"Olympian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and who was to have ordered their ranks and marched at their head; and the name of their Marshal was none other than Francois Gaspard. The Superintendent himself was keeping watch over Company B, but, in a professionally Olympian scorn of processions, he was far from asking or caring to know who the Marshal was, and indeed, if he had known, he would scarcely have drawn such a lightning-quick inference as that the missing Marshal and the missing murderer were one and the same. So Mr. Gaspard's ...
— Half a Hero - A Novel • Anthony Hope
... changeful in their own religious practice, the Parthians were, naturally, tolerant of a variety of creeds among their subjects. Fire altars were maintained, and Zoroastrian zeal was allowed to nourish in the dependent kingdom of Persia. In the Greek cities the Olympian gods were permitted to receive the veneration of thousands, while in Babylon, Nearda, and Nisibis the Jews enjoyed the free exercise of their comparatively pure and elevated religion. No restrictions ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 6. (of 7): Parthia • George Rawlinson
... table, took a sheet of paper, traced a few lines on it, and at once blotted them out.... He recalled Gemma's wonderful figure in the dark window, in the starlight, set all a-fluttering by the warm hurricane; he remembered her marble arms, like the arms of the Olympian goddesses, felt their living weight on his shoulders.... Then he took the rose she had thrown him, and it seemed to him that its half-withered petals exhaled a fragrance of her, more delicate than the ordinary ...
— The Torrents of Spring • Ivan Turgenev
... this was odd, A sort of new Olympian god; And when the wise, who watched his whim, Sighed, "Have the gods demented him? Quem deus vult, et cetera" he Was just as mad as mad could be; And, just like other angry boys, Kicked over tables, smashed his toys, And cried out, "Take the things away! I'll have nought ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, March 26, 1892 • Various
... half-closed eyes, I behold the steps again, and our great man at the head of them receiving his hat from the obsequious Scipio, drawing on his gloves, looping his malacca cane to his wrist by its tasselled cord of silk. The descent might be military or might be civil: he was always Olympian. ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... snatched the shell, And waked wild music from its silver strings; Then tossed it sadly by,—'Ah, hush!' she cries, 'Dead offspring of the tortoise and the mine! Why mock my discords with thine harmonies? 'Although a thrice-Olympian lot be thine, Only to echo back in every tone, The moods of ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... message to deliver urbi et orbi, "Here I reign more tranquilly than at Lahore"? Perhaps but for this immortal analytical study, archaeologists might begin to puzzle their heads about him five hundred years hence, and set about writing quartos with plates (like M. Quatremere's work on Olympian Jove) to prove that Napoleon was something of a Sofi in the East before he became "Emperor of the French." Well, the wealthy shop laid siege to the poor little entresol; and after a bombardment with banknotes, entered and took possession. The Human Comedy gave way before ...
— Gaudissart II • Honore de Balzac
... a Bacon comes after and picks up his brains. A Bruno is angrily seized by the throttle And hunted about by thy ghost, Aristotle, Till a More or Lavater step into his place: Then the world turns and makes an admiring grimace. Once the men were so great and so few, they appear, Through a distant Olympian atmosphere, Like vast Caryatids upholding the age. Now the men are so many and small, disengage One man from the million to mark him, next moment The crowd sweeps him hurriedly out of your comment; And since we seek vainly (to praise in our songs) 'Mid our ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... tales how, when the sons of the gods were born, the mothers always died in agony? Maybe it's only Semele I'm thinking of. At any rate, I've sometimes wondered whether the young men of our time had to die to bring a new idea into the world... something Olympian. I'd like to know. I think I shall know. Since I've been over here this time, I've come to believe ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... the most enduring monument of his fame. He also designed the Propylaea, a magnificent columned vestibule, fronting the broad flight of steps which led up to the western entrance of the Acropolis. But the most renowned of his works was the gigantic statue of the Olympian Zeus, wrought in gold and ivory, which was the chief glory of the temple at Olympia. Of this sublime creation, the highest expression of divinity achieved by the ancients, only the fame survives. These triumphs of art were not brought to completion until nearly the close of the period of forty- ...
— Stories From Thucydides • H. L. Havell
... bacchanal desire, Polluted not the passion of his song; No corybantic clangor clamoured through Its manly harmonies, as sane as strong; So that the captious few Found sickliness in pure Elysian balm, And coldness in such high Olympian calm. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 15, 1892 • Various
... Russian army, to march into the provinces on the Danube; but they were not helped by the Russians, and were defeated by the Turks. Ipsilanti fled into Austria; but another leader, called George the Olympian, lived a wild, outlaw life for some years longer, but as he had no rank the Greeks were too proud to join him. At last he shut himself up in the old convent of Secka, and held it out against the Turks for thirty-six hours, until, finding that he could defend ...
— Aunt Charlotte's Stories of Greek History • Charlotte M. Yonge
... pride. If he had hated her he could not have flung that enormous fortune more brutally at her head. And his unrepentant death seemed to lift for a moment the curtain on something lofty and sinister like an Olympian's caprice. ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... knew at Oxford as an undergraduate, and whom I watched and admired to the end of his life, was Matthew Arnold. He was beautiful as a young man, strong and manly, yet full of dreams and schemes. His Olympian manners began even at Oxford; there was no harm in them, they were natural, not put on. The very sound of his voice and the wave of his hand were Jovelike.... Sometimes at public dinners, when ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... magnificent this theological creation, the work of society! The creation of the demiourgos was obliterated; what we call the Omnipotent was conquered; and for centuries the enchanted imagination of mortals was turned away from the spectacle of Nature by the contemplation of Olympian marvels. ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... Then the night of our sordid commonplace life closes in around it, and the burned-out case, falling back to earth, lies useless and uncared for, slowly smoldering into ashes. Once, breaking loose from our prison bonds, we dare, as mighty old Prometheus dared, to scale the Olympian mount and snatch from Phoebus' chariot the fire of the gods. Happy those who, hastening down again ere it dies out, can kindle their earthly altars at its flame. Love is too pure a light to burn long among the noisome gases that we breathe, but before it is choked ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... stepped. It was Adam Holcomb. He stood directly in front of Pasquale and his bride, blocking the way. There was a strange light in his eyes. It was as if he looked from the present far into the future, as if somehow he were a god, an Olympian who held in his hand the ...
— Steve Yeager • William MacLeod Raine
... told Jupiter that as he was the father it would be better if he left in other hands the making of thunderbolts. Vulcan undertook the task. Soon his furnaces glowed with bolts of two kinds; one that hits its mark with a deadly unerring—and that is the sort which any of the Olympian gods will hurl; whilst the other sort was that which becomes scattered on its course and does damage only to the mountain tops, or perchance is even lost on the way. It is this kind of thunderbolt that Jupiter ...
— The Original Fables of La Fontaine - Rendered into English Prose by Fredk. Colin Tilney • Jean de la Fontaine
... the history of all the religions of the Aryan race, which was missed indeed by every careful observer, but which formerly could be supplied by guess-work only. How the Persians came to worship Ormuzd, how the Buddhists came to protest against temples and sacrifices, how Zeus and the Olympian gods came to be what they are in the mind of Homer, or how such beings as Jupiter and Mars came to be worshipped by the Italian peasant:—all these questions, which used to yield material for endless and ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... original and barbarous character—with an almost Gothic quaintness, more properly belonging to a rich native ballad than to the poetry of Hellas. There was a certain impropriety in his knowing so much Greek—an unfitness in the idea of marble fauns, and satyrs, and even Olympian gods, lugged in under the oaken roof and the painted light of an odd, old Norman hall. But Methley, abounding in Homer, really loved him (as I believe) in all truth, without whim or fancy; moreover, he had a good deal of ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... sorry, then, you are not the Olympian," said the woman, half smiling at the pleasantry. Cimon interrupted them. Some of the party had caught a sun-burned shepherd in among the rocks, a veritable Pan in his shaggy goat-skin. The bribe of two obols brought him out with his pipe. Four of the slave-boys fell to dancing. ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... white-armed Nausicaae: "Stranger, because you do not seem a common, senseless person,—and Olympian Zeus himself distributes fortune to mankind and gives to high and low even as he wills to each; and this he gave to you, and you must bear it therefore,—now you have reached our city and our land, you shall not lack for clothes nor anything ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... said, in his most deliberate, most Olympian tone. "I believe you're entirely mistaken, I believe ... I've been informed that the Systeme Groenlandais is one of the healthiest places in the Polar regions. There are interested ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... the assemblage. Mr. Calvert, who sat directly behind her, could only see the pink ear and outline of the fair, displeased face thus turned away, but he thought she looked more imperiously lovely and more distant than the painted goddesses of the Olympian hierarchy who disported themselves, after the artist's fancy, upon the great dome ...
— Calvert of Strathore • Carter Goodloe
... the following century in Marino's epic of Adone. We find it infusing the scene of Mirtillo's first meeting with Amarilli, which may be said to set the tone of the rest of the poem. Happening to see the nymph at the Olympian games, Mirtillo at once fell in love and contrived to introduce himself in female attire into the company of maidens to which she belonged. Here, the proposal being made to hold a kissing match among themselves, ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... Lincoln through literature into politics. The ease with which he drifted from one to the other is also still to be evaluated. Did it show a certain slackness, a certain aimlessness, at the bottom of his nature? Had it, in a way, some sort of analogy—to compare homespun with things Olympian—to the vein of frivolity in the great Caesar? One is tempted to think so. Surely, here was one of those natures which need circumstance to compel them to greatness and which are not foredoomed, Napoleon-like, to seize greatness. Without encroaching upon the biographical task, one may ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... Denver for fifteen years—watched his rise through all the stages of journalism to the Olympian pinnacle of the Investigator's editorial office. In the thick-set man with grizzling hair there were few traces left of the hungry-eyed young reporter who, on his way home in the small hours, used to "bob in" on Granice, ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 1 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... side, with their arms twined around each other, they were as lovely a sight as the moon ever shone upon. Totally unlike each other, but both excellent in beauty. One might have been a model for the seraphs of Christian faith, the other an Olympian deity. ...
— Philothea - A Grecian Romance • Lydia Maria Child
... handsome expression of regret on the discovery of the real culprit. What Harold had felt was not so much the imprisonment,—indeed he had very soon escaped by the window, with assistance from his allies, and had only gone back in time for his release,—as the Olympian habit. A word would have set all right; but of course ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... edifying neglect of public business; and that his Highness now keeps a cigar store in Rupert Street, much frequented by other foreign refugees. I go there from time to time to smoke and have a chat, and find him as great a creature as in the days of his prosperity; he has an Olympian air behind the counter; and although a sedentary life is beginning to tell upon his waistcoat, he is probably, take him for all in all, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the solitary journey by land and sea, the doubtful welcome at home. And here by her side stood the wealthy lover, the very embodiment of protecting power—is not every girl's first lover in her eyes as Olympian Jove?—eager to take upon himself the burden of her life, ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... the platform to the carriages outside the station. Probably the chairman and directors of the company were also present, but our eyes were not for them. Directors were to us junior clerks, remote personalities, mythical beings dwelling on Olympian heights. ...
— Fifty Years of Railway Life in England, Scotland and Ireland • Joseph Tatlow
... the result of insufficient exercise, impure air, and dietetic errors. An intelligent journalist has remarked that "many of our ministers weigh too little in the pulpit, because they weigh too little on the scales." The Greek Gymnasium and Olympian Games were the sure foundations of that education from which arose that subtle philosophy, poetry, and military skill which have won the admiration of nineteen centuries. The laurel crown of the Olympian victor was far more precious to the Grecian youth than the gilded prize is to our modern ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... blamed her not, But cast the heavy burden on the God, Whose wrath, they deem'd, had verily waxed hot Against the painful race on earth that trod, And in God's hand was Helen but the rod To scourge a people that, in unknown wise, Had vex'd the far Olympian abode With secret ...
— Helen of Troy • Andrew Lang
... Majesty moves, for a mean and a measure Of motion, — not faster than dateless Olympian leisure Might pace with unblown ample garments from pleasure to pleasure, — The wave-serrate sea-rim sinks unjarring, unreeling, Forever revealing, revealing, revealing, Edgewise, bladewise, halfwise, wholewise, — 'tis ...
— Select Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... on that which is really interesting and venerable in these churches, while we admire their long colonnades, their skilful use of ancient columns—some of which may probably have adorned the temples of Olympian deities in the days of the Emperors,—and the exceedingly rich and beautiful new forms of capitals, of a design quite unknown to Vitruvius, which the genius of Romanesque artists has invented, we find that our chief interest is derived from the ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... have conceived no Olympian more heroic than he, and certainly none with so compelling a vitality. "Such a warm, kind light in them!" she thought of the eyes others ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... and Phoebe had Leto and Asteria. One of the children of Krios was Pallas; those of Iapetus were Prometheus, Epimetheus, and Atlas. Kronos married his sister Rhea, and their children were Hestia, Demeter and Here; Hades, Poseidon, and Zeus,—all, except Hades or Pluto, belonging to the subsequent Olympian deities. ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... that the sharpness of extreme grief cuts and grinds away many of those strongest bonds of infirmity and doubt which bind down the souls of men to the cabined darkness of the hour; and that from the cloud and thunderstorm often swoops the Olympian eagle that can ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... spirit or sense of a soul that was soft to the spirit and soul of our senses Sweetens the stress of surprising suspicion that sobs in the semblance and sound of a sigh; Only this oracle opens Olympian, in mystical moods and triangular tenses,— 'Life is the lust of a lamp for the light that is dark till the dawn of the day ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... my dear Rinaldo, that your mere artist never does. Intent upon expressing self, he misses the detachment which alone is Olympian; whereas the critic—Tell me, why is an architect architectonic? Because he sits in his parlour, pushing the brown sherry and chatting with his clients, while his clerks express their souls for him in a back office. This lesson, O Badcocchio, I learnt from an uncle of mine, who had ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... took their flight. Johnny's father and mother "moved"—that was the brief, unadorned, sufficing formula. It was all accepted as inevitable; hardly for a boy a little past twelve, like myself, to question the movements of Olympian elders; nor even, in fact, to feel an abiding interest in them when I had seen them but three or four times in all. I never speculated—never asked where they had come from; never considered the ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... Barbecue-Smith smiled benignly, and, looking up at Denis with an expression of Olympian condescension, "And what sort of things do ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... wine-skins, and I observed that they were cut in the very spots in which I thought I had wounded the robbers. I had, indeed, invented a pleasantry for the festival of the god of laughter! The townspeople laughed with the inextinguishable laughter of the Olympian deities. They climbed up to the roof to get a good look at me; they swarmed up the pillars; they clung to the statues; they hung from the windows at the risk of their lives; all shouting at ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... trepidation by the stupendous event, and eagerly inquired if Madam herself was in her carriage, and was immensely relieved to learn she was not; for, unspeakably gratifying as such condescension, such an Olympian compliment, would have been under other circumstances, I should have felt it more than offset by the mortification of knowing that she knew, that her own eyes had beheld, the very humble quarter in which a lack of means had ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... Incarnation (older than Jerusalem itself) be literally true—that the Almighty was the immediate father of Mary's child: Is not the birth of each and all of us as much a mystery, as great a "miracle," as though we sprang full-grown from the brow of Olympian Jove? Is it necessary that the Creator should violate his own laws to convince us that he does exist? Is it more wonderful that the sun should stand still upon Gibeon and the moon in the Valley of Ajalon than that the great world should ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... very pretty and picturesque, but the hills not lofty enough to be very striking. The entire island, property speaking, is a forest. On the right we have a long massive chain of lofty mountains covered with snow, called the Olympian range—very grand, quite Alpine in aspect. This is the peninsula, composed of a series of mountains running for many miles in one unbroken line, which divides the Straits of Fuca from Puget Sound. It belongs to America, ...
— Handbook to the new Gold-fields • R. M. Ballantyne
... bridge games, and other forms of seaside sports, all of which contributed to the gaiety of life in the Indian Ocean. In the evening one might have imagined oneself at a London music-hall, in the daytime at the Olympian games, and in the early morning out on the farm. There were a number of chickens on board and each rooster seemed obliged to salute the dawn with a fanfare of crowing. They belonged to the governor and were going out to East Africa to ...
— In Africa - Hunting Adventures in the Big Game Country • John T. McCutcheon
... See, see, "Olympian Jupiter!" What folly! To think of your believing in Jupiter, as ...
— The Clouds • Aristophanes
... appears to one at least of those unfortunate "outsiders" for whose judgment or whose "meddling" Mr. Whistler has so imperial and Olympian a contempt.... ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... elect and consecrate By love and reverence of the Olympian sire Whom I too loved and worshipped, seeing so great, And found so gracious toward my long desire To bid that love in song before his gate Sound, and my lute be loyal to his lyre, To none save one it now may dedicate Song's new burnt-offering on a century's pyre. ...
— Studies in Song • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... of James Oppenheim, author of "The Olympian," was recently asked what work he was going to do when he became a man. "Oh," Ralph replied, "I'm not going to work at all." "Well, what are you going to do, then?" he was asked. "Why," he said seriously, "I'm just going to write stories, ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... all wroth with the abominable behaviour of Achilles to dead Hector (XXIV. 134). They console and protect Priam. As for the Odyssey, Mr. Monro finds that in this late Epic the gods are just what Mr. Leaf proclaims them to have been in his old original kernel. "There is now an Olympian concert that carries on something like a moral government of the world. It is very different in the Iliad...." [Footnote: ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... House-boat on the Styx Coffee and Repartee Mollie and the Unwiseman Worsted Man; A Musical Play for Amateurs The Enchanted Typewriter Ghosts I Have Met Mrs. Raffles Olympian Nights R. Holmes & Co. And Many ...
— Alice in Blunderland - An Iridescent Dream • John Kendrick Bangs
... breathed; "yes, why not? Man-making is almost equal to man-bearing. I have no son to spur up the Olympian heights; but what might I not do for Alymer, ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... giant in blue livery and powder. Flinging wide the vast door, he stared down upon the visitors, and his Olympian haughtiness gave way to a ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... accordingly a flattering description of General Washington, compounded of Stuart's portrait and Greenough's statue of Olympian Jove with Washington's features, in the Capitol Square. Miss Dare listened with an expression of superiority not unmixed with patience, and then she ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... events—the Trojan war, the founding of Rome, the loss of Paradise—and bring before us a large number of heroes, divinities, and angels. The "Iliad" is made up chiefly of battle scenes, in which mighty heroes and Olympian deities take part. AEneas is the hero of the "AEneid"; but back of the tribulations through which he passes, we recognize the agency of contending divinities. And in "Paradise Lost" Milton introduces the mighty beings of heaven and hell. The epic is thus the stateliest ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... nature as emporia at the mouths of the Tiber and Po. The cities we have just named are those which appear as holding primitive religious intercourse with Greece. The first of all barbarians to present gifts to the Olympian Zeus was the Tuscan king Arimnus, perhaps a ruler of Ariminum. Spina and Caere had their special treasuries in the temple of the Delphic Apollo, like other communities that had regular dealings with the shrine; and the sanctuary at Delphi, as well as the Cumaean oracle, is interwoven ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... the strange good fortune to captivate the wayward genius of Carlyle. It is difficult to understand how Carlyle, who all through life hesitated between the Christian Puritanism of John Knox and the Olympian paganism of Goethe, could have been fascinated by the Potsdam cynic. We can only seek for an explanation in the deeply rooted anti-French and pro-German prejudices of Carlyle. Frederick was the arch-enemy ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... and maidens bearing sacrificial urns, by the garlanded sheep and oxen destined for sacrifice, to where, on turning the corner that leads to the eastern front, we find ourselves in the presence of the Olympian gods themselves, enthroned to receive the offering of a people's life. And if to this marble representation we add the colour it lacks, the gold and silver of the vessels, the purple and saffron ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... the translucent outline of Capri and the fantastically blue mountains of the coast, to Vesuvius lifting its torch above the plain—this prodigal response to fancy's claims suggested the boundless invention of some great scenic artist, some Olympian Veronese with sea and sky for a palette. And then the city itself, huddled between bay and mountains, and seething and bubbling like a Titan's cauldron! Here was life at its source, not checked, directed, utilised, but gushing forth uncontrollably through every fissure of the brown walls ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... believed the statue to commemorate an event which happened in 425, while he himself preferred to connect it with an event of 453. The inscription on the pedestal is indecisive on this point. It runs in these terms: "The Messenians and Naupactians dedicated [this statue] to the Olympian Zeus, as a tithe [of the spoils] from their enemies. Paeonius of Mende made it; and he was victorious [over his competitors] in making the acroteria for the temple." The later of the two dates mentioned by Pausanias has been generally accepted, though not without recent protest. This would ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... the garden of life we get that special bite out of the sunny side of a peach. One of my own memorable experiences in that way came in this wise. I had heard, long before I went abroad, so much of the singing of the youngest child of the "Olympian dynasty," Adelaide Kemble, so much of a brief career crowded with triumphs on the lyric stage, that I longed, if it might be possible, to listen to the "true daughter of her race." The rest of her family for years had been, ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... realms above: Their father is the Olympian Jove. Ne'er shall oblivion veil their front sublime, Th' indwelling god is great, nor fears the ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... tall man, rather more powerfully built, awaited developments with apparent unconcern. Mr. Handyside, in fact, was in the august company of the Commissioner of Police, and the latter, though eminently agreeable, nevertheless observed an Olympian attitude. Thus might Jove watch a gathering ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... lay aside thy mantle! Clothe thee with nakedness, O Soul, that art its priestess! For lo, thy body is thy temple. Pass unto me a magnet's stream, O amber of the flesh, And let me drink of nectar drawn From Nakedness Olympian! ...
— Life Immovable - First Part • Kostes Palamas
... for weary of plaguing puny mortals, who whimpered and cried when they saw they could not escape, the inevitable Nemesis turned her attention from actors to spectators, and made a clean sweep of the whole Olympian hierarchy. She smashed their altars, pulled down their statues, and after she had completed her malicious work, found that she had, vulgarly speaking, been cutting off her nose to spite her face, for she, too, became ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... he regarded as the Radical doctor's dupe, fell in for a share of his view of the doctor, and Mr. Romfrey became less fitted to observe Nevil Beauchamp's doings with the Olympian gravity ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... it well beyond the lines. One machine chased a train for miles a few hundred feet above, derailed it, and spat bullets at the lame coaches until driven off by enemy craft. Another made what was evidently an inspection of troops by some Boche Olympian look like the riotous disorder of a Futurist painting. A pilot with some bombs to spare spiralled down over a train, dropped the first bomb on the engine, and the second, third, fourth, and fifth on the soldiers who scurried from the carriages. When a detachment of cavalry ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... is not only the most stupendous eloquence ever owned by man. It is profound knowledge of humanity, gathered by a keen and open-eyed Olympian contemplation of all sorts and conditions of men, from the egregious Bottom, and Dogberry the muddled, up to Hamlet and Imogen; it is the broad myriad-minded understanding which feels with every class, and, withal, suffers ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... Heaven, Urania, by that name If rightly thou art called, whose voice divine Following, above the Olympian hill I soar, Above the flight of Pegasean wing! The meaning, not the name, I call; for thou Nor of the Muses nine, nor on the top Of old Olympus dwell'st; but heavenly-born, Before the hills appeared or fountain flowed, Thou with Eternal Wisdom didst ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... B.C. was marked by the destruction by fire of the old Capitoline Temple, which had withstood the ravages of the Gauls. Sulla aspired to rebuild it, and caused to be transported to Rome for that purpose the column of the Olympian Zeus at Athens. It was completed by Caesar, and its roof was gilded at an expense of $15,000,000. The pediment was adorned with statuary, and near it was ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... the curious knickknacks, mysteries, puzzles, Indian gifts, rat-traps, and well-disguised blessings that the gods chuck down to us from the Olympian peaks, the most disquieting and evil-bringing is the snow. By scientific analysis it is absolute beauty and purity—so, at the beginning we look ...
— Waifs and Strays - Part 1 • O. Henry
... goddess-queen Throned 'mid th' Olympian vasts Majestic, splendidly serene 'Spite Boreas' rageful blasts. Immaculate, 'midst starry fires ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... berries!' I know they are at their ripest. Then, with baskets, we sally out; I taking the middle rank, and the children the outer spray of boughs. Even now we gather those only which drop at the touch; these, in a brimming saucer, with golden Alderney cream and a soupcon of powdered sugar, are Olympian nectar; they melt before the tongue can measure their full soundness, and seem to be mere bloated ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... put a sack upon his back. The working of the marble is remarkable and, after all, is a fine piece of study which would do honor to any other sculptor except Michael Angelo; but there is lacking that Olympian mastership which characterizes the works of that ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various
... school of hope deferred. When I was—what I was, I still believed that this dingy carcass swaddled a Roman spirit. In the pomp of my pallet I dreamed Olympian dreams. And the dreams ...
— If I Were King • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... wofully. Sir Asinus scenting the joke, and determined to revenge himself, does the same joyfully. Jacques sighs, Sir Asinus laughs. Jacques directs an Olympian frown at his opponent, but Sir Asinus ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous
... difficulty, the manner which would be correct in their relative positions; accepted the curtsey before stretching out a hand, guaranteed Olympian, to the plains below. "My dear Mrs. Thrale," said she, choking back excitement to chat-point, "I really am more grateful to you than I can say for taking charge of this dear old lady. I was quite at my wits' end what to do with her. You see, I had to go up to London, because of my cousin's illness—Sister ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... she is coloured like the Scythia maid,[308] That challenged Lucio at the Olympian games. Well-bodied, but her face was something black, Like those that follow household business: Her eyes were hollow, sunk into her head, Which makes her have a cloudy countenance. She hath a pretty tongue, I must confess, And yet, my lord, she ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VI • Robert Dodsley
... whom he hath not seen? You, Mr. A, L, M, O, you who care not for Milton, and value not the dark sublimities which rest ultimately (as we all feel) upon dread realities, how can you seriously thrill in sympathy with the spurious and fanciful sublimities of the classical poetry—with the nod of the Olympian Jove, or the seven-league strides of Neptune? Flying Childers had the most prodigious stride of any horse on record; and at Newmarket that is justly held to be a great merit; but it is hardly a qualification for a Pantheon. The parting of Hector and Andromache—that is tender, doubtless; ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... to suit the new and sensitive poetic taste. No commentator has been able to explain the nature of ambrosia. In the genuine bardic times, no such vague euphuism would have been tolerated as that of Homer on this subject. The nature of Olympian ambrosia would have been told in language as clear as that in which Homer describes the preparation of that Pramnian bowl for which Nestor and Machaon waited while Hecamede was grating over it the goat's milk cheese, or that in which the Irish bards described the ambrosia of the Tuatha ...
— Early Bardic Literature, Ireland • Standish O'Grady
... slander. Your own sex will be jealous of your eminence, considering your superiority an insult to their mediocrity; and mine will either ridicule or barely tolerate you; for men detest female competitors in the Olympian game of literature. If you fail, you will be sneered down till you become embittered, soured, misanthropic; a curse to yourself, a burden to the friends who sympathize with your blasted hopes. Edna, you have talent, you write ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... and he laughed a little too, even if he was a philosopher, "boys will be boys, and those seem two fine strong little fellows of yours. One of these days they'll be competing in the Olympian games, I suppose, and how proud you will be if they should bring home ...
— The Spartan Twins • Lucy (Fitch) Perkins
... Yet let vs altogether to our Troopes, And giue them leaue to flye, that will not stay: And call them Pillars that will stand to vs: And if we thriue, promise them such rewards As Victors weare at the Olympian Games. This may plant courage in their quailing breasts, For yet is hope of Life and Victory: Foreslow no longer, make we ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... the bargain with humanity, a bargain to be kept on their side if they expected tribute of lambs and piglings, of hallowed cakes and vervain wreaths. Very little of what we call devotion seasons them. In two Odes (I, ii, xii), from a mere litany of Olympian names he passes to a much more earnest deification of Augustus. Another (III, xix) is a grace to Bacchus after a wine-bout. Or Faunus is bidden to leave pursuing the nymphs (we think of Elijah's sneer at Baal) and to attend to his duties on the Sabine farm, of blessing the soil ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... Leads him perplext, where he may likeliest find Truce to his restless thoughts, and entertain The irksome hours, till his great Chief return. Part on the Plain, or in the Air sublime Upon the wing, or in swift race contend, As at th' Olympian Games or Pythian fields; 530 Part curb thir fierie Steeds, or shun the Goal With rapid wheels, or fronted Brigads form. As when to warn proud Cities warr appears Wag'd in the troubl'd Skie, and Armies rush To Battel in ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... From the time that Miranda is "discovered playing chess with Ferdinand" in Prospero's cell, (an early instance of "discovered mate,") the numberless Mirandas of Romance have played for and been played for mates. Chess has even its Mythology,—Cassa being now, we believe, generally received at the Olympian Feasts. True, some one has been wicked enough to observe that all chess-stories are divisible into two classes,—in one a man plays for his own soul with the Devil, in the other the hero plays and wins a wife,—and to beg for a chess-story minus wives and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... Wonders of the World" are seven most remarkable objects of the ancient world. They are: The Pyramids of Egypt, Pharos of Alexandria, Walls and Hanging Gardens of Babylon, Temple of Diana at Ephesus, the Statue of the Olympian Jupiter, Mausoleum of Artemisia, and Colossus ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... do I care about the tanner, since I do not fear the gods of the State? These gods, whose decline Aeschylus foretold long ago! Does not his Prometheus say that the Olympian Zeus will be overthrown by his own descendant—the son that will be born of a virgin? Is ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... the moil and toil of propaganda, "movements," "causes" and agitations the statesman-inventor and the political psychologist find the raw material for their work. It is not the business of the politician to preserve an Olympian indifference to what stupid people call "popular whim." Being lofty about the "passing fad" and the ephemeral outcry is all very well in the biographies of dead men, but rank nonsense in the rulers of real ones. Oscar Wilde once remarked that only superficial people ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... from an investigation of this subject, that two elements of worship are to be found in the Greek religion, which were never quite harmonized. One is the worship of the Olympian deities, gods of light and day, gods of this world, and interested in our present human life. This worship tended to promote a free development of character; it was self-possessed, cheerful, and public; ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... in 1632, and consecrated by Bishop White of Ely, had a beautiful ceiling and a noble east window. "A grave divine," Fuller tells us, "preaching before the University at St. Mary's, had this smart passage in his Sermon—that as at the Olympian Games he was counted the Conqueror who could drive his chariot wheels nearest the mark yet so as not to hinder his running or to stick thereon, so he who in his Sermons could preach near Popery and yet no Popery, ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... who dwell within the frozen circle; I will become a Greenlander; I will go and preach the religion of Mohammed to the inhabitants of Patagonia; I will brush up the gods of Rome; dust that old mythology; compound and simplify the whole into a good, comfortable, believable system, and proclaim Olympian Jove in the deserts of Amazonia. I will be a Turk, an Indian, a Pirate; I will be any thing. What do I care, and who shall say me nay? This sensation of freedom is too delicious to be interrupted by ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... mud again; cannot be hoisted by engineering. And, after all that filling and emptying of water-casks, and pumping and puffing, and straining of every fibre for a twelvemonth past, Britannic Majesty had to sit down again, panting in an Olympian manner, with that expensive long sword of his still ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... Besides Princess Bielokonski and the old dignitary (who was really a great man) and his wife, there was an old military general—a count or baron with a German name, a man reputed to possess great knowledge and administrative ability. He was one of those Olympian administrators who know everything except Russia, pronounce a word of extraordinary wisdom, admired by all, about once in five years, and, after being an eternity in the service, generally die full of honour and riches, though they have never done anything great, and have even been hostile to ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... it! Lady-love and he are taken prisoners; lodged in separate castles: [2d September, 1730 abdicated, went to Chambery; reclaims, is locked in Rivoli, 8th October, 1731 (news of it just come to Schulenburg); dies there, 31st October, 1732, his 67th year.] and the wrath of the proud old gentleman is Olympian in character,—split an oak table, smiting it while he spoke (say the cicerones);—and his silence, and the fiery daggers he looks, are still more emphatic. But the young fellow holds out; you cannot play handy-dandy ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... harmony with all her appearance and manner. Lothair thought he had never seen any one or any thing so serene; the serenity, however, not of humbleness, nor of merely conscious innocence; it was not devoid of a degree of majesty; what one pictures of Olympian repose. And the countenance was Olympian: a Phidian face, with large gray eyes and dark lashes; wonderful hair, abounding without art, and gathered ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... appearance simultaneously along all the borders of the forest. Curls fluttered on divine heads, graceful arms uplifted garlands and cymbals, and laughter, sparkling, Olympian laughter, rippled and ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... Caribbean flora! School children in Ceylon are compelled to study a long and unfamiliar list of errors in English speech current only in the London streets, in order to identify and correct them on the Oxford papers, distributed with Olympian impartiality to all parts of the Empire. Such insularity of mind seems to justify Bernard Shaw's description of Britain as an island whose natives regard its manners and customs as laws of nature. Yet these are the people who in the Nile Valley have become masters of irrigation, ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... sun the need of sleep began to afflict him. He had thought he never would need sleep again. His paddle became leaden in his hands, and Olympian yawns prostrated him. ...
— The Fur Bringers - A Story of the Canadian Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... to Maison's, near Alfort. You come home by the left bank of the Seine, in the midst of a cloud of very black Olympian dust. The horse drags your family wearily along. But alas! your pride has fled, and you look without emotion upon his sunken flanks, and upon two bones which stick out on each side of his belly. His ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Part First • Honore de Balzac
... valley, are nothing very remarkable or unusual. Then suddenly you are on the threshold of this hall of the elder gods. Demons and furies might lurk in the valley below, but here is the abode of the serene, beneficent Olympian deities. All is so calm, so hushed, so friendly, yet so towering, so stupendous, so unspeakably beautiful. You are in a mansion carved out of the granite foundations of the earth, with walls two or three thousand feet high, hung here and there with snow-white ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... about, living in great comfort at the expense of the Christians, until at last they quarrelled in consequence, Lucian thinks, of his eating some forbidden food. Finally, Peregrinus ended his career by throwing himself into the flames of a funeral pile during the Olympian games. An earthquake is said to have taken place at the time; a vulture flew out from the pile crying out with a human voice; and, shortly after, Peregrinus rose again and appeared clothed in white raiment, ...
— A Reply to Dr. Lightfoot's Essays • Walter R. Cassels
... of the race from two directions. We preserve the feeble and extirpate the strong. He who, in view of this amazing folly can believe in a constant, even slow, progress of the human race toward perfection ought to be happy. He has a mind whose Olympian heights are inaccessible—the Titans of fact can never scale them ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... of humanity in its current phases, even if without prophetic emphasis or direction: the breadth of a Goethe, rather than the fineness of a Shelley or a Leopardi. But such largeness of mind, not to be vulgar, must be impartial, comprehensive, Olympian; it would not be greatness if its miscellany were not dominated by a clear genius and if before the confusion of things the poet or philosopher were not himself delighted, exalted, and by no means confused. ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... mother. All right, I'll catch you in the street, you rat, you toadstool. May I never grow an inch up or down if I don't push your master into a dunghill, and I'll give you the same medicine, I will, by Hercules, I will, no matter if you call down Olympian Jupiter himself! I'll take care of your eight inch ringlets and your two cent master into the bargain. I'll have my teeth into you, either you'll cut out the laughing, or I don't know myself. Yes, even if you had a golden beard. I'll ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... features, with a certain boyish awkwardness of manner, but with the most urban-like courtesy and affability. From noon till dark, the time is spent in conversation, continued, various, and eloquent. What a presence is there in this humble, unpretending cottage! And as the stream of Olympian sweetness moves on, now in laughing ripples, and again in a solemn majestic flood, what a past do we bring before ourselves! what a present! For this is he that talked with Coleridge, that was the friend of Wilson,—and—what furnishes a more sublime suggestion—this ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... that shelters a friend! It might well be built, like a festal bower or arch, to entertain him a single day. Happier, if he know the solemnity of that relation and honor its law! He who offers himself a candidate for that covenant comes up, like an Olympian, to the great games where the first-born of the world are the competitors. He proposes himself for contests where Time, Want, Danger, are in the lists, and he alone is victor who has truth enough in his constitution to preserve the delicacy of his beauty from the wear and tear of all ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... Eliphalet, with his large features and conversational basso profundo, seemed to me. His very name had something elephantine about it, and it seemed to me that the house shook from cellar to garret at his footfall. Some have pretended that he had Olympian aspirations, and wanted to sit in the seat of Jove and bear the academic thunderbolt and the aegis inscribed Christo et Ecclesiae. It is a common weakness enough to wish to find one's self in an empty saddle; Cotton Mather was miserable all his days, I am afraid, after that entry in his Diary: ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... of the earth like Alps, and the roar in the morning was like large music. She knew she had been an Olympian in a recent life, because she found herself familiar with greater and more gorgeous speed than any 'bus attains, and with the divine discords that high ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson
... early date, and attributed to Xenophanes, the founder of the Eleatic school of philosophy, (540-500) the writer enumerates the various ways, in which other animals are superior to man. "If by the will of God there were an equality and community in life, so that the herald of the Olympian games should not only call men to the contest, but also bid all animals to come, no man would carry off a prize; for in the long race the horse would be the best; the hare would win the short race; the deer would be best in the double ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... Chauncey Ellings and the other social potentates whose least doings Mrs. Spragg and Undine had followed from afar in the Apex papers, and who had come to seem so much more remote since only the width of the Central Park divided mother and daughter from their Olympian portals. ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... the old Hellenes Thee of yore the gods had given Another Muse, another Grace Had crowned the Olympian heaven. ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... hideous Walhalla, a fit abode for the savage giant gods of the old Scandinavians. Thor and Woden would have been at home in it. The Cyclops and Titans would have been too little for it. The Olympian deities could not be conceived of as able or willing to exist in such a hideous chaos. No creature of the Greek imagination would have been a suitable inhabitant for it except Prometheus alone. Here his eternal agony and boundless despair ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... all the aims for which I summoned forth The people, was there one I compassed not? Thou, when slow time brings justice in its train, O mighty mother of the Olympian gods, Dark Earth, thou best canst witness, from whose breast I swept the pillars broadcast planted there, And made thee free, who hadst been slave of yore. And many a man whom fraud or law had sold For from his god-built land, an outcast slave, ...
— The Athenian Constitution • Aristotle
... Cedric—"food for the Olympian gods, ambrosia and nectar too. Come along, David, or there will be none left for you. Sit down, man, no one wants you to be waiting on us." "Yes, do sit down, please," observed Elizabeth softly; and Mr. Carlyon slipped at once into the ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... its top and illuminating not only the surrounding treetops but the broad face of this uplifted disc, roused in the awed spectator a thrill such as in mythological times might have greeted the sudden sight of Vulcan's smithy blazing on Olympian hills. But the clang of iron on iron would have attended the flash and gleam of those unexpected fires, and here all was still save for that steady throb never heard in Olympus or the halls of Valhalla, the pant of the motor eager for ...
— Initials Only • Anna Katharine Green
... your laws? 'A God, Stranger. In Crete, Zeus is said to have been the author of them; in Sparta, as Megillus will tell you, Apollo.' You Cretans believe, as Homer says, that Minos went every ninth year to converse with his Olympian sire, and gave you laws which he brought from him. 'Yes; and there was Rhadamanthus, his brother, who is reputed among us to have been a most righteous judge.' That is a reputation worthy of the ...
— Laws • Plato
... and heir of the name and fortune, who now trod the Beach piazza with Miss Carlisle Heth, was obviously more than many sons of wealth, much more than a mere trousered incident to millions. This one saw in the first glance at his Olympian bearing; but Carlisle Heth knew more than that. Upon this young man the enterprising vehicles of modern history had, long since, conferred an individual celebrity. Often had the Sunday editors told their "public" of his exploits in the sporting and social realms, ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... rewarded adventure: 'I will describe you all the outer life and ways of these Lycians, down to their very sandal-thongs,' whereto the be-corresponded one rejoins—'Shall I get next week, then, your dissertation on sandal-thongs'? Yes, and a little about the 'Olympian ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... that the Orphic Alcott invaded the Sahara of silence with a solemn "saying", to which, after due pause, the honorable member for blackberry pastures responded by some keen and graphic observation; while the Olympian host, anxious that so much good material should be spun into something, beamed smiling encouragement upon all parties. But the conversation became more and more staccato. Miles Coverdale, a statue of night and silence, sat, a little removed, under a portrait ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... was the meaning of his pitiful little effort—an orphan asylum! It seemed to Montague that the gods must shake with Olympian laughter when they contemplated the spectacle of Jim Hegan and his orphan asylum: Jim Hegan, who could have filled a score of orphan asylums with the children of the men whom he had driven ...
— The Moneychangers • Upton Sinclair
... representations of the human form are unnatural and monstrous, and it is true that they are able to point out some "terrible examples" of modern failures, such, for instance, as the "Bavaria" statue at Munich. But these writers appear to forget that the "Minerva" of the Parthenon and the Olympian Jupiter were the works of the greatest sculptor of ancient times, and that no less a man than Michael Angelo was the author of the "David" and "Moses." It is therefore apparent that those who deny the legitimacy of colossal sculptures in ...
— The Bay State Monthly - Volume 2, Issue 3, December, 1884 • Various
... posterity. It was a saying of Mr. Fox, that no man ever yet was so wise as Thurlow looked. His countenance was fraught with sense; his aspect stately and commanding; his brow broad, massy, and armed with terrors like that of the Olympian Jove, to which indeed it was often compared. His voice loud, sonorous, and as rolling thunder in the distance, augmented the effect of his fierce and terrible invective. Few indeed were they who did not quail before his frown; fewer still who would abide his onset in debate. Perhaps ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... globe. There was gold—yes, enormous quantities of gold in all directions. There was land of the finest quality to be had for next to nothing; work for all who were blessed with good bone and muscle; a constant demand for labour—skilled or unskilled—at high wages; a climate such as the Olympian gods might revel in, and—in short, if all England had heard the oration delivered by that man, and had believed it, the country would, in less than a month, have been depopulated of its younger ...
— The Coxswain's Bride - also, Jack Frost and Sons; and, A Double Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... principal Adherents, Johann George of Jagerndorf one of them, Prince Christian of Anhalt (once captain at the Siege of Juliers) another, likewise under Ban of the Empire; [22d Jan. 1621 (ibid. p. 518).] and in short had flung about, and was flinging, his thunder-bolts in a very Olympian manner. Under all which, what could Brandenburg and the others do; but whimper some trembling protest, "Clear against Law!"—and sit obedient? The Evangelical Union did not now any more than formerly draw out its fighting-tools. ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. III. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Hohenzollerns In Brandenburg—1412-1718 • Thomas Carlyle
... forgotten to despatch Concho on his usual fool's errand, or he is himself lying helpless in some ditch. Was there ever a girl so persecuted? With a father wrapped in mystery, a lover nameless and shrouded in the obscurity of some Olympian height, and her only confidant and messenger a Bacchus instead of a Mercury! Heigh ho! And in another hour Don Juan—he told me I might call him John—will be waiting for me outside the convent wall! What if Diego fails me? To go there alone would be madness! Who else would ...
— Two Men of Sandy Bar - A Drama • Bret Harte
... every man instead of outside him; when he is told, such a thing must be so, there is immense authority and custom in favor of its being so, it has been held to be so for a thousand years, he answers with Olympian politeness, "But is it so? is it so to me?" Nothing could be more really subversive of the foundations on which the old European order rested; and it may be remarked that no persons are so radically detached from this ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... ALOADAE, i.e. Otus and Ephialtes, in ancient Greek legend, the twin-sons of Poseidon by Iphimedeia, wife of Aloeus. They were celebrated for their extraordinary stature and strength. According to Homer (Od. xi. 305). they made war upon the Olympian gods and endeavoured to pile Pelion upon Ossa in order to storm heaven itself; had they reached the age of manhood, their attempt would have been successful, but Apollo destroyed them before their beards began to grow. In ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... then an account of the affair, and the final peroration. He multiplied the flourishes and exhausted all his euphemisms in describing the drooping shoulders and the tardy baptism of salad his Excellency had received on his Olympian brow, he eulogized the agility with which the General had recovered a vertical position, placing his head where his legs had been, and vice versa, then intoned a hymn to Providence for having so solicitously guarded those ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... their youth and anthropomorphistic and animistic thought worshipped light, and its source, the sun, as the supreme deity, the giver of joy and abundance. All the benevolent deities of the Arians were celestial beings, all the malevolent divinities spirits of darkness: Olympian gods and the demons of the netherworld—Aesir and Giants. To the naive mind of the Indo-Germanic races it appeared a matter of course that the sun, the conqueror of night and winter, the fertilizing, life-giving deity, ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... because they are supposed to be obtained, either by an aptness of nature, which cannot be taught, or only by continual custom, which is soon prescribed which though it be not true, yet I forbear to note any deficiences; for the Olympian games are down long since, and the mediocrity of these things is for use; as for the excellency of them it serveth for the most part ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... the apparent contradictions in her character, imputed in the passage above cited, by assigning the different incidents, which have doubtless caused an intelligent woman to falter in her judgment, to their proper place in the order of time. For as, during the Olympian contests, swift-footed Spartan boys, to typify the transmission of Truth, ran with a lighted torch, and, as each fell breathless, another took up the flambeau and bore it on, bright and rapid, to the goal, so should the light ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... In the Olympian courts Love laughed at Death, because he was unsightly, and because She couldn't help it, and because he never did anything worth doing, ...
— Fifty-One Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... centuries of canonization of the Condes, it has now become the fashion to denigrate them to an equal excess. The traditional figure of the Grand Conde, Olympian and sublime, has been exposed by pitiless documentary evidence. La Bruyere's latest and most learned editor, M. Emile Magne, gives a terrible picture of the Prince's meanness and dirtiness; Harpagon in an ostler's ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... brought from those temples, together with the houses he lay at when he traveled all over Italy; whence he did not scruple to give a command that the statue of Jupiter Olympius, so called because he was honored at the Olympian games by the Greeks, which was the work of Phidias the Athenian, should be brought to Rome. Yet did not he compass his end, because the architects told Memmius Regulus, who was commanded to remove that statue of Jupiter, that the workmanship ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... Romances—Argonautic, Theban, Trojan; and she will then have the satisfaction of finding that, as at the opening of authentic history, she found the Roman, the Greek, and the Asiatic inaugural events coinciding in the same exact focus, so in these semi-fabulous or ante-Olympian events, she finds that one and the same effort of memory serves to register them, and also the most splendid of the Jewish eras—that of David and Solomon. The round sum of 1000 years B.C., so easily remembered, without distinction, without modification, ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... adversaries, among which was a force in the valley of Big Sandy, supposed to be advancing on Paris, Kentucky. General Nelson at Maysville was instructed to collect all the men he could, and Colonel Gill's regiment of Ohio Volunteers. Colonel Harris was already in position at Olympian Springs, and a regiment lay at Lexington, which I ordered to his support. This leaves the line of Thomas's operations exposed, but I cannot help it. I explained so fully to yourself and the Secretary of War the condition of ...
— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman
... you hold back your husbands? Mothers, would you keep your sons? From what? for what? From the doing of the grandest duty that ever ennobled man, to the grief of the greatest infamy that ever crushed him down. You would hold him back from prizes before which Olympian laurels fade, for a fate before which a Helot slave might cower. His country in the agony of her death-struggle calls to him for succor. All the blood in all the ages, poured out for liberty, poured out ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... above the merely speculative powers of man,—the fulfilment of which mission justly entitled him to all the privileges incident to the vantage-ground thus gained,—privileges widely significant in a survey of that field where chiefly these practical powers hold their Olympian supremacy, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... these beldames oid, Unto whose grim and wizened maidenhood Nor god nor man nor beast can e'er draw near. Yea, evil were they born, for evil's doom, Evil the dark abyss of Tartarus Wherein they dwell, and they themselves the hate Of men on earth, and of Olympian gods. But thou, flee far and with unfaltering speed; For they shall hunt thee through the mainland wide Where'er throughout the tract of travelled earth Thy foot may roam, and o'er and o'er the seas And island homes of men. Faint not nor fail, Too soon ...
— The House of Atreus • AEschylus
... considerate recommendation, and very kind it was, indeed, from the great Louis XIV, one of the proudest monarchs that ever lived, to descend from his Olympian seat of majesty to the level of such details and to such minute instructions for ministering to the personal comforts of his remote Louisianan subjects. Many were the gibes and high was the glee on that occasion; ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... did not assume a material form very remarkable for its dignity. Had Creation resolved itself into its original elements, had Chaos come again, or even old Coelus, the indignity might have been endured; but to be baffled by an Olympian juste milieu, and to find, after all the clamour, that nothing has been changed save the places, is, you will ...
— The Infernal Marriage • Benjamin Disraeli
... hear. Mr. George Moore collects every fragment of Irish paganism that the forgetfulness of the Catholic Church has left or possibly her wisdom preserved. There are innumerable persons with eye-glasses and green garments who pray for the return of the maypole or the Olympian games. But there is about these people a haunting and alarming something which suggests that it is just possible that they do not keep Christmas. It is painful to regard human nature in such a light, but it seems somehow possible that Mr. George Moore does not wave his spoon and shout ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... enormous, dark bees of violent progress. Was it a thicket? Was it a bacchanalia? Was it a fortress? Vertigo seemed to have constructed it with blows of its wings. There was something of the cess-pool in that redoubt and something Olympian in that confusion. One there beheld in a pell-mell full of despair, the rafters of roofs, bits of garret windows with their figured paper, window sashes with their glass planted there in the ruins awaiting the cannon, wrecks of chimneys, ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... desire for survival, Faint in the most strenuous moods, Became an Olympian apathein In the presence ...
— Hugh Selwyn Mauberley • Ezra Pound
... wooer, if thou wouldst be wise: "Time is in flight, and never backward flies. "How swiftly fades the bloom, the vernal green! "How swift yon poplar dims its silver sheen! "Spurning the goal th' Olympian courser flies, "Then yields to Time his strength, his victories; "And oft I see sad, fading youth deplore "Each hour it lost, each pleasure it forbore. "Serpents each spring look young once more; harsh Heaven "To beauteous youth has ...
— The Elegies of Tibullus • Tibullus
... garb of the artisan who aspires for the air of gentlemanliness while at work. His face, though fresh-shaven, was dark with the sub-cutaneous stubble of a heavy beard; his eyes were furtive, with that masked gleam of Olympian all-confidence which a ...
— No. 13 Washington Square • Leroy Scott
... the Titan, as shaggy of mind as of limb,— E. the clear-eyed Olympian, rapid and slim; The one's two thirds Norseman, the other half Greek, Where the one's most abounding, the other's to seek; C.'s generals require to be seen in the mass,— E.'s specialties gain if enlarged by the glass; C. gives nature and God his own fits of the ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... we were called up to the platform, where he sat enthroned in all the majesty of the Olympian king-god. One by one, the manuscripts were read by their youthful authors,—the criticisms uttered, which marked them with honor or shame,—gliding figures passed each other, going and returning, while a hasty exchange of glances, betrayed the flash of triumph, or the ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... Aprils hath waved green Above the spent heart, the Olympian head, The hands crost idly, the shut eyes unseen, Unseeing, the locked lips whose song hath fled; Yet mystic-lived, like some rich, tropic flower, His fame puts forth fresh blossoms hour by hour; Wide spread the laden branches dropping dew On the low, laureled brow misunderstood, That ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... world; the long, black, silken tresses are braided from the forehead, and hang wavily on each side of the face, falling behind in a glossy cataract, that sparkles with such golden drops as might have glittered upon Danae, after the Olympian shower. A light tunic of pink or pale blue crape is covered with a long silk robe, open at the bosom, and buttoned thence downward to the delicately slippered little feet, that peep daintily from beneath the full silken trousers. Round the loins, rather than the waist, ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... those which are represented to us in the books of modern knight-errantry." He compares, e.g., the Laestrygonians, Cyclopes, Circes, and Calypsos of Homer, with the giants, paynims, sorceresses encountered by the champions of romance; the Greek aoixoi with the minstrels; the Olympian games with tournaments; and the exploits of Hercules and Theseus, in quelling dragons and other monsters, with the similar enterprises of Lancelot and Amadis de Gaul. The critic is daring enough to give the Gothic manners the preference over the heroic. Homer, he says, if he could ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... checked by awe at her own presumption. The idea that a Deity, other than some disgraced offender like Prometheus, could be the object of her compassion, would never have entered her mind. And now she pitied the whole Olympian cohort most sincerely, not so much for having fallen as for having deserved to fall. She could not conceal from herself how grievously they were one and all behind the age. It was impossible to make Zeus ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... British Museum, MS. Royal 19 B xiii. "Ceste livre est a Thomas fiz au Roy, duc de Glouc', achates dez executeurs Mons' Ric' Stury." It has curious miniatures exemplifying the way in which people pictured to themselves at that time Olympian gods and romance heroes. The "Dieu d'amour" figures as a tall person with a tunic, a cloak, and a crown, a bow in his hand and large red wings on his back. See fol. 16, "coment li diex d'amours ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand |
