"Asphodel" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... graveyard, as I have said, full of unmarked tombs, still here and there we find graves, such as Shelley's or Byron's, whereon pale flowers, like sweet suggestions of ever-silenced music, break into continuous bloom. And shall I not win my own death-garland of asphodel?" ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... suppose that he must begin to learn the Greek alphabet just like a novice. His clay is indeed mixed with the clay of common men, but I love to think of him dwelling on the other side of the River in the meads of asphodel, discussing with kindred shades, the topics he delighted to handle when he was here. With tearful eye I pen these doleful ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... surety that the new-born son of Zeus had done him the mischief. Wrapped in a purple mist, he hastened to beautiful Pylos, and came on the track of the cattle. "O Zeus!" he cried, "this is indeed a marvel. I see the footprints of cattle, but they are marked as though the cattle were going to the asphodel meadow, not away from it. Of man or woman, of wolf, bear, or lion, I spy not a single trace. Only here and there I behold the footprints of some strange monster, who has left his mark at random on either side of the road." So on he sped to the woody heights of Kyllene, and stood on the ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... his cross-flowing course The water-nymphs that in the bottom played, Held up their pearled wrists and took her in, Bearing her straight to aged Nereus' hall, Who, piteous of her woes, reared her lank head, And gave her to his daughters to imbathe In nectared lavers strewed with asphodel, And through the porch and inlet of each sense Dropped in ambrosial oils till she revived, And underwent a quick, immortal change, Made goddess ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... asphodel fluttered from a hundred heads; poplar, lotus, and laurel wreaths overhung their heated brows; panther-skins, deer and goatskins hung from their bare shoulders and waved in the wind as their bearers hurried onwards. This procession had been first ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... are not the rule. Midway between the pulsating town-life and the desert there lies, mostly, a sinister extra-mural region, a region of gaping walls and potsherds, where the asphodel shoot up to monstrous tufts and the fallacious colocynth, the wild melon, scatters its globes of bitter gold. For it is in the nature of Orientals that their habitations should surround themselves with a girdle of corrupting things, gruesome and yet fascinating: a Browning might have grown ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... many wanderings, Gethsemane can tell Through what transporting anguish She reached the asphodel! ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson
... Orgia, or sacred rites of Bacchus, the customary sacrifice to be offered, because it fed on vines, was the goat. The vine, ivy, laurel, asphodel, the dolphin, lynx, tiger, and ass were all sacred to Bacchus. The acceptable sacrifice to Venus was a dove; Jupiter, a bull; an ox of five years old, ram or boar pig to Neptune; and Diana, a stag. At the inception of the Bacchanalian festivals in Greece, the ...
— A History of Pantomime • R. J. Broadbent
... applied in a mechanical way, could remove the famous Logan rock at Trereen Dinas from its present position." Ptolemy, the son of Hephaestion, had made a similar remark about the Gigoman rock,(58) stating that it might be stirred with the stalk of an asphodel, but could not be removed by any force. Lieutenant Goldsmith, living in an age of experimental philosophy, undertook the experiment, in order to show that it was physically possible to overthrow the Logan; and he did it. He was, however, very properly punished for this unscientific ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... entrancing in their loveliness, wearing snow-white kerchiefs, their golden hair unbound and flowing, dressed in white samite, bearing armfuls of flowers; the whole procession defiling against a background of forest glades, venerable oaks, half-hidden fountains, and fields of asphodel ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... good deal of excitement in the Elysian Fields when the news went round that the Committee had exercised their power of electing a certain distinguished Shade to full membership of the Asphodel Club without a ballot. The general opinion seemed to be that the Committee had acted wisely, and that the election was in every way justified. A few members, however, expressed disapproval, not so much on account of any demerits of his ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 16, 1919 • Various
... never been able to see very good reasons for their doubts. The name Jonquil comes corrupted through the French, from juncifolius or "rush-leaf," and is properly restricted to those species of the family which have rushy leaves. "Daffodil" is commonly said to be a corruption of Asphodel ("Daffodil is Asphodelon, and has capped itself with a letter which eight hundred years ago did not belong to it."—COCKAYNE, Spoon and Sparrow, 19), with which plant it was confused (as it is in Lyte's "Herbal"), but Lady Wilkinson says ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... were the couch Pansies, and Violets, and Asphodel And Hyacinth, earth's freshest, ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... intensity of her beauty would flash upon you, that the sweetness of her voice would come upon your ear. A sudden half-hour with the Neroni was like falling into a pit, an evening spent with Eleanor like an unexpected ramble in some quiet fields of asphodel. ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... planted asphodel and mallow round their graves, as the seeds of these plants were supposed to nourish the dead. Mourners, too, wore flowers at the funeral rites, and Homer relates how the Thessalians used crowns of amaranth at the burial of Achilles. The Romans were ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... of the rhodora, the club-moss, the blooming clover, not of the hibiscus and the asphodel. He knows the bumblebee, the blackbird, the bat and the wren. He illustrates his high thought by common things out of our plain New England life: the meeting of the church, the Sunday-School, the dancing-school, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... marsh-flowers in bloom, blowing in the merry wind," "His words flowed abundantly like a sudden shower on an aftermath in May," "When your eyes beam upon me, it seems to me I drink a draught of perfumed wine," "My sister is burned like a branch of the date tree," "You are like the asphodel, and the tanned hand of Summer dares not caress your white brow," "Slender as a dragon-fly," are comparisons taken at random. Of Mireio the poet says, "The merry sun hath hatched her out," "Her glance is like dew, her rounded bosom is a double peach ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... to consist of the Townships of Asphodel, Belmont and Methuen, Douro, Dummer, Galway, Harvey, Minden, Stanhope and Dysart, Otonabee, and Snowden, and the Village of Ashburnham, and any other surveyed Townships lying to the North ...
— The British North America Act, 1867 • Anonymous
... Robinson; that several hundreds of them had been forwarded from Cobourg to Rice Lake, a few days before, on their way to the new settlements up the Otonabee River, and were now camped at Tidy's. He and his friend, a man of the name of Daly, a tailor by trade, wished to settle in the township of Asphodel, on the River Trent. They had accordingly taken a boat and had rowed down the lake in the hope of reaching Crook's Rapids on the Trent before nightfall. Irishman-like, their only stores for the voyage consisted of a bottle of whiskey, to which it appears they applied themselves ...
— Twenty-Seven Years in Canada West - The Experience of an Early Settler (Volume I) • Samuel Strickland
... asphodelon leimona—Asphodel was planted on the graves and around the tombs of the deceased, and hence the supposition that the Stygian plain was clothed with ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer
... Bottom, propped on a bed of asphodel and moly that seemed to curd the moonshine; and at his side, Titania slim and scarlet, and shimmering like a bride-cake. The sky was dark above the tapering trees, but here in the secret woods light seemed to cling in flake and ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... which have been so often heard in "the halls of legislation" that they have acquired an infamy which unfits them for publication in a decent family newspaper; and Shakspere himself, reposing in Elysium on his bed of asphodel and moly, omits them when reading his complete works to the shades of Kit Marlowe and Ben Jonson, ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... ring the luncheon bell! Merrily ring the luncheon bell! Here in meadow of asphodel, Feast we body and mind as well, ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... thorns; the very oak- scrub is of species unknown to Britain. And what are these tall lilies, which fill every glade breast-high with their sword-like leaves, and spires of white flowers, lilac-pencilled? They are the classic flower, the Asphodel of Greece and Grecian song; the Asphodel through which the ghosts of Homer's heroes strode: as heroes' ghosts might ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... Pericles said to Aspasia), while my husband satisfies my highest ideal, and while the graces of heaven fill the hearts of my children. Everything else is very external. This is the immortal life which makes flowers of asphodel bloom in my path, and no rude step can crush them. I exult in my husband. He stands upon a table-land of high behavior which is far above these mean and false proceedings, with which a party of intriguers are now concerning themselves, ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... of the beeches, mingling with the dark and gloomy olive shade of the firs; here and there fields laden with the blue columbine and the "overrated" asphodel; the boulder-strewn slopes on our left, and the snow-ridges on the right; and the strong, fresh, and foaming cascade of Sidonie tumbling down beside us, made a very delicious contemplation as we ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough
... Battus and Bombyce, of Corydon and Daphnis, may it please the hierophants of Sanskrit lore, of derivative Aryan philology, of iconoclastic euhemerism, to spare us yet awhile the lovely myths that dance across the asphodel ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... but timid. Aster, double Variety. Aster, German Afterthought. Arbutus Thee only do I love. Acacia Friendship. Apple Blossom Preference. Asphodel Remembered after death. Arbor Vitae Unchanging friendship. Alyssum Worth beyond beauty. Anemone Your love changes. Azalea Pleasant recollections. Argeratum Worth beyond beauty. Balsam Impatience. Blue Bell ...
— Your Plants - Plain and Practical Directions for the Treatment of Tender - and Hardy Plants in the House and in the Garden • James Sheehan
... circuit, and here and there apparently in their whole hight. It is a small, steep, mound-like hill—you can walk around it in fifteen minutes—and within the walls the terraced slope, thickly sprinkled with fragments of ruins, is grown over with the tall purple flowers of the asphodel—a fit monument to the perished city. From the citadel of Tiryus the view over the wide plain of the Inachus, the broad bay beyond, covered with sails, the bold headland of Napoli crowned with the ruined castle, the noble citadel of Argos, and the ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... bright southern world which she was now urged to revisit. In fancy she saw it again to-day, the tideless sea of deepest sapphire blue, the little wavelets breaking on a yellow beach, the white triangular sails, the woods full of asphodel and great purple and white lilies, the atmosphere steeped in warmth and light and perfume, the glare of white houses in the sun, the red and yellow blinds, the pots of green and orange and crimson clay, with oleanders abloom, the wonderful glow ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... amain, And seemed with tender irony to flout Man's folly and pain when twixt dead spears sprang out The crocus-point and pied the plain with fires More gracious than his beacons; and from pyres Of burnt dead men the asphodel uprose Like fleecy clouds flushed with the morning rose, A holy pall to hide his folly and pain. Thus upon earth hope fell like a new rain, And by and by the pent folk within walls Took heart and ploughed the glebe and ...
— Helen Redeemed and Other Poems • Maurice Hewlett
... understand. It is very foolish, and often suicidal, of men to correct women for going into rapture over mud flats. On that occasion, however, the only resultant harm was the conviction in the girl's heart that the presence of Paul turned mud flats into beds of asphodel. Then, just as she saw outer things through his eyes, she felt herself regarded by outer eyes through him. His rare and absurd beauty made him a cynosure whithersoever he went. London, vast and seething, could produce no such perfect Apollo. When she caught ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... Elysian brightness; the highly questionable purport and promise of which it is becoming more and more important for us to ascertain. Is that a real Elysian brightness, cries many a timid wayfarer, or the reflex of Pandemonian lava? Is it of a truth leading us into beatific Asphodel meadows, or the yellow-burning marl of ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... Shines out again, as all the angels see, Before thy saving kiss! My own, my own, Who camest to me when the world was gone, And I who looked for only God, found thee! I find thee; I am safe, and strong, and glad. As one who stands in dewless asphodel, Looks backward on the tedious time he had In the upper life,—so I, with bosom-swell, Make witness, here, between the good and bad, That Love, as strong ...
— Sonnets from the Portuguese • Browning, Elizabeth Barrett
... the bravest that are slain Shall not dissemble their surprise On waking to find valor reign, Even as on earth, in paradise; And where they sought without the sword Wide fields of asphodel fore'er, To find that the utmost reward Of daring should be still to dare. The light of heaven falls whole and white And is not shattered into dyes, The light for ever is morning light; The hills are verdured pasture-wise; The angel hosts with freshness ...
— A Boy's Will • Robert Frost
... vagabond, unvalued yellow clover, To be our tenderest language. All the years It lent a new zest to the summer hours, As each of us went scheming to surprise The other with our homely, laureate flowers. Sonnets and odes Fringing our daily roads. Can amaranth and asphodel Bring merrier laughter to your eyes? Oh, if the Blest, in their serene abodes, Keep any wistful consciousness of earth, Not grandeurs, but the childish ways of love, Simplicities of mirth, Must follow ...
— ANTHOLOGY OF MASSACHUSETTS POETS • WILLIAM STANLEY BRAITHWAITE
... woven on a Persian loom or blended in a wizard's diadem. The gold and silver of great daisies gleamed in the grass; pimpernel blue and red, mallow red and white, yellow spurge and green mignonette, blue borage and pink asphodel and parti-colored convolvulus, snap-dragon and marigold, violet and dandelion, and that crimson flower which shepherds call Pig's Face and poets call Beard of Jove for its golden change in autumn—all these and ...
— The Proud Prince • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... skulking, and one goes along the vine-rows to devour the ripe grapes, and the other brings all her cunning to bear against the scrip, and vows she will never leave the lad, till she strand him bare and breakfastless. But the boy is plaiting a pretty locust-cage with stalks of asphodel, and fitting it with reeds, and less care of his scrip has he, and of the vines, ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... actually converted into little children. Kings with crowns, popes, bishops, cardinals in hats and mitres, monks cowled and robed in conventual habiliments, are all philandering together through gardens of amaranth and asphodel towards the Grecian portico of heaven; and all these fortunate personages, whether monarchs, priests, fine ladies, or beggars, are depicted with perfectly infantine faces. To do this well lay exactly in the quaint, delicate ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... to his surprise, poor forsaken Dido. A little further on he found the home of the warriors, and held converse with his old Trojan friends. He passed by the place of doom for the wicked, Tartarus; and in the Elysian fields, full of laurel groves and meads of asphodel, he found the spirit of his father Anchises, and with him was allowed to see the souls of all their descendants, as yet unborn, who should raise the glory of their name. They are described on to the very time when the poet wrote to whom we owe all the tale of the wanderings ...
— Young Folks' History of Rome • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... convulsive resolution to obey the commands of his Maker. Obedience was joy. Holy Adam knew nothing of effort in the path of duty. It was a smooth and broad pathway, fringed with flowers, and leading into the meadows of asphodel. It did not become the "straight and narrow" way, until sin had made obedience a toil, the sense of duty a restraint, and human life a race and a fight. By apostasy, the obligation to keep the Divine law perfectly, became repulsive. It was no longer easy for man to do right; and ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
... with shade and gleam Where bloomed the fragrant asphodel, Now bleak commercially teem With signs "To Let," "To Buy," "To Sell." And Commerce holds them fierce and fell; With vulgar sport she now combines Sweet Nature's piping voice to quell. ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... in the soul of man is faith. The blossoms of passion, Gay and luxuriant flowers, are brighter and fuller of fragrance, But they beguile us, and lead us astray, and their odor is deadly. Only this humble plant can guide us here, and hereafter Crown us with asphodel flowers, that are wet ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... Greeks, who knew the gods so well, To you I burn my sacrificial fire! Again reveal the mystic hidden rune Whereby to find the slopes of asphodel— Ah, then to hear Apollo charm his lyre And see ...
— The Rose-Jar • Thomas S. (Thomas Samuel) Jones
... Cleonicus, the lovely Graces met thee going along the narrow field-path, and clasped thee close with their rose-like hands, O boy, and thou wert made all grace. Hail to thee from afar; but it is not safe, O my dear, for the dry asphodel stalk to move too ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... sun of summer beams upon the growing landscape, and, ascending some eminence, you survey the valleys covered over with corn, the hills adorned with verdure, the trees bending their abundant foliage to the gale, the flowers in "yellow meads of asphodel and amaranthine bowers," perfuming the air with their odours, you seem for a moment to inhabit regions of enchantment and perpetual beauty. A month or two intervenes—you reascend your former elevation, once more to feast the senses—to ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... lanes of liquid onyx Toward the high fire-laden altars Move the saints of Manhattan In endless pilgrimage to death, Amidst the asphodel and anemones of dawn. ...
— Precipitations • Evelyn Scott
... see the Sirens on Anthemousa, the flowery isle; three fair maidens sitting on the beach, beneath a red rock in the setting sun, among beds of crimson poppies and golden asphodel. Slowly they sung and sleepily, with silver voices, mild and clear, which stole over the golden waters, and into the hearts of all the heroes, in spite ...
— The Heroes • Charles Kingsley
... that swing with the turning of the great ring of light which lies around that land were softly chiming; and the sound of their commotion went down like dew upon the golden ways of the city, and the long alleys of blossoming trees, and the meadows of asphodel, and the curving shores of ...
— The Spirit of Christmas • Henry Van Dyke
... with the arar or citrus, and the double-thorned lotus. The juniper, wild pear, and cork trees are to be met with now and again, and the ground is for the most part a sea of flowers almost unknown to me, though I could recognise wild thyme, asphodel, and lavender amid the tamarisk and myrtle undergrowth. At intervals the forest opens, showing some large douar that was built probably on the site of a well, and there industrious village folks have reclaimed the ...
— Morocco • S.L. Bensusan
... tore out a handful of hair in his mingled hope and dread. No man knew better than the trainer that no trick would conquer Lycon this second time; and Glaucon the Fair might be nearer the fields of Asphodel than the pleasant hills by Athens. More than one man had died in the last ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... this present version. I was now in another hemisphere and the world was at war. By a happy chance I laid hold of a copy of Aliens, sent previously to a naval relative serving on the same station. Up and down the AEgean Sea, past fields of mines and fields of asphodel, past many an isle familiar in happier days to me, I took my book and my new convictions about human folly. It was a slow business, for it so chanced that my own contribution to the war involved ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... pasture. Here are cress, blue violets, potentilla, and, in the damp of the willow fence-rows, white false asphodels. I am sure we make too free use of this word FALSE in naming plants—false mallow, false lupine, and the like. The asphodel is at least no falsifier, but a true lily by all the heaven-set marks, though small of flower and run mostly to leaves, and should have a name that gives it credit for growing up in such celestial semblance. Native to the mesa meadows is a pale iris, ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin
... Angrec, Royalty Apricot Blossom, Doubt Apple, Temptation Apple Blossom, Preference Apple, Thorn, Deceitful Character Arbor Vitae, Live for me Arum (Wake Robin), Zeal Ash, Mountain, Prudence Ash Tree, Grandeur Aspen Tree, Lamentation Asphodel, My Regrets Follow Auricula, Painting Auricula (Scarlet) Avarice Austurtium, Splendour Azalea, Temperance Bachelor's Buttons, Celibacy Balm, Sympathy Balm (Gentle), Pleasantry Balm of Gilead, Cure Balsam, ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... too, of immortality in the sad, faint sweetness lingering so long in its lifeless petals. Yet this does not tell why it fills my eyes with tears and carries me in blissful thought to the banks of asphodel that border the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... flowery bed was strown With fragrant leaves and with crush'd asphodel, And sweetly still the shepherd-pipe made moan, And many a tale of Love they had to tell,— How Daphnis loved the strange, shy maiden well, And how she loved him not, and how he died, And oak-trees moan'd his dirge, and blossoms fell ...
— Helen of Troy • Andrew Lang
... dry: nothing but a tumbled bed of gray rocks,—the bare bones of a little river. But as we ascend slowly the flowers increase; wild hollyhocks, and morning-glories, and clumps of blue anchusa, and scarlet adonis, and tall wands of white asphodel. ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... may she ride at last. I on that day, a chaplet woven of dill Or rose or simple violet on my brow, Will draw the wine of Pteleas from the cask Stretched by the ingle. They shall roast me beans, And elbow-deep in thyme and asphodel And quaintly-curling parsley shall be piled My bed of rushes, where in royal ease I sit and, thinking of my darling, drain With stedfast lip the liquor to the dregs. I'll have a pair of pipers, shepherds ...
— Theocritus • Theocritus
... serpent, and ass were sacred to this god. His favourite plants were the vine, ivy, laurel, and asphodel. His sacrifices consisted of goats, probably on account of ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens |
