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Gorgon   /gˈɔrgən/   Listen
Gorgon

noun
1.
(Greek mythology) any of three winged sister monsters and the mortal Medusa who had live snakes for hair; a glance at Medusa turned the beholder to stone.






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"Gorgon" Quotes from Famous Books



... silver-shafted queen for ever chaste, Wherewith she tamed the brinded lioness And spotted mountain-pard, but set at nought The frivolous bolt of Cupid; gods and men Feared her stern frown, and she was queen o' the woods. What was that snaky-headed Gorgon shield That wise Minerva wore, unconquered virgin, Wherewith she freezed her foes to congealed stone, But rigid looks of chaste austerity, And noble grace that dashed brute violence With sudden adoration and ...
— L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, Comus, and Lycidas • John Milton

... "every way equal," or "circular." It was plated with twelve circles of bronze, and had twenty [Greek: omphaloi], or ornamental knobs of tin, and the centre was of black cyanus (XI. 31-34). There was also a head of the Gorgon, with Fear and Panic. The description is not intelligible, and I ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang

... that this experience was a trial of his faith, and that if he stood out a little longer, his doubt would pass away. He lifted his head and glanced at the serpent still coiled upon the hearth. Its eyes were fixed upon him in a gorgon-like stare, and his doubts became positive certainties, as disgust became loathing. The battle had ended. The mystic had been defeated. This sudden collapse had come because the foundations of his faith had been honeycombed. The innocent serpent had ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss

... after all we ought to frighten something in the way of compensation out of the gorgon," said Nickie, vengefully. Our reprobate hero was a man who ...
— The Missing Link • Edward Dyson

... slender, ultra-feminine body of Margaret Severence's, as she descended the stairs, putting fresh gloves upon her beautiful, idle hands, he would have borrowed wings of the wind and would have fled as from a gorgon. ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips

... symbolical vase in relief; ornaments in stucco, on the front of the main building, consisting of the lotus, the sistrum, representations of gods, Harpocrates, Anubis, and other objects of Egyptian worship. The figures on one side of this temple are Perseus with the Gorgon's head; on the other side, Mars and Venus, with Cupids bearing the arms of Mars. We next observe three altars of different sizes. On one of them is said to have been found the bones of a victim unconsumed, ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford

... it was, though he could see no more of her than a pale face, staring set and Gorgon-like from under the hood—did not answer at once. Then, 'Who are you?' ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman

... said that it was a mighty giant, the brother of the Evening Star, who held up the sky upon his shoulders, in the midst of the Fortunate Islands, the gardens of the daughter of the Evening Star, full of strange golden fruits; and that Perseus had turned him into stone, when he passed him with the Gorgon's Head. ...
— Madam How and Lady Why - or, First Lessons in Earth Lore for Children • Charles Kingsley

... sallow Frenchwoman, with the face of a Gorgon and the figure of a Juno, who posed for the ensemble. She stood against the dark crimson background, outlined pure and white like a marvel of Phidian sculpture upon which the Spirit of Life had slightly breathed. So still, so white, so coldly, purely statuesque she seemed, that one sometimes ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various

... legends, unsurpassed for beauty in the literature of any race, in which the hero stands out as the deliverer, the destroyer of evil? Theseus ridding the land of robbers, and delivering it from the yearly tribute of boys and maidens to be devoured by the Minotaur; Perseus slaying the Gorgon, and rescuing Andromeda from the sea-beast; Heracles with his twelve famous labours against giants and monsters; ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley

... shepherd kings, who introduced not only the arts, but the religious rites of that ancient country. Among the regal descendants of Lynceus was Danae, whose son Perseus performed marvelous deeds, by the special favor of Athene, among which he brought from Libya the terrific head of the Gorgon Medusa, which had the marvelous property of turning every one to stone who looked at her. Stung with remorse for the accidental murder of his grandfather, the king, he retired from Argos, and founded the city of Mycenae, the ruins of whose massive walls are still to be seen—Cyclopean ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord

... watcher looked upon her low, and said— She sleeps, but sleeps, she is not dead. But in that sleeps contortion showed The terror of the vision there— A silent vision unavowed, Revealing earth's foundation bare, And Gorgon in her hidden place. It was a thing of fear to see So foul a dream upon so fair a face, And the dreamer ...
— John Marr and Other Poems • Herman Melville

... A, who had just learned that the notorious Gorgon sisters had snakes for hair, chewed her gum thoughtfully as ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous

... effects of light, in lurid chiaroscuro;—enlarging the whites of his eyes, and making him frown, grin, and gnash his teeth on all occasions, so as to appear among the other Apostles invariably in the aspect of a Gorgon. ...
— Giotto and his works in Padua • John Ruskin

... Tygers of war, bearing large round shields of basket-work, and long ill-made swords. On the shields of the last are painted monstrous faces of some imaginary animal, intended to frighten the enemy, or, like another gorgon, to petrify their beholders. ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow

... you may recognize true education from false. False education is a delightful thing, and warms you, and makes you every day think more of yourself. And true education is a deadly cold thing with a Gorgon's head on her shield, and makes you every day ...
— Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne - Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work • John Ruskin

... with high promise fraught, And guardian terrors, whose out-flashing swords Beleaguer Paradise and the holy Tree Sciential. Step by step the way is fought That leads from Darkness, through her miscreant hordes, Back to the heavens of wise, and true, and free: Minerva's Gorgon, Ammon's cyclic Asp, And the fierce flame-sword of the Cherubim, That flashed like hate across the pallid gasp Of exiled Eve and Adam, flare, and glare, And hiss venenate, round the steps of him Who thirsts for heavenly Wisdom, if he dare ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various

... before it, and two stone sweeps of staircase meeting in a stone terrace before the principal door. A stony business altogether, with heavy stone balustrades, and stone urns, and stone flowers, and stone faces of men, and stone heads of lions, in all directions. As if the Gorgon's head had surveyed it when it was finished ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various

... That ill-omened and chaotic agglomeration of diverse forms of evil has yet a kind of anarchic order in it, and, like the fabled serpent's locks on the Gorgon head, they intertwine and sting one another, and yet they are a unity. We hear very little about 'the prince of the world' in Scripture. Mercifully the existence of such a being is not plainly revealed ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren

... his wife engaged in even innocent conversation with her lover, his face still calm, should produce the effect mythologically attributed to the celebrated Gorgon. ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac

... bust which stood there so placidly before him, just as the poor youth did at the British Museum, who threw a stone at the Portland vase, to prove that he also was a man, and had volition, and was not to be looked into stone by the Gorgon of society. Fortunately, however, Sir John Steventon himself ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various

... weeds which grew close to the bank of a muddy river there was something which glittered in the pale light. He flew a little nearer; but he did not dare to look straight forward, lest he should all at once meet the gaze of a Gorgon, and be changed into stone. So he turned around, and held the shining shield before him in such a way that by looking into it he could see objects behind him as in ...
— Old Greek Stories • James Baldwin

... Athenaic symbols: but I may note rapidly, that her aegis, the mantle with the serpent fringes, in which she often, in the best statues, is represented as folding up her left hand for better guard, and the Gorgon on her shield, are both representative mainly of the chilling horror and sadness (turning men to stone, as it were,) of the outmost and superficial spheres of knowledge—that knowledge which separates, in bitterness, hardness, and sorrow, the heart of the full-grown man from the heart of the ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin

... knew," said Fink, "why they have had the madness to attack the strongest side of our fortress! It can only be that your peaceful visage has had the effect of the Gorgon's head upon them. Henceforth you will be described as a scarecrow in all ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag

... bold and hasty, and may raise good Contributions on the Public, if he does not cut himself short by Murder. Tom Tipple, a guzzling soaking Sot, who is always too drunk to stand himself, or to make others stand. A Cart is absolutely necessary for him. Robin of Bagshot, alias Gorgon, alias Bluff Bob, alias Carbuncle, alias ...
— The Beggar's Opera • John Gay

... great speeches, held high positions, acquired fame, is due to the inner sickness that night by the river. You will find that the name of many a man of my age is in men's mouths because at the outset Defeat became his trophy, the Gorgon's head, despoiled by his first sword of hiss and venom. So there, my friends, you have the rule you ask for—fail once so ignominiously that you wish to die, and you may wrest from fate a brief name ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson

... walk the horses! I scorn't, faith: [89] I have other matters in hand: let the horses walk themselves, an they will.— [Reads.] A per se, a; t, h, e, the; o per se, o; Demy orgon gorgon.— Keep further from me, O thou illiterate ...
— Dr. Faustus • Christopher Marlowe

... suppliant's head, Dread Goddess, lay thy chastening hand! Not in thy Gorgon terrors clad, Not circled with the vengeful band (As by the impious thou art seen) With thundering voice, and threatening mien, With screaming Horror's funeral cry, Despair, and fell Disease, and ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various

... their endless routine of gaieties, are looked forward to, as pleasures are, the wide world over; and all classes, from highest to lowest, have their modes of enjoyment marked out. Preparation follows preparation in festal succession. Sorrow hides her Gorgon head, care may betake itself to any dreary recesses, for Christmas must ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson

... heads of a beech-tree. When a man possesses that particular shape of muscle he is sure to be a hard nut to crack. And so poor PATRICKSEN found him, merely getting his own wretched back broken for his trouble. GORGON GORGONSEN Was Governor of Iceland, and lived at Reykjavik, the capital, which was not only little and hungry, but was also a creeping settlement with a face turned to America. It was a poor lame place, with its wooden feet in the sea. Altogether a strange ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 10, 1891 • Various

... the wild clutches of hysteria, and Courtney himself was as if possessed with a frenzy: his features were rigid, his eyes dilated, and his hair rose and clung in wavy locks, so that he seemed a very Gorgon's head. The only person apparently unmoved was old Dr Rippon, whose pale, gaunt form rose in the background, sinister ...
— Master of His Fate • J. Mclaren Cobban

... 325 (Let none them read) thereof did verses frame, With which and other spelles like terrible, He bad awake blacke Plutoes griesly Dame,[*] And cursed heaven and spake reprochfull shame Of highest God, the Lord of life and light; 330 A bold bad man, that dar'd to call by name Great Gorgon,[*] Prince of darknesse and dead night, At which Cocytus[*] quakes, and Styx ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser

... put vaguely I always want to know, them—I want to know why Medusa turned into a gorgon? What ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn

... If those lips could only speak!" laughed the girl. "Don't you think Gorgon's a good name for the ugly darling, Mr. Bellamy?" she said, as they went in ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming

... Of women strange to look at sleepeth there Before this wanderer, seated on their stools; Not women they, but Gorgons I must call them; Nor yet can I to Gorgon forms compare them; I have seen painted shapes that bear away The feast of Phineus. Wingless, though, are these, And swarth, and every way abominable. They snort with breath that none may dare approach, ...
— Story of Orestes - A Condensation of the Trilogy • Richard G. Moulton

... towers of iron, And gnash, beside the streams of fire and wail, 345 Your foodless teeth. Geryon, arise! and Gorgon, Chimaera, and thou Sphinx, subtlest of fiends Who ministered to Thebes Heaven's poisoned wine, Unnatural love, and more unnatural hate: These shall ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley

... chose the subject of Perseus because it symbolised his own victory over the Gorgon of tyrannicide and Republican partisanship. Donatello's Judith, symbolising justifiable regicide, and Michel Angelo's David, symbolising the might of innocent right against an overbearing usurper, already decorated the Florentine piazza. ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini

... my fate to fall in again with part of this little band of adventurers. In March 1792, when I arrived in the Gorgon, at the Cape of Good Hope, six of these people, including the woman and one child, were put on board of us to be carried to England. Four had died, and one had jumped overboard at Batavia. The particulars of their voyage were briefly as follows. They coasted the shore of New Holland, putting occasionally ...
— A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson • Watkin Tench

... slaying the great dragon of Lerna, and Iolaues standing with a torch to sear that which he cut with his knife. Also Bellerophon was to be seen on a horse with wings, slaying the Chimaera; and Pallas fighting against the Sons of Earth, with the thunderbolt of her father Zeus and the shield of the Gorgon head. And when they had made an end of seeing these things came the Queen Creuesa herself and had speech with Ion. And she told him that she was the daughter of Erechtheus, King of Athens, and that she was married ...
— Stories from the Greek Tragedians • Alfred Church

... I a Gorgon that she doth me fly, Or was I hatched in the river Nile? Or doth my Chloris stand in doubt that I With syren songs do seek her to beguile? If any one of these she can object 'Gainst me, which chaste affected love protest, Then might my fortunes by her frowns be checked, And blameless she ...
— Elizabethan Sonnet Cycles - Idea, by Michael Drayton; Fidessa, by Bartholomew Griffin; Chloris, by William Smith • Michael Drayton, Bartholomew Griffin, and William Smith

... gracious kinswoman, Katharine, Duchess of Dover and Queensberry, at your service, Mr. Warrington. She was a beauty price! She is changed now, isn't she? What an old Gorgon it is! She is a great patroness of your book-men and when that old frump was young, they ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray

... for a year or two, and, if it did not succeed, then to vote for peace." As if war was a matter of experiment! As if you could take it up or lay it down as an idle frolic! As if the dire goddess that presides over it, with her murderous spear in her hand and her Gorgon at her breast, was a coquette to be flirted with! We ought with reverence to approach that tremendous divinity, that loves courage, but commands counsel. War never leaves where it found a nation. It is never to be entered into without ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... not sacrifice life for such a climax? Many men have said to Fame and Wisdom, 'Let me look upon your face and die'; many have come to view their Gorgon features and cheerfully paid the price, and still more have perished miserably on ...
— Said the Observer • Louis J. Stellman

... dense. Suddenly a trumpet blared. At the gate was Pontius Pilate. On his head was a high and dazzling helmet. His tunic was short, open at the neck. His legs were bare. He was shod with shoes that left the toes exposed. From his cuirass a gorgon's head had, in deference to local prejudice, been effaced; in its stead were scrolls and thunderbolts. From the belt rows of straps, embroidered and fringed, fell nearly to the knee. He held his head in the air. His features were excellent, and his beard hung in rows ...
— Mary Magdalen • Edgar Saltus

... instantly forbade me to look. It is true that they were objects not often seen by bachelor man, except in shop windows and on the advertising pages of women's magazines; but silk petticoats and cobwebby lace frills have no Gorgon qualities, and I was not turned to stone by the sight of them. I even found courage to ask of the company at large if they were the sort of thing that young ladies ought to have in their wardrobes. The answer was emphatically in ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson

... stage who is ever attempting to show the possibility of achieving impossibilities; he is one of the most pleasant visionaries in existence; his spirit soars aloft from every-day matters, and delights in shadowy mysteries; a matter-of-fact is a gorgon to him; he abhors the palpable, and doats upon the occult and intangible; he loves to speculate on the doings of those in the dogstar, to discuss on immortal essences, to dispute with the disbeliever on gnomes—a paradox will be the darling of his bosom for a month, and a good chimera ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 10, No. 272, Saturday, September 8, 1827 • Various

... the Gorgon's head before Polydectes's guests and turning them to stone wrought hardly more of a miracle than this calm announcement of Themistocles. Men stared at him vacantly, stunned by the tidings, then ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis

... ever young, and making sport for other people, than either Homer's Jupiter with his crooked counsels, terrible to everyone; or old Pan with his hubbubs; or smutty Vulcan half covered with cinders; or even Pallas herself, so dreadful with her Gorgon's head and spear and a countenance like bullbeef? Why is Cupid always portrayed like a boy, but because he is a very wag and can neither do nor so much as think of anything sober? Why Venus ever in her prime, but because of her affinity with me? Witness that color of her ...
— The Praise of Folly • Desiderius Erasmus

... mission, cut off the head of the Medusa with the help of a mirror and sickle, brought it away with him in a pouch, and after delivering and marrying Andromeda in his return journey, exposed the head before Polydectes and court at a banquet, which turned them all into stone, whereupon he gave the Gorgon's head to Athena to place on her shield, and set out for Argos; Acrisius hearing of his approach fled, but was afterwards killed accidentally by his grandson, who in throwing a discus had ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... looking back at the individual in black. "What a gorgon!" he continued, as his eyes travelled to the man in motley. "Gog and Magog, by Heavens!" he commented, as ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy

... whilst her eyes suddenly glared dilating, and she looked menacingly at Amanda; "there is Robitaille, and Lamoureux, and Paille, and myself, and Babet Blais, —poor Babet! but her boy, his boy, his own son, has paid him down with sorrow, he has punished him;—ha! ha!" and both she and her Gorgon-like guest laughed a meaning and triumphant laugh, whilst Amanda yet stood there to be baited by the brutish man and the lost, revengeful woman, the latter of whom thus continued to vent her spleen: "Mistress, what are you but an ...
— The Advocate • Charles Heavysege

... Yet, unreasonable as it may appear, I confess that my feelings were not altogether so ecstatic as when I first called Mrs. Bullfrog mine. True, she was a sweet woman and an angel of a wife; but what if a Gorgon should return, amid the transports of our connubial bliss, and take the angel's place. I recollected the tale of a fairy, who half the time was a beautiful woman and half the time a hideous monster. Had I taken that very fairy to be the wife of ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... On the 30th HMS "Gorgon" arrived, towing the brig which brought out Mrs Livingstone and some ladies about to join the University mission, as well as the sections of a new iron steamer intended for the navigation of Lake Nyassa. The name of the "Lady Nyassa" was given ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston

... forward and his face turned back. He can make the future luxuriant and gigantic, so long as he is thinking about the past. When he tries to think about the future itself, his mind diminishes to a pin point with imbecility, which some call Nirvana. To-morrow is the Gorgon; a man must only see it mirrored in the shining shield of yesterday. If he sees it directly he is turned to stone. This has been the fate of all those who have really seen fate and futurity as clear and inevitable. The Calvinists, ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton

... eye Deep flashing through the midnight of their mind, The sable bands combined, Where Fear's black banner bloats the troubled sky, Appall'd retire. Suspicion hides her head, Nor dares the obliquely gleaming eyeball raise; Despair, with gorgon-figured veil o'erspread, Speeds to dark Phlegethon's detested maze. Lo! startled at the heavenly ray, With speed unwonted Indolence upsprings, And, heaving, lifts her leaden wings, ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]

... senses, and to come back from the place where he had been struck by the hammer of treachery. He seemed to realize again that he was still a part of the common world, not a human being swung through the universe on his heart-strings by a Gorgon. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... and haughty, with the cast-bronze countenance of Roman emperors. But the old men bear rigid faces of carved basalt, gazing fixedly before them as though at some time or other in their past lives they had met Medusa: and truly Etna in eruption is a Gorgon, which their ancestors have oftentimes seen shuddering, and fled from terror-frozen. The white-haired old women, plying their spindle or distaff, or meditating in grim solitude, sit with the sinister set features ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds

... the crimson field, And blue-eyed Pallas shook her Gorgon shield; O'er the hushed waves their mightier monarch drove, And Ida trembled ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... breaking of the glass at the gaze of Gorgona, as well as the squamiest serpent in her locks, mentioned in II, give us a clew as to the derivation of her name from that of the Gorgon, Medusa, whose uncomeliness was so intense as to petrify all that met her gaze. On the other hand, the glance of Gorgona seemed to be rather ...
— The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam Jr. (The Rubiyt of Omar Khayym Jr.) • Wallace Irwin

... Zeus the cloud-gatherer, and arrayed her in her armour for dolorous battle. About her shoulders cast she the tasselled aegis terrible, whereon is Panic as a crown all round about, and Strife is therein and Valour and horrible Onslaught withal, and therein is the dreadful monster's Gorgon head, dreadful and grim, portent of aegis-bearing Zeus. Upon her head set she the two-crested golden helm with fourfold plate, bedecked with men-at-arms of a hundred cities. Upon the flaming chariot set ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer (Lang, Leaf, Myers trans.)

... cultivated talent and the supremacy of Genius. He played difficult music, he shook and warbled and imitated, some of his tones were very exquisite, but it was all lifeless, the passionless semblance of beauty. I was as if walking in a Gorgon's ice-palace, with magnificent, clear crystals, and noble, transparent pillars, and all the artifice of beauty and comfort, but evermore a deep chill from the lavish elegance. When he had done, I knew he had done his utmost, that he had exhausted hope. In him I found ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke

... suspicion-bound. "Hasten Medusa: so to adamant Him shall we change;" all looking down exclaim'd. "E'en when by Theseus' might assail'd, we took No ill revenge." "Turn thyself round, and keep Thy count'nance hid; for if the Gorgon dire Be shown, and thou shouldst view it, thy return Upwards would be for ever lost." This said, Himself my gentle master turn'd me round, Nor trusted he my hands, but with his own He also hid me. Ye of intellect Sound ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri

... flies to Illyria, together with his wife, where they are both transformed into serpents. Of those who despise Bacchus, Acrisius alone remains, the grandfather of Perseus, who, having cut off the head of the Gorgon Medusa, serpents are produced by her blood. Perseus turns Atlas into a mountain, and having liberated Andromeda, he changes sea-weed into coral, and ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso

... ah! how changed, Since o'er the Dardan field in arms she ranged! Not such as erst, by her divine command, Her form appeared from Phidias' plastic hand: Gone were the terrors of her awful brow, Her idle AEgis bore no Gorgon now; 80 Her helm was dinted, and the broken lance Seemed weak and shaftless e'en to mortal glance; The Olive Branch, which still she deigned to clasp, Shrunk from her touch, and withered in her grasp; And, ah! though still the brightest of the sky, Celestial tears ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron

... war and pestilence into the heart of that country! No wonder that he paused! No wonder if, in his imagination, wrought upon by his conscience, he had beheld blood instead of water; and heard groans instead of murmurs. No wonder if some Gorgon horror had turned him into stone upon the spot.—But, no!—he cried, "The die is cast!" He plunged!—He crossed!—and Rome was free no ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick

... and shrivelled; the cheeks were sunken; the cheek bones projected; and a million wrinkles were carved upon the deep-seamed brow and corrugated cheeks. Over that hideous face the gray hair wandered. Bob's blood seemed to freeze within his veins. The old fable tells of the Gorgon, whose face inspired such horror that the beholder stiffened into stone. So here. Bob beheld a Gorgon face. He felt petrified ...
— Among the Brigands • James de Mille

... Phineas, her uncle, sought to prevent him, by attempting, with a party, to carry off the bride. The attempt, notwithstanding, was rendered abortive; for the hero, by showing them the head of the Gorgon, at once turned them ...
— Roman Antiquities, and Ancient Mythology - For Classical Schools (2nd ed) • Charles K. Dillaway

... boundaries that divide Man from his species. State of blessedness! Till that ill-omen'd hour when Cain's stern son Delved in the bowels of the earth for gold, Accursed bane of virtue! of such force As poets feign dwelt in the Gorgon's locks, Which whoso saw, felt instant the life-blood Cold curdle in his veins, the creeping flesh Grew stiff with horror, and the heart forgot To beat. Accursed hour! for man no more To JUSTICE paid his homage, but forsook Her altars, and ...
— Poems, 1799 • Robert Southey

... the windy land Of daughters born to Boreas: beware Lest the strong spirit of the stormy blast Snatch thee aloft, and sweep thee to the void, On wings of raving wintry hurricane! Wend by the noisy tumult of the wave, Until thou reach the Gorgon-haunted plains Beside Cisthene. In that solitude Dwell Phorcys' daughters, beldames worn with time, Three, each swan-shapen, single-toothed, and all Peering thro' shared endowment of one eye; Never on them doth the sun shed his rays, Never falls ...
— Suppliant Maidens and Other Plays • AEschylus

... gently on thy suppliant's head, Dread goddess, lay thy chastening hand! Hot in thy Gorgon terrors clad, Nor circled with the vengeful band (As by the impious thou art seen), With thundering voice and threatening mien, With screaming Horror's funeral cry, Despair, and fell Disease, ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum

... Countess, in alarm at the sigh, 'do not be too—too touched. Do, pray, preserve your wits. You weep! Caroline, Caroline! O my goodness; it is just five-and-twenty minutes to the first dinner-bell, and you are crying! For God's sake, think of your face! Are you going to be a Gorgon? And you show the marks twice as long as any other, you fair women. Squinnying like this! Caroline, for your Louisa's ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... cry of battle? where must I bring my aid? where must I sow dread? who wants me to uncase my dreadful Gorgon's head?(1) ...
— The Acharnians • Aristophanes

... Della Cruscan rhymes; Yes, Critics, whisper thee, litigious wretches! Oblivion's hand shall finish all my Sketches. But see, my soul such bug-bears has repell'd With magnanimity unparallel'd! Take up the volumes, every care dismiss, And smile, gruff Gorgon! while I tell thee this: Not one shall lie neglected on the shelf, All shall be sold—I'll buy them ...
— Poetic Sketches • Thomas Gent

... roll'd, A fringe of serpents hissing guards the gold: Here all the terrors of grim War appear, Here rages Force, here tremble Flight and Fear, Here storm'd Contention, and here Fury frown'd, And the dire orb portentous Gorgon crown'd. The massy golden helm she next assumes, That dreadful nods with four o'ershading plumes; So vast, the broad circumference contains A hundred armies on a hundred plains. The goddess thus the imperial ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer

... vein is gushing, Vixen vengeance lulls my heart: See, the Gorgon gang is rushing! Never, ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith

... plain blunt show of briefly-spoken seeming, To hide her bloodless heart's soul-hardened scheming; A lip of lies; a face formed to conceal, And, without feeling, mock at all who feel; With a vile mask the Gorgon would disown; A cheek of parchment, and an eye of stone. Mark how the channels of her yellow blood Ooze to her skin, and stagnate there to mud! Cased like the centipede in saffron mail, Or darker greenness of the scorpion's scale, (For drawn from reptiles only may we trace Congenial colours ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... extinguished in this new radiance. Miss Victoria Capsheaf stuck to the wall as if she had been a fresco on it. The fifty-year-old dynasties were dismayed and dismounted. Myrtle fossilized them as suddenly as if she had been a Gorgon ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... their enemies in impossible attributes—and how details proceeding from mouth to mouth, might, like Virgil's ever-growing Rumour, reach the heavens with her brow, and clasp Hesperus and Lucifer with her outstretched hands. Gorgon and Centaur, dragon and iron-hoofed lion, vast sea-monster and gigantic hydra, were but types of the strange and appalling accounts brought to London concerning our invaders. Their landing was long unknown, but having now advanced within an hundred miles of London, the country people flying before ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley

... afraid of Athene and the Gorgon; at least so you say, though you do not mind Zeus's thunderbolt a bit. But why do you let the Muses go scot free? do they toss their plumes and hold ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata

... with his divine beast that he is represented not as a mere man wearing the protome of a lion or bull, but actually as a lion or bull wearing the protome of another.[24:1] Hera, boopis, with a cow's head; Athena, glaukopis, with an owl's head, or bearing on her breast the head of the Gorgon; Heracles clad in a lion's skin and covering his brow deino chasmati theros, 'with the awful spread jaws of the wild beast', belong to the same class. So does the Dadouchos at Eleusis and other initiators who let candidates for purification set one foot—one only ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray

... great-coat over the rest of her dress, had in her hand a goodly sloethorn cudgel, and in all points of equipment, except her petticoats, seemed rather masculine than feminine. Her dark elf-locks shot out like the snakes of the gorgon between an old-fashioned bonnet called a bongrace, heightening the singular effect of her strong and weather-beaten features, which they partly shadowed, while her eye had a wild roll that indicated something like real or ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott

... and leave her to her extremes?— Pillowy air he treads a time and hangs His thoughts on her, forsaken that she seems, All while her patience, morselled into pangs, Mounts; then to alight disarming, no one dreams, With Gorgon's gear and barebill, ...
— Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - Now First Published • Gerard Manley Hopkins

... hearts to a sweet humility with a strong sense of their wickedness. Then comes Law, with its whips and bonds, to chastise and tie up "the offending Adam"—that is, the Adam without a pocket,—and then the gentle violence of kindly Mother Church leads the poor man far from the fatal presence of his Gorgon wants, to consort him with meek-eyed Charity,—to give him glimpses of the Land of Promise,—to make him hear the rippling waters of Eternal Truth,—to feast his senses with the odours of Eternal sweets. Happy English poor! ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 9, 1841 • Various

... acquaintance is to convince them you do not require it, for when once the petrifying aspect of distress and penury appear, whose qualities, like Medusa's head, can change to stone all that look upon it; when once this Gorgon claims acquaintance with us, the phantom of friendship, that before courted our notice, will vanish into unsubstantial air, and the whole world before us appear a barren waste. Pardon me, ye dear spirits of benevolence, whose benign smiles ...
— Charlotte Temple • Susanna Rowson

... curricle, and had charge of his belle cousine. It may have been the red fezzes in the carriage of the Turkish ambassador which frightened the prince's grays, or Mrs. Champignon's new yellow liveries, which were flaunting in the Park, or hideous Lady Gorgon's preternatural ugliness, who passed in a low pony-carriage at the time, or the prince's own want of skill, finally; but certain it is that the horses took fright, dashed wildly along the mile, scattered equipages, pietons, ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray

... sticks which the beaus have lately walked with about the Park in a morning; but this was far his masterpiece. On its head was engraved a nose and chin, which might have been mistaken for a pair of nutcrackers. The learned have imagined it designed to represent the Gorgon; but it was in fact copied from the face of a certain long English baronet, of infinite wit, humour, and gravity. He did intend to have engraved here many histories: as the first night of Captain B——'s play, where you would have seen critics ...
— Joseph Andrews, Vol. 2 • Henry Fielding

... the separation might be prudent,—if it could only see, it would certainly lose its coldness, and learn to feel; and, in such a case, the charms of these two figures would produce an effect quite opposite to that of the Gorgon's head, which turned flesh into stone. Did I pretend to describe to you the Venus, it would only set your imagination at work to form ideas of her figure; and your ideas would no more resemble that figure, than the Portuguese face of Miss ——, who has enchanted our knights, resembles the sweet ...
— Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e • Lady Mary Wortley Montague

... And stood accoutred for the bloody fray. Her tasselled aegis round her shoulders next She threw, with terror circled all around, And on its face were figured deeds of arms And Strife and Courage high, and panic Rout. There too a Gorgon's head of monstrous size Frown'd terrible, portent of angry Jove. . . . . . . . In her hand A spear she bore, long, weighty, tough, wherewith The mighty daughter of a mighty sire Sweeps down the ranks of those her ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement

... to translate; and finding her own reply. "Ah, yes, the Medusa!" then, as more than one exclaimed in indignant dismay, she said, "No, not the Gorgon, but the beautiful winged head, with only two serpents on the brow and one coiled round the neck, and the ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge

... I am something revived at this testimony of your obedience; but I cannot admit that traitor,—I fear I cannot fortify myself to support his appearance. He is as terrible to me as a Gorgon: if I see him I swear I shall turn to stone, ...
— The Way of the World • William Congreve

... boy. Someone here is composing, with much citation of texts, a dissertation on the Gorgon Islands: de Gorgonum insulis. Medusa, according to him, was a Libyan savage who lived near Lake Triton, our present Chott Melhrir, and it is there that ...
— Atlantida • Pierre Benoit

... subject, which impressed itself upon my mind, as both strong and healthy: 'And by this you may recognize true education from false. False education is a delightful thing, and warms you, and makes you every day think more of yourself; and true education is a deadly cold thing, with a gorgon's head on her shield, and makes you every day think worse of yourself. Worse in two ways also, more is the pity: it is perpetually increasing the personal sense of ignorance, and the personal ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson

... sisters who were gray-haired from their birth, whence their name. The Gorgons were monstrous females with huge teeth like those of swine, brazen claws, and snaky hair. None of these beings make much figure in mythology except Medusa, the Gorgon, whose story we shall next advert to. We mention them chiefly to introduce an ingenious theory of some modern writers, namely, that the Gorgons and Graeae were only personifications of the terrors of the sea, the former denoting the STRONG billows of the wide ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch

... supplying each fighting man with eight drachmas, did good service in manning the fleet; and Kleidemus tells us that this money was obtained by an artifice of Themistokles. When the Athenians were going down to the Peiraeus, he gave out that the Gorgon's head had been lost from the statue of the goddess. Themistokles, under pretext of seeking for it, searched every man, and found great stores of money hidden in their luggage, which he confiscated, and thus was able to supply the crews of the ships with abundance ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch

... down on Miss Douglas's vacant chair, evidently with the intention of staying in the room to act Gorgon. Gwen walked to her desk in the depths of humiliation. She caught Netta's glance as she went by, and it seemed to add insult ...
— The Youngest Girl in the Fifth - A School Story • Angela Brazil

... swift and sudden change passed for a moment over his own rough-hewn features; his dark eyes blazed upon her with an instant's startled, piercing scrutiny; he set his hand on the cupboard door. And still Barbara stood paralyzed, rooted to the ground as if the unveiled horror of the Gorgon's stare had struck her ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 29, May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various

... seems, fell at length upon a cobbler, Giles Gorgon by name, who produced several new grins of his own invention, having been used to cut faces for many years together over his last. At the very first grin he cast every human feature out of his countenance; at the second he became the face of spout; at the third ...
— Essays and Tales • Joseph Addison

... all, in Greek art, remember to keep yourselves clear about the difference between the Lion and the Gorgon. ...
— The Pleasures of England - Lectures given in Oxford • John Ruskin

... which was expressed in that face? No; but dread, horror, almost disgust, as she gazed with side-long, startled eyes, struggling, and yet struggling in vain, to turn her face from some horrible sight, as if her own image had been the Gorgon's head. ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley

... Ceres candidly admitted that her mind was a complete blank on the subject of the Eleusinian mysteries. Aphrodite's dress was admirable for summer, but in winter seemed obstinate conservatism; and why should Pallas make herself a fright with her Gorgon helmet, now that it no longer frightened anybody? Where Elenko would fain have adored she found herself tolerating, excusing, condescending. How many Elenkos are even now tenderly nursing ancient creeds, whose main virtue is the virtue ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett

... on the isle of Seriphos, where a fisherman named Dictys took care of them. A cruel tyrant named Polydectes wanted Danae to be his wife, and, as she would not consent, he shut her up in prison, saying that she should never come out till her son Perseus had brought him the head of the Gorgon Medusa, thinking he must be lost by the way. For the Gorgons were three terrible sisters, who lived in the far west beyond the setting sun. Two of them were immortal, and had dragon's wings and brazen claws and serpent hair, but their sister Medusa was mortal, and so beautiful in the face that ...
— Aunt Charlotte's Stories of Greek History • Charlotte M. Yonge

... an isolated, if not despised, childhood, the idol of society and the recipient of general homage. The fault was not with her. But she had for guardian (alas! my dear girl had the same) an aunt who was a gorgon. This aunt must have been making herself disagreeable to the prospective bridegroom, and he, being quick to take offence—quicker than myself, it was said—had probably retorted in a way to make things unpleasant. As he was a guest in the house, he and all the other members ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green

... reason it out in his heart. It was not that she was physically attractive to him. Mrs. Noble was that. It was not that fascination which Bella aroused, the adventuress, the siren, the gorgon. In Constance there was something different. She was a woman of the world, a man's woman. Then, too, she was so brutally frank ...
— Constance Dunlap • Arthur B. Reeve



Words linked to "Gorgon" :   medusa, Stheno, mythical creature, Greek mythology, mythical monster, Euryale



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