"Mirage" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... harm me further, for I remind him of his vileness. This, then, is life, not as I imagined it, but as it is, and such creatures as Hutchings are human beings. Well, after all, it is better to know the truth than to cheat oneself with a mirage. I shall appreciate large natures with noble and generous impulses better, now that I know how rare ...
— Elder Conklin and Other Stories • Frank Harris
... only pain in the thought of him, but afterwards a faint, misty little pleasure crept in, like a mirage from a land of ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... about this time, my father startled me by calling my attention to a novel sight far in front of us, almost at the horizon. "It is a mock sun," exclaimed my father. "I have read of them; it is called a reflection or mirage. It ...
— The Smoky God • Willis George Emerson
... been taken, and the chances of rescue upon which they had reckoned—all those elaborate calculations of hours and distances—were as unsubstantial as the mirage which shimmered upon the horizon. There would be no alarm at Halfa until it was found that the steamer did not return in the evening. Even now, when the Nile was only a thin green band upon the farthest horizon, the pursuit had probably not begun. ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle
... merely the effect of the MIRAGE," said the doctor, "and nothing else—a simple optical phenomenon due to the unequal refraction of light by different layers of the atmosphere, ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... sun-illumined spires, thy crown and crest! White phantom city, whose untrodden streets Are rivers, and whose pavements are the shifting Shadows of palaces and strips of sky; I wait to see thee vanish like the fleets Seen in mirage, or towers of cloud uplifting In ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... morning that what appears to us impossible is often an impossibility altogether subjective. Our mind, under the action of the passions, produces by a strange mirage gigantic obstacles, mountains or abysses, which stop us short. Breathe upon the passion and the phantasmagoria will vanish. This power of mirage, by which we are able to delude and fascinate ourselves, is a moral phenomenon worthy of attentive study. We make for ourselves, in truth, our own spiritual ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... not wish you to understand," said Norman; and yet he seemed impelled to go on; for, after a hesitating silence, he added, "When the wanderer in the desert fears that the spring is but a mirage; or when all that is held dear is made hazy or distorted by some enchanter, what do you ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... objections to, sacred poetry, dissolve as you internally look at them, like unabiding mist-shapes, or rather like imagined mirage where no mirage is, but the mind itself makes ocular deceptions for its own amusement. By sacred poetry is mostly meant Scriptural; but there are, and always have been, conceited and callous critics, who would exclude ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... but no true poem. In his poetry there is not merely this atmosphere, but there is always a mirage in the horizon. ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... like a dream to Carrigan. He permitted himself to live and breathe it as one who finds himself for a space in the heart of a golden mirage. He was sitting so near Marie-Anne that now and then the faint perfume of her came to him like the delicate scent of a flower. It was a breath of crushed violets, sweet as the air he was breathing, violets gathered in the deep ...
— The Flaming Forest • James Oliver Curwood
... be gone. One morning, he had been off for game for the dogs unsuccessfully, and, when he came back to his men, learned that they had seen seventeen deer. After them goes Pim; finds them to be three hares, magnified by fog and mirage, and their long ears answering for horns. This same day they got upon the Bay of Mercy. No ship in sight! Right across it goes the Lieutenant to look for records; when, at two in the afternoon, Robert Hoile sees ...
— If, Yes and Perhaps - Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact • Edward Everett Hale
... absorbed in their fascinating quest. For the hunting of birch bark is ever enticing and lures one on to further treasures like a mirage. ...
— Two Little Women • Carolyn Wells
... through this perpetual mirage and steam-cloud of style, partly by other methods, Mr. Meredith manages, with consummate cleverness no doubt, to colour his whole representation of character and story in the same extra-natural way. Take the ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... naval, maritime, nautical, Davy Jones, pelagic, pelagian, loom, looming, submarine, ultramarine, rote, frith, estuary, fiord, kraken, Triton, haliography, haliographer, hydrography, thalassography, marinorama, nereid, mirage, nautilus, thalassotherapy. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... you came, and you could not do so, because the spring from which all the enriching waters of married life flow was dry. Poor Jasmine—poor illusion of a wild young heart which reached out for the golden city of the mirage! ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... made the magic of her song. Illusion! Banneker wondered whether any happiness were other than illusion, whether the illusion of happiness were not better than any reality. But in the world of grim fact which he had accepted for himself was no palliating mirage. Upon him "the illusive eyes ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... only were both termini 15,000 feet in altitude. The limit of sight for terrestrial objects under the most favourable conditions does not exceed 210 miles. Yet here it is not difficult to explain the impossible distances, 200 miles instead of 120, at which, they say, the cone has been sighted: mirage or refraction accounts for what the ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... treat it with contempt. Two crucial tests were available. If it could be shown that the fantastic shapes suspended above the edge of the dark moon were seen under an identical aspect from two distant stations, that fact alone would annihilate the theory of optical illusion or "mirage"; while the certainty that they were progressively concealed by the advancing moon on one side, and uncovered on the other, would effectually detach them from dependence on our satellite, and ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... killed his man. There is the hungry-looking prospector, waiting with ill-disguised impatience till he can "cross the Range" and follow again, as he has done year after year, the exciting chase after the ever-receding mirage—the visions of fabulous wealth always going to be, but never quite, attained. The time-honored symbol of Hope must, we think, give place to a more forcible representation furnished by the peculiar genius of our times; for is not our modern Rocky-Mountain prospector the complete ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... absence of shadows. I thought that the land probably rose to a height of 5000 ft. forty or fifty miles inland. The accurate estimation of heights and distances in the Antarctic is always difficult, owing to the clear air, the confusing monotony of colouring, and the deceptive effect of mirage and refraction. The land appeared to increase in height to the southward, where we saw a line of land or barrier that must have been seventy miles, and ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... as the camel topped a rise in the river-bank, a considerable pool came into view, tree-shaded, heron-haunted, too incredibly beautiful and alluring for belief. Was it a mirage?... ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... the way of every form of progress, I may be tempted to publish a cheap edition of my work on Greek Philosophy and Logic. It is not in the least presumptuous to lay hands upon this venerable illusion, and show that it has not even the vitality of a ghost. It is but a simulacrum or mirage, and it is but necessary to approach it fearlessly, and walk through it, ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, September 1887 - Volume 1, Number 8 • Various
... and her rescue from the welter of Paris. The Pilgrim's soul hungers and thirsts for her. After the great Sahara of imprisoned loneliness, how near the Oasis of love and rapture! How beautiful the prospect, if not indeed Mirage! ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon
... steamer and, cut off by the play of reflected light, floated like a mirage between sky and sea. After studying her for a minute, ...
— Brandon of the Engineers • Harold Bindloss
... beneath her flesh that, flashing, somehow lightened all her tints; this woman, albeit dark, had somehow about her a deep golden hue as of dusk in a deep wood beheld against a sunset. Her face had always had a boyish look and still, with years, was boyish. There was a mirage in her face. The stranger glanced and saw a mother—extraordinarily shielding and maternal and benignant things; and looked again and saw a boy—astonishingly reckless and impetuous and rather boyish, hard and mutinous things. Or glanced and saw a boy, perhaps ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... of the senses, which are believed to be real by primitive men, and by those ignorant of physical laws, have a similar origin. The objection of such phenomena as a mirage, or the tremulous effect produced in tropical regions by the refraction and reflection of light on trees, rocks, and mountains, so well described by Humboldt, is due to ignorance of the laws of nature, and this is in fact an entification of the phenomenon, occasioned by the innate tendency ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... and glory but a memory, is still the citta nobilissima,—a city of moods,—all beautiful to the beauty-lover, all mystic to the dreamer; between the wonderful blue of the water and the sky she floats like a mirage—visionary—unreal—and under the spell of her fascination we are not critics, but lovers. We see the pathos, not the scars of her desolation, and the splendor of her past is too much a part of her to be forgotten, though the gold is dim upon her palace-fronts, ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... of cruelly curious heads, all these he had already beheld once, in days gone by, twenty-seven years before; he had encountered those fatal things once more; there they were; they moved; they existed; it was no longer an effort of his memory, a mirage of his thought; they were real gendarmes and real judges, a real crowd, and real men of flesh and blood: it was all over; he beheld the monstrous aspects of his past reappear and live once more around him, with all that ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... foolish. She would not look ahead, yet there was the mirage in the sky when she allowed herself to dream. It can truthfully be said that she was not in love with Bob Worthington. She felt, rather than knew, that if love came to her the feeling she had for Jethro Bass—strong though that was—would be as nothing to it. The girl felt the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... river man, his curiosity was excited, but there was something more than mere curiosity; the river instinct that the inexplicable and unknown should be watched and inquired into moved him almost unconsciously to watch that distant agitation which became a dot afloat in a mirage of light. A little later a sudden flash along the river surface disclosed that the thing was a shanty-boat turning in the coiling ...
— The River Prophet • Raymond S. Spears
... prairie that I saw In youth's mirage; 'twas fairer far than this. For youth's imagination knows no law, And soars to heights of future-coming bliss, In lands where gladness reigns eternally, Too bright, too beautiful, alas! ...
— The Song of the Exile—A Canadian Epic • Wilfred S. Skeats
... great wave swept over the Spray until she reached Cape Virgins nothing occurred to move a pulse and set blood in motion. On the contrary, the weather became fine and the sea smooth and life tranquil. The phenomenon of mirage frequently occurred. An albatross sitting on the water one day loomed up like a large ship; two fur-seals asleep on the surface of the sea appeared like great whales, and a bank of haze I could have sworn was high land. The kaleidescope then changed, and on the following day I sailed ...
— Sailing Alone Around The World • Joshua Slocum
... eyes red and dimmed. For some time he remained there inert, staring, his brain refusing to work. If yonder stood a white object, between him and the mountain, a curious white something with wheels, might it not be a covered wagon? No, it was a mirage. But was it possible for a mirage to deceive him into the fancy that a wagon stood only a few hundred feet away? Perhaps it was really a wagon. He stared stupidly, not moving. There were no dream-horses to this ghost-wagon. There was no sign of life. If captured by the Indians, it would ...
— Lahoma • John Breckenridge Ellis
... Whinney, usually so philosophical, had burst out petulantly with: "To hell with these islands. Give me a good mirage, any time." Swank and I had heartily agreed with him, and it was in that despondent spirit that we had begun our ...
— The Cruise of the Kawa • Walter E. Traprock
... inanition," Van replied to Mrs. Grendon, "that—like the traveller in the desert, isn't it?—I only make out, as an oasis or a mirage, a sweet green rustling blur. I ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... cold, stately Dr. Pell, Toole was ceremonious and deliberate, and oppressively polite. On the other hand, when he had been shut up with brusque, half-savage, energetic Doctor Rogerson, Tom was laconic, decisive, and insupportably ill-bred, till, as we have said, the mirage melted away, and he gradually acquiesced in his identity. Then, little by little, the irrepressible gossip, jocularity, and ballad minstrelsy were heard again, his little eyes danced, and his waggish smiles glowed once more, ruddy as a setting sun, through the nectarian vapours ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... confused order fill all the horizon there with the exception of one space, through which in June can be seen the 11:30 p. m. setting sun. And in this open space on clear evenings, which by the way, in June-July never get even dusky, at various hours can be seen a wondrous mirage of waters and shores that lie on the other side of the city below the direct ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... drives, not in miles but hours, became the order of the day; from four in the morning to eight at night, even at an ox's pace, leaves every landmark of the day far in the rear at nightfall. Thus for the next few days we moved forward, the monotony of existence broken only by the great variety of mirage, the glare of heat-waves, and the silent signal in the sky of other voyageurs like ourselves. On reaching Pig Boggy, nothing but pools greeted us, while the regular crossing was dry and dusty and paved with cattle bones. My curiosity was strong enough to cause me to ...
— The Outlet • Andy Adams
... and indifferent eyes, as though she had never been anything to him. And he gazed curiously into his own heart—no, there was nothing wrong with him. His appetite was good, and there was nothing whatever the matter with his heart. It must all have been a pleasant illusion, a mirage such as the traveller sees upon his way. Certainly she was beautiful; but he could not possibly see anything fairy-like about her. God only knew how he had allowed himself to be so entangled! It was a piece of luck that he hadn't been caught—there was ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... and convents it encloses. On another side, strange as the architecture of dreamland, stands the chimerical and impossible church of Vassili-Blagennoi, which makes your reason doubt the testimony of your eyes. Although it appears real enough, you ask yourself if it is not a fantastic mirage, a building made of clouds curiously coloured by the sunlight, and which the quivering air will change or cause to dissolve. Without any doubt, it is the most original building in the world; it recalls nothing that you have ever seen and it belongs to no style ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... the teachings of this school is pure nihilism, or the non-existence of both self and of matter. There is an utter absence of substantiality in all things. Life itself is a prolonged dream. The objects about us are mere delusive shadows or mirage, the product of the imagination alone. The past and the future are without reality, but the present state of things only stands as if it were real. That is to say: the true state of things is constantly changing, yet it seems as if the state ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... D'Artagnan alone in the midst of the suspended sentence. The king appeared at a distance, surrounded by ladies and horsemen. All the troop advanced in beautiful order, at a foot's pace, the horns of various sorts animating the dogs and the horses. It was a movement, a noise, a mirage of light, of which nothing now can give an idea, unless it be the fictitious splendor or false majesty of a theatrical spectacle. D'Artagnan, with an eye a little weakened, distinguished behind the group three carriages. The ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... purple mountains. And then the unlimited freedom of it, its infinite expansion, its air like wine to the senses, the floods of sunshine, the waves of color, the translucent atmosphere that aids the imagination to create in the distance all architectural splendors and realms of peace. It is all like a mirage and a dream. We pass swiftly, and make a moving panorama of beauty in hues, of strangeness in forms, of sublimity in extent, of overawing and savage antiquity. I would miss none of it. And when we pass to the accustomed again, to the fields of verdure and the forests and the ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... come to the ocean of happiness, do not go back thirsty. Wake, foolish man! for Death stalks you. Here is pure water before you; drink it at every breath. Do not follow the mirage on foot, but thirst for the nectar; Dhruva, Prahlad, and Shukadeva have drunk of it, and also Raidas has tasted it: The saints are drunk with love, their thirst is for love. Kabr says: "Listen to me, brother! The nest of fear is broken. Not for a moment have ...
— Songs of Kabir • Rabindranath Tagore (trans.)
... dark-bearded young grandfather, marriage and war and death; then the multitude of illusions concerning herself, how she was truly a princess of Poland, how in England she was under a spell, she was not really this Ursula Brangwen; then the mirage of her reading: out of the multicoloured illusion of this her life, she must move on, to ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... adulation and celebrity and the praise of the public might satisfy you. But you are not, and I have studied your nature too thoroughly to mistake the result of your ambitious career. My darling, ambition is the mirage of the literary desert you are anxious to traverse; it is the Bahr Sheitan, the Satan's water, which will ever recede and mock your thirsty, toil-spent soul. Dear little pilgrim, do not scorch your feet and wear out your life in the hot, blinding sands, struggling ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... by the mirage, "is it only a bad dream, after all?" And as the false magic glowed into blinding splendour to engulf them: "Oh, boy! boy!—is it hell or ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... my own first cousin I would have loved him desperately, even if I am a week older than he. He was about the only oasis in my marriage mirage, though I don't think anybody would think of calling him at all green. He never stopped coming to see me occasionally, and Mr. Carter liked him. He was the first man to notice the white ruche I sewed in the neck of my old black taffeta four or five months ago and he let me see that he noticed ...
— The Melting of Molly • Maria Thompson Daviess
... a time, to my surprise, recognized, more by its position than its aspect, or Marianna's description, my own abode, glimmering much like this mountain one from the piazza. The mirage haze made it appear less a farm-house than ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... love is mockery and deceit. 'Tis like the mirage of the desert that appears A cool refreshing water, and allures The thirsty traveler, but flies anon And leaves him disappointed, wondering So fair a vision should so futile prove. A mother's love is like unto a well Sealed and kept secret, a deep-hidden fount That flows ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... the antique belfry, had begun to find his dream interesting. For, though he did not know her build, that mirage was the shape of a ship. No doubt it was projected from his brooding on ships of half an hour before; and that was odd.... But perhaps, after all, it was not very odd. He knew that she did not really exist; only the appearance of her ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... sunset,—one of those airy exhalations of the speculator's brain, which I am told are ever flitting in the form of towns and cities along those lines of railroad, built with Government subsidies, luring the unwary settlers as the mirage of the desert lures the famishing traveler on, and ever on, until it fades away in the darkening horizon,—or whether it is a real bona fide, substantial city, all "staked off," with the lots marked with their owners' ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X) • Various
... that they were on the north-eastern extremity of the island of Baru, with the whole of the harbour of Cartagena before them, the roofs and spires of the town just showing waveringly, in a sort of mirage, over the low land which forms the easternmost extremity of the island of Tierra Bomba. It is this same island of Tierra Bomba, by the way, which converts what would otherwise be an open roadstead into a landlocked harbour, for it forms the western side of ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... guide, who had for some time appeared to be walking in search of something, suddenly led me to an elevation whence I had the singular privilege of contemplating for a few instants the magnificent effect of mirage, which is termed the Spectre of the Brocken. The appearance is most striking. A thick mist, which seemed to emerge from the clouds like an immense curtain, suddenly rose to the west of the mountain, a rainbow was formed, ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... not!—the fountain, the flower, Toward which thou'rt pressing with wearying haste. Are but the mirage that floats for an hour, Glowing and green o'er the desolate waste; Yet from the distance come tender home-melodies Borne from the Summer-land over the flood, Lovingly wooing thee homeward and Heavenward To the sweet rest of ...
— Poems of the Heart and Home • Mrs. J.C. Yule (Pamela S. Vining)
... stockwhip crack We take the stock away. As they fall we leave them lying, With the crows to watch them dying, Grim sextons of the Overland that fasten on their prey; By the fiery dust-storm drifting, And the mocking mirage shifting, In heat and drought and hopeless pain we ...
— Rio Grande's Last Race and Other Verses • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... final consciousness of a process that had been going on for centuries, since the breakdown of feudalism and the emancipation of the serf. True, the goal has not been reached. The vision of the universal happiness seen by the economists has proved a mirage. The end of the road is not in sight. But it cannot be doubted that in the long pilgrimage of mankind towards social betterment the economists guided us in the right turning. If we turn again in a new direction, it will at any rate not be in the direction ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock
... wondered if the pair were staying at the place of that name. He knew it well, the beautiful little pointed mountain above Mentone, with its deserted convent, its sad watching cypresses, its one hotel in a fragrant garden, and its famous view of the Corsican mirage. If Vanno's cousin lived in that hotel, which could be reached only by a funicular or a picturesque mule path, it looked as if she had a wish ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... one might add that whatever is deeply observed is well said. The artist in design is by the very nature of his work compelled to observe deeply, precisely, beautifully. He is never able to revolve in a vacuum, or flounder in a morass, or run after a mirage. When there is nothing there he is still. He is held by his art to Nature. So, when he takes up his pen, by training, by acquired instinct, he still follows with the new instrument, deeply, precisely, beautifully, the same ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... from destroying the mirage, it rendered the illusion still more striking. I resolved to descend from the hill in order to convince Lucien how much ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... building, the summoning whistle conveyed to my mind the idea of the exhaustion of air in a ship-compartment, and the opening and shutting of the elevator door completed the illusion of a ship fast going to pieces. But the ship my mind was on never reached any shore, nor did she sink. Like a mirage she vanished, and again I found myself safe in my bed at the hospital. "Safe," did I say? Scarcely that—for deliverance from one impending disaster simply meant ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... comfortable places, Squire Goodlet's home, but he is urged back into the road, and again the pursuit sweeps on. Those blue mountains, the long parallel ranges of Old Bear and his brothers, seem no more a misty, uncertain mirage against the delicious indefinable tints of the horizon. Sharply outlined they are now, with dark, irregular shadows upon their precipitous slopes which tell of wild ravines, and rock-lined gorges, and swirling mountain torrents, and great, ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... Lolita!" she cried; "a tenderfoot is sure funny. The chances are, Mr. Hanson, that if you started to walk around those dunes you'd never get back. Goodness! ain't that mirage pretty?" ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... could not always master the weakness: never had she stood in greater need of Mrs. Heeny's "Go slow. Undine!" Her imagination was incapable of long flights. She could not cheat her impatience with the mirage of far-off satisfactions, and for the moment present and future seemed equally void. But her desire to go to Europe and to rejoin the little New York world that was reforming itself in London and Paris was fortified by reasons which seemed urgent enough to justify ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... immense pity for humanity, crucified upon the cross whose limbs are Time and Space. Those poor Russian pilgrims faring foot-sore across the great frozen plains, lured on by this mirage of blessedness, sleeping by the wayside, and sometimes never waking again! Poor humanity, like a blind Oriental beggar on the deserted roadway crying Bakhshish to vain skies, from whose hollow and ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... point of the peninsula on which the settlers now were their gaze could extend along the southwest. Twenty-five miles off the coast terminated in the Claw Cape, which loomed dimly through the morning mists, and which, by the phenomenon of the mirage, appeared as if suspended ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne
... follow the multitude to do all the evil which he saw being done around him; it looked a joyous and delightful prospect. He gazed on the bright vision of sin, on the iridescent waters of pleasure; and did not know that the brightness was a mirage of the burning desert, the iridescence a film of corruption ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... madness, pausing to wheel above isolated farm-houses, where a wife, already dizzy with the pressure of rarefied silence, looks up, magnetized. Then across the flat stretches, his shadow under him moving across moor and the sand of desert, slowing at the perpetually eastern edge of a mirage, brushing his actual wings against the brick of city walls; the garret of a dreamer, brain-sick with reality. Flopping, until she comes to gaze, outside the window of one so alone in a crowd that her four hall-bedroom ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... were the same high, distant, and brittle-looking mountains, fragile and pearly; the same low, broken half-distances; the same wide sweeps; the same wonderful changing effects of light, colour, shadow, and mirage; the same occasional strips of green marking the watercourses and oases. As to smaller detail, we saw many interesting divergences. In the foreground constantly recurred the Bedouin brush shelters, each with its picturesque figure or so in flowing robes, and its grumpy camels. Twice we saw ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... surrounded by a desolate waste of marshes. The current gurgled and sucked about her run, as the ebbtide washed her black hull on its way to the sea. The spectacle seemed now even more mysterious than when, mirage-like, it peered forth from a cloud of mist. But it was real, and not fantastic. Another hail, louder than the first, went forth into the night air, and penetrated to the ship's forecastle, for a sailor answered my call, and reported to ...
— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop
... not true, Flint. I know I'd like it—to live on a farm and keep chickens. Sometimes in winter, or more often in spring, I can hardly wait for summer and my two weeks. I look out of the window and I see a mirage—trees and hills." Colum sighed. "It's quite wonderful, that view, but it ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... liner. What was there to shoot at, but sand? The Arabs, warned by the death of the gaunt fellow in the burnous, had doffed their headgear. Their brown heads, peeping intermittently from the wady and the dunes, were evasive as a mirage. ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... provisions; after these, countless, giant cannon decorated with branches, flowers and flags, mounted on open trucks without sides. All this procession was a weird phenomenon gliding by in the sky like a mirage, for the road-bed at the rear of the chateau is very high and is hidden by intervening shrubs and bushes so that the wheels of the cars are quite concealed. It reminded me of those Amazon warriors in "Die Walkuere" who slid up to Heaven so smoothly on ...
— Lige on the Line of March - An American Girl's Experiences When the Germans Came Through Belgium • Glenna Lindsley Bigelow
... change in themselves. This is the inexorable Death in Life, and in this Death we cannot dream of a fair consoling Hereafter. The thing we loved has not only perished—alas! we realise that it has never existed! What we worshipped was the shadow of our own making, a mirage conjured up by our heart's desire. To those who love most, ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... possibly be. It is a remarkable thing, and I fancy you will find, when we do know the explanation, that anyone else standing where you were at that time would have seen exactly the same thing. The rock stands out of the water; it is just above a deep pool, and probably it was a sort of mirage effect, and not by any means a figment ...
— The Mystery of the Green Ray • William Le Queux
... green trees reflected in it, and when I looked at Nelson his eyes were sad. Nothing could have seemed more cool or refreshing; it made one long to jump out of the train and go and bathe, for now, though still early in the spring, it is getting very hot. "It is nothing but a mirage," Nelson said. "There is no water there and no trees. It comes and goes in this part of the desert according to the state of the atmosphere, and it has been the cause of many a poor fellow's end." ...
— Elizabeth Visits America • Elinor Glyn
... or more men were between Bill's shack and the well. They were staring grimly at the dawn, as if they could already see blood on the sky, spilling over on the sand and spreading out in a sinister pool at their feet. A mirage-like pool mirroring their own hidden forebodings, mirroring a knotted rope and the straining shoulders of men too vengeful to know the meaning ...
— The Man the Martians Made • Frank Belknap Long
... lifting heavenward of man's life below. Therefore, though better lips ye shall not lack, Suffer if one of modern mood steals back— Weary and wayworn from the desert-road Of barren thought; from Hope's Dead Sea, which glowed With Love's fair mirage; from the poet's haunt, The scholar's lamp, the statesman's scheme, the vaunt, The failure, of all fond philosophies,— Back unto Thee, back to thy olive-trees, Thy people, and thy story, and thy Son, Mary of Nazareth! So long agone Bearing us Him who made our christendom, ...
— In The Yule-Log Glow—Book 3 - Christmas Poems from 'round the World • Various
... possibilities that, if set in motion, would move mountains and revert the course of rivers. But we can't work up enough energy to consummate our aims and carry things to a finish. Perhaps we may be able to do so some day. Oh, Some Day, you are a mirage on the desert of life that ever lures us on to things that can only be attained in the ...
— Confessions of a Neurasthenic • William Taylor Marrs
... say that they are secular but feebly expresses the totally unmoral influence they for the most part exert. They are the extension of the unreligious school into the homes of the people. When Father Hecker and Mrs. George V. Hecker and their associates began The Young Catholic, this vast mirage of the desert of life had but glimmered upon the distant horizon; they saw it coming and they did their best to point Catholic youth away from it and lead it to the real oasis of God, with its grateful shade, its delicious fruits, and ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... hills and valleys around; every ear was intensely strained to catch the faintest noise, in momentary expectation of the unearthly war-whoop and of seeing dusky forms with gleaming tomahawks uplifted. In the moonlight mirage of the prairies, every taller clump of grass, every blacker hillock grew into a blood thirsty Indian, just ready to leap upon them. But, by faith, they were able to ...
— Among the Sioux - A Story of the Twin Cities and the Two Dakotas • R. J. Creswell
... the moment, but by a distinct and true perception of the future. He looked only in one direction, but in that direction he saw clearly. Other statesmen struck blindfold, or in their vision of a regenerated Turkey fought for an empire of mirage. It may with some reason be asked whether the order of Eastern Europe would now be different if our own English soldiers who fell at Balaclava had been allowed to die in their beds: every Italian whom Cavour sent to perish on the Tchernaya or in the cholera-stricken camp died as ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... sure, Mr. Macready—and I address myself to you with the sternness of a man in the pit—are you quite sure, sir, that you do not view America through the pleasant mirage which often surrounds a thing that has been, but not a thing that is? Are you quite sure that when you were here you relished it as well as you do now when you look back upon it. The early spring birds, Mr. Macready, do sing in the groves that ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... more avail than warning to a pilgrim in the middle of the desert that he will suffer from thirst, and be deluded by the mirage, before he gets into green fields again. He has no longer the choice whether to be a pilgrim in the desert or to stay at home. No one of us has the choice to be or not to be; and we must go through with our experience, under ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau
... and not in the nature of the appeal. The larger selves look themselves up in the greater writers and the smaller selves spell themselves out in the smaller ones. It is here we all behold as in some vast reflection or mirage of the reading world our own souls crowding and jostling, little and great, against the walls of their years, seeking to be let out, to look out, to look over, to look up—that they may ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... god's longing for something other than himself, something that should contrast with his eternal solitude and fill the voids of his infinite ennui. From that longing came the bubble, a phantom universe, the mirage of a god's desire. Earth; sea and sky; all that in them is, all that has been and shall be, are but the changing ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... good and of the beautiful which is to be found in the female conscience delights us and settles the question for us. This is why religion is preserved to the world by woman alone. A beautiful and a virtuous woman is the mirage which peoples with lakes and green avenues our great moral desert. The superiority of modern science consists in the fact that each step forward it takes is a step further in the order of abstractions. We make chemistry from chemistry, algebra from algebra; the very indefatigability with which we ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... fancies," thought Philip; and he laid hold of the handrail, and started afresh. The step came on. He knew it now; it was his own step. "An echo," he told himself. "A dream," he thought, "a mirage of the mind;" and he compelled himself to go up. The step came down. It passed him on the stairs, going by the wall as he went by the rail, with an irresistible ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... allow that yet! I'll make a stand and tell you some plain truths to your faces, and then you shall find out my real opinion about you!" He had some difficulty in breathing. "But supposing that all this is pure fancy?—a kind of mirage? Suppose I had misunderstood? Let me try and keep up my nasty part, and not commit myself, like the fool, by blind anger! Ought I to give them credit for intentions they have not? Their words are, in themselves, not very extraordinary ones— so much must be allowed; but a double meaning may ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... lead to truth. This slight book is in verse and drawings, type integrated with delectable black-and-white representations of the prairie dog, armadillo, sanderling, mesquite, whirlwind, sand dune, mirage, and dozens of other natural phenomena. The only other book in this list to which it is akin is Eve Ganson's ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... in the feeble light, and not till he could have struck it with his good oak "wattle" did he discover it to be only one of those wild, gray frontages of living rock that rise here and there in picturesque tiers along the slopes of those solitary mountains. And so, till dawn, pursuing this mirage of the castle, through pools and among ravines, he wore out a night ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 2 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... enough to escape censure and she had seen for herself how indispensable her singing voice was to the group. And then it had appeared she'd have to talk! And, inexplicably to herself, her talking wasn't right. The thing had just been another mirage. It was hopeless. Galbraith would put her back into the chorus—drop her, likely ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... Magistrate, but a prospective one, looking to the chances of reelection, and mingling in all the dirty intrigues of provincial politics with an unhappy talent for making them dirtier. The cheating mirage of the White House lures our public men away from present duties and obligations; and if matters go on as they have gone, we shall need a Committee of Congress to count the spoons in the public plate-closet, whenever a President goes out of office,—with a policeman to watch every ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... work—all the more as there are no milestones or other landmarks to show the progress you are making. Still, it is not so overwhelmingly wearisome as might be supposed. In the morning you may watch the vast lakes, with their rugged promontories and well-wooded banks, which the mirage creates for your amusement. Then during the course of the day there are always one or two trifling incidents which arouse you for a little from your somnolence. Now you descry a couple of horsemen on the distant horizon, ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... same day, the rebel government at Richmond faded thence like a mirage, and, within one week, General Lee surrendered his enfeebled relic of a ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... of the wind in the branches made them afraid. At nightfall, where they rested, one stayed in that place, and the next night another dropped behind; and so it was at the end of each day's journey. They crossed a great plain where waters of mirage rolled over a cracked and parching earth, and the rim of the world was hidden in a bluish mist. So they came at last to another range of hills, not so high, but tumbled thickly together; and beyond these, at the end of the hundred days, to the Big Water, quaking ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... by another mirage of riches as these thoughts went through it, and to settle the matter I stooped down and got a grip on the coffer—which was made of a tougher wood than the boxes and held together—and managed by a good deal of straining to lift it up through ...
— In the Sargasso Sea - A Novel • Thomas A. Janvier
... awaits you. O, unhappy one! beware of men; while they walk along the same path with you, you will seem to see a vast plain strewn with garlands where a happy throng of dancers trip the gladsome furandole standing in a circle, each a link in an endless chain; it is but a mirage; those who look down know that they are dancing on a silken thread stretched over an abyss that swallows up all who fall and shows not even a ripple on its surface. What foot is sure? Nature herself seems to deny you her divine consolation; trees and flowers are yours no ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... dreams. Thousands have given their lives to become convinced of that and thousands have cursed that unattainable mirage." ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont
... wonderful it became to me. It seemed, contrarily to Pope's saying, that the vanity of it WAS indeed given in vain; but that there was something behind the veil of it, which was not vanity. It became to me not a painted cloud, but a terrible and impenetrable one: not a mirage, which vanished as I drew near, but a pillar of darkness, to which I was forbidden to draw near. For I saw that both my own failure, and such success in petty things as in its poor triumph seemed to me worse than failure, came from the want of sufficiently earnest effort to ...
— Sesame and Lilies • John Ruskin
... tears he saw the mirage of his own fireside. Perhaps for the moment his homing spirit rested there, and it was only the body from which the soul had fled that was in the saddle here before us riding through a hostile land. Perhaps more powerfully than the fulminations ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... observed luminous phenomena very analogous to those which fixed my attention during a long abode at Mexico and Quito. These meteors are perhaps modified by the nature of the soil and the air, like certain effects of the looming or mirage, and of the terrestrial refraction peculiar to the ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... haunt his memory; the remembered glory of an eternal sun is in his eyes, and makes the light of common day seem darkness; the heart sickness of a long exile weighs on him; incessantly he labours to overtake the mirage of a loveliness which fades as he pursues it. In the poetic creation by which the bondage of his material life is redeemed, he finds at once ecstasy and disgust, because he feels at once his strength and weakness. For ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... Limfjord is called Vendsyssel. Curious effects of mirage may be seen in summer-time in the extensive "Vildmose"[7] of ...
— Denmark • M. Pearson Thomson
... soil of the desert, without even the ordinary sage brush; but in early morning and, less frequently, toward evening, these lakes take on a semblance of their former state, sometimes (so strong is the mirage) almost deceiving those best acquainted with the region. Years ago—how many it would be difficult to say—these dry lakes were veritable bodies of water; indeed, at an earlier period than that, they were, without doubt, and including a large extent of the surrounding ...
— Old Mission Stories of California • Charles Franklin Carter
... it fall and fade from sight, whence come, where gone no Thought can tell, Drink of yon mirage-stream and chase the tinkling ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... sentiment merely because it is always broken up by events; the Crusade itself, for example, is more present and potent as a dream even than as a reality. From the first Plantagenet to the last Lancastrian it haunts the minds of English kings, giving as a background to their battles a mirage of Palestine. So a devotion like that of Edward I. to his queen was quite a real motive in the lives of multitudes of his contemporaries. When crowds of enlightened tourists, setting forth to sneer at the superstitions ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... Virgil, Aldrich's Logic, and the exasperating Euclid. Still, Latin, Euclid, and Logic would surely be a considerable step in masculine wisdom,—in that knowledge which made men contented, and even glad to live. Not that the yearning for effectual wisdom was quite unmixed; a certain mirage would now and then rise on the desert of the future, in which she seemed to see herself honored for her surprising attainments. And so the poor child, with her soul's hunger and her illusions of self-flattery, began to nibble at this thick-rinded fruit of the ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... from oblivion, we can recreate in a fractional moment whole years gone past, years yet to come—striving to lengthen our existence, stretching out our apperception beyond the phantom boundaries, overdrawing upon a Barmecide deposit of minutes, staking fresh claims upon a mirage? ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... don't and cannot accept. Let me make it plain. I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidian mind of man, that in the world's finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... lines would appear the reverse of apposite; but Orientals have their own ways of application, and all allusions to Badawi partings are effective and affecting. The civilised poets of Arab cities throw the charm of the Desert over their verse by images borrowed from its scenery, the dromedary, the mirage and the well as naturally as certain of our bards who hated the country, babbled of purling rills, etc. thoroughly to feel Arabic poetry one must know the ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... watched him with all her eyes, all her mind; and by giving herself up to hopes that were sometimes flourishing, sometimes blighted, she had brought the matter to such enormous proportions that she saw all things in a mental mirage. To use a common but excellent expression, by dint of looking intently she saw nothing. Alternately she repelled, admitted, and conquered the supposition of this rivalry. She compared herself with Pierrette; she was forty-two years old, ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... a man was sincere, I was, Elise. Since I left you at Roselawn I have followed the one path, thinking there was a great light ahead. Now I am afraid that, perhaps, it was only a mirage.' ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... look into it you see that earth is not continent but insular. This is as important as that it keeps butter cool. When I looked across the pond from this peak toward the Sudbury meadows, which in time of flood I distinguished elevated perhaps by a mirage in their seething valley, like a coin in a basin, all the earth beyond the pond appeared like a thin crust insulated and floated even by this small sheet of interverting water, and I was reminded that this on which I ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... comfort you. Long ago the Prophet's soul was filled with the thought of the hidden beauties of the Divine Face, as our souls are now. Many a century has passed since then. It makes me wonder what is Time. Time is but a mirage, a dream. Already God sees us in glory, and rejoices in our everlasting bliss. How much good I derive from this thought! I understand now why He allows ...
— The Story of a Soul (L'Histoire d'une Ame): The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux • Therese Martin (of Lisieux)
... from the sunrise to its setting, the spectral illusive shapes of the mirage floated like restless spirit betwixt heaven and earth ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... etc. The correct name for the individual fairy is fay, Fr. fee, Vulgar Lat. *fata, connected with fatum, fate. This appears in Ital. fata, "a fairie, a witch, an enchantres, an elfe" (Florio). The fata morgana, the mirage sometimes seen in the Strait of Messina, is attributed to the fairy Morgana of Tasso, the Morgan le Fay ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... road at a little distance what looks like a cluster of houses overshadowed by some tall umbrella pine, with all the signs of human life apparently about them; but, as you come near, the sight resolves itself into a mere mass of ruins. The mirage of life turns out to be a tomb—nay, the ruin of a tomb! A carriage full of visitors may, perhaps, be seen at long intervals, their spirits sobered by the melancholy that broods over the scene; or a lumbering cart, laden with wine-casks ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... a sand-storm, a fusillade from Bedouins, a mirage, and a race for water, if Abdullah and Ali could grasp these lanyards, the caravan was saved, since the other camels followed the dun leader and the black racer as sheep follow ...
— The Turquoise Cup, and, The Desert • Arthur Cosslett Smith
... time-bowed heads thousands of cattle stamped away the noons of summer. Around the old mission, whose bells have rung o'er the valley for a century, a few houses were grouped; but beyond this there was scarcely a sign of man's work except the far-off speck of a herdsman looming in the mirage, or the white walls of the old Spanish ranch-house glimmering afar through the hazy sunshine in which the silent land ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... friend, Our warm fellowship is one Far too old to comprehend Where its bond was first begun: Mirage-like before my gaze Gleams a land of other days, Where two truant boys, astray, ...
— Riley Love-Lyrics • James Whitcomb Riley
... trees upon them, could be distinctly traced on the unruffled surface. As we continued to advance, the water however constantly retreated before us and at last surrounded us. I now found that we had been deceived by mirage; the apparent islands being really such only when these plains are covered by the sea. In many places the sandy mud was so moist that we sank deeply into it, and after travelling for fifteen miles on a north-east course I could still see no limit to these plains in ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 1 (of 2) • George Grey
... had a vision of happiness. Paolo, tumbling from the lofty sphere where his spirit was constantly soaring, was amazed to find reality so sweet; you fancied that his madness would be lulled in the arms of love. But before long Music again clutched her prey. The dazzling mirage which had cheated you into the joys of reciprocal love made the lonely path on which you had started look ...
— Gambara • Honore de Balzac
... wish to be really kind and comforting, talk to me of my wife. Say how sweet and lovely she is. Say that her arms are tender, her eyes gentle and kind. I am the thirsty traveller in the desert, who sights pure water, hastens eagerly forward, and finds—a mirage! But a deadly stream flows from the roots of the Upas—Hullo! Here comes Aubrey Treherne. Look out, Mrs. Dalmain! He owes you a grudge. Hey, presto! Vanish from the chair, or Helen's cousin will lean over, with a bleeding ...
— The Upas Tree - A Christmas Story for all the Year • Florence L. Barclay
... which has certainly spread his name, if not his fame, in quarters which in all his travels he could never have anticipated. Even in the Canary Islands, the natives apply the term 'Isla de San Borondon' to a peculiar effect like mirage, showing a shadowy presentiment of land, which is sometimes seen off their coasts. His character as an hero of romance, somewhat of the type of Sinbad the Sailor, if not of that of Gulliver, has even injured him as a subject of serious study. There has been ...
— Brendan's Fabulous Voyage • John Patrick Crichton Stuart Bute
... that the social state, whose results thus attract us, really produced much more than a beautiful mirage. Simple characters of great charm, though necessarily of great fixity, were developed by it in multitude. Old Japan came nearer to the achievement of the highest moral ideal than our far more evolved societies can ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... before," he said. "The wise skippers all say it is a mirage, but the wiser sailormen say it is a message from another world. She's gone, our Huntress is, and there's no wind under heaven will ever blow ...
— The Windy Hill • Cornelia Meigs
... Ambition to create began to die; the dream scenery of his ill-controlled mental life more and more seldom took shape of words on paper; and there came a time when thought grew wholly wordless for him; a mere personal pleasure, selfish, useless, unsubstantial as the glimmer of mirage over desert sands. ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... of reality. The ideas—truth, beauty, good—will only exist for the common order of men, under such a system, in the human mind, where we have cognizance of them; and thenceforward, the ideal, or God, is nothing else than the image of humanity which contemplates itself in a sort of mirage. Thus it is that the adoration of man by man is disengaged from the high theories of idealism. Let us proceed to the examination of this worship, which is cried up now-a-days in divers parts of ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... idea of this almost Oriental fairyland penetrated eyes now heavy with wine, or crossed the delirium of intoxication. The fire and fragrance of the wines acted like potent philters and magical fumes, producing a kind of mirage in the brain, binding feet, and weighing down hands. The clamor increased. Words were no longer distinct, glasses flew in pieces, senseless peals of laughter broke out. Cursy snatched up a horn and struck up a flourish on it. It acted like a signal given by the devil. Yells, hisses, songs, cries, ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... belong; in his "Christabel," there certainly are several distinct pictures of great beauty; but he, as a poet, clearly comes within the other division which answers to music and the musician, in which you have a magnificent mirage of words with the subjective associations of the poet curling, and twisting, and creeping round, and through, and above every part of it. This is the class to which Milton belongs, in whose poems we have ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... her in past days took new force in view of the sudden barriers that rose between him and the tender, graceful, confiding, charming Adele, whose image had so long and (as he now thought) so constantly dwelt in the dreamy mirage of his future. Under the spur of these feelings, he presently gave over his excited walk up and down the study, and, coming close to the Doctor, whispered, with a grave earnestness that made the old gentleman recognize a man in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... nerve-currents. Life had never looked to her as it did that evening. It was the swan's first breasting the water,—bred on the desert sand, with vague dreams of lake and river, and strange longings as the mirage came and dissolved, and at length afloat upon the sparkling wave. She felt as if she had for the first time found her destiny. It was to please, and so to command, to rule with gentle sway in virtue of the royal gift of beauty,—to enchant with the commonest exercise of speech, through the rare ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... level, and dry; but I believe there is water in it not far off, for there were some red-breasted cockatoos in the trees, and native parrots on each side. On the north side there is a part bearing off to the north-north-west. The mirage on the plain to the south of the creek was stronger than I have before seen it. There appear to be sheets of water within a few yards of one, and it looks sufficiently smooth and glassy to be used for an artificial horizon. To the westward of the plains, some ...
— Successful Exploration Through the Interior of Australia • William John Wills
... Bruno. All conditions are lacking to form the mirage of the desert. And, too; everything was so distinct and clearly outlined that ...
— The Lost City • Joseph E. Badger, Jr.
... wet with dew. The city glittered in the plain beneath, clean and fresh in the dazzling air; it seemed a part of the pageant of summer, an unreal piece of imagery, distinct and clear-cut, yet miraculous, like a mirage seen in mid-ocean. "Truly," he thought, "this is the city of the flower, and the lily is its ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring
... year in those countries, but some days in January are, I think, generally hotter. To-day, however, was as hot as a salamander could wish. All the vast extent of yellow plain to the eastward quivered beneath a fiery sky, and every little eminence stood like an island in a lake of mirage. Used as I had got to this phenomenon, I was often tempted that morning to turn a few hundred yards from my route, and give my horse a drink at one of the broad glassy pools that seemed to lie right and left. Once the faint track I was ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... fascination for me; its outlying dunes began but a few miles east of my camp, and from an isolated granite kopje near their border I had often gazed across the apparently limitless sea of sand: stretching as far as the eye could reach to where the dancing shimmer of the mirage linked sand and ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... the bodies of men and horses were bathed in perspiration. Not a cloud hung in the blue sky; no wing of a bird broke the monotony of distance, no living animal crept across the blazing surface of the desert. Occasionally a distant mirage attracted the eye, making the dead reality even more horrible by its semblance to water, yet never tempting them to stray aside. After the first mile conversation ceased, the men riding grimly, silently forward, intent only on covering all the distance ...
— Keith of the Border • Randall Parrish
... appeared on the bosom of the lonely lake, I thought that I was looking upon a vision of a spectral nature. In spite of all my belief that I was alone on this remote beach, there sat the man in the boat, only a few rods off shore. He was as a mirage, as silent as the very lake itself. A few eerie moments passed; then the boat began to move slowly toward me, gently propelled by a skillful paddle. As it approached, the light of the full moon streaming upon it made it easy for me to study its ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various
... there is to their pain and the dry-rot of their hopes, as to everything else in Nature, an end object. Shall the soul be immortal, and its best essence but a thing of air? Shall the one thought by day and the one dream by night, the ethereal star which guides us across life's mirage, and which will still shine serene at the moment of our fall from the precipice of Time: shall this alone, amidst all that makes us what we are, be chosen out to see corruption, to be cast off and forgotten in the grave? Never! There, by the workings of a Providence we ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... as three. The heat became terrific; not a breath of wind stirred. The face of the world lost its contours in wavering mirage. The travellers found lukewarm water in the station and breakfasted sparingly from their own stores of biscuit and tinned things. Then, in the shadow of the station, they settled down to wait, bored to extinction. ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... wrapt, and wrap All round us; we but feel our way to err: The ocean hath its chart, the stars their map; And knowledge spreads them on her ample lap; But Rome is as the desert, where we steer Stumbling o'er recollections: now we clap Our hands, and cry, 'Eureka!' it is clear - When but some false mirage of ruin ...
— Childe Harold's Pilgrimage • Lord Byron
... unprepared to believe that what once was a dream could be coming true by any chance of my drift through the years. Yet there it remained, right in our course, on a floor of malachite which had stains of orange drift-weed. It could have been a mirage. It appeared diaphanous, something so frail that a wind could have stirred it. Did it belong to this earth? It grew higher, and the waves could be seen exploding against its lower rocks. It was ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... seen, but I dared not believe my eyes. Clyde, who was helping to draw water from the eighty-foot well without a pulley, thought I was bereft as I ran from the camp toward the advancing rider. But although I thought what I saw must be a mirage, still I knew Mrs. ...
— Letters on an Elk Hunt • Elinore Pruitt Stewart |
