"Proteus" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... up-gather'd now like sleeping flowers; For this, for everything, we are out of tune; It moves us not.—Great God! I'd rather be A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn; So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... brainless brothers stand, One cell there is, concealed from vulgar eye. The cave of Poverty and Poetry. Keen, hollow winds howl through the bleak recess, Emblem of music caused by emptiness. Hence bards, like Proteus long in vain tied down, Escape in monsters, and amaze the town. Hence Miscellanies spring, the weekly boast Of Curll's chaste press and Lintot's rubric post; Hence hymning Tyburn's elegiac lines; Hence Journals, Medleys, Mercuries, Magazines, Sepulchral lies, our holy walls to grace, And New-year ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... these? And what their sin?"—They fell by one disease! (Not by the Proteus maladies, that strike Man into nothingness—not twice alike;) By the blue pest, whose gripe no art can shun, No force unwrench—out-singled one by one; When like a timeless birth, the womb of Fate Bore a new death, of unrecorded date, And doubtful ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19. No. 575 - 10 Nov 1832 • Various
... families besides the Cuthites, who occupied the lower provinces towards the sea. The towers which were there raised served for lighthouses, and were, at the same time, temples, denominated from some title of the Deity, such as Canoph, Caneph, Cneph; also Perses, Proteus, Phanes, and Canobus. They were on both accounts much resorted to by mariners, and enriched with offerings. Here were deposited charts of the coast, and of the navigation of the Nile, which were engraved on pillars, and in aftertimes sketched out upon the ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume II. (of VI.) • Jacob Bryant
... call it Pharos [Footnote: Pha'- ros.], and it is distant one day's voyage for a ship, if the wind bloweth fair in her wake. Here did the gods keep me twenty days, nor did the sea winds ever blow. Then all my corn would have been spent, and the lives also of my men lost, if the daughter of Proteus [Footnote: Pro'-teus.]had not taken pity on me. Her heart was moved to see me when I wandered alone, apart from my company, for they all roamed about the island, fishing with hooks because hunger gnawed them. So she stood by me and spake, saying: ...
— The Story Of The Odyssey • The Rev. Alfred J. Church
... For this, for every thing, we are out of tune; It moves us not—Great God! I'd rather be A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn; So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus coming from the sea; Or hear old Triton ...
— Poems In Two Volumes, Vol. 1 • William Wordsworth
... then have become extinct, excepting in their present secluded abodes. Far from feeling surprise that some of the cave-animals should be very anomalous, as Agassiz has remarked in regard to the blind fish, the Amblyopsis, and as is the case with the blind Proteus, with reference to the reptiles of Europe, I am only surprised that more wrecks of ancient life have not been preserved, owing to the less severe competition to which the scanty inhabitants of these dark abodes will have ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... beneath the playfulness, when it was pleaded that two of the youths had oars at Cambridge, "Freshwater fish, my dears. I wish you would wait for us! I don't want you to attend the submarine wedding of our old friends Tame and Isis." To which Pica rejoined, likewise talking out of Spenser, that Proteus would provide a nice ancient nymph to tend on them. Her father then chimed in, saying, "You will spare our nerves by keeping to dry land unless you can secure the ancient mariner who was ...
— More Bywords • Charlotte M. Yonge
... now stands, to diffuse its ceaseless floods of knowledge, to spread its resistless aegis over the poor and the oppressed, and ever to use its vast power to extend liberty and crush injustice, whatever shape the Proteus assumes, whether it sits upon a throne or lurks in a ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... Mechanics' Institution, and hear an able and stimulating discourse on education, admirably adapted to the peculiar capacity of his auditors; and, toward ten perhaps, at a Literary and Scientific Institution in Marylebone, the same Proteus-like intellect might be found expounding the intricacies of physical science with a never tiring and elastic power. Yet, during all these multitudinous exertions, time would be found for the composition of a discourse on Natural Theology, that bears no marks of haste or excitement of ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... buried close to the house. The author of 'La Cite Antique' cites, among other ancient texts bearing upon the subject, an interesting invocation from the tragedy of Helen, by Euripides:—"All hail! my father's tomb! I buried thee, Proteus, at the place where men pass out, that I might often greet thee; and so, even as I go out and in, I, thy son Theoclymenus, call upon thee, father! ..." But in ancient Japan, men fled from the neighbourhood of death. It was long the custom to abandon, either temporarily, or permanently, the house ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... notary public, of the scrivener, and sometimes, we fear, of the sheriff's officer in arranging for special bail. These very uncanonical services one might have fancied sufficient, with spinning and spelling, for filling up the temporal cares of any one man's time. But this restless Proteus masqueraded through a score of other characters—as seedsman, harvester, hedger and ditcher, etc. We have no doubt that he would have taken a job of paving; he would have contracted for darning old Christopher's ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... equilibrium; vacillation &c. (irresolution) 605; fluctuation, vicissitude; alternation &c. (oscillation) 314. restlessness &x. adj. fidgets, disquiet; disquietude, inquietude; unrest; agitation &c. 315. moon, Proteus, chameleon, quicksilver, shifting sands, weathercock, harlequin, Cynthia of the minute, April showers[obs3]; wheel of Fortune; transientness &c. 111[obs3]. V. fluctuate, vary, waver, flounder, flicker, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... prosperity to supply man's wants or satisfy his aspirations. This is a great part of Carlyle's teaching. It is impossible, were it desirable, accurately to define his religious, social, or political creed. He swallows formulae with the voracity of Mirabeau, and like Proteus escapes analysis. No printed labels will stick to him: when we seek to corner him by argument he thunders and lightens. Emerson complains that he failed to extract from him a definite answer about Immortality. Neither by syllogism nor by crucible ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... looks thy world around, Where form and life and reasoning man are found; He loves the mind, in all its modes, to trace, And all the manners of the changing race; Silent he walks the road of life along, And views the aims of its tumultuous throng: He finds what shapes the Proteus-passions take, And what strange waste of life and joy they make, And loves to show them in their varied ways, With honest blame or with unflattering praise: 'Tis good to know, 'tis pleasant to impart, These turns ...
— The Borough • George Crabbe
... the Teacher's trick of repetition, but then he is 'so rare a wondered teacher,' so rich in magical resources, that he does not often find it necessary to weary the sense with sameness. He is prodigal in variety. It is a Proteus repetition. But his charge to his Ariel in getting up his ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... of the Augustan Age Perused in Virgil's golden page, The story of the secret won From Proteus by Cyrene's son— How the dank sea-god showed the swain Means to restore his hives again. More briefly, how a slaughtered bull Breeds honey by ...
— Songs from Books • Rudyard Kipling
... workmanship {even} exceeded the material; for there Mulciber had carved the sea circling round the encompassed Earth; and the orb of the Earth, and the Heavens which hang over that orb. {There} the waves have {in them} the azure Deities, both Triton, sounding {with his shell}, and the changing Proteus, and AEgeon,[1] pressing the huge backs of whales with his arms; Doris,[2] too, and her daughters, part of whom appear to be swimming, part, sitting on the bank, to be drying their green hair; some {are seen} borne upon fishes. The features in all are not the same, nor, however, ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... And, out of endeavor To change and to flow, The gas become solid, And phantoms and nothings Return to be things, And endless imbroglio Is law and the world,— Then first shalt thou know, That in the wild turmoil, Horsed on the Proteus, Thou ridest ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... Proteus in my gripe? How fix him down in one enduring type? Turn to the poor: their megrims are as strange; Bath, cockloft, barber, eating-house, they change; They hire a boat; your born aristocrat Is not more squeamish, ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... with Oriental shadows; we pass from the unveiled Zeus to the veiled Isis. Homer himself gets colored with touches of Oriental mystery. The Egyptian part of this Fourth Book, therefore, will show a transformation of style as well as of thought, and changeful Proteus will become a true image of the Poet. The work will manifest a symbolic tendency; it will have an aroma of the wisdom of the East, taught in forms of the parable, the apologue, with hints of allegory. The world, thrown outside ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... MOTHE-FENELON was born in Perigord (1651), of an ancient and illustrious family. Of one whose intellect and character were infinitely subtle and complex, the blending of all opposites, it is possible to sustain the most conflicting opinions, and perhaps in the end no critic can seize this Proteus. Saint-Simon noticed how in his noble countenance every contrary quality was expressed, and how all were harmonised: "Il fallait faire effort pour cesser de le regarder." During the early years of his clerical career he acted ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... essential part of the organisation of vertebrates. Yet the mole, which habitually makes no use of the sense of sight, has eyes so small that they can hardly be seen; and the aspalax, whose habits-resemble a mole's, has totally lost its sight, and shows but vestiges of eyes. So also the proteus, which inhabits ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... thus greeted them? The bay seemed perfectly lonely. Not a sound was to be heard but the regular dip of the oars, the cry of a startled bird, and the splash of a flock of seals, which had been sunning themselves on the shore, and which floundered into the sea like Proteus' flock of yore before Ulysses. Would that Proteus himself had still been there to be captured and interrogated! For the place was so entirely deserted that, saving for the remains of the wreck, he must have believed ...
— A Modern Telemachus • Charlotte M. Yonge
... seemed gradually to subside, and a calm to succeed. His look and bearing changed; something of depression seemed to steal over him; his voice became deep and melancholy, and the first syllables which he uttered showed this Proteus recalled to himself, and tamed by two words. "Hapless existence!" he exclaimed; then pausing, seemed to muse, and after a while continued, "'tis but too true; comedian or tragedian, all for me is ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... no one slander Proteus and Thetis, or introduce in tragedies, or any other poems, Hera transformed into the guise of a ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... he himself came home in the eighth year after the fall of Troy. He had heard from Proteus, the Old Man of the Sea, that Odysseus was alive, and a captive on an island of the deep. Menelaus invites Telemachus to Stay with him for eleven days or twelve, which Telemachus declines to do. It will later appear that ...
— DONE INTO ENGLISH PROSE • S. H. BUTCHER, M.A.
... and without dread and perplexity, those arts of peace from which my cares have been hitherto so forcibly diverted? The ear of Fancy, it is said, can discover the voice of sea-nymphs and tritons amid the bursting murmurs of the ocean; would that I could do so, and that some siren or Proteus would arise from these billows, to unriddle for me the strange maze of fate in which I am so deeply entangled!—Happy friend!" he said, looking at the bed where Dinmont had deposited his bulky person, "thy cares are confined to the narrow round of a healthy and thriving occupation! Thou ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... navigation along there. The Proteus was nipped and crushed to kindling in about that same latitude ... h'm" ... Bennett tugged at his mustache. Then, suddenly, as if coming to himself: "Well—these temperatures now. Where were we? 'Eight hundred and seventy-four fathoms, ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... would admire them) at the caverns of Adelsberg, in Carniola (in the south of Austria, near the top of the Adriatic), which runs, I believe, for miles in length; and in the lakes of which, in darkness from its birth until its death, lives that strange beast, the Proteus a sort of long newt which never comes to perfection—I suppose for want of the genial sunlight which makes all things grow. But he is blind; and more, he keeps all his life the same feathery gills which newts have when they are babies, and which we have so often looked at through the microscope, ...
— Madam How and Lady Why - or, First Lessons in Earth Lore for Children • Charles Kingsley
... their true names: Zeus (Jupiter), Hera (Juno), Athena (Minerva), Apollo, Artemis (Diana), Hermes (Mercury), Hephaistos (Vulcan), Hestia (Vesta), Ares (Mars), Aphrodite (Venus), Poseidon (Neptune), Amphitrite, Proteus, Kronos (Saturn), Rhea (Cybele), Demeter (Ceres), Persephone (Proserpina), Hades (Pluto), Dionysos (Bacchus). It is this little group of gods that men worshipped in all the temples, that men ordinarily invoked ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... fisherman, whom we saw throwing his nets from an insulated rock at some distance from the shore, and whom a very trifling exertion of fancy might have converted into some sea divinity, a Glaucus, or a Proteus, formed altogether a picture of the most wonderful and luxuriant beauty. In England there is a peculiar charm in the soft aerial perspective, which even in the broadest glare of noonday, blends and masses the forms of the distant landscape; and in that mingling of colours into a cool ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... took his proper form, and began to question me. 'Son of Atreus,' he said, 'who hath taught thee how to make me a prisoner? What is it thou wouldst know?' 'Tell me what god is angry with me, O Proteus,' I replied. 'Why am I detained on this island? Why can I not reach my home?' 'Thou didst not make acceptable sacrifices to Zeus,' said Proteus. 'And thou wilt never see thy home again until thou hast offered up a hundred ...
— Odysseus, the Hero of Ithaca - Adapted from the Third Book of the Primary Schools of Athens, Greece • Homer
... earl, not to have welcomed the union between thy power and my wit. Thou goest to a court where without wit power is nought. Who may foresee the future? Marry, that was a wise ancient fable, that he who seized and bound Proteus could extract from the changeful god the prophecy of the days to come. Yea! the man who can seize Fate can hear its voice predict to him. And by my own heart and brain, which never yet relinquished what affection yearned for, or thought aspired to, I read, as in a book, Anne, that thou shalt ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... doubt of it! The deeper that you look, sir, All your ancient poets tell you just the same as me,— What about old Ovid and his most indecent book, sir, Morphosizing females into flower and star and tree? What about old Proteus and his 'ighly curious 'abits, Mixing of his old grey beard into the old grey sea? What about old Darwin and the hat that brought forth rabbits, Mud and slime that growed into the pomp of Ninevey? What if there should be One ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... declared concerning wit: "It is, indeed, a thing so versatile, multiform, appearing in so many shapes and garbs, so variously apprehended of several eyes and judgments, that it seemeth no less hard to settle a clear and certain notion thereof than to make a portrait of Proteus, or to define the figure of the fleeting wind." Nor is it fitting to attempt exact distinctions between wit and humor, which are essentially two aspects of one thing. It is enough to realize that humor is the product of nature rather than of art, while wit is the ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... special organ, and what will be the organ that nature will form before any others, and which in the simplest animal is the only one constantly found; this is the alimentary canal, the principal organ of digestion common to all except colpodes, vibrios, proteus (amoeba), volvoces, monads, etc. ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... thorough Sestos, from her tower To Venus' temple, where unhappily, As after chanc'd, they did each other spy. So fair a church as this had Venus none: The walls were of discolour'd jasper-stone, Wherein was Proteus carv'd; and over-head A lively vine of green sea-agate spread, Where by one hand light-headed Bacchus hung, And with the other wine from grapes out-wrung. Of crystal shining fair the pavement was; The town of Sestos call'd it ...
— Hero and Leander and Other Poems • Christopher Marlowe and George Chapman
... Avon. From the opposite shore the richly cultivated lands of Somersetshire present themselves in a very beautiful landscape, rising gradually four or five miles from the verge of the river to the top of Dundry Hill, whereon is a high tower, esteemed the Proteus of the weather, as being commonly enveloped with mist, so as scarcely to be visible, against rain; but, on the contrary, if it be seen clear and distinct in the morning, it denotes the approach of a ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 390, September 19, 1829 • Various
... what he "likes" with them; and is, by divine law, answerable for his liking. And, even at this late hour of the day, it is still conceivable that such of them as would verily prefer to see, suppose, instead of a tramp with a harmonium, Orpheus with his lute, or Arion on his dolphin, pleased Proteus rising beside him from the sea,—might, standing on the "pleasant lea" of Margate or Brighton, have ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... Sometimes I cast my nets in our wake, and I pull them up ready to burst. Sometimes I go hunting right in the midst of this element that has long seemed so far out of man's reach, and I corner the game that dwells in my underwater forests. Like the flocks of old Proteus, King Neptune's shepherd, my herds graze without fear on the ocean's immense prairies. There I own vast properties that I harvest myself, and which are forever sown by the hand of the Creator ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... he is, he has a keen eye to profits, he talks roughly to those who know less than he does; he has learned to act a part, he pretends to love his pictures, or again he lets you know the price he himself gave for the things, he offers to let you see the memoranda of the sale. He is a Proteus; in one hour he can be Jocrisse, Janot, Queue-rouge, Mondor, ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... to his relief, the former observing, "There can be no deception here," when the applicant was suddenly pounced upon by an officer, as one of the greatest impostors in the Metropolis, who, with the eyes of Argus, could transform themselves into a greater variety of shapes than Proteus, and that he had been only fifty times, if not more, confined in different houses of correction as an incorrigible rogue and vagabond, from one of which he had recently contrived to effect his escape. The officer now bore off his prize in triumph, while Dashall, hitherto "the ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... Macduff's grief is in harmony with the whole play! It rends, not dissolves, the heart. 'The tune of it goes manly.' Thus is Shakspeare always master of himself and of his subject,—a genuine Proteus:—we see all things in him, as images in a calm lake, most distinct, most accurate,—only more splendid, more glorified. This is correctness in the only philosophical sense. But he requires your sympathy and your submission; ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... street, not by the usual channel, but by a blue-coated serving-man. Two or three days later Humfrey had told him of Langston's interview with Walsingham, which he had at the time laughed to scorn, thinking himself able to penetrate any disguise of that Proteus, and likewise believing that he was ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... my own fashion and popularity. I was sent for to all parties of pleasure, both of men or women; where, in some measure, I gave the 'ton'. This gave me the reputation of having had some women of condition; and that reputation, whether true or false, really got me others. With the men I was a Proteus, and assumed every shape, in order to please them all: among the gay, I was the gayest; among the grave, the gravest; and I never omitted the least attentions of good-breeding, or the least offices of friendship, that could either please, ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... You'll mark in plenty, la Proteus: A bear become a little horse— Presumably from too much throat-use! A thousandfold must go untold; But, should you miss your farm-yard sunny, And miss your ducks and drakes, behold We'll make you ...
— In Divers Tones • Charles G. D. Roberts
... Jacob, the fourth in Thessaly in the time of Deucalion and Pyrrha, in the days of Moses according to Isidore, in 782 as given by Juan Annius. The fifth flood is mentioned by Xenophon as happening in Egypt in the time of Proteus. The sixth was this which destroyed so great a part of the Atlantic Island and sufficed so to separate the part that was left unsubmerged, that all mortals in Asia, Africa and Europe believed that all were drowned. Thus was lost the intercourse and commerce of the people ...
— History of the Incas • Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa
... raised; that he had returned to the Court at Poitiers, where the King stayed during the siege of Brouage, to be near to M. de Mayenne, in order to afford him whatever succours he stood in need of; that, as the Court is a Proteus, forever putting on a new face, he had found it entirely changed, so that he had been no more considered than if he had done the King no service whatever; and that Bussi, who had been so graciously looked upon before and during this last war, had done great personal service, and had lost a brother ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various
... expiates, and which promises the remission of crimes, if it restrains any, it encourages the great number to commit evil. Notwithstanding His immutability, God is, in all the religions of this world, a veritable Proteus. His priests show Him now armed with severity, and then full of clemency and gentleness; now cruel and pitiless, and then easily reconciled by the repentance and the tears of the sinners. Consequently, men face the Deity in the manner which conforms the most to their present interests. ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... believe that he has been, and still continues, beneath the waters of Lake Kirdall, it has been impossible to find any trace of him anywhere around there. One would almost fancy he had the power of making himself invisible, this Proteus of ...
— The Master of the World • Jules Verne
... did not gather to be dreaded, or not with a like fear. The spirit of Aana that ate souls is certainly a fearsome inmate; but the high gods, even of the archipelago, seem helpful. Mahinui—from whom our convict-catechist had been named— the spirit of the sea, like a Proteus endowed with endless avatars, came to the assistance of the shipwrecked and carried them ashore in the guise of a ray fish. The same divinity bore priests from isle to isle about the archipelago, and by his aid, within the century, persons have been ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... on one of the two glory-smitten summits of the poetic mountain, with Milton as his compeer, not rival. While the former darts himself forth, and passes into all the forms of human character and passion, the one Proteus of the fire and the flood; the other attracts all forms and things to himself, into the unity of his own ideal. All things and modes of action shape themselves anew in the being of Milton; while Shakespeare becomes all things, yet for ever ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... with "homely" the entire event of the tragedy turning on betrayal of home duty. Hermione ([Greek: erma]), "pillar-like," ([Greek: he eidos eche chryses 'Aphrodites]). Titania ([Greek: titene]), "the queen;" Benedict and Beatrice, "blessed and blessing;" Valentine and Proteus, enduring (or strong), (valens), and changeful. Iago and Iachimo have evidently the same root—probably the Spanish Iago, Jacob, "the supplanter," Leonatus, and other such names, are interpreted, or played with, in the plays themselves. For the interpretation of Sycorax, ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... much enlightened by what he had permitted me to see. "Anaerobic bacilli and spores," he replied, excitedly. "The things that produce the well-known 'gas gangrene' of the trenches, the gas phlegmon bacilli—all sorts, the bacillus aerogenes capsulatus, bacillus proteus, pyogenic cocci, and others, actively gas-forming microbes that can't live in air. The method I took to develop and discover them was that of Col. Sir Almroth Wright of the ...
— The Treasure-Train • Arthur B. Reeve
... personifies Paris, to which, in the long run, she supplies the toothless portresses, washerwomen, street-sweepers, beggars, occasionally insolent countesses, admired actresses, applauded singers; she has even given, in the olden time, two quasi-queens to the monarchy. Who can grasp such a Proteus? She is all woman, less than woman, more than woman. From this vast portrait the painter of manners and morals can take but a feature here and there; the ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... said he, "if I had begun to speak about Cistercian abbeys, I should have been sure to get on crystals presently; and if I had begun upon crystals, I should soon have drifted into architecture." Those who conceive of Ruskin as being thus a kind of literary Proteus like to point to the year 1860, that of the publication of his tracts on economics, as witnessing the greatest and suddenest of his changes, that from reforming art to reforming society; and it is true that this year affords a simple dividing-line ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... to consume that day, Which without Pastime flies too swift away! See how they labour, as if Day and Night Were both too short to serve their loose Delight? See how their curved Bodies wreath, and skrue Such Antick Shapes as Proteus never knew: One rapps an Oath, another deals a Curse, He never better bowl'd, this never worse; One rubs his itchless Elbow, shrugs and laughs, The t'other bends his Beetle-brows, and chafes; Sometimes they whoop, sometimes ...
— The School of Recreation (1696 edition) • Robert Howlett
... to make his fortune in this ancient capital of the world must be a chameleon susceptible of reflecting all the colours of the atmosphere that surrounds him—a Proteus apt to assume every form, every shape. He must be supple, flexible, insinuating; close, inscrutable, often base, sometimes sincere, some times perfidious, always concealing a part of his knowledge, indulging ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... Proteus—came to the rescue at last,' said Guy, laughing; 'I could not stir, and the tree bent so frightfully with the current that I expected every minute we should all go together; so I had nothing for it but to halloo as loud as I could. ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Proteus, the two gentlemen, are friends. Valentine is about to travel. Proteus, in love with Julia, will not go with him. Antonio, Proteus' father, sends Proteus after Valentine. Julia resolves to follow him in ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... After describing the camp and the Roman road which still exist in the mind's eye of the antiquaries, he might then go on to tell of holy St. Servan's feats in the way of detecting sheep-stealers by making them, like Speed under the influence of Proteus' reasoning, cry "Baa," or relate some such pretty human story as that of how he turned water into wine for the sake of a sick monk, or unfold the thrilling tale of how he fought the Dovan dragon, as Wyntoun sings, or at ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... to judge him by his own utterances? The reason is that all of his writing is playful, and we know it. The instinct at the bottom of all mimicry is self-concealment. Hence the illusive and questionable personality of Stevenson. Hence our blind struggle to bind this Proteus who turns into bright fire and then into running water under our hands. The truth is that as a literary force, there was no such man as Stevenson; and after we have racked our brains to find out the mechanism which has been vanquishing the chess ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... to him the man, the tree, the lamp-post and the fire-escape become not clearly distinguishable; this barbarous logic prevails against the logic in Barbara, and the syllogism is in the predicament of Humpty Dumpty. In this predicament was the Poet Laureate. The miscreant Proteus (could not) escape these chains!" So the miscreant Proteus—no bad name for an old actor—took his little cocked hat and marched, a smaller, if not a wiser man. Some disjointed words fell from him: "Mimicry ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... VERTUMNUS, the Proteus of the Roman ritual, was the god of tradesmen, and, from the power he had of assuming any shape, was believed to preside over the thoughts of mankind. His courtship of Pom{o}na makes one of the most elegant and entertaining stories in Ovid. The Romans esteemed him the god of tradesmen, from ...
— Roman Antiquities, and Ancient Mythology - For Classical Schools (2nd ed) • Charles K. Dillaway
... for I knew that she was no mortal woman. But her look was gracious, and her voice was sweet; so I took courage as she said: 'Who art thou, stranger, and why lingerest thou with thy company in this desert place? I am Eidothea, daughter of Proteus, the ancient one of the sea; and I am ready to help thee, if thou wilt ...
— Stories from the Odyssey • H. L. Havell
... the truth gives you pain, pray remember it gives me agony. However, I must tell you the man was not what he looked, a mere blacksmith; he is a sort of Proteus, who can take all manner of shapes: at the time I'm speaking of, he was a maker of carving tools. Well, sir, you could hardly believe the effect of this accidental interview with that man: the next day, when I renewed ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... for ill deed unforgiven, Till Priam's self might pity us. Witness the star of bane Minerva sent; Euboea's cliffs, Caphereus' vengeful gain! 260 'Scaped from that war, and driven away to countries sundered wide, By Proteus' Pillars exiled now, must Menelaues bide; And those AEtnaean Cyclop-folk Ulysses look upon: Of Pyrrhus's land why tell, or of Idomeneus, that won To ruined house; of Locrian men cast on the Libyan shore? Mycenae's lord, the duke and king ...
— The AEneids of Virgil - Done into English Verse • Virgil
... born poseur, who passes his life in cloud-castles where he always dramatizes himself as the hero, who has no continuity of purpose, and no capacity of self-sacrifice except in spasms of impulse, and in emotional feeling which is real to itself; a spiritual Proteus who deceives even himself, and only now and then recognizes his own moral illusiveness, like Hawthorne's scarecrow-gentleman before the mirror: but with the irresistible instincts also of the born literary creator and constructor. The other characters are drawn with great power ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... have betrayed them. On the next morning Telemachus told the story of the ruin of his home; Menelaus prophesied the end of the suitors, then preceded to recount how in Egypt he waylaid and captured Proteus, the changing god of the sea, whom he compelled to relate the fate of the Greek leaders and to prophesy his own return; from him he heard that Odysseus was with Calypso who kept him by force. On learning this important piece of news Telemachus was eager to return to ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... Mardi Gras in New Orleans the Krewe of Proteus holds its parade and ball. The parade is a most dazzling and magnificent spectacle, and the ball ...
— Frank Merriwell Down South • Burt L. Standish
... the first carp had eaten the bread my father threw to it, Mr. Caxton had mentally resolved that a race so confiding should never be sacrificed to Ceres and Primmins. But all the fishes on my uncle's property were under the special care of that Proteus Bolt; and Bolt was not a man likely to suffer the carps to earn their bread without contributing their full share to the wants of the community. But, like master, like man! Bolt was an aristocrat fit to be hung a la lanterne. He out-Rolanded ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... interesting observation of Goldmann's deserves mention here. Goldmann found in preparations of the pancreas of proteus sanguineus, containing parasites, that the eosinophil cells in the neighbourhood of the encapsuled parasites were much increased, whereas they were sought for in ...
— Histology of the Blood - Normal and Pathological • Paul Ehrlich
... punishment and the reward of guilt, a crew Priam's self might pity; as Minerva's baleful star knows, and the Euboic reefs and Caphereus' revenge. From that warfaring driven to alien shores, Menelaus son of Atreus is in exile far as Proteus' Pillars, Ulysses hath seen the Cyclopes of Aetna. Shall I make mention of the realm of Neoptolemus, and Idomeneus' household gods overthrown? or of the Locrians who dwell on the Libyan beach? Even the lord of Mycenae, the mighty Achaeans' general, sank on his own threshold edge under his accursed ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... flowers— For this, for everything, we are out of tune; It moves us not. Great God! I'd rather be A pagan, suckled in a creed outworn, So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus, rising from the sea, Or hear old Triton blow ...
— Poems Every Child Should Know - The What-Every-Child-Should-Know-Library • Various
... a crop yielding abundant food-stuffs could be raised on an acre of fresh water, no less than on an acre of dry land. In the Arctic regions, again, land has nothing to do with "production" in the social economy of the Esquimaux, who live on seals and other marine animals; and might, like Proteus, shepherd the flocks of Poseidon if they had a mind for pastoral life. But the seals and the bears are dependent on other inhabitants of the sea, until, somewhere in the series, we come to the minute green plants which float ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... not this coy secrecy prevent Th' admiring gaze and warm desires of one Tutored by Love, nor yet would Love consent To hide such lustrous beauty from the sun; Love! that through every change delight'st to run, The Proteus of the heart I who now dost blind, Now roll the Argus eyes that nought can shun! Thou through a thousand guards unseen dost wind, And to the chastest ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... eyeless proteus, found in the celebrated cavern of Adelsberg, is an animal very much larger, called the necturus, inhabiting the waters of the Mississippi, and several southern lakes. It is a creature nearly three feet in length, with a thick body, and, being designed to live in daylight, possesses ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... drinks. Fellow, he hath the falling sickness; Run, fetch two cushions to raise up his head, And bring a little key to ope his teeth. [Exit DRAWER. Pursuivant, your warrant and your box— These must with me; the shape of Fauconbridge Will hold no longer water hereabout. Gloster will be a Proteus every hour, That Elinor and Leicester, Henry, John, And all that rabble of hate-loving curs, May minister me more ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VII (4th edition) • Various
... and many a haven They sped, and many a crowded arsenal: They saw the loves of Gods and men engraven On friezes of Astarte's temple wall. They heard that ancient shepherd Proteus call His flock from forth the green and tumbling lea, And saw white Thetis with her maidens all Sweep up to ...
— Helen of Troy • Andrew Lang
... is a variable as Proteus. There are sympathetic inks. A young celibate has told us in confidence that he has written a letter on the fly-leaf of a new book, which, when the husband asked for it of the bookseller, reached the hands of his mistress, who had been prepared ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac
... Are the illusions of this proteus life! All, all is false: through every phasis still 'T is shadowy and deceitful. It assumes The semblances of things and specious shapes; But the lost traveller might as soon rely On the evasive spirit of the marsh, Whose lantern beams, ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... in details of the changes of form and feature which superstition has assumed in different ages; but it is humiliating to human nature to reflect, that the conquests obtained by philosophy over her great adversary, are in reality very small. Superstition, like the fabled Proteus, appears under an endless variety of forms; but she is also, like the god, still ...
— Architectural Antiquities of Normandy • John Sell Cotman
... as this had Venus none. The walls were of discoloured jasper stone Wherein was Proteus carved, and o'erhead A lively vine of green sea agate spread, Where by one hand lightheaded Bacchus hung, And, with the other, wine from grapes out wrung. Of crystal shining fair the pavement was. The town of Sestos called it Venus' glass. ...
— Hero and Leander • Christopher Marlowe
... the air, as the demigods of the fountains and minor seas are to the great deep; but, as the cloud-firmament detaches itself more from the air, and has a wider range of ministry than the minor streams and seas, the highest cloud deity, Hermes, has a rank more equal with Athena than Nereus or Proteus with Neptune; and there is greater difficulty in tracing his character, because his physical dominion over the clouds can, of course, be asserted only where clouds are; and, therefore, scarcely at all in Egypt;* so that the changes which Hermes ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... instances, well known to naturalists, of a species, or part of a species, remaining permanently in an undeveloped state. As the Greenland whale never acquires teeth, but remains a suckling all its life; as the proteus of the Carniolian caverns, and the axolotl of the Mexican lakes, never attain a higher form than that of the tadpole; so the dodo may be described as a permanent nestling covered with down, and possessing only the ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 440 - Volume 17, New Series, June 5, 1852 • Various
... there any mystery in what is said of Belphoebe, that her hair was sprinkled with flowers and blossoms which had been entangled in it as she fled through the woods? Or is it necessary to have a more distinct idea of Proteus, than that which is given of him in his boat, with the frighted Florimel at ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... societies, Comus, Momus, and Proteus, are understood to be connected with three of the city's four leading clubs, all of which stand within easy range of one another on the uptown side of Canal Street: the Boston Club (taking its name from an old card game); the Pickwick (named for Dickens' genial gentleman, ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... come to its refined and subtle workings in our nature, when we think of its Proteus-like changeableness, its power of assuming the various guises even of duty or religion; when we reflect how it can clothe itself in the choicest garb of art, or science, or divine philosophy, we find very likely that we are always in danger ...
— Sermons at Rugby • John Percival
... they said, there succeeded to the throne a man of Memphis, whose name in the tongue of the Hellenes was Proteus; for whom there is now a sacred enclosure at Memphis, very fair and well ordered, lying on that side of the temple of Hephaistos which faces the North Wind. Round about this enclosure dwell Phenicians of Tyre, and this ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 1(of 2) • Herodotus
... which he is accused, and attributing by his testimony to the Egyptians much religion and justice, he endeavors to cast that abominable wickedness and those impious murders on the Grecians. For in his Second Book he says, that Menelaus, having received Helen from Proteus and having been honored by him with many presents, showed himself a most unjust and wicked man; for wanting a favorable wind to set sail, he found out an impious device, and having taken two of the inhabitants' boys, consulted their entrails; for which villany ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... like a roe. Sandie Macleod, who has at times an excessive flow of spirits, and had it now, was, in his days of absconding, known by the name of M'Cruslick[499], which it seems was the designation of a kind of wild man in the Highlands, something between Proteus and Don Quixote; and so he was called here. He made much jovial noise. Dr. Johnson was so delighted with this scene, that he said, 'I know not how we shall get away.' It entertained me to observe him sitting by, while we danced, sometimes in deep meditation,—sometimes ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... at the palace of Menelaus, from whom he receives some fresh information concerning the return of the Greecians, and is in particular told on the authority of Proteus, that his father is detained by Calypso. The suitors, plotting against the life of Telemachus, lie in wait to intercept him in his return to Ithaca. Penelope being informed of his departure, and of their designs to slay ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer
... with a start. Like Proteus who changed his shape to save himself the trouble of prophesying, he swiftly changed the key to save himself providing accurate information that he ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... movements in circles, volutes, and spirals of ordinary mechanism. The suggestion was confirmed when electrical measurers were refined to the utmost precision, and a single quantum of energy was revealed a very Proteus in its disguises, yet beneath these ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... to rest, and when morning dawns Telemachus inquires whether Menelaus knows aught of his father. All the information Menelaus vouchsafes is that when he surprised Proteus, counting sea-calves on the island of Pharos, he was told he would reach home only after making due sacrifices in Egypt to appease the gods, that his brother had been murdered on arriving at Mycenae, and that Ulysses—sole survivor of his crew—was detained by Calypso in an ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... pretensions of his own. His genius consisted in the faculty of transforming himself at will into whatever he chose: his originality was the power of seeing every object from the exact point of view in which others would see it. He was the Proteus of human intellect. Genius in ordinary is a more obstinate and less versatile thing. It is sufficiently exclusive and self-willed, quaint and peculiar. It does some one thing by virtue of doing nothing else: it excels in some one pursuit by being blind to all excellence but its own. ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... Proteus and Thetis, neither let any one, either in tragedy or in any other kind of poetry, introduce Here disguised in the likeness of a ...
— The Republic • Plato
... found he was mistaken. He wrote, "I am in receipt of your last, which is very encouraging. You were quite right to do as you did. Give Rudd & Carleton no loop-hole. They will soon owe us a good round sum, and will writhe like Proteus to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... my loving Proteus; Home-keeping youth have ever homely wits;— I rather would entreat thy company To see the wonders of the world ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... that amongst the blind insects of the caves in distant parts of the world there are some of the same genus, and yet the genus is not found out of the caves or living in the free world. I have little doubt that, like the fish Amblyopsis, and like Proteus in Europe, these insects are "wrecks of ancient life," or "living fossils," saved from competition and extermination. But that formerly SEEING insects of the same genus roamed over the whole area in which ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... other hand, when a limb is not used, as by Eastern fanatics, or when the nerve supplying it with nervous power is effectually destroyed, the muscles wither. So again, when the eye is destroyed the optic nerve becomes atrophied, sometimes even in the course of a few months.[734] The Proteus is furnished with branchiae as well as with lungs: and Schreibers[735] found that when the animal was compelled to live in deep water the branchiae were developed to thrice their ordinary size, and the lungs were partially atrophied. When, on the ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... the baby and the toy into an intellectual being, desiring equal rights with themselves and asserting her claim to all the immunities they enjoy. Woman must be willing to see herself as she is, the slave of fashion, assuming all the Proteus forms she invents, without reference to health or convenience. She must remember how few of us give evidence of sufficient development to warrant our claims; and whilst we feel a divine impulse to proceed in achieving the enlargement ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... appointed a general?' Ion replies that he is a foreigner, and the Athenians and Spartans will not appoint a foreigner to be their general. 'No, that is not the real reason; there are many examples to the contrary. But Ion has long been playing tricks with the argument; like Proteus, he transforms himself into a variety of shapes, and is at last about to run away in the disguise of a general. Would he rather be regarded as inspired or dishonest?' Ion, who has no suspicion of the irony of Socrates, eagerly embraces ...
— Ion • Plato
... is not a blunder of Shakespeare's, but a mistake of Johnson's, who considers the passage alluded to in a more literal sense than the author intended it. Sir Proteus, it is true, had seen Silvia for a few moments; but though he could form from thence some idea of her person, he was still unacquainted with her temper, manners, and the qualities of her mind. He, therefore, considers ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... preparations, the drama opens, the scenes become rapid and lifelike; events, long impeded, accumulate and pass quickly before us, the action is connected and hastens to an end. We shall see Derues like an unwearied Proteus, changing names, costumes, language, multiplying himself in many forms, scattering deceptions and lies from one end of France to the other; and finally, after so many efforts, such prodigies of calculation and activity, end by wrecking himself ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - DERUES • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... and fickleness,[343] a child Most mutable in wishes, but in mind A wit as various,—gay, grave, sage, or wild,— Historian, bard, philosopher, combined;[ks] He multiplied himself among mankind, The Proteus of their talents: But his own Breathed most in ridicule,—which, as the wind, Blew where it listed, laying all things prone,— Now to o'erthrow a fool, and now ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... Plus Toxins.—The inoculation of pure cultivations of the organism into some selected situation, together with the subcutaneous, intraperitoneal, or intravenous injection of a toxin—e. g., one of those elaborated by the proteus group—either simultaneously with, before, or immediately after, the injection of the feeble virus. By this means the natural resistance of the animal is lowered, and the organism inoculated is enabled to multiply and produce its pathogenic effect, its virulence ...
— The Elements of Bacteriological Technique • John William Henry Eyre
... Sestos, from her tower To Venus' temple, where unhappily, As after chanc'd, they did each other spy. So fair a church as this had Venus none: The walls were of discolour'd[9] jasper-stone, Wherein was Proteus carved; and over-head A lively vine of green sea-agate spread, Where by one hand light-headed Bacchus hung, And with the other wine from grapes out-wrung. 140 Of crystal shining fair the pavement was; The town of Sestos call'd it Venus' ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... and the rest of Europe, were as the eyes and ears of the great king of the universe, seeing and hearing all things; seraphically illuminated; companions of the holy company of unbodied souls and immortal angels; turning themselves, Proteus-like, into any shape, and having the power of working miracles. The most pious and abstracted brethren could slack the plague in cities, silence the violent winds and tempests, calm the rage of ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... page is indelicate. So Byron, after starting bravely as Byron, in the second sentence turns into 'that great but unequal poet' and thenceforward I have as much trouble with Byron as ever Telemachus with Proteus to hold and pin him back to his proper self. Half-way down the page he becomes 'the gloomy master of Newstead': overleaf he is reincarnated into 'the meteoric darling of society': and so proceeds through successive avatars—'this ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... admits, through her most learned professors, that "energy has as much claim to be regarded as an objective reality as matter itself"** and as life, according to the occult doctrine, is the one energy acting, Proteus-like, under the most varied forms, the occultists have a certain right to use such phraseology. Life is ever present in the atom or matter, whether organic or inorganic—a difference that the occultists do not accept. Their doctrine is that life is as much present in the ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... don't mean I must believe all this man says, because the decurions have put him here?" cried Arnobius. "Here is this Polemo saying that Proteus is matter, and that minerals and vegetables are his flock; that Proserpine is the vital influence, and Ceres the efficacy of the heavenly bodies; that there are mundane spirits, and supramundane; and then his doctrine about triads, monads, ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... the ancient abode of Proteus, the old shepherd of Neptune's flocks, now the Island of Scarpanto, situated between Rhodes and Crete. I saw nothing but the granite base through the glass ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... in these caverns, of which the most celebrated is the 'Proteus,' a creature which has greatly perplexed naturalists. At first sight it looks like a lizard, but its movements are those of a fish. The head, lower part of the body, and tail resemble an eel, but it has no fins, and its breathing organs are quite ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... amusement, they now learned that the hated "spy" who had prowled round their folds and fields so long, would resign to Mistress Bevan the house in which they sat, and that atonement made, vanish into thin air—a vox et preterea nihil! being in reality the Proteus-like, mysterious, handsome, though sallow stranger, and no ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... bearded goat, thou mate of the white herd, and O ye blunt-faced kids, where are the manifold deeps of the forest, thither get ye to the water, for thereby is Milon; go, thou hornless goat, and say to him, 'Milon, Proteus was a herdsman, and that of seals, though ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... Proteus, Euripus. Mu[l]ta novit uulpes sed Echinus unum magnum Semper Africa aliquid monstrj parit Ex eodem ore calidum et frigidum. Ex se finxit velut araneus Laqueus laqueum cepit. Hinc ille lachrime; Hydrus in dolio Dicas tria ex Curia (liberty vpon ...
— Bacon is Shake-Speare • Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence
... painters are no musicians, else had they furnished their angels not with harps—beautiful and sparkling as the sea-foam, as are their most graceful chords—but with this, of all instruments the most musical, whose tones admit of more variety than any, (the Proteus organ alone excepted,) and whose delicious long-drawn notes must entrance every one not absolutely soulless. Oh, they are excruciatingly delightful! And yet you shall hear this identical violin, in the hands of an everyday performer, emit such squeals ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... ship their sov'reign knows, His awful summons they so soon obey: So hear the scaly herds when Proteus blows, And so to ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... character of his emendations are not so much that of right or wrong, as that, being in the extreme, they are always Warburtonian. Another has since undertaken the custody of our author, whom he seems to consider as a sort of wild Proteus or madman, and accordingly knocks him down with the butt-end of his critical staff, as often as he exceeds that line of sober discretion, which this learned Editor appears to have chalked out for him: Yet is this Editor notwithstanding "a man, take him for all in all," very highly ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... aquarium itself, we shall see endless repetitions of those "sea-changes" which Shakspeare sang. Ancient mythology typified the changing wonders of aquatic Nature, as well as the fickleness of the treacherous sea, in those shifting deities, Glaucus and Proteus, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... p. 657. The story is mixed up with Greek fables, e.g. that of Proteus, as Wissowa has pointed out, ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... voir les choses comme elles sont." I find men victims of illusion in all parts of life. Children, youths, adults, and old men, all are led by one bawble or another. Yoganidra, the goddess of illusion, Proteus, or Momus, or Gylfi's Mocking,—for the Power has many names,—is stronger than the Titans, stronger than Apollo. The toys, to be sure, are various, and are graduated in refinement to the quality ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... archonship of Pythodorus. 10. He farmed it two years, receiving no olive tree, sacred or otherwise, nor any olive stump. Demetrius had it the third year. In the fourth year I let it to Alcias, a freedman of Antisthenes who has been dead three years. Finally, Proteus hired ...
— The Orations of Lysias • Lysias
... odd carnivorous propensities on the part of the offspring. Merely to achieve a diabolical purpose, the form of a woman is not always the best disguise. There are men quite insusceptible to feminine witchcraft. But the fox is never at a loss for a disguise; he can assume more forms than Proteus. Furthermore, he can make you see or hear or imagine whatever he wishes you to see, hear, or imagine. He can make you see out of Time and Space; he can recall the past and reveal the future. His power has not been ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... at a distance of a quarter of a mile, leaning against the trunk of a gigantic kauri, stood a human being, the Proteus of those subterranean regions, a new son of Neptune, watching this countless herd ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... Triton, blow your wreathed horn Cheerly, as is your wont, and let the blast Circle our island on the breezes borne; Blow, while the shining hours go swiftly past. Rise, Proteus, from the cool depths rise, and be A friend to them ...
— The Vagabond and Other Poems from Punch • R. C. Lehmann
... composition of any length. Defoe's incomparable clearness of statement would alone betray him; that was a gift of nature which no art could successfully imitate. Contemporaries also were quick at recognising their Proteus in his many shapes, and their gossip gives a strong support to internal evidence, resting as it probably did on evidences which were not altogether internal. Though Mr. Lee may have been rash sometimes in quoting ...
— Daniel Defoe • William Minto
... cursed day and hour!— Went Hero thorough Sestos, from her tower To Venus' temple, where unhappily, As after chanc'd, they did each other spy. So fair a church as this had Venus none: The walls were of discolour'd jasper-stone, Wherein was Proteus carv'd; and over-head A lively vine of green sea-agate spread, Where by one hand light-headed Bacchus hung, And with the other wine from grapes out-wrung. Of crystal shining fair the pavement was; The town of Sestos call'd it Venus' ...
— Hero and Leander and Other Poems • Christopher Marlowe and George Chapman
... seen! The Britons, once a savage kind, By you were brighten'd and refined, Descendants to the barbarous Huns, With limbs robust, and voice that stuns: But you have moulded them afresh, Removed the tough superfluous flesh, Taught them to modulate their tongues, And speak without the help of lungs. Proteus on you bestow'd the boon To change your visage like the moon; You sometimes half a face produce, Keep t'other half for private use. How famed thy conduct in the fight With Hermes, son of Pleias bright! Outnumber'd, half encompass'd round, You strove for every inch of ground; Then, by ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... on the other the inundation of the urinal deluge, could not tell what to say nor what to think. Some said that it was the end of the world and the final judgment, which ought to be by fire. Others again thought that the sea-gods, Neptune, Proteus, Triton, and the rest of them, did persecute them, for that indeed they found it to be like ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... quotes, as an example, the case of Baucis and Philemon, who were changed into trees, while their house became a temple, and the neighbouring country a pool of water. Acheloues then tells the story of the transformations of Proteus and of Metra, and how Metra supported her father Erisicthon, while afflicted with ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... passion-warbled song— Still, Fancy! still that voice, those notes prolong. As sweet as when that voice with rapturous falls 55 Shall wake the soften'd echoes of Heaven's Halls! [52:1]O (have I sigh'd) were mine the wizard's rod, Or mine the power of Proteus, changeful God! A flower-entangled Arbour I would seem To shield my Love from Noontide's sultry beam: 60 Or bloom a Myrtle, from whose od'rous boughs My Love might weave gay garlands for her brows. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... his lady) spleen; } "Away, away! take all your scaffolds down, For snug's the word: my dear! we'll live in town." At amorous Flavio is the stocking thrown? That very night he longs to lie alone. The fool, whose wife elopes some thrice a quarter, For matrimonial solace dies a martyr. Did ever Proteus, Merlin, any witch, } Transform themselves so strangely as the rich? } Well, but the poor—the poor have the same itch; } They change their weekly barber, weekly news, Prefer a new japanner to their shoes, Discharge their garrets, move their beds, and run (They know not whither) ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... of court sycophants, hungry harpies, and unprincipled danglers, collected from the neighbouring villages, hovering over the stage in the shape of locusts, led by Massachusettensis in the form of a basilisk; the rear brought up by Proteus, bearing a torch in one hand, and a powder-flask in the other. The whole supported by a mighty army and navy, from Blunderland, for the laudable purpose of enslaving its ...
— The Group - A Farce • Mercy Warren
... straying all over it. Some far up, and frightful to look at, others huddled down in the river, immane pecus, and one huge unloosened fellow, as big as a manse, up aloft watching them, like old Proteus with his calves, as if they had fled from the sea by stress of weather, and had been led by their ancient herd altos visere montes—a wilder, more "unreconciled" place I know not; and now that the darkness ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... chair which Roscius once possess'd. Here give your votes, your interest here exert, And let success for once attend desert. With sleek appearance, and with ambling pace, And, type of vacant head, with vacant face, The Proteus Hill[17] put in his modest plea,— Let Favour speak for others, Worth for me.— For who, like him, his various powers could call Into so many shapes, and shine in all? 110 Who could so nobly grace the motley list, Actor, ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... turning into water, you know, Proteus, because you are a sea-god. I can even pass the tree; and the lion is not wholly beyond the bounds of belief. But the idea of your being able to turn into fire, living under water as you do,—this excites my surprise, not ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... this difficulty that the terrible fate intended for London Bridge and its neighborhood was turned aside by the instantaneous killing instead of the two Fenian criminals. The size and appearance of that machine changes, Proteus-like, according to the necessity of smuggling it in, in one or another way, unperceived by the victims. It may be concealed in bread, in a basket of oranges, in a liquid, and so on. The Commission of Experts is said ...
— Studies in Occultism; A Series of Reprints from the Writings of H. P. Blavatsky • H. P. Blavatsky
... to do so to the king, and when Alexander asked why he did not give him the ball, answered "You do not ask me for it." At this, Alexander laughed and gave him many presents. Once he appeared to be seriously angry with one Proteus, a professed jester. The man's friends interceded for him, and he himself begged for pardon with tears in his eyes, until Alexander said that he forgave him. "My king," said he "will you not give me something by way of earnest, to assure ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... Trades shortly after turning Cape Palmas, and kept them till close upon Grand Canary. They were a complete contrast with the Harmatan, the firmament looking exceptionally high, and the sun shining hot, while a crisp, steady gale made the 'herds of Proteus' gambol and disport themselves over the long ridges thrown up by the cool plain of bright cerulean. The horizon, when clear, had a pinkish hue, and near coast and islands puffy folds of dazzling white, nearly ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... dipneusta arose the class of amphibia, having five toes (the pentadactyla). The gill amphibians are man's most ancient ancestors of the class amphibia. Besides possessing lungs as well as the mud-fish, they retain throughout life regular gills like the still-living proteus and axolotl. Most gilled batrachia live in North America. The paddle-fins of the dipneusta changed into five-toed legs, which were afterwards transmitted to the higher ...
— Was Man Created? • Henry A. Mott
... not lead to it pushed aside or thrown overboard—philosophy, for instance, by those who profess it. People are often reproached for wishing for money above all things, and for loving it more than anything else; but it is natural and even inevitable for people to love that which, like an unwearied Proteus, is always ready to turn itself into whatever object their wandering wishes or manifold desires may for the moment fix upon. Everything else can satisfy only one wish, one need: food is good only if you are hungry; wine, if you are ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer: The Wisdom of Life • Arthur Schopenhauer
... throughout all the world, proclaiming the gods' passage to and fro over the quivering bridge Bifroest, was like the trumpet of the goddess Renown. As he was related to the water deities on his mother's side, he could, like Proteus, assume any form at will, and he made good use of this power on the occasion when he frustrated Loki's attempt ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber |
