"Leda" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... out six months in these places; but they were gradually surrounded on all sides by Malays and Dyaks, so that they could get no fresh stores. On the 10th of March a body of Chinese came down the river to Leda Tanah (Tongue of Land) about halfway to Kuching. They built a breast-work by the river-side, dug a trench behind it, placed some brass guns in position, and then retired to eat their dinners in comfort behind their defences. There was a little house ...
— Sketches of Our Life at Sarawak • Harriette McDougall
... girls there appears scarce one point of resemblance, save the possession of a perfect loveliness. The eye of the soaring eagle may not discover their charms—as did the bird of Jove those of the lovely Leda—but no human eye could gaze for a moment on either one, without receiving the impression that it was looking upon the fairest object on earth. This impression could only be modified, by turning to gaze ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... the boy, Snatch'd from the ruins of unhappy Troy: A robe of tissue, stiff with golden wire; An upper vest, once Helen's rich attire, From Argos by the fam'd adultress brought, With golden flow'rs and winding foliage wrought, Her mother Leda's present, when she came To ruin Troy and set the world on flame; The scepter Priam's eldest daughter bore, Her orient necklace, and the crown she wore Of double texture, glorious to behold, One order set with gems, and one with gold. Instructed thus, the wise Achates goes, And ...
— The Aeneid • Virgil
... of a new sun; you shall sleep on crimson silk, under the gaze of a Madonna; you shall feel like a happy lover gently kissed by a nymph whose bare feet you still may see, but who is about to vanish. That swan will be the voice of Genovese, if he can unite it to its Leda, the voice of Clarina. To-morrow night we are to hear Mose, the grandest opera ...
— Massimilla Doni • Honore de Balzac
... painting the amours of Leda, never failed of exciting the utmost sensibility in the ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... of fable and imposture; for it is necessary to our serious belief in God, that we do not connect it with stories that run, as this does, into ludicrous interpretations. This story is, upon the face of it, the same kind of story as that of Jupiter and Leda, or Jupiter and Europa, or any of the amorous adventures of Jupiter; and shews, as is already stated in the former part of 'The Age of Reason,' that the Christian faith is built upon the ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... dawned the song with stormier wings above the watch-fire spread [Ep. 2. Whence from Ida toward the hill of Hermes leapt the light that said Troy was fallen, a torch funereal for the king's triumphal head. Dire indeed the birth of Leda's womb that had God's self to sire Bloomed, a flower of love that stung the soul with fangs that gnaw like fire: But the twin-born human-fathered sister-flower bore fruit more dire. Scarce the cry that called on airy heaven and all swift winds on wing, Wells of river-heads, ...
— Studies in Song, A Century of Roundels, Sonnets on English Dramatic Poets, The Heptalogia, Etc - From Swinburne's Poems Volume V. • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... came the youths Castor and Polydeuces. They came riding on white horses, two noble-looking brothers. From Sparta they came, and their mother was Leda, who, after the twin brothers, had another child born to her—Helen, for whose sake the sons of many of Jason's friends were to wage war against the great city of Troy. These were the first heroes who came to Iolcus after the word had ...
— The Golden Fleece and the Heroes who Lived Before Achilles • Padraic Colum
... cannot now be ascertained; but we may easily imagine several ways in which it might have originated; nor is it at all necessary to suppose, with Julius Frontinus, that two young men were dressed up by the Dictator to personate the sons of Leda. It is probable that Livy is correct when he says that the Roman general, in the hour of peril, vowed a temple to Castor. If so, nothing could be more natural than that the multitude should ascribe the victory to the ...
— Lays of Ancient Rome • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... of Poitiers was called the most wondrous woman, the woman of eternal youth, the beautiful huntress; it was she whom Jean Goujon sculptured, nude and triumphant, embracing with marble arms a mysterious stag, enamoured like Leda's swan." ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... "literary" painter, it is literature that is the mainspring of his elevated and decorative art. Open at random the catalogue full of quotations from the painter's pen and you encounter such titles as Leda and the Swan, treated with poetic restraint; Jupiter and Semele, Tyrtaeus Singing During the Combat, St. Elizabeth and the Miracle of the Roses, Lucretia and Tarquin, Pasiphae, the Triumph of Alexander, Salome, Dante and Virgil, Bathsheba, Jason and ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... two Swannes of goodly hewe Come softly swimming downe along the Lee; Two fairer Birds I yet did never see; The snow, which doth the top of Pindus strew, Did never whiter shew; Nor Jove himselfe, when he a Swan would be, For love of Leda, whiter did appeare; Yet Leda was (they say) as white as he, Yet not so white as these, nor nothing neare; So purely white they were, That even the gentle streame, the which them bare, Seem'd foule to them, and bad his billowes spare ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... They did not rush "in medias res"—Cennino in particular. He not only begins with the beginning of every particular thing, or invention, or practice; but thinks it necessary to commence his work on the arts with a much earlier fact than the production of Leda's egg—even with the creation of the world—and immediately deduces the art of painting from the fall of Adam, who was from that event compelled to labor; hence invention—hence the art. His book is, however, written in a pious spirit; nor have we now-a-days any right, in good taste, to ridicule ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... walk, expectantly waiting for our scenes to materialize. Here the little steno in the green tarn is Lais of Corinth, the dowager alighting from the electric is Zenobia. Illusions dress the entire procession. Semiramis, Leda, and tailored nymphs; dryad eyes gleam from powder-white masks. Or, if the classics bore you, Watteau and the rococo pertness of the Grand Monarch. And there are Gothic noses, Moorish eyebrows, Byzantine slippers. Take your pick, walk up and down ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... of Oedipus; who, ignorant of kin, wedded with her son, and when she had discovered the unnatural alliance, for shame and grief hanged herself. He continued to drag a wretched life above the earth, haunted by the dreadful Furies. There was Leda, the wife of Tyndarus, the mother of the beautiful Helen, and of the two brave brothers Castor and Pollux, who obtained this grace from Jove, that, being dead, they should enjoy life alternately, living in pleasant places under the earth. For Pollux had prayed that his brother Castor, who ...
— THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES • CHARLES LAMB
... supposed to know all about Helen), the imagination of Greece, and later, the imagination of the civilised world, has played around Helen, devising about her all that possibly could be devised. She was the daughter of Zeus by Nemesis, or by Leda; or the daughter of the swan, or a child of the changeful moon, brooding on "the formless and multi-form waters." She could speak in the voices of all women, hence she was named "Echo," and we might fancy that, like the witch of the Brocken, ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... half-human feet were still tender as a baby's. Except for the bright blue, steely hooks, half sheathed in his little toes, there was not a single harsh outline or detail in his plump figure. He was as free from angles as one of Leda's offspring. Your caressing hand sank away in his fur with dreamy languor. To look at him long was an intoxication of the senses; to pat him was a wild delirium; to embrace him, an utter ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... recognized scientifically that it is a state of mental inferiority and often a sign of idiotic tendency, usually accompanied by a case history, tainted heredity and highly neurotic constitution. AEstheticism has reason for complaint, and more than one painter or sculptor has represented the union of Leda with the Swan. It is certainly much better for society, for an idiot or an imbecile to be castrated than for him to make a girl pregnant and ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... Helen, but she was Leda, the mother of Helen. Then she was Saint Anne, mother of Mary; and next she was Mary, visited by an Angel in a dream, and followed by the Wise Men who had seen ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... of Leda and Jove, (That taught the Spartans dancing on the sands Of swift Eurotas) dance in heaven above, Knit and united with eternal bands; Among the stars, their double image stands, Where both are carried with an equal pace, Together jumping in ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... vision," he said, and his voice broke—"there is that in you which wakes old memories. For now assuredly I believe your father was not Dom Manuel but that ardent bird which nestled very long ago in Leda's bosom. And now Troy's sons are all in Ades' keeping, in the world below; fire has consumed the walls of Troy, and the years have forgotten her tall conquerors; but still you are bringing woe on woe to ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... Daughter of Leda, guardian of my home, Thy speech is as my absence, long drawn out. Well measured praise from other lips must come; I pray thee stint thy woman's blandishments, Nor, like some proud barbarian's minion vile, Crawl to my feet with abject flatteries. I would ...
— Specimens of Greek Tragedy - Aeschylus and Sophocles • Goldwin Smith
... say—encouraged, I stumbled through my story; told him I had credit at the cabman's eating-house, but began to think it was drawing to a close; how Dijon lent me a corner of his studio, where I tried to model ornaments, figures for clocks, Time with the scythe, Leda and the swan, musketeers for candlesticks, and other kickshaws, which had never (up to that day) been honoured with the ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... But the Leda lay sorely stricken, with her mainmast gone, her bulwarks shattered, her mizzen-topmast and gaff shot away, her sails like a beggar's rags, and a hundred of her crew dead and wounded. Close beside her a mass of wreckage floated upon the waves. It was the stern-post of a mangled vessel, ...
— The Great Shadow and Other Napoleonic Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... rose from the crisp-smiling waves, in a rich atmosphere of light and beauty—there Leda toyed with the wreathed neck and ruffled plumage of the enamoured swan—in this compartment, Danae lay warm and languid, impotent to resist the blended power of the God's passion and his gold—in that, Ariadne clung delighted to the bosom ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... mankind descend from animals, as from the Swan, or from gods in the shape of animals, is found in every quarter of the world, and among the rudest races. Many Australian natives of to-day claim descent, like the royal house of Sparta, from the Swan. The Greek myths hesitated as to whether Nemesis or Leda was the bride of the Swan. Homer only mentions Leda among "the wives and daughters of mighty men," whose ghosts Odysseus beheld in Hades: "And I saw Leda, the famous bedfellow of Tyndareus, who bare to Tyndareus two sons, hardy of heart, Castor, tamer ...
— Helen of Troy • Andrew Lang
... glory round it; Mary sits leaning in an arm-chair and opens her mouth to receive the egg!" Which are the most profane—these pictures, or the Venus Anadyomene of Apelles, the Venus of Titian, and the Leda ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects and Curiosities of Art (Vol. 3 of 3) • S. Spooner
... form portray'd within the lucid stream Will oft appear, or on the verdant lawn, Or glossy beech, or fleecy cloud, will gleam So lovely fair, that Leda's self might say, Her Helen sinks eclipsed, as at the dawn A star when cover'd by the solar ray: And, as o'er wilds I stray Where the eye nought but savage nature meets, There Fancy most her brightest tints employs; But when rude truth destroys The loved illusion of those dreamed sweets, I sit ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... pensively contented, in that deep motionless quiet which mortals pity and which the gods enjoy; rather than him who, under the umbrage of Elysium, gazes at once upon all the beauties that on earth were separated—Helena and Eriphyle, Polyxena and Hermione, Deidamia and Deianira, Leda and Omphale, Atalanta and Cydippe, Laodamia, with her arm round the neck of a fond youth whom she still seems afraid of losing, and, apart, the daughters of ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... eyes in order to possess the mind, all united would seem naught compared to the divine pleasure which shone upon me when I turned me to her smiling face. And the virtue with which the look indulged me, tore me from the fair nest of Leda,[1] and impelled me ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 3, Paradise [Paradiso] • Dante Alighieri
... is usually termed by the antiquaries of Naples 'The Chamber of Leda'; and in the beautiful work of Sir William Gell, the reader will find an engraving from that most delicate and graceful painting of Leda presenting her newborn to her husband, from which the room derives its name. This charming apartment opened upon the fragrant garden. ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants: and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... I saw two Swannes of goodly hewe Come softly swimming downe along the lee*: Two fairer birds I yet did never see; The snow which doth the top of Pindus strew 40 Did never whiter shew, Nor Jove himselfe, when he a swan would be For love of Leda, whiter did appear; Yet Leda was, they say, as white as he, Yet not so white as these, nor nothing near: 45 So purely white they were, That even the gentle stream, the which them bare, Seem'd foule to them, ...
— The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, Volume 5 • Edmund Spenser
... twenty-three shells obtained in that locality from argillaceous strata 20 feet thick, two only, namely, Nucula Cobboldiae and Tellina obliqua, are extinct, and not a few of the other species, such as Leda lanceolata, Cardium groenlandicum, Lucina borealis, Cyprina islandica, Panopaea norvegica, and Mya truncata, betray a northern, and some of them ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... these walls, and I do not think, Henry, we are first rate classics;—and yet it would be difficult to puzzle us, in naming the story whence these frescoes have their birth. Look at this Latona—and Leda—and the Ariadne abbandonata—and this must certainly be the blooming Hebe. Ah! and look at this little niche! This grinning little deity—the facsimile of an Indian idol—must express their idea of the Penates. Strange! ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... anger awaken, At the wave of his hair all Olympus is shaken. Yet He from the throne of his birth, Bow'd down to the sons of the earth, Through dim Arcadian glades to wander sighing, Lull'd into dreams of bliss— Lull'd by his Leda's kiss Lo, at his feet the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... like Clodagh,' says she, 'and you are al-leady in the habit of calling me Clodagh; and I saw the name Leda in a book, and liked it: but Clodagh is most hollible, ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... during the time went to Pompeii to witness a special excavation among the ruins of the buried city, which search was instituted on account of our visit. A number of ancient household articles were dug up, and one, a terra cotta lamp bearing upon its crown in bas-relief the legend of "Leda and the Swan," was presented to me as a souvenir of the occasion, though it is usual for the Government to place in its museums everything of such ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... various tribal Gods in a syncretic Olympus, is the genealogical. All are children of Zeus, for example, or grandchildren, or brothers and sisters. Fancy then provides an amour to account for each relationship. Zeus loved Leto, Leda, Europa, and so forth. Thus a God, originally innocent and even moral, becomes a perfect pattern of vice; and the eternal contradiction vexes the souls of Xenophanes, Plato, and St. Augustine. Sacrifices, even human sacrifices, wholly unknown to the most archaic ...
— The Homeric Hymns - A New Prose Translation; and Essays, Literary and Mythological • Andrew Lang
... toying with Leda," replied Bias as confidently as if Arachne's works were before his eyes, "and in the form of a bull bearing away Europa, the chaste Artemis ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... [Fig. 53. Cyllo leda, Linn., from a drawing by Mr. Trimen, shewing the extreme range of variation in the ocelli. A. Specimen, from Mauritius, upper surface of fore-wing. A1. Specimen, from Natal, ditto. B. Specimen, from Java, upper surface of hind-wing. B1. ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... that{16} I saw two Swannes of goodly hewe Come softly swimming downe along the lee{17}; Two fairer birds I yet did never see; The snow which doth the top of Pindus strew, Did never whiter shew, Nor Jove himselfe, when he a swan would be For love of Leda, whiter did appeare. Yet Leda was (they say) as white as he, Yet not so white as these, nor nothing near{18}: So purely white they were, That even the gentle stream, the which them bare, Seem'd foule to them, and bad his billowes spare To wet their silken feathers, least they might Soyle ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... her life; (she swore that she would never leave my side on the day when she told me of the violence of her passion: but Circe owns me, heart and soul, all others I despise. Who could be lovelier than she?) What loveliness had Ariadne or Leda to compare with hers? What had Helen to compare with her, what has Venus? If Paris himself had seen her with her dancing eyes, when he acted as umpire for the quarreling goddesses, he would have given up Helen and the goddesses for her! If I could ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter |
