"Mythology" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in the Norse mythology the primeval northern region of cold and darkness, in contrast with Muspelheim, or Brighthome, the primeval southern region of warmth and light, the two poles, as it ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... find a way or make one," was an expression of the same sturdy independence which to this day distinguishes the descendants of the Northmen. Indeed nothing could be more characteristic of the Scandinavian mythology, than that it had a god with a hammer. A man's character is seen in small matters; and from even so slight a test as the mode in which a man wields a hammer, his energy may in some measure be inferred. Thus an eminent Frenchman hit off in a single phrase the ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... most part, the accounts of Spanish authors regarding the mythology of the Mayas correspond only slightly or not at all with these figures of gods, and all other conjectures respecting their significance are very dubious, the alphabetic designation of the deities, which was tentatively ...
— Representation of Deities of the Maya Manuscripts • Paul Schellhas
... raise a strong suspicion of her fabulous nature to observe that she is classed by Herodotus with Io, and Europa, and Medea—all of them persons who, on distinct grounds, must clearly be referred to the domain of mythology. This suspicion is confirmed by all the particulars of her legend; by her birth, (the daughter of Jupiter, according to Homer;) by her relation to the divine Twins, whose worship seems to have been one of the most ancient ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... of people injuring themselves by walking against plate-glass are by no means uncommon; when the mind is preoccupied it takes much the same place as the plate of glass in the water and the jack. Authorities on mythology state that some Oriental nations had not arrived at the conception of a fluid heaven—of free space; they thought the sky was solid, like a roof. The fish was very much in the same position. The reason why fish swim round and round in tanks, and do not beat themselves against ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... in writing is placed in a very proper light by the ingenious Abbe Bannier, in his preface to his Mythology, a work of great erudition and of equal judgment. "It will be easy," says he, "for the reader to observe that I have frequently had greater regard to him than to my own reputation: for an author certainly pays him a considerable ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... was we do not know. No clue to his identity has been discovered. But from the essays themselves we learn something of his tastes and predilections. A strong interest in classical antiquity is apparent in numerous allusions to ancient history and mythology, allusions particularly plentiful in The Anti-Theatre; an intelligent reverence for the writings of Shakespeare may be observed in a series of admiring references; and from his repeated remarks about Spain and Spanish literature, both in The ...
— The Theater (1720) • Sir John Falstaffe
... should think that I insulted that religion if I said that it cannot stand unaided by intolerant laws. Without such laws it was established, and without such laws it may be maintained. It triumphed over the superstitions of the most refined and of the most savage nations, over the graceful mythology of Greece and the bloody idolatry of the Northern forests. It prevailed over the power and policy of the Roman empire. It tamed the barbarians by whom that empire was overthrown. But all these victories were gained not by the help of intolerance, but in spite of the opposition ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... followed up the pursuit, and made some important accessions to these stores. He found also a great number of gold and silver ornaments, specimens of ancient art, some of them of a most costly nature, but being idols or figures connected with heathen mythology, he cared not to preserve them. Matthew Paris is prolix in his account of the operations and discoveries of this abbot; and one portion of it is so interesting, and seems so connected with our subject, that I cannot refrain from giving it to the reader. "The abbot," ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... or imaginary, are explained by the same hypothesis. No 'survival' can be more odd and striking, none more illustrative of the permanence, in human nature, of certain elements. To examine these psychological curiosities may, or may not, be 'useful,' but, at lowest, the study may rank as a branch of Mythology, or of Folklore. ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... and licentious; and the Jacobitical, in which he issued forth treason of the most pestilential character. He has disfigured his verses by incessant appeals to the Muses, and repeated references to the heathen mythology; but his melody is in ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... Empire, remained warmly attached to Napoleon. Once when the Duke of Wellington visited his studio in Brussels and expressed a wish that the great artist would paint him, David coldly replied, "I never paint Englishmen." In his declining years he painted subjects taken from Grecian mythology. Among the paintings executed by David during his banishment were "Love and Psyche," "The Wrath of Achilles," and "Mars Disarmed by Venus." The number of David's pupils who acquired distinction was very great, among whom the best ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... of mythology, the dryads, naiads, and the fairies. One of his poems is called There ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... with Virgil, a teacher of grammar and prosody, and a lecturer on the saints.[1] Sedulius, the commentator, an Irish monk of Liege, copied Greek psalters, wrote Latin verses, knew Cicero's letters, the works of Valerius Maximus, Vegetius, Origen, and Jerome; was well acquainted with mythology and history, and perhaps had some Hebrew.[2] Another Irishman, John the Scot (Joannes Scotus Erigena), became the most eminent scholar of his time: he alone, among all the learned men Charles the Bald had about him, was able to translate from Greek (c. 858-860). Well might Eric of Auxerre, writing ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... the soul in Hades was conceived as having a body in every respect like that the soul possessed in the earthly life, only it was composed of a subtler substance. This conception of matter as being alive will help us to understand Greek mythology, which, it will be remembered, endowed trees, rivers, springs, clouds, the planets, all physical objects indeed, with ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... by beautiful bronze reliefs. The walls inside are inlaid with coloured wood up to the galleries, where they terminate in Gothic scroll-work. The organ has a full, clear tone; in front of it stands a painting which, at first sight, resembles a scene from heathen mythology more than a sacred subject. A number of cupids soar among wreaths of flowers, and surround three ...
— Visit to Iceland - and the Scandinavian North • Ida Pfeiffer
... and Bourgogne resorted to the Christian narrative, and represented the Duchess as the Virgin, and her two sons as the Saviour and John the Baptist; Leonardo, on the other hand, took his frame-work from the Greek mythology, and painted Leda and the Dioscures. The picture was greatly admired at the time, though that the figure of the Duchess of Milan should be represented nude was thought rather bad even then. The picture soon disappeared, and Vasari says that in his ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... made four hundred francs in a week, to say nothing of the pleasure of now and again saying what you really think. A discerning public will maintain that either C or L or Rubempre is in the right of it, or mayhap all the three. Mythology, beyond doubt one of the grandest inventions of the human brain, places Truth at the bottom of a well; and what are we to do without buckets? You will have supplied the public with three for one. There you are, ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... breechcloth, and his mighty chest and shoulders were painted with many hideous devices. In the distance and in the glow of the flames his size was exaggerated until he looked like one of the giants of ancient mythology. ...
— The Shadow of the North - A Story of Old New York and a Lost Campaign • Joseph A. Altsheler
... went, their ancestral legends, and they would find no difficulty in supplying these interesting stories with a home in their new country. If this supposition be correct, we must look for the origin of Fairy Mythology in the cradle of the Aryan people, and not in any part of the world inhabited by ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... sensations of the muleteer, who saw in those awful solitudes only fiery dragons, colossal bears, and breakneck trails. The converts, Concepcion and Incarnacion, trotting modestly beside the Padre, recognized, perhaps, some manifestation of their former weird mythology. ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... of common weeds confronts us; the compact, dusty-looking clusters appearing not by waysides only, around the world, but in the mythology, folk-lore, medicine, and literature of many peoples. Chiron, the centaur, who taught its virtues to Achilles that he might make an ointment to heal his Myrmidons wounded in the siege of Troy, named the plant for this favorite pupil, giving his own to the beautiful Blue ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... of an interesting work on Greek and Roman mythology, suitable for the requirements of both boys and girls, has long been recognized by the principals of our advanced schools. The study of the classics themselves, even where the attainments of the pupil ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... statements almost synonymous with many in the Bible. That is what may be called universal truth, and if this philosophy is what is consistent with fundamental truth, it will be just what I have been wishing to find." Grace leaned back meditatively, adding, "Mythology used to have a peculiar charm for me, and many of those old stories are coming ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson
... courage and love, looses the spell. Kempion is a type of a class of story that runs, in many variations, through the romances of chivalry, and from these may have been passed down to the ballad-singer, although ruder forms of it are common to nearly all folk-mythology. The hero is one of those kings' sons, who, along with kings' daughters, people the literature of ballad and maerchen; and he has heard of the 'heavy weird' that has been laid upon a lady to haunt the flood around the Estmere Crags as a 'fiery ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... best serve good causes and damage bad ones, then he is a genuine man of letters. If in addition to this he succeeds in making his manner attractive, he will become a classic. He knows this. He knows, although the Greeks in their mythology forgot to say so, that Conceit was saved to mankind as well as Hope when Pandora clapped the lid ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... we have been most charmed with the way the Real and Ideal are made to weave and shoot rays through one another, in which Margaret bestows on external nature what she receives through books, and wins back like gifts in turn, till the pond and the mythology are alternate sections of the same chapter. We delight in the teachings she receives through Chilion and his violin, till on the grave of "one who tried to love his fellow-men" grows up the full white rose-flower of her life. The ease with ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... ALASTOR, in Greek mythology, the spirit of revenge, which prompts the members of a family to commit fresh crimes to obtain satisfaction. These crimes necessitate further acts of vengeance, and the curse is thus transmitted from generation to generation. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... intermediate between simple outline engraving and intaglio. The lining-in is most frequently executed in scratched lines. The representations, mostly in strips placed one above another, are of lively historical scenes, scenes from the life of the dead, great ritual ceremonies, or adventurous scenes from mythology. Bronze vessels have representations in inlaid gold and silver, mostly of animals. The most important documents of the painting of the Han period have also been found in tombs. We see especially ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... the three islands of Madeiras the Hesperides, who, in ancient mythology, are the three daughters of Atlas; as I consider the orange-trees and mysterious shade, with the rocks discerned through it on a nearer approach, to be the best solution of the fable of the golden fruit, the dragon, and the three ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... Niflheim meant, but I have ascertained since that it is a Scandinavian word describing a region of cold and darkness, a place, therefore, where people might easily get lost. Well, it might have suited certain conditions I had then in my mind, but Mr. Curtis will never go to Scandinavian mythology when he wants to describe New York. To my thinking, it will figure in his mind as ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... entirely lost upon me, and that I consider the play itself very ill-timed, improper, and ridiculous. Besides, for a man of talent and a romantic poet you have not exhibited any very great imagination. It is a classical imitation, nothing better. There is something like it in mythology, I believe. Did not Apollo disguise himself ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard
... is to be the sole source! There never was an "historical" religion, however contemptible, that did not make its thousands of proselytes. Man has been easily led to embrace the most absurd systems of mythology and superstition, and is willing even to go to ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... to this authority, Syria and Babylonia were conquered by the Semites, while the Aryans became masters of Europe, Asia Minor, and India. The suggestion is that the conquerors of the Japanese islands and the founders of the Japanese language and mythology were of the Turano-African type. That these invaders intermarried with a mixed short race, and that the new dominating Japanese race maintained and propagated their dialect of the language and their sect of the ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... Jowett who so calls them)—of the 'ages before morality;' of ages of which the civil life, the common maxims, and all the secular thoughts have long been dead. 'Every reader of the classics,' said Dr. Johnson, 'finds their mythology tedious.' In that old world, which is so like our modern world in so many things, so much more like than many far more recent, or some that live beside us, there is a part in which we seem to have no kindred, which we stare at, of which we cannot think how it could be credible, or how it came ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... first contribution to the science, and the Psalmist may be regarded as the founder of Folklore. Herder made an advance when he collected the folk-songs of many nations; and Grimm as a collector was truly scientific, but when he brought in his mythological explanations he brought in mythology. Benfey's celebrated theory that European folk-tales are Oriental in origin and comparatively recent in date seems to ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... their watery ooze," and in "the shady sadness of vales,"—sometimes visited by their successors for counsel or concealment, or for the purpose of establishing harmony amongst them. The Sleep and Death of the Homeric mythology were naturally gentle divinities,—sometimes lifting the slain warrior from the field of his fame, and bearing him softly through the air to his home and weeping kindred. This was a gracious office. The saintly legends of the Roman Church have borrowed a hint from ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... proportion of her beauty and ability. On her father's side she is Rajput, tracing her lineage so far back that it becomes lost at last in fabulous legends of the Moon (who is masculine, by the way, in Indian mythology). All of the great families of Rajputana are her kin, and all the chivalry and derring-do of that royal land of heroines and heroes is part ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... Pindar as half men and half horses, treated as embodying the relation between the spiritual and the animal in man and nature, in all of whom the animal prevails over the spiritual except in Chiron, who therefore figures as the trainer of the heroes of Greece; in the mythology they figure as the progeny of Centaurus, son of IXION (q. v.) and the cloud, their ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... Emperor Augustus possessed in his palace on the Palatine Hill a considerable collection of hatchets of different kinds of rock, nearly all of them found in the island of Capri, and which were to their royal owner the weapons of the heroes of mythology. Pliny tells of a thunder-bolt having fallen into a lake, in which eighty-nine of these wonderful stones were soon afterwards found.[2] Prudentius represents ancient German warriors as wearing gleaming CERAUNIA on their helmets; in other countries similar stones ornamented the statues ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... philosophy;" the higher or positive philosophy has as its aim the rational construction of the history of the universe, or the history of creation, upon the basis of the religious ideas of peoples; it is a philosophy of mythology and revelation. Translations of some of Schelling's works are to be found in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, an American periodical founded by W.T. Harris, which devoted itself to the study of post-Kantian idealism. His Complete ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... little, disregarded wagtail of our own land, which we may frequently see wherever insects abound—on the green meadow, or by the margin of the brook—is the khunjunee of the Hindoo, by whose romantic and fanciful mythology he has been made a holy bird, bearing on his breast the impression of Salagrama, the stone of Vishnoo, a sacred petrified shell. Protected by this prestige, the little creature ranges unmolested near the habitations of man, and may in this respect be styled the robin of the East. To Europeans in ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 441 - Volume 17, New Series, June 12, 1852 • Various
... you," said De Marsay to himself, casting a glance of disdain upon the duenna, "if one cannot make you capitulate, with a little opium one can make you sleep. We know mythology and the ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... pages swarm with the familiar adventures and figures of Gothic romance; distressed ladies and their champions, combats with dragons and giants, enchanted castles, magic rings, charmed wells, forest hermitages, etc. But side by side with these appear the fictions of Greek mythology and the personified abstractions of fashionable allegory. Knights, squires, wizards, hamadryads, satyrs, and river gods, Idleness, Gluttony, and Superstition jostle each other in Spenser's fairy land. Descents ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... taking knecht to mean a knight,' said Anne, 'contrary to your argument last night. Knecht Ruprecht's origin is not nearly so sublime as you would make it out. Keightley's Fairy Mythology says he is only our old friend Robin Good-fellow, Milton's lubber fiend, the Hob Goblin. You know, Rupert, and Robert, and Hob, are all the same ...
— Abbeychurch - or, Self-Control and Self-Conceit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... went up to kiss my grandmother's hand, and went out,—not to study mythology, but simply ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... age of chivalry, but it reaches back to the earliest epochs of German antiquity, and embraces not only the pageantry of courtly chivalry, but also traits of ancient Germanic folklore and probably of Teutonic mythology. One of its earliest critics fitly called it a German "Iliad", for, like this great Greek epic, it goes back to the remotest times and unites the monumental fragments of half-forgotten myths and historical personages into a poem that is essentially national in character, and the embodiment ...
— The Nibelungenlied • Unknown
... I'm over-civilised. Like the god in Greek mythology, I need the touch of earth occasionally to renew my strength, but a very brief contact is all-sufficient. I'm a child of the city, brought up ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... you in Marathee or Gujarathee. The Moonshee struggles to get you to disgorge the sound ghain and leads you through the enchanted mazes of the Bagh-o-Bahar; the Pundit distinguishes between the kurmunnee and the kurturree prayog, and has many knotty points of mythology to expound, in order that you may rightly understand his idioms and appreciate his proverbial sayings. Of Pundits there are three species, quite distinct from each other. The first I would recommend if ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA
... cursed him with a granted prayer in those boots, my boy was deep in the reading of a book about Grecian mythology which he found perpetually fascinating; he read it over and over without ever thinking of stopping merely because he had already been through it twenty or thirty times. It had pictures of all the gods and goddesses, demigods and heroes; and he tried to make poems upon their various ...
— A Boy's Town • W. D. Howells
... the first part is, it is only a preparation for the second, which shows the Church not as one religion among many but as the only religion, for it is the only Thing that binds into one both Philosophy (or Thought) and Mythology (or Poetry), giving us a Logos Who is also the Hero of the strangest story in the world. He asks the man who talks of reading the Gospels really to read them as he might read his daily paper and to feel the terrific shock of the ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... of the determinative prefix for a god or a goddess being, in the oldest form, a picture of an eight-rayed star, it has been assumed that Assyro-Babylonian mythology is, either wholly or partly, astral in origin. This, however, is by no means certain, the character for "star" in the inscriptions being a combination of three such pictures, and not a single sign. The probability therefore is, that the ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Theophilus G. Pinches
... three grey cats with gifts— (For uniformity of metaphor, Since Bacchus, Satan, and the Hangman Are not contemporaneous in my mythology) I send you three grey cats with gifts, Queen Guinevere, To warn you, sleekly, silently To pay ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Marjorie Allen Seiffert
... slight trace of pity on her fixed and unearthly lineaments. It is a faithful embodiment of the old Greek idea of the Fates. I have wondered why some artist has not attempted the subject in a different way. In the Northern Mythology they are represented as wild maidens, armed with swords and mounted on fiery coursers. Why might they not also be pictured as angels, with countenances of a sublime and mysterious beauty—one all radiant with hope and promise of glory, and one with the token of a better future mingled ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... betook himself to Chapman and Lempriere. If you ask, "What right has a country postman to be handling questions that vexed the brain of Plato?"—I ask in return, "What right had John Keats, who knew no Greek, to busy himself with Greek mythology?" And the answer is that each has a perfect right to follow his ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... This is the usual Esthonian euphemism for setting a house on fire. I understand that there is also some connection between red cocks and fire in Scottish folk-lore; and in Scandinavian mythology two of the three cocks which are to crow before Ragnaroek are red. May they not have some connection ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby
... of these things; for to the wisest and best of the ancients, the foreshadowings of the soul's immortality were dim, faint, and uncertain. The legends of their mythology held up such pictures of the sensuality and vice of those whom they called Gods, that it was utterly impossible for any sound understanding to accept them. And deep thinkers were consequently driven into pure Deism, coupled ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... mythology, anthropology and history are of extraordinary interest today. Diderot relates his saying—"Que si la philosophie avait trouv tant d'obstacles parmi nous c'tait qu'on avait commenc par o il aurait fallu finir, par des maximes abstraites, des ...
— Baron d'Holbach - A Study of Eighteenth Century Radicalism in France • Max Pearson Cushing
... numerous, if the victorious party had thought their writings worth preserving. But Gnosticism was rotten before it was ripe. Dogma was still in such a fluid state, that there was nothing to keep speculation within bounds; and the Oriental element, with its insoluble dualism, its fantastic mythology and spiritualism, was too strong for the Hellenic. Gnosticism presents all the features which we shall find to be characteristic of degenerate Mysticism. Not to speak of its oscillations between fanatical austerities and scandalous licence, and its belief in magic ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... benefit of mythology and classic fable above alluded to, I should have furnished the first of the trio with a pedigree equal to that of the proudest hero of antiquity. His name, Van Zandt—that is to say, from the dirt—gave reasons to suppose ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... thoughts paused, and in a silent awe of soul she asked herself if, at the bottom of her soul, she still disbelieved in God. But it was so silly to believe the story of the Virgin—think of it.... As Owen said, in no mythology was there anything more ridiculous. Nevertheless, she did not convince herself that the dim, vague, unquiet sensation which rankled in her was not a still unextirpated germ of the original faith. She tried to think it was not a religious feeling but the result of the terrible ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... she spoke at last, "lovely. I have stood night after night in the cast house watching the metal pour out in its glorious colours. And, when I wake, I go to my window and see the reflections of the blast on the trees, on the first leaves. The charcoal burners come down like giants out of the mythology of the forest. And, when I first came, there was a raccoon hunt, with a great stirring of lanterns and barking dogs in the dark ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... was paved with pieces of marble arranged in beautiful patterns, in which figures of animals and scenes from classic mythology were inlaid. Gerlach[77] noticed the beauty of the pavement, and Salzenberg[78] represents a portion of it in his work on S. Sophia. But the members of the Russian Institute of Constantinople have had the good fortune to bring the ...
— Byzantine Churches in Constantinople - Their History and Architecture • Alexander Van Millingen
... problems of individual ethics to a close discussion without saying one word of their relation to religion; if we except the mythic part at the end the gods scarcely appear in the dialogue. Finally, in his Republic he no doubt gives a detailed criticism of popular mythology as an element of education, and in the course of this also some positive definitions of the idea of God, but throughout the construction of his ideal community he entirely disregards religion and worship, even if he occasionally takes it for granted that a cult of some ...
— Atheism in Pagan Antiquity • A. B. Drachmann
... on the noble river, for ever changing, and yet for ever the same—always fulfilling its errand, which yet is never fulfilled," said Stangrave,—he was given to half-mystic utterances, and hankerings after Pagan mythology, learnt in the days when he worshipped Emerson, and tried (but unsuccessfully) to worship Margaret Fuller Ossoli,—"Those old Greeks had a deep insight into nature, when they gave to each river not merely a name, but a ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... north of Europe there is a rugged land, where the winters are long and dark, with short bright summers. Nine hundred years ago the people there were pagans, believing in gods and giants, and their mythology is full of wonderful stories. As these myths, or sacred fables, tell of strange adventures, I think you will like them quite as well ...
— Harper's Young People, August 24, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... of landscape art, is neither his color, delicate and interesting as his color is, nor his classic serenity harmonizing with, instead of depending upon, the chance associations of architecture and mythology with which now and then he decorates his landscapes; it is the blithe, the airy, the truly spiritual way in which he gets farther away than anyone from both the actual pigment that is his instrument, and from the phenomena that are the objects of his expression—his ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... study of the whole body of Tinguian mythology points to the conclusion that the chief characters of these tales are not celestial beings but typical, generalized heroes of former ages, whose deeds have been magnified in the telling by many generations of their descendants. ...
— Philippine Folk Tales • Mabel Cook Cole
... here. It covers not only the entire period of German civilization down to the present time, but it gives an account of ancient Germany and its inhabitants in times which might almost be called pre-historic. The first chapters are explanatory of the German mythology, and of the ancient methods of worship. The Nibelungen Lied is described and its story told. The real history begins about the year 496 A.D., at a time when the Franks were the victorious race in Europe. From that time down to the beginning of the present year the record is continuous. ...
— Famous Islands and Memorable Voyages • Anonymous
... connue. La vritable histoire est couverte par le voile des temps" (p. 7). Boulanger however was not to be daunted and on the firm foundation of the fact of some ancient and universal catastrophe, as recorded on the surface of the earth and in human mythology, he proceeds to inquire into the moral effects of the changes in the physical environment back to which if possible the history of antiquity must be traced. Man's defeat in his struggle with the elements made him religious, hinc prima ...
— Baron d'Holbach - A Study of Eighteenth Century Radicalism in France • Max Pearson Cushing
... according to its German priests of all creeds, can only influence the individual betterment of mankind, and should not mix itself in affairs of state. The Prussian God of the State is 'the old German God,' the lineal descendant of the ferocious Germanic mythology, a mixture of ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... in the great sea fight in the bay of Salamis, B.C. 480. The poet made this victory the theme of his 'Persians.' This is the only historical Greek tragedy which we now possess: the subjects of all the rest are drawn from mythology. But Aeschylus had a model for his historical play in the 'Phoenician Women' of his predecessor Phrynichus, which dealt with the same theme. Aeschylus, indeed, is said to have imitated it closely in the 'Persians.' Plagiarism was thought ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... de Titan, 'Titanic voice.' The Titans in ancient mythology were gigantic beings, representing the ...
— Le Petit Chose (part 1) - Histoire d'un Enfant • Alphonse Daudet
... mythology of the Romancers, the San Greal, or Holy Grail, was the cup out of which Jesus partook of the Last Supper with his disciples. It was brought into England by Joseph of Arimathea, and remained there, an object of pilgrimage and adoration, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... the remote East turn to the mythology of Minor Asia, to the Descendants of Javan who dwelt in the tents of Shem, and possessed the Isles. Here again, and in the usual form of an historic Solution, we find the same Fact, and as characteristic of the Human Race, stated in that earliest and most venerable Mythus (or symbolic ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... or some other bright being carried away by Paris, who represents Night, or Winter, or the Cloud, or some other power of darkness. Without discussing these ideas, it may be said that the Greek poets (at all events before allegorical explanations of mythology came in, about five hundred years before Christ) regarded Helen simply as a woman of wonderful beauty. Homer was not thinking of the Dawn, or the Cloud when he described Helen among the Elders on the ...
— Helen of Troy • Andrew Lang
... Pierce" and "The Scarlet Letter" may be placed "The Wonder-Book" and "Tanglewood Tales." In these Hawthorne's genius distinctly appears, and appears in its most lovable, though not in its deepest form. These delicious stories, founded on the mythology of Greece, were written for children, but they delight men and women as well. Hawthorne never pleases grown people so much as when he writes with an eye to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... desire to mark him. The practice of tatooing is very common in the navy; and you will see a sailor's arm covered with emblems from the shoulder to the wrist; his own initials, that of his sweetheart, the crucifix, Neptune, and mermaids being huddled together, as if mythology and Scripture were one and the same thing. Adams was not long in deciding, and telling our little hero that his father wished it—he easily persuaded him to undergo the pain of the operation, which was performed on the forecastle, by pricking the shape of the figure ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... gentlemen in the consular service, who are passing through the various grades of student interpreters, are distinguishing themselves not alone by their facility in colloquial Japanese, but by their researches in various departments of Japanese history, mythology, archaeology, and literature. Indeed it is to their labours, and to those of a few other Englishmen and Germans, that the Japanese of the rising generation will be indebted for keeping alive not only the knowledge of their archaic literature, but even of the manners and customs of the ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... same history—a prophecy which foretold their birth, and the fable of a supernatural origin, just like the Perseus of mythology, and the philosopher Plato in history. Is it ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... The Mahabharata and the Ramayana, dating from the Brahminical or the period succeeding that of the Vedas, were next studied, together with the Puranas. Owing to a profounder knowledge of the language and a more intimate acquaintance with the mythology of the Hindus, scholars were able to fix approximately the date of the composition of these poems, to ascertain the numberless interpolations, and to extract everything of actual historical or geographical value from ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... he treats, is in all respects similar to the Jupiter of Greece and Rome. He has a father Saturn; and his mother was Rhea. He was nursed in Crete; and had wars with the Titans. He dethrones his father, who flies to Italy; where he introduces an age of gold. The mythology concerning him we find to be in all respects uniform. It is therefore to little purpose to substitute another person of the same name by way of reconciling matters, unless we can suppose that every person so ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume II. (of VI.) • Jacob Bryant
... which had once adorned the residence of the friend of Trajan. Jovius was an enthusiast of literary leisure: an historian, with the imagination of a poet; a Christian prelate nourished on the sweet fictions of pagan mythology. His pen colours like a pencil. He paints rapturously his gardens bathed by the waters of the lake, the shade and freshness of his woods, his green hills, his sparkling fountains, the deep silence, and the calm ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... almost faultless, the explanatory notes full, while the grammar and glossary constitute valuable contributions to the philology of the Italian dialects. In the Introduction the author, probably for the first time, makes the Sicilian public acquainted with the fundamental principles of comparative mythology and its relation to folk-lore, and gives a good account of the Oriental sources of the novel. He has, it seems to us, very properly confined his notes and comparisons entirely to Italy, with references of course to Gonzenbach and Koehler's notes ...
— Italian Popular Tales • Thomas Frederick Crane
... settlers of the West Branch Valley doubtless had their own mythology and folklore, most of it was passed on by word of mouth; as a result, little of record remains. The Revolutionary pension claims are filled with tales of the courage and patriotism of the stouthearted men and women of this frontier. ...
— The Fair Play Settlers of the West Branch Valley, 1769-1784 - A Study of Frontier Ethnography • George D. Wolf
... stage. "In the French operas not only thunder and lightning, storms and tempests, are commonly represented in the ridiculous manner above mentioned, but all the marvellous, all the supernatural of epic poetry, all the metamorphoses of mythology, all the wonders of witchcraft and magic, everything that is most unfit to be represented upon the stage, are every day exhibited with the most complete approbation and ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... wonderful nor a famous person—I find no mention of her in Society's Doings of the day—nothing of her dress or equipage. If she was "superbly gowned," we do not know it; if she was ever one of the "unbonneted," history is silent. All we know is, that together they read Bulfinch's "Mythology," Grote's "History of Greece," Plutarch, Dante and Shakespeare. We know that she placed a light in the window for him to make his home-coming cheerful, that together they sipped their midnight tea, that together they laughed, and ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... Although tradition and mythology veil past events in more or less obscurity, they do, in regard to circumcision, furnish considerable explanatory light on matters which would be otherwise hard to reconcile. Circumcision has been performed by the Chippeways, on the Upper Mississippi, and its modifications ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... had his eyes naturally fixed, and he was confounded at perceiving a figure glide from behind the shadow of a curtain, and glare at him with the supposed mien and expression of the Satan of monkish mythology, or a satyr of ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... are similar to those that Montagne shows, near the apex of Camillea mucronata. These appear like abortive surface perithecia, but I do not find any clue to their nature, and I do not know what they are. Cyclops was the name of a giant in mythology that had but one eye in the middle of his forehead. Thus species has but one "eye," but it ...
— Synopsis of Some Genera of the Large Pyrenomycetes - Camilla, Thamnomyces, Engleromyces • C. G. Lloyd
... clipped into shapes of animals, in the Italian style. I can remember when I was a lad how I used to try to make out what the trees were cut to represent, and how I used to appeal for explanations to Judith, my Welsh nurse. She dealt in a strange mythology of her own, and peopled the gardens with griffins, dragons, good genii and bad, and filled my mind with them at the same time. My nursery window afforded a view of the great fountains at the head of the upper basin, and on moonlight nights the Welshwoman ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... with regard to the famous individual commonly known as Bluebeard. None, perhaps, was less tenable than that which made of this gentleman a personification of the Sun. For this is what a certain school of comparative mythology set itself to do, some forty years ago. It informed the world that the seven wives of Bluebeard were the Dawns, and that his two brothers-in-law were the morning and the evening Twilight, identifying them with the Dioscuri, who delivered Helena when she was rapt away by Theseus. We must ...
— The Seven Wives Of Bluebeard - 1920 • Anatole France
... in Greek mythology, were the children of Uranus (heaven) and Gaea (earth), and of gigantic size. They engaged in a conflict with Zeus, the king of heaven, which lasted ten years. They were completely defeated, and hurled down into a dungeon below Tartarus. Very often they are confounded with the Giants, ...
— An Essay on Criticism • Alexander Pope
... I knew the Ariadne of mythology, and so the sight of the patent log-line trailing in the creamy turmoil of our wake used always to suggest imaginings to me, as I leaned gazing over our poop rail, of a modern Theseus being rescued by this line of ours from the labyrinthine caverns ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... years which is without value because it is modern and hybrid, inextricably mixed with Biblical legend and Caucasian philosophy. Some of it has even been invented for commercial purposes. Give a reservation Indian a present, and he will possibly provide you with sacred songs, a mythology, and ...
— The Soul of the Indian - An Interpretation • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... on the Bible and was surprised to see how little they had to say about the greatest factor in civilization, the mother of the race, and that little by no means complimentary. The more I read, the more keenly I felt the importance of convincing women that the Hebrew mythology had no special claim to a higher origin than that of the Greeks, being far less attractive in style and less refined in sentiment. Its objectionable features would long ago have been apparent had they not been glossed over with a faith in their divine inspiration. For several months I devoted ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... the Psalmist; the horse was the emblem of strength in the faith; the hunted hare, of persecution; the peacock and the phoenix stood for signs of the resurrection. Christ, as the good pastor, was also introduced in the epitaph. Even personages of the Pagan mythology were introduced, which the Christians employed in a concealed sense, as Orpheus, enchanting the wild beasts with the music (see page 701) of his lyre, was the secret symbol of Christ as the civilizer of ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... days of pageants and royal progresses these old castles were the scenes of very lively exhibitions of rustic histrionic talent. The stories of Greek and Roman mythology were ransacked to provide scenes and subjects for the rural pageant. Shepherds and shepherdesses, gods and goddesses, clowns and mummers, all took part in the rural drama which kings and queens delighted to honour. When Queen Elizabeth visited the ancient ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... that very reason capable of being infinitely more foolish, more cowardly, more superstitious. He can—what the lower animals, happily for them, cannot—organise his folly; erect his superstitions into a science; and create a whole mythology out of his blind fear of the unknown. And when he has done that—Woe to the weak! For when he has reduced his superstition to a science, then he will reduce his cruelty to a science likewise, and write books like the "Malleus Maleficarum," and the rest of the witch literature of the fifteenth, ...
— Scientific Essays and Lectures • Charles Kingsley
... feeling. Except at the rare high moments of our lives, its joys and despairs are too exalted for us; they are not ours; they belong to gods and heroes. In music the superman is born into our feelings. Music does for the emotions what mythology and poetry do for the imagination and philosophy for the intellect—it brings us into touch with a more magnificent life, for which we have perhaps the potency, but not the opportunity here. And in doing this, music performs a great service; for, outside ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... them. In the Caucasus, where the population is not of Slavonic origin, we have innumerable stories of sacred trees, and in each of these stones the main idea is the same—namely, that a human life is dependent on the existence of a tree. In Slavonic mythology, plants as well as trees are magnets for spirits, and in the sweet-scented pinewoods, in the dark, lonely pinewoods, dwell "psipolnitza," or female goblins, who plague the harvesters; and "lieshi," or forest male demons, closely allied to satyrs. ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... through their branches wrought a fantastic tracery, on the smooth asphalte. And on either side Gorby could see the dim white forms of the old Greek gods and goddesses—Venus Victrix, with the apple in her hand (which Mr. Gorby, in his happy ignorance of heathen mythology, took for Eve offering Adam the forbidden fruit); Diana, with the hound at her feet, and Bacchus and Ariadne (which the detective imagined were the Babes in the Wood). He knew that each of the statues had queer names, but thought ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... a page can be opened where the eye does not light upon some antique gem. Mythology, history, art, manners, topography, have all their fitting representatives. It is the highest praise to say, that the designs throughout add to the pleasure with which Horace is read. Many of them carry us back to the very portraitures ...
— Notes & Queries 1849.12.01 • Various
... assassins were hired to slay him, but the attempt did not succeed. In a small town of Bengal, where he treated fetishism with more than his usual severity, some fanatic threw on his naked feet a huge cobra. There are two snakes deified by the Brahman mythology: the one which surrounds the neck of Shiva on his idols is called Vasuki; the other, Ananta, forms the couch of Vishnu. So the worshipper of Shiva, feeling sure that his cobra, trained purposely for the mysteries of a Shivaite ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... a combination of skill and fraud imposed upon the vulgar, is easily settled. The priests of the ancient mythology, the adepts of the middle ages, turned their knowledge of chemistry and mechanics and their proficiency in legerdemain to account; and before we denounce the latter as impostors, we should bear in mind the ignorance of the times in which they lived. People would not have believed any natural explanation, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... glyptic so in poetic art, the Hellenism of the time was decadent and Alexandrine rather than Attic of the best period. But Chenier is always far more than an imitator. La Jeune Tarentine is a work of personal emotion and inspiration. The colouring is that of classic mythology, but the spiritual element is as individual as that of any classical poem by Milton, Gray, Keats or Tennyson. Apart from his idylls and his elegies, Chenier also experimented from early youth in didactic and philosophic verse, and when he commenced his Hermes in 1783 ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... industry, God was represented as a potter; in agricultural districts, as a god of harvest; among warring tribes as an avenger, a Jehovah. And the more needs, the more deities; the higher the aspirations, the better the gods. Hence the ugly fetish of a savage tribe, and the beautiful mythology of a Greek Civilisation. Change the needs and aspirations of the Americans, therefore, and you will have changed their worship, their national Deity, and even their Government. And believe me, this change is coming; people get tired of their gods as of ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... said, however, that the custom was first used by the Christians. It was in practice among early pagan nations also, and is regarded as a survival of the ideas of the fire-worshipers. The sun, which was the impersonation of deity to many primitive races, had his home in their mythology in the east, and out of respect for him the dead were placed facing this quarter, among certain tribes always in a sitting posture. It may also be remarked that among other races the position was reversed, the dead body being placed with its feet toward ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... yet unpaid help France had given to his own country, and above all to the conviction that France, minding her own business, had been set upon by a greater power, with intent to crush and destroy. France was attacked by a dragon, and the old similes of mythology floated through his mind, but, oftenest, that of Andromeda chained to the rock. And the figure that typified France always had the golden hair and dark blue eyes of slim, young ...
— The Forest of Swords - A Story of Paris and the Marne • Joseph A. Altsheler
... his soul upon that other flag. Its possession would be high pride. It would express bloody minglings, near blows. He had a gigantic hatred for those who made great difficulties and complications. They caused it to be as a craved treasure of mythology, hung amid tasks and contrivances ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... success, so profoundly were the ancient intellectual habits rooted in this degenerate people. The long resistance to the new religion was at an end, but Romans, even while confessing that the gods were demons, could not cast off their affection for the mythology and history of their glorious time. Thus Basil had spent his schooldays mostly in the practice of sophistic argument, and the delivery of harangues on traditional subjects. Other youths had shown greater ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing
... analogy, though in some respects on a smaller scale. Now, as then, we can find mystical philosophers trying to evolve a satisfactory creed by some process of logical legerdemain out of theosophical moonshine; and amiable and intelligent persons labouring hard to prove that the old mythology could be forced to accept a rationalistic interpretation— whether in regard to the inspection of entrails or prayers for fine weather; and philosophers framing systems of morality entirely apart from the ancient creeds, and sufficiently satisfactory to themselves, while hopelessly incapable ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... can keep hens, "me and Crankin" can raise ducks, geese thrive naturally with me, but a peacock is a rare and glorious possession. The proud scenes he is associated with in mythology, history, and art rushed through my mind with whirlwind rapidity as I stood debating the question. The favorite bird of Juno—she called the metallic spots on its tail the eyes of Argus—imported by Solomon to Palestine, essentially regal. Kings have ...
— Adopting An Abandoned Farm • Kate Sanborn
... were, in more superstitious if not happier ages, the supposed haunts of elves, fairies, and other such beings, not unaptly denominated the rabble of mythology. ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... alchymy have been much controverted. If any credit may be placed on legend and tradition, it must be as old as the flood—nay, Adam himself is represented to have been an alchymist. A great part, not only of the heathen mythology, but of the Jewish Scriptures, are supposed to refer to it. Thus, Suidas[73] will have the fable of the philosopher's stone to be alluded to in the fable of the Argonauts; and others find it in the book of Moses, as well as in other ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... of Egypt, and afterwards of Greece, and Rome, were derived from men famous in those early times, as in the ages of hunting, pasturage, and agriculture. The histories of some of their actions recorded in Scripture, or celebrated in the heathen mythology, are introduced, as the Author hopes, without impropriety into his account of those remote periods ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... he came to the original he was profoundly impressed. It is strange, he says, that he has learnt for the first time at the age of sixty what a really great poem could be. Poor Milton's adaptation of pagan mythology to the Hebrew legends, in order to expound Puritan theology, results in a series of solecisms, which even the poet could not expect his readers to take seriously. The story, taken for history, certainly breaks down sufficiently to justify a severe remark. ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... Books now stowed away in a dark Closet which affrights my Eyes to think of. But any of your learned friends in London will tell you, and probably more accurately than Paddy. I cannot doubt but that Sphinx and heaps more of the childish and dirty mythology of Greece came from Egypt, and who knows how far beyond, ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble (1871-1883) • Edward FitzGerald
... another, which is called the "Circle of the Infinite," or "Ceugant," which is identical with the "Union with God" of the Persians and Greek Mystics, or the "Nirvana" of the Hindus. Rather an advanced form of philosophy for "barbarians," is it not? Particularly when contrasted with the crude mythology of ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson
... thud, the big man dropped down from the guard's cubicle overhead, grinning cheerfully. He needed a shave—Yetsko always did, in the mornings—and in his leather Literates' guard uniform, he looked like some ogreish giant out of the mythology ...
— Null-ABC • Henry Beam Piper and John Joseph McGuire
... of Daniel had limits. The learning of the 'Chaldeans' was largely ritualistic, and magic, incantations, divination, and mythology constituted a most important part of it. Did not the conscience, which could not swallow idolatrous food, resent being forced to assimilate idolatrous learning? No; for all that learning could be acquired by a faithful monotheist, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... 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, the winds that pluck the grey from the beards of the billows, the clouds that are snorted from the sea's broad nostril, ...
— Shelley - An Essay • Francis Thompson
... example, as India (who occasionally took the form of a bull), Derketo (who sometimes metamorphosed into a fish), Poseidon, Jupiter Ammon, Milosh Kobilitch, Minerva, and countless others—and that it is to this particular belief and worship, which is to be found in the mythology of every race, that all religions, as well as belief in fairies, demons, werwolves, and ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... of my figure. I walk out into a nature such as the old prophets and poets, Menu, Moses, Homer, Chaucer, walked in. You may name it America, but it is not America; neither Americus Vespueius, nor Columbus, nor the rest were the discoverers of it. There is a truer amount of it in mythology than in any history of America, so called, that I ...
— Walking • Henry David Thoreau
... Rome, nor himself, but a view into the enchanted gardens of the Greek mythology. This path I followed, have been following ever since; and now, life half over, it seems to me, as in my childhood, that every thought of which man is susceptible, is intimated there. In those young years, indeed, I did not see what I now see, but loved to creep from amid the Roman ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... character of the scenery is indicated with great preciseness, even to its smallest details. Here, too, actual devils, beings whose will, as Aquinas says, is obstinately set upon evil, appear for the first time, as distinct from the personages of classical mythology, who act as warders of the various circles. Virgil, or human reason, is no longer sufficient of himself to secure a passage. Both at the gates of the fiery city and on subsequent occasions he is as helpless, without superior aid, as ...
— Dante: His Times and His Work • Arthur John Butler
... tell nothing. The inhabitants of Otaheite and New-Zealand are not in a state of pure nature; for it is plain they broke off from some other people. Had they grown out of the ground, you might have judged of a state of pure nature. Fanciful people may talk of a mythology being amongst them; but it must be invention. They have once had religion, which has been gradually debased. And what account of their religion can you suppose to be learnt from savages? Only consider, Sir, our own state: our religion is in a book; we have an order of men whose ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... atmosphere which engenders violence. When passions were wrought up to a white heat by fiery orators and still more fiery newspaper writers, who knew how to draw equally effectively on the ancient legends of Hindu mythology and on the contemporary records of Russian anarchism, the cult of the bomb was easily grafted on to the cult of Shiva, the Destroyer, and murders, of which the victims were almost as often Indians in Government service ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... write of the sexes in English you must either be sentimental or a satirist. You must set the emotions to work; otherwise you must be quiet. Now the emotions have no business with knowledge; and there's a reason why we have no fairy lore, because we can't keep our feelings in hand. The Greeks had a mythology, the highest form of Art, and we have none. Why is that? Because we can neither expound without wishing to convert the soul, nor understand without self-experiment. We don't want to know things, we want to feel them—and are ashamed of our need. ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... associated with a dreamy light, with forests, forest lawns, etc., or the wild accidents of a huntress. But the Moon and the Huntress are surely not the creations of Pagans, nor indebted to them for anything but the murderous depluming which Pagan mythology has operated upon all that is in earth or in the waters that are under the earth. Now, why could not the ancients raise one little scintillating glory in behalf of their monstrous deities? So far are they from thus raising ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... mere realities which you have just been looking at are thrown back so far into distance, that the very event of your intrusion upon such scenes begins to look dim and uncertain, as though it belonged to mythology. ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... very worst electrical storm we've had this whole summer. And you know that I never do mind being out in the rain, don't you? I've always been quite wilting to play Alpheus for you, whenever you wanted." (Timothy had studied mythology when he was in Freeport at college.) "But think," he added, much more seriously, "think of poor Miss 'Titia. You can be sure she's just having one fit right after the other with you out here. I call it dirt mean to ...
— The Heart of Arethusa • Francis Barton Fox
... finding her would have been compromising if he had been less ingeniously tactful. It was by no means easy to meet her in society either, for, in spite of recent social developments, Prince Chiaromonte still clung to the antiquated political mythology of Blacks and Whites, and strictly avoided the families he persisted in calling 'Liberals,' on the ground that his father had called them so in 1870, when he was a small boy. It was not until he had bored himself to extinction in the conscientious effort to take the girl out, that he appealed ...
— The White Sister • F. Marion Crawford
... extensive, and fitted up with every possible convenience;—the passages and apartments were paved with marbles of every hue, and the tesselated floors were adorned with representations of gladiatorial engagements, hunting, racing, and a variety of subjects from the mythology. In the Thermae at Rome, ingenuity and magnificence seem exhausted; and the elegance of the architecture, and the vast range of rooms and porticos, create in the beholder surprise and admiration, mingled with feelings of regret for their neglected state. A quadrans (about a farthing) admitted ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 579 - Volume 20, No. 579, December 8, 1832 • Various
... between the two fatal urns of good and evil, the blind goddess with her cornucopia, the Parcae wielding the distaff, the thread of life, and the abhorred shears, seemed but dim and shadowy abstractions of mythology, when I had gazed upon an assemblage exercising, as I dreamt, a not less eventful power, and all presented to me in palpable and living operation. Reason and experience, ever at their old spiteful work of catching and destroying the bubbles which ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... don't know what to think about the future. Long ago I used to hope for a true religion, but now I see that if it is to be free from mythology, it ceases to be a religion altogether, and becomes only science, which has none of the heating and energizing force that a real religion certainly possesses. Neither has science its power of uniting men in bonds of brotherhood, and in giving them an effective hostile action ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... this analysis is made, discussion of certain features must necessarily be incomplete and unsatisfactory. No one, however, can stand in this Chamber of Psyche, and not feel how great reality the old mythology must still have had, not only for the artists who painted the room, but for the people who inhabited it and enjoyed it. I do not say that they believed it as they believed in the vital articles of Christian faith, but that they accepted it with the same spirit as they accepted the martyrology ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... in ANF, vol. IX, 259-279. This work of Aristides may be as early as 125; if so, it disputes with the similar work of Quadratus the honor of being the first Christian apology. A large part of it is taken up with a statement of the contradictions and absurdities of the mythology of the Greeks and Barbarians. Of this statement, ch. 13, quoted below, is the conclusion. Then, after a short passage regarding the Jews, the author passes to an exposition of the faith of Christians and a ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... of maps or charts; so called from the character of that name in ancient mythology, son of Uranus, and represented as bearing the world on his back. Also ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... daughters married, her only son killed in war, her life now (it never was much else) an uneventful round of market days, eating and sleeping, knitting and prayers; the other—young, careless, fresh to the world, his head stored with heathen mythology, the loves of the Gods, and problems of Euclid—taking a light for his pipe from the old woman, and airing his French in a discussion upon a variety of topics, from the price of apples to the cost of a dispensation; ...
— Normandy Picturesque • Henry Blackburn
... naively enough declares that, if you except all that relates to angels, demons, and miracle, there is scarcely any mythology in the Gospel.' An exception which reminds one of the Irish prelate who, on reading 'Gulliver's Travels,' remarked that there were some things in that book which he could not ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... studied history in Hegel's Philosophy of History. I said nothing of this, or other studies, or they would immediately have been spoken of, in the manner of an instructive lady, who said, that people justly complained that I did not possess learning enough. "You have really no mythology" said she; "in all your poems there appears no single God. You must pursue mythology; you must read Racine and Corneille." That she called learning; and in like manner every one had something peculiar to recommend. ...
— The True Story of My Life • Hans Christian Andersen
... and over that nothing would come of it, but that it had to be. Sometimes, though, I think something must.... Nothing we expect, but something unforeseen." He paused and shut his eyes. "You remember in the old mythology tales how, when the sons of the gods were born, the mothers always died in agony? Maybe it's only Semele I'm thinking of. At any rate, I've sometimes wondered whether the young men of our time had to die to bring a new ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... Bible is a handbook of science after all then! But what has science to do with the origin of matter? The origin of life is still an open question. The origin of man is not an open question. Genesis gives us a piece of mythology; Darwin gave us the truth. Among the eminent sons of science who is greater than he? Yet he has utterly exploded the Adam and Eve story. Darwin has left it on record that he rejected all revelation, and that for nearly forty years of his life he was a disbeliever in Christianity. He did ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... my University studies, I had to think of earning my own living, I not only, as before, gave private lessons, but I gave lectures, first to a circle before whom I lectured on Northern and Greek mythology, then to another, in David's house, to whom I unfolded the inner history of modern literature to interested listeners, amongst them several beautiful young girls. I finally engaged myself to my old Arithmetic master as teacher of Danish ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... of these manuscripts; but it is highly probable that the most important parts of the work, now known under the title of "The Prose Edda," formed a part of them, and that Snorre—who may be regarded as the Scandinavian Euhemerus—merely added a few chapters, in order to render the mythology more conformable to the erroneous notions he appears to have entertained respecting its signification. Be this as it may, the Prose Edda, in its present form, dates from the thirteenth century, and consists of—1. Formali (Fore ...
— The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson; and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson • Saemund Sigfusson and Snorre Sturleson
... prophet Amos (viii. 11) had predicted, when "God will send a famine in the land, not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but a famine of hearing the words of the Lord." The Greek world had lost faith in the poetical gods of its mythology and in the metaphysical powers of its philosophical schools, and was searching for a more real object to revere and lean on. The people were thirsting for the living God. And in place of the gods of nature, whom they had found unsatisfying, or the impersonal ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... learning; nor is it any great matter if a man has knowledge, whether he has it from one language or from another. Nothing is more evident, than that he had a taste for natural philosophy, mechanics, ancient and modern history, poetical learning, and mythology. We find him very knowing in the customs, rites, and manners of the Romans. In Coriolanus, and Julius Caesar, not only the spirit but manners of the Romans are exactly drawn; and still a nicer distinction is shewn between the manners ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume I. • Theophilus Cibber
... moralist; to revive the grand style of Pindar was his object as an artist. Each attempt involved impossibility, and argued a visionary ambition dimly conscious of its scope. Without freedom, without the living mythology of Hellas, without a triumphant national cause, in the very death of independence, at the end of a long age of glorious but artificial culture, how could Chiabrera dare to pose as Pindar? Instead of the youth of Greece ascending with free flight and all ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... tree of councils," from the prevalent custom of assembling legislators, magistrates and savants under its protecting canopy to deliberate on civil affairs; while all around, ensconced in every niche, are the tutelary gods and goddesses that make up the Hindoo mythology. It is indeed a quaint, weird spot, full of the witchery of romance and legendary lore; and though years have passed since I last sat under the Cubber Burr's sheltering boughs with a merry party of picnicking maidens, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... of rare and costly pageantry. At the coronation of Ptolemy Philadelphus the brilliant city surfeited on a long-drawn golden pomp, decked out in all the physical beauty the inheritance of Greek thought and memories of Greek mythology could suggest, together with a wealth of gorgeous mysticism and rapture of sensuous intoxication, which was the fruit of its intercourse with the oriental world. The writers of Alexandria lacked the 'high ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... was both times suspended. Being called to the Berlin Academy by Frederick William IV., in order to counterbalance the prevailing Hegelianism, Schelling delivered lectures in the university also (on Mythology and Revelation), which he ceased, however, when notes taken by his hearers were printed without his consent.[5] His collected works were published in fourteen volumes (1856-61) under the care of his ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... for learning not to be encouraged, and I shall do more for her before long. We have pursued a select course of reading this winter. She has read aloud while I painted. We began stumblingly with Alice in Wonderland and are now groping through mythology." ...
— Amarilly of Clothes-line Alley • Belle K. Maniates
... especially if you look toward the sun! What more remarkable object can there be in the landscape? Visible for miles, too fair to be believed. If such a phenomenon occurred but once, it would be handed down by tradition to posterity, and get into the mythology at last. ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... earth. [3] Fear, gratitude, and curiosity, a dream or an omen, a singular disorder, or a distant journey, perpetually disposed him to multiply the articles of his belief, and to enlarge the list of his protectors. The thin texture of the Pagan mythology was interwoven with various but not discordant materials. As soon as it was allowed that sages and heroes, who had lived or who had died for the benefit of their country, were exalted to a state of power ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... writer, mythology expert, and journalist. Began career as a reporter on the Athens "Times." Was discharged for incompetence, and took up honest writing. Found a publisher who thought his writings would sell to posterity. Later H. took charge of the Ulysses Tours. Was war correspondent ...
— Who Was Who: 5000 B. C. to Date - Biographical Dictionary of the Famous and Those Who Wanted to Be • Anonymous
... Eyrie now took on to my eyes an aspect absolutely fantastic. Its heights seemed peopled by dragons and huge monsters. If chimeras, griffins, and all the creations of mythology had appeared to guard it, I should ...
— The Master of the World • Jules Verne
... the comparative method in philology, in mythology—let me add in politics and history und the whole range of human thought—marks a stage in the progress of the human mind at least as great and memorable as the revival of Greek and Latin learning.—FREEMAN, ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... of healing begins in the Hellenic mythology with Apollo, the god of light and the promoter of health. In the "Iliad" he is hailed as the disperser of epidemics, and, in this respect, the ancients were well informed in attributing destruction ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... and chairs carved to represent the limbs of animals, as has been noted in the Assyrian, Egyptian, and Greek designs, but other parts of furniture were ornamented by carvings in bas relief of subjects taken from Greek mythology and legend. Veneers were cut and applied, not as some have supposed for the purpose of economy, but because by this means the most beautifully marked or figured specimens of the woods could be chosen, and a much richer and more decorative effect produced ...
— Illustrated History of Furniture - From the Earliest to the Present Time • Frederick Litchfield
... to Kevlaar would be amazing as coming from an unbeliever, did we not see in it evidence of the poet's capacity for perfect sympathetic adoption of the spirit of his early environment. The same is true of many another poetic expression of simple faith, whether in Christianity or in the mythology ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... Kami in Japanese mythology; "creation" of chiefs; used in "Chronicles" of Yemishi chiefs; trinity of; two classes; the Kami class or Shimbetsu; worship of, in early 7th century; uji no Kami elective in Temmu's ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... awfulness of whose antiquity hath stricken all mythology dumb;—thou most wrinkled diving Sea, the millions of whose years outnumber even the multitude of thy hoary motions;—thou omniform and most mysterious Sea, mother of the monsters and the gods,—whence shine eternal youth? Still do thy waters hold the infinite thrill ...
— Chita: A Memory of Last Island • Lafcadio Hearn |
