"Prometheus" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... as the Duke; the dresses might be quite as showy, the action hardly less graceful, than those of the odd-looking gentlemen who are dubbed doctors of civil law on such occasions; and the speeches of Prometheus, Oedipus, or Antigone, would be more intelligible to the learned, and more amusing to the ladies, than those Latin essays ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... end? Let it come! He was Prometheus on the peak of Caucasus, hurling defiance at the unjust Jove! His hopes, his love, his very honour—curse it!—ruined! Let the lightning stroke come! He were a coward to shrink from it. Let him face the worst, unprotected, bare-headed, naked, and do battle, himself, and nothing but himself, against ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... article of their creed that the first faint glimmering of true civilisation shone in the first street-light maintained at the public expense. They trace their existence and high position in the public esteem, in a direct line to the heathen mythology; and hold that the history of Prometheus himself is but a pleasant fable, whereof the true hero is ...
— The Lamplighter • Charles Dickens
... interpreted in this way, is the legend of Prometheus. He and his brother Epimetheus are sons of the Titan Iapetus. The Titans are the offspring of the oldest generation of gods, Uranus (Heaven) and Gaea (Earth). Kronos, the youngest of the Titans, dethroned his father and seized upon the government of the world. In return, he was ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner
... . What should we think of a German critic that selected his specimens of British literature from 'The Castle Specter,' Mr. Lewis' 'Monk,' or the 'Mysteries of Udolpho,' and 'Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus'?. . . 'Faust,' for instance, passes with many of us for a mere tale of sorcery and art magic. It would scarcely be more unwise to consider 'Hamlet' as depending for its main interest on the ghost that ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... Prometheus, the man of forethought, could safely predict the fall of Zeus. The struggles by which reason and faith overthrow tradition and superstition vary in different countries and at different times; but the final victory is always on their side. In India the ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... in the beginning, Paine did not aspire to be the political Prometheus of England. He rather looked to the Whig party and to Mr. Burke as the leaders in such a movement. As for himself, a veteran reformer from another hemisphere, he was willing to serve as a volunteer in the campaign against the oppressors of mankind. He had adopted ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... and of that rare poetic pair, the Brownings, each had already given evidence of the great powers they possessed, Robert Browning's tragedy of "Strafford" being produced on the stage in 1837, while his future wife's translation of the "Prometheus Bound" saw the light four years earlier. The Victorian period can boast no greater poetic names than these, each of which is held in highest reverence by its own special admirers. The patriotic fervour with which Lord Tennyson has done almost all his laureate work, the lucid splendour of his style, ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... distance, yes! But in the life of each individual they're only a trade, like anything else! Strife! Titanic efforts! The conditions of modern existence make all that impossible. I suffer, I strive, I surmount obstacles! Well, what then? Where's the end of it? Not in my lifetime, at any rate! Prometheus wished to give fire to mankind, and he did so. That was a triumph, if you like! But what about us? The most we do is to throw faggots on a fire that we have never kindled, and which by us will never be ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... and the cotton warehouse, was revealed as a person of taste and reading. Instead of appearing to her merely an indifferent person, to whom her fate had been chained, and whom she regarded in somewhat the same manner as Prometheus did his rock, I had become a pleasant companion,—a being of more vitality than she ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... his gnatt or Ovid of his fley was all covertly to declare abuse?... You remember not that under the person of Aeneas in Virgil the practice of a dilligent captaine is described; you know not that the creation is signified in the Image of Prometheus; the fall of pryde in the ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
... [*Peter Comestor, Hist. Genes. xxxvii, xl] to have been originated either by Nimrod, who is related to have forced men to worship fire, or by Ninus, who caused the statue of his father Bel to be worshiped. Among the Greeks, as related by Isidore (Etym. viii, 11), Prometheus was the first to set up statues of men: and the Jews say that Ismael was the first to make idols of clay. Moreover, idolatry ceased to a great extent in the sixth age. Therefore idolatry had no cause ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... civilized by the gods and heroes, who taught them to work in metals, to build houses, and other useful arts of civilization. But the human race became in the course of time so degenerate that the gods resolved to destroy all mankind by means of a flood; Deucalion {22} (son of Prometheus) and his wife Pyrrha, being, on account of their piety, ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... it teaches us is that every Christian man who has passed through the experiences which make him Christ's envoy, receives the equipment of a new life, and that that life is the gift of the risen Lord. This Prometheus came from the dead with the spark of life guarded in His pierced hands, and He bestowed it upon us; for the Spirit of life, which is the Spirit of Christ, is granted to all Christian men. Dear brethren! we have not lived up to ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... goes through fire unshielded. In every part and corner of our life, to lose oneself is to be gainer; to forget oneself is to be happy; and this poor, laughable, and tragic fool has not yet learned the rudiments; himself, giant Prometheus, is still ironed on the peaks of Caucasus. But by and by his truant interests will leave that tortured body, slip abroad and gather flowers. Then shall death appear before him in an altered guise; no longer ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... apprehended solely in its results. Rule applies but to the excellences of avoidance—to the virtues which deny or refrain. Beyond these the critical art can but suggest. We may be instructed to build an Odyssey, but it is in vain that we are told how to conceive a 'Tempest,' an 'Inferno,' a 'Prometheus Bound,' a 'Nightingale,' such as that of Keats, or the 'Sensitive Plant' of Shelley. But, the thing done, the wonder accomplished, and the capacity for apprehension becomes universal. The sophists of the negative ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... Leeches, I ascended to the top set, past the dreary series of closed outer doors of offices and an empty set or two, which intervened between that lofty region and the surface. Entering my friend's rooms, I found him stretched upon his back, like Prometheus Bound, with a perfectly demented ticket-porter in attendance on him instead of the Vulture: which helpless individual, who was feeble and frightened, and had (my friend explained to me, in great choler) been endeavouring for some hours to apply leeches to his leg, and as yet had only got on two ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... from Panopeus is with memories of the past, the place itself, now so still and deserted, was once the scene of an event even more ancient and memorable, if Greek story-tellers can be trusted. For here, they say, the sage Prometheus created our first parents by fashioning them, like a potter, out of clay. (Pausanias X. 4.4. Compare Apollodorus, "Bibliotheca", I. 7. 1; Ovid, "Metamorph." I. 82 sq.; Juvenal, "Sat". XIV. 35. According to ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... annals of literature for the number of productions from celebrated authors. Sir Walter Scott published 'Kenilworth Castle;' Lord Byron issued his tragedy of 'Marino Faliero;' Southey, his 'Vision of Judgment;' Shelley, his 'Prometheus,' and Wordsworth a new edition of his poems. Besides these giants in the field of literature, numerous stars of the second and third magnitude sent forth their light. Charles Lamb, Hazlitt, Barry Cornwall, Tom Moore, Allan Cunningham, Leigh Hunt, and others, were busy writing ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... the cultivated society of the day, and the rude barbarism of a Norman fore- time; his human characters have not only such depth and individuality that they do not admit of being classed under common names, and are inexhaustible even in conception: no, this Prometheus not merely forms men, he opens the gates of the magical world of spirits, calls up the midnight ghost, exhibits before us the witches with their unhallowed rites, peoples the air with sportive fairies and sylphs; and ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... 'Political Justice.' The existing social order is to be calmly abolished because founded upon blind prejudice; the constituent atoms called men are to be rearranged in an ideal order as in a mathematical diagram. Shelley gives the translation of this theory into poetry. The 'Revolt of Islam' or the 'Prometheus Unbound,' with all its unearthly beauty, wearies the imagination which tries to soar into the thin air of Shelley's dreamworld; just as the intellect, trying to apply the abstract formulae of political metaphysics to any concrete problem, feels as ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... legend, son of Prometheus, king of Phthia in Thessaly, husband of Pyrrha, and father of Hellen, the mythical ancestor of the Hellenic race. When Zeus had resolved to destroy all mankind by a flood, Deucalion constructed a boat or ark, in which, after drifting nine days and nights, he landed on Mount ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... they were with certain liberal aspirations which he had entertained in early life, and certain political struggles made during his parliamentary career, induced him to regard himself as a sort of Prometheus. He had done much for the world, and the world in return had made him a baronet without any money! He was a very tall, thin, gray-haired, old man, stooping much, and worn with age, but still endowed with some strength of will, and great capability of making himself unpleasant. His son was a bald-headed, ...
— Miss Mackenzie • Anthony Trollope
... the nightingale, to the fall of the leaves, to the coming of the spring. Were we "exempt from eld and age," this noble melancholy could never be ours, and we, like the ancient classical gods, would be incapable of tears. What Prometheus says in Mr. Bridge's poem ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... I see Those eyes which burn through smiles that fade in tears, Like stars half quenched in mists of silver dew. Prometheus Unbound, SHELLEY. ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... of some lone world-neglected persecuted man—some patient toil-worn son of science, whom Genius loves to call her own—though, haply, to the schools, to fortune and to fame unknown. One whose transcendent, superconscious mind has dared, Prometheus-like, to snatch from heaven the fire of the immortal gods and offer it ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... studied; potatoes should not be over-boiled or underdone, as they are exceedingly unhealthy if not properly cooked. Bread must be well kneaded and delicately baked; a woman who understands the uses of fire—and every householder should—has stolen the secret of Prometheus. ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... to this burst, unless it be the first speech of Prometheus in the Greek drama, after the exit of Vulcan and the two Afrites. But Shakespeare alone could have produced the vow of Hamlet to make his memory a blank of all maxims and generalised truths, that "observation had copied there,"—followed ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... forgotten; the blunders, the false quantities in our lives, are treasured up to be flung against our names. We play, but we do not know our parts; we are Oedipus, who has committed unwitting sin, and yet must reap his reward; we are Prometheus who is to be chained to the rock forever, for offending the gods; we are Orestes whom the Eumenides pursue, chasing him down for his guilt. And all the time we vainly imagine that we are some victorious hero, some Perseus, especially favoured by ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... south-east wind will act more mildly; it will woo you to the country, induce you to sit down in a shady place, smoke, and 'muse.' That incarnate essence of enterprise, business, industry, economy, sharpness, shrewdness, and keenness—that Prometheus whose liver was torn by the vulture of cent per cent—eternally tossing, restless DOOLITTLE, was one day seen asleep, during bank hours, on a seat in the Villa Madama. The scirocco blew ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... true Prometheus, if I may so speak, who brings to earth in the fragile reed of his humanity the sacred and immortal fire which may be kindled in every heart. Open your hearts to Him by faith and He will come in, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... suppose might be dismissed in fewest words,—that these are the works which occupy so much space. What is there so new to be said of the "Heroic Symphony" that fifty pages should be allotted to it, while the ballet "Prometheus," still strange to nearly every reader, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... doubtless, from prehistoric wolves; but you could hardly decipher his pedigree on his mild, domesticated face. My dog is as tame as his master (in whose veins flows the blood of the old cavemen). But time has not tamed fire. Fire is as wild a thing as when Prometheus snatched it from the empyrean. Fire in my grate is as fierce and terrible a thing as when it was lit by my ancestors, night after night, at the mouths of their caves, to scare away the ancestors of my dog. And my dog regards it with the old wonder ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... goddess Isis is said by some authors to be the daughter[FN262] of Hermes, [FN263] and by others of Prometheus, both of them famous for their philosophic turn of mind. The latter is supposed to have first taught mankind wisdom and foresight, as the former is reputed to have ...
— Legends Of The Gods - The Egyptian Texts, edited with Translations • E. A. Wallis Budge
... requested, Wherewith the king of gods and men is feasted. He, ready to accomplish what she will'd, Stole some from Hebe (Hebe Jove's cup fill'd), And gave it to his simple rustic love: Which being known,—as what is hid from Jove?— He inly storm'd, and wax'd more furious Than for the fire filch'd by Prometheus; And thrusts him down from heaven. He, wandering here, In mournful terms, with sad and heavy cheer, 440 Complain'd to Cupid: Cupid, for his sake, To be reveng'd on Jove did undertake; And those on whom heaven, earth, and hell relies, I mean the adamantine ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... invention prove to mankind a blessing or a curse?—like the fire which Prometheus stole from heaven to vivify his statue, may it not be followed by the evils ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... similar to and yet in contrast with that of Orion; in the one the Goddess approaches the mortal and in the other the mortal approaches the Goddess; hence, too, the severer punishment in the latter case. The second legend ought to be completed here by a fact derived from the story of Prometheus: the liver grows as fast as the vultures rend or consume it; thus again rises the idea of infinite repetition, now of suffering, not of action, ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... us see what AEschylus says, who was not only a poet, but a Pythagorean philosopher, also, for that is the account which you have received of him; how doth he make Prometheus bear the pain he suffered for the Lemnian theft, when he clandestinely stole away the celestial fire, and bestowed it on men, and was severely punished by Jupiter for the theft. Fastened to mount Caucasus, he ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... similar pool in Pauline—a lasting impression of his youth, for it is again used in Sordello. These landscapes are some of his most careful natural description. They begin with the great thunderstorm of dawn in which Prometheus is seen riveted to his rock and the eagle-hound of Zeus beside him. Then the morning is described and the awakening of the earth and Artemis going forth, the huntress-queen and the queen of death; then noon with Lyda and the ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... one long triumphal arch! Oh bloody and most bootless Waterloo! Which proves how fools may have their fortune too, Won half by blunder, half by treachery: Oh dull Saint Helen! with thy gaoler nigh— Hear! hear Prometheus[294] from his rock appeal To Earth,—Air,—Ocean,—all that felt or feel His power and glory, all who yet shall hear A name eternal as the rolling year; 230 He teaches them the lesson taught so long, So ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... you, obtain fire in those early times? I suggested a burning mountain as a source of fire. You remember, too, perhaps reading about Prometheus, who stole fire from heaven, bringing it to earth in a copper rod, which combined act of theft and scientific experiment made the gods very angry, because they were afraid mortals might learn as many wonderful things as they knew themselves. History seems to show that ...
— The Story of a Tinder-box • Charles Meymott Tidy
... unknown great man whom I love more and more every day, as I discover moment by moment the wealth of his nature, leaves the printing-house more and more to me. Why, I guess. Our poverty, yours, and ours, and our mother's, is heartbreaking to him. Our adored David is a Prometheus gnawed by a vulture, a haggard, sharp-beaked regret. As for himself, noble fellow, he scarcely thinks of himself; he is hoping to make a fortune for us. He spends his whole time in experiments in paper-making; he begged me to ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... and sound seen." The system has proved successful for several years both in the inventor's own school and the Conservatoire at St. Petersburg. Finally Scriabin, on more spiritual lines, has paralleled sound and colours in a chart not unlike that of Frau Unkowsky. In "Prometheus" he has given convincing proof of his theories. (His chart appeared in "Musik," Moscow, 1911, ...
— Concerning the Spiritual in Art • Wassily Kandinsky
... passing notice claim, And hills by hundreds rise without a name; Hills yet unsung, their mystic powers untold; Celestials there no sacred senates hold; No chain'd Prometheus feasts the vulture there, No Cyclop forges thro their summits glare, To Phrygian Jove no victim smoke is curl'd, Nor ark high landing quits a deluged world. But were these masses piled on Asia's shore, ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... theirs, whom they desire to elevate and ennoble, that they are but dust,—a necessary, unconscious secretion of I know not what material substance; that the thought of a Kepler or Dante is dust, or rather phosphorus; that genius, from Prometheus to Jesus, brought down no divine spark from heaven; that the moral law, free-will, merit, and the consequent progress of the Ego, are illusions; that events are successively our masters,—inexorable, irresponsible, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... those marks of sincerity, of modesty, and of justice, which form the very seal of worth in conduct. Those jealousies, and littlenesses, and envyings, which prey upon the spirits of many men, as the vulture on the heart that chained Prometheus—and whose fierce besetment they who WILL be magnanimous, have to fight off, as one drives away the eagles from their prey, with voice and gestures—seem never to assail him. It is the happiness of his nature to have THAT only absolute ...
— Poems • George P. Morris
... heads against the rugged tree, Or, plunging headlong from the lofty rock, Their limbs to scatter to the winds. No law mysterious, misconception dark, Would the sad wish refuse to grant. Of all that breathe the breath of life, You, only, children of Prometheus, feel That life a burden hard to bear; Yet, would you seek the silent shores of death, If sluggish fate the boon delay, To you, alone, stern Jove forbids ...
— The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi • Giacomo Leopardi
... too shalt know; the place Is all to great Poseidon consecrate. Hard by, the Titan, he who bears the torch, Prometheus, has his worship; but the spot Thou treadest, the Brass-footed Threshold named, Is Athens' bastion, and the neighboring lands Claim as their chief and patron yonder knight Colonus, and in common bear ...
— The Oedipus Trilogy • Sophocles
... recommend to you a play of Eschylus (the Prometheus), published and translated by poor old Morel], who is a good scholar, and an acquaintance of mine. It will be but half a guinea, and your name shall be put in the list I am making for him. You will be ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... both sides, and whether half of what each calls crime in the other is not his own distrust or his neighbour's ignorance. Knowledge, Charity, and Patriotism are the only powers which can loose this Prometheus-land. Let us seek them daily in our own ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... horror, or the most painful pity,—sympathies and antipathies which we seem to be feeling not only for them but for the whole race. This world, we are told, is called Britain; but we should no more look for it in an atlas than for the place, called Caucasus, where Prometheus was chained by Strength and Force and comforted by the daughters of Ocean, or the place where Farinata stands erect in his glowing tomb, 'Come avesse ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... be interested in seeing how near to animation the genius of these wonderful men could bring the inflexible marble. Allow but for the absence of the divine afflatus, or breath of animation, and an unenlightened heathen might suppose the miracle of Prometheus was about to be realized. But we," said he, looking upwards, "are taught to form a better judgment between what man can do and the productions of ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... each constituent; but they never could put them together again, or, by any similar compound produce the primordial egg or organic germ, from which a living being would arise. A connecting link—a vital spark, or animating soul—is always wanting to complete the existence of the Prometheus of the laboratory. Mark, too, the "if," and the "might," in this most lame and impotent hypothesis:—"If, therefore, these globules be identical with the cells which are held to be reproductive, it might be said," ...
— An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" • Anonymous
... Prometheus, when first from heaven high He brought down fire, till then on earth not seen; Fond of delight, a satyr, standing by, Gave it a kiss, as it like ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... with two or three others of our ships, which I took care to explain were on the look-out for my guest; and he seemed by this time pretty well convinced that an attempt to elude our cruisers would have been fruitless. On the latter day, the Prometheus showed her number, while we were at dinner: when Buonaparte expressed a wish to know whether the ships at Brest had hoisted the white flag or not. I sent for the officer of the watch, and desired him to ask the question by telegraph. ...
— The Surrender of Napoleon • Sir Frederick Lewis Maitland
... better express its craft school, its local style and skill, its reaction too upon the town's life in peace and war, than by this Hal o' the Wynd by his forge? Nay, what better symbol than this hammer, this primitive tool and ever typical one, of the peaceful education of experience, form Prometheus to Kelvin, of the warlike, from Thor to modern cannon-forge? Turning now from Town and School to Cloister, to the life of secluded peace and meditation—from which, however, the practical issues of life are ever renewed—what plainer symbol, yet what more historic ...
— Civics: as Applied Sociology • Patrick Geddes
... the great last work of Condorcet. As Mirabeau, the intellectual Catiline of his age, is the protagonist of Rebellion, that principle which has drawn the deepest utterances from the world-soul, from Job to Prometheus and Farinata, so Condorcet, whose countenance in its high and gentle benevolence seems the very expression of that bienfaisance which the Abbe de Saint-Pierre made fashionable, may be styled the high-priest of Girondinism, and he carries his faith beyond the ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... from the bottom. A raven also in the Athapascan myth saved their ancestors from the general flood, and in this instance it is distinctly identified with the mighty thunder bird, who at the beginning ordered the earth from the depths. Prometheus-like, it brought fire from heaven, and saved them from a second death by cold.[205-1] Precisely the same beneficent actions were attributed by the Natchez to the small red cardinal bird,[205-2] and by the Mandans ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... diverse forms and attributes; but Ubasti was almost indistinguishable in form from Tafne. The name of her son Iphthimis (Nfr-tm), pronounced Eftem, may mean "All-good," and, in the absence of other information about him, suggests a reason why he was identified with Prometheus. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... as much,' said Albinia. 'Prometheus and his kin do most abound when Ulick's head is worst, and papa is in greatest ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... end; at all events, the dinner I have been describing did not form an exception to the rule. In due time Mrs. Mildman disappeared, after which Dr. Mildman addressed a remark or two about Greek tragedy to the tall pupil, which led to a 8dissertation on the merits of a gentleman named Prometheus, who, it seemed, was bound in some peculiar way, but whether this referred to his apprenticeship to any trade, or to the cover of the book containing his history, did not appear. This conversation lasted about ten minutes, ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... classic world, we see a representation of the kind figure on several Roman sarcophagi, where it indicates positively the introduction of a legend analogous to the narrative of Genesis, and associated with the myth of the formation of man by Prometheus. One famous sarcophagus in the Capitol Museum displays in the neighbourhood of the Titan, son of Japetos, who is performing his work as modeller—a pair—man and woman—in the nudity of primeval days, standing at the foot of a tree, the man's gesture showing that he means to gather its fruit.[69] ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... almost all the portraits good, of what I saw; for many are not hung up, and half of those that are, my lord Duke does not know. The Earl of Warwick is delightful; the Lady Mandeville, attiring herself in her wedding garb, delicious. The Prometheus is a glorious picture, the eagle as fine as my statue. Is not it by Vandyck? The Duke told me that Mr. Spence found out it was by Titian—but critics in poetry I see are none in painting. This was all I was shown, for I was not even carried into the chapel. The walls round ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... fortunately progressed; when their spirit of devotion is nourished by Goethe's Promethean word: "Hast thou not thyself accomplished all, thou holy glowing heart?"—and even when Haeckel prints as the leading motto of his "Anthropogeny" Goethe's poem "Prometheus"; when the struggle of selection is also elevated to a moral principle, and the life-task of an individual is limited to creating elbow-room for himself: then humility, indeed, is a virtue which a naturalist ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... is the Thessalian legend of Deucalion. Zeus having worked to destroy the men of the age of bronze, with whose crimes he was wroth, Deucalion, by the advice of Prometheus, his father, constructed a coffer, in which he took refuge with his wife, Pyrrha. The Deluge came; the chest, or coffer, floated at the mercy of the waves for nine days and nine nights, and was finally stranded on Mount Parnassus. Deucalion and Pyrrha leave ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... I was advising her to read Prometheus when she gaped behind her fan and began to talk about Phebe. What a 'nice creature' she was, 'kept her place,' dressed according to her station, and that sort of twaddle. I suppose it was rather rude, but being pulled up so short confused me a bit, and I said the first thing that ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... little time and learning have been wasted in attempting to fix their several periods. But, lying far within the mythologic ages,—the last of them to which any determining circumstances are attached, in the days of that Prometheus who stole fire from heaven, and was chained by Jupiter to Mount Caucasus,—it appears greatly more probable that the traditions respecting them should be the mere repeated and re-repeated echoes of one signal event, than that many ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... of the jungle are still under the thick shade of cerebral inertia. They have not yet seen the swift, bright light of a first doubt flash across the darkness of their brain giving to it a shock of unsuspected vibrations. As yet no glorious Prometheus has arisen amongst those primitive creatures far whom the discouraging counsel of the Italian poet might seem to ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... heartlessness? That is the one compensation time brings, when men and women have killed the best in our natures. Teeth ache fiercely; then the nerve dies, and we have surcease from pain, and find comfort in knowing that the darkening wreck can throb no more. There was a time when the pangs of Prometheus seemed only pastime to mine, but all things end; and now I get on as comfortably without a heart, as the victims of vivisection—the frogs, and guinea pigs, and rabbits—do without ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... great part of the Essay is devoted, contains little that would seem new to his more recent apologists; little also which to the writer's later judgments continued to recommend itself as true. It was as a great poetic artist, not as a great poet, that the author of 'Prometheus' and 'The Cenci', of 'Julian and Maddalo', and 'Epipsychidion' was finally to rank in Mr. Browning's mind. The whole remains nevertheless a memorial of a very touching affection; and whatever intrinsic value the Essay may possess, its main interest ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... splendid calm of his face as he rode along the lines to battle, or galloped up in the nick of time to a battalion reeling before the enemy's charge or shot.' Of Swift, Esmond says—'I have always thought of him and of Marlborough as the two greatest men of that age ... a lonely fallen Prometheus, groaning as the vultures tear him'; and with a few such strokes he gives etchings of other celebrities in letters and politics. One may observe with astonishment that the youthful Thackeray, who delighted in suburban chronicles, in mean lives and paltry incidents, ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... dinner-party. She says: "Wordsworth was there—an adorable old man. Then there was Walter Savage Landor, too, as splendid a person as Mr. Kenyon himself, but not so full of sweetness and sympathy. But best of all, the charming Miss Barrett, who translated the most difficult of the Greek plays, 'Prometheus Bound.' She has written most exquisite poems, too, in almost every modern style. She is so sweet and gentle, and so pretty that one looks at her as if she were some bright flower." Then in another letter Miss Mitford adds: "She is of ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... though I'm afraid, by the by, the smoked glass is apt to be missing just at the moment it is most wanted. I daresay, now, even a man fortified with a knowledge of the classics might be lured into an imprudent marriage, in spite of the warning given him by the chorus in the Prometheus." ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... timely adage seems to determine him, it is, for the most part, because it acts upon responsive feelings preexistent in him and already struggling to express themselves. And thus, upon the whole, it is to be concluded that proverbs are the children of Epimetheus, or afterthought, rather than of Prometheus, or forethought. They are rather products than producers,—intellectual forms rather than intellectual forces. The prevalent notion of their influence is a huge and singular error. One of our wisest ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... Harold's Pilgrimage') Ode to Napoleon The Battle of Waterloo ('Childe Harold's Pilgrimage') Mazeppa's Ride ('Mazeppa') The Irish Avatar The Dream She Walks in Beauty ('Hebrew Melodies') Destruction of Sennacherib ('Hebrew Melodies') From 'The Prisoner of Chillon' Prometheus A Summing-Up ('Childe Harold's Pilgrimage') On This Day I Complete ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... specimen of our New-England clergy was this Dr. Burge. He held the old creed-formulas through which Wilson and Mather declared their faith, yet warmed them into ruddy life by whatever fire the last transcendental Prometheus or Comte-devoted scientist filched from aerial or material heaven. A good diner-out, a good visitor among the poor. His parishioners supplied him with a wood-fire, a saddle-horse, and, it was maliciously said, a boxing-master; and he, on his part,—so ran the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... giddy height and grandeur of the Dover Cliffs; Ibsen could not have wrought the climbing of the steeple into the crisis and calamity of "The Master Builder"; Teufelsdroeckh could not have uttered his extraordinary night thoughts above the town of Weissnichtwo; "Prometheus Bound" would have been impossible. Only one with at least a dram of dizziness could have conceived an "eagle-baffling mountain, black, wintry, dead, unmeasured." In the days when we read Jules Verne, was not our chief pleasure found in his marvelous way ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... is become of the art of forcing the thunder and celestial fire down, which the wise Prometheus had formerly invented? 'Tis most certain you have lost it; 'tis no more on your hemisphere; but here below we have it. And without a cause you sometimes wonder to see whole towns burned and destroyed by lightning and ethereal fire, and are at a loss about knowing from whom, by whom, and to what ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... imagine. Had we but monuments of Greek, like the Fratres Arvales in Latin! Homer is so modern; even though he certainly belongs to the tenth or eleventh century. That was a time in which the Hellenic mind sang the history of the creation in the deep myth of Prometheus, the son of Iapetos, with his three brothers, the emblem of humanity; a poem which Homer no ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... from work was, for Balzac, to be a chained Prometheus; but there was much during these last months to alleviate his impatience. His letters at this period are easier, less painfully preoccupied than at any other; and he found in Poland better medical advice than he deemed obtainable in Paris. He was preparing a ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... genre and still-life subjects with artistic taste and delicacy. Her studio is in Prague. Among her best pictures are "Battle for Truth," "Sentinels of Peace," "A Contented Old Woman"; and among her etchings may be named "The Veiled Picture of Sais," "Prometheus," "The Microscopist," "Before the Bar of Reason," etc. The latter was reproduced in Zeitschrift fuer bildende Kunst in 1893, and was said to show ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... (after Marckscheffel) [1108] will show the principle of its composition. From Prometheus and Pronoia sprang Deucalion and Pyrrha, the only survivors of the deluge, who had a son Hellen (frag. 1), the reputed ancestor of the whole Hellenic race. From the daughters of Deucalion sprang Magnes and Macedon, ancestors of the Magnesians ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... be many which they must bestow upon the fate of their fathers. One died upon the scaffold, another from the knife of an assassin, a third from a fall upon the pavement of a highway; and the last, the greatest of them all, was bound, like Prometheus, to a rock, and fed on bitter recollections till he ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... life, die to their own names even, that they may know nothing but their holy duties,—while men are torturing and denouncing their fellows, and while we can hear day and night the clinking of the hammers that are trying, like the brute forces in the "Prometheus," to rivet their adamantine wedges right through the breast of human nature,—I have been ready to believe that we have even now a new revelation, and the name of ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Hera torments her until she is driven mad and starts upon those famous wanderings which became the subject of many of the most celebrated stories of antiquity. AEschylus reviews her roamings in his great tragedy, "Prometheus Bound," and makes Io to arrive at Mount Caucasus to which the fire-bringer is chained. It is here that Prometheus delivers to her the oracle given him by his mother, Themis, Titan-born. He directs her to Canobos, ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... form; to retain that early mystical sense of water, or wind, or light, in the [33] moulding of eye and brow; to arrest it, or rather, perhaps, to set it free, there, as human expression. The body of man, indeed, was for the Greeks, still the genuine work of Prometheus; its connexion with earth and air asserted in many a legend, not shaded down, as with us, through innumerable stages of descent, but direct and immediate; in precise contrast to our physical theory of our life, which never seems to ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... brother who was the wisest of all Beings—Prometheus called the Foreseer. But Epimetheus himself was slow-witted and scatter-brained. His wise brother once sent him a message bidding him beware of the gifts that Zeus might send him. Epimetheus heard, but he did not heed the warning, and thereby he brought ...
— The Golden Fleece and the Heroes who Lived Before Achilles • Padraic Colum
... with society, which feels instinctively that those who rise too high in excellence must be crushed. And this is the theme of every real tragedy. Othello, Lear, Njal, Grettir, Clarissa Harlowe, the Maid of Orleans, Antigone, Prometheus, and, as I hope to show, Tristan and Isolde, these are but a few among those who must perish from no fault in themselves, but because they are ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... ferocity, whimsical to the brink of mania, egotistic to the environs of self-idolatry, diseased and deaf, embittered, morose—all the brutal epithets you wish to hurl at him. But withal he had the majesty of a Prometheus chained to the rocks; like Prometheus, he had stolen the very fires of heaven; like Prometheus, he did not suffer in silence, but roared or moaned his demigodlike anguishes ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... color anything that the imagination conceives possible in nature, and there are dreamy landscapes quite beyond the most exquisite fancies of Claude and of Turner. The region is full of wonders, of beauties, and sublimities that Shelley's imaginings do not match in the "Prometheus Unbound," and when it becomes accessible to the tourist it will offer an endless field for the delight of those whose minds can rise to the heights of the sublime and the beautiful. In all imaginative writing or painting the material used is that of human experience, otherwise ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... are there, are you? Sir," said he, turning to me, "I am the most unhappy man in the world. Talk of Sisyphus rolling the ever-recoiling stone—of Prometheus gnawed by the vulture since the birth of time. The fables yet live. There is my rock, forever crushing me back! there is my eternal vulture, feeding upon my heart! There! there! there!" And, with an awful gesture of malediction and hatred, ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... disintegration products of uranium in the Clinton (Oak Ridge) reactor. Marinsky and Glendenin, who did the chemical work of identification, chose to call it promethium because they wished to point out that just as Prometheus stole fire (a great force for good or evil) from the hidden storehouse of the gods and presented it to man, so their newly assembled reactor delivered to mankind an even greater ...
— A Brief History of Element Discovery, Synthesis, and Analysis • Glen W. Watson
... in Riverside Third Reader; Prometheus, the Giver of Fire in Coe, First Book of Stories for the Story-Teller; Six Soldiers of Fortune, in Grimm, German Household Tales; The Country Maid and her Milk-Pail, in Scudder, Book of Fables and Folk-Stories; The Flax, in Andersen, Wonder Stories; The Hammer ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... the unbearable sufferings of the body!" comes in a sigh through time, and strikes upon our ear. What a picture! Griffenfeldt, a Danish Prometheus, bound to the ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... book, father, and not let me have it any more to-day, as it has interfered so much with my study; and I will try to be more industrious. I will finish my Prometheus and Euclid, and the projection of my map, and then, perhaps, I shall be ...
— Louis' School Days - A Story for Boys • E. J. May
... get entirely clear of all the notions drawn from the wild traditions of original sin: the eating of the apple, the theft of Prometheus, the opening of Pandora's box, and the other fables too tedious to enumerate, on which priests have erected their tremendous structures of imposition to persuade us that we are naturally inclined to evil. We shall then leave room for the expansion of ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... away."[1] Something, I suppose, not unlike this appalling picture of Dante's occurs in the world whenever a man's soul becomes saturated with hatred. It will be remembered, for instance, that even Shelley's all-forgiving and sublime Prometheus was forced by the torture of the furies to cry ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... must be in him also. The mystery of the elements must be interwoven with the very stuff of his being and the unfathomable depths of Nature must be a path for his feet. In him all mythologies and all religions must meet and be transcended. He is Prometheus and Dionysus. He is Osiris and Balder. He is the great god Pan. "All that we have been, all that we are, and all that we hope to be, is centred in him alone." His spirit is the creative spirit which moves for ever upon the face of the waters. In him all living souls find the object ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... book to market. All poets are humbugs, all literary men are humbugs; directly a man begins to sell his feelings for money he's a humbug. If a poet gets a pain in his side from too good a dinner, he bellows Ai Ai louder than Prometheus." ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... so, because his will must of necessity be in accordance with the fitting and right. Could we conceive of Omnipotence commanding what is intrinsically unfit and wrong, the virtuous man would not be the God-server, but the Prometheus suffering the implacable vengeance of an unrighteous Deity. 3. Though everlasting happiness be the result of virtue, it is not the ground or the reason for it. Were our being earth-limited, virtue would ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... the Prometheus Unbound (to take an individual instance of the last character) has a fire in his eye, a fever in his blood, a maggot in his brain, a hectic flutter in his speech, which mark out the philosophic fanatic. He is sanguine-complexioned and shrill-voiced. As is often observable in the case of religious ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... appearance in Vienna at the Karnthnerthor Theatre on August 11, 1829. The programme comprised the following items: Beethoven's Overture to Prometheus; arias of Rossini's and Vaccaj's, sung by Mdlle. Veltheim, singer to the Saxon Court; Chopin's variations on La ci darem la mano and Krakowiak, rondeau de concert (both for pianoforte and orchestra), for the latter ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... Faust Symphony, seemed to me the wildest of all. His activity was extraordinary. He had learned the entire score by heart, and gave us an unusually precise, intelligent, and spirited performance with an orchestra composed of anything but the pick of German players. After this symphony the Prometheus music had the greatest success, while I was particularly affected by Emilie Genast's singing of a song-cycle, composed by Bulow, called Die Entsagende. There was little else that was enjoyable at the festival concert with the exception of a cantata, Das Grab im Busento ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... far better the perfidious kidnapper of their king and enemy of their independence. It will be seen then that Aeschylus is most true to nature, when in his Prometheus Bound he makes Strength tauntingly to remind Prometheus, or The Prudent, how ill his name and the lot which he has made for himself agreed, bound as he is with adamantine chains to his rock, and bound, as it might seem, for ever. When Napoleon said of Count Lobau, whose proper name was Mouton, 'Mon mouton c'est un lion,' it was the same instinct ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... book the reader will find the figure of the Prometheus-artist clamped, so to speak, with bands of steel to the huge granitic cliff of English puritanism. No account was taken of his manifold virtues and graces: no credit given him for his extraordinary achievements: he was hounded out of ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... Shakespeare to find a writer who, through fiction, has so enriched the thought of the people. Admit all Dickens' faults twice over, we still have one of the greatest writers of modern times. Such people as these creations of Dickens never lived, says your little critic. Nor was Prometheus, type of the spirit of man, nor was Niobe, mother of all mothers, a truthful picture of the citizen one was likely to meet often during a morning's stroll through Athens. Nor grew there ever a wood like to the Forest ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... initiated, but will go with us, if we ask him. These are the elite of Athens. Then there are the Sophists and their young disciples, and the vast crowd of the Athenian people. Some of the oldest among them may have seen and heard the "Prometheus Vinctus"; certainly very many of them have seen "Antigone," and "Oedipus," and "Electra"; and all of them have heard the Rhapsodists. Great wonders have they seen and heard, which, in their appeal to the heart, transcend all ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... of the plays will not be expected in the Preface to a series of extracts; it will be found in such literary histories as that of Professor Mahaffy. Nor can it be necessary to dilate on the merit of the pieces selected. The sublime agony of Prometheus Bound, the majesty of wickedness in Clytaemnestra, the martial grandeur of the siege of Thebes, or of the battle of Salamis, in Aeschylus; the awful doom of Oedipus, his mysterious end, the heroic despair of Ajax, the martyrdom ...
— Specimens of Greek Tragedy - Aeschylus and Sophocles • Goldwin Smith
... mentions Kennedy in his work on "Mythology," have highly reverenced Noah, and designated him as Noa, Noos, Nous, Nus, Nusas, Nusus (in India), Thoth, Hermes, Mercury, Osiris, Prometheus, Deucalion, Atlas, Deus, Zeus, and Dios. Dios was one of the most ancient terms for Noah, and whence was derived Deus—Nusus compounded of Dios and Nusos, which gives us Dionysus, the Bacchus of the Greeks, and the chief god of the heathen world. ...
— A History of Pantomime • R. J. Broadbent
... tall Jason in the lead, erect and silvery, passing o'er the shining, flowered fields upon their quest of ancient beauty. Further north from this sunny Colchian strand rose the peak of Kasbek, gaunt and desolate pyramid of iron, "sloping through five great zones of climate," whence the ghost of Prometheus still gazed down from his "vast frozen precipice" upon a world his courage would redeem. For somewhere here was the cradle of the human race, fair garden of some Edened life before the "Fall," when the Earth sang for joy in her first, golden ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... industry surmounts all obstacles.' In this way the guardian is seduced. But when God beholds the miraculous effect of Cain's agricultural management, punishment does not fail to ensue. A more delicate way of combining Genesis and the Prometheus myth ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... underwent various changes in successive periods of Greek thought. In its main outline the story is the same: that Prometheus, whose name signifies Forethought, stole fire from Zeus, or Jupiter, or Jove, and gave it as a gift to man. For this, the angry god bound him upon Mount Caucasus, and decreed that a vulture should prey upon his liver, destroying ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... darkness, a whirlwind, a tempest, an ague not appearing, heating worse than any fire, and a battle that hath no end. It crucifies worse than any tyrant; no torture, no strappado, no bodily punishment is like unto it." 'Tis the eagle without question which the poets feigned to gnaw [1642]Prometheus' heart, and "no heaviness is like unto the heaviness of the heart," Eccles. xxv. 15, 16. [1643]"Every perturbation is a misery, but grief a cruel torment," a domineering passion: as in old Rome, when ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... the face; Chaos return and with confusion Involve the world with strange disunion; For Pluto sits in that adored chair Which doth belong unto Minerva's heir. O hecatombs! O catastrophe! From Midas' pomp to Trus' beggary! Prometheus, who celestial fire Did steal from heaven, therewith to inspire Our earthly bodies with a sense-ful mind, Whereby we might the depth of nature find, Is ding'd to hell, and vulture eats his heart Which did such deep ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... interesting variation of this rhythm (though perhaps to be | | related to the Middle English descendant of the Anglo-Saxon | | long line) occurs in Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, Act I, | | | | O sister, desolation is a difficult thing. | | | | Compare also Shelley's earlier poem, Stanzas—April, 1814; | | and for a more recent example: | | | | Ithaca, Ithaca, the land of my desire! | | I'm home again in Ithaca, beside my own hearth-fire. | ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... and clouds, O Zeus," exclaims Goethe's Prometheus, "and practise thy strength on tops of oaks and summits of mountains like the child who beheads thistles. Thou must, nevertheless, leave me my earth and my hut, which thou hast not built, and my hearth, whose flame thou enviest. Is it not my heart, burning with a ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... notion of vicarious suffering was familiar to the ancients is sufficiently attested by the phrases [Greek: antipsychoi], [Greek: antandroi], and hostia succidanea. We find traces of it in the legend of Alcestis, who died for Admetus, and of Cheiron, who took the place of Prometheus in Hades. Suetonius records that in the first days of Caligula's popularity, when he was labouring under dangerous illness, many Romans of both sexes vowed their lives for his recovery in temples of the gods. That this superstition retained a strong hold on the popular imagination in the time of ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... Tantalus, of Prometheus, or of Sisyphus are but the types of what his shall be. Let him try to hang, drown, stab himself—his efforts ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... because founded upon blind prejudice; the constituent atoms called men are to be rearranged in an ideal order as in a mathematical diagram. Shelley gives the translation of this theory into poetry. The 'Revolt of Islam' or the 'Prometheus Unbound,' with all its unearthly beauty, wearies the imagination which tries to soar into the thin air of Shelley's dreamworld; just as the intellect, trying to apply the abstract formulae of political metaphysics ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... Feld Kultus, p. xvii. Kuhn's "epoch-making" book is Die Herabkunft des Feuers, Berlin, 1859. By way of example of the disputes as to the original meaning of a name like Prometheus, compare Memoires de la Societe de Linguistique de Paris, ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... the one from his barren trees, the other from his wild animals. Sea-water also is undrinkable and brackish, but it feeds fish, and is a sort of vehicle to convey and transport travellers anywhere. The Satyr, when he saw fire for the first time, wished to kiss it and embrace it, but Prometheus ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... integument of the young shepherd. The human discovery of the art of photography enables us to rectify the error and restore that important article of clothing to the youth, as well as to vindicate the character of Apollo. There is one spot less upon the sun since the theft from heaven of Prometheus Daguerre and his fellow-adventurers has enabled us ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... my sister Circe in her fairy island in the West, far away from sore temptation and thoughts which tear the heart! But if it must be so—for why should you die?—I have an ointment here; I made it from the magic ice-flower which sprang from Prometheus' wound, above the clouds on Caucasus, in the dreary fields of snow. Anoint yourself with that, and you shall have in you seven men's strength; and anoint your shield with it, and neither fire nor sword ...
— The Heroes • Charles Kingsley
... could not have existed in a community where such ideas prevailed about women as Aeschylus unfolds in the few places where he condescends to notice such inferior beings. The only kind of sexual love of which he shows any knowledge is that referred to in the remarks of Prometheus and Io regarding the designs of ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... parts were to be self-created and self-nourished. At first the case of men was very helpless and pitiable; for they were alone among the wild beasts, and had to carry on the struggle for existence without arts or knowledge, and had no food, and did not know how to get any. That was the time when Prometheus brought them fire, Hephaestus and Athene taught them arts, and other gods gave them seeds and plants. Out of these human life was framed; for mankind were left to themselves, and ordered their own ways, living, like ...
— Statesman • Plato
... extracted from Mr. Newton's "Defence," and will give us an idea of his sentiments. He was speaking of the fable of Prometheus: ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott
... rest was wanting. Then he finish'd MAN! Or by the world's creator, power supreme, Form'd from an heavenly seed; or new-shap'd earth Late from celestial ether torn, and still Congenial warmth retaining, moisten'd felt, Prometheus' fire, and moulded took the form Of him all-potent. Others earth behold Pronely;—to man a face erect was given. The heavens he bade him view, and raise his eyes High to the stars. Thus earth of late so rude, So shapeless, ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... PROMETHEUS. Life, like ancient Thebes, has a hundred gates. You close one, and others will open. You are the last of your species? Then another better species will come, made not of clay, but of the light itself. Yes, last of ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... between his passion for art and the duties of his station I could have aroused sympathy for him. I should so have made him a more imposing figure. Perhaps it would have been possible to see in him a new Prometheus. There was here, maybe, the opportunity for a modern version of the hero who for the good of mankind exposes himself to the agonies of the damned. It is always a ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... picturesque. Let me rather recur to her (although my heart be lacerated once more in the recollection) who was the presiding deity of the whole,—the being after whom, had I had the fabled power of Prometheus, I should have formed and animated the sharer of that sweet wild solitude, nor once felt that fancy, to whom I was so largely a debtor, had in aught been cheated of what she had, for a series of years, so ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... literally starve to death. The worry of it fairly ate him up—he began to look haggard the first two or three days of it. In truth, it was almost maddening for a strong man like him, a fighter, to have to lie there helpless on his back. It was for all the world the old story of Prometheus bound. As Jurgis lay on his bed, hour after hour there came to him emotions that he had never known before. Before this he had met life with a welcome—it had its trials, but none that a man could not face. But now, in the nighttime, when he lay ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... trees at its edge and scattering themselves among the thick branches till they were almost hid from view, David lighted a pine torch and gave it into the hands of the eager boy, who seized it and like a young Prometheus started forth. A single touch to the dry tinder was enough. With a dull explosion, the mass burst into flame. Shouting in his exultation, the little torch-bearer rushed on, igniting pile after pile, ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... know the story of Prometheus, friend Jonathan? It is, of course, a myth, but it serves as an illustration of my present point. Prometheus, for ridiculing the gods, was bound to a rock upon Mount Caucasus, by order of Jupiter, where daily for thirty years a vulture ...
— The Common Sense of Socialism - A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg • John Spargo
... conducted the Sun Dial in the New York Evening Sun since 1912. He stands out as one of the most penetrating satirists and resonant scoffers at folderol that this continent nourishes. He is far more than a colyumist: he is a poet—a kind of Meredithian Prometheus chained to the roar and clank of a Hoe press. He is a novelist of Stocktonian gifts, although unfortunately for us he writes the first half of a novel easier than the second. And I think that in his secret heart and at the bottom ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... reposes on no basis of unverified hypothesis, which makes no call upon a future after all somewhat problematic; as it would be unaffected by any discovery of an Empedocles (improving on the old story of Prometheus) as to what had really been the origin, and course of development, of man's actually attained faculties and that seemingly divine particle of reason or spirit in him. Such a doctrine, at more leisurable moments, would of course have its precepts to deliver on the embellishment, ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... can tell thy fate, thou wandering Sphinx! Pale Science, searching by the midnight lamp Through the vexed mazes of the human brain, Still fails to read the secret of its soul As the superb enigma flashes by, A loosed Prometheus burning with disdain. ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster
... he were a god,' Mirabeau answered. 'Yes, it is true and it is right. Has he not, like Jove, hurled the lightning of heaven in his right hand? Is he not an unpunished Prometheus? Is he not breaking the scepter ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... solitary soul enshrined. Woe unto him! for Envy's pangs impure, Like the undying vultures', will be driven Into his noble heart, that must endure Pangs for each triumph; and, still unforgiven, Suffer Prometheus' doom, ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... generation, the sons of heaven and earth, compared with whom Jupiter himself was a stripling and an upstart, the gigantic Titans, and the inexorable Furies. Foremost among his creations of this class stands Prometheus, half fiend, half redeemer, the friend of man, the sullen and implacable enemy of Heaven. Prometheus bears undoubtedly a considerable resemblance to the Satan of Milton. In both we find the same impatience of control, the same ferocity, the same unconquerable pride. In both characters ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... In the "Prometheus Delivered" of sechylus, Jupiter draws together a cloud, and causes "the district round about to be covered with a shower ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... Byzeres; for ever forward they clave their way, quickly borne by the gentle breeze. And lo, as they sped on, a deep gulf of the sea was opened, and lo, the steep crags of the Caucasian mountains rose up, where, with his limbs bound upon the hard rocks by galling fetters of bronze, Prometheus fed with his liver an eagle that ever rushed back to its prey. High above the ship at even they saw it flying with a loud whirr, near the clouds; and yet it shook all the sails with the fanning of those huge wings. For it had not the form of a bird of the air but kept poising ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius
... mechanism of art, such as precision and certainty in working even the hardest materials, the Egyptians, though they have so long stood still in other points, are still far before us; but to model form with freedom, to breathe, like Prometheus, a soul into the stone, they will never learn until their old notions on this subject have been entirely abandoned. Even the pleasing varieties of corporeal life cannot be represented by a system of mere proportions, much less those ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... wife, Tethys, and his three hundred daughters, the Oceanides. No Argonaut had ever dared to come in contact with these mysterious divinities. Only the grave Aeschylus had dared to portray the Oceanides—virgins fresh and demure, weeping around the rock to which Prometheus was bound. ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... Redbreast.—According to my old nurse (a Carmarthenshire woman), the redbreast, like Prometheus, is the victim philanthropou tropou. Not only the babes in the wood, but mankind at large, are indebted to these deserving favourites. How could any child help regarding with grateful veneration the little bird ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 179. Saturday, April 2, 1853. • Various |
