"Sibyl" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... hunt after the crown of martyrdom, and think a stake, surrounded with blazing fagots, better worth embracing than a willing bride. He is a very knight errant in defence of his religious notions, and does battle wherever he comes. He hath already a quarrel with the monks of Sibyl's Isle yonder about some point of doctrine. ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... of Campania, now in ruins; alleged to be the earliest Greek settlement in Italy; famous as the residence of the SIBYL (q. v.), and a place of luxurious resort for ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... must have noticed it. And then she has encouraged my ambition. I shall be a Deputy; and I shall make no blunders, for I shall consult my Egeria. Every great politician, from Numa to our present Prime Minister, has had his Sibyl of the fountain. A score of deputies visit Valerie; she is acquiring considerable influence; and now that she is about to be established in a charming house, with a carriage, she will be one of ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... Then the king was struck by her pertinacity, and he consulted his augurs what this might be; and they bade him by all means buy the three, and said he had done wrong not to buy the nine, for these were the books of the Sibyl and contained great secrets. So the books were kept underground in the Capitol in a stone chest, and two men (duumviri) were appointed to take charge of them, and consult them when the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... her great rich eyes a goddess might have commanded through, with their eyebrows of raven-black, like entrances to the caves of the Cumaean sibyl, her small head borne as easily upon her neck as a dove upon a sprig—all flashed upon Milburn's thrilled yet flinching soul, as the ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... "The Sibyl and Cleopatra! Yes Colonel Campian is rather proud of possessing them. He collects only modern art, for which I believe there is a great future, though some of our friends think it ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... children play about among the groups of mothers with orange kerchiefs on their heads and heavy silver rings on every finger. Strange processions with cowled faces and crucifix and banners borne aloft sweep into the piazza and up the church steps. Old women with Sibyl-like faces sit spinning at their doors. Maidens with water-jars on their heads which might have been dug up at Pompeii; priests with broad hats and huge cloaks; sailors with blue shirts and red girdles; urchins who almost ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... were so vivid, and her expression so swift and varying; it was to be found in the whole presence—something mountain- like and daring, something Eastern and reserved and secret, something remote—brooding like a Sphinx, and prophetic like a Sibyl. But suppose that in days to come the thing that did not belong, which was of the East, of the tan, of the River Starzke; suppose that ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... stilly light Bowed down before me, the dew came again, The moon my sibyl worshipped through the night, The sun returned and long ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various
... Juno's aid implore. Let gifts be to the mighty queen design'd, And mollify with pray'rs her haughty mind. Thus, at the length, your passage shall be free, And you shall safe descend on Italy. Arriv'd at Cumae, when you view the flood Of black Avernus, and the sounding wood, The mad prophetic Sibyl you shall find, Dark in a cave, and on a rock reclin'd. She sings the fates, and, in her frantic fits, The notes and names, inscrib'd, to leafs commits. What she commits to leafs, in order laid, Before the cavern's entrance are display'd: Unmov'd they ...
— The Aeneid • Virgil
... be it always, then, with you; So be it—whether false or true— I press my faith on none; If other fancies please you more, The flowers shall blossom as before, Dear as the Sibyl-leaves of ...
— Poems of Henry Timrod • Henry Timrod
... things are pure: but unto them that are defiled is nothing pure." According to Serapion, as quoted by Clemens Alexandrinus, the tradition was that the face which appears in the moon is the soul of a Sibyl. Plutarch, in his treatise, Of the Face appearing in the roundle of the Moone, cites the poet Agesinax as saying ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... giggling creature could not resist the mere mention of a fortune-teller. Only for Nutter, who set his face against this sort of sham witchcraft, she would certainly have asked him to treat her with a glimpse into futurity at that famous-sibyl's house; and now that she had an opportunity of having the enchantress tete-a-tete in her own snug parlour at the Mills, she was in a delightful ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... Viola is alone in the world,—alone in the home where loneliness had seemed from the cradle a thing that was not of nature. And at first the solitude and the stillness were insupportable. Have you, ye mourners, to whom these sibyl leaves, weird with many a dark enigma, shall be borne, have you not felt that when the death of some best-loved one has made the hearth desolate,—have you not felt as if the gloom of the altered home was too heavy for thought to bear?—you would leave it, though ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... freshness; but others will not fail to remark, that the accompaniments of these figures, such as the chairs on which they sit, and the pillars which form the frame work of the pieces, are designed and executed in a style of art worthy of the Florentine School of this period. Every Sibyl is succeeded by a scriptural subject. If the faces of these figures were a little more animated and intelligent, this book would be a charming specimen of art of the XVth century. The Erythraean Sibyl holds a white rose very prettily in her left hand. The Agrippinian ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... at the turn of the hinge the light wind from the doorway stirs them, and disarranges the delicate foliage, never after does she trouble to capture them as they flutter about the hollow rock, nor restore their places or join the verses; men depart without counsel, and hate the Sibyl's dwelling. Here let no waste in delay be of such account to thee (though thy company chide, and the passage call thy sails strongly to the deep, and thou mayest fill out their folds to thy desire) that thou do not ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... a sibyl to guide his steps; and as such a conductress nowadays could not be got for love or money, it was judged most prudent to refrain from sauntering through this land of freedom, and wait with patience the return of health. At last this long-looked-for, ...
— Wanderings In South America • Charles Waterton
... Older than Sibyl seemed the beldam hoar, (As far as from her wrinkles one might guess), And in the youthful ornaments she wore, Looked like an ape which men in mockery dress; And now appears more foul, as angered sore, While rage and wrath her kindled eyes express. For none can do a woman worse despite ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... before me had exactly the person of a prophetess—not, indeed, of the divine sibyl imagined by Domenichino, so sweetly distracted betwixt love and mystery, but of a good business-like, practical prophetess, long used to the exercise of her sacred calling. I have been told by those who knew Lady Hester Stanhope in her youth, that ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... meeting held in the common-hall of London, Colonel Torrens remarked:—"Let the peers refuse this bill if they dare; and if they do, dearly will they rue their obstinacy hereafter. You all remember the Sibyl's story. She presented her oracles to the court of Tarquin, and they were rejected. She burned a portion, and again offered them, but they were again rejected. After diminishing their number still further, she once more returned, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... whose plays were written with acrostics on their respective titles. One of the most remarkable acrostics was contained in the verses cited by Lactantius and Eusebius in the 4th century, and attributed to the Erythraean sibyl, the initial letters of which form the words 'Insous Arist.os Theou uios sozer: "Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Saviour.'' The initials of the shorter form of this again make up the word ichthbs (fish), to which a mystical meaning has been attached (Augustine, De Civitale Dei, 18, 23), thus ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... from the exertion. If she skates, she is sure to strain some muscle; or if she falls and strikes her knee or hits her ankle, a blow that a healthy girl would forget in five minutes terminates in some mysterious lameness which confines our poor sibyl for months. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... new organization, and a great genius wrote some delightful novels to show their purpose, and to illustrate their manner of how-not-to-do-it in grappling with the grand social questions of the age. In "Coningsby" they sing canticles and carry about the boar's head; in "Sibyl" they sing hymns to the Holy Virgin and the song of labor, and steal title-deeds, after setting houses on fire to distract attention from their immediate object; and in "Tancred" they go on pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre, by way of reviving ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... fabled of in antiquity, regarded by Ruskin as representing the voice of God in nature, and, as such, endowed with visionary prophetic power, or what in the Highlands of Scotland is called "second-sight"; the most famous of the class being the Sibyl of Cumae, who offered King Tarquin of Rome nine books for sale, which he refused on account of the exorbitant sum asked for them, and again refused after she had burnt three of them, and in the ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... disguised under general courtesy, he found the prevailing fear which at present beset the Lord Keeper was that of danger to his own person from the Master of Ravenswood. The language which the blind sibyl, Old Alice, had used; the sudden appearance of the Master, armed, and within his precincts, immediately after he had been warned against danger from him; the cold and haughty return received in exchange for the acknowledgments with which he loaded him for his timely protection, had ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... not confound the Pythia with the Sibyl of Delphi. The ancients represent the latter as a woman that roved from country to country, venting her predictions. She was at the same time the Sibyl of Delphi, Erythrae, Babylon, Cumae, and many other places, from her having ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... Pembroke was on the table. He did not hurry to open it, for she, and all that she did, was overwhelming. She wrote like the Sibyl; her sorrowful face moved over the stars and shattered their harmonies; last night he saw her with the eyes of Blake, a virgin widow, tall, veiled, consecrated, with her hands stretched out against an everlasting wind. Why should she write? Her letters were not for the likes ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... were speculations beyond the sibyl of his odd adoration; Annapla was too intent upon her own elderly love-affairs to be ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... to persons younger than herself, a Makaria and Natalia. She was wisdom and intellectual beauty, filling life with a charm and glory "known to neither sea nor land." To those of her own age she was sibyl and seer,—a prophetess, revealing the future, pointing the path, opening their eyes to the great aims only worthy of pursuit in life. To those older than herself she was like the Euphorion in Goethe's drama, child of Faust and Helen,—a wonderful union of exuberance and judgment, ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... he is,' cried Mab, as the bishop issued from the sibyl's tent. 'Oh, George, how ill ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... occult sciences—in chiromancy and cartomancy. He had been told of a sibyl even more astonishing than Mademoiselle Lenormand, and he resolved that Madame de Girardin, Mery and Theophile Gautier should drive with him to the abode of the pythoness at Auteuil. The address given them was incorrect, only a family of honest citizens living there, and the old mother became ...
— Women in the Life of Balzac • Juanita Helm Floyd
... with a comical little adventure the other evening. We were wandering over the common, and encountered two gypsies. I always had desired to have my fortune told, so A—— and I each seized hold of a sibyl and listened ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... their wits themselves. For all madness is not miserable, or Horace had never called his poetical fury a beloved madness; nor Plato placed the raptures of poets, prophets, and lovers among the chiefest blessings of this life; nor that sibyl in Virgil called Aeneas' travels mad labors. But there are two sorts of madness, the one that which the revengeful Furies send privily from hell, as often as they let loose their snakes and put into men's breasts either the desire of war, or an insatiate thirst after gold, or some dishonest love, ...
— The Praise of Folly • Desiderius Erasmus
... culture in the South of Europe, and to anticipate the advent of the spirit of modern tolerance. He, too, and all his race were exterminated by the Papal jealousy. Truly we may say with Michelet that the Sibyl of the Renaissance kept offering her books in vain to feudal Europe. In vain because the time was not yet. The ideas projected thus early on the modern world were immature and abortive, like those headless trunks and zoophitic members of half-molded humanity ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... of that month. Night and day were in succession introduced by her, when they began to diminish in length; and souls, before arriving at the gates of Hell, were also led by her. In going through these signs, they passed the Styx in the 8th Degree of Libra. She was the famous Sibyl who initiated Eneas, and opened to him the way to the ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... where it was discovered, and as for the vessel you spoke at random; but as you are an honest man, confess that you were afraid of the results. I am never so bold as that, and when my father asks me questions of that kind, my replies are more obscure than a sibyl's. I don't wish him to lose confidence in my oracle, nor do I wish him to be able to reproach me with a loss that would ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... and flowing in his hexameters. His words are not only chosen, but the places in which he ranks them for the sound. He who removes them from the station wherein their master set them spoils the harmony. What he says of the Sibyl's prophecies may be as properly applied to every word of his: they must be read in order as they lie; the least breath discomposes them and somewhat of their divinity is lost. I cannot boast that I have been thus exact in my verses; but I have endeavored to follow the example of my ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... we loftier strains! The humble tamarisk and woodland plains Delight not all; if woods and groves we try, Be the groves worthy of a consul's eye. Told by the Sibyl's song, the 'latter time' Is come, and dispensations roll sublime In new and glorious order; spring again With Virgo comes, and Saturn's golden reign. A heavenly band from heaven's bright realm descends, All evil ceases, and all ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... "Mr Disraeli ... with infinite polish and grace asked pardon for the flying words of debate, and drew easy forgiveness from the member (Mr Goulburn), whom a few hours before he had mocked as 'a weird sibyl'; the other member (Sir James Graham), whom he could not say he greatly respected, but whom he greatly regarded; and the third member (Sir C. Wood), whom he bade learn that petulance is not sarcasm, and insolence is not invective. ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Vol 2 (of 3), 1844-1853 • Queen Victoria
... Incomparable Sibyl cease, I pray! Hand us thy liquor without more delay. And to the very brim the goblet crown! My friend he is, and need not be afraid; Besides, he is a man of many a grade, Who ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... sons of that very corregidor frequented the nightly dances at the Gitaneria, and were deeply enamoured with some of the dark-eyed singing-girls? What availed making complaints, when perhaps a Gypsy sibyl, the mother of those very girls, had free admission to the house of the corregidor at all times and seasons, and spaed the good fortune to his daughters, promising them counts and dukes, and Andalusian knights in marriage, or prepared philtres for his lady by which she was always to reign ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... pool of water and sundry other arrangements suggest to a lively imagination its designation. It certainly has the recommendation of being the most retired bath-room ever known. That of the Neapolitan sibyl is public in ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Rachel, before her visit to America, much attenuated; indeed, she resembled a bundle of nerves electrified with vitality; her bleached skin, thin arms, large, scintillating eyes, and that indescribable something which marks the Jewish physiognomy, gave her a weird, sibyl-like appearance, as of one wasted by long vigils. There was in her glance and action the spasmodic inspiration observable in Malibran towards the close of her career. The play was Racine's Andromache, and the depth and energy of Hermione's emotions were illustrated ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... immortality he dips his quill: And, since blank paper is denied the press, He mingles the whole alphabet by guess: In various sets, which various words compose, Of which, he hopes, mankind the meaning knows. So sounds spontaneous from the sibyl broke, Dark to herself the wonders which she spoke; The priests found out the meaning, if they could; And nations star'd at what none understood. Clodio dress'd, danc'd, drank, visited, (the whole And great concern of an immortal soul!) Oft have I said, "Awake! exist! ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... Etruscan libri fatales (Books of Fate), and these, together with the Sibylline Books, were kept in the Temple of Capitoline Jupiter. Nothing seemed more natural than to suppose that Tarquin, who built that temple, purchased also the sacred books of the Sibyl.' —Ihne. ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... insatiate idea, without being able to find a new incarnation. She was suffering in this way when the character of Chopin excited her curiosity and suggested a healthful and happy relief. Chopin dreaded to meet this modern Sibyl. The superstitious awe he felt was a premonition whose meaning was hidden from him. They met, and Chopin lost his fear in one of those passions which feed on the whole being ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... unrelaxable for ever. Paint a leaf indeed!—the above-named Titian has done it. Corregio, moreover, and Giorgione and Leonardo, very nearly, trying hard. Holbein three or four times, in precious pieces, highest wrought. Raphael, it may be, in one or two crowns of Muse or Sibyl. If any one else in later times, we have to consider.' There is no endeavour to show how or why accurate drawing of the leaf leads to general accuracy in drawing; no analogy is attempted, for instance, between the human and vegetable anatomies. Perhaps this is as well; ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... regions, and when there was an eruption it was thought that hell was boiling over. Classic mythology, before the time of Christ, had its entrances to hell at Acherusia, in Bithynia; at Avernus, in Campania, where Ulysses began his journey to the grisly abodes; the Sibyl's cave at Cumae, in Argolis; at Taenarus, in the southern Peloponnesus, where Hercules descended, and dragged Cerberus up to the daylight; and the cave of Trophonius, in Lebadea, not to mention a ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... was little Molly going to turn out a sibyl? How grown she was! What a peace and strength shone from her countenance! She was woman, girl, and child, all in one! What a fire of life there was in this lady with the brown hands—so different from ...
— Home Again • George MacDonald
... Mona Earl Wayne's Nobility Mysterious Wedding Ring, A Edrie's Legacy Nora Faithful Shirley Queen Bess False and The True, The Ruby's Reward For Love and Honor, Shadowed Happiness, A, Sequel to Geoffrey's Victory Sequel to Wild Oats Forsaken Bride, The Sibyl's Influence Geoffrey's Victory Stella Roosevelt Girl in a Thousand, A Thorn Among Roses, A, Golden Key, The Sequel to a Girl in a Thousand Heatherford Fortune, The, Threads Gathered Up, Sequel to The Magic Cameo Sequel to Virgie's Inheritance ...
— His Heart's Queen • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... or their sons should forfeit twenty-five myriads of denarii. Now it happened that the Ludi Apollinares fell on the same day, and they therefore voted that his natal feast should be held on the previous day,[28] because (they said) there was an oracle of the Sibyl forbidding a festival to be celebrated during that twenty-four hours to any god except Apollo. [-19-] Besides granting him these privileges they regarded the day on which he had been murdered (on ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol. III • Cassius Dio
... with all these; absurd people upon whom the news of Rabelais' return fell with such varied effect? What have you and I to do with men and women who do not, cannot, could not, will not, ought not, have not, did, and by all the thirsty Demons that serve the lamps of the cavern of the Sibyl, shall not count in the scheme of things as worth one little paring of Rabelais' little finger nail? What are they that they should interfere with the great mirific and most assuaging and comfortable feast of wit ...
— On Nothing & Kindred Subjects • Hilaire Belloc
... Syria, the latter immediately put his army in motion. So the former out of kindness and the latter through corrupt influence restored the king contrary to the wish of the commonwealth, paying no heed either to it or to the utterances of the Sibyl. Gabinius was later brought to trial for this, but on account of Pompey's influence and the money at his command was not convicted. Public administration had so deteriorated among the Romans of that day that when some of the magistrates and jurymen received ...
— Dio's Rome • Cassius Dio
... of the empire; where Sylla lived, and Cicero loved to retire; which Julius loved, and Horace, and every Roman of taste or refinement. There spread away the lake Lucrine, bordered by the Elysian Fields; there was the long grotto through which Aeneas passed; where once the Cumaean Sibyl dwelt and delivered her oracles. There was Misenum, where once the Roman navy rode at anchor; Baiae, where once all Roman luxury loved to pass the summer season; Puteoli, where St. Paul landed when on his way to Caesar's throne. There were the waters in which ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... fit phrase. Its education has always been liberal, and its implied wit can endow a college. The world, which the Greeks called Beauty, has been made such by being gradually divested of every ornament which was not fitted to endure. The Sibyl, "speaking with inspired mouth, smileless, inornate, and unperfumed, pierces through centuries by the power of the god." The scholar might frequently emulate the propriety and emphasis of the farmer's call to his team, ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... not seem to me in any way complete without your name, dear Sibyl of our own, and as I write it here, I am grateful to know that to mine and me it is not only the name of a Sibyl with deep visions, but of a friend to us all. A. ...
— A Book of Sibyls - Miss Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs Opie, Miss Austen • Anne Thackeray (Mrs. Richmond Ritchie)
... or you will not make him into one with cockle and nimbus; an angel must look like an angel on the ground, as well as in the air; and the much-denounced pre-Raphaelite faith that a saint cannot look saintly unless he has thin legs, is not more absurd than Michael Angelo's, that a Sibyl cannot look Sibylline unless she has ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... is based upon thorough investigation, original documents and an exhaustive analysis of facts. The facts brought out in the various litigations in which Mrs. Eddy and the church have been involved confirm both the statements and conclusions of this really distinctive work. The official life by Sibyl Wilbur (whose real name seems to be O'Brien) is so coloured as to be substantially undependable. It touches lightly or omits altogether those passages in Mrs. Eddy's life which do not fit in with ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... saw the Sibyl's finger rest On fate's unturned imagined page, Believed her promise, and was blest With dreams of that heroic age. She sent me, ere my hope was cold, One of the race ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)
... churches described by Paspates in his Byzantine Studies, published in 1877, nine have either entirely disappeared or lost more of their original features. It was no part of wisdom to let the books of the cunning Sibyl become rarer and knowledge poorer by neglecting to secure all that was obtainable when she made her first or ...
— Byzantine Churches in Constantinople - Their History and Architecture • Alexander Van Millingen
... of this footprint on the threshold-stone of the ancestral mansion seems to have associated itself inextricably with the dreamy substance of his yet unshaped romance. Indeed, it leaves its mark broadly upon Sibyl Dacy's wild legend in "Septimius Felton," and reappears in the last paragraph of that story. But, so far as we can know at this day, nothing definite was done until after his departure for Italy. It was then, while staying in Rome, that he began to put ...
— The Ancestral Footstep (fragment) - Outlines of an English Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... soaks the heart As hills are soaked by slow unsealing snow, Or secret as that wind without a chart Whereon did the wild leaves of Sibyl go. ...
— Poems • G.K. Chesterton
... Caverford's portrait, has the rapt eye of the Cumaean sibyl. One of Moore's fine friends, an admirer of Bessy's, speaks to him of her "wild, poetic face," and the Duchess of Sussex thought her like "Lady Heathcote in the days of her beauty." That is putting her very high, for, according to Cosway, Lady Heathcote was ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... no question but our Poet drew the Image in what follows from that in Virgil's sixth Book, where AEneas and the Sibyl stand before the Adamantine Gates, which are there described as shut upon the Place of Torments, and listen to the Groans, the Clank of Chains, and the Noise of Iron Whips, that were heard in those ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... his sword for Marius' fall, The godlike hero with a frown Struck all his rage and malice down; Then how can we dread William Wood, If by thy presence he's withstood? Where wisdom stands to keep the field, In vain he brings his brazen shield; Though like the sibyl's priest he comes, With furious din of brazen drums The force of thy superior voice Shall strike him dumb, and quell ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... Disraeli's "Sibyl," while I built a sand fortress round her; or she read "Venetia," "Oliver Twist," "The Life of Mary II.," "Romany Rye," and "The Lives of the Last Four Popes." She remembered Pio Nono with unflagging interest, and mentions his serious illness, ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... had finished that first cup of tea ever brewed in England,—the gift of the newly-created East India Company,—no sibyl was at hand to peer into the monarch's cup and foretell from its dregs, the dire disaster to his realm, hidden among those insignificant particles. Could a vision of those battered tea chests, floating in Boston harbor, with tu ...
— Tea Leaves • Various
... Proud was king a strange thing happened at Rome. One day an unknown woman came to the king, bearing in her arms nine books, which she offered to sell to him at a certain price. She told him that they contained the prophecies of the Sibyl of Cumae, and that from them might be learned the destiny of Rome and the way ...
— Historic Tales, Volume 11 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... ease. What is fame? an empty bubble. Gold? a transient shining trouble. Let them for their country bleed, What was Sidney's, Raleigh's meed? Man's not worth a moment's pain, Base, ungrateful, fickle, vain. Then let me, sequestered fair, To your sibyl grot repair; On yon hanging cliff it stands, Scooped by nature's salvage hands, Bosomed in the gloomy shade Of cypress not with age decayed. Where the owl still-hooting sits, Where the bat incessant flits, There in loftier strains ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... floating from the fireside to the philosopher's closet: he points his pen, as AEneas brandished his sword at the Gorgons and Chimeras that darkened the entrance of Hell; wanting the admonitions of the sibyl, he would have ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... what do you think was the effect? Why, nearly half the sailors in the merchant ships wanted to join the "Raleigh." They could not be accommodated, but many were engaged and put on board the "Sibyl." ...
— Notes by the Way in A Sailor's Life • Arthur E. Knights
... Priory to-day, and it looked like a great lonely Tomb. In those days, the house where I live now was not built; all up here Hampstead-ways was grass and fields. It was over these fields that Herbert Spencer and George Eliot used to walk on their way to Hampstead Heath. The Sibyl has gone, but the great Philosopher still remains, to brighten the sunshine. It was not my luck to know him then—would it had been!—but he is my friend and neighbour in these latter days, and, thanks to him, I still get ...
— The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... thundering roar of Charybdis, and on the right grim Scylla sits scowling in her cave ready to spring on the unwary traveler. Better take a long circuit round Sicily than come even within sight and sound of Scylla. As soon as you touch the western shores of Italy, go to the city of Cumae and the Sibyl's cavern. Try to win her favor, and she will tell you of the nations of Italy and the wars yet to come, and how you may avoid each peril and accomplish every labor. One warning would I give you and enjoin it with all my power. If you desire to reach ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 2 (of 12) • Various
... carving, groining and all manner of costly contrivances for absorbing money and labor, made on me the impression of waste rather than taste, seeming to give form and substance to the orator's simile of "the contortions of the sibyl without her inspiration." A better acquaintance with the edifice, or with the principles of architecture, might serve to correct this hasty judgment; but surely Westminster Abbey ought to afford a place of worship equal in capacity, fitness and convenience to a modern ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... girl, a sibyl for intentness now, "you would prefer to go? To be asked to! You would find the streets"—with swift discerning contempt—"more profitable for your purpose than ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... describe so graphically. With the bits of pasteboard that you have seen chiefly in coarse, grimy hands, I associate our cosey sitting-room at home, with its glowing grate and 'moon-light lamp,' as we call it, for father's eyes are weak. Even now," she continued, assuming the look of a rapt and beautiful sibyl, that was entrancing to Hemstead as well as De Forrest—"even now I see papa and mamma and old-fashioned Auntie Jane, and poor invalid Jennie, all gathered at home in our sacred little snuggery where father permits no ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... I gather up the scattered rays Of wisdom in the early days, Faint gleams and broken, like the light Of meteors in a northern night, Betraying to the darkling earth The unseen sun which gave them birth; I listen to the sibyl's chant, The voice of priest and hierophant; I know what Indian Kreeshna saith, And what of life and what of death The demon taught to Socrates; And what, beneath his garden-trees Slow pacing, with a dream-like ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... The mind conceived you, though the quenched mind Goes down in dark where you in dawn ascend. Our songs can but suspend The ultimate silence: yet could song aspire The realms of mortal music to extend And wake a Sibyl's voice or Seraph's lyre — How should it tell ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... in "Les Troph['e]es," is both an Imagist and a Symbolist. He has the inspiration and the science of the Sibyl without her contortions. It is unfortunate that the truculent attitude of the professional makers of "free verse" should have arrayed a small and angry group against them; and this group will have none of Robert Frost, who is certainly a poet and a poet of great courage and originality. ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... end, it would be, no doubt, that the funeral rites have been paid to their remains, and that they themselves have given their names to the places where they perished: it is thus that the shade of Palinurus rejoiced in the regions below, at learning from the mouth of the Sibyl, that the promontory near which he was drowned would henceforth be called by his name: gaudet cognomine terra. The rapid and the point of land where the accident I have described took place, will bear, and bears already, probably, ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to the Northwest Coast of America in the years 1811, 1812, 1813, and 1814 or the First American Settlement on the Pacific • Gabriel Franchere
... and her whole form seemed changed,—she was no longer the majestic sibyl, but the attached, ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... It is a gift peculiar to woman and her temperament. By birth a fay, by the regular recurrence of her ecstasy she becomes a sibyl. By her love she grows into an enchantress. By her subtlety, by a roguishness often whimsical and beneficent, she becomes a Witch; she works her spells; does at any rate lull our pains to ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... describe many objects of interest and many scenes of beauty I witnessed in New York and the neighbourhood. The Common Schools; the Croton Waterworks, capable of yielding an adequate supply for a million-and-a-half of people; Hoboken, with its sibyl's cave and elysian fields; the spot on which General Hamilton fell in a duel; the Battery and Castle Garden—a covered amphitheatre capable of accommodating 10,000 people; the Park, and the City Hall with its white marble front; Trinity Church; and its wealthy Corporation; Long Island, ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies
... Jewess Rebecca awaited her fate in a distant and sequestered turret. Hither she had been led by two of her disguised ravishers, and on being thrust into the little cell, she found herself in the presence of an old sibyl, who kept murmuring to herself a Saxon rhyme, as if to beat time to the revolving dance which her spindle was performing upon the floor. The hag raised her head as Rebecca entered, and scowled at the fair Jewess with the malignant envy with ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... gentle, and so kind, That heart, which never gave a harsh decree, Suit all the turns of thy harmonious mind, And must, perforce, with destiny agree. This from the Sibyl's leaves affection drew, O, be the ...
— Poems • Matilda Betham
... Sibyl" was then in the fullness of her powers. She had been born of slave parents about 1798 in Ulster County, New York. In her later years she remembered vividly the cold, damp cellar-room in which slept the slaves ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley
... the Mediterranean, whose blue waters remind me of Newport harbor and our old days there. Ah, my sweet saint, blessed was the day I first learned to know you! for it was you, more than anything else, that kept me back from sin and misery. I call you my Sibyl, dearest, because the Sibyl was a prophetess of divine things out of the Church; and so are you. The Abbe says, that all true, devout persons of all persuasions belong to the True Catholic Apostolic Church, and will in the end be enlightened to know it. What do you think of that, ma ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... their own individual judgment, he doubted collective wisdom. Yet now that his protegee had been accepted by others, he questioned that judgment and became her critic. It struck him that her sudden outburst was strained; it seemed to him that in this mere contortion of passion the sibyl's robe had become rudely disarranged. He spoke to Hamlin, and even ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... nothing that is written shall endure. That is the reason, in my opinion, why, among so many men of talent, France to-day counts not one great writer. In a society like ours, to seek for literary glory seems to me an anachronism. Of what use is it to invoke an ancient sibyl when a muse is on the eve of birth? Pitiable actors in a tragedy nearing its end, that which it behooves us to do is to precipitate the catastrophe. The most deserving among us is he who plays best this part. Well, I no longer aspire to this ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... exhaled a long breath of smoke. "Very well thought out—unusually clever—for a layman," she uttered, and was still, with the suggestion of a sibyl whose oracle has ceased ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... "This shows that the Sibyl at the festival of Adonis was right when she sang in the Jalemus that the gods did half the work of ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... it, to go mumbling through a kind of rhapsody, which most of my German fellow-students confessed they could not understand. It was a comical sight: half a dozen students crowding around his desk, listening as priests might listen to the sibyl on her tripod, the other students being scattered through the room, in various stages of discouragement. My studies at this period were mainly in the direction of history, though with considerable reading on art and literature. Valuable and interesting to me at this time were the ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... women tittered and sneered, and the very children spat out evil words in the Romany language. But Baltic, used to black skins and black looks, was not daunted by this inhospitable reception, and in grave tones repeated his inquiry for the sibyl. ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... countenanced by the state, of course it was not less followed by the people. The poor Jews took to it as a trade. In Alexandria the Jewess, half beggar, half fortune-teller, would stop people in the streets and interpret dreams by the help of the Bible, or sit under a sacred tree like a sibyl, and promise wealth to those who consulted her, duly proportioned to the size of the coin by which she was paid. We find among the Theban ruins pieces of papyrus with inscriptions, describing the positions of the heavens at particular hours in this reign, ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 11 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... consideration in respect of the first stanza, the insuperable difficulties of which seem to have been purposely contrived in order to warn off trespassers at the very boundary of the alluring domain. I have got over the inhibition—somehow—but David and the Sibyl must try to forgive me if they find themselves represented merely by the names of those conspicuous personal qualities to which they probably owed, respectively, their powers of prophecy, as Samson's strength lay in ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... second manual of the two-manual harpsichord originated as a device for transposition is well known. In an article titled "Transposing Keyboards on Extant Flemish Harpsichords," Sibyl Marcuse[5] discusses surviving examples that show how the second keyboard was arranged. The upper keyboard was the principal one, with the lower keyboard sounding a fourth below. The strings acted upon by a c key on ...
— Italian Harpsichord-Building in the 16th and 17th Centuries • John D. Shortridge
... it at first took no official notice of the communication. But, like the Cumaean sibyl to Tarquin, the message came again. It was not received, but it made an unofficial impression. It was repeated. Who was this mysterious stranger? Whence came he, and ...
— True to His Home - A Tale of the Boyhood of Franklin • Hezekiah Butterworth
... Sibyl's volumes, thou shouldst say; Those that remained, after the six were burned, Being held more precious than the nine together. But listen to my tale. Dost thou remember The Gypsy girl we saw at Cordova Dance the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... afternoon all through the season. And round this structure were things desirable by all mankind, and supposed to be desired by possessors of one penny willing to part with it. For a penny-in-the-slot you could learn your fate from a Sibyl, and repent of having spent your penny on it. For another you could scent your pocket-handkerchief, and be sorry you hadn't kept your penny for chocolate. For another you could have the chocolate, and wish you had waited ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... to the marriage bond to yield. The triumph seem'd at last to reach the shore Where lofty Baise hears the Tuscan roar. 'Twas on a vernal morn it touch'd the land, And 'twixt Mount Barbaro that crowns the strand And old Avernus (once an hallow'd ground); For the Cumaean sibyl's cell renown'd. Linterno's sandy bounds it reach'd at last, Great Scipio's favour'd haunt in ages past; Famed Africanus, whose victorious blade The slaughterous deeds of Hannibal repaid, And to his country's heart a bloody passage made. Here in a calm retreat his life he spent, ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... the whole time had not taken his eyes from her, this ready obedience of Crispus produced a wonderful and pervading impression. It seemed to him that among the Christians Lygia was a kind of sibyl or priestess whom they surrounded with obedience and honor; and he yielded himself also to that honor. To the love which he felt was joined now a certain awe, in presence of which love itself became something almost insolent. ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... at last reached the shores of Italy, and joyfully did the adventurers leap to land. While his people were employed in making their encampment AEneas sought the abode of the Sibyl. It was a cave connected with a temple and grove, sacred to Apollo and Diana. While Aeneas contemplated the scene, the Sibyl accosted him. She seemed to know his errand, and under the influence of the deity of the place burst forth in a prophetic strain, giving dark intimations of labors and perils ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... the right, yuh know, old Dennie just says straight and flat, 'Professor Burgess, I'm ashamed of you.' Dennie's a brick. And do you know, Burgess, spite of his cussed thin hide, we've got to toughen for him out here in Kansas; spite of all that, HE LIKES DENNIE SAXON. The oracle hath orked, the sibyl hath sibbed. But say, Vic, if he does come down hard on you, what ...
— A Master's Degree • Margaret Hill McCarter
... supplications; and several of the other gipsy women were awakening strong sympathy among the young girls and maid-servants in the background. The pretty, black-eyed gipsy girl, whom I have mentioned on a former occasion as the sibyl that read the fortunes of the general, endeavoured to wheedle that doughty warrior into their interests, and even made some approaches to her old acquaintance, Master Simon; but was repelled by the latter with all the dignity ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving
... languid maiden to bestir herself. Having fumbled in the drawer for the handkerchief, she approached the window, but no sooner did the little boy become aware of her intention than, with a rebellious shake of his curly head, he buried his nose in his little chapped fists, and, regardless of Sibyl's advice, that he had better be good, he firmly stood his ground, determined to resist ...
— Plantation Sketches • Margaret Devereux
... Sacra, and every stone is old with years whose tale is told by hundreds or by thousands, and the wounded Adonis can be adored beside the tempted Christ of Sistine, and the serious beauty of the Erythean Sibyl lives beside the laughing grace of ivy-crowned Thalia, and the Jupiter Maximus frowns on the mortals made of earth's dust, and the Jehovah who has called forth woman meets the first smile of Eve. A Divine City indeed, holding in its innumerable chambers and its courts of granite ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... dark, bodeful eyes, and with great solemnity of speech and gesture accused him of using undue influence in gaining her son's consent to go on a dangerous voyage among unfriendly tribes; and like an ancient sibyl foretold a long train of bad luck from storms and enemies, and finished by saying, "If my son comes not back, on you will be his blood, and you shall pay. I ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... her spiritual apartness, however far it bear her from earth, she never loses her close sympathy with the fortunes of mankind. Nay, from her lofty station she is the teacher of truth and love and justice, in splendid prophecy. It is with an impassioned exaltation, worthy of Sibyl and Pythoness in one, of divine wisdom both Roman and Greek, that she cries to the companions of her voyage words which embody her soul and the soul of all the wise and loving of the earth, when they act for men; bearing ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... ye what," said the old mariner, in a subdued tone, and with a shrewd and suspicious glance of his eye after the old sibyl, "it's a word that may not very well be uttered, but there are many mistakes made in evening stories if old Moll Moray there, where she lives, knows not mickle more than she is willing to tell of the Haunted Ships and their unhallowed ...
— Little Classics, Volume 8 (of 18) - Mystery • Various
... And there it lies, my sibyl sister, still! Your plummet hath not reached it. Yes, 't is love Flaunts his triumphant colors in my cheek, And quickens my lame speech—but not for him, Not for the Prince—so may I vaunt his ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... changed her purpose, and suddenly made way for Eveline, who passed without farther parley; and as she descended the staircase, which conducted from the apartment to the gateway, she heard the voice of her aunt behind her, like that of an aged and offended sibyl, denouncing wrath and wo upon her insolence ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... OF ERIC THE RED 14 The Ancestry of Gudrid 14 The Colonization of Greenland 15 Gudrid's Father emigrates to Greenland 20 The Sibyl and the Famine in Greenland 21 Leif the Lucky and the Discovery of Vinland 23 Thorstein's Attempt to find Vinland 26 The Marriage of Gudrid to Thorstein 27 The Ancestry of Thorfinn Karlsefni; his Marriage with Gudrid 30 Karlsefni's ...
— The Northmen, Columbus and Cabot, 985-1503 • Various
... unmercifully bullied by my two cousins, who took after their father and followed the imaginations of their own hearts. They were tall, dark, warmly flushed girls handsome rather than pretty. Gertrude, the eldest and tallest, had eyes that were almost black; Sibyl was of a stouter build, and her eyes, of which she was shamelessly proud, were dark blue. Sibyl's hair waved, and Gertrude's was severely straight. They treated me on my first visit with all the contempt of the adolescent girl ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... one of its chief marks; and it is, I think, an important function of a university to create an intellectual atmosphere in which the love of excellence shall become contagious, which whosoever breathes shall, like the Sibyl, feel the ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... But therein, as I found, dwelt now John Field, an Irishman, and his wife, and several children, from the broad-faced boy who assisted his father at his work, and now came running by his side from the bog to escape the rain, to the wrinkled, sibyl-like, cone-headed infant that sat upon its father's knee as in the palaces of nobles, and looked out from its home in the midst of wet and hunger inquisitively upon the stranger, with the privilege of infancy, ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... made quite a stately Sappho. Little, sedate Marjorie was an Alaskan-Indian Princess, and Rosalie rigged up a Puck costume which made her irresistible. Isabel chose to be Portia, though that erudite lady seemed somewhat out of place among the mythological characters. But Stella was a startling Sibyl, with book, staff, and a little crystal globe (removed from her paper-weight) in which to read horoscopes. The others went in all sorts ...
— Peggy Stewart at School • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... Constantin. Orat. ad Sanctos, c. 19 20. He chiefly depends on a mysterious acrostic, composed in the sixth age after the Deluge, by the Erythraean Sibyl, and translated by Cicero into Latin. The initial letters of the thirty-four Greek verses form this prophetic sentence: Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... course. To continue would have been equally rude and foolish. I had perforce to bottle up my curiosity for the moment and wait till my sibyl was in the mood ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... 'opener of all secret places, caskets, aumbries, caves of the winds, thrice blessed Sibyl of the keyhole!' She nodded her head ...
— Privy Seal - His Last Venture • Ford Madox Ford
... discovery that was entirely new and surprising to men ignorant of every art; but more highly respected on account of the supposed divinity of his mother Carmenta, whom these nations had admired as a prophetess, before the coming of the Sibyl into Italy. This prince, alarmed by the concourse of the shepherds hastily crowding round the stranger, whom they charged with open murder, after he heard the act and the cause of the act, observing the person and mien of the hero to be larger, ...
— The History of Rome, Books 01 to 08 • Titus Livius
... for transcendentalists. No doubt his dislike of Margaret Fuller arose from this feeling of his that she was always acting a part, always straining after an effect. He loved simple, natural, unaffected people, and the part of a sibyl was very distasteful to him. He suspected the inspiration of green tea in much that Margaret said, and very ungallantly pronounced her a humbug. But as he did this only upon the paper of his own private diary, with no thought of it ever being ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... the infamous Pedro. Burke has said that if Pedro was not absolutely the most cruel of men, he was undoubtedly the greatest blackguard who ever sat upon a throne, and King Juan was far from meriting similar condemnation. Sibyl de Foix, his stepmother, had exercised so strange and wonderful a power over his father, that when Juan came to the throne he was more than eager to turn upon this enchantress and make her render up the wide estates which the late king ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... once, and sat down to order her costume, while Sibyl, the niece, revelled silently in visions of a new bicycle which should presently revert to her. "For it's ridiculous, auntie's thinking of riding!" Miss Sibyl considered. "She would be a figure of fun on a wheel; besides, she can never ...
— Different Girls • Various
... said Raleigh, "at the gate of the Chase, where a sibyl, one of the FATIDICAE, meets the Queen, to tell her fortune. I saw the verses; there is little savour in them, and her Grace has been already crammed full with such poetical compliments. She whispered to me, during the Recorder's speech yonder, at Ford-mill, as she ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... a leaf of brass, And with a gad of steel will write these words, And lay it by. The angry northern wind Will blow these sands, like Sibyl's leaves, abroad, And ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... part sibyl and part gypsy. She is the ruler and terror of the gypsy race. Meg Merrilees was the nurse of Harry Bertram.—Sir W. Scott, Gay ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... way caprice was leading me. My mind was full of the tales of the place, and glowed with a vehement desire of exploring the world beyond the grot. I longed to ascend the promontory of Misenus, and follow the same dusky route down which the Sibyl conducted AEneas. ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... Glora, and took possession of Thrace; this we call Thrudheim. Then he visited many lands and knew the countries of the world, and conquered single-handed all the berserks and all the giants, and one very big dragon and many beasts. In the north region he found that prophetess who hight Sibyl, whom we call Sif, and married her. None can tell the genealogy of Sif; she was the fairest of all women, her hair was like gold. Their son was Loride (Hloride), who was like his father; his son was Henrede; his son Vingethor (Vingthor); his son Vingener (Vingner); his son Moda (Mode); his son ...
— The Younger Edda - Also called Snorre's Edda, or The Prose Edda • Snorre
... gaze, and, suffering the gay crowds to pass on, he has given himself up with delight to the divination of its mystic revelations, while he continued to weave his incantations and spells only for the entranced Sibyl of his song. ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... Sor Tommaso, and the old sibyl immediately appeared from the stairs, whither she had discreetly retired to wait during Annetta's visit. "Bring water, and that bottle of my wine from downstairs. You know, the bottle of old wine of ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... before; it appears to have no reputation as a work of art, nor am I at all positive that it deserves any. For me, however, it did as much as sculpture could, under the circumstances, even if the artist of the Libyan Sibyl had wrought it, by reviving my interest in the sturdy old Englishman, and particularly by freshening my perception of a wonderful beauty and pathetic tenderness in the incident of the penance. So, the ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... yours easily, O Sibyl!" replied she. "You will never marry, neither for real nor ideal. You should have fallen in love in the orthodox way, when you were seventeen. You are adaptive enough to have moulded yourself into any nature that you loved, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... be drawn into these mysteries. He had time for everything. It afforded him relaxation, and a means of observation. On one occasion, he followed the refugee to a garden where a person of "perfect lucidity" prophesied. The sibyl was a believer as well as a seer and pretended to communicate with God in person. I do not know exactly what supernal secrets the woman revealed, while she slept, ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... for the Germain family. If she were not allowed to see her father, the coming Popenjoy would suffer for it. "You'd better let him come, Susanna," said the Marchioness through her tears. Susanna had looked as stern as an old sibyl. "I really think it will be best," said Lady Amelia. "It ought to be done," said Lady Sarah. "I suppose you had better go to him," said the Marchioness. "I could not see him; indeed I couldn't. But he won't want to see me." Lady Susanna ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... honoured legends as those of the wolf that suckled the foundlings; the ascent of Romulus into heaven; the nymph Egeria; the duel of the Horatii and Curiatii; the leaping of Curtius into the gulf on his horse; the cutting of a flint with a razor by Tarquin; the Sibyl and her books. The modern historian has, therefore, only very little reliable material. He may admit that the Romans and Sabines coalesced; that they conquered the Albans and Latins; that thousands of the latter were transplanted to Mount Aventine ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... May come, and find their last provision here: Whereas we cannot much lament our loss, Who neither carried back, nor brought one cross. We look'd what representatives would bring; But they help'd us, just as they did the king. 20 Yet we despair not; for we now lay forth The Sibyl's books to those who know their worth; And though the first was sacrificed before, These volumes doubly will the price restore. Our poet bade us hope this grace to find, To whom by long prescription you are ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... man and delivered him up to punishment. This person was executed for the reasons stated, and two other men were slaughtered as a kind of piece of ritual. The true cause I am unable to state, inasmuch as the Sibyl made no utterance and there was no other similar oracle, but at any rate they were sacrificed in the Campus Martius by the pontifices and the priest of Mars, and their heads were set up near ...
— Dio's Rome • Cassius Dio
... portraits that had slipped down from its frame in the gloomy oaken chamber. She spoke not again even to Mause that day, but seemed as if bent on some deep and solemn exercise. Abstracted from every outward impression, she sat, the image of some ancient sibyl communing with the inward, unseen pageantries of thought—the hidden workings of a power she could not control. Towards night she seemed more accessible. Naturally austere and taciturn, she rarely spoke but when it was absolutely necessary; yet now there was a softened, a subdued tone ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... Wanderer to stand, as so many have done, shouting question after question into the Sibyl-cave of Destiny, and receive no Answer but an Echo. It is all a grim Desert, this once-fair world of his; wherein is heard only the howling of wild beasts, or the shrieks of despairing, hate-filled men; and no Pillar of Cloud by day, and no Pillar of Fire ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... which, because it is less familiar to us, is well calculated to arrest our attention after it has been paralysed by familiar repetitions. We cannot afford to lose these heathen testimonies to Christian truth; or to hush the glorious utterances of Muse and Sibyl which have justly outlived "the drums and tramplings of a hundred triumphs." We may make them infinitely profitable to us. If St. Paul quotes Aratus, and Menander, and Epimenides,[76] and perhaps more than one lyrical melody ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... gone from us! and shall we see Those sibyl-leaves of destiny, Those calm eyes, nevermore? Those deep, dark eyes so warm and bright, Wherein the fortunes of the man Lay slumbering in prophetic light, In characters a child might scan? So bright, and gone ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... hero visits Elysium in a dream; whilst he sleeps, his head recumbent on the lap of the goddess, in the innermost recess of her sanctuary. His vision resembles the Trojan's rather than the Greek's adventure. "A slipshod sibyl," ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... it amounts to that," Dr. Renshaw returned reluctantly. His age, the kindness of his manner and tone, were disarming, and his listener entertained no more personal resentment toward him than if he were an ancient sibyl uttering of necessity the will of ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... to me that of all I had seen in the world, Tivoli was the most lovely. The old "temple of the Sibyl" on the hill stood on consecrated ground, and consecrated the whole neighbourhood. I loved those waterfalls, which impressed me much more than Trollhaettan [Footnote: Trollhaettan, a celebrated waterfall near Goeteborg in Sweden.], had done in my childhood. In one place ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... and the trailing arbutus now leisurely travel. Wherever Nature is thus seen to be taking to herself, making her own, what man has first made and grown tired of, she is twice an enchantress, strangely combining in one charm the magic of a wistful, all but forgotten, past with her own sibyl-line mystery. ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... gone to her mother's,' began Hugh in a changed voice. 'The poor girl takes it pluckily. It's a damnable thing, you know, for a woman to lose her rings and bracelets and so on—even such a woman as Sibyl. She tried to laugh it off, but I could see—we must buy them again, that's all. And that reminds me—what's ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... ship, and a wider mystery. But in the passage of time, as the strange cruise proceeds, its course begins to tell upon the chart. The zigzag line, like obscure chirography, has an intelligible look, and seems to spell out intimations. As order after order is opened, those sibyl leaves of the cabin commence to prophesy, glimpses multiply, surmises come quick, and shortly the whole ship's company more than suspect, from the accumulating data behind them, what must be their destination, and the mission they have ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... indiscriminate adulation had drawn to a head of conceit. This youth bestowed a great deal of attention on a certain young woman of a classical turn of mind, who once had a longing to attend a fancy-ball as a sibyl. About the same time Sophomore missed the first volume of his Potter's "Antiquities of Greece"; and, having searched for it in vain, made up his mind that I had presented it as a keepsake, together with a lock of my hair and a cent's worth of pea-nut taffy, to the head girl of the infant class ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... prophet, prophesier, seer, soothsayer, augur, fortune teller, crystal gazer^, witch, geomancer^, aruspex^; aruspice^, haruspice^; haruspex; astrologer, star gazer^; Sibyl; Python, Pythoness^; Pythia; Pythian oracle, Delphian oracle; Monitor, Sphinx, Tiresias, Cassandra^, Sibylline leaves; Zadkiel, Old Moore; sorcerer &c 994; interpreter, &c 524. [person who predicts by non-mystical (natural) means] predictor, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... his ears tingling with shame, and hurried down the beach. Presently it occurred to him, however, that it was not quite chivalrous in him to leave little Elsie there alone with the dark-minded sibyl. Who knew but that she might need his help? He paused, and was about to retrace his steps, when he heard some one approaching, whom he instinctively knew to be Elsie. As she came nearer, the moon, which hung transfixed upon ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... that it is easier to collect the leaves of the Sibyl than the titles of the works written by Roger Bacon; and though the labour has been somewhat lightened by the publications of Brewer and Charles, referred to below, it is no easy matter even now to form an accurate idea ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... find them and was quite unable to restrain his mind because of the misfortune of his son, was wounded by some fugitive or other and fell. Thereupon the pursuit ended and the two armies separated. And at that time the Romans recalled the verse of the Sibyl, which had been pronounced in earlier times and seemed to them a portent. For the words of the saying were that when Africa should be held, the "world" would perish together with its offspring. This, however, was not the real meaning of the oracle, but after ...
— Procopius - History of the Wars, Books V. and VI. • Procopius
... quarters now as it was at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Names are only air, and blow away with a change of wind; but beliefs are rooted in human wants and weakness, and die hard. The oaks of Dodona are prostrate, and the shrine of Delphi is desolate; but the Pythoness and the Sibyl may be consulted in Lowell Street for a very moderate compensation. Nostradamus and Lilly seem impossible in our time; but we have seen the advertisements of an astrologer in our Boston papers year after year, which seems to imply that he found believers and patrons. ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... hand, before the grate, as if she questioned a sibyl, she saw again the face of the Marquis de Re. She saw it so precisely that it surprised her. The Marquis de Re had been presented to her by her father, who admired him, and he appeared to her grand and dazzling for his thirty years of intimate triumphs ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... sense is at all lacking, the artist will not succeed in conveying power, but such obvious manifestations of it as mere strength, or, worse still, the insolence not infrequently accompanying high spirits. Now Castagno, who succeeds well enough in one or two such single figures as his Cumaean Sibyl or his Farinata degli Uberti, which have great, if not the greatest, power, dignity, and even beauty, elsewhere condescends to mere swagger,—as in his Pipo Spano or Niccolo di Tolentino—or to mere strength, as in his "Last Supper," or, worse still, to actual brutality, as in his Santa ...
— The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance - With An Index To Their Works • Bernhard Berenson
... played. And she never played except when she was tipped the wink. And it was only one thing—a something of Rubenstein's ... which she had practised and practised and practised to perfection; and that rendered, with haughty head like a little sibyl, she would go back to her work-bench. And if urged to play more, she would answer, lifting her great, velvet eyes in a dreamy gaze, "no, no more to-day. The inspiration has gone." And, awed, the ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... The Sibyl sank her head upon her breast so that her nose and chin quite disappeared, and she stood before them like some furry headless beast. There was a long pause. Alwin nervously followed the pairs of eyes, noiselessly appearing and disappearing, from ...
— The Thrall of Leif the Lucky • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... [Sidenote: Sibyl. Oracles, III 767-784] Then a kingdom over all mankind for all times shall God raise up, who once gave the holy law to the pious, for whom he pledged to open every land, the world and the portals of the blessed, and all joys, ...
— The Makers and Teachers of Judaism • Charles Foster Kent
... in these times hardly justifies his panegyric. There is squalid Tivoli, with the river Anio, diverted from its course, and plunging down, headlong, some eighty feet in search of it. With its picturesque Temple of the Sibyl, perched high on a crag; its minor waterfalls glancing and sparkling in the sun; and one good cavern yawning darkly, where the river takes a fearful plunge and shoots on, low down under beetling rocks. There, too, ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... powerful deity, Wealth, holds his immediate court of joys and pleasures; where the sunny exposure of plenty, and the hot walls of profusion, produce those blissful fruits of luxury, exotics in this world, and natives of paradise!—Thou withered sibyl, my sage conductress, usher me into thy refulgent, adored presence!—The power, splendid and potent as he now is, was once the puling nursling of thy faithful care, and tender arms! Call me thy son, thy cousin, thy kinsman, or ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... obscure you are, my dear," she answered. "You speak like a sibyl. But one thing I see, and that is that you are not so perfectly happy as you would have us believe, seeing that you feel the need of consolations. Then, why do you wish me to follow ...
— Jacqueline, v2 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... stranger gave her offence. And if then she passed to imprecation, she would not curse like an ordinary woman, but like a poetess, gaining rather than losing dignity. She would rise to the evil occasion, no hag, but a largely-offended sibyl, whom nothing thereafter should ever appease. To forgive was a virtue unknown to Mistress Conal. Its more than ordinary difficulty in forgiving is indeed a special fault of the Celtic character.—This must not however be confounded with a desire for revenge. The latter is by no means a specially ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... this neighborhood that they found the Grotto of the Cumaean Sibyl. They followed the intelligent cicerone, armed with torches, into a gloomy tunnel. The intelligent cicerone walked before them with the air of one who had something to show. Seven stoat peasants followed after. ...
— The Dodge Club - or, Italy in 1859 • James De Mille
... came in an hour after, she said to me, as I looked up from my roses and my rose-colored revery, "Katy, you look like an inspired sibyl! What has ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... lighter wings to fly: Gold imp'd by thee, can compass hardest things, Can pocket States, can fetch or carry Kings; A single leaf shall waft an Army o'er, Or ship off Senates to a distant Shore; A leaf, like Sibyl's, scatter to and fro Our fates and fortunes, as the winds shall blow; Pregnant with thousands flits the Scrap unseen, And silent sells a King, ...
— War-Time Financial Problems • Hartley Withers
... N. oracle; prophet, prophesier, seer, soothsayer, augur, fortune teller, crystal gazer[obs3], witch, geomancer[obs3], aruspex[obs3]; aruspice[obs3], haruspice[obs3]; haruspex; astrologer, star gazer[obs3]; Sibyl; Python, Pythoness[obs3]; Pythia; Pythian oracle, Delphian oracle; Monitor, Sphinx, Tiresias, Cassandra[obs3], Sibylline leaves; Zadkiel, Old Moore; sorcerer &c. 994; interpreter &c. 524. [person who predicts by non-mystical (natural) means] predictor, prognosticator, forecaster; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... was never seen before or after. These were the Sibylline books, which the Romans consulted as a divine oracle by some one of the Quindecemvirs, and this is believed to have been the origin of the Quindecemvirate. What did this Sibyl teach the proud king by this bold deed, except that the vessels of wisdom, holy books, exceed all human estimation; and, as Gregory says of the kingdom of Heaven: They are ...
— The Philobiblon of Richard de Bury • Richard de Bury
... you recognise me, Tom? I confess I do not recognise myself. Well, that's out. Let it go. That's the last you will get from me. But, Tom, this is more than I can stand. I must quit this country, and I want you to make it easy for me to go. We'll get up some yarn for Sibyl. You'll help me out, old man? God knows I need help ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor
... more Egyptian than ever to-day. She always dressed for her parts; and as a believer in the Unseen, she felt it right, in honour of the sibyl, to wear her hair very low, with some green pins in it, long earrings, and a ...
— The Twelfth Hour • Ada Leverson
... the attitude which a sibyl might be supposed to assume, while listening to the occult mandates of the mysterious oracle, every faculty entranced ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... Sibylla is the ancient Greek name for a prophetic woman; and at Rome prophecies and counsels (libri Sibyllini) were kept in the Capitol which were believed to have been given as early as the time of the kings by a Sibyl of Cumae. They contained information about festivals, sacrifices, and other religious observances, and the means by which calamities which threatened the state might be averted. They were under the superintendence ...
— De Bello Catilinario et Jugurthino • Caius Sallustii Crispi (Sallustius)
... for this particular part. Scenery lovely, and again and again must HAWES MCCHAVEN be congratulated on the beautiful scene of The Mermaiden's Well (never better, in fact), Act III. The love-making bit in this Act is charming, and the classic Sibyl, Ailsie, superb. Nothing in stage effect within our memory has equalled the pathos of the final tableau. It is most touching ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., October 11, 1890 • Various |
