"Myth" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... heard her beginning a Shawnee myth, in which it was explained why the wet-hawk feeds while flying, and how the small turkey-buzzard ...
— A Virginia Scout • Hugh Pendexter
... varied experiences. I used to wake up in the morning, wondering where I should be at night, and yet quite pleased at the uncertainty. Greenmantle became a sort of myth with me. Somehow I couldn't fix any idea in my head of what he was like. The nearest I got was a picture of an old man in a turban coming out of a bottle in a cloud of smoke, which I remembered from a child's edition of the Arabian Nights. But if he ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... This also is a Jataka story; but Eitel thinks it may be a myth, constructed from the story ...
— Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms • Fa-Hien
... his ungrateful country. He did what Coriolanus had done with us twenty years before. Neither of these men found any helper against his country; [Footnote: No one of his own fellow-countrymen.] they therefore both committed suicide. [Footnote: If the story of Coriolanus be not a myth, as Niebuhr supposes it to be, his suicide forms no part of the story as Livy tells it. The suicide of Themistocles is related as a supposition, not as an established fact. If he died of poison, as was said, it may have been administered by a rival in the favor of ...
— De Amicitia, Scipio's Dream • Marcus Tullius Ciceronis
... existed. And this is a disputed point; for while there are those, like Father Colgan, whose clear faith accepts Saint Patrick just as he stands in history and tradition, yet, on the other hand, there are sceptics, like Ledwick, who contend that the saint is nothing but a prehistoric myth, floating about in the imagination ...
— Saint Patrick - 1887 • Heman White Chaplin
... visiting the House of Commons; the Speaker, says the writer, learning that he was in the gallery, "suspended the discussion until a distinguished place had been found for the French philosopher." This must be set down as a myth. The journals have been searched, and there is no official confirmation of the statement, improbable enough on the face ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... woman," says he, with a reckless laugh. "That's a compliment, my lady—take it as you will. What! are your sneers to outlast life itself? Is that old supposed sin of mine never to be condoned? Why—say it was a real thing, instead of being the myth it is. Even so, a woman all prayers, all holiness, such as you are, might ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... of agriculture, Book II of the cultivation of trees, Book III of domestic animals, Book IV of bees (including the Myth of Aristaeus, ll. 315-558). ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... some, indeed, may have heard of Iceland), and in the west to the farther shores of Ireland and of Spain. Outside these bounds there is something, at any rate to the east, but it is something shadowy and wavering, full of myth and fable. Inside these bounds there is the clear light of a Christian Church, and the definite outline of a single society, of which all are baptized members, and by which all are knit together in ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... the elementary commixture of fable and fact in ages that may be called prehistoric.' In this chapter the author made a rapid survey of the 'kinship between history and fable,' tracing it through the times of myth and romance to the period of the historic novel. 'At their birth,' he says, 'history and fable were twin sisters;' and again, 'There is always a certain quantity of fable in history, and there is always an element of history in one particular sort of fable.' The reviews ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... This is no myth, my friends; it is a real invitation. Every man and woman is invited. All things are now ready. The feast has been prepared at great expense. You may spurn the grace, and the gift of God; but you must bear in mind that it cost God a good deal before He could provide this feast. When ...
— Sovereign Grace - Its Source, Its Nature and Its Effects • Dwight Moody
... drought-proof giant cactus and vivid desert bushes, one vast preserve of browse and grass from the Peaks to the gorge of the Salagua. Here was the last battle-ground, the last stand of the cowmen against the sheep, and then unless that formless myth, "The Government," which no man had ever seen or known, stepped in, there would be no more of the struggle; the green mesa would be stripped of its evanescent glory and the sheep would wander at will. But as long as there was still a chance and the cows had young calves that would die, there was ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... passage, meant, as it would seem, for a jest. Compare the description of Giants in Dante, Inf. XXI and XXII. Perhaps Leonardo had the Giant Antaeus in his mind. Of him the myth relates that he was a son of Ge, that he fed on lions; that he hunted in Libya and killed the inhabitants. He enjoyed the peculiarity of renewing his strength whenever he fell and came in contact with his mother earth; but that Hercules lifted him up and so conquered and strangled ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... mythologies tell us that the radiant arrows of Apollo shot forth from his far-reaching bow, wounded to death the monsters of the slime and unclean creatures that crawled and revelled in darkness. And the myth has a great truth in it. The light of God's face slays evil, of whatsoever kind it is; and just as the unlovely, loathsome creatures that live in the dark and find themselves at ease there writhe and wriggle in torment, and die when their shelter is taken away and they ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... assigned to each wind a separate cave, in which it was supposed to await the commands of its sovereign Aeolus, or Aeolos. It is to this myth that ...
— Lucasta • Richard Lovelace
... the Rabbis assert that this prophet prophesied in the reign of Manasseh, by whom he was eventually put to death, and, although this seems to be a myth, it yet shows that they did not think that all Isaiah's ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part II] • Benedict de Spinoza
... Bay turned to fur trading and won wealth, and discovered an empire while pursuing the little beaver across a continent, the beginning of all this was not the beaver, but a myth—the North-West Passage—a short way round the world to bring back the spices and silks and teas of India and Japan. It was this quest, not the lure of the beaver, that first brought men into the heart of New World wilds by ...
— The "Adventurers of England" on Hudson Bay - A Chronicle of the Fur Trade in the North (Volume 18 of the Chronicles of Canada) • Agnes C. (Agnes Christina) Laut
... composite quatrain (stanza v.) which cannot be claimed as a translation at all" (see the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayya[a]m, by Edward Heron Allen, 1898), embodies a late version of the myth— ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... research and investigation might be employed. But there is no need why these researches should be extended to the region of fancy. Gargantua has been proved by some to be of Celtic origin. Very often he is a solar myth, and the statement that Rabelais only collected popular traditions and gave new life to ancient legends is said to be proved by the large number of megalithic monuments to which is attached the name of Gargantua. It was, of course, quite right to make ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... the South Seas, the tritons blow their conchs and shake their shaggy heads, while the daughters of the deep gather, at certain seasons, on the water, or about some favorite rock, and sing. Always, in Eastern versions of the myth, there is music, save in the case of Melusina, who became a half fish only on Saturdays, when her husband was supposed not to be watching, and this music follows the myth around the world. Among the vague traditions of certain Alaskan Indians is one of an immigration from Asia, under ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... an Aphrodite, originally placed in the Temple of Asclepius on the island of Cos. The goddess was represented, according to the Greek myth of her birth, as rising from the sea, the upper part of her person being alone distinctly visible. The picture, from all that we can learn of it, seems to have been imbued with the same spirit of refinement and grace as Praxiteles's statue of Aphrodite in the neighboring city of Cnidus. ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... hardly any of the conditions which obtained in older communities where great literature arose. There is no glamour of old Romance about our early history, no shading off from the actual into a dim region of myth and fable; our beginnings are clearly defined and of an eminently prosaic character. The early settlers were engaged in a hand-to-hand struggle with nature, and in the establishment of the primitive industries. Their strenuous pioneering days were followed by the feverish excitement ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... like that of Phaethon, is a nature myth; that is, it accounts for natural phenomena which the Greeks saw about them. As they conceived of Ceres, the earth goddess, as the kindest of the immortals, and of her daughter, Proserpina, the goddess of flowers and beautifying vegetation, as always ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... in a pleased way, that though Yale and Harvard and Princeton may be snobbish, the state universities are the refuge of a myth called "college democracy." But there is no university near a considerable city into which the inheritors of the wealth of that city do not carry all the local social distinctions. Their family rank, their place in the unwritten peerage, determines ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... had one trait more striking than another, it was her perfect, simple faith in what people said; irony was a mystery to her; lying, a myth,—something on a par with murder. She thought Kate meant so; and reaching out for the pretty wicker-flask that contained her daily ration of old Scotch whiskey, she dropped a little drop into a spoon, diluted it with water, and was going to give ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... glutted with its hypocrisy, courted by men with manner and no manners, whom she had met with their own weapons. She had never known a real friendship in man—or woman—had not even sought friendship, because life had taught her that, for her, such things did not exist. In Markham she had found the myth without searching, and once found she had grappled it to her soul with hoops of steel. His friendship it was that she had loved—not Markham. He was her own discovery, her very own, and she followed her ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs
... purchase books. As the result of Mr. Blakiston's research, the famous library with which Richard Aungerville is said to have endowed Durham College, and, according to Adam de Murimuth, filled five carts, turns out to be a myth or rather a pious intention. The good Bishop died deep in debt, and the books, if preserved as a collection, went, it is now certain, elsewhere. Thirty-five years later, however, another bishop, Thomas ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... bunch of pirates began to lose themselves in the background of my mind. There was a dance at the hotel that evening. Before I had waltzed twice with Evelyn her buccaneer cousin had dissolved into a myth. ...
— The Pirate of Panama - A Tale of the Fight for Buried Treasure • William MacLeod Raine
... that the above arguments will do away with the plea of mesmeric power being accountable for this myth. The plea is to my mind too absurd for words, yet it is wonderful that many people put it forward in all ...
— Indian Conjuring • L. H. Branson
... into a sort of honored disuse, though their memory is still reverently cherished in all the text-books of the science. The "Challenger" Expedition dissipated most of the myths that had long been taught regarding the deep waters of the ocean; and Professor Suess has disposed of the closely related myth about the coasts of the continents being constantly on the seesaw up and down. These two discoveries, with others that might be mentioned, dispose of Lyell's theory of uniformity. Lord Kelvin and the other ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price
... inlaid in ivory, cups of yellow topaz mounted on filagree, mosaics which inspire theft, Dutch pictures in the style which Schinner has adopted, angels such as Steinbock conceived but often could not execute, statuettes modelled by genius pursued by creditors (the real explanation of the Arabian myth), superb sketches by our best artists, lids of chests made into panels alternating with fluted draperies of Italian silk, portieres hanging from rods of old oak in tapestried masses on which the figures of some hunting ...
— Paz - (La Fausse Maitresse) • Honore de Balzac
... aided by this knowledge he took so many years to acquire—so little, that generally the greater part of it drops out of his memory; and if he occasionally vents a Latin quotation, or alludes to some Greek myth, it is less to throw light on the topic in hand than for the sake of effect. If we inquire what is the real motive for giving boys a classical education, we find it to be simply conformity to public opinion. Men dress their children's minds as they do their bodies, in the ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... Again a hiatus. This time something snapped in his head. He sank back in his chair. Buddha! Was there ever a Buddha? And if there was not, was there ever such a personality as Christ's? Scholar that he was he knew that myth-building was a pastime for the Asiatic imagination, great, impure, mysterious Asia—Asia the mother of all religions, the cradle of the human race. To deny the objective existence of Christ would set at rest all his doubts, one overwhelming ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... Captain. For years vague rumors have come to me from the desert-men, from far oases and cities of the Sahara. Now here, now there, news has drifted in to Algiers—not news, but rather fantastic tales. Yes, I have often heard of the Kaukab el Durri. But till now I have always believed it a story, a myth." ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... in Liverpool. I had called several times at the consulate, and each time met with the same ungracious reception. I could never see the consul, and began to regard him as a myth. I did not then know that every time I called he was seated at his comfortable desk in a room elegantly furnished, which was entered from the ante-room occupied by his clerks. Nor could I get any ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... has arisen in that martial German tribe which once held sway in the greater part of Europe. In its origin, the tale is considered by many careful investigators—so also by Richard Wagner, who founded his famous music-drama on it—to have been a Nature myth, upon which real events became engrafted. From this point of view, the earliest meaning of Siegfried's victory over the Dragon would signify the triumph of the God of Light over the monster of the ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... world-myth this song comes round in its turn. In the play of the seasons, each year, the mask of the Old Man, Winter, is pulled off, and the form of Spring is revealed in all its beauty. Thus we see that the old is ...
— The Cycle of Spring • Rabindranath Tagore
... definition given of it in Grose's "Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue:" "to squeeze out a man's eye with the thumb; a cruel practice used by the Bostonians in America." A curious illustration of the belief in this myth occurred to Cooper. One of his friends in England was an amiable and pleasant man of letters, named William Sotheby, little heard of in these days; and even in his own days he had to endure the double degradation of being called a small ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... of what is called local self-government, is but an ignominious surrender of the principles of nationality for which our armies fought and for which thousands upon thousands of our brave men died, and without which the war was a failure and our boasted government a myth. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... {47} The myth above alluded to exists in Erewhon with changed names and considerable modifications. I have taken the liberty of referring to the story ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... all quarters of Dutch thought, to be followed by many signs that the idea was being prepared for in practice. I repeat, that the fairest and most unbiassed historian cannot dismiss the movement as a myth. ...
— The War in South Africa - Its Cause and Conduct • Arthur Conan Doyle
... plenty of water standing in pools, which had evidently been left from recent rains, and plenty of grass and trees similar to those found on the summits of the other buttes in the neighborhood, but the legend of the Acomas was evidently a myth. ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 42, August 26, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... an amount of incredulity scarcely becoming a sane man, to deny the existence of the traveler, and the reality of that voyage which I believed all along to have been a myth—the ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... rebellious governments was an attack. But for the adoption of the Congressional plan of Reconstruction and the subsequent legislation of the nation along the same line, the abolition of slavery through the ratification of the 13th Amendment would have been in name only, a legal and constitutional myth. This is the civilization, however, an attack upon which Mr. Rhodes so deeply deplores. It is fortunate for the country that a majority of Mr. Rhodes's fellow citizens did not and do not agree with ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... for any one a lifetime would be short to get you. Look, you have never been out of my thoughts—or within my reach. It seems a myth that I kissed ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... mio capitan. There are some incredulous people who believe the white steed of the prairies to be a myth, and deny his existence altogether. Carrambo! I know that he does exist, and what is more to my present purpose, he is—or was, but two hours ago— within ten miles of where I am writing this ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... is based on an ancient Celtic myth or legend, which was very popular during the Middle Ages. It was already known in the seventh century, but whether it originally came from Wales or Brittany is a disputed point. It was very widely known, however, and, thanks to the wandering minstrels, it was translated into all the Continental ...
— Stories of the Wagner Opera • H. A. Guerber
... Gaia or Earth, the eternal Wife and Mother of each in turn, is always ready to renew herself. The new vegetation God each year is born from the union of the Sky-God and the Earth-Mother; or, as in myth and legend the figures become personified, he is the Son of a God and ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... between Washington and Kosciuszko, of Kosciuszko's words, "Father, do you recognize your son?" is a myth. They met neither in Philadelphia nor elsewhere. The above letter is the last indication of any intercourse between them. Washington at this period was regarded with no favour by the democracy. Kosciuszko's sympathies ...
— Kosciuszko - A Biography • Monica Mary Gardner
... implications towards both God and man. And then, and perhaps we need not say any more about it, we know that it is not true. It did not even originate in the Bible, it did not even originate among the Jews: it is nothing in the world but a pagan myth imported into Jewish tradition just a few hundred years before the birth of Jesus. It is of no more authority in rational human thought than the story of Jason or ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... large eaters, would have actually consumed. Lord Alvanley's three hearty suppers, the exploits of the old member of Parliament in Boz's sketch of Bellamy's (I forget his real name, but he was not a myth), and other things might be quoted to show that there is a fatal verisimilitude in the Ambrosian feasts which may, or may not, make them shocking (they don't shock me), but which certainly takes them out of the category of merely humorous exaggeration. The Shepherd's ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... with queenly grace at the head of this mighty host of six thousand American women, Dr. Earl had visions of the reality of the myth or history, whichever it may be, of Semiramis invading Assyria and the Amazons ...
— An American Suffragette • Isaac N. Stevens
... admiration. Siva's desire to behold her was so great that it developed in him four faces, in succession, as she made the tour of the assembly; and Indra's longing was so intense that his body became all eyes. In this myth may be seen exemplified the effect of Desire and Will in the forms of life, function and shape—all following Desire and Need, as in the case of the long neck of the giraffe which enables him to reach for the high branches of the trees ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... Stories.' are four Greek myths retold in Latin, not by a Roman writer, however, but by an Englishman, who believed that they would afford interesting and pleasant reading for young folks who were just beginning the study of the Latin language. By myth is meant an imaginative tale that has been handed down by tradition from remote antiquity concerning supernatural beings and events. Such tales are common among all primitive peoples, and are by them accepted as true. They owe their origin to no single author, but grow up as the untutored imagination ...
— Ritchie's Fabulae Faciles - A First Latin Reader • John Kirtland, ed.
... in society was Widow Tully, who had been the much-respected housekeeper of old Captain Manning for forty years. When he died he left her the use of his house and family pew, besides an annuity. The existence of Mr. Tully seemed to be a myth. During the first of his widow's residence in town she had been much affected when obliged to speak of him, and always represented herself as having seen better days and as being highly connected. But she was apt to be ungrammatical when excited, and ...
— Deephaven and Selected Stories & Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... the arms of Lady Rosamond and Maude. The childish face of Fanny Trevelyan once seen is not soon to be forgotten. Oh no, Fanny, you occupy an important niche within our memory! Two years were only a myth—a dream to the young mistress of Trevelyan Hall, save when some other's troubles aroused her sympathy and called forth the fine feelings of her nature. The former playful glee is still alive in Fanny's buoyant and lively manner. Her gaiety at times subsides to gaze upon Lady ...
— Lady Rosamond's Secret - A Romance of Fredericton • Rebecca Agatha Armour
... considered at home, lifting himself up, letting himself down, running out on the yielding boughs, and traversing with marvelous celerity the whole length and breadth of the thicket, was truly surprising. One thinks of the great myth of the Tempter and the "cause of all our woe," and wonders if the Arch Enemy is not now playing off some of his pranks before him. Whether we call it snake or devil matters little. I could but admire his terrible beauty, however; his black, shining folds, his easy, ...
— Bird Stories from Burroughs - Sketches of Bird Life Taken from the Works of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... sight, their dusty and sweaty shirts grew biting as the poisoned shirt of the Norse myth, their bare feet in the brown dirt grew distressingly flat and hoof-like, and their huge, dirty, brown, chapped, and swollen hands grew so repulsive that the mere remote possibility of some time in the far future "standing a chance" of having an introduction to her, caused them to ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... religions show that entire religious observances come down to modern peoples from heathen sources—The Bohemian Peasant and his Apple Tree—A myth of long descent found in the rhyme of "A Woman, a Spaniel, and Walnut Tree"; our modern "Pippin, pippin, fly away," indicates the same sentiment—The fairy tale of Ashputtel and the Golden Slipper, the legend from which came our story of Cinderella—Tylor on Children's Sports—The ...
— A History of Nursery Rhymes • Percy B. Green
... Signorina shrugged. "Poor Kitty, you are trying in vain to make a romance out of my life. What should I know of love? It is a myth, a fable, only to be found in story-books. You ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... are haunted with these vague Pagan influences that two convents have risen there to purge the atmosphere? From the Capuchin terrace you look across at the grey Franciscan monastery of Palazzuola, which is not less romantic certainly than the most obstinate myth it may have exorcised. The Capuchin garden is a wild tangle of great trees and shrubs and clinging, trembling vines which in these hard days are left to take care of themselves; a weedy garden, if there ever was one, but none the less charming for that, in the deepening ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... goddess. When Christianity came in, the name of the hostess of Bethany was given to the churches erected where Martha the moon goddess had been venerated before, so as gradually to wean the heathen from their old faith. They came over into the Church, but brought with them their myth of the pagan goddess. ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... home in her automobile, and made his escape with due speed. Deciding he had had enough of amateurs and amateur operettas, he mailed a note to Professor Harmon excusing himself from further service on the plea of a telegram summoning him to New York. Whether the telegram were a myth, history does not record. Sufficient to say that he actually went to New York the following afternoon. And thus "The Rebellious Princess" lost a stage manager and Mignon the hitherto chief factor in her plans. She was also the recipient of an apologetic note from the actor, which caused her to ...
— Marjorie Dean - High School Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... her teasing up short. "I've been priding myself on keeping up the myth I'm a wide-awake young man and pilot. Never have I passed out before—never. I feel like a washed-out cadet. You've had your fun ...
— A Fine Fix • R. C. Noll
... quarrels of certain bishops, and for the purpose of examining into the canonicity of the three hundred more or less apocryphal gospels that were being read in the Christian churches as inspired writings, the history of the life of Christ had reached the height of absurd myth. We may see some specimens in the extant books of the apocryphal New Testament, but most of them are now lost. What have been retained in the present Canon may doubtless be regarded as the least objectionable. And yet we ...
— The Life of Buddha and Its Lessons • H.S. Olcott
... According to Marxian orthodoxy, they were misled by cunning capitalists, who made their profit out of the slaughter. But to any one capable of observing psychological facts, it is obvious that this is largely a myth. Immense numbers of capitalists were ruined by the war; those who were young were just as liable to be killed as the proletarians were. No doubt commercial rivalry between England and Germany had a great deal to do with ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell
... thought them impious enough, for daring to build brick walls instead of keeping to the good old- fashioned tents, and gathering themselves into a nation instead of remaining a mere family horde; and gave their own account of the myth, just as the antediluvian savages gave theirs of that strange Eden scene, by the common interpretation of which the devil is made the first inventor of modesty. Men are all conservatives; everything new is impious, till we get accustomed to it; and if it fails, the mob ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... two young men had lived among the Samanas for about three years and had shared their exercises, some news, a rumour, a myth reached them after being retold many times: A man had appeared, Gotama by name, the exalted one, the Buddha, he had overcome the suffering of the world in himself and had halted the cycle of rebirths. He was said to wander through the land, teaching, surrounded by disciples, without possession, ...
— Siddhartha • Herman Hesse
... midsummer 1791, which may be termed the central event of the French Revolution, at least in its first phases. The aim of joining the armed bands of emigres and the forces held in readiness by Austria was so obvious as to dispel the myth of "a patriot King" misled for a time by evil counsellors. True, the moderates, from sheer alarm, still sought to save the monarchy, and for a time with surprising success. But bolder men, possessed both of insight and humour, ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... quarters, so it was hard to guess just where the gigantic stranger was most likely to be found. To north and northeast of the mountain went the two Armstrongs, seeking the stranger's trail; while to south and southeastward explored the Crimmins boys. If real, the giant bull had to be located; if a myth, he had to be exploded before raising impossible hopes in the ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... the fool and his folly, his fatalist excuse for any sin except the scurviest. And there was the flageolet! You will hear the echo of it yet in that burgh town where he performed; its charm lingers in melodies hummed or piped by old folks of winter nights, its magic has been made the stuff of myth, so that as children we have heard the sound of Simon's instrument in the spring woods when we went there white-hay-gathering, or for ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... was speaking a large man entered—a wonderfully fine specimen of Russian manhood. As he stood there, proud but respectful, his flaming red beard falling over his broad chest, he looked like some Viking who had just stepped out of an old myth. ...
— High Noon - A New Sequel to 'Three Weeks' by Elinor Glyn • Anonymous
... sensuous experience, for thought there is myth and drama and dancing and singing. Everything is of the blood, of the senses. There is no mind. The mind is a suffusion of physical heat, it is not separated, ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... village story. It grew as such a dark myth would grow in the superstitious times in which it started. Goethe created the character of Marguerite and added it to the fable. The transformation of Faust from extreme old age to youth was also added. ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth
... night—in a strait-jacket. Mr. Hyde held in his hand a rubber tube. An attendant stood near with the medicine. For over two years, the common threat had been made that the "tube" would be resorted to if I refused medicine or food. I had begun to look upon it as a myth; but its presence in the hands of an oppressor now convinced me of its reality. I saw that the doctor and his bravos meant business; and as I had already endured torture enough, I determined to ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... the main class division is that which separates the employing, wage-paying class from the employed, wage-receiving class. Notwithstanding all the elaborate arguments made to prove the contrary, the frequently heard myth that the interests of Capital and Labor are identical, and the existence of pacificatory associations based upon that myth, there is no fact in the whole range of social phenomena more self-evident than ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... mortals gained Jove's fiery flower, grows old {280} (I have been used to hear the pagans own) And out of mind; but fire, howe'er its birth, Here is it, precious to the sophist now Who laughs the myth of Aeschylus to scorn, As precious to those satyrs of his play, {285} Who touched it in gay wonder at the thing. While were it so with the soul,—this gift of truth Once grasped, were this our soul's gain safe, and sure To prosper as the body's gain is wont,— Why, man's probation would conclude, ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... exasperation. "You don't get me, Hiram. Nobody owns the mine. That part of it's all a myth—a fairy tale manufactured because we need it. But Harris mustn't find that out—not, at any rate, until it's too late. Then if anything ever does leak out, suspicion will be directed toward some mysterious ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... specialized, animistic belief is to be found in most if not all peoples living in the ante-predatory, savage stage of culture. The primitive savage takes his animism less seriously than the barbarian or the degenerate savage. With him it eventuates in fantastic myth-making, rather than in coercive superstition. The barbarian culture shows sportsmanship, status, and anthropomorphism. There is commonly observable a like concomitance of variations in the same respects in the individual temperament of men in the civilized ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... Soon it was a fearful jumble; men and beasts, hoofs and steel, curses and shrill neighing. Then the firing began, a woof of fine red threads through the warp of pale-green reeds. The guerrillas yet fought. The myth of their own heavier numbers kept them from panic. Ragged fellows with feet bare in the stirrups leaned over to slash at heads between the tasselled stalks. They squirmed like snakes from under kicking horses, and fainting, ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... words, above the organ music of his verse sounds clear and far the trumpet call of personality. Therefore Milton is destined to inspire generations by which his theology and his justification of the ways of God to man are swept into his own limbo of myth and delusion. Fortunately Milton's verse is not appallingly great in amount. If we cannot hope to know it all by heart, as Macaulay did, we can at least know it well enough to recognize any quotation from it, and rich will be the furnishing of our minds ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... a new ritual there showed itself, they denied its holiness.[12] The religious importance of the temple, however, was never great, and its chief interest is that it shows the survival of the affection for the priestly service among the Hellenized community, and helps therefore to disprove the myth that the Alexandrians allegorized away ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... years, Kinton had failed to work up any strong desire to try it. The Tepoktans called the ever-shifting lights the Dome of Eyes, after a myth in which each tiny satellite bright enough to be visible was supposed to watch over a single individual on the surface. Like their brothers on Terra, the native astronomers could trace their science back to a form of astrology; ...
— Exile • Horace Brown Fyfe
... Months afterwards it was said that she had been identified among a band of wild horses in the Coast Range, as a strange and beautiful creature who had escaped the brand of the rodeo and had become a myth. There was another legend that she had been seen, sleek, fat, and gorgeously caparisoned, issuing from the gateway of the Rosario patio,[172-2] before a lumbering Spanish cabriole[172-3] in which a short, stout ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... Who stole the Eggs What the Birds say The Wren's Nest On Another's Sorrow The Shepherd's Home The Wood-Pigeon's Home The Shag The Lost Bird The Bird's must know The Bird King Shadows of Birds The Bird and the Ship A Myth Cuvier on the Dog A Hindoo Legend Ulysses and Argus Tom William of Orange saved by his Dog The Bloodhound Helvellyn Llewellyn and his Dog Looking for Pearls Rover To my Dog "Blanco" The Beggar and his Dog Don Geist's Grave On the Death of a Favorite Old ...
— Voices for the Speechless • Abraham Firth
... not "chia," a myth; white jade form the Halls; gold compose their horses! The "A Fang" Palace is three hundred li in extent, but is no fit residence for a "Shih" of Chin Ling. The eastern seas lack white jade beds, and the "Lung Wang," king of the Dragons, has come to ask for one of the Chin Ling Wang, (Mr. Wang ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... sagaciously to this one question, and exerting all his skill and pertinacity, Saunders succeeded in convincing the court that the Hard Cash was a myth: a pure chimera. The defendant's case looked up; for there are many intelligent madmen with a ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... sweetheart, then, forthwith— You're a fool for staying so long— Woman's love you'll find no myth, But a truth; living, tender, strong. And when around her slender belt Your left is clasped in fond embrace, Your right will thrill, as if it felt, In its grave, ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... autumn of 1848 I sketched for the first time the complete myth of the "Nibelungen", such as it henceforth belongs to me as my poetic property. My next attempt at dramatizing the chief catastrophe of that great action for our theatre was "Siegfried's Death". After much wavering I was at last, in the autumn of 1850, on the point of sketching the musical execution ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... an action which may take its place by the side of the myth of Mucius Scaevola, or the real exploit of that brother of the poet AEschylus, who, when the Persians were flying from Marathon, clung to a ship till both his hands were hewn away, and then seized it with his teeth, leaving his name as a portent even in the splendid calendar ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... dramas it is not the individual that is drawn, but the type. Where the individual alone is real, the type is a myth of the imagination—a pure invention. And invention is the mainspring of the theatre, which rests purely upon illusion, and does not please us unless ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet
... Clements seems to be a myth, and the talk now is of Rundle and Ian Hamilton, who are supposed to be getting round De Wet from other quarters, while we drive him up this way into their arms. It is said we are going to Bethlehem. I forgot an important event of ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... probably Italy, and India almost for a certainty, draws the superfluous imagination. One's aunts have been to Rome; and every one has an uncle who was last heard of—poor man—in Rangoon. He will never come back any more. But it is the governesses who start the Greek myth. Look at that for a head (they say)—nose, you see, straight as a dart, curls, eyebrows—everything appropriate to manly beauty; while his legs and arms have lines on them which indicate a perfect degree of development— ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... through our atmosphere, there is no distinct record of one having ever fallen to the earth during these annual displays. One was said to have fallen recently at Naples, but on investigation it turned out to be a myth. These annual meteors in the upper air are supposed to be only small ones, and to be dissipated into dust and vapor at the time of their sudden heating; so numerous are they that 40,000 have been counted ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XXI., No. 531, March 6, 1886 • Various
... religions in this, that it could not fail to admit and preserve the ancient tradition of a first sin. Rather would it have been forced to construct for itself an analogical myth, had it not found such in the primitive memories that it bent to its own doctrines. The tradition squared, indeed, but too well with its system of a dualism having a spiritual basis, although as yet ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... an indefinite feeling of disappointment. This meeting after years of absence was not as it should be. Something seemed to stand between them—a shadow, a myth, a tiny distinction. Luke, with characteristic pessimism, saw it first— felt its chill, intangible presence before his less subtle-minded brother. Then Fitz saw it, and, as was his habit, he went at ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... seem possible that the sprightly, energetic little woman who answered the reporter's ring could have reached the allotted threescore and ten. Old Father Time is certainly no more than a myth to Miss Mary Anthony. "Yes," said she, laughing, "I am about to make my debut. Just think of it, a real reception in my honor! By the time I'm eighty, my existence will probably have become ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... hardly an event or character in history which is not to somebody a myth or a phantom; and so Tell has not escaped the skepticism of men. But those who doubt his existence have little experience of history, says Mueller. Grasser was the first to remark the resemblance between the adventures of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... truth which, like many others, is too simple for our scientists to see. This is where they go wrong, not only about true religion, but about false religions too; so that their account of mythology is more mythical than the myth itself. I do not confine myself to saying that they are quite incorrect when they state (for instance) that Christ was a legend of dying and reviving vegetation, like Adonis or Persephone. I say that even if Adonis ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... the First Recension of the Kalevala however, and in many Finnish ballads, an eagle is said to have built her nest on the knees of Vainamoinen after he was thrown into the sea by the Laplander, and the Creation-Myth is ...
— Kalevala, Volume I (of 2) - The Land of the Heroes • Anonymous
... older theories and legends of the origin and spread of mankind are of interest now only because so many human beings have believed them in the past. The biblical story of Shem, Ham, and Japheth retains the interest of a primitive myth with its measure of allegorical truth,[3] but has, of course, no ...
— The Negro • W.E.B. Du Bois
... sort of fairy tale or myth,—something which has a deep meaning hidden in it, but which is not ...
— Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life • Orison Swett Marden
... Christ; of icebergs and floes sailing in the far northern sea, upon the edge of the six-months' night; out of Edda stories of the Midgard snake, which is coiled round the world; out of reports, it may be, of Indian fakirs and Buddhist shamans; out of scraps of Greek and Arab myth, from the Odyssey or the Arabian Nights, brought home by "Jorsala Farar," vikings who had been for pilgrimage and plunder up the Straits of Gibraltar into the far East;—out of all these materials were made up, as years rolled on, the famous legend of St. ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... a good authority on Praeneste, thinks that all the opus quadratum walls were built as surrounding walls for the great sanctuary of Fortuna. But the facts will not bear out his theory. Ovid, Fasti VI, 61-62, III, 92; Preller, Roem. Myth., 2, 191, are interesting ...
— A Study Of The Topography And Municipal History Of Praeneste • Ralph Van Deman Magoffin
... asking for engagements. But alas! and alas!! where are the actors who will give their time and trouble to such a noble cause? I think our rough and ready way the only one suited to our peculiarities, and, therefore, look upon the idea as a myth. ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... myth, was a wood-nymph, who was pursued by the river Alpheus. She was changed into a fountain, and ran under the sea to Sicily, where she rose near the city of Syracuse. Shelley has a ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... all danger and difficulty was no longer inspired by love of him, but by love of what Raeburn considered a myth and a delusion. ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... Everlasting Yea and its Everlasting No. The negative character of the world is the very vehicle of its progress. Life and activity mean the triumph of the positive over the negative, a triumph which results from absorbing and assimilating it. The myth of the Phoenix typifies the life of reason "eternally preparing for itself," as Hegel says, "a funeral pile, and consuming itself upon it; but so that from its ashes it produces the new, renovated, fresh life." ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... spring in the air, that resurrection of Nature when the thraldom of winter is over, and beauty comes back to the gray dim world. The old Greeks felt it, thousands of years ago, and fabled it in their myth of Persephone and her return from Hades. The Druids knew it in Ancient Britain, and fixed their religious ceremonies for May Day. The birds were caroling it still in the hedgerows, and the girls caught the joyous ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... "I seem to remember an old old myth brought from the original Earth." He waved toward the ...
— Faithfully Yours • Lou Tabakow
... I to the Marquise, "that piece of gallantry of Ninon is only a myth; it is the composition of Martinique, or of the negress, which is the real recipe of Madame de Maintenon. She talked of it one day, when I was present, in the King's carriage. His Majesty said to her: 'I am astonished that, with ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... teachings on the blessedness of slavery and starvation. Meanwhile, as no magnanimous sinner can live down to the pseudo-Christian standard, unprogressive Agnosticism takes the place of demoralised belief, and the Kingdom of God fades into a myth. ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... abides" is rapidly being settled, and is found to be rendered very fertile by the simple process of irrigation, which costs less than the manuring of Eastern farms. So the Great American Desert recedes before the immigrant, and, like the noble savage, is found to be a myth. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... determine when men first essayed the attempt to fly. In myth, legend and tradition we find allusions to aerial flight and from the very dawn of authentic history, philosophers, poets, and writers have made allusion to the subject, showing that the idea must have early taken root in the restless human heart. ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... asphodel when Pluto ran away with her," declared Mr. Stacey, offering Lilias a bouquet which a Greek nymph might have been pleased to accept. "I incline to asphodel myself, because of its immortal significance. It gives an added meaning to the myth." ...
— The Princess of the School • Angela Brazil
... see them; nay, I could have sworn there was a flash of playful mockery in them when she said: "Dear heart! how masterful rough you have grown, all in a moment, my Lord." And then the beautiful eyes filled and she said, "Poor Dick!" in a way to make me suffer all the torments of that old myth-king who could never quaff the water that was ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... became like wax (Koran xxi. xxxiv., etc.). Hence a good coat of mail is called "Davidean." I have noticed (First Footsteps, p. 33 and elsewhere) the homage paid to the blacksmith on the principle which made Mulciber (Malik Kabir) a god. The myth of David inventing mail possibly arose from his peculiarly fighting career. Moslems venerate Daud on account of his extraordinary devotion, nor has this view of his character ceased : a modern divine preferred him to ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... of the reign of Elizabeth thus saw Jonson recognised as a dramatist second only to Shakespeare, and not second even to him as a dramatic satirist. But Jonson now turned his talents to new fields. Plays on subjects derived from classical story and myth had held the stage from the beginning of the drama, so that Shakespeare was making no new departure when he wrote his "Julius Caesar" about 1600. Therefore when Jonson staged "Sejanus," three years later and with Shakespeare's company once more, he was ...
— Every Man In His Humour • Ben Jonson
... grown to manhood and womanhood since the day when his titanic form first loomed up on the horizon of the North. It is not only as their first and greatest poet that the Norsemen love and hate him, but also as a civilizer in the widest sense. But like Kadmus, in Greek myth, he has not only brought with him letters, but also the dragon-teeth of strife, which it is to be hoped will not sprout ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... latter days, that these statues are not representations of any persons who have ever lived, or were supposed to have lived on earth, or anywhere else; and there was not in or about them any hint whatever of myth or antique belief. In the pre-Christian days the work of the poet and sculptor taught a kind of history in the statues of the pagan divinities. Bacchus told of some ancient race that had introduced ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... explanation of exogamy the hypothesis is clearly insufficient, but it is evident that no theory of the origin of the phratries can leave exogamy out of the question. The point, however, with which we are immediately concerned is the myth on which in the main Mr Mathew based his theory. Unfortunately, he did not think it necessary to attempt to define either the area covered by the different phratry names—an omission which is remedied by the present work—nor yet the limits within which the myth in question or its analogues ...
— Kinship Organisations and Group Marriage in Australia • Northcote W. Thomas
... polite toward every one; and if he is rude, he must immediately make an apology. Teach him that all men are equal—that high birth is a myth when not accompanied with merit. Let the prince speak with every one, that he may gain confidence. It is of no consequence if he talks nonsense; every one knows that he is a child. Take care in his education, above all things, that he is self-reliant, and not led by others; his follies, as well ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... strange stirrings of recollected awe. But I endeavor to repress these vestigial emotions and to see the volume—not as a message from God to Good Society, but as a landmark of man's age-long struggle against myth and dogma used as a source of income and a ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... there is in us that needs to be forgiven. This is the wonderful story which was told by the Hebrews so dramatically in their Book of Job; and the phases through which that drama passes might be taken as the completest commentary on the myth of Prometheus which ever has been or can ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... Herodotus and later writers. Although some of the Greek writers made Busiris an Egyptian king and a successor of Menes, about the sixtieth of the series, and the builder of Thebes, those better informed by the Egyptians rejected him altogether. Various esoterical explanations were given of the myth, and the name not found as a king was recognized as that of the tomb of Osiris. Busiris is here probably an earlier and less accurate Graecism than Osiris for the name of the Egyptian god Usiri, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... trust, or, as it should be more properly called, this credit trust, of which Congress has begun an investigation, is no myth; it is no imaginary thing. It is not an ordinary trust like another. It doesn't do business every day. It does business only when there is occasion to do business. You can sometimes do something large when it isn't watching, but when ...
— The New Freedom - A Call For the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People • Woodrow Wilson
... prepares for the study of the primitive man and child so closely related to each other. The myth, custom, belief, domestic practises of savages, vegetative and animal traits in infancy and childhood, the development of which is a priceless boon for the higher education of women, open of themselves a great field of human interest where she needs to know the great results, ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... lore which ascribes its name to Athene, the goddess, is credited by the Greeks to Sais, a native of Egypt. The real founder of Athens, the one who made it a city and kingdom, was Theseus; an unacknowledged illegitimate child. The usual myth surrounds his birth ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... classical student will recognize in this a parallel to the Greek myth in which the Olympian divinities refer their debate in the matter of the apple of discord to the judgment of Paris. May there not in both fables lie a dim forefeeling of the time when Justice shall transfer her seat from the skies, so that whatever her ministers bind on earth ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... opulence of imagery which is ever true to Nature. Like the sea when it retires upon itself and leaves its shores waste and bare, henceforth the tide of sublimity begins to ebb, and draws us away into the dim region of myth and legend. In saying this I am not forgetting the fine storm-pieces in the Odyssey, the story of the Cyclops, and other striking passages. It is Homer grown old I am discussing, but still it is Homer." On ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... himself with a gesture of exasperation. "You are wasting yourself over a myth, an illusion. On my soul, Isabel, what a wicked waste it is! Have you forgotten the days when you and I roamed over the world together? Have you forgotten Egypt and all we did there? ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... not so sharply defined as the myth and the fairy story, and it is not always possible to separate it from these old forms of stories; but it always concerns itself with one or more characters; it assumes to be historical; it is almost always old and haunts ...
— Legends That Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... far as the Mississippi, then certainly as far as the Ohio and the valley of the Mississippi. But Wood was a private adventurer. For years his exploit had been forgotten. No record of it remained but an account written by his men, Batts and Hallam. The French declared the record was a myth, and it has, in fact, been so regarded by the most of historians. Yet, curiously enough, ranging through some old family papers of the Hudson's Bay Company in the Public Records, London, I found with Wood's ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... cosmogony is a myth read literally: its history is, for the most part, a highly immoral distortion, and its ethics are those of the Talmudic Hebrews. It has done good work in its time; but now it shows only decay and decrepitude in the place ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... King to Colin Fitzgerald. But as it is conclusively established that the ten pennylands, being the whole extent of Kintail were all the time, before and after, in possession of the Earls of Ross, this historical myth must follow the rest. Even the Laird of Applecross, in his MS. history of the clan, written in 1669, although he adopts the Fitzgerald theory from his friend and contemporary the Earl of Cromartie, has his doubts. After quoting the statement, ...
— History Of The Mackenzies • Alexander Mackenzie
... of thirty. Her charms touch him not at all; but there are others who may love only the woman of thirty, and, strange to say, they are only loved by the woman of thirty. The universal Don Juan is a myth, and does not exist out of literature. There is the Don Juan who plays havoc among the women of thirty, there is the Don Juan who plays havoc among young ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... self-government; Jacob Grimm, when he brought German philology into existence, while his brother Wilhelm made a science of Northern mythology; still later on, D.F. Strauss, when, in the days of our own youth, he placed the myth and the legend, with their unconscious origin and growth, not alone in opposition to the idea of Deity intervening to interrupt established order, but also to that of imposture and conscious fraud; Otfr. Mueller, when he proved that Greek mythology, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... supposed to regale each customer with yarns till he gasps for breath and to get his signature on the dotted line while he is in that weakened condition, is more or less of a myth. It originated from the fact that most salesmen are fat and that fat people ...
— How to Analyze People on Sight - Through the Science of Human Analysis: The Five Human Types • Elsie Lincoln Benedict and Ralph Paine Benedict
... An ancient myth relates how the god Dionysus decreed that everything touched by Midas, the Phrygian king, should turn into gold, but the effect was so disastrous that Midas begged for a reversal of the decree. The prayer was granted, conditionally upon ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... the non-combatants have suffered even more sometimes than the fighting men. The neuroticism of the age was exaggerated by writing men—we have seen the spirit of the old blood strong and keen—but neurasthenia is not a myth, and God knows it was found out and made a torture to many men and women in the city of Paris, when the Great Fear came—closing in with a narrowing circle until it seemed to clutch at the throats of those ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... the plays for which he is known, he wrote some narrative and lyric verse. Marpessa (1890), a blank verse poem, is a beautiful treatment of the old Greek myth, in which Apollo, the god, and Idas, the mortal, woo Marpessa. Marlowe might have written the lines in which Apollo promises to take her to a home above the world, where movement is ecstasy and repose is thrilling. In some of his non-dramatic poems, Christ in Hades (1896), ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... hot or nearly so, yet to ease them we shall do well to remove some of the clothes; but let us waive this point, if you don't like the line of argument, though a good deal of what you have said seems myth and fable, and let us recall to our minds the recent festival in honour of Apollo called Theoxenia,[845] and the noble share in it which the heralds expressly reserve for the descendants of Pindar, and how grand and pleasant it seemed to you." "Who ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... true; still it is likewise true that most of the Asiatic nations are gifted with a remarkably powerful imagination, which evidently induces them sometimes to assign a fabulously high age to any antiquity of theirs the origin of which dates back to a period where history merges in myth. At the present day the Hindoos possess, among their numerous rude instruments of the Fiddle class, an extraordinarily primitive contrivance, which they believe to be the instrument invented by Ravanon. Their opinion has actually been adopted by some of our modern ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... later researches, but yet not easily to be explained away or accounted for. Such observations Humboldt described as belonging to the myths of an uncritical period; and it is in that sense that I employ the term 'astronomical myth' in this essay. I propose briefly to describe and comment on some of the more interesting of these observations, which, in whatever sense they are to be interpreted, will be found to afford a ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... and is well stated by Jones himself, who, if proper allowance is made for the effects of his vanity, is, as a rule, his own best biographer: "The moral effect of it was very great," he writes, "as it taught the English that the fancied security of their coasts was a myth, and thereby compelled their government to take expensive measures for the defense of numerous ports hitherto relying for protection wholly on the vigilance and supposed omnipotence of their navy. It also doubled or more the rates of insurance, which ...
— Paul Jones • Hutchins Hapgood
... done; but he had wished to do it. He had never willingly rebuked her for his disappointment, either by a glance of his eye, or a tone of his voice; and now he had already forgiven everything. Burgo Fitzgerald was a myth. Mrs Marsham should never again come near her. Mr Bott was, of course, a thing abolished;—he had not even had the sense to keep his seat in Parliament. Dandy and Flirt should feed on gilded corn, and there should be an artificial ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... you understand that as the wife of a man in Mr. Palmer's position, nothing that has ever been connected with my previous history will be liable to touch me. Mrs. Richmond Montague," with a sneering laugh, "will have vanished, or become a myth, and Mrs. Palmer will be unassailable by ...
— True Love's Reward • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... and the present, having an opportunity last spring of preaching in my parish pulpit, gets up and preaches against doctrine with which I am in good measure identified. No plainer proof can be given of the feeling in these quarters, than the absurd myth, now a second time put forward, 'that Vice-Chancellors cannot be got to take the office on account ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... the grave! Eve convulsed over the form of Abel! Jesus weeping where Lazarus lay! America embracing the urn of Washington! The Genius of Humanity at the Tomb of the Past! It is the most pathetic spectacle of the world. As in the old myth the pelican, hovering over her dead broodlets, pierced her own breast in agony and fluttered there until by the fanning of her wings above them and the dropping of her warm blood on them they were brought to life again, so the great Mother of men seems in ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... and Russians on the West Coast of America arouse England—Vancouver is sent out ostensibly to settle the Quarrel between Fur Traders and Spanish Governors at Nootka—Incidentally, he is to complete the Exploration of America's West Coast and take Possession for England of Unclaimed Territory—The Myth of a Northeast Passage dispelled Forever . . . . . . . . . . ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... a science, not a myth. It is a very real fact, a very real power which can be developed only by careful research. To most people it is merely a curiosity. They sit, for instance, in a crowded room at some uninteresting lecture, ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... given "The Story of Siegfried" in the way in which it most appeals to the boy-reader,—simply and strongly told, with all its fire and action, yet without losing any of that strange charm of the myth, and that heroic pathos, which every previous attempt at a version, even for adult readers, ...
— The Bee-Man of Orn and Other Fanciful Tales • Frank R. Stockton
... and she made a mock social bow. "Come to see me some time and have some of my dawn, only don't come before eleven A.M. or you might get mixed up, for its awful dark in the blue room until that hour." And like a real fairy Dorothy shook her golden hair and, stooping low in myth fashion, made a "bee-line" ...
— The Bobbsey Twins at the Seashore • Laura Lee Hope
... I will tell you of Babbulkund, City of Marvel. Babbulkund stands just below the meeting of the rivers, where Oonrana, River of Myth, flows into the Waters of Fable, even the old stream Plegathanees. These, together, enter her northern gate rejoicing. Of old they flowed in the dark through the Hill that Nehemoth, the first of Pharaohs, carved into the City of Marvel. Sterile and desolate they float ...
— The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories • Lord Dunsany
... and coffee in transparent little china cups, and sugar in a silver bowl, and then cigars,—everything of the best and purest; and as we passed from one thing to another, I became at length persuaded that the Arctic Circle was a myth, that my cruise among the icebergs was a dream, and that Greenland was set down wrongly on the maps. Long before this I had been convinced that Doctor Molke was a most mysterious character, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... the first white men in the Archipelago; and the belief in it is so persistent that less than forty years ago there had been an official Dutch inquiry into the truth of it. Such a jewel—it was explained to me by the old fellow from whom I heard most of this amazing Jim-myth—a sort of scribe to the wretched little Rajah of the place;—such a jewel, he said, cocking his poor purblind eyes up at me (he was sitting on the cabin floor out of respect), is best preserved by being concealed about the person of a woman. Yet it is not every woman that would do. ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... rekindled from what was regarded as the sacred flame. At times of public calamities and distress, the practice of kindling needfire was resorted to. It was supposed to counteract sorcery, and stay disease among cattle. These superstitious operations remind one of the story of Prometheus. The myth runs thus:—"During the reign of Zeus, men and gods, once upon a time, were disputing with one another. With the view of outwitting Zeus, Prometheus cut up a bull and divided it into two parts, hiding the meat and the intestines ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... effort to ascertain the balance of human and political forces that bore upon his Su'u territory, ten miles square, bounded by the sea and by landward lines of an inter-tribal warfare that was older than the oldest Su'u myth. Eternally, heads had been taken and bodies eaten, now on one side, now on the other, by the temporarily victorious tribes. The boundaries had remained the same. Ishikola, in crude beche- de-mer, tried to learn the Solomon Islands ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... always thought," she said, "that Penelope was a myth. In your case I should say that Penelope represents a return to sanity—to the ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... do. I have frequently seen a lady walking across Hampstead Heath with a cat in train. When you go for a walk with a dog, however, the dog protects you: when you go for a walk with a cat, you feel that you are protecting the cat. It is strange that the cat should have imposed the myth of its helplessness on us. It is an animal with an almost boundless capacity for self-help. It can jump up walls. It can climb trees. It can run, as the proverb says, like "greased lightning." It is armed like an African ...
— The Pleasures of Ignorance • Robert Lynd |
