"Asp" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... glittering crown upon the head. The train of the procession consisted of the priests in long white vestments, close from head to foot, distributed into various groups, each bearing, exposed aloft, one of the sacred symbols of Isis—the corn-fan, the golden asp, the ivory hand of equity, and among them the votive ship itself, carved and gilt, and adorned bravely with flags flying. Last of all walked the high priest; the people kneeling as he passed to kiss his hand, in ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... appearance. There was the envious Kenrick and the savage Wolcot, the asp George Steevens and the polecat John Williams. It did not, however, occur to them to search the parish register of Lynn, in order that they might be able to twit a lady with having concealed her age. That truly chivalrous ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... sacred animals, as emblems of divinity. Among them were the bulls, Apis, at Memphis, and Muenis, at Heliopolis, both sacred to Osiris. The crocodile was sacred to Lebak, whose offices are unknown; the asp to Num; the cat to Pasht, whose offices were also unknown; the beetle to Ptah. The worship of these and of other animals was conducted with great ceremony, and sacrifices were made to them of other animals, fruits ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... who noted where the flat, spade headed little serpent fell. "Looks wonderfully like an asp, such as they have in Egypt. ...
— Fire Island - Being the Adventures of Uncertain Naturalists in an Unknown Track • G. Manville Fenn
... great gateway, leaves the view open to the sky beyond the western edge of the roof, except in the middle, where a life size image of Ra, seated on a huge plinth, towers up, with hawk head and crown of asp and disk. His altar, which stands at his feet, is a single white stone.) Now everybody can see us, nobody will think of listening to us. (He sits down on the bench left by the ...
— Caesar and Cleopatra • George Bernard Shaw
... 21:8 8 And the suckling child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his ...
— The Book Of Mormon - An Account Written By The Hand Of Mormon Upon Plates Taken - From The Plates Of Nephi • Anonymous
... this rare difference, outlaw—for whereas her tongue (honoured relict!) is tipped with gall, wormwood, henbane, hemlock, bitter-aloes and verjuice, and stingeth like the adder, the asp, the toad, the newt, the wasp, and snaky-haired head of ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... in parts it was difficult. Fragments of "The Tempest," and of other plays, remain stranded in my memory from these readings: Ferdinand and Miranda at chess, Cleopatra cuffing the messenger, the asp in the basket of figs, the Friar and the Apothecary, Troilus on the Ilian walls, a vision of Cassandra in white muslin with her hair down. People forbid children to read this or that. I am sure they need not, and that even in our infancy the magician, ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... the Free Trade Hall, and take a circle of half a mile round there, you would get a cavern of rattlesnakes. You know what I mean. Low theatres, low music-halls, casinos, haunts of yet viler sorts—there the snakes are, hissing and writhing and ready to bite. Do not 'put your hand on the hole of the asp.' Take care of books, pictures, songs, companions that would lead you astray. Oh for a voice to stand at some doors that I know in Manchester, and peal this text into the ears of the fools, men and ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... everyone very miserable. Directly she went out, Imperia told the ladies of Rome that she should die it if she were deserted by this gentleman, and would cause herself, like Queen Cleopatra, to be bitten by an asp. She declared openly that she had bidden an eternal adieu her to her former gay life, and would show the whole world what virtue was by abandoning her empire for this Villiers de l'Ile Adam, whose servant she would rather be ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... danger in supporting such an argument; also Benedict XI. was pope but eight months. One day a veiled woman, a pretended lay-sister of Sainte-Petronille at Perugia, came to him while he was at table, offering him a basket of figs. Did it conceal an asp like Cleopatra's? The fact is that on the morrow the ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere
... Soter, Demetrius should have lost his place at the head of the museum, and been ordered to leave Alexandria. He died, as courtiers say, in disgrace; and he was buried near Diospolis in the Busirite nome of the Delta. According to one account he was put to death by the bite of an asp, in obedience to the new king's orders, but this story is not generally credited; although this was not an ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 10 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... zoophyte. [major divisions of animals] mammal, bird, reptile, amphibian, fish, crustacean, shellfish, mollusk, worm, insect, arthropod, microbe. [microscopic animals] microbe, animalcule &c. 193. [reptiles] alligator, crocodile; saurian; dinosaur [extinct]; snake, serpent, viper, eft; asp, aspick[obs3]. [amphibians] frog, toad. [fishes] trout, bass, tuna, muskelunge, sailfish, sardine, mackerel. [insects] ant, mosquito, bee, honeybee. [arthropods] tardigrade, spider. [classificatiopn by number of feet] biped, quadruped. flocks and herds, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... round to a level with the beard. His feet and arms were bare, except for thin ribbons of downy, purple feathers, which circled the wrists and ankles. No crown was on his head, but among the stringy wig-curls the sinuous body of an asp bent in and out, and the curved neck and threatening head surmounted his ...
— Pharaoh's Broker - Being the Very Remarkable Experiences in Another World of Isidor Werner • Ellsworth Douglass
... body was swollen, except very slightly about the wound; however, there was a rapidly increasing rigidity of the muscles of the neck and throat, and within half an hour after he was bit, he was utterly unable to swallow even liquids. The small whip—snake, the most deadly asp in the whole list of noxious reptiles peculiar to South America, was not above fourteen inches long; it had made four small punctures with its fangs, right over the left jugular vein, about an inch below the chin. There was no blood oozing ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... pleasures grasp? Judge not thou deal'st in joy; Its flowers but hide the asp, Thy revels to destroy: Who trusts a harlot's smile, And by her wiles is led, Plays with a sword the while, ...
— Ancient Poems, Ballads and Songs of England • Robert Bell
... do that?" sez I. "You've shquibbed off your revolver like a child wid a cracker; you can make no play wid that fine large sword av yours; an' your hand's shakin' like an asp on a leaf. Lie still ...
— Soldier Stories • Rudyard Kipling
... which still held Juan's, by degrees Gently, but palpably confirm'd its grasp, As if it said, 'Detain me, if you please;' Yet there 's no doubt she only meant to clasp His fingers with a pure Platonic squeeze: She would have shrunk as from a toad, or asp, Had she imagined such a thing could rouse A feeling dangerous to ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... shall lead them. And the cow and the bear shall make friends; Their young ones shall lie down together; And the lion shall eat straw like the ox. And the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp, And the weaned child shall stretch out his hand to the serpent's eye. None shall do evil or act corruptly in all my holy mountain, For the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as ...
— Stories of the Prophets - (Before the Exile) • Isaac Landman
... we call asp-wood, ma'am, which is a kind of sallow; they lay up great quantities of it in the autumn as a provision for winter, when they are frozen up ...
— The Settlers in Canada • Frederick Marryat
... struggling with illness, he succeeded in accomplishing his object. He next produced a Flageolet-player, which was succeeded by a Duck—the most ingenious of his contrivances,—which swam, dabbled, drank, and quacked like a real duck. He next invented an asp, employed in the tragedy of 'Cleopatre,' which hissed and darted at the bosom ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... all ride down the road to where the bridge is—that's the main stream again, and she's pretty big—regular river, all right. Wait for me there at the bridge. I'll see if I can pick out a fish or so. I see a dry quaking asp lying here that some fellow has left, and I'll just try it myself. You know, get a quaking-asp pole that's dry and hasn't been dead too long, it's the lightest and springiest natural fishing rod that grows. The tip is strong enough, if it hasn't rotted, and she ...
— The Young Alaskans on the Missouri • Emerson Hough
... a poor man—very poor, almost degraded, you understand—so, in my unfortunate munificence, I lifted her out of her poverty, gave her some of my own genius, and took her to my bosom, as Cleopatra took the asp; and she stung me, just in the same way, villainous ingrate! This girl has treated me shamefully. I had made such an engagement for her—such concessions—carriage for herself, dressing-maid always in attendance, a boudoir ...
— The Old Countess; or, The Two Proposals • Ann S. Stephens
... asp, death, fastens on our vein of earthly life, we all feel, like the dying queen of Egypt, that we have "immortal longings" in us. Since the soul thus holds by a pertinacious instinct to the eternity of her own existence, it is more rational to conclude that this is a pledge ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... which lasted for some time, was attributed to a picture which hung at the foot of his, mother's bed, and which she often looked at. It represented a Moor bringing to Cleopatra a basket of flowers, containing the asp by whose bite she destroyed herself. He said that she also told him, "You have a great deal of money about you, but it does not belong to you;" and that he had actually in his pocket two hundred Louis for the Duc de La Valliere. ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 2 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... word "culverin" has a metaphorical meaning. It derives from the Latin colubra (snake). Similarly, the light gun called aspide or aspic, meaning "asp-like," was named after the venomous asp. But these digressions should not obscure the fact that both culverins and demiculverins were highly esteemed on account of their range and the effectiveness of fire. They were used for precision shooting such as building demolition, and an expert gunner ...
— Artillery Through the Ages - A Short Illustrated History of Cannon, Emphasizing Types Used in America • Albert Manucy
... replied, "Since you have not ordered your servants to bring them I supposed that you wished to do it yourself." Then the bishop leaped up in anger and cried out, "Anthony, Anthony, you are a little asp, but you have a great deal of venom!" Vandyck thought it safe to make his escape, and after he crossed the threshold he called back, "My lord Van der Burch, you are a voluminous personage, but you are like the cinnamon tree. The bark is the ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture - Painting • Clara Erskine Clement
... wights whose eager inquisitiveness to obtain a good close look brings them within the reach of their handy staves. We are followed by immense crowds, a Ferenghi being a rara avis in Khoi, and the fame of the wonderful asp- i (horse of iron) has spread like wild-fire through the city. In the bazaar I obtain Russian silver money, which is the chief currency of the country as far east as Zendjan. Partly to escape from the worrying ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... as he looked down. He had a hard, unlovely face, that little dwarf. He suggested to Vergilius unwelcome thoughts of a new sort of Cupid—deformed, evil, and hideous—typifying the degenerate passions of Rome. There were in the quiver of this Cupid arrows which carried the venom of the asp. Some at the table mocked his grinning face and made a jest of his deformity. When he could be heard he mimicked the speech and manners ...
— Vergilius - A Tale of the Coming of Christ • Irving Bacheller
... pain— A father's love and mortal's agony With an immortal's patience blending:—Vain The struggle: vain against the coiling strain And gripe, and deepening of the dragon's grasp, The old man's clench, the long envenom'd chain Rivets the living links,—the enormous asp Enforces pang on pang, and stifles ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... wroughten were by thee And decked full fair. And, beauteous to see, Fine woven weft and web, and the tall screen O'errun with painted bloom, crystal, with gleam Of Lilith's face—thou madest these. Mayhap Beetle and asp likewise didst tint—didst wrap The green about my rose, and richly fringe My cocoa-tree, or peacock's train didst tinge With dazzling hues. Methought thou wert a prince, But now Lilith should humbly kneel, since Thou art far higher than she deemed, if thou Madest ...
— Lilith - The Legend of the First Woman • Ada Langworthy Collier
... his hand; But, soon as e'er he laid it down, Twas a devouring serpent grown. Our great magician, Hamet Sid, Reverses what the prophet did: His rod was honest English wood, That senseless in a corner stood, Till metamorphos'd by his grasp, It grew an all-devouring asp; Would hiss, and sting, and roll, and twist. By the mere virtue of his fist: But, when he laid it down, as quick Resum'd the figure of a stick. So, to her midnight feasts, the hag Rides on a broomstick ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... rifles crackled still, And still their crashing volleys rolled and roared. Our rifles blazed upon the blaze below; The blaze below upon the blaze above, And in the blaze the buzz of myriad bees Whose stings were deadlier than the Libyan asp. Five times our colors fell—five times arose Defiant, flapping ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... imperial beauty, this noblest of all empresses, was marked to be stricken down by the red hand of anarchy, to whose crime, and poison, and danger we open our national ports with an unwisdom which is criminal stupidity, and of which we shall inevitably reap the benefit. America cannot warm the asp of anarchy in her bosom without expecting it to ...
— Abroad with the Jimmies • Lilian Bell
... so fairly in the face that he shrank back, and pressed his hand to a swelling cheek. "I said I hated and despised you. What I despise, though, is beneath my hate. I would tread on you as on a viper or a desert asp, as a noxious creature that is not fit to live. I have played my game; and though it was not I who won, but Agias who won for me, I am well content. Drusus lives! Lives to see you miserably dead! Lives to grow to glory and honour, to happiness and a noble old age, when the ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... creatures—with no flesh on her bones." On the other hand, however, she enjoyed later much complimentary disparagement from her own sex. Miss Celestina Howard, second leader in the ballet at the Varieties, had, with great alliterative directness, in after-years, denominated her as an "aquiline asp." Mlle. Brimborion remembered that she had always warned "Mr. Jack" that this woman would "empoison" him. But Mr. Oakhurst, whose impressions are perhaps the most important, only saw a pale, thin, deep-eyed woman, raised above ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... at the upper end. Against the wall, in the middle of the half-pace, is a chair placed for him, with a table and carpet before it. Over the chair is a state, made round or oval, and it is of ivy; an ivy somewhat whiter than ours, like the leaf of a silver asp, but more shining; for it is green all winter. And the state is curiously wrought with silver and silk of divers colours, broiding or binding in the ivy; and is ever of the work of some of the daughters of the family; and veiled over at the top, with a fine net of silk and silver. But the ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... damsel so her tale pursues, While sobs and sighs oft interposing break Her soft angelic voice, which might infuse Compassion into asp, or venomed snake. What time she so her piteous grief renews, Or haply does her bitter anguish slake, Some twenty men the gloomy cavern fill; This armed with hunting-spear, and that ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... every nook, From the Red Sea to the cold Caspian shore, In earth, in heaven one only Phoenix dwells. What fortunate, or what disastrous bird Omen'd my fate? which Parca winds my yarn, That I alone find Pity deaf as asp, And wretched live who happy hoped to be? Let me not speak of her, but him her guide, Who all her heart with love and sweetness fills— Gifts which, from him o'erflowing, follow her, Who, that my sweets may sour and cruel be, Dissembleth, careth not, or ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... by her winning manners, or move him by a display of her distress. Her power, she realized at last, was gone; but grace his triumph in Rome she was determined she would not. As a crowned queen she had lived; as one she would die. The deadly asp, it is said, became the executioner of her wicked will; and when the victor came to stay the act which would rob him of a part of his revenge, he found the work accomplished. Cleopatra would try ...
— Woman: Man's Equal • Thomas Webster
... these women had taken a deadly poison invented by Cleopatra and held against this day; others, still, told of how a countryman had brought a basket of figs, by appointment, covered over with green leaves, and in the basket was hidden an asp, that deadliest of serpents. Cleopatra had placed the asp in her bosom, and the other women had followed ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... charms, and her amours; first fascinated Caesar, to whom she bore a son, and whom she accompanied to Rome, and after Caesar's death took Mark Antony captive, on whose fall and suicide at Actium she killed herself by applying an asp to her arm, to escape the shame of being taken to Rome to grace the triumph of ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... though lean Hunger and green Thirst Like asp with adder fight, We have little care of prison fare, For what chills and kills outright Is that every stone one lifts by day Becomes ...
— Book of Old Ballads • Selected by Beverly Nichols
... spirit from Tartarus!... I cast thee down, O Tartarean boor, into the infernal kitchen!... Loathsome cobbler,... dingy collier,... filthy sow (scrofa stercorata),... perfidious boar,... envious crocodile,... malodorous drudge,... wounded basilisk,... rust-coloured asp,... swollen toad,... entangled spider,... lousy swine-herd (porcarie pedicose),... lowest of the low,... cudgelled ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... horror? We all feel it, yet how imaginative it is, how disproportioned to the real strength of the creature! There is more poison in an ill-kept drain, in a pool of dish-washing at a cottage door, than in the deadliest asp of Nile. Every back yard which you look down into from the railway as it carries you out by Vauxhall or Deptford, holds its coiled serpent; all the walls of those ghastly suburbs are enclosures of tank temples for serpent worship; yet you ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... adder, or huge asp, And hast thou got a rattle at thy tail? If of the Boa species, couldst thou clasp Within thy fold, ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... of my power, I said to defamation, Who will hear thee? and to artifice, What canst thou perform? But, my son, despise not thou the malice of the weakest, remember that venom supplies the want of strength, and that the lion may perish by the puncture of an asp." ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... process Legal system: has not accepted compulsory ICJ jurisdiction National holiday: Liberation Day, 29 November (1944) Political parties and leaders: there are at least 18 political parties; most prominent are the Albanian Socialist Party (ASP; formerly the Albania Workers Party), Fatos NANO, first secretary; Democratic Party (DP), Eduard SELAMI, chairman; Albanian Republican Party (RP), Sabri GODO; Omonia (Greek minority party), leader NA (ran in 1992 election as Unity for Human ...
— The 1993 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... body there dwelt, unknown to Nature, which has no sense of the ridiculous, the soul of a Cleopatra. At the moment she would cheerfully have died of an asp sooner than relinquish the study of Exodus under the eyes of the rector. In the arid stretch of her existence a great passion had flamed, and like most great passions, it was ruthless, destroying, and utterly selfish. She had made butter all day with the hope of that Bible class in her mind, and ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... value to a proverbially impetuous temperament. Croker (Fairy Legends of Ireland, vol. iii. p. 165) points out several places where the legend seems to have been localised in place-names—two places, called "Gwal y Vilast" ("Greyhound's Couch"), in Carmarthen and Glamorganshire; "Llech y Asp" ("Dog's Stone"), in Cardigan, and another place named in Welsh "Spring of the Greyhound's Stone." Mr. Baring-Gould mentions that the legend is told of an ordinary tombstone, with a knight and a greyhound, in Abergavenny Church; while the Fable of Cattwg is told of a man in Abergarwan. So ...
— Celtic Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... every day. They carry bows and arrows, or sword and buckler, and play at dice and draughts, and give no alms except to their dogs. 'Our places are taken by hawks and hounds, or by that strange creature, woman, from whom we taught our pupils to flee as from an asp or basilisk. This creature, ever jealous and implacable, spies us out in a corner hiding behind some ancient cabinet, and she wrinkles her forehead and laughs us to scorn, and points to us as the only rubbish in the house; and she complains that ...
— The Great Book-Collectors • Charles Isaac Elton and Mary Augusta Elton
... go," said Uncle Kit; "no doubt they will go to the quaking-asp grove, and we can git 'em to-morrow." So we returned to camp without any elk. But the next morning we went to the quaking-asp thicket, and there, sure enough, we found the same band of elk, and ...
— Thirty-One Years on the Plains and In the Mountains • William F. Drannan
... Shaking Asp Leaves to be always in a Quiver?—The wind or vibration of the air only causes the quiver of ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... from a barber and carried no shaving appliances, the brush and comb must suffice for them also. Finally he took his battered old hat from a nearby branch, brushed it carefully, arranged the crown so that fewer holes appeared, and put it upon his head. His clean shirt, spread upon a quaking-asp but by no means dry, afforded the best of reasons why he should not hurry; so, drawing a stained and stubby pipe and sack of tobacco from another pocket, Mr. Crusoe lay beneath a friendly cottonwood at the water's edge and ...
— Virginia of Elk Creek Valley • Mary Ellen Chase
... enemy of the asp. It is a native of Egypt and when it sees an asp near its place, it runs at once to the bed or mud of the Nile and with this makes itself muddy all over, then it dries itself in the sun, smears itself again with mud, and thus, drying one after the other, ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... driver was a melancholy man. He only made one remark to me during that long forty-mile drive through the wilderness. About dinner time he drove the horse under a quaking asp tree, tied a nose bag of oats over its head and took a wad of bread and bacon from his greasy pocket. The bacon and bread had little flakes of smoking tobacco all over it, because he carried his grub and tobacco in the same pocket. For a moment he introduced ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... the thoughtless one to step aside and pluck; but though they are beautiful to the eye, and their fragrance borne to us by the breeze, seems to woo us temptingly, yet, concealed within their leaves is a deadly scorpion or poisonous asp, whose sting is instant death, or some, perhaps, contain a more slow and sluggish poison, that creeps into the mind, and instilling its venom by slow degrees, corrupts the whole. Conscience has well been called the tell ...
— Withered Leaves from Memory's Garland • Abigail Stanley Hanna
... people, it is no longer respectable in the least. Listen to the panegyric which neighbor makes of neighbor. White on white is ferocious; if the lily could speak, what a setting down it would give the dove! A bigoted woman prating of a devout woman is more venomous than the asp and the cobra. It is a shame that I am ignorant, otherwise I would quote to you a mass of things; but I know nothing. For instance, I have always been witty; when I was a pupil of Gros, instead of daubing wretched little pictures, I passed my time in pilfering apples; rapin[24] is the masculine ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... wonderful hieroglyphics of the Egyptians. The spout was not elevated, but extended laterally, projecting like a long rivulet; while on the opposite side was the handle, which, with similar lateral extension, bore on its summit an asp, curling its body into folds, and stretching upward, its wrinkled, ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... so comely, So gentee, alamode, and handsome, I'll never marry man that wants one; And till you can demonstrate plain, You have one equal to your mane, 750 I'll be torn piece-meal by a horse, Ere I'll take you for better or worse. The Prince of CAMBAY's daily food Is asp, and basilisk, and toad; Which makes him have so strong a breath, 755 Each night he stinks a queen to death; Yet I shall rather lie in's arms Than ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... had often whispered to him of a joyous future when she, whom her father designated as "Sunshine," should also shed a halo of sunlight around another fireside. But now the illusion was painfully dispelled, for sooner would he have taken the Egyptian asp to his bosom than chosen for a companion one whom he knew to possess ...
— Tempest and Sunshine • Mary J. Holmes
... the origin, or nature, or name may be as you will, but the deadly reality of the thing is with us, and warring against us, and on our true war with it depends whatever life we can win. Deadly reality, I say. The puff-adder or horned asp is not more real. Unbelievable,—those,—unless you had seen them; no fable could have been coined out of any human brain so dreadful, within its own poor material sphere, as that blue-lipped serpent—working its way sidelong in the sand. As real, but with sting of eternal ...
— Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne - Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work • John Ruskin
... death of Cleopatra has been preferred which attributes her end to poison. According to Plutarch its actual manner is very uncertain, though popular rumour ascribed it to the bite of an asp. She seems, however, to have carried out her design under the advice of that shadowy personage, her physician, Olympus, and it is more than doubtful if he would have resorted to such a fantastic and ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... father's love and mortal's agony With an immortal's patience blending;—vain The struggle! vain against the coiling strain And gripe and deepening of the dragon's grasp The old man's clinch; the long envenomed chain Rivets the living links; the enormous asp Enforces pang on pang and stifles gasp ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... prostrate upon the billiard-table here, you could hit him a square blow in the neck if you had a hundred axes. Delilah might as well cry for her scissors, for all the good it would do us in our predicament. If Cleopatra had her asp with her it might be more to the purpose. One deadly little snake like that let loose on the upper deck would doubtless drive these boors into the sea, and even then our condition would not be bettered, for there isn't any of us that can ...
— The Pursuit of the House-Boat • John Kendrick Bangs
... bottom we mounted again and followed MacRae in a cautious file around clumps of willow and rustling quaking-asp to the place where the blaze should have shown. But no glint of fire appeared in any direction; the coulee-bottom lay more dark and silent, if that were possible, than the gloomy hills above. Perplexed, MacRae halted, and we bunched together, whispering, each of us straining ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... San Gallo, who was much his friend and intimate companion, and who made it when Piero was old; which Francesco still has a work by the hand of Piero that I must not pass by, a very beautiful head of Cleopatra, with an asp wound round her neck, and two portraits, one of his father Giuliano, and the other of his grandfather Francesco Giamberti, ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 04 (of 10), Filippino Lippi to Domenico Puligo • Giorgio Vasari
... feverish entreaty in his voice. That hunted helplessness with which a question so slight yet so momentous was received, was forcing in on him a thought that he flung away like an asp. ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... alas for this false thought of that wrong deed! the poisonous gold has touched thy heart, and left on it a spot of cancer: the asp has bitten thee already, simple soul. This little seed will grow into a huge black pine, that shall darken for a while thy heaven, and dig its evil roots around thy happiness. Put it away, Roger, put it away: covet ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... in the shade of the wagon, his saddle blanket beneath him and his folded arms for a pillow as he slept on his face. The herd chewed its cud drowsily under the quaking asp nearby, out of the mid-day heat and away from pestiferous flies, while under a bush not far from the wagon a lamb lay with eyes half closed, waggling its narrow jaw, and grinding its sharp white ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... midst of the wreck of her life, out of the depths of the dust of humiliation, had sprung the beautiful blossom of love, shedding its intoxicating fragrance over ruin; yet, because the asp of treachery lurked in the exquisite, folded petals, she shut her eyes to the bewildering loveliness, and loyalty strove to tear it up by the roots, to trample it out; learning thereby, that the fibrous thread had struck deep into ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... dust was raised a gory clot (23) In guise of Asp, sleep-bringing, swollen of neck: Full was the blood and thick the poison drop That were its making; in no other snake More copious held. Greedy of warmth it seeks No frozen world itself, nor haunts the sands Beyond the Nile; yet has our thirst of gain No shame nor limit, and this Libyan death, This ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... asp. He knew it was from the descriptions he had read of such creatures, and then the desire to throw it off—as far as he could, came over him, and his ...
— Yussuf the Guide - The Mountain Bandits; Strange Adventure in Asia Minor • George Manville Fenn
... the forest that edged the mesa, and just back of Fernando's camp, a Ranger trail cuts through a patch of quaking-asp and meanders through the heavy-timbered land toward the Blue range, a spruce-clad ridge of southern hills. Close to the trail two saddle horses ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... straught*: *stretched This is to say, the boughes were so broad. Of straw first there was laid many a load. But how the pyre was maked up on height, And eke the names how the trees hight*, *were called As oak, fir, birch, asp*, alder, holm, poplere, *aspen Willow, elm, plane, ash, box, chestnut, lind*, laurere, *linden, lime Maple, thorn, beech, hazel, yew, whipul tree, How they were fell'd, shall not be told for me; Nor how the goddes* rannen up ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... the streets of the mountains gives such a sense of pageantry as the conifers; other trees, if they are any, are home dwellers, like the tender fluttered, sisterhood of quaking asp. They grow in clumps by spring borders, and all their stems have a permanent curve toward the down slope, as you may also see in hillside pines, where they have borne the weight ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin
... and leaders: ruling party is the Arab Socialist Resurrectionist (Bath) Party; the Progressive National Front is dominated by Bathists but includes independents and members of the Syrian Arab Socialist Party (ASP), Arab Socialist Union (ASU), Socialist Unionist Movement, ...
— The 1990 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... returned with forked tongue To forked tongue; for now were all transformed Alike, to serpents all, as accessories To his bold riot: Dreadful was the din Of hissing through the hall, thick swarming now With complicated monsters head and tail, Scorpion, and Asp, and Amphisbaena dire, Cerastes horned, Hydrus, and Elops drear, And Dipsas; (not so thick swarmed once the soil Bedropt with blood of Gorgon, or the isle Ophiusa,) but still greatest he the midst, Now Dragon grown, larger than whom the sun Ingendered in the Pythian ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... Praeneste, the modern Palestrina, and in the necropolis of Clusium; some of those found there, have engraved on the base the lotus flower with four-winged figures of archaic Etruscan form, the kynokephallos ape, the sacred asp or uraeus of Egypt, the winged sun of Thebes and the bull Apis; on others are figures copied from Assyrian originals; on others are Herakles fighting the lion, Herakles stealing the tripod of Apollo and discovered by the latter; Ajax and Cassandra, a Harpy, etc. Some of these have ...
— Scarabs • Isaac Myer
... of crime; it will tell us what follows the broken spell,—broken by the first degrading theft, the first stroke of the dagger, or the first drop of poison. The felon's eye turns upon the beautiful sorceress with loathing and abhorrence: an asp, a toad, is not more hateful! The story of Milwood ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... Carneades, you were to know that an asp was lying hidden anywhere, and that some one who did not know it was going to sit upon it, whose death would be a gain to you, you would act wickedly if you did not warn him not to sit down. Still, you would not be liable to punishment; for who could ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... without the gates. For our places are seized now by dogs, now by hawks, now by that biped beast whose cohabitation with the clergy was forbidden of old, from which we have always taught our nurslings to flee more than from the asp and the cockatrice; wherefore she, always jealous of the love of us, and never to be appeased, at length seeing us in some corner protected only by the web of some dead spider, with a frown abuses and ...
— The Philobiblon of Richard de Bury • Richard de Bury
... A dismal universal hiss, the sound Of public scorn. Dreadful was the din Of hissing through the hall, thick swarming now With complicated monsters, head and tail, Scorpion and asp, and Amphisbaena dire, Cerastes horned, Hydrus, and Elops drear, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... human foot approached her cave—no mortal dared. The warrior, who feared not a hundred foes, quailed at the sight of Elgiva, the enchantress, the worker of wonders. Unclean reptiles crawled around her cave—the asp, the loathsome toad, and the hissing adder. Two owls sat in the farthest corner of the cave, and their eyes were as lamps in its darkness. They sat upon skulls of the dead. A tame raven croaked in the midst of it. It was told that the ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various
... an half-pace at the upper end. Against the wall, in the middle of the half-pace, is a chair placed for him, with a table and carpet before it. Over the chair is a state, made round or oval, and it is of ivy; an ivy somewhat whiter than ours, like the leaf of a silver asp; but more shining; for it is green all winter. And the state is curiously wrought with silver and silk of divers colors, broiding or binding in the ivy; and is ever of the work of some of the daughters of the family; and veiled over at ...
— The New Atlantis • Francis Bacon
... languished upon Marc Antony's shoulder in the most approved manner. Reddy, as the Roman conqueror left nothing to be desired. The star actor of the piece, however, was Hippy, who played the deadly asp. He writhed and wriggled in a manner that would have filled a respectable serpent with envy, and in the closing scene bit the unfortunate Cleopatra so venomously that she howled for mercy, and instead of dying gracefully, arose and engaged ...
— Grace Harlowe's Sophomore Year at High School • Jessie Graham Flower
... days after our arrival at Port Curtis, the Asp, as our decked boat had been named, joined us, having made an important addition to the surveys of this portion of the coast. On his passage up from Brisbane, Lieutenant Dayman, under the unexpected circumstances of finding that the Rattlesnake had sailed, instead of coasting along the eastern ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray
... produced a sharp triple sound through the vibrating motion of her arm. An oblong vessel, in the shape of a boat, depended from her left hand, on the handle of which, in that part which was conspicuous, an asp raised its erect head and largely swelling neck. And shoes, woven from the leaves of the victorious palm-tree, covered her immortal feet. Such, and so great a goddess, breathing the fragrant odor of the shores of Arabia the happy, deigned ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli |
