"Mythological" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... last letter I have visited Venice, a city which realizes the old mythological fable of beauty born of the sea. I must confess, however, that my first feeling on entering it was that of disappointment. As we passed in our gondola out of the lagoons, up one of the numerous canals, which, permeate the ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... however, because his fancy flung a rosy light over this homely privilege. He appreciated highly the fare that was set before him. There was a kind of fresh-looking abundance about it which made him think that people must have lived so in the mythological era, when they spread their tables upon the grass, replenished them from cornucopias, and had no particular need of kitchen stoves. But the great thing that Felix enjoyed was having found a family—sitting in the midst of gentle, generous ...
— The Europeans • Henry James
... once from the competition. But, in fact, in this country the students of oriental literature, endowed with a taste and feeling for poetry, are so few in number, that any attempt to make known the peculiar character of those remarkable works, the old mythological epics of India, may be received with indulgence by all who are interested in the history of poetry. Mr. Wilson alone, since Sir W. Jones, has united a poetical genius with deep Sanscrit scholarship; but he has in general ...
— Nala and Damayanti and Other Poems • Henry Hart Milman
... man of immaculate vesture, of impeccable manners, of undeniable culture, of instinctive sympathy with the great world where great things are done, of unerring tact, of mythological beauty and charm, of boundless ambition, of resistless energy, of incalculable promise, in outer semblance and in avowed creed the fine flower of aristocratic England, professing the divine right of the House of Lords and the utilitarian sanctity of ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... that six Editions of a Mythological Pamphlet, entituled, A Dissertation on Dumpling, should escape your Notice of that wonderful Unriddler of Mysteries the ingenious Mr. E—— C—- who has at the same Time given such Proofs of his Abilities in his many and most elaborate Keys to Gulliver's ...
— A Learned Dissertation on Dumpling (1726) • Anonymous
... Pundjel or Bunjil) on a very different level from the theology. There are two currents, the religious and the mythical, flowing together through religion. The former current, religious, even among very low savages, is pure from the magical ghost-propitiating habit. The latter current, mythological, is full of magic, mummery, and scandalous legend. Sometimes the latter stream quite pollutes the former, sometimes they flow side by side, perfectly distinguishable, as in Aztec ethical piety, compared with the bloody Aztec ritualism. Anthropology has mainly kept her ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... believe anything. In this enlightened age of the universal subscription-paper, exhausted givers are familiar objects, but a receiver who finds the labors of his calling excessive is as non-existent as the harpy, his mythological prototype.] ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... upon the soil, the confluent streams of primitively distinct superstitions! Or your suspicious inquisition rebels against this insular banishment of ours, which, sequestering us from the common mind of the world, may, as you augur, have perverted, into an excessive individuality of growth, our mythological beliefs: ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... would account for the striking absence from them of some of the chief characteristics of Skaldic poetry: the obscuring of the sense by the elaborate interlacing of sentences and the extensive use of kennings or mythological synonyms, and the complication of the metre by such expedients as the conjunction of end-rhyme with alliteration. Eddie verse is governed solely by the latter, and the strophic arrangement is simple, only two forms occurring: (1) couplets of alliterative ...
— The Edda, Vol. 1 - The Divine Mythology of the North, Popular Studies in Mythology, - Romance, and Folklore, No. 12 • Winifred Faraday
... hearing herself speak, like a pagan, of the beneficent Baldus, of Loki, the spirit of evil, and of Freya, the golden tears of whom formed the Baltic amber. To her, the world was yet peopled by the mythological beings, created by the naive faith of the north, and to them she had learned to adapt the phenomena of nature. When she heard the thunder, she thought of Thor, and his mighty hammer, driving across the heavens in his iron car. If the sky was clear, she thought the luminous ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... JUSTICE, only a mythological character whose statue has been frequently erected. She had eye trouble. In the United States J. carried scales with a small statue of politics in one pan, and money in the other. Her statues in other countries are said to be different, ...
— Who Was Who: 5000 B. C. to Date - Biographical Dictionary of the Famous and Those Who Wanted to Be • Anonymous
... his life, which was wholly passed in Florence and its neighborhood, Leonardo painted several other pictures of a very different character, and designed some beautiful cartoons of sacred and mythological subjects, which showed that his sense of the beautiful, the elevated, and the graceful was not less a part of his mind than that eccentricity and almost perversion of fancy which made him delight in sketching ugly, exaggerated caricatures, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... are indebted to the Norman love of pageantry for the development of the drama in England is an unanswered question. During the Middle Ages it was customary, in welcoming a monarch or in celebrating a royal wedding, to represent allegorical and mythological scenes, like the combat of St. George and the dragon, for instance, on a stage constructed for the purpose. These pageants were popular all over Europe and developed during the Renaissance into the dramatic form known as the Masque. Though the drama was of religious ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... right corner of the billiard-room, thou wilt have gone a verst,"—and so forth. But what most impressed the guest who arrived for the first time was the great number of pictures hung on the walls, for the most part the work of so-called Italian masters: ancient landscapes, and mythological and religious subjects. But as all these pictures had turned very black, and had even become warped, all that met the eye was patches of flesh-colour, or a billowy red drapery on an invisible body—or an arch which seemed suspended in the air, or a dishevelled tree with ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... the enlightened men and the liberal parties is, that the ministers shall be responsible to the Diet. The time seems at hand when the sovereign's power over his people will not rest on traditions more or less uncertain, on history manufactured by governmental order, on mythological claims based upon the so-called "eternal ages," on prerogatives upheld by the sword, or on the supposed grace of the gods, but will be "broad-based upon the people's will." The power of the rulers will be derived from the consent of the governed. The Emperor will become the first and ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... any means precisely get to know; believes that it does not itself in the least precisely know. Believes that nobody knows;—that it is a mystery, a kind of Heathen myth; and stranger than any piece of the old mythological Pantheon; for it practically presides over the destinies of many ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... Opimian. They remind me of the mythological fiction, that Jupiter made men and women in pairs, like the Siamese twins; but in this way they grew so powerful and presumptuous, that he cut them in two; and now the main business of each half is to look for the ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... bricks, and the big portfolio containing tracings by my mother, exquisitely done, of Flaxman's "Outlines of the Iliad and Odyssey" and other classic subjects. We knew by heart the story of all these mythological personages, and they formed a large part of our life. They also served the important use of suggesting to my father his Wonder-Book and Tanglewood Tales stories, and, together with the figures of Gothic fairy-lore, they were the only playmates, with the ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... the earth, to figure to himself happiness beyond the region which he knows. El Dorado, similar to Atlas and the islands of the Hesperides, disappeared by degrees from the domain of geography, and entered that of mythological fictions. ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V3 • Alexander von Humboldt
... not a mythological one, not Cupid's arrow, but a real arrow of very flexible wood, with a sharply-pointed tip at one end.... A very unpleasant sensation is produced by such an arrow, especially when it sticks ...
— The Diary of a Superfluous Man and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... other I have taken refuge in the term "adaptation"—even though the word applies only in part to my paraphrases. Some of the Fables in this book are translations in a true sense, and keep closely to the text. From others I have erased such political, mythological and literary allusions (in which La Fontaine abounds) as are either obsolete or unintelligible to ...
— Fables in Rhyme for Little Folks - From the French of La Fontaine • Jean de La Fontaine
... the husk of opposition. The defect is not that he defers too much to the purely pictorial, that he postpones the facts or the story to beauty, but that he does not defer enough, that he does not sufficiently trust his own eyes, but by way of further assurance drags in architecture, ships, mythological or Scripture stories, not caring for them himself, but supposing the spectator cares, so that they remain unassimilated, a scum floating on the surface and obscuring the work. Here is the "want of faith" with which, if any, he is justly ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... blossoms on the tea-rose, the aqua-marine tints of the Mediterranean Sea. Truly oriental they were, giving a hint of the Eastern origin of the Old One. Like some godmother in the fairy tale, like some ancient wife of mythological times, the Old One had wrought into these designs her own life. And what had been her thoughts during those long hours ...
— Virgilia - or, Out of the Lion's Mouth • Felicia Buttz Clark
... elegies. To deny praise to a performance which so many thousands have laboured to imitate, would be to judge with too little deference for the opinion of mankind: yet whoever shall read it with impartiality, will find that most of the images are of the mythological kind, and therefore easily invented; and that there are few sentiments of rational praise or ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... investigation, and would amply repay any trouble or attention that might be bestowed upon it. I allude to Metrical Charms, many of which are still preserved, and, in spite of the corruptions they have undergone in the course of centuries, would furnish curious and valuable illustrations of the Mythological System on which they ...
— Notes & Queries 1850.02.09 • Various
... planet. As already stated, Herschel named it, in compliment to George III., the Georgium Sidus; in this copying the example of Galileo with his "Medicaean stars." Afterwards, astronomers christened it Herschel, and subsequently Uranus, in conformity with the mythological nomenclature ...
— The Story of the Herschels • Anonymous
... from their popularity. He is less of a worshipper than any historian whom we can call to mind. Every political sect has its esoteric and its exoteric school, its abstract doctrines for the initiated, its visible symbols, its imposing forms, its mythological fables for the vulgar. It assists the devotion of those who are unable to raise themselves to the contemplation of pure truth by all the devices of Pagan or Papal superstition. It has its altars ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... times, we are told by Empedocles that "there are two destinies for the souls of highest virtue —to pass either into trees or into the bodies of lions."[28] Amongst the numerous illustrations of this mythological conception may be noticed the story told by Ovid,[29] who relates how Baucis and Philemon were rewarded in this manner for their charity to Zeus, who came a poor wanderer to their home. It appears that they not ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... tresses wins her gratitude and can secure from her for the hunters quantities of fish. It is interesting to note the similarity of the legend of Nerrvik to that of Jonah. But just as the Eskimos have changed the masculine sun of southern mythologies to the feminine, so the victim of the mythological sea storm in the ...
— The Eternal Maiden • T. Everett Harre
... ancient pieces may have been preserved. Even if the poems attributed to Amergin do not go back to the tenth century B.C., as has been claimed for them, they are in any case old enough to be archaic, and certain poems of the mythological cycle are undoubtedly ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... "tapping on her snuff-box," and frequently taking snuff. At this time nothing was so monstrous as the head-dresses of the ladies in Queen Anne's reign: they formed a kind of edifice of three stories high; and a fashionable lady of that day much resembles the mythological figure of Cybele, the mother of the gods, with three ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... any asker of curious questions, as he wanders about Rome, the very thinnest deposit of the past. Within the rococo gateway, which itself has a vaguely esthetic self-consciousness, at the end of the cypress walk, you will probably see a mythological group in rusty marble—a Cupid and Psyche, a Venus and Paris, an Apollo and Daphne—the relic of an age when a Roman proprietor thought it fine to patronise the arts. But I imagine you are safe in supposing ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... of the lower halls of the Louvre, carelessly leaning on his elbow and, with paternal kindliness, allowing himself to be climbed over by the little children which represent cubits, and the various phases of the inundation. Well, it was not under this mythological aspect that the great river appeared to me for the first time. It was flowing in flood, spreading out broadly like a torrent of reddish mud which scarcely looked like water as it swelled and rushed by irresistibly. It looked like a river of soil; scarcely did the reflection of the sky ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... artistic, the result could not be described as beautiful. The carver had thought proper to ornament the box with some of the ugliest figures I remember to have seen. They appeared to me to be devils. Or perhaps they were intended to represent deities appertaining to some mythological system with which, thank goodness, I am unacquainted. The pipe itself was worthy of the case in which it was contained. It was of meerschaum, with an amber mouthpiece. It was rather too large for ordinary smoking. But then, of course, one doesn't smoke ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... mythological repulsive deity who took part in the building of a bridge at the command of a ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... ramification still further we have to do with the special kinds of these products, that is, with the volitions, thoughts, appreciations and beliefs. In the undifferentiated associations they give us morals and habits, languages and enjoyments and mythological ideas, while the individually differentiated association gives political, legal and economic life, knowledge, art and religion: all of course merely as causal, not as teleological processes, and thus merely as psychological and not as historical ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... easily sound glib or irreverent. But are we less convinced that only tasks done joyfully, as labours of love, deserve the reward of fuller and finer powers, and obtain it? When Duerer thought of God, he did not only think of a mythological personage resembling an old king; he thought of a mind, an intention, "for God is perfect in goodness." Words so easily come to obscure what they were meant to reveal; and if we think how the notion ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... look at the most famous of Great Britain's public buildings, he will see emblems of the ridiculous; if he glance at the Calendar, he will ascertain that months and days have been named after, or mentioned in connection with, mythological beings or objects of profane adoration; and if he read the pages of the greatest authors, he will discover much that has assisted to keep alive the embers of superstition. Passing over heraldry and ancient edifices, ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... and black hair streaked with gray. There is something peculiarly alert and vivacious about all his movements; in short his appearance perfectly answers to what we know of him from his public life. One has a strange mythological feeling about the existence of people of whom one hears for many years without ever seeing them. While talking with Lord Palmerston I could but remember how often I had heard father and Mr. S. exulting over his foreign ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... visit Cambridge on June 3, to listen to a most valuable address by Professor Tosch, of Bonn, on Hittite and Aztec affinities. If you can meet me there and accept the hospitality of my college, the encounter may prove a turning point in Mythological and ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... resulting from the dismemberment have a sexual or procreative value. That is evident from the analysis of the parable, even without the support of mythological parallels. None the less let it be noticed that many cosmogonies assign the origin of the universe or at least the world or its life to the disintegrated parts of the body of a great animal or giant. In the younger Edda the dismemberment of the ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... be merely recorded in verse, the historian will deal with them far better; by means of circumlocutions and the intervention of the immortals, the free spirit, wracked by the search for epigrams having a mythological illusion, should plunge headlong and appear as the prophecy of a mind inspired rather than the attested faith of scrupulous exactitude in speech. This hasty composition may please you, even though it has not yet received its ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... poetic flattery. In her royal progresses through the kingdom, the universities and the nobles and the cities vied with one another in receiving her with plays, revels, masques, and triumphs, in the mythological taste of the day. "When the queen paraded through a country town," says Warton, the historian of English poetry, "almost every {79} pageant was a pantheon. When she paid a visit at the house of any of her nobility, at entering the hall she was saluted ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... and that their school learning carried them not as far as the letter, but only to the game of taw. How were they to be inspired by such subjects? From having seen Talma and Mademoiselle Georges flaunting in sham Greek costumes, and having read up the articles Eudamidas, Hecuba, in the "Mythological Dictionary." What a classicism, inspired by rouge, gas-lamps, and a few lines in Lempriere, and copied, half from ancient statues, and half from a naked guardsman at one shilling and sixpence ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... mind is bent on mythological comparisons, Capt. L'Estrange, 'tis but a poor compliment to a fair lady when a gallant officer compares her to three old Fates,—unless he qualifies the remark somewhat. Could you not add something about my fairy fingers weaving the destiny of man? I fear your quick French wits ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 5, Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 5, May, 1886 • Various
... little supper-table in the immense dining-room of the hotel, a room which been built after the proportions and decorated in the manner of an Egyptian temple. Their table was close to a column, which was decorated from pedestal to capital with the most familiar mythological figures of ancient Egypt. Tall lotus flowers with their green leaves decorated the lower portion of it. The whole thing certainly was an amazingly clever reproduction of one of the ancient columns of the famous hypostyle hall at Karnak. A gayer scene could hardly be imagined, for the bright colours ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... but is by no means a satisfactory explanation of its origin; for how was it arranged, and who was it that ordained at first, that the jackal should be the emblem of Anubis, the cat of Bast, the crocodile of Sebak, and so on? (3) Various mythological and quasi-historical accounts of the origin of the practice are given, such as that men long ago chose different animals for their standards in war, or that some early king, wishing to keep his subjects disunited, ordered that each nome should serve a different animal. It is also told ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... said that sprightly ladies, working between love and pleasure times, drew from the court fool for their conception of the mythological buffoon, reproducing Triboulet's great head; his mouth, proportionately large; his protruding eyes; his bowed back, short, twisted legs and long, muscular arms; and his nose far larger than that of Francis, who otherwise had the largest nose in ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... grandfather already wrote notes in current hand at the tail of his letters to his wife: and to the elder boys he had begun to print, with laborious care, sheets of childish gossip and pedantic applications. Here, for instance, under date of May 26th, 1816, is part of a mythological account of London, with a moral for the three gentlemen, "Messieurs Alan, Robert, and James Stevenson," to whom ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the production of Lyly's plays, and the strong or at any rate decided individuality of the author, keep them in a division almost to themselves. The mythological or pastoral character of their subject in most cases might not of itself have prevented their marking an advance in the dramatic composition of English playwrights. A Midsummer Night's Dream and much other work of Shakespere's show how far ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... has been confined to giving the meanings of obsolete or unusual words. There are many mythological allusions that call for explanation; but this, it is thought, any good dictionary of mythology will supply. The list of questions is not of course exhaustive, and is intended to be merely suggestive of the kind of study ...
— Rosalynde - or, Euphues' Golden Legacy • Thomas Lodge
... of our ancestors forms an important chapter in the history of the childhood of our race, and this fact has induced us to offer the public an English translation of the Eddas. The purely mythological portion of the Elder Edda was translated and published by A. S. Cottle, in Bristol, in 1797, and the whole work was translated by Benjamin Thorpe, and published in London in 1866. Both these works are now out of print. Of the Younger Edda we have likewise had two translations into English,—the ...
— The Younger Edda - Also called Snorre's Edda, or The Prose Edda • Snorre
... tendency, as we said, by the mere general tone in which he speaks of Beauty, for instance, "as it really is," of all that "really is," under its various forms; a manner of speaking, not explicit, but veiled, in various degrees, under figures, as at the end of the sixth book of The Republic, or under mythological fantasies, like those of the Phaedrus. He seems to have no inclination for the responsibilities of definite theory; for a system such as that of the Neo-Platonists for instance, his own later followers, who, in a kind of prosaic and cold-blooded ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... small panels in the Gallery at Padua (Nos. 42 and 43), attributed with a query to Giorgione. These are apparently fragments of some decorative series, of which the other parts are missing. The one represents "Leda and the Swan," the other a mythological subject, where a woman is seated holding a child, and a man, also seated, holds flowers. The latter recalls one of the figures in the National Gallery "Epiphany." The charm of these fragments lies in the exquisite landscapes, which, in minuteness ...
— Giorgione • Herbert Cook
... acquainted. But there is abundant direct evidence of the magnitude of this influence in certain spheres. I suppose it is not doubted that the Greek went to school with the Oriental for his primary instruction in reading, writing, and arithmetic; and that Semitic theology supplied him with some of his mythological lore. Nor does there now seem to be any question about the large indebtedness of Greek art to that of ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... of the sort called applied, i.e., added after the completion of the structure itself. Pictures in low relief covered the alabaster revetment. They depicted hunting-scenes, battles, deities, and other mythological subjects, and are interesting to the architect mainly for their occasional representations of buildings and details of construction. Above this wainscot were friezes of enamelled brick ornamented with symbolic ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... the mythological hypothesis an interpretation of the dream has been wanting. The conditions of its origin; its relationship to our psychical life when we are awake; its independence of disturbances which, during the state of sleep, seem to compel notice; its many peculiarities ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... no secret of it either. The chaste daughters of Apollo willingly left the slopes of Helicon and Parnassus at his call. Lady Helena paid him sincere compliments on his mythological visitants, and so did the Major, though ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... much the better, I am fond of mystery. There is almost always something to be gained when people begin by saying 'hush.' In any case you cannot do better than address yourself to your servant," continued the captain, resuming his mythological language. "You see in me the grandson of Hippocrates, the god of silence. So ...
— The Conspirators - The Chevalier d'Harmental • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... Magnifico; whosoever sang of arms, of love, of saints, of fools, was welcome, or he who, drinking and joking, kept the company amused. . . . And in order that the people might not be excluded from this new beatitude (a thing which was important to the Magnifico), he composed and set in order many mythological representations, triumphal cars, dances, and every kind of festal celebration, to solace and delight them; and thus he succeeded in banishing from their souls any recollection of their ancient greatness, in making them insensible to the ills ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead
... ran round the room, and was supported by decorated pilasters, which divided the walls into compartments. A coved ceiling sprang from the cornice, and both ceiling and walls were decorated with paintings, in distemper, of mythological subjects; the lower portion of the wall, however, having what is, I believe, termed a dado, ornamented with a diaper pattern, each square of which contained a conventional representation ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... Beauty of things. Thus it is that the poetic truths of old religions exquisitely vindicate themselves; thus we find, even we moderns, with our downward eyes and our wrinkled brows, that we still worship at the mythological altars of childlike divinities; and when we can get away from the distracting Bedlam of steam-shrieks and machinery, we behold the secrets of our own hearts, the Lares and Penates of our own households, reflected in the "white ideals" on antique ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... delicate hook for the spear shaft resembling those farther south. Since writing this paper two throwing-sticks from Sitka have been seen in many respects resembling this form, but covered all over their surfaces with characteristic Thlinkit mythological figures, and having iron hooks at the lower end of the shaft groove. Collected by Commodore John Rodgers, ...
— Throwing-sticks in the National Museum • Otis T. Mason
... chronological order, first, the relation of the Bible; then the Egyptian monuments and their revelations; and, thirdly, the information gathered by Pythagoras, Herodotus, and other philosophers and historians. To these three sources we may add the misty mixture of tradition and mythological events, whose beginnings as to period of time are indefinite. These are the sources from which we are to determine the origin and antiquity as well as ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... times—indeed, in both cases an acquaintance of his own,—and one taken from ancient history or legend. Jason, for his desertion of Hypsipyle and Medea, is the classical example of the first offence. Of this use of mythological persons we have many examples, but the typical flatterer of old time is a more curious selection, being a character in a play, whom Dante has ...
— Dante: His Times and His Work • Arthur John Butler
... Arabella had herself averted a catastrophe and dexterously turned the conversation in the nick of time. Mrs. Cricklander had a peculiarly unclassical brain, and found learning statistics about ancient philosophies and the names of mythological personages the most difficult of all. Fortunately in these days, even among the most polished, this special branch of cultivation was rather old-fashioned, Miss Clinker reflected, but still, as Mr. Derringham seemed determined to wander along this line (Arabella had unconsciously ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn
... ever increasing, which the sciences furnished. It lay in the logic of the case that some of these attempts should advance the bold claim to deal with all knowledge whatsoever and to offer a theory of the universe as a whole. Religion, both in its mythological and in its theological stages, had offered a theory of the universe as a whole. The great metaphysical systems had offered theories of the universe as a whole. Both had professed to include all facts. Notoriously both theology and metaphysics had dealt in most inadequate ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... only in the tragedies of Euripides and Seneca, but also in German dramas and operas of the eighteenth century which during his youth were frequently produced in Vienna. The immediate impulse to treat this story came to him when, in the summer of 1818, he chanced upon the article Medea in a mythological lexicon. His plan was soon formed and was made to embrace the whole history of the relations of Jason and Medea. For so comprehensive a matter Grillparzer, like Schiller in Wallenstein, found the limits of a single drama too narrow; and ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... verse. Action, therefore, fell into the background. Refinement, elevation was aimed at. In the place of Hodge, Dame Chat and their company, there now appeared gracious beings of perfect manners and speech; and since things Greek and mythological had become the fashion, Arcadian nymphs and swains, beauteous goddesses and Athenian philosophers were judged the most fitting to stand before the English court. In scene after scene fair ladies talk of love, reverend sages display their readiness in solving knotty problems, ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... inhabitants of Pandemonium; demon &c 980. diabolism; devilism^, devilship^; diabolology^; satanism, devil worship; manicheism; the cloven foot. Adj. satanic, diabolic, devilish; infernal, hellborn^. Mythological and other fabulous ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... flowed quietly at our feet. I could not but compare it to some familiar spirit, guiding us through the earth, and I dabbled my fingers in its tepid water, which sang like a naiad as we progressed. My good humor began to assume a mythological character. ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... despair, and in his light humors only careless indulgence in the vanities of this world and blindness to the eternal concerns of life. The pagan will not appreciate the delicacy of his art, and will find the abundance of his literary, mythological, historical, and geographical allusion, the compactness of his expression, and the maturity and depth of his intellect, a barrier calling for too much effort. Both will prefer Virgil—Virgil of "arms and the man," the story-teller, Virgil ...
— Horace and His Influence • Grant Showerman
... disappeared long ago, promising to return after a certain period, and to govern them in peace and happiness; and on the first appearance of the Spaniards on their coast, observing certain marks of resemblance between them and their mythological notions of this god, they believed their god of the air had returned, and was ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. III. • Robert Kerr
... etc.—In reference to works illustrative of poetical, mythological, scriptural, and historical associations connected with animals and plants, inquired for in No. 11. p. 173., many a literary man must ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 28. Saturday, May 11, 1850 • Various
... of his mythological and legendary lore "The Age of Fable," "The Age of Chivalry," and "Legends of Charlemagne" are included. Scrupulous care has been taken to follow the original text of Bulfinch, but attention should be called to some additional sections which have been inserted ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... from Semitic sources. They had their missionaries everywhere and aspired to found a universal philosophical religion. In their proselytizing activity they tried to assimilate to their pantheism the mythological religion of the masses, and thus they became the philosophical supporters of idolatry. Their greatest religious opponents were the Jews, who not only refused to accept their teachings, but preached to the nations ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... certain they had no reputation at first but as jests; and only later, by the very acceptance and adoption they find in the mouths of millions, turn out to be the wisdom of the hour. I am sure if this man had ruled in a period of less facility of printing, he would have become mythological in a very few years, like AEsop or Pilpay, or one of the Seven Wise Masters, by his fables and proverbs. But the weight and penetration of many passages in his letters, messages, and speeches, hidden ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... before a mythological gallery for Chaldaea, in which all the important members of the Mesopotamian pantheon shall take their places and be known by the names they bore in their own day, can be formed, but even now the principles upon which they were represented by art may be stated. The images ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... So, too, in Roman mythological poetry the well-known picture by Ovid is but one among the many exhibitions of this same belief in a primeval golden age—a Saturnian cycle; one of the constantly recurring attempts, so universal and so natural in the early history of man, to account for the ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... at one time I inclined to this view—that we had here merely (let us say) a tea-party at Apollo's; Dr. Drexel, too, wrote to me lately to express the same idea. But I must confess that nearly all the best archaeologists demand a definite mythological identification, and my colleague, Prof. Gardner, suggests a new view—that the scene is the so-called Judgement of Paris. This mythological incident was often depicted in ancient art, and—strange as it may sound—in the later versions Paris was not seldom omitted, Apollo ...
— Roman Britain in 1914 • F. Haverfield
... England earth would offer him. There were a few rose-bushes, however, and a number of apple-trees, probably the descendants of those planted by the Reverend Mr. Blackstone, the first settler of the peninsula; that half-mythological personage, who rides through our early annals, seated on ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... comfortable in such circumstances. The siren still wails, and like Ulysses and his companions I feel very much inclined to stuff my ears with wax. Indeed, peering out of my porthole through the mist, I almost seem to see the figures of the mythological voyager and his companions carved in ice, no doubt beguiled by the treacherous music of the siren. These are in reality our main terrors, ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... Chaldaean sources. We can scarcely doubt but that, in some way or other, there was a communication of beliefs—a passage in very early times, from the shores of the Persian Gulf to the lands washed by the Mediterranean, of mythological notions and ideas. It is a probable conjecture that among the primitive tribes who dwelt on the Tigris and Euphrates, when the cuneiform alphabet was invented and when such writing was first applied to the purposes of religion, a ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 1. (of 7): Chaldaea • George Rawlinson
... history and endeavored to galvanize them into English subjects, tickling the ears of the groundlings, as well as their royal patrons with Grecian and Roman translations of lofty allegorical and mythological conceptions. ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... references, certain channels of imagery, which were purely symbolical, and these could be defended only on the understanding that they produced on the mind of the reader, instantly and without effort, the illustrative effect required. For instance, with all these neo-classicists, the mythological allusions, which seem vapid and ridiculous to us, were simplified metaphor and a question of style. In short, it rested the jaded imagination of Europe, after Gongora and Marini, Donne and D'Aubigne, to sink back on a poetry which had taken a vow to ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... is a valuable book, though a worse use could hardly have been made of such fine material. Had the mythological or hunting stories of the Indians been written down exactly as they were received from the lips of the narrators, the collection could not have been surpassed in interest? both for the wild charm they carry with them, and the light they throw on a peculiar modification of life and mind. As it ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... needful in any case to point out my deviations from Mueller's text, and I have cleared the volume of all the load of mythological and historical notes which are usually appended to a translation of a classic, contenting myself with referring the non-classical reader to ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... thought, and the Knights of the Round Table familiar in almost every household. The romances of chivalry fall naturally into three general classes: those relating to Charlemagne and his peers; those relating to classical and mythological heroes; and, finally, the tales connected with King Arthur. The strong similarity which exists in the character and incidents of these three classes makes an acquaintance with one of them sufficient for the purpose of this work. The "Morte d'Arthur" and the romances ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... well, when both the winds and the sea are personified, and mentioned by their mythological names, as in Juvenal; but when they are mentioned in plain language, the application of the epithets suggested by me, is the most obvious; and accordingly my friend himself, in his imitation of the passage ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... these antique races as the artist has employed in painting them, not to speak of skill in deciphering allegories; but to be impressed with their wonderful richness, grandeur, and beauty, requires no learning, beyond a true eye and a mind capable of feeling. Besides, these mythological pictures, the symbolical men of history are introduced, such as Moses and Solon. The Grecian mythological part is not yet completed, the artist having reserved that to be done next summer; in it he intends to lay himself out as on a ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... found himself in what must have been once the salon of the family. The furniture was of faded tapestry; a spinning-wheel, an armoire of dark mahogany, miniatures, one very old and very ugly oil painting of some mythological subject, cracked with age, the gilt frame thick with fly-specks; a suit of Court clothes hung ostentatiously on a common nail—these were the impressions he received as he sat waiting to hear whether the ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... missionaries to India, China, Africa, Australia, and the islands of the Pacific. They expected to find that the heathen had no knowledge of a Supreme Being, and before they had mastered the idioms of their language, or become familiar with their mythological and cosmological systems, they reported them as utterly ignorant of God, destitute of the idea and even the name of a Supreme Being. These mistaken and hasty conclusions have, however, been corrected by a more intimate ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... He compares the message of Thorwald to the cormorant skimming over the waves, and says he will never take it. "Snap at flies," a very common Icelandic metaphor from fish rising to a fly. (7) Maurer thinks the allusion is here to some mythological legend on Odin's adventures which has not come down to us. (8) "He that giant's," etc., Thor. (9) "Mew-field's bison," the sea-going ship, which sails over the plain of the sea-mew. (10) "Bell's warder," the Christian priest whose bell-ringing ...
— Njal's Saga • Unknown Icelanders
... acknowledge its surpassing value and intrinsic beauty. Jacob Grimm, in a separate treatise, published in his Kleinere Schriften, said that the genuineness and extraordinary value of the Kalevala is easily proved by the fact that from its mythological ideas we can frequently interpret the mythological conceptions of the ancient Germans, whereas the poems of Ossian manifest their modern origin by their inability to clear up questions of old Saxon or German mythology. Grimm, furthermore, shows that both the Gothic and ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... hypocausts more numerous; the things themselves are those of the south. No mosaic, I believe, has ever come to light in the whole of Roman Britain which represents any local subject or contains any unclassical feature. The usual ornamentation consists either of mythological scenes, such as Orpheus charming the animals, or Apollo chasing Daphne, or Actaeon rent by his hounds, or of geometrical devices like the so-called Asiatic shields which are purely of classical origin.[1] Perhaps we may detect in Britain a special fondness ...
— The Romanization of Roman Britain • F. Haverfield
... large as a good-sized church, and through the throne-room, where the king opens the sessions of the Diet. Several were devoted to the Swedish orders of knighthood. The ceilings and walls of the state apartments are beautifully adorned with allegorical and mythological paintings. ...
— Up The Baltic - Young America in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark • Oliver Optic
... endowing their faces sometimes, as it seems to me, with almost human expressions. Whatever may be thought of the likelihood of these beasts being portrayed to look like men, certain it is that in the painted caves of this period the men almost invariably have animal heads, as if they were mythological beings, half animal and half human; or else—as perhaps is more probable—masked dancers. At one place, however—namely, in the rock shelter of Cogul near Lerida, on the Spanish side of the Pyrenees, we have a picture of a group of women ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... (pronounced bun-yup) A large mythological creature, said by the Aborigines to inhabit watery places. There may be some relation to an actual creature that is ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... infringement of universal laws justified on the plea, that the frequent introduction of mythological abstractions into ancient landscape requires an imaginary character of form in the material objects with which they are associated. Something of this kind is hinted in Reynolds's 14th Discourse; but nothing ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... further and maintain that in religions everything is mystery. For to impart truth, in the proper sense of the word, to the multitude in its raw state is absolutely impossible; all that can fall to its lot is to be enlightened by a mythological reflection of it. Naked truth is out of place before the eyes of the profane vulgar; it can only make its appearance thickly veiled. Hence, it is unreasonable to require of a religion that it shall be true in the proper sense of the word; and this, I may observe in passing, is now-a-days ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, A Dialogue, Etc. • Arthur Schopenhauer
... touched me, those peculiar thrills would not run through me. It was most discomforting, because it reminded me of love; and I knew that I never could love this half-baked little barbarian. I was very much interested in her account of the Wieroo, which up to this time I had considered a purely mythological creature; but Ajor shuddered so at even the veriest mention of the name that I was loath to press the subject upon her, and so the Wieroo still remained a ...
— The People that Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... beautiful descriptions of nature to be found in Greek poetry occur, incidentally only, in the choral odes introduced into their dramas; and among all their pictures of which we have any record there is not one that answers to the description of a landscape; the subject is always mythological or historical, and the representation of nature merely a setting for the main theme. And on the other hand, the art for which the Greeks are most famous, and in which they have admittedly excelled all other peoples, is that art of sculpture ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... the other hand, was closely modelled on that of the Alexandrian poets. The odes are largely founded on the best Greek lyric poetry, with which Horace was thoroughly familiar; cf. his first intention to write in Greek (Sat. i. 10, 31-5). Alexandrian influence is little seen, and his mythological allusions are seldom obscure. Examples of imitation (which is commonest in Book i.) are: Od. i. 9, the beginning of which is from Alcaeus (so i. 10; 11; 18); i. 12 (beginning) is from Pindar; i. 27 from Anacreon. Bacchylides is imitated, ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton
... even to moral evil,[52] became corrupted, under the influence of Parsism, by the conception of two kingdoms, of God and of the Devil. The angels, originally the messengers of Providence, became under mythological names, Gabriel, Raphael, Michael, &c., so many middle beings who filled the space between the Deity, existing apart from the world, and the world. The lower world (sheol, [Greek: aides]), formerly the general ...
— A Comparative View of Religions • Johannes Henricus Scholten
... Calpurnius Piso as his authority; this was the man who is well known in Roman history as the author of the first lex de repetundis of the year 149 B.C., a good statesman, but as an annalist much given to indulging a mythological fancy.[92] We happen to know that he wrote with happy confidence about the life and habits of Romulus, and a story about wine-drinking which he attributes to that king is obviously transferred to him from some more historical personage. Romulus ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... in the ship he had meant to sail by, and so escaped the fate of the crew and passengers when it went down with all on board—no "special providence" saving them. It looks like a reflection of the pagan mythological tales about heroes rescued by the timely interference of gods and goddesses in battles where thousands of common mortals perish unheeded. It is the aristocratic idea of privilege carried up to religion. The newer view is more democratic, and it seems to agree better with our Lord's ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... such folly, or rather stupidity, would have exasperated me too much. Besides, I should have been much less useful to the theater, for I should have lived in an everlasting wrangle with authors, actors, and managers on behalf of the mythological bodies supposed to preside over tragedy and comedy, and I should have killed myself (or perhaps been killed), and that quickly, with ineffectual protests against half the performances before the lamps, which are enough to make the angels weep and laugh—in short, go into hysterics, ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... Empire; those of all Greek and Roman writers, whose works are either extant or known to have exercised an influence upon their respective literatures; and, lastly, those of all the more important artists of antiquity. In the Mythological division may be noticed first, the discrimination, hitherto not sufficiently attended to, between the Greek and Roman mythology, and which in this volume is shown by giving an account of the Greek divinities under their Greek names, and the Roman divinities ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 59, December 14, 1850 • Various
... haunted my sleeping hours and still more inflamed my now thoroughly awakened manhood. Recently I had read the mythological tale of the three goddesses, Juno, Venus and Minerva appealing to the shepherd Paris for the prize of the golden apple; as drapery was very rare in those Pagan days, no doubt they stood before him in all the glories ...
— Forbidden Fruit • Anonymous
... accounts, Decameronian tales (Mr. Leyland once possessed some Botticellian illustrations of the tale of Nastagio degli Onesti, the hero of Dryden's "Theodore and Honoria," a sort of pendant to the Griseldis attributed to Pinturicchio), and mythological episodes: a new kind of invention, based upon a desire to please, and as different from the invention of the Giottesques as the Arabian ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... canonical books of the Jaina, apart from some mythological additions and evident exaggerations, contain the following important notes on the life of their last prophet. [Footnote: The statement that Vardhamana's father was a mighty king belongs to the manifest exaggerations. This assertion is refuted by other statements of the Jainas themselves. See Jacobi, ...
— On the Indian Sect of the Jainas • Johann George Buehler
... of Sir John Rh[^y]s, and I would be ungrateful if I did not record my indebtedness to him. In his Hibbert Lectures, and in his later masterly work on The Arthurian Legend, however, he took the standpoint of the "mythological" school, and tended to see in the old stories myths of the sun and dawn and the darkness, and in the divinities sun-gods and dawn-goddesses and a host of dark personages of supernatural character. The present writer, studying the subject rather from an anthropological point of view ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... conditions that then prevailed, to select the books that seemed to them to contain the truth. It is impossible to believe that if the majority at these Councils had supposed that such an account as the account in Genesis of the Creation was mythological, they would thus have attested its literal truth. It never occurred to them to doubt it, because they did not understand the principle that, while a normal event can be accepted, if it is fairly well confirmed, an abnormal event ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... chief, holds in his right hand, as a staff, his flint-headed spear, the ensign, it may be supposed, which marks him as the representative of the Caniengas, or "People of the Flint." Behind him another plumed figure bears in his hand a bow with arrows, and at his shoulder a quiver. Divested of its mythological embellishments, the picture rudely represents the interview which actually took place. The immediate result was unpromising. The Onondaga chief coldly refused to entertain the project, which he had already rejected when proposed by Hiawatha. The ambassadors were not discouraged. Beyond the Onondagas ...
— The Iroquois Book of Rites • Horatio Hale
... splendour; on which his Highness, a great lover of music and dancing, expended prodigious sums. It may be because I was then young, but I think I never saw such an assemblage of brilliant beauty as used to figure there on the stage of the Court theatre, in the grand mythological ballets which were then the mode, and in which you saw Mars in red-heeled pumps and a periwig, and Venus in patches and a hoop. They say the costume was incorrect, and have changed it since; but for my part, I have never seen a Venus more lovely than the Coralie, ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... in cipher. I read and catch a glimpse of hidden meaning; I read again, and it vanishes in mist. It seems to me a poem of symbols, dimly adumbrating truths, which my clouded intellect clutches at in vain. I have a sort of shadowy belief that 'Astarte,' as in its ancient mythological significance, symbolizes nature. There is a dusky vein of mystery shrouding her, which favors my idea of her as representing the universe. Manfred, with daring hand, tore away that 'Veil of Isis' which no mortal had ever pierced before, and, maddened by the mockery of the stony features, paid ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... responsible, personally, for the curious mixture of divinities and semi-divinities who figure in it. It is one of the distinguishing marks of this particular sort of New Poetry to pile up a confusion of more or less mythological names in a series of swinging and resonant lines. In one line the reader may imagine himself to be embarked in the River Cocytus. In the next, he will be surprised to find himself in Eden. Blood, battle, bumptiousness, and an aggressive violence, are special characteristics ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, July 23, 1892 • Various
... give you an impression of one of his figures by a strain of music. The idea of the modern faun was a charming one; but I think it a pity that the author should not have made him more definitely modern, without reverting so much to his mythological properties and antecedents, which are very gracefully touched upon, but which belong to the region of picturesque conceits, much more than to that of real psychology. Among the young Italians of to-day there are still plenty of ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... earth, Erda. "Step up, aged grandmamma! You have got to sing!" And Erda sings. Wagner's end has been achieved. Thereupon he immediately dismisses the old lady. "Why on earth did you come? Off with you! Kindly go to sleep again!" In short, a scene full of mythological awe, before which the Wagnerite wonders ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... good deal about the personages you mention from Bulfinch's "Age of Fable," from Alexander S. Murray's "Manual of Mythology," and from Mrs. Clement's "Handbook of Legendary and Mythological Art"; but the poems of Homer,—the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey,"—of both of which there are good English translations,—are the chief ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, October 1878, No. 12 • Various
... were a fiction, we should expect it to be detailed at length and not noticed allusively and rather obscurely—as we find it; 2) as MM. Croiset remark, if the poet needed a lay-figure the ordinary practice was to introduce some mythological person—as, in fact, is done in the "Precepts of Chiron". In a word, there is no more solid ground for treating Perses and his quarrel with Hesiod as fictitious than there would be for treating Cyrnus, the ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... opened proceeded with spirit and success. Under the mythological forms, room was found for opening all the great questions, on which Margaret and her friends wished to converse. Prometheus was made the type of Pure Reason; Jupiter, of Will; Juno, the passive side of the same, or Obstinacy; Minerva, ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... lacerations of the gods, and many other such symbols of the truth about divine natures which this theology conceals;—this mode he rejects, and asserts that it is in every respect most foreign from erudition. But he considers those mythological discourses about the gods as more persuasive and more adapted to truth, which assert that a divine nature is the cause of all good, but of no evil, and that it is void of all mutation, comprehending in itself the fountain of truth, but never becoming the ...
— Introduction to the Philosophy and Writings of Plato • Thomas Taylor
... However, whenever informants indicated that they considered their statements important I took them down word for word. If I felt some passing remark to have significance, I asked the informant to repeat it and often read it back to him for verification. Other stories, particularly those of a mythological nature, or semilegends, or experiences which were important to individual informants, were repeated voluntarily on almost every occasion of our meeting. Whenever statements are presented in quotation marks the material was gathered in ...
— Washo Religion • James F. Downs
... not intend to compare it, of course, to those ancient traditions which seem to have constituted a tie of relationship between the most distant nations in times anterior to history. These are mostly of a mythological character,—as, for instance, those referring to the existence of elementary spirits. Their connection with mankind has, in the earliest times, occupied the imagination of the most widely different races. A certain analogy we can easily explain by the affinity of human hearts and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... quite obvious. The god Hermes of the Greeks (Mercurius of the Romans) had the surname "Cyllenius," from the mountain where he was born — Mount Cyllene, in Arcadia; and the alteration into "Ballenus" would be quite within the range of a copyist's capabilities, while we find in the mythological character of Hermes enough to warrant his being classed with ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... of the hall are in the better instances either coated with panels of tinted marble, or parcelled out in bright bands or oblongs of paint, or decorated with pictures of mythological, architectural, and other subjects worked in bright colours upon darkened stucco. To our own taste these colours—red, yellow, bluish-green, and others—as seen at Pompeii, are often excessively crude and badly harmonised. But while ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... N. heaven; kingdom of heaven, kingdom of God; heavenly kingdom; throne of God; presence of God; inheritance of the saints in light. Paradise, Eden, Zion, abode of the blessed; celestial bliss, glory. [Mythological heaven] Olympus; Elysium[paradise], Elysian fields, Arcadia[obs3], bowers of bliss, garden of the Hesperides, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... masked men-the former in dresses as varied in hue as the fires of remorse burning out their unuttered thoughts. Two and two they jeer and crowd their way along into the spacious hall, the walls of which are frescoed in extravagant mythological designs, the roof painted in fret work, and the cornices interspersed with seraphs in stucco and gilt. The lights of two massive chandeliers throw a bewitching refulgence over a scene at once picturesque and mysterious; ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... get the things our young Canada can afford; things, too, of such a character and description as shall be useful, not only in elevating the taste of our youth, but of increasing their historical and mythological lore, as well as inform them of the facts of their accuracy in size and form. I was much flattered to find that my humble efforts to begin, in some degree, a Canadian gallery—by securing a few of Paul Kane's pictures in 1851—had been followed ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... generation. In all communities beyond the stage of barbarism a class of persons was set apart for this duty and no other. Thus, for example, in ancient Peru, one college of priests styled amauta, learned, had exclusive charge over the quipus containing the mythological and historical traditions; a second, the haravecs, singers, devoted themselves to those referring to the national ballads and dramas; while a third occupied their time solely with those pertaining to civil affairs. Such custodians preserved and prepared ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... after which date the marriage took place. On the morning sacred to lovers the poet (in a dream, of course, and this time conducted by the arch-dreamer Scipio in person) enters a garden containing in it the temple of the god of Love, and filled with inhabitants mythological and allegorical. Here he sees the noble goddess Nature, seated upon a hill of flowers, and around her "all the fowls that be," assembled as by time honoured custom on St. Valentine's Day, "when ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... the eye And appears to grow in, and grow out of, the sky And plays with the fancy, and baffles the sight. Only reach'd by the vast rosy ripple of light, And the cool star of eve, the Imperial Thing, Half unreal, like some mythological king That dominates all in a fable of old, Takes command of a valley as fair to behold As aught in old fables; and, seen or unseen, Dwells aloof over all, in the vast and serene Sacred sky, where the footsteps of spirits are furl'd 'Mid the clouds beyond which spreads the infinite world Of man's ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... Os Lusiades, or the Lusitanians (i.e., Portuguese), comprises ten books, containing 1102 stanzas in heroic iambics, and is replete with mythological allusions. Its outline is ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... superstitions of Scotland, as of other countries, are for the most part true antiquarian vestiges of the pagan creeds and customs of our earlier ancestors; our present Folk-lore being merely in general a degenerated and debased form of the highest mythological and medical lore of very distant times. A collection of the popular superstitions and practices of the different districts of Scotland now, ere (like fairy and goblin forms vanishing before the break of ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... struck with it, and noticing that he who was banished through the envy excited by his being styled the Just, was represented as unmoved as if the injustice of his countrymen no more affected the even tenour of his mind, than the passions of mortals disturb those of the mythological ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... devoted to an admiration of power, whether of masculine force or feminine beauty. It should be remembered, too, in her extenuation that since her arrival, she had been the unconscious priestess of a mythological worship, perhaps not more ennobling to her womanhood than that which distinguished an older Greek democracy. I think that Brown was dimly conscious of this. But his only confidant was Jack Hamlin, whose INFELIX reputation ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... FAIRIES' SABBATH and the FAIRY TUTOR. We now wish to develope a profounder analogy connecting them. We have compared them, as if ESTHETICALLY; we would now compare them MYTHOLOGICALLY—for, in our understanding, there lies at the very foundation of both tales A MYTHOLOGICAL ROOT—by whomsoever set, whether by Ernst Willkomm to-day, or by the population of the Lusatian mountains—three, six, ten centuries ago; or, in unreckoned antiquity, by the common Ancestors of the believers, who, in still unmeasured antiquity, brought ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... that I've not gone into it. Homeyer would have me think that all religions are but mythological creations invented to satisfy a species of sentimentality—a morbid craving in man for the unknown ...
— At Fault • Kate Chopin
... subject-matter. The first is addressed to the sun-god Tammuz, the husband of Istar, slain by the boar's tusk of winter, and sought by the goddess in the underground world. It is this visit which is described in the mythological poem known as the "Descent of Istar into Hades" ("Records of the Past," Vol. I, p. 143). The myth of Tammuz and Istar passed, through the Phoenicians, to the Greeks, among whom Adonis and Aphrodite represent the personages of the ancient Accadian ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous
... conception of the dramatic unity of the entire poem; and the volumes before us contain merely an enquiry into its meaning, bringing, at the same time, all the resources of modern scholarship and historical and mythological research to bear upon the obscurity of separate passages. It is the most difficult of all the Hebrew compositions—many words occurring in it, and many thoughts, not to be found elsewhere in the Bible. How difficult our translators found it may be seen by the number of words which they ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... still visible was discovered in 1838, and is remarkable for its painted inscriptions, and for its frescoes.[129] There were originally one hundred and seventy-five panels, but scarcely half that number are now to be seen. They represent animals, landscapes, caricatures, scenes from daily life, and mythological and dramatic subjects. One only is historical, and, according to Petersen, represents the Judgment of Solomon (see p. 271). This subject, although exceedingly rare, is by no means unique ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani
... notwithstanding all the endeavours of theologians to give it the appearance of the history of human beings, has preserved its mythological features with an outline and colouring, easily to be recognised by every son of Urania [Ur of the Chaldees is subsequently made to contain the root of Uranus]. We have just seen that the Egyptians have their harvest about the time ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 215, December 10, 1853 • Various
... lately seen. I do not much like Talfourd's Ion; but I mean to read it again. It contains pretty lines; but, to my thinking, it is neither fish nor flesh. There is too much, and too little, of the antique about it. Nothing but the most strictly classical costume can reconcile me to a mythological plot; and Ion is a modern philanthropist, whose politics and morals have been learned from the publications of the Society for the ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... are those of the men by whom they were told to me, viz. Penri, the aged chief of Piratori; Ishanashte of Shumunkot; Kannariki of Poropet (Jap. Horobetsu); and Kuteashguru of Sapporo. Tomtare of Y[u]rap does not appear for the reason mentioned above, which spoilt all his usefulness. The only mythological names which appear are Okikurumi, whom the Ainos regard as having been their civilizer in very ancient times, his sister-wife Turesh, or Tureshi[hi] and his henchman Samayunguru. The "divine symbols," of which such constant mention is made in the tales, are ...
— Aino Folk-Tales • Basil Hall Chamberlain
... Aphrodite, and too subdued for a Hebe, she would yet, with the adjunct of doves or nectar, have stood sufficiently well for either of those personages, if presented in a pink morning light, and with mythological scarcity ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... intellectual presentations of good men. Something besides them—deeper than them all—had to appear before any soul could be [p.198] converted to the things of Eternal Life. Here Eucken shows that metaphysical concepts such as the Trinity have tended to become purely anthropomorphic and mythological, probably necessary at a certain level of religion, but which have now been superseded by truer conceptions of life and existence. There is no longer any meaning in asking whether the Founder was a "mere man" or a God. He was an intermediate ...
— An Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy • W. Tudor Jones
... connection with this I began to sketch a clear summary of the form which the old original Nibelungen myth had assumed in my mind in its immediate association with the mythological legend of the gods—a form which, though full of detail, was yet much condensed in its leading features. Thanks to this work, I was able to convert the chief part of the material itself into a musical drama. It was only by degrees, however, and ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... The Gentle Shepherd, a pastoral that puts to shame the numerous semi-classical and mythological poems which appeared under that name in England. It is essentially a rural poem, in which the action and language harmonize with what we know, or think we know, of country manners and life. There is neither striking invention in the plot nor much individuality ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... revealed to the many. The solemn mystery of Egyptian and the grand scale of Assyrian civilization are best attested by the same trophies. How a Sphinx typifies the land of the Pyramids and all its associations, mythological, scientific, natural, and sacred,—its reverence for the dead, and its dim and portentous traditions! and what a reflex of Nineveh's palmy days are the winged lions exhumed by Layard! What more authentic tokens of Mediaeval piety and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... of their origin, at a time when they were still barbarous, and little removed from their primitive savage conditions, we shall find, the further we go back, the more vivid, general, and multiform will the mythological interpretation and conception of the world and its various phenomena appear to be; everything was personified by these primitive peoples in a way common to the animal ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... and futile reasonings, derived from the scattered passages of some early writers, from the ambiguous silence of others—and, above all, from the dreams of etymological analogy or mythological fable, I believe the earliest civilizers of Greece to have been foreign settlers; deducing my belief from the observations of common sense rather than from obscure and unsatisfactory research. I ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of early mythological reading, the sailor burst into a loud laugh and walked about slapping ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle |
