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More "Sphinx" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... physiognomically a Sphinx, to the phrenologist his brain seems that geometrical circle which it ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... Venice, left upon their stones; in place of the racket of the street, the quiet greenness of an English lane, or the inaccessible ice and glory of a far-off mountain summit; in place of the burnt waste of fields covered with ashes and coal-dust, the burning stretch of the desert with the Sphinx looking out over it century after century; in place of the shower coming down through the dirty air to wash the dirty roofs, a storm breaking over the sea-shore rocks, or beating down on the broken wreck; instead of the drabbled calico ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... Spirit, Matter, Nature, Polarity, the Dialectic Process, the Idea, the Self, the Oversoul, draw the admiration that men have lavished on them from this oracular role. By amateurs in philosophy and professionals alike, the universe is represented as a queer sort of petrified sphinx whose appeal to man consists in a monotonous challenge to his divining powers. THE Truth: what a perfect idol of the rationalistic mind! I read in an old letter—from a gifted friend who died too young—these words: "In everything, in science, art, morals and religion, there MUST be one system that ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... whole machinery of government so thoroughly presupposes a little aristocratic agricultural state, and our strong attachment to form and ritual so hampers all attempts at reorganisation, that the way in which we shall answer, if we do answer, the question of this sphinx, cannot as yet even ...
— The Historic Thames • Hilaire Belloc
... who had been almost as silent as a sphinx, spoke now. "We are convinced that you are a wonderful man," she said; "and what I have seen to-night will be ever a matter of marvel, as well as thankfulness that I have been privileged ...
— Weapons of Mystery • Joseph Hocking
... never had your dude Service suits on his back to know the secrets of these hills, Miss Eleanor. Has he told you about the echo? No, I'll bet you, not; nor the gorge in behind this old Holy Cross; nor the cave? Pshaw! See here,"—showing his bunch of wild flowers—"if you want to know what a sly old sphinx Dame Nature is and how she's up to tricks and wiles and ways, snow or shine, you get these little flower people to whisper their secrets! Whenever I find a new kind on the hills, I mark the place and ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... pedestals supporting the figures of the Sphinx. Two magnificent flights of steps, several hundred feet long, all of granite, exceedingly well finished, and still in their places, are the only remains of a magnificent temple. In an angle of this platform ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... to the smaller Purple-fringed Orchis, whose shorter spur holds out a certain prospect of reward; for, in these two cases, as in so many others, the flower's welcome for an insect is in exact proportion to the length of its visitor's tongue. Doubtless it is one of the smaller sphinx moths, such as we see at dusk working about the evening primrose and other flowers deep of chalice, and heavily perfumed to guide visitors to their feast, that is the great Purple-fringed Orchid's benefactor, since the length of ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... plateau (twelve hundred by sixteen hundred yards), and rode within the shadow of the pyramids, our feeling was deepened by the view of the barren waste stretched before us,—yellowish sand and piles of debris accentuating the solitude of the place, while the inscrutable Sphinx and other monuments added their ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... religious life of the boy is fairly communicative, but as soon as the actual struggle of achieving a personal religion sets in under the pubertal stress the sphinx itself is not more reticent. The normal boy is indisposed to talk about the affairs of his inner life. Probably they are too chaotic to formulate even to himself. If he is unspoiled he clothes his soul with a spiritual modesty which some of his sentimental elders ...
— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben
... hurrying from the room, Brande and his sister, who had joined him, met us. The fire had died out of his eyes. His voice had returned to its ordinary key. His demeanour was imperturbable, sphinx-like. I murmured some words about the eloquence of the lecture, but interrupted myself when I observed his complete indifference ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... for while apparently a most open-hearted, whole-souled fellow, Hay was reticence itself when his fortunes or his family were matters of question or comment. He had long been married, and Mrs. Hay, when at the post, was a social sphinx,—kind-hearted, charitable, lavish to the soldiers' wives and children, and devotion itself to the families of the officers when sickness and trouble came, as come in the old days they too often did. It was she who took poor Ned Robinson's young widow and infant all the way ...
— A Daughter of the Sioux - A Tale of the Indian frontier • Charles King
... she said, "it is your fault. Usually he is most well behaved. He is moderate, Monsieur. At Blanzy a glass of wine at dinner was all he ever desired. For days at a time, I have hardly heard him say a word. The Marquis would call him the Sphinx, and what has he been doing here? Drinking bottle after bottle, talking steadily, acting outrageously. What is more, he has been doing so ever since he spoke of returning home. I tell you, Monsieur, you must keep away from him, or perhaps he will do with the paper ...
— The Unspeakable Gentleman • John P. Marquand
... last, I think the Sphinx and the Pyramid could hardly have impressed me more than their dark faces, that seemed to look vaguely on our modern world from the remote twilights of old, and in their very infancy to be reverend through the antiquity of their race. ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... her, only she herself knew—to be let into the plot, Lucius owned that he had left the details in the hands of Pratinas, and did not himself know just how or when the blow was to fall. In Pratinas—whom Cornelia met very seldom—she met with a sphinx, ever smiling, ever gracious, but who, as if regretting the burst of confidence he had allowed Valeria, kept himself closed to the insinuations and half-questions of every one else. The truth was, the lanista ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... Cross waggons and troops and dug-out camps. As we get closer the signs of shelling get worse, and children are seen no longer. Old men, though, occasionally observed working in a field quite unperturbed. Rarely a French soldier or an interpreter with his sphinx badges. All this quite lost on Hunt, who has "quite got used to abroad, thank you, sir." He is eating chocolate or something, half a horse-length (the correct ...
— Letters to Helen - Impressions of an Artist on the Western Front • Keith Henderson
... obscure yet potent manner, a sense of the soul being near the surface of life. There is the same love of mystery and of symbolism; and in both may be observed the tendency to create strange composite figures to typify transcendental ideas, the sphinx seeming a blood-brother to the gargoyle. The conditions under which each architecture flourished were not dissimilar, for each was formulated and controlled by small well-organized bodies of sincerely religious and highly ...
— The Beautiful Necessity • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... studied and noted the characteristics of the great life-giver of Egypt—the Nile. The Mamelukes engaged his particular attention, though much of the information furnished him about them was erroneous. He plunged into antiquity, visited, measured, and described the Sphinx and the Pyramids—also with many errors. Christian tradition and pious legends have their place in his narrative, especially that of Matarieh—ubi Christus latuerat when carried by his parents into Egypt to escape the Herodian ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... whose final veil none has raised. There is a sphinx in this gloomy odalisk of the frightful Sultan Everybody. None has solved its enigma. It is ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... field work among the birds, so many moths of other families almost had thrust themselves upon me that I began a collection of reproductions of them, I found little difficulty in securing almost anything else. I could picture Sphinx Moths in any position I chose, and Lunas seemed eager to pose for me. A friend carried to me a beautiful tan-coloured Polyphemus with transparent moons like isinglass set in its wings of softest velvet down, and ...
— Moths of the Limberlost • Gene Stratton-Porter
... attain Bakahenzie's overthrow and gain the position of chief witch-doctor, he would do it, even as he, Bakahenzie, would have done in his place. Therefore upon these matters did he talk very guardedly with Marufa, who was unusually reticent. However, after communing with himself in sphinx-like gravity, Marufa assented to the proposal that Zalu Zako be isolated in ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... she sat at the head of the table, graceful, composed, enigmatic. In her soft grey frock, with white ruffles at the wrists falling over her slender hands, she looked very beautiful. When she chose, however, her face could be sphinx-like in its inscrutability. She was very silent, hardly opening her lips, and yet in some queer way I felt that the great strength of her personality was ...
— The Mysterious Affair at Styles • Agatha Christie
... find that to his lot fell the unusual fortune of plucking the bloom of each of these seasons; for even old age has its bloom, and the happiest enjoyment of this, also, was vouchsafed him. Only a few months have passed since for him the brethren of our lodge crowned their mysterious sphinx with roses, to show that, if the aged Anacreon undertook to adorn his exalted sensuality with the rose's light twigs, the ethical sensuousness, the tempered joy of life and wit which animated our noble friend also merited a rich and ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... no more expression than that of the Sphinx, though inwardly he was consumed with laughter; he himself was chief of the Bureau, and Clancy was his most trusted assistant! Certainly, the gods were contriving a spicy dish for the news-loving ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... of the world was apparent to him, and its working interested him no longer; he did not long disguise the profound scorn that makes of a man of extraordinary powers a sphinx who knows everything and says nothing, and sees all things with an unmoved countenance. He felt not the slightest wish to communicate his knowledge to other men. He was rich with all the wealth of the world, ...
— Melmoth Reconciled • Honore de Balzac
... a loud laugh. The "every married man of us" tickled him. "Yes," said he; "they are all daughters of the Sphinx, and past finding out. Is Miss Denham an invalid?" he asked, after ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... fortifications of eternal ice and snow, intrepid explorers have made known nearly every part of the world. There Giant Frost guards his frozen secrets and defies man to wrest them from him. Many a hero has perished in endeavoring to solve the Sphinx-like riddle of northern lands and seas. Many a gallant ship has found its grave in northern ice-clad waters. Yet there has never been a lack of adventurous ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... portal—more enigmatic than was ever sphinx? And what lay beyond it? What did that smooth stone, whose wan deadness whispered of ages-old corridors of time opening out into alien, unimaginable vistas, hide? It had cost the world of science Throckmartin's great brain—as ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... trailing his vast loose moustache over a table. When Grandmoulin entered, a little crowd, like the tail of a comet, followed him into the room. As he passed through he said no word, but drew his cloak about him and moved forward sphinx-like to the bar of the court, where he sat down and commenced to ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair
... article[24] from the pen of that accomplished scholar, and well-known enthusiast in bee-culture, Henry K. Oliver, Esq. "We add a few words respecting the enemies of bees. The mouse, the toad, the ant, the stouter spiders, the wasp, the death-head moth, (Sphinx atropos,) and all the varieties of gallinaceous birds, have, each and all, "a sweet tooth," and like, very well, a dinner of raw bee. But the ravages of all these are but a baby bite to the destruction caused by the bee-moth, (Tinea mellonella.) These ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... said my friend Ray Raymond, his face assuming the sphinx-like expression by which I knew that he had formed some theory for the destruction of his country's dastardly enemies, "to-night we shall come ...
— Once a Week • Alan Alexander Milne
... burning gold? Pass with thy Triumph of Lovers, Aucassin, Tristram, and Pharamond, and Lancelot, Dante, and Rudel, all thy haughty kin, Princes in that high heaven, as we are not.— With some gilt couchant sphinx both casqued and crowned, All mailed in amethyst the new god comes, Whose brooding beautiful eyes at last have found Our uncanonical dark martyrdoms, Who from the sombre catacombs of these Brings his great miracles ...
— The Hours of Fiammetta - A Sonnet Sequence • Rachel Annand Taylor
... however, availed them naught; the old sailor keeping provokingly silent and being as mute as the Sphinx on the subject, in spite of their ...
— Bob Strong's Holidays - Adrift in the Channel • John Conroy Hutcheson
... not hard to decipher, even upon a brief acquaintance. There were depths in Rolph's nature which were never fathomed by those nearest and dearest to him—possibly not even by himself. Mackenzie seems to have long regarded Rolph with a sort of distant awe—as a Sphinx, close, oracular, inscrutable. Rolph evidently estimated Mackenzie correctly, as one whose politics were founded upon deeply-rooted convictions, and not upon mere opinions, although he would probably have found ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... would not you wish to know old age? He who is never an old man, does not know the whole of human life; for old age is one of the divisions of it.' JOHNSON. 'Nay, Sir, what talk is this?' BOSWELL. 'I mean, Sir, the Sphinx's description of it;—morning, noon, and night. I would know night, as well as morning and noon.' JOHNSON. 'What, Sir, would you know what it is to feel the evils of old age? Would you have the gout? Would you have decrepitude?'—Seeing him ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... existence among the vanished peoples of the past, we find ourselves irresistibly borne toward that ancient land of mystery—the home of the mystics and occultists of the past—the land of Isis—the home of the builders of the Pyramids—the people of the Sphinx. Whether these people were the direct descendants of the people of destroyed Atlantis, the home of the Ancient Wisdom—or whether they were a new people who had rediscovered the old doctrines—the fact remains that when tracing back any old occult or mystic doctrine ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson
... fatally well to marble and stone, sir," said Hamilton, mischievously. "I fear your biographers will conceive themselves writing at the feet of a New World Sphinx, and that its frozen granite loneliness will petrify ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... both looked at him curiously, but Sandy's face was sphinx-like and they refrained from ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... and red cattle feeding in one, and above the same rocky woodland, meeting the other at the quarry; and then after a little cascade had tumbled down from the steeper ground, giving place to the heathery peaty moor, which ended, more than two miles off in a torr like a small sphinx. This could not be seen from Magdalen's territory, but from the highest walk in her kitchen garden, she could see the square tower of Arnscombe, her parish church; and on a clear day, the glittering ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... cried to myself laughing, and even now I cannot refrain from laughter,—'can there be anything else? And if this be so, in what does spirit differ from matter? where is the party wall between life and death?' In the spectral phantom of life, in the sphinx-born riddle of being, in that terrific fiat out of which the worlds sprang forth, to roll convulsively onward and evermore onward, till they can drop back into rest and nothingness—in this all contradictions and contrarieties are mixt up ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... the threshold while the searcher made his inspection, always with the same iron visage, offering no opposition to the entrance of this or that chamber; only following and watching, silent, intent, sphinx-like; till at last, fairly worn out by blank disappointment, Denzil turned upon him ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... didn't mind that. It's no credit to carry an interlinear translation of your temperament on your face. So long as he kept in his own yard and quarreled with his own dog for not feeding on Freshmen more enthusiastically, we got along as nicely as the Egyptian Sphinx and John L. Sullivan. Even when he was elected police magistrate we didn't object. In fact, we didn't bumpity-bump to the situation until we went ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... is much more famous than she herself ever was—with a marvellous charm and suavity, a finesse of expression never reached before and hardly ever equalled since. Contrast the head of the Christ at Milan, Leonardo's conception of divinity expressed in perfect humanity, with the subtle and sphinx-like smile ...
— Leonardo da Vinci • Maurice W. Brockwell
... turned to Odo as though to include him in the group. "I do not know, sir," said he, "whether you have found leisure to study these enigmas of that mysterious Sphinx, the earth; for though Count Alfieri has spoken to me of your unusual acquirements, I understand your tastes have hitherto lain rather in the direction of philosophy and letters;" and on Odo's prompt admission ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... back and forth, and to answer, when it was necessary, with a tongue prone to looseness of speech that required a constant curb. And to add confusion to confusion, there was the servant, an unceasing menace, that appeared noiselessly at his shoulder, a dire Sphinx that propounded puzzles and conundrums demanding instantaneous solution. He was oppressed throughout the meal by the thought of finger-bowls. Irrelevantly, insistently, scores of times, he wondered when they would come on and what they looked like. He had heard of such ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... is said to be the finding of a happiness that is not enjoyed at the expense of others, and surely this class have solved that Sphinx's riddle, for they float through their days in a dream of complacency disturbed neither by corroding doubt ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... if so staid a community could be said to ring, with reports of the event of the week before. Doctor Thayer had been sphinx-like, and Little Simon had been imaginative and voluble; and it would have been difficult to say which had teased the popular curiosity the more. Aleck found a tale ready for his ears about the launch and its three passengers, with many conflicting ...
— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger
... Sphinx, is successively a quadruped, a biped, and a triped. But circumstances may change his natural conditions. If he loses a leg, he becomes a uniped. If he loses both his legs, he becomes a nulliped. If art replaces the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... life? Yes, Henley, I can tell you what that is. How old are all truths, and yet how far from commonplace; old, strange, and inexplicable, like the Sphinx. So I learn day by day the value and high doctrinality of suffering. Let me suffer always; not more than I am able to bear, for that makes a man mad, as hunger drives the wolf to sally from the forest; but still to suffer some, and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... course not,' echoed Henrietta, 'when he's buried like a delicate Sphinx up to his shoulders in the sands of your good opinion, and the mummy cloths of his own conceit; but just remove these, and you'll see a downfall. My dear FRANCESCA, this man is your CECCO, and he'd far better retire into a monastery than hope to win you. Why, I'd ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... keno, and stud-poker were going in full blast. The proprietor, his elegant diamonds flashing in the light, was seated on a raised platform from whence he could survey the entire company—his face, impassive as marble and unreadable as the sphinx, was turned toward the faro lay-out, which this evening appeared to be the ...
— Jim Cummings • Frank Pinkerton
... of the scene through the chimney, for it had the same forceful existence to him as anything in life. Ah Ben, seeing that he was still puzzling himself over the problem of mind and matter, the puzzle of life, the great sphinx riddle of ...
— The Ghost of Guir House • Charles Willing Beale
... read the riddle of the sphinx, and your words are as enigmatical. I have not begun to find their clew," replied Madeleine, pausing in the garland she was forming, and letting the ivy ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... his back on the servant, and walked towards the light, while he tore open the envelope. It had the most minute sphinx in the corner, and the paper was un-English, ...
— Three Weeks • Elinor Glyn
... that will baffle even the shrewdest Jew. They never talk. Their faces are always as expressionless as a graven image. While contemplating the most cruel murder they never show the least change in expression, nor do their eyes show the faintest shadow of an emotion. They are stolid, surly and Sphinx-like always. Wolf's partner was like his race, and not even by the droop of an eyelid did he betray the slowly gathering storm of hate and rage within. He brooded over the hurt he felt when Wolf had wanted to buy his sloop, and believing ...
— Pocket Island - A Story of Country Life in New England • Charles Clark Munn
... over our military widow's head, and that his hair (it is red, which colour is very spiritualistic) stood on end as with fear. "What's the matter, P.?" I asked. "Don't you see it?" responded he. "What?" "The grey figure behind Mrs. N.S., bearded like an Egyptian Sphinx." "That's the Colonel!" exclaimed Mr. Hall, and the widow bowed religiously, with a "Dear! is it you?" On this, as my friend was terribly frightened, we soon took leave; and when we went home, I found that he was so pursued ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... the two powerful monarchs, who reign over the Grecian youth, phlattothrattophlattothrat, are sending the Sphinx, that terrible harbinger of death, phlattothrattophlattothrat. With his avenging arm bearing a spear, phlattothrattophlattothrat, the impetuous bird delivers those who lean to the side of Ajax, phlattothrattophlattothrat, to the dogs who roam ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... the face all you can read into it, and nothing more. It gives you what you bring, and nothing else. It is as silent as the lips of Memnon, as voiceless as the Sphinx. It suggests to you every joy that you have ever felt, every sorrow you have ever known, every triumph ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... the sand, insatiate, drinks The steady splendor of the air, Crouched on her heavy paws, the Sphinx Looks forth with old, unwearied stare! Behind her, on the burning wall, The long processions flash and glow: The pillared shadows of the hall Sleep with their ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... and milk-warm sphinx, I taste a strange apocalypse: Your subtle taper finger-tips Weave me new heavens, yet, methinks, I know the wiles and each iynx That brought me passionate to your lips: I know you bare as laughter strips Your charnel ...
— The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems • Aldous Huxley
... did not smile. He turned on his heel, and made his way slowly around the corner of the passage into the other part of the building, and paused at the open doorway of the Honourable Hilary's outer office. By the street windows sat the Honourable Brush Bascom, sphinx-like, absorbing wisdom and clouds of cigar smoke which emanated from ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... most potent, grave, and learned Fellows of the Royal Astronomical Society—I rather think I shall surprise them—I do not say startle—it is impossible to startle the Fellows of the Royal Astronomical Society—or even to astonish them—you might as well hope to tickle the Sphinx—but I fancy it will stir them up a little, especially my friend Professor Sylvanus Pettifer Possil. However, I must take care not to give them the slightest hint of what they are to expect beforehand, otherwise they will declare they ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... matter of weeks. Mentally—the doctor was not so sure. The boy had gone through a terrible experience, and one which was still continuing—might continue no one knew how long. We were, said the doctor, up against a trick played by the great Sphinx, Nature, and one which, so far as he knew, had never before taken place in ...
— Disowned • Victor Endersby
... it; but her talk's translucent enough. But that's a woman. I suppose if the Sphinx were to begin talking she'd merely say: 'Goodness me! more visitors coming for dinner, and nothing to eat but the sand which is here.' But you won't think about that when you meet her, Merriam. You'll propose ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... A sphinx unguessed, enthroned in azure skies, White as the swan, my heart is cold as snow; No hated motion breaks my lines' pure flow, Nor tears nor laughter ever ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... on him a dog and a dart, which Diana had once given her. The dog is turned into stone, while hunting a wild beast, which Themis has sent to ravage the territories of Thebes, after the interpretation of the riddle of the Sphinx, by Oedipus. ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... something flew into her face, and fluttered to the edge of the vase, and as she attempted to brush it off, she started back, smothering a cry of horror. It was the Sphinx Atropos, the Death's Head Moth; and there, upon its breast, appallingly distinct, grinned the ghastly, gray human skull. Twice it circled rapidly round the vase, uttering strange, stridulous sounds, then floated up to the canopy overarching Felix's bed, and poised itself on ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... wondrous and more awful than all else in the land of Egypt, there sits the lonely Sphinx. Comely the creature is, but the comeliness is not of this world; the once worshiped beast is a deformity and a monster to this generation, and yet you can see that those lips, so thick and heavy, were fashioned according to some ancient mold of beauty—some mold of ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... majority of myths back to the incubus dream. The solution of the tormenting riddle, the magic word that banishes the ghost, is the cry of awakening, by which the sleeper is freed from the oppressing dream, the incubus. The prototype of the tormenting riddle propounder is, according to Laistner, the Sphinx. Sphinx, dragon, giants, man eaters, etc., are analogous figures in myths. They are what afflict the heroes, and what he has to battle with. The corresponding figure in ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... the declivity of the hay, disappeared from sight, leaving his companion crouched like a sphinx, with his eyes fixed on ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere
... overcometh all things and is now dominant and sitteth upon a sphinx and looketh upon Memphis and old Thebes, while his sister Oblivion reclineth semi-somnous upon a pyramid, gloriously triumphing, making puzzles of Titanian erections, and turning old glories into dreams. History sinketh beneath her cloud. The traveller as he passeth through these ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... of these would put her face away. I tried to forget the softness of her voice, the fragrance of her hair, the sweetness of her body once held in my arms, all the vague charm of woman, the enigma, the sphinx, the mystery-magnet of the world, the charm that has no analysis, that knows no formula; but I could not forget. A rage filled me against all the other men in the world. I have said I would set down the truth. The truth is that I longed ...
— The Way of a Man • Emerson Hough
... What follows? What is its future destined to be? Will it vanish away, will it pass into new phases, or will some form of it eventually receive the sanction of the nation? These are Sphinx questions, which one may be excused from endeavouring to answer, seeing that the strongest and most far-reaching heads are at this moment intent upon them—not, so far as can be seen, with any strikingly successful result. The Future is a deep mine, and we ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... writer grimly gay, My volumes sell, and sometimes pay. First log-rollers raised a rumour of a rising Star of Humour, Who had faced the Sphinx called Life, With amusing misery rife, So with sin, and woe, and strife, I thought I'd have a lark. With pessimistic pick I pottered round Pottered round, A new "funny" trick I quickly found, Smart and sound, Life's cares in hedonistic chuckles drowned, You be bound! The cynic lay I ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 102, Jan. 9, 1892 • Various
... the iron railings cut her shoulders. She stretched the forefinger of her extended arm; at great peril of slipping forward and rasping her nose along the rails effected to scratch the top of the sphinx's head. ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... represent her as a sphinx with a woman's head, but more often as a woman standing on a lion passant, either nude, or encircled round the hips by merely a girdle, her hands filled with flowers or with serpents, her features framed in a mass of heavy tresses—a faithful ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... nine is the product of three times three. Think of that! This man in that wicked age must have appeared to many a standing miracle, if only for this reason, that he was the one man in London who was content, passing his days in a stubborn rapture, as little inclined for play or laughter as the sphinx in the desert, which the sand storms can ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... indictment, however, of the present age of mechanical power is that it has largely destroyed the spirit of work. The great enigma which it propounds to us, and which, like the riddle of the Sphinx, we will solve ...
— The Constitution of the United States - A Brief Study of the Genesis, Formulation and Political Philosophy of the Constitution • James M. Beck
... wandering weeps, searching for the dead Osiris. The shadow of Typhon's scowl falls no more upon the waves. The sun rises as of yore, and his golden beams still smite the lips of Memnon, but Memnon is as voiceless as the Sphinx. The sacred fanes are lost in desert sands; the dusty mummies are still waiting for the resurrection promised by their priests, and the old beliefs wrought in curiously sculptured stone, sleep in the mystery of a language lost and dead Odin, the author of life and soul, Vili ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... Mona Lisa! What was he trying to express? Vasari found the "smile so pleasing that it was a thing more divine than human to behold"; Ruskin thought it archaic, Muentz "sad and disillusioned," Berenson supercilious, and Freud neurotic. Reymond calls it the smile of Prometheus, Faust, Oedipus and the Sphinx; Pater saw in it "the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the reverie of the Middle Ages with its spiritual ambitions and imaginary loves, the return to the pagan world, the sins of the Borgias." Though some great critics, ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... Queen Aahotep, who lived and was lovely in the days of the Patriarchs, he pondered sadly over all that had been in the world and was no more. He pictured in fancy the black locks that had scented this diadem with the sphinx's head, the slim brown arms these, beads of gold and lapis lazuli had touched, the shoulders that had worn these vulture's wings, the peaked bosoms these chains and gorgets had confined, the breast that had once communicated its warmth to yonder gold scarabaeus with the blue wing-cases, ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... his horse motionless. 'Good woman,' cried Hind, flinging her a crown, 'I am in haste; pray let me pass.' 'Sir,' answered the witch, 'three days I have awaited your coming. Would you have me lose my labour now?' And with Hind's assent the sphinx delivered her message: 'Captain Hind,' said she, 'your life is beset with constant danger, and since from your birth I have wished you well, my poor skill has devised a perfect safeguard.' With this she gave ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... hypothesis. Unconscious of all these inquiries and fictions, Maurice Kirkwood lived on in his inoffensive and unexplained solitude, and seemed likely to remain an unsolved enigma. The "Sachem" of the boating girls became the "Sphinx" of the village ramblers, and it was agreed on all hands that Egypt did not hold any hieroglyphics harder to make out than the meaning of this young man's ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Way, and she as often has directed a Discourse to me which I do not understand. This Barbarity has kept me ever at a Distance from the most beautiful Object my Eyes ever beheld. It is thus also she deals with all Mankind, and you must make Love to her, as you would conquer the Sphinx, by posing her. But were she like other Women, and that there were any talking to her, how constant must the Pleasure of that Man be, who could converse with a Creature—But, after all, you may be sure her Heart is fixed on some ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... of Darkness, lends you her cloak! Out!" Kenkenes cried, striking at his pet. The wary animal eluded the blow and for a moment revolved about another sphinx, pursued by his master, and then fled like a phantom out of the court by the path he came. By this time the priest had emerged from his refuge and was attempting to prevent the young man's interference with the ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... approaching, whose conjunction, free From all impediment and bar, brings on A season, in the which, one sent from God, (Five hundred, five, and ten, do mark him out) That foul one, and th' accomplice of her guilt, The giant, both shall slay. And if perchance My saying, dark as Themis or as Sphinx, Fail to persuade thee, (since like them it foils The intellect with blindness) yet ere long Events shall be the Naiads, that will solve This knotty riddle, and no damage light On flock or field. Take heed; and as these words By me ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... ran to the open front door. Copplestone's manservant was at work in the hall, and came forward with a sphinx-like expression. ...
— The Crooked House • Brandon Fleming
... Sometimes I think I'm getting a little warmer and then I go stone cold. But I've found out a few things, anyhow. How tall should you say Madame Delano is? I've only seen her sitting on her throne there in the Palace Court lookin' like an old Sphinx that's havin' a laugh all ...
— The Avalanche • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... author's theory on firmer foundation, to outward aspect, than it now rests upon. Had he compared the accumulation of the pyramid with the proportion of the peristyle, and then with the aspiration of the spire; had he set the colossal horror of the Sphinx beside the Phidian Minerva, and this beside the Pieta of M. Angelo; had he led us from beneath the iridescent capitals of Denderah, by the contested line of Apelles, to the hues and the heaven of Perugino ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... in making life easier, multiplies the species in excess of the means of subsistence, it raises up within itself, in the intensest form, the unlimited struggle for existence. "This is the true riddle of the Sphinx, and every nation which does not solve it will, sooner or later, be devoured by the ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... earliest Egyptian sculptures now existing, though certainly not earlier than the Fourth Dynasty, is the great Sphinx of Gizeh (Fig. 1). The creature crouches in the desert, a few miles to the north of the ancient Memphis, just across the Nile from the modern city of Cairo. With the body of a lion and the head of a man, it represented a solar deity and ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... inscrutable, and all effort to elucidate it, like the language of the Son of Maia, 'by night bringeth darkness before the eyes, and in the daytime nought clearer.' I shall as soon expect to wrest her buried secrets from the Sphinx, or to revive the lost mysteries ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... leaving a smile behind her that would have coaxed the Sphinx, and rode down-street toward the ancient city on a big gray donkey guarded by two Bedouins armed with swords ...
— The Lion of Petra • Talbot Mundy
... itself a proof of the service done by the author to those who would know something of the careers of varying success and bitter failure, of hardship and romantic adventure, upon which so many of their kinsmen set out forty years ago. Nevermore and The Sphinx of Eaglehawk give other views of the gold-digging days, chiefly of their seamy side, but these stories offer nothing that equals in interest the splendid panorama of pioneer life revealed ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... naturse, he had precedent and regulation: but for arresting a mad Englishman, none. He held fully the opinion of his superiors, that there was no saying what an Englishman might not, could not, and would not do. He was a sphinx, a chimera, a lunatic broke loose, who took unintelligible delight in getting wet, and dirty, and tired, and starved, and all but lolled; and called the same "taking exercise:" who would see everything that nobody ever cared to see, and who knew mysteriously everything about everywhere; ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... to the light guitar; even wisdom comes from his tongue like singing; no one is, indeed, more tuneful in the upper notes. But even while he sings the song of the Sirens, he still hearkens to the barking of the Sphinx. Jarring Byronic notes interrupt the flow of his Horatian humours. His mirth has something of the tragedy of the world for its perpetual background; and he feasts like Don Giovanni to a double orchestra, one lightly sounding for the dance, one pealing Beethoven[24] in the distance. ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... hope to send you in fair print. Comfort yourself—as you will—you will survive the reading, and will be a sure proof that the nut is not cracked. For when we find out what Fate is, I suppose, the Sphinx and we are done for; and Sphinx, Oedipus, and world ought, by good rights, to roll down the ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... The other deities keep far from earth; Have no ears, though mighty; They are not, or they will not hear us wail: Thee our eye beholdeth; Not wood, not stone, but living, breathing, real, Thee our prayer enfoldeth. First give us peace! Give, dearest, for thou canst; Thou art Lord and Master! The Sphinx, who not on Thebes, but on all Greece Swoops to gloat and pasture; The AEtolian, he who sits upon his rock, Like that old disaster; He feeds upon our flesh and blood, and we Can no longer labor; For it was ever thus the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... gave him a burning sensation and yet to his surprise it did not destroy the structure, though it knocked against the very region of his face where it was rising. But besides this there was something else of importance. It was something white by the door—the statue of a sphinx, which ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... example of an ill-used and misunderstood husband, and she is disposed to take him under her wing, and defend him on all occasions against us. He never speaks to her; he is at all times a man of few words, but, as far as Minora is concerned, he might have no tongue at all, and sits sphinx-like and impenetrable while she takes us to task about some remark of a profane nature that we may have addressed to him. One night, some days after her arrival, she developed a skittishness of manner which has since disappeared, and tried to be playful with him; ...
— Elizabeth and her German Garden • "Elizabeth", AKA Marie Annette Beauchamp
... in those days; she loved. She moved as one who is moved; she was drawn as by the cords of the sun. The Ancient One, the Sphinx, had her fast. The reflection of a greater thing claimed her and taught her, held her like a bayadere ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... With the city before me I could well believe that, but I am very curious to know what some of the changes have been. To make a beginning somewhere, for the subject is doubtless a large one, what solution, if any, have you found for the labor question? It was the Sphinx's riddle of the nineteenth century, and when I dropped out the Sphinx was threatening to devour society, because the answer was not forthcoming. It is well worth sleeping a hundred years to learn what the right answer was, if, indeed, you have ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... gravely, with sphinx face, "I might stay. I have to ask so much, Vesty, you see. All my life seems ...
— Vesty of the Basins • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... since it is obvious that in such places every person knows the other—as the saying goes—inside out. In every English village walls have ears and windows have eyes, so that every cottage is a hot-bed of scandal, and what is known to one is, within the hour, known to the others. Even the Sphinx could not have preserved her secret long in ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume
... principal occupations of the dwellers on the Pacific coast. It is indeed difficult to see how tourists could pass their time here without this topic of conversation, so infinite is its variety and so debatable are many of the conclusions drawn from it. It is the Sphinx of California; differing, however, from the Sphinx of Egypt in that it offers a new problem every day. The literature that treats of the Pacific coast fairly bristles with statistics on this subject, and many writers have found it impossible to resist the temptation of adorning their pages ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... heroes and our heroines be not what men and women are, but what they should be. Let Angelina be always spotless and Edwin always true. Let virtue ever triumph over villainy in the last chapter; and let us assume that the marriage service answers all the questions of the Sphinx. ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... cliff to cliff attendant guide In headlong cataracts the impetuous tide; Or lead o'er wastes of Abyssinian sands The bright expanse to EGYPT'S shower-less lands. —Her long canals the sacred waters fill, 140 And edge with silver every peopled hill; Gigantic SPHINX in circling waves admire; And MEMNON bending o'er his broken lyre; O'er furrow'd glebes and green savannas sweep, And towns and temples laugh amid ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... had the chance to look this sphinx in the eyes, and, for five minutes, to watch him like a wild animal, at the moment of his greatest achievement and most splendid action. One saw a quiet-featured, quiet-voiced man in a red flannel shirt; absolutely impervious; a type of which ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... him. He sat there like a man turned to stone, his forehead riven by one deep line, his straight firm mouth set close and hard. His servant, the only living being who had approached him, had set food by his side, which now and then he had mechanically taken. Changeless as a sphinx, he had sat there in darkness and in light, whilst sunlight had changed to moonlight, and the songs of the birds had given place to the low murmuring of frogs from a lake below ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... purple velvet, and wore a large purple hat. The rich dark hue gave her light eyes a very curious colour, more green than gray; and as she stood on the doorstep, tall and somehow formidable, the cure thought that she looked Egyptian, an elemental creature who might have lived by the Nile when the Sphinx was new. ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... WORLD IS A SPHINX. It is a vast riddle—an unfathomable mystery; and on every side there is temptation to questioning. In every leaf, in every cell of every leaf, there are a hundred problems. There are ten good years of a man's life in investigating what is in a leaf. ...
— Addresses • Henry Drummond
... vainly doth the earnest voice of man Call for the thing that is his pure desire! Fame is the birthright of the living lyre! To noble impulse Nature puts no ban. Nor vainly to the Sphinx thy voice was raised! Tho' all thy great emotions like a sea, Against her stony immortality, Shatter themselves unheeded and amazed. Time moves behind her in a blind eclipse: Yet if in her cold eyes the end of all Be visible, as on her large closed lips Hangs dumb the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... uninitiated," said Cardinal Bernis, laughing; "some divinity may have taken a seat there, or perhaps it is a sphinx which will from thence give us the solution of her enigma. But let us see what belated guests are now coming ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... baths of jasper and chalcedony and malachite, ablaze with precious stones and metals, and tended with continual service. For very noble is the site, and worthy of a noble monument; behind looms the grey pyramid, symbol of the world's age, and filled with memories of the sphinx, and the lotus leaf, and the glories of old Nile; in front is the Monte Testaccio, built, it is said, with the broken fragments of the vessels in which all the nations of the East and the West brought their tribute to Rome; and a little distance off, along ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... outside. The only clear idea in the heads of the robed and wigged wiseacres was, that the case, Napier versus Napier, was a puzzle which no man could read or solve. It seemed fated to be as famous as the old Sphinx, the insoluble Moenander, or the tortuous labyrinth, or the intricate key of Hercules—ne Apollo quidem intelligat; and if it had not happened that Lord Kames suggested the possibility of getting ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... mean fiction's recognition of her as the creature of the social biologist, exercising her ancient function amidst all the changes and shifting ideas of successive generations. Whatever her superficial changes under the urge of the time-spirit, Woman, to a thoughtful eye, sits like the Sphinx above the drifting sands, silent, secret, powerful and obscure, bent only on her great purposive errand whose end is the bringing forth of that Overman who shall rule the world. With her immense biologic mission, seemingly at war with her individual career, ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... plain family-party, when fondly hoping for an introduction to some distinguished stranger, we may be excused for thinking ourselves hardly treated. Is it so infallible a sign of superiority, moreover, to speak constantly in riddles? This Sphinx-like style is eminently characteristic of Mr. Linden. Then again, our authors have been too ambitious. They laboriously assert Mr. Linden to be a marvel of learning,—a man of vast and curious literary attainments: but all that their hero does ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... question with which some modern Sphinx may defy some coming OEdipus. Let us hope it will prove a question so adequately answered that the evil goddess using it as a challenge—the conventional deity of injustice, duplicity, and extortion—will ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... for her pictures of cats. She illustrated the "Fireside Sphinx," by Agnes Repplier. Her picture of "Hot Milk" is in the Pennsylvania Academy; her "Suspense," in a private gallery in ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... think they will miss us. It is extraordinary how Zimbabwe gets into one's heart. I have never seen anything anywhere that appealed to me quite like those old walls, with their untold story and their patience of the ages. The Sphinx in Egypt may be older, but we know how it came to be there and who built it. One of Zimbabwe's fascinations seems to be the absence of all knowledge about it, of all why and wherefore." She broke off as a Cape cart drove up to the door. "Here is someone coming to call. I think it is Mrs. Cluer, ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... You can still give yourself a counsel.' And Sugarman looked a conscious sphinx. 'You may yet ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... and I have no more of it than at twenty-eight[1001].' BOSWELL. 'But, Sir, would not you wish to know old age? He who is never an old man, does not know the whole of human life; for old age is one of the divisions of it.' JOHNSON. 'Nay, Sir, what talk is this?' BOSWELL. 'I mean, Sir, the Sphinx's description of it;—morning, noon, and night. I would know night, as well as morning and noon.' JOHNSON. 'What, Sir, would you know what it is to feel the evils of old age? Would you have the gout? Would you have decrepitude?'—Seeing him heated, I would not argue any farther; but ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... expression which the latter's countenance could assume. It had seemed interesting and even admirable to him then—but then he had not foreseen the possibility that he himself might some day confront its adamantine barrier with a sinking heart. All at once he could bear this implacable sphinx-gaze no longer. ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... irresolute foresight, cunning treachery, and impetuous rage, hurry on to a common destruction; the less guilty and the innocent are equally involved in the general ruin. The destiny of humanity is there exhibited as a gigantic Sphinx, which threatens to precipitate into the abyss of scepticism all who are unable to ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... whose high white panels were decorated with trophies of antique weapons carved in wood and gilded. A dauber from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts would have branded with the epithet "sham" the armchairs and sofas ornamented with sphinx heads in bronze, as well as the massive green marble clock upon which stood, all in gold, a favorite court personage, clothed in a cap, sword, and fig-leaf, who seemed to be making love to a young person in a floating tunic, with her hair dressed exactly like that of the ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... the intense bitterness in his tone. Truly this man, with his lightning changes from boorish incivility to whole-hearted hospitality, from apparently impenetrable reserve to an almost desperate outspokenness, was as incomprehensible as any sphinx. ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... of the Sphinx.*—It is not theoretical but practical interests which start the work of the investigation activity in the child. The threat to the conditions of his existence through the actual or expected arrival of a new child, the fear of the loss in care ...
— Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex • Sigmund Freud
... all Metaphysics had hitherto proved so inexpressibly unproductive! The secret of Man's Being is still like the Sphinx's secret: a riddle that he cannot rede; and for ignorance of which he suffers death, the worst death, a spiritual. What are your Axioms, and Categories, and Systems, and Aphorisms? Words, words. ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... plebeian origin the first Christian baron of France had pointed out with ill-disguised contempt, but whose plans and purposes had now acquired such world-wide importance that grave diplomats and shrewd churchmen esteemed the difficult riddle of her sphinx-like countenance and character a worthy subject of prolonged study. Not far from their royal brother, were two children: the elder, a boy of ten years, Edward Alexander, a few years later to appear on the pages of history under the altered name of Henry the Third, the last ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... greenness of an English lane, or the inaccessible ice and glory of a far-off mountain summit; in place of the burnt waste of fields covered with ashes and coal-dust, the burning stretch of the desert with the Sphinx looking out over it century after century; in place of the shower coming down through the dirty air to wash the dirty roofs, a storm breaking over the sea-shore rocks, or beating down on the broken wreck; instead of the drabbled calico of the factory girl and her face ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... theory and practice within those soberly quiet walls, to indulge in fancies about the secrets, financial and political, which must be discussed and locked up in human breasts there—to him the magic address, New Court, St. Swithin's Lane, was as full of potential mystery as the Sphinx is to an imaginative traveller. He glanced at its gates and at its sign now with an almost youthful awe and reverence—the reverence of the man of considerable wealth for the men of enormous wealth—and while his eyes were thus busy a taxi-cab came along the Lane, stopped by the ...
— The Rayner-Slade Amalgamation • J. S. Fletcher
... Kilda. Then he polishes the drunk one off with chloroform, gets out of the cab, jumps into another, and after getting out at Powlett Street, vanishes—that's the riddle I've got to find out, and I don't think the Sphinx ever had a harder one. There are three things to be discovered—First, who is the dead man? Second, what was he killed for? ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... can tell anything about her," he said. "Do you know her? She's a sphinx. All the Pendletons are Stoics. And besides, she's been so busy with this Charities Conference that she hasn't had time to think of Cecil. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... above all, the new First Lord, who is resolved that he will really build us a fleet, purge the dock-yards, and save us half a million a year at the same time? Phineas Finn was bent on unriddling the Irish sphinx. Surely something might be done to prove to his susceptible countrymen that at the present moment no curse could be laid upon them so heavy as that of having to rule themselves apart from England; and he thought that this ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... expressionless as a graven image. While contemplating the most cruel murder they never show the least change in expression, nor do their eyes show the faintest shadow of an emotion. They are stolid, surly and Sphinx-like always. Wolf's partner was like his race, and not even by the droop of an eyelid did he betray the slowly gathering storm of hate and rage within. He brooded over the hurt he felt when Wolf had wanted to buy his sloop, and believing the Jew meant ...
— Pocket Island - A Story of Country Life in New England • Charles Clark Munn
... Canterville Ghost The Sphinx Without a Secret The Model Millionaire The Portrait ...
— Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories • Oscar Wilde
... earlier," says Miss Kavanagh with very noteworthy deliberation, unmoved by his lover-like glances, which after all have more truth in them than most of his declarations. She sits playing with her fan, and with a face expressionless as any sphinx. ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... the entrance to the Egyptian temple. It was square and heavy-browed, flanked by short thick columns rising from a base of sculptured papyrus-leaves, and flowering in lotus capitals. Three marble steps led to the threshold, while on either side reclined a sphinx in polished granite, softened, however, by a delicate flowering vine, which had been trained to cling round their necks. On the deep panels of the door were mystic emblems carved in relief. A line of hieroglyphics inscribed the lintel in deep blue, red, ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... der Lieder at the poem in his preface—the song of the sphinx in the enchanted wood ... and how it clutched the seeker, the poet, to its monstrous but voluptuous woman's breasts as it ravished his soul with kisses. And ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... not flinch from making an energetic assault upon atheism and the excesses of its partisans. His admirers usually count his speech of the Twenty-first of November one of the most admirable of his oratorical successes. The Sphinx still sits inexorable at our gates, and his words have lost none of their interest. 'Every philosopher and every individual,' he said, 'may adopt whatever opinion he pleases about atheism. Any one who wishes to make such an opinion into a crime is an insensate; but ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... early Renaissance; and while they studied, copied, and calculated, another thought began to haunt them, another eager desire began to pursue them: by the side of Nature, the manifold, the baffling, the bewildering, there rose up before them another divinity, another sphinx, mysterious in its very simplicity and ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... shone wisdom preternatural in a horse, opened and looked down upon us with the calm questioning reproach one might expect from a rude awakening of the Sphinx; then the tall ears straightened and the great bulk rose to the full majesty of its seventeen hands; and while slats, hip bones, and shoulder blades were distressingly prominent, a glance got the full story of Sol's wonderful deeds ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... think I can explain myself without That sad inexplicable beast of prey— That Sphinx, whose words would ever be a doubt, Did not his deeds unriddle them each day— That monstrous hieroglyphic—that long spout Of blood and water—leaden Castlereagh! And here I must an anecdote relate, But luckily of no great ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... said to be the finding of a happiness that is not enjoyed at the expense of others, and surely this class have solved that Sphinx's riddle, for they float through their days in a dream of complacency disturbed neither by corroding ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... convey, in some obscure yet potent manner, a sense of the soul being near the surface of life. There is the same love of mystery and of symbolism; and in both may be observed the tendency to create strange composite figures to typify transcendental ideas, the sphinx seeming a blood-brother to the gargoyle. The conditions under which each architecture flourished were not dissimilar, for each was formulated and controlled by small well-organized bodies of sincerely religious and highly enlightened men—the priesthood in the one case, the masonic guilds in ...
— The Beautiful Necessity • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... lowest sound, When the suspicious tread of theft is stopp'd: Love's feeling is more soft and sensible, Than are the tender horns of cockled snails; Love's tongue proves dainty Bacchus gross in taste; For valour, is not love a Hercules, Still climbing trees in the Hesperides? Subtle as Sphinx; as sweet and musical, As bright Apollo's lute, strung with his hair; And when love speaks, the voice of all the gods Makes heaven drowsy with the harmony. Never durst poet touch a pen to write, Until his ink were temper'd ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... was the only woman in Paris, or in the universe, who naturally pleased him most. He entertained for her, at once, the interest which attaches to forbidden fruit, to the attraction of strange beauty, and to the mystery of an impenetrable sphinx. She was, at this time, more goddess-like than ever. The immense fortune of her husband, and the adulation which it brought her, had placed her on a golden car. On this she seated herself with a gracious and native majesty, as ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet
... Germany in those Years; scanning the phenomena; a long while not knowing what in the world to make of them. Bully Belleisle having stept into the ring, it is evident, clear as the sun, that one must act, and act at once; but it is a perfect sphinx-enigma to say How. Seldom was Sovereign or man so spurred, and goaded on, by the highest considerations; and then so held down, and chained to his place, by an imbroglio of counter-considerations and sphinx-riddles! ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... slowly around the corner of the passage into the other part of the building, and paused at the open doorway of the Honourable Hilary's outer office. By the street windows sat the Honourable Brush Bascom, sphinx-like, absorbing wisdom and clouds of cigar smoke which emanated from ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Ulstervelt and his "amazingly attractive ways." Was it possible that she could be really in love with that insignificant little whipper-snapper? He seemed to be propounding this doleful question to the lofty, sphinx-like Waldraster-Spitze, looming dark in the path ...
— The Husbands of Edith • George Barr McCutcheon
... am a homely man, and do not understand hints, innuendoes, and riddles, like Oedipus. Oedipus was the Theban who expounded the riddle of the Sphinx, that puzzled all his countrymen. Davus was the stock name of a servant or slave in Latin comedies. The proverb is used by Terence, Andria, ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... interpret the riddle, if you will promise that afterward you will do what the Sphinx did ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... he is in his grave," were the words of Solon. Here was a strong fresh proof of their truth. Every corpse is a sphinx of immortality. The sphinx in this sarcophagus might unveil its own mystery in the words which the living had himself ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... with all her heart and soul. They also agreed on a mode of proceeding. It is more than a year and a day since then. They settled that when the new moon had just disappeared, she was to betake herself by night to the marble sphinx in the desert, to remove the sand from the entrance with her foot, and then to follow one of the long passages which led to the centre of the great pyramids, where one of the most mighty monarchs of ancient times, surrounded by splendour ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... my songs . . . black butterflies! Wild words of all the wayward songs I sing . . . Called from the tomb of some enchanted past By that strange sphinx, my soul, they slowly rise And settle on white pages wing to wing . . . White pages like flower-petals fluttering Held spellbound there till some blind hour shall bring The perfect voice that, delicate and wise, Shall set them free in fairyland at last! That garden of all dreams and ecstasies ...
— The Inn of Dreams • Olive Custance
... Denmark! This disgrace Of work, with hands or brain, no matter why, No matter how, in one who ought to dwell Fixed to the solid upper sphere, my friends, Would never be forgiven." Dancey stared In mute amazement, but that mask of gold Outstared him, sphinx-like, and inscrutable. ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes
... and the Sphinx, had been appointed to accompany and aid the Great Eastern on her important mission. A gun was fired, and signals were made, to acquaint these with what had occurred while the fires were being got up in the boilers of the ...
— The Battery and the Boiler - Adventures in Laying of Submarine Electric Cables • R.M. Ballantyne
... Song of Songs. The latter was purchased for the Dijon Museum. At the Universal Exhibition of 1855 he showed a monster work, The Athenians and the Minotaur. He withdrew from the public until 1864, when his Oedipus and the Sphinx set Paris talking. He exhibited until 1880 various canvases illustrative of his studies in classic literatures and received sundry medals. He was elected a member of the Academie des Beaux-Arts in 1888, replacing Boulanger. He was decorated in 1875 with the Legion ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... visitor may tread the streets and pavements, handle the implements which the old Romans used, admire their well-turned arches, and see the paint and plaster upon the walls of their apartments. The "Old Wall," so long a sphinx by the roadside, suggesting enigmas to passers-by, has found an interpreter in revelations which the spade and pickaxe have made within its shadow. From the time when its walls first fell down, it has furnished ...
— Handbook to the Severn Valley Railway - Illustrative and Descriptive of Places along the Line from - Worcester to Shrewsbury • J. Randall
... Sir Peter undertook to attack the fort, which was commanded by Colonel Moultrie. General Lee, however, with a large force, had by rapid marches advanced to the protection of the city. The Thunder-bomb began the action, during which the Sphinx, Syren, and Actaeon ran foul of each other and got on shore. The two first hauled off, but the Actaeon remained, and was ultimately abandoned and burned. The fire was most tremendous and deadly on both sides, but the British suffered the most; indeed, ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... secret of Burleigh's stampede. Unless Stone was utterly in error, Loring had seen somewhere before the handwriting of the superscription of the envelope Burleigh had dropped in his nerveless collapse. But Stone might as well have cross-questioned the sphinx. ...
— A Wounded Name • Charles King
... the person who told the tales did us a good turn after all," laughed Grace. "The girls were ever so much more anxious to attend the bazaar after they heard of the circus. Every girl loves 'Alice in Wonderland,' I think. And then the Sphinx is a first-class surprise." ...
— Grace Harlowe's Third Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... branches of study. The statements of Greek writers on Egyptian thought not to be depended upon. Quotations from the Book of the Dead on the symbolism of the scarabaeus deity. The symbolism of the Great Sphinx. Further quotations from the Book of the Dead, on the symbolism ...
— Scarabs • Isaac Myer
... for me and commenced asking questions about the S. A. S. I tried not to tell, but you know the way the Dowager looks when she's angry. Even a sphinx would break down and tell everything it knew, and I never did pretend ...
— Just Patty • Jean Webster
... laughing. Emma wore her usual Sunday cashmere, with a snowy apron and head-handkerchief. Satan lay upon the small table beside her, in the attitude of a sphinx, his black, velvety paws stretched in front of him, his inscrutable eyes watching the restless young man. Peter paused, and his eyes narrowed. Then he snapped his fingers, as he had done when he was a little boy back in Riverton and something ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... have died a premature death, and whose memory is melodiously prolonged to the latest morning; the beautiful stories of Phaeton, and of the Sirens whose isle shone afar off white with the bones of unburied men; and the pregnant ones of Pan, Prometheus, and the Sphinx; and that long list of names which have already become part of the universal language of civilized men, and from proper are becoming common names or nouns,—the Sibyls, the Eumenides, the Parcae, the Graces, ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... stripes of the tiger, and is as remarkable for its wildness as its congeners, the horse and ass, are for their docility and usefulness. To quote again from Mr. Swainson, "the singular threatening aspect which the caterpillars of the sphinx moth assume on being disturbed, is a remarkable modification of the terrific or evil nature which is impressed in one form or another, palpable or remote, upon all sub-typical groups; for this division ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... escape, she paused now and turned toward me. I have never seen a glance like hers. Say not there is no language of the eyes, no speech in the composure of the features. Yet such is the Sphinx power given to woman, that now I saw, as though it were a thing tangible, a veil drawn across her eyes, across her face, ...
— 54-40 or Fight • Emerson Hough
... grandfather was a consummate scoundrel, or the victim of a baseless slander,—whether he left India a rich man or a poor man, is known to no mortal except Lady Maulevrier, and compared with her the Theban Sphinx was a ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... cattle feeding in one, and above the same rocky woodland, meeting the other at the quarry; and then after a little cascade had tumbled down from the steeper ground, giving place to the heathery peaty moor, which ended, more than two miles off in a torr like a small sphinx. This could not be seen from Magdalen's territory, but from the highest walk in her kitchen garden, she could see the square tower of Arnscombe, her parish church; and on a clear day, the ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... had already heard from the same lips. A pretty girl—or rather "an exquisite creature!" met at the house of some relation in Scotland, met again at the "Boats" at Oxford, and yet again at Commemoration balls, Nuneham picnics, and the rest; adored and adorable; yet, of course, a sphinx born for the torment of men, taking her haughty way over a prostrate sex, kind to-day, cruel to-morrow; not to be won by money, yet, naturally, not to be won without it; possessed like Rose Aylmer of "every virtue, every grace," whether of form or family; yet making nothing but a devastating and ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... witch-doctor, he would do it, even as he, Bakahenzie, would have done in his place. Therefore upon these matters did he talk very guardedly with Marufa, who was unusually reticent. However, after communing with himself in sphinx-like gravity, Marufa assented to the proposal that Zalu Zako be isolated in ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... Strabo was right. There were two of Rhodopis. Everybody knows that. The Third Pyramid was built for the tomb of the first one, not for King Mycineris, I believe. Why shouldn't a woman have a Pyramid to herself? The Sphinx is a woman, as I will insist to my dying day, if it were my last word! I hope Lord Ernest won't ram down our throats any nonsense about that noble and graceful tribute to the Mystery of Womanhood being a stupid King Harmachis, ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... streaming behind her. Her face seemed like a piece of delicate oval statuary, her steady eyes seemed fixed upon some point where the clouds and sea meet. She took no heed of, she did not even see, my gesture of farewell. I left her there inscrutable, a child with the face of a Sphinx. She had set me a riddle ...
— The Betrayal • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... tresses, and her temper could always be softened by stroking them down. When her hair was brushed she would instantly sink into stillness and look like the Sphinx. If, in passing under one of the Egdon banks, any of its thick skeins were caught, as they sometimes were, by a prickly tuft of the large Ulex Europaeus—which will act as a sort of hairbrush—she would go back a few steps, and pass against it a ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... the Sphinx's, and furnished with great sticks, dashed into the crowd, striking right and left. This was to drive back the slaves, who were curious to see their master, so that he might not be assailed by their numbers or inconvenienced by ...
— Salammbo • Gustave Flaubert
... we didn't mind that. It's no credit to carry an interlinear translation of your temperament on your face. So long as he kept in his own yard and quarreled with his own dog for not feeding on Freshmen more enthusiastically, we got along as nicely as the Egyptian Sphinx and John L. Sullivan. Even when he was elected police magistrate we didn't object. In fact, we didn't bumpity-bump to the situation until we went ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... remain to glean, where he, the experienced and skilful officer, had perceived nothing. As soon as he was within speaking distance, the inspector called to Father Absinthe, who, after warning Lecoq, remained on the threshold, leaning against the door-post, puffing his pipe, as immovable as a sphinx. ...
— Monsieur Lecoq • Emile Gaboriau
... a fairly correct idea of what the white people of the country think of them, for that opinion has for a long time been and is still being constantly stated; but they are themselves more or less a sphinx to the whites. It is curiously interesting and even vitally important to know what are the thoughts of ten millions of them concerning the people among whom they live. In these pages it is as though a veil had been drawn aside: the reader is given a view of the inner life of the Negro in America, ...
— The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man • James Weldon Johnson
... the face of a sphinx. He made no protestations. He denied nothing. He waited simply to see where I ...
— The Lost Ambassador - The Search For The Missing Delora • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... machinery of government so thoroughly presupposes a little aristocratic agricultural state, and our strong attachment to form and ritual so hampers all attempts at reorganisation, that the way in which we shall answer, if we do answer, the question of this sphinx, cannot as yet ...
— The Historic Thames • Hilaire Belloc
... the servant, and walked towards the light, while he tore open the envelope. It had the most minute sphinx in the corner, and the paper was un-English, and ...
— Three Weeks • Elinor Glyn
... confronts like a sphinx the foreigners. In the same way you will find that the Russian homes are full of contrasting colors, bright red and yellow, white and blue. The Russian music is the most dramatic phonetic art ever created; it reaches the deepest sorrow and the gayest hilarity ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... call ... across strange seas they call, Strange seas, and haunted coasts of time.... They startle me with wordless songs To which the Sphinx hath known the rhyme. ...
— Dreams and Dust • Don Marquis
... butterflies was not large; but I obtained some rare and very handsome insects, the most remarkable being the Ornithoptera Brookeana, one of the most elegant species known. This beautiful creature has very long and pointed wings, almost resembling a sphinx moth in shape. It is deep velvety black, with a curved band of spots of a brilliant metallic-green colour extending across the wings from tip to tip, each spot being shaped exactly like a small triangular feather, and having very much the effect of a row of the wing coverts of the Mexican ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... I meant. I referred to Madge's health and appearance and accomplishments and all that. She has not changed in heart and feeling any more than I have, and I'm sure I'm not a sphinx." ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... coprolitic sands—sands stretching into the bosom of the earth, sands woven of windy reaches hemming the sun.... We lay with the grains of corn in Egyptian granaries, and saw them fructify under the smile of the sphinx; we buzzed in the ambient atmosphere, gaudy dragon-flies or whirling motes in full cry chased by humming-birds. Then from some cold crag we launched with wings of fire-breathing pestilence and fell fathoms ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... appear strange—more than ever unlike reality, and more nearly allied to the spectral. For, under the moonlight, shimmering through a film that has spread over the plain, the head seems magnified to the dimensions of the Sphinx; while the coyotes—mere jackals of terrier size—look large as ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... What is its future destined to be? Will it vanish away, will it pass into new phases, or will some form of it eventually receive the sanction of the nation? These are Sphinx questions, which one may be excused from endeavouring to answer, seeing that the strongest and most far-reaching heads are at this moment intent upon them—not, so far as can be seen, with any strikingly successful result. The Future is a deep mine, and we have ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... from an article[24] from the pen of that accomplished scholar, and well-known enthusiast in bee-culture, Henry K. Oliver, Esq. "We add a few words respecting the enemies of bees. The mouse, the toad, the ant, the stouter spiders, the wasp, the death-head moth, (Sphinx atropos,) and all the varieties of gallinaceous birds, have, each and all, "a sweet tooth," and like, very well, a dinner of raw bee. But the ravages of all these are but a baby bite to the destruction caused by the ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... following day and that she knew how to go right through the German lines. That was precisely the way that the Germans had just forbidden me to go. But this accomplice (if such she was) got no rise out of me. To all intents I was stone-deaf. Compared to me, she would have found the Sphinx garrulous indeed. She may have been as harmless as a dove but, after my escapade, I wouldn't have talked to my own mother without a written permit from the military governor. The Kaiser himself would have found it hard work breaking through my cast-iron spy-proof armor of formality. I had ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... the poet or the philosopher, in whom reflection has reached such a height, that, instead of being drawn on to investigate any one particular phenomenon of existence, he stands in amazement before existence itself, this great sphinx, and makes it his problem. In him consciousness has reached the degree of clearness at which it embraces the world itself: his intellect has completely abandoned its function as the servant of his will, and now holds the world before him; and the world calls upon him much ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Studies in Pessimism • Arthur Schopenhauer
... England character, abounding in humor and pathos; but we had never conceived her as a writer of verse. The readers of the "Atlantic" remember too well her "Maya, the Princess," "Metempsychosis," and "The Sphinx's Children," to need reminding that she has qualities of fancy as remarkable as her faculty for observing real life. Miss Terry seems in this volume to have sought refuge from the real in the ideal, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... fierce North blood which was not easily laid when once aroused, and he glared around the battle-field, hoping to find signs of resistance. When none were to be seen, he donned his coachman's coat and sat the box like a sphinx. ...
— The Fat of the Land - The Story of an American Farm • John Williams Streeter
... who should solve the mystery of this name would obtain a knowledge of the whole prophecy, and would succeed in mastering the beast. Well! by the most careful interpretation of our axiom we shall kill the sphinx of property. ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... or plant-louse, sometimes attacks the young, tender shoots of the vine. The moment they appear, take off the shoot, and crush it on a board with the foot. Leaf-rollers, the grape- vine sphinx, and caterpillars in general must be caught by hand and killed. Usually they are not very numerous. The horrid little rose-chafers or rose-bugs are sometimes very destructive. Our best course is to take a basin ...
— The Home Acre • E. P. Roe
... still no observer can avoid a feeling of astonishment on account of the vast energy, courage and industry of the men of old who could vanquish such gigantic difficulties. At the same time it will not do to assume that the Egyptian stone cutters were not artists. The great Sphinx of Giseh, huge as it is, is far from being a primitive and vulgar creation. "The portions of the head which have been preserved," says Mr. Charles Blanc, "the brow, the eyebrows, the corners of the eyes, the passage from the temples to the cheek-bones, and from the cheek-bones to the cheek, ...
— The Bay State Monthly - Volume 2, Issue 3, December, 1884 • Various
... doctor came to see him, felt his pulse, sounded his lungs, and ordered him ass's milk. He drank the prescribed beverage very readily out of his own especial china saucer. For hours together he lay stretched upon my knee, like the shadow of a sphinx. I felt his spine under my finger tips like the beads of a rosary, and he tried to respond to my caresses by a feeble purr that resembled a death-rattle. On the day of his death he was lying on his side panting, and suddenly, ...
— Concerning Cats - My Own and Some Others • Helen M. Winslow
... cries weird beyond description—so fierce and screeching as to be almost blood-curdling. It seems to come from all directions and distance out of measure! Vibrating over the sands and through the rocks, filling the immense void, crying out as it were for the sphinx, a veritable de profundis of the wastes. The vultures, who hold the fort during the day have given way to the night shift, the jackals. These come from all directions; from the caves in the earth, from among the rocks, from here, there, and from everywhere to take up their hygienic services ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... Riding a camel for the first time is quite an experience. The beast will lie down, but it is continually snarling and when it gets up you go through all kinds of motions. As I rode around the great pyramid and sphinx on one of these beasts the swing was not unlike that of a great rocking chair and while this ship of the desert did not seem to be going fast I noticed that the driver was running and the donkey alongside was on the gallop most ...
— Birdseye Views of Far Lands • James T. Nichols
... would descend from his heights to mingle a brief moment in the family talk. Al clerked in the National Cigar Company's store at Clark and Madison. His was the wisdom of the snake, the weasel, and the sphinx. A strangely silent young man, this Al, thin-lipped, smooth-cheeked, perfumed. Slim of waist, flat of hip, narrow of shoulder, his was the figure of the born fox-trotter. He walked lightly, on the balls of his feet, like an Indian, but ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... Pacific coast. It is indeed difficult to see how tourists could pass their time here without this topic of conversation, so infinite is its variety and so debatable are many of the conclusions drawn from it. It is the Sphinx of California; differing, however, from the Sphinx of Egypt in that it offers a new problem every day. The literature that treats of the Pacific coast fairly bristles with statistics on this subject, and many writers have found it impossible to resist the temptation ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... availed them naught; the old sailor keeping provokingly silent and being as mute as the Sphinx on the subject, in spite of their ...
— Bob Strong's Holidays - Adrift in the Channel • John Conroy Hutcheson
... hard to describe. As the columns of hail grew thinner, I saw the white figure more distinctly. It was very large, for a silver birch-tree touched its shoulder. It was of white marble, in shape something like a winged sphinx, but the wings, instead of being carried vertically at the sides, were spread so that it seemed to hover. The pedestal, it appeared to me, was of bronze, and was thick with verdigris. It chanced that the face was towards me; the sightless eyes seemed to watch me; there was the faint shadow ...
— The Time Machine • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... occupation nor study have been able to cure you, my friend. To forget and to learn, that is your device. You finger the leaves of dead books; you are too young for ruins. Look about you, the pale herd of men surrounds you. The eyes of the sphinx glitter in the midst of divine hieroglyphics; decipher the book of life! Courage, scholar, launch out on the Styx, the invulnerable flood, and let the waves of sorrow waft you ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... but the great snow spectacle was to the left. There the proud crests of the Hoch Gall, Wild Gall and Schnebige Nock rose out of a vast white glittering amphitheatre, a peculiar, bare, conical rock standing like an Alpine sphinx strangely forth from ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... now to question of my true heart's lord, And of the ports and alleys of this isle, Which way they lead the clueless wanderer To fields suburban, and the towers of men, I would confront the strangest things that haunt In horrid shades of brooding desolation: Griffin, or satyr, sphinx, or sybil ape, Or lop-eared demon from the dens of night, Let loose to caper out of Acheron. Ah me, my Theseus, wherefore art thou gone! Who left that crock of water at my side? Who stole my dog that loved no one but me? Why was the tent unstruck, ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... God and the things which had befallen him, is constantly haunting him; it has a sting in it far worse than all the other misery with which he is tormented; but it is not fixed in the hopelessness of hell by an accepted explanation more frightful than itself. Let the world-sphinx put as many riddles as she will, she can devour no man while he waits an answer from the world-redeemer. Job refused the explanation of his friends because he knew it false; to have accepted such as would by many in the present day be given him, would have been to be devoured at once of the ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... such a spectacle of herself. Such husbands as I had been familiar with had never hesitated to vent their feelings under such circumstances. But from Douglas van Tuiver there came—not a word! He sat, perfectly straight, staring before him, like a sphinx; and Sylvia, after one or two swift glances at him, began to gossip cheerfully about her plans for ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... riddle for the folk mind is well known, and before the spread of cards appears to have been one of the chief forms of gambling in which even life was staked, as in the case of Samson or the Sphinx. In the Folk-Tale it often occurs in the form of the Riddle-Bride-Wager, in which a princess is married to him that can guess some elaborate conundrum. The first two of Child's Ballads deal with similar riddles, and his notes are a mine of erudition ...
— Europa's Fairy Book • Joseph Jacobs
... as a human being under such circumstances." Then he stopped, and looked with blank, unseeing eyes down the slanting fir avenue. "It is a mystery," he went on—"the very mystery of mysteries; the Sphinx is nothing to it. A month ago we were strangers—I neither knew nor cared that such a person as Elizabeth Templeton existed; and a week—a little cycle of seven or eight nights and days—has wrought this ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... chaplet had twelve great carbuncles in the centre, and went off by gradations into smaller garnets by the thousand. They flashed their blood-red flames in the African sun, and the head of Ucatella, grand before, became the head of the Sphinx, encircled with a coronet of fire. She bestowed a look of rapturous gratitude on Staines, and then glided away, like the stately Juno, to admire herself in the nearest glass like any other coquette, black, brown, ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... warmer and then I go stone cold. But I've found out a few things, anyhow. How tall should you say Madame Delano is? I've only seen her sitting on her throne there in the Palace Court lookin' like an old Sphinx that's havin' ...
— The Avalanche • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... on the English Poets" confesses that he knows nothing of him save "some beautiful verses to his wife, dissuading her from accompanying him on his travels abroad (see p. 318), and some quaint riddles in verse, which the Sphinx could ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... eyebrows were delicately arched and sharply defined, and her eyes of jet were large and swimming; her nose had not utterly abjured its African origin, neither had her lips, but, notwithstanding, her countenance shone with all the beauty of expression so conspicuous in the Egyptian sphinx Abyssinian, but most sweet—while her teeth were as the finest ivory, and her chin and throat, and bosom, as if her bust had been an antique statue of the rarest workmanship. The only ornaments she wore were two large virgin gold ear—rings, massive yellow hoops without any ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... the door he stepped quickly before her and pressed her gently back as he closed it. She heard him moving to and fro, and knew his burdens—the poor, little burdens he bore. When she entered, he was alone in the room. The grim switchboard flashed its metallic face in cryptic, sphinx-like immobility. She seated herself on a stool and donned the bright earpiece. She looked at the mouthpiece. She had never looked at one so closely before. It was wide and black, pimpled with usage; inert; dead; almost sarcastic ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... recognizes its existence. The world of the poet's fancy, that world into which he was born, does not exist for him. He spoils his art as well as his life, carving back to bull what another had carved into a sphinx." ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... in the annals of most peoples; riddles put by the Sphinx of the Past to the curious of the new generations. These questions do not greatly concern the scientific historian, who is busy with constitution-making, statistics, progress, degeneration, in short with human evolution. These high matters, these streams of tendency, ...
— James VI and the Gowrie Mystery • Andrew Lang
... classes of logic and moral philosophy; and although few will agree with his brother that his writings show unusual aptitude and profound knowledge in these sciences, or that, as he says, "the thinker was always on a level with the poet," nobody can deny the constant questioning of the Sphinx, the eager, restless pursuit of truth, which pervades his pages. He pushed his search through a long course of reading,—Descartes, Spinoza, Cabanis, Maine de Biran—only to fall back upon an innate faith in God which never forsook him, although ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... knew—to be let into the plot, Lucius owned that he had left the details in the hands of Pratinas, and did not himself know just how or when the blow was to fall. In Pratinas—whom Cornelia met very seldom—she met with a sphinx, ever smiling, ever gracious, but who, as if regretting the burst of confidence he had allowed Valeria, kept himself closed to the insinuations and half-questions of every one else. The truth was, ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... Afterwards, on becoming reconciled to him, she bestows on him a dog and a dart, which Diana had once given her. The dog is turned into stone, while hunting a wild beast, which Themis has sent to ravage the territories of Thebes, after the interpretation of the riddle of the Sphinx, by Oedipus. ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... to the Sphinx, is successively a quadruped, a biped, and a triped. But circumstances may change his natural conditions. If he loses a leg, he becomes a uniped. If he loses both his legs, he becomes a nulliped. If art replaces the loss ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... a woman in a steel-built city who had all that money could buy, she had gold and dividends and trains and houses, and she had pets to play with, but she had no sphinx. ...
— Fifty-One Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... that! This man in that wicked age must have appeared to many a standing miracle, if only for this reason, that he was the one man in London who was content, passing his days in a stubborn rapture, as little inclined for play or laughter as the sphinx in the desert, which the sand storms can ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... was—with a marvellous charm and suavity, a finesse of expression never reached before and hardly ever equalled since. Contrast the head of the Christ at Milan, Leonardo's conception of divinity expressed in perfect humanity, with the subtle and sphinx-like smile ...
— Leonardo da Vinci • Maurice W. Brockwell
... riddle of the Sphinx, was the murderer of his father. Basil Montagu was Procter's father-in-law. Procter's address was ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... feet three in his boots, sat himself down one day in the study of a West-end minister, and gazed before him with the countenance of a sphinx. ...
— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren
... "they are bringing Mademoiselle de Tonnay-Charente and her sphinx butterfly in grand ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... interrupted. "It isn't fair. I tell you I won't take it. I'll go two days earlier to prevent you. Unless you promise me—— Of course I see how things are with her. She's not a sphinx. But it isn't fair. It isn't. Not to her, or to him—or myself. He's got some claims. He's got more right to her ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... solace for his mined hopes. Natacha, standing in a corner, with her face singularly calm, watched this extraordinary scene that was like a menagerie in which the tamer himself had become a wild beast. From another corner, Rouletabille kept his eyes fixed on Natacha who ignored him. Ah, that girl, sphinx to them all! Even to him who thought a while ago that he could read things invisible to other vulgar men in her features, in her eyes! The impassive face of that girl whose father they had tried to assassinate only a few hours before and who had just pressed the hand of Priemkof, the ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux
... You're a regular sphinx sometimes. Peter says that you even disconcert him at times, when you take to remembering things out of ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley
... the prominent eyes, together with the line of the mouth extending straight back with a final jeering, upward lift; in front, the lower lip thick and protruding, which, with the slanting eyes, gave a leering, devilish smirk, while her set, stiff, exact posture compelled a vivid thought of the sphinx. Never have I seen such a remarkable combination. It fascinated us. We looked at Guinevere, and then at the tadpoles swimming quietly in their tank, and evolution in its wildest ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... races, and collectively those masses will propound the general question, "What will you do with us, we hundreds of millions, who cannot keep pace with you?" If the New Republic emerges at all it will emerge by grappling with this riddle; it must come into existence by the passes this Sphinx will guard. Moreover, the necessary results of the reaction of irresponsible wealth upon that infirm and dangerous thing the human will, the spreading moral rot of gambling which is associated with irresponsible ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... face of wondrous beauty, yet calm and inscrutable as that of the sphinx, had any power as yet passed over the hidden depths of her woman's nature, and troubled the waters? Were those eyes, with their far-away look, gazing into the past with its strange darkness and mystery, or striving to pierce ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... has solved the mystery of the sphinx!" cried Tom. "Can you open it? I claim a third share ...
— The Rover Boys In The Mountains • Arthur M. Winfield
... your sons;" Verres having a son who had fallen into disgraceful courses. Hortensius, the orator, not daring directly to undertake the defence of Verres, was yet persuaded to appear for him at the laying on of the fine, and received an ivory sphinx for his reward; and when Cicero, in some passage of his speech, obliquely reflected on him, and Hortensius told him he was not skilful in solving riddles, "No," said Cicero, "and yet you have ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... exclaimed Violet, as the little girl's delight grew beyond bounds at the sight of the peacock sunning himself on the sphinx's head, and Johnnie was charmed with the flowers in the parterre; and with 'look but not touch' cautions, the two were trusted to walk together hand-in-hand ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... some; others of French origin, dating before the Empire period, are a combination of French art with Egyptian ornament, brought out during the Directoire, when after the Battle of the Pyramids French artists introduced the sphinx and other Egyptian ornaments into their art designs. During the Empire period, the style that is said to consist of a blending of Roman, Greek, and Egyptian prevailed. Many of the continental countries have ...
— Chats on Household Curios • Fred W. Burgess
... animals never seen by man, and horns of plenty, were used to support tables and chairs and sofas. Everywhere one turned the feeling of martial grandeur was in the air. Ormolu mounts of bay wreaths, torches, eagles, military emblems and trophies, winged figures, the sphinx, the bee, and the initial N, were used on furniture; and these same motives were used in wall decoration. The furniture was left the natural color of the wood, and mahogany, rosewood, and ebony, were used. Veneer was also extensively used. The front legs of chairs were usually straight, ...
— Furnishing the Home of Good Taste • Lucy Abbot Throop
... by Colonel Celliers had been directed to cut the railway line between Jakalswater and Sphinx. He was to attack the former place after blocking the way, in case any reenforcements should be sent by the enemy from Windhoek. Celliers succeeded in cutting the railway and seized a train containing supplies for the Germans, but his attack on Jakalswater ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... What depths, what subtleties, what unfailing revelations of beauty, and surely, too, of love, there were in Nature! And yet in Nature what terrible indifference there was: a powerful, an almost terrific inattention, like that of the sphinx that gazes at what men cannot see. Hermione moved away from the house. She walked to the brow of the island and sat down on the seat that Vere was fond of. Presently she would go to the bridge and look over into the Pool and listen for the voices ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... was freighted, however, with peculiar significance as an artistic work, far surpassing that of the circumstances which gave it origin, or which saw its first production in the mysterious land of the Nile and Sphinx. ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... Terence pronounced her a Sphinx. Perhaps he was biassed by the opinion the fair Maria had expressed. Jack did not altogether like to hear her talked about, especially by the master and purser, or the lieutenant of marines, who called her a monstrously fine woman. The colonel was fair game. No one could make out who ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... of the world, thirty-three years of age—no deception, Morgan—and, knowing you have lived twenty-eight, I naturally suspect the existence of those chapters, you darling sphinx. And when I suddenly come across a poem from your pen about a sweet little girl, my ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... him munching a sandwich and keeping his own eyes rather away from than on her own, she asked herself whether she had undertaken too much, and whether this sphinx-like face might hide danger for her. She at least knew it was far from being possible to tell by looking at the outside of a man's head what might be going on inside. Only the plight of her father's affairs had seemed to justify her; even this did ...
— Laramie Holds the Range • Frank H. Spearman
... if you could only hate! That is what you lack, hate. In spite of your great Sphinx eyes, you have seen the world through a golden colour. That comes from the sun in your heart; but so many shadows have risen that now you are not recognizing things any more. Come now! Cry out! Thunder! Take your great lyre and touch the brazen string: the monsters will flee. Bedew us with drops ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... as possible, for they interested me greatly, and I used try and classify them much as an entomologist would classify his beetles and insects. One lady of forbidding appearance was known as "the Sphinx." When on an expedition, it was the custom to call the "Cookii" at 5 a.m., and strike the tents at six. It appears that her bower falling at the stroke of six disclosed the poor thing in a light toilet, whence ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... faces, necks, and breasts like women, but their bodies are covered with scales, and they have the tails of serpents. The Chim[oe]ra is a monster that vomits fire, and has the head and breast of a lion, the belly of a goat, and the tail of a dragon. The Sphinx, begotten of Typhon and Echidna, has the head and face of a virgin, the wings of a bird, and the body of a dog. A riddle she put forth being explained by [OE]dipus, so enraged her that she threw herself from a rock ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... picked up the talk. There was a subtle, sardonic flavor to it on both sides and, once in a while, as Tamada, like an animated sphinx, went about his duties, Rainey saw the eyes of Carlsen turned questioningly upon the giant as if a bit puzzled concerning the exact ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn
... You have a heart like a girl underneath that saturnine front of yours, and while you look like the Sphinx, you are really as much of a kid at heart as I am. Where do you ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... benediction. The Virgin herself is of unequalled solemnity, while her young and gracious face, exquisite in expression and contour, is full of queenly beauty. But there is still this atmosphere of mystery, an enigmatic aloofness in spite of the warm human sentiment. The Sphinx's faces, with all their traditions of secrecy, contribute their share to the cryptic environment. Donatello uses them as the supports of the throne on which the Madonna is seated; behind it are Adam and Eve in relief: in front she herself shows the New Adam ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... rides a beetle which he calls a 'sphinx,' And O what questions asked in club-foot rhyme Of Earth the tongueless, and the deaf-mute Time! Here babbling 'Insight' shouts in Nature's ears His last conundrum on the orbs and spheres; There Self-inspection sucks its little thumb, With 'Whence ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... thinking that—thinking so many things that she could not speak or eat. Her heart was like lead within her; but she could not rid herself of the thought of Darby. She could have torn it out for hate of herself; and to all her mother's questioning glances she turned the face of a sphinx. For two days she neither ate nor spoke. She watched the opposite hill through the rain which still kept up—something was going on over there, but what it was she could not tell. At last, on the evening of the third day, ...
— The Burial of the Guns • Thomas Nelson Page
... a Pandorus Sphinx!" he said in great excitement to Kathleen, who had lifted the big glass jar into the lantern light and was trying to get a glimpse of the exquisite moth, whose wings of olive green, rose, and bronze velvet were already beating a hazy death tattoo ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... to answer, when it was necessary, with a tongue prone to looseness of speech that required a constant curb. And to add confusion to confusion, there was the servant, an unceasing menace, that appeared noiselessly at his shoulder, a dire Sphinx that propounded puzzles and conundrums demanding instantaneous solution. He was oppressed throughout the meal by the thought of finger-bowls. Irrelevantly, insistently, scores of times, he wondered when they would come on and what they looked like. He had heard of such things, and now, ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
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