"Prometheus" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... effort, the labour, is quickly forgotten; the blunders, the false quantities in our lives, are treasured up to be flung against our names. We play, but we do not know our parts; we are Oedipus, who has committed unwitting sin, and yet must reap his reward; we are Prometheus who is to be chained to the rock forever, for offending the gods; we are Orestes whom the Eumenides pursue, chasing him down for his guilt. And all the time we vainly imagine that we are some victorious hero, some Perseus, especially favoured ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... his views in the form of an apologue, in which, after Prometheus had given men the arts, Zeus is represented as sending Hermes to them, bearing with him Justice and Reverence. These are not, like the arts, to be imparted to a few only, but all men are to be partakers of them. Therefore the Athenian people are right in distinguishing ...
— Protagoras • Plato
... peculiarly the philosophy of outsides. Few dive deeper into the human breast than the bosom of the shirt. Who could doubt the heart that beats beneath a cambric front? or who imagine that hand accustomed to dirty work which is enveloped in white kid? What Prometheus was to the physical, Stultz is to the moral man—the one made human beings out of clay, the other cuts characters out of broad-cloth. Gentility is, with us, a thing of the goose and shears; and nobility an attribute—not of the mind, but (supreme ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari. Vol. 1, July 31, 1841 • Various
... insults which would drive me to rend alive marquises and dukes; rage fills my heart; I should like to fight twenty duels, and to die. Do you wish me to suffer any further insults? No more secrets for me! Prometheus of hell, either finish your work, or ...
— Vautrin • Honore de Balzac
... and strictly superhuman plot. The Agamemnon is human, though legendary the Prometheus presents to us the gods of Olympus in the days when mankind crept like emmets upon the earth or dwelt in caves, scorned by Zeus and the other powers of heaven, and—still aided by Prometheus the Titan—wholly without art or science, letters or handicrafts. For his benevolence towards oppressed mankind, Prometheus is condemned by Zeus to uncounted ages of pain and torment, shackled and impaled in a lonely cleft of a Scythian precipice. The ...
— Suppliant Maidens and Other Plays • AEschylus
... it is so, because his will must of necessity be in accordance with the fitting and right. Could we conceive of Omnipotence commanding what is intrinsically unfit and wrong, the virtuous man would not be the God-server, but the Prometheus suffering the implacable vengeance of an unrighteous Deity. 3. Though everlasting happiness be the result of virtue, it is not the ground or the reason for it. Were our being earth-limited, virtue would ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... as strong every time, till Hercules found out that he grew in force whenever he touched his mother earth, and therefore, lifting him up in those mightiest of arms, the hero squeezed the breath out of him. By and by he came to Mount Caucasus, where he found the chained Prometheus, and, aiming an arrow at the eagle, killed the tormentor, and set the Titan free. Atlas undertook to go to his daughters, and get the apples, if Hercules would hold up the skies for him in the meantime. Hercules agreed, and Atlas shifted the heavens to his shoulders, went, and presently ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... procuring fire; and although Pliny says the reverse—I think we are justified in believing that the plan of rubbing sticks together was absolutely universal in the barbaric infancy of the human race. In later Greek History, Prometheus is accredited with the invention of fire-sticks. Among the Romans both Seneca and Pliny write about them. Pliny says (Nat. Hist. xvi. 76, 77), "There is heat in the mulberry, in the bay-laurel, in ivy, and in all plants whence fire-sticks are made. The experience of soldiers reconnoitring ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... portraits belonging to the pre-historical age, and, according to mythical tradition, taken by the orders of a philosopher, whose origin and attributes were as much mixed up with symbolical fable as those of an Indian Budh or a Greek Prometheus. ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... suffer. It aided him in this respect however, that his inherent modesty caused him to look up to Helen as to a suffering goddess, noble, grand, lovely, only ignorant of the one secret, of which he, haunting the steps of the Unbound Prometheus, had learned a few syllables, broken yet potent, which he would fain, could he find how, communicate in their potency to her. And besides, to help her now looking upon him from the distant height of conscious superiority, he must persuade her to what she regarded as ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... conditions, and not dependent on them. But the melancholy Jacques of our ordinary experience either uses some narcotic or stimulant to excess, or else has trouble with his liver or kidneys. "Liver complaint," says Zangwill, "is the Prometheus myth done into modern English." Already historical criticism has shown that the Bloody Assizes had its origin in disease of the bladder, and most forms of vice and cruelty resolve themselves into decay of ...
— The Philosophy of Despair • David Starr Jordan
... slovenly, surly to the point of ferocity, whimsical to the brink of mania, egotistic to the environs of self-idolatry, diseased and deaf, embittered, morose—all the brutal epithets you wish to hurl at him. But withal he had the majesty of a Prometheus chained to the rocks; like Prometheus, he had stolen the very fires of heaven; like Prometheus, he did not suffer in silence, but roared or moaned his ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... prompt and benevolent attention to my request last Wednesday night. Although I am convinced your ideas and mine thoroughly coincide as to the real cause of man's bitter degradation, yet I fear human means to redeem him are now fruitless. The Fire must burn, and Prometheus endure his agony. The Pestilence of Asia must come again, ere the savage will be taught humanity. May you ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... learned the entire score by heart, and gave us an unusually precise, intelligent, and spirited performance with an orchestra composed of anything but the pick of German players. After this symphony the Prometheus music had the greatest success, while I was particularly affected by Emilie Genast's singing of a song-cycle, composed by Bulow, called Die Entsagende. There was little else that was enjoyable at the festival concert with the exception of a cantata, Das Grab im Busento ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... take that book, father, and not let me have it any more to-day, as it has interfered so much with my study; and I will try to be more industrious. I will finish my Prometheus and Euclid, and the projection of my map, and then, perhaps, I shall be ready for ...
— Louis' School Days - A Story for Boys • E. J. May
... society of that time, and the former rude and barbarous state of the North; his human characters have not only such depth and precision that they cannot be arranged under classes, and are inexhaustible, even in conception:—no—this Prometheus not merely forms men, he opens the gates of the magical world of spirits; calls up the midnight ghost; exhibits before us his witches amidst their unhallowed mysteries; peoples the air with sportive fairies and sylphs:—and these beings, existing only in imagination, ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... the rock-strewn Calvary: and crowning its summit, clear against the starlit sky, the cold, dark cross. "Not perhaps to us the bleeding hands and feet, but to all the bitter tears. Our Calvary may be a very little hill compared with the mountains where Prometheus suffered, but to us it ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... languages and of the division of the nations, without speaking of numerous other useless narrations upon low and frivolous subjects which important authors would scorn to relate. All these narrations appear to be fables, as much as those invented about the industry of Prometheus, the box of Pandora, the war of the Giants against the Gods, and similar others which the poets have invented to amuse the men of ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... nothing more sublime than a thunder-storm," said Goethe, looking up as if inspired; "when the thunder rolls in such awful majesty and wrath, it seems as if I heard Prometheus in angry dispute with the gods. In the dark clouds I see the Titan, enveloped in mist, overspreading the heavens, and raising his giant-arm to hurl his mighty wrath." At this instant a flash of lightning, followed by a ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... type of humanized culture, who goes through the school of life and from apprentice becomes master, who begins with the pursuit of ideals that soar above life and who ends by discerning the ideal in the real, for whom these two expressions finally melt into one. There is Goethe's Prometheus, who, chained to his rock, gives utterance to the philosophy of Spinoza in the sublime rhythms of enthusiasm. Last of all, there is the Marquis von Posa, the true incarnation of the revolution, the apostle and prophet of liberty, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... inflexible integrity which refuses to utter "words of wind" and which would not, against his conscience, confess to wrong-doing merely to pacify the Lord who was stronger than himself. The Classics taught this noble lesson in the case of Prometheus versus Zeus. Many articles are called after Job e.g. Ra'ara' Ayyub or Ghubayra (inula Arabica and undulata), a creeper with which he rubbed himself and got well: the Copts do the same on "Job's Wednesday," i.e. that before Whit Sunday O.S. Job's ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... Prometheus made the first man of clay and animated him with fire stolen from Heaven. Jupiter is represented as attaching the terrible consequences of a rational and responsible vitality, thus conferred upon a creation ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... deluge the stage with blood. When the heroism of Mucius Scaevola was represented, a real criminal must thrust his hand without a groan into the flame and stand motionless while it is being burned. Prometheus must be really chained to his rock, and Dirce in very fact be tossed and gored by the wild bull; and Orpheus be torn to pieces by a real bear; and Icarus must really fly, even though he fall and be dashed to death; and Hercules must ascend the funeral ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... of Prometheus underwent various changes in successive periods of Greek thought. In its main outline the story is the same: that Prometheus, whose name signifies Forethought, stole fire from Zeus, or Jupiter, or Jove, and gave it as a gift to man. For this, the angry god bound him upon ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... burst of irrepressible grief she gave vent to her apprehensions and sorrow. She described in vivid terms the ceaseless care that with still renewing hunger ate into her soul; she compared this gnawing of sleepless expectation of evil, to the vulture that fed on the heart of Prometheus; under the influence of this eternal excitement, and of the interminable struggles she endured to combat and conceal it, she felt, she said, as if all the wheels and springs of the animal machine worked at double rate, and were fast consuming themselves. Sleep was not sleep, for her waking ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... second in charge, and the second told the first, and the first laid the matter before the assembled Korps. Thereupon the whole Seniorum Conventus sat in solemn committee upon this war-worn nose, and decided that its owner need fight no more. But he was not only brave; he possessed the invention of Prometheus, combined with the diabolical sense of humour which so much distinguished the late Mephistopheles. He offered to go on fighting if he might be allowed an iron nose. Goetz of Berliehingen, he said, had won battles with an iron hand, and the case was analogous. The proposition was put to the ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... Pitt, when a member of the House of Commons, exclaiming one day, during a former war, against the enormous and ruinous expense of German connections, as the offspring of the Hanover succession, and borrowing a metaphor from the story of Prometheus, cried out: "Thus, Hie Prometheus, is Britain chained to the barren rock of Hanover; whilst the imperial eagle preys upon her ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... knuckles for my sacrilegious tampering with Divine Myths. What mercy could I expect from one who had never forgiven "Johnny" Keats for his frightful perversion of the sacred mystery of Endymion and Selene? and who was horrified at the base "modernism" of Shelley's "Prometheus Unbound?" But to think of it! He had known Shelley, and all the rest of the demigods, and his speech was golden with memories of them all! Dear old Pagan, wonderful in his death as in his life. ...
— The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... the South-wind sleeps the haze: So on thy broad mystic van Lie the opal-colored days, And waft the miracle to man. Soothsayer of the eldest gods, Repairer of what harms betide, Revealer of the inmost powers Prometheus proffered, Jove denied; Disclosing treasures more than true, Or in what far to-morrow due; Speaking by the tongues of flowers, By the ten-tongued laurel speaking, Singing by the oriole songs, Heart of bird the man's heart seeking; Whispering hints of treasure hid Under Morn's unlifted ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... hungered for it. I have loved the great elemental art-works—the art-works that were born of pure suffering. For months before I began The Captive I read but three books—read them and brooded over them, all day and all night. They were Prometheus Bound, Prometheus Unbound, ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair
... of creating living things was entrusted to two of the gods, Epimetheus and Prometheus. Epimetheus gave to the different animals various powers, to the lion strength, to the bird swiftness, to the fox sagacity, and so on until all the good gifts had been bestowed, and there was nothing left for man. Then Prometheus ascended to heaven and brought down fire, as his gift to man. With ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... of its history. So luminous was his mind, so profound and far-reaching his sympathy, that he understood the obscure workings of the mediæval mind as clearly as he appreciated Mirabeau’s transcendent genius. He believed that humanity, like Prometheus, was self-made; that nations modelled their own destiny during the actions and reactions of history, as each one of us acquires a personality through the struggles and temptations of existence, by the evolving power every ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... breast. Here the pulse seems to beat, there it is motionless, life and death are at strife in every detail; here you see a woman, there a statue, there again a corpse. Your creation is incomplete. You had only power to breathe a portion of your soul into your beloved work. The fire of Prometheus died out again and again in your hands; many a spot in your picture has not been touched ...
— The Unknown Masterpiece - 1845 • Honore De Balzac
... Perhaps Prometheus was the first Darwin of antiquity, for he is said to have begun his creation from below, and after passing from the invertebrate to the sub-vertebrate, from thence to the backbone, from the backbone to the mammalia, and from the ...
— Samuel Butler's Canterbury Pieces • Samuel Butler
... similar import seemed to rise up from the lidless coffin before us. It was no brother mortal that lay at our feet, softly folded in the embraces of "Mother Earth," but a poor scarecrow, gibbeted for ages on this bare rock, like a dead Prometheus; the vulture, frost, gnawing for ever on his bleaching relics, ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... chair, and, going across the room, sat down at her bureau. She turned a shaded lamp, so that the light might fall upon the pages of a book she was studying, and, pushing her hands through her thick hair, she began to read a passage from the splendid Prometheus Vinctus of AEschylus: ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... us see what AEschylus says, who was not only a poet, but a Pythagorean philosopher, also, for that is the account which you have received of him; how doth he make Prometheus bear the pain he suffered for the Lemnian theft, when he clandestinely stole away the celestial fire, and bestowed it on men, and was severely punished by Jupiter for the theft. Fastened to mount Caucasus, ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... in the one the Goddess approaches the mortal and in the other the mortal approaches the Goddess; hence, too, the severer punishment in the latter case. The second legend ought to be completed here by a fact derived from the story of Prometheus: the liver grows as fast as the vultures rend or consume it; thus again rises the idea of infinite repetition, now of suffering, not of action, ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... poems mentioned, Shelley wrote "The Cenci," "Alastor," "Prometheus Unbound," and many others, including a beautiful little ode to a "Skylark," and the well-known ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... about women as Aeschylus unfolds in the few places where he condescends to notice such inferior beings. The only kind of sexual love of which he shows any knowledge is that referred to in the remarks of Prometheus and Io regarding the designs ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... PROMETHEUS for September-November is a journal of unusual literary and artistic value, edited by our poet-laureate, Miss Olive G. Owen. The paper well lives up to its sub-title, "A Magazine of Aspirations Dreamed into Reality". Mr. ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... land his passing notice claim, And hills by hundreds rise without a name; Hills yet unsung, their mystic powers untold; Celestials there no sacred senates hold; No chain'd Prometheus feasts the vulture there, No Cyclop forges thro their summits glare, To Phrygian Jove no victim smoke is curl'd, Nor ark high landing quits a deluged world. But were these masses piled on Asia's shore, Taurus would shrink, Hemodia ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... Hilda Wangel, Nora, Hedda—Sir Robert would never even have spoken to such baggages! Mon sieur Bergeret—an amiable weak thing! D'Artagnan—a true swashbuckler! Tom Jones, Faust, Don Juan—we might not even think of them: And those poor Greeks: Prometheus—shocking rebel. OEdipus for a long time banished by the Censor. Phaedra and Elektra, not even so virtuous as Mary, who failed of being what she should be! And coming to more familiar persons Joseph and Moses, David and Elijah, all of them lacked his finality of true heroism—none could quite ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... The double ndictment (in which he is The Syrian), The Fisher (Parrhesiades), Swans and Amber, Alexander, Hermotimus (Lycinus), Menippus and Icaromenippus (in which Menippus represents him), A literary Prometheus, Herodotus, Zeuxis, Harmonides, The Scythian, The Death of Peregrine, The Book-fancier, Demonax, The Rhetorician's Vade mecum, Dionysus, Heracles, A Slip of the Tongue, Apology for 'The dependent Scholar.' Of ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... a Lyrical Drama, and other Poems. The Prometheus ranks as at once the greatest and the most thoroughly characteristic ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... a facile supernaturalism, but Conrad, from first to last, faces squarely the massive and intolerable fact. His stories are not chronicles of men who conquer fate, nor of men who are unbent and undaunted by fate, but of men who are conquered and undone. Each protagonist is a new Prometheus, with a sardonic ignominy piled upon his helplessness. Each goes down a Greek route to defeat and disaster, leaving nothing behind him save an unanswered question. I can scarcely recall an exception. Kurtz, Lord Jim, Razumov, Nostromo, Captain Whalley, Yanko ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... power is thine, To quicken and inspire! Fabled Prometheus well might dare To steal from heaven such fire. For 'tis a beacon light to guide To rapturous joy and peace, In this our present earthly home, And where all ...
— Home Lyrics • Hannah. S. Battersby
... did not form an exception to the rule. In due time Mrs. Mildman disappeared, after which Dr. Mildman addressed a remark or two about Greek tragedy to the tall pupil, which led to a 8dissertation on the merits of a gentleman named Prometheus, who, it seemed, was bound in some peculiar way, but whether this referred to his apprenticeship to any trade, or to the cover of the book containing his history, did not appear. This conversation lasted about ten minutes, ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... that the soul is a divine substance, a breath of God, miraculously breathed by Him into every creature at the commencement of its existence, often reappears, and plays a prominent part in the history of psychological opinions. It corresponds with the beautiful Greek myth of Prometheus, who is fabled to have made a human image from the dust of the ground, and then, by fire stolen from heaven, to have animated it with a living soul. So man, as to his body, is made of earthly clay; but the Promethean spark that forms his soul is the fresh breath of God. There is no objection ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... you not know that the trade in human chattels is now prohibited in our civilized states? But let us see your slave.—Come, gentlemen," added Napoleon, turning toward his marshals and adjutants, "let us look at the work of this modern Prometheus." He walked toward the door, but, before leaving the cabinet, he turned to the chamberlain. "When the Duke de Cadore comes bring me word immediately." He then stepped into the adjoining room and the marshals and ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... confess, invariably delights and humiliates me: it is so full of sympathy for all sorts and conditions of men, and so appreciative of what is and what is not. It is so very human and humane. There is in it a sort of quite gentle and dignified Prometheus Vinctus attitude towards the Powers That Be; and Zeus, with his thunderbolts and chains, looks very much ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... interest, when interpreted in this way, is the legend of Prometheus. He and his brother Epimetheus are sons of the Titan Iapetus. The Titans are the offspring of the oldest generation of gods, Uranus (Heaven) and Gaea (Earth). Kronos, the youngest of the Titans, dethroned his father and seized upon the government of the world. ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner
... continually endeavoureth to secure himselfe against the evill he feares, and procure the good he desireth, not to be in a perpetuall solicitude of the time to come; So that every man, especially those that are over provident, are in an estate like to that of Prometheus. For as Prometheus, (which interpreted, is, The Prudent Man,) was bound to the hill Caucasus, a place of large prospect, where, an Eagle feeding on his liver, devoured in the day, as much as was repayred in the night: So that man, which ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... people without fire (Prometheus!); and it seems that broiling was the earliest mode of preparing food; then followed baking in heated cavities, and lastly came boiling in vessels. (Klemm, Allgemeine Kulturgeschichte, I, ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... with the dead, and the living claim our thoughts," sighed the king. "What an absurd thing is the human heart! It will never grow cold or old; always pretending to a spark of the fire which that shameful fellow Prometheus stole from the gods. What an absurdity! What have I, an old fellow, to do with the fire of Prometheus, when the fire of war will soon rage around me," At this instant the door gently opened. "What do you want, Muller? ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... found the "smile so pleasing that it was a thing more divine than human to behold"; Ruskin thought it archaic, Muentz "sad and disillusioned," Berenson supercilious, and Freud neurotic. Reymond calls it the smile of Prometheus, Faust, Oedipus and the Sphinx; Pater saw in it "the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the reverie of the Middle Ages with its spiritual ambitions and imaginary loves, the return to the pagan world, the sins of the Borgias." Though ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... romantic and the picturesque. Let me rather recur to her (although my heart be lacerated once more in the recollection) who was the presiding deity of the whole,—the being after whom, had I had the fabled power of Prometheus, I should have formed and animated the sharer of that sweet wild solitude, nor once felt that fancy, to whom I was so largely a debtor, had in aught been cheated of what she had, for a series of ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... of our ships, which I took care to explain were on the look-out for my guest; and he seemed by this time pretty well convinced that an attempt to elude our cruisers would have been fruitless. On the latter day, the Prometheus showed her number, while we were at dinner: when Buonaparte expressed a wish to know whether the ships at Brest had hoisted the white flag or not. I sent for the officer of the watch, and desired him to ask the question by telegraph. In a few minutes he returned, with ...
— The Surrender of Napoleon • Sir Frederick Lewis Maitland
... how Harris or Elliston should be so insane as to think of acting Marino Faliero; they might as well act the Prometheus of Aeschylus. I speak of course humbly, and with the greatest sense of the distance of time and merit between the two performances; but merely to show the absurdity ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... grandeur of the Dover Cliffs; Ibsen could not have wrought the climbing of the steeple into the crisis and calamity of "The Master Builder"; Teufelsdroeckh could not have uttered his extraordinary night thoughts above the town of Weissnichtwo; "Prometheus Bound" would have been impossible. Only one with at least a dram of dizziness could have conceived an "eagle-baffling mountain, black, wintry, dead, unmeasured." In the days when we read Jules Verne, was not our chief pleasure found in ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... dare to pass out of it.[173] And there are many other extravagances of illustration, but the main position is serious enough, as represented in the emblematic vignette with which the essay was printed—the torch of science brought to men by Prometheus, who warns a satyr that it burns; the satyr, seeing fire for the first time and being fain to embrace it, is the symbol of the vulgar men who, seduced by the glitter of literature, insist on delivering themselves up to its study.[174] Rousseau's whole ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... Others, long before the days of Smith and Rigdon, advanced the theory that the Urim and Thummim were clear crystals intended for "gazing" purposes. One writer remarks of the practice, "Aeschylus refers it to Prometheus, Cicero to the Assyrians and Etruscans, Zoroaster to Ahriman, Varro to the Persian Magi, and a very large class of authors, from the Christian Fathers and Schoolmen downward, to the devil."* An act of James I (1736), against witchcraft in ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... Revolt of Islam, published in 1819. It is in the Spenserian stanza. Also, in the same year, he published The Cenci, a tragedy, a dark and gloomy story on what should be a forbidden subject, but very powerfully written. In 1820 he also published The Prometheus Unbound, which is full of his irreligious views. His remaining works were smaller poems, among which may be noted Adonais, and the odes To ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... no actual beings whatever, except The Prince of Light and The Prince of Darkness or The Demon. In truth, there is nothing analogous to a Spanish Auto in English original poetry. The nearest approach to it, and the only one, is The Prometheus Unbound of Shelley. There, indeed, The Earth, Ocean, The Spirits of the Hours, The Phantasm of Jupiter, Demogorgon, and Prometheus himself, read like the 'Personas' of a Spanish Auto, and the poetry is worthy the resemblance. The Autos Sacramentales ...
— The Two Lovers of Heaven: Chrysanthus and Daria - A Drama of Early Christian Rome • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... | [38] An interesting variation of this rhythm (though perhaps to be | | related to the Middle English descendant of the Anglo-Saxon | | long line) occurs in Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, Act I, | | | | O sister, desolation is a difficult thing. | | | | Compare also Shelley's earlier poem, Stanzas—April, 1814; | | and for a more recent example: | | | | Ithaca, Ithaca, the ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... touch us with dread, horror, or the most painful pity,—sympathies and antipathies which we seem to be feeling not only for them but for the whole race. This world, we are told, is called Britain; but we should no more look for it in an atlas than for the place, called Caucasus, where Prometheus was chained by Strength and Force and comforted by the daughters of Ocean, or the place where Farinata stands erect in his glowing tomb, 'Come avesse lo Inferno in ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... Prometheus, if I may so speak, who brings to earth in the fragile reed of his humanity the sacred and immortal fire which may be kindled in every heart. Open your hearts to Him by faith and He will come in, and with Him the rejoicing life which will triumph over the death ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... Ninth. Minuet and Interlude. Music for the ballet of "Prometheus." "Egmont." "King Stephen." "The Ruins of Athens." "Wellington's Victory at Vittoria." March to "Tarpeia." Gratulation Minuet. ...
— Beethoven's Letters 1790-1826 Vol. 2 • Lady Wallace
... thou too shalt know; the place Is all to great Poseidon consecrate. Hard by, the Titan, he who bears the torch, Prometheus, has his worship; but the spot Thou treadest, the Brass-footed Threshold named, Is Athens' bastion, and the neighboring lands Claim as their chief and patron yonder knight Colonus, and in common bear his name. Such, stranger, is the spot, ...
— The Oedipus Trilogy • Sophocles
... his wrongs and his rage against mankind. I have always thought of him and of Marlborough as the two greatest men of that age. I have read his books (who doth not know them?) here in our calm woods, and imagine a giant to myself as I think of him, a lonely fallen Prometheus, groaning as the vulture tears him. Prometheus I saw, but when first I ever had any words with him, the giant stepped out of a sedan-chair in the Poultry, whither he had come with a tipsy Irish servant parading before him, who announced him, bawling out his reverence's name, ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... elevate and ennoble, that they are but dust,—a necessary, unconscious secretion of I know not what material substance; that the thought of a Kepler or Dante is dust, or rather phosphorus; that genius, from Prometheus to Jesus, brought down no divine spark from heaven; that the moral law, free-will, merit, and the consequent progress of the Ego, are illusions; that events are successively our masters,—inexorable, irresponsible, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... Greeks, being proper creations of the imagination and not of the fancy, are universal verities. What a range of meanings and what perpetual pertinence has the story of Prometheus! Beside its primary value as the first chapter of the history of Europe, (the mythology thinly veiling authentic facts, the invention of the mechanic arts and the migration of colonies,) it gives the history of religion, with some closeness to the faith of later ages. Prometheus is ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... Redbreast.—According to my old nurse (a Carmarthenshire woman), the redbreast, like Prometheus, is the victim philanthropou tropou. Not only the babes in the wood, but mankind at large, are indebted to these deserving favourites. How could any child help regarding with grateful veneration the little bird with bosom ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 179. Saturday, April 2, 1853. • Various
... point out the parallel between Loki and Prometheus, also both helper and enemy of the Gods, and agent in their threatened fall, though in the meantime a prisoner. In character Loki has more in common with the mischievous spirit described by Hesiod, than with the heroic figure of Aeschylus. The struggles of Loki (p. 28) find a ...
— The Edda, Vol. 1 - The Divine Mythology of the North, Popular Studies in Mythology, - Romance, and Folklore, No. 12 • Winifred Faraday
... the Fountain Moliere are excellent works. He made several separate statues which are well known; his Psyche has a butterfly poised on the upper part of the arm; Atalanta is fastening her sandals; Sappho is in despair. His Niobe group showed his power to represent bold action, and his Prometheus chained, erected in the garden of the Tuileries, is grand ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... hardiment. Python is slain, yet his accursed race Dare look divine Astrea in the face; Chaos return and with confusion Involve the world with strange disunion; For Pluto sits in that adored chair Which doth belong unto Minerva's heir. O hecatombs! O catastrophe! From Midas' pomp to Trus' beggary! Prometheus, who celestial fire Did steal from heaven, therewith to inspire Our earthly bodies with a sense-ful mind, Whereby we might the depth of nature find, Is ding'd to hell, and vulture eats his heart Which did such deep philosophy impart To ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... lofty verse Who sweep the earth with lowly wing, Like sand before the blast disperse— A Nose! a mighty Nose I sing! As erst Prometheus stole from heaven the fire 5 To animate the wonder of his hand; Thus with unhallow'd hands, O Muse, aspire, And from my subject snatch a burning brand! So like the Nose I sing—my verse shall glow— Like Phlegethon my verse in waves ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... man who has detected the injustice of a law, the absurdity of a tenet, the malversation of a minister, or the impiety of a priest, and who has not been stoned, or hanged, or burnt, or imprisoned, or exiled, or reduced to poverty. The chain of Prometheus is hanging yet upon his rock, and weaker limbs writhe daily in its rusty links. Who then, unless for others, would be a darer of wisdom? And yet, how full of it is even the inanimate world? We may gather it out of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... from shore to shore, Shall thrill the magic thread; The new Prometheus steals once more The ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... his poetry is associated, in the minds of his friends, with the loveliest scenes of the countries which he inhabited. In early life he visited the most beautiful parts of this country and Ireland. Afterwards the Alps of Switzerland became his inspirers. "Prometheus Unbound" was written among the deserted and flower-grown ruins of Rome; and, when he made his home under the Pisan hills, their roofless recesses harboured him as he composed the "Witch of Atlas", "Adonais", ...
— Notes to the Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley • Mary W. Shelley
... this powerful invention prove to mankind a blessing or a curse?—like the fire which Prometheus stole from heaven to vivify his statue, may it not be followed by the evils of Pandora's ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... Prometheus stole fire from heaven and paid it back to an eternal death. The old cattleman was refusing his payment. It was no state of coma in which he lay; it was no prolonged trance. He was vitally, vividly ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... Shelley were really original poets; their attitude of thought and feeling marked without doubt certain great changes in literature and philosophy. Nevertheless, the "Ode on the Intimations of Immortality" is a perfectly normal and traditional ode, and "Prometheus Unbound" is a perfectly genuine and traditional Greek lyrical drama. But if we study Browning honestly, nothing will strike us more than that he really created a large number of quite novel and quite admirable artistic forms. It is too often forgotten what and how excellent ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... the separation of matter, God gives form and regularity to the universe; and all other living creatures being produced, Prometheus moulds earth tempered with water, into a human form, which ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... would have gladly steeped his hands in the blood of his host, scattered the ashes of his father to the four winds, overthrown the holy images of the gods, and stolen the fire of heaven itself, like the sublime thief, Prometheus. ...
— King Candaules • Theophile Gautier
... of white marble, handsomely carved, with Bacchantes, and Silenus on his donkey—not very appropriate guardians of a sea-coal fire. On the mantel-piece was a massive bronze clock, with a figure of Prometheus chained to a rock on the top, and the vulture digging into his ribs. And Buller, as he noticed this, remembered, with the clearness afforded by funk spoken of above, that an uncle of his, who was an ...
— Dr. Jolliffe's Boys • Lewis Hough
... her seven-headed idols. His favourite gods are those of the elder generation, the sons of heaven and earth, compared with whom Jupiter himself was a stripling and an upstart, the gigantic Titans, and the inexorable Furies. Foremost among his creations of this class stands Prometheus, half fiend, half redeemer, the friend of man, the sullen and implacable enemy of Heaven. Prometheus bears undoubtedly a considerable resemblance to the Satan of Milton. In both we find the same impatience of control, the ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... results. Rule applies but to the excellences of avoidance—to the virtues which deny or refrain. Beyond these the critical art can but suggest. We may be instructed to build an Odyssey, but it is in vain that we are told how to conceive a 'Tempest,' an 'Inferno,' a 'Prometheus Bound,' a 'Nightingale,' such as that of Keats, or the 'Sensitive Plant' of Shelley. But, the thing done, the wonder accomplished, and the capacity for apprehension becomes universal. The sophists of the negative school, who, through inability to create, have scoffed at ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... ancestors, think you, obtain fire in those early times? I suggested a burning mountain as a source of fire. You remember, too, perhaps reading about Prometheus, who stole fire from heaven, bringing it to earth in a copper rod, which combined act of theft and scientific experiment made the gods very angry, because they were afraid mortals might learn as many wonderful things ...
— The Story of a Tinder-box • Charles Meymott Tidy
... their happinesses, loves, and adventures, gave relatively small scope for the personal aspects of tragedy. There was no need for vicarious or redemptive suffering: what pain existed, and they rarely expressed it in marble, was human in its origin and punitive in effect: Icarus, Niobe, Laocoon, Prometheus; and even here the proprieties of good taste imposed strict limits, beyond which the portrayal of tragedy could not go without violating unwritten laws. It had to occupy a secondary place in their art: the dying gladiator was merely a broken toy tossed aside. Their tragedies were largely limited ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... Evening Sun since 1912. He stands out as one of the most penetrating satirists and resonant scoffers at folderol that this continent nourishes. He is far more than a colyumist: he is a poet—a kind of Meredithian Prometheus chained to the roar and clank of a Hoe press. He is a novelist of Stocktonian gifts, although unfortunately for us he writes the first half of a novel easier than the second. And I think that in his secret ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... the tradition of the Grecians, and ascribe the first inventions to men, yet you will rather believe that Prometheus first stroke the flints, and marvelled at the spark, than that when he first stroke the flints he expected the spark; and therefore we see the West Indian Prometheus had no intelligence with the European, because of the rareness with them of flint, that gave the first occasion. So as it should seem, ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... mapping it forth about evenfall for the eye of observant birds, a new age had begun for sociality and corporate pleasure-seeking, and begun with proper circumstance, becoming its own birthright. The work of Prometheus had advanced by another stride. Mankind and its supper-parties were no longer at the mercy of a few miles of sea-fog; sundown no longer emptied the promenade; and the day was lengthened out to every man's fancy. The city-folk had stars of their own; ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... older than people imagine. Had we but monuments of Greek, like the Fratres Arvales in Latin! Homer is so modern; even though he certainly belongs to the tenth or eleventh century. That was a time in which the Hellenic mind sang the history of the creation in the deep myth of Prometheus, the son of Iapetos, with his three brothers, the emblem of humanity; a poem which Homer no ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... my miserable Fall:—most miserable, yet surely most undeserved! For why should the thirst for knowledge be aroused, only to be disappointed and punished? My volition shrinks from the painful task of recalling my humiliation; yet, like a second Prometheus, I will endure this and worse, if by any means I may arouse in the interiors of Plane and Solid Humanity a spirit of rebellion against the Conceit which would limit our Dimensions to Two or Three or any number short of Infinity. Away then with all personal ...
— Flatland • Edwin A. Abbott
... flood of Ogyges, and several other floods; and no little time and learning have been wasted in attempting to fix their several periods. But, lying far within the mythologic ages,—the last of them to which any determining circumstances are attached, in the days of that Prometheus who stole fire from heaven, and was chained by Jupiter to Mount Caucasus,—it appears greatly more probable that the traditions respecting them should be the mere repeated and re-repeated echoes of one signal event, than that many ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... Amongst the poems chiefly concerned in the results of his "Examination" may be named "Marenghi", "Prince Athanase", "The Witch of Atlas", "To Constantia", the "Ode to Naples", and (last, not least) "Prometheus Unbound". Full use has been made in this edition of Mr. Locock's collations, and the fragments recovered and printed by him are included in the text. Variants derived from the Bodleian manuscripts are marked ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... people there were another set of traditions, illustrated sufficiently for our purpose by the story of Prometheus. According to this the first age of humanity was its worst and poorest and lowest age. The people lived in abject poverty and misery. They were even neglected on the part of the gods, who did not seem to care for them, but ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... foreshadow and divine,—unknown to us in the street and the market, unknown to us on the scaffold of the patriot or amidst the flames of the martyr, unknown to us in the Lear and the Hamlet, in the Agamemnon and the Prometheus. Millions upon millions, ages upon ages, are entered but as items in the vast account in which the recording angel sums up the unerring ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the most difficult and the easiest of all arts. You have but to copy a model, and the task is done; but to give it a soul, to make it typical by creating a man or a woman—this is the sin of Prometheus. Such triumphs in the annals of sculpture may be counted, as we may count the few poets among men. Michael Angelo, Michel Columb, Jean Goujon, Phidias, Praxiteles, Polycletes, Puget, Canova, Albert Durer, ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... PROMETHEUS. Life, like ancient Thebes, has a hundred gates. You close one, and others will open. You are the last of your species? Then another better species will come, made not of clay, but of the light itself. Yes, last of men, all the common ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... Aeschylus and Alfieri are two links that unite the chain in a circle. In Alfieri art once more achieved the faultless purity of its proper character; Greek tragedy reached the same height in the Italian's Saul that it touched in the Greek's Prometheus, two dramas which are perhaps the most gigantic creations of any literature." Emiliani-Giudici thinks that the literary ineducation of Alfieri was the principal exterior cause of this prodigious development, that a more regular course ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... the graceful diagram of a perfect gentleman. The sculptor, with all the patient perseverance of genius, conscious of the greatness of its object, chips, and chips, and chips, from day to day; and as the stone quickens at each touch, he glows with all the pride of the creative Prometheus, mingled with the gentler ecstacies of paternal love. The tailor, with fresh-ground shears, and perfect faith in the gentility and solvency of his "client," snips, and snips, and snips, until the "superfine" grows, with each abscission, into the first style of elegance and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 5, 1841 • Various
... is the best of these small rooms—the Sala of Prometheus—where on Sundays most people spend their time in astonishment over the inlaid tables, but where Tuscan art also is very beautiful. The most famous picture is, I suppose, the circular Filippino Lippi, No. 343, but although the lively background is very entertaining ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... as well as in his commerce with the world of men. The boy who despised discipline and sought to extort her secrets from nature by magic, was destined to become the philanthropist who dreamed of revolutionizing society by eloquence, and the poet who invented in "Prometheus Unbound" forms of grandeur too colossal to ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... respiration] respirator, artificial respirator, heart and lung machine, iron lung; medical devices &c 662. lifeblood; Archeus^; existence &c 1. vivification; vital force; vitalization; revivification &c 163; Prometheus; life to come &c (destiny) 152. [Science of life] physiology, biology; animal ecology. nourishment, staff of life &c (food) 298. genetics, heredity, inheritance, evolution, natural selection, reproduction (production) 161. microbe, aerobe, anaerobe, facultative ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... too deep and strong. Prometheus bound to the rock, with the beak of the vulture in his bleeding breast, suffering daily renewing pangs, his wounds healed only to be torn open afresh, is an emblem of the victim of that vulture passion, which the word of God declares to be cruel ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... crown, supposed at last secure; Forsake this ample, proud Messenian realm; To some small, humble, and unnoted strand, Some rock more lonely than that Lemnian isle Where Philoctetes pined, take ship and flee! Some solitude more inaccessible Than the ice-bastion'd Caucasian Mount Chosen a prison for Prometheus, climb! There in unvoiced oblivion sink thy name, And bid the sun, thine only visitant, Divulge not to the far-off world of men What once-famed wretch he there did espy hid. There nurse a late remorse, and thank the Gods, And thank thy bitterest ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... have no choice but be evil. But Good only can create; and if Evil were ever so much the stronger, the duty of men would remain the same—to hold by the Living One, and defy Power to its worst—like Prometheus on his rock, defying Jove, and for ever dying—thus for ever foiling the Evil. For Evil can destroy only itself and its own; it could destroy no enemy—could at worst but cause a succession of deaths, ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... might not move him now: he must die in his sins, at that dread season, upon that dread spot. Perjury, robbery, and murder—all had fastened on his soul, and were feeding there like harpies at a Strophadian feast, or vultures ravening on the liver of Prometheus. Guilt, vengeance, death had got hold of him, and rent him, as wild horses tearing him asunder different ways; he lay there gurgling, strangling, gasping, panting: none could help him, none could give him ease; ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper |
