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Hermes   Listen
noun
Hermes  n.  
1.
(Myth.) See Mercury. Note: Hermes Trismegistus was a late name of Hermes, especially as identified with the Egyptian god Thoth. He was the fabled inventor of astrology and alchemy.
2.
(Archaeology) Originally, a boundary stone dedicated to Hermes as the god of boundaries, and therefore bearing in some cases a head, or head and shoulders, placed upon a quadrangular pillar whose height is that of the body belonging to the head, sometimes having feet or other parts of the body sculptured upon it. These figures, though often representing Hermes, were used for other divinities, and even, in later times, for portraits of human beings. Called also herma. See Terminal statue, under Terminal.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Hermes" Quotes from Famous Books



... and carver, Skilful, but feeble of heart; for they know not the lords of Olympus, Lovers of men; neither broad-browed Zeus, nor Pallas Athene, Teacher of wisdom to heroes, bestower of might in the battle; Share not the cunning of Hermes, nor list to the songs of Apollo. Fearing the stars of the sky, and the roll of the blue salt water, Fearing all things that have life in the womb of the seas and the livers, Eating no fish to ...
— Andromeda and Other Poems • Charles Kingsley

... with them, and Life with her keen imitative faculty set herself to supply the master with models. The Greeks, with their quick artistic instinct, understood this, and set in the bride's chamber the statue of Hermes or of Apollo, that she might bear children as lovely as the works of art that she looked at in her rapture or her pain. They knew that Life gains from art not merely spirituality, depth of thought and feeling, soul-turmoil or soul- peace, but that ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde

... the eruption of 79. They were Doric, but the attempt was to render them Corinthian, and, to this end, they were covered with stucco and topped with capitals that are not becoming to them. Against one of these columns still leans a statue in the form of a Hermes. Around the court is cut a small kennel to carry off the rain water, which was then caught in reservoirs. The wall along the Forum was gaily decorated with handsome paintings; one of these, probably on wood, was ...
— The Wonders of Pompeii • Marc Monnier

... before Jesus Christ; See chronology of the twelve ages; and Orpheus is of still greater antiquity. If, as is the case, the doctrine of Pythagoras and that of Orpheus are of Egyptian origin, that of Beddou goes back to the common source; and in reality the Egyptian priests recite, that Hermes as he was dying said: "I have hitherto lived an exile from my country, to which I now return. Weep not for me, I ascend to the celestial abode where each of you will follow in his turn: there God is: this life is only ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney

... spring came with its flowers. Each of their own activities also had its unseen genius. Each enclosure for flocks had its Apollo, "him of the sheepfold," who protected the flock and the shepherd; and each boundary stone its Hermes, "him of the boundary," who also watched over flocks and took charge of marches and ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies

... light, half golden, and half dusky, and full of many blended colours, where the marbles and the pictures live, sole dwellers in the deserted dwellings of princes; to come out where the oranges are all aglow in the sunshine, and the red camellias are pushing against the hoary head of the old stone Hermes, and to go down the width of the mighty steps into the gay piazza, alive with bells tolling, and crowds laughing, and drums abeat, and the flutter of carnival banners in the wind; and to get away from it all with a full heart, and ascend to see the sun ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida

... HERMES. We have received a packet from Holland for our correspondent. Will he inform us how it may be ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 72, March 15, 1851 • Various

... Ah me, what madness! How mad, then, I was when I ejected the gods on account of Socrates! But O dear Hermes, by no means be wroth with me, nor destroy me; but pardon me, since I have gone crazy through prating. And become my adviser, whether I shall bring an action and prosecute them, or whatever you think. You advise ...
— The Clouds • Aristophanes

... "The Mind unto Hermes," 16: "The Cosmos is all-formed [Pantomorphos]—not having forms external to itself, but changing them, itself within itself"; also the "Perfect Sermon," xix. 3: "The thirty-six, who have the name of Horoscopes, ...
— The Gnosis of the Light • F. Lamplugh

... Aug. O Hermes! pity me! I was, while heaven did smile, The queen of all this isle, Europe's pride, And Albion's bride; But gone my plighted lord! ah, gone is he! O ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden

... the thing; but not so radically as to prevent us, their posterity, from undoing it. They expelled the writing sufficiently to leave a field for the new manuscript, and yet not sufficiently to make the traces of the elder manuscript irrecoverable for us. Could magic, could Hermes Trismegistus, have done more? What would you think, fair reader, of a problem such as this—to write a book which should be sense for your own generation, nonsense for the next, should revive into ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various

... to sleep, ye winds, whose fitful sound Seems from some faint Aeolian harp-string caught; Seal up the hundred wakeful eyes of thought As Hermes with his lyre in sleep profound The hundred ...
— Sleep-Book - Some of the Poetry of Slumber • Various

... approval on his condemnation than I should have got from his gratitude if he had been acquitted.[40] I am very glad to hear what you say about the Hermathena. It is an ornament appropriate to my "Academia" for two reasons: Hermes is a sign common to all gymnasia, Minerva specially of this particular one. So I would have you, as you say, adorn the place with the other objects also, and the more the better. The statues which you sent me before I have not yet seen. They are in ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero

... witchcraft. It was as if the wine poured out for them had soured in the cup. The golden age had indeed come back for a while:—golden was it, or gilded only, after all? and they were too sick, or at least too serious, to carry through their parts in it. The monk Hermes was whimsically reminded of that after-thought in pagan poetry, of a Wine-god who had been in hell. Denys certainly, with all his flaxen fairness about him, was manifestly a sufferer. At first he thought of departing secretly to ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Horatio Pater

... L. L. LUCILLE, the only living descendant of Hermes, the Egyptian, who has traveled through all the known parts of the world, now makes her first appearance in Chicago. She will cast the horoscope of all callers; will tell them the events of their past life, and reveal what ...
— The Somnambulist and the Detective - The Murderer and the Fortune Teller • Allan Pinkerton

... more foolish evasions, most foolish renewals. But I have made the step, have quitted the ship of Ulysses; Quitted the sea and the shore, passed into the magical island; Yet on my lips is the moly, medicinal, offered of Hermes. I have come into the precinct, the labyrinth closes around me, Path into path rounding slyly; I pace slowly on, and the fancy, Struggling awhile to sustain the long sequences, weary, bewildered, Fain must collapse in despair; I yield, I am lost, and know nothing; ...
— Amours de Voyage • Arthur Hugh Clough

... alcove, the shelves of which were burdened with ancient volumes and with those rolls of papyrus in which was treasured up the eldest wisdom of the earth. Perhaps the most valuable work in the collection, to a bibliomaniac, was the Book of Hermes. For my part, however, I would have given a higher price for those six of the Sibyl's books which Tarquin refused to purchase, and which the virtuoso informed me he had himself found in the cave of Trophonius. ...
— A Virtuoso's Collection (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... benches and all the paraphernalia for a foot race. The first contest have just ended. The races are standing, panting after their exertions, but their friends are talking vehemently. Out in the sand, near the statue of Hermes (the patron god of gymnasia) is a dignified and self-conscious looking man in a purple edged chiton—the gymnasiarch, the official manager of the Academy. While he waits to organize a second race we can study the visitors and habitues of ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis

... hastily, in a melodious voice, quoted some scraps of guide-book. Rosamund did not find what she wanted among them. She knew already about the ruins, about the Nike of Paeonius and the Hermes of Praxiteles. So she left the young Greek to his waking dream, and possessed her soul in a patience that was not difficult. She liked to dwell in anticipation. And she felt that any secret this land was about to reveal to her would be, must ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens

... god Anubis was the son of Osiris and Nephthys, and the jackal was sacred to him. In the earliest ages even he is prominent in the nether world. He conducts the mummifying process, preserves the corpse, guards the Necropolis, and, as Hermes Psychopompos (Hermanubis), opens the way for the souls. According to Plutarch "He is the watch of the gods as the dog is ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... a frequent subject in old Roman sculpture, and there are many delineations of the birth of Bacchus by Cesarean section from the corpse of Semele. Greek mythology tells us of the birth of Bacchus in the following manner: After Zeus burnt the house of Semele, daughter of Cadmus, he sent Hermes in great haste with directions to take from the burnt body of the mother the fruit of seven months. This child, as we know, was Bacchus. Aesculapius, according to the legend of the Romans, had been excised from the belly of his dead mother, Corinis, ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould

... that shone In Aaron's breast-plate, and a stone besides Imagined rather oft than elsewhere seen, That stone, or like to that which here below Philosophers in vain so long have sought, In vain, though by their powerful art they bind Volatile Hermes, and call up unbound In various shapes old Proteus from the sea, Drained through a limbeck to his native form. What wonder then if fields and regions here Breathe forth Elixir pure, and rivers run Potable gold, when with ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton

... length James openly and angrily denounced Philip as a hypocrite, and refused longer to work with him. Thereupon the milder Philip offered the other cheek and installed a mediator, in the person of one Rawlins, a sickly, emaciated, bearded, but loyal Hermes, who thenceforth performed the multifold functions of pacificator, go-between, human telephone, and bearer of messages, documents, and what-not from one to the other for a nominal wage and the crumbs that ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking

... Yet it was found later that the Arabs, while they added much of their own to it, still were but the preservers of Greek-Hellenistic knowledge and we are convinced that the alchemists were right when they indicated in their traditions the legendary Egyptian Hermes as their ancestor. This legendary personage is really the Egyptian god Thoth, who was identified with Hermes in the time of the Ptolemies. He was honored as the Lord of the highest wisdom and it ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer

... their influences, [2539]as I have already proved out of Ptolemy, Pontanus, Lemnius, Cardan, and others as they are principal significators of manners, diseases, mutually irradiated, or lords of the geniture, &c. Ptolomeus in his centiloquy, Hermes, or whosoever else the author of that tract, attributes all these symptoms, which are in melancholy men, to celestial influences: which opinion Mercurialis de affect, lib. cap. 10. rejects; but, as I say, [2540]Jovianus Pontanus and others stiffly defend. That some are solitary, dull, heavy, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior

... who had previously opened negotiations about friendship, now made terms, sending among other gifts tigers, which were then for the first time seen by the Romans, as also, I think, by the Greeks. They likewise presented to him a boy without shoulders (like the statues of Hermes that we now see). Yet this creature in spite of his anatomy made perfect use of his feet and hands: he would stretch a bow for them, shoot missiles, and sound the trumpet,—how, I do not know; I merely record ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol. 4 • Cassius Dio

... enigmatical characters an extensive literature once existed, of which the celebrated books of Hermes were perhaps a corruption or a relic; a literature embracing compositions on music, astronomy, cosmogony, geography, medicine, anatomy, chemistry, magic, and many other subjects that have amused the ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper

... the little bottle that I have told you of before. It was distilled of his own blood, according to the method of Hermes Trismegistus.) ...
— The History of Richard Raynal, Solitary • Robert Hugh Benson

... as with the Hermetic philosophers of ancient Egypt, all things were interrelated by correspondence, analogy, and similitude. "As above, so below," is the teaching on the Smaragdine Table of Hermes. Therefore, whatever happened to the divine Epinoia, the Supreme Mother, among the Aeons, happened also to the human Spiritual Soul or Monadic Essence, in its evolution through all stages of manifestation. This Soul is shut into all forms and bodies, ...
— Simon Magus • George Robert Stow Mead

... godhead benignant I order The blight which may blacken the bloom of the trees. Far from thy border, and far from thy dwelling, Be the hot blast which shrivels the bud in its swelling, The seed-rotting taint, and the creeping disease. Thy flocks be still doubled, thy seasons be steady, And when Hermes is near thee, thy hand be still ready The ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley

... a suspicion that the Griffin was a claustral thing and a mystery not to be blurted out. I knew that all the secrets of Hermes may be reached by careful and long-drawn words, and that the simplest of things will not be told one if one asks too precipitately; so I began to lay siege to his mind by the method of ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc

... one as soon as might be, at the rendezvous of his tribe, gave notice to the hundreds, and summoned the muster which appeared for the most part upon good horses, and already indifferently well armed; as to instance in one for all, the tribe of Nubia, where Hermes de Caduceo, lord orator of the same, after a short salutation and a hearty welcome, applied himself to his business, ...
— The Commonwealth of Oceana • James Harrington

... upper rooms in the Iliad we have to abolish II. 514, where Astyoche meets her divine lover in her upper chamber, and XVI. 184, where Polymele celebrates her amour with Hermes "in the upper chambers." The places where these two passages occur, Catalogue (Book II.) and the Catalogue of the Myrmidons (Book XVI.) are, indeed, both called "late," but the author of the latter knows the early law of bride-price, which is supposed to be unknown to the authors ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang

... was informed that we intended to remain strictly neutral, the decision was also come to to inform the Taepings of this fact. Therefore in April, 1853, before the army had left for the northern campaign, Sir George Bonham sailed for Nankin in the "Hermes" man-of-war. On the twenty-seventh of that month the vessel anchored off Nankin, and several interviews were held with the Taeping Wangs, of whom the Northern King was at this time the most influential. The negotiations lasted a week, and they had no result. It was soon made apparent that ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger

... Peter; "it will be over soon, and we must set out. The dead will not need to tarry. Look at that trail of fire along the avenue; dost see yon line of sparkles, like a rocket's tail? That's the path the corpse will take. St. Hermes's flickering fire, Robin Goodfellow's dancing light, or the blue flame of the corpse-candle, which I saw flitting to the churchyard last week, was not so pretty a sight—ha, ha! You asked me for a song a moment ago—you shall ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth

... aided them in their combats; but the familiar genii who belonged to them; to whom also, as their principal support, Pythagoras owes his eminence, and Socrates and Numa Pompilius and the elder Scipio. And, as some fancy, Marius, and Octavianus the first, who took the name of Augustus. And Hermes Trismegistus, and Apollonius of Tyana, and Plotinus, who ventured upon some very mystical discussions of this point; and endeavoured to show by profound reasoning what is the original cause why these genii, being thus connected with the souls of mortals, protect ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus

... way again,' said Alvan, without looking back. 'That tree belongs to a plantation of the under world; its fellows grow in the wood across Acheron, and that tree has looked into the ghastliness of the flood and seen itself. Hecate and Hermes know about it. Phoebus cannot light it. That tree stands for Death blooming. We think it sinister, but down there it is a homely tree. Down there! When do we go? The shudder in that tree is the air exchanging between Life and Death—the ghosts going and coming: ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... of the occult teachings possessed by the world which have been so closely guarded as the fragments of the Hermetic Teachings which have come down to us over the tens of centuries which have elapsed since the lifetime of its great founder, Hermes Trismegistus, the "scribe of the gods," who dwelt in old Egypt in the days when the present race of men was in its infancy. Contemporary with Abraham, and, if the legends be true, an instructor of that venerable sage, Hermes was, and is, the Great Central Sun ...
— The Kybalion - A Study of The Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece • Three Initiates

... advice was good and helped her to endure the fires of this pitiless sky. She liked this incisive, shrewd, plain-spoken man—often indeed sharp and abrupt in his freedom—and he appreciated her bright, natural ways. Now and then Martina even succeeded in winning a smile from "Hermes Trismegistus," who was "generally as solemn as though there was no such thing on earth as a jest," and in spurring him to a rejoinder which showed that this dolorous being had a particularly ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... Mercury (Hermes) was the son of Jupiter and Maia. He presided over commerce, wrestling, and other gymnastic exercises, even over thieving, and everything, in short, which required skill and dexterity. He was the messenger of Jupiter, and wore a winged ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch

... manhood is enchanting, And flesh is deified; Artemis is virginity, And Longing is a Hermes; And here, and every hour, Aphrodite rises bare, A marvel to the Sea-Things, And to the world, ...
— Life Immovable - First Part • Kostes Palamas

... to this list the English cruiser "Hermes" near Dover, the "Niger" off the Downs of the English coast; the Russian cruiser "Pallada" in the Baltic; and a great number of other English torpedo boats, torpedo boat destroyers, as well as auxiliary cruisers and transports. All this was achieved before the end of 1914. Unfortunately I am ...
— The Journal of Submarine Commander von Forstner • Georg-Guenther von Forstner

... Caligula's galleys, which still lie buried in the deepest depth of the water; on the rock of Nemi, and the fortress-like Orsini villa; on the Alban Mount itself, where it cut the clear sky. I presently came up with Mr. James and Aristodemo, who led us on serenely, a young Hermes in the transfiguring light. One almost looked for the winged feet and helmet of the messenger god! Mr. James paused—his eyes first on the boy, then on the surrounding scene. "Aristodemo!" he murmured, smiling, and more to himself than me, his voice caressing the word. "What ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... very truth, Agesias, thy mother's ancestors dwelling by the borders of Kyllene did piously and oft offer up prayer and sacrifice to Hermes, herald of the gods, who hath to his keeping the strife and appointment of games, and doeth honour to Arcadia the nurse of goodly men,—then surely he, O son of Sostratos, with his loud-thundering sire, is the accomplisher of this ...
— The Extant Odes of Pindar • Pindar

... befel him in February which for a time put him in high good-humour. He bought at York—very cheaply—a small bronze Hermes, which some fifteenth-century documents in his own possession, purchased from a Florentine family the year before, enabled him to identify with great probability as the work of one of the rarest and most famous of the Renaissance sculptors. He told no one outside the ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... imaginative people, in the mental creation of some sort of daemon or god. This daemon, or god, was more and more held responsible on his own account for the food-supply and the order of the Horae, or Seasons; so we get the notion that this daemon or god himself led in the Seasons; Hermes dances at the head of the Charites, or an Eiresione is carried to Helios and the Horae. The thought then arises that this man-like daemon who rose from a real King of the May, must himself be approached and dealt with as a man, bargained with, sacrificed ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison

... painful remorses, with shrinkings of soul, and relentings, Foolish delays, more foolish evasions, most foolish renewals. But I am in for it now,—I have quitted the ship of Ulysses; Yet on my lips is the moly, medicinal, offered of Hermes. I have passed into the precinct, the labyrinth closes around me, Path into path rounding slyly; I pace slowly on, and the fancy, Struggling awhile to sustain the long sequences, weary, bewildered, Fain must collapse in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various

... and song and silver speech, Condemned to serve a mortal for his sin To Zeus in sending violent darts of death, A raising hand irreverent, against The one-eyed forgers of the thunderbolt. For shepherd's crook he held the living rod Of twisted serpents, later Hermes' wand. Him sought the king, discovering soon hard by, Idle as one in nowise bound to time, Watching the restless grasses blow and wave, The sparkle of the sun upon the stream, Regretting nothing, living with the hour: For him, who had his light and song within, Was naught that did not shine, and ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus

... daunted her; she turned to the boys, but she only saw one—the little hatless, coatless scarecrow with the perfect features And arresting grace, who stood out among his smug companions with the singularly vivid incongruity of a Greek Hermes in the central hall of Madame Tussaud's waxwork exhibition. Fascinated, she strayed down the line toward him. She halted, looked for a second or two into a pair of liquid black eyes and then blushed in agonized shyness. She stared at the beautiful boy, and the beautiful boy stared at her, ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke

... Thinking about the Hermes of Olympia, and the fact that so far he is pretty well the only Greek statue which historical evidence unhesitatingly gives us as an original masterpiece, it struck me that, could one become really familiar with him, could eye and soul learn all the fulness of his perfection, we should have ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee

... to the earth to fetch fair Io thence; If Venus in the curled locks was tied Of proud Adonis not of gentle kind; If Tellus for a shepherd's favour died, The favour cruel Love to her assigned; If Heaven's winged herald Hermes had His heart enchanted with a country maid; If poor Pygmalion was for beauty mad; If gods and men have all for beauty strayed: I am not then ashamed to be included 'Mongst those that love, and ...
— Elizabethan Sonnet Cycles - Idea, by Michael Drayton; Fidessa, by Bartholomew Griffin; Chloris, by William Smith • Michael Drayton, Bartholomew Griffin, and William Smith

... hiatu with its wide-open mouth. 203. Cyllenes, i.e. Mt. Cyllene (Zyria), the highest point in the Peloponnesus, on the borders of Arcadia and Achaia, where Hermes is said to have been born: hence styled Cyllenius. 209. tergore ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce

... meadows of the celestial Nile that wound through the Milky Way. To reach it a passport, vise'd by Osiris, sufficed. The first draft of that passport was held to have been written on tablets of alabaster, in letters of lapis lazuli, by an eidolon of Ra, who, known in Egypt as Thoth, elsewhere was Hermes Thrice ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus

... lake and morass near Tyana were ascribed to the wrath of Zeus and Hermes, who, having visited the cities which formerly stood there, and having been refused shelter by all the inhabitants save Philemon and Baucis, rewarded their benefactors, but sunk the wicked cities beneath the lake ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White

... "Dialogues of the Dead. X. Charon, Hermes, and a number of Ghosts." Hermes required Lampichus to leave behind him his pride, ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift

... darkness came as a consequence, even as the shadow follows the body, and that this is nothing but privation. Such a thesis would clear this ancient author of the errors the Greeks imputed to him. His great learning caused the Orientals to compare him with the Mercury or Hermes of the Egyptians and Greeks; just as the northern peoples compared their Wodan or Odin to this same Mercury. That is why Mercredi (Wednesday), or the day of Mercury, was called Wodansdag by the northern peoples, ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz

... the opalescent over-tones of an unearthly composition. Is this Spring, this tender, tremulous virgin whose right hand, deprecatingly raised, signals as a conductor at the head of an invisible orchestra its rhythms? Hermes, supremely impassive, hand on thigh, plucks the fruit as the eternal trio of maidens with woven paces tread the measures of a dance whose music we but overhear. Garlanded with blossoms, a glorious girl keeps time with the pulsing atmospheric ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker

... Encyclopaedia Britannica, thus notices this derivation: "The generally received opinion among alchymistical writers was, that chemistry originated in Egypt; and the honour of the invention has been unanimously conferred on Hermes Trismegistus. He is by some supposed to be the same person with Chanaan, the son of Ham, whose son Mizraim first occupied and peopled Egypt. Plutarch informs us that Egypt was sometimes called Chemia: this name is supposed to be derived from Chanaan. Hence it was inferred that ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 211, November 12, 1853 • Various

... about him a curious, and almost godlike air of simplicity and native directness. He reminded her of an apparition, the young Hermes. ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence

... prisoners were taken to Venice, but Louis XII claimed them, and they were given up. Thus the King of France found himself master of Ludovico Sforza and of Ascania, of a legitimate nephew of the great Francesco Sforza named Hermes, of two bastards named Alessandro and Cortino, and of Francesco, son of the unhappy Gian Galeazza who had been ...
— The Borgias - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... care of steers, had ne'er dwelt near the white stream, where are the fountains of the Nymphs, and the meadow flourishing with blooming flowers, and roseate flowers and hyacinths for Goddesses to cull. Where once on a time came Pallas, and artful Venus, and Juno, and Hermes, the messenger of Jove; Venus indeed, vaunting herself in charms, and Pallas in the spear, and Juno in the royal nuptials of king Jove, [these came] to a hateful judgment and strife concerning beauty; but my death, my death, O virgins, bearing glory indeed to the Greeks, ...
— The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides

... 'slams.' He is as debonair and inconsequential as a young Hermes to whom only the serious lessons of life can teach sympathy and true insight, ...
— Poet Lore, Volume XXIV, Number IV, 1912 • Various

... son of Publius, of the Galban tribe, the proconsul, to the magistrates, senate, and people of the Mileslans, sendeth greeting. Prytanes, the son of Hermes, a citizen of yours, came to me when I was at Tralles, and held a court there, and informed me that you used the Jews in a way different from my opinion, and forbade them to celebrate their Sabbaths, ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus

... it with delight. Sad Demeter had in a single night Removed her sombre garments! and mine eyes Beheld a 'broidered mantle in pale dyes Thrown o'er her throbbing bosom. Sweet and clear There fell the sound of music on mine ear. And from the South came Hermes, he whose lyre One time appeased the great Apollo's ire. The rescued maid, Persephone, by the hand He led to waiting Demeter, and cheer And light and beauty once more ...
— Poems of Passion • Ella Wheeler Wilcox

... Moralization. John Baptist begged her to inform him whether it were true, as had been stated, that Jupiter had just sent Mercury to the Netherlands. The phantom, correcting his mistake, observed that the king of gods and men had not sent Hermes but the Archduke Ernestus, beloved of the three Graces, favourite of the nine Muses, and, in addition to these advantages, nephew and brother-in-law of the King of Spain, to the relief of the suffering provinces. The Netherlands, it was true, for their religious infidelity, had justly incurred ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... Hercules. The great child-hero was the son of the god Jupiter and Alcmena, daughter of Electryon, King of Argos. He was exposed by his mother, but the goddess Athene persuaded Hera to give him her breast (another version says Hermes placed Hercules on the breast of Hera, while she slept) and the infant Hercules drew so lustily of the milk that he caused pain to the goddess, who snatched him away. But Hercules had drunk of the milk of a goddess and had ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain

... lamp, at midnight hour, Be seen in some high lonely tower, Where I may oft outwatch the Bear, With thrice great Hermes. ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock

... father's ashes." Here the young Chian paused. "Alas, alas!" he murmured, smiting his breast, "and I was not at hand to fix over thy doors the sacred branch, to give thee the parting kiss, and receive into my lips thy latest breath. May Hermes, O father, have ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton

... important adventure befel Odysseus. The cannibals destroyed all his fleet, save one ship, with which he made his escape to the Isle of Circe. Here the enchantress turned part of the crew into swine, but Odysseus, by aid of the god Hermes, redeemed them, and became the lover of Circe. This adventure, like the story of the Cyclops, is a fairy tale of great antiquity. Dr. Gerland, in his Alt Griechische Marchen in der Odyssee, his shown that the ...
— DONE INTO ENGLISH PROSE • S. H. BUTCHER, M.A.

... that when the teacher comes all the world will listen and obey. It seems to me that teacher after teacher has uttered the truth—Hermes, Zoroaster, Buddha, Confucius, Orpheus, Jesus—and that the trouble is not lack of teachers but lack of disciples. In the teachings of Jesus Christ, the world has a model wherewith to mould the old order of hate and selfishness ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby

... turned upon him in an attitude of indignant and haughty surprise. To the quick fancy of the girl it seemed as if some disguised rustic god had been startled by the challenge of a mortal. Under an oilskin hat, like the petasus of Hermes, pushed back from his white forehead, crisp black curls were knotted around a head whose beardless face was perfect as a cameo cutting. In the close-fitting blue woolen jersey under his open jacket the clear outlines and youthful grace of his upper figure were revealed as clearly as ...
— The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh and Other Tales • Bret Harte

... and much more important character,—one infinitely more interesting to my beautiful Lady of the Shipyards than any grandfather gondolier or staid old painter who ever lived. This young gentleman is twenty-one; has a head like the Hermes, a body like the fauns, and winsome, languishing eyes with a light in their depths which have set the heart of every girl along his native Giudecca pitapatting morning, noon, and night. He enjoys the distinguished name of Vittorio Borodini, and is the descendant of ...
— The Veiled Lady - and Other Men and Women • F. Hopkinson Smith

... was a wonderful hero, the master of every art, the victor over a hundred monsters. He had told her of his adventure with Phaon—not calling names, lest disagreeable consequences ensue—and Artemisia dreamed of him as the cleverest creature on the earth, able to outwit Hermes in subtlety. Agias had found out when Pratinas was likely to be away from home—and that worthy Hellene, be it said, never declined an invitation to dine with a friend—and Agias timed his visits accordingly. He taught Artemisia to play the cithera and to sing, and she made ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis

... a long glorious day, unhappy is that mortal whom the Hermes of a cosmopolitan hotel, white-chokered and white-waistcoated, marshals to the Hades of the table-d'hote. The world has often been compared to an inn; but on my way down to this common meal I have, not unfrequently, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds

... Petersburgh, and converses with the Empress— Persuades the Russians and Turks to cease cutting one another's throats, and in concert cut a canal across the Isthmus of Suez—The Baron discovers the Alexandrine Library, and meets with Hermes Trismegistus—Besieges Seringapatam, and challenges Tippoo Sahib to single combat—They fight—The Baron receives some wounds to his face, but at last vanquishes the tyrant—The Baron returns to Europe, and raises the hull ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe

... Hermes cunning Poor Argus funning, He made him drink like a buffer; To his great surprise Sew'd up all his eyes, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 380, July 11, 1829 • Various

... is too useful with the crowd to lead to the conviction that anything one could say would lead to its disuse. In the dialogue of Lucian's to which we have referred, and after the theist has been refuted by the Atheist, Hermes consoles the chief deity, Zeus, by telling him that even though a few may have been won over by the arguments of the Atheist, the vast majority, "the whole mass of uneducated Greeks and the Barbarians everywhere," still remain firm in their faith. And although Zeus replies that he ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen

... of them in plaster. The statues are generally marred and broken, but enough remains to show us the wonderful beauty of the artist's work. Among the most famous are the Venus, of Melos (or "de Milo"), which stands in a special room in a museum called the Louvre in Paris; the Hermes in the museum of Olympia in Greece; and the figures from the Parthenon in the ...
— Introductory American History • Henry Eldridge Bourne and Elbert Jay Benton

... enthusiastic; he does not set himself up as a prophet; he does not say that he is inspired by the gods. Thus I shall not put in the rank of philosophers either the ancient Zarathustra, or Hermes, or the ancient Orpheus, or any of those legislators of whom the nations of Chaldea, Persia, Syria, Egypt and Greece boasted. Those who styled themselves children of the gods were the fathers of imposture; and if they used lies for the teaching of truths, they were unworthy of teaching them; they ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire

... is to him, as to many people, more than entirely the enigma of an enigma, Hermes Trismegistus, or the mediaeval Prester John. Not only are most people unable to solve the enigma, but they have no idea of what it is that they are to solve. I have to inform Schlosser that there are three separate questions about Junius, of which he has evidently ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey

... I cannot bring it out. It may sound like a joke, but I do feel something corresponding to that tale of the Destinies falling in love with Hermes.' ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli

... the earth-clods And themselves come forth for witness In their heavy marble togas;— Where the goddesses of Delos In the frescoed halls are dancing, As two thousand years before now;— Pantheon and Coliseum In their spacious fate have sheltered All the world's swift evolution;— Where a Hermes from that corner Saw the footsteps firm of Cato, Pontifex in the procession,— Saw then Nero as Apollo Lifted up take sacrifices, Saw then Gregory, the wrathful, Riding forth to rule in spirit Over all the known world's kingdoms,— Saw then Cola di Rienzi Homage pay to freedom's ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson

... themselves, tend to prove that the author is not always very scrupulous in speaking of things he has not studied. A purist so severe as to write "Kelt" for "Celt" ought not to call Mercury, originally a very different personage from Hermes, one of "the legendary authors of Greek civilisation" (p. 43); and we do not believe that anybody who had read the writings of the two primates could call Bramhall "an inferior counterpart of Laud" (p. 105). In a loftier mood, and ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton

... operations, when we see the seal of an army set to them. It was an ancient way of celebrating the memory of such as deserved well of the state, to afford them that kind of statuary representation, which was then called Hermes, which was the head and shoulders of a man standing upon a cube, but those shoulders without arms and hands. Altogether it figured a constant supporter of the state, by his counsel; but in this hieroglyphic, which they made without hands, they pass their consideration no farther but that the counsellor ...
— Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions - Together with Death's Duel • John Donne

... great tragedian is [Greek: theos suggenaes]. The kindred deities come to him, some to soothe, to condole; others to give weak, yet friendly, counsels of submission; others to tempt, or insult. The most prominent of the latter, and the most odious to the imprisoned and insulated 'Nous', is Hermes, the impersonation of interest with the entrancing and serpentine 'Caduceus', and, as interest or motives intervening between the reason and its immediate self-determinations, with the antipathies to the [Greek: nomos autonomos]. The Hermes impersonates the eloquence of cupidity, ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge

... divides this panel from the next. Since in classic times a herm, or hermes, was used to mark distances on the roads, so here the hermes is used to mark ...
— Palaces and Courts of the Exposition • Juliet James

... his picturesque Oriental costume, like another Mohini, the Arabian poisoner-in-chief of the Gibraltar Toxicological Department, who, after some honourable assurances that the Bible was not true, departed transcendentally as he came. This personage subsequently proved to be the demon Hermes. Even when he merely masonified, the doctor had unheard-of experiences in magic. For example, at Golden Square, in the west central district of this wicked city, an address which we have heard of before, ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite

... table, the curtains of the mullioned windows were of a warm dark blue. And whatever in the room was not blue seemed to be white, or wood in its natural colour, or polished brass. Books ran round the room in low white book-cases. In one corner a pure white Hermes stood on a pedestal with tiny wings outspread. There was only one picture, an excellent copy of "Rembrandt's mother." The windows looked out to the garden, now veiled by the dusk of evening. Tea was on a little table close ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole

... my lamp at midnight hour Be seen in some high lonely tower, Where I may oft outwatch the Bear, Or thrice-great Hermes, and unsphere The ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... resort of mirth, Save the cricket on the hearth, Or the bellman's drowsy charm, To bless the doors from nightly harm. Or let my lamp at midnight hour Be seen on some high lonely tower, Where I may oft out-watch the Bear With thrice-great Hermes, or unsphere The spirit of Plato, to unfold What worlds, or what vast regions hold The immortal mind, that hath forsook Her mansion in this fleshly nook; And of those demons that are found In fire air, flood, or under ground, Whose power hath a true consent ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous

... my Hermes, as he led me to the lower regions, had had a little grog, but I said nothing, and followed him. One hundred and five was on the port side, well aft. There was nothing remarkable about the state-room. The lower berth, like most of those upon the Kamtschatka, ...
— The Upper Berth • Francis Marion Crawford

... Fair order and beauty establish their throne; For order, and beauty, and just regulation, Support all the works of this ample creation. For this, in compassion to mortals below, The gods, their peculiar favour to show, Sent Hermes to Bath in the shape of a beau: That grandson of Atlas came down from above To bless all the regions of pleasure and love; To lead the fair nymph thro' the various maze, Bright beauty to marshal, his glory and praise; To govern, ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton

... physical bankruptcy. Its name in ancient Caria denotes its seaside-resort location, Hali-Karnas-Sos meaning literally "Karnassus-by-the-sea," like Boulogne-sur-mer. The city was under the protection of Hermes and Aphrodite, whose temples were near each other. Human nature in the days of Halicarnassus did not much differ from human nature at Monte Carlo or Baden-Baden. The baths had a number of young and handsome eunuchs who waited on the old, ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino

... statues of that goddess, of her daughter Persephone, and of Iacchus, all executed by Praxiteles; and beyond were several porticoes leading from the city gates to the outer Ceramicus, while the intervening space was occupied by various temples, the Gymnasium of Hermes, and the house of Polytion, the most ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker

... you wrong, Young fellow from Socrates' land? — You, like a Hermes so lissome and strong Fresh from the Master Praxiteles' hand? So you're of Spartan birth? Descended, perhaps, from one of the band — Deathless in story and song — Who combed their long hair at Thermopylae's pass? Ah, I forget the straits, alas! More tragic ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse

... both in the "Ilias" and "Odusseia," gives his readers frequent glimpses into the halls of Olympus; for messengers are continually flashing to and fro, like meteors, between the throne of Zeus and the earth. Sometimes it is Hermes sandalled with down; sometimes it is wind-footed Iris, who is winged with the emerald plumes of the rainbow; and sometimes it is Oneiros, or a Dream, that glides down to earth, hooded and veiled, through the shadow of night, bearing the behests ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various

... harmonies of eight, would give the formula nine meaning man's supremacy is expressed in his body. The importance of working round to this famous nine will be clear when we reflect that, according to the Kabbala and the lost sacred book of Hermes Trismegistus—the Pimandra, doubtless, which he is represented, on the floor of Siena Cathedral, as offering to a Jew and a Gentile—nine represents the sun and all beautiful bright things that draw their influence from it, as the gleam of beaten gold, the rustle of silken stuffs, the smell ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)

... or the 'ideas' which 'represent' them. They can be stuck together or taken apart, but all the words which express relations, categories, and the like, are in themselves meaningless. The special objects of his scorn are 'Hermes' Harris, and Monboddo, who had tried to defend Aristotle against Locke. Monboddo had asserted that 'every kind of relation' is a pure 'idea of the intellect' not to be apprehended by sense.[149] If so, according to Tooke, it would be ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen

... Chaos old; Before her, Fancy's gilded clouds decay, And all its varying rainbows die away; Wit shoots in vain its momentary fires, The meteor drops, and in a flash expires. As, one by one, at dread Medea's strain The sick'ning stars fade off the ethereal plain; As Argus' eyes, by Hermes' wand oppress'd, Closed one by one to everlasting rest;— Thus, at her fell approach and secret might, Art after Art goes out, and all is night. See skulking Faith to her old cavern fled, Mountains of casuistry heaped o'er her ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray

... Zeus. Hermes, who is that calling out from Attica? there, on the lower slopes of Hymettus—a grimy squalid fellow in a smock-frock; he is bending over a spade or something; but he has a tongue in his head, and is not afraid to use it. He must be a philosopher, ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata

... that a man of genius should be so seriously wanting in appreciation of sculpture as to think with the centre of his brain, that an actor standing, his hand on his hip, could fill the place hitherto occupied in the mind by, let us say, the Hermes of Praxiteles. Yet this idea still obtained at Bayreuth, and Rosa Sucher walked about, her arms raised and posed above her head, in the conventional, statuesque attitude designed for the ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore

... never been to hear the fifty-drachma course of Prodicus; and having only attended the single-drachma course, he is not competent to give an opinion on such matters. When Cratylus denies that Hermogenes is a true name, he supposes him to mean that he is not a true son of Hermes, because he is never in luck. But he would like to have an open council ...
— Cratylus • Plato

... even our proficiencies are deciduous and evanescent. So here with these exquisite pieces the XVIIth, XVIIIth, and IVth of the present collection. You will perhaps never excel them; I should think the "Hermes," never. Well, you will do something else, and of that I ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... promoting his glory. I met a Dr. King in Simon's Bay, of the 'Cambrian' frigate, one of our class-mates in the Andersonian. This frigate, by the way, saluted us handsomely when we sailed out. We have a man-of-war to help us (the 'Hermes'), but the lazy muff is far behind. He is, however, to ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie

... that the Athenians would take all the Syracusans. Those oracles which made against the project, people dared not mention, for fear of saying words of ill-omen. Yet even the most obvious portents would not turn them from their purpose, such as the mutilation of all the Hermae, or statues of Hermes, in Athens, in a single night, except only one, which is called the Hermes of Andokides, which was erected by the tribe AEgeis, and stands before the house in which Andokides lived at that time. A man likewise leaped upon the ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch

... delineating his paunch in that one soft summary curve, and echoing it in the curve of the wine-skin that swells around him. Himself, as a living man, were too loathsome for words; but here, thanks to Hokusai, he is not less admirable than Pheidias' Hermes, or the Discobolus himself. Yes! Swathed in his abominable surplusage of bulk, he is as fair as any statue of astricted god or athlete that would suffer not ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm

... merchants pass by the kingdom of Persia, and go to a city that is Clept Hermes, for Hermes the philosopher founded it. And after that they pass an arm of the sea, and then they go to another city that is clept Golbache. And there they find merchandises, and of popinjays, as great plenty as men find here of geese. And if they will ...
— The Travels of Sir John Mandeville • Author Unknown

... or Moro Reef, Pearl and Hermes Reef, Gambia Bank, and Johnston or Cornwallis Island are also claimed as Hawaiian possessions, but there is some obscurity as to the dates of acquisition, and it is of record in the Foreign Office articles ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead

... preserved with him. The traditions of Rhodes only supposed the Telchines, those of Crete Sasion, to have escaped the cataclysm. In Samothracia the same character was attributed to Saon, said to be the son of Zeus or of Hermes. ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly

... PHILIP and to remember more interesting matters.] I fancied Hermes would come in an easy winner. He came in nowhere. Nonpareil was ridden by Henslow—he's a rotten bad ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: The New York Idea • Langdon Mitchell

... his awful figure raised; High in his hand the golden sceptre blazed; The golden sceptre, of celestial flame, By Vulcan formed, from Jove to Hermes came: To Pelops he the immortal gift resign'd; The immortal gift great Pelops ...
— The Story of Troy • Michael Clarke

... the end of removing evil. Look, too, at Paul at Athens, surrounded by heathen temples, statues and altars. He does not proceed to demonstrate to the curious multitude that the philosophies of Zeno or Epicurus are wrong; or that the worship of Hermes or Athene is absurd. He throws out at once, bold and stern as a mountain headland, the assertion of the Divine unity, and follows it up with the doctrines of salvation through Christ, the resurrection, and the ...
— Amusement: A Force in Christian Training • Rev. Marvin R. Vincent.

... 'root of Baaras' over again. Gerarde further holds it to be the identical mandragoras of the Greeks, and called Circaea because it was used by Circe for love-potions and enchantments. If this be so, then what was the 'moly' given to Odysseus by Hermes wherewith to counteract the charms of Circe? Was it a totally different plant, or was it merely the same applied on the homoeopathic principle? Mr. Andrew Lang thinks they cannot be the same, because the 'moly' is described ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor

... language, with an eloquent oration that soon gathered them under my control; and thereafter I set a hundred of them at the pleasant task of trying to push the train for Olympia on its way to take me to the Hermes of Praxiteles. I knew no word of their language, nor did they of mine; but they understood that that train should be started, if human force were sufficient to help the cars upon their way: and finally, when the engine puffed and snorted with ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various

... Phoreus and Ceto were the parents of the Gorgons — Stheno, Euryale. and Medusa, of whom the latter alone was mortal, (Hesiod. "Theogony", 276.) Phorcus was a son of Pontus and Gaia (sea and land), ibid, 287. (21) The scimitar lent by Hermes (or Mercury) to Perseus for the purpose; with which had been slain Argus the guardian of Io (Conf. "Prometheus vinctus", 579.) Hermes was born in a cave in Mount Cyllene in Arcadia. (22) The idea seems to ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan

... the middle of the city to the sepulchres. There he with his own hands draws water from the well, washes the head-stones of the graves, and anoints them with oil. After this he cuts the throat of the bull, places his bones on a funeral pile, and with prayer to Zeus, and Hermes who conducts men's souls into the nether world, he calls on the brave men who died for Greece, to come to the feast and drink the libations of blood. Next he mixes a large bowl of wine and water, pours out a ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long

... day, standing beside the writing-table in the Chilworth Street study, with David's portrait in her hand. It usually stood there, in a silver frame—a coloured photograph of a young man of thirty, stupid, and beautiful as the Praxitelean Hermes, resplendent in the gold and blue and scarlet of a crack Dragoon Regiment. Owen stood upon the hearthrug, for once in Mildred's company, and not thinking of Mildred. And with tears rising in her round, pretty, foolish eyes the girl looked from the face and figure enclosed ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves

... it God. People three thousand years ago called it Mercury or Hermes. Both mean the same thing,—mere words to designate an unknown quality. Where are you going? Does your ...
— Bebee • Ouida

... bounds from the earth, as if his entrails were hairs; le cheval volant, the Pegasus, chez les narines de feu! When I bestride him, I soar, I am a hawk. he trots the air; the earth sings when he touches it; the basest horn of his hoof is more musical than the pipe of Hermes. ...
— The Life of King Henry V • William Shakespeare [Tudor edition]

... constantly illustrated in daily conversation. The word [Greek text], hymn, had not originally a religious sense: it merely meant a lay. Nobody calls the Theocritean idylls on Heracles and the Dioscuri "hymns," but they are quite as much "hymns" (in our sense) as the "hymn" on Aphrodite, or on Hermes. ...
— The Homeric Hymns - A New Prose Translation; and Essays, Literary and Mythological • Andrew Lang

... almost as bad as too little. In the preface of the dictionary of the French Academy, there are, as it is computed by an able French critic, no less than sixteen faults; and in Harris, the celebrated grammarian's dedication of his Hermes, there is one bull, and almost as many faults as lines. It appears as if the most precise and learned writers sometimes, like the ladies in one of Congreve's plays, "run into the danger to avoid ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth

... gradual in its development. The suggestion that a book, especially a novel, was translated from the English was an assurance of its receiving consideration, and many original German novels were published under the guise of English translations. Hermes roguishly avoids downright falsehood, and yet avails himself of this popular trend by describing his "Miss Fanny Wilkes" upon the title page as "So gut als aus dem Englischen bersetzt," and printing "so ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer

... eve of St. John, the cereal vase, ornamented with ribbons, is exposed on a balcony, decorated with garlands and flags. Formerly, also, a little image in female attire, or phallic emblems moulded in clay, such as were exhibited in the feasts of Hermes, were placed among the blades of corn; but these representations have been so severely denounced by the Church, that they are fallen into disuse. The young men flock in crowds to witness the spectacle and attend the maidens who come out to grace the feast. A great ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester

... heads spike the clerestory of the Duomo, you would look down upon a sea of pictures (by the best pavement-artists in the world)—the Massacre of the Innocents like a patch of dry blood by the altar-steps, a winking Madonna in the Capella del Voto thronged with worshippers, Hermes Trismegistus, a freaksome wizard, by the West door, and a gilded array of the great world smiling and debonnair in the sacristy. Not far off is Sodoma's lovely Catherine fainting under the sweet dolour of her spousals. Are you for the White or the ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett

... sent you the Play till Night had I thought you would sit up that same night to read it. Indeed, I had put it away for the Night Post: but my old Hermes came in to say he was going into Town to market, and so he took it ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble (1871-1883) • Edward FitzGerald

... That dance projected the Megistos Kouros, the greatest of youths, who is the incarnation of spring or the return of life, and lies at the back of so many of the most gracious shapes of the classical pantheon. The Kouros appears as Dionysus, as Apollo, as Hermes, as Ares: in our clearest and most detailed piece of evidence he actually appears with the characteristic history ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray

... we read in the Acts of the Apostles, actually thought Barnabas and Paul were Zeus and Hermes, and brought oxen and garlands to offer them the sacrifices appropriate to those deities. Peisistratus obtained rule over Athens by dressing a stately woman, by the name of Phye, as Athene, and passing off her commands ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger

... and others besides these which I shall mention, the Hellenes have adopted from the Egyptians; but to make, as they do, the images of Hermes with the phallos they have learnt not from the Egyptians but from the Pelasgians, the custom having been received by the Athenians first of all the Hellenes and from these by the rest; for just at the time when the Athenians were beginning to rank among the Hellenes, the Pelasgians became dwellers ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 1(of 2) • Herodotus

... harbor, was defended by Fort Barrancas, six miles from the town. Before it lay eight English men-of-war at anchor, the source of military supplies for the fort, on which floated the flags of both England and Spain. The fleet was in command of Captain Lord Percy, whose flagship was the "Hermes," while Colonel Nichols commanded the troops. This latter boastful and imprudent officer was foolish enough to issue a proclamation to the inhabitants of Louisiana and Kentucky to take up arms against their country. A body of Indians were also drilled in the service of the British, so far as ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XII • John Lord

... maketh mentioun, He saith right thus, withouten any lie; "There may no man mercury mortify, But* it be with his brother's knowledging." *except Lo, how that he, which firste said this thing, Of philosophers father was, Hermes; He saith, how that the dragon doubteless He dieth not, but if that he be slain With his brother. And this is for to sayn, By the dragon, Mercury, and none other, He understood, and Brimstone by his brother, That out of Sol and Luna were y-draw.* *drawn, ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer

... as of old. The god of music rules the Sabbath choir; The lyric muse must leave the sacred nine To help us please the dilettante's ear; Plutus limps homeward with us, as we leave The portals of the temple where we knelt And listened while the god of eloquence (Hermes of ancient days, but now disguised In sable vestments) with that other god Somnus, the son of Erebus and Nog, Fights in unequal contest for our souls; The dreadful sovereign of the under world Still shakes his sceptre at us, ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... were at once laid by the heels. But the old public punishment still continued, for in 1600 (the year before the execution of Essex) we read that "Mrs. Fowler's case was decided" by sentencing that lady to be whipped in Bridewell; while a Captain Hermes was sent to the pillory, his brother was fined L100 and imprisoned, and Gascone, a soldier, was sentenced to ride to the Cheapside pillory with his face to the horse's tail, to be there branded in the face, ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury

... the Arbiter Elegantiarum at the court of Nero. "The question as to the date of the narrative of the adventures of Encolpius and his boon companions must be regarded as settled," says Theodor Mommsen (Hermes, 1878); "this narrative is unsurpassed in originality and mastery of treatment among the writings of Roman literature. Nor does anyone doubt the identity of its author and the Arbiter Elegantiarum of Nero, whose end ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter

... before you the various personages of whom these fables have been written? Let it suffice to recall the interesting fact to your notice, and invite you to compare the respective biographies of the Brahmanical Krshna, the Persian Zoroaster, the Egyptian Hermes, the Indian Gautama, and the canonical, especially the apocryphal, Jesus. Taking Krshna or Zoroaster, as you please, as the most ancient, and coming down the chronological line of descent, you will find them all made after the same pattern. The real personage is all covered up and concealed ...
— The Life of Buddha and Its Lessons • H.S. Olcott

... best to accept the concensus of their opinion, which seems to divide between the Phoenicians and the Egyptians as being the inventors of the foremost of all the arts. "For, in Phoenicia, had lived Taaut or Thoth the first Hermes, its inventor, and who later carried his art into Egypt where they first wrote in pictures, ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho

... and, locking the door, Beulah returned to her seat and laid her head wearily down on the window-sill. What a Hermes is thought! Like a vanishing dream fled the consciousness of surrounding objects, and she was with Eugene. Now, in the earlier years of his absence, she was in Heidelberg, listening to the evening ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans

... to Hermes, the Egyptian philosopher. Manning had written An Introduction to Arithmetic ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas

... (Eleg. IV. 7); and unless this were so, there would be no meaning whatever in the whole pagan idea of Hades—in the "domus exilis Plutonia;" in the Hermes driving the spirits of the dead across the Styx; in the "judicantem Aeacum, sedesque, discretas piorum"—the "Aeacus dispensing doom, and the Elysian Fields serene" (Odes, II. 13). But this after-life ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin

... assuredly come when the merchants of a state shall be its true ministers of exchange, its porters, in the double sense of carriers and gate-keepers, bringing all lands into frank and faithful communication, and knowing for their master of guild, Hermes the herald, instead of ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin

... the Graces held hands. Phoebus Apollo appeared; his face was as a silver shield, so shining was it. He improvised upon a many-stringed lyre made of tortoise shell, and his music was shimmering and symphonious. Hermes and his Syrinx wooed the shy Euterpe; the maidens went in woven paces: a medley of masques flamed by; and the great god Pan breathed into his pipes. Stannum saw Bacchus pursued by the ravening Maenads; saw Lamia and her ophidian flute; and sorrowfully sped Orpheus searching for his Eurydice. ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker

... from all other cities by this singular attribute, that the bodies of its inhabitants cast no shade. Such, O Jews and Christians! disciples of the Persians, was the source of your New Jerusalem, your paradise and your heaven, modelled upon the astrological heaven of Hermes. Meanwhile your hell, O ye Musselmans! a subterraneous pit surmounted by a bridge, your balance of souls and good works, your judgment pronounced by the angels Monkir and Nekir, derives its attributes from the mysterious ceremonies ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts

... hermes we have a capital representation of the features of the rival of Sophocles. The countenance is at once noble, serious, and expressive. It bears the stamp of the genius of that celebrated tragic poet, which was naturally sublime and profound, though ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon

... sight was that! Not prurient Mars, Pointing his toe through ten celestial bars— Not young Apollo, beamily arrayed In tripsome guise for Juno's masquerade— Not smartest Hermes, with his pinion girth, Jerking with freaks and snatches down to earth, Looked half so bold, so beautiful, and strong, As thou, when pranking through the glittering throng! How the calmed ladies looked with eyes of love On thy trim velvet doublet laced above; The hem of gold, ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun

... man, and his very silence suggested his superior dignity. So he was taken for Jupiter (Zeus in the Greek), and the younger man for his inferior, Mercury (Hermes in the Greek), 'the messenger of the gods.' Clearly the two missionaries did not understand what the multitudes were shouting in their 'barbarous' language, or they would have intervened. Perhaps they had left the spot before the excitement rose to ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren

... Tatian and Hermes also looked upon Greek philosophy as an invention of the devil. Irenaeus was more discriminating. He opposed the broad and lax charity of the Alexandrines, but he read the Greek philosophy, and when called to the bishopric of Lyons, he ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood

... came about that Zeus was compelled to send a messenger down to the Underworld to bring Persephone back to the mother who grieved so much for the loss of her. Hermes was the messenger whom Zeus sent. Through the darkened places of the earth Hermes went, and he came to that dark throne where the lord Aidoneus sat, with Persephone beside him. Then Hermes spoke to the lord of the Underworld, saying that Zeus commanded that Persephone should come forth from ...
— The Golden Fleece and the Heroes who Lived Before Achilles • Padraic Colum

... supper made the meal, so far as Lyveden was concerned, an Olympian banquet. The assemblage, indeed, was remarkable, and the hostess—a very Demeter—must have been the oldest present by some twenty years. The sprightliness of Hermes alone, in the guise of the man called Berry, kept a lively table ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates

... American literature is anomalous. It has no centre, or, if it have, it is like that of the sphere of Hermes. It is divided into many systems, each revolving round its several sun, and often presenting to the rest only the faint glimmer of a milk-and-water way. Our capital city, unlike London or Paris, is not a great central heart, from which life and vigor radiate to ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell

... Alessandro, gesticulating with one hand, "may you be my Hermes, my swiftfoot messenger. Tell me what you know ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett

... answered the complaisant demon, "the wedding of Hermes with the Black DragonBut take thy fire that thou camest to seek, and begone! no mortal may look upon ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott

... began To give her leave to rise: away she ran; After went Mercury, who us'd such cunning, As she, to hear his tale, left off her running; (Maids are not won by brutish force and might But speeches full of pleasure, and delight;) And, knowing Hermes courted her, was glad That she such loveliness and beauty had As could provoke his liking; yet was mute, And neither would deny nor grant his suit. Still vow'd he love: she, wanting no excuse To feed him with delays, as women use, Or thirsting after immortality, (All women are ambitious naturally,) ...
— Hero and Leander and Other Poems • Christopher Marlowe and George Chapman

... darkened the doorway of the temporary office. The Arizonan stepped in with his easy, swinging stride, a lithe, straight-backed Hermes showing strength of character ...
— Gunsight Pass - How Oil Came to the Cattle Country and Brought a New West • William MacLeod Raine

... gods then left us in our need Like base and common men? Were even the sweet grey eyes Of Artemis a lie, The speech of Hermes but a trick, The glory of Apollonian ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum



Words linked to "Hermes" :   Greek deity, Greek mythology



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