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More "Supernatural" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of moralizing on the subject may find a theme presenting aspects both sad and comical. When, however, one reflects that amulets, in some one of their protean forms, have been invested with supernatural preventive and healing powers by the people of all lands and epochs, and that they have been worn not only by kings and princes, but by philosophers, prelates, and physicians of eminence as well, it is evident that the subject deserves ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... victory had been achieved had vanished. You had risen from the dead, had assailed one of the surviving enemies, had employed bullet and dagger in his destruction, with both of which you could only be supplied by supernatural means, and had disappeared. If any inhabitant of Chetasco had done this, we should have heard ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown
... the captive's description of those powers in action suggested a supernatural origin of Foanna knowledge, or at least for its application. But Ross thought that the answer might be that they possessed the remnants of some almost forgotten technical know-how, the heritage of a very old race. He had tried to ...
— Key Out of Time • Andre Alice Norton
... almost to the point of hampering action, when an Asiatic delicacy had begun to be manifest in Western character, when the fusion of Europe and Asia was commencing to make itself felt. And in Scriabine, that new intensity of sensation attained something near to heroic supernatural stature. What was beautiful and sick in his age entered into his art. Through it, we learn, not a ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... that dread of the supernatural which possesses the savage who is confronted with anything unheard of. Besides, the spell of the dances was upon them, remote though they were from that scene—the far-off frenzies that were preparing had begun to trouble their nerves. But at last ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... was any God, who manifested any interest in the affairs of men, that there was any Particular Providence. Though Franklin did not accept the idea, that Jesus Christ was a divine messenger, and that the Bible was a supernatural revelation of God's will, he certainly did not, in his latter years, deny that there was a God, who superintended the affairs of this world, and whom it was proper to worship. It is generally supposed that Thomas Paine ...
— Benjamin Franklin, A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago - American Pioneers and Patriots Series • John S. C. Abbott
... el-Aazam, "the Most Great Name"), by means of which King David was saved from a cruel death, as above, is often employed in Eastern romances for the rescue of the hero from deadly peril, as well as to enable him to perform supernatural exploits. It was generally engraved on a signet-ring, but sometimes it was communicated orally to the fortunate hero by a holy man, or by a king of the genii—who was, of course, a ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... understand, Goodwin, how the occurrences I have related would excite the scientific curiosity. We rejected immediately, of course, any explanation admitting the supernatural. ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... high time we looked to the natural basis of morality. Natural morality came to be the phrase ever on the lips of the leading spirits. Too frequently they had come to look askance at the morality of those who alleged a supernatural sanction for that which they at least enjoined upon others. We come in this field also, as in others, upon the assertion of the human as nobler and more beautiful than that which had by the theologians been alleged to be divine. The assertion ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... (cap. lxviii.), that the muscular strength of Tiberius Claudius Nero was, in the prime of his manhood, almost as supernatural as his crimes; that he could with his outstretched finger bore a hole through a sound apple (integrum malum digito terebraret), and wound the head of a child or even a youth with a fillip, (caput pueri, vel etiam adolescentis, talitro vulneraret.) His excesses must, however, have ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... degree of religious terror. Fear is the parent of superstition, by ignorance. Those two animals prove the Sumatran's greatest scourge. The mischief the former commit is incredible, whole villages being often depopulated by them, and the suffering people learn to reverence as supernatural effects the furious ravages of an enemy they have not resolution ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... mass of water force a passage for itself, or was the rock riven by subterranean fire? Did Neptune or Vulcan, or both together, execute this supernatural work, which the iron-clad hand of man scarce can emulate in these days ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... the abundant harvests of this elegant weed on the upland pastures, prepared and manufactured by supernatural skill, 'the good people' were wont, in the olden time, to procure ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... realizing itself. The proceeding of God towards the different Churches and States is regulated by their conduct towards Him. The history of the world is a judgment of the world. But even to know this truth is, in itself, a supernatural gift; and they only are able to use it with safety, to whom God has given an insight into the mysteries of His government of the world. This becomes very evident, if we observe how often the predictions of those who knew the truth ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... asleep, many also are working, between the colonnades, at future inventions; and their tools, their instruments, the apparatus which they are constructing, the plants, flowers and fruit which they are cultivating or plucking are of the same supernatural and luminous blue as the general atmosphere of the Palace. Figures of a taller stature, clad in a paler and more diaphanous azure, figures of a sovereign and silent beauty move among the CHILDREN and ...
— The Blue Bird: A Fairy Play in Six Acts • Maurice Maeterlinck
... an atmosphere. Smash! Rattle. Then a wild whistling; a many lashes, that flapped and cracked; then the fall of the spar, and the deep, quick sigh from Lennard as it whizzed close by him. The gaff of the mizen had broken away, halliards and all, as if a supernatural knife had been drawn across by a strong hand. The men were hanging on, while a bellying, uncontrollable canvas buffeted them as if it had volition and sense, and strove to knock their senses out of them. A canvas adrift is like an unruly beast. All hands came through the after-cabin, ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... Love. Hence, to Thompson there was nothing irrational in the special revelation of God to man, in His Incarnation, His death on the cross, and His sacramental life in the Church. The Divine energy of God's love, as displayed in the supernatural revelation of Himself, seems to be even vaster and more intense than the Divine energy of creation displayed in the revelation of nature. Every new revelation of God's power and wisdom which science unfolds serves ...
— The Hound of Heaven • Francis Thompson
... me a confused account of some occurrences, and, as well as I recollect, he described the same persons—I mean a returned French nobleman and a Russian gentleman. But he made the whole story so marvelous—I mean in the supernatural sense—that, I confess, I did not ...
— The Room in the Dragon Volant • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... in; not as a ladder to scramble up (or down) helter-skelter without knowing whither or why; but as a fact—a great and mysterious fact—to be pondered over, studied, and perchance in some small measure understood. By the multitude these men were sneered at as eccentric or feared as supernatural. Their calm, clear, contemplative attitude seemed either insane or diabolic; and accordingly they have been pitied as enthusiasts or killed as blasphemers. One of these great souls may have been ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... the two heroes do not make their appearance bruised and dishevelled as the Second Messenger does after his fight with the Greeks. Of course there is no great harm in making the Taurians bad shots as well as cowards, and possibly there is some value in the suggestion of a supernatural protection which is only saving its object for a crueller death. But very likely the two ...
— The Iphigenia in Tauris • Euripides
... calm was disturbed. He looked at Fleming Stone as at a supernatural being. And small wonder. For the truth of Stone's statements was evident from ...
— The Gold Bag • Carolyn Wells
... I have made should prove interesting, not merely because it will introduce the reader to a class of Japanese poetry about which little or nothing has yet been written in English, but much more because it will afford some glimpses of a supernatural world which still remains for the most part unexplored. Without knowledge of Far Eastern superstitions and folk-tales, no real understanding of Japanese fiction or drama or poetry ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... times I have seen and felt the necessity of supernatural aid, and by fervent applications to a throne of grace I have experienced that my heavenly Father is able and willing to supply the place of every earthly friend. I shall now no longer feel this want, this sense of helpless weakness, for I believe a kind ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... never forgot a face he had once seen, and treated the officers with a rather vulgar familiarity, guessing at their weaknesses and making use of them on occasion. The rank and file regarded him as a sort of supernatural being. Francis II., who succeeded him, could scarcely appear in this light even to the most ignorant. Popular opinion considered him not quite sound in his mind. Probably his timorous, awkward ways and his seeming stupidity were simply the result of an education conducted by bigoted priests ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... superstitious and, as it proved, fatal insinuation, that the birth of the Chevalier de St George was owing to the supernatural intercession of St Francis Xavier, was much insisted on by the Protestants as an argument against the reality of his birth. See the Introduction to "Britannia Rediviva," Vol. X. p. 285. In that piece, our author also alludes to this foolery: Hail, son of prayers, ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume XVI. (of 18) - The Life of St. Francis Xavier • John Dryden
... and as it can see, hear, smell, feel, and taste, so can the soul; I call, therefore, these the senses of the soul, in opposition to the senses of the body, and because the soul is the seat of all spiritual sense, where supernatural things are known and enjoyed; not that the soul of a natural man is spiritual in the apostle's sense, for so none are, but those that are born from above (1 Cor 3:1-3) nor they so always neither. But ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... inch of the room was lit up by the powerful torch he carried, and, save for himself, the room was empty. The first moment of realisation was chill and unnerving. Then the slight smarting of the wound at his throat became convincing proof to him that there was nothing supernatural about this visit. He lit up half-a-dozen of the candles distributed about the place and laid down his torch. He was ashamed to find that his forehead was dripping ...
— The Great Impersonation • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... he had really anticipated something from the interview. The disappointment was keen. A moment of expectation; the thrill which comes to us all under the shadow of the supernatural, and then—this! a young and imaginative girl's dream, convincing to herself but supplying nothing which had not already been supplied both by the facts and his own imagination! A man had stood at the staircase, and this man had raised ...
— Initials Only • Anna Katharine Green
... supernatural incident was thus fortified, and although there were other strong presumptions against the prisoners, the story of the apparition threw an air of ridicule on the whole evidence for the prosecution. It was followed up by the counsel ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... museums. They made no attempt to move when we approached; they seemed to regard themselves as kings of the desert, looked on Tyre as an appanage which belonged to them, and whither they were about to return. Nothing more supernatural ever met my eyes; I could almost suppose that behind them I saw the terrible figure of Ezekiel, the poet of vengeance, pointing to the devoted city which the divine wrath had overwhelmed with destruction. The discharge ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... or spirits, has frequently been discussed in connection with speculations on the origin of religion. According to Mr. Spencer ('Principles of Sociology') 'the first traceable conception of a supernatural being is the conception of a ghost.' Even Fetichism is 'an extension of the ghost theory.' The soul of the Fetich 'in common with supernatural agents at large, is originally the double of a dead man.' How do we get this notion - 'the double of a dead man?' Through ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... lived. The reason that men do not believe it is that of course there seems to be to them some strange and previous presumption with regard to it, something which makes the story incredible. They say it is the supernatural in it, that it goes beyond the ordinary experience of man. Ah! it seems also strange to me, the ordinary experience of man. Who dares to dream that human life has lived its completest and shown the noblest power of receiving God into itself? Who dares to think that these ...
— Addresses • Phillips Brooks
... spectator to leave his place in the Piazza, where there should be wrought a miracle. It was clear that the Prior's enemies had sought his death, for they showed a furious passion of resentment. Even the Piagnoni were troubled by doubts of their prophet, who had refused to show his supernatural powers and silence the Franciscans. The monks were protected with difficulty from the violence of the mob as they returned in the April twilight to the ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead
... as George Washington recognized that the voice was not supernatural, he recovered his courage and at once disarmed the Major, who, watch in hand, was demanding if he supposed he had nothing else to do than to wait for him all night, by falling into his vein and acquiescing in all that he said in abuse of the yet absent duellists, or at ...
— "George Washington's" Last Duel - 1891 • Thomas Nelson Page
... and this disagreeable peculiarity often missed one generation, and sometimes two, while at other times both father and son had club-feet, as was the case with the late Lord Rantremly and the young man at Oxford. I am not a believer in the supernatural, of course, but nevertheless it is strange that within the past few years everyone residing in the castle has heard the club-footed ghost, and now title and estates descend to a family that were utter strangers ...
— The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont • Robert Barr
... a supernatural effort, she flung me on to the side of the boat; we both hung half overboard; her hair touched the water. The decisive moment had come. I planted my knee against the bottom of the boat, caught her by the tresses ...
— A Hero of Our Time • M. Y. Lermontov
... about the art of crayon portraiture, the mastery of it not only seems very difficult, but almost unattainable. In fact, any work of art of whatever description, which in its execution is beyond the knowledge or comprehension of the spectator, is to him a thing of almost supernatural character. Of course, this is more decided when the subject portrayed carries our thoughts beyond the realms of ...
— Crayon Portraiture • Jerome A. Barhydt
... of such manifestations ought, I think, to be inquired into and explained by some one who has a knowledge, which I have not, of causes natural and supernatural. It may, however, be, as certain wise men say, that the air is filled with intelligent beings, to whom it is given to forecast future events; who, taking pity upon men, warn them beforehand by these signs to prepare for what awaits them. Be this as it may, certain it is that ...
— Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius • Niccolo Machiavelli
... children poked one another, and fairly giggled with unreproved delight as we listened to the crackle of the slowly unfolding document. That great sheet of paper impressed us as something supernatural, by reason of its mighty size and by the broad seal of the State affixed thereto; and when the minister read therefrom, "By his Excellency, the Governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, a Proclamation," our mirth was with difficulty repressed by admonitory ...
— Good Cheer Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... each one thinking the same thought, and each boy-mind holding its own vision. Marco was the calmer of the two, because his belief that there was always help to be found was an accustomed one and had ceased to seem to partake of the supernatural. He believed quite simply that it was the working of a law, not the breaking of one, which gave answer and led him in his quests. The Rat, who had known nothing of laws other than those administered by police-courts, was at once awed and fascinated by the suggestion of crossing ...
— The Lost Prince • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... dexterity which mystified the simple folk of the country. This diversion, and his proficiency in it, gave rise to that mysterious awe with which he was regarded by the common people of his home region; they ascribed to him supernatural powers, and refused to believe that he was really dead even after the ...
— Lineage, Life, and Labors of Jose Rizal, Philippine Patriot • Austin Craig
... Laulewasikaw, the Prophet, and a third brother, Kumskaukau, were triplets; that Tecumseh was the youngest or last born of the three; that "this event so extraordinary among the Indian tribes, with whom a double birth is quite uncommon, struck the mind of the people as supernatural, and marked him and his brothers with the prestige of future greatness—that the Great Spirit would direct them to the achievement of something great." The date of this extraordinary event is given by most authors as 1768, making Tecumseh and ...
— The Land of the Miamis • Elmore Barce
... apostle of Browning in America, and his wife, Celia, a poetess in the bud, only sixteen, but very bright, original, and pleasant. They admired Hawthorne above all living men, and his sudden advent on their barren island seemed, as Thaxter afterward expressed it, like a supernatural presence. They became good companions in the next two weeks; climbing the rocks, rowing from one island to another,—bald pieces of rock, like the summits of mountains rising above the surface of the sea,—visiting the light-house, the monument to Captain John Smith, Betty Moody's Cave, the ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... nearest to Napoleon regarded him as an almost supernatural being. The Baron of Mneval, who, before he was the private secretary of Marie Louise, when regent, had been secretary of the First Consul and Emperor, thus writes: "By the influence which Napoleon exercised on his age he was more than a man. Never perhaps will a human being accomplish ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... a very obvious one, of examining his claims to this character, is to compare his person, life, actions, and doctrine, with the supposed predictions of them. But if it also appear that this Jesus wrought such works, as evinced that he enjoyed the supernatural assistance and cooperation of God, this certainly is a fact of great importance. For we cannot say, that in estimating the validity of our Lord's claims to the character of Messiah, it is of no consequence whether, while he advanced those ...
— Five Pebbles from the Brook • George Bethune English
... preservation in Wales of a bridge-sacrifice tradition. It relates to the "Devil's Bridge" near Beddgelert. "Many of the ignorant people of the neighbourhood believe that this structure was formed by supernatural agency. The devil proposed to the neighbouring inhabitants that he would build them a bridge across the pass, on condition that he should have the first who went over it for his trouble. The bargain was made, and the bridge appeared in its place, but ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... "Me off, indeed! Oh, would yer? Sh'like to see the feller try!" Burleybumbo then appeared, and vainly tried to drag him back. JOHN stove his pasteboard head in with a most refreshing crack. The wicked Demon now rushed on; his supernatural might Was very little use to him on this surprising night. He tried to push him down the glade, but here again JOHN sold him; He caught the Demon round the waist, and at the Prompter bowled him. Ah! such a ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 17, 1891 • Various
... another side of life grasped by means of this new world of experience, and that is, the spiritual side that lies between conduct and ideals; children have always accepted the supernatural quite readily and it is not to be wondered at, for all the world is new and therefore supernatural to them. Magic is done daily in children's eyes, and there is no line between what is understandable and what is not, until adults try to ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... I would not for the world have destroyed my father's faith. How often did he muse over it and pronounce the name of a dear friend—a friend lost to him forever; and on his death-bed, when the near approach of eternity seemed to have illumined his mind with supernatural light, this thought, which had until then been but a doubt, became a conviction, and his last words were, 'Maximilian, it was Edmond Dantes!'" At these words the count's paleness, which had for some time ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... and nights of frenzied fear of the supernatural desire to appease the power above, a fierce quivering excitement in every inch of nerve and blood vessel, there comes a time when nature cannot endure longer, and the spring long bent recoils. We sink down emasculated. Up creeps the ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner
... as did the blaze of the sheet-lightning, which was now flickering among the clouds in half a dozen places at once, bringing out into powerful relief their titanic masses, weirdly changing shapes, and varied hues, and converting the erstwhile Cimmerian darkness into a quivering, supernatural light, that caused the ocean to glow like molten steel, and revealed every object belonging to the ship as distinctly as though it had been illuminated by a port-fire. So vivid and continuous was the light that I not only ...
— A Pirate of the Caribbees • Harry Collingwood
... Shaftesbury, and concluded his harangue with the greatest part of that frothy writer's rhapsody, which he repeated with all the violence of enthusiastic agitation, to the unspeakable satisfaction of his entertainer, and the unutterable admiration of Pallet, who looked upon him as something supernatural and divine. ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... upon the island when the Ithaca arrived and that it would have been impossible for them to have landed and reached the camp without having been seen by himself or some member of his company, was sufficient evidence to warrant him in attributing their presence to some supernatural and malignant power. ...
— The Monster Men • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... dramas, children's books, and one or two novels, including Susan Hopley (1841), and Lilly Dawson (1847), but is chiefly remembered for her Night-side of Nature (1848), a collection of stories of the supernatural. Though somewhat morbid she ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... and next adjourned to Beaton's room, who offered a series of twelve preliminary observations on the Theology of Rupert of Deutz, whereupon his host promptly put out his candle, leaving that man of supernatural memory to go to bed in the dark; and as Carmichael pulled up the blind in his own room, the day was breaking and a blackbird had begun to sing. Next afternoon Beaton had resumed his observations on ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... there may be NO CHRISTMAS BOOK! I would give the world to be on the spot to tell you this. Indeed I once thought of starting for London to-night. I have written nearly a third of it. It promises to be pretty; quite a new idea in the story, I hope; but to manage it without the supernatural agency now impossible of introduction, and yet to move it naturally within the required space, or with any shorter limit than a Vicar of Wakefield, I find to be a difficulty so perplexing—the past Dombey work taken into account—that ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... sight. We stood for a long time in silent wonder, for there was a deep and most melancholy stillness about the place that quite overpowered us; and when we did at length speak, it was in subdued whispers, as if we were surrounded by some awful or supernatural influence. Even Peterkin's voice, usually so quick and lively on all occasions, was hushed now; for there was a dreariness about this silent, lonely, uninhabited cottage—so strange in its appearance, so far away from the usual dwellings of man, ...
— The Coral Island • R.M. Ballantyne
... question indicate the speedy discovery of relations not hitherto suspected to exist between matter and spirit. We do not anticipate the development of any other than natural laws. We are not credulous as to the interference of supernatural agencies; but we are fully prepared for almost any discoveries in the department of psychology, unveiling the mysterious but unquestionable relations of harmony—of action and reaction—existing between the soul of man and the universe ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the outer world, and living on a rock singled out by supernatural visitants, the people remain more superstitious than even the superstitious Germans and Bretons who are their neighbours. Few of them can read or write. The new thoughts, opinions, and creeds of the present ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... mean what they pretended, she suspected there might be some sort of mechanical efficacy at last; like the partly undeceived disciple and assistant of a master juggler, who is not quite sure that there may not be a supernatural power behind some of the tricks. Beyond an overflowing animal vitality, and a passion for having men make love to her, there really was not much of Victorine. But it is wonderful how far these two qualities can pass in a handsome woman for other and nobler ones. ...
— Between Whiles • Helen Hunt Jackson
... quoting," the repairman told him. "I mean, this is a thing like, outside material means. Supernatural, sort of. Did you cross ...
— Something Will Turn Up • David Mason
... "romantic" and "aesthetic" side of things that appeals to children. They have their nightmares, poor imps, and such devils follow them as older people never dream of. Dickens knew all that, and in his books the thrill of the supernatural, as it hovers over chairs and tables and pots and pans, is never far away. It lurks, that repelling-alluring Terror, in a thousand simple places. It moves in the darkness of very modern cupboards. It hides in the recesses of very modern cellars. ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... school for forty years with absolute impunity. She was more credulous as to her own possible failings than she had ever been in her whole life. She was cold with horror and terror, and yet not so much horror and terror of the supernatural as of her own self. The weakness of belief in the supernatural was nearly impossible for this strong nature. She could more easily believe ...
— The Wind in the Rose-bush and Other Stories of the Supernatural • Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman
... the reputation and what had been told her about a creaking board and a light that came and went without human agency. Frightened for a minute, she stood stock-still, then she rushed down. Whatever it was, natural or supernatural, she went to see it; but the light vanished before she passed the lower stair, and only a long-drawn sigh not far from her ear warned her that the space between her and the real hall was not the solitude she was anxious to consider it. A sigh! That meant a person. Striking ...
— The Mayor's Wife • Anna Katharine Green
... dialogue; one sees his characters because one shares all their sadness, their passions, their intelligence, and their sensibility. Dostoyevsky is the painter of the depths of the human soul, which he portrays with almost supernatural acuteness. And, as Tolstoy is "the seer of the flesh," so is Dostoyevsky ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... of the poem do we find that the allusions to the supernatural are classic and pagan? in what part, Christian? What corresponding difference is there in the tone ...
— Teachers' Outlines for Studies in English - Based on the Requirements for Admission to College • Gilbert Sykes Blakely
... of the worship of the Sun, Moon, and Stars, are both interesting and suggestive. It is probable that Sun worship is the older of the two, while that of Montezuma, as a later growth, remained concurrent with the other in all the New Mexican pueblos without superseding it. In this supernatural person, known to them as Montezuma, who was once among them in bodily human form, and who left them with a promise that he would return again at a future day, may be recognized the Hiawatha of Longfellow's ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan
... distance from the shore, but no creek, no inlet, could be discerned in the towering wall of cliff, which seemed about to topple over and involve them in annihilation. Except a change of wind or, as Procope observed, a supernatural rifting of the rock, nothing could bring deliverance now. But the wind did not veer, and in a few minutes more the schooner was hardly three cables' distance from the fatal land. All were aware that their last moment had arrived. Servadac and the count grasped each other's hands ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne
... tiles. With all this material progress, however, there had been a steady decline in spiritual religion as well as in morals,—from which fact we infer that men if left to themselves, whatever truth they may receive from ancestors, will, without supernatural influences, constantly decline in those virtues on which the strength of man is built, and without which the proudest triumphs of the intellect avail nothing. The grandest civilization, in its material aspects, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume II • John Lord
... only laugh at me," replied Angela, her cheeks paling a little as she spoke, "but it really is as if some supernatural being were present who could see all my inward thoughts,—and not only mine, but the thoughts of everyone else. Someone too who impels us to do what we have never thought of ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... adapted to general comprehension. He is not to be equaled in child conversations. The world of the fairy tale must be simple like the world Andersen has given us. It must be a world of genuine people and honest occupations in order to form a suitable background for the supernatural. Only fairy tales possessing simplicity are suited to the oldest kindergarten child of five or six years. To the degree that the child is younger than five years, he should be given fewer and fewer fairy tales. Those given should be largely ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready
... personages of his own time, with a more critical and common-sense attitude towards his own crotchets, Borrow could hardly have wrought out for himself (as he has to an extent hardly paralleled by any other prose writer who has not deliberately chosen supernatural or fantastic themes) the region of fantasy, neither too real nor too historical, which Joubert thought proper to the poet. Strong and vivid as Borrow's drawing of places and persons is, he always contrives to throw in touches which somehow ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... and Arrows, the Wood which was left in his Body took Root in his Wounds, and gave Birth to that bleeding Tree. This Circumstance seems to have the Marvellous without the Probable, because it is represented as proceeding from Natural Causes, without the Interposition of any God, or other Supernatural Power capable of producing it. The Spears and Arrows grow of themselves, without so much as the Modern Help of an Enchantment. If we look into the Fiction of Milton's Fable, though we find it full of surprizing Incidents, ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... their religion I could get no satisfactory information—every thing is ascribed to supernatural agency. Their invocations to their deity are frequent, and seem generally to be made with the view of filling their own stomachs with animal food. They live in a very promiscuous manner, one hundred being occasionally accommodated in a single house. Their laws appear to be simple,—all ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... reasons for having called them, asked them to accompany him to the convent to examine, with the most scrupulous impartiality, two nuns whom he would point out, in order to discover if their illness were feigned, or arose from natural or supernatural causes. Having thus instructed them as to his wishes, they all ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - URBAIN GRANDIER—1634 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... that they were called and supported by the Deity; and that no tender beings like women could otherwise voluntarily undergo such tortures—they become inspired with supernatural powers of courage and fortitude. When Duli Sukul, the Sihora[14] banker's father, died, the wife of a Lodhi cultivator of the town declared, all at once, that she had been a suttee with him six times before; and that she ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... normal faculty, to be studied and pursued by methods that are efficient while yet harmless; and this is the purport of the present treatise. I will therefore ask the reader to follow me in these pages with a mind divested of all disposition to the supernatural. ...
— Second Sight - A study of Natural and Induced Clairvoyance • Sepharial
... medicine, and aspired to celebrity as a practitioner of physic. About the same time he fell in with certain cotemporaries, of tastes similar to his own, and associated with them in the study of Chaldean, Greek, and Arabic science, of strange incantations and supernatural influences, in short, of all ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... but for a moment, to what immediately precedes my text. Our Lord says three things. First, He asserts His supernatural character and divine relation to life: 'I am the Resurrection and the Life.' Next, He declares that it is possible for Him to communicate to dying and to dead men a life which triumphs over death, and laughs at change, and persists through the superficial ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... glanced fitfully on the figures of the young girl, Gabriel, and the two children; the great, gloomy shadows rose and fell, and grew and lessened in bulk about the walls like visions of darkness, animated by a supernatural specter-life, while the dense obscurity outside spreading before the curtainless window seemed as a wall of solid darkness that had closed in forever around the fisherman's house. The night scene within the cottage was almost as wild ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... than a few minutes, for, as soon as the clouds are dispersed by the thunder it disappears so quickly, that, having once taken your eye off it when it begins to diminish, it is gone before you can catch it again—a fact which adds something of a wild and supernatural character to its life-like motion and appearance. The storm in which we saw it, was altogether confined to the mountains, where it raged for a long time, evidently pouring down deluges of rain, whilst on the hill side which we traversed, ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... believe, my dear friend, that it was predicted at Paris that I should be a King, but that I must cross the sea to reach my throne?" I could not help smiling with him at this weakness of mind, from which Bonaparte was not far removed. It certainly was not any supernatural influence which elevated Bernadotte to sovereign rank. That elevation was solely due to his excellent character. He had no other talisman than the wisdom of his government, and the promptitude which he always, showed to oppose unjust measures. This it was ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... a moment, then lifted it with a smile, and sailed in the spirit into the China seas, and there told them how the Chinamen used to slip on board his ship and steal with supernatural dexterity, and the sailors catch them by the tails, which they observing, came ever with their tails soaped like pigs at a village feast; and how some foolhardy sailors would venture into the town at the risk of their lives; and how one day they had to run for it, and when they got to the ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... in the last scene, he saw and heard her again clearly and distinctly, yet not as with his ordinary senses, for she wore for him the elemental guise of a supernatural vision. When the prompter's bell tinkled and the curtain descended for the last time, he had a feeling as though the universe ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... to furnish a case of stantis aut cadentis ecclesiae. That is, of course, absurd; but it creates an undoubted bias against the theory. Hence it is the fashion amongst its opponents to write of it as "mystical" or, as Loeb does, as "supernatural," probably the most illogical term that could possibly be used. What is Vitalism? It is the theory that there is some other element—call it entelechy with Driesch, or call it what you like—in living things than those elements known to chemistry and physics. If ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... nights as these. I call them nights, yet what a strange mistake. The sunshine still lingers in the heavens with a golden glow; the evening vanishes dreamily in the arms of the morning; there is nothing to mark the changes—all is soft, gradual, and illusory. A peculiar and almost supernatural light glistens upon the gilded domes of the churches; the glaring waters of the Neva are alive with gondolas; miniature steamers are flying through the winding channels of the islands; strains of music float upon the air; gay and festive throngs move along the promenades of the Nevskoi; ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... field, but without the addition of supernatural agency, we have another scene of scientific import in the War of Inisthona. Inisthona, according to Macpherson, was on the coast of Norway—he did not know where; Inisthona, according to Laing, was a wilful corruption of Inis-owen in Lough Foyle; Inisthona, in point of ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 3, January 1876 • Various
... with redoubled energy, in the hope of distracting his mind. Then a horrible delusion began to take possession of him; he fancied that the dead man was beginning to turn his head slowly, almost imperceptibly, towards him. Those closed eyes would open and look him in the face, a supernatural voice would speak his name. As on the previous afternoon the cold perspiration began to trickle from his brow. He was on the point of crying aloud with terror, when the man next to him rose. In an instant he ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... the silver top of the pepper-caster on his coat-sleeve, drawing corks and filling decanters, with a skill and expedition that were quite dazzling. And as if, in the course of this rubbing and polishing, he had rubbed an enchanted lamp or a magic ring, obedient to which there were twenty thousand supernatural slaves at least, suddenly there appeared a being in a white waistcoat, carrying under his arm a napkin, and attended by another being with an oblong box upon his head, from which a banquet, piping hot, was taken out and set ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... of common sense which enabled him to see, and weigh, and compare whatever passed before him, and which kindled a desire to search out and define their relations to other things not so patent, but which never succumbed to the marvelous nor the supernatural; a sacred thirst for liberty and for learning, first as a means of attaining liberty, then as an end in itself most desirable; a will; an unfaltering energy and determination to obtain what his soul pronounced desirable; ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... A writer whose imagination concerns itself with supernatural phenomena, especially in the doings of spooks. One of the most illustrious spookers of our time is Mr. William D. Howells, who introduces a well-credentialed reader to as respectable and mannerly a company of spooks as one could wish to meet. To the terror that invests ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... you should take my little talk about gardens, and fit it to what Ruskin has said, is a gracious act. You speak of that night in the garden. Do you remember that you wore a scarlet wrap of thin silk? I could think of nothing as you came toward me, but of some glorious flower of almost supernatural bloom. All about you the garden was dying. But you were Life—Life as it springs up afresh from a world that ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... for in some way, or pass into the category of the supernatural. Probably it was one of those intuitions, with objective projection, which sometimes come to imaginative young persons, especially girls, in certain exalted nervous conditions. The study of the portraits, with the knowledge of some parts of the history of the persons they represented, ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... sleeping-apartment, expecting to find Tulee there. She had been there, and had left a little glimmering taper behind a screen, which threw a fantastic shadow on the ceiling, like a face with a monstrous nose. It affected the excitable child like some kind of supernatural presence. She crept to the window, and through the veil of the mosquito-bar she dimly saw the same thick wall of greenery. Presently she espied a strange-looking long face peering out from its recesses. On their voyage home from Nassau, Gerald had sometimes read ...
— A Romance of the Republic • Lydia Maria Francis Child
... it not to attribute them to an occult cause? What is God? What is a spirit? They are causes of which we have no idea. O wise divines! Study nature and her laws; and since you can there discover the action of natural causes, go not to those that are supernatural, which, far from enlightening, will only darken your ideas, and make it utterly impossible that ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach
... behind his large hand that he would call for her at "four o'clock" and tiptoed out of the schoolroom. The master, who felt that everything would depend upon his repressing the children's exuberant curiosity and maintaining the discipline of the school for the next few minutes, with supernatural gravity addressed the young girl in Spanish and placed before her a few slight elementary tasks. Perhaps the strangeness of the language, perhaps the unwonted seriousness of the master, perhaps also the impassibility of the young stranger herself, all contributed to ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... that she had any better foundation than analogy and conjecture for charging my father with supernatural pretensions; and in all points when her orthodoxy was not concerned, she loved her master ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... hills like his own ingle, and she could tell to within five minutes how long it would take him to go to the fauld and back. But when it was ten minutes past his time Mysie stood anxiously in the open door and listened. Her ears, trained to almost supernatural quickness, soon detected above the winds and rain a sound of footsteps. She called a wise old sheep-dog and bid him listen. The creature held his head a moment to the ground, looked at her affirmatively, and at her command ...
— Scottish sketches • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... dazzling flash of lightning took place, and the dragonfly was no longer there. A long low wild cry was heard. I started, and my flesh creeped. The cry was repeated. "Es el—el mismo, y ningun otro. Me venga, Federico; me venga, mi querido!" shrieked poor Maria, with a supernatural energy, and with such piercing distinctness that it was heard shrill even ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... accepted the angel theory, swallowed it whole, tried to force it on us—with varying effect. He so worshipped Celis, and not only Celis, but what she represented; he had become so deeply convinced of the almost supernatural advantages of this country and people, that he took his medicine like a—I cannot say "like a man," but more ...
— Herland • Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman
... are suffering. And so the legend forms itself. And, of course, there must be cures out of so large a number of cases. Nature often cures without medical aid. Certainly, many of the workings of Nature are wonderful, but they are not supernatural. The Lourdes miracles can neither be proved nor denied. The miracle is based on human ignorance. And so the doctor who lives at Lourdes, and who is commissioned to register the cures and to tabulate the miracles, has a very careless time of it. A person comes, and gets cured. He has but ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... have prepared himself for the difficult task which he would have had to undertake, and no one would have been better able to go through it with feeling, delicacy, and firmness; but such was not the case. The sudden apparition of the wife and sister of his friend seemed to him to be supernatural; and though he at once made up his mind to give no false hope, he could not so quickly decide in what way he should impart the sad news which he had ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... being shrouded in his black beard, was undiscernible; but his cheeks and forehead were like cold marble. His dark brows were compressed so tightly that they seemed knotted, and beneath them his eyes glittered with an intensity that seemed to me supernatural. Not a muscle moved; his gaze was fixed; and it was not difficult to fancy that he was actually, ...
— The Gorilla Hunters • R.M. Ballantyne
... with pale yellow. Could such a sky be represented on canvas it would be condemned as unnatural—a case of the painter's imagination carrying him beyond the limits of true art. But it was from the reflection in the lake that the scene derived its weird, supernatural character. The shadows lay heavily upon the trees and bank that line the western shore. Upon the edge of the waters, which were so still that not a ripple waved the line drawn upon the white streak of sand, the deep red of the cloud upon the horizon reappeared. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... wailing was within him, in his ears. This evening had completely confirmed him in his suspicions about his wife. He no longer doubted that his wife, with the aid of the Evil One, controlled the winds and the post sledges. But to add to his grief, this mysteriousness, this supernatural, weird power gave the woman beside him a peculiar, incomprehensible charm of which he had not been conscious before. The fact that in his stupidity he unconsciously threw a poetic glamour over her made her seem, as it were, whiter, ...
— The Witch and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... Tempest first to roar. That innocence and beauty, which did smile In Fletcher, grew on this enchanted isle. But Shakspeare's magic could not copied be; Within that circle none durst walk but he. 20 I must confess 'twas bold, nor would you now That liberty to vulgar wits allow, Which works by magic supernatural things: But Shakspeare's power is sacred as a king's. Those legends from old priesthood were received, And he then writ, as people then believed. But if for Shakspeare we your grace implore, We for our theatre shall want ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... lead a solemn procession from the sick bed to the dining-room, and give his opinion from the hearthrug with an air of wisdom bordering on the supernatural, because neither the Drumtochty houses nor his manners were on that large scale. He was accustomed to deliver himself in the yard, and to conclude his directions with one foot in the stirrup; but when he left the room where the ...
— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren
... our verger heard in his kitchen of the supernatural skill of this cunning man; and whilst Mr. Hill ate his snack with his wonted gravity, he revolved great designs in his secret soul. Mrs. Hill was surprised, several times during dinner, to see her consort put down his ...
— Murad the Unlucky and Other Tales • Maria Edgeworth
... parson and squire must combine in this matter and continue to claim and enforce, as far as possible, a beneficent autocracy in thorpe and hamlet; and he perceived that religion was the only remaining force which upheld their sway. That supernatural control was crumbling under the influences of education he also recognised; but did his best to stem the tide, and trusted that the old dispensation would at ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... after his own, which first gave him his great fame, was not seduced into admiration by any whole-hearted fellowship in belief. Dryden laments the presence in the poem of so many "machining persons,"—as he calls the supernatural characters of Paradise Lost. At almost the same date Dr. Thomas Burnet was causing a mild sensation in the theological world by expounding the earlier chapters of the Book of Genesis in an allegorical sense, and denying to them the significance of a literal history. Voltaire, while ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... the natural-magic tendency of the human mind asserting itself. To some of us indeed this tendency is even greater in the case of the Snake than in that of the Tree. W. H. Hudson, in Far Away and Long Ago, speaks of "that sense of something supernatural in the serpent, which appears to have been universal among peoples in a primitive state of culture, and still survives in some barbarous or semi-barbarous countries." The fascination of the Snake—the fascination of its mysteriously ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... fit vel datur, but the man who at once named and defined the disease hydrocephalus, producing pressure on the brain. For it is the essence of a scientific definition to be causative, not by introduction of imaginary somewhats, natural or supernatural under the name of causes, but by announcing the law of action in the particular case, in subordination to the common law of which all the ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... to him, hugged the child in his arms, and drove the quivering coracle into the black waste of night and sea. To Frere, sitting sullenly in the bows, the aspect of this grim immovable figure, with its back-blown hair and staring eyes, had in it something supernatural and horrible. He began to think that privation and anxiety had driven the unhappy ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... through the intercession of the fates, but by recourse to their own valour. Do the Munis of rigid vows, and devoted to the practice of austere penances, denounce their curses with the aid of any supernatural power or by the exercise of their own puissance attained by individual acts? All the good which is attained with difficulty in this world is possessed by the wicked, is soon lost to them. Destiny does not help the man that is steeped ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... something of the history of the intervening years. He had heard now of the moral decay that had followed the collapse of supernatural religion in the minds of ignoble man, the decline of public honour, the ascendency of wealth. For men who had lost their belief in God had still kept their faith in property, and wealth ruled ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... in her sleep. She was talking with a strange accent that caused emotion, almost fear. The vague solemnity of supernatural things, a breath from regions beyond this life, arose in the room, with those words of sleep, involuntary, fugitive words, palpitating, half-spoken, as if a soul without a body were wandering about a dead man's lips. The voice was slow and ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... is uncertain, but supposed to be very ancient, soon after the Mahommedan conquest. They now claim a divine original, and are supposed to have supernatural powers, and to be the emissaries of the divinity, like the wolf, the tiger, and the bear. It is only lately that they have swarmed so prodigiously,—seven original gangs having migrated from Delhi to the Gangetic provinces about 200 years ago, and from these all the rest have sprung. Many belong ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... bank. The Indians set about every thing with an activity that amazed us. Indeed, contrasted with our emaciated figures and extreme debility, their frames appeared to us gigantic, and their strength supernatural. These kind creatures next turned their attention to our personal appearance, and prevailed upon us to shave and wash ourselves. The beards of the Doctor and Hepburn had been untouched since they left the sea-coast, and were become of a hideous length, and peculiarly offensive to the Indians. The ...
— Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the years 1819-20-21-22, Volume 2 • John Franklin
... can easily be understood, Rachel could not have made a more effective entry into Zululand, or one more calculated to confirm her supernatural reputation. When the "wild beast" she rode plunged about she had remained seated on it as though she grew there, whereas every warrior knew that he would have fallen off. When the bull charged her that ...
— The Ghost Kings • H. Rider Haggard
... the aspect of such supernatural devotion. He knelt with the first, groaned audibly at intervals, and when his face became visible, his eyes were strained in upward glances, so that the spectator could behold little more in their orbs ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... unromantic Englishman who thought he saw a vision would have blamed in turn his eyesight, his digestion, his sobriety, and his sanity before he allowed that he had anything to do with the supernatural. He now tells, without the least semblance of a blush, that he puts his faith in superstitions, and charms, and mascots, and that his lucky sign has saved his life on ...
— Mud and Khaki - Sketches from Flanders and France • Vernon Bartlett
... and, at any rate, could live without manual labour. There was a further feeling that a knowledge, however little, of the Greek and Latin languages would make one a very superior human being, something bordering almost on the supernatural. I remember that the first coloured man whom I saw who knew something about foreign languages impressed me at the time as being a man of all others ...
— Up From Slavery: An Autobiography • Booker T. Washington
... condemned continually to encounter without ever being able to explain—the rock, so to say, upon which their optimistic systems strike, and are shattered to pieces—unless protected by the armour of supernatural faith. ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon
... of late. He spoke little, and never at all of the scenes he had witnessed in his long campaign—never of his own share in them. He had become at once an active and a brooding man. The shadow of a supernatural presence seemed to hang over everything. Tonight that ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... attitude" of Professor Huxley as a thing of the past, candour obliges us to insist emphatically that the struggle continues and must perpetually be renewed. Huxley was opposing the teaching of science to that of revelation. In these days the ground has shifted, and supernatural teachings make preferably their defence by an appeal to intuition and other obscure phenomena which can be trusted to defy investigation. Against all such apocryphal glosses of evidential truth science protests with ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... was for just the same reason that the tremendous purposes of the Brotherhood had been able to fire his imagination with luridly brilliant dreams of a gigantic world-tragedy in which he, armed with almost supernatural powers, ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... purpose, however, to present him here as a musical "prodigy," nor as one of those rather abnormal, supernatural beings who astound their hearers by playing upon an instrument almost at sight, without previous study, or without observable method; playing, as it would seem, from a kind of instinct. I present him rather as he ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... Dillon now touched at Tucopia, where he obtained interpreters and a pilot, and thence went to Mallicolo, where he learnt from the natives that the strangers had stayed there five months to build their vessel, and that they had been looked upon as supernatural visitors, an idea not a little confirmed by their singular behaviour. They had been seen, for instance, to talk to the moon and stars through a long stick, their noses were immense, and some of them ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... brought. "In the course of a very few years, as the recollection of the man's personality becomes misty, his origin grows mysterious, his career takes a legendary hue, his birth and death were both supernatural; in the next generation the names of the elder gods get introduced into the story, and so the marvellous tradition works itself into a myth, until nothing but a personal incarnation can account for such a series of prodigies. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... weakly into the pillows. Beulah placed a glass to his lips, and the doctor told him to take his time with his story. The jurors stood about the bed in silence, looking from one to the other with expressions that suggested they were almost in the presence of the supernatural. If the black bag with the money had slowly risen out of the floor someone would have quietly set it in a corner until Allan was ready to ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... if he orders the people of the village to perform a certain action they will do it, even if death stares them in the face. They blindly believe that the fetish is all-powerful, and that the half naked dancing savages who administer it are endowed with supernatural powers. ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... learned Sir Matthew Hale condemned two women without even summing up the evidence. Old women, for no other reason than that they were old, were held as most susceptible to the assaults of the devil, and most especially endowed with supernatural powers for evil, to doubt which was equivalent to doubting the Bible. We see a reason for this hatred of old women, in the fact that woman was chiefly viewed from a sensual stand-point, and when by reason of age or debility, she no longer attracted the physical admiration of man, he looked ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... conscience put the question, Full of troublesome suggestion, As at length, with hurried pace, Towards his cell he turned his face, And beheld the convent bright With a supernatural light, Like a luminous cloud expanding Over floor and wall ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... You have disputed it and ridiculed it, but here I hold a proof of its truth. A month ago this blessing was vouchsafed to me. It was at one of our Wednesday-evening exercises. I had just been speaking of supernatural gifts, and of the duty which we lie under of expecting and demanding them. The moment I sat down, a stranger (a gentleman whom I had previously noticed at church) rose up with a strangely beaming look and broke out ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... had passed through the straggling village of Campillos the moon was up, a great white, incandescent globe of light, so brilliant that instead of draining colour from rock, and grass, and flower, it gave new and almost supernatural values to all. ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... the Bucephalid strain was perhaps but another form of a story told by the Chinese, many centuries earlier, when speaking of this same region. A certain cave was frequented by a wonderful stallion of supernatural origin. Hither the people yearly brought their mares, and a famous breed was derived from the foals. (Rem. N. Mel. As. ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... Not only for the sake of their variety, But as subservient to a moral use; Because my business is to dress society, And stuff with sage that very verdant goose. And now, that we may furnish with some matter all Tastes, we are going to try the Supernatural. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... how Mr Vanslyperken had picked up his favourite Snarleyyow cannot be discovered, and must remain a secret. The men said that the dog had appeared on the deck of the cutter in a supernatural way, and most of them looked upon him with ...
— Snarley-yow - or The Dog Fiend • Frederick Marryat
... animal creation. Man should be estimated as all other products and phenomena of nature are estimated, according to his absolute value, divested, as in the case of all other physical and organic sciences, of preconceived ideas or prejudices in favour of the supernatural. He should be studied as in physics we study bodies and the laws which govern them, or as the laws of their motions and combinations are studied in chemistry, allowance always being made for their reciprocal relations, and for their appearance as a whole. For if there be in the universe a distinction ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... wishing to back out of the supernatural and anxious to explain it away where possible, we would keep our disbelief in the supernatural in the background, as far as we could, and would explain away our rejection of the miracles, as far as was decent; furthermore we would approximate our language ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... a feminine impulse, put her hands before her face, to hide this supernatural hand; and, when she found courage to withdraw them, and glare at the place, there was no aperture whatever in the brick-work; and, consequently, the hand appeared to have traversed the solid material, both coming ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... exploits had spread through Syria, and from the year 1813 onwards, her reputation was enormous. She was received everywhere as a royal, almost as a supernatural, personage: she progressed from town to town amid official prostrations and popular rejoicings. But she herself was in a state of hesitation and discontent. Her future was uncertain; she had grown scornful of the West—must ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... old castles and peel towers of the Border, there are few to which some tale or other of the supernatural does not attach itself. It may be a legend of buried treasure, watched over by a weeping figure, that wrings its hands; folk may tell of the apparition of an ancient dame, whose corpse-like features yet show traces of passions unspent; of ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... ear, in consequence of the old-fashioned mode of writing, I have modernised the orthography, and amended the grammar and structure of the phrases. And lastly, I trust that all just thinkers of every party will pardon me for having here and there introduced my supernatural views of Christianity. A man's principles, as put forward in his philosophical writings, are in general only read by his own party, and not by that of his adversaries. A Rationalist will fly from a book by a Supernaturalist as rapidly as this latter from one by a Friend of Light. But by introducing ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V1 • William Mienhold
... treated thus with contumely, and then later to see her suggestions acted upon—a feminine consolation which men would do well to take unto themselves. As soon as they entered the ball-room, Mrs. Ingham- Baker, with that supernatural perspicacity which is sometimes found in stupid mothers, saw that Agatha was refusing her usual partners. She noted her daughter's tactics with mingled awe and admiration, both of which tributes were certainly deserved. She saw Agatha look straight ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... assisted her to mount beside him, and drove on again, almost in silence. He was inclined to believe that some supernatural legerdemain had to do with these periodic impacts of Picotee on his path. She sat mute and melancholy till they ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... Eternity; but cast thine Eye on that thick Mist into which the Tide bears the several Generations of Mortals that fall into it. I directed my Sight as I was ordered, and (whether or no the good Genius strengthened it with any supernatural Force, or dissipated Part of the Mist that was before too thick for the Eye to penetrate) I saw the Valley opening at the farther End, and spreading forth into an immense Ocean, that had a huge Rock of Adamant running through the Midst of it, and dividing it into two equal parts. The Clouds still ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... belonged to a sect who by no means rejected the supernatural, and whose founder, on the contrary, has sanctioned ghosts in the most emphatic way. He was glad therefore to remember, that in prosecuting his search that day, he had seen some six inches of wax candle in the press in the ...
— J.S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 5 • J.S. Le Fanu
... in a few days than another in a month, while some can solve with ease a mathematical problem that others could never grasp. So it is here. Perhaps I was in a favourable frame of mind on dying, for the so-called supernatural always interested me on earth, or I had a natural aptitude for these things; for soon after death I was able to affect the senses of the friends I ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... conclusions of science with those of the received theology. Thoughtful and religious laymen in the higher ranks of society were earnestly seeking a reason for the faith that was in them, and pondering over fundamental problems like the personality of God, the divinity of Christ, the reality of supernatural agency, and the awful mystery of the future life. Yet the tractarians passed lightly over all these problems, to exercise themselves and others with disputations on points which to most laymen of their ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... weird to me, this one-sided recognition, this unfamiliar familiarity: it gave me a queer thrill of the supernatural that I can hardly express to you. But I didn't know what to do, when a kindly-faced, middle-aged English upper-class servant rushed out at me, open-armed, and hugging me hard to her breast, exclaimed ...
— Recalled to Life • Grant Allen
... rest of those present disbelieved in the existence of the condemned Dutchman. The state of the atmosphere, the strange, wild, awful look of the ocean, prepared our minds for the appearance of anything supernatural. The captain told me that I looked ill and tired from having been on deck so many hours, and insisted on my turning in, which I at length ...
— James Braithwaite, the Supercargo - The Story of his Adventures Ashore and Afloat • W.H.G. Kingston
... Gregory of Tours (Hist. de Fr., i., 5) speak of this. However this may be, the marvelous art was lost at an early date, for it was at such a date that priests began to have recourse to tricks that were more or less ingenious for lighting their sacred fireplaces in an apparently supernatural manner.—A. De ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 392, July 7, 1883 • Various
... vision faded, he felt springing up within him an irrepressible desire to follow it. A mysterious fascination seized him, a wild desire to seek the phantom bridge. His whole being was swayed as by a supernatural power toward the west whence the vision had passed. He started forward eagerly, then checked himself in bewilderment. What could ...
— The Bridge of the Gods - A Romance of Indian Oregon. 19th Edition. • Frederic Homer Balch
... fatal engines, this mechanical cataclysm that pursues us through space, there is something that surpasses human strength and will, something supernatural. Joseph, standing with his hand in mine, looks over his shoulder at the storm of rending explosions. He bows his head like an imprisoned beast, distracted: "What, again! Always, then!" he growls; "after all we've done ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... is something supernatural about this!" said he to himself. "If I were fool enough to believe in God, I should think that He had set Saint Michael on my tracks. Suppose that the devil and the police should let me go on as I please, so as to nab me in ...
— Melmoth Reconciled • Honore de Balzac
... the things that are Caesar's—looks to natural agencies for the actual distribution and perpetuation of species, to a supernatural for ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... Moses, does little else than err ingeniously, this fact, that the Jewish Lawgiver, though touching science at a thousand points, has written nothing that has not been "demonstrated to be exactly and strictly true," is an irrefragable proof of his having derived his knowledge from a supernatural source. How does it happen, then, that Dr. Cumming forsakes this strong position? How is it that we find him, some pages further on, engaged in reconciling Genesis with the discoveries of science, by means of imaginative hypotheses and feats of "interpretation?" Surely, that ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... image had the marvelous peculiarity of looking straight at those who contemplated it, following them even though they changed position. A veritable miracle. It seemed impossible that that good gentleman who came up every morning in the summer to hear mass in the village, had painted that supernatural work. An Englishman had tried to buy it for its weight in gold. No one had seen the Englishman, but every one smiled sarcastically when they commented on the offer. Yes, indeed, they were likely to let the picture go! Let the heretics rage with all their millions. ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... gleaming white statuary, the gay company, the wild strains of music, all combined to form a scene of peculiar interest. High overhead, dimly visible through the tops of the trees, the sky wears an almost supernatural aspect during these long summer nights. A soft golden glow flushes upward from the horizon, and, lying outspread over the firmament, gives a spectral effect to the gentler and more delicate sheen of the ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... "seldom appears as a fixed law of nature...but rather as a blind necessity, depending on chance and not on law." The gods are mentioned by name in the poetic epitaphs only, and for poetic purposes, and even here only one in fifty of the metrical inscriptions contains a direct reference to any supernatural power. For none of these deities, save for Mother Earth, does the writer of an epitaph show any affection. This feeling one may see in the couplet which reads:[35] "Mother Earth, to thee have we committed the bones of Fortunata, to thee who dost come near to thy children as a mother," ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... the element of supernatural vengeance on cruelty compare L'Aigle du casque, published in ...
— La Legende des Siecles • Victor Hugo
... personal acquaintance of many of the very first minds of England; but, among all with whom this experience brought her in connection, there was none who impressed her so strongly as Lady Byron. There was an almost supernatural power of moral divination, a grasp of the very highest and most comprehensive things, that made her lightest opinions singularly impressive. No doubt, this result was wrought out in a great degree from the anguish and conflict of these two years, ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... shudder strangely at the breath of this blast that cried with such clamor out of the black vaults above, this unknown and tremendous power beneath which she was nothing but a mote; she suffered an unexplained awe, as if this fearful wind were some supernatural assemblage of souls fleeting through space and making the earth tremble under their wild rush. All the while the heavy thunders charged on high in one unbroken roar, across whose base sharp bolts broke and burst perpetually; and with the outer world wrapped in quivering curtains of blue flame, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... proceeding from God or the world." "The way of God consisteth not in ways of devotion or sweetness, though these may be necessary to beginners, but in giving ourselves up to suffer." And so we must fly from all "mystical phenomena" (supernatural manifestations to the sight, hearing, and the other senses) "without examining whether they be good or evil." "For bodily sensations bear no proportion to spiritual things"; since the distance "between God and the creature is infinite," "there is no essential ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... and consists of statements by possible witnesses. The man who would have been the defendant or prisoner seems never to have appeared. The dossier is not complete, but, such as it is, it furnishes a riddle in which the supernatural appears to play a part. You must see what ...
— A Thin Ghost and Others • M. R. (Montague Rhodes) James
... reveal things supernatural. His teaching is made up of moral and political maxims. He builds on the past, and always inculcates reverence for the fathers and for what has been. There is much wise counsel to parents and to rulers. His morality reaches its acme ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... as any body. After due examination of the specimen of the genus Zana which the bursar still held in captivity, and pronouncing an unanimous opinion, that, come from where he would, he was a bona fide frog, with nothing supernatural about him, the conclave proceeded round the quadrangle, calculating the numbers, and conjecturing the probable origin of these strange visitors. Equally curious, if not equally scientific, were the under-graduates who followed them; for, having strictly kept our own ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... historic conception witchcraft and its demonstrations centered in the claim of power to produce certain effects, "things beyond the course of nature," from supernatural causes, and under this general term all its occult manifestations were classified with magic and sorcery, until the time came when the Devil was identified and acknowledged both in church and state as the originator and sponsor of the mystery, sin and crime—the sole father ...
— The Witchcraft Delusion In Colonial Connecticut (1647-1697) • John M. Taylor
... he answered. "In return for supernatural service rendered you during your lifetime, your soul reverts ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring
... than a strange commingling of cloud and moon in atmospheric illusion, still the effect was awe-inspiring to a degree difficult of realization within the environments of peace and safety. To us, it appeared as a dreadful warning,—a mysterious manifestation of supernatural power, chilling our blood with terror and striking agony into our souls. Up from the far east had rolled an immense black cloud, rifted here and there by bars of vivid yellow as electric bolts tore it asunder. Moonlight tipped its heavy edges with a pale spectral gleam; and as it swiftly rose ...
— When Wilderness Was King - A Tale of the Illinois Country • Randall Parrish
... France—him, who was nothing at all, the son of a mere printer: it was the only example of such a piece of fortune which could then be instanced, and which, even during Fabert's life, had appeared so extraordinary, the vulgar never feared to ascribe his elevation to supernatural causes. It was said that from his youth he had busied himself with magic and sorcery, and that he had made a league with the devil. Mine host, who, to the stupidity inherent in all the natives of the ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... experiences have gradually produced in the human mind. From generation to generation Science has been proving uniformities of relation among phenomena which were before thought either fortuitous or supernatural in their origin—has been showing an established order and a constant causation where ignorance had assumed irregularity and arbitrariness. Each further discovery of Law has increased the presumption that Law is everywhere conformed to. And hence, ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... learning that he thought it would be useful to bring this together in a connected sketch of the whole subject. This he did, and sent it to a secularist magazine, in which it appeared in 1866, under the title of "The Scientific Aspect of the Supernatural." He sent a copy ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... and proceeded to work about the house, to the great astonishment of my friends, some of whom thought me wild; but I continued my work, assuring them that Jesus had healed me. Realizing the scrutiny and doubt with which I was observed, I said to my father, 'What do you think?' He replied, 'It is supernatural power; no one ...
— The Wonders of Prayer - A Record of Well Authenticated and Wonderful Answers to Prayer • Various
... encircling the middle of the vase. The subject is the wedding of the mortal, Peleus, to the sea- goddess, Thetis, the wedding whose issue was Achilles, the great hero of the Iliad. To this ceremony came gods and goddesses and other supernatural beings. Our illustration shows Dionysus (Bacchus), god of wine, with a wine-jar on his shoulder and what is meant for a vine-branch above him. Behind him walk three female figures, who are the personified Seasons. Last comes a group consisting ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... all-concealing mist. Not a ripple stirred along that weird beach, or a ray changed the fixed gray twilight. And I was afraid, for my danger was not of the common dangers of mankind, but that which freezes the blood of man when he draws near the supernatural; the ancient fear. ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... made her cling to the forms, in which, though she knew they did not mean what they pretended, she suspected there might be some sort of mechanical efficacy at last; like the partly undeceived disciple and assistant of a master juggler, who is not quite sure that there may not be a supernatural power behind some of the tricks. Beyond an overflowing animal vitality, and a passion for having men make love to her, there really was not much of Victorine. But it is wonderful how far these two qualities can pass in a handsome ...
— Between Whiles • Helen Hunt Jackson
... regular charlatans, and know nothing whatever of the diseases they pretend to cure or their remedies. They carry bags containing sundry relics; these are "medicine bags." Every brave has his own private medicine bag. Everything that is incomprehensible, or supposed to be supernatural, religious, or medical, is "medicine." This feast, being an unusual one, in honour of strangers, and in connection with a peculiar and unexpected event, was "medicine." Even Crusoe, since his gallant conduct in saving the Indian child, was "medicine;" and Dick Varley's ...
— The Dog Crusoe and His Master - A Story of Adventure in the Western Prairies • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... learned argued the question of their existence. Here are parts of another letter culled from Pliny already several times quoted. He writes to his friend Sura: "I should very much like to know whether you think that apparitions actually exist, with a real shape of their own and a kind of supernatural power, or that it is only our fear which gives an embodiment to vain fancies. My own inclination is to believe in them, and chiefly because of an experience which, I am told, befell Curtius Rufus." He then speaks of a phantom form which prophesied that person's fortune. "Another occurrence, quite ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... considered as one of the darkest and most strictly guarded of the mysteries of the initiation into occultism—from the days of the Rishis until those of the Theosophical Society—came to the knowledge of the author in a way that would seem to the ordinary run of Europeans strange and supernatural. He himself, however, we may assure the reader, is a most thorough disbeliever in the Supernatural, though he has learned too much to limit the capabilities of the natural as some do. Further, he has to make the following confession of his own belief. It will be apparent, from a careful perusal ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... monk, lean, black cowled, eyes glowing with a light that held the supernatural, placed hand upon the boy's head and gave him blessing. So then the boy mounted horse ...
— In the Court of King Arthur • Samuel Lowe
... reason. Secondly, as to the object; in respect of which two acts of the reason have to be noticed. One is the act whereby it apprehends the truth about something. This act is not in our power: because it happens in virtue of a natural or supernatural light. Consequently in this respect, the act of the reason is not in our power, and cannot be commanded. The other act of the reason is that whereby it assents to what it apprehends. If, therefore, that which the reason apprehends is ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... Jehovah ever made of himself was on Mt Sinai—Every other depended upon the testimony of a very few & usually of a single individual—We will first therefore consider the revelation of Mount Sinai. Taking the fact plainly it happened thus. The Jews were told by a man whom they believed to have supernatural powers that they were to prepare for that God wd reveal himself in three days on the mountain at the sound of a trumpet. On the 3rd day there was a cloud & lightning on the mountain & the voice of a trumpet extremely loud. The people were ordered to stand round the foot of the mountain ...
— Proserpine and Midas • Mary Shelley
... important for our first object, which was limited to our expectation of five pounds; and we began to think of a volume, which was to consist, as Mr. Coleridge has told the world, of poems chiefly on supernatural subjects, taken from common life, but looked at, as much as might ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... characteristics, is a state of actual hostility between master and slave, in which "a revolution of the wheel of fortune, in exchange of situation, is among possible events; and this may become probably by supernatural interference! The Almighty has no attribute which can take part with us ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... they had been before, into the suburbs of the town. It was a remarkable quality of the Ghost (which Scrooge had observed at the baker's) that, notwithstanding his gigantic size, he could accommodate himself to any place with ease; and that he stood beneath a low roof quite as gracefully, and like a supernatural creature, as it was possible he could have ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... a keen observer of nature, and his knowledge of the ways of animals is extensive and peculiar. Perhaps even more marked is his love of the supernatural; he could believe anything, if it was only wonderful enough—except Geoffrey of Monmouth's History. But I must confine myself to one story—the story of the boy in Gower who (as the root of learning is bitter) played truant and found two little men of pigmy stature, ...
— Mediaeval Wales - Chiefly in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries: Six Popular Lectures • A. G. Little
... ludicrous contrast, which is an essential in the composition of a sceptic. In Dante's time, learning had something of a sacred character, the line was hardly yet drawn between the clerk and the possessor of supernatural powers, it was with the next generation, with the elegant Petrarch, even more truly than with the kindly Boccaccio, that the purely literary life, and that dilettanteism, which is the twin sister of scepticism, began. As a merely literary ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... it very openly, General. I remember your trying to see a freckle through the rouge; but the truth is, I am of a supernatural paleness if I do not rouge, so I do. You understand, therefore, I have a false complexion. Now ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... and weird to me, this one-sided recognition, this unfamiliar familiarity: it gave me a queer thrill of the supernatural that I can hardly express to you. But I didn't know what to do, when a kindly-faced, middle-aged English upper-class servant rushed out at me, open-armed, and hugging me hard to her breast, exclaimed with many ...
— Recalled to Life • Grant Allen
... after another issues from the darkness, producing a supernatural effect upon the assemblage. The nerves of even the most intrepid are at ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams
... can find ways and means for persuading Faith to any belief. These simple children of nature have implicit faith in the supernatural. As for genius—well, some persons possess it, while others do not, and modesty forbids my making invidious comparisons. Seeing by their incredulous smiles that the several members of my crew were inclined to doubt my statements, and were determined to pass the first night on shore as usual, ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore
... the savages of Peru before the time of Capac, among other objects of adoration, paid homage to the sun. By availing himself of this popular sentiment he appeared, like Moses and Mahomet, in the character of a divine legislator endowed with supernatural powers. After impressing these ideas on the minds of the people, drawing together a number of the tribes and rendering them subservient to his benevolent purposes, he applied himself to forming the outlines of a plan of policy ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... been accidental. Some masker has watched us, and has tried to frighten you. That is all. If I thought that we could have any enemy, I would say that it was his work. But that is impossible. We are unknown here. At any rate, you must not think that there has been any thing supernatural about it. It seems to me," he concluded, "that we have ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... be the most isolated group of inhabited islands in the world. It is possible that the real discoverer of the islands was not Jas. Cook, but a Spanish seaman named Juan Gaetano, who sighted them in 1555. Cook and his men were treated as supernatural beings and worshiped by the superstitious natives as gods, until the death of one of the sailors showed that they were mere mortals; and in 1779, by their overbearing conduct, the Englishmen came ...
— Wanderings in the Orient • Albert M. Reese
... confusion, from his seat. But these feelings were of short duration, and soon gave place to others of a very different character. For now were those wonderful faculties which he possessed, for the first time developed; and now was first witnessed that mysterious and almost supernatural transformation of appearance, which the fire of his own eloquence never failed to work in him. For as his mind rolled along, and began to glow from its own action, all the exuviae of the clown seemed to shed themselves spontaneously. His attitude, by degrees, became ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler
... out with a supernatural clearness, the square, white-clothed table in the bay of the window, the Queen Anne fluting on the Britannia metal teapot, the cups and saucers and plates, white with a gentian blue band, The King's Head stamped in gold ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... suffering keenly. He fancied that all this was some supernatural temptation, and, unwilling to look at the markets any longer, turned towards Saint Eustache, a side view of which he obtained from the spot where he now stood. With its roses, and broad arched windows, its bell-turret, and roofs of slate, ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... states, whatever strongly controls mental attitudes becomes a very great factor in mental healing. There is a long line of testimony that what may be called the complex of faith does just this with unique power, for faith implies supernatural intervention. If there be anywhere an all-prevailing power whose word is law and we could really be persuaded that such a power had really intervened—even if it actually had not—on our behalf and brought its ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... telegraph operators caught on to the fact that they were signals, a sort of awe seemed to come over both Republicans and Democrats alike. Even Tammany's thoughts began to lift above the sordid level of boodle. It was almost like a message from another world. There was something supernatural about it, and when it was translated and rushed out in extra editions of the evening papers: "Vote for sound men and sound money" became ...
— A Honeymoon in Space • George Griffith
... are blood-relations of the Sun-god, some through their father, others through their mother, directly begotten by the God, and their souls as well as their bodies have a supernatural origin; each soul being a double detached from Horus, the successor of Osiris, and the first to reign alone over Egypt. This divine double is infused into the royal infant at birth, in the same manner as the ordinary double is incarnate in common mortals. It always remained ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... by exertions almost supernatural in a gentleman of his years and weight, contrived to get upon Sam's back; and Sam gently raising himself up, and Mr. Pickwick holding on fast by the top of the wall, while Mr. Winkle clasped him tight by the legs, they contrived by ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... the poem, in perfect good faith and with great tenacity. But the generation after his own, which first gave him his great fame, was not seduced into admiration by any whole-hearted fellowship in belief. Dryden laments the presence in the poem of so many "machining persons,"—as he calls the supernatural characters of Paradise Lost. At almost the same date Dr. Thomas Burnet was causing a mild sensation in the theological world by expounding the earlier chapters of the Book of Genesis in an allegorical ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... mentions it in such a way as to make it clear beyond all doubt that he himself could never have seen it; and moreover, in addition to the fact that no date is given, either of the birth or death of Lao Tzu, the account is so tinged with the supernatural as to raise a strong suspicion that some part of it did not really come from the pen of ...
— China and the Chinese • Herbert Allen Giles
... again, holy men and prophets have always been common in India. They foretell pestilence and famine: the downfall of British rule, or the destruction of the whole world. They are often supposed to be endowed with supernatural powers and to be impervious to bullets; but these phenomena invariably disappear whenever they come in contact with Europeans, especially as all such characters are liable to be treated as vagrants ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... bounce in. The young man must not be startled. If the mountain had come to Mahomet, it would, we may be sure, have come slowly, that the prophet should have time to realise the grandeur of the miracle. Let the hero remember that his coming, too, will seem supernatural to the young man. Let him be framed for an instant or so in the doorway—time for his eyes to produce their peculiar effect. And by the way: if he be a wearer of glasses, he should certainly remove these before ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... Moses and Elijah talking with Him." How did the disciples know the Lawgiver and the Prophet? We are not told. There may have been given them some supernatural powers of discernment. They may have known by the conversation between Jesus and His celestial visitants, as, in earthly language with heavenly tone, they "spoke of His departure which He was about to accomplish ...
— A Life of St. John for the Young • George Ludington Weed
... on this same evening that Paddy Doolan roused the whole regiment to a state of alarm. He was on sentry go on the extreme left of his regiment's line. Being dark, Paddy began to feel the effects of things supernatural. Every sound, every moving leaf or blade was a Turk. He had fired at a few nothings, and during a spell of silence he was amazed to hear on his left a ...
— The Kangaroo Marines • R. W. Campbell
... glory and grandeur—which consists not merely in considering nothing wrong that one does but in priding oneself on every crime one commits, ascribing to it an incomprehensible supernatural significance—that ideal, destined to guide this man and his associates, had scope for its development in Africa. Whatever he does succeeds. The plague does not touch him. The cruelty of murdering prisoners ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... by human sacrifice.[29] This conclusion is confirmed by the preservation in Wales of a bridge-sacrifice tradition. It relates to the "Devil's Bridge" near Beddgelert. "Many of the ignorant people of the neighbourhood believe that this structure was formed by supernatural agency. The devil proposed to the neighbouring inhabitants that he would build them a bridge across the pass, on condition that he should have the first who went over it for his trouble. The bargain was ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... feet, and circumstances almost incredible are related of his matchless strength and appetite. [37] Had he lived in a less enlightened age, tradition and poetry might well have described him as one of those monstrous giants, whose supernatural power was constantly exerted for the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... invisible roof above them, the water heaving beneath them, the walls that hemmed them in, called, with a multiplication of resonance, upon the name of Darrow. The boat quivered with the start of its occupants. Then one or two laughed weakly as they realised that what they had heard was no supernatural voice. It was the captain hailing ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... be absolutely sure how far they are the result of the direct action of God's Spirit upon our minds. It is God's plan to work through simple, natural means, so that we may not be looking and waiting for the supernatural. And yet it would seem that many are so irrational that, when they find mere feeling passing away, they give up their hope and all relationship to Christ, acting as if the immutable love of God were changing with ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... His utter disbelief in Christian's testimony regarding the footprints was based upon positive scepticism. His reason refused to bend in accepting the possibility of the supernatural materialised. That a living beast could ever be other than palpably bestial—pawed, toothed, shagged, and eared as such, was to him incredible; far more that a human presence could be transformed from ...
— The Were-Wolf • Clemence Housman
... explanation I was incompetent to give. I studied the obscurer sides of consciousness, dreams, hallucinations, illusions, insanity. Into the darkness shot a ray of light—A.P. Sinnett's "Occult World," with its wonderfully suggestive letters, expounding not the supernatural but a nature under law, wider than I had dared to conceive. I added Spiritualism to my studies, experimenting privately, finding the phenomena indubitable, but the spiritualistic explanation of them incredible. The phenomena of clairvoyance, clairaudience, ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... Jinks with supernatural activity, and making a leap, he lit, so to speak, behind Ralph, much after the fashion of a monkey falling on the bough of a ...
— The Last of the Foresters • John Esten Cooke
... or Gwrach-y-rhybin.—Another instance of the grand, though gloomy superstitions of the Cymry, is that of the Cyoeraeth, or hag of the mist, an awful being who is supposed to reside in the mountain fog, through which her supernatural shriek is frequently heard. She is believed to be the very personification of ugliness, with torn and dishevelled hair, long black teeth, lank and withered arms and claws, and a most cadaverous appearance; to this some add, wings of a leathery and ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 19, Saturday, March 9, 1850 • Various
... laziness and distaste for his duty—why should not a quantity of his life-atoms have passed into the materials of the future besom, and therein have been recognized by Buddha, owing to his superhuman (not supernatural) powers? The processes of Nature are acts of incessant borrowing and giving back. The materialistic sceptic, however, will not take anything in any other way than in a ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... horse went too fast, he could detach the bobs from the cutter by the simple expedient of letting go the rope. All the others immediately piled on to get the benefit of the ride. Some preferred to stand atop the cutter's runners. It lent a pleasant sensation of a sort of supernatural gliding, this standing, upright and motionless, but nevertheless moving forward at a good rate of speed. Certain drivers refused, however, to allow these liberties, but scowled blackly when addressed by the usual cheerful "Give us a ride, Mister?" ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... because he had absolutely no fear of the Devil. He was the only Christian I have ever known of whom that could be truly said. People stood in deep dread of him on that account; for they thought that there must be something supernatural about him, else he could not be so bold and so confident. All men speak in bitter disapproval of the Devil, but they do it reverently, not flippantly; but Father Adolf's way was very different; he called him by every name he could lay his tongue to, and it made everyone shudder that heard him; ...
— The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... have been the cause of such a movement. But the spirit of an age is stronger than the echoes of tradition, sound they never so sweetly. And the spirit of that age, as every extension lecturer knows, moved towards Truth and Nature, away from supernatural ecstasies. There is a moment at which the spirit begins to crave for Truth and Nature, for naturalism and verisimilitude; in the history of art it is known as the early decadence. Nevertheless, on naturalism and ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... and, without a word, proceed to order supper and dry my tears with her handkerchief, that I was rendered speechless; it revolted, yet charmed me. What I had done had been done so quickly that I seemed to have obeyed some impulse of despair. Perhaps I was a fool, or the victim of some supernatural caprice. ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... answer to all questions relating to what is called the supernatural, I always say, ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... fiery skull in its flaming hands, shied it with such dexterity that it hit Bully Tom in the middle of his back, and falling on to the wet ground, went out with a hiss. This blow was an unexpected shock to the Bully, who thought the ghost must have come up to him with supernatural rapidity, and falling on his knees in the mud, began ...
— Frances Kane's Fortune • L. T. Meade
... during the mournful gales of autumn, the strange mixed music of water, wind, and strings met her ear, swelling and sinking with an almost supernatural cadence. The character of the instrument was far enough removed from anything she had hitherto seen of Bob's hobbies; so that she marvelled pleasantly at the new depths of poetry this contrivance revealed as existent in that young seaman's nature, and allowed her emotions to flow out yet a ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... loved in return. You will soon find that out from her gentle, almost supernatural ways and doings. For the present don't ask me the name of the other one. The happy ones, however, acted, met, talked, and exchanged their vows, without the father's knowledge. He has found them out, wants to take violent measures, and forbids any sort of intercourse on ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... he, nor any of his relations, disbelieves the statements recorded." Possibly not; nor dare we profess to be utterly sceptical—simply as Christians—to all narratives of this description; but, allowing the possibility, nay, the necessity in some cases, of supernatural agency, still, a spirit should have some just and striking reason for its permitted appearance; and we cannot exactly discover the object of Sir Tristram's mission. Would it be unfair to hazard a conjecture that the lady, being a Catholic, married ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 487 - Vol. 17, No. 487. Saturday, April 30, 1831 • Various
... Fitzpiers while he drew from her father and the bark-rippers sundry narratives of their fathers', their grandfathers', and their own adventures in these woods; of the mysterious sights they had seen—only to be accounted for by supernatural agency; of white witches and black witches; and the standard story of the spirits of the two brothers who had fought and fallen, and had haunted Hintock House till they were exorcised by the priest, and compelled to retreat to a swamp in this very wood, whence they were returning to ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... peep at us out of German-land through a pleasant, clear translation, and they remind us how easily the supernatural and loves to dwell in airborn castles. The beautiful instinct of reverence common to child-life is readily taken advantage of by writers for the young; but where in England we find in stories some angel-mother who discovers the treachery of her governess and teaches ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... morbid young person who loved to dabble in the supernatural. Her taste in literature was for Edgar A. Poe. In religion she inclined toward spiritualism. Her favorite amusement was to gather a few shuddering friends about her, turn out the gas, and tell ghost stories. She had an extensive repertoire ...
— Just Patty • Jean Webster
... passing in his enemy's mind, not through any supernatural means, but by his knowledge of human nature. He was aware, as he lay on his narrow straw bed, that his life was in imminent danger. No one knew where he was; no message could reach his friends. A discredited wizard could count on no popular sympathy. The record of his studies for many ...
— Masters of the Guild • L. Lamprey
... oppression which they hoped to share; and when shipmasters were restrained by heavy fines from affording them passage, they made long and circuitous journeys through the Indian country, and appeared in the province as if conveyed by a supernatural power. Their enthusiasm, heightened almost to madness by the treatment which they received, produced actions contrary to the rules of decency as well as of rational religion, and presented a singular contrast to the calm and staid deportment of their sectarian successors of ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... with Him. It is a part of our settled experience thus to draw strength from the inexhaustible source which at all times is at our disposal. We know how the tasks of the day are lightened and our strength to meet them renewed by these momentary invasions of the supernatural. There are also special times in each week when we meet with other members of the One Body of Christ in the offering of the unbloody Sacrifice. We know that in that act heaven and earth join, and that not only our brethren who are kneeling beside ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... elephant!" echoed Karl and Caspar—both considerably relieved at this natural explanation of what had appeared so like a supernatural apparition. ...
— The Cliff Climbers - A Sequel to "The Plant Hunters" • Captain Mayne Reid
... you a short time ago. In the presence of gentlemen so enlightened as you are, I hardly need to say that the speedy communication which I have been enabled to make with the Western world is effected by no supernatural agency, but by a wonderful discovery in the realms of nature, the precise character of which I do not at present consider it expedient to disclose. Let it suffice, that I am able to furnish you, at reasonable rates, with the latest intelligence from the United States of America; ...
— John Whopper - The Newsboy • Thomas March Clark
... giants from the remotest part of Africa brought them to Ireland, and in the plains of Kildare, not far from the castle of Naas, miraculously set them up.... These stones (according to the British history) Aurelius Ambrosius, King of the Britons, procured Merlin by supernatural means to bring from Ireland ...
— Rough Stone Monuments and Their Builders • T. Eric Peet
... belong to the regular course of events, are regarded as prodigies. The same delusion prevails as to moral phenomena, and many of these are ascribed to the intervention of demons, ghosts, witches, and other immaterial and supernatural agents. By degrees, many of the enigmas of the moral and physical world are explained, and, instead of being due to extrinsic and irregular causes, they are found to depend on fixed and invariable laws. The philosopher at last becomes ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... assuredly be murdered before the sun sets; if he orders the people of the village to perform a certain action they will do it, even if death stares them in the face. They blindly believe that the fetish is all-powerful, and that the half naked dancing savages who administer it are endowed with supernatural powers. ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... to examine the opinions of those who differ from me. (147) The first which comes under our notice is, that the light of nature has no power to interpret Scripture, but that a supernatural faculty is required for the task. (148) What is meant by this supernatural faculty I will leave to its propounders to explain. (149) Personally, I can only suppose that they have adopted a very obscure way of stating their ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part II] • Benedict de Spinoza
... morality with the orgies of African Apuleius and Petronius Arbiter—at times taking away the reader's breath—and, finally, the whole dominated everywhere by that marvellous Oriental fancy, wherein the spiritual and the supernatural are as common as the material and the natural; it is this contrast, I say, which forms the chiefest charm of The Nights, which gives it the most striking originality and which makes it a perfect expositor of the medieval ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... known as the hermitage of Metronhena. Make for it with a pure intent and do your utmost endeavour to come into the hermitage, for therein is a true believer from Jerusalem, by name Abdallah, one of the holiest of men, whom God hath blessed with supernatural powers, such as dispel doubts and obscurity. Him certain of the monks seized by fraud and shut in an underground dungeon, where he has lain many a year. So, if ye desire to gain the favour of the Lord ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume II • Anonymous
... benefit of intelligent readers, the principal facts upon which scholars are now generally agreed concerning the literary history of the Bible. The doctrines taught in the Bible will not be discussed; its claims to a supernatural origin will not be the principal matter of inquiry; the book will concern itself chiefly with those purely natural and human agencies which have been employed in writing, transcribing, editing, preserving, transmitting, ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... ban sith, "woman of the fairies"), a supernatural being in Irish and general Celtic folklore, whose mournful screaming, or "keening," at night is held to foretell the death of some member of the household visited. In Ireland legends of the banshee belong more particularly ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... great. Scientific ideas as to natural phenomena disappeared, and crude and childish ideas as to natural forces came to prevail. As if barbarian chiefs and robber bands were not enough, popular imagination peopled the world with demons, goblins, and dragons, and all sorts of superstitions and supernatural happenings were recorded. Intercommunication largely ceased; trade and commerce died out; the accumulated wealth of the past was destroyed; and the old knowledge of the known world became badly distorted, as is evidenced by the many crude mediaeval maps. (See Figure 46.) The only scholarship ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... breathed. "Some of them do make me angry. They like to play at having dealings with the supernatural. But I thought the crystal would be such a good thing for Sullivan's reception. It is very important to Sullivan that this should be a great success—our first large public reception, you know. Sullivan ...
— The Ghost - A Modern Fantasy • Arnold Bennett
... I was, as it were, groping in the dark, no ray of light penetrating the intense gloom surrounding me. My scanty garments felt too tight for me, my very respiration seemed to be restrained by some supernatural power. Now, free as I supposed, I felt like a bird on a pleasant May morning. Instead of the darkness of slavery, my eyes were almost blinded ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... everybody some natives appeared on the scene and occupied it, and later on Parrott & Co. leased the premises for their whisky agency. Let us hope that the material spirit has had the effect of exorciting the supernatural one. ...
— Recollections of Calcutta for over Half a Century • Montague Massey
... usurper, because Elala offered his protection to the priesthood; but the orthodox annalist closes his notice of his reign by the moral reflection that "even he who was an heretic, and doomed by his creed to perdition, obtained an exalted extent of supernatural power from having ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... parts were of a peculiar steel blue, while the brighter portions glowed with a fleshy tint. At dusk, catching the reflection of the sun, they seemed to shine out of the dark sky like pale spectres of gigantic size, casting their supernatural lights over the waves. At midnight the expected lightning burst forth with as almost terror-inspiring grandeur; sometimes eight or ten flashes of forked lightning darted forth at once, lighting up the whole ocean, and showing the dark banks of ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... herself, and her fortune, and all her right, were in Sir Tom's own hands, he was naturally more and more sure that this foolish will (after giving him a great deal of amusement, and perhaps producing a supernatural chuckle, if such an expression of feeling is possible in the spiritual region where old Trevor might be supposed to be) would be henceforward like a testament in black letter, voided by good sense and better knowledge and time, the most certain ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... separation. Like so many people of her class, she was a brave narrator; her place was on the hearthrug and she made it a rostrum, miming her stories as she told them, fitting them with vital detail, spinning them out with endless "quo' he's" and "quo' she's," her voice sinking into a whisper over the supernatural or the horrific; until she would suddenly spring up in affected surprise, and pointing to the clock, "Mercy, Mr. Archie!" she would say, "whatten a time o' night is this of it! God forgive me for a daft wife!" So it befell, by ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... than sixty tales, some of which rank among the world's greatest short stories. The most important of these productions may be classified as tales (1) of the supernatural, like The Fall of the House of Usher and Ligeia, (2) of conscience, like William Wilson, that remarkable forerunner of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, (3) of pseudo-science, like A Descent into the Maelstrom, ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... recalls the Homeric poetry. The constant epithets, the military enumerations, the discourses of the heroes before combat, and the idea of God, are simple, childlike, and superstition has no place. The supernatural exists ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... the young girl, "he never even glances at me; on the contrary, if I accidentally cross his path, he appears rather to avoid me. Ah, he is not generous, neither does he possess that supernatural penetration which you attribute to him, for if he did, he would have perceived that I was unhappy; and if he had been generous, seeing me sad and solitary, he would have used his influence to my advantage, ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... chivalry within his realm, till through the entrance of sin and treachery the spell is broken and the heathen overrun the land. After his last battle, in the far west of our island, the king passes away to the supernatural world from which he came. This last episode had been handled many years before, and the 'Morte d'Arthur', which had appeared in the volume of 1842, was incorporated into the 'Passing of Arthur' to close the series ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... the sense of familiarity is sometimes so persistent as to fill one with a strange feeling of the supernatural and to incline our minds to ...
— The Trained Memory • Warren Hilton
... was to be stared at. She became as much of a celebrity as any woman with a character and without a position "in society" can become. If she were counterfeiting a type, enough of the original Mrs. Nevill Tyson remained to give her own supernatural naeivete to the character. Stanistreet was completely puzzled by this new freak; it looked like recklessness, it looked like vanity, it looked—it looked like an innocent parody of guilt. He had given in to her ...
— The Tysons - (Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson) • May Sinclair
... a real belief in supernatural things among the simple-minded, a belief which, it seems to me, was much more in accordance with the Christian character than the senseless unbelief in every thing which cannot be explained according to natural laws, which is certainly ...
— The Pearl Story Book - A Collection of Tales, Original and Selected • Mrs. Colman
... at sight and pounded to a pulp lest it should survive and escape before sunset, that I began to appreciate its unique beauty and singularity. Then, somewhat later, I met with an adventure which produced another and a new feeling in me, that sense of something supernatural in the serpent which appears to have been universal among peoples in a primitive state of culture and still survives in some barbarous or semi-barbarous countries, and in others, like Hindustan, which ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... Miss Squeers adjusted the bonnet and veil, which nothing but supernatural interference and an utter suspension of nature's laws could have reduced to any shape or form; and evidently flattering herself that it looked uncommonly neat, brushed off the sandwich-crumbs and bits of biscuit which had accumulated in her lap, and availing herself of John Browdie's ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... upon shriek, and was too frightened to get up. She thought it was supernatural; some old De Beaurepaire had served her thus for sleeping on her post. A struggle took place between her fidelity and her superstitious fears. Fidelity conquered. Quaking in every limb, she groped up the staircase for ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade
... cigar, offering one to the chauffeur. "I'm not supernatural and often I'm able to solve a mystery only with the help of all those who, like ...
— The Film Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve
... at the mere thought of it. Then Sylvia would come to hear of it, and what would she think? She would naturally be repelled, as any nice-minded girl would be, by the idea that her lover was in secret alliance with a supernatural being. And her father and mother—would they allow her to marry a man, however rich, whose wealth came from such a questionable source? No one would believe that he had not made some unholy bargain before ...
— The Brass Bottle • F. Anstey
... Put saint and stander-by in that quaint garb Familiar to him in his daily walk, Not doubting God could grant a miracle Then and in Nuremberg, if so He would; But never artist for three hundred years Hath dared the contradiction ludicrous Of supernatural in modern clothes. Perhaps the deeper faith that is to come Will see God rather in the strenuous doubt, Than in the creed held as an infant's hand 500 Holds purposeless ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... whenever the Devil appears in these tales, it is not at all as the Arch-enemy, as the subtle spirit of the Christian's faith, but rather as one of the old Giants, supernatural and hostile indeed to man, but simple and easily deceived by a cunning reprobate, whose superior intelligence he learns to dread, for whom he feels himself no match, and whom, finally, he will receive in Hell at no price. ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... codes were not formulated until after class-divisions had arisen. Every moral code of which we have any knowledge has been moulded by the cultural discipline of a society based on class-divisions. In every one of them there is implied the relation of status, of a superior, natural or supernatural, with the right or power to formulate "commandments," and of an inferior class whose lot it is to obey. We find this implication of status in even the noblest expressions of current ethical aspirations. Wordsworth's immortal Ode to Duty begins, ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte
... loathsome details of some ghastly bit of fancy. It was the time of Lewis's "Tales of Terror," of Walpole's "Castle of Otranto," of Beckford's "Vathek," and of Mrs. Radcliffe's "Mysteries of Udolpho" and Mrs. Shelley's "Frankenstein." William Godwin, too, wrote ghostly stories of crime and supernatural agencies, and from Godwin, Charles Brockden Brown caught his style. The influence of Godwin is noticeable in Brown's first work, "Alcuin, a Dialogue on the Rights of Women" (1797). Godwin's "Falkland" and "Caleb Williams" are the ...
— The Philadelphia Magazines and their Contributors 1741-1850 • Albert Smyth
... pomp led along the streets. And in the similes, what pictures from animal life and manners! And then our enchantment is heightened by a prevailing duplication. Throughout, or nearly so, the transactions that are presented in the natural, are also presented in the supernatural. Thus we have earthly councils, heavenly councils; warring men, warring gods; kings of men, kings of gods; mortal husbands and wives, and sons and daughters; immortal husbands and wives, and sons and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... strange thrill of awe. It was, in very truth, to him a phenomenon, more than an eclipse, not a mere passage of the moon before the sun for which science gave a natural account, but a sudden combination of light and air that had in it a tinge of the supernatural. ...
— The Rulers of the Lakes - A Story of George and Champlain • Joseph A. Altsheler
... Justification Article 2. The Positive Element Of Justification Section 2. Justifying Or Sanctifying Grace Article 1. The Nature Of Sanctifying Grace Article 2. The Effects Of Sanctifying Grace Article 3. The Supernatural Concomitants Of Sanctifying Grace Section 3. The Properties Of Sanctifying Grace Chapter III. The Fruits Of Justification, Or The Merit Of Good Works Section 1. The Existence Of Merit Section 2. The Requisites Of Merit Section 3. The Objects ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... (so to speak) comfort require the nominal separation. So electricity sets up for itself; and chemistry, the metropolis, swells into other offshoots. So numerous and so great are these that the old alchemists, unlimited range through the material, immaterial and supernatural as they claimed for their art, would rub their eyes, bleared over blowpipe and alembic, at sight of its present riches. The half-hewn block handed down by these worthies—not ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... strengthened it in the converts; they accepted the differences which parted husband and wife, parent and child, and set strife between brothers and neighbors as proof of his divine authority to bring a sword; they knew by the hate and dissension which followed from his claim that it was of supernatural force, and when the pillars of the old spiritual temple fell one after another under his blows, they exalted in the ruin as the foundation of a new sanctuary. They drove the worshipers out of the material Temple, Methodists and ...
— The Leatherwood God • William Dean Howells
... least tolerated. But there remains one other remarkable fact to be noted. No one can have travelled in the East, especially in Turkey, without remarking the way in which the dog is generally regarded. Yet, in spite of this, he is all the while certainly classed as supernatural, and by no less an authority than the Koran. His uncleanness must be recognised; but, on the other hand, how are his fidelity and courage to be overlooked? They cannot be. And so this unclean animal, from whom men shrink, ...
— 'Murphy' - A Message to Dog Lovers • Major Gambier-Parry
... pleasure, and all other temptations, as I am sure you do, I cannot fancy there will be any danger of your not being able to check a dishonest merchant or an extortionate collector. For even the Greeks, when they see you living thus, will look upon you as some hero from their old annals, or some supernatural being from heaven, ...
— Cicero - Ancient Classics for English Readers • Rev. W. Lucas Collins
... plane because of those half dozen wonderful notes of hers, and the unflagging enthusiasm which needed but the name of love-feast or festival to bring a light into her lovely eyes that seemed to spread up and around her white forehead and beautiful hair like a supernatural lustre. There was a fire that animated her which nobody who saw its glow or felt its warmth could question. Without that altar of music—But why speculate on what she might have been if she had not been what she was? That would be to consider ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... just; that his justice can not sleep forever; that considering numbers, nature, and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation, is among possible events; that it may become practicable by supernatural influences! The Almighty has no attribute which can take sides with us in such a contest."[4] And must we prove, that Jesus Christ is not in favor of what universal Christendom is impelled to abhor, denounce, and oppose; is not in favor of what every attribute of Almighty God ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... the crowd stood still before Glenarvan and his companions, who for the time were preserved by a supernatural influence. ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... presently. It is commonly regarded as the principal difficulty which Theists and Pantheists are condemned continually to encounter without ever being able to explain—the rock, so to say, upon which their optimistic systems strike, and are shattered to pieces—unless protected by the armour of supernatural faith. ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon
... has ever baptized infants and enjoined the practice; she has ever answered to the prophecy as being "a word behind us, saying, This is the way; walk ye in it." Her teachers surely (according to the prophecy) have never been removed into a corner. But if we will not accept this supernatural mercy, then I say it is not unnatural that we should find ourselves in the same kind of doubt in which we commonly are involved in matters of this world. God has promised us light and knowledge in the Gospel, but in His way, not ...
— Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VII (of 8) • John Henry Newman
... death-hour is to strike before his own. I doubt if the scene which then occurs has, in the whole range of fiction and poetry, ever been surpassed. This poor boy, the son of an insane mother and a poet-father, is gifted with supernatural faculties, endowed with second or spiritual sight. Entirely blind, and consequently surrounded by perpetual darkness, it mattered not to him if the light of day or the gloom of midnight was upon the earth; and in his rayless wanderings he had made his way into the dungeons, sepulchres, and vaults, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... a few minor ailments of second childhood which attacked him occasionally when he saw a stiff hill ahead, or when he had heard me say I was in a hurry. The Vannecks were perfection as chaperons, not through supernatural tact and unselfishness, but because Maud feared the effect upon Fred of too much Barrie. She laid herself out to charm her husband. Never an "I told you so!" Never a nagging word or look. She chatted to Fred in the car, and saw sights with him out of the ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... no desire to dispute the assumption, nor had Diane. They stood there as people might in the imminence of the supernatural, awaiting ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... nature—instincts and desires that will remain in us so long as our nature is human; while for a large part of its effect the "Dutchman" trusts to a feeling which is elusive at all times and has no permanent hold upon us. Horror of the supernatural is not very deeply rooted in us, after all. Modern training tends to eliminate it altogether. In later life Goethe could not call up a single delightful shiver. There are probably not half a dozen stories in ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... find water that way. Back in Illinois an old German used to do that to locate wells. He showed me I had the same power. I can't explain. But you needn't look so dumfounded. There's nothing supernatural ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... and gave Birth to that bleeding Tree. This Circumstance seems to have the Marvellous without the Probable, because it is represented as proceeding from Natural Causes, without the Interposition of any God, or other Supernatural Power capable of producing it. The Spears and Arrows grow of themselves, without so much as the Modern Help of an Enchantment. If we look into the Fiction of Milton's Fable, though we find it full of ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... me, my friend, it seemed as though the world had come to an end, that the eternal laws had changed. I experienced the overwhelming dread that one has in presence of things supernatural, in presence of irreparable disaster. My boyish head whirled round and soared. I began to cry with all my might, without knowing why, a prey to terror, to grief, to a dreadful bewilderment. My father heard me, turned round, and, ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... the mouth of the Valley of Rocks, about which so much has been written, which has been compared to an amphitheatre of giants, or the scene of some titanic conflict, where the huge granite crags and boulders have been torn up and tossed about by supernatural and terrific forces. In honesty I must admit that this seems to me an exaggeration. Any walker who goes with this in his mind must, I think, be disappointed; the place is wild enough, and barren enough, ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... dark, mysterious stranger, whose appearance impressed Mozart with the conviction that he was a messenger of death; more than this, that he himself had been poisoned, and that he was writing his own death-song, upon the order of some supernatural power. There was some foundation for the belief, as the commission was given in a very mysterious manner, and Mozart's health at that time was so delicate that he had had several premonitions of death. In his gloomy spirits he even said to his wife that he was writing his own ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... What is the intimate and inherent nature of those forces? Do they, or either of them, belong to the domain of the supernatural? Are they the products of some supreme force, or forces, heretofore unappreciated? The reply is clear and unquestionable. The supernatural must necessarily be a part of the Divine Essence, and consequently intangible. Not so the subjects of our inquiry. They are natural products, therefore, ...
— New and Original Theories of the Great Physical Forces • Henry Raymond Rogers
... reason and faith in social ideals, and while the materialists abandoned themselves to hideous orgies and sensual debaucheries, the higher-minded went to the opposite excess and sought by flight from the world and mortification of the flesh to attain to supernatural states of ecstasy. A book has come down to us under the name of Philo[60] which describes "the contemplative life" of a Jewish brotherhood that lived apart on the shores of Lake Mareotis by the mouth of the Nile. Men and women ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... with astonished eyes the supernatural calm which reigns in your countenance; your health seems to me a prodigy, your beauty was never so ravishing; but this barbarous garb ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... Asa(*) is comparatively novel and unusual; in days of illness many millions more still seek their gods rather than the physicians. In an upward path man has had to work out for himself a relationship with his fellows and with nature. He sought in the supernatural an explanation of the pressing phenomena of life, peopling the world with spiritual beings, deifying objects of nature, and assigning to them benign or malign influences, which might be invoked or propitiated. Primitive priest, physician and philosopher were one, and struggled, on the one hand, ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... to perform the highest missions and to teach great lessons. The student, upon leaving the subject, feels the same reverence experienced upon leaving a sacred place, where the spirit has been under the influence of the supernatural. Bolvar's ambition was the legitimate desire for glory, but he never wanted that power which consists in the oppression of fellowmen ...
— Simon Bolivar, the Liberator • Guillermo A. Sherwell
... was doubtless Venus, which, in certain circumstances, is often bright enough to be seen when the sun is above the horizon. The populace of London, however, who were not in those days very profound astronomers, regarded the shining of the star as a supernatural occurrence altogether, and as portending the future greatness and glory of the prince whose natal day it thus ...
— History of King Charles II of England • Jacob Abbott
... their prodding brought no outward evidence of suffering, their awe increased, so that they soon desisted, half believing that this strange white giant was a supernatural being and ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... his God. The new religionist cries out for some god to be his. The whole point of religion as it has hitherto existed in the world was that you knew all about your gods, even before you saw them, if indeed you ever did. Spiritualism seems to me absolutely right on all its mystical side. The supernatural part of it seems to me quite natural. The incredible part of it seems to me obviously true. But I think it so far dangerous or unsatisfactory that it is in some degree scientific. It inquires whether its gods are worth inquiring into. A man (of a certain age) ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... the Passion Play is the absence of superstitious elements. Beyond the dominating influence of the purpose of God, which is brought into strong prominence, there is almost nothing which suggests the supernatural or miraculous. That little even is forgotten in the intensity of human interest. The Devil and his machinations have vanished entirely. One sees in the religious customs of the people of Oberammergau few of the superstitions common among the peasant classes of other parts of Europe. ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan
... sulky, grimy, brick tenements, we were surprised with clean, white, picket-fences; and green lawns, and clever, little cottages, nestled in shrubbery and clover. The mines are over the bay, five miles from South Sydney. Slowly we dragged on, until we came to a sleepy little one-story inn, with supernatural dormer windows rising out of the roof, before which Boab stopped. We paid McGibbet's kirk-fine, wagon-fare, and his unconscionable charge for his conscience, without parleying with him; we were ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... of this. However this may be, the marvelous art was lost at an early date, for it was at such a date that priests began to have recourse to tricks that were more or less ingenious for lighting their sacred fireplaces in an apparently supernatural manner.—A. De Rochas, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 392, July 7, 1883 • Various
... His views about religious toleration were founded on his intense faith in civil liberty; and even his demonstration that lightning was an electrical phenomenon brought deliverance for mankind from an ancient terror. It removed from the domain of the supernatural a manifestation of formidable power that had been supposed to be a weapon of the arbitrary gods; and since it increased man's power over nature, it ...
— Four American Leaders • Charles William Eliot
... them are secretly troubled when they do not see the new moon over the lucky shoulder; some of them have strange, secret incredulities—they do not believe in geology, for instance; and some of them think they have had supernatural experiences. "Of course there was nothing in it—still ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... is so dripping wet with the supernatural, the phantasmal, the mystical—so surcharged with adventures, from the deeper picturesque to the illusive fantastic, one unconsciously finds oneself thinking of him as a poet of greater imaginative ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... Lady Kew smiled (in her supernatural way) almost as much as her portrait, by Harlowe, as you may see it at Kewbury to this very day. She is represented seated before an easel, painting a miniature ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... priest in the African state is well known; his realm alone—the province of religion and medicine—remained largely unaffected by the plantation system. The Negro priest, therefore, early became an important figure on the plantation and found his function as the interpreter of the supernatural, the comforter of the sorrowing, and as the one who expressed, rudely but picturesquely, the longing and disappointment and resentment of a stolen people. From such beginnings arose and spread with marvelous rapidity the Negro church, the first distinctively Negro American social institution. ...
— The Negro • W.E.B. Du Bois
... unburden my overweighted heart, and you can be my augur and advise me with supernatural wisdom. Are you ...
— The Unspeakable Perk • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... as they are any more supernatural than the telegraph and telefone and electric light, and many other seemin'ly supernatural works. And who knows but there may still be some hidden powers in nature that is the source of what ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... within myself for more than half-an-hour whether I should relate a circumstance bordering a little on the supernatural line, that happened to me, as connected with the business of the bairns of which I have just been speaking; and, were it for no other reason, but just to plague the scoffer that sits in his elbow-chair, I have determined ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - Tailor in Dalkeith, written by himself • David Macbeth Moir
... man as he lay opposite to it, and glanced fitfully on the figures of the young girl, Gabriel, and the two children; the great, gloomy shadows rose and fell, and grew and lessened in bulk about the walls like visions of darkness, animated by a supernatural specter-life, while the dense obscurity outside spreading before the curtainless window seemed as a wall of solid darkness that had closed in forever around the fisherman's house. The night scene within the cottage was almost as wild and as dreary to look upon as ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... of the Devil may thus be traced to the first vain contempt for the eternal laws of nature. The woman, refusing to be a woman, engenders devils; the man, trying to be a God, loses paradise and his innocence, for the element of the supernatural intruded upon him and abstracted his thoughts from this earth. These were the half idealistic and half realistic elements from which the three greatest spiritual incarnations of the Evil Spirit sprung up. Luther took the ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... each of them, in their several degrees, together with the duties of every mixed class; for thou, Lord, and thou only among mortals, knowest the true sense, the first principle, and the prescribed ceremonies of this universal, supernatural Veda, unlimited in extent ...
— The Christian Foundation, February, 1880
... made should prove interesting, not merely because it will introduce the reader to a class of Japanese poetry about which little or nothing has yet been written in English, but much more because it will afford some glimpses of a supernatural world which still remains for the most part unexplored. Without knowledge of Far Eastern superstitions and folk-tales, no real understanding of Japanese fiction or drama or poetry ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... below, or was it possible that he could already hear the bells of fairyland ringing? Over the church spire of a little village they soared, and all the children shouted: "Zeppelin! Zeppelin!" because you see all this happened in modern times, when even the children no longer believe in the supernatural. ...
— Fairy Tales from the German Forests • Margaret Arndt
... And there was no question of its being resumed. My forty-two worthies found themselves face to face with a conqueror, against whom revenge is always possible, by fair means or foul, but with one who had subjugated them in a supernatural manner. There was no other explanation of the inexplicable facts which they had witnessed. I was a sorcerer, a kind of marabout, a direct emissary of ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... I had an almost supernatural attention from the lad who did not deign to grant me even a nod of acquiescence. I began to tell him a few things about the technical end of writing for others to read. I encountered resistance here. Until I pressed upon ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... resembled the finest statuary marble,—but rather the crystalline marbles of Vermont, with their brilliant half-sparkle, than the dead polish of the Parian; while the form and character of this facade suggested some fascinating, supernatural consent of chance and art, of fracture with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... extending from tree to tree for many hundred yards; now felling to the earth and striking a fresh root; then, with increased energy, remounting the largest trunks, and forming a labyrinth of twisted ropes along the ceiling of the forest. From these creepers hang the sabre-beans. Everything seems on a supernatural scale—the bean-pod four feet or more in length, by three inches in breadth; the beans two ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... Pharisees were Parsis. But the point is also obscure. It is immaterial as well. The Gospels were not written in Jerusalem but mainly in Rome, where crucifixions were common, as they were, for that matter, throughout the East, but where, too, all religions were acclimated and the supernatural was at home. ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... to no other contemporary painter was it given to endow the human frame with a like degree of passion, vehemence, and strength."[60] And beside the dignity with which he has in these frescoes elevated the body to an almost superhuman grandeur, his conception of supernatural things is proportionately solemn and impressive. It is impossible to look at the scenes without emotion, and the mood evoked is due in a great measure to the earnest conviction with which they are conceived. Signorelli, always a religious painter, in the wider meaning of the word, seems here ...
— Luca Signorelli • Maud Cruttwell
... Rome, wearing on his leg a heavy chain; this he fastened by a padlock and threw the key into the Dee at a place now known as "The Pool of the Key." He is said to have bought a fish for food in Rome and to have found the key in its stomach; this he took for a supernatural intimation to discontinue his ...
— A Calendar of Scottish Saints • Michael Barrett
... the best English houses; the importance of Boston in the development of the world-soul; the advantages of the baggage-check system in railway travelling; and the sweetness of the New York accent as compared to the London drawl. No mention at all was made of the supernatural, nor was Sir Simon de Canterville alluded to in any way. At eleven o'clock the family retired, and by half-past all the lights were out. Some time after, Mr. Otis was awakened by a curious noise in the corridor, outside his room. It sounded like the clank of metal, and seemed to be coming nearer ...
— The Canterville Ghost • Oscar Wilde
... wherever he could find them, and made great slaughter among them. The Governor of Podgorica, then Turkish, Yussuf Mucic by name, offered a large sum of money for his head, but no one could be found willing to meet that terrible man whom legend and story had endowed with supernatural powers. Finally, a criminal consented to attempt the deed on the promise of his liberty, and this led to one of the most incredible episodes in Marko's life. The criminal lay in wait for him on a lonely part of the road ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... dialogues "Symposium" and "Phaedros." In conscious opposition to all sexuality Platonic love (what is usually called Platonic love is based on an obstinate misunderstanding) turns to the purely spiritual, that is to say, the conceptions of truth, beauty and goodness; it is a yearning for the supernatural, and it knows itself as the path to it. In the mutual love of all noble souls lies the germ of all higher things; it is the way to the gods of light which, in this connection, are conceived philosophically as ideas, though ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... branded into it. Many truths, too, would be learned, which can be learned in no other manner. As the history of states is generally written, the greatest and most momentous revolutions seem to come upon them like supernatural inflictions, without warning or cause. But the fact is, that such revolutions are almost always the consequences of moral changes, which have gradually passed on the mass of the community, and which originally proceed far before their progress is indicated by any public ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... The richer he got the stronger his passion grew for hiaqua, and, when a spirit told him in a dream of vast hoards at the summit of Rainier, he determined to climb the mountain. The spirit was Tamanoues, which, Winthrop explains, is the vague Indian personification of the supernatural. ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... attached as a personal attendant (to Mrs. Ch'in,) and who happened to be standing by interposed: "How could it be otherwise?" she ventured. "In real truth, Doctor, you speak like a supernatural being, and there's verily no need for us to say anything! We have now, ready at hand, in our household, a good number of medical gentlemen, who are in attendance upon her, but none of these are proficient enough to speak ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... face, and he sank back weakly into the pillows. Beulah placed a glass to his lips, and the doctor told him to take his time with his story. The jurors stood about the bed in silence, looking from one to the other with expressions that suggested they were almost in the presence of the supernatural. If the black bag with the money had slowly risen out of the floor someone would have quietly set it in a corner until Allan was ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... particular tenderness to women and children when they meet them on board. We are the more touched with these sentiments, because we know with what coolness they expose themselves to those terrible dangers of war and the sea, in the midst of which the presence of man has something of the supernatural. ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... threatened to destroy me? By what means could he hide himself in this closet? Surely he is gifted with supernatural power. Such is the enemy of whose attempts I was forewarned. Daily I had seen him and conversed with him. Nothing could be discerned through the impenetrable veil of his duplicity. When busied in conjectures as to the author ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... he listened to it, the fires in his brain were allayed, and all yielded to a sense of coolness and repose. He seemed to sink from trance to trance of utter rest, and yet was dimly aware that either something in his own condition, or some supernatural accession of tone, was changing the music from its proper quality to a harmony more infinite and awful. It was still low and indeterminate and sweet, but had unaccountably and strangely swelled into a gentle and sombre ...
— The Ghost • William. D. O'Connor
... Mr Brown's 'Record,' the memoranda are followed by a long and very interesting list of 'Parochial Superstitions,' some of which, but not all, are generally known. He also tells one or two stories with a caustic touch where he might have suggested a supernatural atmosphere. ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... at last left the building, he was still puzzled in mind and had decided to say nothing about his discovery to his companions. Chris and the captain would be sure to view the matter in its most supernatural light. ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... then?" he interposed. He was a sceptic who called himself agnostic. The mystery of earth and heaven might be interpreted, but always in terms of science; yet he did not fancy the superior manner in which this charlatan flouted the supernatural. He had heard of her miracles—and doubted them. She gave a little laugh at ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... come in for about thirty thousand, besides what he had under that settlement of Roger's, which had avoided death duty. He found George in a bow-window, staring out across a half-eaten plate of muffins. His tall, bulky, black-clothed figure loomed almost threatening, though preserving still the supernatural neatness of the racing man. With a faint grin on his fleshy ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... their bearing on the evangelist's view of the Old Testament. His Messianic quotations are introduced by such phrases as "that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet," or, "then was fulfilled," etc. The tendency of modern scepticism to ridicule the supernatural element in prophecy has caused some writers to depreciate this method of quotation. And we find even a thoughtful Roman Catholic writer speaking of it as "giving the impression that the supple and living story of the life of Jesus is only a chain of debts which fall ...
— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan
... their unearthly merriment, mingled with shrieks and wailings, borne upon the night-breeze; whilst the few who have ventured within its walls, tell of shapes seen, and sounds heard, which would cause the stoutest heart to quail. For myself, I am no great believer in the supernatural, and have no doubt that imagination, united to the loneliness of the spot, and the strange freaks the wind plays through a large uninhabited house, have originated reports which we are sure would lose nothing in the recital; so if you are inclined to make the trial, ...
— Tales for Young and Old • Various
... they could be furnished with books, the library they brought with them from their college being usually not the most numerous, or judiciously chosen. If such gentlemen arrive to be great scholars, it must, I think, be either by means supernatural, or by a method altogether out of any road yet known to the learned. But I conceive the fact directly otherwise, and that many of them lose the greatest part of the small pittance ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... that lead to it, so I should say that I had been long sufficiently familiar with all experiments that appertain to the marvellous. I had witnessed many very extraordinary phenomena in various parts of the world,—phenomena that would be either totally disbelieved if I stated them, or ascribed to supernatural agencies. Now, my theory is that the supernatural is the impossible, and that what is called supernatural is only a something in the laws of Nature of which we have been hitherto ignorant. Therefore, if a ghost ...
— Haunted and the Haunters • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... companions. It is a fate all may meet with, and it induces reflection and sadness. Still, the English did not give up the hope of rescuing some unfortunate wretch, clinging to a spar, or supporting himself by supernatural efforts, for several hours. At noon, however, the ship squared away and ran for Naples before the wind, being drawn aside from her course by another chase, in which she succeeded better, capturing a sloop-of-war, which she carried ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... say miracles are past; and we have our philosophical persons to make modern and familiar things, supernatural and causeless. Hence is it that we make trifles of terrors; ensconcing ourselves in a seeming knowledge when we should submit ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 201, September 3, 1853 • Various
... forebodings occurred to him often in after days, and read by the light of after events, he was unable to decide whether the expectation of evil, so strongly forced upon him then, was due to natural or supernatural causes. At present he ascribed his anxieties to the disturbed state of ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... in their dreams! Painted cars with orchestral wheels, making music more delicious than the roll of planets. Agile men of cylindrical figure, who sprang unexpectedly out of meek-looking boxes, with a supernatural fierceness in their crimson cheeks and fur-whiskers. Herds of marvellous sheep, with fleeces as impossible as the one that Jason sailed after; animals entirely indifferent to grass and water and "rot" and "ticks." Horses spotted ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... that your people have pretty well exhausted the possibilities of the supernatural, by this time. Progress having come to an end, I don't see what you find to interest ...
— The Lord of Death and the Queen of Life • Homer Eon Flint
... found, when an entry was effected, to be entirely deserted. The enemy, aided by a great Persian host, came down, and those who had been the besiegers were now besieged. However, when in the last strait the Christian army sallied out, and inspired with supernatural strength, defeated the Turks and Persians, with a slaughter of one hundred thousand men. Another slow movement to the south brought them into the Holy Land, and pressing forward, they came at last ...
— The Boy Knight • G.A. Henty
... any relaxation to speak of, except to demonstrate the truth of spiritualism. He does love to monkey with the supernatural, and he delights in getting hold of some skeptical friend and convincing him of the presence of spirits beyond a doubt. I've known him to ignore two cases of croup and one case of twins to attend a seance and help convince a doubting Thomas ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... pictures might be the ground of those mistaken, if mistaken, waxen images, which I desire to be taught by others who can give a better account.—Casaubon's (M.) Treatise, proving Spirits, Witches, and Supernatural Operations, ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... self-restraint and a policy of moderation. Temperaments of every type are to be met in her pages—a sensitive poet, troubled by "confusion of thought" deepening into melancholia; a harum-scarum boy, in whose sunny joyousness she discerns the germ of supernatural grace; vehement sinners, fearful saints, religious recluses deceived by self- righteousness, and men of affairs devoutly faithful to sober duty. Catherine enters into every consciousness. As a rule we associate with very pure and spiritual women, ...
— Letters of Catherine Benincasa • Catherine Benincasa
... crushed and fettered souls, bound by no iron bonds, confined by no bolts and bars, but only under the shadow of the supernatural, sat together like prisoners in a dungeon concocting schemes for ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... omens of some dire disaster Impending over us, and soon to fall, Moreover, in the language of the Prophet, Death is again come up into our windows, To cut off little children from without, And young men from the streets. And in the midst Of all these supernatural threats and warnings Doth Heresy uplift its horrid head; A vision of Sin more awful and appalling Than any phantasm, ghost, or apparition, As arguing and portending some enlargement Of the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... the speedy discovery of relations not hitherto suspected to exist between matter and spirit. We do not anticipate the development of any other than natural laws. We are not credulous as to the interference of supernatural agencies; but we are fully prepared for almost any discoveries in the department of psychology, unveiling the mysterious but unquestionable relations of harmony—of action and reaction—existing between the soul of man and the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... to come, thou shouldst journey to the Country of the Yukon, know thou that there shall always be a place and much food by the fire of the Wolf. The night is now passing into the day. I go, but I may come again. And for the last time, remember the Law of the Wolf!' He was supernatural in their sight as he rejoined Zarinska. She took her place at the head of the team, and the dogs swung into motion. A few moments later they were swallowed up by the ghostly forest. Till now Mackenzie had waited; he slipped ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London
... them came Adrien and Lady Constance. The latter had chosen to represent "Miranda," and her loveliness seemed almost supernatural. The pale gold of her hair and the perfect shell-pink of her complexion were set off to advantage by her gown, which, simple as it was, yet showed by that very simplicity the hand of the master by whom it had been designed. It was of palest green satin, ...
— Adrien Leroy • Charles Garvice
... theme requires attention is that the religion of this period had its form and substance in the Catholic church; and of this church the twin aspects were an authoritative government administered by popes, councils, bishops, and priests, and a conception of the supernatural world equally definite and authoritative, which dominated the intellects and imaginations of man with its Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. The visible church and the invisible world of which the church held the interpretation and the key,—this concrete fact, and this faith the counterpart of the ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... before he gave it away. I delight too in the temperature of your piety, and that you would not see the enthusiastic exorcist. How shocking to suppose that the Omnipotent Creator of worlds delegates his power to a momentary insect to eject supernatural spirits that he had permitted to infest another insect, and had permitted to vomit blasphemies against himself! Pray do not call that enthusiasm, but delirium. I pity real enthusiasts, but I would shave their heads and take away some blood. The exorcist's associates ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... and found considerable relief in remembering that he had agreed 'to leave them tae the Almichty.' But the manner of leaving them was so solemnly awful, that I could not wonder that Slavin's superstitious Irish nature supplied him with supernatural terrors. It was the second day after the funeral that Geordie and I were walking towards Slavin's. There was a great shout of laughter ...
— Black Rock • Ralph Connor
... to lecture on subjects other than theology. Forced to earn a living by writing, he developed an astounding literary activity. His orthodoxy had now quite gone by the board, and all his efforts were directed to the propaganda of a "moral system" which should replace supernatural Christianity. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... On came the gallant line of black steeds and horsemen, swift, swift before them rode my officers in yellow—Glogger, Pappendick, and Stuffle; their sabres gleamed in the sun, their voices rung in the air. "D—- them!" they cried, "give it them, boys!" A strength supernatural thrilled through my veins at that delicious music: by one tremendous effort, I wrested the post from its foundation, five feet in the ground. I could not release my hands from the fetters, it is true; but, grasping the beam tightly, I sprung forward—with one blow I levelled ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... body there are, the soul formally giving being, and operating natural operations; and the angel operating supernatural operations. ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... as to the free-thinking of the Periclean age is, however, to be met with in the historical writing of Thucydides. In his work on the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides completely eliminated the supernatural element; not only did he throughout ignore omens and divinations, except in so far as they played a part as a psychological factor, but he also completely omitted any reference to the gods in his narrative. Such a procedure was at this time unprecedented, ...
— Atheism in Pagan Antiquity • A. B. Drachmann
... which I had writ that letter, came Montreuil secretly to my chamber. He had been accustomed to visit Gerald by stealth and at sudden moments; and there was something almost supernatural in the manner in which he seemed to pass from place to place, unmolested and unseen. He had now conceived a villanous project; and he had visited Devereux Court in order to ascertain the likelihood of its success; ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... be the war between Religion and Science. It will be a war to the death, for if Science wins it will do away with the personal God of the Jews, the Christians and the Muhammedans, the childish doctrine or dogma of future rewards and punishments, and everything connected with the supernatural. It will be shown that Law reigns supreme. The police representing Law and Order will be of more importance than the clergy. Even now we might do away with the latter, everybody becoming his own priest—a great economy. None of us knows what happens to us after death, all we can do is ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... mind, and unable to conjecture whence this evil comes to me; for if on the one hand thou dost tell me that the barber and curate of our village are here in company with us, and on the other I find myself shut up in a cage, and know in my heart that no power on earth that was not supernatural would have been able to shut me in, what wouldst thou have me say or think, but that my enchantment is of a sort that transcends all I have ever read of in all the histories that deal with knights-errant that have been enchanted? So thou ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... was a morbid young person who loved to dabble in the supernatural. Her taste in literature was for Edgar A. Poe. In religion she inclined toward spiritualism. Her favorite amusement was to gather a few shuddering friends about her, turn out the gas, and tell ghost stories. She had an extensive repertoire of ghoulish incidents, that were not fiction ...
— Just Patty • Jean Webster
... because of these conditions that the coming of the dawn does not dissipate all fears of the supernatural. I ni p zombi mnm gran'-jou (he is afraid of ghosts even in broad daylight) is a phrase which does not sound exaggerated in these latitudes,—not, at least, to anyone knowing something of the conditions that nourish or inspire weird beliefs. In the awful peace of tropical ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... military eloquence than on the present occasion. On both sides there was much discouragement, and a general reluctance to begin the fight. The Peloponnesians were cowed by their recent defeat, and dreaded the naval skill of the Athenians, which seemed to them almost supernatural; and Phormio's men shrank from an encounter with such enormous odds. Accordingly the Peloponnesian captains on one side, and Phormio on the other, did what they could to argue their crews into a more hopeful ...
— Stories From Thucydides • H. L. Havell
... to turn attention from herself, "usually folks talk a lot of nonsense when they attribute supernatural things to certain places. But for once they're right, mother Hephzy; I shall never disbelieve in ghosts again. Oh, the horror of it—it was awful," and the girl gave ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... knew the dread his fellow-countrymen possessed for anything approaching the supernatural, and in the belief that they would be startled at the sight of the huge birds known only to them by tradition, he had boldly adopted the disguise—one possible only in the darkness; and so far his ...
— The Adventures of Don Lavington - Nolens Volens • George Manville Fenn
... people, and was unheeded by those whom he most wanted to influence. The remarkable unity of idea sustained by Mr. Belasco as manager, and by Mr. Warfield as actor, was largely instrumental in making the play a triumph. The playwright did not attempt to create supernatural mood; he did not resort to natural tricks such as Maeterlinck used in "L'Intruse," or as Mansfield employed in "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde." He reduced what to us seems, at the present moment, a complicated explanation of a psychic ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm • David Belasco
... white, picket-fences; and green lawns, and clever, little cottages, nestled in shrubbery and clover. The mines are over the bay, five miles from South Sydney. Slowly we dragged on, until we came to a sleepy little one-story inn, with supernatural dormer windows rising out of the roof, before which Boab stopped. We paid McGibbet's kirk-fine, wagon-fare, and his unconscionable charge for his conscience, without parleying with him; we were too sleepy to indulge in the luxury of a monetary skirmish. A pretty, ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... 'Wanderings through Elysium,' etc., etc., ends by absorbing the entire work after the advent of Christianity. The 'Divine Comedy,' the 'Paradise Lost,' and the 'Messiah,' form a magnificent Christian trilogy, of which the scene is almost always in a supernatural sphere, and in which the principal ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... spiritual significance, bullied and belittled by science on every hand, man not unnaturally begins to feel that it is no use taking his life seriously, that, in fact, it betrays a lack of humour to do so. While he was a supernatural being, a son of God, it was with him a case of noblesse oblige; and while he is happy and comfortable he doesn't mind giving up the riddle of the world. It is only the unhappy that ever really think. But what is he to do when agony ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne
... Charles Fort, although I have no belief in the supernatural, and rather faint faith in the Hereafter. And people who enter the Hereafter leave their ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... have been shortened to the imagination by the prevalent belief that by supernatural aid the miles could be actually lessened. Rabbi Natronai was reported to be able to convey himself a several days' journey in a single instant. So Benjamin of Tudela tells how Alroy, who claimed to be the Messiah ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... Stephano Verrina's intention to observe good faith with Nisida in respect to the service on which she had intimated her desire to employ him and his band. But so dazzled was he by her almost supernatural majesty of beauty on that night when he and his companions encountered her in the Riverola palace, that he would have promised, or indeed undertaken, anything calculated ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... the poetry and the essays addressed to the mood of unrest, of questioning, to the scientific spirit and to the shifting attitudes of social change and reform, claim the attention of an age that is completely adrift in regard to the relations of the supernatural and the material, the ideal and the real. It would be natural if in such a time of confusion the calm tones of unexaggerated literary art should be not so much heeded as the more strident voices. Yet when the passing fashion of this day is succeeded by the fashion ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... see such eclipses sufficiently often not to be particularly astonished at them. But Columbus judged—and as the event proved, judged rightly—that by predicting the eclipse he would gain a reputation as a prophet, and command the respect and the obedience due to a person invested with supernatural powers. He assembled the caciques of the neighbouring tribes. Then, by means of an interpreter, he reproached them with refusing to continue to supply provisions to the Spaniards. 'The God who protects me,' he said, 'will punish you. You know what ...
— The Story of Eclipses • George Chambers
... With almost supernatural force and quickness he sprung upon the forester, and seized him by the throat. But the active young man freed himself from the gripe, and closed with his assailant. But though of Herculean build, it soon became evident that Ashbead would have the worst of it; when Hal o' ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... one more attempt to dissuade Cartier from his journey. Finding that persuasion and oratory were of no avail, they decided to fall back upon the supernatural and to frighten the French from their design. Their artifice was transparent enough, but to the minds of the simple savages was calculated to strike awe into the hearts of their visitors. Instead of coming near the ships, as they had done on ...
— The Mariner of St. Malo: A Chronicle of the Voyages of Jacques Cartier • Stephen Leacock
... he retired early and lay open-eyed in the diffused starry light, wakeful in the glint of the moon as it shimmered through the half-opened door. It was that half hour in which all the past appears supernatural; that forerunner of sleep, in which the remotest memories are revived. The sea roared, strident calls of the night birds broke the stillness, the gulls complained with a lament like tortured children. What were his friends doing now? What were they saying in the cafes of the ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... which you have suggested might very well be true. I think that either out of sheer love of mischief, or from some subtler motive, he is capable of anything. Every one in the place, except one poor woman, seems to look upon him as a sort of supernatural being. He gives money away to worthless people with both hands. Yet I share your opinion of him. I believe that he is a creature without conscience or morals. I have sat at his table and shivered ...
— The Vanished Messenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... still attributing what he heard to a supernatural being, "when one makes a compact of this kind, one prefers to know with whom ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE BRINVILLIERS • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... always been "a mystery in the soul of state." When men ceased to invest government with a supernatural character, they did not for all that dispel the mystery. Modern statesmen by the score have chosen to believe the occult doctrine that the state's promise to pay is payment, and Napoleon was one of these. He was equally childish in regard to the knotty social ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... like a silhouette cut out of black paper, against a background of shining oil- smooth water and dense masses of twisting and writhing cloud-shapes all reflecting the weird, mysterious ruddy light. It was an awe-inspiring phenomenon, strongly suggestive of the supernatural, and from the uneasy glances that were directed aft from the forecastle it was not difficult to surmise that none of the men had ever before beheld anything like it. Neither had we of the afterguard, for that matter, and I have no doubt that I should have been very much more seriously alarmed than ...
— The Strange Adventures of Eric Blackburn • Harry Collingwood
... bright winter day. She grows in intelligence by the fruit of the tree, and sinks in moral worth and in peace of mind. Never, since the time of Helen, has there been a woman in literature of more physical charm. Tolstoi, whose understanding of the body is almost supernatural, has created in Anna a woman, quite ordinary from the mental and spiritual point of view, but who leaves on every reader an indelible vision of surpassing loveliness. One is not surprised at Vronsky's instant and ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... ascended the dark stairs from the gloom ridden cellar of the deserted ruin. Even Bridge paled a trifle. The man upon the floor appeared to have met an unnatural death—the frightful expression frozen upon the dead face might even indicate something verging upon the supernatural. The sound of the THING climbing out of the cellar was indeed uncanny—so uncanny that Bridge discovered himself looking about for some means of escape. His eyes fell upon the stairway ...
— The Oakdale Affair • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... but with his face, for appearing so often when I did not invite it. Once I caught myself on the verge of crying out, "Can't you wait? I will come presently!" and my uncle looked up as if I had spoken. Perhaps he had as good as heard the words; he possessed what almost seemed a supernatural faculty of divining the thought of another—not, I was sure, by any effort to perceive it, but by involuntary intuition. He uttered no inquiring word, but a light sigh escaped him, which all but made me burst into tears. I was on one side of a widening ...
— The Flight of the Shadow • George MacDonald
... with supernatural, or even with statutory powers; and my informants have for the most part thought that they had obliged me quite enough if they promised to do as I told them. But just as I was beginning to imitate the dictum, "Miracles do not happen," ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... the good fortune to have a mother endowed with these happy qualities. During his childhood and youth, the boy thought of her as little less than an angel,—as a supernatural being, all wisdom, love, and beauty. When her husband drove her into the county town, or to the assize balls or concerts there, he would step into the assembly with his wife on his arm, and look the great folks in the face, ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... supposed to enjoy the secret tutelage of the Supreme Deity; but a council, composed of subordinate and responsible agents, could not. Again, the auspices of the emperor, and his edicts, apart even from any celestial or supernatural inspiration, simply as emanations of his own divine character, had a value and a consecration which could never belong to those of a council—or to those even which had been sullied by the breath ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... anything of the same kind. The Odyssey is sweet, but there is nothing like this." About this time, prompted by Mrs. Gisborne, he began the study of Spanish, and conceived an ardent admiration for Calderon, whose splendid and supernatural fancy tallied with his own. "I am bathing myself in the light and odour of the starry Autos," he writes to Mr. Gisborne in the autumn of 1820. "Faust", too, was a favourite. "I have been reading over and over again "Faust", and always with sensations which no other composition excites. ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... than the storm; Medici held out among the crumbling walls of the Vascello, which had been bombarded for a week; the heroic Manara fell fighting at Villa Spada; Garibaldi, descending into the melee, dealt blows right and left: he seemed possessed by some supernatural power. Those around him say that it is impossible that he would have much longer escaped death, but suddenly a message came summoning him to the Assembly—it saved his life. When he appeared at the door of the Chamber, the deputies rose and burst into wild ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... night. The use of charms and spells to guard against such creatures passed over into Christian times. Their memory also survives in folk tales, which are full of allusions to giants, dwarfs, goblins, and other supernatural beings. ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... resistance, they would have soon compelled him to relinquish his charge, if Solomon Eagle, who had hitherto contented himself with gazing sternly on what was passing, had not interfered; and, rushing towards the combatants, seized Rochester and Etherege, and hurled them backwards with almost supernatural force. When they arose, and menaced him with their swords, he laughed loudly and contemptuously, crying, "Advance, if ye dare! and try your strength against one armed by Heaven, and ye will find how far ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... attached to Lichonin with all her feminine being, loving and jealous; had grown attached to him with body, feeling, thoughts. The prince was funny and entertaining to her, and the expansive Soloviev interestingly amusing; toward the crushing authoritativeness of Simanovsky she felt a supernatural terror; but Lichonin was for her at the same time a sovereign, and a divinity; and, which is the most horrible of all, her ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... passed into her chamber, the first shadow was cast, and it was day. She put her hands to her face; the tears fell faster, but she wiped them away and her great purpose was fixed. She crept back into bed, her agitation ceased, a strange and almost supernatural peace overshadowed her and she fell asleep not to wake till the sound of the scythe had ceased in the meadow just beyond the rick-yard that came up to one side of the cottage, and the mowers were at ...
— Clara Hopgood • Mark Rutherford
... they put to flight, as it is said, disorders that have baffled the powers of medicine, work in conformity to the light of reason? Or do they effect these wonderful cures by supernatural aid? ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... a method of looking into futurity, and of ascertaining, as they imagined, by supernatural means, the course of future events, which was peculiar to that people; at least no other nation seems ever to have practiced it in the precise form which prevailed among them. It was by means of the oracles. There were four or five localities in the Grecian countries which possessed, as ...
— Cyrus the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... regarded as peculiarly its own; and just as psychology and pathology were found to hold the key to an understanding of such a phenomenon as witchcraft, so we may yet realise that a true explanation of religious phenomena is to be found, not in some supernatural world, but in the workings of natural forces ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... these views, except that he makes a distinction between a natural and a supernatural idea of God, we find Barclay, the early defender of the Quakers, in an argument with a certain Dutch nobleman, philosophizing thus: "If the Scripture then be true, there is in men a supernatural idea of God, which ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... himself the chosen son of the universe; but his happiness, consciousness, peace of mind, have gained all that his pride has lost. And, this point once attained, then will the miraculous adventures of a St. Theresa or Jean-de-la-Croix, the ecstasy of the mystics, the supernatural incidents of legendary loves, the star of an Alexander or a Napoleon—then will all these seem the merest childish illusions compared with the healthy wisdom of a loyal, earnest man, who has no craving to soar above his fellows so ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... so intense at the siege of Amposta, that serpents of an enormous magnitude are reported by L. Marineo to have descended from the mountains, and taken refuge in the camp of the besiegers. Portentous and supernatural voices were frequently heard during the nights. Indeed, the superstition of the soldiers appears to have been so lively as to have prepared them for seeing ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... intercourse with the outer world, and living on a rock singled out by supernatural visitants, the people remain more superstitious than even the superstitious Germans and Bretons who are their neighbours. Few of them can read or write. The new thoughts, opinions, and creeds of the present century do not ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... religion so few? Why was it, he said, that all the humanitarians, the reformers, the guilds, the ethical groups, the agnostics, the male and female knights, sustained him, and only a few of the poor and friendless knocked, by his solicitation, at the supernatural door of life? How was it that a woman whom he encountered so often, a very angel of mercy, could do the things he was doing, tramping about in the misery and squalor of the great city day and night, her path unilluminated by a ray from ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... said, that, when any strange, supernatural, and necromantic adventure has occurred to a human being, that being, however desirous he may be to conceal the same, feels at certain periods torn up, as it were, by an intellectual earthquake, and is forced to bare the inner depths of his spirit to another. I am a witness of the truth of this. ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... because for them too profound excellencies,—such was Shakespeare. But alas! the exceptions prove the rule. For who will dare to force his way out of the crowd,—not of the mere vulgar,—but of the vain and banded aristocracy of intellect, and presume to join the almost supernatural beings that stand ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... hidden under squalid raiment, and sometimes a stout arm was muffled trader a dusky cloak; thus the fault of nature was retrieved by valour, and deficiency in race requited by nobleness of spirit. He therefore feared the might of no supernatural prowess, save of the god Thor only, to the greatness of whose force nothing human or divine could fitly be compared. The hearts of men ought not to be terrified at phantoms, which were only awful from their ghastly foulness, and whose semblances, marked by counterfeit ghostliness, ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... feelings for the benefit of our interests; the only difference being that, the gods having no longer a name, our methods are less sincere and less precise. When the Greeks, powerless before Troy, felt the need of supernatural signal and support, they went to Philoctetes, deprived him of Hercules' bow and arrows, and abandoned him, ill, naked, and defenceless, on a desert island. This was the mysterious Justice, loftier than that of man; this was the command of ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... of France—him, who was nothing at all, the son of a mere printer: it was the only example of such a piece of fortune which could then be instanced, and which, even during Fabert's life, had appeared so extraordinary, the vulgar never feared to ascribe his elevation to supernatural causes. It was said that from his youth he had busied himself with magic and sorcery, and that he had made a league with the devil. Mine host, who, to the stupidity inherent in all the natives of the ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... to be denied or concealed, that the clergy were instrumental in bringing on the witchcraft delusion in 1692. As the supposed agents of the mischief belonged to the supernatural and spiritual world, which has ever been considered their peculiar province, it was thought that the advice and co-operation of ministers were particularly appropriate and necessary. Opposition to prevailing vices and attempts ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... recognized, is a matter of common knowledge. That class of truth which has to do with God we call supernatural, or spiritual, truth, and that which relates to His creation we call ...
— The Church, the Schools and Evolution • J. E. (Judson Eber) Conant
... "who put to death one hundred brothers," to secure the throne to himself, is described in the Mahawanso, ch. v. p. 21, as a prince "of piety and supernatural wisdom." Even Malabar infidels, who assassinated the Buddhist kings, are extolled as "righteous sovereigns" (Mahawanso, ch. xxi. p. 127); but a Buddhist king who caused a priest to be put to death who ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... to watch, but went home not quite so comfortable as he had gone; for he did not altogether, notwithstanding his unbelief in the so-called supernatural, relish the approaching situation. Belief and unbelief are not always quite plainly distinguishable from each other, and Fear is not always certain which of them is his mother. He was not the less resolved, however, to carry out what he had undertaken—that was, to sit up ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... another without announcing himself.[76] It cannot be denied, the words "Where art thou?" were pregnant with meaning. They were intended to bring home to Adam the vast difference between his latter and his former state—between his supernatural size then and his shrunken size now; between the lordship of God over him then and the lordship of the serpent over him now.[77] At the same time, God wanted to give Adam the opportunity of repenting of his sin, and he would have received Divine forgiveness for it. But so far from repenting of ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... study and office of the good physician, swung itself gently on its noiseless hinges, into the position distinguished in description as "slightly ajar," and thus remained fixed, after a fashion that spiritual mediums might have been able to account for, on supernatural principles. ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... slight shudder at the supernatural which sometimes affects the healthiest nerves, Hope paused to consider. To alarm the neighborhood was her first thought. A slight murmuring from above dispelled it; she must first reconnoitre a few steps farther. As she ascended ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... peril to life. The details vary: sometimes there is a Dead Body laid on the altar; sometimes a Black Hand extinguishes the tapers; there are strange and threatening voices, and the general impression is that this is an adventure in which supernatural, and evil, forces ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston
... devote every energy of body and soul to the greatness of France. He loved not ease, he loved not personal indulgence, he loved not sensual gratification. The elevation of France to prosperity, wealth, and power, was a limitless ambition. The almost supernatural success which had thus far attended his exertions, did but magnify his desires and stimulate his hopes. He had no wish to elevate France upon the ruins of other nations. But he wished to make France the pattern of all excellence, the illustrious ...
— Napoleon Bonaparte • John S. C. Abbott
... she could not understand the words, of course; she only knew that his soul seemed to escape through the music, and come to her own. She had a strange comprehension of music, inherited from the old grandfather who left her his temper,—that supernatural gift, belonging to but few souls among those who love harmony, to understand and accept its meaning. She could not play or sing; she looked often in the dog's eyes, wondering if its soul felt as dumb and full as hers; ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... unbelieving as Tobias, doubting as Paul; have mercy on me, O master! for in this hour the divine light of belief and knowledge banishes doubt from my sinful heart. I acknowledge thy supernatural power and heavenly wisdom! My whole being bows in humility before you and your sublimity, and henceforth I will only be your humble scholar and servant, the tool of your will. Forgive me, all-knowing one, if my heart doubted. Breathe upon me the breath of knowledge, and lay thy august right hand ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... readers; that these poems, so called, were little better than rhymed doggerels, written in couplets of eight-syllabled lines and having for their subjects the miraculous deeds of saints and heroes and the occurrence of supernatural or impossible phenomena; that the composers of these metrical romances and chronicles, although giving free rein to the imagination, were utterly destitute of poetic fancy and hence produced no true poetry; that, nevertheless, some writer was now and then inspired ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... diminishes.[O] In the first mode it is an entity, and true. See now, the mathematicians take it for granted, that the true figures are not to be found in natural bodies, nor can they be there through the power either of nature or of art. You know, besides, that the truth (reality) of supernatural substances is above matter. We must therefore conclude that he who seeks the truth must rise above the reason of corporeal things. Besides which it must be considered, that he who feeds has a certain natural memory of his food, especially when it is most required; it leaves ...
— The Heroic Enthusiast, Part II (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... Crees make vows to abstain from particular kinds of food, either for a specific time, or for the remainder of their life, esteeming such abstinence to be a certain means of acquiring some supernatural powers, or at least of entailing upon themselves a succession of ...
— Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the Years 1819-20-21-22, Volume 1 • John Franklin
... religious feeling. He is always reverent, and "the feeling infinite" stirs faintly in one or two of his hymns. But, in general, his religion is of the rationalizing type, a religion of common sense, a belief resting upon logical deductions, a system of ethics in which the supernatural is reduced to the lowest terms, and from which the glooms and fervors of a deep spiritual experience are almost entirely absent. This "parson in a tie-wig" is constantly preaching against zeal, enthusiasm, superstition, mysticism, and recommending a moderate, cheerful, and reason religion.[12] ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... of opinions and things ecclesiastical on the condition of nations. They may clearly see that he who needs the priest, should disdain to saddle others with the cost of him, while blind to the fact that no people having faith in the supernatural ever failed to mix up such faith with political affairs. Even leading members of the 'Third Estate' are constantly declaring their disinclination for religious controversy, and express particular anxiety to keep their journals ...
— An Apology for Atheism - Addressed to Religious Investigators of Every Denomination - by One of Its Apostles • Charles Southwell
... profession had sadly degenerated, and in place of a class of physicians who practised medicine along rational or legitimate lines, in the footsteps of the great Hippocrates, there appeared great numbers of "specialists," most of them charlatans, who pretended to possess supernatural insight in the methods of treating certain forms of disease. These physicians rightly earned the contempt of the better class of Romans, and were made the object of many attacks by the satirists of the time. Such ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... genuine convictions, capable of supporting her in hours of weakness and unsatisfied longing. Several times of late she had all but brought herself to speak plainly with Eleanor, and ask on what foundation was built that calm life which seemed independent of supernatural belief; but shame always restrained her. It would be the same as confessing that she had not really the liberty to which she pretended. There was, however, an indirect way of approaching the subject, by which her dignity would possibly be rather ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... blazing piles now shed their lurid brightness on the place, which resembled some unhallowed and supernatural arena in which malicious demons had assembled to act their bloody and lawless rites. The forms in the background looked like unearthly beings gliding before the eye and cleaving the air with frantic and unmeaning gestures; while the savage passions of such as passed the flames ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... understand nothing else but a translation, we may be (as in the place alleged we have been) beguiled or misled by the translation, while we should be searching the true sense of the Scripture, which cannot be attained in a natural way (and a commonwealth is not to presume upon that which is supernatural) but by the knowledge of the original and of antiquity, acquired by our own studies, or those of some others, for even faith comes by hearing. Wherefore a commonwealth not making provision of men from time to time, knowing in the original ...
— The Commonwealth of Oceana • James Harrington
... mythology of Greece does not more fully abound with gods and goddesses, than that of the old Scandinavia with rude deities,—dwarfs, and elfs, and mountain spirits. It was in these northern regions that the Normans acquired their wild enthusiasm, their supernatural daring, and their magnificent superstitions. It was from these regions that the Saxons brought their love of liberty, their spirit of enterprise, and their restless passion for the sea. The ancient Scandinavians were heroic, adventurous, and chivalrous ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... Prince, and though at times unruly, were completely to be depended upon. Yet, while owning Sir Eustace to be a brave, gallant, and kind-hearted Knight, there were times when even they felt a shudder of dread and almost of hatred pass over them, when tales were told of the supernatural powers he was supposed to possess; when Leonard Ashton's adventure with the cats was narrated, or the story of his sudden arrival at Lynwood Keep on the night before the lady's funeral. His own immediate attendants might ...
— The Lances of Lynwood • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Kew smiled (in her supernatural way) almost as much as her portrait, by Harlowe, as you may see it at Kewbury to this very day. She is represented seated before an easel, painting a miniature of ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... stage in its scenes of wildest contrast, and in all its boundless variety of character.... Their fictitious narratives, their ballad poetry, and other branches of their literature, which are particularly apt to bear the stamp of the extravagant and the supernatural, began also to occupy the attention of the British literati. In Edinburgh, where the remarkable coincidence between the German language and the Lowland Scottish encouraged young men to approach this newly discovered spring of literature, a class was formed of six or seven intimate ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... strangely enkindled, as if suffused from within by a powerful sweet fire. His soul was arrested in wonder. She was enkindled in her own living fire. Arrested in wonder and in pure, perfect attraction, he moved towards her. She sat like a strange queen, almost supernatural in her glowing ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... it was like a scene at the pantomime. He had divined it; he had foreseen and yet there was the shock and eerie thrill of magic, the appealing unreality of the supernatural in the revelation. ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... presence, but his utter and complete unlikeness to the white frontiersmen of their knowledge and tradition—creatures of fire and sword and malevolent activity—as well as his manifest dissimilarity to themselves, settled their conviction of his supernatural origin. His gentle, submissive voice, his yielding will, his lazy helplessness, the absence of strange weapons and fierce explosives in his possession, his unwonted sobriety—all proved him an exception to his apparent race that was in itself miraculous. For it must be confessed ...
— A Drift from Redwood Camp • Bret Harte
... speak, but could not. What increased my dread was that I could not tell whether the Thing by my side was a reality or a spectre. I had caught a glimpse of something white as the light disappeared, and I believe that a pistol at my head would have caused me less alarm than this horrible idea of the supernatural. I began to feel that I could endure it no longer, that I should stifle, should die, when Annie's voice spoke in the darkness quite near, and I found it was she who ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... will wonder at them," she thought, "and maybe come on shore to find out whatever their meaning may be." Then she hurriedly closed the door. The night was cold, but it was more than that,—the air had the peculiar coldness that gives sense of the supernatural, such coldness as precedes the advent of a spirit. She was awed, she opened her mouth as if to speak, but was dumb; she put out her hands—but ...
— A Knight of the Nets • Amelia E. Barr
... shouted to him to desist; the sound of the bell jarred on his nerves. It sounded like a summons, and a summons on that deserted craft was quite out of place. Who knew what mightn't answer it in the way of the supernatural? ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... of the consequences of wealth attained by the aid of the supernatural which hangs about the ancient village of Endenich, near Bonn, where at the end of the seventeenth century there dwelt a certain sheriff and his son, Konrad, who was a locksmith by trade. They were poor and had lost everything in the recent wars, which had also ruined Heribert, another sheriff, ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
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