"Scylla" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... marriage would be good for him; but he had made up his mind, at least, to this, that it was no longer to be postponed without a balance of disadvantage. The Charybdis in the Close drove him helpless into the whirlpool of the Heavitree Scylla. He had no longer an escape from the perils of the latter shore. He had been so mauled by the opposite waves, that he had neither spirit nor skill left to him to keep in the middle track. He was almost daily at Heavitree, and did not attempt ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... and order most uncommon among these people. On my way home, I overtook two of my daily suppliants, who were going to the house in search of me, and meat, flannel, rice, and sugar, as the case might be; they were both old and infirm-looking women, and one of them, called Scylla, was extremely lame, which she accounted for by an accident she had met with while carrying a heavy weight of rice on her head; she had fallen on a sharp stake, or snag, as she called it, and had never recovered ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... sure of his opinion of her. Having little faith in the firmness of any man's admiration of her, she believed less than was avowed. And Fred, exacting much, was too inexperienced to understand her. They were drifting apart, I thought; but in avoiding Scylla, had I not ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... violent earthquakes occurred in Calabria and Sicily. In February, the city of Casal Nuova was entirely swallowed up; and the Princess Gerace Grimaldi, with more than four thousand persons, perished in an instant. The inhabitants of Scylla, who, headed by their Prince, had descended from the rock and taken refuge on the sea-shore, were all washed away by an enormous wave, on its return from the land ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... the tempestuous sea bellow so loud, when the Northern blast dashes it, with its foaming waves between Scylla and Charybdis; nor Stromboli, nor Mount Etna, when their sulphurous flames, having been forcibly confined, rend, and burst open the mountain, fulminating stones and earth through the air together with the flames they ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... Peter was an effective study, avoiding Scylla of the commonplace and Charybdis of the mawkish—no mean feat. A young man with a future, I dare hazard; with a gift of clear utterance, and sensibility ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, February 18th, 1920 • Various
... all heard of the dreadful passage between Sicily and the coast of Italy. On one side there are some frightful rocks, over which the sea roars like thunder. They are called the rocks of Scylla, and if a ship gets on them she is dashed to pieces in a quarter less than no time. On the other side is the awful whirlpool of Charybdis, which draws ships from miles towards it, and sucks them under the water like ...
— Marmaduke Merry - A Tale of Naval Adventures in Bygone Days • William H. G. Kingston
... and restless gusty Jealousies and wintry sea of revellings, whither am I borne? and the rudders of my spirit are quite cast loose; shall we sight delicate Scylla once again? ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... his Associate, and stumbles upon the French Camp, where he finishes his Military Career XX He prepares a Stratagem, but finds himself countermined— Proceeds on his Journey, and is overtaken by a terrible Tempest XXI He falls upon Scylla, seeking to avoid Charybdis. XXII He arrives at Paris, and is pleased with his Reception XXIII Acquits himself with Address in a Nocturnal Riot XXIV He overlooks the Advances of his Friends, and smarts severely for his Neglect XXV He bears his Fate like a Philosopher; and contracts acquaintance ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... the offers of the self-appointed champion of orthodoxy; but, if she declined, he was resolved none the less to afford his succor to any true friend of the Church that chose to request it. Timid and irresolute Catharine, who desired to steer clear of the Scylla of Spanish intervention quite as much as of the Charybdis of Huguenot supremacy, trembled for the security of her unballasted bark. But the watchful old man who sat on St. Peter's reputed seat was thrown into ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... as we shall see hereafter, first in this school. Turner gave the hackneyed composition a strange power and freshness, in his Glaucus and Scylla. [Ruskin.] ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... fear. We may suppose we are in danger because the stone tables of the Decalogue have gone to dust, but it is more dangerous to attempt to control men by fictions. Better no chart whatever than one which shows no actually existing perils, but warns us against Scylla, Charybdis, and the Cyclops. If we are perfectly honest with ourselves we shall not find it difficult to settle whether we ought to do this or that particular thing, and we may be content. The new legislation will come naturally at the appointed time, and ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... responded, "blood asserts itself to the end of races. There are two separate civilizations in this land, destined some day to come in fearful conflict; and the wars of Scylla, of the Jews themselves, shall be outdone in the horror and persistence of that strife of partners—I will not say brothers—for there is no brotherhood of blood between South and North, of which Clay and Calhoun stand ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... charged with every conceivable heresy. In a letter of March 14, accompanying the copy of his Propositions which Eck sent to the Emperor, he refers to Luther as the domestic enemy of the Church (hostis ecclesiae domesticus), who has fallen into every Scylla and Charybdis of iniquity; who speaks of the Pope as the Antichrist and of the Church as the harlot; who has praise for none but heretics and schismatics; whom the Church has to thank for the Iconoclasts, ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... and as there were only two women who hadn't been snubbed by her—Mrs. Tudor Carstairs and Mrs. Sanderson-Spear—I was simply overwhelmed with unsolicited advice and undesirable attention. Indeed, it was all I could do to steer a dignified course between that uncompromising Scylla, Blakely's mother, and the compromising Charybdis of my self-elected champions. But I managed it, somehow. Dad bought me a stunning big automobile in Los Angeles, and Blakely taught me how to run it; then, Blakely was awfully fond of golf; and we ...
— Cupid's Understudy • Edward Salisbury Field
... was it for Mary to order anything without an advance notice, for otherwise she was forced to start her little bark through the Scylla and Charybdis of 'fire island,' namely, 'The fire's too low, marm;' or 'I've ...
— A Christmas Story - Man in His Element: or, A New Way to Keep House • Samuel W. Francis
... the loftiest stars I'll reach. "What are those rocks, they tell, which 'mid the waves "Meet in encounter? Fell Charybdis what,— "Hostile to ships, now sucking in the tide, "Now fierce discharging? What the savage bounds, "Which compass greedy Scylla 'mid the main "Sicilian? O'er the wide-spread ocean borne, "Him whom I love embracing; sheltering close "In Jason's bosom; clasp'd by him, no fear "My soul could harbor. Or if fear I felt, "For him alone I'd tremble; for my spouse. "Spouse, ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... lays undue stress on outward forms, and fanaticism, which gives credit to preternatural impulses, and professes a particular kind of inspiration differing not at all from infallibility, are the Scylla and Charybdis, through which, over stormy waters or serene, we have to make our steady way. Both are equally intolerant, and both are condemned by the genius of Protestantism, the constitution of the Church, and the ...
— On Calvinism • William Hull
... by Lord Mountcashell, on which are now extensive and flourishing farms. At the east end of the Isle of Tanti are the Lower Gap and the Brothers, two rocky islets famous for black bass fishing and for a deep rolling sea, which makes a landsman very sick indeed in a gale of wind. After passing this Scylla, the bay, an arm rather of Lake Ontario, becomes very smooth and peaceable for several miles, until you leave the pleasant little village of Bath, where is one of the first churches erected by the English settlers in Western Canada, ...
— Canada and the Canadians, Vol. 2 • Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... this complicated scene would be to fill a book, and enough pre-Raphaelites are already browsing there. Giving due attention to particulars in their places, we must yet give effects in sweeping strokes, steering as best we can between the Scylla of didactic details and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... made there in the spring of the years 1817 and 1822. Bartolomeo Borghesi, who first visited them in April, 1817, describes the remains of a noble villa of the first century, with mosaic pavements, fountains, statuary, candelabra, and frescos. The pictures of Pasiphae, Canace, Phaedra, Myrrha, and Scylla, which are now in the Cabinet of the Aldobrandini Marriage, in the Vatican Library, were discovered in one of the bedrooms of the villa. Other works of art, now exhibited in the third compartment of the Galleria dei Candelabri, were found in the peristyle. ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani
... danger and distress, the last strip of earth which their mortal eyes beheld! Think of the amount of suffering which a single strand has witnessed! The ancients would have represented it as a sea-monster with open jaws, more terrible than Scylla and Charybdis. An inhabitant of Truro told me that about a fortnight after the St. John was wrecked at Cohasset he found two bodies on the shore at the Clay Pounds. They were those of a man and a corpulent woman. The man had thick boots on, though his head was off, but "it was along-side." ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... a lamentable thing!' and there was a heavy sincerity in his utterance, his pose, with his foot weightily upon the ground, being that of an honest man. 'But I do think you have the right of it. We, and the new faith with us, are between Scylla and Charybdis. For certain, our two paths do lie between divorcing the Queen and seeing you, great lords, who so ...
— Privy Seal - His Last Venture • Ford Madox Ford
... sea of aspic jelly will satisfy the palate of him who eats solely for flavor—who never knows the sauce of hunger, or the deliciousness of a plain crust of bread. We must be on guard, saying, like the little daughter of a classical professor, "If Scylla doesn't get me Charybdis will." Flavor we must have, but not too much, not too many kinds at once, and not applied indiscriminately to foods which need them and foods which do not. The wise cook uses her arts to ...
— Everyday Foods in War Time • Mary Swartz Rose
... drama of Fate! what motley pageantries rise On the stage of this make-shift world! what irony silenced in sighs! In the strait beneath Etna for as the waves ebb, and Scylla betrays The monster below, foul scales of the serpent and slime,—could we gaze On Tyranny stript of her tinsel, what vision of dool and dismay! Terror in confidence clothed, and anarchy biding her day: Selfishness hero-mask'd; stage-tricks of the shabby-sublime; ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... Libystinis Aut Scylla latrans infima inguinum parte Tam mente dura procreavit ac taetra, Vt supplicis vocem in novissimo casu Contemptam haberes a! nimis fero ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... you the voyage. Sybaris is what we are after, all this time, if we can only get there. Very easy it would be for me to give you cheap scholarship from the AEneid, about Palinurus and Scylla and Charybdis. Neither Scylla nor Charybdis bothered me,—as we passed wing-wing between them before a smart north wind. I had a little Hunter's Virgil with me, and read the whole voyage,—and confused Battista utterly by trying to make ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... asked a quiet voice at his ear; and he turned to look straight in the eyes of Rewa Gunga, who had leaned forward to read over his shoulder. Just for one second he hovered on the brink of quick defeat. Having escaped the Scylla of the dancing women, Charybdis waited for him in the shape of eyes that were pools of hot mystery. It was the sound of his own voice that brought him back to the world again and saved ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... ordinary woman—and she disliked Mrs. Rawson something awful. They were always fight—I mean, father had—that is, I mean, WE had more trouble keeping peace between them than we did between any of the rest of the Aiders," corrected Pollyanna, a little breathless from her efforts to steer between the Scylla of her father's past commands in regard to speaking of church quarrels, and the Charybdis of her aunt's present commands in regard to ...
— Pollyanna • Eleanor H. Porter
... meet Miss Andrews at a dance at the Ocean House the day after his arrival. I even progressed so far as to get up the dance. I described the room, the decorations, and the band. I had Osborne dressed and waiting, with Bonetti also dressed and waiting on the other side of the room, Scylla and Charybdis all over again, but by no possibility could I force Miss Andrews to appear. Why it was, I do not pretend to be able to say—she may have known that Bonetti was there, she may have realized that I was trying to force Osborne upon her; but whatever it was that enabled her to do ...
— A Rebellious Heroine • John Kendrick Bangs
... round the jutting points, the dashing of the waters, and the cries of one of the most timid of our followers, who to save himself from wet feet had mounted an overladen pony, and was now in imminent danger both of Scylla and Charybdis, added to the interest of the picture; but, occasionally, the reverberation caused by the fragments of rock, which, detaching themselves from the upper regions, came tumbling down, not far from where we stood, warned ...
— A Peep into Toorkisthhan • Rollo Burslem
... pursued by one who has freed himself from the power of the senses. He has got so far that his spirit acts freely, but is not initiated. He pursues illusions, from the power of which he must break loose. Odysseus has to accomplish the awful passage between Scylla and Charybdis. The Mystic, at the beginning of the path wavers between spirit and sensuousness. He cannot yet grasp the full value of spirit, yet sensuousness has already lost its former attraction. All Odysseus' ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner
... honor was what kept me from her? Such honor as a man feels when he knows that he is poised between a Scylla and ...
— Idle Hour Stories • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... smoothing the Raven doune Of darknes till it smil'd: I have oft heard My mother Circe with the Sirens three, Amid'st the flowry-kirtl'd Naiades Culling their Potent hearbs, and balefull drugs. Who as they sung, would take the prison'd soul, And lap it in Elysium, Scylla wept, And chid her barking waves into attention. And fell Charybdis murmur'd soft applause: Yet they in pleasing slumber lull'd the sense, 260 And in sweet madnes rob'd it of it self, But such a sacred, and home-felt delight, ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... spring, since the first has not fulfilled its promise. Of course, I wasn't clearly conscious of this at the time: who is? But I had had my youthful passion and my tragic disappointment, as you know: I had looked far enough into what Thackeray used to call the cryptic mysteries, to save me from the Scylla of dissipation, and yet preserved enough of natural nature to keep me out of the Pharisaic Charybdis. My devotion to my legal studies had already brought me a mild distinction; the paternal legacy was ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 1 • Various
... alarmed with the dreadful cry of breakers ahead. We had got amongst a reef of rocks; and in our present state, being worn out and fatigued, it is difficult to say how we got out of them, as the place was fraught with danger all round; for in standing clear of Scylla, we might fall foul of Charybdis; the horror of which, considering our present situation, may be better understood than expressed. After running along, we came to an inhabited island, from which we promised ourselves a supply of water. On our approach, the natives ...
— Voyage of H.M.S. Pandora - Despatched to Arrest the Mutineers of the 'Bounty' in the - South Seas, 1790-1791 • Edward Edwards
... of the passage on a flood tide. As everybody bestirred themselves, however, she was got round and filled on the opposite tack, just in time to clear the rocks. Spike breathed again, but his head was still full of the boat. The danger he had just escaped as Scylla met him as Charybdis. The boatswain again roared to go about. The order was given as the vessel began to pitch in a heavy swell. At the next instant she rolled until the water came on deck, whirled with her stern down the tide, and her bows rose as ...
— Jack Tier or The Florida Reef • James Fenimore Cooper
... the rim. The upper end of handle takes the form of a goddess—Scylla, or Diana with two hounds—ending in acanthus leaves below the waist. On the curved back of handle is a long leaf; the lower attachment is in the form of a mask, ivy-crowned maenad (?). Ntl. Mus., Naples, 69171; ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius
... the Wanderer, "as it is doomed so shall I die and not otherwise. Never shall it be told," he murmured in his heart, "that he who stood in arms against Scylla, the Horror of the Rock, turned back from any form of fear or from any ...
— The World's Desire • H. Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang
... verge of its foam on the sand, or the intermediate spiral whorl which gathers into a lustrous precision, like that of a polished shell, the grasping force of a giant, you have the most vivid sight and embodiment of literally rampant energy; which the Greeks expressed in their symbolic Poseidon, Scylla, and sea-horse, by the head and crest of the man, dog, or horse, with the body of the serpent; and of which you will find the slower image, in vegetation, rendered both by the spiral tendrils of grasping or climbing plants, and the perennial gaining of the foam or the lichen upon barren shores ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin
... oars were shipped, the sailors and some of the more courageous passengers took hold, and we shot ahead, scudding rapidly along the dark shores, to the sound of the wild Maltese songs. At length, the promontory was gained, and the restless current, rolling down from Scylla and Charybdis, tossed our little bark from wave to wave with a recklessness that would have made any one nervous but an ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... moment two quite different impulses, is necessarily always in a zigzag or a curve. That is to say that at every erotic moment her action is the resultant of the combined force of her desire (conscious or unconscious) and her modesty. She must sail through a tortuous channel with Scylla on the one side and Charybdis on the other, and to avoid either danger too anxiously may mean risking shipwreck on the other side. She must be impenetrable to all the world, but it must be an impenetrability not too obscure for the divination ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... we made for the river at its nearest point, though in the utter darkness it was not easy to direct our way with much precision. Raymond rode on one side and Henry on the other. We could hear each of them shouting that he had come upon a deep ravine. We steered at random between Scylla and Charybdis, and soon after became, as it seemed, inextricably involved with deep chasms all around us, while the darkness was such that we could not see a rod in any direction. We partially extricated ourselves ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... equally confident in the purity of her air as her neighbour, stood another female "Briton," with the come-into-my-parlour expression of countenance, regarding us as prey. Under the circumstances, exhausted nature gave in; though saved from Scylla, our destiny was Charybdis, and we accordingly surrendered ourselves to a wash, breakfast, and the Brahminee Bull. During the day, we had a visit from a friend and ex-brother officer, whom we had promised to stay with, ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight
... or litterateur, plunge into the history of Letters or of Arts, never at a loss for authorities or original ideas, often even illuminating intellectual problems by some happy analogy with the problems of his trade, and rarely grounding on either the Scylla of overbearing conceit or the ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... that many things which not only please, but are real beauties in the reading, would appear absurd upon the stage; and those not only the speciosa miracula, as Horace calls them, of transformations of Scylla, Antiphates, and the Laestrygons (which cannot be represented even in operas), but the prowess of Achilles or AEneas would appear ridiculous in our dwarf-heroes of the theatre. We can believe they routed armies in Homer or in Virgil, but ne Hercules contra duos in ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... This is the Scylla's cave which men of science are preparing for themselves to be able to pounce out upon us from it, and ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... unwritten? God knows—I don't! But one thing at least is true:—to steer a course between an optimism that deprives us of support and a pessimism that may wreck the whole enterprise, there indeed is a Scylla and Charybdis problem, a two-horned dilemma, or whatever words may best convey ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume 2 • Ian Hamilton
... m. long, and at its narrowest 21/2 broad; separates Sicily from the Italian mainland; here were the Scylla and Charybdis ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... could not handle more than half his army, as by official returns not more than fifty thousand were in line of battle and in actual combat. There were only two points at which he could extend his line, and if at one he found a "Scylla," he was equally sure to find a "Charybdis" at the other. On his left flank Jackson's whole corps was massed, at Hamilton's Crossing; at his right was the stone wall and Mayree's Hill. To meet Hood and Pickett he would have had to advance between a quarter ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... the fond Roscoe to Scylla the fair, As he gaz'd on her charms, with a love-soothing care: Hear now the last wish, that fondly I sigh, I'll conquer in love, ...
— She Would Be a Soldier - The Plains of Chippewa • Mordecai Manuel Noah
... enough to escape these rocks—this "Scylla and Charybdis,"—has survived these wrong choices, these under-values with their prizes, Bohemias and heroes, is not such a one in a better position, is he not abler and freer to "declare himself and so to love his cause so singly that he will cleave to it, and forsake all else? What is this cause ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... nor aforetime are we ignorant of ill, O tried by heavier fortunes, unto this last likewise will God appoint an end. The fury of Scylla and the roaring recesses of her crags you have been anigh; the rocks of the Cyclops you have trodden. Recall your courage, put dull fear away. This too sometime we shall haply remember with delight. Through chequered fortunes, through many perilous ways, we steer for Latium, ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... foreigners from the country, dismiss the Greek mercenaries, and instead of taking counsel from the Greeks, would hearken only to the commands of the priesthood. But in this, as you must see yourself, the prudent Egyptians had guessed wide of the mark in their choice of a ruler; they fell from Scylla into Charybdis. If Hophra was called the Greeks' friend, Amasis must be named our lover. The Egyptians, especially the priests and the army, breathe fire and flame, and would fain strangle us one and all, off hand, This feeling on the part of the soldiery does not disturb ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... propraetors they will seek to gain the love and vote of their soldiers; discipline will become relaxed, and the basest instead of the noblest passions of the troops be appealed to. We may have civil wars again, like those of Marius and Scylla, and Anthony and Brutus. I hate the intrigues of Rome, and loathe the arts of the demagogue, and to this our generals will descend. Therefore I shall soon apply for service in Britain again. Muro approves, and when I obtain an office there he will come out and build another ...
— Beric the Briton - A Story of the Roman Invasion • G. A. Henty
... with a tremendous spray, like breakers on a lee-shore, threatening destruction to whatever approached it. You would have thought, by the confusion it caused in the river and the whirlpools it made, that Scylla and Charybdis, and their whole progeny, had left the Mediterranean and come and settled here. The channel was barely twelve feet wide, and the torrent in rushing down formed traverse furrows which showed how near the rocks were to ...
— Wanderings In South America • Charles Waterton
... ours is strength Has brooked the test of woes; O worse-scarred hearts! these wounds at length The gods will heal, like those. You that have seen grim Scylla rave, And heard her monsters yell, You that have looked upon the cave Where savage Cyclops dwell, Come, cheer your souls, your fears forget; This suffering will yield us yet A pleasant tale to tell. Through chance, ...
— Story of Aeneas • Michael Clarke
... I warn you, Critobulus, it is not within the province of my science to make the beautiful endure him who would lay hands upon them. And that is why men fled from Scylla, I am persuaded, because she laid hands upon them; but the Sirens were different—they laid hands on nobody, but sat afar off and chanted their spells in the ears of all; and therefore, it is said, all men endured to listen, and ...
— The Memorabilia - Recollections of Socrates • Xenophon
... Lafayette, in the dusk of the evening, as he returns, successful with difficulty at Vincennes: Sansculotte Scylla hardly weathered, here is Aristocrat Charybdis gurgling under his lee! The patient Hero of two Worlds almost loses temper. He accelerates, does not retard, the flying Chevaliers; delivers, indeed, this or the other hunted Loyalist ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... the various Australian species of this marine crustacean, Scylla serrata alone is large enough to be much used as food, and it is seldom caught. In Tasmania and Victoria, Pseudocarcinus gigas, called the King-Crab, which reaches a weight of 20 lbs., is occasionally brought to market. There is only one fresh-water ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... believe it is the unholy holiday of all the devil's crew. Alas! said Panurge, Friar John damns himself here as black as buttermilk for the nonce. Oh, what a good friend I lose in him. Alas, alas! this is another gats-bout than last year's. We are falling out of Scylla into Charybdis. Oho! I drown. Confiteor; one poor word or two by way of testament, Friar John, my ghostly father; good Mr. Abstractor, my crony, my Achates, Xenomanes, my all. Alas! I drown; two words of testament ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... that the empire was falling into a danger, by which it had been threatened from the outset, and which it had been ever trying to avoid. We may say that there were two dangers which constantly impended over the Roman Empire from its inauguration by Augustus to its redintegration by Diocletian—a Scylla and Charybdis, between which it had to steer. The one was a cabinet of imperial freedmen, the other was a military despotism. The former danger called forth, and was counteracted by, the creation of a civil ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... moment, and he repelled the intrusive thoughts which forced on his mind the image of, Amy, by saying to himself there would be time to think hereafter how he was to escape from the labyrinth ultimately, since the pilot who sees a Scylla under his bows must not for the time think of the more distant ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... before my mind,—her kings, her consuls, her emperors,—her legislators, her orators, her poets,—her popes,—all seemed to stalk solemnly past, one after one. There was the great Romulus; there was the proud Tarquin; there was Scylla with his laurel, and Livy with his page, and Virgil with his lay, and Caesar with his diadem, and Brutus with his dagger; there was the lordly Augustus, the cruel Nero, the beastly Caligula, the warlike Trajan, the philosophic Antoninus, ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... Amphitrite, whom he wooed under the form of a dolphin. She afterwards became jealous of a beautiful maiden called Scylla, who was beloved by Poseidon, and in order to revenge herself she threw some herbs into a well where Scylla was bathing, which had the effect of metamorphosing her into a monster of terrible aspect, having twelve ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... was on his return trip from Messina to Naples he wrote at the sight of Scylla and Charybdis: "These two natural curiosities, standing so far apart in reality and placed so close together by the poet, have furnished men with an opportunity to abuse the fables of the bards, not remembering that the human imaginative faculty when it ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... Scylla of local neglect and the Charybdis of centralized jobbery. At first the settler was burdened with the task of clearing roughly the road in front of his own land, but the existence of vast tracts of Clergy Reserves, or other grants exempt from clearing duties, made ...
— The Railway Builders - A Chronicle of Overland Highways • Oscar D. Skelton
... congeals the Cronian waves, Tumultuous enter with dire chilling blasts, Portending agues. Thus a well-fraught ship, Long sailed secure, or through the Aegean deep, Or the Ionian, till cruising near The Lilybean shore, with hideous crush On Scylla, or Charybdis (dangerous rocks!) She strikes rebounding; whence the shattered oak, So fierce a shock unable to withstand, Admits the sea; in at the gaping side The crowding waves gush with impetuous ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... never-ceasing barked With wide Cerberean mouths full loud, and rung A hideous peal; yet, when they list, would creep, If aught disturbed their noise, into her womb, And kennel there; yet there still barked and howled Within unseen. Far less abhorred than these Vexed Scylla, bathing in the sea that parts Calabria from the hoarse Trinacrian shore; Nor uglier follow the night-hag, when, called In secret, riding through the air she comes, Lured with the smell of infant blood, to dance With Lapland witches, while the labouring moon ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... mes braves!" with all the strength of their lungs. It must have been very like the boat-race Virgil describes in the fifth book of the Aeneid. There was the "huge Chimaera" the "mighty Centaur" and possibly even the "dark-blue Scylla" with their modern counterparts of Gyas, Sergestus, and Cloanthus, bawling just as lustily as doubtless those coxswains of old shouted; no one, however, struck on the rocks, as we are told the unfortunate "Centaur" did. Still the little ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... water gained in speed very much. At The Turn the waves were no doubt ten feet high. Francois, with a great sweep of his oar, fairly flung the boat athwart the current here, and the passage was made with no more than a scraping on the dangerous lower rock—the one which Uncle Dick called Scylla. The upper one ...
— Young Alaskans in the Far North • Emerson Hough
... And they would have done so except for the fish (sailors) and the women (Highlanders), as they styled us, who, they said, were too much for them, combined I think with the Ladysmith sweet shop, which proved their Scylla ...
— With the Naval Brigade in Natal (1899-1900) - Journal of Active Service • Charles Richard Newdigate Burne
... particular confutations and solutions of every scruple, cavillation, and objection; breeding for the most part one question as fast as it solveth another; even as in the former resemblance, when you carry the light into one corner, you darken the rest; so that the fable and fiction of Scylla seemeth to be a lively image of this kind of philosophy or knowledge; which was transformed into a comely virgin for the upper parts; but then Candida succinctam latrantibus inguina monstris: so the generalities of the schoolmen are for a while good and proportionable; but ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... it he groaned, and struck his hands together. And 'Little will it help us,' he cried, 'to escape the jaws of the whirlpool; for in that cave lives Scylla, the sea-hag with a young whelp's voice; my mother warned me of her ere we sailed away from Hellas; she has six heads, and six long necks, and hides in that dark cleft. And from her cave she fishes for all things which pass ...
— The Heroes • Charles Kingsley
... Athens, who caused him to be slain, either by waylaying him on the road to Thebes, or by sending him against the Marathonian bull. In his sorrow and righteous anger, Minos, who had already conquered Megara by the treachery of Scylla, raised a great fleet, and levied war upon Athens; and, having wasted Attica with fire and sword, he at length reduced the land to such straits that King AEgeus and his Athenians were glad to submit to the hard terms which were asked of them. ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie
... wedding, holiday, From his big horn he sprinkles drop by drop Oil on the cabbages himself:—you'd stop Your nose to smell it:—vinegar, I own, He gives you without stint, and that alone. Well, betwixt these, what should a wise man do? Which should he copy, think you, of the two? 'Tis Scylla and Charybdis, rock and gulf: On this side howls the dog, on that the wolf. A man that's neat in table, as in dress, Errs not by meanness, yet avoids excess; Nor, like Albucius, when he plays the host, Storms at his slaves, while ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... not pretty to-night, Scylla," he said tauntingly, "though you left us early. There are dark circles under the eyes that looked kindly at the enemy ...
— The Lion's Brood • Duffield Osborne
... ignorant; far more Than these ye suffered, and to these as well Will Jove give ending, as he gave before. Ye know mad Scylla, and her monsters' yell, And the dark caverns where the Cyclops dwell. Fear not; take heart; hereafter, it may be These too will yield a pleasant tale to tell. Through shifting hazards, by the Fates' decree, To Latin shores we steer, our ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... float down the current of the stream into the sea; and then, keeping near land, I would coast the beauteous shores and sunny promontories of the blue Mediterranean, pass Naples, along Calabria, and would dare the twin perils of Scylla and Charybdis; then, with fearless aim, (for what had I to lose?) skim ocean's surface towards Malta and the further Cyclades. I would avoid Constantinople, the sight of whose well-known towers and inlets belonged to another state of existence from my present one; ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... needle may be passed round it without bruising of the coats, or rupture of an unnecessary number of the vasa vasorum by rough attempts to force a passage for it. Hence all compromises, such as blunted instruments, silver knives, and the like, are dangerous, for in trying to avoid the Scylla of wounding the artery, they fall into the Charybdis, on the one hand, of isolating too much of the vessel and causing gangrene from want of vascular supply, or, on the other, expose the vein to the danger of injury by the aneurism-needle in their attempts to force ...
— A Manual of the Operations of Surgery - For the Use of Senior Students, House Surgeons, and Junior Practitioners • Joseph Bell
... finally the thumb uv my left hand wuz acksidentally shot off, owin to my foot becomin entangled into the lock uv my gun, wich thumb wuz also accidentally across the muzzle thereof, and I wuz no longer liable to military dooty and cood bid Provost Marshels defiance, I only steered clear uv Scylla to go bumpin onto Charybdis. I coodent let Dimocrisy alone, and the eggins—the ridin upon rails—the takin uv the oath—but why shood I harrow up the public buzzum? I stood it all till one nite I wuz pulled out uv bed, compelled to kneel onto my bare knees in the cold snow, the extremity ...
— "Swingin Round the Cirkle." • Petroleum V. Nasby
... "metaphysics" of the neo-vitalist school, which the experimental study of development and regeneration soon brought into being. In 1895 he writes:—"The too simple mechanistic conception on the one hand, and the metaphysical conception on the other represent the Scylla and Charybdis, between which to sail is indeed difficult, and so far by few satisfactorily accomplished; it cannot be denied that with the increase of knowledge the seduction of the second has lately notably ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell
... bounced by Charybdis, With limestone which ribb'd is; A touch from a pebble might seam her; Made a curtsey to Scylla, As the Turks say, "Bismillah," 'Twas a very close shave ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... by the charity we spare. There let them warble in the tainted breeze, 75 Or sing like widow'd orphans to the trees: There let them chant their incoherent dreams, Where howls Charybdis, and where Scylla screams! Or where Avernus, from his darksome round, May echo to the winds the blasted sound! 80 As fair Alcyone,[69] with anguish press'd, Broods o'er the British main with tuneful breast, Beneath the white-brow'd cliff protected ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... Sophocles, of Demosthenes, and of Plato. From this communion Britain was cut off. Her shores were, to the polished race which dwelt by the Bosphorus, objects of a mysterious horror, such as that with which the Ionians of the age of Homer had regarded the Straits of Scylla and the city of the Laestrygonian cannibals. There was one province of our island in which, as Procopius had been told, the ground was covered with serpents, and the air was such that no man could inhale it and live. To this ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Plutarch—for what was accessible in translations, or had long before been copiously decanted into English prose and poetry. Shakespeare could get Rhodope, not from Pliny, but from B. R.'s lively translation (1584) of the first two books of Herodotus. 'Even Launcelot Gobbo talks of Scylla and Charybdis,' says Judge Webb. Who did not? Had the Gobbos not known about Scylla and Charybdis, Shakespeare would not have lent them ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... Adonis, ll. 427-450. Only Mirrha among these poems, however, makes specific acknowledgment of a debt to Shakespeare (see p. 177). Finally, Dom Diego's plangent laments at Ginevra's cruelty recall Glaucus' unrestrained weeping at Scylla's cruelty in Lodge's Scillaes Metamorphosis. But whereas the "piteous Nimphes" surrounding Glaucus weep till a "pretie brooke" forms,[29] "the fayre Oreades pitty-moved gerles" that comfort Dom Diego are ...
— Seven Minor Epics of the English Renaissance (1596-1624) • Dunstan Gale
... because she had deceived him, he had added thereto this curse, that no one should believe her even speaking truth. And then she told them that the old crimes of the house should end in yet another crime; that there was one in the house, a woman to look at, but in truth a very Scylla, a monster of the sea. And at the last she declared plainly that they should see the King Agamemnon lying dead. But the curse was upon her, and they believed her not And then crying out that she saw a lioness that had taken a wolf ...
— Stories from the Greek Tragedians • Alfred Church
... were deities who performed special services to the greater gods, like the Horae; and monsters, offspring of gods, like the gorgons, chimera, the dragon of the Hesperides, the Lernaean hydra, the Nemean lion, Scylla and Charybdis, the centaurs, ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... "the moment is arrived, when the great decrees of destiny are to be fulfilled. Providence at length calls you, to become an independent people: one cry resounds from the Alps to the straits of Scylla, the independence of Italy. By what right would foreigners rob you of your independence, the first right, and the first good, ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. I • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon
... expugnable[obs3], exposed; open to &c. (liable) 177. aux abois[Fr], at bay; on the wrong side of the wall, on a lee shore, on the rocks. at stake, in question; precarious, critical, ticklish; slippery, slippy; hanging by a thread &c. v.; with a halter round one's neck; between the hammer and the anvil, between Scylla and Charybdis, between a rock and a hard place, between the devil and the deep blue sea, between two fires; on the edge of a precipice, on the brink of a precipice, on the verge of a precipice, on the edge of a volcano; in the lion's den, on slippery ground, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... simultaneously we hear of constructive energy in the same direction, on the Italian peninsula,—an engineer having submitted to Victor Emmanuel proposals for throwing a bridge across the Straits of Messina, "binding Scylla to Charybdis, and thus clinching Italian unity with bonds of iron." Bonds of nationality, in more than a physical sense, indeed, are bridges: even cynical Heine found an endeared outlook to his native Rhine on the bastion of a familiar bridge; Tennyson makes one an essential ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... B.C. In 63 the State escaped an economic catastrophe through the vigilance of Cicero and the alliance of the respectable classes under his leadership. In 49, and again in 48, it escaped a similar disaster through the good sense of Caesar and his agents, who succeeded in steering between Scylla and Charybdis by saving the ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... empty grate. No,—Lord Alfred had not been there. 'Nor Mr Grendall?' The senior understrapper knew that Melmotte would have asked for 'his Secretary,' and not for Mr Grendall, but for the rumours. It is so hard not to tumble into Scylla when you are avoiding Charybdis. Mr Grendall had not been there. Indeed, nobody had been there. 'In fact, there is nothing more to be done, I suppose?' said Mr Melmotte. The senior understrapper thought that there was nothing more to be done. He left word that his brougham ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... She has escaped Scylla only to fall upon Charybdis. As she hurries along through the familiar streets, her plans are laid. She will go to Lucian Davlin's rooms; nobody will be there to dispute her possession for a day or two to come, and she has possessed herself of the keys, left behind ...
— Madeline Payne, the Detective's Daughter • Lawrence L. Lynch
... or an angel. With one-half of Christendom the doctrine of the verbal inspiration of the four Gospels never became an article of faith. It was first made so among the Protestants to provide something incontestable in place of the councils and the Pope. But this only drove Protestants from Scylla into Charybdis, and landed them in inextricable difficulties, because they withdrew the Gospels from the historical soil out of which they sprang. But we do not escape Charybdis by steering again into Scylla, but by endeavouring to rise above Charybdis, ay, even above the Gospels. In our ...
— The Silesian Horseherd - Questions of the Hour • Friedrich Max Mueller
... hard-fought engagements—the defeats, plans, failures—the gloomy hours, days, when our Nationality seem'd hung in pall of doubt, perhaps death—the Mephistophelean sneers of foreign lands and attaches—the dreaded Scylla of European interference, and the Charybdis of the tremendously dangerous latent strata of secession sympathizers throughout the free States, (far more numerous than is supposed)—the long marches in summer—the hot sweat, and many a sunstroke, as on the rush to Gettysburg in '63—the ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... colors of scriptural doctrine, we steer clear of the Scylla of Calvinism on the one hand, and also escape the Charybdis of Arminianism ...
— The Way of Salvation in the Lutheran Church • G. H. Gerberding
... avoiding Scylla to fall into Charybdis." She had spent her winter in endeavoring to avoid Charybdis. Just because it had not been Edna who was John's ideal was no sign that the Princess did not exist, either already selected, as Edna's lover had been, or ...
— The Opened Shutters • Clara Louise Burnham
... tresses are like wires of beaten gold, Gold bright and sheen; Like Nisus' golden hair that Scylla poll'd, Scyll ...
— Tudor and Stuart Love Songs • Various
... of the State circling in her veins. Whether this intimacy might drift into something closer, compelling him to take a reef in his sails, never troubled him. It was not the first time that he had steered his craft between the Scylla of matrimony and the Charybdis of scandal, and he had not the slightest doubt of his being able ...
— The Tides of Barnegat • F. Hopkinson Smith
... to pass the Messina Straits by daylight, and to cast another glance upon old Etna, Scylla and Charybdis, the Liparis and Stromboli. And all looked well, as about noon we were abreast of Cape Spartivento, the 'Split-wind' which divides the mild northers and southers of the Straits from the raw Boras and rotting Sciroccos of the Adriatic. But ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... too, there may be some trace of compensation. If the reader has been drawn into the whirlpools of the political Charybdis, he might not even in far worthier hands than mine have escaped the rocky headlands of the ecclesiastic Scylla. For churches ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... all recollect the classical story of Scylla and Charybdis, the former a maiden changed by Circe into a hideous sea-monster, who threw herself into the sea and became a rock, the latter changed by Jupiter into a foaming whirlpool. Vessels which avoided the rock of Scylla were oft-times ...
— Little Folks (December 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... of its spangled nights is like a Scylla of a thousand heads, each head a menace. Glancing from his cab window one such midnight, an inarticulate expression of that fear must have crept over and sickened Mr. Herman Loeb. He reached out and placed his enveloping hand over ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... away was the town of Amarilla (pronounced Ah-ma-ree-ah). There were plenty of women and girls there, but Martha knew none of them well except the preacher's daughter, Scylla. Martha and Scylla were great friends. They saw each other as often as Martha could get time and permission to ride in to Amarilla. Scylla could seldom visit the ranch, for she was an invalid. When she ...
— Southern Stories - Retold from St. Nicholas • Various
... bed-makers, a stranger might have imagined some ruthless plague had swept away, "at one fell swoop," two-thirds of the population of Rhedycina. It was at this dull period of time, that a poor student, having passed successfully the Scylla and Charybdis of an Oxonian's fears, the great go and little go, and exhausted by long and persevering efforts to obtain his degree, had just succeeded in adding the important academical letters to his name, when he received a kind invitation from an old brother Etonian to spend a few weeks with ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... bar, roulette and faro tables, bright with varnish and gaudy with nickel trimmings, were waiting with invitations to feverish excitement. The room was a modern presentation of Scylla and Charybdis. Scylla, the bar, stimulated to the daring of Charybdis across the way, and Charybdis, the roulette, sent its winners to celebrate success, or its victims to deaden the ...
— Blue Goose • Frank Lewis Nason
... dark cloud that passeth not away from it, no, not in summer time or harvest. This rock no man could climb, even though he had twenty hands and feet, for it is steep and smooth. In the midst of this cliff is a cave wherein dwelleth Scylla, the dreadful monster of the sea. Her voice is but as the voice of a new-born dog, and her twelve feet are small and ill-grown, but she hath six necks, exceeding long, and on each a head dreadful to behold, and in each head three rows of teeth, thick set and ...
— The Story Of The Odyssey • The Rev. Alfred J. Church
... President, but it was evident that I had made as absurd a demand as if I had asked for the nose off his respectable face. He referred me to the Governor at the State House, and I backed out, leaving him no doubt to regret that such mild maniacs were left at large. Here was a Scylla and Charybdis business: as if a President wasn't trying enough, without the Governor of Massachusetts and the hub of the hub piled on top of that. "I never can do it," thought I. "Tom will hoot at you if you don't," ...
— Hospital Sketches • Louisa May Alcott
... "what a miserable lot you have chosen for yourself. You have fallen from Scylla into ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... fruitless—the Flying Dutchman had evidently vanished to join the Phantom Ship. I felt very uneasy, fearing he might fall a prey to my two cats, who would no doubt find cold squirrel a very tempting entremet; or if he escaped this Scylla, the Charybdis of death by starvation lay before him. The hours passed, and Fliegende Hollaender did not appear. Senta was cheerful, and reigned mistress of the revolving wheel—always the bone of contention between ...
— The Story of a Summer - Or, Journal Leaves from Chappaqua • Cecilia Cleveland
... felt "'twixt Scylla and Charybdis". To toll the bell seemed their only chance of escape, and to do so they must certainly mount into the square room where the rope was hanging. On the one hand was the prospect of spending some time in a building which was rapidly ...
— The Manor House School • Angela Brazil
... faculties, but not at the expense of his spiritual; and romantic frivolity and mental dissipation on the one hand, and a too severe repression—dangerous in its after reaction—on the other, were the Scylla and Charybdis between which she had to steer. The ascetic Puritanism of her training and surroundings would naturally have led her to the narrower and more restrictive view, in which her husband, austerer yet, would have heartily concurred; but her broad sense, ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... of the wilderness, Owen Dugdale had probably never heard of the kindred terrors that used to lie in wait for the bold mariners of ancient Greece—the rock and the whirlpool known as Scylla and Charybdis—if they missed being impaled upon the one they were apt to be engulfed in the other—and yet here in the rapids of this furious Saskatchewan feeder he was brought face to face with a proposition exactly ...
— Canoe Mates in Canada - Three Boys Afloat on the Saskatchewan • St. George Rathborne
... of the water. Whirling and boiling eddies burst as if from some subaqueous explosion; down currents are on one side of the canoe, and an up current on the other; now a cross stream at the bows and a diagonal one at the stern, with a foaming Scylla on your right and a whirling Charybdis on the left. But our nervousness gave way to admiration as our popero, or pilot, the sedate governor, gave the canoe a sheer with the swoop of his long paddle, ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... see?" asked Richling. "If you mix them, you avoid both necessities. You sail triumphantly between Scylla and Charybdis without so much ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... in their precocious emancipation; two divinities worshipped in the temple of the grand sculptors of modern Athens; the Scylla and Charybdis of Paris. ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
... induced the Lairds of Ellangowan to interfere with politics, he had yet the prudence, ere he went out with Lord Kenmore in 1715, to convey his estate to trustees, in order to parry pains and penalties in case the Earl of Mar could not put down the Protestant succession. But Scylla and Charybdis—a word to the wise—he only saved his estate at expense of a lawsuit, which again subdivided the family property. He was, however, a man of resolution. He sold part of the lands, evacuated the old cattle, where the family ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... every principle of gratitude and sound policy? In time, when passion shall have yielded to sober reason, the current may possibly turn; but, in the meanwhile, this government, in relation to France and England, may be compared to a ship between the rocks of Scylla and Charybdis. If the treaty is ratified, the partisans of the French, or rather of war and confusion, will excite them to hostile measures, or at least to unfriendly sentiments; if it is not, there is no foreseeing all the consequences ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... inflicted upon the wicked who had died before him. On his return he was sent upon another voyage, where he met the Sirens, who lured some of his men to destruction by their charming songs; but Ulysses himself escaped by having himself chained to the mast. He sailed between Scylla and Charybdis safely, though he lost some of his ...
— Journeys Through Bookland - Volume Four • Charles H. Sylvester
... is hypocritical and deceitful as sin, dazzling and alluring as a poisonous flower, dangerous and deadly as Scylla and Charybdis, of the company of the ...
— The Youth of the Great Elector • L. Muhlbach
... in sitting on the rocks by the sea and singing to passing mariners. According to Homer, their island lay between AEaea and the rock of Scylla, or near the southwestern coast of Italy; but the Roman poets place them on the Campanian coast. Their magic power to charm all hearers was to last only until some one proved himself able to resist their spell; and here again accounts differ. Homer gives the credit to Ulysses, who ...
— Woman's Work in Music • Arthur Elson
... between Scylla and Charybdis Between two perilous alternatives, which cannot be passed without falling victim ...
— History of the United States, Volume 5 • E. Benjamin Andrews
... approached, had also so unaccountably disappeared. Nor had this threatening state of the atmosphere the counterbalancing advantage of storm and tempest to drive them onward through the narrow waters of the Sinclair, and enable them, by anticipating the pursuit of their enemies, to shun the Scylla and Charybdis that awaited their more leisure advance. The wind increased not; and the disappointed seamen remarked, with dismay, that their craft scarcely made more progress than at the moment when ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... but the deliverance of the island, so vainly undertaken by the forces of the Eastern empire, was achieved by a small and private band of adventurers. [53] In the first attempt, Roger braved, in an open boat, the real and fabulous dangers of Scylla and Charybdis; landed with only sixty soldiers on a hostile shore; drove the Saracens to the gates of Messina and safely returned with the spoils of the adjacent country. In the fortress of Trani, his active and patient courage ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... rock on rock, on mountain mountain rears; Heaves up huge ABYLA on Afric's sand, Crowns with high CALPE Europe's saliant strand, Crests with opposing towers the splendid scene, 330 And pours from urns immense the sea between.— —Loud o'er her whirling flood Charybdis roars, Affrighted Scylla bellows round his shores, Vesuvio groans through all his echoing caves, And Etna thunders ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... coast, past the isle of Capreae, then, leaving the Campanian main behind, cut the blue billows of the Tyrrhenian Sea; all that day and night, and more sail and oar swept them on. They flew past the beaches of Magna Graecia, then, betwixt Scylla and Charybdis, and Sicilia and its smoke-beclouded cone of AEtna faded out of view, and the long, dark swells of the Ionian Sea caught them. No feeble merchantman, hugging coasts and headlands, was ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... soul, like the composite creations of ancient mythology, such as the Chimera or Scylla or Cerberus, and there are many others in which two or more different natures are ...
— The Republic • Plato
... our experience of a social state which is still at sixes and sevens; of a civilisation so imperfectly developed and organised that the majority does nothing save under compulsion, and the minority does nothing to any purpose; and where that little boy's Scylla and Charybdis all work and all play is effectually realised in a nightmare too terrible and too foolish, above all too wakingly true, to be looked at in the face without flinching. One wonders, incidentally, ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... no benefit to us if in steering away from the Scylla of monopoly, we be wrecked on the Charybdis of wasteful competition. We have been trying for a score of years now to defeat monopolies by creating competition; but in spite of a universal public sentiment in favor ...
— Monopolies and the People • Charles Whiting Baker
... of the universal, this surely was happiness. To be at one with the morning, to belong to this frontierless world of nature, to be coaxed into flower by the sun, to be a strand in some unknown design, how much better than the weary steering of your life between the Scylla of your ardent futile longings and the Charybdis of some ...
— Balloons • Elizabeth Bibesco
... coursing over the deep, but you do not find these things to occur because you imagine them. Again, if we assume that what we think is identical with what is, then it must be impossible to think of what is not. But this is absurd; for we can think of such admittedly imaginary beings as Scylla and Chimaera, and multitudes of others. There is therefore no necessary relation between our thoughts and any realities; we may believe, but we cannot prove, which (if any) of our conceptions have relation to an external fact and ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... Rhasis, Vittorius Faventinus, pract. mag. tract. 2. cap. 15. Bruel, &c. put for ordinary causes. Fuchsius, l. 2. sect. 5. c. 30, goes farther, and saith, [1475]"That many men unseasonably cured of the haemorrhoids have been corrupted with melancholy, seeking to avoid Scylla, they fall into Charybdis." Galen, l. de hum. commen. 3. ad text. 26, illustrates this by an example of Lucius Martius, whom he cured of madness, contracted by this means: And [1476] Skenkius hath two other instances of two melancholy and ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... from Scylla to Charybdis! I was so intent on securing the disappearance of a single epithet that I accepted the rest of the advertisement and all that it involved without discussion. So it befell that the words "well-known connoisseur" were deleted; but that H. Loudon ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... turn out to be one of your social superiors, and not care to know you; in which case, of course, you would only be letting yourself in for a needless snubbing. In fact, in this modern England of ours, this fatherland of snobdom, one passes one's life in a see-saw of doubt, between the Scylla and Charybdis of those two antithetical social dangers. You are always afraid you may get to know somebody you yourself do not want to know, or may try to know somebody who does not want ...
— The British Barbarians • Grant Allen
... and most urgent morality off the same card in another; but never, if the devil can help it, never both in one and the same pulpit; never both in one and the same sermon; and never both in one and the same minister. You have all heard of the difficulty the voyager had in steering between Scylla and Charybdis in the Latin adage. Well, the true preacher's difficulty is just like that. Indeed, it is beyond the wit of man, and it takes all the wit of God, aright to unite the doctrine of our utter inability with the companion doctrine of our strict responsibility; free grace with a ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... them not are in the same religious condition as those who have,—this is your safe man and the hope of the Church; this is what the Church is said to want, not party men, but sensible, temperate, sober, well-judging persons, to guide it through the channel of no meaning, between the Scylla and Charybdis of Aye and No.'[4] The writer then thought that such a type could not endure, and that the Church must become more real. On the contrary, her reality is more phantom-like now than it was then. She is the sovereign pattern and exemplar of management, of the ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... disclaiming, saying and in the next breath again unsaying. The Oxford student being asked for the doctrine of the Anglican Church on good works, knew the rocks and whirlpools among which an unwary answer might involve him, and steering midway between Scylla and Charybdis, replied, with laudable caution, 'a few of them would not do a man any harm.' It is scarcely a caricature of the prudence of the Articles. And so at last it has come to this with us. The soldier can ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... it hard to put his fears and feelings into satisfactory words. He was on dangerous seas, but he made his way doggedly on, between the Charybdis of reticence and the Scylla of plain-spoken suggestion. ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... at each end of the Firth were likened to the Scylla and Charybdis between Italy and Sicily, where, in avoiding one mariners were often wrecked by the other; but the dangers in the Firth were from the "Merry Men of Mey," a dangerous expanse of sea, where the water was always boiling like a witch's cauldron at one end, and ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... of Fableland, or its supernatural powers, are therefore opposite to the deities of Olympus. Hence their shape is changed, they can be even monstrosities, such as Polyphemus, the Laestrigonians, Scylla and Charybdis. Circe and Calypso are beautiful women, yet not natural women, in spite of their beauty; there is something superhuman about them, divine, though they be not Olympians. Shapes of wonder they ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... me to shore, and the remainder of the battle was fought out from the shingle. There was one rush of nearly a hundred yards, then the fish calmed down and answered to the winch, moving down, nevertheless, much too persistently to Scylla and Charybdis. ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... "O 'Sblood! A pirate!" He swung to the Colossus who followed him—"A damned pirate, van der Kuylen. Rend my vitals, but we're come from Scylla ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... propensities, the word 'monster' is peculiarly appropriate to this great quicksand, which still craves more victims, and still with claws and feelers outstretched—Scylla and Charybdis combining their terrors in the Goodwins—lies in ambush for the goodly ships that so bravely wing their flight to and fro beyond its reach. But it is only in the storm blast and the midnight that its most dreadful features are unveiled, and even then the lifeboatmen face its perils ...
— Heroes of the Goodwin Sands • Thomas Stanley Treanor
... traditions and find employment for its spears. Often and often he must have been sorely puzzled to find excuses wherewithal to put it off. Indeed his position was both awkward and dangerous: on the one hand was Scylla in the shape of the English Government, and on the other the stormy and uncertain Charybdis of his clamouring regiments. Slowly the idea must have began to dawn upon him that unless he found employment for the army, which, besides being disgusted with his inactivity, ...
— Cetywayo and his White Neighbours - Remarks on Recent Events in Zululand, Natal, and the Transvaal • H. Rider Haggard
... living-dead! Wrecks of a being whence the soul has fled! Ye Goths and Vandals of his plundered coast! Ye Christian Bondous, who of feeling boast,[7] Who quickly kindling to historic fire Contemn a Marius' or a Scylla's ire,[8] Or kindly lulled to sympathetic glow, Lament the martyrs of some far-off woe, And tender grown, with sorrow hugely great Weep o'er an Agis' or Jugurtha's fate![9] View him, ye hollow heartlings as he stalks The dauntless monarch of his ...
— Autographs for Freedom, Volume 2 (of 2) (1854) • Various
... me the rocks of Scylla have you tried, Th' inhuman Cyclops and his den defied: What greater ills hereafter can you bear? Resume your courage and dismiss your care; An hour will come with pleasure to relate Your sorrows past as ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... woes are many, but most terrible of all is a passion-driven woman: Thestias, who burnt out the mystic brand that measured her son's life; Scylla, who robbed her father of his life-charm; another—but the woman who slew her warrior-chief it is meet for me to pass over in silence. Then there is the great Lemnian Crime, foremost of all crimes; yet this might well be compared to it; and as that race perished, so is judgment at hand here; the ...
— Story of Orestes - A Condensation of the Trilogy • Richard G. Moulton
... calculated to appal the timid and confound the brave. We made two efforts to reach this Church from the eastern side; once in the night time, during which, and particularly when within 100 yards of the building, we had to beat about mystically between Scylla and Charybdis, and once at day time, when the utmost care was necessary in order to avoid a mild mishap amid deep side crevices, cart ruts two feet deep, lime heaps, and cellar excavations. We shall long remember the time when, after our first visit, we left the Church, All ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... transmuted into Gold, and how Midas Mygdonius washed himself in the same. Likewise those candid Rivals of this Art, shall in a serious order behold the Bathing-place of naked Diana, the Fountain of Narcissus and Scylla walking in the Sea, without garments, by reason of the most fervent Rayes of Sol: partly also the Blood of Pyramus and Thisbe, of it self collected, by the help of which, white Mulberries are tinged into Red; partly also the Blood ...
— The Golden Calf, Which the World Adores, and Desires • John Frederick Helvetius
... war had ended. Then, as now, half the world was prostrated by the wounds of fratricidal strife. As Washington said: "The whole world was in an uproar," and he added that the task "was to steer safely between Scylla and Charybdis." The problem, then as now, was not only to make "the world safe for democracy," but to make democracy, for which there is no alternative, safe for the world. The thirteen colonies in 1787, while small and relatively unimportant, were, however, a little world in ...
— The Constitution of the United States - A Brief Study of the Genesis, Formulation and Political Philosophy of the Constitution • James M. Beck
... glad in his heart that the young men of the house were out of the way; he did not want his little Molly to be passing from Scylla to Charybdis; and, as he afterwards scoffed at himself for thinking, he had got an idea that all young men were wolves in chase of ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... by a peril too strong for their spears. Mr. Croker remembered Lysander; and, being thus hedged and hemmed about, sought safety by nominating Mr. Shepard. There need be no mistake; Mr. Shepard was not a candidate, he was a refuge. And such a refuge as is Scylla when ...
— The Onlooker, Volume 1, Part 2 • Various
... The famous rock of Scylla and whirlpool of Charybdis, known to the ancients as two sea-monsters, near the Straits of Messina, next claimed his attention. Let us see how Ulysses ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge
... attacked on opposite grounds at once. It is condemned for being pessimistic, it is blamed for being optimistic. From this position Chesterton deduces that it is the only rational religion, because it steers between the Scylla of pessimism and avoids the Charybdis of a facile optimism. Regarding presumably the early Church she has also kept from extremes. She has ignored the easy path of heresy, she has adhered to the adventurous ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... when used to thunder against king Philip; yet we are not quite certain whether it was the power of eloquence alone persuaded the men to enter voluntarily, or whether being seated between the two rocks of Scylla and Charybdis, it was indifferent to them which they dashed upon; however this was, all but one of them entered (though with sad hearts) without being pressed, which we make no doubt the lieutenant attributed to the eloquence of ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Bampfylde Moore Carew • Unknown
... canvass from one end of the Conference to the other, and after he receives it he is liable to find himself among a people, who had rejected him in the canvass, and now only acquiesce in the decision from sheer necessity. But if he escape Scylla in this particular, he is certain to drive upon Charybdis in another. Granting that his relations and labors may be acceptable, he falls upon the inevitable necessity of devoting his time and labor, during the vigor and strength ...
— Thirty Years in the Itinerancy • Wesson Gage Miller
... dead, so calm, so still, So lovely, thou, beneath the light that fell From angel-chariots sentinelled on high, Reposed, and listened, and saw thy living change, Thy dead arise. Charybdis listened, and Scylla; And savage Euxine on the Thracian beach Lay motionless: and every battle ship Stood still; and every ship of merchandise, And all that sailed, of every name, stood still." ROBERT POLLOK: Course of Time, Book ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... in the hearts of all her children." This passage is of peculiar interest as it shows the source of what Mrs. Stowe loves to call the "Christ-worship" which characterized the religion of the younger Beechers. Writing at the age of seventeen, when her soul was tossing between Scylla and Charybdis, Harriet says: "I feel that I love God,—that is, that I love Christ"; and in 1876, writing of her brother Henry, she says, "He and I are Christ-worshippers, adoring him as the Image of the Invisible God." Her son refers ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... advice the Trojans coasted round the south of Sicily, instead of trying to pass the strait between the dreadful Scylla and Charybdis, and just below Mount Etna an unfortunate man came running down to the beach begging to be taken in. He was a Greek, who had been left behind when Ulysses escaped from Polyphemus' cave, and had made his way to the forests, where ...
— Young Folks' History of Rome • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... to the bee-moth. A motherless hive is almost always assaulted by stronger stocks, which seem to have an instinctive knowledge of its orphanage, and hasten at once, to take possession of its spoils. (See Remarks on Robbing.) If it escape the Scylla of these pitiless plunderers, it is soon dashed upon a more merciless Charybdis, when the miscreant moths have ascertained its destitution. Every year, large numbers of hives are bereft of their queen, and every year, the most of such hives are either robbed by other ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... detailed knowledge of every foot of the Ellesmere Land and Grant Land coasts, combined with Bartlett's energy and ice experience, that enabled us to pass four times between this arctic Scylla and Charybdis. ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary
... Convention and its members to leave the butchering of aristocrats to take its course. He sought information at the Captain's hands, but the officer was reticent to the point of curtness, and so, their anxiety but little relieved, since it might seem that they had but escaped from Scylla to be engulfed in Charbydis, the aristocrats at Bellecour spent the night in odious suspense. Those that were tending the wounded had perhaps the best of it, since thus their minds were occupied and saved ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... but to the outer sense not always. Virtues are often harsh to the ear—errors very sweet-voiced. The sirens did not sing out of tune. Better to stop one's ears than glide on Scylla or be merged ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... philosophy, Kant would not lie in that line. His thought is essentially excentric and sophisticated, being largely based on two inherited blunders, which a truly progressive philosophy would have to begin by avoiding, thus leaving Kant on one side, and weathering his philosophy, as one might Scylla or Charybdis. The one blunder was that of the English malicious psychology which had maintained since the time of Locke that the ideas in the mind are the only objects of knowledge, instead of being the knowledge ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana |
