"Mythology" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Greek mythology, that naive poem of Nature, the product of the artistic impulse of the race to stamp its impressions in a beautiful and harmonious form, so in the clear-cut comparisons in Homer, the feeling for Nature is profound; but ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... poetry, history, and mythology she had read with her mother had quickened her mind, sharpened her intuition, had made her temperament still more sensitive—and her heart less peaceful. In her was almost every note of human feeling: home and duty, song and gaiety, daring and neighbourly kindness, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... once pass out of sight, and then again the old fanciful notions are restored, and the mere realities which you have just been looking at are thrown back so far into distance, that the very event of your intrusion upon such scenes begins to look dim and uncertain, as though it belonged to mythology. ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... are essential to the verse. Even in those parts of the poems which use romantic motives, one reason of their original charm is that they suggest how the Greek imagination would have dealt with the forsaken merman, the church of Brou, and Tristram and Iseult. The presence of such motives, such mythology, and such Christian and chivalric color in the work of Arnold does not disturb the simple unity of its feeling, which finds no solvent for life, whatever its accident of time and place and faith, except in that Greek spirit which ruled in thoughtful men before the triumph of Christianity, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... and final capture in 717 B.C. As has been said in the last chapter, it is usual to identify this king with one of those "Phrygians" known to the Greeks as Midas—preferably with the son of the first Gordius, whose wealth and power have been immortalized in mythology. If this identification is correct, we have to picture Phrygia at the close of the eighth century as dominating almost all Asia Minor, whether by direct or by indirect rule; as prepared to measure her forces (though ...
— The Ancient East • D. G. Hogarth
... deny that if it were possible to compress his mythology and merge his Invisible King in his Veiled Being, the result would be a great simplification of the problem. But this is not, in fact, possible; for it would mean the positing of an all-good and all-powerful Creator, which is precisely the idea which Mr. Wells rebels against,[1] ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... and metaphors be true or false? In the sense that, in terms drawn from moral predicaments or from literary psychology, they may report the general movement and the pertinent issue of material facts, and may inspire us with a wise sentiment in their presence. In this sense I should say that Greek mythology was true and Calvinist theology was false. The chief terms employed in psycho-analysis have always been metaphorical: "unconscious wishes", "the pleasure-principle", "the Oedipus complex", "Narcissism", "the censor"; nevertheless, interesting and profound vistas may be opened up, in such terms, ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... Play settlers of the West Branch Valley doubtless had their own mythology and folklore, most of it was passed on by word of mouth; as a result, little of record remains. The Revolutionary pension claims are filled with tales of the courage and patriotism of the stouthearted men and women of this frontier. A frequent claim is that the measures ...
— The Fair Play Settlers of the West Branch Valley, 1769-1784 - A Study of Frontier Ethnography • George D. Wolf
... the Mohawks, he found a strong tide of feeling running against him. The accident that aroused it illustrates Indian superstitiousness. On his former visit, expecting to return, he had left a small box. From the first the Indians suspected it of being, like Pandora's box in the old mythology, full of all kinds of ills. But Jogues opened it and showed them that it contained only some harmless personal effects. After he was gone, however, some Huron prisoners wrought on their terror and at the same time reviled the French, declaring ...
— French Pathfinders in North America • William Henry Johnson
... Gothic romance; distressed ladies and their champions, combats with dragons and giants, enchanted castles, magic rings, charmed wells, forest hermitages, etc. But side by side with these appear the fictions of Greek mythology and the personified abstractions of fashionable allegory. Knights, squires, wizards, hamadryads, satyrs, and river gods, Idleness, Gluttony, and Superstition jostle each other in Spenser's fairy land. Descents to the infernal shades, in the manner of Homer and Vergil, alternate with ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... him—a want very grave in poetry, and very strange in antique poetry—the want of devotional feeling and conscience of God. Observe, that all antique poets rejoice greatly and abundantly in their divine mythology; and that if this Ossian be both antique and godless, he is an exception, a discrepancy, a monster in the history of letters and experience of humanity. As ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... thick head of hair which he possessed. It is a frequent subject in old Roman sculpture, and there are many delineations of the birth of Bacchus by Cesarean section from the corpse of Semele. Greek mythology tells us of the birth of Bacchus in the following manner: After Zeus burnt the house of Semele, daughter of Cadmus, he sent Hermes in great haste with directions to take from the burnt body of the mother the fruit of seven months. This child, as we know, was Bacchus. Aesculapius, according ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... in History or Mythology are more significant than that Moslem one, of Moses and the Dwellers by the Dead Sea. A tribe of men dwelt on the shores of that same Asphaltic Lake; and having forgotten, as we are all too prone to do, the inner facts of Nature, and taken up with the falsities ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... made statements almost synonymous with many in the Bible. That is what may be called universal truth, and if this philosophy is what is consistent with fundamental truth, it will be just what I have been wishing to find." Grace leaned back meditatively, adding, "Mythology used to have a peculiar charm for me, and many of those old stories are coming back ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson
... Hinduism. An "infernal religion." Hindu mythology. Ascetics. Translations of Hindu sacred books. Modern and ancient ways of teaching Christianity. Danger of the incorporation of a false Christ into Hinduism. Hindu India as it really is. Definitions of "What is Hinduism?" ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin
... each of the cardinal points. Each held an arrow made of the cliff rose (Cowania mexicana) in his extended right hand. The head of the arrow was of stone, the fletching of eagle feathers, and the "breath feather" of the downy plume of the Tsenáhale (the Harpy of Navajo mythology). As they held the arrows they ejaculated, "ai', ai', ai', ai'," as they who dance the kátso-yisçà u do in the ceremonies to this day, and after the fourth ai' each one swallowed his arrow, head foremost, until the fletching touched his lips. Then he withdrew the arrow and ...
— The Mountain Chant, A Navajo Ceremony • Washington Matthews
... self-sufficient in their inventive life, with Christmas a rite full of surprises and tenderness, and "dressing-up parties" spontaneous and joyously absurd. The beasts in the Milford hearth-mythology were not the obscene Night Animals who jump out of closets and eat little girls, but beneficent and bright-eyed creatures—the tam htab, who is woolly and blue and lives in the bathroom, and runs rapidly to warm small feet; the ferruginous ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... brook margins. But Corot's true distinction—what gives him his unique position at the very head of landscape art, is neither his color, delicate and interesting as his color is, nor his classic serenity harmonizing with, instead of depending upon, the chance associations of architecture and mythology with which now and then he decorates his landscapes; it is the blithe, the airy, the truly spiritual way in which he gets farther away than anyone from both the actual pigment that is his instrument, and from the phenomena ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... offered to take care of the child at any time when the grandmother wished to be about her labors; and so, during her early years, the little one was often domesticated for days together at the Convent. A perfect mythology of wonderful stories encircled her, which the good sisters were never tired of repeating to each other. They were the simplest sayings and doings of childhood,—handfuls of such wild-flowers as bespread ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... resemblance between the Biblical and Babylonian Creation narratives the legend has been founded "that the introductory chapters of the Book of Genesis present to us the Hebrew version of a mythology common to many of the Semitic peoples." And the legend has been yet further developed, until writers of the standing of Prof. Friedrich Delitzsch have claimed that the Genesis narrative was borrowed from ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... fellow who was called Argus in mythology, who had a hundred eyes, of which only two were ever asleep at the same time. This bird gets his name from him; though the story is that Mercury killed him, and Venus transferred his eyes to the tail of ...
— Four Young Explorers - Sight-Seeing in the Tropics • Oliver Optic
... German, the sturdy Englishman with the unconquerable Roman, the aspiring Russian with the proud American. Seven cities, in ancient times, competed for the honour of having given him birth, but seventy nations have since been moulded by his productions. He gave a mythology to the ancients; he has given the fine arts to the modern world. Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, Juno, are still household words in every tongue; Vulcan is yet the god of fire, Neptune of the ocean, Venus of love. When Michael Angelo and Canova ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... Zahra," the bright or shining one par excellence, in which sense the same word is used to describe a flower. This "Flower of Night" is supposed to be no other than the white rose into which Adonis was changed by Venus in the fable which is the basis of all early Asiatic mythology. The morning and evening star is thus the celestial symbol of that union between earth and heaven in the vivifying processes of nature, typified in the love of ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... the C class in Ancient History. She did not succeed. Her embarrassment was caused in a great measure by not knowing the names of the pupils. Teachers should obtain lists of the names, if they are not familiar with them. The lesson being one in mythology, could have been made very interesting with a slight effort on the part of the teacher. Many errors in pronunciation made by both teacher and pupils, were allowed to pass. Teaching ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... as the most extraordinary creation which the world has seen. A jumble of all things; polytheistic pantheism; much of Buddhism; something apparently of Christianity, but terribly disfigured; a science wholly outrageous; shreds of history twisted into wild mythology; the bold poetry of the older books understood as literal prose; any local deity, any demon of the aborigines, however hideous, identified with some accredited Hindu divinity; any custom, however repugnant to common sense or common decency, accepted and explained—in a ...
— Two Old Faiths - Essays on the Religions of the Hindus and the Mohammedans • J. Murray Mitchell and William Muir
... provided an elaborate commentary, containing, besides all the variorum readings, a great mass of bibliographical and critical matter; and, in addition, he has enabled the reader to obtain a clue through the labyrinth of Blake's mythology, by means of ample quotations from those passages in the Prophetic Books, which throw light upon the obscurities of the poems. The most important Blake document—the Rossetti MS.—has been freshly collated, with the generous aid of the owner, ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... doubtless his man Moses also, knew that men possessed at least common sense. In the New Testament we have the word tartarus in its verb form. Where did it come from? The Apostle Peter, guided by the divine spirit, found it in Grecian mythology. Is it to be thrown out on that account? Nay, verily. A man of God, that is, a prophet, in any of the ancient ages as far back as Moses, is not to be regarded as under obligations to shun a truth because it was already ...
— The Christian Foundation, February, 1880
... The latest feature in nursery autobiography, so far as I could gather, was to have a profound objective sympathy with vegetables and a faculty for naming domestic animals after the principal figures in classical mythology. If you have these gifts you get published by The Atlantic Monthly, with a preface by Viscount GREY. But I doubted whether Priscilla had them. I thought I ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, October 13, 1920 • Various
... strange questions that sometimes I am tempted to believe you a relic of ancient mythology that has drifted down the centuries and landed on our civilized shores, or else have been gifted with a marvelous prolongation of life, and have emerged upon us from some cavern where you have lived, or slept for ages in unchanged possession of ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley
... be regarded as a man who has consented so to degrade himself as to become for the time being a heartless automaton, ruthlessly working for gain, a being like one of those terrible ogres of the popular mythology who feed on human flesh. But he is not a mere automaton or ogre. There is a better side to his nature, as we often discover, to our amazement, when we learn about the facts of his private life. These private virtues do not indeed condone his social sins—far from it—but they ...
— The Essentials of Spirituality • Felix Adler
... spreading its broad mirror at the foot of the town, and the mountains rising abrupt around, all combined to present a landscape new and beautiful. Indeed, where may be its parallel? the lake was the Acherusian, Mount Pindus was in sight, and the Elysian fields of mythology spread in the lovely plains over which they passed in ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... most part, the accounts of Spanish authors regarding the mythology of the Mayas correspond only slightly or not at all with these figures of gods, and all other conjectures respecting their significance are very dubious, the alphabetic designation of the deities, which was tentatively introduced in the first edition of this work, has been preserved. This designation ...
— Representation of Deities of the Maya Manuscripts • Paul Schellhas
... course, not to be supposed that Siro had lectured upon mythology as such. But the Epicurean teachers, despite their scorn for legends, employed them for pedagogical purposes in several ways. Lucretius, for instance, uses them sometimes for their picturesqueness, as in the prooemium and again in the allegory of the seasons (V. 732). ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... Aristides may be as early as 125; if so, it disputes with the similar work of Quadratus the honor of being the first Christian apology. A large part of it is taken up with a statement of the contradictions and absurdities of the mythology of the Greeks and Barbarians. Of this statement, ch. 13, quoted below, is the conclusion. Then, after a short passage regarding the Jews, the author passes to an exposition of the faith of Christians and a statement regarding ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... besides, his so-called "Reise-Colleg," in which he instructed the students how to observe while on their travels. Schelling taught philosophy, the titles of his courses in the first term being, "Introduction to Philosophy" and "The Ages of the World"; in the second, "The Philosophy of Mythology" and "The Philosophy of Revelation." Schelling made a strong impression upon the friends. His manner was as persuasive as his style was clear, and his mode of developing his subject led his hearers along with a subtle power which did not permit fatigue. Oken lectured on general natural ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... them like titles. Mr. Tomkins, the twenty-pound man; an elector of uncommon purity. I saw the ruffian yesterday. He has an extra breadth to his hat. He has never been known to listen to a member under L20, and is respected enormously—like the lady of the Mythology, who was an intolerable Tartar of virtue, because her price was nothing less than a god, and money down. Nevil will have to come down on Bevisham in the Jupiter style. Bevisham is downright the dearest of boroughs—"vaulting-boards," ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the man who allowed himself in those liberties either of speech or action, which Lovelace thought shameful, was so far a worse man than Lovelace. For this reason is he every-where made to treat jests on sacred things and subjects, even down to the Mythology of the Pagans, among Pagans, as undoubted marks of the ill-breeding of the jesters; obscene images and talk, as liberties too shameful for even Rakes to allow themselves in; and injustice to creditors, and in matters of Meum and ...
— Clarissa: Preface, Hints of Prefaces, and Postscript • Samuel Richardson
... these books, so far as we can judge from the hints in the early writers, related chiefly to the ritual and calendar, to their history or Katuns, to astrological predictions and divinations, to their mythology, and to their system ...
— The Maya Chronicles - Brinton's Library Of Aboriginal American Literature, Number 1 • Various
... are very complicated, having appendages of wood, fur and feathers. They are all fashioned with an idea of representing some feature in the mythology of the spirit (Inua) or animal shade (Tunghat) which they represent. In the latter case they are nearly always made double, the mythical beings who inhabited the early world being regarded as able to change from animal to human shape, by merely pushing up or pulling down the upper part ...
— The Dance Festivals of the Alaskan Eskimo • Ernest William Hawkes
... and yet unpaid help France had given to his own country, and above all to the conviction that France, minding her own business, had been set upon by a greater power, with intent to crush and destroy. France was attacked by a dragon, and the old similes of mythology floated through his mind, but, oftenest, that of Andromeda chained to the rock. And the figure that typified France always had the golden hair and dark blue eyes ...
— The Forest of Swords - A Story of Paris and the Marne • Joseph A. Altsheler
... with the seasons; that sun, moon, and planets moved among them in a plane, and the belt of the Zodiac was marked out and divided,—then a new order of things began. Traces of the earlier stage remained in the names of the signs and constellations, just as the Scandinavian mythology survives now in the names of the days of the week; but, for all that, the understanding was now at work on the thing; science had begun, and the first triumph of it was the power of foretelling the future. Eclipses were ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... more sense. I never read in any mythology of indoor goddesses. Opinion seems to differ, however. Lady Mary said to me yesterday: 'You are so masculine, dear Miss Percy. You make us ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton
... thought has not yet been undertaken on a comprehensive scale. Sanskritists also with very few exceptions have neglected this important field of study, for most of these scholars have been interested more in mythology, philology, and history than in philosophy. Much work however has already been done in the way of the publication of a large number of important texts, and translations of some of them have also been attempted. But owing to the presence of many ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... fairly the state of opinion on this subject. We are presented in short with the old fable of the Twins suckled by the She-wolf in a slightly rationalized form. It was more likely to be true, if anything, in its original form, for in mythology nothing is so irrational as rationalization. That unfortunate She-wolf with her Twins has now been long discarded by criticism as a historical figure; but she still obtrudes herself as a symbolical legend into the first chapter of Roman history, and continues ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... pleasantest of his autobiographical papers; and as for details to supply a more complete picture,—are they not written at large in the family letters? His wife worshiped him, and named him all the names of classic mythology and history,—Endymion, Epaminondas, Apollo,—glorying in his physical kinghood, as she saw it, when he glided skating in the rose-colored air of twilight, and also in the divine qualities of his spirit in doors, where he, on occasion—and the occasion ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... ritual and popular legend that has clustered round Christmas through all the Christian ages, it is a truly extraordinary thing to reflect that Dickens (wishing to have in The Christmas Carol a little happy supernaturalism by way of a change) actually had to make up a mythology for himself. Here was one of the rare cases where Dickens, in a real and human sense, did suffer from the lack of culture. For the rest, Wilkie Collins is these two elements: the mechanical and the mystical; both very good of their ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... the Orient and the Occident even from the time of Alexander the Great, cotton is traced as a factor in the development of ancient nations and in the rise of the modern. It strikes one as being a little strange to read in this economic treatise such captions as "The Vegetable Lamb" and "Cotton Mythology." The author then gives in more detail the earliest history of the industry, referring to Hindu skill, Alexander's trade routes, Egyptian mummies, the microscope, the transit from Rome to Spain, cotton and the Renaissance, Edward III as ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... Dictionary of Biography, Mythology, and History, may be considered as the third in that important series of Classical Dictionaries for which the world is indebted to the learning of Dr. Smith. As the present work is distinguished by the same excellencies which have won for the ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 59, December 14, 1850 • Various
... mythology, the God of war and strength. He is girded by a belt of bear-sinews, and bears a hammer called "Miolner," which means the shatterer, and with which he destroys giants, demons, and other foes of Odin ...
— Romantic Ballads - translated from the Danish; and Miscellaneous Pieces • George Borrow
... of the Kadiakers, and have exercised a more important influence on their characters than any of their surroundings except the sea. It is no wonder, then, that the natives endowed these animals with a strength and size which easily takes them into the realm of mythology. The sea otter being nearly extinct, the bear is now made to shoulder all the large stories, and, strong as he is, this is no ...
— American Big Game in Its Haunts • Various
... lions—Some unicorns do not fight with lions, are both meaningless, because in Zoology there are no centaurs nor unicorns; and, therefore, in this reference, the propositions are not really contradictory. But if the subject of discussion or suppositio be Mythology or Heraldry, such propositions as the above are to the purpose, and ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... James Mackintosh, Mrs. Barbauld, Crabb Robinson, the solemn Dr. John Alderson, Amelia Opie, Henry Reeve of Edinburgh fame, Basil Montagu, the Sewards, the Quaker Gurneys of Earlham, and Dr. Frank Sayers, whom the German critics compared to Gray, who had handled the Norse mythology in poetry, to which Borrow was introduced by Sayer's private biographer, the eminent and aforesaid William Taylor" [no relation of the "Taylors of Norwich"] "whose 'Jail-delivery of German Studies' ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... book of maps or charts; so called from the character of that name in ancient mythology, son of Uranus, and represented as bearing the world on his back. Also the Indian satin ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... Laurentio-Mediceana in Florence, where I examined it in April, 1889. It is a most elaborate and beautiful MS., in three large volumes, containing thirteen hundred and seventy-eight illustrations, carefully drawn by hand, mostly colored, illustrative of the native mythology, history, arts and usages, besides many elaborate head and tail pieces ...
— Rig Veda Americanus - Sacred Songs Of The Ancient Mexicans, With A Gloss In Nahuatl • Various
... much reading, at least, if they will not call it learning; nor is it any great matter if a man has knowledge, whether he has it from one language or from another. Nothing is more evident, than that he had a taste for natural philosophy, mechanics, ancient and modern history, poetical learning, and mythology. We find him very knowing in the customs, rites, and manners of the Romans. In Coriolanus, and Julius Caesar, not only the spirit but manners of the Romans are exactly drawn; and still a nicer distinction is shewn between the manners of the Romans in the time ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume I. • Theophilus Cibber
... temptations, the twofold danger which a wise fortitude must expect to encounter in its course through this world. The fictions contained in it will be found to comprehend some of the most admired inventions of Grecian mythology. ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... survivor of our woodland divinities. His pedigree reaches back to the satyrs and dryads of Greek mythology; he claims kinship with the fauns that haunted the groves of leafy Tibur, and he lorded it in the green woods of merry ...
— More Tales of the Ridings • Frederic Moorman
... off into mythology!' commented Bazarov. 'You can see at once that he was a great Latinist in his day! Why, I seem to remember, you gained the silver ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... "Mythology, which was the interpretation of nature, and legend, which is the idealization of history," are the main elements of the epic. Being the "living history of the people," an epic should have "the breadth and volume of a river." All epics have therefore generally ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... things. Insensibly the idea that contemporary political forms mattered very fundamentally to men, was fading out of my mind. The British Empire and the German Empire, the Unity of Italy, and Anglo-Saxon ascendency, the Yellow Peril and all the other vast phantoms of the World-politician's mythology were fading out of my mind in those years, as the Olympic cosmogony must have faded from the mind of some inquiring Greek philosopher in the days of Heraclitus. And I revised my history altogether in the new light. The world had ceased to be chaotic in my mind; it had become ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... same time, the rich and fascinating stores of the Greek and Roman mythology, and those of the romantic poetry of Spain and Italy, were eagerly explored by the curious, and thrown open in translations to the admiring gaze of the vulgar. This last circumstance could hardly have afforded so much advantage ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... where beyond the hills were the almost inaccessible monasteries of the Greek Church. The moonlight turned the banks into shadowy substances, in which the ghosts of former days seemed to make a part; and spurred by the young girl's interest, the Italian, to entertain her, called up all the legends of mythology and the stories of Roman explorers and ...
— The Princess Aline • Richard Harding Davis
... he never writes without thinking how he shall best serve good causes and damage bad ones, then he is a genuine man of letters. If in addition to this he succeeds in making his manner attractive, he will become a classic. He knows this. He knows, although the Greeks in their mythology forgot to say so, that Conceit was saved to mankind as well as Hope when Pandora clapped the lid on to ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... of art and literature can be more vividly apprehended than in the province of classical study, and especially in the domain of those pursuits which are conversant with the life and thought of ancient Greece. The inheritor of a shapeless mythology and a rude tradition, Homer emerges as the first artist in European poetry, giving clear outline and beautiful form to types of godhead and heroism. The successor to schools which had rather combated than conquered their material, Phidias, ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... with them a curious trident-shaped stand, about four feet high, on the horns of which garlands of flowers are hung as offerings. The visitor is told that the male figures are Mahadeva, and the female Kali: we could hear of no other deities. I leave it to those who know Indian mythology better than I do, to interpret the meaning—or rather the past meaning, for I suspect it means very little now—of all this trumpery and nonsense, on which the poor folk seem to spend much money. It was impossible, of course, even if one had understood their language, ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... to his subject and retarding speed again, "that opens up a wide field. In Celtic mythology Avallon is Ynys yr Afallon, the Island of Apples. It is the Land of the Blessed, where Morgana holds her court. Great heroes like King Arthur and Ogier le Dane were carried there after death, and, as apples were the only first-rate fruit known to the northern nations, a place where they grew ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... dignity of this latter piece, and gave it a somewhat comic air, were the four Latin verses, which might make people imagine that, after enjoying the girl as Hebe, I had gone in search of her as Ganymede. This was not the case, but the empress understood Latin and was familiar with mythology, and if she had looked on it in the light I have mentioned I should have been undone. I made six copies of the two documents before I went to bed; I was quite tired out, but the exertion had somewhat ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... nam'st thy motley freight; But from what source their birth they date, Mythology or history. Old records, or the dreams of youth, Dark fable, or transparent truth, Is all to thee ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13, Issue 353, January 24, 1829 • Various
... Nutt says in Ossian and the Ossianic Literature, No. 3 of his excellent series of sixpenny pamphlets, Popular Studies in Mythology, Romance, and Folklore:— ...
— Gods and Fighting Men • Lady I. A. Gregory
... the comparative study (or Science) of Religion, and the greatest authorities in its various departments, are practically unanimous in their opinion, that all pagan systems of mythology and religion contain remnants of a more exalted form of belief, of a higher, clearer knowledge of the Divinity, which gradually became ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... condition now of being forced to make the first move. Over and over again he cursed the men who had made Ali Partab prisoner, and over and over again: he wondered how—by all the gods of all the multitudinous Hindoo mythology—how, when, and by what stroke of genius he could make use of the stiff-chinned Rangar and convert him from being a rankling thorn ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... Mr. Fairfield introduced the Arcadian Club of New York, an organization that for a time threatened to rival the Lotos in the latter's particular field. Writing men snatched up into the clouds in those days for their metaphors, and combed Mythology for illustrations with which to garnish descriptions of the most commonplace events of everyday life. Here is another gem from Mr. Fairfield's book, also in his ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... horrid dress a great deal too tight, and the neck chokes me. Now, I hope this is the last folly of the kind that we shall have here for many a long day. I, for one, refuse to be laced up in this heathen mythology style again. Now then, my dears, all of you to bed. Molly, what in the world are you staying here for? We didn't expect you, ...
— Red Rose and Tiger Lily - or, In a Wider World • L. T. Meade
... of antique thought was full of this pictorial tendency and even now the shrewdest of modern thinkers are compelled to use images drawn from antique mythology. Poetic thought may go astray. But it can never negate itself into quite the thin simulacrum of reality into which pure reason divorced from poetic ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... the gods and goddesses of classical mythology or our own folk-lore, none were more fascinating than the Nature Spirits—Elves and Fairies, Neckans and Kelpies, Pixies and Ouphes, Mermaids, Undines, Water Spirits, and all the ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... for Molly, and the girl with a petulant exclamation, sped away, leaving Aurelia to the society of the tapestry. It was of that set of Gobelin work which represents the four elements personified by their goddesses, and Aurelia's mythology, founded on Fenelon, was just sufficient to enable her to recognise the forge of Vulcan and the car [chariot—D.L.] of Venus. Then she looked at the work prepared for her, a creamy piece of white satin, and a most elaborate pattern of knots of roses, lilacs, ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Cyclops with the idea of a forge. These gentry would be the very last people in the world to flit across my mind whilst gazing at the forge from the bottom of the dark lane. The truth is, they are highly unpoetical fellows, as well they may be, connected as they are with Grecian mythology. At the very mention of their names the forge burns dull and dim, as if snowballs had been suddenly flung into it; the only remedy is to ply the bellows, an operation which I now ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... the air has been the dream of mankind for uncounted centuries. As far back as we have historic records we find stories of the attempts of men to fly. The earliest Greek mythology is full of aeronautical legends, and the disaster which befell Icarus and his wings of wax when exposed to the glare of the midsummer sun in Greece, is part of the schoolboy's task in Ovid. We find like traditions in the legendary lore of the Peruvians, the East ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... Suetonius, the Emperor Augustus possessed in his palace on the Palatine Hill a considerable collection of hatchets of different kinds of rock, nearly all of them found in the island of Capri, and which were to their royal owner the weapons of the heroes of mythology. Pliny tells of a thunder-bolt having fallen into a lake, in which eighty-nine of these wonderful stones were soon afterwards found.[2] Prudentius represents ancient German warriors as wearing gleaming CERAUNIA ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... sacrifices; but the gods cannot have ordained them; daemons, who stole the names of gods, imposed these on men—not the gods; men practised them to avert the anger of daemons. The gods are good. Waiving the fact that he had not much evidence for this in the mythology, how was a man to distinguish god from daemon, to know which is which? He does not tell us. Again he speaks of the image of Osiris with three "lingams". He apologizes for it; he defends it; for ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... disregarded wagtail of our own land, which we may frequently see wherever insects abound—on the green meadow, or by the margin of the brook—is the khunjunee of the Hindoo, by whose romantic and fanciful mythology he has been made a holy bird, bearing on his breast the impression of Salagrama, the stone of Vishnoo, a sacred petrified shell. Protected by this prestige, the little creature ranges unmolested near the habitations of man, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 441 - Volume 17, New Series, June 12, 1852 • Various
... the Anglo-Saxon name was a simplex instead of a compound. The simple Cytel survives as Chettle, Kettle. [Footnote: Connected with the kettle or cauldron of Norse mythology. The renowned Captain Kettle, described by his creator as a Welshman, must have descended from some hardy Norse pirate. Many names in this chapter are Scandinavian.] Beorn is one of the origins of Barnes. Brand also appears as Braund, Grim is common in place-names, and from Grima we have Grimes. ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... to mean a knight,' said Anne, 'contrary to your argument last night. Knecht Ruprecht's origin is not nearly so sublime as you would make it out. Keightley's Fairy Mythology says he is only our old friend Robin Good-fellow, Milton's lubber fiend, the Hob Goblin. You know, Rupert, and Robert, and Hob, are all the same ...
— Abbeychurch - or, Self-Control and Self-Conceit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... said with truth, that the theological imagery and speculations of that day, particularly as developed in the writings of the two Mathers, were more adapted to mislead the mind and shroud its moral sense in darkness, than any system, even of mythology, that ever existed. It was a mythology. It may be spoken of with freedom, now, as it has probably passed away, in all enlightened communities in Christendom. Satan was the great central character, in what was, in reality, a Pantheon. He was surrounded with ...
— Salem Witchcraft and Cotton Mather - A Reply • Charles W. Upham
... gallants of the Stuart period, who found the grave courtesy of the Italians rather slow. Learning, for which men once had travelled into Italy, was no longer confined there. Nor did the Cavaliers desire exact classical learning. A knowledge of mythology, culled from French translations, was sufficient. Accomplishments, such as riding, fencing, and dancing, were what chiefly helped them, it appeared, to make their way at Court or at camp. And the best instruction ...
— English Travellers of the Renaissance • Clare Howard
... heart she was as pagan as the top of Slievegullion, and along with her favourite Christian oaths (in one of which St. Anthony of Padua was disguised as Saint Antonio Perrier), and her whispered "Aves," she taught Gabrielle enough pagan mythology and folklore to set her head spinning whenever she found herself alone in the woods ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... but it is highly probable that the most important parts of the work, now known under the title of "The Prose Edda," formed a part of them, and that Snorre—who may be regarded as the Scandinavian Euhemerus—merely added a few chapters, in order to render the mythology more conformable to the erroneous notions he appears to have entertained respecting its signification. Be this as it may, the Prose Edda, in its present form, dates from the thirteenth century, and consists of—1. Formali ...
— The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson; and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson • Saemund Sigfusson and Snorre Sturleson
... Like the god in Greek mythology, I need the touch of earth occasionally to renew my strength, but a very brief contact is all-sufficient. I'm a child of the city, brought up on ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... on philosophy, mythology, anthropology and history are of extraordinary interest today. Diderot relates his saying—"Que si la philosophie avait trouv tant d'obstacles parmi nous c'tait qu'on avait commenc par o il aurait fallu ...
— Baron d'Holbach - A Study of Eighteenth Century Radicalism in France • Max Pearson Cushing
... sex are not uncommon in Eastern and classical mythology and folk-lore; usually, as in this instance, the change of a man into a woman, although it is the converse (apparent, of course) which we meet with occasionally in ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... which two boys personate a Centaur, a creature of Greek mythology, half man and half horse. One of the players stands erect and the other behind him in a stooping position with his hands upon the first player's hips, as shown in Fig. ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics
... Grecian feeling of the Commonwealth,—the idea of a common good surpassing a personal good; then in the conception of the Epic, which assumes a political as well as a physical Kosmos, or order; then in the grand moral ideas lying at the basis of the Mythology,—the myths, for instance, of Prometheus, and the picture of Nemesis and the Fates. Next, the deep sense of God speaks out in Grecian Tragedy and the great works of Grecian Art; and in the highest degree, in the Philosophy which culminated in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... brother—Hahn, No. 70, in which a Drakos, as a cloud, steals golden apples, a story closely resembling the Russian skazka. See also No. 26, very similar to which is the Servian Story in "Vuk Karajich," No. 2—and a very interesting Tuscan story printed for the first time by A. de Gubernatis, "Zoological Mythology," vol. ii. p. 187. ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston
... wrote a poem every year for the reunion of his regiment, had written certain lines for the "Evening Star" in which "P. K." was addressed as the Diana of Main Street. As to the soundness of his mythology there might be debate, but there was no question as to Phil's thorough identification with Main Street, all the way from her father's house, past the court-house, shops, and banks, out to the old Sugar Creek Bridge where ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... that he turned a theology back again into a religion: that he revived in a higher and purer form those primitive elements of reverence for Nature's powers which had diffused themselves into speculation, or crystallized into mythology; that for a system of beliefs about Nature, which paganism had allowed to become grotesque,— of rites which had become unmeaning,—he substituted an admiration for Nature so constant, an understanding of her so subtle, a sympathy so profound, that they became a veritable ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... they can be separated from the physical propositions, will share in that discredit. In this way, undoubtedly, the progress of science may indirectly serve the cause of religious truth. The Hindoo mythology, for example, is bound up with a most absurd geography. Every young Brahmin, therefore, who learns geography in our colleges learns to smile at the Hindoo mythology. If Catholicism has not suffered to an equal degree from the papal decision that the sun goes round the earth, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... there, so he betook himself to Chapman and Lempriere. If you ask, "What right has a country postman to be handling questions that vexed the brain of Plato?"—I ask in return, "What right had John Keats, who knew no Greek, to busy himself with Greek mythology?" And the answer is that each has a perfect right to follow his ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... of light, color, and darkness with the instincts which have been inherited by mankind from its superstitious ancestry of the age of mythology, another field of application of artificial light is opened. Light has gradually assumed such attributes as truth, knowledge, progress, enlightenment. Throughout the early ages light was more or less worshiped ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... pursuit, and made some important accessions to these stores. He found also a great number of gold and silver ornaments, specimens of ancient art, some of them of a most costly nature, but being idols or figures connected with heathen mythology, he cared not to preserve them. Matthew Paris is prolix in his account of the operations and discoveries of this abbot; and one portion of it is so interesting, and seems so connected with our subject, that I cannot ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... their abode. A spreading fig not far off invited them to repose beneath its umbrageous foliage; and removing; their camp paraphernalia from the poison-breathing; upas, they once more erected the tarpaulin, and recommenced housekeeping under the protecting shelter of a tree celebrated in the Hindu mythology ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... Miss Ludolph, for saying it, but I think your ideas of Deity are borrowed more from mythology and human greatness than from the Bible. Let your reason stand aside a moment; this is not contrary to it, but beyond it. Imagining the Bible story true, can you not wish it true? If the man who died on Calvary ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... named Tiger-tail sitting there, his feet dangling above his moored canoe, evidently waiting for the tide to turn before he went out to spear crayfish. I merely noticed he was sitting there in the sunshine, that's all. And then I opened my mythology book and turned to the story of Argus, on which I was ...
— Police!!! • Robert W. Chambers
... Obi, a word used on the East coast of Africa to denote witchcraft, sorcery, and fetishism in general. The etymology of Obi has been traced to a very antique source, stretching far back into Egyptian mythology. A serpent in the Egyptian language was called Ob or Aub. Obion is still the Egyptian name for a serpent. Moses, in the name of God, forbade the Israelites ever to enquire of the demon, Ob, which is translated ...
— Bat Wing • Sax Rohmer
... would fain claim even in the kingdom free from all care, Madeleine often found herself contemplating her son fighting the brave fight, winning crown upon crown, and virtue flinging around him a shield more impenetrable than the fabulous Aegis of pagan mythology. ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... best; and the lines of separation between it and necromancy, medical magic, and demonology are too faintly separated to allow him to speak with discrimination. The best reply, as to his religious views, his mythology, his cosmogony, and his general views as to the mode and manifestations of the government and providences of God, are to be found in his myths and legends. When he assembles his lodge-circle, to hear stories, in seasons of leisure ...
— The Myth of Hiawatha, and Other Oral Legends, Mythologic and Allegoric, of the North American Indians • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... governing civilized peoples, and working to defend them against the barbarians, would have gone down to posterity, amongst the same peoples, as the good god; but the chief of these devastators will have become the symbol of the evil principle: that is altogether reasonable. It appears from this same mythology that these two princes contended for long, but that neither of them was victorious. Thus they both held their own, just as the two principles shared the empire of the world according to the ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... to my desire of amusing myself, and I might have succeeded if the three Graces had not all been there. Love only laughs when two are present, and thus it is that the ancient mythology tells no story of the loves of the Graces, who were always together. I had not yet found an opportunity of getting my three maids one after the other, and I dared not risk a general attack, which might have lost me the confidence of each one. Rose, I saw, was openly jealous ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... styled also "the tree of councils," from the prevalent custom of assembling legislators, magistrates and savants under its protecting canopy to deliberate on civil affairs; while all around, ensconced in every niche, are the tutelary gods and goddesses that make up the Hindoo mythology. It is indeed a quaint, weird spot, full of the witchery of romance and legendary lore; and though years have passed since I last sat under the Cubber Burr's sheltering boughs with a merry party of picnicking maidens, now ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... to another? Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other's eyes for an instant? We should live in all the ages of the world in an hour; ay, in all the worlds of the ages. History, Poetry, Mythology!—I know of no reading of another's experience so startling and informing as ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... pepper and curry, highly salted and acid foods, and all rich foods; and meat must be eaten only in moderate quantities. Constipation irritates the genitalia directly and increases the inflammation. The close relation of Venus and Bacchus is known not only in mythology. Carbonated waters are to be especially avoided, such as soda, seltzers, Preblauer, Geisshubler, and acid waters; also champagne and beer, heavy Italian, Spanish, and English wines. All alcoholic ...
— The Four Epochs of Woman's Life • Anna M. Galbraith
... thoughts. At one time his enterprise, connecting itself with his own life and mission, rose before his imagination and kindled his feelings, and embodied itself in the lofty and stately "Proem" already quoted. His quick and brilliant imagination saw shadows and figures of his ideas in the ancient mythology, which he worked out with curious ingenuity and often much poetry in his Wisdom of the Ancients. Towards the end of his life he began to embody his thoughts and plans in a philosophical tale, which he did not finish—the ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... the title. "Oh, Absalom, thank you. This is lovely. It's a story from Greek mythology—I've been hearing some of these stories from the teacher"—she checked herself, suddenly, at Absalom's ...
— Tillie: A Mennonite Maid - A Story of the Pennsylvania Dutch • Helen Reimensnyder Martin
... China, and I was interested in the fact that their walnuts there produced yearly crops. In trying to find out why they produced yearly crops, I also discovered that their persimmons, their plums and their peaches did the same thing. The reason for that apparently goes back to their mythology. They believe in signs and doing certain things according to certain seasons of the year, and one of the things that they did was to gather together in the dark of the moon on one particular night at a certain time and beat the living daylights out of these trees with big bamboo clubs. ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 43rd Annual Meeting - Rockport, Indiana, August 25, 26 and 27, 1952 • Various
... of such legends or fables as involved a transformation, from the Creation to the time of Julius Caesar, the last being that emperor's change into a star; the Fasti in 12 books, of which only the first six are extant, a sort of poetical Roman calendar, with its appropriate festivals and mythology; and the Elegies, written during his banishment. Ovid undoubtedly possessed a great poetical genius, which makes it the more to be regretted that it was not always under the control of a sound judgment. He exhibits great vigor ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... pantheistic way, which identifies the two, which [76] regards nature itself as the living energy of an intelligence of the same kind as though vaster in scope than the human. Partly through the influence of mythology, the Greek mind became early possessed with the conception of nature as living, thinking, almost speaking to the mind of man. This unfixed poetical prepossession, reduced to an abstract form, petrified into an idea, is the force which gives unity ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... at the head of those of all inventors in all ages and nations. In another part of his writings the same great man illustrates the dignity of useful inventions by one of those happy allusions to the beautiful mythology of the ancients, which he often employs to illuminate as well as to decorate reason. "The dignity," says he, "of this end of endowment of man's life with new commodity appeareth, by the estimation that antiquity ...
— James Watt • Andrew Carnegie
... of the Rhine. They were converted to the Christian faith, and gave up with their old creed much of the coarse ferocity which must have been fostered in the spirits of the ancient warriors of the North by a mythology which promised, as the reward of the brave on earth, an eternal cycle of fighting and drunkenness ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... the greatest advantage from Asia. Very similar stories have been preserved in the memories of the common people in many parts of Asia, but especially in India. And their leading ideas are perfectly in accordance with the mythology or the moral teaching of the Asiatics who, age after age, have delighted in telling or hearing them. In such cases as these it seems to be not very unreasonable to suppose that the story was originally, if not created, at all events shaped and trimmed in Asia, and thence was ...
— Indian Fairy Tales • Anonymous
... persuades him that the ancient Irish had forestalled the modern dockyards in the making of metal ships. The man who doubted, let us say, our fabulous ancient kings running up to Adam, or found but mythology in some old tale, was as hated as if he had doubted the authority of Scripture. Above all no man was so ignorant, that he had not by rote familiar arguments and statistics to drive away amid familiar applause, all those had they but found strange truth in the world or in their mind, whose ...
— Synge And The Ireland Of His Time • William Butler Yeats
... elementary schools. The Committee of Ten recommends an eight years' course in history, beginning with the fifth year in school and continuing to the end of the high school course. The first two years of this course are given wholly to the study of biography and mythology. The Committee of fifteen recommends that history be taught in all the grades of the elementary school and emphasizes the value of biography and ...
— Famous Men of The Middle Ages • John H. Haaren, LL.D. and A. B. Poland, Ph.D.
... aged 19. Here were represented eight direct generations, and there were present, of course, the wives and daughters; so that, on the whole, the gathering must have been as numerous as it was otherwise remarkable. Nowhere in any of the vistas of history, of romance, or of mythology were it possible to find a spectacle more imposing than that of the child Methuselah surrounded by his father Enoch, his grandfather Jared, his great-grandfather Mahalaleel, his great-great-grandfather Cainan, his great-great-great-grandfather ...
— The Holy Cross and Other Tales • Eugene Field
... for many centuries and are mentioned in the Bible as having been imported into Palestine by Solomon; although the bird is referred to in mythology, the Greeks probably had but little knowledge of it until after the ...
— Camps and Trails in China - A Narrative of Exploration, Adventure, and Sport in Little-Known China • Roy Chapman Andrews and Yvette Borup Andrews
... that a church always brought the old feeling back again, and her thoughts paused, and in a silent awe of soul she asked herself if, at the bottom of her soul, she still disbelieved in God. But it was so silly to believe the story of the Virgin—think of it.... As Owen said, in no mythology was there anything more ridiculous. Nevertheless, she did not convince herself that the dim, vague, unquiet sensation which rankled in her was not a still unextirpated germ of the original faith. She tried to think ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... outward form than in their character as truly national poems. The kavya is a narrative poem written in a sophisticated age by a learned poet, who possesses all the resources of an elaborate rhetoric and metric. The subject is drawn from time-honoured mythology. The poem is divided into cantos, written not in blank verse but in stanzas. Several stanza-forms are commonly employed in the same poem, though not in the same canto, except that the concluding verses of ...
— Translations of Shakuntala and Other Works • Kaalidaasa
... can be opened where the eye does not light upon some antique gem. Mythology, history, art, manners, topography, have all their fitting representatives. It is the highest praise to say, that the designs throughout add to the pleasure with which Horace is read. Many of them carry ...
— Notes & Queries 1849.12.01 • Various
... Incarnation was not unfamiliar to human thought, it was no new or strange idea to the heathen mind. The numberless metamorphoses of Grecian mythology, the incarnations of Brahm, the avatars of Vishnu, and the human form of Krishna had naturalized the thought.[932] So that when the people of Lystra saw the apostles Paul and Barnabas exercising supernatural ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... things about the study of mythology is the attempt to discover how widely separate nations came to have similar stories. Many learned men have worked much over this question, and some of them say that, having the same facts to explain, or the same things to express ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester
... some degree our own fault. All that we can learn by reading is valuable. I do not refer to criticism or descriptions, but what may be called the general literature of art—the lives of artists, the history of the various schools, even mythology and the lives of the saints; which last were the favorite theme during the best period everywhere except in England, whose native art is not much over a century old. This is within the reach of every ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... mythology about Toombs at his State university. The things he said would fill a volume of Sydney Smith, while the pranks he played would rival the record of Robin Hood. There is still standing in the college campus in Athens a noble tree, with the crown of a century upon it. Under its spreading branches ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall
... in mystery, his image assumed a sublimity and grandeur in my imagination, dark and oppressive as night. I would sit and ponder over his mystic attributes, till he seemed like those gods of mythology, who, veiling their divinity in clouds, came down and wooed the daughters of men. A being so lovely and good as my mother would never have loved a common mortal. Perhaps he was some royal exile, who had found her in his wanderings ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... upon the vision of this palpitating young man through the parting curtains, like a dramatic climax or the goddess of reward, or denunciation, she seemed to Dennis, whose mythology was centralized from that moment, like another Aphrodite churned into ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... of the whole body of Tinguian mythology points to the conclusion that the chief characters of these tales are not celestial beings but typical, generalized heroes of former ages, whose deeds have been magnified in the telling by many generations of ...
— Philippine Folk Tales • Mabel Cook Cole
... lose by awaking to find that our Theology is human invention and our eschatology an unhealthy dream. We are freed from the incubus of base Hebrew mythology, and from doctrines of Divine government which outrage morality and set cruelty and injustice in the place of holiness. If we have to abandon cherished anthropomorphic visions of future Blessedness, ...
— A Reply to Dr. Lightfoot's Essays • Walter R. Cassels
... was of the very newest enormity of circumference; I effected this object. "Well, Count," said she, "I am glad to see you have brought so much learning from school; make the best use of it while it lasts, for your memory will not furnish you with a single simile out of the mythology by the ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... readers ask when all this took place, we must answer, in the first place, that mythology is not careful of dates; and next, that, as Brutus was the great-grandson of Aeneas, it must have been not far from a century subsequent to the Trojan war, or about eleven hundred years before the invasion of the island by Julius Caesar. This long interval is filled with the ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... Phonics, Mythology, History, Chemistry, Astronomy, Chronology, Hydrostatics, Meteorology, Logic, Pneumatics, Geology, Ontology, Electricity, Mineralogy, Mathematics, Galvanism, Physiology, Mechanics, Literature, Anatomy, ...
— Percy - A Tragedy • Hannah More
... concealment there until the function had come to an end, and his wife had begun to search for him. He was quite happy, consuming his salad and beer behind the stairs and telling me in detail his conception of certain of the figures of Celtic mythology which he had had in mind ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... destiny, takes to neglecting knowledge altogether and to hugging instead various irrational ideas. On the one hand it lapses into dreams which, while obviously irrelevant to practice, express the mind's vegetative instincts; hence art and mythology, which substitute play-worlds for the real one on correlation with which human prosperity and dignity depend. On the other hand, the mind becomes wedded to conventional objects which mark, perhaps, the turning-points ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... idolatry, wrought so glorious a transformation in the character of his countrymen, what may we not look for from the universal dissemination of those writings on whose authors was poured the full splendor of eternal truth? If unassisted human nature, spell-bound by a childish mythology, have done so much, what may we not hope for from the supernatural efforts of preeminent genius, which spake as it was moved by ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... is a remarkable coincidence(?), that there are: First, Twelve Lunations in a year; Second, Twelve Months in a year; Third, Twelve Constellations in the heavens; Fourth, Twelve Gods in the ancient mythology; Fifth, Twelve Labors of Hercules; Sixth, see Law of the Twelve tables(?), Encyclopaedia Britannica on Burying; Seventh, Twelve Sons of Jacob; Eighth, Twelve Tribes of Israel; Ninth, Twelve Apostles of Christ; Tenth, Twelve Virtues and Twelve Vices ...
— The Youthful Wanderer - An Account of a Tour through England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany • George H. Heffner
... a way or make one," was an expression of the same sturdy independence which to this day distinguishes the descendants of the Northmen. Indeed, nothing could be more characteristic of the Scandinavian mythology, than that it had a god with a hammer. A man's character is seen in small matters; and from even so slight a test as the mode in which a man wields a hammer, his energy may in some measure be inferred. Thus an eminent Frenchman hit off in a single phrase the characteristic ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... intercourse, in wine, music, and sensual indulgence; for to-morrow we must die. Death was in his view no mere change of condition and relation; it was the black end of all. It is evident that he placed no reliance on the mythology of his time, and that he regarded the fables of the Elysian Fields and their dim and wandering ghosts simply in the light of convenient poetic fictions for illustration and imagery. Nothing can, in my view, be sadder than his attempts at consolation for the ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... hired to slay him, but the attempt did not succeed. In a small town of Bengal, where he treated fetishism with more than his usual severity, some fanatic threw on his naked feet a huge cobra. There are two snakes deified by the Brahman mythology: the one which surrounds the neck of Shiva on his idols is called Vasuki; the other, Ananta, forms the couch of Vishnu. So the worshipper of Shiva, feeling sure that his cobra, trained purposely for the mysteries of a Shivaite pagoda, would ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... arises, where (if at all) is the real truth of the mythos? That truth which is beyond the mere metaphysical thinker and commonplace philosopher; the truth which the Initiates recognize—where is it? That truth lies far beyond the purview of Astro-Mythology. It is connected with the center of angelic life. Sufficient here to say that, as there are seven races of humanity, seven divisions to the human constitution, seven active principles in Nature, typified by the seven rays of the solar spectrum, so are there seven ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... the times of the Homeric Circe and Ulysses (the latter has been recognised by many as a genuine wizard) to the age of Apollonius or Apuleius, magic and sorcery, as a philosophical science or as a vulgar superstition, had apparently more or less distinctly a place in the popular mythology of old Greece. But in the pagan history of neither Greece nor Rome do we read of holocausts of victims, as in Christian Europe, immolated on the altars of a horrid superstition.[19] The occasion of the composition ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams |
