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Stygian   Listen
adjective
Stygian  adj.  Of or pertaining to the river Styx; hence, hellish; infernal. See Styx. "At that so sudden blaze, the Stygian throng Bent their aspect."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Stygian" Quotes from Famous Books



... pretty soon have died away; nor could any amount of unwise desire to satisfy that feeling in fellow-creatures less seriously disposed have sustained him alive, in those baleful Historic Acherons and Stygian Fens, where he has had to dig and to fish so long, far away from the upper light!—Let me request all readers to blow that sorry chaff entirely out of their minds; and to believe nothing on the subject except what they ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. I. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Birth And Parentage.—1712. • Thomas Carlyle

... match and lit it, and the underground stream was lit by a faint ruddy glow. The channel, covered by a semicircular arch, was just wide enough for one boat to pass through, with oars out. The black water flowed silently by in a sluggish, Stygian stream. Bats, startled by the light, fluttered in their faces, and then disappeared ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne

... hears: Patient permit the sadly pleasing strain; Familiar now with grief, your tears refrain, And in the public woe forget your own; You weep not for a perish'd lord alone. What Greeks new wandering in the Stygian gloom, Wish your Ulysses shared an equal doom! Your widow'd hours, apart, with female toil And various labours of the loom beguile; There rule, from palace-cares remote and free; That care to man belongs, ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope

... sight in the brain. But after that—what? He laughed again at Carmen's pertinent question about the mind climbing up into the brain to see the vibrating nerve. But was it so silly a presumption, after all? Is the mind within the brain, awaiting in Stygian darkness the advent of the vibrations which shall give it pictures of the outside world? Or is the mind outside of the brain, but still slavishly forced to look at these vibrations of the optic nerve and then translate them into terms of things without? What could a vibrating ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking

... vanished silently down stream. We all became hushed and apprehensive. The night was gigantic and terrible. There were a few stars, but the flood slid along too swiftly to reflect them. The whole scene seemed some Stygian imagination of Dante. As we drew further and further into that lightless land, little twists and curls of vapour wriggled over the black river-surface. Our homeless, irrelevant, tiny steamer seemed to hang between two abysms. One became ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke

... fence; wistaria, in its deeper green of midsummer, ran riot over the trellis where Clarence had basely dodged his lovely mistress, and, after making a furry pin wheel of himself, had fled through the airhole into Stygian depths. ...
— The Green Mouse • Robert W. Chambers

... was the first (here) Coffee made, And ever since the rest drive on the trade; Me no good Engalash! and sure enough, He plaid the Quack to salve his Stygian stuff; Ver boon for de stomach, de Cough, de Ptisick And I believe him, for it looks like Physick. Coffee a crust is charkt into a coal, The smell and taste of the Mock China bowl; Where huff and puff, they labour out their lungs, ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers

... been the friend and confidant of Four Dogs who have helped to humanize him for a quarter of a century and more, and who have souls to be saved, he is sure. And when he crosses the Stygian River he expects to find, on the other shore, a trio of dogs wagging their tails almost off, in their joy at his coming, and with honest tongues hanging out to lick his hands and his feet. And then he is going, with these faithful, devoted ...
— A Boy I Knew and Four Dogs • Laurence Hutton

... Sun, Before the Heavens, thou wert, and at the voice Of God, as with a mantle, didst invest The rising World of waters dark and deep, Won from the void and formless Infinite! Thee I revisit now with bolder wing, Escaped the Stygian pool, though long detained In that obscure sojourn, while in my flight, Through utter and through middle Darkness borne, With other notes than to the Orphean lyre, I sung of Chaos and eternal Night, Taught by the Heavenly Muse to venture down The dark descent, and up to re-ascend, ...
— Milton • John Bailey

... whom Hell in vain enthralled. His shade from Hades upon that dread day Bursting to light in terrible array! What! could not Pluto spare the Chief once more, To scare a second robber from his prey? Idly he wandered on the Stygian shore, Nor now preserved the walls ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron

... very long time indeed—before any light stole in upon his Stygian darkness, and then, when the light did come, it came in skyrocket guise, and had its share of cons attached to its very ...
— The Rejuvenation of Aunt Mary • Anne Warner

... neither—then he'll flatter Till he finds some trait for satire; Hunts your weak point out, then shows it Where it injures to disclose it, In the mode that's most invidious, Adding every trait that's hideous, From the bile, whose blackening river Rushes through his Stygian liver. Then he thinks himself a lover: Why I really can't discover In his mind, age, face, or figure: Viper-broth might give him vigor. Let him keep the caldron steady, He the venom has already. For his faults, he has but ONE— 'Tis but envy, when ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton

... for years. The pious and the educated (and there were plenty of both in Barbados) were not proof against the infection. Old letters describe the scene in the churches that morning as hideous—prayers, sobs, and cries, in Stygian darkness, from trembling crowds. And still the darkness continued and ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various

... was their goal, the Dark Moon! And they were prepared for Stygian darkness and a land of perpetual night. The almost invisible gas-clouds thinned; there was a glow ahead that grew brilliant as they watched; and then, with a blinding suddenness that made them shield their eyes, there flashed before them ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various

... desperate, he drowned his stomach and senses with a large draught and ingurgitation of wine; whereupon the epigram was made, Hinc Stygias ebrius hausit aquas; he was not sober enough to taste any bitterness of the Stygian water. But the physicians contrariwise do make a kind of scruple and religion to stay with the patient after the disease is deplored; whereas in my judgment they ought both to inquire the skill, and to give the attendances, ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon

... spoke—His son obey'd:—and to his feet Bound the light wings of gold—wings ever fleet, Which over earth and sea, through yielding air, Swift as the wind the rapid herald bear; 305 And took the rod that calls the trembling ghost To light, or binds it to the Stygian coast, Gives balmy slumber, breaks the sweet repose, Weighs down the lid of dying eyes that close. Thro' storms and dripping clouds with this he glides; Now o'er the summit and the hoary sides 310 Of Atlas hangs, pois'd on whose shoulders rest The Heav'ns: ...
— The Fourth Book of Virgil's Aeneid and the Ninth Book of Voltaire's Henriad • Virgil and Voltaire

... simples Cocted in Stygian shades— Acids of wrinkles and pimples From faces of ancient maids— Acrid precipitates sunken From tempers of scolding wives Whose husbands, uncommonly drunken, Are commonly found in dives,— With this I baptize and appoint thee (to St. John.) To marshal the vinophobe ranks. In the name of ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce

... of a narrow and slippery bridge, from which many were lost. The Zunis set apart a day in each year which they spent among the graves of their dead, communing with their spirits, and bringing them presents—a kind of All-souls-day. (Dorman, "Prim. Superst.," p. 35.) The Stygian flood, and Scylla and Charybdis, are found among the legends of the Caribs. (Ibid., p. 37.) Even the boat of Charon reappears in the ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly

... had been eleven years Dean of St. Patrick's before he produced those famous letters which have left their mark so indelibly upon the course of Irish politics. Swift's part in this Stygian pool of the eighteenth century is rather a difficult one to explain. He was not in any sense an Irish champion, indeed, objected to being called an Irishman at all, and regarded his life in Ireland as one of all but unendurable banishment. He was a vehement High Churchman, ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless

... Carefully he laid flat on his belly and edged himself along until he could thrust his face into the abyss. The air felt very warm—a dank, damp warmth, such as exudes from the depths of a swamp in summer. He peered downward but his eyes could not penetrate the Stygian blackness out of which rose the monotonous wail of ...
— Connie Morgan in the Fur Country • James B. Hendryx

... was in vain. Some monk would surely see him in a vision, as St. Eucherius, Bishop of Orleans, saw Charles Martel (according to the Council of Kiersy), 'with Cain, Judas, and Caiaphas, thrust into the Stygian whirlpools and Acherontic ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley

... never. And to see her face, Broad with sleek homely beams; her babied hands, Ever like 'lighting doves, and her small eyes— Blue wells a-twinkle, arch and lewd and pious— To darken all sudden into Stygian gloom, And paint disaster with uplifted whites, Is life's epitome. She prates and prates— A waterbrook of words o'er twelve small pebbles. And when she dies—some grey, long, summer evening, When the bird shouts of childhood through the dusk, 'Neath night's faint tapers—then her body ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume I. • Walter de la Mare

... between us and the border of the basin, arose a long neck, on the top of which, like the blossom of some Stygian lily, sat what seemed the head of a corpse, its mouth half open, and full of canine teeth. I went on; it retreated, then drew aside. The lady stepped on the firm land, but the leopardess between us, roused once more, turned, and flew at the throat ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald

... a gleam of light! Could a man choke himself with his own fingers if the worst came to the worst? The Digger and Stygian darkness—now—when he was going mad! Men could not be so cruel.... But they'd say he was drunk. He would lie still and cling with all his strength and heart and soul to sanity. He would think of That ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren

... in the rear seat. Two small lamps served to light the way through the Stygian labyrinth of trees and rocks. O'Dowd had an electric pocket torch with which to pick his ...
— Green Fancy • George Barr McCutcheon

... to which a huntsman has given a mortal wound. Mortally wounded he truly was, slain, like many another since his day, by a hopeless love for what was in truth but an image, and that an image of his own creation. Even when his shade passed across the dark Stygian river, it stooped over the side of the boat that it might try to catch a glimpse of the beloved one ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang

... myths and immaterials, there is the home of the law and the force, there dwell the Odyles, the electricities, the magnetisms, and affinities, and there the speculative AEneas pursues shadows more fleeting than the Stygian ghosts, and the grasp of the metaphysician closes on shapes whose embrace is vacancy. The bark that ploughs within this mystic expanse, sheds from its cleaving keel but coruscations of phosphorescent ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... and Fortunius lie, Traytorous Sempronius and proud Ptolomey, Go plead your cause fore the angry Rhadamant, 800 And tel him why you basely Pompey slew. And let your guilty blood appease his Ghost, That now sits wandring by the Stygian bankes, Vnworthy sacrifice to quite his worth, For Pompey though thou wert mine enemy, And vayne ambition mou'd vs to this strife; Yet now in death when strife and enuy cease. Thy princely vertues and thy noble minde, Moue me to rue thy vndeserued death, That found ...
— The Tragedy Of Caesar's Revenge • Anonymous

... tomb: Here in spirit now I stand and mourn at thine. Yet no breath of death strikes thence, no shadow of gloom, Only light more bright than gold of the inmost mine, Only steam of incense warm from love's own shrine. Not the darkling stream, the sundering Stygian ford, Not the hour that smites and severs as a sword, Not the night subduing light that perisheth, Smite, subdue, divide from us by doom abhorred, Life so sweet as this that dies ...
— Astrophel and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne, Vol. VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... insensible they never knew. Justus Miles was the first to come to, and he found himself in Stygian blackness. "Rusty!" he called, feeling terribly sick and giddy. Only silence answered him. "Good God!" he thought, "what has happened?" His hand went out and recoiled from something soft and sticky. Gingerly he sat up. There ...
— The Heads of Apex • Francis Flagg

... broken is the golden bowl! the spirit flown forever! Let the bell toll!—a saintly soul floats on the Stygian river; And, Guy De Vere, hast thou no tear?—weep now or never more! See! on yon drear and rigid bier low lies thy love, Lenore! Come! let the burial rite be read—the funeral song be sung!— An anthem for the queenliest dead that ever died so young— A dirge for her the doubly dead in that ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... else he would have said to himself that his anger often filled his heart with hell's dunnest gloom. The old Castle was never well lighted; but, with a father and a son in it like Cardoness and his heir, it was sometimes like the Stygian pool itself. Rutherford had need to write to her ladyship to have a soft answer always ready between such a father and such a son. If you have the Inferno at hand, and will read what it says about the Fifth Circle, you will see what went on sometimes in that ...
— Samuel Rutherford - and some of his correspondents • Alexander Whyte

... was afterwards conveyed to Rouen, when Rollo embraced Christianity. Other causes also contributed to the migration of these remains: they were often summoned in order to dignify acts of peculiar solemnity, or to be the witnesses to the oaths of princes, like the Stygian ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner

... Stygian mountains,' replied Manto. 'Through their centre runs the passage of Night which leads to the regions ...
— The Infernal Marriage • Benjamin Disraeli

... that drink with glee This fanciful Philosophy, Pray tell me what good is it? If antient Nick should come and take, The same across the Stygian Lake, I guess we ne'er ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... all color and form, whose contours crumbled on all sides under the assault of the liquid putrescence that flowed across the broken bones of stakes and wire and framing; nor, rising above those things amid the sullen Stygian immensity, can I ever forget the vision of the thrill of reason, logic and simplicity that suddenly shook these men like a ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse

... above the abyss of Stygian blackness on the other side, not a little daunted by its imperturbable mystery, a quick backward glance showed him figures moving in the basement hallway of the gambling house; and easing over, ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance

... to be of Caesar's and Marius's Villas, Agrippina's Tomb, Caligula's Bridge, &c., may be anything; they are nothing but shapeless fragments, only on a rock I saw a bit of marble or stucco in what they call Caesar's Villa. The Stygian Lake presented no horrors, nor the Elysian Fields any delights; the former is a great round piece of water, and the latter are very common-looking vineyards. When well wooded, which in the time of the Romans it was, this coast must have been a most delicious and luxurious retreat, ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville

... reaches the Acherusian lake,—this is the river at which the souls of the dead await their return to earth. Pyriphlegethon is a stream of fire, which coils round the earth and flows into the depths of Tartarus. The fourth river, Cocytus, is that which is called by the poets the Stygian river, and passes into and forms the lake Styx, from the waters of which it gains new and strange powers. This river, ...
— Phaedo - The Last Hours Of Socrates • Plato

... layd on thing that likte him best, Or ever sleepe his eie-strings did untye, Should be his pray. And therefore still on hye He over him did hold his cruell clawes, Threatning with greedy gripe to doe him dye, And rend in peeces with his ravenous pawes, If ever he transgrest the fatal Stygian lawes. ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin

... The haughty Paul, the fanatic Gregory, the worldly Urban, the austere Innocent the Tenth, the affable Alexander the Seventh, all concurred in assuring me that it was deeply to be regretted that I should ever have been emancipated from the restraints of the Stygian realm, to which I should do well to return with all possible celerity; that it would much conduce to the interests of the Church if my name could be forgotten; and that as for doing anything to revive its memory, they would just as soon think of ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett

... mortal prayers are heard in hell, Hear, Goddess dread, invisible! Monarch of the regions drear, Aidoneus, hear, O hear! By a gentle, tearless doom Speed this stranger to the gloom, Let him enter without pain The all-shrouding Stygian plain. Wrongfully in life oppressed, Be he ...
— The Oedipus Trilogy • Sophocles

... never thought of praying. Why should she? The prisoned seed, buried in the dank and quickening soil, struggles instinctively toward the source of light and strength. But what instinct is there to guide the human soul that, quickened by unselfish love, is yet walled in by the Stygian darkness ...
— Blue Goose • Frank Lewis Nason

... Charon by the Stygian coast Take toll of all the shades who land, Your little, faithful, barking ghost May leap to lick my ...
— The Dog's Book of Verse • Various

... favor of Heaven to me that I hear of you again by this accident; and am made to answer a word de Profundis. It is constantly among the fairest of the few hopes that remain for me on the other side of this Stygian Abyss of a Friedrich (should I ever get through it alive) that I shall then begin writing to you again, who knows if not see you in the body before quite taking wing! For I feel always, what I have some times written, that there is (in a sense) ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson

... But are great abilities, complete without a flaw, and polished without a blemish, the standard of human excellence? This is certainly the staunch opinion of men of the world; but I call on honour, virtue, and worth, to give the stygian doctrine a loud negative! However, this must be allowed, that, if you abstract from man the idea of an existence beyond the grave, then the true measure of human conduct is, proper and improper: virtue and vice, as dispositions of ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham

... with perfect eyes. The pallor of the head is broken by two black pigment specks, conspicuous indeed as the only bits of color on the whole blanched body; and these, even to the casual observer, certainly represent well-defined organs of vision. But what do they with eyes in these Stygian waters? There reigns an everlasting night. Is the law for once at fault? A swift incision with the scalpel, a glance with a lens, and their secret is betrayed. The eyes are a mockery. Externally they are organs of vision—the front of the eye is perfect; behind, there is nothing but a mass of ruins. ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond

... can forget your trip on this river of Stygian darkness. With oil lanterns that emit but a feeble flickering flame you see ghostlike figures, goblins and grim cave monsters that loom before you; your imagination peoples these subterranean halls and their titanic masonry with fantastic forms of ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand

... they sail." They then have a respite till two, and go in till five. Eight hours in hot water! Nothing can be more disgusting than the sight of these baths. Gustave Dore must have learned here how to make those ghostly pictures of the lost floating about in the Stygian pools, in his illustrations of the Inferno; and the rocks and cavernous precipices may have enabled him to complete the picture. On what principle cures are effected in these filthy vats, I could not learn. I have a theory, that, where so many diseases meet and ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... impression to carry away into the wide country, where the road ran through field and forest. As they sped along, they plunged into a chasm of blackness, caused by the trees on both sides of the road which appeared to be constantly closing upon them. In the darkness of that stygian tunnel, dashing blindly through threatening obscurity, she yet felt no terrors, for a band of steel seemed to hold her above some pit of ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham

... to the senses. Several times she was forced to turn away her head, but only for a second, as she was compelled by some strange fascination to look upon the wonderful spectacle. Flash upon flash, racing gleam upon gleam, Stygian darkness and crashing thunder intermingled in an appalling confusion. Jean felt that she could endure the sight no longer. Her body trembled, and her eyes ached. She was about to go back to Mammy, when her father laid ...
— The King's Arrow - A Tale of the United Empire Loyalists • H. A. Cody

... past Elysium, past the long Slow smooth strong lapse of Lethe—past the toil Wherein all souls are taken as a spoil, The Stygian web of waters—if your song Be quenched not, O our brethren, but be strong As ere ye too shook ...
— Poems & Ballads (Second Series) - Swinburne's Poems Volume III • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... the rapids, he is the incarnation of all that is untamed, a wild spirit of the mountain stream, as free as a raindrop or a sunbeam. How solitary he is, a lone little bird, flitting from rock to rock through the desolate gorge, like some spirit in a Stygian world. Yet he sings continually as he takes his solitary way along the stream, and bursts of melody, so eerie and sylvan as to fire the imagination, come to the ear, sounding above the roar of the torrent. Like Orpheus, he seeks in the nether world of that wild gorge for his Eurydice, now dashing ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various

... was to receive a tangible physical blow—it was actually ponderable force; that of embodied hardness and of ruthlessness incarnate, generated in that merciless brain and hurled forth through those flame-shot, Stygian orbs. ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith

... flight from Dantzig, "disguised as a cattle-dealer;" got out on the night of Sunday last, Town under such a rain of bombshells being palpably too hot for him: got out, but cannot get across the muddy intricacies of the Weichsel; lies painfully squatted up and down, in obscure alehouses, in that Stygian Mud-Delta,—a matter of life and death to get across, and not a boat to be had, such the vigilance of the Russian. Dantzig is capitulating, dreadful penalties exacted, all the heavier as no Stanislaus is to be found in it; and ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... perjure himself, but believe that there was some deity in the temple, or at the ensanguined altar! That the souls of the departed are anything, and the realms below, and the punt-pole and frogs of the Stygian pool, and that so many thousands pass over in one boat, not even the boys believe, except those who are too young to pay ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange

... they accepted his offer, assuring him that his suspicions were correct. For neither Kaffir laundrywoman or Hindu dhobi would go down any more to the washing troughs by the river, for fear of crossing that Stygian flood of blackness rivalling their own, supposing, as Beauvayse once suggested, that there is a third-class ferry for niggers and persons of colour? And from the waterworks on the Eastern side of the town the supply ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves

... the dashing of the waves, mingle with the roar of the thunder. The swelling sea seems lifted up to the heavens, to scatter its foam among the clouds; then sinking away to the bottom assumes the color of the shoal—a Stygian blackness. ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch

... not; thy heat and stir The greater coyness breed in her: Yet thou may'st find, ere Age's frost, Thy long apprenticeship not lost, Learning at last that Stygian Fate Supples for him that knows to wait. The Muse is womanish, nor deigns Her love to him who pules and plains; With proud, averted face she stands To him who wooes with empty hands. Make thyself free of manhood's guild; Pull down thy barns and greater ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... have been. But there is in him a recognizable flash of magnanimity, of heroic enterprise and purpose; which is highly peculiar in that sordid element. And it can be said of him, as of lightning striking ineffectual on the Bog of Allen or the Stygian Fens, that his strength was never tried."—For the upshot of him we will ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... of the prairie, and some worldly miser with a surveyor looking after his bounds, while heaven had taken place around him, and he did not see the angels going to and fro, but was looking for an old post-hole in the midst of paradise. I looked again, and saw him standing in the middle of a boggy Stygian fen, surrounded by devils, and he had found his bounds without a doubt, three little stones, where a stake had been driven, and looking nearer, I saw that the Prince of Darkness was ...
— Walking • Henry David Thoreau

... lady's glasses, never to be donned again in fancy or in life; and Varney was ready to admit that there might be ladies in Hunston who were worse-looking than she by far. In the Stygian blackness he collided with a chair and paused, leaning upon ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison

... poets say The simple truth, as poets do to-day,— When Charon's boat conveyed a spirit o'er The Lethean water to the Hadean shore, The fare was just a penny,—not too great, The moderate, regular, Stygian statute rate. Now, for a shilling, he will cross the stream, (His paddles whirling to the force of steam!) And bring, obedient to some wizard power, Back to the Earth more spirits in an hour, Than Brooklyn's famous ferry could convey, Or thine, Hoboken, ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin

... of the Montagnes d'Arree lies a vast and dismal peat bog known as the Yeun, which has long been regarded by the Breton folk as the portal to the infernal regions. This Stygian locality has brought forth many legends. It is, indeed, a remarkable territory. In summer it seems a vast moor carpeted by glowing purple heather, which one can traverse up to a certain point, but woe betide him who would advance farther, for, surrounded by what seems solid ground, lies a treacherous ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence

... indeed that recalls the dangerous path on the wall. The passage over the water is also a death symbol. We have not only the anxiety about death caused by the moral conflict, but we have also to remember that the passage into the uterus is a passage to the beyond. The water is the Water of Death (stygian waters) and of Life. In narrower sense it is also seminal fluid and the amniotic liquor. It is overdetermined as indeed all symbols are. The water bears the death color black. In the Flying Post dream ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer

... was carried to my own chamber, and passed the night without closing an eye, in such a flutter of spirits as rendered me the most miserable wretch in being. I should certainly have run distracted, if the rarefaction of my blood, occasioned by that Stygian bath, had not burst the vessels, and produced a violent haemorrhage, which, though dreadful and alarming, removed the horrible disquiet — I lost two pounds of blood, and more, on this occasion; and find myself still weak and languid; but, I believe, a little ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett

... be from us, Virgil salutes him, and Theocritus; Catullus, mightiest-brained Lucretius, each Greets him, their brother, on the Stygian beach; Proudly a gaunt right hand doth Dante reach; Milton and Wordsworth bid him welcome home; Bright Keats to touch his raiment doth beseech; Coleridge, his locks aspersed with fairy foam, Calm Spenser, Chaucer suave, His equal friendship crave: ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson

... not: thy heat and stir But greater coyness breed in her; Yet thou mayst find, ere Age's frost, Thy long apprenticeship not lost, Learning at last that Stygian Fate Unbends to him that knows to wait. 130 The Muse is womanish, nor deigns Her love to him that pules and plains; With proud, averted face she stands To him that wooes with empty hands. Make thyself free of Manhood's guild; Pull down thy barns and greater build; ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell

... was devoid of important incidents yet it was filled for me with a strange charm of excitement and adventure which I think I must have hinged principally on the unguessable antiquity of these long-forgotten corridors. The things which the Stygian darkness hid from my objective eye could not have been half so wonderful as the pictures which my imagination wrought as it conjured to life again the ancient peoples of this dying world and set them once more to the labours, the intrigues, the mysteries ...
— The Gods of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... must soon be back again to that unkindly haunt 'upon the mountains visitant' - there goes no angel there but the angel of death. The deaths of last winter are still sore spots to me. . . . So, you see, I am not very likely to go on a 'wild expedition,' cis-Stygian at least. The truth is, I am scarce justified in standing for the chair, though I hope you will not mention this; and yet my health is one of my reasons, for the class is ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson

... flights of Stygian stairs Nevada climbed, and rapped firmly at the door numbered "89." She had been there many times before, with Barbara and ...
— Options • O. Henry

... boiling pours itself down to a foss Sluic'd from its source. Far murkier was the wave Than sablest grain: and we in company Of th' inky waters, journeying by their side, Enter'd, though by a different track, beneath. Into a lake, the Stygian nam'd, expands The dismal stream, when it hath reach'd the foot Of the grey wither'd cliffs. Intent I stood To gaze, and in the marish sunk, descried A miry tribe, all naked, and with looks Betok'ning rage. They with their hands alone Struck not, but with the head, the breast, the feet, Cutting ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge

... drawn to the farther wall. An archway gaped there. I walked across the room, passed under the archway. Instantly I was in complete, stygian darkness. But I ...
— Where the World is Quiet • Henry Kuttner

... forge was a machine which had been used to operate the crane. Beyond it was stygian darkness. He ...
— The Whispering Spheres • Russell Robert Winterbotham

... few, the blood of Hydra—Herne's bane, The juice of Hebron, and Cocytus' breath, And all the poisons of the Stygian pool." ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie

... the light; my cubby was Stygian dark. A heat-cylinder was in the bunk-bracket over my head; I searched for it, pried ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various

... them how much better it would be for the departed one if the fare were not forthcoming,—because then the ferryman would decline to take him, and he would be sent back into the living world. Lest the Stygian Lake should prove inadequate to the requirements of ghostly toilets, the corpse is next washed, anointed with the choicest unguents to arrest the progress of decay, crowned with fresh flowers, and laid out in sumptuous raiment; an obvious precaution, this ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata

... and finally they began to abuse one another. Anno abused Stanislaus, because he had disarranged her hat and hair, and Stanislaus, Anno, because he couldn't hear all she said, and because what he did hear was silly. Then the Stygian darkness of the great pines grew; and the silence of wonder fell on the two quarrellers. On, on, on rolled the droshky, a monotonous rumble, rumble, that sounded very loud amid the intense hush that had suddenly fallen on the forest. Stanislaus and Anno grew drowsy; ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell

... or quick revolving year; Welcome an owner, not a sojourner. This peaceful seat my poverty secures; War seldom enters but where wealth allures: Nor yet despise it; for this poor abode Has oft received, and yet receives a God; A God victorious of the Stygian race Here laid his sacred limbs, and sanctified the place, 710 This mean retreat did mighty Pan contain: Be emulous of him, and pomp disdain, And dare not to ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden

... you will never rob me, you will do A thing extremely pleasing to my heart.' 700 Then Mercury swore by the Stygian dew, That he would never steal his bow or dart, Or lay his hands on what to him was due, Or ever would employ his powerful art Against his Pythian fane. Then Phoebus swore 705 There was no God or ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley

... who would not Lament him save this wretch alone? Dear son, Must I then never, never see thee more? O me! too well I see thee crossing now The Stygian stream to clasp thy father's shade: Both turn your frowning eyes askance on me, Burning with dreadful wrath! Yea, it was I, 'T was I that slew you both. Infamous mother And ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells

... still, with a slight neigh and ears erect. They were at that moment winding around the face of a precipice, with the wall on the left rising to a height of a hundred feet or more, and sloping downward on the right into a gorge of Stygian blackness. The path was a yard or over in width, so there was plenty of foothold, and the halt could not be due to any lack ...
— Up the Forked River - Or, Adventures in South America • Edward Sylvester Ellis

... as in witty torturing Spain, The brain is vext to vex the brain, Where hereticks bare heads are arm'd In a close helm, and in it charm'd An overgrown and meagre rat, That peece-meal nibbles himself fat; So on the toads blew-checquer'd scull The spider gluttons her self full. And vomiting her Stygian seeds, Her poyson on his poyson feeds. Thus the invenom'd toad, now grown Big with more poyson than his own, Doth gather all his pow'rs, and shakes His stormer in's disgorged lakes; And wounded now, apace crawls ...
— Lucasta • Richard Lovelace

... stept became hotter and hotter, while around us rolled an oppressive steam, which obscured and hid the sun; the guide, who was a few steps in advance of me, presently turned back, and seizing hold of me, hurried out of this Stygian exhalation. ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various

... rich soil required to furnish corn and due sustenance, but men even descended into the entrails of the Earth; and riches were dug up, the incentives to vice, which the Earth had hidden, and had removed to the Stygian shades.[32] Then destructive iron came forth, and gold, more destructive than iron; then War came forth, that fights through the means of both,[33] and that brandishes in his blood-stained hands the clattering arms. Men live by rapine; the guest is not safe from his entertainer, ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso

... an upward slant as far as she could see. She longed for a light so that she might explore further. . . . After some minutes advance into the deepening gloom, a feeling of timidity began to assail her. She paused leaning against a lobsided boulder. The absence of life, the stillness, the Stygian darkness ahead seemed suddenly ominous. She turned and saw the mouth of the cavern far back of her. Like an oblong frame it enclosed a small bright picture of beach and sunlit sea. Undoubtedly, she thought, when the tide was full, the ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby

... tried hard to make one, for myself, through German pantheism. But I turn this rubbish over disconsolately, for it is a material God, and does not respond to one spiritual nature. It seems rather to react against it. Alas! alas! I sink down into a Cimmerian darkness here; it seems as if the Stygian pools of blackness had closed over me, and a cry of anguish goes forth from my inmost soul, piercing the dark depths to learn what is spirit? and what is God? What manner of existence or unity of Being is He? Who is He? Where is He? And how can I attain to a knowledge of Him? But through the echoing ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur

... proper service. Candles, kerosene lamps and old gas fixtures, the rusty cocks of which had not been turned in a decade, were put hastily in use, while the streets were black with a blackness particularly Stygian, contrasted with the brilliantly illuminated squares supplied by the Consolidated Company. All night long the mechanical force, attended by the worried but painfully helpless Bobby, pounded and tapped and worked in ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester

... master gave another order into the speaking tube and their ship shot forward, faster and yet faster, with a speed that pressed them heavily into their seats. Behind them was the glory of the sunlit clouds; ahead the gloomy gray-black masses that must make a stygian night sky over this lonely world—a world cut off by that vaporous shell from ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various

... glowed frigidly. Opposite, a single arc-lamp on the corner of Cypress Street cast a white, cheerless light on the gelid pavement. The few stores along the avenue were dark, with the exception of the warmly lighted White Star restaurant directly opposite the Stygian spot where ...
— Midnight • Octavus Roy Cohen

... speak to me, Speak from thy silent grave; It doth not roll o'er thee, Death's dark and Stygian wave! Sweet! speak, I'm sick, to hear The heaven of thy voice, Which wont, while life was dear, To thrill ...
— Lays of Ancient Virginia, and Other Poems • James Avis Bartley

... Might presently be banish'd into hell, And aged Saturn in Olympus dwell. They granted what he crav'd; and once again Saturn and Ops began their golden reign: Murder, rape, war, and[24] lust, and treachery, Were with Jove clos'd in Stygian empery. But long this blessed time continu'd not: As soon as he his wished purpose got, 460 He, reckless of his promise, did despise The love of th' everlasting Destinies. They, seeing it, both Love and him abhorr'd, And Jupiter unto his place ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe

... men set themselves to master the psychology of the ancients, and tortured the letter of Aristotle for a decisive answer. In one of the Lucianic dialogues of the time, Charon tells Mercury how he questioned Aristotle on his belief in immortality, when the philosopher crossed in the Stygian boat; but the prudent sage, although dead in the body and nevertheless living on, declined to compromise himself by a definite answer—and centuries later how was it likely to fare with the interpretation of his writings? ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt

... of the Orphici, gradually exalted by the progress of thought, out of the symbol of Sensuality into the torch-bearer of the Nuptials of the Gods; the Divine Influence which physically called the world into being, and which, awakening the soul from its Stygian trance, restores ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike

... might encourage them to virtue." 'Twas for a politic end, and to this purpose the old [6398]poets feigned those elysian fields, their Aeacus, Minos, and Rhadamanthus, their infernal judges, and those Stygian lakes, fiery Phlegethons, Pluto's kingdom, and variety of torments after death. Those that had done well, went to the elysian fields, but evil doers to Cocytus, and to that burning lake of [6399]hell with fire, and ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior

... few the blood of Hydra, Lerna's bane, The juice of Hebon, and Cocytus breath, And all the poison of the Stygian pool." ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe

... Of Cerberus, and blackest midnight born, In Stygian Cave forlorn 'Mongst horrid shapes, and shreiks, and sights unholy, Find out som uncouth cell, Where brooding darknes spreads his jealous wings, And the night-Raven sings; There under Ebon shades and low-brow'd Rocks, As ragged as thy Locks, In dark ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton

... not be at all certain that I saw anything, although there were times when the same vague, shapeless blot of deeper darkness that had previously attracted my attention seemed to loom up momentarily out of the Stygian murkiness ahead. There were times also when, the water being highly phosphorescent, it appeared to me that, among the ghostly gleamings of the breaking surges, I could faintly discern a more symmetrical space of luminosity, ...
— The Log of a Privateersman • Harry Collingwood

... den, and, like him, must be appeased by a sop before access can be gained to his master. Perhaps Jones might have seen him in that light, and have recollected the passage where the Sibyl, in order to procure an entrance for Aeneas, presents the keeper of the Stygian avenue with such a sop. Jones, in like manner, now began to offer a bribe to the human Cerberus, which a footman, overhearing, instantly advanced, and declared, "if Mr Jones would give him the sum proposed, he would ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding

... second mate's voice I turned, and saw, dead astern, a thin streak of ghostly white, drawn horizontally across the curtain of Stygian darkness in that quarter. The line lengthened and broadened with amazing rapidity; and presently a low ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood

... sometimes again the lowing of some disconsolate cow in a distant barn-yard. In the mean-while all the shore rang with the trump of bullfrogs, the sturdy spirits of ancient wine-bibbers and wassailers, still unrepentant, trying to sing a catch in their Stygian lake—if the Walden nymphs will pardon the comparison, for though there are almost no weeds, there are frogs there—who would fain keep up the hilarious rules of their old festal tables, though their voices have waxed hoarse and solemnly grave, mocking at mirth, and the wine has lost its flavor, ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau

... stumbled—along the slippery road which skirted the mountain's base. Soggy, unseen farm lands and gardens to their left, Stygian forests above and to their right. Ahead, the far-distant will-o-the-wisp flicker of many lights, blinking in the foggy shroud. Three or four miles lay between the sullen travelers and the town that cradled itself in the lower ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon

... his exit from the world, with which he had played ducks and drakes, was to be entirely voluntary and in no wise forced: that though he was closing life's door upon himself he was still crossing the Stygian threshold the captain ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck

... apes sat huddled close to one another for warmth; while Mugambi built a fire close to them over which he crouched. Tarzan and Sheeta, however, were of a different mind, for neither of them feared the jungle night, and the insistent craving of their hunger sent them off into the Stygian blackness of the forest in search ...
— The Beasts of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... Well, then, Jupiter, a god who, if he were living now, would deserve to be put in jail, does not launch the thunderbolt, but the thunderbolt falls when electricity wills it. There is no Parnassus; there is no Olympus; there is no Stygian lake; nor are there any other Elysian Fields than those of Paris. There is no other descent to hell than the descents of Geology, and this traveller, every time he returns from it, declares that there are no damned souls in the centre of ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos

... on the water." He pulled the rude shallop to her feet and they got in and went on, Jack not heeding her gibe. "These brackish, threatening deeps remind me of all sorts of weird and uncanny things; Stygian pools—Lethe—what not mystic and terrifying. See, the tiny waves that curl before our boat are like thin ink; a thousand roots and herbs and who knows what mysterious vegetable mixture colors these dark deeps? ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan

... loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and the black stinking fume thereof nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless." ...
— How to Live - Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science • Irving Fisher and Eugene Fisk

... fifth morning, or the 23rd April, the rain gave us a few hours' respite, during which we managed to wade through the Stygian quagmire reeking with noisomeness to the inundated river-bank. The soldiers commenced at 5 A.M. to convey the baggage across from bank to bank over a bridge which was the most rustic of the rustic kind. Only an ignorant African would have been satisfied with its small utility as a means to cross ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley

... night were ill lighted, except where a blaze of illumination poured from the bigger saloons. The interims were dark, and the side streets and alleys stygian. "None too safe, either," Sansome understated the case. Many people were abroad, but Keith noticed that there seemed to be no idlers; every one appeared to be going somewhere in particular. After a short stroll they ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White

... their sockets. His face turned an ashy blue. Presently he relaxed once more—this time in the final dissolution from which there is no quickening. Korak propped the dead body against the door frame. There it sat, lifelike in the gloom. Then the ape-man turned and glided into the Stygian darkness ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... {as to be a recompense for the crime to which it owed its origin}. Cupid himself denies, Myrrha, that it was his arrows that injured thee; and he defends his torches from that imputation; one of the three Sisters kindled {this flame} within thee, with a Stygian firebrand and with swelling vipers. It is a crime to hate a parent; {but} this love is a greater degree of wickedness than hatred. On every side worthy nobles are desiring thee {in marriage}, and throughout the whole ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso

... was the helm, the neck without its band: So, like a rush, was severed by the sword. Down-fell, and shook its last upon the sand The heavy trunk of Libya's mighty lord. His spirit, which flitted to the Stygian strand, Charon with crooked boat-hook dragged aboard. On him Orlando wastes no further pain, But, sword in hand, seeks ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto

... Edmundsbury Monk and Boswell, now seven centuries old, how remote is it from us; exotic, extraneous; in all ways, coming from far abroad! The language of it is not foreign only but dead: Monk-Latin lies across not the British Channel, but the ninefold Stygian Marshes, Stream of Lethe, and one knows not where! Roman Latin itself, still alive for us in the Elysian Fields of Memory, is domestic in comparison. And then the ideas, life-furniture, whole workings and ways of this worthy Jocelin; covered deeper than Pompeii with the lava-ashes and inarticulate ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle

... as many blooming maids, In one sad day beheld the Stygian shades; These by Apollo's silver bow were slain, Those Cynthia's arrows stretched upon the ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown

... of brimstone and Stygian hatred, offered by Calvin and the Catholics, and after the plethoric gorge of good cheer at Gargantua's table, the mild sedative of Montaigne's conversation comes like a draft of nepenthe or the fruit of the lotus. ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith

... natural cavern, now reached by descending about a hundred steps to a canal below, on which was a boat for conveying passengers to the other end of the canal, with only a small light or torch at the bow to relieve the stygian darkness. Visitors were landed on a platform to listen to a tremendous sound of rushing water being precipitated somewhere in the fearful and impenetrable darkness, whose obscurity and overpowering gloom could almost be felt. On the slope of ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor

... disdainfull spight: To you th' inheritance belongs by right Of brothers prayse, to you eke longs his love. Let not his love, let not his restlesse spright, 430 Be unreveng'd, that calles to you above From wandring Stygian shores, where ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser

... Egyptian! Glorious sorceress of the Nile, Light the path to Stygian horrors With the splendors of thy smile. Give the Caesar crowns and arches, Let his brow the laurel twine; I can scorn the Senate's triumphs, Triumphing in ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn

... life alone, methinks, to me Belongs the office; Lady, when my tongue Is cold in death, believe me, unto thee My voice shall raise its tributary song. My soul, from this strait prison-house set free, As o'er the Stygian lake it floats along, Thy praises singing still shall hold its way, And make the ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

... lookouts. In all probability no signals were given. The little craft was to be at a certain place at a certain hour,—and she was there! The men who jumped knew that she would be there. A black, tiny speck on the broad expanse of water, sheltered by a night of almost stygian darkness, she lay outside the narrow radius to which visual observation was confined, patiently waiting for the Doraine to pass a designated point. There was to be no miscalculation on the part of either the boat or the men who went over the side of ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon

... not imagine what she meant. How could more light than there was ever come to this dreadful spot? While I was still wondering, suddenly, like a great sword of flame, a beam from the setting sun pierced the Stygian gloom, and smote upon the point of rock whereon we lay, illumining Ayesha's lovely form with an unearthly splendour. I only wish I could describe the wild and marvellous beauty of that sword of fire, laid ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard

... aside," she said, "your vainly-conceived terrors! You shall behold only a living and a human figure, whose accents you may listen to with perfect security. If this alarms you, what would you say if you should have seen the Stygian lakes, and the shores burning with sulphur unconsumed, if the Furies stood before you, and Cerberus with his mane of vipers, and the Giants chained in eternal adamant? Yet all these you might have witnessed unharmed; for all these would quail at the ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various

... even a Count St. Germain. Many take for their ideal Margrave with his ever-renewing youth, and care little for the soul as the price paid for it. Not a few, mistaking "Witch-of-Endorism" pure and simple, for Occultism—"through the yawning Earth from Stygian gloom, call up the meager ghost to walks of light," and want, on the strength of this feat, to be regarded as full blown Adepts. "Ceremonial Magic" according to the rules mockingly laid down by Eliphas Levi, is another imagined ...
— Studies in Occultism; A Series of Reprints from the Writings of H. P. Blavatsky • H. P. Blavatsky

... graces and small endearing chivalries the next; outrageously outspoken at times, at other times, reticent to the point of secretiveness; now reaching the most extravagant pitch of high spirits, and then, almost without warning, submerged in moods of Stygian gloom from which nothing could ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper

... sometimes burnt his mother-murdering soule (When wandring madde, rage boiling in his bloud, He fled his fault which folow'd as he fled) kindled within his bones by shadow pale Of mother slaine return'd from Stygian lake. Antony, poore Antony! since that daie Thy olde good hap did farre from thee retire. Thy vertue dead: thy glory made aliue So ofte by martiall deeds is gone in smoke: Since then the Baies so well thy forehead ...
— A Discourse of Life and Death, by Mornay; and Antonius by Garnier • Philippe de Mornay

... sank and the world became darker. His brain working feverishly, Mal Shaff waited for the darkness. Adroitly he worked the battle nearer and nearer to the Stygian darkness that lay at the foot of the mighty crags. In the darkness he might escape. He could no longer continue this unequal ...
— Hellhounds of the Cosmos • Clifford Donald Simak

... impossible they should understand, and by his sophistries alienating them from their venerable parent? Not so, by Hercules! I should ill deserve my office of supreme guardian of the honor and liberties of Rome, did I not mew him up in the Fabrician dungeons, or send him lower still to the Stygian shades.' ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware

... sore, Nor yet ignore The cause of hate and sorrow in thy breast. Time bringeth rest: All is made easy through his power divine. The heir of Agamemnon's line Who dwells by Crisa's pastoral strand Shall yet return unto his native land; And he shall yet regard his own Who reigns beneath upon his Stygian throne. ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles

... asperse me rudely, and excuse Of ignorance hast none, far better taught; What words were these? How could'st thou thus reply? Now hear me Earth, and the wide Heav'n above! Hear, too, ye waters of the Stygian stream 220 Under the earth (by which the blessed Gods Swear trembling, and revere the awful oath!) That future mischief I intend thee none. No, my designs concerning thee are such As, in an exigence resembling thine, Myself, most sure, should for myself conceive. I have a mind more equal, ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer

... From each grave a small urn was taken, containing the ashes of one cremated human body, and upon the mouth of the urn was found, in each instance, a Roman obolus, which had been deposited there to pay the ferriage of the soul of the departed over the Stygian river. General Grant was presented with some of these coins as mementos of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various

... circumlocution and cold categories of Kant fail to improve the conditions of mortals, morally, spiritually, or physically. Such miscalled metaphysical systems are reeds shaken by the wind. Compared with the inspired wisdom and infinite meaning of the Word of Truth, they are as moonbeams to the sun, or as Stygian ...
— No and Yes • Mary Baker Eddy

... the gods!" he continued. "And may I from across this Stygian lake (there was a little water collected in the haw-haw here from the recent rains) introduce Miss Lutworth to you—and Miss Clinker and Lord Freynault? ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn

... His gifts are for all His children. It was never the Divine intent that a favored few should bask in the sunshine of His grace while the majority suffered want and deprivation. These false ideas have been the procurers of darkness: of the Stygian gloom now ...
— The Planet Mars and its Inhabitants - A Psychic Revelation • Eros Urides and J. L. Kennon

... attraction on account of the gloomy grandeur of the scene at the entrance. When I saw it for the first time I understood at once the supernatural horror in which the peasant has learnt to hold such places. It responds to impressions left on the mind of the 'Stygian cave forlorn,' the entrance to Dante's 'City of Sorrow,' and that other cave where Aeneas witnessed in cold terror the prophetic ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker

... might serve, ev'n by the Stygian lake, Which poets say the gods themselves do fear, I never did my vowed word forsake: For why should I, whom free choice slave doth make, Else-what in face, than in ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney

... wreath, and skrue Such Antick Shapes as Proteus never knew: One rapps an Oath, another deals a Curse, He never better bowl'd, this never worse; One rubs his itchless Elbow, shrugs and laughs, The t'other bends his Beetle-brows, and chafes; Sometimes they whoop, sometimes the Stygian cryes, Send their black Santo's to the blushing Skies: Thus mingling Humours in a mad Confusion They make bad ...
— The School of Recreation (1696 edition) • Robert Howlett

... the plaster close by the bed, his eyes fell on a piece of rich old tapestry! Curtains of silk damask, all bespotted with quaintest flowers, each like a page of Chaucer's poetry, hung round his bed, quite other than fit sails for the Stygian boat. They had made the bed as different as the vine in summer from the vine in winter. A quilt of red satin lay in the place of the patchwork coverlid. Everything had been changed. He thought the mattress felt soft ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald

... in and out on her other ministrations, till finally, when thoroughly saturated and dinner-hour impends, she bethinks herself, and crowds the fire below to a roaring heat, and finishes the process by a smart burn, involving the kitchen and surrounding precincts in volumes of Stygian gloom. ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... of Bethlehem rose, and truth and light Burst on the nations that reposed in night, And chased the Stygian shades with rosy smile That spread from Error's home, the land of Nile. No more with harp and sistrum Music calls To wanton rites within Astarte's halls, The priests forget to mourn their Apis slain, And bear Osiris' ark with pompous train; Gone is Serapis, and Anubis fled, ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various

... of home-coming, mingled with a peculiar dream-like feeling, that they were arriving on a strange planet, after having been ferried across Stygian currents on a Charon's raft. Out there, on the ocean and over the ocean, hovered a gruesomeness of solitudes, in which the human being, himself seeing everything, remains unseen, unknown, forgotten by God and the world. To be happy in his heated, clustered ant nests, man can and must ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann



Words linked to "Stygian" :   Acherontic, dark, Acheronian



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