"Asphodel" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... believe I have some such feeling about these golden flowers. When I did not know what was the Asphodel, so celebrated by the poets, I thought it was a golden flower; yet this yellow is so ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... grace thy brows With wreathes of fadeless asphodel, And let them yearly plight their vows Unto the bard they love ...
— Canada and Other Poems • T.F. Young
... wooded lanes with shade and gleam Where bloomed the fragrant asphodel, Now bleak commercially teem With signs "To Let," "To Buy," "To Sell." And Commerce holds them fierce and fell; With vulgar sport she now combines Sweet Nature's piping voice to ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... lain on the breast of a mummied Pharaoh. Something, too, of immortality in the sad, faint sweetness lingering so long in its lifeless petals. Yet this does not tell why it fills my eyes with tears and carries me in blissful thought to the banks of asphodel that border the River ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... wooden ladder where Master Simon chained his ferry-boat. Fourteen miles inland, a brown trout-stream singing down from the moors, plunged over a ledge of rock into the cool depths of Cuckoo Valley. Thenceforward it ran by beds of sundew, water-mint and asphodel, under woods so steeply converging that the traveller upon the ridges heard it as the trickle of water in a cavern. But just above Master Simon's inn the valley widened out into arable and grey pasture land, and the river, too, widened and grew deep enough to float up vessels of small tonnage at ...
— Wandering Heath • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... In Enna's mountains, Down one vale where the morning basks, Like friends once parted, Grown single hearted They ply their watery tasks. At sunrise they leap [8] From their cradles steep In the cave of the shelving hill[,—] At noontide they flow Through the woods below And the meadows of asphodel,— And at night they sleep In the rocking deep Beneath the Ortygian shore;— Like spirits that lie In the azure sky, When they love, but ...
— Proserpine and Midas • Mary Shelley
... it ran nimbly in and out among the seasons. It travelled under the rosy eaves of a forest of blossoming almond up to a steep as haggard with weather as a Scotch moor, and dipped again to hedges of aloes and cactus and asphodel. At one moment a spindrift of orange blossom blew about him; at another he had watched the peasants in their brown capes stripping their dark green orange-groves and piling the golden globes into the panniers of donkeys which were gay with magenta tassels. At one time ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... of excitement in the Elysian Fields when the news went round that the Committee had exercised their power of electing a certain distinguished Shade to full membership of the Asphodel Club without a ballot. The general opinion seemed to be that the Committee had acted wisely, and that the election was in every way justified. A few members, however, expressed disapproval, not so much on account of any demerits of his own as of the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 16, 1919 • Various
... cyclamen-like flower, Erythronium Dens Canis L. with its trefoil-like and spotted leaves; in shady places the Primrose, Primula acaulis All.; everywhere over the summit of the mountain the Cowslip, Primula veris; two species of Gentian, Gentiana verna and G. acaulis L.; Ophrys fusca Link, also a species of Asphodel, Asphodelus albus Willd.; Saxifraga cuneifolia; Sempervivum arachnoideum L.; and lastly, in shady dells, Daphne laureola L.With two or three exceptions, these flowers were found in blossom at the ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... follow out some of these trains of thought in gathering together what I have to say about field herbage; but I must say briefly here that the great sign, to the Greeks, of the coming of spring in the pastures, was not, as with us, in the primrose, but in the various flowers of the asphodel tribe (of which I will give you some separate account presently); therefore it is that the earth answers with crocus flame to the cloud on Ida; and the power of Athena in eternal life is written by the light of the asphodel on the ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... very true sense, ennobling. In the end, when the girl grows prettily miffed and throws me out, I return to my sorrows somehow purged and glorified. I am a better man in my own sight. I have grazed upon the fields of asphodel. I have been ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... The Arabs borrowed nothing, but the Persians much, from Greek Mythology. Hence the eye of Narcissus, an idea hardly suggested by the look of the daffodil (or asphodel)-flower, is at times the glance of a spy and at times the die-away look of a mistress. Some scholars explain it by the form of the flower, the internal calyx resembling the iris, and the stalk being bent just below the petals suggesting drooping eyelids and languid eyes. Hence a poet addresses ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... blown A life-breath, till the forehead hopefully Shines out again, as all the angels see, Before thy saving kiss! My own, my own, Who camest to me when the world was gone, And I who looked for only God, found thee! I find thee; I am safe, and strong, and glad. As one who stands in dewless asphodel, Looks backward on the tedious time he had In the upper life,—so I, with bosom-swell, Make witness, here, between the good and bad, That Love, as strong as Death, ...
— Sonnets from the Portuguese • Browning, Elizabeth Barrett
... when I set out to write this present version. I was now in another hemisphere and the world was at war. By a happy chance I laid hold of a copy of Aliens, sent previously to a naval relative serving on the same station. Up and down the AEgean Sea, past fields of mines and fields of asphodel, past many an isle familiar in happier days to me, I took my book and my new convictions about human folly. It was a slow business, for it so chanced that my own contribution to the war involved long hours. But ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... at last where souls unbodied dwell, In ever-flowing meads of Asphodel. Odyssey, Bk. ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... were the couch Pansies, and Violets, and Asphodel And Hyacinth, earth's freshest, ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... Dwarf-palm is to be found on all sides, together with the arar or citrus, and the double-thorned lotus. The juniper, wild pear, and cork trees are to be met with now and again, and the ground is for the most part a sea of flowers almost unknown to me, though I could recognise wild thyme, asphodel, and lavender amid the tamarisk and myrtle undergrowth. At intervals the forest opens, showing some large douar that was built probably on the site of a well, and there industrious village folks have reclaimed the land, raised ...
— Morocco • S.L. Bensusan
... amid the throng Drew near with purpose fell, And lo! the orange-flowers were changed To mournful asphodel. ...
— Man of Uz, and Other Poems • Lydia Howard Sigourney
... singly seek the immortal way. So guided and inspired, it cannot but be a charming path; for those who perpetually walk therein come to look as though they were entranced with the perfume that floats from fields of asphodel. Characters so developed are beautiful exceedingly, and seem of a far higher strain than those who most generously and effectively labor for the amelioration and moral advancement of the race. They, more than any others who have riches there, illumine the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... spring air comes no whisper From him to tell us all is well? Why to our flower-time comes no token Of lily and of asphodel? ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... dainty mysteries of coolness and sudden flavors; a fish salad in which the essences of sea and land are blended in cold, celestial harmony; innermost kernels of the lamb of the salted meadows where must grow the Asphodel on which it fed, in amorous union with what men call a sauce, but really oil and cream and herbs stirred by a god in a dream; peaches in purple ichor chastely clad in snow, melting on the palate as the voice of the divine singer after whom they are ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... wed anyone. When he was gone, Ginnifer went out over the moor among the heather, where she might fight her grief alone, with only the birds and the flowers to see her weep. She lay on the short moorland grass among the sweet bog-myrtle and asphodel, until the sun was setting in a red ball over the hillside. Then, all of a sudden, she heard a rustling and a whispering like countless leaves ...
— Monitress Merle • Angela Brazil |
