"Sibyl" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... between the original and the copy. The copyists generally imitate the weak points, and seldom get nearer than the imitation of external and trivial peculiarities. It is more feasible to reproduce the 'contortions of the Sibyl' than to catch ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... woman, taking the solemn oracular tone of a sibyl, being in the habit of combining fortune-telling with basket-selling if she thought she saw an opportunity, "it'll no be as ye like: it'll be as it's ordained. A bonnie lassie'll maybe ask ye ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... Sibyl's finger rest On fate's unturned imagined page, Believed her promise, and was blest With dreams of that heroic age. She sent me, ere my hope was cold, One of ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)
... been liberal, and its implied wit can endow a college. The world, which the Greeks called Beauty, has been made such by being gradually divested of every ornament which was not fitted to endure. The Sibyl, "speaking with inspired mouth, smileless, inornate, and unperfumed, pierces through centuries by the power of the god." The scholar might frequently emulate the propriety and emphasis of the farmer's call to his team, ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... parted and red, her great rich eyes a goddess might have commanded through, with their eyebrows of raven-black, like entrances to the caves of the Cumaean sibyl, her small head borne as easily upon her neck as a dove upon a sprig—all flashed upon Milburn's thrilled yet flinching soul, as the revelation of ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... Nay, like the Sibyl's volumes, thou shouldst say; Those that remained, after the six were burned, Being held more precious than the nine together. But listen to my tale. Dost thou remember The Gypsy girl we saw at Cordova Dance the Romalis ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... Orat. ad Sanctos, c. 19 20. He chiefly depends on a mysterious acrostic, composed in the sixth age after the Deluge, by the Erythraean Sibyl, and translated by Cicero into Latin. The initial letters of the thirty-four Greek verses form this prophetic sentence: Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... of some isolated figure, arresting it in its course by the magic of his gaze, and, suffering the gay crowds to pass on, he has given himself up with delight to the divination of its mystic revelations, while he continued to weave his incantations and spells only for the entranced Sibyl of ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... Newdigate Prize Poem of just eighty years ago, written, says tradition, by its brilliant author in a single night. (R. C. Sewell, Magdalen College, 1825.) Tivoli he had never visited; but those who stand to-day beside the Temple of the Sibyl on the edge of its ravine, who enjoy the fair beauty of the headlong Anio and the lesser Cascatelle, of the ruined Temple of Tiburtus, the Grottos of the Sirens and of Neptune, understand how a poet's genius can, ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... that they found the Grotto of the Cumaean Sibyl. They followed the intelligent cicerone, armed with torches, into a gloomy tunnel. The intelligent cicerone walked before them with the air of one who had something to show. Seven stoat peasants followed after. The ...
— The Dodge Club - or, Italy in 1859 • James De Mille
... a comical little adventure the other evening. We were wandering over the common, and encountered two gypsies. I always had desired to have my fortune told, so A—— and I each seized hold of a sibyl and listened ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... sent orders to Gabinius, then governor of Syria, the latter immediately put his army in motion. So the former out of kindness and the latter through corrupt influence restored the king contrary to the wish of the commonwealth, paying no heed either to it or to the utterances of the Sibyl. Gabinius was later brought to trial for this, but on account of Pompey's influence and the money at his command was not convicted. Public administration had so deteriorated among the Romans of that day that when some of the magistrates and jurymen received from him only a very little of the ...
— Dio's Rome • Cassius Dio
... countenance so gentle, and so kind, That heart, which never gave a harsh decree, Suit all the turns of thy harmonious mind, And must, perforce, with destiny agree. This from the Sibyl's leaves affection drew, O, be the omen just! ...
— Poems • Matilda Betham
... twice blest: for prisoners and men without appetite it punctuates and makes time of eternity. I dawdled over my chop and pint of brown stout until Mrs. McRankine, after twice entering to clear away, with the face of a Cumaean sibyl, so far relaxed the tension of unnatural calm as to inquire if I meant to be all ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... So the Sibyl was noted by Heraclitus as [Greek: mainomeno stomati gelasta kai akallopista phtheggomenae] 'as one speaking ridiculous and unseemly speeches with ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... Incomparable Sibyl cease, I pray! Hand us thy liquor without more delay. And to the very brim the goblet crown! My friend he is, and need not be afraid; Besides, he is a man of many a grade, Who hath ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... the sibyl of his odd adoration; Annapla was too intent upon her own elderly love-affairs to be interested in ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... The Little Marplot, The Little Miss Whirlwind Lost, A Pearle Magic Cameo, The Marguerite's Heritage Masked Bridal, The Max, A Cradle Mystery Mona Mysterious Wedding Ring, A Nameless Dell Nora Queen Bess Ruby's Reward Sibyl's Influence Stella Rosevelt That Dowdy Thorn Among Roses, A Sequel to a Girl in a Thousand Thrice Wedded Tina Trixy True Aristocrat, A Two Keys Virgie's Inheritance Wedded By Fate Welfleet Mystery, The Wild Oats Winifred's ...
— The Masked Bridal • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... elaborated, but in which nothing that is written shall endure. That is the reason, in my opinion, why, among so many men of talent, France to-day counts not one great writer. In a society like ours, to seek for literary glory seems to me an anachronism. Of what use is it to invoke an ancient sibyl when a muse is on the eve of birth? Pitiable actors in a tragedy nearing its end, that which it behooves us to do is to precipitate the catastrophe. The most deserving among us is he who plays best this part. Well, I no longer aspire to this ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... instantly. Woman has a way with a man; she leads him whither she desires, and never is he any the wiser. She will throw obstacles in his way, or she will tear down walls that rise up before him; she will make a mile out of a rod, or turn a mountain into a mole-hill: and none but the Cumaean Sibyl could tell why. And as Laura was of the disposition to walk down by the cemetery, to take a final view of the sea before it melted into the sky, what was more natural than that Fitzgerald should follow her? They walked on ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... receives it as a child in later years recovers the forgotten dearness of a nursery tale; and is more himself, and again and again himself, as he breathes the air of Greece, and hears, in his own Italy, the lost voice of the Sibyl murmur again by ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... Little, sedate Marjorie was an Alaskan-Indian Princess, and Rosalie rigged up a Puck costume which made her irresistible. Isabel chose to be Portia, though that erudite lady seemed somewhat out of place among the mythological characters. But Stella was a startling Sibyl, with book, staff, and a little crystal globe (removed from her paper-weight) in which to read horoscopes. The others went in all sorts of ...
— Peggy Stewart at School • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... in the city whose very air became to them the breath of inspiring suggestion? Where but in Rome would have come to Crawford the vision of his "Orpheus" and of his noble Beethoven? or to Story his "Libyan Sibyl," and that exquisite group, "Into the Silent Land"? or to Vedder his marvellous creations of "The Fates Gathering in the Stars," the "Cumaean Sibyl," or the "Dance of the Pleiades"? to Simmons his triumphant "Angel of the Resurrection," ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... will peep amid anemones from rustling foliage strewn by winter's winds. The heights of Casentino, the Perugian highlands, Volterra, far withdrawn amid a wilderness of rolling hills, and solemn snow-touched ranges of the Spolentino, Sibyl-haunted fastnesses of Norcia, form the most distant horizon-lines of this unending panorama. And then there are the cities, placed each upon a point of vantage: Siena; olive-mantled Chiusi; Cortona, white upon her spreading throne; poetic ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... the Roman Catholic Church in the testimony of the sibyl is shown by the well-known hymn, said to have been composed by Pope Innocent III, at the close of the thirteenth century, beginning with ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... accompanied it, we shall have the five periods which these five essays try to describe: the period before the Tarquins, that is the "Religion of Numa"; the later kingdom, that is the "Reorganisation of Servius"; the first three centuries of the republic, that is the "Coming of the Sibyl"; the closing centuries of the republic, that is the "Decline of Faith"; and finally the early empire and the "Augustan Renaissance." Like all attempts to cut history into sections these divisions are more or less arbitrary, but their convenience sufficiently ...
— The Religion of Numa - And Other Essays on the Religion of Ancient Rome • Jesse Benedict Carter
... men. They were the architects, who contrived the temple of Apollo at Delphi, and the treasury constructed to Urius. They were, I make no doubt, some of those, who were styled Cyclopians; as the people under this appellation were far the most eminent in this way. When the Sibyl in Virgil shews AEneas the place of torment in the shades below, and leads him through many melancholy recesses, we find that the whole was separated from the regions of bliss by a wall built by the Cyclopians. The Sibyl accordingly at their exit ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume II. (of VI.) • Jacob Bryant
... below. Juan Can, when he first hobbled out on the stout crutches Alessandro had made him of manzanita wood, dragged himself all the way round the house, to have a look at Senor Felipe and a word with him. The Senora sat there, in the big carved chair, looking like a sibyl with her black silk banded head-dress severely straight across her brow, and her large dark eyes gazing out, past Felipe, into the far south sky. Ramona lived there too, with her embroidery or her book, sitting on cushions on the floor in a corner, or at the foot of Felipe's bed, always ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... before the dingy building at Forty-seven Queen Anne Street, and broadcloth and satin mounted the creaking stairs to the studio. It happened about this time that Turner's prices began to increase. Like the sibyl of old, if a customer said, "I do not want it," the painter put an extra ten pounds on the price. For "Dido Building Carthage," Turner's original price was five hundred pounds. People came to see the picture and they said, "The price is too high." Next day Turner's price for the "Carthage" was one ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... conservative self-devotion, a market-place by Ostade, Reynolds's "Strawberry Girl," one of Copley's colonial grandees in a New England farmer's parlor, a cabinet gem by Greuze, a dog or sheep of Landseer's, the misty depths of Turner's "Carthage," Domenichino's "Sibyl," Claude's sunset, or Allston's "Rosalie,"—how much of eras in Art, events in history, national tastes, and varieties of genius do they each foreshadow and embalm! Even when no special beauty or skill ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... 8. Hellespontica, 9. Phrygia, 10. Tiburs, by name Albunea, worshipped at Tiber as a goddess. Thus Varro categorizes the Sibyls, and besides these we hear of a Hebrew, a Chaldaean, a Babylonian, an Egyptian, a Sardian Sibyl, and some others. Other writers considerably reduce this number, three being that most usually accepted, and Salmasius, the most learned man that ever lived, summed up the various theories concerning these mysterious beings with the ...
— Holidays in Eastern France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... organization, and a great genius wrote some delightful novels to show their purpose, and to illustrate their manner of how-not-to-do-it in grappling with the grand social questions of the age. In "Coningsby" they sing canticles and carry about the boar's head; in "Sibyl" they sing hymns to the Holy Virgin and the song of labor, and steal title-deeds, after setting houses on fire to distract attention from their immediate object; and in "Tancred" they go on pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre, by way of reviving their faith. All this is so well ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... plates of outlines from heads and figures in a picture of "Michael setting the Watch." This picture must have been painted in England, and in unknown here except by these outlines. From these alone great strength of design might be inferred. There are, besides, "A Sibyl," sitting in a cave-like, rocky place, the eyes dilated with thought, the mouth tenderly fixed; the cave is open to the sea. This design would have proved one of the most characteristic works of Allston, had it been painted. "Dido and AEneas." ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... years ago, and he claims it's a finer picture than any they saw in the museums, that time he took mamma to Europe. But it's horribly out of date to have those things in dining-rooms, and I caught Bobby Lamhorn giggling at it; and Sibyl made fun of it, too, with Bobby, and then told papa she agreed with him about its being such a fine thing, and said he did just right to insist on having it where he wanted it. She makes me ...
— The Turmoil - A Novel • Booth Tarkington
... Tiberius, the half-crazy and wholly vicious Caligula, many a king and queen of evil repute that ruled Naples, the vile Pier-Luigi Farnese, the adventurer Joachim Murat, all have left the marks of their personality upon the coveted shores of the Neapolitan Riviera. From the days of the Sibyl and of the Trojan hero to the stirring times of Garibaldi and of King Bomba, which were but of yesterday, Naples and its environs have played a prominent part in the annals and development of the civilised western world; Roman emperors, Pagan statesmen ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... recently appointed, and he was no longer to receive payment for services which he refused to render. Peter's pence were still paid, and might continue to be paid, if the pope would recollect himself; but, like the Sibyl of Cuma, Henry destroyed some fresh privilege with each delay of justice, demanding the same price for the preservation of what remained. The secondary streams of tribute now only remained to the Roman See; and communion with the English church, which ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... as against the "untaught sallies of the spirit," the surmises and vaticinations of the mind,—the "imperfect theories, and sentences which contain glimpses of truth." In a word, he would have us leave the laboratory and its crucibles for the sibyl's cave and its tripod. We can all—or most of us, certainly—recognize something of truth, much of imagination, and more of danger in speculations of this sort. They belong to visionaries and to poets. Emerson feels ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... finished that first cup of tea ever brewed in England,—the gift of the newly-created East India Company,—no sibyl was at hand to peer into the monarch's cup and foretell from its dregs, the dire disaster to his realm, hidden among those insignificant particles. Could a vision of those battered tea chests, floating ...
— Tea Leaves • Various
... anglers, Mr. Rose; but he, too, was there on his shelty, armed with his salmon-rod and landing-net.... This little group of Waltonians, bound for Lord Somerville's preserve, remained lounging about, to witness the start of the main cavalcade. Sir Walter, mounted on Sibyl, was marshalling the order of procession with a huge hunting-whip; and among a dozen frolicsome youths and maidens, who seemed disposed to laugh at all discipline, appeared, each on horseback, each as ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... Empire manvantaras back, when the Mysteries were in their flower and Theosophy guided the relations of men and nations, some thin stream of that divine knowledge flowed down into the pralaya; that an echo lingered,—at Cumae, perhaps, where the Sibyl was,— or somewhere among the Oscan or Sabine mountains. Certainly nothing remained, regnant and recognised in the cities, to suggest a repugnance to the summer campaigns, or that other nations had their ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... office and a house. As she could then no longer bear it, Another tenanted the garret. To her came up the city crowd,— Wives, maidens, servants, gentry proud,— To ask their fortunes, as before; A Sibyl's cave was on her garret floor: Such custom had its former mistress drawn It lasted even when herself was gone. It sorely tax'd the present mistress' wits To satisfy the throngs of teasing cits. 'I tell your fortunes! joke, indeed! Why, ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... the bloom of one hundred and twenty and the gloom of Rembrandt. The two dozen pictures in this room form nearly as odd an association as any like number of portraits could do. Guercino's Sibyl figures with a cottage interior by Teniers, and Lely's Prince Rupert looks down with lordly scorn on Jonah pitched into the sea by the combined efforts of the two Poussins. The link between Berghem's cows and Del Sarto's Holy Family ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... and it is boldly said that the three now forthcoming are above challenge. [414:1] But Truth still refuses to be compromised, and sternly disowns these claimants for her approbation. The internal evidence of these three epistles abundantly attests that, like the last three books of the Sibyl, they are only the last shifts ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... struggle that is life; the slaves are writhing under their bonds as though they were of hot iron; Moses is starting from his seat for some tremendous conflict. Every figure lavished on the decoration of the Sistine Chapel reaches, when it does not surpass, the limit of human physical development. Sibyl and Prophet, {682} Adam and Eve, man and God are all hurled together with a riot of ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... more Egyptian than ever to-day. She always dressed for her parts; and as a believer in the Unseen, she felt it right, in honour of the sibyl, to wear her hair very low, with some green pins in it, long earrings, and a ...
— The Twelfth Hour • Ada Leverson
... recollect yourself; alas! How much distracted are your thoughts; and how Disjointed all your words! The sibyl's leaves more orderly were laid. Where is that harmony of mind, that prudence, Which guided all you did? that sense of glory, Which raised you high above the rest of kings, As kings are o'er the level ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. II • Edited by Walter Scott
... world and inspires that fear, that sadness, that awe, which few have looked on the face of the insane and not experienced. Her features were still noble, and of the fair Greek symmetry of the painter's Sibyl; but the cheeks were worn and hollow, and one bright spot alone broke their marble paleness; her lips were, however, full, and yet red, and by their uncertain and varying play, gave frequent glimpses ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... The "Libyan Sibyl" was then in the fullness of her powers. She had been born of slave parents about 1798 in Ulster County, New York. In her later years she remembered vividly the cold, damp cellar-room in which slept the slaves of the family to which she ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley
... had exactly the person of a prophetess—not, indeed, of the divine sibyl imagined by Domenichino, so sweetly distracted betwixt love and mystery, but of a good business-like, practical prophetess, long used to the exercise of her sacred calling. I have been told by those who knew Lady Hester Stanhope ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... study, with practice upon such plants as he found upon his hill-top, and along the brook and in other neighboring localities, sufficed to do a great deal for him. In this pursuit he was assisted by Sibyl, who proved to have great knowledge in some botanical departments, especially among flowers; and in her cold and quiet way, she met him on this subject and glided by his side, as she had done so long, a companion, a daily observer and observed of him, mixing herself up with ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the Sibyl to the Romans he obtained even against his will. A woman whom they called Sibyl, gifted with divine inspiration, came to Rome bringing [Sidenote: FRAG. 10^4] THREE OR NINE books, offered these to Tarquin for purchase, and stated the value of the books. As he paid no attention to her, she ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume 1 (of 6) • Cassius Dio
... In immortality he dips his quill: And, since blank paper is denied the press, He mingles the whole alphabet by guess: In various sets, which various words compose, Of which, he hopes, mankind the meaning knows. So sounds spontaneous from the sibyl broke, Dark to herself the wonders which she spoke; The priests found out the meaning, if they could; And nations star'd at what none understood. Clodio dress'd, danc'd, drank, visited, (the whole And great concern of an immortal soul!) Oft have I said, "Awake! exist! and strive For birth! ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... quite worthy of the name they bear. We descended from them into the Bath-room, where a pool of water and sundry other arrangements suggest to a lively imagination its designation. It certainly has the recommendation of being the most retired bath-room ever known. That of the Neapolitan sibyl is public ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... unhealthy for transcendentalists. No doubt his dislike of Margaret Fuller arose from this feeling of his that she was always acting a part, always straining after an effect. He loved simple, natural, unaffected people, and the part of a sibyl was very distasteful to him. He suspected the inspiration of green tea in much that Margaret said, and very ungallantly pronounced her a humbug. But as he did this only upon the paper of his own private diary, with ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... one, her brothers and sisters had been taken, and she was made sole guardian of their orphan children,—a flock of tender little lambs,—to be nourished and protected from the cold and the rain, the snare and the pitfalls, the tempter and the ravening wolf ever prowling around the fold. Hugh and Sibyl, Tom and Grace, and, last of all, wild little Bessie from the southern hill-country,—this was her charge. Hugh and Sibyl Warrington were the children of an elder brother; Tom and Grace Morris the children of a sister, and Bessie Darrell the only child of Aunt Faith's ...
— The Old Stone House • Anne March
... heard its legend of "The Bloody Footstep," and from that time on, the idea of this footprint on the threshold-stone of the ancestral mansion seems to have associated itself inextricably with the dreamy substance of his yet unshaped romance. Indeed, it leaves its mark broadly upon Sibyl Dacy's wild legend in "Septimius Felton," and reappears in the last paragraph of that story. But, so far as we can know at this day, nothing definite was done until after his departure for Italy. It was then, while staying in ...
— The Ancestral Footstep (fragment) - Outlines of an English Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... by the newspapers," said I, "the same delusions are renewed again. Benevolent theorists go about prophesying peace as a positive certainty, deduced from that sibyl-book the ledger; and we are never again to buy cannons, provided only we can exchange ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... sudden swell of the ocean. Here they were desolate and homesick. The strange people among whom they had fallen did not know they were the children of a king. No one was left to care for them but their old nurse, named Sibyl. ...
— Fairy Book • Sophie May
... read a profound political pamphlet under the guise of a brilliant novel may find it in "Sibyl, or The Two Nations." The gay overture of "The Eve of the Derby," at a London club, with which the curtain rises, contrasts with the evening amusements of the proletaire in the gin-palaces of Manchester in a more than ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... cheek in her hand, before the grate, as if she questioned a sibyl, she saw again the face of the Marquis de Re. She saw it so precisely that it surprised her. The Marquis de Re had been presented to her by her father, who admired him, and he appeared to her grand ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... king a strange thing happened at Rome. One day an unknown woman came to the king, bearing in her arms nine books, which she offered to sell to him at a certain price. She told him that they contained the prophecies of the Sibyl of Cumae, and that from them might be learned the destiny of Rome and the way to ...
— Historic Tales, Volume 11 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... a sibyl for intentness now, "you would prefer to go? To be asked to! You would find the streets"—with swift discerning contempt—"more profitable for your purpose than here, where you ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... how he was then carried southward to Sicily, where he generously took on board an English sailor, whom a man-of-war had unhappily left there, and who was in imminent danger of being devoured by the Cyclops; how he landed in the bay of Naples, saw the Sibyl, and descended to Tartarus; how he held a long and pathetic conversation with Poniatowski, whom he found wandering unburied on the banks of Styx; how he swore to give him a splendid funeral; how he had also an affectionate ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... E'en as the Sibyl in Northland-dawn drew Forth from the myth-billows gliding, Told all the past, all the future so true, Sank with the lands' last subsiding,— Prophecies ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... yet," said Marian, jumping up again. "I want to remark further that not only is Patty going to live in Vernondale, but she's going to have a house very near this one. I've picked it out," and Marian wagged her head with the air of a mysterious sibyl. "I won't tell you where it is just yet, but it's a lovely house, and big enough to accommodate Uncle Fred and Patty, and a guest or two besides. I've selected the room that I prefer, and I hope you ...
— Patty at Home • Carolyn Wells
... considerable maritime city of Campania, now in ruins; alleged to be the earliest Greek settlement in Italy; famous as the residence of the SIBYL (q. v.), and a place of ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... dear head you mourn has sunk, for ever, beneath the wave. Virgil might wander forth bearing the golden branch "the Sibyl doth to singing men allow," and might visit, as one not wholly without hope, the dim dwellings of the dead and the unborn. To him was it permitted to see and sing "mothers and men, and the bodies ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... nor a sibyl thou! What brave conceit had he, my poet, built; No jugglery of numbers that mean nought, That can mean nought for ...
— English Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... beginning of the seventeenth century. Names are only air, and blow away with a change of wind; but beliefs are rooted in human wants and weakness, and die hard. The oaks of Dodona are prostrate, and the shrine of Delphi is desolate; but the Pythoness and the Sibyl may be consulted in Lowell Street for a very moderate compensation. Nostradamus and Lilly seem impossible in our time; but we have seen the advertisements of an astrologer in our Boston papers year after year, which seems ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... lighter wings to fly! Gold imped by thee can compass hardest things, Can pocket states, can fetch or carry kings; A single leaf shall waft an army o'er, Or ship off senates to a distant shore; A leaf, like Sibyl's, scatter to and fro Our fates and fortunes, as the winds shall blow: Pregnant with thousands flits the scrap unseen, And silent sells a king, or buys a queen. Oh! that such bulky bribes as all might see, Still, as of old, encumbered villainy! ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... [Sidenote: Sibyl. Oracles, III 767-784] Then a kingdom over all mankind for all times shall God raise up, who once gave the holy law to the pious, for whom he pledged to open every land, the world and the portals of the blessed, and all joys, and an eternal, ...
— The Makers and Teachers of Judaism • Charles Foster Kent
... upon ourselves unnecessary troubles, observations; we punish our bodies, as in Turkey (saith [6595]Busbequius leg. Turcic. ep. 3.) "one did, that was much affected with music, and to hear boys sing, but very superstitious; an old sibyl coming to his house, or a holy woman," (as that place yields many) "took him down for it, and told him, that in that other world he should suffer for it; thereupon he flung his rich and costly instruments which he had bedecked with jewels, all at once into the fire. He was served in silver plate, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... doubt that she was leaning like a ripe peach within his reach, ready at a touch to fall into his hand; and though Regina felt that this low-browed, sibyl-eyed woman was vastly his inferior in all save beauty and wealth, she knew that even his failure to marry the widow would furnish no justification for the further indulgence of her own foolish ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... objections, being recognized by both ladies as trouser-pocket ones, carried no weight. It ended in Flora going off with half a crown in her glove and an urgent request from her father to make it as difficult as possible for the sibyl by giving a ...
— Sailor's Knots (Entire Collection) • W.W. Jacobs
... my agony, I hear astir, over this earth accurst, the despairing sob of impotent agony. For ten thousand years I have cried in infinite space: Truth! Truth! For ten thousand years infinite space keeps answering me: Desire, Desire. O Sibyl forsaken! O mute Pythia! dash then thy head against the rocks of thy cavern, and mingle thy raging blood with the foam of the sea; for thou deemest thyself to have possessed the almighty Word, and these ten thousand years thou art ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... her haughty mind. Thus, at the length, your passage shall be free, And you shall safe descend on Italy. Arriv'd at Cumae, when you view the flood Of black Avernus, and the sounding wood, The mad prophetic Sibyl you shall find, Dark in a cave, and on a rock reclin'd. She sings the fates, and, in her frantic fits, The notes and names, inscrib'd, to leafs commits. What she commits to leafs, in order laid, Before the cavern's entrance are display'd: Unmov'd they ...
— The Aeneid • Virgil
... anything she might have told me, and I couldn't see that her satisfaction in being justified by the event relieved her little nephew's condition. The truth is that, as the sequel was to prove, Miss Ambient had some of the qualities of the sibyl and had therefore perhaps a right to the sibylline contortions. Her brother was so preoccupied that I felt my presence an indiscretion and was sorry I had promised to remain over the morrow. I put it to Mark that clearly I had best leave them in the morning; to which he replied ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... queen, Dido, to whom he relates his past adventures and sufferings. By his narrative he wins her love, but at the command of Jupiter abandons her. Unable to retain him, Dido, in the despair of her passion, destroys herself. After passing through many dangers, under the guidance of the Sibyl of Cumae, he descends into the kingdom of the dead to consult the shade of his father. There appear to him the souls of the future heroes of Rome. On his return, he becomes a friend of the king of Latium, who promises to him the hand of his daughter, ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... Jerusalem, and of such magnificence that the celebrated Eusebius is strongly inclined to look upon its building as the fulfilment of the prophecies in the Scriptures for a city of that name.[4] A verse of the sibyl was also remembered or composed, which, like all predictions after the event, tallied in a surprising manner with the holy object so happily revealed. The greater share of the Cross was left at Jerusalem, set in a case of silver, and the remainder was sent to Constantine, who, in hopes ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 580, Supplemental Number • Various
... pictures here is Domenichino's Cumean Sibyl, which, like all other masterpieces, defies the copyist and engraver. The Sibilla Persica of Guercino hangs a little to the left; and with her contemplative air, and the pen in her hand, she looks as if she were recording the effusions of her more inspired sister. The former is ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... through the mountain, through rock of the hardest possible description. But the same age had seen the excavation of other subterranean passages far larger than this, and in the same country, preeminently the Grotto of Posilipo, at Naples, and that of the Cumaean Sibyl, and at length it was accomplished. The people of Veii heard of it, and were filled with alarm. Ambassadors were sent to Rome, with the hope of inducing the Romans to come to some other terms less severe than the ...
— Among the Brigands • James de Mille
... wrote verses. Some of these had been printed on satin paper, and sold for objects of beneficence at charity bazaars. The county newspapers said that the verses "were characterized by all the elegance of a cultured and feminine mind." The other two sisters agreed that Sibyl was the genius of the household, but, like all geniuses, not sufficiently practical for the world. Miss Sarah Chillingly, the youngest of the three, and now just in her forty-fourth year, was looked upon by the ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Studies in Classical Philology," vol. II, makes out a very strong case for Puteoli, and his theory of the old town and the new town is as ingenious as it is able. Haley also has Trimalchio in his favor, as has also La Porte du Theil. "I saw the Sibyl at Cumae," says Trimalchio. Now if the scene of the dinner is actually at Cumae this sounds very peculiar; it might even be a gloss added by some copyist whose knowledge was not equal to his industry. On the other hand, suppose Trimalchio ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... deity, Wealth, holds his immediate court of joys and pleasures; where the sunny exposure of plenty, and the hot walls of profusion, produce those blissful fruits of luxury, exotics in this world, and natives of paradise!—Thou withered sibyl, my sage conductress, usher me into thy refulgent, adored presence!—The power, splendid and potent as he now is, was once the puling nursling of thy faithful care, and tender arms! Call me thy son, thy cousin, thy kinsman, or favourite, and adjure the god by the scenes of his infant years, no ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... instruction. What can we want more, you will say, for the intellectual education of the whole man, and for every man, than so exuberant and diversified and persistent a promulgation of all kinds of knowledge? Why, you will ask, need we go up to knowledge, when knowledge comes down to us? The Sibyl wrote her prophecies upon the leaves of the forest, and wasted them; but here such careless profusion might be prudently indulged, for it can be afforded without loss, in consequence of the almost ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... of all appreciation of art. The only true connoisseur is the one who can enter into the delight felt by the artist in creating his work. Exercise leads to invention. The ancients well said that the contortions of the sibyl generated her inspiration. Critics have been sneeringly defined as "those who have failed in literature and art," but this is not true of the greatest critics, who never carried their creative work to the point of success simply because they had found a better ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... down from its frame in the gloomy oaken chamber. She spoke not again even to Mause that day, but seemed as if bent on some deep and solemn exercise. Abstracted from every outward impression, she sat, the image of some ancient sibyl communing with the inward, unseen pageantries of thought—the hidden workings of a power she could not control. Towards night she seemed more accessible. Naturally austere and taciturn, she rarely spoke but when it was absolutely necessary; ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... get a leaf of brass, And with a gad of steel will write these words, And lay it by. The angry northern wind Will blow these sands, like Sibyl's leaves, abroad, And ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... Frederick II., who strove to found a new society of humane culture in the South of Europe, and to anticipate the advent of the spirit of modern tolerance. He, too, and all his race were exterminated by the Papal jealousy. Truly we may say with Michelet that the Sibyl of the Renaissance kept offering her books in vain to feudal Europe. In vain because the time was not yet. The ideas projected thus early on the modern world were immature and abortive, like those headless ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... things are pure: but unto them that are defiled is nothing pure." According to Serapion, as quoted by Clemens Alexandrinus, the tradition was that the face which appears in the moon is the soul of a Sibyl. Plutarch, in his treatise, Of the Face appearing in the roundle of the Moone, cites the poet Agesinax as saying ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... cried; 'opener of all secret places, caskets, aumbries, caves of the winds, thrice blessed Sibyl of the keyhole!' She nodded ...
— Privy Seal - His Last Venture • Ford Madox Ford
... of the simulated frame which surrounds the fresco, are hexagonal spaces containing half figures of prophets with labels, containing texts referring to the passion of Christ; and below them on the right, the Erythrean Sibyl. In the lower part of the frieze, are ten rounds, containing portraits of the most illustrious members of the Dominican Order. In the centre St. Dominic, on the left Pope Innocent V., Cardinal Ugone, Father Paulo the Florentine, the Archbishop St. Antonino (this must surely have been added later), ...
— Fra Angelico • J. B. Supino
... among the great pianists of the second quarter of this century has been felicitously characterised by an anonymous contemporary: Thalberg, he said, is a king, Liszt a prophet, Chopin a poet, Herz an advocate, Kalkbrenner a minstrel, Madame Pleyel a sibyl, ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... the old sibyl immediately appeared from the stairs, whither she had discreetly retired to wait during Annetta's visit. "Bring water, and that bottle of my wine from downstairs. You know, the bottle of old wine of Stefanone's that ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... close of the book one of its most delectable episodes ends in his excusing Mr. Justice Bridoye for settling law cases in that way. But he recommends the sortes Virgilianae, and he, others, and Panurge himself add the experiment of dreams, and the successive consultation of the Sibyl of Panzoust, the dumb Nazdecabre, the poet Raminagrobis, Epistemon, "Her Trippa," Friar John himself, the theologian Hippothadee, the doctor Rondibilis, the philosopher Trouillogan, and the professional fool Triboulet. No reader of the most moderate intelligence can need to be ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... of the day with Aileen Lawton, Olive Bascom, and Sibyl Thorndyke, out of doors, fascinated by the spectacle of ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... was on the table. He did not hurry to open it, for she, and all that she did, was overwhelming. She wrote like the Sibyl; her sorrowful face moved over the stars and shattered their harmonies; last night he saw her with the eyes of Blake, a virgin widow, tall, veiled, consecrated, with her hands stretched out against an everlasting wind. Why should ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... stood upon the platform, I looked back again toward the wooded uplands of Bartram; and far behind, the fine range of mountains, azure and soft in the distance, beyond which lay beloved old Knowl, and my lost father and mother, and the scenes of my childhood, never embittered except by the sibyl who sat ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... stranger than to her chief whom she loved—until the stranger gave her offence. And if then she passed to imprecation, she would not curse like an ordinary woman, but like a poetess, gaining rather than losing dignity. She would rise to the evil occasion, no hag, but a largely-offended sibyl, whom nothing thereafter should ever appease. To forgive was a virtue unknown to Mistress Conal. Its more than ordinary difficulty in forgiving is indeed a special fault of the Celtic character.—This must not however be confounded ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... said the old mariner, in a subdued tone, and with a shrewd and suspicious glance of his eye after the old sibyl, "it's a word that may not very well be uttered, but there are many mistakes made in evening stories if old Moll Moray there, where she lives, knows not mickle more than she is willing to tell of the Haunted Ships and their unhallowed mariners. She lives cannilie and ...
— Little Classics, Volume 8 (of 18) - Mystery • Various
... and breast. She was perfectly exposed to the storm; and the wind blowing her hair and dress about her thin tall figure, and the lightning flashing round her, and the waves rolling at her feet, made her look like Medea alighted from her chariot, or the Sibyl of the tempest that was rolling around her, the only living thing within hail at that moment except ourselves. On seeing me safe, she did not wait to greet me, as might have been expected, but calling out to me—'Ah! ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. IV - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... family,—a sort of sophomorical boil, that the soap and sugar of indiscriminate adulation had drawn to a head of conceit. This youth bestowed a great deal of attention on a certain young woman of a classical turn of mind, who once had a longing to attend a fancy-ball as a sibyl. About the same time Sophomore missed the first volume of his Potter's "Antiquities of Greece"; and, having searched for it in vain, made up his mind that I had presented it as a keepsake, together with a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... It is a gift peculiar to woman and her temperament. By birth a fay, by the regular recurrence of her ecstasy she becomes a sibyl. By her love she grows into an enchantress. By her subtlety, by a roguishness often whimsical and beneficent, she becomes a Witch; she works her spells; does at any rate lull our pains to rest and ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... terrible and strange, figures of the past or of the future, from which she could not turn her face. The curve of her upper lip, where it lay along its fellow and made a dimpled end, sharpened and grew bleak. Poring and smiling into the fire, she looked like a Sibyl envisaging the fate of men, not concerned in it, yet absorbed, interested in the play, not at all in the persons. This friend of Mrs. Benson, this midnight mate of young gardeners, disturber of high ladies' comfort, serene controller of Wanless, she was, it would seem, all ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... the Temple of Jupiter. Its present altar encloses an ancient altar which is said to have been erected by Augustus. "According to a legend of the 12th century, this was the spot where the Sibyl Tibur appeared to the emperor, whom the senate proposed to elevate to the rank of a god, and revealed to him a vision of the Virgin and ...
— The Youthful Wanderer - An Account of a Tour through England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany • George H. Heffner
... investigation, original documents and an exhaustive analysis of facts. The facts brought out in the various litigations in which Mrs. Eddy and the church have been involved confirm both the statements and conclusions of this really distinctive work. The official life by Sibyl Wilbur (whose real name seems to be O'Brien) is so coloured as to be substantially undependable. It touches lightly or omits altogether those passages in Mrs. Eddy's life which do not fit in with the picture which Mrs. Eddy herself and the church ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... months in Rome she moved on to Naples. Here it was that she painted the portrait of Lady Hamilton, Nelson's Emma, reclining by the sea, holding a cup in her hand as a Bacchante. Vigee Le Brun also painted her as a Sibyl—that picture which she took with her wherever she went, from town to town, and which always drew a crowd to her studio; whilst, grimly enough, Nelson's Emma rose to be one of the famed lovers ...
— Vigee Le Brun • Haldane MacFall
... I have struck The chord that answers to your gloomy thoughts. Bah! on your sibyl and her prophecy! Put Guido's blood aside, and yet, I say, Marry ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Francesca da Rimini • George Henry Boker
... I; for my vision almost wholly fails, while the sweetness that was born of it yet distills within my heart. Thus the snow is by the sun unsealed; thus on the wind, in the light leaves, was lost the saying of the Sibyl. ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... of mind, as well as of person, were hereditary. All, therefore, sought the daughters of Lochiel, as coming of an untainted race. The elder ones were married early, and seemed, as Mrs. Grant expresses it, by the solicitude to obtain them, as ever to increase, like the Sibyl's leaves, in value, as they lessened in number. Of the daughters, one, the youngest and the fairest, was actually married to Cameron of Glendinning, in the twelfth year of her age. She became a widow, and afterwards married Maclean of Kingasleet, so that she was successively ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745. - Volume I. • Mrs. Thomson
... be sure! Sibyl Eversleigh! I haven't seen her since she was so high. I used to call her my little sweetheart. So Sybby remembered Cousin Jack and came to find him? But when did you meet her?" he asked suddenly, as if this was the only ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... and Dian, huntress fair, To-day and always magnified, Bright lights of heaven, accord our prayer This holy tide, On which the Sibyl's volume wills That youths and maidens without stain To gods, who love the seven dear hills, Should chant the strain! Sun, that unchanged, yet ever new, Lead'st out the day and bring'st it home, May nought be present to thy view More great than ...
— Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace • Horace
... air of Adeline Imposed not upon her: she saw her blaze Much as she would have seen a glow-worm shine, Then turn'd unto the stars for loftier rays. Juan was something she could not divine, Being no sibyl in the new world's ways; Yet she was nothing dazzled by the meteor, Because she did not pin her faith ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... She was very glad to get rid of me just now. Why? I am inoffensive enough. There is something uncommon about her; she gives me the idea of having a history, which is anything but desirable for a young woman. What fine eyes she has! She is something like that Sibyl of Guercino's in the Capitol. Why does she object to me? It is rather absurd. I must make her talk, then I shall ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... by the sense rather than by any grammatical ellipsis. [226] Sibylla is the ancient Greek name for a prophetic woman; and at Rome prophecies and counsels (libri Sibyllini) were kept in the Capitol which were believed to have been given as early as the time of the kings by a Sibyl of Cumae. They contained information about festivals, sacrifices, and other religious observances, and the means by which calamities which threatened the state might be averted. They were under the superintendence of a special college of priests, by whom alone they were consulted, ...
— De Bello Catilinario et Jugurthino • Caius Sallustii Crispi (Sallustius)
... own with its puny compulsion Can summon the spirit that quickens the lyre; It comes, if at all, like the Sibyl's convulsion And touches the brain ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... the bewildered Wanderer to stand, as so many have done, shouting question after question into the Sibyl-cave of Destiny, and receive no Answer but an Echo." Faith, indeed, lies dormant but alive beneath the doubt. But in the meantime the man's own weakness paralyses action; and, while this paralysis lasts, all faith appears to have departed. He has ceased to believe in himself, ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... Caverford's portrait, has the rapt eye of the Cumaean sibyl. One of Moore's fine friends, an admirer of Bessy's, speaks to him of her "wild, poetic face," and the Duchess of Sussex thought her like "Lady Heathcote in the days of her beauty." That is putting her very high, for, according to Cosway, Lady Heathcote was a lovely young woman ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... revolution of things, to put a period at this time to the liberty of Greece, which opposed and thwarted all their actions, and by many signs foretold what should happen. Such were the sad predictions uttered by the Pythian priestess, and this old oracle cited out of the Sibyl's verses: ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... 'Sibyl,' said he softly to his young wife, 'were I now to leave thee, how many of my lines would remain written ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... succession introduced by her, when they began to diminish in length; and souls, before arriving at the gates of Hell, were also led by her. In going through these signs, they passed the Styx in the 8th Degree of Libra. She was the famous Sibyl who initiated Eneas, and opened to him the way to the ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... events recorded professes to be found in the cave of the Cumsean Sibyl, near Naples, where they had remained for centuries, outlasting the changes of nature and, when found, being still two hundred and fifty years in advance of the time foretold. The accounts are all written on the sibylline leaves; they are in all languages, ancient and modern; and those concerning ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti
... several of the other gipsy women were awakening strong sympathy among the young girls and maid-servants in the background. The pretty, black-eyed gipsy girl, whom I have mentioned on a former occasion as the sibyl that read the fortunes of the general, endeavoured to wheedle that doughty warrior into their interests, and even made some approaches to her old acquaintance, Master Simon; but was repelled by the latter with all the dignity of office, having assumed a look of gravity and importance ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving
... duties in the school-room, one afternoon, I was startled to observe these characters as suddenly and mysteriously raised as if by the unseen hand of a modern sibyl on the blackboard:— ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... while Apronianus was prefect of Rome, the temple of the Palatine Apollo was burnt in the Eternal City; and if aid from all quarters had not come to the rescue the violence of the conflagration would have destroyed even the prophetic volumes of the Sibyl. ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... and stilly light Bowed down before me, the dew came again, The moon my sibyl worshipped through the night, The sun returned and long abode; ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various
... through the season. And round this structure were things desirable by all mankind, and supposed to be desired by possessors of one penny willing to part with it. For a penny-in-the-slot you could learn your fate from a Sibyl, and repent of having spent your penny on it. For another you could scent your pocket-handkerchief, and be sorry you hadn't kept your penny for chocolate. For another you could have the chocolate, and wish you had waited and taken a cigarette. And for another you could take the cigarette, ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... Cicero in his first book on Divination, says that it was the oracle of Zelia, a little town at the foot of Mount Ida, which gave that answer as an interpretation of the dream of Hecuba. Pausanias says it was the sibyl Herophila who interpreted the dream, while other ancient writers state that it was Cassandra. Apollodorus says that AEsacus learned from his grandfather Merops the art of foretelling ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... Flinders, as to the effect of the ship's course upon it. The reader will find them in the appendix to the account of his voyage lately published, 2d volume. Similar observations have still more recently been made by an officer on board his majesty's ship Sibyl, while in the North Sea protecting our Greenland fishery. They form an appendix to the Account of a Voyage to Spitzbergen, by Mr John Laing, Surgeon, published at Edinburgh, 1815. Of their importance ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... and join the ship, as Dalton had directed. The old death-dresser forsook the corpse, and standing on the highest crag, her long hair floating backwards on the breeze, her arms tossing from the effects of terror and astonishment, looked like the sibyl whose spells and orgies have distracted nature by some terrible convulsion. The cliffs and strand at the moment formed a picture that Salvator would have gloried in conveying to his canvass—the line of coast now rising boldly ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... his ears tingling with shame, and hurried down the beach. Presently it occurred to him, however, that it was not quite chivalrous in him to leave little Elsie there alone with the dark-minded sibyl. Who knew but that she might need his help? He paused, and was about to retrace his steps, when he heard some one approaching, whom he instinctively knew to be Elsie. As she came nearer, the moon, which ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... lecture, and must lie by all the next day from the exertion. If she skates, she is sure to strain some muscle; or if she falls and strikes her knee or hits her ankle, a blow that a healthy girl would forget in five minutes terminates in some mysterious lameness which confines our poor sibyl for months. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... to some of our natural instincts, to imagine our far posterity dwelling under the same roof-tree as ourselves. Still, when people insist on building indestructible houses, they incur, or their children do, a misfortune analogous to that of the Sibyl, when she obtained the grievous boon of immortality. So we may build almost immortal habitations, it is true; but we cannot keep them from growing old, musty, unwholesome, dreary,—full of death scents, ghosts, and murder stains; in short, such habitations ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... not sleep at all but sat bowed together in the window, her arms about her knees, her forehead upon them, and her dark hair loose about her. She sat like a sibyl till the dawn, then rose and bathed and dressed, and was at the hospital earliest of all the workers of that day. In the evening again, just at dusk, she reentered the room, and presently again took her seat by ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... eloquent and obscure you are, my dear," she answered. "You speak like a sibyl. But one thing I see, and that is that you are not so perfectly happy as you would have us believe, seeing that you feel the need of consolations. Then, why do you wish me to follow ...
— Jacqueline, v2 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... her mother's,' began Hugh in a changed voice. 'The poor girl takes it pluckily. It's a damnable thing, you know, for a woman to lose her rings and bracelets and so on—even such a woman as Sibyl. She tried to laugh it off, but I could see—we must buy them again, that's all. And that reminds me—what's ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... The sibyl entertained the officers with her gay conversation, while they drank or sat at the gaining-table; she probably owed her name to the skill she displayed in telling fortunes by cards. The common soldiers ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... would not seem to me in any way complete without your name, dear Sibyl of our own, and as I write it here, I am grateful to know that to mine and me it is not only the name of a Sibyl with deep visions, but of a friend to ...
— A Book of Sibyls - Miss Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs Opie, Miss Austen • Anne Thackeray (Mrs. Richmond Ritchie)
... political career. His radicalism was a thing of the past. He had drifted from Conservatism, with Peel for a leader, to aristocratic socialism; and in 1844, 1845, and 1847 appeared the Trilogy, as he styled the novels 'Coningsby,' 'Tancred,' and 'Sibyl.' Of the three, 'Coningsby' will prove the most entertaining to the modern reader. The hero is a gentleman, and in this respect is an improvement on Vivian Grey, for his audacity is tempered by good breeding. The plot is slight, but the scenes are entertaining. The famous Sidonia, the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... tell you, Sibyl, they are with their own nurse, and Graham will be far more likely to put them all at ease than I should. They will hear that "Miss 'Unter, is the missis, and lets every one know she is. Miss 'Ester keeps the maids on their legs all day long because she won't use hers. ...
— Bulbs and Blossoms • Amy Le Feuvre
... happiness that soaks the heart As hills are soaked by slow unsealing snow, Or secret as that wind without a chart Whereon did the wild leaves of Sibyl go. ...
— Poems • G.K. Chesterton
... a great lonely Tomb. In those days, the house where I live now was not built; all up here Hampstead-ways was grass and fields. It was over these fields that Herbert Spencer and George Eliot used to walk on their way to Hampstead Heath. The Sibyl has gone, but the great Philosopher still remains, to brighten the sunshine. It was not my luck to know him then—would it had been!—but he is my friend and neighbour in these latter days, and, thanks to him, I still get glimpses of the ...
— The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... than herself, a Makaria and Natalia. She was wisdom and intellectual beauty, filling life with a charm and glory "known to neither sea nor land." To those of her own age she was sibyl and seer,—a prophetess, revealing the future, pointing the path, opening their eyes to the great aims only worthy of pursuit in life. To those older than herself she was like the Euphorion in Goethe's drama, child of Faust and Helen,—a wonderful ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... OF ERIC THE RED 14 The Ancestry of Gudrid 14 The Colonization of Greenland 15 Gudrid's Father emigrates to Greenland 20 The Sibyl and the Famine in Greenland 21 Leif the Lucky and the Discovery of Vinland 23 Thorstein's Attempt to find Vinland 26 The Marriage of Gudrid to Thorstein 27 The Ancestry of Thorfinn Karlsefni; his Marriage with Gudrid 30 Karlsefni's Voyage to ...
— The Northmen, Columbus and Cabot, 985-1503 • Various
... ended, the first names with her will be these.' The prophecy is as little like to commend itself to the pious votary of Keats as to the ardent Shelleyite: there are familiars of the Tennysonian Muse, the Sibyl of Rizpah and Vastness and Lucretius and The Voyage, to whom it must seem impertinent beyond the prophet's wont; there are—(but they scarce count)—who grub (as for truffles) for meanings in Browning. But it was not uttered to please, and in truth it has enough of plausibility to infuriate ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... The den of the sibyl was much darker than the antechamber; the color of the walls could scarcely be distinguished. The ceiling, blackened by smoke, far from reflecting the little light that came from a window obstructed by pale and sickly vegetations, absorbed the greater part ...
— Unconscious Comedians • Honore de Balzac
... interest and many scenes of beauty I witnessed in New York and the neighbourhood. The Common Schools; the Croton Waterworks, capable of yielding an adequate supply for a million-and-a-half of people; Hoboken, with its sibyl's cave and elysian fields; the spot on which General Hamilton fell in a duel; the Battery and Castle Garden—a covered amphitheatre capable of accommodating 10,000 people; the Park, and the City Hall with its white marble front; ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies
... easier to copy the beautiful in the nude statues which people Italy, than to express such intellectual majesty as Michael Angelo conceived—that intellectual expression which Story has succeeded in giving to his African Sibyl. Thus while the great artist retained the antique, he superadded a loftiness such as the ancients rarely produced; and sculpture became in his hands, not demoralizing and Pagan, resplendent in sensual charms, but ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... fables. But therein, as I found, dwelt now John Field, an Irishman, and his wife, and several children, from the broad-faced boy who assisted his father at his work, and now came running by his side from the bog to escape the rain, to the wrinkled, sibyl-like, cone-headed infant that sat upon its father's knee as in the palaces of nobles, and looked out from its home in the midst of wet and hunger inquisitively upon the stranger, with the privilege of infancy, not knowing but it was the last of a noble line, and the hope and cynosure ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... will conclude what I have to say of him singly, with this one remark: a lady of my acquaintance, who keeps a kind of correspondence with some authors of the fair sex in France, has been informed by them that Mademoiselle de Scudery, who is as old as Sibyl, and inspired like her by the same god of poetry, is at this time translating Chaucer into modern French. From which I gather that he has been formerly translated into the old Provencal (for how she should come to understand ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... say it amounts to that," Dr. Renshaw returned reluctantly. His age, the kindness of his manner and tone, were disarming, and his listener entertained no more personal resentment toward him than if he were an ancient sibyl uttering of necessity the ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... felt that it had no resting place for me! God! God! what a forlorn and miserable creature is man, when, in his affliction, he cannot say to the worm, I shall be yours! I might have cast away, indeed, the YENARKON—the Giver of Life—the elixir of the Sibyl—but that would have been to subject myself to a power of darkness, in whose fell wrath I should have suffered the casting away of mine ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume XIII, No. 376, Saturday, June 20, 1829. • Various
... strangely blended of the pathetic and the ludicrous, set my mind at work upon the future; but I could find little interest in the study. Even the predictions of my sibyl failed to allure me, nor could life's prospect charm and detain my ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... diamonds are swept aside; and hold their hands over their eyes so as not to be dazzled, the grass paths lead forward gradually to a place where one sees a little opening in the golden rocks. You were at Chamouni last year, Sibyl; did your guide chance to show you the pierced rock of the Aiguille ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... all about that, since you invented her, didn't you? That's what she says; she's awfully sweet on you," Nick kindly pursued. "What I ought to do is to try something as different as possible from that thing; not the sibyl, the muse, the tremendous creature, but the charming woman, the person one knows, differently arranged as she appears en ville, she calls it. I'll do something really serious and send it to you out there with my respects. It will remind you of home ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... fierce pursuing Gaul Had drawn his sword for Marius' fall, The godlike hero with a frown Struck all his rage and malice down; Then how can we dread William Wood, If by thy presence he's withstood? Where wisdom stands to keep the field, In vain he brings his brazen shield; Though like the sibyl's priest he comes, With furious din of brazen drums The force of thy superior voice Shall strike him dumb, ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift |
