"Inferno" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... pitch—"I never thought I'd get to hell so soon! Why, sir," he continued, knocking a cloud of dust from his hat, "this isn't nature, this is geology! I don't see how you ever discovered the damned country! The wind-swept wastes of Dante's Inferno are verdant in comparison! You're mad, there's no doubt of it!" he ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... determined, neither in the Old, nor New Testament, by any note of situation; but onely by the company: as that it shall bee, where such wicked men were, as God in former times in extraordinary, and miraculous manner, had destroyed from off the face of the Earth: As for Example, that they are in Inferno, in Tartarus, or in the bottomelesse pit; because Corah, Dathan, and Abirom, were swallowed up alive into the earth. Not that the Writers of the Scripture would have us beleeve, there could be in the globe of the Earth, which is not only finite, but also (compared to the height of the Stars) ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... And at this point there began the terrible part of the journey—the arid, alkaline, thirsty desert, short of game, horrible in its monotony, deadly with its thirst. It is no wonder that, weakened by their sufferings in this inferno, so many of the immigrants looked upon the towering walls of the Sierras with a ...
— The Forty-Niners - A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado • Stewart Edward White
... in the circle of the Lustful, it is clear that he realized the enormity of their sin. The theory that his friendship with Guido Novella, the nephew of Francesca, made Dante refrain from entering fully into the incident, will not hold, when it is remembered that the cantos of the Inferno were written in 1300, seventeen years before the poet reached Ravenna, and accepted the hospitality of the Polenta house. Dante's infinite compassion is, therefore, the cause for the compressed poetry of ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Francesca da Rimini • George Henry Boker
... me into a teeming Inferno of darkness and lost spirits who (spent with eight hours' monotonous toil in this Circle) had dropped asleep, sitting half-naked in the line of boxes which would bear them away to a spell of rest. They had fallen into pathetic attitudes of collapse, some ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... one does he recognize as final,—and that is given, not by word of mouth, but by elevating the fore-finger of the right hand, and slowly wagging it to and fro. When this finger goes up he resigns all hope, as those who pass the gate of the Inferno, replaces his hat and lapses into silence, or turns away to some new group of sunny-haired foreigners. The recipe to avoid beggars is, to be black-haired, to wear a full beard, to smoke in the streets, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... be applied. The child of an Asklepiad, Nicomachus, physician to the father of Philip, there must have been a rare conjunction of the planets at the birth of the great Stagirite. In the first circle of the "Inferno," Virgil leads Dante into a wonderful company, "star-seated" on the verdure (he says)—the philosophic family looking with reverence on "the Master of those who know"—il maestro di color che sanno.(28) And with justice has Aristotle been so regarded for these twenty-three ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... renewed pressure bursts upward like a volcano. All the winter the drifting pack changes—grows by freezing, thickens by rafting, and corrugates by pressure. If, finally, in its drift it impinges on a coast, such as the western shore of the Weddell Sea, terrific pressure is set up and an inferno of ice-blocks, ridges, and hedgerows results, extending possibly for 150 or 200 miles off shore. Sections of pressure ice may drift away subsequently and become embedded ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... given in the words of Darino, a lyrical artist of the Comedie Francaise, who joined the Cuirassiers, and was a spectator of the scene he describes. A bridge had to be blown up, and the whole place was an inferno of mitrailleuse and rifle fire. "Into this," he relates, "went your Engineers. A party of them rushed towards the bridge, and, though dropping one by one, were able to lay the charge before all were sacrificed. ...
— Tommy Atkins at War - As Told in His Own Letters • James Alexander Kilpatrick
... whirr of splinters, the crash of impacting shells, and ear-splitting crack of the guns' discharge, the 'r-r-rupp' of shrapnel on the wet ground, the metallic clang of bullets and steel fragments on the gun-shields and mountings. But through all the inferno the gunners worked on, swiftly but methodically. After each shot the layers glared anxiously into the eye-piece of their sights and made minute movements of elevating and traversing wheels, the men at the range-drums examined them carefully and readjusted them ...
— Between the Lines • Boyd Cable
... along past a fine coast, we reached Dellis about eight o'clock. I got Angelo to bring me my sheepskin and cloak, and preferred sleeping on deck to passing the night in a locality which, for the horrors it contained, might have figured as a scene in Dante's "Inferno." ...
— Notes in North Africa - Being a Guide to the Sportsman and Tourist in Algeria and Tunisia • W. G. Windham
... back and again the spectacle was different. There was a white and golden fury of flame above, beautiful and blinding; and below, farther back, an inferno of glowing fire, black-streaked, with trembling, exploding puffs and streams of yellow smoke. The aisles between the burning pines were smoky, murky caverns, moving and weird. Slone saw fire shoot from the ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... no meaning for him in that inferno of suffering. He moved his head, that searching spot of sunlight dancing in his eyes, and cursed deep in his throat the man ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... quis piorum manibus locus, si, ut sapientibus placet, non cum corpore extinguuntur magnae animae, placide quiescas, nosque domum tuam ab inferno desiderio et muliebribus lamentis ad contemplationem virtutum tuarum voces, quas neque lugeri neque plangi fas est. Admiratione te potius et immortalibus laudibus et, si natura suppeditet, similitudine ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... eye, "We didn't engage to 'list at all, at all, but to wurruk on the railroad." Upon which Sir John Gaspard, seeing that Her Majesty had been imposed upon, politely told the legion to go to——Dante's Inferno. ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... her death throes, writhe in the fiery doom that had struck her in seconds, that was devouring her with awful rapidity while thousands of men, blanched and trembling, gazed on helplessly. He saw her plunge, a blazing inferno, into the sea beneath.... ...
— Raiders Invisible • Desmond Winter Hall
... puddle. There they would stick and become chilled if they were not constantly stirred. The whole charge must be mixed and mixed as it steadily thickens so that it will be uniform throughout. I am like some frantic baker in the inferno kneading a batch of iron bread for ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis
... obliged to wait—when, even as before—Heaven be praised!—the arrival of the gallant waits, (I say, gallant, for the night had fast become a white inferno) loosened my fetters, and as I sprang towards ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... hue of the rainbow. In short, with every mile of our advance the scenery grew more wildly and romantically beautiful, yet withal there were spots, deep narrow glens and ravines shut in by towering cliffs and overshadowing trees, where the effect was as weird as a scene copied from Dante's Inferno, and in the midst of which one felt that the strangest happenings would have ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... into the live man's flesh for parchment, Loosed him, laughed to see the writing rankle, 40 Let the wretch go festering through Florence)— Dante, who loved well because he hated, Hated wickedness that hinders loving, Dante standing, studying his angel— In there broke the folk of his Inferno. 45 Says he—"Certain people of importance" (Such he gave his daily, dreadful line to) "Entered and would seize, forsooth, the poet." Says the poet—"Then ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... cups, small tea pot, usual strainer, straw-coloured infusion; still, it just saved our reason. H.C. felt that he should never write another line of poetry; the tobacco fumes had taken an opium effect upon me, and I began to see visions and imagined ourselves in Dante's Inferno. We looked with mild reproach at the waiter. He quite understood; a guilty conscience needed no words; and explained that the chef had let out the fire. As the chef was at that moment in the cafe playing cards, as absorbed and excited as anyone, no wonder ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 1, January, 1891 • Various
... and doubtful stragglers, Carl finished the whiskey in his glass and rose. His brain was very drunk—that he knew—for every life current in his body swept dizzily to his forehead, focusing there into whirling inferno, but his legs he could always trust. He stepped to the table and lurched heavily. Mocking, treacherous demon of the bottle! His legs had failed him. Fiercely he flung out his arm to regain his balance. It struck a candelabrum, a giant relic of ancient wood as ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... of the inferno he had raised in Karl, Millar continued to chat affably, Karl not deigning to answer. Finally ...
— The Devil - A Tragedy of the Heart and Conscience • Joseph O'Brien
... hermitage no more; the problem, he was free to confess, beat him. Next day, therefore, he took horse and rode over the mountains to Bologna, intent upon finding Dante there; but Dante had gone to Verona with half of his "Inferno" in his saddlebag. Thither Cino pursued and there found him in the church of St. Helen, disputing with the doctors upon the Question of the Land and the Water. What passed between the great poet and the less I cannot certainly report, nor is it material. I think that the ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... museum at Florence; you find them on the mediaeval Campo Santo at Pisa; you find them with greater skill, but equal repulsiveness, in the work of the great Renaissance artists. The 'ghastly glories of saints' the Tuscan revels in. The most famous portion of the most famous Tuscan poem is the 'Inferno'—the part that gloats with minute and truly Tuscan realism over the torments of the damned in every department of the mediaeval hell. And, as if still further to mark the continuity of thought, here in Orcagna's frescoes at Santa Maria Novella you have every horror of the heathen religion ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... Henry Francis, a native of this town (born in 1772), vicar of Bromley Abbots, Staffordshire, himself a poet of no mean order, translated in blank verse Dante's "Inferno," the "Divina Commedia," &c., his works running rapidly through several editions. For some time he was assistant librarian at the British Museum, and afterwards received a pension of L200 a year. Died in 1844, and lies in ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... to Dante's "Inferno" can we liken this steamboat-cabin, with its double row of pits, and its dismal captives? What are these sighs, groans, and despairing noises, but the alti guai rehearsed by the poet? Its fiends are the stewards who rouse us from our perpetual torpor with offers of food and praises of shadowy ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... another and another. It seemed to fire gas-shells into the town, at this moment, ignoring the batteries playing upon it. It was still again, while the queer excrescence on its back moved vaguely and shells burst about it in a very inferno. ...
— Morale - A Story of the War of 1941-43 • Murray Leinster
... ocean boom. Cypress Point is one of the most conspicuous of these projections, and its strange trees creep out upon the ragged ledges almost to the water's edge. These cypresses are quite as instinct with individual life and quite as fantastic as any that Dore drew for his "Inferno." They are as gnarled and twisted as olive-trees two centuries old, but their attitudes seem not only to show struggle with the elements, but agony in that struggle. The agony may be that of torture in the tempest, or of some fabled creatures fleeing and pursued, stretching out their long ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... band was ordered to move on, and as they marched through the great gateway in the massive walls Foster felt as if he were entering the portals of Dante's Inferno, and had left all hope behind. But his feelings misled him. Hope, thank God! is not easily extinguished in the human breast. As he tramped along the narrow and winding streets, which seemed to him an absolute labyrinth, ...
— The Middy and the Moors - An Algerine Story • R.M. Ballantyne
... and soldiers could not stop them. They plunged on to Preny and Pagny, and they rushed into the Bois Frehaut, and held for thirty-six hours, this place from which picked Moroccan and Senegalese troops were forced to retreat in ten minutes after they had entered it. The Bois Frehaut was an inferno under the murderous fire of the Germans. Holding it for thirty-six hours and remaining there until hostilities ceased, it is surprising that the casualty list of the 92nd Division did not amount to ...
— History of the American Negro in the Great World War • W. Allison Sweeney
... and his followers ascended the mountain on ponies to see the volcano. This was a kind of inferno with wicked mouths which looked like ventilators from the bowels of the earth spitting and ...
— From Jungle to Java - The Trivial Impressions of a Short Excursion to Netherlands India • Arthur Keyser
... his home and all that it means to him. What kind of a home has he, this private soldier? In the slums, with a slattern wife, or in a cottage with a flower garden in front, only a few minutes' walk from the green fields of the English countryside? But we set out to tell you about the kind of inferno in which this man got ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... powerful explosive shells. The fire proved to be remarkably accurate. As their shells exploded on the cupolas and platforms of the forts, the garrisons in their confined citadels began to experience that inferno of vibrations which subsequently deprived them of the incentive to eat or sleep. The Belgians replied vigorously, but owing to the broken nature of the country, and the forethought with which the Germans took advantage of every form ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of 12) - The War Begins, Invasion of Belgium, Battle of the Marne • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... brutalities and stupidities with which I had to strive, I did again just what I had done as a child. I have enjoyed, too, my rests, my recuperations, my breathing times, my very prostrations after strife; but rather would I be dragged through all the circles of the foolish Italian's Inferno than through the pleasures of Europe. That is what has made this place of eternal pleasures so deadly to me. It is the absence of this instinct in you that makes you that strange monster called a Devil. It is the success with which you have diverted the attention of ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... year, 1568, Antwerp, that began with 125,000 people, ended it with 50,000. Many multitudes were put to death by the sword and stake, but many, many thousands fled to England, to begin anew their lives as manufacturers and mariners; and for years Belgium was one quaking peril, an inferno, whose torturers were Spaniards. The visitor in Antwerp is still shown the rack upon which they stretched the merchants that they might yield up their hidden gold. The Painted Lady may be seen. Opening her arms, she embraces the victim. The Spaniard, with his spear, forced the merchant ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... eyes pierced through the pallid light That crowned the awful place, and then I saw That which shall not be seen of mortal eye Until the final day. I saw the vast Black concourse of Inferno pouring in From Hell's four sides, and gathering at the base Of a stupendous mountain whose great crest Towered high above the glare, and lost itself In blackness. Never met such throng before In Hell or Heaven. Flowing ...
— Pan and Aeolus: Poems • Charles Hamilton Musgrove
... jostling on the wagon seats; men almost slept as they walked, ox whip in hand; the cattle slept as they stumbled on, tongues dry and lolling. All the earth seemed strange, unreal. They advanced as though in a dream through some inferno of a ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... firing-line. About noon the day after the first attack was made, word came out that one of our crew had caught it and asking for help and stretchers to carry out the wounded. So we made our way in through a perfect inferno and we found the crew—an officer and six men—all lying wounded in a dugout. We got busy and carried them out, and poor beggars, they got some awful bumps as we stumbled along through the darkness, over dead bodies ...
— Into the Jaws of Death • Jack O'Brien
... contamination of this inferno, into active support of this cruel infamy, many and many a young man is led by the impurity of his boyhood. Such at least is the conclusion of some who know boys best. Thus ...
— Youth and Sex • Mary Scharlieb and F. Arthur Sibly
... the animal beauty is growing complete in the magic of proportion, the indescribable marvel that can even give charm to ugliness, is as steadily vanishing. Such a woman, like Branca d'Oria in the Inferno, is already damned, and only seems to live. Lady Ann was indeed born capable of less than most; but had she attempted to do the little she could, one would not have been where she was; she would have beep toiling up the hill of truth, with a success to be measured, like ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... In Deacon's Orders She Combeth Not Her Head She Cometh Not, She Said Trial of a Servant Trail of the Serpent Essays of a Liar Essays of Elia Soap and Tables AEsop's Fables Pocketbook's Hill Puck of Pook's Hill Dentist's Infirmary Dante's Inferno Holy ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... she walked straight across and up to us, and asked us very nicely if she might play with us. We turned upon her six scarlet scandalized faces, and what we said, in what brutal child language, I do not care to repeat. The child stared at us for a moment as if she were looking into the Inferno itself, and I expect she was, poor little soul! Then she gave a cry, and tore across the bridge and up the 'pike as hard as she could run. As long as we could see her she was running, and as I never saw her again—we avoided the brook after ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... buildings were brilliantly outlined in the evening mist by countless points of light. The scene from Twelfth Street north to the river, flanked by railroad yards and grim buildings, was an animated circle of a modern inferno. The cross streets intersecting the lofty buildings were dim, canon-like abysses, in which purple fog floated lethargically. The air was foul with the gas from countless locomotives, and thick with smoke and the mist of the lake. And through this ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... gras—truffles on toast; salad; olives; Alice Fallstaff; Italian ham "Prosciutto;" soup—semino Italiani with Brodo de Cappone; pompano a la papillote; tortellini with fungi a funghetto; fritto misto; spring chicken saute; Carcioffi all'Inferno; Capretto al Forno con Insallata; omelet Celestine; fruit; ...
— Bohemian San Francisco - Its restaurants and their most famous recipes—The elegant art of dining. • Clarence E. Edwords
... seems to me to contain more than the psychological content of these lines from the fifth canto of the "Inferno." ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... little more than a congeries of musico-gymnastic forms, wherein the vocal soloists could display their art, it needs not to speak at length, for some of these vices have not yet disappeared. In the language of Dante's guide through the Inferno, at one stage of their wanderings, when the sights were ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... a mighty cavern, so black and high that it might well suggest a portal leading to the regions below, where Vulcan is supposed to stir those tremendous fires which have moulded much of the configuration of the world, and which are ever seething—an awful Inferno—under the thin crust of the ...
— Blown to Bits - The Lonely Man of Rakata, the Malay Archipelago • R.M. Ballantyne
... the rest of his life. They all met at breakfast and shortly afterwards went to church, the service being at half-past ten. By way of putting into effect the good resolutions with which he was so busy paving an inferno of his own, Geoffrey did not sit by Beatrice, but took a seat at the end of the little church, close to the door, and tried to console himself by looking ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... explosion and the prisoner might be blown to bits, or if the captor were, another Briton took charge of the prisoner. Persistently stubborn were the captors in holding on to prisoners who were trophies out of that inferno, and when a Briton was back in the first-line trench with his German his delight was greater in delivering his man alive than in his own safety. Out in No Man's Land the wounded hugged their shell-craters until the fire slackened or night fell, ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... now on the rim of the crater, looking straight into the inferno. By means of the dull light that struggled through the grimy, grated windows, I discovered that we were in a corridor having an iron floor that sprang up and down under our feet. This was flanked by a line of steel cages—huge ...
— The Underdog • F. Hopkinson Smith
... of Ireland, grows on a man like dram-drinking. Onomacritus is generally charged with the authorship of the poems which the ancients usually attributed to Orpheus, the companion of Jason. Perhaps the most interesting of the poems of Orpheus to us would have been his 'Inferno,' or [Greek text], in which the poet gave his own account of his descent to Hades in search of Eurydice. But only a dubious reference to one adventure in the journey is quoted by Plutarch. Whatever the exact truth about the Orphic poems may be (the reader may pursue ...
— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang
... prop. l. 2. c. 20. Zanch. l. 4. de malis angelis. Perer. in Gen. l. 8. in c. 6. 2. Origen. saepe praeliis intersunt, itinera et negotia nostra quaecumque dirigunt, clandestinis subsidiis optatos saepe praebent successus, Pet. Mar. in Sam. &c. Ruscam de Inferno. ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... it on fire, and the whole church was wrapped in flames. Now the scaffolding is gone, and in the dull provincial square there stands a structure so strange and beautiful that one must search the Inferno, or some tale of Eastern magic, for words to picture the luminous unearthly vision. The lower part of the front has been warmed to deep tints of umber and burnt siena. This rich burnishing passes, higher up, through yellowish-pink and carmine, ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... anger due to the cruelty I am repressing in myself? I don't care whether it is sadism or the spark of the divine in me. All I care about is that this inferno of pain must cease. ...
— A Dominie in Doubt • A. S. Neill
... pictures, kept Haydon afloat throughout this year, but a widespread commercial distress in the early part of 1826 affected his gains, and in February he records that for the last five weeks he has been suffering the tortures of the Inferno. He was persuaded, much against his will, to send his pictures to the Academy, and he was proportionately annoyed at the adverse criticism that greeted his attempts at portraiture. This attack he regarded ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... a spy, and bowled out myself for a spy and a humbug rolled into one. Oh, Bunny, if old man Dante were alive to-day I should commend him to that sink of salubrity for the redraw material of another and a worse Inferno!" ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... Sandy Hook the pilot was dropped and the real voyage begun. Fifty feet below her deck, in an inferno of noise, and heat, and light, and shadow, coal-passers wheeled the picked fuel from the bunkers to the fire-hold, where half-naked stokers, with faces like those of tortured fiends, tossed it into the eighty white-hot mouths of the furnaces. In the engine-room, oilers passed to and fro, in ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson
... would take us to the foot of a darker streak in the wall which seems from here like a possible groove or gully and in fact is such. Unscalable as it seems, that is the magic stairway which leads up out of this rocky Inferno to the higher ledges and finally over glacier-fields to the Breche de Roland, (which is invisible from the Cirque itself,) and through this gateway on into Spain. Mountaineers and smugglers make the trip with unconcern, and it is entirely practicable for ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... and, like most of its kind in Devon, ran between high fern-grown banks, on the tops of which grew trees whose boughs almost met overhead and made an archway. To plunge down here was like taking a dip into Dante's 'Inferno,' it looked so particularly dark and gloomy, and such a ...
— Monitress Merle • Angela Brazil
... of sullen aspect, rose from the dusky, writhing mass, and the flaming of more than ten thousand eyeballs in the gloom presented a picture more terrible than ever came into the imagination of the writer of the Inferno. The spectacle, as observed by those some twenty feet from the ground, might be likened somewhat to a turbulent sea when a sturdy tide sets against the storm, and the mad waves tumble hither and thither, foiled, and ...
— The Story of Louis Riel: The Rebel Chief • Joseph Edmund Collins
... found new horrors for the "Inferno" in the voyage as I made it. From Saturday morning till Sunday night, while the storm was at its height, the waves beat clean over the top of our vessel. A thousand times it rolled almost completely to one side, shivered, trembled, and recovered itself, only to yield again ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... translation than they all." Mr. J. C. Peabody is right in supposing that none of the previous translations of Dante could descend to such labor and plodding as his. In 1849, Dr. Carlyle published his literal prose translation of the "Inferno." It was in many respects admirably done, and it has afforded great assistance to the students of the poet in their first progress. Mr. Peabody does not acknowledge any obligations to it, or refer to it in any way. Let us, however, compare a passage or two of the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... frozen in your throat, by a gelid horror seizing you, to feel that these follies or these crimes displayed belong to that human nature, one and the same everywhere and always, of which also you yourself partake. Comedy, Dante, too, called his poem, which included the "Inferno." And a Dantesque quality, not of method, but of power, is to ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... noticed an interesting thing. Into this organic moat or tunnel, this living mouth of an inferno, passed all the booty-laden foragers, or those who for some reason had returned empty-mouthed. But the outgoing host seeped gradually from the outermost nest-layer—a gradual but fundamental circulation, like that of ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... long since extinct. The young stranger, who was not unstudied in the great poem of his country, recollected that one of the ancestors of this family, and perhaps an occupant of this very mansion, had been pictured by Dante as a partaker of the immortal agonies of his Inferno. These reminiscences and associations, together with the tendency to heartbreak natural to a young man for the first time out of his native sphere, caused Giovanni to sigh heavily as he looked around ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... traitor in the "Chanson de Roland", to whose charge is laid the defeat of Charlemagne's rear-guard at Ronceval, became the arch-traitor of mediaeval literature. It will be recalled that Dante places him in the lowest pit of Hell ("Inferno", xxxii. 122). (NOTE: There is a slight time discrepance here. Roland, Ganelon, and the Battle of Ronceval were said to have happened in 8th Century A.D., fully 300 years after ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes
... brother were reminiscent of a multiplicity of children and a scarcity of room. To her the Inferno presented no more disquieting prospect than the necessity of sharing her bedroom. She always returned from these sojourns in the country with impaired digestion, and shattered nerves. She looked forward to them with dread and looked back on them with ...
— Miss Mink's Soldier and Other Stories • Alice Hegan Rice
... finding that Borrow had no chance of obtaining it, accepted Lord Palmerston's offer of the post for himself. It is, however, idle to speculate what actually happened. What resulted was that Bowring as the "Old Radical" took premier place in the Appendix-inferno that closed ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... side of the little garage and looked out. And, to the east, on a piece of rising ground, that would have been hidden had the de Frenard house still stood, as it had stood before the fire, they saw something that looked like a picture of an inferno. ...
— The Belgians to the Front • Colonel James Fiske
... furnace-doors swing wide open; and in the hot glare the negro stokers—their stalwart forms jetty black, naked to the waist and streaming with exertion that makes the muscles strain out in great cords—show like the distorted imps of some pictured inferno. They, too, have imbibed the excitement. With every gesture of anxious haste and eyeballs starting from their dusky heads, some plunge the long rakes into the red mouths of the furnace, twisting and turning the crackling mass with terrific strength; others hurl in huge logs of resinous pine, ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... his Journal constantly—thought him one of the most remarkable men that age produced. He liked his hostility to Calvinism. "How little that fellow Macaulay," he said, "could understand Quakerism! A man needs to have been in Inferno himself to know what the Quakers meant in what they said and did." He referred me to an article of his on Jacob Boehme and the mystic writers, in which he had given his views in regard ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... left the slothful and lazy are punished; beneath them in two bolge are the passionate and the gluttonous souls, and below again the luxurious and avaricious ones. The poverty of conception in this "Inferno" is not even compensated by the usual good qualities of refinement; one could almost believe that the artist found it so repugnant to his character to depict brutality and infernal tortures, that ...
— Fra Angelico • J. B. Supino
... Faust's passion by the description of her beauty. He takes Faust to the prophetess Manto, daughter of the old blind Theban prophet Teiresias, and she conducts him to a dark fissure—a Bocca dell' Inferno—at the foot of Mount Olympus, such as that which you may have seen in the Sibyl's cave on Lake Avernus; and here (as once Orpheus did in search of Eurydice) he descends to the realms of the dead to seek the help of Persephone, ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... Dante, and I was Virgil, our inferno was an endless procession of tortured faces—faces of women, haggard and mournful, faces of little children, starved and stunted, dulled and dumb. Several times we stopped to talk with these people—one little Jewess girl I knew whose ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... thoughtful and subdued. They descended in a complete silence the dusty street, blazing in the late afternoon sun, and passed into the inferno of a crowded city square in midsummer. As they stood before the waiting-room, Lydia asked suddenly: "Godfather, how can we, any of us, do ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... part (the Inferno) is wonderfully impressive with its Francesca da Rimini interlude, in which burn all the fires of Italian passion. The second part (Purgatory and Paradise) combines the most intense and poignant charm. It contains a fugue episode of ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens
... and understood clearly: Whatever is true of London in the way of poverty and degradation, is true of all England. While Paris is not by any means France, the city of London is England. The frightful conditions which mark London an inferno likewise mark the United Kingdom an inferno. The argument that the decentralisation of London would ameliorate conditions is a vain thing and false. If the 6,000,000 people of London were separated into one hundred cities each with a population of 60,000, misery would be ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... and women in India to whom many a day is a nightmare, and this fair land an Inferno, because of what they know of the wrong that is going on. For that is the dreadful part of it. It is not like the burning alive of the widows, it is not a horror passed. It is going on steadily day and night. Sunlight, moonlight, and darkness pass, the one changing into ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael
... much less beautiful than that of Hogarth's dog. It was Clare's intention to stop at least a week with his kind host at Chiswick, but an awkward circumstance occasioned his departure at the end of a few days. The reverend translator of Dante's 'Inferno' introduced his guest in a careless sort of way to his house, without presenting the various members of his family, and the consequence was that Clare fell into a grievous mistake from the beginning. Mr. Cary had several grown-up ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... avowed intention of committing them all over again manifesting itself in every turn of her head, every grin of her rouged lips, and every flash of her painted eyes! For these sections out of the French "Inferno," Notre Dame de Lorette is a good place to play penitence and feign prayer;—the Madeleine is too classic and serene and sombre in its interior to suggest anything but a museum, from which the proper custodian is absent,—Notre Dame de Paris reeks too much ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... shabbily dressed men coming and going in this with projectile swiftness, and within this factory companies of printers, tensely active with nimble fingers—they were always speeding up the printers—ply their type-setting machines, and cast and arrange masses of metal in a sort of kitchen inferno, above which, in a beehive of little brightly lit rooms, disheveled men sit and scribble. There is a throbbing of telephones and a clicking of telegraph needles, a rushing of messengers, a running to and fro of heated men, clutching proofs and copy. Then ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... oppressively. In these three Governments, taken separately, one can see something excusable, or at least human. When the Kaiser encouraged the Russian rulers to crush the revolution, the Russian rulers undoubtedly believed they were wrestling with an inferno of atheism and anarchy. A Socialist of the ordinary English kind cried out upon me when I spoke of Stolypin and said he was chiefly known by the halter called "Stolypin's Necktie." As a fact, there ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... and play of those mixed emotions which agitate modern swains. Fancy the difference between the African of Yariba who, as Lander tells us (I., 161), "thinks as little of taking a wife as of cutting an ear of corn," and the modern lover who suffers the tortures of the inferno because a certain girl frowns on him, while her smiles may make him so happy that he would not change places with a king, unless his beloved were to be queen. Savages cannot experience such extremes of anguish and rapture, because they have no imagination. It is only when the imagination ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... hesitation, with no thought for her own safety, she drew her skirts about her tightly, wrapped her shawl around her head to save her hair and dashed through the growing flames about the stable-door, into the inferno which now raged within the structure, just as Neb, running with a lurching step, but with a speed remarkable in one so old and stiffened by rheumatic pains, dashed back to the scene of the disaster, in advance of Frank, the Colonel, Holton, Miss Alathea and the other inmates of the house, ...
— In Old Kentucky • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... exclaimed the cadaverous humorist. "Ever this indigenous Pius IX—fulminating, fulminating, fulminating!—Too much inferno. The cure does half his burning for Beelzebub! We are ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair
... come at times over those big open eyes, like a film through which a blazing glance would break out now and then. He had recognized us perfectly; but, for the most part, we seemed to him to be the haunting ghosts of his inferno. ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... Tuesday I hope, but I hate and protest against your horrible 'entomology.' Beginning to explain, would thrust me lower and lower down the circles of some sort of an 'Inferno'; only with my dying breath I would maintain that I never could, consciously or unconsciously, mean to distrust you; or, the least in the world, to Simpsonize you. What I said, ... it was you that put it into my head to say it—for certainly, in ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... others went out on the bowsprit, being buried deep in the enormous seas every time the ship plunged her nose into them with great force. It was an education to see him lead those men out into that roaring inferno. He has left his own vivid impression of this gale in a letter home. His tendency was always to underestimate difficulties, whether the force of wind in a blizzard, or the troubles of a polar traveller. ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... his hat, that he might lose no time. They had brought him a little bread and wine for his evening meal, for often he went not home when the mood of work possessed him; and beside him was a writing of the man Savonarola—this and the Holy Evangel and the 'Inferno' fashioned his thoughts. He lived not long after that, for we were still in Rome when they made for him that great funeral in Santa Croce of Florence, the rumor of which is dear to artist hearts. He was great and lonely, and he knew no joy; there hath been ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... Inferno, detto Malebolge, Tutto di pietra e di color ferrigno, Come la cerchia che d'intorno il volge. Nel dritto mezzo del campo maligno Vaneggia un pozzo assai largo e profondo, Di cui suo luogo contera l' ordigno. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... and finally the greatest joy, because of the shifting fortunes of the fight." It seems likely that Dante was present, probably under arms, in the later part of the same summer, at the surrender to the Florentines of the Pisan stronghold of Caprona, where, he says ('Inferno,' xxi. 94-96), "I saw the foot soldiers afraid, who came out under compact from Caprona, seeing themselves among ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... low-ceiled dining-rooms, stretching far back from the street in a complicated vista of interiors, were apt to be crowded; for the quality of the eightpenny dinner could be relied upon. Edwin imagined what a stifling, deafening inferno of culinary odours and clatter they would be at one o'clock, ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... would have gone had it been possible. Women and logic are only cousins german. Six months ago I hadn't been in love with any one but myself, and now the Virgil of love's dream was leading me like a new Dante through his Inferno, and was pointing out the foster-brother of Sisyphus (if he had a foster-brother), pushing the stone of my lady's favor up the steeps of Forlorn Hope. Well, I would go up to the club, and if I didn't get home till mor-r-ning, who was there ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X) • Various
... Jonathan Edwards is very similar to that produced on me when I took the same mental bath. His was a mind whose grasp and intensity you cannot help feeling. He was a poet in the intensity of his conceptions, and some of his sermons are more terrible than Dante's 'Inferno.'" ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... I must have appeared drunk, for I was greeted with howls and cheers, an inferno of cries and laughter; and the red-faced man stood up also and clung to me, and brought his queer face close up to mine. The girl also clung to me. Then it occurred to me, this was the crisis of a nightmare; ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... back, their fearless eyes challenging the devil and all his works—and getting the challenge accepted. Girls would flit across the lit windows like shadows before flames, or stand in the doorways hailing the men jovially by name. And every few moments, above the roar of this wild inferno, would sound the sudden crash and the dull blows of combat. Only, never was heard the bark of the pistol. The fighting was fierce, and it included kicking with the sharp steel boot-caulks, biting and gouging; but it barred knives and firearms. ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... the two fires," said Bob, as they began their perilous journey, "there is nothing much to fear, it seems to me. The next mile is No Man's Land with a vengeance; after that it will be Dante's Inferno with the ...
— With Haig on the Somme • D. H. Parry
... burning oil, huge columns of fire stretching heavenward from the oil wells in full blaze, and, over all, the pitiless hail of iron and explosives pouring upon them, the horror of the situation in which the soldiers and civilians found themselves may be faintly imagined. Gorlice was an inferno in a few hours. When the German infantry dashed into the town they found the Russians still in possession. Fighting hand to hand, contesting every step, the ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 12) - Neuve Chapelle, Battle of Ypres, Przemysl, Mazurian Lakes • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... was a not less elegant card room, appreciatively nicknamed the Inferno by the band. In it stood a large table with a green cloth, on which lay a heap of bank notes and two little piles of gold, before which sat Sergei Antonovitch Kovroff, presiding over the bank with the composure ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... the boy's life had been an inferno, he was to be repaid. The girl—she of the brown eyes—was home once more, and they met again as members of a camping party." He half-turned in his seat to look at her, but she sat with face averted, so quiet, so motionless, that he wondered ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... his logic enlightens himself. One statement would be as valuable as the other and neither would be worth a pinch of snuff. Come, let us argue with dignity and composure, like honest men sincerely searching after truth, and eager to lend a hand in abolishing this social Inferno of legalized robbery which fairly threatens to consume ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... extremities mortals will endure and still cling to life. But not alone as regarded the economical follies of this age, but equally as touched its moral abominations, scales had fallen from my eyes since that vision of another century. No more did I look upon the woful dwellers in this Inferno with a callous curiosity as creatures scarcely human. I saw in them my brothers and sisters, my parents, my children, flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood. The festering mass of human wretchedness about me offended not now my senses merely, but pierced my heart like a knife, so that I could ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... over the seemingly interminable plains, green and productive during the rainy season, but now parched and arid by the terrible heat, we were almost suffocated by the dense dust clouds, and well-nigh withered by the winds which seem to come from the very jaws of Dante's Inferno; then the shifting young cyclone would suddenly envelop us with chilling snows from Shasta, and so we oscillated like pendulums 'twixt ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... increasing heat of the inferno he had thrown off his coat, and now his shirt went too. The sweat poured out of ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... planet itself; lava flowing into and filling up the vast craters caused by the explosions. The attack seemed fiercest at certain points, perhaps a quarter of a mile apart around the circle, and after a time the watchers perceived that at those points, under the edge of the apron, in that indescribable inferno of boiling lava, destructive rays, and disintegrating copper, there were enemy machines at work. These machines were strengthening the protecting apron and extending it, very slowly, but ever wider and ever deeper as the ground under it and before it was volatilized ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... rest. They saw a sea of fire in the darkness, and against it moving masses of human figures. Flames were devouring the huts and tents. Despairing shrieks and yelling cries reached their ears; they saw thousands upon thousands of wild and desperate faces; and through this inferno a column of soldiers was cutting its way to the bridge, between the two hedges of ...
— Farewell • Honore de Balzac
... eleven o'clock the groups begin to break up, the canvas chairs to empty. Soon reappears a pyjamaed figure followed by a steward carrying a mattress. This is spread, under its owner's direction, in a dark corner forward. With a sigh you in your turn plunge down into the sweltering inferno of your cabin, only to reappear likewise with a steward and a mattress. The latter, if you are wise, you spread where the wind of the ship's going will be full upon you. It is a strong wind and blows upon you heavily, so that the sleeves and legs of your pyjamas flop, but it is a soft, warm wind, ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... black-board—Sea water 90 deg., discharge 116 deg.—and call the Second. He is awake, panting in the hot oven of his berth. If I wish him a merry Christmas he will murder me. I slink below again, and have a sea bath. Even salt water at 90 deg. Fah. is a boon after four hours in that inferno. ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... aeolian melodies, "morning and evening anthems" to the Creator. His paintings have a freshness and fragrance of the dawn; a mystery seems to hang over them. The very spirit of the morn broods over that classic landscape of his "Dante and Vergil." In the opening words of Dame's Inferno he gives us the vivid setting ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... success of the experiment your power ceases?—you cannot foretell whether the unimprisoned creature will take its course to an inferno of suffering or a heaven of ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... grandeur in the Workmans' book entitled In the Ice World of Himalaya (pp. 28-29, 30-32). The poet who had found ideas for a new Paradiso in the Vale of Kashmir might here get suggestions for a new Inferno. ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... have read to-day one canto of Dante's Inferno and eight or ten pages of Cicero de Amicitia. In this, as well as in de Senectute which I have just finished, I am much interested. I confess I am not a little surprised to find how largely the moderns are indebted to the ancients; how many wise ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... the third circle of the Inferno—a desert of red-hot sand, in which lay a multitude of victims of divine wrath, additionally tortured by an ever-descending storm of fiery flakes—he was led by Virgil out of this burning wilderness along a narrow causeway. This path was protected, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... by Donato Giannotti in his Dialogue De' giorni che Dante consumo nel cercare l'Inferno e 'l Purgatorio. The date of ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... wrote the poet, Vincenzo Calmeta, "everything fell into ruin, and that court, which had been a joyous paradise, was changed into a black Inferno." ...
— Beatrice d'Este, Duchess of Milan, 1475-1497 • Julia Mary Cartwright
... no doubt people were sometimes terrified into 'goodness' by the picture of that dread vista of torment, as no doubt they were bribed into it by the companion picture of a green unbounded Paradise; but, O my friend, what an unworthy kind of goodness, the mere mask of virtue! And now that the Inferno has practically disappeared from our theology, the belief in eternal life simply means unlimited cakes and ale, for good and evil alike, for all eternity. How such a belief can be moralising I fail ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne
... fearful bodily injuries inflicted by the storm, and others with deeper wounds of grief;—mothers whose babies had been torn from their arms, children whose parents were missing, fathers whose entire families were lost—a dazed and tearless throng, such as Dante might have met in his passage through Inferno. These were dumped by thousands on the sandy beach at Texas City, and then conveyed by rail to Houston, to be cared for by the good people of that city, who, notwithstanding their own grievous losses, were doing noble work for their ...
— A Story of the Red Cross - Glimpses of Field Work • Clara Barton
... and lightness, it is still capable, under high and powerful impulse of extraordinary feats of endurance. This has of late been admirably illustrated. Not long since, there returned to our shores a hero who—as Dante was believed by the people of Italy to have entered the Inferno of Fire—had actually descended into the opposite Inferno of Frost, and done unprecedented battle with the demons of that realm. Dr. Kane was slight, delicately framed, lean, with sharp, clear-cut features, of quivering mobility and fineness of texture, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... Professor paced his rooms at the Royal Victoria, and mentally consigned Prince Djiddin and his indefatigable Moonshee to Eblis, the Inferno, Sheol, or some other ardent corner of Limbo. "How long will these two yellow fellows keep poor old Fraser enchanted?" mused the disgruntled American, mindful of his hotel bill running on. "The old man is crazy after the two Thibetans, and I can't see his game. He does not wish me to publish my own ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... complicated, more hideous and terrible. Unable to bear longer the distracting scene, he makes an effort and opens, his eyes, and dissolves the delirious dream, only, however, to glide again unconsciously into another dream-land where another unreal inferno is dioramically revealed, and new agonies suffered. Oh! the many many hours, that I have groaned under the terrible incubi which the fits of real delirium evoke. Oh! the racking anguish of body that a traveller in Africa must undergo! Oh! the spite, the fretfulness, ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... offices, I, from force of habit, mechanically went direct to the ticker—and dropped all in an instant from the pinnacle of Heaven into a boiling inferno. For the ticker was just spelling out these words: "Mowbray Langdon, president of the Textile Association, sailed unexpectedly on the Kaiser Wilhelm at noon. A two per cent. raise of the dividend rate of Textile Common, from the present four per ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... or novel. On the other hand, we admit aesthetic value to fanciful painting and literature, and to expressions of beliefs which no one accepts at the present time. We appreciate the beauty of Dante's descriptions of the Inferno and of the conversations between him and its inhabitants without believing them to be reports of fact. No one values the Blue Bird the less because it is not an account of an actual occurrence. ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... reflections and his skin prickled as at the touch of something loathsome. Up to that moment he had suffered none of the pains of the hunted fugitive; but he knew now that he had fairly entered the gates of the outlaw's inferno; that however cunningly he might cast about to throw his pursuers off the track, he would never again know what it was to be wholly free from the terror of the arrow that ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... was then blowing with tremendous force and increasing to the power of a hurricane each instant as it whistled through the cordage, wailing and shrieking like the lost souls in Dante's "Inferno." The momentarily quiet sea, too, had got up again, and was now covered with huge broken waves—raised aloft in pyramids one moment, and the next scooped out into yawning valleys, into which the vessel plunged, with a shock that made her timbers vibrate ...
— On Board the Esmeralda - Martin Leigh's Log - A Sea Story • John Conroy Hutcheson
... Mongol. A clipper-ship from Boston, two thousand tons, and with skysails. Around the Horn it almost blew the sticks out of that Mongol. We froze; we worked day and night. It was terrible. The seas almost drowned us. Ah, how we cursed! Tonnerre de dieu! Had we known it we were in Paradise. The inferno—we were coming to ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... made bets, and talked racing, and rode or drove fiery steeds, and who lived on, and swindled through, the noblest of all animals. Mr Mosk, a lean light-weight, who wore loud check suits, tight in the legs and short in the waist, was the presiding deity of this Inferno, and as the Ormuz to this Ahrimanes, Gabriel Pendle was the curate of the district, charged with the almost hopeless task of reforming his sporting parishioners. And all this, with considerable irony, was placed almost in the shadow ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... Will explained, and there was a stern note in his young voice, "we worked and we sweated and we fought. We lived under conditions week after week and month after month that it makes us shudder even to think of now. For months we lived in a perfect inferno—and do you know what our ...
— The Outdoor Girls at Wild Rose Lodge - or, The Hermit of Moonlight Falls • Laura Lee Hope
... life. I think you will readily believe my statement." Continuing in the same half-bantering vein, I said: "I intend to immortalize all members of medical staff of State Hospital for Insane—when I illustrate my Inferno, which, when written, will make Dante's Divine Comedy ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... alongside, or a smart tap on the bottom of the boat, warned us how thick the concourse was that had gathered below. Until that weariness which no terror is proof against set in, sleep was impossible, nor could we keep our anxious gaze from that glowing inferno beneath, where one would have thought all the population of Tartarus were holding high revel. Mercifully, at last we sank into a fitful slumber, though fully aware of the great danger of our position. One upward rush of any of those ravening monsters, happening to strike ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... air he breathes does not feed my lungs. Up yonder, above the clouds of human weakness, my vertebrae become unhinged, my bones inarticulate, and I collapse. I meet missionaries, and I hear the music of the spheres; and I long to descend again to the circles of the everyday inferno where ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... Dante's books a sight to his pa and me. "The Divine Comedy," "The Inferno," "Bernadiso," "New Life," etc., etc. Thomas Jefferson thought "The Divine Comedy" a powerful work, showing the story of how a man wuz tempted, and how sorrow lifts up ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... bowed impressively to the group on the porch. "I should much prefer to stay here," said he gallantly, "but business reasons impel me to seek that inferno out yonder. What Jarve finds interesting in that sort ...
— Strawberry Acres • Grace S. Richmond
... "If we're going to save ourselves out of this inferno we've got to make some kind of preparation. We can't just swim and trust to luck. We shall have to malice float of some sort or ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... [Greek]. In reference to valises which open lengthways like a chest, Dante uses the word to signify those compartments which he feigns in his Hell." (Per similitudine di quelle valigie, che s'aprono per lo lungo, a guisa di cassa, significa quegli spartimenti, che Dante finge nell' Inferno.) The reader will think of the homely figurative names in Bunyan, and the contempt which great and awful states of mind have for conventional notions of rank in phraseology. It is a part, if ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... advance, without intermission or rest for twenty hours, for fifty hours, for whole weeks of fatigue, hunger, cold, and murder—till their ghastly labour, worthy of a place amongst the punishments of Dante's Inferno, passing through the stages of courage, of fury, of hopelessness, sinks into the ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... "The Inferno" is therefore a tragic book. But I think that the attentive reader will find that the destructive criticism of M. Barbusse, in so far as it is possible for him to agree with it, only clears away the dead undergrowth ...
— The Inferno • Henri Barbusse
... skill nor the equipment to explore a wilderness. These people hitch up the farm team, or the grocer's cart, or the family horse, pile in their bedding and their simple cooking utensils, whistle to the dog, and climb up out of the scorching inferno to ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... after so swift a chase that her master had no opportunity to get rid of his damning cargo, the boarding officers saw sights that scarce Inferno itself could equal. To look into her hold, filled with naked, writhing, screaming, struggling negroes was a sight that one could see once and never forget. The effluvium that arose polluted even the fresh air of the ocean, and burdened ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... he imagines the home he would best love in all the world;[84] in a cleft the pine-tree, symbol of hardy song,[85] strikes precarious root, the ruined eagle finds refuge,[86] and Sibrandus Schaffnaburgensis a watery Inferno. A like instinct allures him to other images of deep hollow things the recesses of which something else explores and occupies,—the image of the sheath; the image of the cup. But he is equally allured by the opposite, or salient, kind of angularity. ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... Presently there was silence, and then, without any warning, came a tearing crack, the thunder as of 100 heavy guns, a metallic din, and a cloud of smoke rose; and while we forced ourselves to stay and watch, the inferno below thundered a roaring echo, the walls shook, and a thousand dark specks flew up like a swarm of frightened birds. They were lava blocks, and they fell back from the height of the crater, rattling on the rocks, or were swallowed up by the invisible gorge. Then a thick cloud surrounded everything, ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... of this castle, with the spacious view to westward, I thought of Dante. For Dante in this castle was the guest of Moroello Malaspina, what time he was yet finishing the "Inferno." There is a little old neglected garden, full to south, enclosed upon a rampart which commands the Borgo, where we found frail canker-roses and yellow amaryllis. Here, perhaps, he may have sat with ladies—for ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... myriad blinding flashes, turning the inclosed valley into an inferno of heat and rocking, boiling, shattered ground. Up the valley shot the massed hand rays of the hundreds as they swept ...
— Slaves of Mercury • Nat Schachner
... all the things that were made out of the carcasses of animals, and of all the lesser industries that were maintained there; now he found that each one of these lesser industries was a separate little inferno, in its way as horrible as the killing beds, the source and fountain of them all. The workers in each of them had their own peculiar diseases. And the wandering visitor might be skeptical about all the swindles, but he could not be skeptical about these, for the worker bore the evidence ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... have spoken of this interview between Christ and the young ruler as "the great refusal." Dante, wandering with Virgil through the Inferno, thought he saw this young ruler searching for his lost opportunity. For this ruler was the Hamlet of the New Testament. Like the Prince of Denmark, he stood midway between his conscience and his task, and indecision slew him. It has been said that Hamlet could have been happy ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... inferno I do not know. Buffeted and blinded, stumbling and scrambling to my feet again, turning this way or that way to avoid the thickest centres of the strife, oppressed and paralyzed by a feeling of impotence that put an iron band around ...
— The Valley of Vision • Henry Van Dyke
... Hopes. "If" and "Perhaps". If in Loving, Singing. If Thou'lt be Mine. If Thou wouldst have Me sing and play. Ill Omens. I love but Thee. Imitation. Imitation of Catullus. Imitation of the Inferno of Dante. Impromptu. Impromptu. Impromptu. Incantation. Incantation, An. Inconstancy. Indian Boat, The. In Myrtle Wreaths. Insurrection of the Papers, The. Intended Tribute. Intercepted Letters, ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... picture; and its ghastly horror—the apparent fidelity of the descriptions, which makes one feel as if he had before him the evidence of an eye-witness—gives a measure of the power of the artist and the range of his imagination, from an earthly inferno to an earthly paradise, such as even the 'Commedia' does not give us. In this stupendous ensemble, the individual tales become mere details, filling in of the space or time; and, taken out of it, the whole falls into a mere story-book, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... 1841.—Newman writes to me that he is gone to the Rhine. I wish I were! And yet the only 'wish' at the bottom of my heart, is to be able to work vigorously in my own way anywhere, were it in some Circle of Dante's Inferno. This, however, is the secret of my soul, which I disclose only to ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... San Sebastian were clanging the alarm, the good monks were toiling up the path toward the inferno which lit the heavens, when, black against the glare, they saw a giant figure approaching. It came reeling toward them, vast, mighty, misshapen. Not until it was in their very midst did they recognize their brother, Joseph. He was bent and broken, he was singed of body and of raiment, ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... then. The fire had leaped the check-trail at a dozen points. With his men he tried to smother the flames in the grass by using saddle blankets and gunnysacks, as well as by shoveling sand upon it. Sometimes they cut down the smouldering brush and flung it back across the break into the inferno on the other side. Blinded and strangling from the smoke, the fire-fighters would make short rushes into the clearer air, swallow a breath or two of it, and plunge once more into the line to ...
— Gunsight Pass - How Oil Came to the Cattle Country and Brought a New West • William MacLeod Raine |
