"Mirage" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... The heat became terrific; not a breath of wind stirred. The face of the world lost its contours in wavering mirage. The travellers found lukewarm water in the station and breakfasted sparingly from their own stores of biscuit and tinned things. Then, in the shadow of the station, they settled down to wait, bored to extinction. Lulled by the ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... it was a question of manhood, of life, and of that which gives the highest value and incentive to life. It was inevitable, therefore, that Marian Vosburgh should become a mirage to more than one man; and when at last the delusion vanished, there was usually a flinty desert to be crossed before the right, ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... waste, thirsty travellers are deceived by the effects of the curious mirage, when lakes glittering in the sun, with towers, domes, and minarets reflected on their surface, appear before their eyes, to vanish suddenly as ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... your cruel wheel, O Time!" I cried in my heart, "and give me but one hour's youth again—sweet, ecstatic youth with the bounding pulse, led by the purple mirage of Hope, whose sirens whisper that the world's sweets are sweet and its crowns worth winning. Let me for a space be free from this dastard age creeping through the veins, dulling the perspective of life ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... world, they listen to the poet's song, wondering, admiring, but powerless over the great instrument of human speech, from whose 15,000 keys their touch can draw but the dull, tuneless prose of daily question and answer; as in a mirage of things unreal, they see the great deeds that are done in their time for love or hate, for race or country, for ambition and for vengeance, but though they see the result, and know the motive, the inward meaning and spirit of it all escapes them. It is theirs ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... the top of that mountain, clouds or no clouds. For he had heard it said that the mirage of Portcausey was being seen again—the Devil's Troopers, and the Oilean-gan-talamh-ar-bith, the Isle of No Land At All, and the Swinging City, and they were to be seen in the blue heat haze over the sea from ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... the pleasant words that lulled a pleasure-seeking and money-making generation into self-satisfied rest and the mirage ...
— Why I Preach the Second Coming • Isaac Massey Haldeman
... taken on legendary character, and so "Francesca da Rimini" now ranks as a theme with the history of Lancelot and Guinevere, of Tristan and Isolde. It has become the inspiration for Maeterlinck in "Pelleas and Melisande," who has viewed the Italian passion through a mirage ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Francesca da Rimini • George Henry Boker
... Apollo, I shall live to see the eclipse of Wagner. Can't you read the handwriting on the wall? Dinna ye hear the slogan of the realists? No music rooted in bookish ideas, in literary or artistic movements, will survive the mutations of the Zeitgeist. Schumann reared his palace on a mirage. The inside he called Bachian—but it wasn't. In variety of key-color perhaps; but structurally no symphony may be built on Bach, for a sufficient reason. Schumann had the great structure models before him; he heeded them not. He did ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... summoning whistle conveyed to my mind the idea of the exhaustion of air in a ship-compartment, and the opening and shutting of the elevator door completed the illusion of a ship fast going to pieces. But the ship my mind was on never reached any shore, nor did she sink. Like a mirage she vanished, and again I found myself safe in my bed at the hospital. "Safe," did I say? Scarcely that—for deliverance from one impending disaster simply ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... would follow the multitude to do all the evil which he saw being done around him; it looked a joyous and delightful prospect. He gazed on the bright vision of sin, on the iridescent waters of pleasure; and did not know that the brightness was a mirage of the burning desert, the iridescence a film of corruption over ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... about this time, my father startled me by calling my attention to a novel sight far in front of us, almost at the horizon. "It is a mock sun," exclaimed my father. "I have read of them; it is called a reflection or mirage. It will soon ...
— The Smoky God • Willis George Emerson
... people who cannot view the past through a mirage. The marks of the birth-pangs remain on the land; its struggle for breath was too terrible, its scars too deep ...
— The Maid-At-Arms • Robert W. Chambers
... the gloom and solitude that it held in its owner's eyes. The ponderous furniture, the high ceiling, the heavy curtains, unchanged since the days of Chilcote's grandfather, all hinted at a far-reaching ownership that stirred him. The ownership was mythical in his regard, and the possessions a mirage, but they filled the day. And, ...
— The Masquerader • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... foreshadowings, with the result of more and more completely separating the individual from his legitimate activities and endeavor, and leading him to substitute for spiritual realities a mere false and mirage-like outlook,—and instead of that rational activity and high endeavor that create events and increasingly control their conditions, there is merely an impatient and restless expectation of something or other that may suddenly occur ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... terminate? You could not puzzle any of us more than by putting such a question. We are more at our wit's end than the war's end. And yet I do not see that anything has been left undone, that might have been done. The army has moved steadily toward its objects. But those objects are like a mirage, they are always nearly the same distance off. What can we do in such ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... taken, and the chances of rescue upon which they had reckoned—all those elaborate calculations of hours and distances—were as unsubstantial as the mirage which shimmered upon the horizon. There would be no alarm at Halfa until it was found that the steamer did not return in the evening. Even now, when the Nile was only a thin green band upon the farthest horizon, the pursuit had probably ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle
... in its outlines, and so coherent, so thinkable and possible even in its most gorgeous details, should have had behind it something, probably a great deal, of fact actually seen and known, than that it should have been the mere mirage of a poet's dream? 'The picture presented to us of the Homeric heroes and their surroundings,' says Father Browne, 'is not merely vivid and complete; it is grand, though with a grandeur which is homely and ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie
... many parts of the world, and vice in all, but the concentrated essence of all the iniquities and all the vices in all the continents finds itself at Port Said. And through the heart of that sand-bordered hell, where the mirage flickers day long above the Bitter Lake, move, if you will only wait, most of the men and women you have known in this life. Dick established himself in quarters more riotous than respectable. He spent his evenings on the quay, and boarded ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... crown are not yours alone to offer, and every promise you make, I make also. I offer the good and the bad indifferently. The lover, the poet, the mystic, and all who would drink of the first Fountain, I delude with my mirage. I was the Beatrice who led Dante upward: the gloom was in me, and the glory was mine also, and he went not out of my cave. The stars and the shining of heaven were delusions of the infinite I wove about him. I captured his soul with the shadow of space; ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... is a remarkable thing, and I fancy you will find, when we do know the explanation, that anyone else standing where you were at that time would have seen exactly the same thing. The rock stands out of the water; it is just above a deep pool, and probably it was a sort of mirage effect, and not by any means ...
— The Mystery of the Green Ray • William Le Queux
... light appears far to the southward, heralding the approach of the sun, and daily the twilight lengthens, until early in March, the sun, a flaming disk of fiery crimson, shows his distorted image above the horizon. This distorted shape is due to the mirage caused by the cold, just as heat-waves above the rails on a railroad-track distort the ...
— A Negro Explorer at the North Pole • Matthew A. Henson
... danger, Alexander pressed onward. Like his soldiers, he suffered from heat and thirst; and like them, too, he was deceived by the mirage. ...
— The Story of the Greeks • H. A. Guerber
... speech lent their forms to clothe the ineffable experience of Mary and the disciples. For us, the story of outward events—the visible form, the eating of bread and fish, the conversations, the floating up into the clouds—all this fades away as a mirage. The reality below this symbol—the sense of the human friend's continued and higher life—this abides and renews itself; not as an isolated historic fact, but as an instance and counterpart of the message which in every age comes to the bereaved heart—of a love greater than loss, a life in ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... these great masses of bloom; it is enough simply to live in an hour which brings such an overflow of beauty from the ancient fountains; but Nature herself lures one to deeper thoughts, and, through the vision which spreads like a mirage over the landscape, hints at some hidden loveliness at the root of this riotous blossoming, some diviner vision for the eye of the spirit alone. "Look," she seems to say, as I stand and gaze with unappeased hunger of soul, "this is my holiday. In the coming weeks I have a whole race to ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... chase a never-reached mirage Across the hot, white sand, And choke and die, while gazing on Its green and ...
— Fifty years & Other Poems • James Weldon Johnson
... miles westward, for the sun told me the course. I was suddenly roused from my stupor. A glad sight was before me. A lake!—a lake shining like crystal. Was I certain I saw it? Could it be the mirage? No. Its outlines were too sharply defined. It had not that filmy, whitish appearance which distinguishes the latter phenomenon. No. It was not the mirage. It ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... History, like a mirage, lifts only a part of the past into view, leaving much that we should like to know in oblivion. At this distance the Middle Ages wear an aspect of smooth uniformity of faith and opinion, but that is only ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... beautiful with the sunshine on them," said the old man, with a sneer; "so is a mirage in the desert; so are the apples on the shores of the Dead Sea. But she is yours. You'll find no trouble in winning her, even at the sacrifice of her creed. She is of the earth earthy, and will willingly escape from such a ...
— May Brooke • Anna H. Dorsey
... frosty night, the day came, hot and clear, with the sun beating down from a cloudless sky and the mirage dancing upon the distant horizon. To the men from the north, it was a bit of a shock to exchange Christmas greetings, while the thermometer went sliding up to the mark of one hundred degrees. Nevertheless, they hailed one another lustily, and threw themselves into the spirit of the ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller
... almost afraid that I shall lose her. I shall see how she is in the morning, and, if she is no better, I will endeavour to get her on to some permanent water or creek running to the south. I think we have now made the dip of the country to the south, but the mirage is so powerful that little bushes appear like great gum-trees, which makes it very difficult to judge what is before us; it is almost as bad as travelling in the dark. I never saw it so bright nor so continuous as it is now; one would ...
— Explorations in Australia, The Journals of John McDouall Stuart • John McDouall Stuart
... it." Ingersoll breathed deeply, staring into the blackness, searching for a glimmer, a glint, some faint reassurance that it had not been a mirage they had seen. And then Ingersoll felt a hand in his, Tom Shandor's hand, gripping his tightly, wringing it, and when the lights snapped on again, he was staring at Shandor, tears of happiness streaming from his pale, tired eyes. "You ...
— Bear Trap • Alan Edward Nourse
... know whom I had there, opposite me, busy now devouring a slice of pate de foie gras. Not in the least. It never entered my head. How could it? The Rita that haunted me had no history; she was but the principle of life charged with fatality. Her form was only a mirage of desire decoying one step ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... were selfish and heartless as other women, adulation and celebrity and the praise of the public might satisfy you. But you are not, and I have studied your nature too thoroughly to mistake the result of your ambitious career. My darling, ambition is the mirage of the literary desert you are anxious to traverse; it is the Bahr Sheitan, the Satan's water, which will ever recede and mock your thirsty, toil-spent soul. Dear little pilgrim, do not scorch your feet and wear out your life in the hot, blinding sands, struggling in ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... moment that I perceived the contents of this glass case a sense of fantasy claimed me, and I ceased to know where reality ended and mirage began. ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... out of this wood on the dusty road in the golden heat, between fields of cucumbers, you meet market carts and contadini returning from the city. Then you cross the Serchio in the early light, still and mysterious as a river out of Malory. And at last, suddenly, like a mirage, the towers of Pisa rise before you, faint and beautiful as in a dream. As you turn to look behind you at the world you are leaving, you find that the mountains, those marvellous Apuan Alps with their fragile peaks, have been lost ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... was letting himself in for a terrible disappointment; that all this happy anticipation, this belief, an intuition almost, that some delightful surprise awaited him, was the result of many lonely musings under the cold remote stars in virgin forests and wide deserts, a fleeting mirage born ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... a series of huts, each like Burns' birthplace, grouped on the shelving side of a stony cliff. The bay itself is semi-circular, with a long cape jutting out to the south, the extremity of which almost always is floating in the air, owing to the mirage. In the bay were two rusty steamers—one the Benedetto, which had been promised to us by the Italian governor—several old wooden sailers, and a lot of smallish fishing smacks very brightly painted and with raised poop and prow. A group of Albanians were toiling ...
— The Luck of Thirteen - Wanderings and Flight through Montenegro and Serbia • Jan Gordon
... an old age free from cares and troubles, which he had promised himself in the poorhouse, and which that morning had faded under the pressure of hard work like a fair mirage, now returned gradually to him. His heart soothed by the feeling of a pensioner assured for the rest of his days from anxiety, hunger, and homelessness, he sat at his ease on the turf, feeling the pleasing ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... raise their slimy heads a couple of feet above the sea; the tiny nautilus floats in myriads upon the undulating waves, and at times the ship is surrounded by a shoal of the indolent jelly-fish. Mirage plays us strange tricks in the way of optical delusion in these regions. We seem to be approaching land which we never reach, but which at the moment when we should fairly make it, fades ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... and nearer I roam, In the month of the rosy-mouthed June, What is it that throws round your home The mirage of the mystical moon? What is it that softens my sight, That mellows the marvellous skies? What is it, my Love, but the light,— The light of ...
— Soldier Songs and Love Songs • A.H. Laidlaw
... passionate intensity, and Nayland Smith hesitated. To my nostrils was wafted that faint, delightful perfume which, since one night, two years ago, it had come to disturb my senses, had taunted me many times as the mirage taunts the parched Sahara traveler. I took a ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... the good and of the beautiful which is to be found in the female conscience delights us and settles the question for us. This is why religion is preserved to the world by woman alone. A beautiful and a virtuous woman is the mirage which peoples with lakes and green avenues our great moral desert. The superiority of modern science consists in the fact that each step forward it takes is a step further in the order of abstractions. We make chemistry from chemistry, algebra from algebra; the very indefatigability ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... ways of getting back—escape and exchange. Exchange was like the ever receding mirage of the desert, that lures the thirsty traveler on over the parched sands, with illusions of refreshing springs, only to leave his bones at last to whiten by the side of those of his unremembered predecessors. Every day there came something to build up the ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... believe I'll look about a little;" and he went to the northern extremity of the island, where there was a little, narrow neck of land connecting it with the mainland; and the devil, who is always playing pranks with us, got up a mirage, and when he looked over to the mainland, such hills and dells, vales and dales; such mountains, crowned with silver; such cataracts, clad in robes of beauty, did he see there, that he went back and told Heva: "The country over there is a thousand times better than this; ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... His spirit seemed to soar aloft in the yellow air and hang hovering over and around her, while his body stood rooted to the spot, like one who fears, by moving nigher, to lose the lovely vision of a mirage. She sat motionless, her gaze on the sea. Malcolm bethought himself that she could not know him in his fisher-dress, and must take him for some rude fisherman staring at her. He must go at once, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... meeting: the mysterious light of the picture gallery, the stillness of the old house, the presence of their elders, all contributed to trace upon their hearts the delicate lines of this vaporous mirage. The many confused thoughts that surged in Marguerite's mind grew calm and lay like a limpid ocean traversed by a luminous ray when Emmanuel murmured a few farewell words to Madame Claes. That voice, whose fresh and mellow tone sent nameless delights into her heart, completed ...
— The Alkahest • Honore de Balzac
... church bells, which gave them a sense of escape and boundless freedom. Every rabbit that shot across the path, every sage hen that flew up by the trail, was like a runaway thought, a message that one sent into the desert. As they went farther, the illusion of the mirage became more instead of less convincing; a shallow silver lake that spread for many miles, a little misty in the sunlight. Here and there one saw reflected the image of a heifer, turned loose to live upon the sparse sand-grass. They were magnified to a preposterous height and ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... the ordeal will mean both pain and suffering for him and he must not be worried about it in advance. He will need all his nerve and courage when the time for action comes. Moreover, we feel it would be cruel for him to glimpse such a vision and then find it only a mirage. So we have told him nothing. But I have told you because you are fond of him and I wanted you to ...
— Ted and the Telephone • Sara Ware Bassett
... ceremonious and deliberate, and oppressively polite. On the other hand, when he had been shut up with brusque, half-savage, energetic Doctor Rogerson, Tom was laconic, decisive, and insupportably ill-bred, till, as we have said, the mirage melted away, and he gradually acquiesced in his identity. Then, little by little, the irrepressible gossip, jocularity, and ballad minstrelsy were heard again, his little eyes danced, and his waggish smiles glowed once more, ruddy as a ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... me to hurry up, but I called him out of his tent and asked him if I was really a sergeant, or if it was a mirage. He said if I made a success of that bridge, and the command got across, and I was not killed I would be appointed sergeant. He said the general would try me as a bridge-builder, and if I was a success he would ...
— How Private George W. Peck Put Down The Rebellion - or, The Funny Experiences of a Raw Recruit - 1887 • George W. Peck
... continent but insular. This is as important as that it keeps butter cool. When I looked across the pond from this peak toward the Sudbury meadows, which in time of flood I distinguished elevated perhaps by a mirage in their seething valley, like a coin in a basin, all the earth beyond the pond appeared like a thin crust insulated and floated even by this small sheet of interverting water, and I was reminded that this on which I dwelt was ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... Suista rippled and curled like the hair of a nymph, and from the woods wrapt in the evening gloom there came forth a simultaneous murmur, as though they were awakening from a black dream. Call it reality or dream, the momentary glimpse of that invisible mirage reflected from a far-off world, 250 years old, vanished in a flash. The mystic forms that brushed past me with their quick unbodied steps, and loud, voiceless laughter, and threw themselves into the river, did ...
— The Hungry Stones And Other Stories • Rabindranath Tagore
... Being fascinated they fascinate. They see through Claude Lorraines. And how dare any one, if he could, pluck away the coulisses, stage effects and ceremonies by which they live? Too pathetic, too pitiable, is the region of affection, and its atmosphere always liable to mirage." ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... are come to the ocean of happiness, do not go back thirsty. Wake, foolish man! for Death stalks you. Here is pure water before you; drink it at every breath. Do not follow the mirage on foot, but thirst for the nectar; Dhruva, Prahlad, and Shukadeva have drunk of it, and also Raidas has tasted it: The saints are drunk with love, their thirst is for love. Kabr says: "Listen to me, brother! The nest of fear is broken. Not for a moment have you come face to face ...
— Songs of Kabir • Rabindranath Tagore (trans.)
... slumbering within our bosoms ambitions and possibilities that, if set in motion, would move mountains and revert the course of rivers. But we can't work up enough energy to consummate our aims and carry things to a finish. Perhaps we may be able to do so some day. Oh, Some Day, you are a mirage on the desert of life that ever lures us on to things that can only be attained in the ...
— Confessions of a Neurasthenic • William Taylor Marrs
... him of his vileness. This, then, is life, not as I imagined it, but as it is, and such creatures as Hutchings are human beings. Well, after all, it is better to know the truth than to cheat oneself with a mirage. I shall appreciate large natures with noble and generous impulses better, now that I ...
— Elder Conklin and Other Stories • Frank Harris
... green, and here and there a scrub-cedar. Half a mile down, the slope merged into green level. But close, keen gaze made out this level to be a rolling plain, growing darker green, with blue lines of ravines, and thin, undefined spaces that might be mirage. Miles and miles it swept and relied and heaved to lose its waves in apparent darker level. A round, red rock stood isolated, marking the end of the barren plain, and farther on were other round rocks, all isolated, all of different shape. They resembled huge grazing cattle. But as ...
— The Rainbow Trail • Zane Grey
... along the horizon, a belt of fire. I waved a good-bye to Old England and then turned to see the spires of Dunkirk, which were visible in the distance before us. On the low Belgian coast we could see trees and steeples, resembling a mirage over the level surface of the sea; at length, about ten o'clock, the square tower of Ostend came in sight. The boat passed into a long muddy basin, in which many unwieldy, red-sailed Dutch craft were lying, and stopped beside a high pier. Here amid the confusion of three languages, an officer ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... absolutely clear than our own northern air. Intense clearness, whether, in the north, after or before rain, or in some moments of twilight in the south, is always, as far as I am acquainted with natural phenomena, a notable thing. Mist of some sort, or mirage, or confusion of light or of cloud, are the general facts; the distance may vary in different climates at which the effects of mist begin, but they are always present; and therefore, in all probability, ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin
... a pine wood and climbed for another two hours, the summit always vanishing before them like a mirage. At the end of that time they were apparently no nearer their goal than when they had started. They had followed first one path, then another, until they had lost all sense of direction, and finally when they came to a place where three ...
— Jerry • Jean Webster
... Arab steed! what shall thy master do, When thou, who wast his all of joy, hast vanished from his view? When the dim distance cheats mine eye, and through the gathering tears Thy bright form, for a moment, like the false mirage appears; Slow and unmounted shall I roam, with weary step alone, Where, with fleet step and joyous bound, thou oft hast borne me on; And sitting down by that green well, I'll pause and sadly think, "It was here he bowed his glossy neck when ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... story of Abdullah ibn Kilabah (D'Herbelot's Colabah). At Aden I met an Arab who had seen the mysterious city on the borders of Al-Ahkaf, the waste of deep sands, west of Hadramaut; and probably he had, the mirage or sun-reek taking its place. Compare with this tale "The City of Brass" ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... name impatiently: 'Crane! Crane! let us have a speech from the gallant General P. Crandall!'—yes, even though the aristocratic brown-stone mansion, which was to have been a testimonial of esteem from admiring friends; though all these fade before me like the beautiful mirage that proves only an illusion of the senses, yet I am equal to this act of self-denial, and submit to pass my life in ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... life on a bed of fever, with no hand to soothe her dying moments, for her people, too, were dead. The palace, half-completed, stands in the midst of this desolation, and sometimes it seems to lift into view of those at a distance in the shifting mirage that ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... near it, as well as those of the trees upon them, could be distinctly traced on the unruffled surface. As we continued to advance, the water however constantly retreated before us and at last surrounded us. I now found that we had been deceived by mirage; the apparent islands being really such only when these plains are covered by the sea. In many places the sandy mud was so moist that we sank deeply into it, and after travelling for fifteen miles on a north-east course I ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 1 (of 2) • George Grey
... youth—the glamorous realm afar which drew to itself from across the sea our eager artist-bands, pilgrims to the Old, the Stately, and the Fair; Europe, which reared above our dull horizon the towers of Oxford and of Notre Dame, sent up into our pale, empty sky the shimmering mirage of Venice, and cast across our workaday way the grave and noble shadow of Rome; Europe, which gave out through the varying voices of Correggio, Canova, Hugo, and Wagner the cry, so lofty and so piercing-sweet, of Art; ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... nights of reading now, but sometimes when S—— and I are lying side by side in the trench, you would not believe what a mirage we evoke and what joy we have in stirred-up memories. Ah, how science and intellectual phenomena lead us into a very heaven of legends, and what pleasure I get from the marvellous history of this metal, or that acid! For me the thousand and one nights are renewing themselves. ...
— Letters of a Soldier - 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... over the "headache and heartache" of it all, and then saying, gleefully, "at all events Chancery will work none of its bad influence on us"? "None of its bad influence on us!" poor lad, whose life is wasted and character impaired in following the mirage of the suit, and who is killed by the mockery of its end. Thus do the two intertwined stories run; but apart from these, though all in place and keeping, and helping on the general development, ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... curious, and at the same time the most tormenting phenomenon occasioned by optical deception, is the "mirage," or, as commonly called by the Mexican travellers, "the lying waters." Even the experienced prairie hunter is often deceived by these, upon the arid plains, where the pool of water is in such request. The thirsty wayfarer, after jogging for hours under ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... a woman, and one, it is plain, Whose sentiment hangs like a cloud o'er her brain. You gaze through a sort of traditional mist, And behold a mirage of God's laws which exist But in fancy. God made but one law—it is love. A law for the earth, and the kingdoms above, A law for the woman, a law for the man, The base and the spire of His intricate plan Of existence. All evils the world ever saw Had birth in man's breaking away from this law. God ...
— Three Women • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... like their victim—was carried by the wind into the unknown. All day long my coat became more and more beautiful. The texture was solid smoke and the stripes were shafts of moonlight. How it shimmered through the mirage of ...
— Balloons • Elizabeth Bibesco
... watched and waited in vain—for those who were with us were no longer of us for some weeks to come, and the mouths of the singers were hushed. The next thing we knew a city seemed to spring suddenly out of the plains—a mirage of brick and mortar—an oasis in the wilderness,—and we realized, with a gasp, that we had struck the bull's-eye of the ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard
... and when the surface caught a glint of light and reflected it, only the clay and mud walls about came to the eye. It was a very regular pool, a man's height in diameter, and, for all I knew, from two inches to two miles deep. I became absorbed in a sort of subaquatic mirage, in which I seemed to distinguish reflections beneath the surface. My eyes refocused with a jerk, and I realized that something had unconsciously been perceived by my rods and cones, and short-circuited to my duller brain. Where a moment before was an unbroken translucent surface, were ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... lonely, and drank so much that his manager declined to do business with him. Daniel prayed, expostulated and even threatened to leave; but Mychowski kept on the broad, downward path that leads to the mirage called Thirst. ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... drawing the purple shadows of evening around their feet. The high bold coast did not appear, in that clear atmosphere, to be fifteen miles away, and it seemed to have risen suddenly like a beautiful mirage out of the sea. In less than five minutes the grey curtain of mist dropped slowly down again over the magnificent picture, and it faded gradually from sight, leaving us almost in doubt whether it had been a reality, or only a bright ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... relieving way. Her sorrows were as strange, enticing figures in dreams. They moved about and around her, not as things actually identical with her, but as ills which she could view at a distance. Sometimes both she and they (for she saw herself also as in a kind of mirage or inverted vision) seemed beings of another state, troubled, but not bitterly painful. The old nepenthe of the bottle had seized upon her. After a few accidental lapses, in which she found it acted as a solace or sedative, the highball visioned itself ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... often wondered whether the nature of things might not be, after all, something other than what they thought it. Again and again it seemed to be in as direct conflict with duty as with inclination; so that they were driven to wonder also whether what they conceived to be duty were not also a mirage—a marsh-light leading them on ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm
... had caught of his perverted heart and mind was not a pleasant vision. She even shuddered at herself as, with burning face, she recalled how near she had come, on such brief and slight acquaintance, to giving herself to such a life, lured in great part by the glamour of that golden mirage into which so many of earth's brave and beautiful souls have hastened, only to find its sparkling waters to be nothing but dust and its promise of luscious delights of the senses, nothing but the dead ...
— The High Calling • Charles M. Sheldon
... day, the rebel government at Richmond faded thence like a mirage, and, within one week, General Lee surrendered his enfeebled relic ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... the unlimited freedom of it, its infinite expansion, its air like wine to the senses, the floods of sunshine, the waves of color, the translucent atmosphere that aids the imagination to create in the distance all architectural splendors and realms of peace. It is all like a mirage and a dream. We pass swiftly, and make a moving panorama of beauty in hues, of strangeness in forms, of sublimity in extent, of overawing and savage antiquity. I would miss none of it. And when we pass to the accustomed again, to the fields of verdure and the forests and the hills of green, ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... Hell, and Booligal in that order. Tim had driven starving, rickety sheep across his native plains when the earth's surface had been powdered to red sand and driven by shrivelling westerlies in travelling sandhills from mirage to summer mirage. Tim was used to hot places. That is why he became a stretcher-bearer for his company in Gallipoli, and transferred to the regimental bombers when they reached France. When they came to a sea of brown mud waves, which some cynic had misnamed the "Grass ...
— Letters from France • C. E. W. Bean
... and looked away from him. His tone stirred what little blood there was still left in me to rebellion; but when I saw the shore with its swamps and ragged palms, I felt how perilously near it was, and Panama became suddenly a distant mirage. I was as helpless as a sailor clinging to a plank. I felt I was in no position to take offence, so I bit my ...
— Captain Macklin • Richard Harding Davis
... caused by a spiral haze of smoke so vague that one could only tell of its existence from the mirage-like tremor of the mast round which ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... water-plants, we found ourselves on a glassy surface, extending away towards the west as far as the eye could see, and bordered on all sides by gorgeous mountains and ranges of snow. Around the edges of the lake a sunny mirage was playing tricks with the cattle and the objects on the banks, and as we glided lazily on with the stream, and the splashing paddles, and even the foiled mosquitoes, made music about us, we began to enter more into the spirit ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight
... conviction, an illusion a mistaken perception or inference. An illusion may be wholly of the senses; a delusion always involves some mental error. In an optical illusion the observer sees either what does not exist, or what exists otherwise than as he sees it, as when in a mirage distant springs and trees appear close at hand. We speak of the illusions of fancy or of hope, but of the delusions of the insane. A hallucination is a false image or belief which has nothing, outside of the disordered mind, to suggest it; as, the hallucinations of delirium tremens. ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... tides and in the calmest weather, as dangerous as any tempest, and which make compass untrustworthy and helm powerless. It is to be remembered also that an island not only appears and disappears upon the horizon in brighter or darker skies, but it varies its height and shape, doubles itself in mirage, or looks as if broken asunder, divided into two or three. Indeed the buccaneer, Cowley, writing of one such island which he had visited, says: "My fancy led me to call it Cowley's Enchanted Isle, for we having had a sight of it upon several points of the compass, it appeared always in so many ...
— Tales of the Enchanted Islands of the Atlantic • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... privation. She had begun to see this, but she could not always master the weakness: never had she stood in greater need of Mrs. Heeny's "Go slow. Undine!" Her imagination was incapable of long flights. She could not cheat her impatience with the mirage of far-off satisfactions, and for the moment present and future seemed equally void. But her desire to go to Europe and to rejoin the little New York world that was reforming itself in London and Paris was fortified by reasons ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... marine, naval, maritime, nautical, Davy Jones, pelagic, pelagian, loom, looming, submarine, ultramarine, rote, frith, estuary, fiord, kraken, Triton, haliography, haliographer, hydrography, thalassography, marinorama, nereid, mirage, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... below him. Miramar, he had named it—"Beautiful Sea." The name was half an affectionate mockery of this land where the nearest water was fifty miles away, and half because of the sea of blue that he looked at now. Garry had never ceased to wonder at the mirage. ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... difficult to discern the true dimensions of objects in that mirage which covers the studies ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... they recalled the irritation of the men who found they had been riding for a mirage—And lunch ...
— Polly and Eleanor • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... what it promised. You have not made the best of the power into which you came, and you could not do so, because the spring from which all the enriching waters of married life flow was dry. Poor Jasmine—poor illusion of a wild young heart which reached out for the golden city of the mirage! ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... ennui, that vile ennui, the precursor of storms, which she had so much reason to dread? In any event, she suffered herself to be deceived and had been living for several days in a state of delicious unrest, for love is so strong, so beautiful, that its semblance, its mirage, takes us captive and may move us as deeply as ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... assumed a human shape. Oh! with what interest—what deep, enthusiastic interest, did Fernand contemplate the spectacle; for his well-stored mind at once suggested to him that he was now the witness of that wondrous optical delusion, called the mirage. ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... wandering there had been dark hours turbulent with pain, hours when his vision, his hope, his memory had not availed to uplift him, and he had known the terror of a doubt lest the whole of it should, after all, be but a creation of his yearnings, a mirage of his desires. Everywhere men had believed him mad. He had accepted that as he accepted toil, hunger and exile, as things to be redeemed by their end. But if it should be true! If this grossness and harshness should, after all, be his real life! Bill saw ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... electricity, which had departed for a while, was out in it again, so that it would snap and stand out horizontally from her head. The little spark of a smile was constantly over her face like a mirage before her lips and her eyes and seeming to hover on the very peak of her brows when ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... camel topped a rise in the river-bank, a considerable pool came into view, tree-shaded, heron-haunted, too incredibly beautiful and alluring for belief. Was it a mirage?... ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... reversions to the habits of the parent society. But have these mediaeval legacies from Ancient Greece been really important constituents in our history viewed as a whole? Have they not rather been false growths which led to little or nothing? The Holy Roman Empire was never more than a mirage. The sense of unity in the modern Western world is derived not from this but from a really original institution, the early Papal Church, in which any legacy from Ancient Greece would be hard to discern. The national states of modern Europe and America are derived not from mediaeval Ghent or Bruges ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... would be without dreams—waking dreams, I mean—the dreams that we call "castles in the air," built by the kindly hands of Hope! Were it not for the mirage of the oasis, drawing his footsteps ever onward, the weary traveler would lie down in the desert sand and die. It is the mirage of distant success, of happiness that, like the bunch of carrots fastened an inch beyond the donkey's nose, seems always just within our reach, if only we will gallop ...
— Dreams - From a volume entitled "Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow" • Jerome K. Jerome
... shoved through them with an insistence that brought an angry hail of spray on deck. The tramp cared little for this protest of the sea or for the threats of more hostile resistance. Through the rainbow kicked up by her forefoot there glimmered and beckoned a mirage of wealthy cities sunk fathoms deep and tenanted only by strange sea creatures. For the tramp and her crew there was a stranger goal than was ever sought by an argosy of legend. The lost cities of Atlantis and all the wealth that they contain was the ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... and weeds Lifting thy golden filaments and seeds, Thy sun-illumined spires, thy crown and crest! White phantom city, whose untrodden streets Are rivers, and whose pavements are the shifting Shadows of palaces and strips of sky; I wait to see thee vanish like the fleets Seen in mirage, or towers of cloud uplifting In ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... waterway to the South Sea, still seeking gold, falling back at last upon the prosaic business of colonization and the exploitation of its less attractive resources. The Spaniards found no lack of treasure, but in North America gold ever turned to ashes, and the great South Sea receded like a mirage before every advance. Yet the failure of many voyages to the frozen North, and of many inland expeditions ending in disaster and death, could not quench the optimism which the gentlemen adventurers caught from the men of the Renaissance and bequeathed to the colonist, and which for two hundred ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... as in other desert regions, the mirage mocks him as he journeys across it parched with thirst—often assuming a semblance of the ocean, slowly moving in ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... but there was certainly no help to be obtained. On the one side he saw the birch wood indistinctly; the white trunks half vanished from sight against the white ground, but the brush of upper branches hung like the mirage of a forest between heaven and earth. All round was the wild region of snow. From his own small house the lamp which he had left on the table shot out a long bright ray through a chink in the frostwork ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... air. Sea-sounds, sea-odors—these were all my world. Hence is it that life languishes with me Inland; the valleys stifle me with gloom And pent-up prospect; in their narrow bound Imagination flutters futile wings. Vainly I seek the sloping pearl-white sand And the mirage's phantom citadels Miraculous, a moment seen, then gone. Among the mountains I am ill at ease, Missing the stretched horizon's level line And the illimitable restless blue. The crag-torn sky is not the sky I love, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... find her beauty irresistible and all powerful. How could it ever have occurred to her, that this man, the very first whom she loved sincerely, should also be the first and the only one to escape from her snares? She was taken in, besides, by the double mirage of love and ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... tempted to publish a cheap edition of my work on Greek Philosophy and Logic. It is not in the least presumptuous to lay hands upon this venerable illusion, and show that it has not even the vitality of a ghost. It is but a simulacrum or mirage, and it is but necessary to approach it fearlessly, and walk through it, to discover ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, September 1887 - Volume 1, Number 8 • Various
... the word that led to the Vicar's story. In old rambles, after long mornings spent with Plato, my eyes (by mirage, no doubt) had always found something Greek in the curves and colour of this coast; or rather, had felt the want of it. What that something was I could hardly have defined: but the feeling was always with me. It was as ...
— News from the Duchy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... objects on the earth, like the images one sees in glass or water, but they were not generally upright, as in the case of this ship, but reversed—turned bottom upwards. This appearance in the air is called a mirage. He told a sailor to go up to the foretop and look beyond the phantom-ship. The man obeyed, and reported that he could see on the water, below the ship in the air, one precisely like it. Just then another ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton
... the island is to land, as we did, at Waimea; ride to a singular spot called the "barking sands"—a huge sand-hill, gliding down which you hear a dull rumble like distant thunder, probably the result of electricity. On the way you meet with a mirage, remarkable for this that it is a constant phenomenon—that is to say, it is to be seen daily at certain hours, and is the apparition of a great lake, having sometimes high waves which seem to submerge the cattle which stand about, ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff
... would be like this oasis, and the only necessity ever imposed on her would be that of choice from its rich profusion. But ere she was aware she had lost herself in a desert; the oasis had vanished like a mirage, and she had no choice at all. That which her heart craved with an intensity which fairly made it ache, seemed as hopeless as a sudden bloom and ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... while in the middle lies the southern section of the "Ghor," the noble and memorious Wady el-'Akabah, supposed to have given a name to Arabia.[EN126] The surface-water still rolls down it after rains; and the mirage veiling the valley-sole prolongs the Gulf-waters far to the north, their bed in the old geologic ages. The view was charming to us; for the first time since leaving Suez we saw the contrast of perpendicular and horizontal, of height and flat. ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... fall, and I had a sort of bet with myself not to lie down—not at any rate just yet. If I lay down I should feel the pain in my head worse. Once I had ridden for five days down country with fever on me and the flat bush trees had seemed to melt into one big mirage and dance quadrilles before my eyes. But then I had more or less kept my wits. Now I was fairly daft, and ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... the golden shore of the blue Birket Karun, all that's left of Lake Moeris of which Strabo and Herodotus raved. From the dune-sheltered plateau where our white tents cluster, the glitter of water in the desert is like a mirage: a mysterious, melancholy sheet of steel and silver turning to ruby in the sunset, with dark birds skimming ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... love, warm, tender, true, To guide me o'er the billowy deep, was given; E'en now I view her barge's silvery trail, And faint, in distance, mark her snowy sail Bloom like a lily on the water blue. 'Tis but a mirage, she ...
— Across the Sea and Other Poems. • Thomas S. Chard
... her with such strange and indifferent eyes, as though she had never been anything to him. And he gazed curiously into his own heart—no, there was nothing wrong with him. His appetite was good, and there was nothing whatever the matter with his heart. It must all have been a pleasant illusion, a mirage such as the traveller sees upon his way. Certainly she was beautiful; but he could not possibly see anything fairy-like about her. God only knew how he had allowed himself to be so entangled! It was ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... they thought it was a mirage. They turned away from it by mutual assent. But the horses had scented drink, and they became unmanageable. Five minutes later the animals were up to their knees in the muddy water, and the men were floundering ...
— The Rangeland Avenger • Max Brand
... till he could have struck it with his good oak "wattle" did he discover it to be only one of those wild, gray frontages of living rock that rise here and there in picturesque tiers along the slopes of those solitary mountains. And so, till dawn, pursuing this mirage of the castle, through pools and among ravines, he wore out a night of miserable ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 2 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... spirit has been the idea that by isolating the spiritual life from all the rest, by suspending it in space as high as possible above the earth, they were placing it beyond attack, as if they were not thereby simply exposing it to be taken as an effect of mirage! Certainly they are right to listen to conscience when conscience affirms human freedom; but the intellect is there, which says that the cause determines its effect, that like conditions like, that all is repeated and that all is given. They are right to believe in the absolute reality ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... enhances the thrill of an unique experience. Vista after vista opens into the world of long ago so graphically depicted on the monumental tablets of the processional paths, while type and symbol point also to the infinite future intensely realised by Eastern mysticism. Mortal life was but a fleeting mirage besides this vision of the life beyond. For the words "Shadow, Unreality, Illusion," perpetually repeated by the yellow-robed monks on the beads of the Buddhist Rosary were inscribed on the ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... the Limfjord is called Vendsyssel. Curious effects of mirage may be seen in summer-time in the extensive ...
— Denmark • M. Pearson Thomson
... mockery and deceit. 'Tis like the mirage of the desert that appears A cool refreshing water, and allures The thirsty traveler, but flies anon And leaves him disappointed, wondering So fair a vision should so futile prove. A mother's love is like unto a well Sealed and kept secret, a deep-hidden fount That flows ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... had called it six or seven miles. It might have been two or twenty. The deceit of rarefied air was intensified by the dazzle of the merciless sun beating down on powdered alkali, on snaky flows of weathered lava, on mock lakes that sparkled and dissolved in mirage. The broken mesa, across which ran the road to the deserted mining camp, mysteriously changed form before their eyes; unsubstantial masses in pastel lights and shades of saffron, mauve and rose. Over all was the hard vault ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... me, the heat was not oppressive. The woods, dense and tangled though they were, threw up no exhalations of mud or rotting leaves, but a clean, aromatic odour. It seemed to give them a substance without which they had been but a mirage, a scene painted on a cloth, so motionless and apparently lifeless they stood, with the long vines hanging from their boughs, and the hot, rarefied air ...
— Poison Island • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... my old friend, Our warm fellowship is one Far too old to comprehend Where its bond was first begun: Mirage-like before my gaze Gleams a land of other days, Where two truant boys, astray, Dream ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... with all the distinctness of reality the rich, cool, green, unrivalled meads of England. But the vision soon melted away, and I was again in exile. I wept like a child. It was like a beautiful mirage of the desert, or one of those waking dreams of home which have sometimes driven the long-voyaging seaman to distraction and urged him by an irresistible impulse to plunge ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... Rolfe, the minister, was shot by the Indians on the 29th of August, 1708. What a vision it was when I awoke in the morning to see the fog on the river seeming as if it wrapped the towers and spires of a great city!—for such was my fancy, and whether it was a mirage of youth or a fantastic natural effect I hate to ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Barbara the mountains came crowding down to the sea, as at Mentone; and on the horizon floated islands, mysterious as the mirage of Corsica seen from the Italian shore at sunrise. Over there, Nick told her, was a grotto, painted in many lovely colours; and boats dived into it on the crest of a wave. He had not heard of the Blue Grotto at Capri, but she described it; and ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... the totally unmoral influence they for the most part exert. They are the extension of the unreligious school into the homes of the people. When Father Hecker and Mrs. George V. Hecker and their associates began The Young Catholic, this vast mirage of the desert of life had but glimmered upon the distant horizon; they saw it coming and they did their best to point Catholic youth away from it and lead it to the real oasis of God, with its grateful shade, ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... they were on the north-eastern extremity of the island of Baru, with the whole of the harbour of Cartagena before them, the roofs and spires of the town just showing waveringly, in a sort of mirage, over the low land which forms the easternmost extremity of the island of Tierra Bomba. It is this same island of Tierra Bomba, by the way, which converts what would otherwise be an open roadstead into a landlocked harbour, for it forms the western ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... It was hard to believe that she had moved from the spot at all. The fleeting weight of her body on his knees, the hug round his neck, the whisper in his ear, the kiss on his lips, might have been the unsubstantial sensations of a dream invading the reality of waking life; a sort of charming mirage in the barren aridity of his thoughts. He hesitated to speak till she ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... optimistic tone. I have certainly admitted the existence of enormous difficulties and the probabilities of very imperfect success. I cannot think that the promised land of which we are taking a Pisgah sight is so near or the view so satisfactory as might be wished. A mirage like that which attended our predecessors may still be exercising illusions for us; and I anticipate less an immediate fruition, than a beginning of another long cycle of wanderings through a desert, let us hope rather more fertile than ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen |
