They sat smoking, staring into the fire with mesmerised eyes.

His artistic good taste, his classical polish, his sound shrewd sense, his hatred of cant, his insight into humbug above all, his shallow, pitiable habit of being always intelligiblethese are the sins which condemn him in the eyes of a mesmerising, table-turning, spirit-rapping, spiritualising, Romanising generation, who read Shelley in secret, and delight in his bad taste, mysticism, extravagance, and vague and pompous sentimentalism.

If this be true, it would seem that the mere presence of man had a certain subduing or mesmerising effect upon the native turbulence of Nature, and his absence now may have removed the curb.

It may be, that the soul grows to its atmosphere as well as the body, and living in a land where dreams are realities, and all things are credible, and history is only a fairy tale: the land of the moon and the lotus and the snake, old gods and old ruins, former births, second sight, and idealism: it falls back, unconsciously mesmerised, under the spell of forgotten creeds.

"You didn't ought to have written about that mesmerising.

There was what my soul abhorred, and what I feared his soul might be too weak to facethe kaleidoscope of mean colours turning in the city, tickling our senses, striving to bind our souls and to mesmerise.

He explains (June 10, 1884) that he had mesmerised Miss on several occasions to relieve rheumatic pain and sore throat.