"Medea" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... endanger the noble barons who have devoted themselves to my advancement. If I have sinned in alluring them thus far, I will not deepen my guilt by betraying them. Though I knew that the crown which I am about to assume were like the gift of Medea, I would still set it on my temples: better pay the penalty of ambition by advancing than by timidly retreating, when boldness may remedy, ...
— The Truce of God - A Tale of the Eleventh Century • George Henry Miles
... years before Christ King Ahasuerus (Xerxes) reigned over Persia. In the third year of his reign he gave a royal feast to all the princes and nobles of Persia and Medea, in Shushan, the royal city. It lasted one hundred and eighty days, and was very costly, for the king wished to show the great men from all his provinces the riches and glory of his kingdom and of ...
— Child's Story of the Bible • Mary A. Lathbury
... tells us, Iolaus was transmogrified; and thus Phaon, for whom kind-hearted Sappho run wild, grew young again, for Venus's use; so Tithon by Aurora's means; so Aeson by Medea, and Jason also, who, if you'll believe Pherecides and Simonides, was new-vamped and dyed by that witch; and so were the nurses of jolly Bacchus, and ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... considered his boys to be wasting their faculties in representing such inferior performances, but humoured the prevailing taste so much as to choose two Scriptural subjects, Jephthah and John the Baptist, alternately with the Medea and Alcestis. He "was successful beyond his hopes," he says, in these efforts. In all of the plays the little Montaigne was one of the chief performers. "Before a fit age, Alter ab undecimo tum me vix ceperat ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... power to scatter tempests rude, And snows in summer at her whisper fall; The horrid simples by Medea brewed Are hers; she holds the ...
— The Elegies of Tibullus • Tibullus
... republic; a republic to be perpetuated, if not in England herself, yet among her great children beyond the sea. France was to go her way through Bartholomew massacres and the dragonnades to a polished Louis the Magnificent, and thence to the bloody Medea's cauldron of Revolution, out of which she was to rise as now we know her. No common road could have been found for such destinies as these; and the French prince followed the direction of his wiser instincts when ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... forefront of the present; courtier, statesman, and poet of the day, exquisite maid of honor whose every hour convention governed,—yet the face upon which in one revealing moment he had gazed seemed not less old than the face of Helen—of Medea—of Ariadne; not less old and not less imperishably beautiful. Neither spoke of her idyll turned to a crowder's song. Knowing that there were no words which she could bear, he waited, his mind filled with deep pity, hers with God knows what complexity, what singleness of feeling, until ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... Cronius, now called Hecatombaeon, he arrived at Athens, where he found the public affairs full of all confusion, and divided into parties and factions. Aegeus also, and his whole private family, laboring under the same distemper; for Medea, having fled from Corinth, was living with him. She was first aware of Theseus, whom as yet Aegeus did not know, and he being in years, full of jealousies and suspicions, and fearing everything by reason of the faction that was then in the city, she easily persuaded him ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... exotic blossom on the stem of French art. He saw ivory, apes, and peacocks, purple, gold, and the heavens aflame with a mystic message. He never translated that message, for his was an art of silence; but the painter of The Maiden with the Head of Orpheus, of Salome, of Jason and Medea, of Jupiter and Semele, will never fail to win the admiration and homage of those art lovers who yearn for dreams of vanished ages, who long to escape the commonplaces of the present. Gustave Moreau will be their poet-painter ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... said presently; "why shouldn't we get hold of Farmer Larkin's boat, and go right away up the river in a real Argo, and look for Medea, and the Golden Fleece, and everything? And I'll tell you what, I don't mind your being Jason, as you thought of ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... past Bithynia and Pontus, and arrived at the river Phasis, south of the Caucasian mountains, where dwelt AEetes, whom they sought. But he refused to surrender the golden fleece except on conditions which were almost impossible. Medea, however, his daughter, fell in love with Jason, and by her means, assisted by Hecate, he succeeded in yoking the ferocious bulls and plowing the field, and sowing it with dragons' teeth. Still AEetes refused the reward, and meditated the murder of the Argonauts; ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... three of us to deal with that one woman. When I saw her in Paris she was still young and handsome, with superb eyes and a kind of eastern tread. You could imagine her, when she did not speak, as Semiramis, Medea, Clytemnestra! Except that when you saw a little more of her, you felt that she was only a heroine of a cheap theater. Wharton could not have been fascinated by her, if, at that time of his life, he had ever known a refined woman or mixed at all in the world; but she certainly had a gypsy ...
— Esther • Henry Adams
... and Epicurus, were in this of two quite contrary humours: the first not only in his books mixed passages and sayings of other authors, but entire pieces, and, in one, the whole Medea of Euripides; which gave Apollodorus occasion to say, that should a man pick out of his writings all that was none of his, he would leave him nothing but blank paper: whereas the latter, quite on the contrary, in three hundred volumes that he left ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... of the Civil Court was recounting to a deputy the legend of AEson of old, who was boiled in Medea's caldron. ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About
... simple an argument, and was, as the socialist D... said to me one night walking home after some lecture, 'an anarchist without knowing it.' Certainly I and all about me, including D... himself, were for chopping up the old king for Medea's pot. Morris had told us to have nothing to do with the parliamentary socialists, represented for men in general by the Fabian Society and Hyndman's Socialist Democratic Federation and for us in particular by D... ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... Aper interposed: And are you, indeed, so enamoured of your dramatic muse, as to renounce your oratorical character, and the honours of your profession, in order to sacrifice your time, I think it was lately to Medea, and now to Thyestes? Your friends, in the mean time, expect your patronage; the colonies [b] invoke your aid, and the municipal cities invite you to the bar. And surely the weight of so many causes may be deemed sufficient, without ...
— A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, Or The Causes Of Corrupt Eloquence • Cornelius Tacitus
... Playing on the Spinnet Paraphrase of Proverbs, chap. iv. verses 6-11 Horace, Lib. iv. Ode vii. Translated On Seeing a Bust of Mrs Montague Anacreon, Ode Ninth Lines Written in Ridicule of certain Poems published in 1777 Parody of a Translation from the 'Medea' of Euripides Burlesque on the Modern Versification of Ancient Legendary Tales: an Impromptu Epitaph for Mr Hogarth Translation of the Two First Stanzas of the Song 'Rio Verde, Rio Verde', printed in Bishop Percy's 'Reliques of Ancient ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... the life, is commanded; and on the contrary, if the imitation make a foul thing to appear fair, it is dispraised because it observes not decency and likeness. Now some painters there are that paint uncomely actions; as Timotheus drew Medea killing her children; Theon, Orestes murdering his mother; and Parrhasius, Ulysses counterfeiting madness; yea, Chaerephanes expressed in picture the unchaste converse of women with men. Now in such cases a young man is to be familiarly acquainted with this notion, that, when men praise such ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... the beautiful and accomplished daughter of the witch, playing the part of a Medea, without ...
— Kalevala, Volume I (of 2) - The Land of the Heroes • Anonymous
... the compositions of the Ancients, especially in their serious Plays were after this manner? And it will be found, that the subjects they commonly chose, drave them upon the necessity; which were usually the most known stories and Fables [p. 522]. Accordingly, SENECA, making choice of MEDEA, HYPPOLITUS, and HERCULES OEtaeus, it was impossible to show MEDEA throwing old mangled AESON into her age-renewing caldron, or to present the scattered limbs of HYPPOLITUS upon the Stage, and show HERCULES burning upon his own ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... Story-Telling," are "The Fate of the Children of Usnach," comparable, in the great wars it led to, to the rape of Helen; "The Fate of the Children of Lir," a story that has as its base the folk-tale that underlies "Lohengrin," but which takes us back farther into the past in its kinship to "Medea"; and "The Sons of Tuireann," which has been called the Irish Odyssey. Of these the first is incomparably the finest story, and Lady Gregory has told it nobly in "Cuchulain of Muirthemne," but it alone of all the stories in her three books of translations ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... his, he wanted only such silly things as Stewart, Wells, and that pitiful strolling actress,—[Probably Nell Gwyn.]—whom he had lately introduced into their society." Floods of tears from rage, generally attended these storms; after which, resuming the part of Medea, the scene closed with menaces of tearing her children in pieces, and setting his palace on fire. What course could he pursue with such an outrageous fury, who, beautiful as she was, resembled Medea less than her dragons, ...
— The Memoirs of Count Grammont, Complete • Anthony Hamilton
... they should be married;—but how if, even now, there should be no marriage for her? Camilla French had never heard of Creusa and of Jason, but as she paced her mother's drawing-room that morning she was a Medea in spirit. If any plot of that kind should be in the wind, she would do such things that all Devonshire should hear of her wrongs ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... marvels of the Argonautic expedition; that vessel, itself sentient and intelligent, having its prophet as well as pilot on board, darting through rocks which move and join together, like huge pincers, to crush the passing ship; think of the wondrous Medea who conducted the homeward voyage, and reflect upon the sort of people who created and credited all these marvels. Then turn to the semi-critical version of Strabo, where the whole expedition resolves ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... cure of gout, of quinsy, and of asthma; I know so much about the water and so much about the pulse that evil would be the hour in which you would take another leech. And I know, if I dared say it, of enchantments and of charms, well proven and true, more than ever Medea knew. Never spake I a word of it to you; and yet I have brought you up till now; but never reproach yourself at all for it, for never would I have said aught to you if I had not seen for a surety ...
— Cliges: A Romance • Chretien de Troyes
... and Mrs. Oldfield still stand confronted on the historic page, and still their battle continues year after year. All readers know the sleepy voice and horrid sigh of Mrs. Pritchard in Lady Macbeth's awful scene of haunted somnambulism; the unexampled and unexcelled grandeur of Mrs. Yates in Medea; the infinite pathos of Mrs. Dancer (she that became in succession Mrs. Spranger Barry and Mrs. Crawford) and her memorable scream, as Lady Randolph, at "Was he alive?"; the comparative discomfiture of both those ladies by Mrs. Siddons, ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... Mansfield, whose untimely death is mourned by every lover of the drama. The next pages are from the hand of Tommaso Salvini, admittedly the greatest Othello and Samson that ever trod the boards. A few words, in closing, are from Adelaide Ristori, whose Medea, Myrrha and Phaedra are among the great traditions of the modern stage. From first to last this little book sheds light on the severe toil demanded for excellence on the stage, and reveals that for the highest success of a drama, author ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... have been persuaded to bring it forth in London, I think more calculated for an audience in the university. The subject is the Music of the Grecian Theatre; in which I have, I hope naturally, introduced the various characters with which the chorus was concerned, as OEdipus, Medea, Electra, Orestes, etc. etc. The composition too is probably more correct, as I have chosen the ancient tragedies for my models, and only copied the most ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... went to Bourdeaux.——There he taught three years in the schools, which were erected at the public cost. In that time he composed four tragedies, which were afterwards occasionally published. But that which he wrote first, called The Baptist, was printed last, and next the Medea of Euripides. He wrote them in compliance with the custom of the school, which was to have a play written once a-year, that the acting of them might wean the French youth from allegories, to which they had taken a false taste, and bring them back, as much ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... and Profane Love," painted during these years for the Borghese, there are summed up all those artistic aims towards which the Venetian painters had been tending. The picture is still Giorgionesque in mood. It may represent, as Dr. Wickhoff suggests, Venus exhorting Medea to listen to the love-suit of Jason; but the subject is not forced upon us, and we are more occupied with the contrast between the two beautiful personalities, so harmoniously related to each other, yet so opposed in type. The gracious, self-absorbed lady, with her softly dressed hair, ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... glad that my letter, with Dr. Shaw's opinion, has lessened your bathing; for since I was born, I never heard of bathing four hours a-day; which would surely be too much, even in Medea's kettle, if you wanted (as you do ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... temperament, which, combined with her unbounded ambition and her ability for hard work, soon brought her public recognition. Her simple but effective manner of singing and her wonderful histrionic ability made all her work dignified and impressive; her representation of the character of Medea, in Simon Mayer's opera by that name, has been called the "grandest lyric impersonation in the records of art." When the great actor Talma heard her in the days of her early success in Paris, he said: "Here is a woman of whom I can still learn. One turn of her beautiful head, one glance of ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... captain would have been a marquis," he exclaimed to himself, "the Marquis de Medea, and owner of those magnificent estates. Well, truly he had something to live for, and yet he was cut off—while I who have not a peco beyond my pay, and little enough of that, have been allowed to remain in existence. ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston
... Medea in the house of Castor and Pollux, recalling the masterpiece of Timomachos the Byzantine are the only two Pompeian pictures which reproduce well-known paintings; but let us not, for that reason, conclude that the others are original. The painters of the little city ...
— The Wonders of Pompeii • Marc Monnier
... 'Tis like your Irish wood, 'Gainst cob-webs. I have a piece of Jason's fleece, too, Which was no other than a book of alchemy, Writ in large sheep-skin, a good fat ram-vellum. Such was Pythagoras' thigh, Pandora's tub, And, all that fable of Medea's charms, The manner of our work; the bulls, our furnace, Still breathing fire; our argent-vive, the dragon: The dragon's teeth, mercury sublimate, That keeps the whiteness, hardness, and the biting; And they are gathered into Jason's helm, The ...
— The Alchemist • Ben Jonson
... their Babes, Teares Virginall, Shall be to me, euen as the Dew to Fire, And Beautie, that the Tyrant oft reclaimes, Shall to my flaming wrath, be Oyle and Flax: Henceforth, I will not haue to do with pitty. Meet I an infant of the house of Yorke, Into as many gobbits will I cut it As wilde Medea yong Absirtis did. In cruelty, will I seeke out my Fame. Come thou new ruine of olde Cliffords house: As did Aeneas old Anchyses beare, So beare I thee vpon my manly shoulders: But then, Aeneas bare a liuing loade; Nothing so heauy as these woes ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... scattered throughout the pieces of Euripides like flowers in a pleasure-garden; hence above all the psychology of Euripides, which rests by no means on direct reproduction of human experience, but on rational reflection. His Medea is certainly in so far painted from life, that she is before departure properly provided with money for her voyage; but of the struggle in the soul between maternal love and jealousy the unbiassed reader will not find much in Euripides. But, above all, poetic effect is ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... been at all times extravagance and credulity itself. They looked upon this young villain as a martyr, and at once dedicated an elegy to him, in which I was compared with Medea, Circe, and Fredegonde. ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... Now we'll turn to Juan. Poor little fellow! he had no idea Of his own case, and never hit the true one; In feelings quick as Ovid's Miss Medea,[52] He puzzled over what he found a new one, But not as yet imagined it could be a Thing quite in course, and not at all alarming, Which, with a little ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... stamped in all its lines; and though each passion was, by turns, developed, it was evident that all were subordinate to the sin by which the angels fell. The contour of her face was formed in the purest Grecian mould, and might have been a model for Medea; so well did the gloomy grandeur of the brow, the severe chiselling of the lip, the rounded beauty of the throat, and the faultless symmetry of her full form, accord with the beau ideal of antique perfection. Shaded by smooth folds of raven hair, which still maintained its jetty dye, ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... is sublimely unconscious that the joys of childhood are not hers. Though with the hypochondria of advancing years she demands a doctor for her soul, she knows not from what disease she suffers. She does not pray for a Medea to thrust her into a cauldron of rejuvenescence. With a bluff optimism she declares that she is still the youngest of the nations, and boasts that when she has grown up to the height of her courage and ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... theirs, that they lose much more than gaine thereby. These were two contrarie humours: The Philosopher Chrisippus was wont to foist-in amongst his bookes, not only whole sentences and other long-long discourses, but whole bookes of other Authors, as in one, he brought in Euripides his Medea. And Apollodorus was wont to say of him, that if one should draw from out his bookes what he had stolne from others, his paper would remaine blanke. Whereas Epicurus cleane contrarie to him in three hundred volumes he left behind him, had ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... have abandoned, not as honorable soldiers yielding to circumstances and the chances of war, but as perjurers pursued by remorse.... In flying from Vienna their adieus to its inhabitants consisted of murder and fire. Like Medea, they have sacrificed their children with their own hands."—13th bulletin: "The rage of the house of Lorraine ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... being overtaken by retribution. The brother and sister seemed to be on delightful terms with each other for once, and there was something of cheerful anticipation in their morning talk. I was reminded of Medea's anointing Jason before the great episode of the iron bulls, but to-day William really could not be going up country to see a railroad for the first time. I knew this to be one of his great schemes, but he was not fitted to appear in public, ...
— The Queen's Twin and Other Stories • Sarah Orne Jewett
... for all he cared so long as this sea remained; and with the story of Theseus and "lonely Ariadne on the wharf at Naxos" ringing in his ears he looked to the north-east, whither lay the Cyclades and Propontis. Medea, too, had been deserted—"Medea deadlier than the sea." Helen! All the stories of the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" had been lived about these seas, from the coasts of Sicily to those of Asia Minor, whence AEneas had made his way to Carthage. ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... credit of the successful ones. What is said here of Louis Philippe was verified in some of its minute particulars within a few months' time. Enough to have made the fortune of Delphi or Ammon, and no thanks to Beelzebub neither! That of Seneca in Medea will suit here:— ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... kindness to tear the poor girl away from her solitary broodings and plunge her into the whirl of the world of Roman fashion. Claudia had become an intimate of Clodia, the widow of Quintus Metellus, a woman of remarkable gifts and a notoriously profligate character. "The Medea of the Palatine Hill," Cicero had bitingly styled her. Nearly all the youth of parts and social distinction enjoyed the wild pleasures of Clodia's garden by the Tiber. Catullus the poet, Caelius the brilliant young politician, and many another had figured ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... second wrong; for they sailed in to Aia of Colchis and to the river Phasis with a ship of war, and from thence, after they had done the other business for which they came, they carried off the king's daughter Medea: and the king of Colchis sent a herald to the land of Hellas and demanded satisfaction for the rape and to have his daughter back; but they answered that, as the Barbarians had given them no satisfaction for the rape of Io the Argive, so neither would ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 1(of 2) • Herodotus
... Neo-platonic sort of meaning. As every apologist interpreted the legends in his own fashion, the interpretations usually disagreed and killed each other. Just as one modern mythologist sees the wind in Aeetes and the dawn in Medea, while another of the same school believes, on equally good evidence, that both Aeetes and Medea are the moon, so writers like Porphyry (270 A. D.) and Plutarch (60 A. D.) made the ancient deities types of their own favourite doctrines, whatever these might ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... to the Goddess of Good; the celebrated Mithras with a serpent coiled round him, between the folds of which are sculptured the signs of the zodiac; Medea and her children; a mile-stone, bearing the names of the Emperors Theodosius and Valentinian; a basso-relievo of the Muses; several sarcophagi, votive altars, cornices, pillars, mutilated statues, and inscriptions, are here carefully preserved: but nothing in the collection equals the ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... here and there, as in that earliest picture of romantic love, as some have called the story of "Dido," not remembering, perhaps, that even here Virgil had before his mind a Greek model, that he was thinking of Apollonius Rhodius, and of Jason and Medea. He could be himself, too, in passages of reflection and description, as in the beautiful sixth book, with its picture of the under world, and its ...
— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang
... produced tragic poets. In the first flourished Livius Andronicus, Naevius, and Ennius; in the second, Pacuvius and Attius; in the third, Asinius Pollio wrote tragedies, the plots of which seem to have been taken from Roman history. Ovid attempted a "Medea," and even the Emperor Augustus, with other men of genius, tried his hand, ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... The Hague was a Court town. I was richly dressed; my elaborate attire made the saddest possible contrast with the gloom of my surroundings. Therese, dressed in black and seated between her children at that black table, reminded me of Medea. To see these two fair young creatures vowed to a lot of misery and disgrace was a sad and touching sight. I took the boy between my arms, and pressing him to my breast called him my son. His mother told him to look upon me as his father from henceforth. The lad ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... Ph.D. He was a native of Heidelberg. He had been compelled to leave Prussia because of his love of liberty. He had studied theology, and had published a treatise on gymnastics, in which he was accomplished. We read with him Terence and Plautus, the Medea of Seneca, Horace, and probably some Latin prose, which I have forgotten. He was a very learned Latin scholar. I do not know whether he cared anything about poetry or eloquence or the philosophy of the Roman authors or no. Certainly he did ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... scepter, which ought to be his own by right of inheritance. Thus these bad-hearted nephews of King Aegeus, who were the own cousins of Theseus, at once became his enemies. A still more dangerous enemy was Medea, the wicked enchantress; for she was now the king's wife, and wanted to give the kingdom to her son Medus, instead of letting it be given to the son ...
— Tanglewood Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the classic models are first consulted,—Oenone, Evadne, Medea,—these characters being followed through the delineation of modern dramatists. We know of no more exquisite criticism than the pages devoted to Griseldis. Analyzing the accounts of Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Perault, our author concludes with the play of "Munck Bellinghausen." ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... could not present himself as a candidate for election. Florine was herself in communication with the sheriff on the subject of her personal debts, and no resource was left to her but the "I" of Medea, for her new furniture and belongings were now attached. The ambitious Raoul heard the cracking in all directions of his prosperous edifice, built, alas! without foundations. His nerve failed him; too weak already to sustain so vast an enterprise, ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac
... quietly, like a symbolic figure of evening, or the genius of the place. Her hair shone duskily as she bent beside the candle, and with steady fingers tilted a vial, from which amber drops fell slowly into a glass. With dark eyes watching closely, she had the air of a young, beneficent Medea, intent on some ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... journey by plunging down a precipice. Perhaps it would have been as well; but it was not to be. The headlong rush was to be checked. The descent was to be eased by a strange detour, by a fantastic adventure, a revival that was no re-birth, a Medea's cauldron rather, an extravagant disease full of lust and laughter; the life of the old world was to be prolonged by four hundred years or so, by the galvanising power of ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... biblical commentators. It is to be presumed that the reference to a source so well known as the Bible would have occurred at once to the Querist, had not the allusions, in the preceding stanza, to the heathen fable of Medea, diverted his thoughts from that ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 74, March 29, 1851 • Various
... a group of angels on the marble doorway leading from the church into the cloisters. He had afterwards been employed at Bergamo, where the Colleoni Chapel and the effigy of the great Condottiere's young daughter, the sleeping virgin Medea, still bear witness to his poetic invention and rare decorative skill. One of Lodovico's first acts after his return to Milan had been to recall Amadeo to Pavia, and in 1490, this gifted artist was appointed Capo maestro of the Certosa ...
— Beatrice d'Este, Duchess of Milan, 1475-1497 • Julia Mary Cartwright
... ac dirum nefas A me quoque absit. Quod scelus miseri luent? Scelus est Iason genitor, et maius scelus Medea mater. Occidant: non sunt mei. Pereant? mei sunt. Crimine et culpa carent. Sunt innocentes, fateor: et frater fuit. Quid, anime, titubas? ora quid lacrimae rigant? Variamque nunc huc ira nunc illuc amor Diducit? anceps ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... earth and talked face to face with men, and in my heart I secretly built shrines to those I loved best. I knew and loved the whole tribe of nymphs and heroes and demigods—no, not quite all, for the cruelty and greed of Medea and Jason were too monstrous to be forgiven, and I used to wonder why the gods permitted them to do wrong and then punished them for their wickedness. And the mystery is still ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... And hence generally arose for Shakspeare the wider field, and the more astonishing by its perfect novelty, when he first introduced female characters, not as mere varieties or echoes of masculine characters, a Medea or Clytemnestra, or a vindictive Hecuba, the mere tigress of the tragic tiger, but female characters that had the appropriate beauty of female nature; woman no longer grand, terrific, and repulsive, but woman "after her kind"—the other hemisphere of the dramatic world; woman, running ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... enjoyed in the arms of Cassandra, his captive, and, therefore, by the laws of the heroic ages his concubine: she would purchase revenge for a murdered son with the acknowledged and permitted degradation of a living daughter. He was the first to make the unbridled passion of a Medea, and the unnatural love of a Phaedra, the main subject of his dramas, whereas from the manners of the ancients, we may easily conceive why love, which among them was much less dignified by tender feelings than among ourselves, should hold only a subordinate place in the older tragedies. With ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... Washington Irving wrote "the predictions of the ancient oracles were rarely so unequivocal," is part of the "chorus" at the end of the second act of Seneca's "Medea," written near the date of St. Paul's first Epistle ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... of animal, and am sure that I should have preferred Medea to any woman that ever breathed. You may, perhaps, wonder at my speaking thus (making allusion to Lady Byron).... I could have forgiven the dagger or the bowl, any thing but the deliberate desolation piled ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... and Euryalus, even to an ignorant man, carry not an apparent shining: and contrarily, the remorse of conscience in Odipus, the soon repenting pride of Agamemnon, the self-devouring cruelty in his father Atreus, the violence of ambition in the two Theban brothers, the sour-sweetness of revenge in Medea, and to fall lower, the Terentian Gnatho and our Chaucer's Pandar, so expressed, that we now use their names to signify their trades. And finally, all virtues, vices, and passions so in their own natural seats laid to the view, that we seem not to hear of them, but clearly to see through them. ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... sons of Chus founded a colony in Colchis; and we find a king of that country named Ait; or, as the Greeks expressed it, [Greek: Aietes]: and the land was also distinguished by that characteristic. Hence Arete in the Orphic Argonautics, speaking of Medea's returning to Colchis, expresses this place by the terms ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume I. • Jacob Bryant
... and of a sweetness most alluring and fatal! Had Medea worn such a look, sure Jason had quite forgot the fleece, and with those eyes Circe had needed no other charm to make men what she would. Her voice, when she spoke, was no longer imperious; it was low pleading music. And she held out ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... sleep, the wild beasts lie: May suburb curs, that all may jeer, Bay the old lecher, smear'd with nard {94}, More choice than which these fingers ne'er Have, skilful, at my need prepar'd. But why have charms by me employ'd, Less luck than her's, Medea dread, With which her rival she destroy'd, Great Creon's child, then proudly fled, When the robe bane-imbued, her gift, Enwrapp'd the new-wed bride in flame? But neither herb, nor root from rift Of lone rock ta'en, are here to blame; In every harlot's bed lies ...
— Targum • George Borrow
... action. This spirit of self-dependence was the grandest feature of Greek and Roman heathenism; and it is in this, if in anything, that a superiority of character is manifest in the men of ancient times. The famous passage in Seneca's tragedy, in which Medea asserts herself as sufficient to stand alone against the universe, contains its essence and is its ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... Woman and Love in Sophocles Woman and Love in Euripides Romantic Love, Greek Style Platonic Love of Women Spartan Opportunities for Love Amazonian Ideal of Greek Womanhood Athenian Orientalism Literature and Life Greek Love in Africa Alexandrian Chivalry The New Comedy Theocritus and Callimachus Medea and Jason Poets and Hetairai Short Stories Greek Romances Daphnis and Chloe Hero ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... of a few more curiosities must suffice. The immense skull of Polyphemus was recognizable by the cavernous hollow in the centre of the forehead where once had blazed the giant's single eye. The tub of Diogenes, Medea's caldron, and Psyche's vase of beauty were placed one within another. Pandora's box, without the lid, stood next, containing nothing but the girdle of Venus, which had been carelessly flung into it. A bundle of birch-rods which ...
— A Virtuoso's Collection (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... time necessarily arises the contraction of place. The spectator, who knows that he saw the first act at Alexandria, cannot suppose that he sees the next at Rome, at a distance to which not the dragons of Medea could, in so short a time, have transported him; he knows with certainty that he has not changed his place; and he knows that place cannot change itself; that what was a house cannot become a plain; that what was Thebes can ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... introduces characters which are unheroic. He gives the people plenty of passion, especially of feminine passion, without being nice as to its sources, or rejecting such stories as those of Phaedra and Medea, which would have been alien to the taste, not only of Aeschylus, but of Sophocles. He gives them plenty of politics, plenty of rhetoric, plenty of discussion, political and moral, plenty of speculation, which in those days was ...
— Specimens of Greek Tragedy - Aeschylus and Sophocles • Goldwin Smith
... Canidia of Horace,' Gibbon pronounces, 'is a vulgar witch. The Erichtho of Lucan is tedious, disgusting, but sometimes sublime.' The love-charms of Canidia and Medea are chiefly indebted ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... gelatinous fashion. Her eyes—they were the color of perfect June at that high-noon moment when the spinning of the humming-bird can be distilled to sound. Laura and Marguerite and Stella Schump had eyes as blue as Cleopatra's, and Sappho's and Medea's ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... the towne, they tooke indignation against her, and ordayned that the next day shee should most cruelly be stoned to death. Which purpose of theirs she prevented by the vertue of her inchantments, and as Medea (who obtained of King Creon but one days respit before her departure) did burn all his house, him, and his daughter: so she, by her conjurations and invocations of spirits, (which she useth in a certaine hole in her house, ...
— The Golden Asse • Lucius Apuleius
... may be done consciously and with knowledge of the persons, in the manner of the older poets. It is thus too that Euripides makes Medea slay her children. Or, again, the deed of horror may be done, but done in ignorance, and the tie of kinship or friendship be discovered afterwards. The Oedipus of Sophocles is an example. Here, indeed, the incident is outside the drama proper; but ...
— Poetics • Aristotle
... new rendering of the Life and Death of Jason, so (it would seem) the same story of Jason got a new meaning in the twelfth century when it was read by Benoit de Sainte More in the light of Celtic romance. Then it was discovered that Jason and Medea were no more, and no less, than the adventurer and the wizard's daughter, who might play their parts in a story of Wales or Brittany. The quest of the Golden Fleece and the labours of Jason are all reduced ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... the tomb of Arthur. The nymph in furred raiment who seduces Hylas is conceived frankly in the spirit of Teutonic romance; her song is of a garden [226] enclosed, such as that with which the old church glass-stainer surrounds the mystic bride of the song of songs. Medea herself has a hundred touches of the medieval sorceress, the sorceress of the Streckelberg or the Blocksberg: her mystic changes are Christabel's. It is precisely this effect, this grace of Hellenism relieved against the sorrow of the Middle Age, which forms the chief motives of The Earthly ...
— Aesthetic Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... late years its Greek play, presented during Commencement week, has surpassed both the senior play and the Shakespeare play in dramatic rendering and careful study of the lines. Gilbert Murray's translation of the "Medea", presented in 1914, was a performance of which Wellesley was justly proud. Usually the Wellesley plays are better as pageants than as dramatic productions, but the Classical Society is setting a standard for the careful literary interpretation and rendering of dramatic texts, which should ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse
... sentence with your own lips," said the Prince, "you have yourselves judged the cause, you have yourselves signed the decree. It remains for me to cause your order to be executed, since it is you who with the heart of a negro, with the cruelty of Medea, made a fritter of this beautiful head, and chopped up these lovely limbs like sausage-meat. So quick, make haste, lose not a moment! throw them this very instant into a large dungeon, where they ...
— Stories from Pentamerone • Giambattista Basile
... instead of give. The degradation of woman involved in being sold to a husband, to put it in the most humiliating way, is not comparable to the degradation of having to buy a husband. Euripides made Medea say: "We women are the most unfortunate of all creatures since we have to buy our masters at so dear a price," and the degradation of Grecian women is repeated—all flower-garlanded and disguised by show—in the marriage sentiments of our own civilization. Jacob was dominated by his wives ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... Ariadne. If we may credit Plutarch[225], Theseus, as soon as he was advanced towards manhood, went, by the advice of his mother AEthra, from Troezen, in quest of his father AEgeus at Athens. This was some years after the Argonautic expedition; when Medea had left Jason, and put herself under the protection of this same AEgeus. After having been acknowledged by his father, Theseus went upon his expedition to Crete; where he is said to have first seen Ariadne, and to have carried her away. All this, I say, ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume II. (of VI.) • Jacob Bryant
... STORY OF THESEUS. From Kingsley's "Heroes." How Theseus lifted the stone. How Theseus slew the Corynetes. How Theseus slew Sinis. How Theseus slew Kerkyon and Procrustes. How Theseus slew the Medea and was acknowledged the son of Aegeus. How Theseus slew the Minotaur. To be told in ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... was MEDEA to JASON In his Conquering of the Fleece of Gold! How falsely quit he her true affection, By whom victory he gat as he would! How may this man, for shame, be so bold To falsen her, that, from his death and shame Him kept, and gat him so ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various
... the last word startled me. I looked at her and wondered if Medea wore such a countenance when she stabbed her children to the heart. But it flashed and was gone, and the next moment she had moved away from my side and I had stepped to the door. As I opened it to pass out I caught one glimpse of the bride as she came down the stairs. ...
— The Mill Mystery • Anna Katharine Green
... to doe no more than reforme the Common-wealth, shall find they do thereby destroy it; like the foolish daughters of Peleus (in the fable;) which desiring to renew the youth of their decrepit Father, did by the Counsell of Medea, cut him in pieces, and boyle him, together with strange herbs, but made not of him a new man. This desire of change, is like the breach of the first of Gods Commandements: For there God says, Non Habebis Deos Alienos; Thou ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... influenced the philosophies of all races, nations and peoples, for several thousand years. Egypt, the home of the Pyramids and the Sphinx, was the birthplace of the Hidden Wisdom and Mystic Teachings. From her Secret Doctrine all nations have borrowed. India, Persia, Chaldea, Medea, China, Japan, Assyria, ancient Greece and Rome, and other ancient countries partook liberally at the feast of knowledge which the Hierophants and Masters of the Land of Isis so freely provided for those who came prepared to partake of the great store of Mystic and Occult Lore which the ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson
... plenty of local color in his work, only the color belongs to his own locality, and not to that of the heroes whose adventures he purports to relate. In his work the old classical heroes are transformed into typical mediaeval knights, and heroines such as Helen and Medea, for instance, are ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber
... hero, son of AEson, king of Iolcos; brought up by the centaur Chiron, was supplanted on the throne by his half-brother Pelias; undertook the leadership of the Argonautic expedition, assisted by Medea in this enterprise; he took her to wife, but cast her off for Creusa, whom Medea to avenge herself killed, with her father and her two sons by Jason, she herself escaping to Athens in a chariot drawn by winged dragons; Jason took ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... to argue with you, Medea," replied Mr Culpepper; "I take the world as I find it, and make the best of it. I must go now,— my steward is waiting for me at the victualling office. Just brush my hat a little, Medea, the wind has raised the nap, and ...
— Percival Keene • Frederick Marryat
... thinned down till it became inaudible. And just so ideas, although immortal, were it not for author-borrowers, through age grown obsolete, might virtually perish. But by and by, just as some precious thought is being lost unto the world, let there come some Medea, by whose potent sorcery that old and withered idea receives new life-blood through its shrunken veins, and it starts to life again with recreated vigor—another AEson, with the bloom of youth upon him. Besides in this way playing the physician to save old ideas from a burial ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... indulging that fancy of his for Latin poetry which seems to us now-a-days a childish pedantry; which was then—when Latin was the vernacular tongue of all scholars—a serious, if not altogether a useful, pursuit. Of his tragedies, so famous in their day—the 'Baptist,' the 'Medea,' the 'Jephtha,' and the 'Alcestis'—there is neither space nor need to speak here, save to notice the bold declamations in the 'Baptist' against tyranny and priestcraft; and to notice also that these tragedies gained for the poor Scotsman, in the ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... The confident of Medea in the tragedy recommends caution and submission; and enumerating all the distresses of that unfortunate heroine, asks her, what she has to support her against her numerous and implacable enemies. MYSELF, ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals • David Hume
... form-element of style. Jules Janin was loud in his praises, the Emperor begged Ristori to join the troupe of the Comedie Francaise, and Rachel, with the strange narrow jealousy of her nature, trembled for her laurels. Myrrha was followed by Marie Stuart, and Marie Stuart by Medea. In the latter part Madame Ristori excited the greatest enthusiasm. Ary Scheffer designed her costumes for her; and the Niobe that stands in the Uffizzi Gallery at Florence, suggested to Madame Ristori her famous pose in the ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... but it is my great misfortune, my prevalent weakness, that I cannot be stern when I ought to be. It is with me in life as in art. I never could on the stage have taken the part of a Norma or a Medea. If I attempt in fiction a character which deserves condemnation, I am untrue to poetic justice. I cannot condemn and execute; I can but compassionate and pardon the creature I myself have created. I was never in the real world stern but to one; and then, alas! it was because I loved where I could ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... enchantments: "The Golden Apples," "Bellerophon," "Cupid and Psyche," "The Story of Perseus," etc. Even "Jason" is treated as a romance. Of its seventeen books, all but the last are devoted to the exploits and wanderings of the Argonauts. Medea is not the wronged, vengeful queen of the Greek tragic poets, so much as she is the Colchian sorceress who effects her lover's victory and escape. Her romantic, outweighs her dramatic character. Sea voyages, emprizes, and wild adventures, ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... always like a thing read in a book or remembered out of the far-away past; if, in fact, this be veritably nightfall, he will not wish greatly for the continuance of a twilight that only strains and disappoints the eyes, but steadfastly await the perfect darkness. He will pray for Medea: when she comes, let her either rejuvenate ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... she said to him, "and my name is Medea. I know a great deal of which other young princesses are ignorant and can do many things which they would be afraid so much as to dream of. If you will trust to me I can instruct you how to tame the fiery bulls and sow the dragon's teeth ...
— Myths and Legends of All Nations • Various
... to Malone, seems to have been the chief source of Lucrece, with some aid from Ovid's Fasti, II. 721 ff. Among other Ovidian allusions are those to the story of Philomela, so pervasive in Titus Andronicus; to the Medea myth in four or five passages; to Narcissus and Echo, Phaeton, Niobe, Hercules, and a score more of the familiar names of classical mythology. Pyramus and Thisbe Shakespeare may have read about in Chaucer as well as in Ovid, but Bottom's treatment of this story in A Midsummer-Night's ...
— The Facts About Shakespeare • William Allan Nielson
... . . . We are back in the world's first best age; when a man, if he wanted a woman to wife, sailed in a ship and abducted her, as did the Tyrian sea-captain with Io daughter of Inachus, Jason with Medea, Paris with Helen of Greece; and again, when he tired of her, left her on an island and sailed away. There was Sappho, now; she ran and cast herself off a rock. And Medea, she murdered her children in revenge. But we are over hasty, ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... list of parallels attached to Mr. Lang's variant in Revue Celtique, iii. 374; and Mr. Lang, in his Custom and Myth ("A far travelled Tale"), has given a number of parallels from savage sources. And strangest of all, the story is practically the same as the classical myth of Jason and Medea. ...
— Celtic Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... sable throne behold Of night primaeval and of chaos old. Before her, fancy's gilded clouds decay, And all its varying rainbows die away. Wit shoots in vain its momentary fires, The meteor drops, and in a flash expires. As one by one, at dread Medea's strain, The sickening stars fade off the ethereal plain; As Argus' eyes, by Hermes' wand oppress'd Clos'd one by one to everlasting rest; Thus, at her felt approach and secret might, Art after art goes out, and all is night. See skulking truth to her old cavern fled, Mountains of casuistry heap'd ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... opportunities of watching women in states of degradation and vindictiveness which opened to me the gloomiest secrets of Greek and Syrian tragedy. I have seen them betray their household charities to lust, their pledged love to devotion; I have seen mothers dutiful to their children, as Medea; and children dutiful to their parents, as the daughter of Herodias: but my trust is still unmoved in the preciousness of the natures that are so fatal in their error, and I leave the words of the 'Lilies' unchanged; believing, ...
— Sesame and Lilies • John Ruskin
... sort of refusal, direct or implied, in a thousand cases which might be named, which brings down evil, not only upon those who make it, but upon others. They mean no, perhaps; and yet it is not certain that the decision is—like the laws of the Medea and Persians—irrevocable. Something in the tone, or manner, or both combined, leaves room to hope for success in time to come. "The woman who deliberates, is lost," we are told: and is it not so? Do not many who say no with hesitancy, ...
— The Young Woman's Guide • William A. Alcott
... and Argives arrived with succours, he retreated and encamped on the knolls above Medea. (32) While he was there, Cissidas, the officer in charge of the reinforcement from Dionysius, made the announcement that the period for his stay abroad had elapsed; and the words were no sooner out of his lips than off he set on the road to Sparta. The march ...
— Hellenica • Xenophon
... beautiful in one of these moods," he said; "don't restrain yourself. What a Medea you ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... may'r and aldermen, On whom three hundred gold-capt youths await, To lug the pond'rous volume off in state. "When Dulness, smiling—'Thus revive the wits! But murder first, and mince them all to bits! As erst Medea (cruel, so to save!) A new edition of old AEson gave; Let standard authors thus, like trophies borne, Appear more glorious as more hack'd and torn. And you my Critics! in the chequer'd shade, Admire new light through holes yourselves have made. "'Leave not a foot of verse, a foot of stone, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... served in the expedition equipped in precisely the same manner; for this equipment is in fact Median and not Persian: and the Medes acknowledged as their commander Tigranes an Achaimenid. These in ancient time used to be generally called Arians; but when Medea the Colchian came from Athens to these Arians, they also changed their name. Thus the Medes themselves report about themselves. The Kissians served with equipment in other respects like that of the Persians, but instead of the felt caps they wore fillets: 59and of the Kissians Anaphes ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 2 (of 2) • Herodotus
... or deed; but considering that gold, like feathers, is equally useful to those who have and those who have not, why, it is worth while for the goose to remember that he may possibly one day be plucked. And what remains? "Io," as Medea says. . . . But Argemone?' . . . And Lancelot felt, for the moment, as conservative as the tutelary ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... life, says that a ship may sail in a few days with a fair wind from Spain to India. And if, as some suppose, the same Seneca were the author of the tragedies, he expresses himself to the same purpose in the following chorus of the Medea: ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. III. • Robert Kerr
... bird-wise Shriek with birds' voices, and with furious feet Tread loose the long skirts of a storm; and saw The whole white Euxine clash together and fall Full-mouthed, and thunderous from a thousand throats; Yet we drew thither and won the fleece and won Medea, deadlier than the sea; but there Seeing many a wonder and fearful things to men I saw not one thing like this one seen here, Most fair and fearful, feminine, a god, Faultless; whom I that love not, being unlike, Fear, and give honour, and choose ...
— Atalanta in Calydon • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... think she has taken the character of the 'Princess Creusa,' the daughter of Creon, King of Corinth, and the victim of Medea the Sorceress. Creusa perished, you know, in the robe of magic presented to her as a wedding gift from Medea, and designed to burn the wearer to ashes! Yes, decidedly it is Creusa, in her death robe of fire!" persisted the 'gentle Desdemona,' ...
— Cruel As The Grave • Mrs. Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... Julia. Now we 'll turn to Juan. Poor little fellow! he had no idea Of his own case, and never hit the true one; In feelings quick as Ovid's Miss Medea, He puzzled over what he found a new one, But not as yet imagined it could be Thing quite in course, and not at all alarming, Which, with a little patience, ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... incessantly poured on the heads of the assailants; but they were most dangerously annoyed by a fiery composition of sulphur and bitumen, which in Colchos might with some propriety be named the oil of Medea. Of six thousand Romans who mounted the scaling-ladders, their general Bessas was the first, a gallant veteran of seventy years of age: the courage of their leader, his fall, and extreme danger, animated the irresistible effort of his ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... she had certainly never loved him. Nor did she love Lord Rufford. As far as she knew how to define her feelings, she thought that she hated him. But she told herself hourly that she had not done with him. She was instigated by the true feminine Medea feeling that she would find some way to wring his heart,— even though in the process she might suffer twice as much as he did. She had convinced herself that in this instance he was the offender. "Painful to both of us!" No doubt! But because it would ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope
... terno. "Who will buy a pianeta," he cries, "with the numbers sure to bring him a prize? He shall have his fortune told him who buys. Who does not need counsel must surely be wise. Here's Master Tommetto, who never tells lies. And here is his brother, still smaller in size. And Madama Medea Plutonia to advise. They'll write you a fortune and bring you a prize for a single baiocco. No creature so wise as not to need counsel. A fool I despise, who keeps his baiocco and loses his prize. Who knows what a fortune he'll get till he tries? Time's ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... that a lady in whom we had remarked a most extraordinary power of displaying softness should, the very next moment after the words were out of her mouth, express sentiments becoming the lips of a Dalila, Jezebel, Medea, Semiramis, Parysatis, Tanaquil, Livilla, Messalina, Agrippina, Brunichilde, Elfrida, Lady Macbeth, Joan of Naples, Christina of Sweden, Katharine Hays, Sarah Malcolm, Con Philips,[Footnote: Though last not least.] ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding
... political affairs; and I am astonished at my own former blindness, and at his greatness. I could not bear Euripides at college. I now read my recantation. He has faults undoubtedly. But what a poet! The Medea, the Alcestis, the Troades, the Bacchae, are alone sufficient to place him in the very first rank. Instead of depreciating him, as I have done, I may, for aught I know, end ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... Medea of Ovid uttered that cry, many others, one after another, have groaned over the fact that, seeing the best and approving it, they ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... thus my pen strives to eternise thee, Age rules my lines with wrinkles in my face, Where in the map of all my misery Is modelled out the world of my disgrace; Whilst in despite of tyrannising times, Medea-like, I make thee young again, Proudly thou scorn'st my world-outwearing rhymes, And murther'st virtue with thy coy disdain; And though in youth my youth untimely perish, To keep thee from oblivion and ...
— Elizabethan Sonnet Cycles - Idea, by Michael Drayton; Fidessa, by Bartholomew Griffin; Chloris, by William Smith • Michael Drayton, Bartholomew Griffin, and William Smith
... false things, there's danger in a fool. Let them, tho' modest, Gray more modest woo; Let them with Mason bleat, and bray, and coo; Let them with Franklin, proud of some small Greek, Make Sophocles disguis'd, in English speak; Let them with Glover o'er Medea doze; Let them with Dodsley wail Cleone's woes, Whilst he, fine feeling creature, all in tears, Melts, as they melt, and weeps with weeping peers; Let them with simple Whitehead, taught to creep Silent and soft, lay Fontenelle asleep;[214] Let them with Browne contrive, to ...
— English Satires • Various
... supernatural arts, and through the favor of Me-de'a, daughter of the King of Colchis, he succeeded in capturing the fleece. After four months of continued danger and innumerable hardships, Jason returned to Iolcus with the prize, accompanied by Medea, whom he afterward deserted, and whose subsequent history is told by the poet Euripides in his celebrated tragedy ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... but you have heard how Medea, in Euripides, compassionates her sex on their hard lot—on the intolerable pangs they endure in travail? And by the way—Medea's words remind me did you ever have a child, when you were a woman, ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... English Iambic to the plain but sparkling prose of Moliere, and from that again to the intricate harmonies of Calderon, Goethe, and Shelley; with its use of all voices, from vociferous mob to melodious daughters of Ocean, and its command of all colour, from the gloom of Medea to the splendour of Marlowe's Helen,—it is a small matter to remember the connection of work or author with the stage—how long they held it, how soon they were dispossessed, how and at what intervals ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... comer. He was soon followed by Professor Morgan, an authority on Greek literature; Mr. Peebles, the ex-Prime Minister; Mrs. Hubert Baldwin, the immensely popular novelist; the fascinating Mrs. Rupert Duncan, who was lending her genius to one of Ibsen's heroines at that moment; Miss Medea Tring, one of the latest American beauties; Corporal, the portrait-painter; Richard Giles, critic and man of letters; Hereward Blenheim, a young and rising politician, who before the age of thirty had already risen higher than most ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring
... that the tyrant oft reclaims Shall to my flaming wrath be oil and flax. Henceforth I will not have to do with pity; Meet I an infant of the house of York, Into as many gobbets will I cut it As wild Medea young Absyrtus did. In cruelty will I seek out my fame.— Come, thou new ruin of old Clifford's house: As did Aeneas old Anchises bear, So bear I thee upon my manly shoulders; But then Aeneas bare a living load, Nothing so heavy as these ...
— King Henry VI, Second Part • William Shakespeare [Rolfe edition]
... these there is something left to the poet himself; it is for him to devise the right way of treating them. Let us explain more clearly what we mean by 'the right way'. The deed of horror may be done by the doer knowingly and consciously, as in the old poets, and in Medea's murder of her children in Euripides. Or he may do it, but in ignorance of his relationship, and discover that afterwards, as does the Oedipus in Sophocles. Here the deed is outside the play; but it may be within ...
— The Poetics • Aristotle
... the rock to which he was nailed, of the avenging eagle for ever hovering and for ever devouring; of the land of Aeetes, and of the bulls with brazen feet and flaming breath, and how Jason yoked and made them plough, of the enchantress Medea, and the unguent she concocted from herbs that grew where the blood of Prometheus had dripped; of the field sown with dragons' teeth, and the mail-clad men that leaped out of the furrows; of the magical ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... on them, others evidently counterfeited, are preserved in several museums. Of larger representations we mention the marble statue of a girl playing with astragaloi in the Berlin Museum, and a Pompeian wall-painting in which the children of Jason play the same game, while Medea threatens their lives with a drawn sword. The celebrated masterpiece of Polykletes, representing two boys playing with astragaloi, formerly in the palace of Titus in Rome, has unfortunately been lost. Another wall-painting shows in ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... own feelings must have been scarcely enviable. They say that great enchantresses, from Medea and Circe downward, have generally been unhappy in their loves. Either they could not raise the spirit, or it proved unmanageable; either their affection was not returned, or its object was unfaithful at last. In the single case where they put their science ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... moreover, he is deliberately antiquarian, if not pedantic. His true merit is in his original and, as we think, modern telling of a love tale—pure, passionate, and tender, the first in known literature. Medea is often sublime, and always touching. But it is not on these merits that our author lingers; he loves only the highest literature, and, though he finds spots on the sun and faults in Homer, he condones them as oversights passed in the ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus
... of a couple so enfeebled, so perverted, so distempered both in body and soul, society throws the yoke of marriage: that yoke which, once rivetted on the necks of its victims, clings to them like the poisoned garments of Nessus or Medea. What can be expected from these ill-assorted yoke-fellows, but that, like two ill-tempered hounds, coupled by a tyrannical sportsman, they should drag on their indissoluble fetter, snarling and growling, and pulling in different directions? What can be expected for their wretched ...
— Headlong Hall • Thomas Love Peacock
... "'In such a night Medea gathered the enchanted herbs,'—and in such a night your friend, who may never see another—takes occasion to ask a promise ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... part of our treasures. Over what tragedy could Lady Jane Grey have wept, over what comedy could she have smiled, if the ancient dramatists had not been in her library? A modern reader can make shift without Oedipus and Medea, while he possesses Othello and Hamlet. If he knows nothing of Pyrgopolynices and Thraso, he is familiar with Bobadil, and Bessus, and Pistol, and Parolles. If he cannot enjoy the delicious irony of Plato, he may find some compensation in that of Pascal. If he is shut out from Nephelococcygia, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... this is the husband of whom she had dreamed? Ah, well! God grant that she may be happy; for we were very fond of her, very—were we not, Aunt Medea?" ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau
... pardoned Medea, whom, with hands whitened to the utmost with chalk, she persuaded not to think ill of her for being absent from ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... serving to bring the ladies to town, should the evening prove cold; that, for the water-music, the following programme be adopted: 1. On reaching Vauxhall Bridge, the concert to commence with Madame Pasta's grand scena in "Medea," previous to the murder of the children, by Miss Corinna Grouts. 2. Nicholson's grand flute concerto in five sharps, by Mr. Frederick Snodgrass. 3. Grand aria, with variations, guitar, by Miss ...
— Stories of Comedy • Various
... straightway she herself became Medea, Jason took on the form of Drusus, and she would read no more; "while," as the next line of the learned poet had it, "grief ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... come from a neutral principle if this argument held good. But free will tends towards good, and if it meets with evil it is by accident, for the reason that this evil is concealed beneath the good, and masked, as it were. These words which Ovid ascribes to Medea, ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... immobile as if carved from pearl,—perhaps it was just such a face as hers that fronted Jason, amid the clustering boughs of Colchian rhododendrons, when first he sought old AEetes' prescient daughter,—the maiden face of magical Medea, innocent as yet of murder, sacrilege, fratricide, and plunder,—eloquent of all possibilities of purity and peace, but vaguely adumbrating all ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... elongated hill, 100 ft. high. Slightly beyond, preceded by a great mass of rock, was another island 200 m. long, dividing the stream in two. Two other islands, one 700 m. long—Leda Island—the other one Medea Island, of greater length but much narrower, were disclosed ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... dear count," exclaimed Richelieu; "if you will renew his youth, I will proclaim you a true pupil of Medea." ...
— The Queen's Necklace • Alexandre Dumas pere
... soul to me; otherwise, I shall fear lest, by the fatality of my star, and by the too fortunate influence of the stars on women less tender and less faithful than I, I may be supplanted in your heart as Medea was in Jason's; not that I wish to compare you to a lover as unfortunate as Jason, and to parallel myself with a monster like Medea, although you have enough influence over me to force me to resemble her each time our love ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - MARY STUART—1587 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... sing My soft low song: to thee and Hecate The dweller in the shades, at whose approach E'en the dogs quake, as on she moves through blood And darkness and the barrows of the slain. All hail, dread Hecate: companion me Unto the end, and work me witcheries Potent as Circe or Medea wrought, Or Perimede of the golden hair! Turn, magic wheel, draw homeward him I love. First we ignite the grain. Nay, pile it on: Where are thy wits flown, timorous Thestylis? Shall I be flouted, I, by such as thou? Pile, and still say, 'This pile is of his bones.' ...
— Theocritus • Theocritus
... Eve, the Eve of the depths. Probably you are, unknown to yourself, a devil. I am in love with a nightmare. You are a moving puppet, of which the strings are pulled by a spectre. You are the incarnation of infernal mirth. You are the master I require. I wanted a lover such as those of Medea and Canidia. I felt sure that some night would bring me such a one. You are all that I want. I am talking of a heap of things of which you probably know nothing. Gwynplaine, hitherto I have remained untouched; ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... of its venture and service—as its loss but gave new foil to the hardihood of La Salle and Tonty. We can imagine the golden-brown skins scattered over the blue waters as the bits of the body of the son of the king of Colchis strewn by Medea to detain the pursuers of the Argonauts. It was the first sacrifice to the valley for the fleece. In the depths of these Lakes or on their shores were buried the bones of these French mariners who, ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley |
