"Hydra" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... proof of friendship man can give (And other motives), to work out a cause Of jealousy, to rack Alonzo's peace? I have turn'd o'er the catalogue of human woes, Which sting the heart of man, and find none equal. It is the hydra of calamities, The sev'nfold death; the jealous are the damn'd. Oh, jealousy, each other passion's calm To thee, thou conflagration of the soul! Thou king of torments, thou grand counterpoise For all the transports ...
— The Revenge - A Tragedy • Edward Young
... if seen under the microscope, sticking to a piece of weed (fig. 2). At the top end of the stalk is the mouth, and if you watch carefully you may be fortunate enough to see the long arms catch a water-flea, and carry it towards the mouth. This creature is known as the hydra. In some cases you will see two or even three of these creatures all attached to the same stalk, and if you watch every day, you will at last find that sooner or later this partnership is dissolved, so that the branched hydra has split up into a number ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... form). The sub-class of the Hydrozoa, which comprises the animals most nearly allied to the Hydra. ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... right and utter change of constitution: and that "they do but lose their labour who think that by any tricks of law they can get the better of these mischiefs of commerce, and see not that they hew at a Hydra." ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... these wrestling specters—for in the dim smoke and Tartarean atmosphere the actions of loading and aiming take the shape of huge writhing, convulsing, monstrous, grappling—come quick-moving lines of help. They rush through them, over them. The thirteen cannon behind the struggling hydra of gray seem one vortex—sulphurous, flaming, spitting, as from one vast mouth, scorching fire, huge mouthfuls of granite venom. Back—back, the gray masses break in ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... ardour of neophytes they looked at every phenomenon—even the most trivial incident of common life—from the philosophical point of view, talked day and night about principles, ideas, subjectivity, Weltauffassung, and similar abstract entities, and habitually attacked the "hydra of unphilosophy" by analysing the phenomena presented and relegating the ingredient elements to the recognised categories. In ordinary life they were men of quiet, grave, contemplative demeanour, ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... four legs were to be disposed of. I learnt more at that time of the trials and privileges of authority than I am ever likely to experience again. Upon my word, I think if the poor thing had possessed as many legs as my editor tells me somebody called the Hydra (with whom my readers are perhaps more familiar than I am) had heads, I should have found candidates for them. As it was, the contest for those I had to bestow was very keen, and the lucky individuals who were favoured by me looked after their interests most carefully. One ...
— Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands • Mary Seacole
... for hydra-like, the fire Lifts up his hundred heads to aim his way; And scarce the wealthy can one half retire, Before he rushes in ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... He conquers the realms of his own self-reliance, And the last cry of fear wakes the first of defiance. From the serpent he crushes its poisonous soul; Smitten down in his path see the dead lion roll! On toward Heaven the son of Alcmena strides high on The heads of the Hydra, the spoils of the lion: And man, conquering ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... be a veritable hydra. From one head sprang many daughters, the Anabaptists, [Sidenote: Anabaptists] harder to deal with than their mother. For while Lutheranism stood essentially for passive obedience, and flourished nowhere save as a state church, Anabaptism was frankly revolutionary ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... existed to put down. It was as if in a hospital which should cure the sick, the doctors, instead of curing disease, should make the sick worse and should make the well sick. How was Roosevelt, equally valiant and honest, to conquer this Hydra? He took the straight way dictated by common sense. First of all, he gained the confidence and respect of his men. He said afterwards, that even at its worst, when he went into office, the majority of the Police wanted to do right; that their ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... would probably split up the Makolo into a number of petty tribes, at enmity with each other, and an easy prey to those other nations who surrounded them. Would the king have the courage boldly to seize the hydra-headed menace and choke the life out of it, or would he resort to a policy of temporising and concession? Everybody present awaited the king's action in breathless suspense, while some were already grimly counting the number of spears upon which they might reckon ...
— The Adventures of Dick Maitland - A Tale of Unknown Africa • Harry Collingwood
... was successful in excluding feudalism from the principal centres of urban industry. In the larger states, whether kingdoms or not, the rulers, supported by the Church and the commons, bestirred themselves to slay the many-headed Hydra. Feudalism was not extirpated, but it was brought under the law. In many districts it defied repression. To the end of the Middle Ages the Knights of Suabia and the Rhineland maintained the predatory traditions of the Dark Ages; and everywhere feudalism remained a force inimical ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... the water, and thus bringing the food into their open mouths. Forfeiting mobility, they have, like the plant, forfeited the greater possibilities of progress, and they remain flowering to-day on the floors of our waters, recalling the next phase in the evolution of early life. Such are the hydra, the polyp, the coral, and the sea-anemone. It is not singular that earlier observers could not detect that they were animals, and they were long known in ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... a different sort; an immense, black, serpentine stem of ebony, coiling this way and that, in endless convolutions, like an anaconda round a traveler in Brazil. Smoking this hydra, Babbalanja looked as if playing ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... queer fish; mongrel, random breed; half-caste, half-blood, half-breed; metis[Lat], crossbreed, hybrid, mule, hinny, mulatto; tertium quid[Lat], hermaphrodite. [mythical animal] phoenix, chimera, hydra, sphinx, minotaur; griffin, griffon; centaur; saggittary[obs3]; kraken, cockatrice, wyvern, roc, dragon, sea serpent; mermaid, merman, merfolk[obs3]; unicorn; Cyclops, "men whose heads do grow beneath ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... said her husband good-humouredly, "be not always a boder of ill. Thou deemest a Goth worse than a gorgon or hydra, whereas, I assure you, they are very good fellows after all, if you stand up to them like a man, and trust their word. Old Meinhard is a capital ...
— More Bywords • Charlotte M. Yonge
... angels; so many deformities laboring for our own embellishment; so many clumsy chrysalises each working painfully toward the development of the butterfly within him. Our ideal is no longer a serene beauty of soul; it is the agony of Laocoon struggling with the hydra of evil. The lot is cast irrevocably. There are no more happy whole-natured men among us, nothing but so many candidates for heaven, galley-slaves ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... for musket firing had suddenly, mysteriously begun on all sides of her. Many fierce pairs of eyes were bobbing up from behind the boulders on the right of the trail; yellow-brown faces, like a many-headed Hydra coiled in the cacti. They were shooting, not at her, but at the fleeing American. She felt an object in her hand, which Driscoll had thrust there, and she remembered that he had whispered something, though she ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... working at in my orchids is an admirable illustration of the law. I should certainly conclude that all sexuality had descended from one prototype. Do you not underrate the degree of lowness of organisation in which sexuality occurs—viz., in Hydra, and still lower in some of the one-celled free confervae which "conjugate," which good judges (Thwaites) believe is the simplest form of true sexual generation? (130/1. See Letter 97.) But the ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... blood of Hydra, Lerna's bane, The juice of Hebon, and Cocytus breath, And all the poison of the ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... will leave to the horrors of the Roman crucifixion the twin thieves, superstition and scepticism, while the angel of "Goodwill'' will go free to solace the world with the fruit and fragrance of enduring power and promise{.} The steel chains that fasten these hydra-headed crocodiles of sensuous poison around love and destiny can only be severed by the ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... still live—still preserve his intellectual integrity—still command a hearing from nations and their rulers. It matters not for us whether Columbus ever knew that he had discovered a new continent. His work was to teach that neither hydra, chimera nor abyss—neither divine injunction nor infernal machination—was in the way of men visiting every part of the globe, and that the problem of conquering the world reduced itself to one of sails and rigging, hull and compass. The better part ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... all day; but when I spoke, was in a hurry, "going to his ledger," Had I had as many months as hydra, that ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 2, 1841 • Various
... one; Fair hope has flown,—no star can pierce my night: Each tyrant rages 'gainst opposing foe In deadly fight—yet brings to light no friend: In travail sore hope comes not to the birth— Fear hydra-headed terror still begets;— All fancies grim I see, and straight embrace, At hope I clutch, who still eludes my grasp; Her rainbow hues adored are but a frame That serve by contrast to make fear more dark. Severus ...
— Polyuecte • Pierre Corneille
... to destroy faction, and that he could face and dare the greatest and proudest connexions. But this was an Herculean task which neither Chatham nor any other minister has yet been able to accomplish. Faction is an hydra-headed monster, which no man can destroy, either by the charms of his eloquence or the terror of ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... naturally regarded as the manifestation of the evil spirit by Christians as well as by the old Hebrews; thus, also, it became the presiding genius of the malaria and fever which arose from the fens haunted by it—a superstition which gave rise to the theory that the tales of Hercules and the Hydra, Apollo and the mud-Python, St. George and the Dragon, were sanitary-reform allegories, and the monsters whose poisonous breath destroyed cattle and young maidens only typhus and consumption. We see no reason why early Christian heroes should not have actually met ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... now to be noticed how complexity of organisation is hindered by reproductive activity and conversely. The hydra's power to produce young ones from nearly all parts of its body is due to the comparative homogeneity of its body, while it is not improbable that the smallness of human fertility, compared with the fertility of large feline animals, ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... [Footnote 15: The Hydra was a monster with one hundred heads. If one was cut off two grew in its place unless the wound was stopped ...
— The Original Fables of La Fontaine - Rendered into English Prose by Fredk. Colin Tilney • Jean de la Fontaine
... the multitude; that numerous piece of monstrosity, which, taken asunder, seem men, and the reasonable creatures of God, but, confused together, make but one great beast, and a monstrosity more prodigious than Hydra. It is no breach of charity to call these Fools; it is the style all holy writers have afforded them, set down by Solomon in canonical scripture, and a point of our faith to believe so. Neither in the name of multitude do I only include the base and minor sort ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... melancholy moments I presage the most dire calamities. I already see in my imagination the time when the banner of civil war shall be unfurled; when Discord's hydra form shall set up her hideous yell, and from her hundred mouths shall howl ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... gathered there to read their party organ. The gentlemen of the Ayuntamiento feared the barber more than any ten newspapers combined, and whenever some famous Conservative minister referred in parliament to a "revolutionary hydra" or a "hotbed of anarchy," they pictured to themselves a barbershop like that of Cupido, but much larger perhaps, scattering a poisonous atmosphere of cruel gibe and perverse effrontery ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... Which lately made all Europe quake for fear. I have of Turks, Arabians, Moors, and Jews, Enough to cover all Bithynia: Let thousands die; their slaughter'd carcasses Shall serve for walls and bulwarks to the rest; And as the heads of Hydra, so my power, Subdu'd, shall stand as mighty as before: If they should yield their necks unto the sword, Thy soldiers' arms could not endure to strike So many blows as I have heads for them. [174] Thou know'st not, ...
— Tamburlaine the Great, Part I. • Christopher Marlowe
... Anglo-American who has lived years amongst us and in private intimacy must, when he returns home, speak disparagingly of the old country unless he can afford the expensive luxury of telling unpopular truths and of affronting Demos, the hydra-headed. ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... San Francisco newspaper man who landed for the first time in New York early in the morning. Before night he had explored the city, written a scathing philippic on it and sold it to a leading newspaper. New York had not daunted him. It had only annoyed him. He was quite impervious to its hydra-headed appeal. But you don't get the answer to that imperviousness until you visit the California which has produced the Native ...
— The Native Son • Inez Haynes Irwin
... I will aske him for my Place againe, he shall tell me, I am a drunkard: had I as many mouthes as Hydra, such an answer would stop them all. To be now a sensible man, by and by a Foole, and presently a Beast. Oh strange! Euery inordinate cup is vnbless'd, and the ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... extending his arms, and grasping the Lion's jaws with both his hands, he is opening them and rending them asunder by main force, although the beast is tearing his arms grievously with its claws in self-defence. The third picture, wherein Hercules is slaying the Hydra, is something truly marvellous, particularly the serpent, which he made so lively and so natural in colouring that nothing could be made more life-like. In that beast are seen venom, fire, ferocity, rage, and such vivacity, ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 3 (of 10), Filarete and Simone to Mantegna • Giorgio Vasari
... not taken a single woman, and only a few children, that some of the boats pick'd up floating. We conversed on different topics, but more particularly on the politics of Turkey and Greece. I ask'd him if he meant to strike the iron while it was hot, and get on to Hydra, and strike a blow there, telling him at the same time that I was going to the Naval Islands on business and should tell all I had seen. He replied, "No, I love the Hydriotes." The crafty old dog loves them like a cannibal "well enough to eat them." After having sat above ...
— Charles Philip Yorke, Fourth Earl of Hardwicke, Vice-Admiral R.N. - A Memoir • Lady Biddulph of Ledbury
... ambassadorship obtained by the influence of his friends. I told him that the theologians would probably, as time went on, let his affair drop, but that they would never admit themselves to be guilty of impiety. I told him to always bear in mind what a hydra was that Beda, and at how many mouths he belched forth venom. I told him to reflect well that he was about to commit himself with a foe that was immortal, for a faculty never dies, and to rest assured that after having ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... Theban's charmed life; We come not scathless from the strife! The Python's coil about us clings, The trampled Hydra bites and stings! ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... could to effect the return of certain members to Parliament; these certain members being pledged to effect a reform in the law, according to Mr Hickson. And, as he once observed confidentially, "If you had to destroy a hydra-headed monster, would you measure swords with the demon as if he were a gentleman? Would you not rather seize the first weapon that came to hand? And so do I. My great object in life, sir, is to reform ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... to assign the proper employment of a true, ancient, genuine critic: which is, to travel through this vast world of writings; to peruse and hunt those monstrous faults bred within them; to drag out the lurking errors, like Cacus from his den; to multiply them like Hydra's heads; and rake them together like Augeas's dung; or else to drive away a sort of dangerous fowl who have a perverse inclination to plunder the best branches of the tree of knowledge, like those Stymphalian birds ...
— A Tale of a Tub • Jonathan Swift
... combinations; but Longinus had been at war with his own provincials. He had been driven out of the Peninsula, and had lost his own life in leaving it. Caesar, like Cicero, had believed that the war had ended at Pharsalia. He found that the heads of the Hydra had sprouted again, and were vomiting the old fire and fury. Little interest could it give Caesar to match his waning years against the blinded hatred of his countrymen. Ended the strife must be, however, before ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... imposed on him was to destroy the lion that haunted the forests of Nemea and Cleonae, and could not be wounded by the arrows of a mortal. Hercules boldly attacked the lion and strangled him. The second was to destroy the Learnaean hydra, which he accomplished with the aid of Iolaus; but because he obtained assistance in his work, Eurystheus refused to reckon it. Hercules's third labour was to catch the hind of Diana, famous for its swiftness, ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... energy of mind, which disdained to yield to any obstacle that could be opposed to him. His achievements are characteristic of the rude and barbarous age in which he lived: he strangled serpents, and killed the Erymanthian boar, the Nemaean lion, and the Hydra. ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... poison doth assume, And my burnt entrails with its flame consume. Crest-fallen, unembraced I now let fall Listless, those hands that lately conquer'd all; When the Nemaean lion own'd their force, And he indignant fell a breathless corse: The serpent slew, of the Lernean lake, As did the Hydra of its force partake: By this, too, fell the Erymanthian boar: E'en Cerberus did his weak strength deplore. This sinewy arm did overcome with ease That dragon, guardian of the golden fleece. My many conquests let some others trace; It's mine to ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... symbol of Adad, above a bull, the Tortoise, symbol of Ea (?), the Scorpion of the goddess Ishkhara, and the Lamp of Nusku, the Fire-god. Down the left-hand side is the serpent-god representing the constellation of the Hydra. ...
— The Babylonian Legends of the Creation • British Museum
... brings to mind a day gone by, Our fathers and their chivalry— It speaks of courtly Knight and Squire, Of Lady's love, and Dame, and Friar, Of times, (perchance not better now,) When care had less of wrinkled brow— When she with hydra-troubled mien, Our greatest enemy, the Spleen, Was seldom, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 348, December 27, 1828 • Various
... Like a hydra of three hideous heads the German army had pushed its course over the Saar, over the Rhine, over the Lauter; it sniffed at the frontier line; licked Wissembourg and the Spicheren with flaming tongues, shuddered, coiled, and glided over the boundary into the fair land of Lorraine. ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers
... waged against federalism, has filled our latter times with strife and unhappiness. We have met it, with pain indeed, but with firmness, because we believed it the last convulsive effort of that Hydra, which in earlier times we had conquered in the field. But if any degeneracy of principle should ever render it necessary to give ascendancy to one of the rising sections over the other, I thank my God it will fall ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... could be better. Already have Harkaway and his hard-knuckled companion, Girdwood, been seen in Lenoir's society. But before the day is over they will be seen in the Caveaux themselves, where proofs of their guilt will spring up hydra-headed from the very ground." ...
— Jack Harkaway's Boy Tinker Among The Turks - Book Number Fifteen in the Jack Harkaway Series • Bracebridge Hemyng
... I hurried to the main street of Linrock and to that section where violence brooded, ready at any chance moment to lift its hydra head. For that time of day the street seemed unusually quiet. Few pedestrians were abroad and few loungers. There was a row of saddled horses on each side of the street, the full ...
— The Rustlers of Pecos County • Zane Grey
... th' undaunted Hero rushes, With massy club her hundred heads he crushes, In vain. One crush'd, two hissing heads arise, Till good Iolas to each wound applies The burning brand. Dipt in the Hydra's gall, His arrows slightest ...
— The Twelve Labours of Hercules, Son of Jupiter & Alcmena • Anonymous
... seduced them by her soft and bewitching speeches, viz.: That "they must render to the Eternal Creator of all things an adoration with more testimony, and more extensive, than they had hitherto done," etc. This Hydra with a hundred heads, at that time misled, and continues to this day to mislead men who are so weak as to submit to her empire; and it will subsist, until the moment that the true elected shall appear and ...
— The Mysteries of Free Masonry - Containing All the Degrees of the Order Conferred in a Master's Lodge • William Morgan
... make an effort with Pupasse, plaiting her hundred hairs in a ten-strand braid. The effect was a half yard of black worsted galloon; nothing more, or better. Had Pupasse possessed as many heads as the hydra, she could have "coiffe'd" them all with fools' caps during one morning's recitations. She entirely monopolized the "Daily Bee." Madame Joubert was forced to borrow from "madame" the stale weekly "Courrier ...
— Balcony Stories • Grace E. King
... and suddenly become their own masters, without the discretion necessary for their guidance, became licentious and turbulent, and the whole kingdom presented a scene of riot and disorder which there were no laws to repress. And now was hatched that political hydra, the Jacobin faction, which no Frenchman will ever be able to remember ...
— Celebration in Baltimore of the Triumph of Liberty in France • William Wirt
... sun through the twelve signs of the zodiac; but if this be the case, it is certain that such construction was relatively late, and that the separate adventures must be referred to some more simple facts. If Heracles slays the Hydra, it is more natural to regard this as having represented originally some mundane phenomenon of nature or some simple conflict of the savage life. The same thing is probably true of the adventures of the Babylonian hero Gilgamesh, who is sometimes considered ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... the usual support of the assembly, defiled through it. There was, also, opposite the Invalides, an elevated mound, a Mountain, surmounted by a colossal group, representing Hercules crushing a hydra. The section of the Halle-au-ble demanded that this should be removed. The left of the assembly murmured. "The giant," said a member, "is an emblem of the people." "All I see in it is a mountain," replied another, "and what is a Mountain but ...
— History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814 • F. A. M. Mignet
... their chargers' flanks, while Black Douglas stood like a rock, though a butcher's tray was pressed against his withers, a mongrel was snapping at his hocks, and the inevitable apple-woman, of Cecil's prophetic horror, was wildly plunging between his legs, as the hydra-headed rushed down in insane, headlong haste to stare at, and crush on to, ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... ancient days, But Cadiz, rising on the distant coast, Calls forth a sweeter, though ignoble praise. Ah, Vice! how soft are thy voluptuous ways! While boyish blood is mantling, who can 'scape The fascination of thy magic gaze? A cherub-hydra round us dost thou gape, And mould to every ...
— Childe Harold's Pilgrimage • Lord Byron
... book in a pleasant arbour at the end of one of the walks, which is surrounded by rose-bushes, and has a little stream of water running past it. Nor do we ever enter the orchard unarmed with a long pole, for its entrance is guarded by a flock of angry geese, hissing like the many-headed Hydra that watched over the golden apples of the Hesperides. At eight we breakfast, and by nine the sun is already powerful enough to prevent us from leaving the house. We therefore sit down to read or write, and do ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... The book therefore creates a sensation, the censor is astir, hurried consultation takes place, his Majesty himself is roused; but all this too late; the living book can no longer be strangled. The government saw that the monster was hydra-headed, and resolved to let it alone rather than by cutting one of its heads to rouse twenty in its stead. The book then was spared, but the writer was henceforth doomed; and the occasion for the final blow is soon enough ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... fam'd La Mancha's knight, who launce in hand, Mounted his steed to free th' enchanted land, Our Quixote bard sets forth a monster-taming, Arm'd at all points, to fight that hydra—GAMING. Aloft on Pegasus he waves his pen, And hurls defiance at the caitiff's den. The First on fancy'd giants spent his rage, But This has more than windmills to engage: He combats passion, rooted in the soul, Whose pow'rs, at once delight ...
— The Gamester (1753) • Edward Moore
... confronting Washington was hydra-headed. Either way it was serious. On one side New England lay open to the enemy, on the other New Jersey. And an advance was also threatened from the North. If he stayed where he was, the enemy would overrun New Jersey at will. ...
— The Campaign of Trenton 1776-77 • Samuel Adams Drake
... after the date of Peyssonel's suppressed paper, the Abbe Trembley [118] published his wonderful researches upon the fresh-water Hydra. Bernard de Jussieu [119] and Guettard [120] followed them up by like inquiries upon the marine sea-anemones and corallines; Reaumur, convinced against his will of the entire justice of Peyssonel's views, adopted them, and made ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... from a free and enlightened people governing themselves, have principally engendered and fostered this vice, is most certain; and it would be some satisfaction, if, after the hostile feelings had subsided, the hydra also ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... now hydra-head Theology appears To shatter dreams and chill her heart with nameless fears, For Sage and Seer spare not in sharp dissection, 'Till poor Puff, ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... known to you already, It is right, for all that follows, That it should be well remembered, Since of me you know no more Than what this my name presenteth. Yes, I am Lysander, son Of that city which on Seven Hills a hydra seems of stone, Since it seven proud heads erecteth; Of that city now the seat Of the mighty Roman empire, Cradle of Christ's wider realm,— Boon that Rome alone could merit. There of poor and humble ...
— The Wonder-Working Magician • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... does witchcraft exhibit the conclusive proof of its age, its hydra-headed forms, and its influence in the intellectual and spiritual development of the races ...
— The Witchcraft Delusion In Colonial Connecticut (1647-1697) • John M. Taylor
... glorious with palm of prize, Along the grass his chariot shows and steeds of victories, Sprung from the goodly Hercules, marked by his father's shield, Where Hydra girded hundred-fold with adders fills the field: Him Rhea the priestess on a day gave to the sun-lit earth, On wooded bent of Aventine, in secret stolen birth; 660 The woman mingled with a God, what time ...
— The AEneids of Virgil - Done into English Verse • Virgil
... person can, with the eye of the imagination, picture as now present before him any particular object or event, real or imaginary, such as King Arthur's round table; the death scene of Sir Isaac Brock or Captain Scott; the sinking of the Titanic; the Heroine of Vercheres; or the many-headed Hydra. ...
— Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education • Ontario Ministry of Education
... dark abode Rise up victorious, and be twice a god. 20 And thou, my sire, not destined by thy birth To turn to dust, and mix with common earth, How wilt thou toss, and rave, and long to die, And quit thy claim to immortality; When thou shalt feel, enraged with inward pains, The Hydra's venom rankling in thy veins'? The gods, in pity, shall contract thy date, And give thee over to the power of Fate.' Thus, entering into destiny, the maid The secrets of offended Jove betrayed; 30 More had she still to say; but now appears Oppressed ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... Another King? They grow like Hydra's heads: I am the Dowglas, fatall to all those That weare those colours on them. What art thou That counterfeit'st the person of a King? King. The King himselfe: who Dowglas grieues at hart So many of his shadowes thou hast met, And not the very ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... what thing would be fatal to him, and you will guard him against it." The princess gets from the magician the fatal secret. "One must go into a far distant forest," he says "Where there is a beast called the hydra, and cut off his seven heads. If the middle head is split open a leveret will jump out and run off. If the leveret is split open, a bird will fly out. If the bird is caught and opened, in its body is a precious stone, and should that be placed under ...
— A History of Pantomime • R. J. Broadbent
... battle lightning flickered along the Southern horizon to sober folk with premonition; but the nightly illumination of the metropolis was becoming tinged with a more sinister reflection where licence had already begun to lift a dozen hydra-heads from certain lurid resorts hitherto limited in number and ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... "draco"—also recalls the Babylonian water monsters. There was a "dragon well" near Jerusalem.[172] From China to Ireland rivers are dragons, or goddesses who flee from the well dragons. The demon of the Rhone is called the "drac". Floods are also referred to as dragons, and the Hydra, or water serpent, slain by Hercules, belongs to this category. Water was the source of evil as well as good. To the Sumerians, the ocean especially was the abode of monsters. They looked upon it as did Shakespeare's Ferdinand, when, leaping into the sea, he cried: "Hell is empty and ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... [384][Greek: Huperboreous], Hyperborean young women. The Hyperboreans, Alazonians, Arimaspians, were Scythic nations of the same family. All the stories about Prometheus, Chimaera, Medusa, Pegasus, Hydra, as well as of the Grupes, or Gryphons, arose, in great measure, from the sacred devices upon the entablatures ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume II. (of VI.) • Jacob Bryant
... vaunted destruction of the ancient Hydra of superstition by the darts and javelins of modern rationalism, and the ponderous hot irons of empirics, it is undeniably true that the habit of 'seeking after a sign' survived the generation of Scribes and Pharisees whom Christ rebuked; and manifests itself in the middle of the nineteenth ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... horror in which this hated impost was then enveloped. The fact of Brougham procuring the destruction of all the public books and papers in which its odious accounts were recorded, only illustrates the intensity of the common sentiment against the dire hydra evoked by Mr. Pitt for the destruction of the regicide power of France, and sent back again to its gruesome limbo after the ruin of Napoleon. From 1842 until 1874 the question of the income-tax was the vexing enigma of ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... afterwards, when he had completed the celebrated "twelve labors" at which he had been set by a Grecian king, whom Jupiter commanded him to serve for a period of years because of an offense he had committed. One of these labors was the killing of the lion. Another was the destroying of the Lerʹnæ-an hydra, a frightful serpent with many heads, which for a long time had been devouring man and beast in the ...
— The Story of Troy • Michael Clarke
... slaughter of the Hydra. This monster ravaged the country of Argos, and dwelt in a swamp near the well of Amymone. This well had been discovered by Amymone when the country was suffering from drought, and the story was that Neptune, who loved her, ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... Henry, taking a hasty turn across the chamber; "no considerations of interests or security shall induce me to give up Anne. I love her too well for that. Let the lion Charles roar, the fox Francis snarl, and the hydra-headed Clement launch forth his flames, I will remain firm to my purpose. I will not play the hypocrite with you, whatever I may do with others. I cast off Catherine that I may wed Anne, because I cannot otherwise obtain her. And shall I now, ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... stupidity that delayed so plain and simple a reconstruction of the order of the world. Then we grew malignant, and thought of barricades and significant violence. I was very bitter, I know, upon this night of which I am now particularly telling, and the only face upon the hydra of Capitalism and Monopoly that I could see at all clearly, smiled exactly as old Rawdon had smiled when he refused to give me more than a ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... territory, wholly failed to see how much it would have been for their own good that Flamininus had not incorporated the towns of Aetolian sympathies with their league, acquired in Lacedaemon and Messene a very hydra of intestine strife. Members of these communities were incessantly at Rome, entreating and beseeching to be released from the odious connection; and amongst them, characteristically enough, were even those who were indebted to the Achaeans for their ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... Almost all the leaves, excepting those that float on the surface, are so thickly incrusted with corallines as to be of a white colour. We find exquisitely delicate structures, some inhabited by simple hydra-like polypi, others by more organized kinds, and beautiful compound Ascidiae. On the leaves, also, various patelliform shells, Trochi, uncovered molluscs, and some bivalves are attached. Innumerable crustacea frequent every ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... story of Hercules and the Hydra, then, was to the general Greek mind, in its best days, a tale about a real hero and a real monster. Not one in a thousand knew anything of the way in which the story had arisen, any more than the English peasant generally is aware of the plebeian original of St. George; or supposes that there ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... paroxysm of horror at the sight of the common house-spider. At all events, whether we were intruding or not, in turning this stone, we must pay a fine for having done so; for there lies an animal as foul and monstrous to the eye as "hydra, gorgon, or chimaera dire," and yet so wondrously fitted to its work, that we must needs endure for our own instruction to handle and to look at it. Its name, if you wish for it, is Nemertes; probably N. Borlasii; (18) a worm of very "low" organization, though ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... before Ilerda and honourably spared the defenceless at Pharsalus. The habit of civil war and the rancour left behind by the mutiny asserted their power in a terrible manner on the battlefield of Thapsus. If the hydra with which they fought always put forth new energies, if the army was hurried from Italy to Spain, from Spain to Macedonia, from Macedonia to Africa, and if the repose ever more eagerly longed for never came, the soldier sought, and ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... Another hydra-headed monster which ate into the very vitals of the commonwealth was the provision for the clergy, known as the Clergy Reserves. This was perhaps the greatest of all the curses imposed upon Upper Canada by the Constitutional Act, for its ill effects ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... him for my place again: he shall tell me I am a drunkard! Had I as many mouths as Hydra, such an answer would stop them all. To be now a sensible man, by and by a fool, and presently a beast! Oh strange!—Every inordinate cup is unblessed, and the ingredient is a devil! Iago. Come, come; good wine is a good familiar creature, if it be well used; ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... families pointed out others, and others still, whose relationship grew into nearness by the removal of such as had stood before them, and presented to the affrighted eyes of their persecutor, a hydra with still renewed ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... even confess that you kiss; and yet you sit here secure, unassailed, unsolicited for damages, unengaged, as you lead us to suppose. What are the fathers and brothers of Connaught doing to let such a hydra-headed monster as thou near their doors—such a wolf into their sheep-pens? Go down, thou false Lothario. Go down, thou amorous Turk, and remember that a day of retribution may yet ...
— The Macdermots of Ballycloran • Anthony Trollope
... every contract which was not written upon paper, vellum, or parchment impressed with the stamp of the imperial government. For these, fixed rates were stipulated. In this measure the Americans perceived another head of the Hydra, Despotism. The Writs of Assistance touched the interests of commercial men; the Stamp Act touched the interests of the whole people. The principle involved was the same in each; the practical effect of the latter was universally felt. Fierce was the tempest ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... But the hydra had a thousand heads, and new expeditions were continually arriving. In the words of Mr. Worsaae, a ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... the necessity, and finally as to the probability and possibility, of an external, verbal revelation. A revealed code or system was antagonistic to the doctrines of rationalism; her own consciousness must furnish the necessary data. But how far was "individualism" allowable? And here the hydra of speculation reared its horrid head; if consciousness alone furnished truth, it was but true for her, true according to the formation of her mind, but not absolutely true. Admit the supremacy of the individual reason, and she could not deny "that the individual ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... more general use than petroleum, and but few things are known less about by the majority of persons. It is hydra-headed. It appears in many forms and under many names. "Burning fluid" is a popular name with many unscrupulous dealers in the cheap and nasty. "Burning fluid" is usually another name for naphtha, or something worse. Gasoline, naphtha, benzine, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 288 - July 9, 1881 • Various
... is a most lovely morning; a light breeze wafts us up the gulf of Napoli, while far on the eastern horizon, rise the islands of Spezzia and Hydra; and further to the south, that of Kaimena. We are now off the singular looking town of Nauplia di Malvoisie, built on a square island, having two platforms, each resembling a gigantic stair. The lower town is walled ...
— Journal of a Visit to Constantinople and Some of the Greek Islands in the Spring and Summer of 1833 • John Auldjo
... her fine small wits to rack! Closer, and faster on her track Hurries the hydra-headed pack, ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... his conquest of the Lernaean hydra, a formidable serpent or monster which harbored in the fens of Lerna, and infected the region of Argos with his poisonous exhalations. This seems to have been one of the most difficult tasks in which ...
— Roman Antiquities, and Ancient Mythology - For Classical Schools (2nd ed) • Charles K. Dillaway
... it is necessary to attack a nation thus prolifick, while we may yet hope to prevail. When he is told, through what extent of territory we must travel to subdue them, he recollects how far, a few years ago, we travelled in their defence. When it is urged, that they will shoot up, like the hydra, he naturally considers how the hydra ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... his vengeance dread To Egypt's shores pursued; At Trafalgar its hydra-head For ever sunk subdued. The freedom of mankind was won! The hero's glorious task was done! When Heaven, Oppression's ensigns furl'd, Recall'd him ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... all others." Then she smiling a little said: "Thou invitest me to a matter which is most hardly found out, and can scarcely be sufficiently declared; for it is such that, one doubt being taken away, innumerable others, like the heads of Hydra, succeed, neither will they have any end unless a man repress them with the most lively fire of his mind. For in this matter are wont to be handled these questions: of the simplicity of Providence; of the course of Fate; of sudden chances; of God's knowledge and predestination, ...
— The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy • Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius
... obtained his object. But now comes the question, "What will he do with it?" Question with as many heads as the Hydra; and no sooner does an author dispose of one ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Dambreuse the first leaf of a pamphlet, bearing the title of "The Hydra," the Bohemian defending the interests of a reactionary club, and in that capacity he was introduced by ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... mere necessity of uniformity in the interpretation of the national laws, decides the question. Thirteen independent courts of final jurisdiction over the same causes, arising upon the same laws, is a hydra in government, from which nothing but contradiction and ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... ship timber) but would suspend the adoption of the resolution as to the extension of these convoys, until the time when they would assign their crews. This is only pushing time by the shoulders; it is the Lernean hydra, whose heads started up in place of those that were destroyed. For they agree on all the rest. There were yesterday only altercations and reproaches, to which those of Amsterdam answered with as much moderation and decency as ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. IX • Various
... joy, (Friends oft the jealous character annoy,) And made a fine collection in a book, Of tricks with which the sex their wishes hook. Strange fool! as if their wiles, to speak the truth, Were not a hydra, both in age ...
— The Tales and Novels, Complete • Jean de La Fontaine
... clustering under their surrounding greenery, have been replaced by mills which now, dragon-like, everywhere rear their hissing heads, belching forth black smoke. In the midday glare of modern life even our hours of mental siesta have been narrowed down to the lowest limit, and hydra-headed unrest has invaded every department of life. Maybe, this is for the better, but I, for one, cannot account it ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... Author's Farce—the play appears to be writing itself on the stage. He displays all the tricks of satire—exaggeratedly ironic praise, allegorical names (Miss Giggle, Miss Brilliant, Miss Bashfull), stock characters of satire (Pasquin, Marforio, Hydra, Drawcansir), lists of offenses, parodies of polite conversation reminiscent of Swift, and constant topical references: to the Robin Hood Society to which little Bob Smart belongs; to Mother Midnight; to playwrights (Fielding, Foote, ...
— The Covent Garden Theatre, or Pasquin Turn'd Drawcansir • Charles Macklin
... acquaintance, Monsieur Richelieu, made a great progress there in metallic learning and inscriptions. If Prince Ferdinand ventures a battle to prevent it, I dread the consequences; the odds are too great against him. The King of Prussia is still in a worse situation; for he has the Hydra to encounter; and though he may cut off a head or two, there will still be enough left to devour him at last. I have, as you know, long foretold the now approaching catastrophe; but I was Cassandra. Our affairs ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... been at druken writers' feasts, Nay, been bitch-fou' 'mang godly priests, Wi' rev'rence be it spoken: I've even join'd the honour'd jorum, When mighty squireships of the quorum Their hydra ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... and are therefore ignorant of their own stature. But they are to be pitied or laughed at, not to be quarrelled with; they mean well with their nostrums, if they could only learn that they are cutting off a Hydra's head. This moderation towards those who are in error is one of the most characteristic features of Socrates in the Republic. In all the different representations of Socrates, whether of Xenophon ...
— The Republic • Plato
... afraid of socialism, we who have anything to lose; and yet we let the syndics, and their secretaries, conciliators, and chancellors sow it broadcast in dragon's teeth of petty injustices and petty cruelties, that soon or late will spring up armed men, hydra-headed and torch ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... laughing hyena, with a variety of household idols, on a small scale, calculated for family worship. Eighteen months credit will be given, or a discount of fifteen per cent. for prompt payment, on the sum affixed to each article. Direct, Canton-street, Canton, under the marble Rhinoceros and gilt Hydra." ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... dry at the fountain of tears, Green earth lay brown-faced and torn, Scarr'd and hard and forlorn. And as that foul monster of Lerna Whom Heracles slew in his might, But this one slaying, not slain, From the marshes, poisonous, white, Crawl'd out a plague-mist and sheeted the plain, A hydra of hell and of night. —Whence upon men has that horror past? From Cathaya westward it stole to Byzance,— The City of Flowers,—the vineyards of France;— O'er the salt-sea ramparts of England, last, Reeking and rank, a serpent's breath:— ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... but a stripling, he had killed a huge lion, almost as big as the one whose vast and shaggy hide he now wore upon his shoulders. The next thing that he had done was to fight a battle with an ugly sort of monster, called a hydra, which had no less than nine heads, and exceedingly sharp teeth in every ...
— The Three Golden Apples - (From: "A Wonder-Book For Girls and Boys") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... necessities of a very painful and dreadful kind. Such a necessity is war. And is it not a war that I commence, and does it not involve the destruction of all those thousands who call themselves the followers of Loyola, and belong to the Society of Jesus? Ah, believe me, this Society of Jesus is a hydra, and we shall never succeed in entirely extirpating it. I may now separate my own head from my body; but a day will come when the head of this hydra will have grown again, and when it will rise from the dead with renewed ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... true to it. That is the one thing I have faith in! Our good and wonderful sovereign has to perform the noblest role on earth, and he is so virtuous and noble that God will not forsake him. He will fulfill his vocation and crush the hydra of revolution, which has become more terrible than ever in the person of this murderer and villain! We alone must avenge the blood of the just one.... Whom, I ask you, can we rely on?... England with her commercial spirit ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... old trembling came again to Democrates. He had Bias light all the lamps. The room seemed full of lurking goblins,—harpies, gorgons, the Hydra, the Minotaur, every other foul and noxious shape was waiting to spring forth. And, most maddening of all, the chorus of AEschylus, that Song of the Furies Democrates had heard recited at the Isthmus, rang ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... considering our present circumstances at this time, the Almighty God has reserved this great work for us. We may bruise this Hydra of division, and crush this Cockatrice's egg. Our neighbors in England are not yet fitted for any such thing; they are not under the afflicting hand of Providence, as we are; their circumstances are great and glorious; their treaties are prudently managed, ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... that immense and terrible figure outlined in the foreground of all the prophets' pictures? That woman, as pale and beautiful as vice—that great harlot of nations, decked with the wealth of the East, and bestriding a hydra belching forth rivers of poison on all human pathways—is Civilization; is humanity demoralized by luxury and science; is the torrent of venom which will swallow up all virtue, all ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... current on its rim, is scavenging the water—till a tadpole comes by and scavenges it. How many millions of living creatures are there on that one sprig? Look here!—a brown polype, with long waving arms—a gigantic monster, actually a full half-inch long. He is Hydra fusca, most famous, and earliest described (I think by Trembley). Ere we go home I may show you perhaps Hydra viridis, with long pea-green arms; and rosea, most beautiful in form and colour of all the strange ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... Old World. But even now, when we are struggling for our very existence, when every energy and every material resource is being exerted to stem the tide of internal dissensions and crush out the hydra of internal treason; at a time when the mother country has gone to every length short of open war to aid and assist those who are striving for our downfall, and her press is exhausting every epithet of vituperation and scurrilous abuse of us, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... great discouragements. Of his fifty-three expeditions, eighteen were against the Saxons. As soon as he had cut off one head of the monster, another head appeared. How allegorical of human labor is that old fable of the Hydra! Where do man's labors cease? Charlemagne fought not only amid great difficulties, but perpetual irritations. The Saxons cheated him; they broke their promises and their oaths. When beaten, they sued for peace; but the moment his back was turned, they broke out in ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume V • John Lord
... a nine-headed specimen of the same family. On the third night appears "a twelve-headed Chudo-Yudo," mounted on a horse "with twelve wings, its coat of silver, its mane and tail of gold." Ivan lops off three of the monster's heads, but they, like those of the Lernaean Hydra, become re-attached to their necks at the touch of their owner's "fiery finger." Ivan, whom his foe has driven into the ground up to his knees, hurls one of his gloves at the hut in which his brothers ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston
... Hydra Hydrea AEgean AEgaean Iasus Iassus Akanthus Acanthus Kabala Cabalia Akarnania Acarnania Nile Nilus Akesines Acesines Olympieion Olympieum Akte Acte Oneium OEneum Chaeroneia Chaeronea Palike Palica Dekeleia Decelea Pattala Patala Dyrrachium ...
— The Atlas of Ancient and Classical Geography • Samuel Butler
... that "he would be content with the next place, not envying thy reputation with thy patron;" and he thinks that Horace and himself "would soon lift out of favour Virgil, Varius, and the best of them, and enjoy them wholly to ourselves." The restlessness of Horace to extricate himself from this "Hydra of Discourse," the passing friends whom he calls on to assist him, and the glue-like pertinacity of ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... of reason, virtue, and religion—the multitude: that numerous piece of monstrosity which, taken asunder, seem men and the reasonable creatures of God, but confused together, make but one great beast and a monstrosity more prodigious than Hydra: it is no breach of charity to call these fools; it is the style all holy writers have afforded them, set down by Solomon in canonical Scripture, and a point of our faith to believe so. Neither in the name of multitude do I only include the base and minor sort of people: there is a rabble even ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... rebels were subdued. It takes more than one brave effort to split the rock of ages, to cut off the head of that hydra monster, the Catholic Church and the Spanish throne. Arrest, persecution, and punishment followed the heroic attempt of the little band. Those who could escape the bloodhounds had to flee for safety to foreign shores. Francisco Ferrer was among the ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... Customs House officers at Dover, or guard that port; just as he, subsequently, somehow failed to station soldiers near those obvious points of danger, Marston Moor and Salisbury Plain.[36] 'Oliver, Protector,' evidently 'understood his Protectorship moderately well, and what Plots and Hydra-Coils were inseparable from it.' ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... the perfecting of his friend's work. It was hardly a labour of love, and he came to it with an ever-increasing weariness; all the tedious toiling through piles of proofs and revised proofs, the weeding out of ingenious perversions which seemed to possess a hydra-like power of multiplication after the first eradication, began to inspire him with an infinite loathing of this book which was his and ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... "Father Joliet. You are as full of information as an oracle, but you are not coherent. This month past I have been hunting down a chimaera, a hydra with a dozen heads: each head shows me by turn the portrait of Fortnoye, or Francine, or yourself, or Kranich, or Mrs. Ashburleigh. Ever since Noisy I have been meandering through the folds of a mystery. My head is turning with it. If you want to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... no denying the fact that Catholicism has already a strong hold upon the affairs of this country, as we find the hydra-headed demon in every branch of our government, and since such is the case, it is folly to deny the fact that if Catholicism is what we have shown it to be, that her influence is demoralizing, and the influence of the ...
— Thirty Years In Hell - Or, From Darkness to Light • Bernard Fresenborg
... determined to bombard Beyrout; the bombardment of Algiers had shown what could be done against stone walls. A new power was now introduced into naval warfare—a considerable number of steam-ships being among the fleet. They were the Gorgon, Cyclops, Vesuvius, Hydra, Phoenix, and Confiance. At that time little confidence was placed in them as vessels of war, though it was acknowledged that they might prove useful in towing line-of-battle ships into action, or in acting as despatch-boats, ...
— How Britannia Came to Rule the Waves - Updated to 1900 • W.H.G. Kingston
... more meet for him who rules to drive away his stress— He, being god, should lightnings hurl and make a wilderness— But, haste! for night is darkling—soon, the festival it brings; Already see the hydra show ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... kind. Numerous cases could be given amongst the lower animals of the same organ performing at the same time wholly distinct functions; thus the alimentary canal respires, digests, and excretes in the larva of the dragon-fly and in the fish Cobites. In the Hydra, the animal may be turned inside out, and the exterior surface will then digest and the stomach respire. In such cases natural selection might easily specialise, if any advantage were thus gained, a part or organ, which had performed two functions, for one function ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin
... rebellion will feel that they have received a mortal blow. Especially will this be the case in Arkansas, Louisiana, Texas, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Alabama. We shall have cut the gordian knot of slavery, and the death agonies of the hydra would soon be visible. The importance of the result would be felt in the North also, and the wretched traitors there, far more guilty even than those of the South, will shrink from their atrocious conspiracy to dissolve this Union. The dark plot of severing New England ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... hydra was a serpent with seven heads, and, when one of them was cut off, two grew in its place. It is Hugo's favourite ...
— La Legende des Siecles • Victor Hugo
... leave to unborn generations, save the glorious Republic that he founded; and well will it be for the youth of our country when that life becomes to them the stimulus to exalted aims. Then loyalty will be free as air, and rebellions be unknown; then treason will hide its hydra-head, and our insulted flag wave in triumph where the last chain ...
— The Farmer Boy, and How He Became Commander-In-Chief • Morrison Heady
... annoyance of government. Many lawless and uproarious individuals enjoyed the Count's hospitality. All the dregs and filth of the provinces, according to Doctor Viglius, were accumulated at Viane as in a cesspool. Along the placid banks of the Lech, on which river the city stands, the "hydra of rebellion" ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... bought Hydra House we all hoped that beyond papering and painting, dabbing on a bit of plaster where it was needed, and grubbing the groundsel in the drive, he would allow it to remain in the state of old-world picturesqueness in which he had found it. We would not have objected even if he ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 3, 1914 • Various
... the subject free; The government's ungirt when justice dies, And constitutions are nonentities. The nation's all a mob, there's no such thing, As lords, or commons, parliament, or king; A great promiscuous crowd the Hydra lies, Till laws revive and mutual contract ties; A chaos free to choose for their own share, What case of government they please to wear; If to a king they do the reins commit, All men are bound in conscience to submit; But then the king must by his oath assent, To ...
— The True-Born Englishman - A Satire • Daniel Defoe
... combat the hydra-headed monster of superstition, he would have written as I have ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... proclaims at once the morality of the governors and that of the governed: were the former just, and the latter good, this mass of vileness would never be employed; or, if employed, wickedness would expire for want of fuel, and the hydra of tyranny perish ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... me. "Coasting along Tasman's Peninsula, what a shock of pleasant wonder must have struck the early mariner on suddenly sighting Cape Pillar, with its cluster of black-ribbed basaltic columns rising to a height of 900 feet, the hydra head wreathed in a turban of fleecy cloud, the base lashed by jealous waves ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... same time, is more book-learned than Don Sebastian. She plays an Hydra upon the Emperor, that is full as good as ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... or abilities were the subject of encomium.” His opinions of poetry were, she thought, “so absurd and inconsistent with each other, that, though almost any of his dogmas may be clearly and easily confronted, yet the attempt is but combating an hydra-headed monster . . . Johnson’s ‘Lives of the Poets,’ and all the records of his own life and conversation, prove that envy did deeply stain his spirit. To your question, ‘Whom could Johnson envy’? I answer, all ...
— Anna Seward - and Classic Lichfield • Stapleton Martin
... David, when yet young, was not afraid to join in combat with the lion or the bear. The Greek mythology teems with hunting exploits. Hercules overthrows the Nemaean lion, the Erymanthean boar, and the hydra of Lerna; Diana descends to the earth, and pursues the stag; whilst Aesculapius, Nestor, Theseus, Ulysses, and Achilles are all followers of the chase. Aristotle, sage as he was, advises young men to apply themselves early to it; and Plato finds in it something divine. Horace exalts it as ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... discord was abroad; one of the most favoured and interesting of our colonies was in revolt. The noble Duke saw this, and seemed at once to decide that it would require all the energies of the mother country to crush the Hydra at its birth. Accordingly, when any measure was brought forward tending to support the dignity, to uphold the honour, and to secure the integrity of the empire, the noble Duke invariably came forward and nobly supported those measures. But the noble Duke ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... he was of opinion it was not on board a man-of-war. Napoleon is reported to have said that one bad general was better than two good ones; meaning that one head to an army, though of inferior quality, is better than a hydra of Solomons, or Cesars. Captain Mull was much of the same way of thinking, seldom troubling his subordinates with anything but orders. He interfered very little with "working Willy," though he saw ...
— Jack Tier or The Florida Reef • James Fenimore Cooper
... hypocrisy or self-deception enabled you to clothe your statements of fact in a moral aura, and to blind yourselves and the world to the truth that you were killing a domesticated dragon who guarded the cave of a devouring hydra, whom you benevolently loosed? Why did you not see that the end of all your devotion was to shift man's responsibility for himself from his shoulders? Do you, because you clothed yourselves in ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry |
