"Prometheus" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Justice.' The existing social order is to be calmly abolished because founded upon blind prejudice; the constituent atoms called men are to be rearranged in an ideal order as in a mathematical diagram. Shelley gives the translation of this theory into poetry. The 'Revolt of Islam' or the 'Prometheus Unbound,' with all its unearthly beauty, wearies the imagination which tries to soar into the thin air of Shelley's dreamworld; just as the intellect, trying to apply the abstract formulae of political metaphysics to any concrete problem, feels as though it were under an exhausted ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... the true Prometheus lyric, but when put back in its place it refuses to rest at Port-Royal which has a right to nothing but precision; it has but one real home—the Abbaye-de-Saint-Victor. The mind that recoils from itself can only commit a sort of ecstatic suicide; it must ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... analysis (after Marckscheffel) [1108] will show the principle of its composition. From Prometheus and Pronoia sprang Deucalion and Pyrrha, the only survivors of the deluge, who had a son Hellen (frag. 1), the reputed ancestor of the whole Hellenic race. From the daughters of Deucalion sprang Magnes and Macedon, ancestors of the Magnesians and Macedonians, who ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... the flood of Deucalion, the flood of Ogyges, and several other floods; and no little time and learning have been wasted in attempting to fix their several periods. But, lying far within the mythologic ages,—the last of them to which any determining circumstances are attached, in the days of that Prometheus who stole fire from heaven, and was chained by Jupiter to Mount Caucasus,—it appears greatly more probable that the traditions respecting them should be the mere repeated and re-repeated echoes of one signal ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... everything was in confusion. Vast military preparations were again made, our own corps was levied anew, and my brother became an officer in it; but the danger was soon over, Napoleon was once more quelled, and chained for ever, like Prometheus, to his rock. As the corps, however, though so recently levied, had already become a very fine one, thanks to my father's energetic drilling, the Government very properly determined to turn it to some account, and, as ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... king. In The Divine Philothea, in the same volume, there are no actual beings whatever, except The Prince of Light and The Prince of Darkness or The Demon. In truth, there is nothing analogous to a Spanish Auto in English original poetry. The nearest approach to it, and the only one, is The Prometheus Unbound of Shelley. There, indeed, The Earth, Ocean, The Spirits of the Hours, The Phantasm of Jupiter, Demogorgon, and Prometheus himself, read like the 'Personas' of a Spanish Auto, and the poetry is worthy the resemblance. ...
— The Two Lovers of Heaven: Chrysanthus and Daria - A Drama of Early Christian Rome • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... know thou too shalt know; the place Is all to great Poseidon consecrate. Hard by, the Titan, he who bears the torch, Prometheus, has his worship; but the spot Thou treadest, the Brass-footed Threshold named, Is Athens' bastion, and the neighboring lands Claim as their chief and patron yonder knight Colonus, and in common bear his name. Such, stranger, is the spot, to fame unknown, But dear to us ...
— The Oedipus Trilogy • Sophocles
... fine, of course; if fate would smile, I fancy that the Cloud-Compeller's style Would suit me sweetly; just the line I love; Resolute rule's the appanage of a Jove. But SHELLEY's dismal Demogorgon's self, That solemn, shadowy, stern, oracular elf, Plus obstinate Prometheus, did not play Such mischief as the parties do to-day, With Law and Order. Who would be a god When force forsakes his ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 93, September 3, 1887 • Various
... wonderful story told in most effective fashion. To realize this value, one needs to recall only the efforts of Prometheus in bringing down fire for man and his heroic endurance of vengeful tyranny as a result. The work of Hercules in slaying the many-headed serpent or in cleansing the Augean stables, the adventures of Theseus culminating in the labyrinth of the horrible Minotaur, ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... under over-material-production of every sort and degree, as on all hands is now acknowledged. The foundations of Manchester tremble under the ponderous piles of Cobden's calicoes, in Cobden's warerooms, ever, like the liver of Prometheus, undiminished, though daily devoured by the vulture of consumption. The sight of the Pelion upon Ossa, accumulated masses of pig upon bar iron, immovable as the cloud-capped Waen and Dowlais of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... mystical sense of water, or wind, or light, in the [33] moulding of eye and brow; to arrest it, or rather, perhaps, to set it free, there, as human expression. The body of man, indeed, was for the Greeks, still the genuine work of Prometheus; its connexion with earth and air asserted in many a legend, not shaded down, as with us, through innumerable stages of descent, but direct and immediate; in precise contrast to our physical theory of our ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... surrounding fires. The poet has not in all this given us a mere shadowy outline; the strength is equal to the magnitude of the conception. The Achilles of Homer is not more distinct; the Titans were not more vast; Prometheus chained to his rock was not a more terrific example of suffering and of crime. Wherever the figure of Satan is introduced, whether he walks or flies, "rising aloft incumbent on the dusky air," it is illustrated with the most striking ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... little outward resemblance, the name, the death he suffered. But for the rest it seemed to me that they might as well have named any other hero of tragedy - Prometheus for example - as the mighty and loving being that, even now, directed all their steps and shed light ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... fail to obtain. This is the Law and the Prophets. Knock and it shall be opened; seek and ye shall find. It is demonstrated; it is a maxim. Man no longer paints his proper nature in some form, and says, "Prometheus had it; it is God-like;" but "Man must have it; it is human." However disputed by many, however ignorantly used, or falsified by those who do receive it, the fact of an universal, unceasing revelation ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... gentle-breathing south-east wind will act more mildly; it will woo you to the country, induce you to sit down in a shady place, smoke, and 'muse.' That incarnate essence of enterprise, business, industry, economy, sharpness, shrewdness, and keenness—that Prometheus whose liver was torn by the vulture of cent per cent—eternally tossing, restless DOOLITTLE, was one day seen asleep, during bank hours, on a seat in the Villa Madama. The scirocco ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... does she not mitigate many sufferings that may not be removed? To all that are galled with gall-stones, to those whom the Chameleon litmus paper of "coming events casts their shadows before;" to Indian livers condemned, else hopelessly, to the fate of Prometheus, preyed upon by that vulture Hepatitis, in its gnawing and chronic forms; and to the melancholy hypochondriac, steeped at once both in sadness and in pains—she calls, and calls loudly, that all these should ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... the book of Job and its tragic picture of a bewildered soul cannot disguise the ignoble irrelevance of the retort of God with which it closes, or supply the need of such modern revelations as Shelley's Prometheus or The Niblung's Ring of Richard Wagner. There is nothing in the Bible greater in inspiration than Beethoven's ninth symphony; and the power of modern music to convey that inspiration to a modern man is far greater ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... the Brownings, each had already given evidence of the great powers they possessed, Robert Browning's tragedy of "Strafford" being produced on the stage in 1837, while his future wife's translation of the "Prometheus Bound" saw the light four years earlier. The Victorian period can boast no greater poetic names than these, each of which is held in highest reverence by its own special admirers. The patriotic fervour with which Lord Tennyson has ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... become of the art of forcing the thunder and celestial fire down, which the wise Prometheus had formerly invented? 'Tis most certain you have lost it; 'tis no more on your hemisphere; but here below we have it. And without a cause you sometimes wonder to see whole towns burned and destroyed by lightning and ethereal ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... closed, as we had the opportunity of seeing afterward when he was dead.] But Tydeus was drawn up at the Homoloian gate, having on his shield a lion's skin rough with his mane, but in his right hand he bore a torch, as the Titan Prometheus,[38] intent on firing the city. But thy son Polynices drew up his array at the Crenean gate; but the swift Potnian mares, the emblem on his shield, were starting through fright, well circularly[39] grouped within the ...
— The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides
... Third Reader; Prometheus, the Giver of Fire in Coe, First Book of Stories for the Story-Teller; Six Soldiers of Fortune, in Grimm, German Household Tales; The Country Maid and her Milk-Pail, in Scudder, Book of Fables and Folk-Stories; The Flax, in Andersen, Wonder Stories; The Hammer and the Anvil, in Ramaswami Raju, Indian ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... bestowed on men by higher beings, gods or demigods; such benefactors are Hastsezini (of the Navahos), Lightning (of the Pawnees), the Beaver and the Eagle (of the Thompson River Indians of British Columbia), Maui (of the Maoris), Agni, Prometheus.[590] ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... Indra who, by killing the Dasyus, protected the colour of the Aryans; and again, Indra "unveiled the light for the Aryas and the Dasyus was left on the left hand" (ii. III 18). Let the student of Occultism bear in mind that the Greek Noah, Deukalion, the husband of Pyrrha, was the reputed son of Prometheus who robbed Heaven of its fire (i.e., of secret Wisdom "of the right hand," or occult knowledge); that Prometheus is the brother of Atlas; that he is also the son of Asia and of the Titan Iapetus—the antetype from which the ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... tinman he could not have felt the giddy height and grandeur of the Dover Cliffs; Ibsen could not have wrought the climbing of the steeple into the crisis and calamity of "The Master Builder"; Teufelsdroeckh could not have uttered his extraordinary night thoughts above the town of Weissnichtwo; "Prometheus Bound" would have been impossible. Only one with at least a dram of dizziness could have conceived an "eagle-baffling mountain, black, wintry, dead, unmeasured." In the days when we read Jules Verne, was not our chief ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... pock-marked, ugly, slovenly, surly to the point of ferocity, whimsical to the brink of mania, egotistic to the environs of self-idolatry, diseased and deaf, embittered, morose—all the brutal epithets you wish to hurl at him. But withal he had the majesty of a Prometheus chained to the rocks; like Prometheus, he had stolen the very fires of heaven; like Prometheus, he did not suffer in silence, but roared or moaned his demigodlike ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... of Prometheus, as already mentioned; the death of the two brothers, the Cercopes, famous robbers; the defeat of the Bull of Marathon; the death of Lygis, who disputed the passage of the Alps with him; that of the giant Alcyaneus, who hurled at him a stone so vast that it crushed twenty-four ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... all human laws, from whence all their powers are derived. That higher law is the Law of God, that supreme authority is the God of Justice. To this eternally just God, innocence, under oppression and wrong, has made its proud appeal, like that of Prometheus to the elements, to the witnessing clouds, to coming ages, and has been sustained and comforted. And to that higher law the weak have confidently appealed against the unrighteous enactments of the strong, and have finally conquered. The last and inmost ground of all obligation ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... comparative anatomists, man is not structurally a flesh-eater. At any rate he is not fanged or clawed. His teeth and nails are not like the natural cutlery found in the mouths and paws of beasts of prey. He cannot eat raw flesh. Digger Indians are left to do that when the meat is putrescent. Prometheus was the inventor of roast and boiled beef, and of cookery generally, and therefore the destroyer of the original simplicity of living which characterized primitive man, when milk and fruits cooked by the sun, and acorns, were the standing repasts of unsophisticated humanity. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... merely on moral energies, but on a synthesis between man and nature—for what may properly be called the Ethico-physical Sublime—there is but one great model surviving in the Greek poetry, viz. the gigantic drama of the Prometheus crucified on Mount Elborus. And this drama differs so much from everything else, even in the poetry of Aeschylus, as the mythus itself differs so much from all the rest of the Grecian mythology, (belonging apparently ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... descended, doubtless, from prehistoric wolves; but you could hardly decipher his pedigree on his mild, domesticated face. My dog is as tame as his master (in whose veins flows the blood of the old cavemen). But time has not tamed fire. Fire is as wild a thing as when Prometheus snatched it from the empyrean. Fire in my grate is as fierce and terrible a thing as when it was lit by my ancestors, night after night, at the mouths of their caves, to scare away the ancestors of my dog. ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... story of my miserable Fall:—most miserable, yet surely most undeserved! For why should the thirst for knowledge be aroused, only to be disappointed and punished? My volition shrinks from the painful task of recalling my humiliation; yet, like a second Prometheus, I will endure this and worse, if by any means I may arouse in the interiors of Plane and Solid Humanity a spirit of rebellion against the Conceit which would limit our Dimensions to Two or Three or any number short of Infinity. Away then with all personal considerations! Let me continue ...
— Flatland • Edwin A. Abbott
... allowed for the swing and rebound of taste, for the despoiling of tawdry splendours and to permit the work of art itself to form a public capable of appreciating it. Such marvellous fragments reach us of Elizabethan praises; and we cannot help recalling the number of copies of 'Prometheus Unbound' sold in the lifetime of the poet. We know too well "what porridge had John Keats," and remember with misgiving the turtle to which we treated Hobbs and Nobbs at dinner, and how complacently we watched them put ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... confess, invariably delights and humiliates me: it is so full of sympathy for all sorts and conditions of men, and so appreciative of what is and what is not. It is so very human and humane. There is in it a sort of quite gentle and dignified Prometheus Vinctus attitude towards the Powers That Be; and Zeus, with his thunderbolts and chains, looks very much like a ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... Thlinkeet, Melanesian, and other myths, a Bird is the Prometheus Purphoros; in Normandy this part is played by ...
— Rhymes a la Mode • Andrew Lang
... affliction, and of the mighty goddess his grand-daughter, or than the secret signs of coming woe in the palace of Hyperion. These things grew from darker creeds than Greece had ever known since the elder traditions of Prometheus—creeds that sent down their sounding plummets into far deeper wells within the human spirit. What had been meant, by the question proposed to Shelley, was no doubt— How so young a man as Keats, not having had the advantage of a regular classical education, could have been so much at home in the ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... that ever expressed its workings in poetry. But what shall we say of the young English poet who has now attempted, not only a flight as high as the highest of Aeschylus, but the very flight of that father of tragedy—who has dared once more to dramatise Prometheus—and, most wonderful of all, to dramatise the deliverance of Prometheus—which is known to have formed the subject of a lost tragedy of Aeschylus no ways inferior in mystic elevation to that of ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... injuries as the body does after a great shock. She understood what bitter tragedies threaten the business man no less than the monarch, the warrior, the poet, and the lover, though there has not been many an AEschylos or Euripides or Dante to make poetry of the Prometheus chained to the rocks of trade with the vulture pay-roll gnawing at his profits; the OEdipos in the factory who sees everything gone horribly awry; or the slow pilgrim through the business hell with all the infernal variations of bankruptcy, strikes, ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... products of uranium in the Clinton (Oak Ridge) reactor. Marinsky and Glendenin, who did the chemical work of identification, chose to call it promethium because they wished to point out that just as Prometheus stole fire (a great force for good or evil) from the hidden storehouse of the gods and presented it to man, so their newly assembled reactor delivered to mankind an ...
— A Brief History of Element Discovery, Synthesis, and Analysis • Glen W. Watson
... PROMETHEUS. Life, like ancient Thebes, has a hundred gates. You close one, and others will open. You are the last of your species? Then another better species will come, made not of clay, but of the light itself. ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... fact that Terpander did invent the seven chords is not beyond dispute historically, while, mythically, Apollo and Amphion are credited with the idea. That Hermes invented fire-sticks seems a fable which robs Prometheus of the honour. We must not look for any kind of consistency ...
— The Homeric Hymns - A New Prose Translation; and Essays, Literary and Mythological • Andrew Lang
... think you, obtain fire in those early times? I suggested a burning mountain as a source of fire. You remember, too, perhaps reading about Prometheus, who stole fire from heaven, bringing it to earth in a copper rod, which combined act of theft and scientific experiment made the gods very angry, because they were afraid mortals might learn as many wonderful things as they knew themselves. History seems to ...
— The Story of a Tinder-box • Charles Meymott Tidy
... Utopia is duly constructed, and the daring plan to secure the sovereignty is in a fair way to succeed. Meantime various quacks and charlatans, each with a special scheme for improving things, arrive from earth, and are one after the other exposed and dismissed. Presently arrives Prometheus, who informs Epops of the desperate straits to which the gods are by this time reduced, and advises him to push his claims and demand the hand of Basileia (Dominion), the handmaid of Zeus. Next an embassy ...
— The Birds • Aristophanes
... things in their ancient books, if they would but look for them; he held out the hopes of ample rewards for any extracts from their sacred literature containing the histories of Adam and Eve, of Deukalion and Prometheus; and at last he succeeded. The coyness of the Pandits yielded; the incessant demand created a supply; and for several years essay after essay appeared in the "Asiatic Researches," with extracts from Sanskrit MSS., containing not only the ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller
... with my ideas of the romantic and the picturesque. Let me rather recur to her (although my heart be lacerated once more in the recollection) who was the presiding deity of the whole,—the being after whom, had I had the fabled power of Prometheus, I should have formed and animated the sharer of that sweet wild solitude, nor once felt that fancy, to whom I was so largely a debtor, had in aught been cheated of what she had, for a series of ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... in the same original version are confused in the Greek story of Prometheus. He stole the fire from heaven and brought it to earth: but, in place of the episode of the elixir, which is adopted in the Indian story just mentioned, the creation of men from clay is accredited by the Greeks to the "flaming one," the "fire ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... of the Prometheus Unbound (to take an individual instance of the last character) has a fire in his eye, a fever in his blood, a maggot in his brain, a hectic flutter in his speech, which mark out the philosophic fanatic. He is sanguine-complexioned and shrill-voiced. As is often observable ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... to point out the parallel between Loki and Prometheus, also both helper and enemy of the Gods, and agent in their threatened fall, though in the meantime a prisoner. In character Loki has more in common with the mischievous spirit described by Hesiod, than with the heroic figure of Aeschylus. The struggles ...
— The Edda, Vol. 1 - The Divine Mythology of the North, Popular Studies in Mythology, - Romance, and Folklore, No. 12 • Winifred Faraday
... morning to find the ashes in the fireplace cold, and the nearest neighbor eight miles away. It was an impossible undertaking to keep a coal alive on a walk of eight miles. Wrapping a piece of cotton cloth tightly about a small stick he ignited one end at his neighbor's hearth, and like an humble Prometheus carried the smouldering gift to his little ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee
... the steamship Prometheus came in and tied up near us, and soon word was brought that she would take the New Orleans passengers on board and sail immediately for that port. It now occurred to me that I could get nearer home by going up the Mississippi River than by way of New York, so I went on ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... nothing equal to this burst, unless it be the first speech of Prometheus in the Greek drama, after the exit of Vulcan and the two Afrites. But Shakespeare alone could have produced the vow of Hamlet to make his memory a blank of all maxims and generalised truths, that "observation had copied there,"—followed immediately ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... [Footnote: That is, amongst stories not wearing a mythologic character, such as those of Prometheus, Hercules, &c. The era of Troy and its siege is doubtless by some centuries older than its usual chronologic date of nine centuries before Christ. And considering the mature age of Eteocles and Polynices, the two sons of dipus, at the period of the "Seven against Thebes," which seven ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... it is, for the most part, because it acts upon responsive feelings preexistent in him and already struggling to express themselves. And thus, upon the whole, it is to be concluded that proverbs are the children of Epimetheus, or afterthought, rather than of Prometheus, or forethought. They are rather products than producers,—intellectual forms rather than intellectual forces. The prevalent notion of their influence is a huge and singular error. One of our wisest authors, himself a great aphorist, says,—"Proverbs are the sanctuaries of the intuitions." ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... more but so," in which Ophelia compresses the heart-break whose compression was to make her mad, and that sublime appeal of Lear to the elements of Nature, only to be matched, if matched at all, in the "Prometheus," is a wide one, and Shakespeare is as truly simple in the one as in the other. The simplicity of poetry is not that of prose, nor its clearness that of ready apprehension merely. To a subtile sense, a sense heightened by sympathy, those sudden fervors ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... held to be no more real a personage than Prometheus, and if the story of the Fall is merely an instructive "type," comparable to the profound Promethean mythus, what value ...
— The Lights of the Church and the Light of Science - Essay #6 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... legend is similar to and yet in contrast with that of Orion; in the one the Goddess approaches the mortal and in the other the mortal approaches the Goddess; hence, too, the severer punishment in the latter case. The second legend ought to be completed here by a fact derived from the story of Prometheus: the liver grows as fast as the vultures rend or consume it; thus again rises the idea of infinite repetition, now of suffering, not of action, ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... writer who, through fiction, has so enriched the thought of the people. Admit all Dickens' faults twice over, we still have one of the greatest writers of modern times. Such people as these creations of Dickens never lived, says your little critic. Nor was Prometheus, type of the spirit of man, nor was Niobe, mother of all mothers, a truthful picture of the citizen one was likely to meet often during a morning's stroll through Athens. Nor grew there ever a wood like to the Forest of Arden, though every Rosalind and Orlando ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... enigmas which art and poetry only can foreshadow and divine,—unknown to us in the street and the market, unknown to us on the scaffold of the patriot or amidst the flames of the martyr, unknown to us in the Lear and the Hamlet, in the Agamemnon and the Prometheus. Millions upon millions, ages upon ages, are entered but as items in the vast account in which the recording angel sums up the unerring ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... love. Without contradiction, the greatest miracle of Christ is the reign of love. All who believe in Him sincerely feel this love, wonderful, supernatural, supreme. It is a phenomenon inexplicable, impossible to reason and the power of man; a sacred fire given to the earth by this new Prometheus, of which Time, the great destroyer, can neither exhaust the force nor terminate the duration. That is what I wonder at most of all, for I often think about it; and it is that which absolutely proves to me ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... enwrapt, Prometheus strove to trace Inspir'd perceptions of celestial grace, Th' ideal spirit, fugitive as wind, Art's forceful spells in adamant confin'd; Curv'd with nice chisel, floats the obsequious line, From stone unconscious, beauty beams divine, On magic ...
— Poetic Sketches • Thomas Gent
... first public appearance in Vienna at the Karnthnerthor Theatre on August 11, 1829. The programme comprised the following items: Beethoven's Overture to Prometheus; arias of Rossini's and Vaccaj's, sung by Mdlle. Veltheim, singer to the Saxon Court; Chopin's variations on La ci darem la mano and Krakowiak, rondeau de concert (both for pianoforte and orchestra), for the latter of which the composer substituted an improvisation; ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... its edge and scattering themselves among the thick branches till they were almost hid from view, David lighted a pine torch and gave it into the hands of the eager boy, who seized it and like a young Prometheus started forth. A single touch to the dry tinder was enough. With a dull explosion, the mass burst into flame. Shouting in his exultation, the little torch-bearer rushed on, igniting pile after pile, and leaving behind him almost ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... rivalry but in welcome. We can realise, perhaps, something of the startled delight, of the sudden electric tremors, of the young poet when, with eager eyes, he turned over the pages of "Epipsychidion" or "Prometheus Unbound," "Alastor" or "Endymion," or the Odes to a Nightingale, on Melancholy, on ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... to clime, from shore to shore, Shall thrill the magic thread; The new Prometheus steals once more The fire ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... Him God, by all means, if you like, but such a God as Zeus was to Prometheus, omnipotent, indeed, and able to exact with infallible precision His daily and hourly toll of blood and tears, but powerless at least to chain the mind He has created free, or to exact allegiance and homage from spirits greater, though weaker, ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... lofty verse Who sweep the earth with lowly wing, Like sand before the blast disperse— A Nose! a mighty Nose I sing! As erst Prometheus stole from heaven the fire 5 To animate the wonder of his hand; Thus with unhallow'd hands, O Muse, aspire, And from my subject snatch a burning brand! So like the Nose I sing—my verse shall glow— Like Phlegethon my verse in waves ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... days of yore, no matter where or when, 'Twas ere the low creation swarm'd with men, That one Prometheus, sprung of heavenly birth (Our author's song can witness), lived on earth. He carved the turf to mould a manly frame, And stole from Jove his animating flame. 20 The sly contrivance o'er Olympus ran, When thus the Monarch of the Stars began: 'Oh versed in arts! whose daring thoughts ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... tell thy fate, thou wandering Sphinx! Pale Science, searching by the midnight lamp Through the vexed mazes of the human brain, Still fails to read the secret of its soul As the superb enigma flashes by, A loosed Prometheus burning with disdain. ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster
... during the first run of the work, superstitious people thought the box was bewitched, and no one cared to occupy it. Two fine works, "Charles VI." and "Le Val d'Andorre," succeeded at intervals of a few years; and in 1849 the noble music to AEschylus's "Prometheus Bound" was written with an idea of reproducing the supposed effects of the enharmonic style ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... Wilhelm Meister, the type of humanized culture, who goes through the school of life and from apprentice becomes master, who begins with the pursuit of ideals that soar above life and who ends by discerning the ideal in the real, for whom these two expressions finally melt into one. There is Goethe's Prometheus, who, chained to his rock, gives utterance to the philosophy of Spinoza in the sublime rhythms of enthusiasm. Last of all, there is the Marquis von Posa, the true incarnation of the revolution, the apostle and ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... of the "Messiah" and "Lohengrin" (to say nothing of my "Prometheus" choruses) will also be the best opportunity for you to present your work in person to ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... and, going across the room, sat down at her bureau. She turned a shaded lamp, so that the light might fall upon the pages of a book she was studying, and, pushing her hands through her thick hair, she began to read a passage from the splendid Prometheus Vinctus of AEschylus: ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... results. Rule applies but to the excellences of avoidance—to the virtues which deny or refrain. Beyond these the critical art can but suggest. We may be instructed to build an Odyssey, but it is in vain that we are told how to conceive a 'Tempest,' an 'Inferno,' a 'Prometheus Bound,' a 'Nightingale,' such as that of Keats, or the 'Sensitive Plant' of Shelley. But, the thing done, the wonder accomplished, and the capacity for apprehension becomes universal. The sophists of the negative school, who, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... "whereby indeed he divineth" (Genesis xliv. 5). Others, long before the days of Smith and Rigdon, advanced the theory that the Urim and Thummim were clear crystals intended for "gazing" purposes. One writer remarks of the practice, "Aeschylus refers it to Prometheus, Cicero to the Assyrians and Etruscans, Zoroaster to Ahriman, Varro to the Persian Magi, and a very large class of authors, from the Christian Fathers and Schoolmen downward, to the devil."* An act of James I (1736), against witchcraft in England, made it a crime to pretend to ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... countries with the estranging main, If our vessels ne'ertheless With reckless plunge that sacred bar transgress. Daring all, their goal to win, Men tread forbidden ground, and rush on sin: Daring all, Prometheus play'd His wily game, and fire to man convey'd; Soon as fire was stolen away, Pale Fever's stranger host and wan Decay Swept o'er earth's polluted face, And slow Fate quicken'd Death's once halting ...
— Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace • Horace
... dread, horror, or the most painful pity,—sympathies and antipathies which we seem to be feeling not only for them but for the whole race. This world, we are told, is called Britain; but we should no more look for it in an atlas than for the place, called Caucasus, where Prometheus was chained by Strength and Force and comforted by the daughters of Ocean, or the place where Farinata stands erect in his glowing tomb, 'Come avesse ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... the tradition of the Grecians, and ascribe the first inventions to men, yet you will rather believe that Prometheus first stroke the flints, and marvelled at the spark, than that when he first stroke the flints he expected the spark; and therefore we see the West Indian Prometheus had no intelligence with the European, because of the ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... Prometheus stole fire from heaven and paid it back to an eternal death. The old cattleman was refusing his payment. It was no state of coma in which he lay; it was no prolonged trance. He was vitally, vividly alive; he was concentrating with a bitter and exhausting vigour day and night, and ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... the new Countess of Denbigh. How could a woman be ambitious of resembling Prometheus, to be pawed and clawed and gnawed by a vulture?(498) I beg your earldom's pardon; but I could not conceive that a coronet was so ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... allegorical figures representing Sculpture and the kindred arts. On each side of the portico there are three niches in the front, containing on one side Pericles, Phidias and Vulcan; on the other, Hadrian, Prometheus and Daedalus. The whole building forms a hollow square and is lighted entirely from the inner side. There are in all twelve halls, each containing the remains of a particular era in the art, and arranged according to time; ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various
... but is stated [*Peter Comestor, Hist. Genes. xxxvii, xl] to have been originated either by Nimrod, who is related to have forced men to worship fire, or by Ninus, who caused the statue of his father Bel to be worshiped. Among the Greeks, as related by Isidore (Etym. viii, 11), Prometheus was the first to set up statues of men: and the Jews say that Ismael was the first to make idols of clay. Moreover, idolatry ceased to a great extent in the sixth age. Therefore idolatry had no cause on ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... Gwynplaine was a terror. Even those who expected much found their expectations surpassed. It was as though on the mountain reserved for the gods, during the banquet on a serene evening, the whole of the all-powerful body being gathered together, the face of Prometheus, mangled by the vulture's beak, should have suddenly appeared before them, like a blood-coloured moon on the horizon. Olympus looking on Caucasus! What a vision! Old and young, open-mouthed with surprise, fixed ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... him all the world is spirit. Miss Kingsley says, "If you want, for example, to understand the position of man in nature according to fetish, there is, as far as I know, no clearer statement of it made than is made by Goethe in his superb 'Prometheus.'"[52] Fetish is a severely logical way of accounting for the world in terms of good and ...
— The Negro • W.E.B. Du Bois
... His own sweet voice,—his look how heavenly! But why of that great attribute Kronion joys in most, be mute,— The majesty that hurls the thunder, And tears the fleeting clouds asunder? Wilt thou say naught of that alone? Prometheus and Deucalion May lend the fairest charms of love, But none can wield the bolt save Jove! The thunderbolt it is alone Which he before thy feet laid down That proves thy right ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... of Frederic. Yet at this very time the scanty leisure of the illustrious warrior was employed in producing odes and epistles, a little better than Cibber's, and a little worse than Hayley's. Here and there a manly sentiment which deserves to be in prose makes its appearance in company with Prometheus and Orpheus, Elysium and Acheron, the plaintive Philomel, the poppies of Morpheus, and all the other frippery which, like a robe tossed by a proud beauty to her waiting-woman, has long been contemptuously abandoned by genius to mediocrity. We ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Ixion, human illusions are still the preoccupying thought; but they appear as fetters, not as specious masks, and instead of the serio-comic exposure of humanity we see its tragic and heroic deliverance. Ixion is Browning's Prometheus. The song that breaks from his lips as he whirls upon the penal wheel of Zeus is a great liberating cry of defiance to the phantom-god—man's creature and his ape—who may plunge the body in torments but can never so baffle the ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... of Pitt, when a member of the House of Commons, exclaiming one day, during a former war, against the enormous and ruinous expense of German connections, as the offspring of the Hanover succession, and borrowing a metaphor from the story of Prometheus, cried out: "Thus, Hie Prometheus, is Britain chained to the barren rock of Hanover; whilst the imperial eagle ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... poem was The Revolt of Islam, published in 1819. It is in the Spenserian stanza. Also, in the same year, he published The Cenci, a tragedy, a dark and gloomy story on what should be a forbidden subject, but very powerfully written. In 1820 he also published The Prometheus Unbound, which is full of his irreligious views. His remaining works were smaller poems, among which may be noted Adonais, and the odes To the Skylark and ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... tradition is the Thessalian legend of Deucalion. Zeus having worked to destroy the men of the age of bronze, with whose crimes he was wroth, Deucalion, by the advice of Prometheus, his father, constructed a coffer, in which he took refuge with his wife, Pyrrha. The Deluge came; the chest, or coffer, floated at the mercy of the waves for nine days and nine nights, and was finally ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... You are there, are you? Sir," said he, turning to me, "I am the most unhappy man in the world. Talk of Sisyphus rolling the ever-recoiling stone—of Prometheus gnawed by the vulture since the birth of time. The fables yet live. There is my rock, forever crushing me back! there is my eternal vulture, feeding upon my heart! There! there! there!" And, with an awful gesture of malediction ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... self-nourished. At first the case of men was very helpless and pitiable; for they were alone among the wild beasts, and had to carry on the struggle for existence without arts or knowledge, and had no food, and did not know how to get any. That was the time when Prometheus brought them fire, Hephaestus and Athene taught them arts, and other gods gave them seeds and plants. Out of these human life was framed; for mankind were left to themselves, and ordered their own ways, living, like the universe, in one cycle ...
— Statesman • Plato
... up the questions of theodicy or of the principles of the divine government. Aeschylus and Sophocles, writing perhaps about the same time as the author of the Book of Job, are full of problems of this nature. Why is Prometheus, though the noblest benefactor of the human race, doomed to undergo such sufferings? Why does a curse cleave to a certain house, evil producing evil from generation to generation? What is the relation between the divine laws which are written in the hearts of all men, and human ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... proving that I'd made 20 pounds less than last year, I could ask her to let me chance Johnny's and Hypatia's future by going into literature. But it was no good. First it was 250 pounds more than last year. Then it was 700 pounds. Then it was 2000 pounds. Then I saw it was no use: Prometheus was chained to his rock: read Shelley: read Mrs Browning. Well, well, it was not to be. [He rises solemnly]. Lord Summerhays: I ask you to excuse me for a few moments. There are times when a man needs to meditate in solitude on his destiny. A chord is touched; and he sees the drama of ...
— Misalliance • George Bernard Shaw
... Sakuntala or The Lost Ring Aeschylus' Prometheus Trilogy of Orestes Sophocles' OEdipus Euripides' Medea Aristophanes' The Knights and ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... the true Prometheus, if I may so speak, who brings to earth in the fragile reed of his humanity the sacred and immortal fire which may be kindled in every heart. Open your hearts to Him by faith and He will come in, and with Him the rejoicing life which will triumph ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... hand;—these, one and all, had not been his objects; but, asking no favors from any element or any being, of himself, to rival her, outstrip her, and rule her. He stooped to conquer. With him, common sense was theurgy; machinery, miracle; Prometheus, the heroic name for ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... from the first, to have been affected towards Pompey, much in the same manner as Prometheus, in Aeschylus, was towards Hercules, when after that hero had delivered him from his ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... rock. His beard has grown for centuries, and flowed this way and that, adown his breast and over to the stone on either side; and the whole of him is covered with a greenish ice, ancient beyond the memory of man. 'This is Prometheus,' I whisper to myself, 'and ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... crucified and mangled by a bear, and really fling himself down and deluge the stage with blood. When the heroism of Mucius Scaevola was represented, a real criminal must thrust his hand without a groan into the flame and stand motionless while it is being burned. Prometheus must be really chained to his rock, and Dirce in very fact be tossed and gored by the wild bull; and Orpheus be torn to pieces by a real bear; and Icarus must really fly, even though he fall and be dashed to death; and Hercules must ascend the funeral pyre and there be veritably ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... gods were the infirm shadows of the men who dreamed them. Who says, after familiarizing himself with the religions of the world, that Caliban or his theology is myth? Setebos has no morals. He has might. But this was Jupiter. Read "Prometheus Bound," and know a Greek ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... the close of that great war which Western Europe waged against the genius and fortune of the first Napoleon; just as the eagle—Prometheus and the eagle in one shape—was fast fettered by sheer force and strength to his rock in the Atlantic, there arose a man in Central Germany, on the old Thuringian soil, to whom it was given to assert the dignity of vernacular literature, to throw off the yoke ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... of the liver. The fable of Prometheus, on whose liver a vulture was said to prey constantly, as a punishment for his stealing fire from heaven, was intended to illustrate the painful effects of ardent spirits upon ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... Greek, like the Fratres Arvales in Latin! Homer is so modern; even though he certainly belongs to the tenth or eleventh century. That was a time in which the Hellenic mind sang the history of the creation in the deep myth of Prometheus, the son of Iapetos, with his three brothers, the emblem of humanity; a poem which ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... And, in truth, the wisest may be interested in seeing how near to animation the genius of these wonderful men could bring the inflexible marble. Allow but for the absence of the divine afflatus, or breath of animation, and an unenlightened heathen might suppose the miracle of Prometheus was about to be realized. But we," said he, looking upwards, "are taught to form a better judgment between what man can do and the productions ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... THE FIRST. Birds of Passage Prometheus, or the Poet's Forethought Epimetheus, or the Poet's Afterthought The Ladder of St. Augustine The Phantom Ship The Warden of the Cinque Ports Haunted Houses In the Churchyard at Cambridge The Emperor's Bird's-Nest The Two Angels Daylight and Moonlight The Jewish Cemetery at Newport Oliver Basselin ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... passage in Boehme, which relates how Satan, when asked the cause of the enmity of God and his own consequent downfall, replied,—"I wished to be an Artist." So, according to antique tradition, Prometheus manufactured a man and woman of clay, animated them with fire stolen from the chariot of the Sun, and was punished for the crime of Creation; Titans chained him to the rocks of the Indian ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... rough places on the mountain-side. He has remarkable presence of body. In any emergency he is usually the best man on the spot. He is at once seer, creator, accomplisher, and present help in time of trouble. But his everyday occupation is that of entertainer. He is the joy-bringer—the Prometheus of pleasure. In his vicinity there is no such thing as ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... in colors too deep and strong. Prometheus bound to the rock, with the beak of the vulture in his bleeding breast, suffering daily renewing pangs, his wounds healed only to be torn open afresh, is an emblem of the victim of that vulture passion, which the word of God declares to be cruel ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... Dare look divine Astrea in the face; Chaos return and with confusion Involve the world with strange disunion; For Pluto sits in that adored chair Which doth belong unto Minerva's heir. O hecatombs! O catastrophe! From Midas' pomp to Trus' beggary! Prometheus, who celestial fire Did steal from heaven, therewith to inspire Our earthly bodies with a sense-ful mind, Whereby we might the depth of nature find, Is ding'd to hell, and vulture eats his heart Which did such deep philosophy ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... a play of Eschylus (the Prometheus), published and translated by poor old Morel], who is a good scholar, and an acquaintance of mine. It will be but half a guinea, and your name shall be put in the list I am making for him. You will be in ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... Prometheus-like from heaven she stole The fire that through those silken lashes In darkest glances seems to roll, From eyes that cannot hide their flashes: And as along her bosom steal In lengthened flow her raven tresses, You'd swear each clustering lock could feel, And curled to ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... Argonaut had ever dared to come in contact with these mysterious divinities. Only the grave Aeschylus had dared to portray the Oceanides—virgins fresh and demure, weeping around the rock to which Prometheus was bound. ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... celestial birth, Within his solitary soul enshrined. Woe unto him! for Envy's pangs impure, Like the undying vultures', will be driven Into his noble heart, that must endure Pangs for each triumph; and, still unforgiven, Suffer Prometheus' doom, who ravished fire ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... and men is feasted. He, ready to accomplish what she willed, Stole some from Hebe (Hebe Jove's cup filled) And gave it to his simple rustic love. Which being known (as what is hid from Jove?) He inly stormed and waxed more furious Than for the fire filched by Prometheus, And thrusts him down from heaven. He, wandering here, In mournful terms, with sad and heavy cheer, Complained to Cupid. Cupid for his sake, To be revenged on Jove did undertake. And those on whom heaven, earth, and hell relies, I mean the adamantine Destinies, ...
— Hero and Leander • Christopher Marlowe
... and take the book to market. All poets are humbugs, all literary men are humbugs; directly a man begins to sell his feelings for money he's a humbug. If a poet gets a pain in his side from too good a dinner, he bellows Ai Ai louder than Prometheus." ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... possessed with the spirit of jealousy. Being a mixture of passions directly contrary to one another, the person, whose soul is the seat of such confusion and tumult, must be in as much greater misery than Prometheus, with the vulture tearing his liver, as the pains of the mind are greater than those of the body. Jealousy is a ferment of love, hatred, hope, fear, shame, anxiety, suspicion, grief, pity, envy, pride, rage, cruelty, vengeance, madness, and if there be any other tormenting passion which can ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... years both in the inventor's own school and the Conservatoire at St. Petersburg. Finally Scriabin, on more spiritual lines, has paralleled sound and colours in a chart not unlike that of Frau Unkowsky. In "Prometheus" he has given convincing proof of his theories. (His chart appeared in "Musik," ...
— Concerning the Spiritual in Art • Wassily Kandinsky
... it is just my brother and I. It's most of it false and most of it useless. We all surely must take what comes in this topsy-turvy world. I believe in saying out:—that the more one thinks about life the worse it becomes. There are only two kinds of happiness in this world—a wooden post's and Prometheus's. And who ever heard of any one having the impudence to be kind to Prometheus? As for a miserable "medium" like me, not quite a post and leagues and leagues from even envying a Prometheus, she's better for the powder without the jam. But that's all nothing. ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... feel, I see Those eyes which burn through smiles that fade in tears, Like stars half quenched in mists of silver dew. Prometheus Unbound, SHELLEY. ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... darkest hour, it was Greek that surged in him—iambics of thunderous wrath such as those which are volleyed by Prometheus. But as he sat down to his writing-table, and unlocked the dear old album, and dipped his pen in the ink, a great calm fell on him. The iambics in him began to breathe such sweetness as is on the lips of Alcestis going to her doom. But, just as he set pen to paper, his ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... year, Harriet having drowned herself, he married Mary; his body consumed on a funeral pyre at Spezia in the presence of Leigh Hunt, Byron and Trelawny; published "Queen Mab" in 1813; "Alastor" in 1816; "Prometheus Unbound" in 1820; his works collected by his wife ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... the buoyant influences of the Muse. Shakspeare and Plato are lighter than levity; they are lifting forces, and weigh less than nothing. The novelette of the season, or any finest and flimsiest gossamer that is fabricated in our literary looms, compares with "Lear," with "Prometheus Bound," with any supreme work, only as cobwebs and thistle-down, that are easily borne by the breeze, may compare with sparrows and thrushes, that can fly and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... the mechanism of art, such as precision and certainty in working even the hardest materials, the Egyptians, though they have so long stood still in other points, are still far before us; but to model form with freedom, to breathe, like Prometheus, a soul into the stone, they will never learn until their old notions on this subject have been entirely abandoned. Even the pleasing varieties of corporeal life cannot be represented by a system of mere proportions, much less those which are inner and spiritual. Look at ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... is said by some authors to be the daughter[FN262] of Hermes, [FN263] and by others of Prometheus, both of them famous for their philosophic turn of mind. The latter is supposed to have first taught mankind wisdom and foresight, as the former is reputed to have invented ...
— Legends Of The Gods - The Egyptian Texts, edited with Translations • E. A. Wallis Budge
... Arrow, called by the Arabians Schahan. One of the old constellations in the northern hemisphere, near Aquila and Delphinus. It is fabled to have been the arrow with which Hercules slew the vulture that was devouring the liver of Prometheus who was, like Jesus, ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... mean. When gas first spread along a city, mapping it forth about evenfall for the eye of observant birds, a new age had begun for sociality and corporate pleasure-seeking, and begun with proper circumstance, becoming its own birthright. The work of Prometheus had advanced by another stride. Mankind and its supper parties were no longer at the mercy of a few miles of sea-fog; sundown no longer emptied the promenade; and the day was lengthened out to every man's fancy. The city-folk ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... always thought of him and of Marlborough as the two greatest men of that age. I have read his books (who doth not know them?) here in our calm woods, and imagine a giant to myself as I think of him, a lonely fallen Prometheus, groaning as the vulture tears him. Prometheus I saw, but when first I ever had any words with him, the giant stepped out of a sedan-chair in the Poultry, whither he had come with a tipsy Irish servant parading before him, who announced him, bawling out his reverence's name, whilst his ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... and fixed; the mouth was curled like a scroll, and every lean feature firm as in life; while the whole face, now wound in curls of soft blue flame, wore an aspect of grim defiance, and eternal death. Prometheus, blasted ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... nothing but their holy duties,—while men are torturing and denouncing their fellows, and while we can hear day and night the clinking of the hammers that are trying, like the brute forces in the "Prometheus," to rivet their adamantine wedges right through the breast of human nature,—I have been ready to believe that we have even now a new revelation, and the name of its Messiah ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... with the revolutionary spirit of the time. Shelley, of all the poets of his generation, had the most prophetic fervor in regard to the progress of the democratic spirit. All his greatest poems are informed with this fervor, but it is especially exhibited in the 'Prometheus Unbound', which is, in the words of Todhunter, "to all other lyrical poems what the ninth symphony is to all other symphonies; and more than this, for Shelley has here outsoared himself more unquestionably than Beethoven in his ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... right a thicket, from which issued Orpheus. At the back part of the scene, at the sudden fall of a curtain, the upper part broke on the spectators, a heaven of clouds of all hues; the stars suddenly vanished, the clouds dispersed; an element of artificial fire played about the house of Prometheus—a bright and transparent cloud, reaching from the heavens to the earth, whence the eight masquers descending with the music of a full song; and at the end of their descent the cloud broke in twain, and one part of it, as with a wind, was blown athwart the scene. ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... terms, and from several of the most distinguished officers in the service. Early in his career as a midshipman, he suffered a mortifying interruption of the active life which had long since become essential to his comfort. He had contrived to get appointed on board a fire ship, the Prometheus, (chiefly with a wish to enlarge his experience by this variety of naval warfare,) at the time of the last Copenhagen expedition, and he obtained his wish; for the Prometheus had a very distinguished ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... really original poets; their attitude of thought and feeling marked without doubt certain great changes in literature and philosophy. Nevertheless, the "Ode on the Intimations of Immortality" is a perfectly normal and traditional ode, and "Prometheus Unbound" is a perfectly genuine and traditional Greek lyrical drama. But if we study Browning honestly, nothing will strike us more than that he really created a large number of quite novel and quite admirable artistic forms. It is too often forgotten what and how excellent these were. The ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... carrier Lord Byron's epitaph on Addison, Joseph, his character as a poet His conversation His 'Drummer' 'Adolphe,' Benjamin Constant's Adversity 'AEneid, the,' written for political purposes AEschylus His 'Prometheus' His 'Seven before Thebes' 'Agathon,' Wieland's history of Aglietti, Dr., MS. letters in his profession offered to Mr. Murray Albania Albanians, their character and manners Alberoni, Cardinal Albrizzi, Countess, some account ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... chained to a rock. [Footnote: The original tragedy of Prometheus Bound was written by Aschylus, a famous old Greek dramatist. The same poet wrote also Prometheus Unbound, but the latter drama has been lost. Shelley borrowed the idea of his poem from this lost drama.] In this poem Prometheus (man) is represented as being tortured by Jove (law or custom) until he is released by Demogorgon (progress or necessity); whereupon he marries Asia (love or goodness), and stars and moon break out into a happy ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... [38] An interesting variation of this rhythm (though perhaps to be | | related to the Middle English descendant of the Anglo-Saxon | | long line) occurs in Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, Act I, | | | | O sister, desolation is a difficult thing. | | | | Compare also Shelley's earlier poem, Stanzas—April, 1814; | | and for a more recent example: | | | | Ithaca, Ithaca, the land of my desire! | | I'm home again in Ithaca, beside my own hearth-fire. ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... comely ancient ugliness. The great apartment is truly noble, and almost all the portraits good, of what I saw; for many are not hung up, and half of those that are, my lord Duke does not know. The Earl of Warwick is delightful; the Lady Mandeville, attiring herself in her wedding garb, delicious. The Prometheus is a glorious picture, the eagle as fine as my statue. Is not it by Vandyck? The Duke told me that Mr. Spence found out it was by Titian—but critics in poetry I see are none in painting. This was all I was shown, for I was not even carried into the chapel. The walls round the ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... those of the elder generation, the sons of heaven and earth, compared with whom Jupiter himself was a stripling and an upstart, the gigantic Titans, and the inexorable Furies. Foremost among his creations of this class stands Prometheus, half fiend, half redeemer, the friend of man, the sullen and implacable enemy of Heaven. Prometheus bears undoubtedly a considerable resemblance to the Satan of Milton. In both we find the same impatience of control, the same ferocity, the same unconquerable pride. In both characters ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Ti'iti'i, they give the names of Maui, the father, and Maui, the son. Instead of going through a rock, their entrance was down through a reed bush. And, instead of a stipulation for the fire, they say that the youth Maui, like another Prometheus, stole it, ran up the passage, and before his father could catch him, he had set the bush in flames in all directions. The father tried to put it out, but in vain; and they further add, that ever since the exploit of young Maui, ...
— Samoa, A Hundred Years Ago And Long Before • George Turner
... cowardly when they never risked their own blood in any way. Condemned criminals were compelled to take roles in which they suffered torture and a frightful death, in order to entertain the Roman crowd. Such roles were Prometheus, Daedalus, Orpheus, Hercules, and Attys; Pasiphae and the bull, and Leda and the swan were also enacted. In Martial's Epigrams, Book I, the cases are mentioned where a woman fought with a lion; Laureolus, a robber, was crucified and torn, ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... feels instinctively that those who rise too high in excellence must be crushed. And this is the theme of every real tragedy. Othello, Lear, Njal, Grettir, Clarissa Harlowe, the Maid of Orleans, Antigone, Prometheus, and, as I hope to show, Tristan and Isolde, these are but a few among those who must perish from no fault in themselves, but because they are too ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... and exhibiting the highest achievements of art. On his left, somewhat beyond the walls, the Academy, with its groves of plane and olive-trees, its retired walks and cooling fountains, its altar to the Muses, its statues of the Graces, its Temple of Minerva, and its altars to Prometheus, to Love, and Hercules, near which Plato had his country seat, and in the midst of which he had taught as well his followers after him. But the most impressive spectacle laying on his right hand, that small ...
— Conversion of a High Priest into a Christian Worker • Meletios Golden
... your hospitality, dear lady," said the Reverend Prometheus, "and I trust I may have the pleasure ...
— Men of Affairs • Roland Pertwee
... story of Prometheus, friend Jonathan? It is, of course, a myth, but it serves as an illustration of my present point. Prometheus, for ridiculing the gods, was bound to a rock upon Mount Caucasus, by order of Jupiter, where daily for thirty years a vulture ...
— The Common Sense of Socialism - A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg • John Spargo
... it were, into that scene of retribution; Minos and Rhadamanthus passing judgment on the successive spirits brought before them; the flames of Tartarus, the rock of Sisyphus, the wheel of Ixion, the vulture gnawing Prometheus. But with Homer and Virgil, the descent into the infernal regions was a brief episode; with Dante it was the whole poem. Immense was the effort of imagination requisite to give variety to such a subject, to prevent the mind from ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... misery impelled, they sought To dash their heads against the rugged tree, Or, plunging headlong from the lofty rock, Their limbs to scatter to the winds. No law mysterious, misconception dark, Would the sad wish refuse to grant. Of all that breathe the breath of life, You, only, children of Prometheus, feel That life a burden hard to bear; Yet, would you seek the silent shores of death, If sluggish fate the boon delay, To you, alone, ...
— The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi • Giacomo Leopardi
... regard, and was abundantly loaded with academic honors. The Academy of Sciences of Paris made him an associate member, as it had Newton and Leibnitz. All the learned bodies of Europe eagerly admitted him into their ranks. Kant, the celebrated German philosopher, called him 'the Prometheus of modern times.' To this scientific glory, which he might have extended if he had consecrated to his favorite pursuits his thoughts and his time, he added high political distinction. To this man, happy because he was intelligent, great because he had an active genius ...
— From Boyhood to Manhood • William M. Thayer
... finished with the dead, and the living claim our thoughts," sighed the king. "What an absurd thing is the human heart! It will never grow cold or old; always pretending to a spark of the fire which that shameful fellow Prometheus stole from the gods. What an absurdity! What have I, an old fellow, to do with the fire of Prometheus, when the fire of war will soon rage around me," At this instant the door gently opened. "What do you want, Muller? What do you poke your stupid face in ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... happinesses, loves, and adventures, gave relatively small scope for the personal aspects of tragedy. There was no need for vicarious or redemptive suffering: what pain existed, and they rarely expressed it in marble, was human in its origin and punitive in effect: Icarus, Niobe, Laocoon, Prometheus; and even here the proprieties of good taste imposed strict limits, beyond which the portrayal of tragedy could not go without violating unwritten laws. It had to occupy a secondary place in their art: ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... where a man is all pride, vanity, and personal aspiration, he goes through fire unshielded. In every part and corner of our life, to lose oneself is to be gainer; to forget oneself is to be happy; and this poor, laughable, and tragic fool has not yet learned the rudiments; himself, giant Prometheus, is still ironed on the peaks of Caucasus. But by and by his truant interests will leave that tortured body, slip abroad and gather flowers. Then shall death appear before him in an altered guise; no longer as a doom peculiar to himself, whether fate's crowning injustice or his ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... personal good; then in the conception of the Epic, which assumes a political as well as a physical Kosmos, or order; then in the grand moral ideas lying at the basis of the Mythology,—the myths, for instance, of Prometheus, and the picture of Nemesis and the Fates. Next, the deep sense of God speaks out in Grecian Tragedy and the great works of Grecian Art; and in the highest degree, in the Philosophy which culminated in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... that book, father, and not let me have it any more to-day, as it has interfered so much with my study; and I will try to be more industrious. I will finish my Prometheus and Euclid, and the projection of my map, and then, perhaps, I shall be ready ...
— Louis' School Days - A Story for Boys • E. J. May |
