"Ophidian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... he had escaped, like the Psalmist, 'as a bird out of the snare of the fowlers,' and fled for safety unto the mountain of celibacy. Bishop, if the new school of science lack the link that binds us to the ophidian type, I can furnish a thoroughly 'developed' specimen of an 'evolved' Melusina; for Mrs. Pru's ancestors must have been not very remotely, cobra-capellos. Such a chronic blister as she is keeps up more inflammation in a church than all ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... shimmering and symphonious. Hermes and his Syrinx wooed the shy Euterpe; the maidens went in woven paces: a medley of masques flamed by; and the great god Pan breathed into his pipes. Stannum saw Bacchus pursued by the ravening Maenads; saw Lamia and her ophidian flute; and sorrowfully sped Orpheus searching for his Eurydice. Neptune blew his wreathed horn, the Tritons gambolled in the waves, Cybele clanged her cymbals; and with his music Amphion summoned rocks to Thebes. Jephtha's daughter danced to her death before the Ark of the ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... thou a true Ophidian art; I can not say a reptile of the deep, Because thou dost not play a reptile's part; Thou swimmest, it appears, ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... sprang up, gradually the outline of that awful head would fade and the well-defined pattern would resolve itself into the motlings on the earth. But if the sun grew more and more hot and dazzling as the day progressed, then the tremendous ophidian head would become increasingly real to my sight, with glistening scales and symmetrical markings; and I would walk carefully not to stumble against or touch it; and when I cast my eyes behind me I could see no end to its great coils extending across ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... does who looks at the sunshine. A remarkable point about her was that long flexible neck, arching and undulating in strange sinuous movements, which one who loved her would compare to those of a swan, and one who loved her not, to those of the ophidian who tempted our common mother. Her talk was affluent, magisterial, de haut en bas, some would say euphuistic, but surpassing the talk of women in ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... dear Madam, this is all a fable. Mephistopheles—the real, vital, moving Mephistopheles—has outlived Goethe, and will outlast the very memory of the unhappy heroine of his noble poem. He walks the streets to-day as fresh and persuasive as when, in ophidian form, he haunted that lovely garden which is said to have once stood near the banks of the Euphrates, and there beguiled the mother of mankind. Your friend Asmodeus—albeit not the quondam friend of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... inner room, which had been Carry's; then she swept by him again into her own bedroom, and then suddenly reappeared before him, erect, menacing, with a burning fire over her cheekbones, a quick straightening of her arched brows and mouth, a squaring of jaw, and ophidian flattening of ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte |
