"Mesmerical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was talking to Mr. Sheldon's stepdaughter, Captain Paget had contrived to make himself very agreeable to that gentleman himself. Lord Lytton has said that "there is something strange and almost mesmerical in the rapport between two evil natures. Bring two honest men together, and it is ten to one if they recognise each other as honest; differences in temper, manner, even politics, may make each misjudge the other. But bring together two men unprincipled ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... he would, he could not keep his hands steady in the violent spasms of shuddering, nor could he call his mind to think. He was one shuddering turmoil. Yet he performed his purpose methodically and exactly. In every particular he was thorough, as if he were the servant of some stern will. It was a mesmeric performance, in which the agent trembled ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... before cousin or my man brother." (She almost choked with the word.) "Not before strangers—we are not strangers when alone. You read my nature, as I do yours, and we are not strangers when alone. It is not long acquaintance which makes familiar friends. The mesmeric spark will do more than years of intercommunication, where there is no congeniality—and do it in a little precious moment. The bloody arrow we held in common was an electric chain. I learned you at the plucking ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... sweeping generalization but it becomes intelligible as we follow the process by which Quimby reached his conclusions and it helps us to understand the significance of Belief as one of the key words of Christian Science. Quimby was led to identify sickness and wrong beliefs through this analysis of mesmeric diagnosis and health and right belief through his own experiences as a healer. He had no training to help him to an understanding of the real facts which lay behind the belief in sickness. He became a skillful diagnostician of states of mind and a healer ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... they could hear and see with their toes and fingers, and read unknown languages, and understand them too, by merely having the book placed on their stomachs. Ignorant peasants, when once entranced by the grand mesmeric fluid, could spout philosophy diviner than Plato ever wrote, descant upon the mysteries of the mind with more eloquence and truth than the profoundest metaphysicians the world ever saw, and solve knotty points of divinity ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... engaged, constantly patted with a gentle tattoo, in tune to the steady trot of her knee. All babies knew Miss Roxy's tattoo on their backs, and never thought of taking it in ill part. On the contrary, it had a vital and mesmeric effect of sovereign force against colic, and all other disturbers of the nursery; and never was infant known so pressed with those internal troubles which infants cry about, as not speedily to give over and sink to slumber at this ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... be found to excel all the rest of his race. And in every female face possessing any attractions at all, no matter what may be her general inferiority, there lurks some secret peculiarity of expression—some mesmeric individuality—which is valid within its narrower range—limited superiority over the supreme of beauties within a narrow circle. It is unintelligibly but mesmerically potent, this secret fascination attached to features oftentimes ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... must be strongly mesmeric, and your will acted upon theirs, if you are to take credit for any part in the affair,' continued ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... interesting if we recollect that Cervantes' great-grandmother was a Saavedra, and that the soldier alluded to in the text was really himself. It is impossible to explain satisfactorily the sheathing of the tiger's claws on his account alone; did Cervantes exercise unconsciously a mesmeric influence over Azan? Did Azan ascribe his captive's defiance of death and worse than death to his bearing a charmed life? Or did he hold him to be a man of such consequence in his own country, that it was well to keep him in as good condition as Azan's greed would permit? ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... to believe that Malvina could possibly change anybody! Way back, when the human brain was yet in process of evolution, such things may have been possible. Hypnotic suggestion, mesmeric influence, dormant brain cells quickened into activity by magnetic vibration. All that had been lost. These were the days of George the Fifth, not of King Heremon. What the Professor was really after was: How would Malvina receive the proposal? ...
— Malvina of Brittany • Jerome K. Jerome
... unknown in the waking state, by trance or vision, in which the thoughts of one brain could be transmitted to another, and knowledge be thus rapidly interchanged. I replied, that there were amongst us stories told of such trance or vision, and that I had heard much and seen something in mesmeric clairvoyance; but that these practices had fallen much into disuse or contempt, partly because of the gross impostures to which they had been made subservient, and partly because, even where the effects upon certain abnormal constitutions were genuinely produced, the effects when fairly ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... forth, the fingers closed. Then opening his fingers, he drew back his arm suddenly, sharply, then jerked it forward again—it was the old mesmeric pass ...
— The Mark of the Beast • Sidney Watson
... suspense at home. Yet there was in him some fibre which the deliberate deception had fretted and frayed beyond reason or forgiveness. He saw all there was to be said about it; he could imagine Baumgartner himself putting the case with irresistible logic, with characteristic plausibility, and all the mesmeric wisdom of a benevolent serpent; but for once, the boy felt, he would not be taken in. It was not coming to that, however, for he had quite decided not to betray his knowledge of the fraud—if only he ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... loved her blue eye, her golden hair, her delicious voice, that was true in song, though when she spoke, false as Eblis! You are aware that I possess in rather a remarkable degree what we have agreed to call the mesmeric power. I set the unhappy girl to sleep. THEN she was obliged to tell me all. It was as I had surmised. Goby de Mouchy, my wretched, besotted, miserable secretary, in his visits to the chateau of the Marquis de Bechamel, who was one of our society, had seen Blanche. I suppose it ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... asserts that it is unlawful in Heaven for any person to look at the back of the head of another, as by so doing he interrupts the divine influx. The foundation of this idea is perhaps the desire to avoid mesmeric action upon the cerebellum. ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... Commission form of government and of its modification, the City Manager plan, the aim of which is to centralize governmental authority and to entice able men into municipal office. And there are many other manifestations of the new civic spirit. The mesmeric influence of national party names in civic politics is waning; the rise of home rule for the city is severing the unholy alliance between the legislature and the local Ring; the power to grant franchises is being taken away from legislative bodies and placed directly with the people; ...
— The Boss and the Machine • Samuel P. Orth
... physical and psychological laws, which we do not at all understand, which account for the curious subjective effects which certain people have at close quarters; there is something hypnotic and mesmeric about the glance of certain eyes; and there is in all probability a curious blending of mental currents in an assembly of people, which is not a mere fancy, but a very real physical fact. Personalities ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... out-of-doors, though the tones of morning were feeble and wan, and it was long before the sun would be perceptible in this overshadowed vale. Not a sound came from any of the out-houses as yet. The tree-trunks, the road, the out-buildings, the garden, every object wore that aspect of mesmeric fixity which the suspensive quietude of daybreak lends to such scenes. Outside her window helpless immobility seemed to be combined with intense consciousness; a meditative inertness possessed all things, oppressively contrasting ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... uncomfortable things are absolutely necessary to a valid marriage—just as they have persuaded the landlady class that no house is complete without a big mirror over the fireplace and a bulgy sideboard. There is a very strong flavour of mesmeric suggestion about a woman's attitude towards these matters, considered in the light of her customary common sense. Do you know, George, I really believe there is a secret society of tradesmen, a kind of priesthood, who get hold of our womenkind and muddle them up with all these fancies. It's a ...
— Select Conversations with an Uncle • H. G. Wells
... the other bore with a grin of sympathetic comprehension, or, at long intervals, returned upon Crailey with devastating effect. Vanrevel was the one steadying thing in his life, and, at the same time, the only one of the young men upon whom he did not have an almost mesmeric influence. In good truth, Crailey was the ringleader in all the devilries of the town. Many a youth swore to avoid the roisterer's company for all time, and, within two hours of the vow, found himself, ...
— The Two Vanrevels • Booth Tarkington
... grieve others. They cannot attend to conversation because of the annoyance occasioned by the habit which some people have of invariably taking more butter than they want. Have you not seen the anxious look (almost mesmeric) which such persons fix on the article? They would feel it a relief if they might bury it out of their sight by popping it into their own mouths and swallowing it down; and they are really made happy ...
— Practical Grammar and Composition • Thomas Wood
... large hands softly on her bowed head and held them there with a soothing, quieting, mesmeric touch, until she had sobbed, and cried, and talked herself into ...
— For Woman's Love • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... been attained, he tells us, together with perfect health, by the judicious employment of "these subtler agencies." One is tempted to ask, in view of such a result, why waste time on the color-cure when the mesmeric ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... rail until it touched hers. In her deep absorption she did not notice it, or pretended that she did not; but when he took a step nearer she drew her hand away gently. The star held her gaze as though it possessed some mesmeric power. A smile was upon her face as the situation at the soda-water counter took form, became a veritable ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... a greater or less degree leaves in his works, whatever their design, traces of his personal character: elements of his immortal being, in which the individual survives the person. While we read the pages of the 'Fall of the House of Usher,' or of 'Mesmeric Revelations,' we see in the solemn and stately gloom which invests one, and in the subtle metaphysical analysis of both, indications of the idiosyncrasies of what was most remarkable and peculiar in the author's intellectual nature. But we see here only the better phases of his nature, only the ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... dwelling upon the space between the slightly parted doors that gave into the next room. But even as he spoke, the last line faltered and halted. His glance slowly stiffened out of widening eyes to the face it had caught there—a face new, strange, mesmeric, that all at once enchained him soul and body. With a splendid, reckless might it assailed him—left him dazed, ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... was at Southall. At half-past nine I sat down to endeavour to fix my mind so strongly upon the interior of a house at Kew, where Miss V. and her sister lived, that I seemed to be actually in the house. I was conscious, but I was in a kind of mesmeric sleep. When I went to bed that night I willed to be in the front bedroom of that house at Kew at twelve, and make my presence felt by the inmates. Next day I went to Kew. Miss V.'s married sister told me, without any ...
— Real Ghost Stories • William T. Stead
... vain to sleep. The events of the day passed continually through my brain, and brought on a nervous headache. All the blood in my body seemed concentrated in my head, leaving my feet and hands paralyzed with cold. After tossing about for many hours, I dropped off into a sort of mesmeric sleep, full of confused images, among which the singular face of Dinah North haunted me like the genius ...
— The Monctons: A Novel, Volume I • Susanna Moodie
... direct look into your own. Even in the painted representation of that gaze, almost too calm in its absolute mastery to be called searching or scrutinising, yet seeming to look through the eyes into the soul, there was an almost mesmeric influence; as if, across the abyss of ten thousand years, the Master could still control the wills and draw forth the inner thoughts of the living, as he had dominated the ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... said Howard, with a whimsical smile. "I am drawn, into the vortex; I am dragged at the chariot wheels of that wonderful father of yours. I am the victim of a peculiar kind of fascination which is as irresistible as the mesmeric influence or hypnotism. I feel towards Sir Stephen as I should feel towards Napoleon the Great, if he were alive. I follow and gaze at him, so to speak, with my mouth agape and a fatuous smile over ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... a sound, whether it was a movement, none of the group was accurately aware. It may have been merely that mesmeric influence of an intently concentrated gaze that caused them suddenly to turn. They beheld standing in the road—and they flinched at the sight—a witness to all the proceedings. A small, a simple, object to excite such abject terror as blanched the faces ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... understand, but with very infrequent success. Pulling teeth while the patient is asleep is not 'practised to a very great extent in this community;' for no sooner is the glittering instrument of torture 'placed in communication' with the jaw, than it is found to 'disturb the Mesmeric function' ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... instinctively he threw a meaning into his manner so much more than ever he had before, that by the time they had gained the little cove both were really agitated and excited. He felt that temporary delirium which is often the mesmeric effect of a strong womanly presence, and she felt that agitation which every woman must when a determined hand is striking on the great vital chord of her being. When they had stepped round the last point of rock they found themselves driven by the advancing ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... measured tread, he wept, and with many sighs of grief adjusted the head with much care, caught rain in his shield and poured it over the body; then rubbed and shook the limbs, which by degrees became alive by his mesmeric-like passings and chafings from the feet upwards. Each limb as it revived beat time to the music, first faintly, then with more vigour, till it came to the head; and when that nodded satisfactorily, and the whole body of his friend was in motion, he gave him a few extra shakes, lifted him on his ...
— Sketches of Our Life at Sarawak • Harriette McDougall
... of clear-headed financiers was extremely remarkable. The unknown metal appeared to exercise a kind of mesmeric influence, its soft hues blending together in a chromatic harmony which captivated the sense of vision as the ears are charmed by a perfectly rendered song. Gradually all gathered in an eager group around the ...
— The Moon Metal • Garrett P. Serviss
... human contrivance or to the agency of evil spirits. The latter opinion has been most general in past ages. A third theory has been advanced since the phenomena of Mesmerism have attracted attention, that something like the mesmeric trance was induced in the Pythoness, and the faculty of ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... dearest!" with no change in the mesmeric intentness of his gaze. "I want nothing more than to have you always near me. You have been a good, faithful wife, Mabel, better and nobler—a thousandfold nobler than I deserved. I have thought it all over while you were sleeping so tranquilly in my sight. I wish my conscience ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... manners. It also alludes to that state, which induces Hindu devotees to allow themselves to be buried alive, and to appear dead for weeks or months, and then to return to life again; a curious state of mesmeric catalepsy, into which they work themselves by concentrating the mind and abstaining from food - a specimen of which I have given a practical illustration in the Life of ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... yet are not. There can be few to whom there has not come that imagination of the spiritually compelled presence, which Browning has so marvellously uttered in Mesmerism. Here, in these breathless stanzas,[208:1] so almost literally mesmeric that, as we read them (or rather draw them in at our own breathless lips!), we believe in the actual coming of our loved one, and scarce dare look round lest we should find the terrifying glory true . . . here the man sits alone in his room at dead ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... Plantin. She was sixty-four years of age, and laboured under scirrhus of the breast. She was prepared for the operation by M. Chapelain, who on several successive days threw her into trance by the ordinary mesmeric manipulations. She was then like an ordinary sleep-walker, and would converse with indifference about the contemplated operation, the idea of which, when she was in her natural state, filled her with ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... consistent sustaining of imaginative lift;" and by that of one of the most extraordinary instances of the naturalness of detail—-the verisimilitude of minute narrative—for which lie was preeminently distinguished, his "Mesmeric Revelation," purporting to be the last conversation of a somnambule, held with his magnetizer just before his death, which was followed by the yet more striking exhibition of abilities in the same way, entitled "The Facts in the case of M. Vaklemar," ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... book has just been placed on our table; we know its reputation of old; it is an admirable discourse on the subject of supernaturalisms, such as mental illusions, dreams, ghosts, mesmeric phenomena, &c. If any one will but read the first half dozen pages, we will vouch for it he will not neglect the rest of the volume: it is one of the best written books on one of the most curious range of topics that could engage the pen of a writer, or the attention of a reader. ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... produce or see their like in water and in crystal, the difference being only one of size. They were but reflections of scenes familiar to the mind of Ayesha, or perhaps not so much as that. Perhaps they were only phantasms called up in our minds by her mesmeric force. ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... sitting she prescribed for herself nettle-broth; at the third, catnip. The crises became mitigated, then disappeared. It was truly a miracle. The nasal addigitation did not succeed with the others, and, in order to bring on somnambulism, they projected the construction of a mesmeric tub. Pecuchet already had even collected the filings and cleaned a score of bottles, when a scruple made ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... for the good of his fellow-creatures, which indeed might be expected as he gets his livelihood from them, and he is also less powerful than the tonhi. The Baiga cures ordinary maladies and the bites of snakes and scorpions by mesmeric passes fortified by the utterance of charms. He raises the dead in much the same manner as a witch does, but employs the spirit of the dead person in casting out other evil spirits by which his clients may be possessed. One of the miracles performed by the Baiga is to make ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... dies the man in us." Whatever might have been the real nature of these emotional experiences, no one doubted that they possessed a genuine reality of some kind or other, for it was a matter of history in this little community that David Corson had often exercised prophetic, mesmeric ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... champagne for his friends, paid for out of his collections for charity. In his inebriated state his wild-looking eyes glowed like coals, and as he looked at me I experienced once more the strange sensation of being enthralled. Truly, there was something mesmeric about that gaze of his, a mystery ...
— The Minister of Evil - The Secret History of Rasputin's Betrayal of Russia • William Le Queux
... of the crickets, the shu-shu of feet, the gentle clapping; and the wavering hovering measure proceeds in silence, with mesmeric lentor—with a strange grace, which, by its very navet, seems old ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... subtle something in the stranger's voice that throbbed through the child's pulses like leaping fire—a strange, mysterious influence that bound her, heart and soul, like the mesmeric influence a serpent exerts over a fascinated dove. Slowly, hesitatingly, this child, whose fiery will had never bowed before human power, came timidly forward, step by step, close to the iron gate against which the woman's face was pressed. She stretched ...
— Daisy Brooks - A Perilous Love • Laura Jean Libbey
... on two brawny arms. His feet followed the mesmeric influence of their movement. Was he going into the clouds, he wondered? They stopped to open a gate, the gate leading to the gardens of Mainsail Haul. How did he get there? He had no idea. More movements of his feet, and then ...
— The Zeppelin's Passenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... mysterious and subtle social force. Its effect on a minister he can neither analyze nor explain. But he knows that its power is mesmeric and cannot be escaped. He goes into its presence from an hour of exalted and uplifted prayer, serene, happy, strong, and prepared to speak words of power and life. Gazing at his people—he can never tell why—the words freeze on his lips. An icy hand seems laid upon his heart, and ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... out, seen anything, heard anything or read anything in the artistic sense. He was almost beyond belief incapable of intercourse in private conversation. He could tell you his adventures provided you didn't interrupt him (which you were mostly afraid to do, as the man was a mesmeric terror); but as to exchanging ideas, or expressing the universal part of his soul, you might as well have been reading the letters of Charles Dickens to his family—those tragic monuments of dumbness of soul and noisiness of pen. Lord help you if you ever lose your gift ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... legitimate branch of our profession. You needn't grin like that," he added, a little irritably. "There is a legitimate side, and a very wonderful side, only a brain like yours is not capable of assimilating it. You should have heard my paper to-night upon self-directed mesmeric waves." ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... is a man of will and of strong physique, with an inquiring and scientific turn of mind, which inclines him chiefly to metaphysical studies. It is not to be wondered at, that, having lately discovered that he possesses the mesmeric gift, he should not sufficiently discriminate as to its application. Later he will see that it is an agent not to be tampered with, and never to be used on healthy subjects, but applied only to invalids. To-day he is like a newly-armed knight-errant, bounding off on his steed at sunrise, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... be true to myself. Yielding to some influence, mesmeric or otherwise—an influence unwelcome, displeasing, but effective—I again glanced round to see if M. Paul was gone. No, there he stood on the same spot, looking still, but with a changed eye; he had penetrated ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... accepted the theory of Animal Magnetism, which, so far as it went, was satisfactory; but it only illustrated the powers and relations of the soul in its present state of existence; it threw no light upon that future which I was not willing to take upon faith alone. Though sensible to mesmeric influences, I was not willing that my spiritual nature should be the instrument of another's will,—that a human being, like myself, should become possessed of all my secrets and sanctities, touching the keys of every passion with his unhallowed fingers. In the phenomena of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... previous evening, that a metamorphosis took place in the very abysses of my being. I woke from my torpor, as he put it, I came out of death, and was alive again. I was far, yet, from being my own man; I realised that he exercised on me a degree of mesmeric force which I had never dreamed that one creature could exercise on another; but, at least, I was no longer in doubt as to whether I was or was not dead. I knew ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... out, as it were, to its very farthest stretch. It was quite dark by this time; only the yellow flicker of the wind-blown flame of the lamp made uncertain lights and shadows round the place where we were sitting, and an eerie influence fell on us all, almost mesmeric in effect. I did not need the awestruck whispers round me to tell me what it was. But oh! I felt, as I never felt before, the reality of the presence of unseen powers, and I knew that the Actual itself was in the ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael
... down on her back, and after waiting to satisfy himself that she was in a fast mesmeric sleep, he placed one throbbing hand on her hip, and gradually raising it till he found the lovely prominence of one charming bosom, then his other hand sought its companion, and he pressed those heaving hills ...
— The Power of Mesmerism - A Highly Erotic Narrative of Voluptuous Facts and Fancies • Anonymous
... tossing main, where delirium drove Beryl's consciousness to and fro like a rudderless wreck, did some mysterious communion of spirits survive? Did some subtle mesmeric current telegraph her soul, that her foul wrongs were at last avenged? Whatever the cause, certainly a strangely clear, musical laugh broke suddenly from her lovely lips, mingled with a triumphant ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... a sore shock to Richard Gray. When Douglas found him on the trail and broke the news to him as gently as possible, he seemed at first hardly to comprehend it. He was stunned. He said little, but followed Douglas back to the cabin like one in a mesmeric sleep. A few days before he had gone away happy and buoyant, now he shuffled back ...
— Ungava Bob - A Winter's Tale • Dillon Wallace
... knew for what purpose Dr. Pillsbury visited me, or that he did so at all. Of course, when Edith became my wife I should have to tell her my secrets. I had not hitherto told her this, because there was unquestionably a slight risk in the mesmeric sleep, and I knew she would set her face against my practice. The risk, of course, was that it might become too profound and pass into a trance beyond the mesmerizer's power to break, ending in death. Repeated experiments had fully convinced me that the risk was next to nothing if reasonable ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... obey her. She sat down and, such was the influence of Mrs. Matilda Pitman's mesmeric eye, she ate a tolerable breakfast. The obedient Amelia never spoke; Mrs. Matilda Pitman did not speak either; but she knitted furiously and chuckled. When Rilla had finished, Mrs. Matilda ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Buchanan. Since then "A Dead Man's Diary"—of which Mr. J.M. Barrie, in reviewing it, said, "The vigour of the book is great, and the author has such a gift of intensity that upon many readers it will have mesmeric effect"—has gone through innumerable editions, in ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... given to a physical force recently surmised and believed to pervade all nature, and as manifesting itself chiefly in connection with mesmeric phenomena. ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... fantastic if it had not been for the sound of the machine guns and the rifles and the deeper-throated chorus of the heavy guns, which proved that this was no mesmeric, fantastic spectacle but a game with death, precise and ordered, with nothing that could be rehearsed left to chance any more than there was in the regulation of the traffic which was pressing forward, column after column, to supply the food ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... Lord not to heal this invalid through her means if she employed mesmerism; but if not, to permit recovery. The woman was cured in a short time, though Dorothea had never entered her house, and had, therefore, no opportunity of placing herself in a mesmeric relation ...
— The Wonders of Prayer - A Record of Well Authenticated and Wonderful Answers to Prayer • Various
... a sudden sense of escape from her almost mesmeric state. The change in his tone, his calm references to things belonging to another and altogether different world, had dissolved a situation against the charm of which she had found herself powerless, even unwilling ...
— The Great Prince Shan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... reddened soil to gaze, and, gazing, fell back dead. Slowly, mechanically, silently, the living gave way, the weapons dropping from their nerveless grip. Step by step they drew back as if compelled by some strange mesmeric power. ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... it is not material to what sublimated sphere they may have ascended; it is merely a mesmeric influence which they exert over their disciples, and this influence can penetrate through all ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... hypnotic power that I had felt that very night was real, and, above all, a feeling of dread that had gripped my being was real. I could not explain it, and I could not throw it off, but ever since I had awoke out of my mesmeric sleep, or whatever the reader may be pleased to call it, I felt numbed; weights seemed to hang on my limbs, and my whole being was in ...
— Weapons of Mystery • Joseph Hocking
... intense, confident way, to see that his hasty words had not injured him with me. He used to meet one's eye as boldly as any man I ever saw; but it was not the simple gaze of honesty and innocence, but an imperious, searching look, as if defying scrutiny. His was a true mesmeric eye, if ever there was one. No wonder it worked the miracles ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... sobs, cries, and contractions, there was peaceful slumber. He recognized the rapport between operator and subject, and amnesia on awaking, and other phenomena now well known, but he still held to the Mesmeric theory of the existence of a universal fluid which saturated all bodies, especially the human body. It was electric in nature, and man could display and diffuse this ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... gave a little start, as if awakened out of a kind of trance. The sheer vacuity of his mind might naturally slide into mesmeric sleep. ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... subjects to which he had not hitherto been able to devote himself—he was led to become greatly interested in phrenology and mesmerism, and before long found himself something of an expert in giving mesmeric demonstrations before small audiences. Phrenology, he believed, proved of much value in determining his own characteristics, good and bad, and in guiding him to a wise use of the faculties which made for his ultimate success; while his ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... he, "I wish they were in Hades with their mesmeric stunts! I shan't tell Brass what happened, for it won't do any good; and the less notice there's taken of it the better. But carrying things before him as he was—it was hard luck to have that occur. Puts him in an undignified position, to say ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... PSYCHEISM; or, the Science of the Soul, and the Phenomena of Nervation, as revealed by Mesmerism, considered Physiologically and Philosophically; including Notes of Mesmeric and Psychical Experience. By JOSEPH WILCOX HADDOCK, M.D. Second and enlarged Edition, illustrated by Engravings of ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 82, May 24, 1851 • Various
... in persons of a peculiar organization, and diffusing radios salutares vel perniciosos. Though the terms employed by them, as well as their notions of its origin, are very unphilosophical and vague, it is plain that they considered it as a species of mesmeric or biologic power, operating by nervous impression. The fascinator generally endeavored to provoke in his victims an excited and pleased attention, for in this condition they were peculiarly predisposed to his influence. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... inconceivable, I grant you, to the English mind—to surround their wearisome and perilous errand in this country with a certain halo of the marvellous and the supernatural. Their boy is unquestionably a sensitive subject to the mesmeric influence—and, under that influence, he has no doubt reflected what was already in the mind of the person mesmerising him. I have tested the theory of clairvoyance—and I have never found the manifestations get beyond that point. The Indians don't investigate the ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... the eyes until the very last. Some draughtsmen are never happy until they have an eye to adjust the head round, treating it as the centre of interest and drawing the parts relatively to it. While others say, with some truth, that there is a mesmeric effect produced when the eye is drawn that blinds one to the cold-blooded technical consideration of a head as line and tone in certain relationships; that it is as well to postpone until the last that moment when the shapes and ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... had always burned with an eagle fierceness and an unyielding aggressiveness. Now they were different, and as the guests who had brought the chair and its occupant up the stairs and into the room withdrew in silent respect, the daughter's gaze was held by them with a mesmeric force. ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... time Paul's eyes would wander around the table; and from its dainty dishes and exquisite flowers return to their true lodestone, his hostess. In fact, the girl possessed a mesmeric charm for him, which had grown with marvelous rapidity since ...
— The Ghost of Guir House • Charles Willing Beale
... literally transfixed him in an attitude of surprise and consternation. Like the Ancient Mariner, he held him by his glittering eye, but the spell was not an enduring one. 'Truly,' remarked Dr Garland, as he found the kind of mesmeric influence he had exerted beginning to fail, 'not so very bad a chance resemblance; especially ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 434 - Volume 17, New Series, April 24, 1852 • Various
... six out of seven pullets, first mesmerising them with its eyes and then biting them as they stood helpless. The seventh pullet was one of that French sort, with feathers all over its eyes, so it escaped the mesmeric snare, and just flew at what it could see of the snake ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... it, and transfer its revelations to our page. But there was a story, for which it is difficult to conceive any foundation, that the posterity of Matthew Maule had some connection with the mystery of the looking-glass, and that, by what appears to have been a sort of mesmeric process, they could make its inner region all alive with the departed Pyncheons; not as they had shown themselves to the world, nor in their better and happier hours, but as doing over again some deed of sin, or in the crisis of life's bitterest ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... you?" He was liable like most paralytics to mechanical jerks and convulsions which drove him mad with impatience. Laura drew down the helplessly twitching knee, and ran one firm hand over him from thigh to ankle. Her touch had a mesmeric effect on his nerves when he could endure it, but nine times out of ten he struck it away. He did so now. "Go to the devil! How often have I told you not to paw me about? I wish you'd do as you're told. What do you call ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... him, painted in the vivid mesmeric colours of evening, lay a vista dear to him—a new railway built in silent places. Across the yellow grade the bush of Northern Canada stretched on and on, not thick just here, but prophetic of the untracked ...
— The Return of Blue Pete • Luke Allan
... this—that by some mesmeric influence of which she was ignorant, the nurse had been forced to either poison the glass herself or open the door for another to do it. If this were so, she or the other person would be obliged to pass around the foot of the bed in order to reach the glass, and ...
— The Old Stone House and Other Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... what may be admitted as possible, we find that the Dene Hareskins practise a form of healing under hypnotic or mesmeric treatment. {38} The physician (who is to be pitied) begins by a three days' fast. Then a 'magic lodge,' afterwards to be described, is built for him in the forest. Here he falls into the Sleep of the Shadow; the patient is then ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... Mormon matrimony—at least that indulged in by the dignitaries of the church—there were no statutes, except such as they had chosen to set up for themselves. The ceremony is simply a farce; and consists in the sprinkling of a little water by some brother apostle, with a few mock-mesmeric passes—jocosely termed the "laying on of hands!" The cheat is usually a secret performance: having no other object than to overcome those natural scruples—not very strong among women of Mormon training—but which sometimes, in the case of young girls ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... but I mostly sleeps very little." And to my no small astonishment she now shut up like an umbrella, and at once recommenced her mesmeric monotone. ...
— Labrador Days - Tales of the Sea Toilers • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... barber's to-day. Gave him no instructions. Thought of course he was going to cut it; and so fell asleep. I almost always fall asleep when under the mesmeric influence of a capillary administrator. I should like him to keep on doing it; cut and comb again. So soothing! Woke up and found myself—like this. (See Hair Cut.) Herewith please receive portrait, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, July 18, 1891 • Various
... he received religious impressions which might almost be described as mesmeric or hypnotic in their influence upon his nerves. These abode with him through manhood; and in later life morbid scruples and superstitious anxieties about his soul laid hold on his imagination. Yet religion did not penetrate Tasso's nature. As he conceived it, there was nothing solid and ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... as already noted, that spirits do their work through mesmeric power, it is easy to understand how the medium is made to believe that such and such a spirit is communicating when it is not so at all. This question of identity came up in the very early stages of Spiritualism, and is no nearer settled, on their own confession, now than ...
— Modern Spiritualism • Uriah Smith
... a doctor on board ship who dabbled in hypnotism told me that I was the most unsympathetic person he had ever struck. He said I was about as good a mesmeric subject as Table Mountain. Suddenly I began to realize that this woman was trying to cast some spell over me. The eyes grew large and luminous, and I was conscious for just an instant of some will battling to subject mine. I was ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... confirm our own deductions. His visitor, on entering his rooms, had drawn a life-preserver from his sleeve, and had so impressed him with the fear of instant and inevitable death that he had kidnapped him for the second time. Indeed, it was almost mesmeric, the effect which this giggling ruffian had produced upon the unfortunate linguist, for he could not speak of him save with trembling hands and a blanched cheek. He had been taken swiftly to Beckenham, and had acted as interpreter in a second interview, ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... right, eh? All right!"—he had a strange mesmeric power over her, as if he possessed the sensual secrets, and she was to ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... early marriage. That odious letter decided her; and now it only remained to make her choice. There are women—and these, though sometimes the most fascinating, by no means the most trustworthy of their sex—who possess over mankind a mesmeric influence, almost akin to witchcraft. Without themselves feeling deeply, perhaps for the very reason that they do not, they are capable of exercising a magic sway over those with whom they come in contact; and while they attract more admirers than they know what to do with, are seldom very ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... she became calm, and presently she fell asleep. But on awaking she was attacked as before, and try as he might the physician could not effect a permanent cure. To all his "passes" she responded with gratifying promptitude, only to suffer a relapse the moment she was released from the mesmeric influence. ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... they become sometimes pleasant, sometimes even laughable. I found it so. It robbed the calamity of something of its supernatural and horrible abruptness; it prevented that monotony of object which is to the mind what it is to the eye, and prepared the faculty for those mesmeric illusions that ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... we think of the man who says, "I believe in God," and then explains himself to mean, by the name God, heat, steam, electricity, force, animal life, the soul of man, magnetism, mesmeric force, and, in one word, the sum of all the intelligences and forces in the universe, at the same time denying the proper currency of the term God by denying the existence of a personal God. All Christians ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 7, July, 1880 • Various
... the bygone time, I can understand the apparition making itself visible to me, to claim the mercy of Christian burial, and the vengeance due to a crime. I can even perceive some faint possibility of truth in the explanation which you described as the mesmeric theory—that what I saw might be the result of magnetic influence communicated to me, as I lay between the remains of the murdered husband above me and the guilty wife suffering the tortures of remorse at my bedside. ...
— The Haunted Hotel - A Mystery of Modern Venice • Wilkie Collins
... made a few passes, the Fairy sank into a mesmeric trance. Then, CINDERELLA desired that her Godmother should imagine that she had been the heroine of ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., December 27, 1890 • Various
... dangerous surgical operations, is the greatest triumph of Therapeutic Science in the present century. It came first by mesmeric hypnotism, which was applicable only to a few, and was restricted, by the jealous hostility of the old medical profession. Then came the nitrous oxide, introduced by Dr. Wells, of Hartford, and promptly ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, November 1887 - Volume 1, Number 10 • Various
... vision promotes moral and emotional expansion—for true catholicity of mind manufactures charity in the heart; and toleration is the real mesmeric current which brings the extremes of humanity en rapport,—is the veritable ubiquitous Samaritan always provided with wine and oil for the bruised and helpless, who are strewn along the highway of life; and those who penetrated beyond the polished surface ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... extinct in England, and I have often heard of it in the Brazil and upon the African Gaboon. It appears to me that there may be a basis of fact to tints fancy, the abnormal effect of precious stones upon mesmeric "sensitives." ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... concrete. If he saw a man with a humped back or a short leg he would have been prepared to make his portrait, assuming that the entity was not in conflict with the subject in hand. Hence the Zuccone. Its mesmeric ugliness is the effect of Donatello's gothic creed, and it well shows how Donatello, who from his earliest period was opposed to the conventions of the Pisan school, took the lead among those who founded their art upon the observation of nature. A later critic, shrewd ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... luxury to do as I was not told just for once; to feel there was an independent me still capable of asserting itself. My belief is that, waking, you hold me subjugated: but, once your godhead has put on its spiritual nightcap, and begun nodding, your mesmeric influence relaxes. Up starts resolution and independence, and I breathe desolately for a time, feeling myself ...
— An Englishwoman's Love-Letters • Anonymous
... A Modern Miracle-Worker Human Longevity Justice to the Indians MISCELLANEOUS INTELLIGENCE—Anatomy of the Brain; Mesmeric Cures; Medical Despotism; The Dangerous Classes; Arbitration; Criticism on the Church; Earthquakes and Predictions Chapter II. Of Outlines of Anthropology; Structure of the Brain Business Department, ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, April 1887 - Volume 1, Number 3 • Various
... on her lips; and her eyes, filled with wonderment, travelled from one countenance to the other, as if determined to drag the secret from them by mesmeric force. ...
— Sara, a Princess • Fannie E. Newberry
... Englishwoman seemed to have a mesmeric effect on Amy, who was never quite so violent after she arrived. Katy was more thankful for this than can well be told; for her great underlying dread—a dread she dared not whisper plainly even to herself—was that "Polly dear" might break down before Amy was better, ...
— What Katy Did Next • Susan Coolidge
... demeanor which had seemed an essential part of his very flesh and blood had fallen away from him, leaving a sad and lofty dignity that ennobled his countenance. The lines of his face were stern, of his mouth pathetic; his eyes yearned. He stared toward the south with an almost mesmeric intensity, as though he hoped by sheer longing to materialize a vision. Tears sprang to the girl's eyes at the ...
— Conjuror's House - A Romance of the Free Forest • Stewart Edward White
... thought wonderful and to hear him repeat 'The Raven' is an event in one's life. People seem to think there is something uncanny about him, and the strangest stories are told and what is more, believed, about his mesmeric experiences—at the mention of which he always smiles. His smile is captivating! Everybody wants to know him, but only a few people seem to get well ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... will work," whispered Bickley. Then he lifted the syringe and looked inquiringly at the man, who shook his head, and went on with his mesmeric passes. ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... them, within the area of some interior sense which reflects its perception on the physical brain. We are not all of us able to make this effort equally well, so that memory is sometimes dim, but even in the experience of mesmeric research, the occasional super-excitation of memory under mesmerism is a familiar fact. The circumstances plainly show that the record of Nature is accessible if we know how to recover it, or even if our own capacity to make an effort ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot
... the secret of a great doctor's success," she pursued. "What is your charm? There is something mesmeric about you, I think, something inimical to disease at all events. There is healing in your touch, and your very manners make an ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... the nameless fascination he exercised over the young Scotchman? We speak lightly of mesmeric influence, but, after all, there is only one mesmerist for youth—a good woman or a good man. Depend upon it, that is why so many "mesmerists" have mistaken their vocation. Andrew took to prowling about the streets looking for this man, ...
— Better Dead • J. M. Barrie
... event interrupted the eloquence flowing from the lips of Lucian Davlin, and set the mind of the girl free to think one moment, unbiased by the mesmeric power of ...
— Madeline Payne, the Detective's Daughter • Lawrence L. Lynch
... people are crowded together under any excitement, there is nothing which they will not make each other believe. They will make each other believe in spirit-rapping, table-turning, the mesmeric fluid, electro-biology; that they saw the lion on Northumberland House wagging his tail; {203} that witches have been seen riding in the air; that the Jews had poisoned the wells; that— but why go further into the sad catalogue of human absurdities, and the crimes which have ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... the excellent people whom, as by mesmeric attraction, goodness soon draws to itself, he began to go out a little into society. It could be done, with some personal difficulty and pain, and some slight trouble to his friends, which last was for a long time his chief ...
— A Noble Life • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... like the castle of Sleeping Beauty. The ladies had sought their apartments and the downy couches; the cook, on a shady bench under the trellis, nodded as she seeded the raisins for the frozen pudding of the six-o'clock dinner; the waiter had succumbed in clearing the lunch-table and made mesmeric passes with the dish-rag in a fantasy of washing the plates; the stable-boy slumbered in the hay, high in the loft, while the fat old coachman, with a chamois-skin in his hand, dozed as he sat on the step ...
— The Phantom Of Bogue Holauba - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... had not yet occurred that it was a tactical error to leave me between the door and himself. I supposed he relied too implicitly on the mesmeric pistol. He was not even ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... and address which never failed him, and a quality even higher than courage—I can describe it only as the faculty of subjecting every one to his will, whom he tried to influence; it was almost mesmeric. The prisoners fifty or sixty in number, were paroled in the course of the day and started back to Kentucky by a route which would enable them to avoid meeting detachments of their own army. Our party encamped that night about ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... better than we do the mesmeric effects of sights and sounds. It was to give her time to assimilate her surroundings that Asako was left alone for half an hour or so, while Sadako and her mother were combing their hair and putting their kimonos ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... been prolonged far beyond our mortal span, for hundreds and hundreds of years, indeed; which, as Euclid says, is absurd, and had pretended to supernatural powers, which is still more absurd. Moreover, by a clever use of some hypnotic or mesmeric power, she had feigned to transport me to some place beyond the earth and in the Halls of Hades to show me what is veiled from the eyes of man, and not only me, but the savage warrior Umhlopekazi, commonly called Umslopogaas of the Axe, who, ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... casket. Even Nassim Farhi has risen. I must go and talk to him: he has impulses, that man, at least compared with his brother; Mourad is a stone, a precious stone though, and you cannot magnetise him through his wife, for she has not an idea; but Madame Nassim is immensely mesmeric. Come, ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... believe that there is such a thing as clairvoyance, nor am I seeking to convince those who are in doubt about the matter. In so small a work as this I have no space for that; such people must study the many books containing lists of cases, or make experiments for themselves along mesmeric lines. I am addressing myself to the better-instructed class who know that clairvoyance exists, and are sufficiently interested in the subject to be glad of information as to its methods and possibilities; and I would assure them that what I write is the result of much careful ...
— Clairvoyance • Charles Webster Leadbeater
... you that I was thinking, my beloved, when I wrote that name on the cards," he continued, as he still smoothed her hair with his light mesmeric touch. She did not repel his caresses, but neither did she reply to his words. And he saw, by the heaving of her bosom and the quivering of her lips, that the storm ...
— Cruel As The Grave • Mrs. Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... and patting the body and limbs of a colt are curious, as proving that an operation which we have been in the habit of performing as a matter of course without attaching any particular virtue to it, has really a sort of mesmeric effect in soothing and conciliating a nervous animal. The directions in Chapter V. for approaching a colt deserve to be studied very minutely, remembering always the maxim printed at p. 57—Fear and anger, a good ...
— A New Illustrated Edition of J. S. Rarey's Art of Taming Horses • J. S. Rarey
... awake,—tell you what money you had in your pocket, nay, describe your very thoughts,—it is not necessarily an imposture, any more than it is necessarily supernatural. I should be, unconsciously to myself, under a mesmeric influence, conveyed to me from a distance by a human being who had acquired power over me ...
— Haunted and the Haunters • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... the bow softly, perplexedly over the strings. He had no idea what he should play. Then his eyes were caught and held by Naomi's burning, mesmeric, blue gaze as she lay on her crumpled pillow. A strange, inspired look came over the boy's face. He began to play as if it were not he who played, but some mightier power, of which he ...
— Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... lifting of skirts, revealing many high-born insteps, and a scramble for chairs, as the ladies reflected upon the long lines of rats in the train of the mesmeric Pied Piper. ...
— Mistress Nell - A Merry Tale of a Merry Time • George C. Hazelton, Jr.
... undistinguished in stature, unassuming in his manner, and taking his simple dignity for granted, but wonderfully comfortable and quite self-assured in contrast to the intellectual restlessness of Franklyn and the mesmeric self-assertiveness of Burge. His presence suddenly brings out the fact that they are unhappy men, ill at ease, square pegs in round holes, whilst he ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... to him as one in a mesmeric sleep. "'Tis a long way home, my child, and we shall not ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... was neither too acute nor too obtuse; and purely to oblige her, Ethel for the first time submitted to her favourite panacea of hair brushing, and found that in very truth those soft and steady manipulations were almost mesmeric in soothing away the hard oppressive excitement, and bringing on a gentle ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... pliable as in natural sleep; third, Somnambulism, so called from its analogies to the ordinary sleep-walking condition to which many persons are subject. This last covers the phenomena of ordinary mesmeric exhibitions at which travelling mesmerists "control" persons before audiences and make them obey their commands. While other scientists properly deny that these three stages are really distinct, they may yet be taken as representing extreme instances of the ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... (as indeed she had) all her life looking out of the corners of her eyes. Her qualifications as white witch were boundless cunning, equally boundless good nature, considerable knowledge of human weaknesses, some mesmeric power, some skill in "yarbs," as she called her simples, a firm faith in the virtue of her own incantations, and the faculty of holding her tongue. By dint of these she contrived to gain a fair share of money, and ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... sort of confidence in these messages from the other world. There may be mesmeric forces—there may be an odic force. It may be that some people can tell of what another is thinking. I have seen no such people—at least I am not acquainted with them—and my own opinion is that no ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... war-wolves on our trail, Their gaunt fangs sluiced with gouts of blood; Till the Past, in a dead, mesmeric veil, Drooped with a ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... her eyes half closed. She took no more notice of Hamel or his arrival than if he had been some useless piece of furniture. Every faculty seemed to be absorbed in that one intense effort of listening. There was no need of her out-stretched finger. Hamel fell in at once with a mood so mesmeric. He, too, listened. The small clock which she had brought with her from the village ticked away upon the mantelpiece. The full sea fell with placid softness upon the high beach outside. Some slight noise of cooking came from the stove. Save for these ...
— The Vanished Messenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... opportunity for the full exercise of his ability. But it is probable that neither Belding nor any others amongst the leading men who, in time, were gathered into the works, realized to what a degree they were animated by the mesmeric influence of Clark. ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... them and listened to their chant until he began to recognize the strain on the eye-muscles that precedes the mesmeric spell. Then he wrote and read what he had written and wrote again. And after that, for the sake of mental exercise, he switched his thoughts into another channel altogether. He reverted to ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... man who could move an audience to frenzy, lift them out of the body, and do with their spirits as he willed, he acknowledged him as master. Whether his gospel was a pure and undefiled religion I doubt, but he certainly was a master of mesmeric control. My mother was beguiled, entranced, even bewitched at first, I doubt not, for she translated all that Cochrane said into her own speech, and regarded him as the prophet of a new era. But Cochrane's last 'revelations' differed from the first, and were of the ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... stranger to myself—I venture to disclose some characteristic trends and tendencies, as indicated by this phrenological depression and development of the skull-proper, as later we will show, through the mesmeric condition, the ...
— Pipes O'Pan at Zekesbury • James Whitcomb Riley
... across madmen who became sane just before death, i.e., when consciousness was passing into the astral body. He also mentions a servant girl, quite uneducated and of ordinary intelligence, who nevertheless became a veritable philosopher during mesmeric somnambulism and delivered learned discourses on lofty ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... more, he is very ignorant. The truth is, he has been brought up in a Shivaite pagoda, like all the real snake-charmers. Shiva is the patron god of snakes, and the Brahmans teach the bunis to produce all kinds of mesmeric tricks by empirical methods, never explaining to them the theoretical principles, but assuring them that Shiva is behind every phenomenon. So that the bunis sincerely ascribe to their god the honor ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... hundred points, is drawn into the gulf of his omnivorous egotism. The portion of the story that strikes me as least felicitous is that which deals with Priscilla and with her mysterious relation to Zenobia—with her mesmeric gifts, her clairvoyance, her identity with the Veiled Lady, her divided subjection to Hollingsworth and Westervelt, and her numerous other graceful but fantastic properties—her Sibylline attributes, as the author calls them. Hawthorne is rather too fond of Sibylline attributes—a taste of the ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... had only two thousand pounds in all the world; so compensating Nature endowed her with a fair complexion, gray, mesmeric eyes, art, and resolution—qualities that often enable a poor girl to conquer landed estates, ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... Under the mesmeric influence of Malkiel he began to feel as if architects were some strange race of sacred beings set apart, denizens of some holy isle or blessed nook of mediaeval legend. Would he ever meet them? Would he ever encounter one ranging unfettered ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... shoulders, down the arms, and off at the ends of his fingers. Throw your hands outward as you return them to his head, and continue these passes till he can hear no voice but yours. He is then entirely in the mesmeric state. When a person is in the mesmeric state, whether put there by yourself or someone else, you can awake him by the upward passes, or else do it by an impression, as follows: Tell him, "I will count three, and at the same instant I say three ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous
... railway train for Petersburg, where we arrived after dark, and, therefore, could form no judgment of the appearance of the town. Here we were transferred to another train of cars. Among the passengers was a lecturer on Mesmerism with his wife, and a young woman who accompanied them as a mesmeric subject. The young woman, accustomed to be easily put to sleep, seemed to get through the night very comfortably; but the spouse of the operator appeared to be much disturbed by the frequent and capricious opening of the door by the other passengers, which let in torrents of intensely ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant |
