"Vestal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... family is the heart of the state, and that the state is but the widened family, is the fact which the old vestal consecration, power, and honor set forth ...
— Debate On Woman Suffrage In The Senate Of The United States, - 2d Session, 49th Congress, December 8, 1886, And January 25, 1887 • Henry W. Blair, J.E. Brown, J.N. Dolph, G.G. Vest, Geo. F. Hoar.
... cells of her heart, and brought forth thoughts in sparkling words, which otherwise might have remained concealed; but there was nothing in what she thought or spoke calculated to give umbrage either to an anchorite or to a vestal. A word or two she said or sung about the flowing bowl, and once she called for Falernian; but beyond this her converse was chiefly of the rights of man and the weakness of women; of the iron ages that were past, and of the golden time that ...
— Mrs. General Talboys • Anthony Trollope
... nor small, Which quantum sufficit the doctors call; Let this estate from parents' care descend: The getting it too much of life does spend. Take such a ground, whose gratitude may be A fair encouragement for industry. Let constant fires the winter's fury tame, And let thy kitchens be a vestal flame. Thee to the town let never suit at law, And rarely, very rarely, business draw. Thy active mind in equal temper keep, In undisturbed peace, yet not in sleep. Let exercise a vigorous health maintain, Without which all the composition's vain. In the same weight prudence ...
— Cowley's Essays • Abraham Cowley
... and their house is the prototype of the convent. Six nobly-born young women, sworn to chastity, and dressed in a ritual garb, live in an edifice of much magnificence under the rule of one who is the chief Vestal, a sort of Mother Superior. Many pedestals of the statues of such chief priestesses still remain, and we can clearly trace the arrangement of their abode, with its open court—once containing a garden and cool cisterns of pure water—its separate ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... vanities of the world, retired to a hut, where he lived in prayer and fasting. While thus living he was visited by a tempter, who sought to rekindle his desire for the good things of this life. Thereupon Praboe sent for a large bird and four vestal virgins to defend him against the evil spirit. By a miracle he transformed himself into a flower, around which the vestal virgins danced. By chance, however, a princess passed that way, and, seeing a vase with beautiful flowers therein, she chose and gathered one, which she carried ...
— A Visit to Java - With an Account of the Founding of Singapore • W. Basil Worsfold
... the victor of the day? Thou of the delicate form, and golden hair, And manhood glorious in its midst of May; Thou who upon thy shield of argent bearest The bold device, "The loftiest is the fairest!" As bending low thy stainless crest, "The vestal throned by the west" Accords the old Provencal crown Which blends her own with thy renown; Arcadian Sidney, nursling of the muse, Flower of fair chivalry, whose bloom was fed With daintiest Castaly's most silver dews, Alas! how soon thy amaranth leaves were shed; Born, what the Ausonian ...
— With Spurs of Gold - Heroes of Chivalry and their Deeds • Frances Nimmo Greene
... which first the vestal fire begun, Which might be borrowed from no earthly flame, Devised a vessel to receive the sun, Being stedfastly opposed to the same; Where with sweet wood laid curiously by art, On which the sun ...
— Elizabethan Sonnet Cycles - Idea, by Michael Drayton; Fidessa, by Bartholomew Griffin; Chloris, by William Smith • Michael Drayton, Bartholomew Griffin, and William Smith
... study for a painter. By such men, the embers of learning and of science were nursed into a faint but steady flame, burning through the long, gloomy night of the dark ages, unseen by profane eyes, like the vestal fire in pagan temples.... ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... with the bunting of a first voyage, with a fair wind, and on a fine morning; and when such a ship came back long after as an old plank bearded with sea moss, to the dunes under which it stranded the day was still the same, vestal and innocent; for they were on a voyage of greater length and import. They had buried many ships; but, as time moved to them, all ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... by the Romans to their household deities, individually and unitedly, in honour of whom a fire, in charge of the vestal ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... Father, God the Son, God the Holy Ghost, the Virgin Mary, and the other saints (or gods) of the Christian Pantheon. Statues therein were rechristened, and the sacrificial altars were simply transferred for the use of the eucharistical sacrifice. The vestal virgins became nuns of the church; the Sacerdotes, her priests; the mysteries of Isis, her Agapae. Her incense, her pictures, her image-worship, her holy water, her processions, and her prodigies, too, all came from the same source. Thus were ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley as a Philosopher and Reformer • Charles Sotheran
... A vestal virgin with a husband and two children, a Roman Lothario, with an Irish friend, a Druidical temple, a gong, and an auto-da-fe, mix up charmingly with Bellini's quadrille-like music to form a pathetic ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, December 11, 1841 • Various
... Bigfoot's Adventures is the rollickiest and the most flavorsome that any American frontiersman has yet inspired. The tiresome thumping on the hero theme present in many biographies of frontiersmen is entirely absent. Stanley Vestal wrote Bigfoot Wallace also, Boston, ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... although he wrote a century and a half ago, there is less of the low and indelicate than in the plays we see posted at the doors of our theatres. The French of the time of Louis XIV. must have been a much more refined people than the contemporary English. At least, Thalia in Paris was a vestal, compared with her tawdry, indecent, and drunken London sister. One is ashamed to be seen reading the unblushing profligacy of Wycherley, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... the happy living things Of the old world come forth upon the new I know my heart shall miss thee; and the dew Of summer twilights shall shed tears for me —Tears liker thee, ah, purest! than mine own— Upon thy vestal ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... old the Sun, our sire, Came wooing the mother of men, Earth, that was virginal then, Vestal fire to his fire. Silent her bosom and coy, But the strong god sued and pressed; And born of their starry nuptial joy Are all that drink of ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... may seize On the white wonder of dear Juliet's hand And steal immortal blessing from her lips, Who, even in pure and vestal modesty, Still blush, as thinking their own ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... in the very bosom of this majestic scenery that Lake Tahoe lies enshrined. Its entrancing beauty is such that we do not wonder that these triumphant monarchs of the "upper seas" cluster around it as if in reverent adoration, and that they wear their vestal virgin robes of purest white in token of the purity ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... That I was shipped at sea I well remember, but whether there delivered of my babe, by the holy gods I cannot rightly say; but since my wedded lord I never shall see again, I will put on a vestal livery and never ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... no common muse inspires, I heard your verse that glows with vestal fires; And I from unwatch'd needle's erring point Had surely suffered on each finger joint, Those wounds, which erst did poor Arachne meet; While he, the much-loved object of my choice, (My bosom thrilling with enthusiast heat) Pour'd on ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... her, do I woo? Because her spirit's vestal grace Provokes me always to pursue, But, spirit-like, eludes embrace; Because her womanhood is such That, as on court-days subjects kiss The Queen's hand, yet so near a touch Affirms no mean familiarness, Nay, rather marks ...
— The Angel in the House • Coventry Patmore
... ladder, and leaped free of the moat of the convent, into which we must otherwise have been precipitated. The Champion of Scotland was saved in the desperate attempt, but I who fell among a heap of stones and rubbish, I the disobedient daughter, wellnigh the apostate vestal, waked only from a long bed of sickness, to find myself the disfigured wretch, which you now see me. I then learned that Malcolm had escaped from the fray, and shortly after I heard, with feelings less keen perhaps than they ought to ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... inchoate letters into small pieces, and, with a tart good-night to Miss Bella Perkins, who was closing her ledgers, the hour being close upon twelve-thirty, she passed sedately, stiffly, as though in performance of some vestal's ritual, up the grand staircase. Turning to the right at the first landing, she traversed a long corridor which was no part of the route to her cubicle on the ninth floor. This corridor was lighted by glowing sparks, which hung on yellow cords from the central line ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... her love affair, was an invincible expression of reserve and modesty. She remained a little astonished. This chaste astonishment is the shade of difference which separates Psyche from Venus. Fantine had the long, white, fine fingers of the vestal virgin who stirs the ashes of the sacred fire with a golden pin. Although she would have refused nothing to Tholomyes, as we shall have more than ample opportunity to see, her face in repose was supremely virginal; a sort of serious and ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... in Valerius Maximus renders it probable that the Cimbrian states were of this number: "The wives of the Teutones besought Marius, after his victory, that he would deliver them as a present to the Vestal virgins; affirming that they should henceforth, equally with themselves, abstain from the embraces of the other sex. This request not being granted, they all strangled themselves the ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus
... promising twelve centuries of supremacy to Rome, from the year 748 or 750 B. C.— cooperated with the endless other Pagan superstitions in anchoring the whole Pantheon to the Capitol and Mount Palatine. So long as Rome had a worldly hope surviving, it was impossible for her to forget the Vestal Virgins, the College of Augurs, or the indispensable office and the indefeasible privileges of the Pontifex Maximus, which (though Cardinal Baronius, in his great work, for many years sought to fight off the evidences for that ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... value of our guiltless ore Makes no man atheist, and no woman whore; Yet why should hallow'd vestal's sacred shrine Deserve more honour than a flaming mine? These pregnant wombs of heat would fitter be, Than a few embers, for a deity. Had he our pits, the Persian would admire No sun, but warm 's devotion at our fire: He'd leave the trotting whipster, and prefer Our profound ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... Numitor chose the kingdom; but Amulius, having the money, and being able to do more with that than Numitor, took his kingdom from with great ease, and, fearing lest his daughter might have children who would supplant him, made her a Vestal, bound in that condition forever to live a single and maiden life. This lady some call Ilia, others Rhea, and others Silvia; however, not long after, contrary to the established laws of the Vestals, she had two sons of more than human size and beauty, whom ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... few remains in Rome of the domus or private house. Two, however, have left remarkably interesting ruins—the Atrium Vest, or House of the Vestal Virgins, east of the Forum, awell-planned and extensive house surrounding a cloister or court; and the House of Livia, so-called, on the Palatine Hill, the walls and decorations of which are excellently ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... who could'st trample and despise The holiest chain of human ties For him, the dear One in thine eyes, Broke it no more. Thy heart was withered to it's Core, It's hopes, it's fears, it's feelings o'er: Thy Blood grew Ice when his was shed, And Thou the Vestal of ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... get born with. I know a girl carried hers around in a little wooden box for luck. Well, you got that white-veil kind of look that would blacklist you for the Vestal Virgin Sextet. I can pick 'em every time. You look to me like—say, I got a little mud puddle of my own to play in without ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... imagine, continued the gentleman; for I assure you they were all vestal virgins for anything which I knew to the contrary. The reputation of intriguing with them was all I sought, and was what I arrived at: and perhaps I only flattered myself even in that; for very probably the persons to whom I showed ...
— Joseph Andrews, Vol. 2 • Henry Fielding
... there he walked up and down for hours. The sun set, and the night came, and the stars glittered; but still he walked alone, inspired, exalted, full of generous and loving schemes: of sweet and tender fancies: a heart on fire; and youth the fuel, and the flame vestal. ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade
... VESTAL. A woman of the town, or prostitute; Drury-lane and its environs were formerly the residence of ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... her head, pauses and wonders: had she any love for children? He finds in her "a plentiful lack of inborn baby-worship"; she is unworthy to compare in this with George Eliot, "the spiritual mother of Totty, of Eppie, and of Lillo". "The fiery-hearted Vestal of Haworth," he says, "had no room reserved in the palace of her passionate and high-minded imagination as a nursery for inmates of such divine and delicious quality." There was little Georgette in Villette, to say nothing of Polly, and there was ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... the inconsiderate use of final causes in science, and an illustration of some of the manifold errors and absurdities which their hasty assumption is apt to involve—considerations probably equivalent to those which induced Lord Bacon to liken final causes to "vestal virgins." So, if any one, it is here Bacon that "sitteth in the seat of the scornful." As to Darwin, in the section from which the extracts were made, he is considering a subsidiary question, and trying ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... the Jersey ferry would be as flagons of cod-liver oil to me. Who conspicuously walks the Rialto now, and what does he or she wear? Are the trees still green in Madison Square, or have they grown brown and dusty? Does the chaste Diana on the Garden Theatre still keep her vestal vows through all the exasperating changes of weather? Who has your brother's old studio now, and what misguided aspirants practice their scales in the rookeries about Carnegie Hall? What do people go to see at the theaters, and what do they eat and drink there in the ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... skirts have almost reached the tops of your boots will find "Mrs. Overtheway's Remembrances," by Mrs. Ewing, very interesting. "Unknown to History," by Miss Yonge, and "Number XIII., the Story of the Lost Vestal," by Emma Marshall, are slightly historical in character, and are stories of absorbing interest, the one containing old English, and the ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 34, July 1, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... cat,—she who hesitates, is lost. But Diana, shining in heaven, the goddess of the Silver Bow, sees the peril of poor Pussy, and interposes her celestial aid to save the vestal. An enormous grimalkin, almost a wild cat, comes rattling along the roof, down from the chimney-top, and Tom Tortoiseshell, leaping from love to war, tackles to the Red Rover in single ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 484 - Vol. 17, No. 484, Saturday, April 9, 1831 • Various
... Hong Kong, where we found the Castor, Vixen, and Espiegle. The next day the Agincourt, Daedalus, Vestal, and Wolverine, arrived from Borneo, having been engaged with the pirates of Maludu Bay. The squadron had suffered a loss of one officer and eighteen men killed, and about double the number wounded. This heavy loss was occasioned by their having to cut through a large boom which the pirates had ...
— Borneo and the Indian Archipelago - with drawings of costume and scenery • Frank S. Marryat
... unwilling, to their accustomed passions. Consider the timorous, they are afraid even of those things that preserve them. Consider the pettish, they are angry with their best and dearest friends. Consider the amorous and lascivious, in the height of their fury they dare violate a Vestal. For custom is very powerful to draw the temper of the body to anything that is suitable to it; and he that is apt to fall will stumble at everything that lies in his way. So it is no wonder that those that have raised in themselves an envious and bewitching habit, if according to the peculiarity ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... Mars, that a she-wolf was his foster mother, that he marched with a thousand men of his village of Rome against twenty-five thousand combatants of the village of the Sabines: that later he became a god; that Tarquin, the ancient, cut a stone with a razor, and that a vestal drew a ship to land ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... wouldst thou talk of love To Marcia, whilst her father's life's in danger? Thou might'st as well court the pale, trembling vestal, When she beholds ...
— Cato - A Tragedy, in Five Acts • Joseph Addison
... annual festival; births, marriages, deaths, and similar occurrences are, of course, as common and frequent in our temples as in our homes. Gentlemen, can any amount of esoteric whitewashing justify these disgraceful and fairly incredible practices? Then there are the deva dasies, our 'vestal virgins,' of whom even small and poor temples have one or two to boast. They are the recognized prostitutes of the country, and many sociologists are of opinion that no 'civilized' human society can completely get rid of such a class. Is that any reason why we should associate them with our ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... in fact so much hair is thus offered every year that the priests cannot use it all, so they quietly burn the superfluity as soon as the pilgrims' backs are turned. The cut hair and nails of the Flamen Dialis were buried under a lucky tree. The shorn tresses of the Vestal Virgins were hung on ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... Christ-worshipers say that Christ was miraculously born of a virgin, the Pagans had said before them that Remus and Romulus, the founders of Rome, were miraculously born of a vestal virgin named Ilia, or Silvia, or Rhea Silvia; they had already said that Mars, Argus, Vulcan, and others were born of the goddess Juno without sexual union; and, also, that Minerva, goddess of the sciences, sprang from Jupiter's brain, and that she came out of it, all armed, by means ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... unanimous, undulate, urbanity, usurious, uxorious, vacillate, vacuous, vandalism, variegate velocity, venal, venereal, venial, venous, veracious, verdant, verisimilitude, vernacular, versatile, vestal, vibratory, vicarious, vicissitude, virulence, viscid, viscous, vitiate, vitreous, vituperate, vivacious, volatile, volition, voluminous, voluptuary, voluptuous, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... merely gave his maidens their names from his own fancy. So Homer altered the name of one of them, naming her Pasithea, and betrothed her to a husband, in order that you may know that they are not vestal virgins. [Footnote: i.e. ...
— L. Annaeus Seneca On Benefits • Seneca
... cabinet than in the field. Henry IV., who loved his jests whether at his own expense or that of friend or foe, was wont to observe that there were three things which nobody would ever believe, and which yet were very true; that Queen Elizabeth deserved her title of the, throned vestal, that he was himself a good Catholic, and that Cardinal Albert was a good general. It is probable that the assertions were all ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... should vex thee, I did bring That worshipped wafer by the Vestal given; Then, with loose robes and linen stole, did sing Nine prayers to ...
— The Elegies of Tibullus • Tibullus
... I had once prayed to him!") and she always wore a scarab ring. She had bought both in an antique-shop just off Washington Street. I thought this rather a far cry from Thebes, myself, but The Author insisted that if a Theban vestal of the time of Sesostris had to reincarnate, she would naturally and inevitably come to life ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... Hedges, haystacks, isolated farms—all were English in their details. Only the vines, and mulberries, and wattled waggons drawn by oxen, most Roman in aspect, reminded us we were in Tuscany. In such carpenta may the vestal virgins have ascended the Capitol. It is the primitive war-chariot also, capable of holding four with ease; and Romulus may have mounted with the images of Roman gods in even such a vehicle to Latiarian Jove upon the Alban ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... Christ, when they find the stone rolled away and, looking around, see the Saviour's figure before them. The scene is low and cavern-like, with a brilliant light surrounding the tomb. This artist also painted "The Vestal Virgin," "King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid," "Pan and Psyche," "The Golden Stairs," and ...
— Pictures Every Child Should Know • Dolores Bacon
... robe floating, the dejection worn On the dropt eye, and lip no smile illumes; Not all this pomp of sorrow, that presumes It pays Affection's debt, is due concern To the FOR EVER ABSENT, tho' it mourn Fashion's allotted time. If Time consumes, While Life is ours, the precious vestal-flame Memory shou'd hourly feed;—if, thro' each day, She with whate'er we see, hear, think, or say, Blend not the image of the vanish'd Frame, O! can the alien Heart expect to prove, In worlds of light ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... rich realms will then admire And emulate our matchless fame, And Asia burn with fierce desire To burst her galling bonds of shame! Greece will resume th' Aonian lyre, And Rome again to heaven aspire, And vestal Freedom's quenchless fire From ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... February, captain Hood, of his majesty's frigate the Vestal, belonging to a small squadron commanded by admiral Holmes, who had sailed for the West Indies in January, being advanced a considerable way ahead of the fleet, descried and gave chase to a sail, which proved to be a ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... mad, every mother's son of them!" said Maurice Quill, as he elbowed his way through the mass; "and here's an old vestal won't leave my arm. She has already embraced me three times, and we've finished a flask of Malaga ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... him, a glorious bird of paradise. The wanton display of a maddening curve of slender ankle, through the slash of the clinging gown imparted just the needed allurement to stamp her as a Vestal of the temple of Madness. The cunning simplicity of the draping over her shoulders—luminous with the iridiscent gleam of ivory skin beneath, accentuated by the voluptuous beauty of her youthful bosom—the fleeting change of colors ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... alliance of Science and the People—those opposite poles! They will crush between their arms of steel all that opposes the higher civilization. The State, the immemorial vestal fire of all civilization—what a good phrase! I must write that ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... marked—but thou could'st not— Flying between the cold moon and the earth, Cupid all armed. A certain aim he took At a fair vestal throned by the west, And loosed his love-shaft smartly from his bow As he would pierce a hundred thousand hearts. But I might see young Cupid's fiery dart Quenched in the chaste beams of the watery moon, And the imperial votaress passed on ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... Graeco-Etruscan Chariot (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). An Etruscan Arch. Characters of the Etruscan Alphabet. An Early Roman Coin. A Roman Farmer's Calendar. Cinerary Urns in Terra Cotta (Vatican Museum, Rome). A Vestal Virgin. Suovetaurilia (Louvre, Paris). An Etruscan Augur. Coop with Sacred Chickens. Curule Chair and Fasces. The Appian Way. A Roman Legionary. A Roman Standard Bearer (Bonn Museum). Column of Duilius (Restored). A Carthaginian or Roman Helmet (British Museum, London). A Testudo. Storming a City ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... practice of magic and the inspection of the entrails of animals capital offences, he proceeded to prohibit sacrifices, A.D. 391, and even the entering of temples. He alienated the revenues of many temples, confiscated the estates of others, some he demolished. The vestal virgins he dismissed, and any house profaned by incense he declared forfeited to the imperial exchequer. When once the property of a religious establishment has been irrevocably taken away, it is needless to declare its ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... I saw (but thou couldst not), Flying between the cold moon and the earth, Cupid, allarm'd: a certain aim he took At a fair vestal, throned by the west; And loos'd his love-shaft smartly from his bow, As it should pierce a hundred thousand hearts: But I might see young Cupid's fiery shaft Quench'd in the chaste beams of the watery moon; And the imperial vot'ress passed on, In ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... striking when placed in obvious contrast to the ingenuous nature and calm purity that shone in every lineament of the face of Ghita. One might very well have passed for an image of the goddess Circe; while the other would have made no bad model for a vestal, could the latter have borne the moral impression of the sublime and heart-searching truths that are inculcated by the real oracles of God. Then the lady was a woman in the meridian of her charms, aided by all the cunning of the toilet and a taste that was piquant and peculiar, ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... convinced that he resented the condemnation of Essex and the imprisonment of Southampton very bitterly, for though he had praised Elizabeth in his salad days again and again, talked about her in "A Midsummer Night's Dream" as a "fair vestal throned by the west"; walking in "maiden meditation, fancy-free"; yet, when she died, he could not be induced to write one word about her. His silence was noticed, and Chettle challenged him to write in praise of the dead sovereign, because she had been kind to him; but he would ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... husband, and the jewels; and she looked on the paper, and said, "It is my lord's writing. That I was shipped at sea, I well remember, but whether there delivered of my babe, by the holy gods I cannot rightly say; but since my wedded lord I never shall see again, I will put on a vestal livery, and never more have joy." "Madam," said Cerimon, "if you purpose as you speak, the temple of Diana is not far distant from hence; there you may abide as a vestal. Moreover, if you please, a niece of mine shall there attend you." This proposal was accepted ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb
... find faith to her mind, Seek you the peace of the groves Elysian, Or the ivy twine and the wands of vine, The Dionysian, Orphic rite? To share the joy of the Maenad's leaping In frenzied train thro' the dusk glen sweeping, The dew-drench'd dance and the star-watch'd sleeping, Or temple keeping in vestal white? ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... withdrew their claims, and pledged their cordial support to the regular nominee of the convention.[157] Such machine-like precision warmed the hearts of Democratic politicians. The editor of the People's Advocate declared the integrity of Douglas to be "as unspotted as the vestal's fame—as untarnished and as pure as ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... as performing the ordinary acts of a mortal world. He had the feeling that she moved on higher levels—that she was a creature too shy and perfect to be made the instrument of passion. She should be guarded in her purity like a vestal virgin, so that her straight young body might be forever valiant and her eyes might never ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... in mimic tides; Where Mirth and Peace beguile the blameless Day; And where Friendship's fixt star beams a mellow'd Ray; 50 Where Love a crown of thornless Roses wears; Where soften'd Sorrow smiles within her tears; And Memory, with a Vestal's meek employ, Unceasing feeds the lambent flame of Joy! No more thy Sky Larks less'ning from my sight 55 Shall thrill th' attund Heartstring with delight; No more shall deck thy pensive Pleasures sweet With wreaths of sober hue my evening seat! ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... rob her of her freedom and independence; the horror that love or the joy of motherhood will only hinder her in the full exercise of her profession—all these together make of the emancipated modern woman a compulsory vestal, before whom life, with its great clarifying sorrows and its deep, entrancing joys, rolls on without ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... among them; and seeing that the worship had been carried on without fail, that the vestal fire had never gone down upon the hearth, I should not have said that the Dales had walked their ways without high principle. To this religion they had all adhered, and the new heir had ever entered in upon his domain without other encumbrances than those with which ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... tables d'hote of every hotel in Europe, who spoil Italy, poison Switzerland, render the charming cities of the Mediterranean uninhabitable, carry everywhere their fantastic manias, their petrified vestal manners, their indescribable toilettes, and a certain odor of india-rubber, which makes one believe that at night they slip themselves into a case of that material. When I meet one of these people in a hotel, I act like birds which see ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... blackness. But moonlight shrouds the Coliseum in mystery. It opens deep vaults of gloom where the eye meets only an ebon wall, upon which the fancy paints innumerable pictures in solemn, splendid, and tragic colors. Shadowy forms of emperor and lictor and vestal virgin and gladiator and martyr come out of the darkness, and pass before us in long and silent procession. The breezes which blow through the broken arches are changed into voices, and recall the shouts and cries of a vast audience. By day, the ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various
... bewildered your understanding," exclaimed the lady. "Whatever my ambition may be, my morality is unimpeached; a vestal would lose none of her ...
— Turns of Fortune - And Other Tales • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... cataract, and in the lonely lanes and woods, she had vowed herself to one alone—had dedicated her virgin beauty (in the spirit of those romances she had fatally devoured) to her "night-harper" with as true devotion as ever did white vestal, at the end of her noviciate, devote herself alive and dead to the one God. Instilled by the touching tone, the wild pathos, the swimming eye of a wayward passionate character, weak, yet bold, of whom she knew almost nothing, this devoted girl yielded up her better reason to his rash innovations ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... whom the rock opposite Charybdis was named, was a beautiful maiden, beloved by the sea-god Glaucus, but changed into a monster through the jealousy and enchantments of Circe. The mother of Romulus: Silvia, daughter and only living child of Numitor, whom her uncle Amulius made a vestal virgin, to preclude the possibility that his brother's descendants could wrest from him the kingdom of Alba Longa. But the maiden was violated by Mars as she went to bring water from a fountain; she bore Romulus and Remus; and she was drowned in the Anio, while the cradle with the children was carried ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... did not materialise; in the walnut and chestnut forest around them not a leaf stirred; and gradually the mountains cleared, became inartistically distinct, and turned a beautiful but disturbing dark-blue colour. And Thusis wore her vestal veil in ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers
... the man but would be damnation to the girl. Even the name of this big, blue-eyed, fair-skinned young votary of science had much about it that made her fairly bristle, for she had once been described as an "austere vestal" by Lieutenant Blake, of the regiment preceding them at Sandy, the ——th Cavalry—and a mutual friend had told her all about it—another handicap for Blakely. She had grown, it must be admitted, somewhat gaunt and forbidding in these later years, a thing that had stirred certain ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... death, and the resurrection. And they have also got a new goddess. Have you heard of Cybele, the mother of the gods, a virgin, who is worshipped in Rome like Vesta by vestal priests." ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... large print of the Circus Maximus, with crowded tiers mounting toward the sky, and awninged boxes where sat the Vestal Virgins and the Emperor high above a motley, serried group on the sand. At the mouth of a tunnel a lion stood motionless, menacing, regarding ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... year, one of these—to whom the seed sown in London ball-rooms and German watering-places had produced nothing yet but those tiresome garlands of the vestal—I look curiously to see how she wears, thinking of the courtier's answer to Louis XIV. when the latter asked if he was looking older: "Sire, I see some more victories written on your forehead." It is more defeats that one can read so plainly on ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... have never doubted my mother's faith. When I imagined I did I was self-deceived. Everything here confirms it, and Miss Walton more than all. I will consult the divine oracle. She shall be the fair vestal, the gentle priestess. She lives near to heaven, and knows its mind. If her kind and womanly nature shrinks from me, if she coldly draws her skirts aside that I pollute them not even with a touch—if ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... the circular colonnade around it, is 32 feet high. Wherever the Temple of Vesta may have stood, it is evident that from its eternal fires was borrowed the custom, still extant in Catholic churches, of keeping up a perpetual flame by means of tapers. Six Vestal Virgins sworn to perpetual virginity, used to watch the sacred flame upon the altar in the Temple of Vesta, and it is an impressive sight to see the same sacred and eternal flame still burning around the High Altar in St. Peter's. From what may ...
— The Youthful Wanderer - An Account of a Tour through England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany • George H. Heffner
... goes back to the walls of Troy. The form of it passed with the windmills that Don Quixote charged. It is with you to keep the high spirit of it an ever-burning vestal fire. It was a deadly play of old—it is a harmless play to you this day. But the prowess of the game is unchanged; for the skill to strike those pendent rings is no less than was the skill to strike armor-joint, visor, or plumed crest. It was of old an exercise ...
— A Knight of the Cumberland • John Fox Jr.
... through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun. Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon, Who is already sick and pale with grief That thou, her maid, art far more fair than she. Be not her maid, since she is envious; Her vestal livery is but sick and green.... Two of the fairest stars in all the heaven, Having some business, do entreat her eyes To twinkle in their spheres till they return. What if her eyes were there, they in her head? The brightness ...
— How to Use Your Mind • Harry D. Kitson
... Rome is indeed far more poetical than anything else in Latin literature. The loves of the Vestal and the God of War, the cradle laid among the reeds of Tiber, the fig-tree, the she-wolf, the shepherd's cabin, the recognition, the fratricide, the rape of the Sabines, the death of Tarpeia, the fall of Hostus Hostilius, the struggle of Mettus Curtius through the marsh, the ...
— Lays of Ancient Rome • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... for the bridal hour Of nymph and naiad from woodland bower; Till vestal pearls that on leaflets lay, Ravished with beauty the ...
— Poems • Mary Baker Eddy
... her not human like the other women and the men I had known, but a creature apart and in a class apart, I stood day after day gaping at that very door, and wondering how I could open it, how penetrate even to the courtyard of that vestal citadel. So long as my old-fashioned belief that good women were more than human and bad women less than human had influenced me only to a sharper lookout in dealing with the one species of woman I then came in contact with, no harm to me resulted, but on the contrary good—whoever got into trouble ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... substance, and especially of her personal attentions, on the sick and the poor, she will find all she has done of good at home an invaluable prompter and aid. For the sake, therefore, of others, as a social and responsible being, let the flame she would support on the public altar be kindled from the vestal fire ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey
... group by Nattier: Mlle. de Lambec as Minerva, arming her brother the young Count of Brienne. To the same skilful portraitist are due: 660, a Knight of Malta; and 661, A Daughter of Louis XV. as a Vestal Virgin. By Boucher are: 48, R. of entrance, The Painter in his Studio, and R. wall, 47, The Three Graces; 46 and 49, L. wall, Venus and Vulcan, and Vulcan's Forge. Fragonnard is represented by some of his characteristic works executed with ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... was the most scrupulous of all mankind, he ran to an excess of blood-guiltiness,] killing four of the vestal virgins, one of whom—so far as he was able—he had forcibly outraged. For latterly all his sexual power had disappeared, as a result of which it was reported that he satisfied his vileness in a different way; and associated with ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol VI. • Cassius Dio
... accomplished the impossible and transmuted the pirate of body into the pure of soul. It would not be true to say that he never thought lewdly of her; he would have thought lewdly of an angel or a vestal maid; that was ingrain in the composition of the man; but he thought well of her as he had never thought well of women before since he first scorched his stripling's fingers, and he would have killed twenty men to keep her from hearing a foul word. Sometimes when he talked with her, ever in his ...
— The Lady of Loyalty House - A Novel • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... still smiles upon me, nor will shun My face for hers of younger, fairer birth. Though oft her fruitful beauty glides between And robs me of his countenance, I will Ne'er hate her, but yield up my borrowed sheen To make her hallowed nights more hallowed still. Burn then, my pale and vestal flame, make fair The nuptials of the amorous Earth with night! My sickle reaps the lurking stars in air, My argent shield hangs lucent on the height. Yet he that chafes and wounds the Earthen shores, And flees though she embrace—the yearning Sea,— Is shackled ...
— The Masque of the Elements • Herman Scheffauer
... oh when the cloud of some darkening hour O'ershadows the soul with its gloom, Then where is the light of the vestal pow'r, The lamp of pale Hope to illume? Oh! the light ever lies In those bright fond eyes, Where Heaven has impressed its own blue As a seal from the skies As my heart relies On that gift of ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... had left "those few sheep in the wilderness"; and by the prophet who "was in the deserts till the time of his showing unto Israel." Its primary "institution," for Europe, was Numa's, in that of the Vestal Virgins, and College of Augurs; founded on the originally Etrurian and derived Roman conception of pure life dedicate to the service of God, and practical wisdom dependent on ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... hair, tied up in a piece of blue ribbon, conveyed to the happy Bell the result of the Vestal's conference with herself. Thrice before had she snipt off one of her auburn ringlets, and given them away. The possessors were faithless, but the hair had grown again: and Martha had indeed occasion to say that men were deceivers when she ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... She too wore the conventional sailor suit, but without color, and this effect of purity, the inscrutable delicacy of her, seemed to set her apart from these dark, materialistic sisters as though she had strayed like a lost vestal into the wrong atmosphere. His brows relaxed. For a moment the censor that had come to hold dominion in his heart was off guard. He felt the magnetism of her personality drawing him once more; he desired to cross the deck ...
— The Rim of the Desert • Ada Woodruff Anderson
... principle of life! precious flame over which all nature, like a careful vestal, incessantly watches in the temple of God! Center of all, by whom all exists! The spirit of destruction would itself die, blowing at thy flame! I am not astonished that thy name should be blasphemed, for they do not know who thou art, they who think they have seen thy face because ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... distressed damsel in faded silk and dirty muslin, who had trembled under his tyranny, and afflicted me so much by her sorrows, now seated familiarly on his knee, and quaffing from the same tankard. Harlequin lay asleep on one of the benches; and monks, satyrs, and Vestal virgins were grouped together, laughing outrageously at a broad story told by an unhappy count, who had been barbarously murdered in the tragedy. This was, indeed, novelty to me. It was a peep into another planet. I gazed and listened ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... yours; where'er it falls, It treads your well-wrought leather, On earthen floor, in marble halls, On carpet, or on heather. Still there the sweetest charm is found Of matron grace or vestal's, As Hebe's foot bore nectar ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... fair vestal is stirring abroad?" said the only man she met, who was one of the menials; but Catharine passed on without notice or reply, and gained the ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... am Sargon, the mighty King of Akkad. My mother was a vestal (priestess), my father an alien, whose brother inhabited the mountain.... When my mother had conceived me, she bare me in a hidden place. She laid me in a vessel of rushes, stopped the door thereof with pitch, and cast me adrift on the river.... The river floated me ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... four hours Godfrey got back. Just before he reached the tree he heard the shrill "twang! squeak!" of the kit, and soon found himself face to face with Professor Tartlet, who, in the attitude of a vestal, was watching the sacred fire confided ...
— Godfrey Morgan - A Californian Mystery • Jules Verne
... Funeral A Light to a Cigar Evening Amusement Trip to MATANZAS—El Casero Slave Plantation Sugar Making Luxuriant Vegetation Punic Faith and Cuban Cruelty H.M.S. "Vestal" Bribery Admiralty Wisdom Cigars and Manufactory Population—Chinese Laws of Domicile—Police and Slavery Increase of Slaves and Produce Tobacco, Games, and Lotteries Cuban Jokes Sketch of ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... Abbess of Saint Roque's Nunnery, like herself a conscientious, rigid, and devoted Papist. When the house of Saint Roque was despotically dissolved by the fiat of the impetuous monarch, the Lady Foljambe received her friend into her spacious mansion, together with two vestal sisters, who, like their Abbess, were determined to follow the tenor of their vows, instead of embracing the profane liberty which the Monarch's will had thrown in their choice. For their residence, the ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... the rule of contraries, we are at a loss to guess; seeing that the style of its decorations is very far from corresponding with that purity of thought and manners which we are accustomed to associate with the title of vestal. The paintings are numerous and beautiful, and the mosaics remarkably fine. Upon the threshold here, as in several other houses, we find the word "Salve" (Welcome), worked in mosaic. One may be seen in cut on ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... Mrs. Gerome had dropped her head once more on her arms, and the weary, despairing expression of her countenance, as she looked at the gilded horizon, where sea and sky seemed divided only by a belt of liquid gold,—might have served for the face of some careless Vestal, who, having allowed the fire to expire on the altar she had sworn to guard sleeplessly, sat hopeless, desolate, and doomed,—watching from the dim, cheerless temple of Hestia, the advent of that sun whose rays alone could rekindle the sacred flame, ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... Monahan. I wish I had the gift of eloquence. I wish I had the right to spank you. I wish I could prove to you, somehow, that with your gift, and heritage, and racial right it's as criminal for you to be earning your thousands at Haynes-Cooper's as it would have been for a vestal virgin to desert her altar fire to stoke a furnace. Your eyes are bright and hard, instead of tolerant. Your mouth is losing its graciousness. Your whole face is beginning to be stamped with a look that says ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... astray by their own sagacity and the overweening petulance of hard-earned and late-acquired wisdom. They do not fall in love with every meretricious extravagance at first sight, or mistake an old battered hypothesis for a vestal, because they are new to the ways of this old world. They do not seize upon it as a prize, but are safe from gross imposition by being as wise and no wiser than ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... shall remain under guardianship (tutela), even though they shall become of full age (perfecta aetas)[17] ... the Vestal Virgins are excepted [and] shall be free ...
— The Twelve Tables • Anonymous
... are but thoughts, found her a Vestal Virgin in Pagan Rome when brutes were kings, and lust stalked rampant through the streets. She was the bride of Christ, and her fair, frail body was flung to the wild beasts, and torn limb from limb while the multitude ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... walls were overrun with flowering vines, and whose cells were pretty vestal bowers, entered the bard and the young girl, to be met on the front porch by the wardeness herself, a mite of a woman, with wavy yellow hair, fine complexion and washed-out blue eyes. Sensitive almost to shyness, Mademoiselle de ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... novice unprofessed, Lovely and gentle, but distressed. She was betrothed to one now dead, Or worse, who had dishonoured fled. Her kinsmen bade her give her hand To one who loved her for her land; Herself, almost heart-broken now, Was bent to take the vestal vow, And shroud, within Saint Hilda's gloom, Her blasted hopes and ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... of this bloody edict, Constantius visited the temples of Rome; and the decency of his behavior is recommended by a pagan orator as an example worthy of the imitation of succeeding princes. "That emperor," says Symmachus, "suffered the privileges of the vestal virgins to remain inviolate; he bestowed the sacerdotal dignities on the nobles of Rome, granted the customary allowance to defray the expenses of the public rites and sacrifices; and, though he had ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... go straight to Norbanus and tell him what had happened, yet he feared that in such a case the anger of the magistrate would be so great that Ennia would be forced by him into becoming one of the vestal virgins, or be shut up in strict imprisonment. Scarce a word was spoken as they passed down the hill and into the streets, now almost deserted. At last Ennia stopped at the entrance used by the ...
— Beric the Briton - A Story of the Roman Invasion • G. A. Henty
... — N. purity; decency, decorum, delicacy; continence, chastity, honesty, virtue, modesty, shame; pudicity[obs3], pucelage[obs3], virginity. vestal, virgin, Joseph, Hippolytus; Lucretia, Diana; prude. Adj. pure, undefiled, modest, delicate, decent, decorous; virginibus puerisque[Lat]; simon-pure; chaste, continent, virtuous, honest, Platonic. virgin, unsullied; cherry [coll.]. Phr. "as chaste as unsunn'd snow" [Cymbeline]; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... illustrious prefect of the city has in a memorial set forth three propositions which he considers of force—that Rome, he says, asks for her rites again, that pay be given to her priests and vestal virgins, and that a general famine followed upon the refusal of the priests' ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... more virgin-proud. The maiden-moon, new-seated on a cloud That seems her throne where she receives the stars,— The moon who holds her court beyond the jars Of land and sea,—the moon, the vestal moon, Has kept thee cold since the transcendant noon Of that wild day when I thy hand did claim, And when thy lips ...
— A Lover's Litanies • Eric Mackay
... sympathetic smile. 'Beware of Love! she cried, ye Nymphs, and hear 'His twanging bowstring with alarmed ear; 'Fly the first whisper of the distant dart, 'Or shield with adamant the fluttering heart; 430 'To secret shades, ye Virgin trains, retire, 'And in your bosoms guard the vestal fire.' —The obedient Beauties hear her words, advised, And bow with laugh ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... positively erratic in its changes of key. It is full of reminiscences of Haydn's "Creation" and other works. The musical stimulation of this boy was meager indeed. Not until he was thirteen years of age did he hear an opera; and not until he was fifteen a really first-class work, Spontini's "Vestal," in 1812. Three years later he probably heard Gluck's "Iphigenie en Tauride," a work which in his estimation eclipsed them all. During the same year there were the sixth and seventh symphonies, the choral fantasia and portions of the mass in C, and the overture to ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... Dodona's leaves; Phoebus is dumb, and votaries crowd no more The Delphian mountain and the Delian shore, And lone and still the Lybian Ammon stands, His utterance stifled by the desert sands. No more in Cnydian bower, or Cyprian grove The golden censers flame with gifts to Love; The pale-eyed Vestal bends no more and prays Where the eternal fire sends up its blaze; Cybele hears no more the cymbal's sound, The Lares shiver the fireless hearthstone round; And shatter'd shrine and altar lie o'erthrown, Inscriptionless, save where Oblivion ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... guardians of a state, And when they fail, portend approaching fate: For that which Rome to conquest did inspire, Was not the Vestal, but the Muses fire; Heav'n joins the blessings, no declining age E'er felt the raptures ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. IV • Theophilus Cibber
... gained the Capitol—her foot is on the stair; She stands a form of matchless grace, the queen of thousands there. Bring forth the wreath that threw afresh a lustre round his name, Whose genius burned, a vestal fire, with ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 449 - Volume 18, New Series, August 7, 1852 • Various
... at the building. Then the moonlight vanished ghostlike from one of the windows, a material glow took its place, and a girlish figure, holding a candle, drew the white curtains together. To Culpepper it was a vestal virgin standing before a hallowed shrine; to the prosaic observer I fear it was only a fair-haired young woman, whose wicked black eyes still shone with unfilial warmth. Howbeit, when the figure had disappeared he stepped out briskly into the moonlight of the high-road. Here ...
— Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... prospects and done no good to anyone. I understood perfectly that I had acted in an unpardonable manner; for Her Majesty's Maids of Honour were kept, or were supposed to be kept, in very great seclusion at home, as if they were Vestal virgins—which was indeed a very great supposition. Tale after tale came back to my mind of those Maids in the past—of Mademoiselle de la Garde herself, of Miss Stewart, Miss Hyde, Miss Hamilton, and others like them—some of whom ...
— Oddsfish! • Robert Hugh Benson
... Force, however, prevailed more than a father's wish or the respect due to seniority. Amulius drove out his brother and seized the kingdom: he added crime to crime, murdered his brother's male issue, and, under pretence of doing honour to his brother's daughter, Rea Silvia, having chosen her a Vestal Virgin,[2] deprived her of all hopes of issue by ...
— Roman History, Books I-III • Titus Livius
... poet saw, With saints for petals. When this rose was perfect Its hundred thousand petals were not saints, But senators in their Thessalian caps, And all the roaring populace of Rome; And even an Empress and the Vestal Virgins, Who came to see the gladiators die, Could not give sweetness to a rose like this. The sand beneath our feet is saturate With blood of martyrs; and these rifted stones Are awful witnesses against a people Whose pleasure was the pain ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... morning, waiting for Germans to cross the flooded fields. For him cigarettes were an endless chain that went through his life. From the expiring stub he lit his fresh smoke, as if he were maintaining a vestal flame. He kept puffing till the live butt singed his upturned mustache. He squinted his eyes to escape ...
— Golden Lads • Arthur Gleason and Helen Hayes Gleason
... thin, fleecy scarf of clouds was silvered by the rising moon, the west was a huge shrine of beryl whereon burned ruby flakes of vapor, watched by a solitary vestal star; and the sapphire arch overhead was beautiful and mellow as any that ever vaulted above the sculptured marbles of ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... with the sidewalk. They don't draw the shades at night, and everyone uses little muslin curtains which conceal nothing. One of my favorite things to do is to walk along Pleasant Street to Lily Lane, or through Vestal Street, just about dusk, and see the darling interiors of the spotless cottages. Not really to stop nor stare, just to go softly and slowly by.... One house has little heads around the tea-table with father and mother; another has company for supper; and the next—just old folks are left—but all ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... number, Ugo; and moreover, she is not a woman, but a noble virgin. I discern a distinction, though you may not. The Vestal's fire burns straight." ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... decorated the foyer of the Grand Opera in Paris; is best known as the author of the "Punishment of a Vestal Virgin" and the "Assassination of ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... statesman, and popular to boot with all his subjects save the malignant oligarchy which he consistently snubbed, and which took revenge on him by writing his life. And, to crown all, even Catiline, abuser of our patience, seducer of vestal nuns, and drinker of children's blood,—whose very name suggests murder, incest, and robbery,—even Catiline has found an able defender in Professor Beesly. It is claimed that Catiline was a man of great abilities and average ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... of her virtue and vigour, the Roman matron laboured mightily, and bore on her shoulders her full half of the social burden, though her sphere of labour and influence was even somewhat smaller than that of the Teutonic sisterhood whose descendants were finally to supplant her own. From the vestal virgin to the matron, the Roman woman in the days of the nation's health and growth fulfilled lofty functions and bore the whole weight of domestic toil. From the days of Lucretia, the great Roman dame whom we find spinning with her handmaidens deep into the night, and whose personal ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... darkness of the upper and lower halls, made walls and balustrades seem vast by its flickering impotence to oust the darkness. Surely this girl, towering in her sweeping robe and queenly pose, was made to be loved of men and gods! Hero, carrying her vestal taper in the temple recesses, before ever Leander had crossed the wave, could not have had a larger or more noble form, a more ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... "editing" of Harte's story. This was agreed to, and when the publisher came back, a few days later, the embargo was removed. The Luck of Roaring Camp was printed as it was written, and printing office and vestal proof-reader survived the shock.' ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... enough for little Mary Ware," he had said once, when she was a romping child. He was thinking of her unselfishness, her sturdy sincerity, her undaunted courage. Now he repeated it, thinking of her as this letter revealed her, a white-souled vestal maiden who took the stars as a symbol of her duty, and who would not swerve a hair's-breadth from the orbit which she thought ...
— Mary Ware's Promised Land • Annie Fellows Johnston
... her which made it necessary that he should assert mere sportiveness on his part as his reason in seeking her—something in her quite antipathetic to that side of him which had been occupied with literary study and the magnificent Christminster dream. It had been no vestal who chose THAT missile for opening her attack on him. He saw this with his intellectual eye, just for a short; fleeting while, as by the light of a falling lamp one might momentarily see an inscription on a wall before ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... immense flaps to his knees; his brown locks, also, hung down behind, in a mode unknown to our times. By his side was a sweet young damsel, her fair features sheltered by a prim little bonnet, within which appeared the vestal muslin of a cap; her close, long-waisted gown, and indeed her whole attire, might have been worn by some rustic beauty who had faded half a century before. But that there was something too warm and life-like in them, ...
— The Snow Image • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... a moment's mental devotion, "No, fair daughter, I and another know your real mind better. Ha! fair cousin of Orleans, do we not? Approach, fair sir, and lead this devoted vestal ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... great son of Lagus; and what would become of our commerce with Cos if I did not purchase the finest bombyx stuffs, since those who sell it make no profits out of you, the queen—and you cover yourself, like a vestal virgin, in garments of tapestry. Give me a wreath for my head—aye and another to that, and new wine in the cup! To the glory of Rome and to your health, Publius Cornelius Scipio, and to our last critical conjecture, my Aristarchus—to ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... some basket chairs, tacked a few coloured pictures from annuals on its bare walls, and made it look quite pretty. Tom lighted them a blazing fire every day, and tended it during their absence with the care of a vestal virgin, so they were extremely cosy and jolly there. The joiner's bench and the glue-pot gave facilities for any hobbies they wished to carry on; they could make as much noise as they liked, and walk in and out with ...
— Monitress Merle • Angela Brazil
... suffrage system of America. Sir, it seems to me that it would be ruthlessly tearing the angel element from the homes of America, for the homes of the people of America are infinitely more valuable than any suffrage system. It will be a sorry day for this country when those vestal fires of piety and love are put out. Mr. President, it seems to me that the Christian religion, which has elevated woman to her true position as a peer by the side of man from which she was taken; that religion which is a part of the common law of this land, in its very spirit ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... takes her to his bosom knows, Lost in the magic crystal of her eyes, Upon her vestal cheek a fairer rose, What rapture and what passionate surprise Awaits his kiss beneath her mask of snows, And what strange fire ...
— A Jongleur Strayed - Verses on Love and Other Matters Sacred and Profane • Richard Le Gallienne
... the defense of Cluentius, Caelius, Milo, and Flaccus; the most striking instances of which are the poetical bursts of feeling with which he addresses his client, Plaucius, and his picture of the desolate condition of the vestal Fonteia, should her brother be condemned. At other times his peroration contains more heroic and elevated sentiments, as in the invocation of the Alban Altars, and in his defense of Sextius, and that on liberty at the close of the third Philippic." [Footnote: ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord |
