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Mythical   Listen
adjective
Mythical, Mythic  adj.  Of or relating to myths; described in a myth; of the nature of a myth; fabulous; imaginary; fanciful; mythological. "The mythic turf where danced the nymphs." "Hengist and Horsa, Vortigern and Rowena, Arthur and Mordred, are mythical persons, whose very existence may be questioned."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Mythical" Quotes from Famous Books



... a mythical adventure of Luna—the moon, given by Virgil in the Georgics; and has for its text a ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr

... professors, their families, and their friends in the town, and concerts and dances were given in it. It seems that the Heidelberg "Museum" comes nearest to the original meaning of the word as "a seat of Muses," for nearly all those mythical ladies were remarkable for their special patronage ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester

... these designs are what they profess to be, and Miss Curtis undertakes to be convinced by that proof, provided it be one that should carry conviction to a clear, unbiassed mind. I undertake, on the other hand, that if the said proof should be effectual, a mythical personage called Simon Skinflint shall become a supporter of the Female ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge

... this: in no case does the city appear as equivalent to the dwelling-place of a tribe or of a confederation of tribes. In no case does citizenship, or burghership, appear to rest upon the basis of a real or assumed community of descent from a single real or mythical progenitor. In the primitive mark, as we have seen, the bond which kept the community together and constituted it a political unit was the bond of blood-relationship, real or assumed; but this was not the ...
— American Political Ideas Viewed From The Standpoint Of Universal History • John Fiske

... status is better established by elimination—by stating what they are not. Midgets are neither dwarfs, runts, pygmies, nor Lilliputians. Dwarfs may have normal bodies but with either short legs or arms, or both; a runt is a small specimen in a litter or drove; pygmies were a mythical creation of the Greeks, but the name was later given to a tribe in South Africa, whose stature was considerably less than their neighbors; and Lilliputians were the creation of a mind that was later to go haywire—but not ...
— David Lannarck, Midget - An Adventure Story • George S. Harney

... as Julius Caesar would have made if he had chosen to remain a fashionable lawyer instead of mixing in politics, or Achilles, if he had taken a necklace or a bracelet and left the sword in Ulysses' basket. You would have found your mythical duenna ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford

... take Spenser, and show you how all his fairy knights are sometimes deceived and sometimes vanquished; but the soul of Una is never darkened, and the spear of Britomart is never broken. Nay, I could go back into the mythical teaching of the most ancient times, and show you how the great people,—by one of whose princesses it was appointed that the Lawgiver of all the earth should be educated, rather than by his own kindred;—how that great Egyptian people, wisest then of nations, gave to their Spirit of Wisdom the form ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various

... are the heroes, the saints of the ancient world, who from their graves have some power of hearing and answering. Like the saints, they belong to all times, from the most remote to the most recent. The mythical Philopregmon, a shadowy being dating back to times of primitive worship, gives luck from his monument on the roadside by the gate of Potidaea.[11] But the traveller who had prayed to him in the morning as he left the town might pay the same duty next evening ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail

... this saying to Plato. It is also ascribed to Pythagoras, Chilo, Thales, Cleobulus, Bias, and Socrates; also to Phemone, a mythical Greek poetess of the ante-Homeric period. Juvenal (Satire xi. 27) says that ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett

... The mythical hero of this shadowy romance has long embodied in his person the virtues of the typical avenger of the wrongs of the poor and the oppressed against the tyranny of the rich and the powerful; his name has been honored and his manly ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various

... This left me free to my own affairs, and I was out among my roses when Lloyd Inwood arrived. Clipping and pruning and tacking the climbers on the porch, with my mouth full of nails, and Lloyd following me about and lending a hand now and again, we fell to discussing the mythical race of invisible people, that strange and vagrant people the traditions of which have come down to us. Lloyd warmed to the talk in his nervous, jerky fashion, and was soon interrogating the physical properties and possibilities of invisibility. A perfectly black object, he contended, would ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London

... which conflicts also with the testimony of all military men. But the testimony of mere military men on such a matter is without value. Who ever heard of a military man who did not desire to have his art considered as mythical as possible? Moreover, the rulers of the world have spared no pains to imbue their people with false ideas upon this point. It is necessary to put forward some excuse for that terrible incubus upon ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid

... votaries of the ancient Astral worship divided into two distinct classes, the Esoterics, or Gnostics; and the Exoterics, or Agnostics; the former comprising those who knew that the Gods were mythical and the scriptures allegorical; and the latter, those who were taught that the Gods were real, and the scriptures historical; or, in other words, it was philosophy for the cultured few, and religion for the ignorant multitude. The initiates ...
— Astral Worship • J. H. Hill

... Leo in every posture, and with all possible gestures, his master, the artist, wanted him to look "heraldical"; that is, like some of the mythical beasts that were combinations of any and all creatures having fins, fur, feathers, or scales, such as the dragon or griffin. One day, he attempted to make out of a live lion a fanciful creature of curlicues and curliewurlies. ...
— Dutch Fairy Tales for Young Folks • William Elliot Griffis

... to my text," said La Fontaine. "Listen, Conrart, this is the morality of Epicurus, whom, besides, I consider, if I must tell you so, as a myth. Antiquity is mostly mythical. Jupiter, if we give a little attention to it, is life. Alcides is strength. The words are there to bear me out; Zeus, that is, zen, to live. Alcides, that is, alce, vigor. Well, Epicurus, that is mild watchfulness, that is protection; now ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... the uniquely decorated walls, upon which hung, here, the shrieking prospectus of a mythical gold-mine; there a small but venomous political placard, and on all sides examples of the uncouth or unusual in paid print; exploitations of grotesque quackeries; appeals, business-like, absurd, or even passionate, in ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... splendid ambition after knowledge, for the conquest of nature and for the service of man; gathering up in himself the spirit and longings and efforts of all discoverers and inventors of the arts, as they are symbolised in the mythical Prometheus. He rose to the highest place and honour; and yet that place and honour were but the fringe and adornment of all that made him great. It is difficult to imagine a grander and more magnificent career; and his name ranks among the few chosen examples of human achievement. And yet it was ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church

... classical and eminently national. Those characteristics which, in general literature, earn for a work the description "Homeric," in Jewish literature make a liturgical poem "Kaliric," so called from the poet Eliezer Kalir, the subject of many mythical tales, and the first of a long line of poets, Spanish, French, and German, extending to the sixteenth or seventeenth century. The literary history of this epoch has been written by Leopold Zunz with warmth of feeling and stupendous learning. He closes his work with the hope that mankind, at some ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles

... subject of 'The Hundred Old Tales,' whose original composition falls certainly within this century. In them Ezzelino is spoken of with the awe which all mighty impressions leave behind them. His person became the centre of a whole literature from the chronicle of eye-witnesses to the half-mythical ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt

... from the dead, the chantings of Hervor "between the worlds," are too much for the plain texture of the Sagas. Though, as has already been seen in Grettir and Gisli, this element of fantastic beauty is not wholly absent; the less substantial graces of mythical romance, "fainter and flightier" than those of epic, are sometimes to be found even in the historical prose; the historical tragedies have their accompaniment of mystery. More particularly, the story of the Death of Thidrandi whom the Goddesses ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker

... Not Impossible. The Mythical Theory. The Inner Light. Many Ignorant of God. Heathen ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson

... wrong, Mr. Anderson—if your name is Anderson. I don't know what you are trying to do, nor why you picked out steamfitting as your mythical life-work, but I do ...
— 32 Caliber • Donald McGibeny

... You can understand that I could not hope to play the Trask deception exclusively and successfully. I invented Colonel Flail and Mr. Bisland, and I contrived to render them quite as liberal in their patronage as the mythical Judge Trask himself. Occasionally a donation came in, by way of variety, from Smeaton and Holbrook and Caswell and other solitary creations of my mendacious imagination, when I used to blind poor dear Alice to the hideous ...
— The Holy Cross and Other Tales • Eugene Field

... and the rest ran away, leaving twenty-three beautiful longbows behind. The only clothing the dead men had on was snail-shells fastened to the ends of their long locks of hair. The trappers now began to seek more anxiously for the mythical settlements. "A great many times each day," says Pattie, "we bring our crafts to the shore and go out to see if we cannot discover the tracks of horses and cattle." On the 18th they thought some ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh

... verses were very silly; and, recalling the big, blundering boy who had written them, Billy began to wonder—somewhat forlornly—whither he, too, had vanished. He and the girl he had gone mad for both seemed rather mythical—legendary as King Pepin. ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell

... this total stranger helped him, what could he say to show his appreciation? He knew that all humans weren't robe-haters, why it was even rumored that some humans treated robots as equals instead of machines. The driver must be one of these mythical individuals, there was no other way to explain ...
— The Velvet Glove • Harry Harrison

... is this simple truth which, like many others, is too simple for our scientists to see. This is where they go wrong, not only about true religion, but about false religions too; so that their account of mythology is more mythical than the myth itself. I do not confine myself to saying that they are quite incorrect when they state (for instance) that Christ was a legend of dying and reviving vegetation, like Adonis or Persephone. I say that even if Adonis was a god of vegetation, they have got ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton

... taken up again by Scheffel; Goethe's "Novellen" themselves were continued by all those eminent writers whom we have already named. The Divan, with its bent toward immutable relations, prepares the way for the new lyric, until finally, with the second part of Faust, mythical world-poetry and symbolism complete the circle, just as the cycle of German literature finishes with Nietzsche, Stefan George, Spitteler and Hofmannsthal. At the same time new forces are starting to form the new ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... systematic, persistent exploration of any portion of the Australian coast. The continent grew on the map of the world gradually, slowly, almost accidentally. It emerged out of the unknown, like some vast mythical monster heaving its large shoulders dank and dripping from the unfathomed sea, and metamorphosed by a kiss from the lips of knowledge into a being fair to look upon and rich in kindly favours. It took two centuries and a half for civilised mankind to know Australia, even in form, ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott

... As Tigernmas, a mythical king of Ireland, was sacrificing "the firstlings of every issue, and the scions of every clan" to Crom Croich, the king idol, and lay prostrate before the image, he and three-fourths ...
— The Book of Hallowe'en • Ruth Edna Kelley

... ferocity—inclination to war, yet faculties for the inventions of peace; such were the attributes most honoured among men, in the progressive, but still uncivilized age which makes the interval so pre-eminently Grecian— between the mythical and historic times. Vain and impotent are all attempts to identify that religion of Achaian warriors with the religion of oriental priests. It was indeed symbolical—but of the character of its believers; typical—but of the restless, yet poetical, daring, yet graceful temperament, which afterward ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... refined. The Thracians brought into Phrygia, and the Persian magi into Cappadocia, the fast spreading belief in the immortality of mankind. Under their influence, especially under that of Mazdaism, which made the mythical steer the author of creation and of resurrection, the old savage practice assumed a more spiritual and more elevated meaning. By complying with it, people no longer thought they were acquiring the buffalo's strength; the blood, as the ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont

... along the platform to the carriages outside the station. Probably the chairman and directors of the company were also present, but our eyes were not for them. Directors were to us junior clerks, remote personalities, mythical beings dwelling on ...
— Fifty Years of Railway Life in England, Scotland and Ireland • Joseph Tatlow

... Huang-ti represent a group of rulers comprised by the Chinese under the name of San-huang, i.e. "The Three Emperors." Although we have no reason to deny their existence, the details recorded concerning them contain enough in the way of improbabilities to justify us in considering them as mythical creations. The chronology, too, is apparently quite fictitious; for the time allotted to their reigns is much too long as a term of government for a single human life, and, on the other hand, much too short, if we ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various

... wonder, miracle, curiosity, flying fish, black sheep, black swan, lusus naturae[Lat], rara avis[Lat], queer fish; mongrel, random breed; half-caste, half-blood, half-breed; metis[Lat], crossbreed, hybrid, mule, hinny, mulatto; tertium quid[Lat], hermaphrodite. [mythical animal] phoenix, chimera, hydra, sphinx, minotaur; griffin, griffon; centaur; saggittary[obs3]; kraken, cockatrice, wyvern, roc, dragon, sea serpent; mermaid, merman, merfolk[obs3]; unicorn; Cyclops, "men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders" ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... 1572—that, on the contrary, the queen mother refused, in a peremptory manner that disgusted the Spanish fanatics, every proposition that looked like violence. That we have not read the correspondence of Alva incorrectly, and that no letter containing the mythical agreement of Catharine ever reached Philip, is proved by the tone of the letters that passed between the great agents in the work of persecution in the Spanish Netherlands. Cardinal Granvelle, who, in his retreat at Besancon, was kept ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird

... The mythical traditions of almost all peoples place at the beginning of the history of the race, a "golden age," which is the opposite of savagery and barbarism. The Chinese speak of a "first heaven," an age of innocence and a state of happiness, when "all was beautiful and ...
— The Christian Foundation, March, 1880

... plate 12, Borgian Codex. Here is Tlaloc sending down rain upon the earth, from which the enlivened plants are springing forth and expanding into leaf and blossom. The earth, on which they stand and from which they arise, is represented by the figure of the mythical Cipactli. ...
— Day Symbols of the Maya Year • Cyrus Thomas

... philosophy, Daylight preempted for himself the position and vocation of a twentieth-century superman. He found, with rare and mythical exceptions, that there was no noblesse oblige among the business and financial supermen. As a clever traveler had announced in an after-dinner speech at the Alta-Pacific, "There was honor amongst thieves, and this was what ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London

... wife and stepdaughter, and not publishing the record of his travels till he was nearly ten years older. The localities are traceable on the map and in Murray, instead of being the enchanted dingles and the half-mythical woods of Lavengro. The personages of the former books return no more, though, with one of his most excellent touches of art, the author has suggested the contrast of youth and age by a single gipsy interview in one of the later chapters. Borrow, like all sensible men, was at no time ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury

... "that—well—probably such a man lived, and was a very pure and holy man, and a very remarkable teacher, certainly for his age a very remarkable teacher. But he ridicules the idea of the miracles; says he does not believe them any more than he believes in the mythical legends of Greek and Roman literature. And as to Christianity he believes its a very good sort of thing, better for America than any other religion; but he rather thinks Buddhism is very likely ...
— Laicus - The experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish • Lyman Abbott

... practices of a scatalogical character. It is significant that in the majority of cases it is easy to see a sexual reference in these stories and customs. The legends have lost their earlier and often mythical significance, and frequently take on a suggestion of obscenity, while the scatalogical practices have become the magical devices of lovelorn maidens or forsaken wives practiced in secrecy. It has happened to scatalogical rites to be regarded as we may gather from the Clouds of Aristophanes, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... poet, and even bestows rare gifts from that wealth of imagination which a host of imitators could not exhaust,—still I am far from wishing to deny that the author of these great poems found a rich fund of tradition, a well-stocked mythical storehouse, from whence he might derive both subject and embellishment. But it is one thing to use existing romances in the embellishment of a poem, another to patch up the poem itself from such materials. What consistency of style and execution can ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope

... which it is not safe to disregard. Great occurrences, such as the Trojan War and the Siege of Thebes, not long ago faithfully described by all historians of Greece, have been found to be part of the common mythical heritage of the Aryan nations. Achilleus and Helena, Oidipous and Iokasta, Oinone and Paris, have been discovered in India and again in Scandinavia, and so on, until their nonentity has become the legitimate inference from their very ubiquity. Legislators like Romulus and Numa, ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske

... fellow be? He endeavored by a mental process to eliminate himself and see but a mythical some one else in a mythical background. A short person; a tall one? What kind of person would the imaginary individual be, anyhow? And what had he done, what crime committed? Mr. Heatherbloom tried to think with the minds of all these ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham

... Theseum, a mythical hero, whose exploits resemble and rival those of Hercules. The most famous of them was the killing of the Minotaur. Theseus was the ...
— Ritchie's Fabulae Faciles - A First Latin Reader • John Kirtland, ed.

... mythical synthesis was the representation of the whole world under the form of the sacred ash tree Yggdrasil. This was the world tree which united heaven, earth, and hell. Its branches stretched across the world and reached up to the ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese

... sure that Greene's supposed debauchery is not, to a great extent, "copy." The majority of the too celebrated "jests" attributed to George Peele are directly traceable to Villon's Repues Franches and similar compilations, and have a suspiciously mythical and traditional air to the student of literary history. There is something a little more trustworthily autobiographical about Nash. But on the whole, though we need not doubt that these ancestors of all modern Englishmen ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury

... thought of meeting this traditional, this almost mythical aunt whom she had so often heard about. Sometimes she had wondered if the personality of this remarkable relative had not been a figment of her father's imagination, long pondered, and reconstructed out of half-forgotten material. But this letter ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors

... is the patronym of the kings of Colchis from mythical times onwards; e.g. Medea was the daughter ...
— Anabasis • Xenophon

... half-mythical, half-ethical; and he himself, true to the character which is given him in the Dialogue bearing his name, is half-sophist, half-enthusiast. He is the critic of poetry also, who compares Homer and Aeschylus in the insipid and irrational manner of the schools of the day, characteristically reasoning ...
— Symposium • Plato

... returned to his own town. Before he was twenty-three he had decorated Villa Porti, near Vicenza, in collaboration with Zelotti, a Veronese, portraying feasting gods and goddesses, framed in light architectural designs in monochrome. The two painters went on to other villas, mixing mortal and mythical figures in a happy, ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps

... such a wide ethical significance, and must also have held an important place in the Sceptical School in all metaphysical and philosophical discussions. The definition[5] in the beginning of Sextus' exposition of this Trope Fabricius thinks was taken from Aristotle, of schools, laws, customs, mythical beliefs and dogmatic opinions,[6] and the definition which Diogenes gives of law in his life of Plato[7] is similar. Pappenheim, however, thinks they were taken from the Stoics, perhaps from Chrysippus.[8] The ...
— Sextus Empiricus and Greek Scepticism • Mary Mills Patrick

... Gallery is a scene from the mythical story of a goddess who fell in love with the youthful son of a faun and a naiad. Thus she excited the jealous fury of the cyclops, Polythemus, who is seen in the picture herding his flock of sheep upon the high cliff ...
— Pictures Every Child Should Know • Dolores Bacon

... out by Brunetiere, Evolution de la Poesie lyrique, ii, p. 147.] Victor Hugo in that all-comprehending Legende des Siecles could find room for the Hegira and for Zim-Zizimi, but did not consecrate a single line to the departed glories of mythical Greece, the Romantic poets of England may claim to have restored in freshness and purity the religion of antiquity. Indeed their voice was so convincing that even the great Christian chorus that ...
— Proserpine and Midas • Mary Shelley

... Like Any Other Book. Two Modes of Investigation. Did the Council of Nice Make the Bible? The Mythical Theory. The Evidence of Celsus. The Fragment Hypothesis. The Bank Signature Book. Could ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson

... or mythical, but potent to lure, like the land of El Dorado, abounding in gold and jewels, which for two centuries spurred on Spanish exploration in America. Other than purely material motives may initiate or maintain such a movement, an ideal or a ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple

... implied the previous existence of our present Gospels. I do not now allude to the presence in it of added traits, such as the cave of the Nativity and the fire on Jordan, which are of the nature of those mythical details that we find more fully developed in the Apocryphal Gospels. I do not so much refer to these—though, for instance, in the case of the fire on Jordan it is highly probable that Justin's statement is a translation ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday

... in the Union has at some time been lauded as the favored spot for the cure of consumption, but, after all, it seems as mythical as the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Some climates may be better than others for those ill with this disease, but if you are a poor, homesick sufferer—a stranger in a strange land—I doubt whether the best climate on earth can vie with ...
— Confessions of a Neurasthenic • William Taylor Marrs

... the Norman Conquest; but they allowed angels to appear in epics dealing with the earlier time, almost as freely as gods intervene in Homer. In short, the Homeric poet undeniably treats the age of his heroes as having already, in the phrase of Thucydides, "won its way to the mythical," ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang

... burnt in the fields, and the very barns and stables under their windows. Nearly every night a couple of such fires blazed up, and spread terror among the farmers and landlords. The offenders were rarely discovered, and the workers attributed the incendiarism to a mythical person whom they named "Swing." Men puzzled their brains to discover who this Swing could be and whence this rage among the poor of the country districts. Of the great motive power, Want, Oppression, only a single person here and there ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels

... up, and as I had always been a good cook I cleaned up handsomely, especially as it was while I was running the restaurant that Miner started his notorious stampede, when thousands of gold-mad men followed a will-o'-the-wisp trail to fabulously rich diggings which turned out to be entirely mythical. ...
— Arizona's Yesterday - Being the Narrative of John H. Cady, Pioneer • John H. Cady

... entertainment and keen enjoyment than any book since "Graustark." Full of picturesque life and color and a delightful love-story. The scene of the story is Wallaria, one of those mythical kingdoms in Southern Europe. Maritza is the rightful heir to the throne, but is kept away from her own country. The hero is a young Englishman of noble family. It is a pleasing book of fiction. Large 12mo. size. Handsomely bound in cloth. White coated ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour

... half-mocking, yet musical voice he touched lightly on vast and distant things. He talked of the great Saskatchewan, of Peace River, and the delta of the Mackenzie, of the winter journeys beyond Great Bear Lake into the Land of the Little Sticks, and the half-mythical lake of Yamba Tooh. He spoke of life with the Dog Ribs and Yellow Knives, where the snow falls in midsummer. Before her eyes slowly spread, like a panorama, the whole extent of the great North, with its fierce, hardy men, its dreadful journeys ...
— Conjuror's House - A Romance of the Free Forest • Stewart Edward White

... in many places, though nowhere else are the blocks of such gigantic size. The Greeks of the historical period Viewed these imposing structures with as much astonishment as do we, and attributed them (of at least those in Argohs) to the Cyclopes, a mythical folk, conceived in this connection as masons of superhuman strength. Hence the adjective Cyclopian or Cyclopean, whose meaning varies unfortunately in modern usage, but which is best restricted to walls of the Tirynthian type; that is to say, walls built of large blocks not accurately fitted ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell

... higher powers. In the worldly hearer, who does not strive after this goal exclusively, this could not succeed. Since the doctrine gave no other support, the religious feeling of the laity clung to the founder of it: Jina, and with him his mythical predecessors, became gods. Monuments and temples ornamented with their statues were built, especially at those places, where the prophets, according to legends, had reached their goal. To this is added a kind of worship, consisting of offerings of flowers ...
— On the Indian Sect of the Jainas • Johann George Buehler

... up all their days to a single object—to religion, to vengeance, to some overpowering selfish wish; of daring acts done to avert death or disgrace, or some oppressing misfortune. We read mythical tales of friendship; but we do not recollect any instance in which a great object has been so unremittingly carried out throughout a whole life, in defiance of a thousand difficulties, and of numberless temptations, straining the good resolution to its utmost, except in the case ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall

... organised and alert, but it was neither; and Napoleon's secrecy and suddenness in taking the offensive were worthy of his best days. It has been freely imputed to Wellington that he was thereby in a measure surprised. There is the strange and probably mythical story in the work professing to be Fouche's Memoirs to the effect that Wellington was relying on him for information of Napoleon's plans, and that he—Fouche—played the English commander false. "On the very day of Napoleon's departure from Paris," say the Memoirs, "I despatched Madame ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes

... cannot begin to tell how much has been encompassed in these twenty-six years, but our bound volumes are full of his editorials and articles—the serious, the analytical, the constructive, the caustic, the witty and the amusing. He created The Piney Woods Clarion and in quotations from that mythical publication put a new light on the business. "Insurance Arabian Nights" which he declared were "translated from the Persian," contained more of the odd conceits that fairly flowed from his pen and these two series, with a marine policy-form insuring the "contents" of Noah's ...
— The Dead Men's Song - Being the Story of a Poem and a Reminiscent Sketch of its - Author Young Ewing Allison • Champion Ingraham Hitchcock

... Paris. He knew that the most refined and noble and disinterested of women—a woman who cannot be induced to accept anything but a bouquet—can be as dangerous an acquaintance for a young man as any opera girl of former days. As a matter of fact, the opera girl is an almost mythical being. As things are now at the theatres, dancers and actresses are about as amusing as a declaration of the rights of woman, they are puppets that go abroad in the morning in the character of respected and ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac

... countries which produced the rich fabrics in which he trafficked: he knew only that they came to Alexandria or Damascus from Far Eastern lands. For from time immemorial the Orient had been the enemy's country, little known beyond the bounds of Syria, a half-mythical land of alien races, of curious customs and infidel faiths, a land of interminable distances, rich and populous, doubtless, certainly dangerous and inaccessible. But in the thirteenth century the veil which had long shrouded Asia in mystery was ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker

... thus form some idea of the general position of American exploration and discovery at the time when Cartier made his momentous voyages. The maritime nations of Europe, in searching for a passage to the half-mythical empires of Asia, had stumbled on a great continent. At first they thought it Asia itself. Gradually they were realizing that this was not Asia, but an outlying land that lay between Europe and Asia and that must be passed by the navigator before Cathay ...
— The Dawn of Canadian History: A Chronicle of Aboriginal Canada • Stephen Leacock

... steadily; and if they imagined that the mythical staff of this general officer was clustered aloft somewhere up there where the bells hung it was impossible to tell by the strained expressions ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers

... intensified by the fact that the relationship between them was, in effect, that of servant and master; that Voltaire, under a very thin disguise, was a paid menial, while Frederick, condescend as he might, was an autocrat whose will was law. Thus the two famous and perhaps mythical sentences, invariably repeated by historians of the incident, about orange-skins and dirty linen, do in fact sum up the gist of the matter. 'When one has sucked the orange, one throws away the skin,' somebody told Voltaire ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey

... thoughts it was to me silence. I had perched my ears for the note of London, the sound made simply by the existence of five million people in one place. I had imagined something deep, vastly deep, a bass from a mythical organ, but found as far as I was ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane

... murder Washington. They communicate their knowledge to Gen. Putnam and are commissioned by him to play the role of detectives in the matter. They do so, and meet with many adventures and hairbreadth escapes. The boys are, of course, mythical, but they serve to enable the author to put into very attractive shape much valuable knowledge concerning one phase ...
— Dick, Marjorie and Fidge - A Search for the Wonderful Dodo • G. E. Farrow

... in the night time. The natives call the Amphisbaena the "Mai das Saubas," or Mother of the Saubas, and believe it to be poisonous, although it is perfectly harmless. It is one of the many curious animals which have become the subject of mythical stories with the natives. They say the ants treat it with great affection, and that if the snake be taken away from a nest, the Saubas will forsake the spot. I once took one quite whole out of the body of a young Jararaca, ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates

... labors of an African Hercules, mythical as these labors might be, was so interesting to the four men who had been drinking and smoking in the tavern, that they determined to pursue it as far as their ignorance of the African's language, and his ignorance of English and Spanish, ...
— The Adventures of Captain Horn • Frank Richard Stockton

... students of the social order of India entirely discard and ignore all Hindu mythical explanations and Puranic legends concerning this subject, and endeavour to trace the present system to its sources and primal causes through patient historic research and through a most elaborate system of anthropometric ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones

... (741) of Koken; earlier; in time of Tsunayoshi; result in stock farming; worship of; mythical and terrible beasts in ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi

... grandeur, and of the subjects of poets. (As if it were necessary to trot back generation after generation to the eastern records! As if the beauty and sacredness of the demonstrable must fall behind that of the mythical! As if men do not make their mark out of any times! As if the opening of the western continent by discovery, and what has transpired in North and South America, were less than the small theatre of the antique, or the aimless sleep-walking of the middle ages!) The pride ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman

... the make and use of the ploughshare. Read more carefully—you might indeed do well to learn at once by heart,—the twenty-seven lines of the Fourth Pythian, which describe the ploughing of Jason. There is nothing grander extant in human fancy, nor set down in human words: but this great mythical expression of the conquest of the earth-clay, and brute-force, by vital human energy, will become yet more interesting to you when you reflect what enchantment has been cut, on whiter clay, by the tracing of finer furrows;—what ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin

... Age is that period of the world's history when there was no sin, sorrow or suffering, and when all mankind was so good that there was no need of government of any sort. The Greeks, especially, but other peoples to some extent, have mythical tales of ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester

... monastery, or hall has not its traditional subterranean passage? Certainly the majority are mythical; still, there are some well authenticated. Burnham Abbey, Buckinghamshire, for example, or Tenterden Hall, Hendon, had passages which have been traced for over fifty yards; and one at Vale Royal, Nottinghamshire, has been explored for nearly a mile. In the older portions ...
— Secret Chambers and Hiding Places • Allan Fea

... came a ring at the front door, and a feeling of keen, angry annoyance shot through her. Of course it was Jack—Jack again! He would ask tiresome, inconvenient questions about the mythical woman friend, the almost sister, for whom she had required the money, and she would have to make up tiresome, inconvenient lies. Also he would want to kiss her, and she did so ...
— What Timmy Did • Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes

... for instance.... He rather inclined to the belief that the phoenix was extinct—that is, died out; and then, again, when he called to mind the singular habits with which this bird was credited, he conceived that it had never had a real but only a mythical existence—that is, it was a makebelieve bird, ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens

... learned at Bandon Fair of how the County Cork hunter is arrived at, of the Lord Hastings colt out of a high-bred Victor mare; of New Laund, of Speculation, of Whalebone, of the ancient and well-nigh mythical Druid, whose name adds a lustre to any pedigree. These things are matters far more real and serious than English history to every man and boy in the fair field, whether he is concerned in practical horse-dealing ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross

... marble mantel-piece contained but a single ornament—an orchestra. A coral vase contained a large and perfect tiger lily, made of gold. Each stamen supported a tiny figure carved out of ivory, holding a musical instrument. When they played, each figure appeared instinct with life, like the mythical fairies of my childhood; and the music was so sweet, yet faint, that I readily imagined the charmed ring and tiny dancers keeping ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley

... of Artemis and son of Zeus and Leto. The island of Delos was his mythical birthplace and his principal ...
— Odysseus, the Hero of Ithaca - Adapted from the Third Book of the Primary Schools of Athens, Greece • Homer

... ancient critiques have no appreciable bearing on our argument and we cite them rather for historical interest and retrospect.[13] [Sidenote: Festus] [Sidenote: Brix] While Festus[14] makes a painful effort to explain the location of the mythical "Portus Persicus" mentioned in the Amph.,[15] Brix[16] in modern times shows that there is no historical ground for the elaborate mythical genealogy in Men. 409 ff. We contend that "Portus Persicus" is pure fiction, as our novelists refer fondly to "Zenda" or "Graustark," ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke

... nothing then, but an imaginary existence?" exclaimed the master. "And have not mythical beings the power to influence men! Consider mythology, Monsieur Goubin, and you will perceive that they are not real beings but imaginary beings that exercise the most profound and lasting influence on the mind. Everywhere and always, beings who have no ...
— Putois - 1907 • Anatole France

... like Jonah, passed three days, ultimately escaping with the loss of his hair or rays. Chesil, the rebellious giant Orion, represented in Job as riveted to the sky, was compared to Ninus or Nimrod, the mythical founder of Nineveh (City of Fish) the mighty hunter, who slew lions and panthers before the Lord. Rahab's confederates are probably the "High ones on High," the Chesilim or constellations in Isaiah, the Heavenly Host or Heavenly ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike

... satisfied with this arrangement; and then, when husband and wife leave for distant countries, Georges, who cannot bear the thought of being parted from his dear Picciola, enters the service of the young couple and accompanies them on their honeymoon." This mythical journey gives the author opportunities for the subtle psychological analysis of a young lady's heart, strongly inclined to revolt against some of the conventions laid down by Society ...
— In Bohemia with Du Maurier - The First Of A Series Of Reminiscences • Felix Moscheles

... humbly, "it is a wonder-beautiful myth, full of true idealism. But what if it lost its purely mythical quality and became historical, actual, contemporaneous? Would it not change its aspect? Would not people object to it? Might not the Werwolf ...
— Fighting For Peace • Henry Van Dyke

... in the distant land of a fairy queen, who was proffering him, not the delights of her love, but healing for his wounds, in order that when he was made whole again he might return "to help the Britons." Historic, mythical, and romantic tradition have combined to produce the version that Layamon records. Geoffrey of Monmouth (xi. 2), writing in the mock role of serious historian and with a tendency to rationalisation, ...
— Arthurian Chronicles: Roman de Brut • Wace

... the Potsdam Grenadier Guard; that unique giant-regiment, of which the world has heard so much in a vague half-mythical way. The giant-regiment was not a Myth, however, but a big-boned expensive Fact, tramping very hard upon the earth at one time, though now gone all to the ghostly state. As it was a CLASS-BOOK, so to speak, of our Friedrich's,—Class-Book ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... the Cock and The Golden Eagle, in the latter portion of the seventeenth century. At the former Evelyn dined on one occasion with the councillors of the Board of Trade; at the latter, on January 30th, 1735, occurred the riot connected with the mythical Calf's Head Club. How the riot arose is something of a mystery. It seems, however, that a mob was gathered outside the tavern by the spreading of the report that some young nobles were dining within on a calf's head in ridicule of the execution of Charles I, and a lurid account was ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley

... is called in Cora Quemalusi, after the principal one of the five mythical men who in ancient times lived in the Sierra del Nayarit. Reports say an idol now hidden was once found here. A few miles east of Santa Teresa is a deep volcanic lake, the only remnant of the large flood, the Coras say. It is called "Mother," or "Brother," the last name containing ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz

... a special interest from the venerable age they attain. In some cases, no doubt, the age is more or less mythical, as, for instance, the Olive of Minerva at Athens, the Oaks mentioned by Pliny, "which were thought coeval with the world itself," the Fig tree, "under which the wolf suckled the founder of Rome and his brother, lasting (as Tacitus calculated) 840 years, putting out new shoots, ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock

... interpretation. To a mother her child is a wonderful being. To a true lover the girl he loves has sacredness. With Jesus the consciousness of a God of love revealed the beauty of men. The old gods were despotic supermen, mythical duplicates of the human kings and conquerors. The God of Jesus was the great Father who lets his light shine on the just and the unjust, and offers forgiveness and love to all. Jesus lived in the spiritual atmosphere of that faith. Consequently he saw men from that point ...
— The Social Principles of Jesus • Walter Rauschenbusch

... separately. They were no doubt written for magazines, and were lying by him, but his Bath story—"The True Legend of Prince Bladud"—was written specially. It is quite in the vein of Elia's Roast Pig story, and very gaily told. He had probably been reading some local guide-book, with the mythical account of Prince Bladud, and this suggested to him his own humorous version. At the close, he sets Mr. Pickwick a-yawning several times, who, when he had arrived at the end of this little manuscript—which certainly could not have been compressed ...
— Pickwickian Studies • Percy Fitzgerald

... is mythical and uncertain concerning Lycurgus that many have doubted whether he ever lived. Curtius, however, says, "There really lived in the ninth century B.C. a legislator of the name of Lycurgus." Lycurgus formed the constitution which gave Sparta its peculiar ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley

... frequent commendation in after years indicated that I gained his goodwill before the close of the war, if not when I first came to his notice; and a more intimate association convinced me that the cold and cruel characteristics popularly ascribed to him were more mythical ...
— The Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan, Vol. I., Part 3 • P. H. Sheridan

... part of the entire weight of a man. Wherefore either the strength of the muscles ought to be increased or the weight of the human body must be decreased, so that the same proportion obtains in it as exists in birds. Hence it is deducted that the Icarian invention is entirely mythical because impossible, for it is not possible either to increase a man's pectoral muscles or to diminish the weight of the human body; and whatever apparatus is used, although it is possible to increase the momentum, the velocity or the power employed ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian

... pass into the world of the supernatural. Even in the case of a hero so surrounded with historic light as Cuculain we find a halo, as of godhood, often settling around him. His gray warsteed had already passed into the realm of mythical representation, as a second avatar of the Liath Macha, the grey war-horse of the war-goddess Macha. This could be believed, even in the days when the imagination was controlled by ...
— Early Bardic Literature, Ireland • Standish O'Grady

... his act? Averbuch, like most young Russian immigrants, undoubtedly believed in the mythical liberty of America. He received his first baptism by the policeman's club during the brutal dispersement of the unemployed parade. He further experienced American equality and opportunity in the vain efforts to find an economic master. In short, a three ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman

... was in company with a very stout gentleman in shirt sleeves and an apron, clasping Jonas by both hands and laughing hilariously. Then Teta Elzbieta recollected suddenly that Szedvilas had been the name of the mythical friend who had made his fortune in America. To find that he had been making it in the delicatessen business was an extraordinary piece of good fortune at this juncture; though it was well on in the morning, they had not breakfasted, and the ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair

... every word is a name designating a quality or an act, transformed by the imagination into substance. Max Mueller has translated a page of Hesiod, substituting the analytic, abstract, rational language of our time for the image-making names. Immediately, all the mythical material vanishes. Thus, "Selene kisses the sleeping Endymion" becomes the dry formula, "It is night." The most skilled linguists often declare themselves unable to change the pliant tongue of the imaginative ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot

... from kings, all else was ignored. At that table there were those who had once reigned themselves, others lawfully claimed descent from kings that the world had forgotten, the kingdoms claimed by some had even changed their names. Hatzgurh, the mountain kingdom, is almost regarded as mythical. ...
— Tales of Wonder • Lord Dunsany

... distant and mythical past, sergeant, but he'd be mighty useful if we had him here. If even a single one of his hundred eyes were to light on Stonewall Jackson, it would be ...
— The Sword of Antietam • Joseph A. Altsheler

... discussing the mythical search for certain supplies that Mother Corey had apparently used as an alibi for their absence from the building. Sheila started to make coffee, but he shook his head and headed for the bed. She yawned and nodded, fingering the stitches ...
— Police Your Planet • Lester del Rey

... clothes, filled the hold with corn, and consigned her to the seven mouths of the Nile, and since she weighed anchor nothing more has been heard of her fate. The next great ship worthy of mention is the mythical Saracen encountered in the Mediterranean Sea by the crusading fleet of Richard CIur de Lion, Duke of Guienne and King of England, which, after much slaughter and damage incident to its infidel habit of vomiting Greek fire upon its adversaries, was captured and sunk. ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs

... slang for Irish, from Milesius, mythical Spanish conqueror of Ireland; Evreux town in Normandy, France; a D'Uzes a member of an ancient ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper

... sometimes obscure, certain main conclusions clearly emerge. In early Europe there were, according to Grimm, only two seasons, sometimes regarded as spring and winter, sometimes as spring and autumn, and for mythical purposes these seasons were alone available.[143] The appearance of each of these two seasons was inaugurated by festivals which were religious and often erotic in character. The Slavonic year began in March, at which time there was formerly, it ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... the coast of Thrace near the mouth of the Nestos, and almost opposite Thasos. Its mythical foundation was attributed to Heracles, its historical to a colony from Clazomenae in the 7th century B.C. But its prosperity dates from 544 B.C., when the majority of the people of Teos migrated to Abdera after the Ionian revolt to escape ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... "A purely mythical prisoner. It was an attempt in the first place by some one who knew something of the domestic situation, probably a discharged valet, to bluff a lump sum out of Edward Umberleigh before the missing woman turned up; the subsequent yearly instalments were an unlooked-for ...
— The Toys of Peace • Saki

... Lamiâ, said in Kashmîr to be a snake 200 years old, and to possess the power of becoming a woman. In India, especially in the hill districts, it is called Yahawwâ. In this tale the Lamiâ is described as being a Wâsdeo, a mythical serpent. Wâsdeo is the same as Vâsudeva, a descendant of Vasudeva. Vasudeva was the earthly father of Krishna and of his elder brother Balarâma, so Balarâma was a Vâsudeva. Balarâma in the classics is constantly mixed up ...
— Tales Of The Punjab • Flora Annie Steel

... season, the Canton High eleven had won greater laurels. Canton had played some of the best schools in the state and had emerged victorious. It would be hard to prophesy what would happen when Canton met Trumbull. State sporting authorities began to figure the Canton-Trumbull encounter a mythical championship battle providing both elevens won the remaining games on ...
— Over the Line • Harold M. Sherman

... everywhere completely interwoven with that of their mysterious, continually invasive "Danes," as they call them, and inextricably unintelligible till these also get to be a little understood, and cease to be utterly dark, hideous, and mythical to ...
— Early Kings of Norway • Thomas Carlyle

... our approaching relief. It has become such a regular thing, this siege life, and all other kinds of life are somehow so far away and so impossible after what we have gone through, that we look upon the outer world as something mythical.... Some men have their minds a little unhinged; two are absolutely mad. One, a poor devil of a Norwegian missionary, who has been living in misery for years in a vain effort to make converts, became so dangerous long ago that he had to be locked up, and even bound. But one night ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale

... permanent prosperity. He points out the succession in which his labors must follow if he determines to lead a life of industry, and gives wise rules of economy for the management of a family; and to illustrate and enforce the principal idea, he ingeniously combines with his precepts mythical narratives, fables, and descriptions. The "Theogony" of Hesiod is a production of the highest importance, as it contains the religious faith of Greece. It was through it that Greece first obtained a religious code, which, although without external sanction or priestly ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta

... Pope. His opinions upon the subject were in part the outcome of his friendship with Lord Acton, a historian to whom learning and judgment had not been granted in equal proportions, and who, after years of incredible and indeed well-nigh mythical research, had come to the conclusion that the Pope could err. In this Mr. Gladstone entirely concurred, though he did not share the rest of his friend's theological opinions; for Lord Acton, while straining at the gnat of Infallibility, had swallowed the camel of the ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey

... of wealthy progenitors had come to the Northland in search of laurels, with much money to burn, and a 'man' apiece. Luckily for their souls, the other two men were up the White River in search of a mythical quartz-ledge; so Sandy had to grin under the responsibility of three healthy masters, each of whom was possessed of peculiar cookery ideas. Twice that morning had a disruption of the whole camp been imminent, only ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London

... and how it will be. Aye, even to the memories which were the possession of that far future youth, who was indeed I, of his childhood's days, when his nurse of that Age swung him, and crooned impossible lullabies of this mythical sun which, according to those future fairy-tales, had once passed across the blackness that now lay ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson

... to a mythical story current in Poland, three brothers, Lech, Czech, and Rus, were the founders of the Polish, Bohemian, and ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz

... plant itself but mythical, Set in the fresco of tradition's wall Like Jotham's bramble, mattereth not ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... tales of mythical heroes have some slight historical basis, they have been so adorned by the fancy of mediaeval bards, and so frequently remodeled with utter disregard of all chronological sequence, that the kernel of truth is very hard to find, and the stories must ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber

... I, who drove him upon it! This disgrace, loss nigh ruinous; in fine, this infernal Campaign (CETTE CAMPAGNE INFEMALE)!" The Anecdote-Books abound in details of Friedrich's behavior at Wilsdruf that day; mythical all, or in good part, but symbolizing a case that is conceivable to everybody. Or would readers care to glance into the very fact with their own eyes? As happens ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... on KRIYA. "The text of the BHAGAVAD GITA is a part of the great epic, the MAHABHARATA, which possesses several knot-points (VYAS-KUTAS)," Sri Ananda wrote. "Keep those knot-points unquestioned, and we find nothing but mythical stories of a peculiar and easily-misunderstood type. Keep those knot-points unexplained, and we have lost a science which the East has preserved with superhuman patience after a quest of thousands of years of experiment. {FN35-20} It was the commentaries of Lahiri Mahasaya which ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda

... hack along the Old Ridge Road, as if she belonged to another outfit; and yet, I knew how much of a Fewkes she was, as she joined in the conversation when they planned their great estates in the mythical state of Negosha, or in Texas, or even in California. I grew hot with anger as I began to realize what a humiliation this tarring and feathering would be to her—and I kept wondering, as I have said, where she could be, even as I felt ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick

... barely whisper my suspicion that there were no such things in Kansas as "free-State Democrats"—that they were altogether mythical, good only to figure in newspapers and speeches in the free States. If there should prove to be one real living free-State Democrat in Kansas, I suggest that it might be well to catch him, and stuff and preserve his skin as an interesting specimen of that soon-to-be ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln

... was undertaken to counteract the impression made by STRAUSS'S "Life of Christ," in which the attempt was made to apply the mythical theory to the entire structure of evangelical history. According to Strauss, the sum of the historical truth contained in the narratives of the evangelists is, that Jesus lived and taught in Judea, where he gathered disciples who believed that he ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various

... some thought fabric which they put before the mores, although it was found out after the mores had established the relations. In the case in which the fixed mores do not conform to new interests and needs crises arise. Moses, Zoroaster, Manu, Solon, Lycurgus, and Numa are either mythical or historical culture heroes, who are said to have solved such crises by new "laws," and set the society in motion again. The fiction of the intervention of a god or a hero is necessary to account for a reconstruction of the mores of the ancestors ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner

... of ideas may seem amusing, but it is not more absurd than the existing popular idea that Stonehenge is of Druidical origin. The stone circle of Salisbury Plain was many hundred years old when those half mythical Celtic priests first set foot in England, and the Druids of yesterday have about as much connection with Stonehenge as the ...
— Stonehenge - Today and Yesterday • Frank Stevens

... reason for doing it. Why not? No reply is possible from the Militarist, disable-your-enemy point of view. If disablement is your will, there is your way, and the only effectual way. We really must not call the Kaiser and Von Bernhardi disciples of the mythical Neech when they have either overlooked or shrunk from such a glaring "biological necessity." A pair of puling pious sentimentalists if you like. But Supermen! Nonsense. O, my brother journalists, if you revile the Prussians, call them sheep led by snobs, call them beggars on horseback, ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various

... there is a house shown at Eisleben as Luther's birthplace, but it is "not well authenticated." (p. 2.) There is a bar and a restaurant in this particular building now, for the accommodation of foreign visitors. It is possible that in this mythical birthplace of Luther you can get a stein of foaming "monk's brew" or a "benedictine" from the monastery at Fecamp, or a "chartreuse" from Tarragona, distilled according to the secret formula of the holy fathers of La Grande Chartreuse. If you sip a sufficient quantity of ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau

... literally martyred in this cause have faced their death for the sake of the paltry coppers they collected to keep body and soul together. Such may possibly find no difficulty in persuading themselves that this is but another attempt to raise money to augment that mythical fortune which I, who never yet drew a penny beyond mere out-of-pocket expenses from the Salvation Army funds, am supposed to be accumulating. From all such I ask only the tribute of their abuse, assured that the worst they say of me is too mild to describe the infamy of my conduct if they are ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth

... But that of the milliards of human beings who have inhabited the Earth, not one should have been found invariably to choose Good, proves how insufficient is the solution. Hence no one believes in the existence of the complete man under the present state of things. The Hj rejects all popular and mythical explanation by the Fall of Adam, the innate depravity of human nature, and the absolute perfection of certain Incarnations, which argues their divinity. He can only wail over the prevalence of evil, assume its foundation to ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton

... of armed knights and warriors are supposed to haunt these scenes of ancient slaughter, and popular superstition has handed down the memory of the battles which were fought so long ago. It tells us of the mythical records of the fights of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table by the banks of the River Douglas, which ran with blood for three days, so terrible was the slaughter. It tells us how stubbornly the Britons resisted the Roman armies, so that on one occasion ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield

... By dint of using such expressions as "It is said," "It is rumoured," "The report about the Criminal Courts Building is," "An informant high in the police department," and crediting much to a mythical "gambler who is operating quietly uptown," we managed to tell some ...
— Guy Garrick • Arthur B. Reeve

... through the voting in the Provinces. Obsequious officials returned to the use of the old Imperial phraseology and Yuan Shih-kai, even before his "election," was memorialized as though he were the legitimate successor of the immense line of Chinese sovereigns who stretch back to the mythical days of Yao and Shun (2800 B.C.). The beginning of December saw the voting completed and the results telegraphed to Peking; and on the 11th December, the Senate hastily meeting, and finding that "the National Convention of Citizens" had unanimously ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale

... of the relations of man and nature. Moments of their growth, as treated by mythological science. Their similar forms, explained variously, the topic of the philosophy of mythology. The ante-mythical period. Myths have centred chiefly around three subjects, each giving rise to ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton

... these things when a piece of news, very strange and unexpected, arrived at the rectory. A distant, almost a mythical relative, known from childhood as "Cousin Edward in the Isle of Wight," had died, and by some strange freak had left Lucian two thousand pounds. It was a pleasure to give his father five hundred pounds, ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen

... known as the deluge, which, it is claimed, took place either in Armenia, at Cashgar, or at some other place in the East, is observed, in later ages, to furnish a covering beneath which have been veiled the mythical doctrines of the priests. Of the catastrophes which from time to time have visited our planet, and of the belief which has come to be entertained by ecclesiastics that the earth will be destroyed by fire, ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble

... sustenance and defence constituted the basis of tribal society. The latter clusters were the clans, and they originated during the beginnings of the human family. Every clan formed a group of supposed blood-relatives, looking back to a mythical or traditional common ancestor. Descent from the mother being always plain, the clan claimed descent in the female line even if every recollection of the female ancestor were lost, and theoretically all the members of one clan were so many brothers and sisters. ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier

... extraordinary and mythical narration of events is employed in order to stir his readers with wonder and to make his hearers strongly impressed. Whence he seems to have said some things contrary to what is likely. For the persuasive always follows where the remarkable and elevated are previously conjoined. ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch

... from teotl, god, deity. The description in the text of the relations of land and water in this mythical land, ...
— American Hero-Myths - A Study in the Native Religions of the Western Continent • Daniel G. Brinton

... the wonder and the glory of such a sight. Once there were two chariots—one held the band in red-and-blue uniforms, and was drawn by eighteen piebald horses; and the other was drawn by a troop of Shetland ponies, and carried in a vast mythical sea-shell little boys in spangled tights and little girls in the gauze skirts and wings of fairies. There was not a flaw in this splendor to the young eyes that gloated on it, and that followed it ...
— A Boy's Town • W. D. Howells

... the | social factor in scientific research | and in determining its ends, places | his philosophy on a radically | different plane from that of the | followers of Hermetic tradition." | | In DE SAPIENTIA VETERUM Bacon | describes Orpheus as the mythical | prototype of the philosopher ("Orpheus | sive Philosophia", VI, 646-649). | | 1B. | Bacon gives the following | definition of "interpretation: "that | reason which is elicited from facts | by a just and methodological process, | I call INTERPRETATION ...
— Valerius Terminus: of the Interpretation of Nature • Sir Francis Bacon

... science advances, the more of precious poetry and pathos, and of deep verity, too, is seen in the Saviour-gods, who are essentially the same mythical personifications of the glorious sun and of the happy events of its annual career, because from it the earth with its brother and sister planets had their origin, and because from it the earth, not to speak of the other planets, has the heat, light and force ...
— Communism and Christianism - Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View • William Montgomery Brown

... feasts. A mythical sorceress, who feasted mariners landed on her shores, and by charmed drinks changed them to swine. Ulysses spent a year with her, and frustrated ...
— Palamon and Arcite • John Dryden

... the introduction of dates, may give us sufficient ground for identifying the period with which a novel deals. Of course the question as to whether a particular person or event is truly historical, is not always an easy one to answer. By the adaptation in it of some purely mythical character or event, a novel is no more constituted "historical" than is a Fairy-tale by the adaptation of folklore. King Arthur and Robin Hood are unhistorical, and, if I have ventured to insert in my list certain tales ...
— A Guide to the Best Historical Novels and Tales • Jonathan Nield

... people perished. It was only after this inundation took place that the city of Amsterdam arose on the southwest shore of the Zuyder Zee. The story, with the exception of the inundation, is purely mythical.] ...
— Contes et lgendes - 1re Partie • H. A. Guerber

... generally found in the vicinity of the coral banks of Polynesia, to the eastward of New Guinea, and not in the direction of the Australian coast, there is much reason to think that the Chinese claim to the discovery of this continent is purely mythical, although, like the ancients, they may have believed in its existence as ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc

... flame. And in the very midst of it stood the outlaw in his familiar attitude, with one forefoot slightly raised, his head high, his nostrils distended, his dark eyes filled with fire. There had never been anything so bright and beautiful. His golden hide gleamed with planetary splendor, like the mythical horses of the sun. This was The Horse, the golden epiphany of the brute, the answer to all of Haig's fears and resolutions. And in the very hour of ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham

... exciting attention. It was a novelty to me, that Arnold treated these questions as matters of indifference to religion; and did not hesitate to say, that the account of Noah's deluge was evidently mythical, and the history of Joseph "a beautiful poem." I was staggered at this. If all were not descended from Adam, what became of St. Paul's parallel between the first and second Adam, and the doctrine of Headship and Atonement founded on it? If the world ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman

... the son of Anu, Gibil-Nusku is brought into association with the two other members of the triad, Bel and Ea. He is the messenger of Bel and the son of Ea. The former conception is again mythical. Fire is also the instrument of the gods, and Nusku is particularly called the messenger of Bel because Bel is one of the highest gods. In reality he is the messenger of all the gods, and is frequently ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow

... study, the tales have been roughly divided into three parts. The first, which deals with the mythical period, contains thirty-one tales of similar type in which the characters are for the most part the same, although the last five tales do not properly fit into the cycle, and the concluding story of Indayo is evidently ...
— Traditions of the Tinguian: A Study in Philippine Folk-Lore • Fay-Cooper Cole

... (q.v.; 1480-1554) was the first man of letters produced in Denmark. He edited and published, at Paris in 1514, the Latin text of the old chronicler, Saxo Grammaticus; he worked up in their present form the beautiful half-mythical stories of Karl Magnus (Charlemagne) and Holger Danske (Ogier the Dane). He further translated the Psalms of David and the New Testament, printed in 1529, and finally—in conjunction with Bishop ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various

... life deserves particular emphasis for the reason that there has recently been growing up among the lumber-camps from the Bay of Fundy to Puget Sound the legend of a mythical hero named Paul Bunyan who is the only personage of the sort yet invented and elaborated by the ordinary run of men in any American calling. Paul is less a patron saint of the loggers than an autochthonous Munchausen, ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren



Words linked to "Mythical" :   mythical place, mythic, mythical monster, unreal, mythical being, mythologic, fabulous, mythological, mythical creature



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