"Second-sight" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to scoff and smile, firmly believing, until it had been his own experience, that it was affectation. The second day that he had gone to look out of the window at about five o'clock in the morning, feeling that curious lucid clearness of brain, almost a kind of second-sight, sometimes produced by unwonted sleeplessness, he still thought that people made much too much fuss about ...
— The Twelfth Hour • Ada Leverson
... man aching for a woman. He thought that the poet sang to ease his bleeding heart. He came to picture the mating of these two— Sanchia the salient, beautiful woman, and his master of the clear, long- enduring, searching eyes, and that strange look of second-sight upon him which those only have who live apart from men, under the sky. It is a look you can never mistake. Sailors have it, and shepherds, and dwellers in the desert. The eye sees through you—into you, and beyond you. It is almost impossible for any person to be either so arresting ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... afternoon congratulating himself on the success of his dust-throwing, proving with many illustrations that "it's the hardest thing to spring a surprise on niggers. Something seems to tell 'em you're coming," he explained. "Some chaps put it down to second-sight or thought-reading." ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... Jack was otherwise engaged, there seems to have been a sort of deputy seer employed in the enterprise, a blind man named Philip. He was a preacher, was said to have been born with a caul on his head, and so claimed the gift of second-sight. Timid adherents were brought to his house for ghostly counsel. "Why do you look so timorous?" he said to William Garner, and then quoted Scripture, "Let not your hearts be troubled." That a blind man should know how he looked was beyond the philosophy of the visitor, and this piece of rather ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... the floor of the hut, extended his hand to him in the way of friendly greeting. They sat down side by side, and conversed in a low mysterious tone of voice. Menteith and Angus M'Aulay were not surprised at this, for there prevailed among the Highlanders who pretended to the second-sight, a sort of Freemasonry, which generally induced them, upon meeting, to hold communication with each other on the nature and extent ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... bid the usurer good-bye, he showed no sign of feeling, he was neither cordial nor sorry to lose me, he did not ask me to come to see him, and only gave me one of those glances which seemed in some sort to reveal a power of second-sight. ...
— Gobseck • Honore de Balzac
... told me that the Scottish gift of second-sight runs in her family, and that she is afraid she has it. Those who are so endowed look upon a well man and see a shroud wrapt about him. According to the degree to which it covers him, his death will be near or more remote. It is an awful faculty; but science gives one too much like it. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... darling, as he was at this very moment,—that is, what was left of him! If only the much-implored Virgin, or some other power, would do her the blessing to show her by second-sight her beloved! either living and working hard to return a rich man, or else as a corpse surrendered by the sea, so that she might at least ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... foretell the course of fashion, that one cannot help wondering why the modern soothsayers, who eke out what appears to be a miserable existence in the smaller streets of the Faubourg St. Honore and in the neighbourhood of Bond Street, do not turn their second-sight to the contemplation of the future of streets and districts, instead of telling the curious a number of vague facts respecting their past and vaguer ...
— The Isle of Unrest • Henry Seton Merriman
... not, have no religion or no superstition themselves, see that both religion and superstition are universal phenomena, and cannot be neglected by those who would study humanity historically and scientifically. Even if there be nothing in hallucinations, apparitions, scrying, second-sight, poltergeists, and the rest, there is a great deal in the fact that belief in these things is as wide and as old as the world; it is a fact to be explained. "Each man," says Meister, "commonly defends himself as long as possible from casting out the idols which he worships ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... Merriston had not, in her thoughts, brought them near to one another—Gerald, and Althea, and her; yet something significant ran through her sudden memory of it. She had moments of her race's sense of second-sight, and it never came without making her aware of a pause—a strange, forced pause—where she had to look at something, touch something, in the dark, as it were. It was there as she roused herself from her half-somnolent state; it was there in the consciousness ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... second-sight too much honour,' said Fergus. 'We were so busy, first with the scheme of giving battle to Cope, and afterwards with our operations in the Lowlands, that I could only give general directions to such of our people as were left in Perthshire to respect ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... always scheming something—they never quite understood what—against her own peerless lord; each on seeing the other, hoping that Heaven would defend the right and change the hearts of her enemies, or, at all events confound their politics; and each, with a sort of awful second-sight, when they viewed one another across the street, beholding her neighbour draped in a dark film of thunder-cloud, and with a sheaf of pale lightning, instead of a ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... of the troops was more smitten with second-sight, than this friend of the Pervyse women, this courageous Commandant. His eyes were level to command, but they grew distant and luminous when his mood was on him. This gift in him called out the like in other men, and his pockets were heavy with the keepsakes of young soldiers, a photograph ...
— Young Hilda at the Wars • Arthur Gleason
... South African schemes, and advising others to risk theirs on events which seemed to him certain, such as the election of a President or the short-lived nature of a revolution; events which he foresaw with intuition amounting to second-sight. At the same time he lost nearly all his own money by investing it in a company which professed to have discovered a manner—cheap and rapid—of transforming copper into platinum. He made the fortune of a publisher by insisting on ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring
... she was the knowingest old nuss in all these parts; and she was with Ruth's mother when she was born, and she told Lady Lothrop all about it. Says she, 'You may depend upon it that child 'll have the "second-sight"' says she. Oh, that 'are fact was wal known! Wal, that was the reason why Jeff Sullivan couldn't come it round Ruth tho' he was silkier than a milkweed-pod, and jest about as patient as a spider in his hole a watchin' to get his grip on a fly. Ruth wouldn't argue with him, and she wouldn't ...
— Oldtown Fireside Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... to-day by magnetic fluids, who are possessed by it in an instant. To you I can now tell all—as soon as I saw the charming woman whose name you bear, I felt that I should love her forever, solely and faithfully, without knowing whether our characters or persons suited each other. Is there a second-sight in love? What answer can I give to that, I who have seen so many unions formed under celestial auspices only to be ruptured later, giving rise to hatreds that are well-nigh eternal, to repugnances that are unconquerable. The senses sometimes harmonize while ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... whenever there was no one there, under pretence of affection. 'Come to-day, papa, we shall have you all to ourselves, and that will be much nicer!' and all that sort of thing. As for me, dear, I believe that love has second-sight: poor Ninety-three; his heart must have bled. He saw that his daughters were ashamed of him, that if they loved their husbands his visits must make mischief. So he immolated himself. He made the sacrifice because he was a father; he went into voluntary ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... at my peevish injustice in complaining because my dear ones, not being gifted with second-sight, had failed to exactly anticipate my coming; and in blaming my poor aunt for behaving just as the dear old slow-witted creature had always behaved since she was stricken with small-pox, twenty years before. Yet this course of candid ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... prejudice, and wanted to be a smart modern thinker." To a reader of our day the History of St. Kilda appears to be innocent of any trace of such pretension; unless it be that the author speaks slightingly of second-sight, a subject for which Johnson always had a strong hankering. In 1773 Johnson paid a visit to Mr. Macaulay, who by that time had removed to Calder, and began the interview by congratulating him on having produced "a very pretty piece of topography,"—a compliment which did not seem to the taste ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... are they all covering their eyes for? Oh, that is THEIR colt which has just been trotted up on the stage. Do they really think those little thin legs can do anything in such a slashing sweepstakes as is coming off in these next forty years? Oh, this terrible gift of second-sight that comes to some of us when we begin to look through the silvered rings of the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... could not be other than it is. This coroneted town is like a queen, who, being always with child, has desires of irresistible fury. Paris is the crown of the world, a brain which perishes of genius and leads human civilization; it is a great man, a perpetually creative artist, a politician with second-sight who must of necessity have wrinkles on his forehead, the vices of a great man, the fantasies of the artist, and the politician's disillusions. Its physiognomy suggests the evolution of good and evil, battle and victory; ...
— The Girl with the Golden Eyes • Honore de Balzac
... day thou metes threescore eleven, And I can tell that bounteous Heaven (The second-sight, ye ken, is given To ilka Poet) On thee a tack o' seven times ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... cheering, and the shouting and clapping and stamping that followed for good measure, had quieted down, Mr. Robey said: "Fellows, Captain Childers is much too flattering. I'm not gifted with second-sight, even if he thinks so. I don't know any more than he does or you do whether we're going to win on Saturday. Like Mr. Fernald, I hope we are and, like Captain Edwards, I think we are." Cheers interrupted then. "But I ...
— Left Guard Gilbert • Ralph Henry Barbour
... by the help of these Second-sight Glasses, to see the common Periods of Life; and Others said, they could see a great way beyond the leap in the Dark: I confess, all I could see of the first was, that holding up the Glass against the Sea, I plainly ...
— The Consolidator • Daniel Defoe
... Quickly thou must come in, for Eric has both second-sight and hearing, and no doubt he knows already that here thou art——" and talking thus as she went, Mrs. Beaton led the way up a wide, light stairway. Even as Mrs. Beaton was speaking a thin, eager voice called Sunna's name, a door flew open, and a man, beautiful as a dream-man, stood in ...
— An Orkney Maid • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... delicious divinations The whorls of our blue Labyrinth: the sweet Blind sense of touch tells like an undersong Marvellous matters. What though snared feet, And wounded hands, and ravelled coils of wrong, Plead that the solemn Vision might make whole Our imperfection?—Fevered second-sight, Audacious wisdom of the blinded soul, Dim delicate auroras of delight That thrill the Dark from startled finger-tips, Are ye ...
— The Hours of Fiammetta - A Sonnet Sequence • Rachel Annand Taylor
... supernatural powers thought to be possessed by certain persons, which differed from witchcraft in this, that they were not regarded as the result of a compact with the devil, but in some cases were thought to be rather a gift from God. For example, there was second-sight, a gift bestowed upon certain persons without any previous compact or solicitation. Sometimes the seer fell into a trance, in which state he saw visions; at other times the visions were seen without the trance condition. Should the seer see in a vision ...
— Folk Lore - Superstitious Beliefs in the West of Scotland within This Century • James Napier
... drunk some tea, I regretted the delay, and I suffered by it. Surely, I thought, she will read in my demeanour something which she ought not to read there. But she did not. She was one of the simplest of women. In ten thousand women one is born without either claws or second-sight. She was that one, defenceless ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... was it not all a mere vision she was beholding, out of which she would presently awake! Such moments were followed by dark melancholy. This life she was leading could not last, but would pass away in some fearful shock of soul. Once she half believed herself endowed with the curse of a hideous second-sight. Sitting with her father and mother, silence all at once fell upon the room, and everything was transfigured in a ghostly light. Distinctly she saw her mother throw her head back and raise to her throat ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... to quarrel the more fiercely; the name of Mrs. Adcock was proscribed, nor did it again pass her sister's lips, until the morning when she announced: "Mary Adcock is dead; I saw her in her shroud last night." Second-sight was hereditary in the house; and sure enough, as I have it reported, on that very night Mrs. Adcock had passed away. Thus, of the four daughters, two had, according to the idiotic notions of their friends, disgraced ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... that she and Lottie were his favorites. Had he taken them out that night together in the hope of contrasts, of finding tests that would help his halting decision? He had ventured where the intuitions of a girl like Carrie Mitchell were almost equal to second-sight; and she was alert ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe
... Celt with the second-sight did not see fit to reply till he had tapped Dan on the shoulder, and for the twentieth time croaked the old, old prophecy in ...
— "Captains Courageous" • Rudyard Kipling
... the date being recorded by my father, "Received July 24, 1851," one of the frolicsome letters which it requires second-sight to decipher, the handwriting being, ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... invalid, poor Bleuet was of course a spoiled child, his mother's darling and pet. His wishes, his sick-child's caprices were her law, and she gratified them at the cost of many a secret privation. She seemed to know—maternal love hath often the faculty of second-sight—that her poor boy, though only the child of the humblest parentage, was destined to rise one day far above the station in which he was born. She attired him better than children of his class commonly dressed. She polished his manners as ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... makes us aware of a talent of unusual distinction, and a highly endowed nature,—a sort of tact of sentiment and expression, an instinct of the true and beautiful, and that quick intuition which is like second-sight in its sensitiveness to apprehend and respond to external stimulus. But it is not the purely imaginative poems in this volume that most deeply interest us. We come upon experience of life in these pages; not in the ordinary sense, however, of outward activity and movement, but ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... stage—exactly three months from to-day—you will receive the gift of second-sight; the power of separating your immaterial from your material body and projecting it, anywhere you will, on the physical plane; and, to a large extent, you will be enabled to circumvent gravity. Thus ...
— The Sorcery Club • Elliott O'Donnell
... equally so. Under these circumstances we should expect that it would be unequally developed in different races, and that a large natural gift of the visionary faculty might become characteristic not only of certain families, as among the second-sight seers of Scotland, but of certain races, as that of ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... undoubtedly possessed of second-sight and I implicitly believe him to have been a Ragil Kashif, i.e., a man who could penetrate the mysteries of the future. Wild and improbable as his prophecies must have appeared to most of those who heard them at Kassala, yet his every utterance was received with profound respect, and ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... what you mean, Radie; and you warned me, with a strange second-sight, before the evil was known to either of us. It was an irrevocable step, and I took it, not seeing all that has happened, it is true; but forewarned. And this I will say, Radie, if I had known the worst, I think even that would ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... arm. While the widow or widower is living in seclusion on the grave, he or she is supplied with food by relations. At sundown on the day of the burial, a curious ceremony is performed. An old woman or man, supposed to be gifted with second-sight, is sent for. Seating herself at the foot of the grave she peers into the deepening shadows under the coco-nut palms. At first she remains perfectly still, while the relations of the deceased watch her with painful anxiety. ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... Croumba's bard has second-sight, And he'll moan the Gunna's plight, When the frosts are flickering white, And the kine are housed till day; For he'll see him perched alone On a chilly old grey stone, Nibbling, nibbling at a bone ...
— Elves and Heroes • Donald A. MacKenzie
... England's Improvement by Sea and Land—a very remarkable book, full of sagacious insight as respected the future commercial and manufacturing greatness of England. Mr. Dove says of this book that "Yarranton chalks out in it the future course of Britain with as free a hand as if second-sight had revealed to him those expansions of her industrial career which never fail to surprise us, even when we behold them realized." Besides his extensive plans for making harbours and improving internal navigation with ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... Psychometry and second-sight in excelsis would also be among the faculties which our friend would find at his command; but those will be more fitly dealt with under a later heading, since in almost all their manifestations they involve clairvoyance either in space ...
— Clairvoyance • Charles Webster Leadbeater
... believe it?—she is a woman still. This very life of hers, dreadful though it be, tightens and braces her woman's energy, her womanly electricity. Hence, you may see her endowed with two gifts. One is the inspiration of lucid frenzy, which in its several degrees, becomes poesy, second-sight, depth of insight, cunning simplicity of speech, the power especially of believing in yourself through all your delusions. Of such a gift the man, the wizard, knows nothing. On his side no ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... poetry of personal passion into a sublimer region. Again, the Italians are deficient in a sense of the supernatural. The wraiths that cannot rest because their love is still unsatisfied, the voices which cry by night over field and fell, the water-spirits and forest fairies, the second-sight of coming woes, the presentiment of death, the warnings and the charms and spells, which fill the popular poetry of all Northern nations, are absent in Italian songs. In the whole of Tigri's collection I only remember one mention of a ghost. It is not that the Italians are deficient in ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... the intellect which does not come through the senses'—a queer theme for a man of the sword to study. But, thirty years earlier, the Regent d'Orleans had made crystal-gazing fashionable, and stories of ghosts and second-sight in the highest circles were popular. Mesmer had not yet appeared, to give a fresh start to the old savage practice of hypnotism; Cagliostro was not yet on the scene with his free-masonry of the ancient Egyptian school. But ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... believe in all sorts of supernatural things-in the doctrine of transmigration, second-sight, and every other impossible ...
— Dawn • Mrs. Harriet A. Adams
... the French flying like hares before a little pack of English talbots. When the evil news came, and was approved true, Baudricourt could hold her in no longer, and now she is on the way with half a dozen esquires and archers of his command. The second-sight she may have—it is common enough, if you believe the red-shanked Highlanders; but if maiden she set forth from Vaucouleurs, great miracle it is if maiden she comes to Chinon." He whispered this in a manner that we call "pauky," being a ...
— A Monk of Fife • Andrew Lang
... spoke harshly to her, he for whose smile, whose kindly glance she would have done any thing. He mentioned her father with ill-concealed contempt; his language was that of a hard egotist; and yet his offer seemed a blessing in her helpless condition, and with the second-sight of a loving heart she divined a meaning in it that she did not fully understand, but which shone into her abyss of sorrow like a distant ray of hope. However he might phrase it, this offer proceeded from ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... just four o'clock, the hour at which the judges left their court-rooms. Popinot the elder chanced to go and see his nephew. This judge, whose mind was singularly acute on all moral questions, was also gifted with a second-sight which enabled him to discover secret intentions, to perceive the meaning of insignificant human actions, the germs of crime, the roots of wrongdoing; and he now watched Birotteau, though Birotteau was not aware of it. The ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac |
