"Bacchanalian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... recollections of Baltimore are by no means exclusively bacchanalian. British stock, lamentably at a discount in other parts of the Union, is, perhaps, a trifle above par here. The popularity of our representatives—masculine and feminine—may have something to do with this; at any rate, the avenues ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... Upon the 25th April, he entertained a select circle of friends at his hotel in Amsterdam, and then embarked at midnight for Embden. A numerous procession of his adherents escorted him to the ship, bearing lighted torches, and singing bacchanalian songs. He died within a year afterwards, of disappointment and hard drinking, at Castle Hardenberg, in Germany, after all his fretting and fury, and notwithstanding his vehement protestations to die a poor soldier at the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... tells how maid, in guileless youth, Flies tow'rds her Love with trusting wing, Bruises her heart 'gainst broken truth, And falls, like thee, a crippled thing. How man in bacchanalian sphere Soars to the heat of Pleasure's sun, Then, by gradations dark and drear, Sinks low as thee, poor wingless one: How hearts from proud Ambition's height Have drooped to darkest, lowest hell— From blazing noon to pitchy night, ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... he seemed in good spirits—or, rather, perhaps had a pretty good amount of spirits or beer in him—as he reeled somewhat in his gait, and, although it was Sunday, was trying in his cracked falsetto voice to chant a Bacchanalian ditty assertive of the fact that he wouldn't "go ...
— On Board the Esmeralda - Martin Leigh's Log - A Sea Story • John Conroy Hutcheson
... his half-drunken mood, consoling himself for present perplexities by dwelling upon the bacchanalian joys of other days, a carriage drove up the street, and stopped before the door. Soon afterward, the hall bell was rung, and Philip, alarmed and astonished, started ...
— Fort Lafayette or, Love and Secession • Benjamin Wood
... the bacchanalian songs and quarrels recorded above, as the prince stepped out of the house at about eleven o'clock, the general suddenly ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... of the doors leading to the Master Debtors' side, he heard a loud voice chanting a Bacchanalian melody, and the boisterous laughter that accompanied the song, convinced him that no suspicion was entertained in this quarter. Entering the Red Room, he crept through the hole in the wall, descended ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... Palace. Thus far Portugal alone represents the Iberian painters. The collection fills three rooms, 109-111, between Sweden and Holland. The Portuguese artists infuse the spirit of revelry into much of their work. Indeed, it sometimes approaches the bacchanalian. The work is of the extreme modern school as to color, although, technically, there is much drawing in and respect for definite form. Most striking, perhaps, is the splendid representation in many ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... sprang up at the name of her friend. She heard subjoined to, it, "la voila en triomphe," and then came shouts and laughter. She looked out. At a distance she perceived something like a Bacchanalian procession, and thought, as she hoped, that the Princess was coming to her in triumph from her prison, and her heart rejoiced in the anticipation of once more being, blessed with her society. But the King, who had seen and heard more distinctly from his apartment, flew to that of the ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 7 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... Against this latter hung three pictures from the famous Sansevero collection: a Holy Family by Leonardo da Vinci, a triptych by Perugino, and a Madonna by Correggio. Hardly less celebrated, but sharply at odds with the ecclesiastical subjects of the paintings, was the mantle, carved in a bacchanalian procession of satyrs and nymphs—a model said to have been made by ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... find before it silence and solitude, the streets and public places abandoned, the houses shut up, the windows deserted, and the flight and scorn of the passers-by would tell history what share honest and well-disposed men took in this scandalous and bacchanalian procession." ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... the unction of an old debauchee, of former exploits, such as deer-stealing, orchard-robbing, drunken gambols, and desperate affrays in which he had been engaged in the earlier part of his life, sung bacchanalian and amorous ditties, dwelt sometimes upon adventures which drove Phoebe Mayflower from the company, and penetrated even the deaf ears of Dame Jellicot, so as to make the buttery in which he held his carousals no proper place for the ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... his care were as beautiful as gardens may be. Where trimness was desirable, they were as neat, as well-ordered, as stately as some old-world lady; where nature was allowed fuller sway, they luxuriated in a very riot of mad colour,—pagan, bacchanalian almost, yet in completest harmony, despite ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... until daylight, it resembles a bacchanalian fete in the days of the Romans. But all through it, one is impressed by its artistic completeness, its studied splendor, and permissible license, so long as a costume (or the lack of it) produces an artistic result. One sees the mise en scene of a barbaric ...
— The Real Latin Quarter • F. Berkeley Smith
... ultimately throw her into the arms of the haggard and grim monster death. But, oh, how patient, under every pining influence! Let us view the matter in bolder colors; see her when the dearest object of her affections recklessly seeks every bacchanalian pleasure, contents himself with the last rubbish of creation. With what solicitude she awaits his return! Sleep fails to perform its office—she weeps while the nocturnal shades of the night triumph in the ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... together, or scattered about in isolated grandeur; some pitched on their sides, others standing erect, still others suspended, as it were, in mid-air. It seemed to him that these boulders had formerly served for the games of bacchanalian Titans, who, after having used them as skittles or jack-stones, had ended by hurling them at one another's heads. It is most probable that He who constructed the Albula Pass, alarmed and confused by the hideous aspect of his work, did justice to it by breaking it into fragments ...
— Samuel Brohl & Company • Victor Cherbuliez
... for kind words, and every noble was as ignoble as a phenomenal thirst and unbridled lust could make him. Every farm had a stone jail on it, in charge of a noble jailer. Feudal castles, full of malaria and surrounded by insanitary moats and poor plumbing, echoed the cry of the captive and the bacchanalian song of the noble. The country was made desolate by duly authorized robbers, who, under the Crusaders' standard, prevented the maturity of the spring chicken and hushed the still, small voice of the roast ...
— Comic History of England • Bill Nye
... massacre of the grandchildren of their prophet, and by the images of their tombs, and their sombre music,[8] crosses that of the Holi[9] (in which the Hindoos are excited to tumultuous and licentious joy by their bacchanalian songs and dances) every thirty-six years; and they reign together for some four or five days, during which the scene in every large town is really terrific. The processions are liable to meet in the street, and the lees of the ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... found the ex-Collector of Boggley Wollah groaning on the sofa at his lodgings. Dobbin was already in the room, good-naturedly tending his patient of the night before. The two officers, looking at the prostrate Bacchanalian, and askance at each other, exchanged the most frightful sympathetic grins. Even Sedley's valet, the most solemn and correct of gentlemen, with the muteness and gravity of an undertaker, could hardly keep his countenance in ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... his sobriety and his composure throughout all the rodomontade and bacchanalian outbreak of the mercurial Frenchmen; leaving the task of pledging them to his master of fence, Van Braam, who was not a man to flinch from potations. He took careful note, however, of all their ...
— The Life of George Washington, Volume I • Washington Irving
... While this Bacchanalian scene proceeded, Julian had wrapt himself closely in his cloak, and stretched himself on the couch which they had shown him. He looked towards the table he had left—the tapers seemed to become hazy and dim as he gazed—he ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... asphodel, the dolphin, lynx, tiger, and ass were all sacred to Bacchus. The acceptable sacrifice to Venus was a dove; Jupiter, a bull; an ox of five years old, ram or boar pig to Neptune; and Diana, a stag. At the inception of the Bacchanalian festivals in Greece, the tragic song of the Goat, a sacred hymn was sung, and from which rude beginning sprang the Tragedy and Comedy of Greece. The Greeks place every event as happening in their country, ...
— A History of Pantomime • R. J. Broadbent
... springing up, and crouching-as also the opposite movements of attack with arrows and lances, and also of every kind of thrust. So strong was the attachment to this dance at Sparta that, long after it had in the other Greek states degenerated into a Bacchanalian revel, it was still danced by the Spartans as a warlike exercise, and boys of fifteen were instructed in it." Of the Hunting-dance I have already given instances. (2) It always had the character of Magic about ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... warning. If you have nothing better to say to make men use their powers rightly than to tell them that they will lose their powers some day, the answer will always be, "Well, I will wait until that losing day comes before I worry." If you tell a young man that his life is short, the old bacchanalian answer is the first one, "Live while we live." You must somehow get hold of that, you must persuade him that the true life now is the holy life, that life, this same life that he prizes, ought to breed humility and ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 8 - Talmage to Knox Little • Grenville Kleiser
... this plan, the first proselytisers in Germany and the North were often reduced (we are told) to substituting the name of Christ and the saints for those of Odin and the gods in the toasts drunk at their bacchanalian festivals. ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... sadness of farewell, or cast a shadow upon the joy of return. Many of the marble sarcophagi were ornamented with beautiful bas-reliefs of mythical incidents, utterly inconsistent, we should suppose, with the purpose for which they were designed. Nuptials, bacchanalian fetes, games, and dances, are crowded upon their sculptured sides, in seeming mockery of the pitiable relics of humanity within. They treated death lightly and playfully, these ancient Romans, and tried to hide his terror with a mask of smiles, and to cover his dart ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... of triumphs was invariably consummated at the end of harvest, for then a supper was given to the tenants and servants. This supper took place in the great hall of the castle—the hall that in ancient days had witnessed many a warlike meeting and Bacchanalian feast. ...
— Our Home in the Silver West - A Story of Struggle and Adventure • Gordon Stables
... duck on the other; a small porker from his haversack; the ends of onions or such like vegetables would be protruding, and his broad-brimmed hat or bashed-in helmet would be garlanded with peach blossoms, resembling a joyous Bacchanalian, and the unshaven, dirty face underneath wreathed in smiles. We have destroyed a lot more waggons and houses, and lifted several hundred of cattle, besides getting some prisoners. How the women must hate us! Their faces are invariably concealed by the large ...
— A Yeoman's Letters - Third Edition • P. T. Ross
... seemed to be an essential part of the worship. At Uji, not far from Kyoto, the capital of the Empire, for a thousand years and more, and the center of Buddhism, there was a shrine of great repute and popularity. Thither resorted the multitudes for bacchanalian purposes. Under the auspices of the Goddess Hashihime and the God Sumiyoshi, free rein was given to lust. Since the beginning of the new regime such revels have been forbidden and apparently stopped; the phallic symbols themselves are no longer visible, although it is asserted by the keeper of the ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... but no one who has read his metrical translation of the Psalms of David will be troubled again with doubts whether he was the writer also of "Macbeth," "Othello," and "Lear." Compared with these sterile, bald, and mechanical quatrains, the sacred hymns of Isaac Watts are howling and bacchanalian anacreontics, to be hiccoughed by drunkards in their most ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... of solid gold ornaments;—nearly two hundred massive finger and earrings;—rich chains—thirty of these, if I remember;—eighty-three very large and heavy crucifixes;—five gold censers of great value;—a prodigious golden punch bowl, ornamented with richly chased vine-leaves and Bacchanalian figures; with two sword-handles exquisitely embossed, and many other smaller articles which I cannot recollect. The weight of these valuables exceeded three hundred and fifty pounds avoirdupois; and in this estimate ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... was rendered peculiarly interesting by the discovery of a dainty bit of female beauty shewing fight with half a dozen watchmen, in order to extricate herself from the grasp of these guardians of our peace. She was evidently under the influence of the Bacchanalian god, which invigorated her arm, without imparting discretion to her head, and she laid about her with such dexterity, that the old files{2} were fearful of losing their prey; but the odds were fearfully against her, and never ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... the returning hero was in the van, high above all the other figures. From the golden throne borne on the shoulders of twelve black slaves he waved his long thyrsus in greeting to the exulting multitude. Before the bacchanalian train which accompanied him, and behind the musicians who followed, moved two elephants bearing between them, as a light burden, some unrecognizable object covered with a purple cloth. Now the column had passed between the pylons through the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... were as thriftless as locusts, and in the midst of their bacchanalian revels Pierce felt very poor, very obscure. Here was the roisterous spirit of the Northland at full play; it irked the young man intensely to feel that he could afford no part in it. Laure was not long in discovering him. She sped to him ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... 'old woman' occurred pretty audibly. But Loftus remained under the glimpses of the moon in perturbation and sore perplexity. It was so late he scarcely dared disturb Dr. Walsingham or General Chattesworth. But there came the half-stifled cadence of a song—not bacchanalian, but sentimental—something about Daphne and a swain—struggling through the window-shutters next the green hall-door close by, and Dan instantly bethought himself of Father Roach. So knocking stoutly at the window, he caused the melody ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... a joyous meeting," Burns writes, "that Mr. Masterton and I agreed, each in our own way, that we should celebrate the business," and Burns's celebration of it was the famous bacchanalian song,— ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... huge hogshead of rum, lay in a row, presided over by men appointed to deal out the contents to the populace. A boisterous demonstration followed that almost drowned the roar of the twenty-one cannon that thundered forth a royal salute. As a fitting wind-up to the bacchanalian scene, at night twenty-five tar-barrels, fastened on poles, blazed over the "common," while brilliant fireworks were exhibited at Bowling Green. The feasting continued late in the night, and so delighted were the "Sons of Liberty," that they erected a mast, inscribed "to his most gracious Majesty, ...
— The Great Riots of New York 1712 to 1873 • J.T. Headley
... the birds were singing their matutinal songs from the trees, I sallied forth from the dormitory of my seminary to enjoy the reflections so well suited to that auspicious occasion. I had not proceeded far before my ears were accosted with certain Bacchanalian sounds of revelry, which proceeded from one of those haunts of vicious depravity located at the cross-roads, near the place of my boyhood, and fashionably denominated a doggery. No sooner had I passed beyond the precincts of this diabolical ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VII. (of X.) • Various
... crowding up with a boisterous show of affection, were about to fall on my neck in a heap, after the old Hebrew fashion. The priest, clamorous for more, followed with glowing face, and the whole group had a riotous and bacchanalian character, which I should never have imagined could spring from such a ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... At that time the tenor generally sang the melody, and, as in order to show on what foundation their work rested, the Flemings retained the original words in his part, it was not uncommon to hear the tenors singing some bacchanalian verses, while the rest of the choir were intoning the sacred words of a "Gloria" or an "Agnus Dei." These abuses lasted for an incredibly long time, but finally, in 1562, the cardinals were brought together for the purification of all churchly matters, and the Council ...
— Among the Great Masters of Music - Scenes in the Lives of Famous Musicians • Walter Rowlands
... Thyrsis when contrasted with the rustic elegance of Aristaeus, a touch of simple feeling in Eurydice's lyrical outcry of farewell, a discrimination between the tender sympathy of Proserpine and Pluto's stern relenting, a spirited presentation of the Bacchanalian furore in the Maenads, an attempt to model the Satyr Mnesillus as apart from human nature and yet sympathetic to its anguish, these points constitute the chief dramatic features of the melodrama. Orpheus himself is a purely lyrical personage. Of character, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... all. I find in them abundance of ingenuity, of droll naivete, of profound and just reflection, of happy expression. Manners, characters, opinions, are treated with "a most learned spirit of human dealing." But something is still wanting. We read, and we admire, and we yawn. We look in vain for the bacchanalian fury which inspired the comedy of Athens, for the fierce and withering scorn which animates the invectives of Juvenal and Dryden, or even for the compact and pointed diction which adds zest to the verses of Pope and Boileau. ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... lordship of Bagnacavallo and Cotignola. When with Alberigo da Barbiano Italian armies and leaders appeared upon the scene, the chances of founding a principality, or of increasing one already acquired, became more frequent. The first great bacchanalian outbreak of military ambition took place in the duchy of Milan after the death of Giangaleazzo (1402). The policy of his two sons was chiefly aimed at the destruction of the new despotisms founded by the Condottieri; and from the greatest ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... their faces, in which the old Roman fire scarcely flickers, brutalized with excess of every kind; their heads of dishevelled hair bound with coronals of leaves, while, from goblets of an antique grace, they drain the fiery torrent which is destroying them. Around the bacchanalian feast stand, lofty upon pedestals, the statues of old Rome, looking with marble calmness and the severity of a rebuke beyond words upon the revellers. A youth of boyish grace, with a wreath woven in his tangled ...
— The Potiphar Papers • George William Curtis
... the pride of reason curse their God. When in the vaulted arch Lucina gleams, And gaily dances o'er the azure streams; On silent ether when a trembling sound Reverberates, and wildly floats around, Breaking through trackless space upon the ear, Conclude the Bacchanalian rustic near: O'er hills and vales the jovial savage reels, Fire in his head and frenzy at his heels; From paths direct the bending hero swerves, And shapes his way in ill-proportioned curves. Now safe arrived, his sleeping rib he calls, And ...
— Inebriety and the Candidate • George Crabbe
... singing is also taught. But the ethical significance of music is too little considered. Instruction in music often aims only to train pupils for display in society, and the tendency of the melodies which are played is restricted more and more to orchestral pieces of an exciting or bacchanalian character. The railroad-gallop-style only makes the nerves of youth vibrate with stimulating excitement. Oral speech, the highest form of the personal manifestation of mind, was also treated with great reverence ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... composed usually of red wine, but sometimes of white, with the addition of sugar and spices. Sir Walter Scott ("Quarterly Review," vol. xxxiii.) says, after quoting this passage of Pepys, "Assuredly his pieces of bacchanalian casuistry can only be matched by that of Fielding's chaplain of Newgate, who preferred punch to wine, because the former was a liquor nowhere spoken ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... the Darkness; in the two figures near the Adam in his creation of Eve; and best of all, for comparison, in the figures near the foot of Adam in the creation of Man. Another model was of a rounder and more bacchanalian character, not unlike the Dancing Fawn in the Uffizi; but he was not in such good training. He was decidedly fat, his face was mobile, and very easily took jovial expressions, his cheeks dimpled, his eyes round and large, the pupils very dark and the whites very ...
— Michael Angelo Buonarroti • Charles Holroyd
... Ritualistic services at Saint Cow's, and he renders the organ-accompaniments with such unusual freedom from reminiscences of the bacchanalian repertory, that the Gospeler is impelled to compliment him ...
— Punchinello Vol. 1, No. 21, August 20, 1870 • Various
... Sufis are the mystics of Islam, and their poetry, while often externally anacreontic—bacchanalian and erotic—possesses an esoteric, spiritual signification: the sensual world is employed to symbolise that which is to be apprehended only by the inward sense. Most of the great poets of Persia, Afghanistan, and Turkey are generally understood ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... may well say that," lamented Mrs. Sampson, rolling her dingy handkerchief into a ball, and dabbing at her red-rimmed eyes, which presented quite a bacchanalian appearance, due, be it said in justice, to grief, not to liquor. "'Avin' bin beguiled by that serping in light clothes as wanted to know if 'e allays come 'ome afore twelve, which I said 'e was in the 'abit of doin', tho', to be sure, 'e ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... Titian showed constant hospitality, and there are records of the princely fashion in which he entertained his friends and distinguished foreign visitors. Priscianese, a well-known Humanist and savant of the day, describes a Bacchanalian feast on the 1st of August, in a pleasant garden belonging to Messer Tiziano Vecellio. Aretino, Sansovino, and Jacopo Nardi were present. Till the sun set they stayed indoors, admiring the artist's pictures. "As soon as it went down, the tables were spread, looking on the lagoons, which soon swarmed ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... individual had come with the Revolution. Between MALHERBE and CHATEAUBRIAND, that is for almost two hundred years, poetry that breathes the true lyric spirit is practically absent from French literature. There were indeed the chansonniers, who produced a good deal of bacchanalian verse, but they hardly ever struck a serious note. Almost the most genuinely lyric productions of this long period are those which proceed more or less directly from a reading of Hebrew poetry, like the numerous paraphrases ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... burst forth in that bacchanalian melody at the top of his voice, waving an allumette holder over his head to represent ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... after him, as he came pounding along Notre-Dame Street, in Montreal, in his red shirt and tan-colored shupac boots, all dripping wet after mooring an acre or two of raft, and now bent for his ashore-haunts in the Ste.-Marie suburb, to indemnify himself with bacchanalian and other consolations for long-endured hardship. Among other feats of strength attributed to him, I remember the following, which has an old, familiar taste, but was related to me ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... serpent's coil; and there is rarely a piece of monkish decorated writing in the world that is not tainted with some ill-meant vileness of grotesque,— nay, the very leaves of the twisted ivy-pattern of the fourteenth century can be followed back to wreaths for the foreheads of bacchanalian gods. And truly, it seems to me, as I gather in my mind the evidences of insane religion, degraded art, merciless war, sullen toil, detestable pleasure, and vain or vile hope, in which the nations of the world have lived since first ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... Wherever she might be she had only to imagine a ballroom and a blaze of light, and swift circling round to the sound of music, and her heart would burn within her, her eyes would glow with a strange lustre, a smile would wander around her lips, a kind of bacchanalian grace would seem to diffuse ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... monument raised to the glory of our armies the image of the hero, who had led them to victory. The Emperor, as soon as he was informed of it, ordered me to write to the minister of the police, to have the bust removed in the night. "It is not after bacchanalian orgies," said he, proudly, "that my image should be ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. I • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon
... up and down with haste and lust, in quest of and to fix some chamber-standard in their Paphian ground, that never did the Proetides, Mimallonides, nor Lyaean Thyades deport themselves in the time of their bacchanalian festivals more shamelessly, or with a so affronted and brazen-faced impudency; because this terrible animal is knit unto, and hath an union with all the chief and most principal parts of the body, as to anatomists is evident. Let ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... met in the temple of Duellona or Bellona, the goddess of War. Duellona and Bellona are the same. Compare the Bacchanalian Inscription, and ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... look for male society, Do one thing and another In which mother Shouldn't mix; But revels Bacchanalian Are—or should be—quite alien To you a ...
— Tobogganing On Parnassus • Franklin P. Adams
... converted into temporary hotels, and many a jovial party were collected in both. Military music, church bells, drinking choruses, were all commingled in the din and turmoil; processions in honor of "Our Lady of Succor" were jammed up among bacchanalian orgies, and their very chant half drowned in the cries of the wounded as they passed on to the hospitals. With difficulty we pushed our way through the dense mob, as we turned our steps towards the seminary. We both felt naturally curious ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... go to another class, which may be found in the same collection; I mean the bacchanalian. Men are invited here to sacrifice frequently at the shrine of Bacchus. Joy, good humour, and fine spirits, are promised to those, who pour out their libations in a liberal manner. An excessive use of wine, which injures the constitution, and stupifies the ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume I (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... execute little oscillatory movements, bending the body from one side to the other. The reeds ranged in a line, and fastened together, resemble the Pan's pipes, as we find them represented in the bacchanalian processions on Grecian vases. To unite reeds of different lengths, and make them sound in succession by passing them before the lips, is a simple idea, and has naturally presented itself to every nation. We were surprised to see with what promptitude the young Indians constructed and tuned ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... in its violence, occurred in Sparta. In many places throughout Laconia the rocky soil was rent asunder. From Mount Ta-yg'e-tus, which overhung the city, and on which the women of Lacedaemon were wont to hold their bacchanalian orgies, huge fragments rolled into the suburbs. The greater portion of the city was absolutely overthrown; and it is said, probably with exaggeration, that only five houses wholly escaped disaster from the shock. This terrible ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... and etched a Judgment of Midas. Round the room of a tavern in Drury Lane, where was held a club of virtuosi, he painted a Bacchanalian procession, and presented the house with ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... promoted such a quick circulation of the bottle, that their mirth grew noisy and obstreperous; they broke forth into repeated peals of laughter, without any previous incitement except that of claret. These explosions were succeeded by Bacchanalian songs, in which the old gentleman himself attempted to bear a share; the sedate governor snapped time with his fingers, and the parish priest assisted in the chorus with a most expressive nakedness of countenance. Before midnight they were almost all pinned to their chairs, ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... obeisance, departed without further speech, and in a few moments ushered in from the bacchanalian revels a maid ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle
... upwards. She held her head and shoulders as though she had carried baskets of fruit or washing upon the crown of her pate since her youth; her glorious bosom was like a bed of lotus buds in the southern wind; she moved like a deer, or a snake, or a bacchanalian dancer, as you will; but in any case in a way which in the present tense caused the Principal to mourn in secret, and in the future brought the condemnation of women and the eyes ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... did nothing but preach and pray and sing psalms and take up a collection at the last social Scott gave. It's just like church, and I don't want to go anyway." She had never been to a church social, but from what she had heard she believed them to be bacchanalian scenes of riotous enjoyment, and her remarks were intended ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major
... are women, have I driven maddened from the house. And they, mingled with the sons of Cadmus, sit on the roofless rocks beneath the green pines. For this city must know, even though it be unwilling, that it is not initiated into my Bacchanalian rites, and that I plead the cause of my mother, Semele, in appearing manifest to mortals as a God whom she bore to Jove. Cadmus then gave his honor and power to Pentheus, born from his daughter, who fights ...
— The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides
... satyriasis and bacchanalian excesses. They commit rape and indecent acts in public and often appropriate strange objects, hair or wearing apparel, with the idea of obtaining means to satisfy their vices, either because they are unconscious of doing wrong or because, ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... was regaling himself on dry bread in one of their dungeons. The bells rang out against each other with a wild glee as I paced my narrow floor. They seemed mad with intoxication of victory; they mocked me with a bacchanalian frenzy of triumph. Yet I smiled grimly, for their clamor was no more than the ancient fool's shout, "Great is Diana of the Ephesians." Great Christ has had his day since, but he in turn is dead; dead in man's intellect, dead in man's heart, dead in man's life; ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... pope had touched the French soil, and that the people were streaming toward him to manifest their respect, and to implore his blessing on their knees; the same people who precisely ten years before had closed the churches, driven the priests into exile, and consecrated their bacchanalian worship to ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach
... to Lenaean god; Chase brutal feuds of Belgian skippers hence (Amid their cups whose innate temper's shown), In clumsy fist wielding scymetrian knife, Who slash each other's eyes, and blubber'd face, Profaning Bacchanalian solemn rites: Music's harmonious numbers better suit His festivals, from instruments or voice, Or Gasperani's hand the trembling string Should touch; or from the dulcet Tuscan dames, Or warbling Toft's ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... from their unmanageable cruses. Then on they went, crying, creaking, struggling, straining through the corridor, which echoed deafeningly, the gleaming crystals of those hard Italian mountains in their winter raiment building a background of still beauty to the savage Bacchanalian riot of ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... table and chairs, and played a certain game of cards, which was one of their simple amusements. Whether this meeting was intended as an exorcism of any evil influences which might threaten the new must about to be put in, or a mild bacchanalian tribute to the empty space from which they had drawn so much comfort and cheerfulness during the year, or whether the wine left some fine perfume behind it which they wished to inhale, tradition saith not. Maybe the fathers never went there, and the story ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... bankrupt condition of Yussuf, and who was anxious to know how he had got on after the fetva had been promulgated, sent for his vizier Giaffar. "I wish to ascertain," said the caliph to the vizier, "if the unlucky Yussuf has managed to provide for his bacchanalian revels to-night?" ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat
... spitefulness for having been banished to Constantinople, had sent her ring as a gage d'amour to the repulsive barbarian. He then retired to the Danube by the passes of the Alps, where he spent the winter in bacchanalian orgies and preparations for an invasion of the eastern provinces. But his career was suddenly cut off by the avenging poniard of Ildigo, a Bactrian or Burgundian princess, whom he had taken for one of his numerous wives, and ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... he did in Bacchanalian measure! One time he gave an unconscious exhibition of his technical ability that, while regrettable, would have been of immense interest to psychologists who are seeking to prove that music depends upon a separate ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... Lawton's song!" roared five or six at once; when the trooper proceeded, in a fine, full tone, to sing the following words to a well-known bacchanalian air, several of his comrades helping him through the chorus with a fervor that shook the ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... within, a wild medley of shouts, song, and laughter, a clatter of wine-cups, and pealing notes of violins struck him with amazement and disgust. He distinguished drunken voices singing snatches of bacchanalian songs, while now and then stentorian mouths called for fresh brimmers, and new toasts were drunk ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... nature would be comprised in a few pages. One sings of his coggie, as if he were in the custom of gulping his whisky all alone; many describe the boisterous carousals in which they made fools of themselves; not a few extol the power and properties of whisky, and incite to Bacchanalian pleasures; and we have several good songs suitable for singing at the close of an evening pleasantly spent, but almost none which express the feelings that naturally well-up when one sees his friends around ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume III - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... magnitude, and respected accordingly. The merry pin was that which stood pretty far from the mouth of the horn, and he who, at a draught, reduced the liquor to that point, was a man of no ordinary prowess in bacchanalian contest. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 387, August 28, 1829 • Various
... man made a rude kind of harp specially for his poor blind daughter, and on which Dot used to play when she visited the toy-maker's. Caleb's musical contribution would be 'a Bacchanalian song, something about a sparkling bowl,' which much annoyed his ...
— Charles Dickens and Music • James T. Lightwood
... his habit, in these cases of Bacchanalian emergency, to stagger obstinately into his room on the ground-floor, to take the model-ship out of the cupboard, and to try if he could proceed with the never-to-be-completed employment of setting up the rigging. ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... to the oak!" shouted the whole bacchanalian crew; and away they flew across the park, starting the quiescent deer with their shouts, their laughter, and their revelry. Rochester took the naiad under his arm, that she might not be left behind, and dancing, capering, tumbling, ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat
... the kindling of the Nodfyr, which was forbidden them by St. Boniface, and the belief subsists even to the present day that people and animals that have leaped through these flames, or their smoke, are protected for a whole year from fevers and other diseases, as if by a kind of baptism by fire. Bacchanalian dances, which have originated in similar causes among all the rude nations of the earth, and the wild extravagancies of a heated imagination, were the constant accompaniments of this half-heathen, half-Christian festival. At the period of which we are treating, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... another movement, which for a time restored the early matriarchate. The women, at first opposing, presently became converts to the Dionysusian gospel, and were afterwards its warmest supporters. Motherhood became degraded. Bacchanalian excesses followed, which led to a return to the ancient hetairism. Bachofen believes that this formed a fresh basis for a second gynaecocracy. He compares the Amazonian period of these later days with that in which marriage was first introduced, ...
— The Position of Woman in Primitive Society - A Study of the Matriarchy • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... were sufficiently aroused by their potations to enter readily into any mischief. Some were smoking with all the industrious perseverance of the Hollander; others shouted forth songs in honor of the bottle, and with all the fervor and ferment of Bacchanalian novitiates; and not a few, congregating about the immediate person of the pedler, assailed his ears with threats sufficiently pregnant with tangible illustration to make him understand and acknowledge, by repeated starts and wincings, the awkward and uncomfortable ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... golden beauty, in which the butterflies flit from flower to flower over the dead. I do not know a place more silent or more beautiful. One lingers in the cool shadow of the cloisters before many an old marble,—a vase carved with Bacchanalian women, the head of Achilles, or the bust of Isotta of Rimini. But it is before the fresco of the Triumph of Death that one stays longest, trying to understand the dainty treatment of so horrible a subject. Those fair ladies riding on horseback with so brave a show of cavaliers, even they too ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... recitations of imaginary love adventures, accompanied by swayings of the body and occasional choral interruptions, all becoming more and more excited as the story or song approached its natural climax. Sometimes this was varied by a solitary dancer starting from the circle, and performing the wildest bacchanalian antics, to the vocal incitement of the rest. This only ended with physical exhaustion, or ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... genus homo. As a sly old joker, she had performed various tricks, such as nipping off the tails of sucking calves, catching chickens in her manger, and making various pieces of them, and kicking in the ribs of strange dogs and horned cattle. But to the eccentric habits and bacchanalian customs of her ex-military master, the old mare's dormant talents ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... surprise warmer than seemed reasonable, for he had really known that Cuckoo had some feeling for him. But he had always at the back of his mind the idea, common to so many, that such a girl as Cuckoo could not be capable of the real love, the love ascetic, not the love Bacchanalian. Love among the roses is easy, but not many can welcome love among the nettles; and, moreover, Julian, despite his knowledge of the thorny paths along which Cuckoo walked habitually, along which all her ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... of Christmas: "If we compare our Bacchanalian Christmasses and New Year's Tides with these Saturnalia and Feasts of Janus, we shall finde such near affinytie betweene them both in regard of time (they being both in the end of December and on the first of January), and in their manner of solemnizing (both of them being spent in ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton
... in front of the remains with the horse-doctor, and tried to conduct myself in as solemn a manner as befitted the occasion, and tried to reason with the horse-doctor against his unseemly jokes, which he was constantly getting on. He told several stories, better calculated for a gathering where bacchanalian revelry was the custom, and I told him that while I respected his calling, he must respect mine. He said something about calling a man on a full hand, against a flush, but I did not pretend to know what he meant. We had to go out of town about two miles, to the cemetery. Unfortunately we were in ...
— How Private George W. Peck Put Down The Rebellion - or, The Funny Experiences of a Raw Recruit - 1887 • George W. Peck
... qualities. Upon perceiving this holy fervency in the pious fraternity, we plied them closely, and frequently joined them in flowing bumpers, until their ardour began to sink into brutal stupidity, and the morning's hymns were changed into revelry and bacchanalian roar. ...
— Observations Upon The Windward Coast Of Africa • Joseph Corry
... The rain began to fall in torrents. They broke into the houses for shelter; insulted maids and matrons; tore down every thing combustible for their watch fires; massacred a few of the body-guard of the queen, and, with bacchanalian songs, roasted their horses for food. And thus passed the hours of this long and dreary night, in hideous outrages for which one can hardly find a parallel in the annals of New Zealand cannibalism. The immense gardens of Versailles were filled with a tumultuous ocean of ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... achronically beneath the Western horizon; and then to begin their lamentations, or hold forth the signal for others to weep: and when his prolific virtues were supposed to be transferred to the vernal sun, bacchanalian revelry became devotion. ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... undergo a temporary change. Sons and daughters revile their parents in gross language, and parents their children; men and women become almost like animals in the indulgence of their amorous propensities. They enact all that was ever portrayed by prurient artists in a bacchanalian festival or pandean orgy; and as the light of the sun they adore, and the presence of numerous spectators, seems to be no restraint on their indulgence, it cannot be expected that chastity is preserved when the shades of night fall on such a scene of licentiousness and debauchery." ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... fire-crackers, only seconds apart, the great revolvers spoke. A nudely suggestive cast in the corner followed the vase. A quaintly carved clock paused in its measure of time, its hands chronicling the minute of interruption. A decanter of whiskey burst spattering over a table. Two bacchanalian pictures on the wall suddenly had yawning wounds in their centre. The portrait of a queen of the footlights leaped into the air. One of the beer-bottles, which the madame had placed on a convenient table, popped as though ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... enervated and too emaciated to acquire any knowledge of the military exercise; and, what was rather remarkable, there was another young sprig of the Church to keep him in countenance, who was also a private in the same troop of yeomanry. Although I sometimes made one of the bacchanalian party of our Curate, yet I felt most severely the difference between this society and that ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... another. "He not only sets it, but carries it along. He has fine wenches at his beck and call." 'Twas evident 'twas but the beginning of revelry; a sort of bacchanalian prelude to what might come later. No sooner was this dance finished than another began. Some lithe creature came forth to dance, in bright scarlet, the passacaglia. The glasses were refilled and the noise became more boisterous; and the scandal more flagrant. The candles were ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... in-door servants to assist in the work of the house; one, an antiquated female named Sally, who was more devoted to her tea-pot than ever was any bacchanalian to his glass. Were there four different teas in the inn in one evening, she would have drained the pot after each, though she burst in the effort. Sally was, in all, an honest woman, and certainly a religious one;—she never neglected her devotional duties, confessed with most scrupulous accuracy ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... took Gomphi, a town of Thessaly, he not only found provisions for his army, but physic too. For there they met with plenty of wine, which they took very freely, and heated with this, sporting and reveling on their march in bacchanalian fashion, they shook off the disease, and their whole constitution was relieved and changed into ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... 'Heidsick' and 'Rheims.' 'But then the cork proves it, you know,'—for, by a strange superstition, it is assumed that when the cork is correct the wine is not less so; a theory which is exploded by a revelation in the following by no means Bacchanalian lyric:— ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... in the company of merry mates, In spite of Temperance's if's and buts, So sure as Eating is set off with plates, His Drinking always was bound up with cuts! Howbeit, such Bacchanalian revels Bring very sad catastrophes about; Palsy, Dyspepsy, Dropsy, and Blue Devils, Not to forget the Gout. Sometimes the liver takes a spleenful whim To grow to Strasburg's regulation size, As if for ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... this Latin rigmarole written down in honest Hungarian by the morning and to encourage him in his task he gave him two guldens and an order on the butler for as much punch as he could drink. By the morning all the punch was drunk, but the translation also was finished, to the tune of bacchanalian songs which Margari kept up with great ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... that a workingman who stands upon a metropolitan street corner and observes this Bacchanalian revel and prodigality of expense, should not be embittered by a sense of the inequality of the conditions of life. But this is not the most mischievous effect of the spectacle. It is the example of what these people care for. With all their wealth and opportunities, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... Nor dreamed of headaches, or of ills, For nought killed then, but doctors' pills! The song, the dance, and glass went round, The precincts of that classic ground; And when bent on a tearing spree, Filled full of grog and jollity, The bacchanalian rant they made Would please even old Anacreon's shade, While o'er them the athletic charms Of the stern hostess's bare arms, Struck terror and kept order in The revel's hottest, wildest din! For cash or credit bartered ...
— Recollections of Bytown and Its Old Inhabitants • William Pittman Lett
... illness, half-fainting also from the shock of the terrible and unexpected fate which had overtaken her, Elissa was borne in triumph to the palace that now was hers. Around her gilded litter priestesses danced and sang their wild chants, half-bacchanalian and half-religious; before it marched the priests of El, clashing cymbals and crying, "Make way, make way for the new-born goddess! Make way for her whose throne is upon the horned moon!" while all about the multitude of ...
— Elissa • H. Rider Haggard
... mind that they shared the spirit of the East; and did they not live on the very boundary-line between the East and the West? As those institutions were propagated farther to the west, they lost their original character. We know what the Bacchanalian rites became at Rome; and had they been introduced north of the Alps, what form would they have there assumed? But to those countries it was possible to {39} transplant the vine, not the service of the god to whom the vine was sacred. ...
— Mysticism and its Results - Being an Inquiry into the Uses and Abuses of Secrecy • John Delafield
... vain,—there could be no singing: none, unless—but I trust that this evil suggestion occurred to nobody—we were so lost to shame as to call upon the college-boys to supply the place of our absent psalmody with some of those Bacchanalian choruses with which they were doubtless too familiar. We felt rather wicked. We knew that we were stigmatized by that terrible compound, "Pro-Rum"; we were held up as the respectable abettors of drunkenness, the dilettanti patrons of pot-houses, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... the tally-ho of the hunters, the noble animal at bay, his death, and the shouts of the crowd,—are all pictured with a freshness and genuine out-door feeling which seem almost incredible considering Haydn's age. This remarkable number is separated from its natural companion, the bacchanalian chorus, by a recitative extolling the wealth of the vintage. This chorus ("Joyful the Liquor flows") is in two parts,—first a hymn in praise of wine, sung by the tippling revellers, and second, a dance tempo, full of ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... wasting causes combined. His eyes were sunk and dim, as from late indulgence in revelry on the preceding evening, while his cheek was inflamed with unnatural red, as if either the effect of the Bacchanalian orgies had not passed away from the constitution, or a morning draught had been resorted to, in order to remove the effects ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... lapsed into a state of sullen desperation which, but for the Rincon stubbornness, would have precipitated him into the dark stream. Aimlessly he wandered about the town, avoiding any possible rencontre with priests, or with his fellow-passengers, many of whom, together with the bacchanalian captain, he saw in the various cantinas, making merry over rum and ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... claims to the title philosopher, won for him by his book Al-Chazari. But now we must hurry on to Moses ben Ezra, the last and most worldly of the three great poets. He devotes his genius to his patrons, to wine, his faithless mistress, and to "bacchanalian feasts under leafy canopies, with merry minstrelsy of birds." He laments over separation from friends and kin, weeps over the shortness of life and the rapid approach of hoary age—all in polished language, sometimes, however, lacking euphony. ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... a smack. I was considerably astonished, on doing the same, to discover that this dark beverage—which, from Armstrong's manner, I had been prepared to find something at least as wicked as absinthe—was simply and solely Bordeaux of a mild quality. After this Bacchanalian proceeding we went out into the orchard, which was reserved for family use, and sat on a bench under an apple-tree. Armstrong called his little boy who had been at supper with us and gave him a whispered message, together with some small change. ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 8 • Various
... his own bottle, recovered, and more than recovered, his Bacchanalian good humor. He clapped Jack on the shoulder. "Who's the right doctor now?" he asked cheerfully. "A drab of a housekeeper? or Father Schwartz? Your health, my jolly boy! When the bottle's empty, I'll help ...
— Jezebel • Wilkie Collins
... fire is still burning, the women come like so many furies, with more than bacchanalian madness, making the most hideous howlings, and dancing without any order, round the fire. Then all their apparent rage turns of a sudden against the men. They threaten them, that if they do not supply them with scalps, they ...
— An Account Of The Customs And Manners Of The Micmakis And Maricheets Savage Nations, Now Dependent On The Government Of Cape-Breton • Antoine Simon Maillard
... more story of the bacchanalian sort, in which Clarence and York, and the very highest personage of the realm, the great Prince Regent, all play parts. The feast took place at the Pavilion at Brighton, and was described to me by a gentleman who was present at the scene. In Gilray's caricatures, and amongst ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... came—in gigs, in launches, dinghies, and longboats—came with laughter, came with rejoicing, for they were to dine with the senor of the open hand, Senor Howland, who always opened wine as they would open tins of beef. The gods never repaired more blithely to a Bacchanalian revel on Parnassus. Two by two, in rigid order of rank they were escorted into the saloon, and the eloquent popping of corks was as music in their ears. The Admiral took his place at the head of the table; ...
— Dan Merrithew • Lawrence Perry
... able to abolish the noisy bacchanalian festivals of the pagan times, but it has changed the names. That which it has given to these "days of liberty" announces the ending of the feasts, and the month of fasting which should follow; carn-ival means, literally, "farewell to flesh!" It is a forty ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... or ladies in powdered wigs embarking in a golden gondola to the sound of lutes. To give freshness to his stock, he would interpolate a sacristy scene with much show of embroidered chasubles and golden incensaries, or an occasional bacchanalian, imitating from memory, without models, Titians' voluptuous forms and amber flesh. When the list was ended, the ciociari were once more in style and could be begun again. The painter with his extraordinary facility of execution produced two or three pictures a week, and the impresario, to ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... and stagger on, others stoop and rise, others whirl, others caper sideways, all keep steadily circling like dervishes; spectators applaud special strokes of skill; my approach only enlivens the scene; the circle enlarges, louder grows the singing, rousing shouts of encouragement come in, half bacchanalian, half devout, "Wake 'em, brudder!" "Stan' up to 'em, brudder!"—and still the ceaseless drumming and clapping, in perfect cadence, goes steadily on. Suddenly there comes a sort of snap, and the spell breaks, amid general sighing and laughter. And this not rarely and occasionally, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... beguile. And while the harp, impassioned flings Tuneful rapture from its strings,[1] Some airy nymph, with graceful bound, Keeps measure to the music's sound; Waving, in her snowy hand, The leafy Bacchanalian wand, Which, as the tripping wanton flies, Trembles all over to her sighs. A youth the while, with loosened hair, Floating on the listless air, Sings, to the wild harp's tender tone, A tale of woe, alas, ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... impression of one of these pilgrim's brains by "Kodak," one would get some queer results in chaos, rather like the game of family post—the Raphael frescoes transferring themselves to Karnak, and the Sphinx hiding in the Catacombs, whilst pictures, statuary, and shrines of "cult" executed a Bacchanalian dance on a gigantic scale ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... daughter, son-in-law, big boy, and big girl all silently busy together. There were bees and wasps humming around the tubs of crushed grapes in the pale afternoon sun; the view of the lake and the mountains was inspiring; but there was nothing bacchanalian in the affair, unless the thick calves of the girl, as she bent over to cut the clusters, suggested a Maenad fury. These poor people were quite songless, though I am bound to say that in another vineyard ...
— A Little Swiss Sojourn • W. D. Howells
... him, but was equally baffled. The old general listened for some time to the discussion, and then asked the parson if he had read Captain Morris's or George Stephens's or Anacreon Moore's bacchanalian songs; on the other replying in the negative, "Oh, then," said the general, with a sagacious nod, "if you want a drinking song, I can furnish you with the latest collection—I did not know you ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving
... and recognized the rustic bacchanalian for the first time. He had always had a peculiar antipathy to this young gentleman; but at this moment it was intensified into a loathing. How could he ask assistance from such a ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... doing all the mornings? Could you not write then?—No, then I was masqued too; I have done nothing but slip out of my domino into bed, and out of bed into my domino. The end of the Carnival is frantic, bacchanalian; all the morn one makes parties in masque to the shops and coffee-houses, and all the evening to the operas and balls. Then I have danced, good gods! how have I danced! The Italians are fond to a degree of our country dances: Cold and raw they only know by the tune; Blowzybella ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... is not always bacchanalian. He has a loving, human heart as well, which Landor has shown in a charming translation given to me shortly after our conversation concerning this poet. "I never publish translations," he remarked at the time; but though translations ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... deck a set of dances, which in one sense of the word at least, were very intelligibly and appropriately entitled reels. The passengers, who lay in the cabin below in all the agonies of sea- sickness, must have found our bacchanalian merriment ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... force and breadth to the design by "coaling in" the shadows with a charred stick. Then calling color to my aid, as far as my limited means admitted, I scraped from the edges of the moose-hide a portion of the red-streaked fat, and, having impasted therewith the bacchanalian nose of my subject, I stepped back a few paces to contemplate the effect. So ludicrous was the resemblance, that I laughed outright in the pride of my success,—a transient hilarity, nipped suddenly in the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... them are little emblematic figures, of a relief exceedingly low, of dead and dying animals, and little winged genii, and female forms bending in groups in some funereal office. The high reliefs represent, one a nautical subject, and the other a Bacchanalian one. ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... ridiculous and unnatural. The rouge with which they painted their faces, and the powder which they sprinkled upon their hair were not used to give them the semblance of youthful beauty, but rather to impart the purple hues of perpetual drunkenness, such as Rubens gave to his Bacchanalian deities, united with the blanched whiteness of premature old age. Licentiousness without shame, drunkenness without rebuke, gambling without honor, and frivolity without wit characterized, alas, a great proportion of that "upper class" ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... directions of Trevor's eyes, he descried a blue-clad, golden-haired young lady lolling against the window, trying with a giant chiffon muff to smother a fit of hilarious laughter. One arched and smiling eye showed above the muff and the whole figure was instinct with Bacchanalian mirth. "Why that's," he began to explain, but young Trevor ...
— New Faces • Myra Kelly
... rises. What do I see? The only scene to which we gave the epithet infernal: an orgy of knights in Sicily. In that chorus in F every human passion is unchained in a bacchanalian allegro. Every thread by which the devil holds us is pulled. Yes, that is the sort of glee that comes over men when they dance on the edge of a precipice; they make themselves giddy. What go there is ...
— Gambara • Honore de Balzac |
