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Mythological   Listen
adjective
Mythological, Mythologic  adj.  
1.
Of or pertaining to mythology or to myths; as, mythological creatures.
2.
Based on or told of in traditional stories; lacking factual basis or historical validity; mythical; fabulous.
Synonyms: fabulous, mythic, mythical.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Mythological" Quotes from Famous Books



... life and death; it is to the literature of the Assyrians. Among those tablets of terra-cotta from the library of Assurbanipal that are now preserved in the British Museum, George Smith discovered, in 1873, a mythological document in which the descent of Istar to the infernal regions in search of her lover Tammouz is recounted. Of this he gives a first translation, which is already out of date. Since his discovery was announced, ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot

... Penri, the aged chief of Piratori; Ishanashte of Shumunkot; Kannariki of Poropet (Jap. Horobetsu); and Kuteashguru of Sapporo. Tomtare of Y[u]rap does not appear for the reason mentioned above, which spoilt all his usefulness. The only mythological names which appear are Okikurumi, whom the Ainos regard as having been their civilizer in very ancient times, his sister-wife Turesh, or Tureshi[hi] and his henchman Samayunguru. The "divine symbols," of which such constant mention is made in the tales, are the inao or whittled sticks ...
— Aino Folk-Tales • Basil Hall Chamberlain

... sacred to lovers the poet (in a dream, of course, and this time conducted by the arch-dreamer Scipio in person) enters a garden containing in it the temple of the god of Love, and filled with inhabitants mythological and allegorical. Here he sees the noble goddess Nature, seated upon a hill of flowers, and around her "all the fowls that be," assembled as by time honoured custom on St. Valentine's Day, "when every fowl comes there ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward

... humor as they have, too, is of the coarsest kind, and is expressed chiefly in rude practical jokes, or the bloody overreaching of the poor thick-headed Trolls, who are the butts of the stories and the victims of their heroes. There is good ethnological and mythological reason why the Trolls should be butts and victims, it is true; but that is not to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various

... let her pull her fingers, and the number will be equal to the cracks heard. In fact we have nearly as many signs, omens, charms, and freits as our forefathers had. We have legendary lore concerning the supernatural, we have mythological fables, forecasts, fatalities, our spell-bound individuals, our fey persons, and those who have had glamour cast into their eyes. None of us are likely to forget the New Year, Christmas, St. Valentine's ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant

... on this account devised wanderings, castrations, battles and lacerations of the gods, and many other such symbols of the truth about divine natures which this theology conceals;—this mode he rejects, and asserts that it is in every respect most foreign from erudition. But he considers those mythological discourses about the gods as more persuasive and more adapted to truth, which assert that a divine nature is the cause of all good, but of no evil, and that it is void of all mutation, comprehending in itself ...
— Introduction to the Philosophy and Writings of Plato • Thomas Taylor

... deities. But when these get too numerous they take them on a pilgrimage to some sacred river and deposit them in it. A man who has lost both parents will invite some man and woman on Akshaya Tritiya, [35] and call them by the names of his parents, and give them a feast. Among the mythological stories known to the caste is one of some interest, explaining how the dark spots came on the face of the moon. They say that once all the gods were going to a dinner-party, each riding on his favourite animal or vahan (conveyance). ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell

... from Elba, an historical fact as marvellous and incredible as the exploits of some mythological demi-god, found General D'Hubert still quite unable to sit a horse. Neither could he walk very well. These disabilities, which Madame Leonie accounted most lucky, helped to keep her brother out of all possible mischief. His ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad

... sceptical view. For 1) if the quarrel between the brothers were a fiction, we should expect it to be detailed at length and not noticed allusively and rather obscurely—as we find it; 2) as MM. Croiset remark, if the poet needed a lay-figure the ordinary practice was to introduce some mythological person—as, in fact, is done in the "Precepts of Chiron". In a word, there is no more solid ground for treating Perses and his quarrel with Hesiod as fictitious than there would be for treating Cyrnus, the ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod

... the morning of the day. There was a holy joy in the air. The neighbors, up earlier than usual, hung cloths with flowers or figures, worked in tapestry, along the streets. I went from one to another, by turns admiring religious scenes of the Middle Ages, mythological compositions of the Renaissance, old battles in the style of Louis XIV, and the Arcadias of Madame de Pompadour. All this world of phantoms seemed to be coming forth from the dust of past ages, to assist—silent and motionless—at the holy ceremony. I looked, alternately in fear and ...
— An "Attic" Philosopher, Complete • Emile Souvestre

... of these antique races as the artist has employed in painting them, not to speak of skill in deciphering allegories; but to be impressed with their wonderful richness, grandeur, and beauty, requires no learning, beyond a true eye and a mind capable of feeling. Besides, these mythological pictures, the symbolical men of history are introduced, such as Moses and Solon. The Grecian mythological part is not yet completed, the artist having reserved that to be done next summer; in it he intends to lay himself out as on a favorite and ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various

... This animistic and mythological habit of thought still holds its own at the confines of knowledge, where mechanical explanations are not found. In ourselves, where nearness makes observation difficult, in the intricate chaos of animal and human life, we still appeal to the efficacy of will and ideas, ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana

... my profound indebtedness, for the central mythological idea embodied in this tale, to Mr. J.G. Frazer's admirable and epoch-making work, "The Golden Bough," whose main contention I have endeavored incidentally to popularize in my present story. I wish also to express my ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen

... ways, equally conclusive, of criticizing this conception, in both its alleged foundations and in its educational application. (1) Perhaps the most direct mode of attack consists in pointing out that the supposed original faculties of observation, recollection, willing, thinking, etc., are purely mythological. There are no such ready-made powers waiting to be exercised and thereby trained. There are, indeed, a great number of original native tendencies, instinctive modes of action, based on the original connections of neurones in the central nervous ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey

... had rightly chosen among the powers invisible, and found their choice a great god above all gods. So the future may suffer not from the loss but the multiplicity of faith; and its fate be far more like the cloudy and mythological war in the desert than like the dry radiance of theism or monism. I have said nothing here of my own faith, or of that name on which, I am well persuaded, the world will be most wise to call. But I do believe that the tradition founded in that far tribal ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton

... under the safest of commanders, to feel comfortable in such circumstances. The siren still wails, and like Ulysses and his companions I feel very much inclined to stuff my ears with wax. Indeed, peering out of my porthole through the mist, I almost seem to see the figures of the mythological voyager and his companions carved in ice, no doubt beguiled by the treacherous music of the siren. These are in reality our main ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss

... Thorwald to the cormorant skimming over the waves, and says he will never take it. "Snap at flies," a very common Icelandic metaphor from fish rising to a fly. (7) Maurer thinks the allusion is here to some mythological legend on Odin's adventures which has not come down to us. (8) "He that giant's," etc., Thor. (9) "Mew-field's bison," the sea-going ship, which sails over the plain of the sea-mew. (10) "Bell's warder," the Christian priest whose ...
— Njal's Saga • Unknown Icelanders

... The fact is he has long been afraid of overrating their intrinsic value. But as the great Shelley centenary year has come, perhaps this little monument of his wife's collaboration may take its modest place among the tributes which will be paid to his memory. For Mary Shelley's mythological dramas can at least claim to be the proper setting for some of the most beautiful lyrics of the poet, which so far have been read in undue isolation. And even as a literary sign of those times, as an example of that classical renaissance which the romantic ...
— Proserpine and Midas • Mary Shelley

... conditions that then prevailed, to select the books that seemed to them to contain the truth. It is impossible to believe that if the majority at these Councils had supposed that such an account as the account in Genesis of the Creation was mythological, they would thus have attested its literal truth. It never occurred to them to doubt it, because they did not understand the principle that, while a normal event can be accepted, if it is fairly well confirmed, an abnormal event requires a far greater amount of converging testimony ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson

... omitted], and that their school learning carried them not as far as the letter, but only to the game of taw. How were they to be inspired by such subjects? From having seen Talma and Mademoiselle Georges flaunting in sham Greek costumes, and having read up the articles Eudamidas, Hecuba, in the "Mythological Dictionary." What a classicism, inspired by rouge, gas-lamps, and a few lines in Lempriere, and copied, half from ancient statues, and half from a naked guardsman at one shilling and sixpence ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray

... probability strongly against a disguise which I have never met with in actual life; but by this time I heard the clatter of horses' feet approaching rapidly from both sides. The prospective violation of my incognito by a hap-hazard audience made my position more and more admirable from a mythological point of view, so I straightway vaulted over the fence, and ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy

... pell mell fashion one with the other; the choruses are free and performed in the open air, namely: soprano and alto- -flocks of geese; tenor and bass—cattle;—so that a conductor like O.B. would have nothing further to do than to pose as a mythological figure... ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 2: "From Rome to the End" • Franz Liszt; letters collected by La Mara and translated

... degree of divine inspiration which was vouchsafed to them, arise to the degree of HAXA, or chief priestess, from which comes the word Hexe, now universally used for a witch; a circumstance which plainly shows that the mythological system of the ancient natives of the North had given to the modern language an appropriate word for distinguishing those females who had intercourse ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott

... floods in a motley procession of painted females and masked men-the former in dresses as varied in hue as the fires of remorse burning out their unuttered thoughts. Two and two they jeer and crowd their way along into the spacious hall, the walls of which are frescoed in extravagant mythological designs, the roof painted in fret work, and the cornices interspersed with seraphs in stucco and gilt. The lights of two massive chandeliers throw a bewitching refulgence over a scene at once picturesque and mysterious; ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams

... to seven years of age the child passes her time with chambermaids who teach her only a little catechism, "with an infinite number of ghost stories." About this time she is taken care of; but in a way which well portrays the epoch. The Marquise, her mother, the author of mythological and pastoral operas, has a theater built in the chateau; a great crowd of company resorts to it from Bourbon-Lancy and Moulins; after rehearsing twelve weeks the little girl, with a quiver of arrows and blue wings, plays the part of Cupid, and the costume is so becoming she is allowed ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine

... mythological tunnel where everybody went in old and came out young. This conversation has been like that. Since we have talked," said Varney, "I have knocked thirty years off your age. But much remains to be told—and that is the game. ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison

... drinking and joking, kept the company amused. . . . And in order that the people might not be excluded from this new beatitude (a thing which was important to the Magnifico), he composed and set in order many mythological representations, triumphal cars, dances, and every kind of festal celebration, to solace and delight them; and thus he succeeded in banishing from their souls any recollection of their ancient greatness, in making them ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead

... walk was largely upon this adventure, and we wondered if the ferns could not have been found as easily on the other side of the loch as on this—but then we knew that Love is proverbially blind, and we consigned this fern story to the region of our mythological remembrances, and were still in good humour and not too tired when we reached the Cairndow inn, where we were hospitably, sumptuously, and we could safely add, when we paid the bill next morning, expensively entertained. But was this partly accounted for by the finely flavoured ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor

... made some ten years after the first of Cartier's voyages, has pictured upon it a group of figures that represent the landing of the navigator and his followers among the Indians of Gaspe. It was the fashion of the time to attempt by such decorations to make maps vivid. Demons, deities, mythological figures and naked savages disported themselves along the borders of the maps and helped to decorate unexplored spaces of earth and ocean. Of this sort is the illustration on the map in question. But it is generally agreed that we have no right to identify Cartier with ...
— The Mariner of St. Malo: A Chronicle of the Voyages of Jacques Cartier • Stephen Leacock

... period of his life, which was wholly passed in Florence and its neighborhood, Leonardo painted several other pictures of a very different character, and designed some beautiful cartoons of sacred and mythological subjects, which showed that his sense of the beautiful, the elevated, and the graceful was not less a part of his mind than that eccentricity and almost perversion of fancy which made him delight in sketching ugly, exaggerated caricatures, and representing ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various

... hero-legends and myths we are sometimes confronted with the curious fact that a hero whose name and date can be ascertained with exactitude has yet in his story mythological elements which seem to belong to all the ages. This anomaly arises chiefly from the fact that the imagination of a people is a myth-making thing, and that the more truly popular the hero the more likely he is to become ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt

... street into a large court, surrounded with a corridor, the arches of which support a second series of arches above. The picture-rooms open from one into another, and have many points of magnificence, being large and lofty, with vaulted ceilings and beautiful frescos, generally of mythological subjects, in the flat central part of the vault. The cornices are gilded; the deep embrasures of the windows are panelled with wood-work; the doorways are of polished and variegated marble, or covered with a composition as hard, ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... Literature of the Indo-Chinese Nations, recently published in Volume 10 of the Asiatic Researches. The substance of the information conveyed by them is as follows; and I trust it will not be thought that the mixture of a portion of mythological fable in accounts of this nature invalidates what might otherwise have credit as historical fact. The utmost indeed we can pretend to ascertain is what the natives themselves believe to have been their ancient history; and it is proper ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden

... doctrine of transmigration. Hence, referring to bygone times, we are told by Empedocles that "there are two destinies for the souls of highest virtue —to pass either into trees or into the bodies of lions."[28] Amongst the numerous illustrations of this mythological conception may be noticed the story told by Ovid,[29] who relates how Baucis and Philemon were rewarded in this manner for their charity to Zeus, who came a poor wanderer to their home. It appears that they not only lived to an extreme old age, but at the last were transformed ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer

... in the country were originally the gods of Chinese or Korean craftsmen; but I think that Japanese mythology, as a whole, will prove to offer few important exceptions to the evolutional law. Indeed, Shinto presents us with a mythological hierarchy of which the development can be satisfactorily explained by that law alone. Besides the Ujigami, there are myriads of superior and of inferior deities. There are the primal deities, of whom only the names are mentioned,—apparitions of the period of chaos; and there are the gods of creation, ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn

... has made rapid strides among comparatively modern peoples and nations, not only traces of mythological, but entire religious observances, reclothed in Christian costumes, are still kept up. Praying to an apple tree to yield an abundant crop was the habit of the Bohemian peasant, until Christian teaching ...
— A History of Nursery Rhymes • Percy B. Green

... as a warrior, but as a patron and protector of letters, is Sargon's name destined to a sure place in history. He classified and translated into the Semitic, or Assyrian tongue the religious, mythological, and astronomical literature of the Accadians, and deposited the books in great libraries, which he established or enlarged,—the oldest and most valuable libraries of the ancient world. The scholar Sayce calls ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers

... the Dutch mind. People developed a morbid taste for everything classical; and when I read in the prose works and poems of these days the Latinised names and the constant allusions to Greek gods and goddesses and mythological personages, so strangely out of place under our northern sky, I am filled ...
— Rembrandt • Josef Israels

... the narrow aisle staring at the apotheosis of this brilliant creature in whose existence they had collaborated. They had the mythological experience of two old peasants seeing their child translated as in a chariot of fire. Their eyes were dazzled with tears, for they had mourned her as lost, either dead in body or dead of soul. They had imagined her drowned and floating ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes

... Brun changed his design, seeing the King had no love for Bacchus, but he left the Thundering Jove, and all the other mythological flatteries, in regard to which no opinion ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan

... find a place? What about the long-drawn-out conversations in books and on the stage that are attributed to historical persons? What about the actions attributed to them, which need not be true but only seem to be so? The supernatural element is the only thing lacking to make such works mythological in ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens

... of London represented Blake's four great mythological personages, the Zoas, and also the four elements. These few sentences were the foundation of all study of the philosophy of William Blake, that requires an exact knowledge for its pursuit and that traces the connection ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats

... would rather write books of my own imagining than be hired to develop the ideas of an engraver; especially as the pecuniary prospect is not better, nor so good, as it might be elsewhere. I intend to adhere to my former plan of writing one or two mythological story-books, to be published under O'Sullivan's auspices in New York,—-which is the only place where books can be published with a chance of profit. As a matter of courtesy, I may call on Mr. ———, if I have time; but I do not intend to ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 2. • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... an immediate collapse of the dream in which he had for the splendid previous space of time been living. The young Lord himself, in his radiant costly barbarism, figured far better than John Berridge could do the prepossessing shepherd, the beautiful mythological mortal "distinguished" by a goddess; for our hero now saw that his whole manner of dealing with his ridiculous tribute was marked exactly by the grand simplicity, the prehistoric good faith, as one might call it, of far-off romantic and "plastic" ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James

... How detrimental it is to ignore the psychological nature of Political Economy is evident from the errors of Karl Marx, who personifies things in a manner almost mythological. Thus, according to him, modesty should be ascribed to a coat which exchanges for a piece of linen, and purpose to the linen, etc. (Das Kapital, 1867, I, 19, 22, seq.) The greatest fault of this intelligent but not very acute man, his inability to reduce complicated phenomena to their ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher

... a mythological one, not Cupid's arrow, but a real arrow of very flexible wood, with a sharply-pointed tip at one end.... A very unpleasant sensation is produced by such an arrow, especially when it sticks ...
— The Diary of a Superfluous Man and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev

... became for a time a teacher at Parr's Drawing School, but was soon busily employed on his own account in supplying the jewellers' shops with miniature paintings on ivory; pretty heads and fancy subjects or mythological scenes to be framed with gold or set with diamonds; the beau of the day was incomplete without a costly snuff-box adorned with a lid, the prettiness of which, perhaps, somewhat surpassed its pudicity. Cosway seems to have been just the ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook

... above: "At all seasons of the year, Diana plunges into a cold bath on rising. As soon as day breaks, she mounts a horse, and, followed by swift hounds, rides through dewy verdure to her royal lover to whom—fascinated by her mythological pomp—she seems no more a woman but a goddess. Thus he styles her in ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme

... books of the Jaina, apart from some mythological additions and evident exaggerations, contain the following important notes on the life of their last prophet. [Footnote: The statement that Vardhamana's father was a mighty king belongs to the manifest ...
— On the Indian Sect of the Jainas • Johann George Buehler

... Titania, and Helen essayed Oberon. Juno, who was very musical, made quite a stately Sappho. Little, sedate Marjorie was an Alaskan-Indian Princess, and Rosalie rigged up a Puck costume which made her irresistible. Isabel chose to be Portia, though that erudite lady seemed somewhat out of place among the mythological characters. But Stella was a startling Sibyl, with book, staff, and a little crystal globe (removed from her paper-weight) in which to read horoscopes. The others went in all ...
— Peggy Stewart at School • Gabrielle E. Jackson

... on which his Highness, a great lover of music and dancing, expended prodigious sums. It may be because I was then young, but I think I never saw such an assemblage of brilliant beauty as used to figure there on the stage of the Court theatre, in the grand mythological ballets which were then the mode, and in which you saw Mars in red-heeled pumps and a periwig, and Venus in patches and a hoop. They say the costume was incorrect, and have changed it since; but for my ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray

... hundred and twelve pounds merely a hundred weight? 5. I shall feel still more obliged if your readers can inform me of any works on natural history, particularly adapted for a literary man to refer to at times when poetical, mythological, scriptural, and historical associations connected with animals and plants are in question. I am constantly feeling the want of a work of the kind to comprehend zoological similes and allusions, and also notices of customs and superstitions ...
— Notes & Queries 1850.01.12 • Various

... of the Isle of Man. Songs of Wales. Songs of the Gaelic Highlands. Songs of Anglo-Saxon England. Songs of the North, Mythological. Songs of the North, Heroic. Songs of Iceland. Songs of Sweden. Songs of Germany. Songs of Holland. Songs of Ancient Greece. Songs of the Modern Greeks. Songs of the Klephts. Songs of Denmark, Early Period. Songs of Denmark, Modern Period. ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter

... that these, the earliest pure Descriptive Lyrics in our language, should still remain the best in a style which so many great poets have since attempted. The Bright and the Thoughtful aspects of Nature are their subjects: but each is preceded by a mythological introduction in a mixed Classical and Italian manner. The meaning of the first is that Gaiety is the child of Nature; of the second, that Pensiveness is the daughter of Sorrow ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various

... many times in Europe and been horribly bored by it. The story of the opera seemed to interest the young mason especially. He retold it minutely for Adelle's benefit, offering amusing explanations of its mythological mysteries. ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick

... might have brought a large amount of accumulated matter, sometimes of a critical character, to bear upon the text. But Pope's version was no field for such a display; and my purpose was to touch briefly on antiquarian or mythological allusions, to notice occasionally some departures from the original, and to give a few parallel passages from our English Homer, Milton. In the latter task I cannot pretend to novelty, but I trust that my other annotations, while utterly disclaiming high scholastic ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer

... touched me, those peculiar thrills would not run through me. It was most discomforting, because it reminded me of love; and I knew that I never could love this half-baked little barbarian. I was very much interested in her account of the Wieroo, which up to this time I had considered a purely mythological creature; but Ajor shuddered so at even the veriest mention of the name that I was loath to press the subject upon her, and so the Wieroo still ...
— The People that Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... Jeffrey, Esq., of the Edinburgh Review, have risen up against me, and my later publications. Such is Truth! men dare not look her in the face, except by degrees; they mistake her for a Gorgon, instead of knowing her to be Minerva. I do not mean to apply this mythological simile to my own endeavours, but I have only to turn over a few pages of your volumes to find innumerable and far more illustrious instances. It is lucky that I am of a temper not to be easily ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli

... with a certain country girl, whose name is Cowslip, to whom he makes a declaration of his passion in a strange mythological, grammatical style and manner, and to whom, among other fooleries, he sings, quite enraptured, the following air, and seems to work himself at least up to such a transport of passion as quite overpowers him. ...
— Travels in England in 1782 • Charles P. Moritz

... and ribbed like a ship's hull, opened the wide, flat-stepped staircase, the parapet surmounted at intervals by heraldic monsters, the wall covered with oak carvings of coats-of-arms, leafage, and little mythological scenes, painted a faded red and blue, and picked out with tarnished gold, which harmonised with the tarnished blue and gold of the stamped leather that reached to the oak cornice, again delicately tinted and gilded. The beautifully ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee

... the possible he bethinks him of the impossible. He will render the human body flying. It may have been the accident of a mythological subject that first suggested the motive. Leochares, a famous artist of the fourth century B.C., made a group of Zeus in the form of an eagle carrying off Ganymede. A replica of the group is preserved ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison

... he had been killed at the Metropolitan was a delight, the war news was nothing to the fact that the party with the stiletto had escaped "unbeknownst." These people were unacquainted with Paliser. But here was a young man with an opera-box of his own, and think of that! Here was the mythological monster that the Knickerbocker has become. Here was the heir to unearned and untold increments. These attributes made him as delectable to the majority who did not know him, as he had become to the ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus

... to another tale of quest with somewhat similar incidents, where the solar nature of one of the characters is perhaps more obvious—the quest for the mortal maiden who has been carried off by the sun-hero. We refrain in this place from indicating the mythological basis which underlies such a tale as this, as such a phenomenon is already amply illustrated in ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence

... and in so doing invents a spirit world. The mistake here lies in the "seeks to account for it." (Primitive man, as Dr Beck observes, is not impelled by an Erkenntnisstrieb. Dr Beck says he has counted upwards of 30 of these mythological Triebe (tendencies) with which primitive man has been endowed.) Man is at first too busy LIVING to have any time for disinterested THINKING. He dreams a dream and it is real for him. He does not seek to account for it any more than for his hands and feet. He cannot ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others

... much like Talfourd's Ion; but I mean to read it again. It contains pretty lines; but, to my thinking, it is neither fish nor flesh. There is too much, and too little, of the antique about it. Nothing but the most strictly classical costume can reconcile me to a mythological plot; and Ion is a modern philanthropist, whose politics and morals have been learned from the publications of the Society for ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan

... dearest, are too strong for transcription. I feel, pen in hand, like the mythological Titan at war with Jove, strong enough to hurl mountains, and finding nothing but pebbles. The simile is a good one. You must not judge of me ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... mythological traditions of earlier times had spread throughout all Asia the belief in a great Mediator who was to come, of a future Saviour, King, God, Conqueror, and Legislator who would bring back the Golden Age to earth and deliver men from the ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster

... desirous of investing them with the venerable garb of antiquity. They endeavoured to carry up the study to the time of Solomon; and there were not wanting some who imputed it to the first father of mankind. They were desirous to track its footsteps in Ancient Egypt; and they found a mythological representation of it in the expedition of Jason after the golden fleece, and in the cauldron by which Medea restored the father of Jason to his original youth. [178] But, as has already been said, the first unquestionable mention of the subject is to be referred to the time of ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin

... competition. But, in fact, in this country the students of oriental literature, endowed with a taste and feeling for poetry, are so few in number, that any attempt to make known the peculiar character of those remarkable works, the old mythological epics of India, may be received with indulgence by all who are interested in the history of poetry. Mr. Wilson alone, since Sir W. Jones, has united a poetical genius with deep Sanscrit scholarship; but he has in general preferred the later and more polished period—that ...
— Nala and Damayanti and Other Poems • Henry Hart Milman

... Belle. "But, Cora Kimball, do you suppose we could make mythological frocks that would stand damp, night air? Of course, they would ...
— The Motor Girls • Margaret Penrose

... the Delian were originally much closer together, but the Delian differentiated towards ideal virginity, the Ephesian towards ideal fruitfulness. The Kouroi, or Youths, in the same way were absorbed into some half-dozen great mythological shapes, Apollo, Ares, ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray

... are thus at least one thousand years old. "There stands the stone to tell if I lie." According to Prof. Rhys (Hibbert Lect. 486-97) the whole story is a mythological one, Kulhwych's mother being the dawn, the clover blossoms that grow under Olwen's feet being comparable to the roses that sprung up where Aphrodite had trod, and Yspyddadon being the incarnation of the sacred hawthorn. Mabon, again (i.e. pp. 21, 28-9), is the Apollo Maponus discovered ...
— Celtic Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)

... even clearer what Empathy really is. The first of these two main misinterpretations is based upon the reflexive form of the German verb "sich einfuehlen" (to feel oneself into) and it defines, or rather does not define, Empathy as a metaphysical and quasi-mythological projection of the ego into the object or shape under observation; a notion incompatible with the fact that Empathy, being only another of those various mergings of the activities of the perceiving subject with the qualities of the ...
— The Beautiful - An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics • Vernon Lee

... to be distinctly understood, that he is in no way responsible, personally, for the curious mixture of divinities and semi-divinities who figure in it. It is one of the distinguishing marks of this particular sort of New Poetry to pile up a confusion of more or less mythological names in a series of swinging and resonant lines. In one line the reader may imagine himself to be embarked in the River Cocytus. In the next, he will be surprised to find himself in Eden. Blood, battle, bumptiousness, and an aggressive violence, are special ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, July 23, 1892 • Various

... bent on mythological comparisons, Capt. L'Estrange, 'tis but a poor compliment to a fair lady when a gallant officer compares her to three old Fates,—unless he qualifies the remark somewhat. Could you not add something about my fairy fingers weaving the destiny of man? I fear your ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 5, Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 5, May, 1886 • Various

... be in any application here not ridiculous, appears to any asker of curious questions, as he wanders about Rome, the very thinnest deposit of the past. Within the rococo gateway, which itself has a vaguely esthetic self-consciousness, at the end of the cypress walk, you will probably see a mythological group in rusty marble—a Cupid and Psyche, a Venus and Paris, an Apollo and Daphne—the relic of an age when a Roman proprietor thought it fine to patronise the arts. But I imagine you are safe in supposing it to constitute the only allusion savouring of culture ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James

... oh! that advice, filled with the maternal eloquence of a female Daedelus has had the fate of all things mythological. Dear, beloved mother, could you ever have supposed it possible that I should begin by the catastrophe which, according to you, ends the honeymoon of the young women ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac

... that in the later Sumerian period the structure was lavishly adorned. It is referred to in the fragments of early literature which have survived as "the splendid house, shady as the forest", that "none may enter". The mythological spell exercised by Eridu in later times suggests that the civilization of Sumeria owed much to the worshippers of Ea. At the sacred city the first man was created: there the souls of the dead passed towards the great Deep. Its proximity to the sea—Ea ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie

... francs," said Marcel. "You are always in the clouds. The idea of coming and asking me for that mythological amount at a period when one is always under the equator of necessity. You must ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger

... who say that for St. Paul Jesus was 'a Saviour God, after the manner of Osiris, Attis, or Mithra', and who proceed to draw out obvious parallels between the sufferings, death, and resurrection of these mythological personages and the gospels of the Christian Church, surely forget that St. Paul was a Jew, and that there are some transformations of which the religious mind is incapable. He never speaks of Christ as a 'Saviour God'. Even more perverse are the arguments which ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various

... persecution. Of the seven leading Cuban poets, often spoken of as "the Cuban Pleiad," Avellaneda removed to Spain, where she married and spent her life in tranquillity; and Joaquin Luaces avoided trouble by living in retirement and veiling his patriotic songs with mythological names. On the other hand Jose Jacinto Milanes lost his reason at the early age of thirty years, Jose Maria Heredia and Rafael Mendive fled the country and lived in exile; while Gabriel Valdes and Juan Clemente Zenea were shot by order of ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various

... of us, and yet it resembles the most ponderous limestone or granite. Then you ask yourself: How is it possible? If their burden were what it seems to be, they would be crushed to earth instead of striding proudly along. Admirable figures! As you say, the spectacle takes one back into mythological times. Would you not call it a procession of Titans, children of the Gods, storing up mountain-blocks for some earth-convulsing battle? Your eyes deceive you. Like Thomas, the doubting apostle, you must ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas

... good deal about the personages you mention from Bulfinch's "Age of Fable," from Alexander S. Murray's "Manual of Mythology," and from Mrs. Clement's "Handbook of Legendary and Mythological Art"; but the poems of Homer,—the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey,"—of both of which there are good English translations,—are the chief sources ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, October 1878, No. 12 • Various

... edifice. The only ruin preserved, as if by miracle, is the house on a lower level which some assert to have been that of Livia,* a house which seems very small beside all the huge palaces, and where are three halls comparatively intact, with mural paintings of mythological scenes, flowers, and fruits, still wonderfully fresh. As for the palace of Tiberius, not one of its stones can be seen; its remains lie buried beneath a lovely public garden; whilst of the neighbouring palace of Caligula, overhanging the Forum, ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola

... piece of royal pilotage, being on the whole the most characteristic example I remember of the Mythological marine above alluded to, is accordingly recommended ...
— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin

... youth, they have been instilled into the childish understanding as indisputable dogmas. Such hereditary articles of faith take root all the more firmly, the further they are removed from a rational knowledge of nature, and enveloped in the mysterious mantle of mythological poesy. In the case of the dogma of personal immortality, there comes into play also the interest which man fancies himself to have in his individual future existence after death, and the vain hope that in a blessed world to come ...
— Monism as Connecting Religion and Science • Ernst Haeckel

... which the impressions already considered lead us to describe as the ultimate power in the tragic world? It appears to be a mythological expression for the whole system or order, of which the individual characters form an inconsiderable and feeble part; which seems to determine, far more than they, their native dispositions and their circumstances, and, through these, their action; which is so vast ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley

... form in which artistic effort of any kind is appreciated. The pictorial art that appeals to the young or the ignorant is the kind that tells a story—perhaps historical painting on enormous canvasses, perhaps the small genre picture, possibly something symbolic or mythological; but at any rate it must embody a narrative, whether it is that of the signing of a treaty, a charge of dragoons, a declaration of love or the feeding of chickens. The same is true of music. The popular song ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick

... given of Proper Names, Historical, Mythological, and Geographical. Tables of French Coins, Weights, and ...
— The Boat Club - or, The Bunkers of Rippleton • Oliver Optic

... evening, the loyal people had decorated their houses with flags and many pretty ornaments, in honor of the arrival of the Federal troops; and had met them as gayly as the mythological young women used to dance before Bacchus. On the morning of the 18th, all of these symbols of joy were taken in. The Southern people, in their turn, were jubilant—"which they afterward wished ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke

... the world is wiser now than it was in Solomon's days. He lived in the old mythological period, when men attributed everything extraordinary to the gods. But the world is too wise now to believe in any supernatural revelation. "The Hebrew and Christian religions like all others have their myths." "The fact is, the pure historic idea was never developed among the Hebrews during ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson

... he look at the most famous of Great Britain's public buildings, he will see emblems of the ridiculous; if he glance at the Calendar, he will ascertain that months and days have been named after, or mentioned in connection with, mythological beings or objects of profane adoration; and if he read the pages of the greatest authors, he will discover much that has assisted to keep alive the embers of superstition. Passing over heraldry and ancient edifices, let us inquire whence the names of months and days are derived, and ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant

... Person of the Hindu Trinity, the best-loved god of all their mythological heaven, is represented in the cheap coloured oleographs sold in the bazaars in India as ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly

... valuable book, though a worse use could hardly have been made of such fine material. Had the mythological or hunting stones of the Indians been written down exactly as they were received from the lips of the narrators, the collection could not have been surpassed in interest, both for the wild charm they carry ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller

... Sculpture. Through it the most just and clear idea of Grecian culture is revealed to the many. The solemn mystery of Egyptian and the grand scale of Assyrian civilization are best attested by the same trophies. How a Sphinx typifies the land of the Pyramids and all its associations, mythological, scientific, natural, and sacred,—its reverence for the dead, and its dim and portentous traditions! and what a reflex of Nineveh's palmy days are the winged lions exhumed by Layard! What more authentic tokens of Mediaeval piety and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various

... and can rarely be distinguished, unless they are accompanied by an inscription, from the similar objects obtained in such abundance from Babylonia and Assyria. They reproduce, with scarcely any variation, the mythological figures and emblems native to those countries—the forms of gods and priests, of spirits of good and evil, of kings contending with lions, of sacred trees, winged circles, and the like—scarcely ever introducing any novelty. The greater number of the cylinders are very rudely cut. They have ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson

... sources. We can scarcely doubt but that, in some way or other, there was a communication of beliefs—a passage in very early times, from the shores of the Persian Gulf to the lands washed by the Mediterranean, of mythological notions and ideas. It is a probable conjecture that among the primitive tribes who dwelt on the Tigris and Euphrates, when the cuneiform alphabet was invented and when such writing was first applied to the purposes of religion, a Scythic or Scytho-Arian race existed, ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 1. (of 7): Chaldaea • George Rawlinson

... elapse before a mythological gallery for Chaldaea, in which all the important members of the Mesopotamian pantheon shall take their places and be known by the names they bore in their own day, can be formed, but even now the principles upon which they ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot

... I can analyze. I could sooner live with lunatics or brute animals. All this, and much more than I can say, or have time to say, the reader must enter into before he can comprehend the unimaginable horror which these dreams of Oriental imagery and mythological tortures imprest upon me. Under the connecting feeling of tropical heat and vertical sunlights I brought together all creatures, birds, beasts, reptiles, all trees and plants, usages and appearances, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various

... compare the founder of the fair and famous city of Athens with him, and to contrast Theseus with the father of unconquered glorious Rome. Putting aside, then, the mythological element, let us examine his story, and wherever it obstinately defies probability, and cannot be explained by natural agency, let us beg the indulgence of our readers, who will kindly make allowance ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch

... explanation of its origin; for how was it arranged, and who was it that ordained at first, that the jackal should be the emblem of Anubis, the cat of Bast, the crocodile of Sebak, and so on? (3) Various mythological and quasi-historical accounts of the origin of the practice are given, such as that men long ago chose different animals for their standards in war, or that some early king, wishing to keep his subjects disunited, ordered that each nome should serve ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies

... The mythological basis is explained. (76 pp.) Then the stories of the four music dramas are given with translations of many passages and some description of the ...
— Some Forerunners of Italian Opera • William James Henderson

... versatile and brilliant and romantic. He remains a perpetual type of the hero of romance, the double hero, in the field of action and the realm of the spirit. Had he lived in an earlier age he would now be a mythological personage; and even without the looming exaggeration and glamour of myth he still imposes. The men of to-day seem all of little stature, and less consequence, beside the gigantic creature who made his way with equal ...
— The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Knight Opened • Kenelm Digby

... close, Monsieur, or I shall be forced to change myself into laurel," still keeping hold of the mythological thread. ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath

... further it may be advisable to examine the meaning of such ideas when they arise in other settings than those of the psychoses. If we consider these ideas of death, Heaven, of going under ground, being in water, in a boat, etc., we are impressed with the similarity which they bear to certain mythological motifs. This is, of course, not the place to enter into this topic more than briefly. We are here concerned with a clinical study, and therefore, among other tasks, with the interrelationship of symptoms, but ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch

... particular found that somebody else {200} had taken the last berth in the ship he had meant to sail by, and so escaped the fate of the crew and passengers when it went down with all on board—no "special providence" saving them. It looks like a reflection of the pagan mythological tales about heroes rescued by the timely interference of gods and goddesses in battles where thousands of common mortals perish unheeded. It is the aristocratic idea of privilege carried up to religion. The newer view is more democratic, and it seems to agree better ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer

... wilt have gone a verst,"—and so forth. But what most impressed the guest who arrived for the first time was the great number of pictures hung on the walls, for the most part the work of so-called Italian masters: ancient landscapes, and mythological and religious subjects. But as all these pictures had turned very black, and had even become warped, all that met the eye was patches of flesh-colour, or a billowy red drapery on an invisible body—or an arch which seemed suspended in the air, or a dishevelled ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev

... to us before the sun could be observed with advantage. I directed our steps towards a vast bay cut in the steep granite shore. There, I can aver that earth and ice were lost to sight by the numbers of sea-mammals covering them, and I involuntarily sought for old Proteus, the mythological shepherd who watched these immense flocks of Neptune. There were more seals than anything else, forming distinct groups, male and female, the father watching over his family, the mother suckling her little ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne

... 2: Until the time Menes, with whom historical times begin, ruled in Egypt among visionary heroes or mythological gods.] ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 819 - Volume XXXII, Number 819. Issue Date September 12, 1891 • Various

... The prevailing religious and semi-mythological ideas, accordingly, enter as factors in the significance that was attached to infants or to the young of animals, serving as illustrations of ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow

... introduction of Christianity into Eastern Europe, the new converts seem to have retained their fondness for the heathen practice used in religious, as in secular, celebrations of theatrical representations, which were chiefly upon mythological subjects, and all of which angered and distressed the priests of the new religion. However, the latter soon found out that it was necessary to reach the minds of these people through their more acutely trained senses and the medium of their old traditions, and thus in these early ages the dramatic ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII, No. 357, October 30, 1886 • Various

... Lucerne, with much regret. For there he had been able to work in perfect seclusion, under the protection and forethought of the devoted Cosima. His new villa at Bayreuth he called "Wahnfried," setting over the door a fresco of mythological figures, symbolising music and tragedy; in whom are portrayed Cosima Wagner, his final ideal, and Wilhelmine Schroeder-Devrient, who had been his first inspiration, and also figures of Wotan and Siegfried; the former being ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes

... Scarce more practicable is it to arrange them in any regular order of chronology or locality; and even when we seek to group them with regard to type and subject, difficulties start up at every step. A convenient and intelligible division would seem to be one that recognised the ballads as Mythological, Romantic, or Historical, this last class including the lays of the foray and the chase, that cannot be assigned to any particular date—that cannot, indeed, be proved to have any historical basis at all—but can yet, with ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie

... greedy creditors waiting. Ah! and for yet others, for me not so very long ago, for you to-day—she is a white-robed angel with many-colored wings, bearing a green palm branch in the one hand, and in the other a flaming sword. An angel, something akin to the mythological abstraction which lives at the bottom of a well, and to the poor and honest girl who lives a life of exile in the outskirts of the great city, earning every penny with a noble fortitude and in the full light of virtue, returning to heaven inviolate ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac

... fox is common knowledge. Malingering, an instinctive function originally, has, in the process of evolution, become an act of reason with certain animals. One is forced to believe, from a survey of mythological writings, that primitive man must have had recourse to simulation and all else that this term stands for whenever he was confronted with an especially difficult problem in his struggles for existence. To the gods was attributed, among other special propensities, the ability to assume any ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck

... LAIRESSE is a critical reminiscence of the unreal and mythological in art, and its immediate subject a Belgian painter, born at Liege, but who nourished at Amsterdam in the second half of the seventeenth century. De Lairesse was a man of varied artistic culture as ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr

... Christians and Infidels alike) into a common and highly intellectual and spiritual faith, opposed to which will be the less advanced people under the leadership of the Roman Catholic church, representing the temporal power of Christian priestcraft and the mythological superstitions which have attached themselves to the precepts and teachings of the Christ man ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, December 1887 - Volume 1, Number 11 • Various

... has played with this idealism, refined upon it, varied it, produced new phases of it; reviving the strangest paradoxes of the Alexandrian school; and teaching—in this, the nineteenth century—with the gravest confidence in the world—with all the assurance of an ancient Scald chanting forth his mythological fables, a whole system ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various

... to thought upon the relations of man to the divine, played an important part in the development of the human mind. As a result of their speculative activity of thought the old religious systems sank into the background; the simple worship of primitive times was overshadowed by intricate mythological systems, splendid in worship and creed; cosmogonies and philosophies were devised; and human thought, once fairly set loose in this field, went on with great energy ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris

... folk-tales. For many of the incidents and several of the complete tales Benfey showed Indian parallels, and suggested that the stories had originated in India and had been transferred by oral tradition to the different countries of Europe. This entirely undermined the mythological theories of the Grimms and Max Mueller and considerably reduced the importance of folk tales as throwing light upon the primitive psychology of the Aryan peoples. Benfey's researches were followed up by E. Cosquin who, in the elaborate notes to his Contes de Lorraine, Paris, 1886, ...
— Europa's Fairy Book • Joseph Jacobs

... The first thing he made for her was a butter-stamper. In it he carved a mythological bird, a phoenix, something like an eagle, rising on symmetrical wings, from a circle of very beautiful flickering flames that rose upwards from the ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence

... very well, when both the winds and the sea are personified, and mentioned by their mythological names, as in Juvenal; but when they are mentioned in plain language, the application of the epithets suggested by me, is the most obvious; and accordingly my friend himself, in his imitation of the ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill

... proximity to human weakness, introduce the various distribution and division of their authority, and thereby give rise to allegory. The same principles naturally deify mortals, superior in power, courage, or understanding, and produce hero-worship; together with fabulous history and mythological tradition, in all its wild and unaccountable forms. And as an invisible spiritual intelligence is an object too refined for vulgar apprehension, men naturally affix it to some sensible representation; such as either the more conspicuous parts of nature, or the statues, images, and ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley

... Annabale Caracci, a painter of Bologna of the latter half of the sixteenth century. His most celebrated work is a series of frescoes on mythological subjects in the Farnese Palace at Rome. Along with his cousin Lodovico and his brother Agostino he founded the so-called Eclectic School of Painting; their maxim was that "accurate observation of Nature should be combined with judicious imitation of the best ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann

... of the Alexandrian poets. The odes are largely founded on the best Greek lyric poetry, with which Horace was thoroughly familiar; cf. his first intention to write in Greek (Sat. i. 10, 31-5). Alexandrian influence is little seen, and his mythological allusions are seldom obscure. Examples of imitation (which is commonest in Book i.) are: Od. i. 9, the beginning of which is from Alcaeus (so i. 10; 11; 18); i. 12 (beginning) is from Pindar; i. 27 from Anacreon. Bacchylides is imitated, e.g. in ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton

... our ancient families went down in the War of Independence, and few of our present aristocracy trace back beyond the revolution of families and property which took place under Bruce. The Earls of Angus, Fife, and Strathearn are little more than mythological personages to the modern genealogist.... It is the common case ...
— Scottish Cathedrals and Abbeys • Dugald Butler and Herbert Story

... fight, both die and are buried in one tomb, and Galahad later achieves the adventure of winning Balin's sword. "Thus endeth the tale of Balyn and of Balan, two brethren born in Northumberland, good knights," says Malory, simply, and unconscious of the strange mythological medley under the coat ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang

... and in his light humors only careless indulgence in the vanities of this world and blindness to the eternal concerns of life. The pagan will not appreciate the delicacy of his art, and will find the abundance of his literary, mythological, historical, and geographical allusion, the compactness of his expression, and the maturity and depth of his intellect, a barrier calling for too much effort. Both will prefer Virgil—Virgil of "arms and the man," the ...
— Horace and His Influence • Grant Showerman

... Greek localities and their mass of primeval, mythological legends, he sails and swims, like a cannon-ball on a quick-silver sea, and cannot sink, even if he wished. Everything is ready to his hand—subject matter, contents, circumstances, relations. He has only to set to ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton

... "Rose-bud, laurel," which had also a pretty refrain; it is full of such expressions as "altars of freedom," "angels of freedom," "wreaths of freedom," and other such mythological things. How the strings responded to the young woman's touch, what expression was in her refrain! It was as if she felt the meaning of those beautiful "flosculi" best of all, and must suffer more ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai

... representing with perfect mastery these scenes of country life, as, for instance, Albrecht Durer, in his engraving of the prodigal son. But it is one thing if a painter, brought up in a school of realism, introduces such scenes, and quite another thing if a poet, accustomed to an ideal or mythological framework, is driven by inward impulse into realism. Besides which, priority in point of time is here, as in the descriptions of country life, on the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various

... had no reputation at first but as jests; and only later, by the very acceptance and adoption they find in the mouths of millions, turn out to be the wisdom of the hour. I am sure if this man had ruled in a period of less facility of printing, he would have become mythological in a very few years, like AEsop or Pilpay, or one of the Seven Wise Masters, by his fables and proverbs. But the weight and penetration of many passages in his letters, messages, and speeches, hidden now by the very closeness of their application to the moment, are destined ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various

... outside the ordinary and somewhat tedious course of his employment at the Court. To this period are assigned twenty-six pictures—Senor Beruete only admits the authenticity of eighty-three in all, it may be mentioned—twelve of which are royal portraits, seven those of buffoons and dwarfs, three mythological and two sacred subjects, and the two famous pieces of real life, Las ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies

... the box of wooden bricks, and the big portfolio containing tracings by my mother, exquisitely done, of Flaxman's "Outlines of the Iliad and Odyssey" and other classic subjects. We knew by heart the story of all these mythological personages, and they formed a large part of our life. They also served the important use of suggesting to my father his Wonder-Book and Tanglewood Tales stories, and, together with the figures of Gothic fairy-lore, they were the only playmates, ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne

... good-humored impatience, the tardiness of his fellow- laborer in applying to the managers. Fears are expressed that Foote may have made other engagements,—and that a piece, called "Dido," on the same mythological plan, which had lately been produced with but little success, might prove an obstacle to the reception of theirs. At Drury Lane, too, they had little hopes of a favorable hearing, as Dibdin was one of the principal ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore

... valuable book, though a worse use could hardly have been made of such fine material. Had the mythological or hunting stories of the Indians been written down exactly as they were received from the lips of the narrators, the collection could not have been surpassed in interest? both for the wild charm they carry with them, ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli

... that in reading over the present account and the mythological story of Jack the Giant Killer, I am struck by several discrepancies in the commonly received tradition, and in the account of the manners and customs of the times here revealed. I make no attempt to reconcile the two versions, though I am decidedly of opinion that ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed

... her mythological personality, just as the agility of Mercury created that of the messenger of ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion

... wind, through flat and uninteresting country. As there was nothing special to look at, I could just sit still and enjoy the strange exhilaration of that wild drive—the steady pulsation of the magnificent car, which like some mythological monster ate up the long straight road, indifferent to the shrieking opposing wind and lashing rain. On, on, till gradually the furies grew weary, the gray gave place to gold, and the earth wore the "washed" look of a beautiful water-colour. ...
— An Account of Our Arresting Experiences • Conway Evans

... constitutes a legitimate successor to the late Georgian poets. His development has been of extraordinary rapidity, and he will shortly surprise the amateur public both by a poetic drama called "The Pauper and the Prince", and by a long mythological poem not unlike Moore's "Lalla Rookh". The natural and pantheistic character of Mr. Cole's philosophy adapts him with phenomenal grace to his position as a mirror of classical antiquity. Another developing poet is Mr. Roy Wesley Nixon ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft

... were covered with grotesquely and elaborately figured hand-wrought tapestry. The musty ancient beds remained in the chambers, and their quilts and curtains and canopies were decorated with curious handwork, and the walls and ceilings frescoed with historical and mythological scenes in glaring colors. There was enough crazy and rotten rubbish in the building to make a true brick-a-bracker green with envy. A painting in the dining-hall verged upon the indelicate —but then the Margravine ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... Homer paints for us the warlike life of his day, Hesiod paints the peaceful labors of the husbandman, the holiness of domestic life, the duty of economy, the education of youth, and the details of commerce and politics. He also collects the flying threads of mythological legend and lays down for us the story of the gods in a work of great value as the earliest exposition of this picturesque phase of religious belief. The veil is lifted from the face of youthful Greece by these two famous writers, and we are shown the land and its people in full detail at a period ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris

... matter-of-fact geographical and mythological information in William of Tours' History of the Crusades; for instance, in his description of the Bosphorus he does not waste a word over its beauty. But, as 'fruitful' and 'pleasant' are ever-recurring adjectives with him, one cannot say ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese

... the deification of Buddha as a personal Saviour. New Buddhas and B[o]dhisatvas were added, and new worlds were provided for them to live in; in China, especially, there was an enormous extension of the mythological element. In fact, the Mah[a]y[a]na system of Buddhism, inspired, as has been observed, by a progressive spirit, but without contradicting the inner significance of the teachings of Buddha, broadened its scope and ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various

... THE mythological page of a country's history has an interest of its own apart from legendary relations; it affords indications of the people's creeds and furnishes traces of the nation's genesis. In Japan's mythology there is a special difficulty for the interpreter—a ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi

... general tone in which he speaks of Beauty, for instance, "as it really is," of all that "really is," under its various forms; a manner of speaking, not explicit, but veiled, in various degrees, under figures, as at the end of the sixth book of The Republic, or under mythological fantasies, like those of the Phaedrus. He seems to have no inclination for the responsibilities of definite theory; for a system such as that of the Neo-Platonists for instance, his own later followers, who, in a kind of prosaic and cold-blooded transcendentalism, developed ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater

... line she had recited was more singularly applicable to their case than that which they paid heed to. "The great stars that globed themselves in Heaven," were shining clear and bright in the vast arch above. Resplendent amidst the throng rose the Pleiades, the mythological seven hailed by the Greeks as an augury of safe navigation. And the Dyaks—one of the few remaining savage races of the world—share the superstition of the people who fashioned all the arts and most ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy

... specified in time, With strict regard to Aristotle's rules, The Vade Mecum of the true sublime, Which makes so many poets, and some fools: Prose poets like blank-verse, I'm fond of rhyme, Good workmen never quarrel with their tools; I've got new mythological machinery, And very handsome ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron

... of Ovid are a compendium of the Mythological narratives of ancient Greece and Rome, so ingeniously framed, as to embrace a large amount of information upon almost every subject connected with the learning, traditions, manners, and customs of antiquity, and have afforded a fertile field of investigation to the learned of the civilized world. ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso

... numerous; the things themselves are those of the south. No mosaic, I believe, has ever come to light in the whole of Roman Britain which represents any local subject or contains any unclassical feature. The usual ornamentation consists either of mythological scenes, such as Orpheus charming the animals, or Apollo chasing Daphne, or Actaeon rent by his hounds, or of geometrical devices like the so-called Asiatic shields which are purely of classical origin.[1] Perhaps we may detect in ...
— The Romanization of Roman Britain • F. Haverfield

... This argument against mechanism is a good instance of the difficulties which mythological habits of mind import unnecessarily into science. An equilibrium would not displace itself! But an equilibrium is a natural result, not a magical entity. It is continually displaced, as its constituents are modified by internal movements or external agencies; and while ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana

... possesses comparatively few; and, strangely enough, these are not most characteristic of the painter. His name, you know, is almost indissolubly connected with noble portraits, magnificent mythological representations, and those ideal pictures of beautiful women of which he painted so many, and which wrought such a revolution in the character of succeeding art. Hardly any of these, though so entirely in keeping with the brilliant city, are in Venice ...
— Barbara's Heritage - Young Americans Among the Old Italian Masters • Deristhe L. Hoyt

... serve them, and if the ways of justice do not conspire to that end, so much the worse for the blind goddess. Modern justice oft-times means the longest purse and the keenest ability to evade the law, and while an unprincipled lawyer will not exactly throttle the mythological maiden who holds the scales, he will, if necessary, so befog her every sense with evasions, subterfuges, and non-pertinent issues that she might just as well have been born deaf and dumb, and without feeling, ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn

... a member of the Labiatae, is a very hardy perennial, native to Mediterranean countries. Its generic name is derived from the mythological origin ascribed to it. Poets declared that Proserpine became jealous of Cocytus's daughter, Minthe, whom she transformed into the plant. The specific name means green, hence the common name, green mint, often applied to it. The old Jewish law did not require that tithes of "mint, anise ...
— Culinary Herbs: Their Cultivation Harvesting Curing and Uses • M. G. Kains

... maritime region of Al Hijaz, the Moslems Holy Land; and its "Arabah," a very small tract which named a very large tract, must not be confounded, as some have done, with the Wady Arabah, the ancient outlet of the Dead Sea. The derivation of "Arab" from "Ya'arab" a fancied son of Joktan is mythological. In Heb. Arabia may be called "Eretz Ereb" (or "Arab")land of the West; but in Arabic "Gharb" (not Ereb) is the Occident and the Arab dates ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton

... which, in spite of his essentially modern character as a singer, qualified Shelley to be the poet of Prometheus Unbound, for it made him, in the truest sense of the word, a mythological poet. This child-like quality assimilated him to the child-like peoples among whom mythologies have their rise. Those Nature myths which, according to many, are the basis of all mythology, are likewise the very basis of Shelley's poetry. The lark that is the gossip of heaven, ...
— Shelley - An Essay • Francis Thompson

... three hundred written or rewritten by him, a large number are negligible in estimating his poetical capacity. One cause lay in his unfortunate ambition to write in the style of his eighteenth-century predecessors in English, with the accompanying mythological allusions, personifications, and scraps of artificial diction. Another was his pathetic eagerness to supply Thomson with material in his undertaking to preserve the old melodies—an eagerness which often led him ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson

... idea of existence, to which further reference will be made in the next chapter, finds its illustration in the dual life, real and imaginary, of all the peoples of the earth. They have both real histories and mythological histories. In the preceding chapter I have dealt briefly with the first—the life of reality—in China from the earliest times to the present day; the succeeding chapters are concerned with the second—the life of imagination. A survey of the first was necessary for a complete understanding of ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner

... Christian, she was amazed, from time to time, at hearing herself speak, like a pagan, of the beneficent Baldus, of Loki, the spirit of evil, and of Freya, the golden tears of whom formed the Baltic amber. To her, the world was yet peopled by the mythological beings, created by the naive faith of the north, and to them she had learned to adapt the phenomena of nature. When she heard the thunder, she thought of Thor, and his mighty hammer, driving across the heavens in his iron car. If the sky ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various

... A mythological serpent, the personification of eternity, and king of the Nagas, or snakes, who inhabit Patala, the lowermost of the seven regions below the earth. His body formed the couch of Vishnu, reposing on the waters of Chaos, whilst his thousand heads were the god's canopy. He is also ...
— Sakoontala or The Lost Ring - An Indian Drama • Kalidasa

... result could not be described as beautiful. The carver had thought proper to ornament the box with some of the ugliest figures I remember to have seen. They appeared to me to be devils. Or perhaps they were intended to represent deities appertaining to some mythological system with which, thank goodness, I am unacquainted. The pipe itself was worthy of the case in which it was contained. It was of meerschaum, with an amber mouthpiece. It was rather too large for ordinary smoking. But then, of course, one doesn't smoke a pipe like that. ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various

... Saviour. The finding of him is salvation from the purposelessness of life. The new religion has but disentangled the idea of him from the absolutes and infinities and mysteries of the Christian theologians; from mythological virgin births and the cosmogonies and intellectual pretentiousness ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells

... defeat, even in conquest, which Goethe has embodied,—a picture of the loftiest grief of which the soul is capable, and which may remind us of the profound and august melancholy which the Great Sculptor breathed into the repose of the noblest of mythological heroes, when he represented the God resting after his labours, as if more convinced of their vanity than elated with ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... the Cid." But these were not due to the compelling bent of his genius, as in Scott. They were miscellaneous jobs, undertaken in the regular course of his business as a manufacturer of big, irregular epics, Oriental, legendary, mythological, and what not; and as an untiring biographer, editor, and hack writer of all descriptions. Southey was a mechanical poet, with little original inspiration, and represents nothing in particular. Wordsworth again, ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers



Words linked to "Mythological" :   fabulous, unreal, mythical, mythologic



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