"Vestal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... her hair, tied up in a piece of blue ribbon, conveyed to the happy Bell the result of the Vestal's conference with herself. Thrice before had she snipt off one of her auburn ringlets, and given them away. The possessors were faithless, but the hair had grown again: and Martha had indeed occasion to say ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... columns which constitute the circular colonnade around it, is 32 feet high. Wherever the Temple of Vesta may have stood, it is evident that from its eternal fires was borrowed the custom, still extant in Catholic churches, of keeping up a perpetual flame by means of tapers. Six Vestal Virgins sworn to perpetual virginity, used to watch the sacred flame upon the altar in the Temple of Vesta, and it is an impressive sight to see the same sacred and eternal flame still burning around the High Altar in St. Peter's. From what may still be seen in Europe in general, and ...
— The Youthful Wanderer - An Account of a Tour through England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany • George H. Heffner
... be beautiful—beautiful! Why—there's a thousand feet of crevasse on every hand, I know, steps an' benches an' weathered faces that no man can climb. They say there's bright waters that tumble down like th' Vestal's Veil and sink into holes without an outlet. Just go away in the rock. There's strange flowers an' stunted trees. An' they tell of th' Cup of God, a hidden glade so beautiful that th' eye of man has never ...
— Tharon of Lost Valley • Vingie E. Roe
... your understanding," exclaimed the lady. "Whatever my ambition may be, my morality is unimpeached; a vestal would lose none of her purity ...
— Turns of Fortune - And Other Tales • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... well-informed school-girl already knows much more of it than she will find in this "Tale of the Jewish Dispersion." "Adonijah" is simply the feeblest kind of love story, supposed to be instructive, we presume, because the hero is a Jewish captive and the heroine a Roman vestal; because they and their friends are converted to Christianity after the shortest and easiest method approved by the "Society for Promoting the Conversion of the Jews;" and because, instead of being written in plain language, it is adorned with that peculiar style of grandiloquence which is held ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... of Vesta, called Vestales or Vestal Virgins, played a conspicuous part in these festivals. They were six in number, and were chosen—between the ages of six and ten—from the noblest families in Rome. Their term of office was thirty years. During the first ten years, they were initiated in their religious duties, ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... that Turner said he wished he could do without trees; Rousseau worshiped them. Turner loved the mountains; Rousseau never cared to see them and never painted one. Turner, a colorist, reveled in color like a Bacchanal; Rousseau, a tonalist, felt it like a vestal; but both had the sense of color ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... 6. The Vestal Virgin; or the Roman Ladies, a Tragedy, 1665. In his prologue to this play, Sir Robert has the following couplet, meant as an answer to Dryden's animadversions on ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. III • Theophilus Cibber
... was the ritual of Wagner she worshipped; the nerves of his score had never been laid bare to her. She took her mother's tumult in good faith, and ridiculed singers of more frigid temperaments. When she writhed in Tristan's arms this vestal sat in front, a piano score on her lap, carefully listening, and later, at ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... I woo? Because her spirit's vestal grace Provokes me always to pursue, But, spirit-like, eludes embrace; Because her womanhood is such That, as on court-days subjects kiss The Queen's hand, yet so near a touch Affirms no mean familiarness, ...
— The Angel in the House • Coventry Patmore
... coquette, A brow of marble, but a heart of jet; An eye that shows no vestige of the deep And stained thoughts that in her bosom sleep: By day a vestal, but by night a bawd; Her ways a riddle, her whole life a fraud; At church an angel, but at home a shrew, Cheating her mother, to her sire untrue; Vain without talent, without merit proud; By all who see her, still a fool allow'd; Without all love, with but the show of truth, ...
— Lays of Ancient Virginia, and Other Poems • James Avis Bartley
... distinguished from Portia, and strongly individualized by a certain moral grandeur, a saintly grace, something of vestal dignity and purity, which render her less attractive and more imposing; she is "severe in youthful beauty," and inspires a reverence which would have placed her beyond the daring of one unholy wish or thought, except in such ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... beauty, and wit, which was the principal merit of my new conquest, prejudice was there to enhance a hundredfold my felicity, for she was a vestal: it was forbidden fruit, and who does not know that, from Eve down to our days, it was that fruit which has always appeared the most delicious! I was on the point of encroaching upon the rights of an all-powerful ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... my Nisida, forbear, Ah! those words forbear to sing, Which on zephyr's wanton wing Thou shouldst waft not on the air. All is wrong, how sweet it be, That the vestal's thoughts reprove: What is jealousy? what is love? That they should be sung by thee? Think this wood is consecrated To Diana's service solely, Not to Venus: it is holy. Why then wouldst thou desecrate it With thy songs? Does 't ...
— The Two Lovers of Heaven: Chrysanthus and Daria - A Drama of Early Christian Rome • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... is the victor of the day? Thou of the delicate form, and golden hair, And manhood glorious in its midst of May; Thou who upon thy shield of argent bearest The bold device, "The loftiest is the fairest!" As bending low thy stainless crest, "The vestal throned by the west" Accords the old Provencal crown Which blends her own with thy renown; Arcadian Sidney, nursling of the muse, Flower of fair chivalry, whose bloom was fed With daintiest Castaly's most silver dews, Alas! ...
— With Spurs of Gold - Heroes of Chivalry and their Deeds • Frances Nimmo Greene
... objection, and is read by discerning men with the same incredulity. It is all on one side. No answer has reached our times. Yet on the showing of the accusers the accused seem entitled to acquittal. Catiline, we are told, intrigued with a Vestal virgin, and murdered his own son. His house was a den of gamblers and debauchees. No young man could cross his threshold without danger to his fortune and reputation. Yet this is the man with whom Cicero was willing to coalesce in a contest for the first magistracy ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... seen to do things which are above humane Strength, that no man living could do without Diabolical Assistances? Claudia was seen by Witnesses enough, to draw a Ship which no humane Strength could move. Tuccia a Vestal Virgin was seen to carry Water in a Sieve: The Devil never assists men to do supernatural things undesired. When therefore such like things shall be testified against the accused Party not by Spectres which are Devils in the Shape of Persons either living or ...
— The Wonders of the Invisible World • Cotton Mather
... coach to herself. Jack Hamlin, a gambler, having once silently ridden with her in the same coach, afterward threw a decanter at the head of a confederate for mentioning her name in a barroom. The over-dressed mother of a pupil whose paternity was doubtful had often lingered near this astute Vestal's temple, never daring to enter its sacred precincts, but content to worship the priestess ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various
... bitter innuendoes which will be their portion when they come to us in the next hunting season. Our conscience, at least, will be pure and undefiled, and we shall pass to the end of our pilgrimage sans peur, though perchance, even then, not sans reproche. "Servitudes," as Miggs, the veteran vestal remarked, "is no inheritance," but there are natures who thrive rarely in this tranquil and inglorious condition. Such men live, as a rule, pretty contentedly to a great old age, and die in the odor of intense respectability. Salubrious, it seems, ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... and said, "It is my lord's writing. That I was shipped at sea, I well remember, but whether there delivered of my babe, by the holy gods I cannot rightly say; but since my wedded lord I never shall see again, I will put on a vestal livery, and never more have joy." "Madam," said Cerimon, "if you purpose as you speak, the temple of Diana is not far distant from hence; there you may abide as a vestal. Moreover, if you please, a niece of mine shall there attend you." This proposal ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb
... but the girl is wise, And well would seem to make a vestal Nun. How finely frames she ...
— 2. Mucedorus • William Shakespeare [Apocrypha]
... the city has in a memorial set forth three propositions which he considers of force—that Rome, he says, asks for her rites again, that pay be given to her priests and vestal virgins, and that a general famine followed upon the refusal ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... went by them to sea gay with the bunting of a first voyage, with a fair wind, and on a fine morning; and when such a ship came back long after as an old plank bearded with sea moss, to the dunes under which it stranded the day was still the same, vestal and innocent; for they were on a voyage of greater length and import. They had buried many ships; but, as time moved to them, ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... Christ was miraculously born of a virgin, the Pagans had said before them that Remus and Romulus, the founders of Rome, were miraculously born of a vestal virgin named Ilia, or Silvia, or Rhea Silvia; they had already said that Mars, Argus, Vulcan, and others were born of the goddess Juno without sexual union; and, also, that Minerva, goddess of the sciences, sprang from Jupiter's brain, and that she came out ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... from parents' care descend: The getting it too much of life does spend. Take such a ground, whose gratitude may be A fair encouragement for industry. Let constant fires the winter's fury tame, And let thy kitchens be a vestal flame. Thee to the town let never suit at law, And rarely, very rarely, business draw. Thy active mind in equal temper keep, In undisturbed peace, yet not in sleep. Let exercise a vigorous health maintain, Without which all the composition's vain. In the same weight prudence and innocence take ...
— Cowley's Essays • Abraham Cowley
... not, therefore, be conceived that I mean to degrade or vilify the literary character, when I would only separate the Author from those polluters of the press who have turned a vestal into a prostitute; a grotesque race of famished buffoons or laughing assassins; or that populace of unhappy beings, who are driven to perish in their garrets, unknown and unregarded by all, for illusions which even their calamities cannot disperse. Poverty, said an ancient, is a sacred thing—it ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... before him, a glorious bird of paradise. The wanton display of a maddening curve of slender ankle, through the slash of the clinging gown imparted just the needed allurement to stamp her as a Vestal of the temple of Madness. The cunning simplicity of the draping over her shoulders—luminous with the iridiscent gleam of ivory skin beneath, accentuated by the voluptuous beauty of her youthful bosom—the fleeting change of colors and contours ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... burgeoned at the knowledge. His play-actor passion had bettered him, if it had not accomplished the impossible and transmuted the pirate of body into the pure of soul. It would not be true to say that he never thought lewdly of her; he would have thought lewdly of an angel or a vestal maid; that was ingrain in the composition of the man; but he thought well of her as he had never thought well of women before since he first scorched his stripling's fingers, and he would have killed twenty men to keep her from hearing a foul word. Sometimes when he ...
— The Lady of Loyalty House - A Novel • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... a change from the almost vestal quiet of "Aunt Mary's" life, to all this open-windowed, open-eyed screaming of "poltroon," "nefarious plan," "entire depravity," ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... large measure the ancient prototype of the modern nun, and their house is the prototype of the convent. Six nobly-born young women, sworn to chastity, and dressed in a ritual garb, live in an edifice of much magnificence under the rule of one who is the chief Vestal, a sort of Mother Superior. Many pedestals of the statues of such chief priestesses still remain, and we can clearly trace the arrangement of their abode, with its open court—once containing a garden ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... longer the cold vestal that came to Venice as your wife. Her eye is bright, her cheek is flushed, her lips are parted with womanly longing. I congratulate you upon the change. Your love has at last awakened a corresponding sentiment, and now ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... than the leprosy which our forefathers brought from the East. Could they have done this, if they had not been actuated by some strong, some vehement, some perennial passion, which, burning like the Vestal fire, chaste and eternal, never suffers generous sympathy to grow cold in maintaining the rights of the injured or in denouncing ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... whose walls were overrun with flowering vines, and whose cells were pretty vestal bowers, entered the bard and the young girl, to be met on the front porch by the wardeness herself, a mite of a woman, with wavy yellow hair, fine complexion and washed-out blue eyes. Sensitive almost to shyness, Mademoiselle de Castiglione appeared more adapted for the seclusion of the veil ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... her own and a somewhat different opinion on this point; but Petronius, calling her his vestal and his dove, began to explain the difference which must exist between a trained charioteer of the Circus and the youth who sits on the quadriga for the first time. Then, turning to Vinicius, he continued,—"Win her confidence, make her joyful, be magnanimous. I have ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... great liberty under the old civilizations. In Rome she had not only secured remarkable personal and property rights,[178] but she officiated as priestess in the most holy offices of religion. Not only as Vestal Virgin did she guard the Sacred Fire, upon whose preservation the welfare of Rome was held to depend, but at the end of every consular period women officiated in private worship and sacrifice to the Bono Dea, with mystic ceremonies which no man's presence was suffered ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... good enough for little Mary Ware," he had said once, when she was a romping child. He was thinking of her unselfishness, her sturdy sincerity, her undaunted courage. Now he repeated it, thinking of her as this letter revealed her, a white-souled vestal maiden who took the stars as a symbol of her duty, and who would not swerve a hair's-breadth from the orbit which she ...
— Mary Ware's Promised Land • Annie Fellows Johnston
... cried, "so it will be. They will be charred to ashes." And turning tail, she fled to the kitchen, pursued by her lover. There, dead to the surprise of the servant, David Brandon fed his eyes on the fair incarnation of Jewish domesticity, type of the vestal virgins of Israel, Ministresses at the hearth. It was a very homely kitchen; the dressers glistening with speckless utensils, and the deep red glow of the coal over which the pieces of fish sputtered and crackled in their ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... marriage—perhaps the marriage of the universal patroness of poets, Lucy Harington, to Edward Russell, third earl of Bedford, on December 12, 1594; or that of William Stanley, earl of Derby, at Greenwich on January 24, 1594-5. The elaborate compliment to the Queen, 'a fair vestal throned by the west' (II. i. 157 seq.), was at once an acknowledgment of past marks of royal favour and an invitation for their extension to the future. Oberon's fanciful description (II. ii. 148-68) of the spot where he saw the little western flower called 'Love-in-idleness' that he bids Puck ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... face was very sweet, very pure and noble. She would have gone without another word, but Haward caught her by the sleeve. "Stay awhile!" he cried. "I too am a dreamer, though not like you, you maid of Dian, dark saint, cold vestal, with your eyes forever on the still, white flame! Audrey, Audrey, Audrey! Do you know what a pretty name you have, child, or how dark are your eyes, or how fine this hair that a queen might envy? Westover has been ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... conventional sailor suit, but without color, and this effect of purity, the inscrutable delicacy of her, seemed to set her apart from these dark, materialistic sisters as though she had strayed like a lost vestal into the wrong atmosphere. His brows relaxed. For a moment the censor that had come to hold dominion in his heart was off guard. He felt the magnetism of her personality drawing him once more; he desired ...
— The Rim of the Desert • Ada Woodruff Anderson
... of final causes in science, and an illustration of some of the manifold errors and absurdities which their hasty assumption is apt to involve—considerations probably equivalent to those which induced Lord Bacon to liken final causes to "vestal virgins." So, if any one, it is here Bacon that "sitteth in the seat of the scornful." As to Darwin, in the section from which the extracts were made, he is considering a subsidiary question, and trying to obviate a particular difficulty, but, we suppose, is wholly unconscious of denying "any ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... tumblers, conjurers, allegories, martyrdoms, marriages, elephants on the tight-rope, learned horses, and learned asses too, if we may trust Apuleius of Madaura; with a good many other spectacles of which we must not speak in the presence of a vestal? It is an age of execrable taste, and we must ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... arches of triumph and temples of the gods. I tried to convert the clustering mendicants into barbarian prisoners clanking by, chained at wrist and neck and ankle; I sought to imagine the pestersome flower venders as being vestal virgins; the two unkempt policemen who loafed nearby, as centurions of the guard; the passing populace as grave senators in snowy togas; the flaunting underwear on the many clotheslines as silken banners ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... painted us a sweet picture of the domestic Woman, in his Economics, but in the Cyropedia has given, in the picture of Panthea, a view of Woman which no German picture can surpass, whether lonely and quiet with veiled lids, the temple of a vestal loveliness, or with eyes flashing, and hair flowing to the free wind, cheering on the hero to fight for his God, his country, or whatever name his duty might bear at the time. This picture I shall copy by and by. Yet Xenophon grew up ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... Roque's Nunnery, like herself a conscientious, rigid, and devoted Papist. When the house of Saint Roque was despotically dissolved by the fiat of the impetuous monarch, the Lady Foljambe received her friend into her spacious mansion, together with two vestal sisters, who, like their Abbess, were determined to follow the tenor of their vows, instead of embracing the profane liberty which the Monarch's will had thrown in their choice. For their residence, the ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... absurd to pretend that the multiplication of virtuous friendships between the sexes would foster licentiousness. Their flourishes best in their absence. Their lifeelement, esteem, is death to licentiousness. A holy thought, with its train of vestal emotions, like Diana and her nymphs, hunts impure desire out of the blood. One of the most known and remarkable friendships of woman and man was that of the Pope Hildebrand and the Countess Matilda of Tuscany. Their relation was based on veneration for each other's ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... she had devoted herself to one who must ever be to her as a being of air. No word of sympathy would ever whisper felicity to her heart; no-the flame that was within her (which she found would be immortal as the vestal fires which resemble its purity) must burn there ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... are indeed a pleasant thing, Although one must be damn'd for you, no doubt: I make a resolution every spring Of reformation, ere the year run out, But somehow, this my vestal vow takes wing, Yet still, I trust it may be kept throughout: I 'm very sorry, very much ashamed, And mean, next ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... he that takes her to his bosom knows, Lost in the magic crystal of her eyes, Upon her vestal cheek a fairer rose, What rapture and what passionate surprise Awaits his kiss beneath her mask of snows, And what strange fire beneath her ...
— A Jongleur Strayed - Verses on Love and Other Matters Sacred and Profane • Richard Le Gallienne
... perfectly turned; but, I think, rather in a subdued glow from the soul outward. This was not an opaque vase, of material however costly, but a lamp chastely lucent, guarding from extinction, yet not hiding from worship, a flame vital and vestal. In speaking of her attractions, I would not exaggerate language; but, indeed, they seemed to me very real and engaging. What though all was on a small scale, it was the perfume which gave this white violet distinction, ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... the avenue; and while she was receiving the salutations of the rest of the family, he took occasion to notice the fat coachman, to pat the sleek carriage-horses, and, above all, to say a civil word to my lady's gentlewoman, the prim, sour-looking vestal ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving
... her head, she threw her long black hair over one shoulder, then, dropping one end of the counterpane from the other like a vestal tunic, she stepped before Carry with a purposely-exaggerated classic stride. "And what if I have, miss! What if I happen to know a gentleman when I see him! What if I happen to know, that among a thousand such traditional, conventional, feeble editions of their grandfathers as Mr. Harry Robinson, ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... of the convention.[157] Such machine-like precision warmed the hearts of Democratic politicians. The editor of the People's Advocate declared the integrity of Douglas to be "as unspotted as the vestal's fame—as untarnished and as pure as the ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... sacred fire. There are many references in ancient Roman and Grecian literature to sacred lamps burning day and night in sanctuaries and before statues of gods and heroes. On birthdays and festivals the houses of the Romans were specially ornamented with burning lamps. The Vestal Virgins in Rome maintained the sacred fire which had been brought by fugitives from Troy. In ancient Rome when the fire in the Temple of Vesta became extinguished, it was rekindled by the rubbing of a piece of wood upon another until fire was obtained. This was carried into the temple by the ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... Rome is indeed far more poetical than anything else in Latin literature. The loves of the Vestal and the God of War, the cradle laid among the reeds of Tiber, the fig-tree, the she-wolf, the shepherd's cabin, the recognition, the fratricide, the rape of the Sabines, the death of Tarpeia, the fall of Hostus Hostilius, ...
— Lays of Ancient Rome • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... at this critical moment, so the Mystic Seven filed off like vestal virgins to feed the fire which Miss Gibbs, with her accustomed energy, had already lighted. Their contribution of wood was so substantial that it drew comment from the rest of the party, but they received the congratulations with due modesty, and did not divulge the source of their supply. ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... begged his body, that I might burn it upon the funeral-pile, and mourn over him. Ay, on my knees, amid the dust and blood of the arena, I begged that boon, while all the Roman maids and matrons, and those holy virgins they call vestal, and the rabble, shouted in mockery, deeming it rare sport, forsooth, to see Rome's fiercest gladiator turn pale, and tremble like a very child, before that piece of bleeding clay; but the praetor drew back as if I were pollution, and sternly said, 'Let the carrion ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... the sick poor, and each city had five, seven or ten, according to its size. Rome had fourteen of these officers, besides one for the vestal virgins, and one for the gymnasia. They were paid by the Government for attending the poor, but were not restricted to this class of practice, and were well paid by their prosperous patients. Their office was ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... writing. That I was shipped at sea I well remember, but whether there delivered of my babe, by the holy gods I cannot rightly say; but since my wedded lord I never shall see again, I will put on a vestal livery and never more ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... year after year, one of these—to whom the seed sown in London ball-rooms and German watering-places had produced nothing yet but those tiresome garlands of the vestal—I look curiously to see how she wears, thinking of the courtier's answer to Louis XIV. when the latter asked if he was looking older: "Sire, I see some more victories written on your forehead." It is more defeats that one can read so plainly on ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... hearty welcome from his father, and intense was the satisfaction of the brave seaman when his son showed him his commission and appointment as second lieutenant to the "Vestal," an eighteen gun sloop of war, commanded by Captain Gale, and destined for the ...
— The Grateful Indian - And other Stories • W.H.G. Kingston
... this flower. Here, again, is the inevitable intermingling of the eternal principles of Beauty, Love, and the Creative Power in that pure triune medallion image which the ancients so tenderly cherished and so exquisitely worshipped with vestal fires and continual sacrifices of Art. Old Father Nile, reflecting in his deep, mysterious breast the monstrous temples of Nubia and Pylae, bears eloquent witness to the earnestness and sincerity of the old votive homage ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... child of art, which Heaven doth give To few, to very few as unto him! His songs are wandering o'er the world, but live In his child's heart, in some place lone and dim; And nights and days With vestal's eyes And soundless sighs Thou keepest watch ...
— Poems: Patriotic, Religious, Miscellaneous • Abram J. Ryan, (Father Ryan)
... imagining her not human like the other women and the men I had known, but a creature apart and in a class apart, I stood day after day gaping at that very door, and wondering how I could open it, how penetrate even to the courtyard of that vestal citadel. So long as my old-fashioned belief that good women were more than human and bad women less than human had influenced me only to a sharper lookout in dealing with the one species of woman I then came in contact with, no harm to me resulted, but on the contrary good—whoever got into ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... has no effect on the skin—no, I really dare not." As she said this she looked as prim as a vestal. "It is the first time, do you know, that I ever used this liquid white, ah! ah! ah! What a baby I am! I am all ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... had left "those few sheep in the wilderness"; and by the prophet who "was in the deserts till the time of his showing unto Israel." Its primary "institution," for Europe, was Numa's, in that of the Vestal Virgins, and College of Augurs; founded on the originally Etrurian and derived Roman conception of pure life dedicate to the service of God, and practical wisdom dependent ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... supposed, taught the leavening process, and through the various fermentations thereafter, till I came to "good, sweet, wholesome bread," the staff of life. Leaven, which some deem the soul of bread, the spiritus which fills its cellular tissue, which is religiously preserved like the vestal fire—some precious bottleful, I suppose, first brought over in the Mayflower, did the business for America, and its influence is still rising, swelling, spreading, in cerealian billows over the land—this seed I regularly and faithfully procured from the village, till at length ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... freedom and independence; the horror that love or the joy of motherhood will only hinder her in the full exercise of her profession—all these together make of the emancipated modern woman a compulsory vestal, before whom life, with its great clarifying sorrows and its deep, entrancing joys, rolls on without touching or gripping ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... On the dropt eye, and lip no smile illumes; Not all this pomp of sorrow, that presumes It pays Affection's debt, is due concern To the FOR EVER ABSENT, tho' it mourn Fashion's allotted time. If Time consumes, While Life is ours, the precious vestal-flame Memory shou'd hourly feed;—if, thro' each day, She with whate'er we see, hear, think, or say, Blend not the image of the vanish'd Frame, O! can the alien Heart expect to prove, In worlds of light and life, a ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... have never doubted my mother's faith. When I imagined I did I was self-deceived. Everything here confirms it, and Miss Walton more than all. I will consult the divine oracle. She shall be the fair vestal, the gentle priestess. She lives near to heaven, and knows its mind. If her kind and womanly nature shrinks from me, if she coldly draws her skirts aside that I pollute them not even with a touch—if she by word or even manner proves ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... She had always looked on Alice as excluded by her misfortune from the usual destiny of her sex, as consecrated from her birth for a vestal's lot. She had never thought of her being wooed as a wife, and she repelled the idea as ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... crowd no more The Delphian mountain and the Delian shore, And lone and still the Lybian Ammon stands, His utterance stifled by the desert sands. No more in Cnydian bower, or Cyprian grove The golden censers flame with gifts to Love; The pale-eyed Vestal bends no more and prays Where the eternal fire sends up its blaze; Cybele hears no more the cymbal's sound, The Lares shiver the fireless hearthstone round; And shatter'd shrine and altar lie o'erthrown, Inscriptionless, ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... meekest maid— Hail! purest Pearl that time's great sea hath borne— May our white souls, in purity arrayed, Shine, as if they thy vestal robes had worn; Make our hearts pure, as thou thyself art pure, Make safe the rugged pathway of our lives, And make us pass to joys that will endure When the dark term of mortal ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... themselves at a first representation.' All this is very true, but not at all applicable in this instance. This time Racine is well judged. The denouement is the most ridiculous I ever heard. Imagine that silly, conceited Junia turning vestal, as if Madame de Sennes were to enter the Ursuline Convent. Heaven forbid that I should play the scholar; but I have read in Menage that it required other formalities to take the veil in the convent of ladies of the society of Vesta. I forgot the most essential. Your ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... old hot-tair registers—they had been wonderful bronze things—had been removed and ugly modern ones that did not fit had been substituted. But this one grating—a delightful oval affair whereon chubby Vestal Virgins lifted delicate torches, had remained intact. The reason was plain enough, it was almost impossible to dislodge it. Even with the lawyer and the Cartoonist to help him, the enthusiastic Architect, balanced dangerously on one of Janet's ladders, could scarcely pry it ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... counter or "bar" of the saloon, gorgeous in white and gold, now sawn in two and divided, was set up on opposite sides of the room as separate dressing-tables, decorated with huge bunches of azaleas, that hid the rough earthenware bowls, and gave each table the appearance of a vestal altar. ...
— Devil's Ford • Bret Harte
... article, a bungling piece of work, and naturally felt his disadvantages more keenly in the presence of those upon whom Nature had expended all her best art. He was, according to his own assertion, an idealist by temperament, and had kept a sacred chamber in his heart where the vestal fire burned with a pure flame. Now the deepest strata of his being were stirred, and he loved with an overwhelming fervor and intensity which fairly frightened him. In a moment of abject despair ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... parson's busy daughter in her cooking and cleaning; from all alike we hear of an active, genial, warm-hearted girl, full of humour and feeling to those she knew, though shy and cold in her bearing to strangers. A different being to the fierce impassioned Vestal who has seated herself ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... the street, Benda said in a tone of compassion: "They are three delicate creatures; they live their lonely lives like vestal ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... toss up their silvery spray;— Sometimes behold thee glide, Cluster'd by all thy family of stars, Like a lone widow, through the welkin wide, Whose pallid cheek the midnight sorrow mars;— Sometimes I watch thee on from steep to steep, Timidly lighted by thy vestal torch, Till in some Latmian cave I see thee creep, To catch the young Endymion asleep,— Leaving thy splendor at the ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... exceedingly. He was not sure, indeed, but that he ought to go straight to Norbanus and tell him what had happened, yet he feared that in such a case the anger of the magistrate would be so great that Ennia would be forced by him into becoming one of the vestal virgins, or be shut up in strict imprisonment. Scarce a word was spoken as they passed down the hill and into the streets, now almost deserted. At last Ennia stopped at the entrance used by the slaves ...
— Beric the Briton - A Story of the Roman Invasion • G. A. Henty
... VESTAL. A woman of the town, or prostitute; Drury-lane and its environs were formerly the residence ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... have the happiness of being able to send you an account of the capture of Seringapatam. The news is brought by a letter from a Dr. Abercromby, who was sent with Lord Cornwallis's despatches, in the 'Vestal.' He put this letter on board another vessel in the Channel, and it comes by ...
— Memoirs of the Court and Cabinets of George the Third, Volume 2 (of 2) - From the Original Family Documents • The Duke of Buckingham
... for how many an age when Pontiff and Vestal sleep in the eternal silence. Let the slave of the iron gods chatter what he will; for him flows no Falernian, for him the Muses have no smile, no melody. Ere the sun set, and the darkness fall about ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... task. As he looked at his sturdy young companion, listened to her picturesque talk, he felt that he was called upon to tell a young vestal virgin that she was to be sacrificed to the ...
— The Cricket • Marjorie Cooke
... Hearts—they still existed! The children of Arras who have come back "since the worst was over" (that is their way of putting it!) would not feel that life was life without the Arras Hearts. Besides, Arras without the Hearts would be like the Altar of the Vestal Virgins without the ever-burning lamp. So they are still baked, and still eaten, those brave little Hearts of Arras—and Brian asked Father Beckett to ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... On the white wonder of dear Juliet's hand And steal immortal blessing from her lips, Who, even in pure and vestal modesty, Still blush, as thinking their ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... foot is yours; where'er it falls, It treads your well-wrought leather, On earthen floor, in marble halls, On carpet, or on heather. Still there the sweetest charm is found Of matron grace or vestal's, As Hebe's foot bore nectar round Among the ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... thereafter till I came to "good, sweet, wholesome bread,"—the staff of life. Leaven, which some deemed the soul of bread, the spiritus which fills its cellular tissues, which is religiously preserved like the vestal fire,—some precious bottleful, I suppose, brought over in the Mayflower, did the business for America, and its influence is still rising, swelling, spreading in cerulean billows over the land,—this seed I regularly and ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg
... December, but by luck we found a halcyon morning which had got lost in the year's procession. It was a Sunday morning, and it had not been ashore. It was still virgin, bearing a vestal light. It had not been soiled yet by any suspicion of this trampled planet, this muddy star, which its innocent and tenuous rays had discovered in the region of night. I thought it still was regarding ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... think life has not yet done with the vivacious Ricord, whom I remember calling the Voltaire of pelvic literature,—a sceptic as to the morality of the race in general, who would have submitted Diana to treatment with his mineral specifics, and ordered a course of blue pills for the vestal virgins. ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... time I saw, but thou could'st not, Flying between the cold moon and the earth, Cupid all-arm'd: a certain aim he took At a fair Vestal throned by the West, And loos'd his love-shaft smartly from his bow, As it should pierce a hundred thousand hearts; But I might see young Cupid's fiery shaft Quench'd in the chaste beams of the watry moon, And the Imperial Votress passed on, In ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... her to be like the traditional lehua tree of Hopoe, of which men stood in awe as a sort of divinity, not daring to pluck its flowers? It is as if the woman had asked—if the poet's meaning is rightly interpreted—"Did you really think me plighted to vestal vows, a tree whose bloom man was forbidden ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... beads and even-song; But having cast his cowl, and left those laws, Adds to Christ's prayer, the Power and Glory clause. The lands are bought; but where are to be found Those ancient woods, that shaded all the ground? We see no new-built palaces aspire, No kitchens emulate the vestal fire. Where are those troops of poor, that thronged of yore The good old landlord's hospitable door? Well, I could wish, that still in lordly domes Some beasts were killed, though not whole hecatombs; That both extremes were banished from their walls, Carthusian ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... which did not rest upon the unseen structure of artistic sincerity. That was why in rare solemn moments he believed that his poetry would live, live beyond his own lifetime and his age, even, perhaps, as long as the Pontifex Maximus and the Vestal Virgin should ascend to the Capitol in public processional. He had said laughingly of his published metrical letters that they might please Rome for a day, travel on to the provinces, and finally become exercise-books for school-boys ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson
... murderer was caught, but escaped the gallows. C. was honored with one of the finest funeral orations over delivered over a corpse. He was also awarded a few triumphant arches. Publications: Omnes Gallia est divisa in tres parses. Ambition: Rome: Address: Capitol, Rome. Clubs: Gladiators, Vestal. Was also a member of the Society for the Protection of Roman Ruins. Epitaph: ...
— Who Was Who: 5000 B. C. to Date - Biographical Dictionary of the Famous and Those Who Wanted to Be • Anonymous
... the mighty King of Akkad. My mother was a vestal (priestess), my father an alien, whose brother inhabited the mountain.... When my mother had conceived me, she bare me in a hidden place. She laid me in a vessel of rushes, stopped the door thereof with ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... beauty of the Sienese contado is clearly on the sandstone, not upon the clay. Hedges, haystacks, isolated farms—all were English in their details. Only the vines, and mulberries, and wattled waggons drawn by oxen, most Roman in aspect, reminded us we were in Tuscany. In such carpenta may the vestal virgins have ascended the Capitol. It is the primitive war-chariot also, capable of holding four with ease; and Romulus may have mounted with the images of Roman gods in even such a vehicle to Latiarian Jove upon the Alban ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... in Rome of the domus or private house. Two, however, have left remarkably interesting ruins—the Atrium Vest, or House of the Vestal Virgins, east of the Forum, awell-planned and extensive house surrounding a cloister or court; and the House of Livia, so-called, on the Palatine Hill, the walls and decorations of which are excellently ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... Mozart's music served to bring about a complete change in his style. Thus his one-act opera "Milton," dedicated to Empress Josephine, may be regarded as the first of his truly original works. Empress Josephine appointed him her chamber composer, and secured a hearing for his new opera "The Vestal," produced at the Grand Opera. Napoleon awarded to him the prize for the best dramatic work of that year. In 1810, Spontini became the director of the Italian opera, and there staged Mozart's "Don Giovanni." Dismissed in 1812, on ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... of March, and was carried back a bloody corpse from the Curia of Pompey. It ceased to become the residence of the Pontifex when Augustus bought the house of Hortensius on the Palatine, and elected to dwell there instead; and was therefore given over to the Vestal Virgins to increase their scanty accommodation. The Atrium Vestae, or convent of the Vestal Virgins, adjoined the Regia, and behind it, along the lower slope of the Palatine, stretched the sacred ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... that the task were mine, To guard the liquid fires that shine, And round your orbits play— To watch them with a vestal's care, And feed with smiles a light so fair, That it ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel , Volume I. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... yokes from the shoulder: Leopoldine, Jensine, and little Rebecca. All three barefooted. The Margravine, Inger herself, is not with them; she is indoors preparing the meal. Tall and stately, as she moves about her house, a Vestal tending the fire of a kitchen stove. Inger has made her stormy voyage, 'tis true, has lived in a city a while, but now she is home; the world is wide, swarming with tiny specks—Inger has been one of them. All but nothing in all ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... thy other softer magic move Us less thy fam'd Etesia to love; Where such a character thou giv'st, that shame Nor envy dare approach the vestal dame: So at bright prime ideas none repine, They safely in ...
— Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, Volume II • Henry Vaughan
... in a dream, through the buzz of the crowd, The Duke's blithe associates, babbling aloud Some comment upon his gay humor that day? He never was gayer: what makes him so gay? 'Tis, no doubt, say the flatterers, flattering in tune, Some vestal whose virtue no tongue dare impugn Has at last found a Mars—who, of course, shall be nameless, That vestal that yields to Mars ONLY is blameless! Hark! hears he a name which, thus syllabled, stirs ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... some get born with. I know a girl carried hers around in a little wooden box for luck. Well, you got that white-veil kind of look that would blacklist you for the Vestal Virgin Sextet. I can pick 'em every time. You look to me like—say, I got a little mud puddle of my own to play in without ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... did the thing well. I told the furniture people I wanted it just as it stood in the picture: "Design for bedroom and boudoir combined, suitable for young girl, in teak, with sparrow blue hangings." We had everything: the antique fire arrangements that a vestal virgin might possibly have understood; the candlesticks, that were pictures in themselves, until we tried to put candles in them; the book-case and writing-desk combined, that wasn't big enough to ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... less liable to be led astray by their own sagacity and the overweening petulance of hard-earned and late-acquired wisdom. They do not fall in love with every meretricious extravagance at first sight, or mistake an old battered hypothesis for a vestal, because they are new to the ways of this old world. They do not seize upon it as a prize, but are safe from gross imposition by being as wise and no wiser than those who went ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... Henry IV., who loved his jests whether at his own expense or that of friend or foe, was wont to observe that there were three things which nobody would ever believe, and which yet were very true; that Queen Elizabeth deserved her title of the, throned vestal, that he was himself a good Catholic, and that Cardinal Albert was a good general. It is probable that the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... exasperating than words. It was the young astronomer, he reflected, who had helped to crystallise her strange views. His lurking fear that she might one day marry and leave him was aroused at the thought, and his heart contracted with jealousy. She possessed in his eyes something of the sanctity of a vestal virgin, one who must not be profaned by marriage. In such an event, also, his cherished hope that she might complete the quadrangle of St. George's Hall was likely to be frustrated forever. These fears moved him to argue with a bitterness that ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... perform had more ethical and spiritual value than the casual observer would suppose, because of the perfect sincerity with which she undertook its performance. No priestess ever entered an oracle, no vestal virgin a temple, nor saint a shrine with more reverence than she felt, as she passed into the silence ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... yet thy face Gives the meaning of all space; And thine eyes, with starbeams fraught, Hold the measure of all thought; For of them my soul besought, And was shown a glimpse of thine— A veiled vestal, with divine Solace, in sweet love's despair, For that life is brief as fair. Who hath most, he yearneth most, Sure, as seldom heretofore, Somewhere of the gracious more. Deepest joy the least shall boast, Asking with new-opened eyes The remainder; that which lies ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Jean Ingelow
... his work stood perfected, A woman beautiful with youth and grace, But like a Vestal singled from her sex To show the beauty of pure innocence. Her form was such as rapt Endymion Saw on the heights of Latmos when he slept And dreamed Heaven down to him. A glorious shape That to the brightness of ethereal charms Join'd the familiar sweetness of a maid; A ...
— Eidolon - The Course of a Soul and Other Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... cod-liver oil to me. Who conspicuously walks the Rialto now, and what does he or she wear? Are the trees still green in Madison Square, or have they grown brown and dusty? Does the chaste Diana on the Garden Theatre still keep her vestal vows through all the exasperating changes of weather? Who has your brother's old studio now, and what misguided aspirants practice their scales in the rookeries about Carnegie Hall? What do people go to see at the theaters, and what do they eat and drink there in the world ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... (Aside.) They're all alike in these stages. (Aloud.) No, my Vestal. We're going along the quietest road we ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... at a distance. She went swiftly up the road, and straight to the railway tracks. She entered the house, the dark, wrecked house, where from the second story window, a perpetual look-out was kept, like the watch of the Vestal Virgins. They came to the open door, and heard her ascend to the room ...
— Young Hilda at the Wars • Arthur Gleason
... responsible for many changes for the better in the lives of these people. Her very presence in a room was an inspiration for cleanliness. Her clothes were no better than theirs but she stood out among them like a vestal virgin. She came into their quarters and made the women ashamed that the rooms were not better fitted to receive so pure a being. You would scarcely have recognized Michele's rooms at the end of the first year. The windows were ...
— One Way Out - A Middle-class New-Englander Emigrates to America • William Carleton
... principle of life! precious flame over which all nature, like a careful vestal, incessantly watches in the temple of God! Center of all, by whom all exists! The spirit of destruction would itself die, blowing at thy flame! I am not astonished that thy name should be blasphemed, for they do not know ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... that the comedies of Aristophanes were unworthy of presentation in a country tavern! One is tempted to believe that the father was a man of robuster judgment in such matters than the son, whose own rather mediocre literary equipment, made him the easy prey of that acidulous vestal of literature, Voltaire. However that may be, he left a useful and unexpected legacy to his son, provided, indeed, the sinews for the making of a ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... the abbess. They had been accustomed to look up to her as all-powerful, and they now implored her protection. The mother abbess looked with a rueful eye upon the treasures of beauty and vestal virtue exposed to such imminent peril. Alas! how was she to protect them from the spoiler! She had, it is true, experienced many signal inter-positions of providence in her individual favor. Her early ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... this conception as perfect an instance as we require of the lowest supposable phase of immodest or licentious art in music; the "inner consciousness of good" being dim, even in the musician and his audience, and wholly unsympathized with, and unacknowledged by the Delphian, Vestal, and all other prophetic and cosmic powers. This represented scene came into my mind suddenly one evening, a few weeks ago, in contrast with another which I was watching in its reality; namely, a group of gentle school-girls, ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... been a religion among them; and seeing that the worship had been carried on without fail, that the vestal fire had never gone down upon the hearth, I should not have said that the Dales had walked their ways without high principle. To this religion they had all adhered, and the new heir had ever entered in upon his domain without other encumbrances than those with which he himself was then already ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... the house, and discontinue his visits to Madame Lebrun. This simple proceeding let loose all the winds of heaven; poor Lebrun was pounced upon by the whole female sex. Even his old mother turned against him; even his sister, a sour vestal of thirty-seven, sided with her injured sister-in-law; and what had the wretched poet to say for himself? He suspected nothing improper—a good easy man—he adored his "Fanny"—he wanted her to come back—but that horrid fellow Grimod!—he would not have Grimod within his door. So ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... ——, with a face like Cynthia in all her glory, boldly approach the promenade in Kensington Gardens, in open defiance of public decorum, and, unzoned and divested of superfluous drapery, prepare for the race, in opposition to a slim vestal from ———, how shall we be able to restrain our risibility? The running ladies will, however, labour under one great disadvantage. Their muscular exertions must affect the lungs, and, in a great degree, suspend the exercise of their ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... cap; others, the elephant-huntresses, have a heavy carbine, a short-bladed dagger, and two antelope horns fixed to their heads by a band of iron. The artillery-women have a blue-and-red tunic, and, as weapons, blunderbusses and old cast cannons; and another brigade, consisting of vestal virgins, pure as Diana, have blue tunics and white trousers. If we add to these Amazons, five or six thousand men in cotton drawers and shirts, with a knotted tuft to increase their stature, we shall have passed in review the ...
— Rubur the Conqueror • Jules Verne
... nightly round the shining household hearth, What to them is dearer, better, than the brightest things of earth, Ask that dearer one whose loving, like a ceaseless vestal flame, Sets my very soul a-glowing at the mention of her name; Ask her why the loved in dying feels her spirit linked with his In a union death but strengthens, she will tell you ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... "Creation" and other works. The musical stimulation of this boy was meager indeed. Not until he was thirteen years of age did he hear an opera; and not until he was fifteen a really first-class work, Spontini's "Vestal," in 1812. Three years later he probably heard Gluck's "Iphigenie en Tauride," a work which in his estimation eclipsed them all. During the same year there were the sixth and seventh symphonies, the choral fantasia and portions of the mass in C, and the overture ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... vestal violate her oath; Thou blow'st the fire when temperance is thaw'd; Thou smother'st honesty, thou murther'st troth; Thou foul abettor! thou notorious bawd! Thou plantest scandal and displacest laud: Thou ravisher, thou traitor, ...
— The Rape of Lucrece • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... animals capital offences, he proceeded to prohibit sacrifices, A.D. 391, and even the entering of temples. He alienated the revenues of many temples, confiscated the estates of others, some he demolished. The vestal virgins he dismissed, and any house profaned by incense he declared forfeited to the imperial exchequer. When once the property of a religious establishment has been irrevocably taken away, it is needless to declare its worship a ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... vestal virgins, too, I suppose! can they be Romans?" reasoned Aunt Maria, beginning ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... some inner cells of her heart, and brought forth thoughts in sparkling words, which otherwise might have remained concealed; but there was nothing in what she thought or spoke calculated to give umbrage either to an anchorite or to a vestal. A word or two she said or sung about the flowing bowl, and once she called for Falernian; but beyond this her converse was chiefly of the rights of man and the weakness of women; of the iron ages that were past, and of the golden time that ...
— Mrs. General Talboys • Anthony Trollope
... Kong, where we found the Castor, Vixen, and Espiegle. The next day the Agincourt, Daedalus, Vestal, and Wolverine, arrived from Borneo, having been engaged with the pirates of Maludu Bay. The squadron had suffered a loss of one officer and eighteen men killed, and about double the number wounded. This heavy loss was occasioned by their ...
— Borneo and the Indian Archipelago - with drawings of costume and scenery • Frank S. Marryat
... serious delay arose, during the first act, through the evolutions of a triumphal march. With the most vociferous emphasis the master expressed intense dissatisfaction with the apathetic demeanour of our populace during the procession of vestal virgins. He was quite unaware of the fact that, in obedience to our stage manager's instructions, they had fallen on their knees upon the appearance of the priestesses; for he was so excited, and withal ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... and nation she might have been a distinguished dame de salon. As it was, she was sufficiently harassed and overworked in her double office of decorous, authoritative chaperon and qualified guide, philosopher, and friend to the girls under her charge. These might be vestal virgins or nymphs of Minerva, but they were also girls, so long as the world lasted—the most of them half curious, half friendly where May was concerned. This was true even of the wonderful young American who came and stayed with no other ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... were brought from Troy. Numitor chose the kingdom; but Amulius, having the money, and being able to do more with that than Numitor, took his kingdom from with great ease, and, fearing lest his daughter might have children who would supplant him, made her a Vestal, bound in that condition forever to live a single and maiden life. This lady some call Ilia, others Rhea, and others Silvia; however, not long after, contrary to the established laws of the Vestals, she had two sons of ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... married his widow, by whom he had his children; neither was there in these respects any of the Romans who lived a more orderly life than he did, though later in life he was suspected to have been too familiar with one of the vestal virgins, named Licinia, who was, nevertheless, acquitted, upon an impeachment brought against her by one Plotinus. Licinia stood possessed of a beautiful property in the suburbs, which Crassus desiring to purchase at a ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... her greatness stoop so low, 395 To be the rival of a cow: Others to prostitute their great hearts, To he baboons' and monkeys' sweet-hearts; Some with the Dev'l himself in league grow, By's representative a Negro. 400 'Twas this made vestal-maids love-sick, And venture to be bury'd quick: Some by their fathers, and their brothers, To be made mistresses and mothers. 'Tis this that proudest dames enamours 405 On lacquies and valets des chambres; Their haughty stomachs ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... four years after the supposed date of this bloody edict, Constantius visited the temples of Rome; and the decency of his behavior is recommended by a pagan orator as an example worthy of the imitation of succeeding princes. "That emperor," says Symmachus, "suffered the privileges of the vestal virgins to remain inviolate; he bestowed the sacerdotal dignities on the nobles of Rome, granted the customary allowance to defray the expenses of the public rites and sacrifices; and, though he had embraced a different religion, he never attempted ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... Winchmore's verdant hill, Two lovely damsels cheer my lonely walk: The fair Maria, as a vestal, still; And Emma brown, exuberant in talk. With soft and Lady speech the first applies The mild correctives that to grace belong To her redundant friend, who her defies With jest, and mad discourse, and bursts of song. O differing Pair, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... however, these philanthropists met with some discouragement. In 1821 certain masters were sending their slaves to a Sunday-school opened by Levi Coffin and his son Vestal. Before the slaves had learned more than to spell words of two or three syllables other masters became unduly alarmed, thinking that such instruction would make the slaves discontented.[1] The timorous element threatened ...
— The Education Of The Negro Prior To 1861 • Carter Godwin Woodson
... buy, and sell; and this [Greek: demos] they walled about for its safety, and called [Greek: ten polin] the city: and this I take to have been the original of Villages, Market-Towns, Cities, common Councils, Vestal Temples, Feasts and Fairs, in Europe: the Prytaneum, [Greek: pyros tameion], was a Court with a place of worship, and a perpetual fire kept therein upon an Altar for sacrificing: from the word [Greek: Hestia] fire, came the name Vesta, which at length the people turned into a Goddess, ...
— The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended • Isaac Newton
... from the hint that a tiny spot of green and white, bursting through the dark earth, might give, to the fully-developed blossoms, hanging lightly on its graceful stalks, robed in its vestal garb of white, and shedding its own peculiar fragrance on the pure air. I gathered large supplies—enough to make me the envy of all the lovers of spring-flowers whom I met; enough to fill my moss-basket, and vases, and glasses without end for myself; and enough ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 427 - Volume 17, New Series, March 6, 1852 • Various
... of our guiltless ore Makes no man atheist, and no woman whore; Yet why should hallow'd vestal's sacred shrine Deserve more honour than a flaming mine? These pregnant wombs of heat would fitter be, Than a few embers, for a deity. Had he our pits, the Persian would admire No sun, but warm 's devotion at our fire: He'd leave the trotting ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... I marked—but thou could'st not— Flying between the cold moon and the earth, Cupid all armed. A certain aim he took At a fair vestal throned by the west, And loosed his love-shaft smartly from his bow As he would pierce a hundred thousand hearts. But I might see young Cupid's fiery dart Quenched in the chaste beams of the watery moon, And the imperial votaress passed on In maiden ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... way through the Forum, where his wife, an ardent worshipper of the gods, stopped to lay a bunch of roses on the base of a large statue of Ceres, standing near the Temple and a building dedicated to the use of the Vestal Virgins. ...
— Virgilia - or, Out of the Lion's Mouth • Felicia Buttz Clark
... and universal conquest. In the darkest ages and most benighted regions, it has been found impossible utterly to extinguish the light of reason. There always have been some in whose souls the torch of truth has been kept burning with vestal watchfulness: we can discern its glimmer here and there through the deepest night that has yet settled upon the earth. In the midst of the most extravagant superstition, there have been individuals who have disowned the popular belief, and considered it a mark of wisdom and true philosophy ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... the temple of the sun The vestal fires of being burn; Thence beauty's finest fibres run, And weave ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... O murderess, I am dead, And that thou think'st thee free From all solicitation from me, Then shall my ghost come to thy bed, And thee, feign'd vestal, in worse arms shall see: Then thy sick taper will begin to wink, And he, whose thou art then, being tired before, Will, if thou stir, or pinch to wake him, think Thou call'st for more, And, in false sleep, will from thee shrink; And then, poor aspen wretch, ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... timorous, they are afraid even of those things that preserve them. Consider the pettish, they are angry with their best and dearest friends. Consider the amorous and lascivious, in the height of their fury they dare violate a Vestal. For custom is very powerful to draw the temper of the body to anything that is suitable to it; and he that is apt to fall will stumble at everything that lies in his way. So it is no wonder that those that have raised in themselves an envious and bewitching habit, if according to the ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... not to utter a eulogy on Lincoln; he stands in need of none, but to endeavor to interpret the meaning of this gift to the nation of the place of his birth and origin. Is not this an altar upon which we may forever keep alive the vestal fire of democracy as upon a shrine at which some of the deepest and most sacred hopes of mankind may from age to age be rekindled? For these hopes must constantly be rekindled, and only those who live can rekindle them. The only stuff ...
— President Wilson's Addresses • Woodrow Wilson
... history with his own hands in large letters, that the boy might start in life with a useful knowledge of what his forefathers had done, and he was as careful not to use an indecenr expression before his son as he would have been before the vestal virgins. He never bathed with him; which indeed seems to have been customary at Rome, as even fathers-in-law scrupled to bathe naked before their sons-in-law. In later times, however, the Romans learned from the Greeks the habit of bathing naked, and have taught the Greeks ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... Milk-white and vestal-chaste the hollyhock Grows tall, clove, sweetgale nightly shed forth spice, Long woodbines leaning over scent the ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Jean Ingelow
... virgins, for instance the vestal virgins of the Romans. The mother of Buddha was declared to be holy and pure, Buddha having been conceived supernaturally, according to the legend. A Buddhist monk is forbidden to have sexual intercourse, ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... had once prayed to him!") and she always wore a scarab ring. She had bought both in an antique-shop just off Washington Street. I thought this rather a far cry from Thebes, myself, but The Author insisted that if a Theban vestal of the time of Sesostris had to reincarnate, she would naturally and inevitably come to ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... been so busy, I have found time to read a good deal.... I have lately read "Wilhelm Tell" by Schiller, and "The Lost Vestal."... Now I am reading "Nathan the Wise" by Lessing and ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... one so young, so gentle, and fair, Their only child, lying ailing there, Waning and waning slowly away, Yet waxing more beautiful every day, As if she were drawing from spheres above, Before she got there, the spirit of love, Which shone as a light through the silken lire, Pure as was that of the vestal fire; And ever she kissed in hysterical mood The bit of the cross all red with blood. "Oh mother dear! I wish—I fear The time of my going is drawing near: Last night, at the mirk and midnight hour, A voice seemed ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume XXIV. • Revised by Alexander Leighton
... C.— cooperated with the endless other Pagan superstitions in anchoring the whole Pantheon to the Capitol and Mount Palatine. So long as Rome had a worldly hope surviving, it was impossible for her to forget the Vestal Virgins, the College of Augurs, or the indispensable office and the indefeasible privileges of the Pontifex Maximus, which (though Cardinal Baronius, in his great work, for many years sought to fight off the ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey |
