"Lesbian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Harold sailed and passed the barren spot Where sad Penelope o'erlooked the wave, And onward viewed the mount, not yet forgot, The lover's refuge and the Lesbian's grave. Dark Sappho! could not verse immortal save That breast ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... also an old Lesbian story which is very much to the point. It is said that after Orpheus had been torn to pieces by the Thracian women, his head and his lyre were carried down the Hebrus into the sea; the head, it seems, floated down upon the lyre, singing ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... into the opposite extreme: it took to the love of members of its own sex. This happened especially with the women of the island of Lesbos, whence this aberration was, and still continues to be named, "Lesbian love," for it has not yet died out: it survives among us. The poetess Sappho, "the Lesbian nightingale," who lived about six hundred years before our reckoning, is considered the leading representative of this form of love. Her passion ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... Apollo was carried into the Maeander and, after being thrown on land, dedicated to Apollo, the god of song. Comp. Lyc. 58-63, where the Muses and misfortune are similarly associated by a reference to Orpheus, whose 'gory visage' and lyre were carried "down the swift Hebrus to the Lesbian shore." Further, the Maeander is associated with the sorrows of the maiden Byblis, who seeks her lost brother Caunus (called by Ovid Maeandrius juvenis). [Since the above was written, Prof. J. W. Hales has ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... He refuses to yield even after Agamemnon, alarmed by his reverses, seeks to conciliate him by offering him gold and horses and women in abundance; telling him he shall have back his Briseis, whom the king swears he has never touched, and, besides her, seven Lesbian women of more than human beauty; also, the choice of twenty Trojan women as soon as the city capitulates; and, in addition to these, one of the three princesses, his ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... preceding article, on Destruction of Books. Aristotle having declaimed irreverently of the gods, and dreading the fate of Socrates, wished to retire from Athens. In a beautiful manner he pointed out his successor. There were two rivals in his schools: Menedemus the Rhodian, and Theophrastus the Lesbian. Alluding delicately to his own critical situation, he told his assembled scholars that the wine he was accustomed to drink was injurious to him, and he desired them to bring the wines of Rhodes and Lesbos. He tasted both, and declared they both did honour to their soil, each being ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... been translating some extracts from the Greek Anthology. I send you a few specimens of my work, with a Dedication to the Shade of Sappho. I hope you will find something of the Greek rhythm in my versions, and that I have caught a spark of inspiration from the impassioned Lesbian. I have found great delight in this work, at any rate, and am never so happy as when I read from my manuscript or repeat from memory the lines into which I have transferred the thought of the men and women of two thousand years ago, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Dionysus. But modern motives are clearer; and in a Bacchus by a young Hebrew painter, in the exhibition of the Royal Academy of 1868, there was a complete and very fascinating realisation of such a motive; the god of the bitterness of wine, "of things too sweet"; the sea-water of the Lesbian grape become somewhat brackish in the cup. Touched by the sentiment of this subtler, melancholy Dionysus, we may ask whether anything similar in feeling is to be actually found in the range of Greek ideas;—had ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... the near Isle of Ebony;— Some, Hydriot barks that deep in caves Beneath Colonna's pillared cliffs, Had all day lurked and o'er the waves Now shot their long and dart-like skiffs. Woe to the craft however fleet These sea-hawks in their course shall meet, Laden with juice of Lesbian vines, Or rich from Naxos' emery mines; For not more sure, when owlets flee O'er the dark crags of Pendelee, Doth the night-falcon mark his prey, Or pounce on it more ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al |
