"Stygian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and proud Ptolomey, Go plead your cause fore the angry Rhadamant, 800 And tel him why you basely Pompey slew. And let your guilty blood appease his Ghost, That now sits wandring by the Stygian bankes, Vnworthy sacrifice to quite his worth, For Pompey though thou wert mine enemy, And vayne ambition mou'd vs to this strife; Yet now in death when strife and enuy cease. Thy princely vertues and thy noble minde, Moue me to rue thy vndeserued ...
— The Tragedy Of Caesar's Revenge • Anonymous
... who would not Lament him save this wretch alone? Dear son, Must I then never, never see thee more? O me! too well I see thee crossing now The Stygian stream to clasp thy father's shade: Both turn your frowning eyes askance on me, Burning with dreadful wrath! Yea, it was I, 'T was I that slew you both. Infamous mother And ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... you!" he cried out. The only response was the fast diminishing tread of heavy footsteps on a stairway outside. He tried the window bars. The night was black outside; a cool drizzle blew against his face as he peered into the Stygian darkness. Baffled in his attempt to wrench the bars away, he shouted at the top of his voice, hoping that some passer-by—some good Samaritan—would hear his cry and come to his relief. Some one laughed out there in the night; a low, coarse ...
— Her Weight in Gold • George Barr McCutcheon
... Almighty Father, offended that any mortal should rise to the light of life from the infernal shades, struck the son of Phoebus with his forked lightning to the Stygian lake." ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... writhing on the floor in agony indescribable. My veins were filled with liquid fire, and but that stygian darkness was about me, I told myself that I must have seen the smoke ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... the golden bowl! the spirit flown forever Let the bell toll!—a saintly soul floats on the Stygian river; And, Guy De Vere, hast thou no tear?—weep now or never more! See, on yon drear and rigid bier low lies thy love, Lenore! Come, let the burial rite be read—the funeral song be sung, 5 An anthem for the queenliest dead that ever died so young, A dirge for her the doubly ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... Juan and Haidee! they were So loving and so lovely—till then never, Excepting our first parents, such a pair Had run the risk of being damn'd for ever; And Haidee, being devout as well as fair, Had, doubtless, heard about the Stygian river, And hell and purgatory—but forgot Just in the very crisis she ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... gradually introduced into the cult. It fed on the more sensational aspects of certain of the gods brought in: on the enthusiastic rites of Bacchus, on the miracle-working of Aesculapius, on the Stygian mystery of Dis and Proserpina. But its fulfilment was to come from the East, that inexhaustible fountain of religious energy. In the Magna Mater it recognised its own. This was the first undiluted Orientalism which came to Rome. But the state ...
— The Religion of Numa - And Other Essays on the Religion of Ancient Rome • Jesse Benedict Carter
... reached by descending about a hundred steps to a canal below, on which was a boat for conveying passengers to the other end of the canal, with only a small light or torch at the bow to relieve the stygian darkness. Visitors were landed on a platform to listen to a tremendous sound of rushing water being precipitated somewhere in the fearful and impenetrable darkness, whose obscurity and overpowering gloom could almost be felt. On the slope of the Eldon Hill there ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... Unfortunately, there is the domain of the myths and immaterials, there is the home of the law and the force, there dwell the Odyles, the electricities, the magnetisms, and affinities, and there the speculative AEneas pursues shadows more fleeting than the Stygian ghosts, and the grasp of the metaphysician closes on shapes whose embrace is vacancy. The bark that ploughs within this mystic expanse, sheds from its cleaving keel but coruscations of phosphorescent sparkles, which glimmer and quench in a gloom that Egyptian seers never penetrated, and modern ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Aeginetan; nor does it occur to them how much better it would be for the departed one if the fare were not forthcoming,—because then the ferryman would decline to take him, and he would be sent back into the living world. Lest the Stygian Lake should prove inadequate to the requirements of ghostly toilets, the corpse is next washed, anointed with the choicest unguents to arrest the progress of decay, crowned with fresh flowers, and laid out in sumptuous raiment; an obvious precaution, this last; it would not do for the ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... goal, the Dark Moon! And they were prepared for Stygian darkness and a land of perpetual night. The almost invisible gas-clouds thinned; there was a glow ahead that grew brilliant as they watched; and then, with a blinding suddenness that made them shield their eyes, there flashed before them a ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... as a Roger Bacon or even a Count St. Germain. Many take for their ideal Margrave with his ever-renewing youth, and care little for the soul as the price paid for it. Not a few, mistaking "Witch-of-Endorism" pure and simple, for Occultism—"through the yawning Earth from Stygian gloom, call up the meager ghost to walks of light," and want, on the strength of this feat, to be regarded as full blown Adepts. "Ceremonial Magic" according to the rules mockingly laid down by Eliphas Levi, is another imagined alter ego of the philosophy ...
— Studies in Occultism; A Series of Reprints from the Writings of H. P. Blavatsky • H. P. Blavatsky
... day of the gods!" he continued. "And may I from across this Stygian lake (there was a little water collected in the haw-haw here from the recent rains) introduce Miss Lutworth to you—and Miss Clinker and Lord ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn
... special favor of Heaven to me that I hear of you again by this accident; and am made to answer a word de Profundis. It is constantly among the fairest of the few hopes that remain for me on the other side of this Stygian Abyss of a Friedrich (should I ever get through it alive) that I shall then begin writing to you again, who knows if not see you in the body before quite taking wing! For I feel always, what I have some times written, that there is (in a sense) but one completely human voice to me ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... Nor yet ignore The cause of hate and sorrow in thy breast. Time bringeth rest: All is made easy through his power divine. The heir of Agamemnon's line Who dwells by Crisa's pastoral strand Shall yet return unto his native land; And he shall yet regard his own Who reigns beneath upon his Stygian throne. ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... psychology of the ancients, and tortured the letter of Aristotle for a decisive answer. In one of the Lucianic dialogues of the time, Charon tells Mercury how he questioned Aristotle on his belief in immortality, when the philosopher crossed in the Stygian boat; but the prudent sage, although dead in the body and nevertheless living on, declined to compromise himself by a definite answer—and centuries later how was it likely to fare with the interpretation of ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... night—the baying of dogs, and sometimes again the lowing of some disconsolate cow in a distant barn-yard. In the mean-while all the shore rang with the trump of bullfrogs, the sturdy spirits of ancient wine-bibbers and wassailers, still unrepentant, trying to sing a catch in their Stygian lake—if the Walden nymphs will pardon the comparison, for though there are almost no weeds, there are frogs there—who would fain keep up the hilarious rules of their old festal tables, though their voices have waxed hoarse and solemnly grave, mocking ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... lusty as Dido, Fat Clemitson's widow Flits now a small shadow By Stygian hid ford; And good Master Clapton Has thirty years napt on, The ground he last hapt on, Entomb'd by ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... the plaster close by the bed, his eyes fell on a piece of rich old tapestry! Curtains of silk damask, all bespotted with quaintest flowers, each like a page of Chaucer's poetry, hung round his bed, quite other than fit sails for the Stygian boat. They had made the bed as different as the vine in summer from the vine in winter. A quilt of red satin lay in the place of the patchwork coverlid. Everything had been changed. He thought the mattress felt soft under him—but that was only ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... almost over, when, between us and the border of the basin, arose a long neck, on the top of which, like the blossom of some Stygian lily, sat what seemed the head of a corpse, its mouth half open, and full of canine teeth. I went on; it retreated, then drew aside. The lady stepped on the firm land, but the leopardess between us, roused once more, turned, and flew at the throat of ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... likte him best, Or ever sleepe his eie-strings did untye, Should be his pray. And therefore still on hye He over him did hold his cruell clawes, Threatning with greedy gripe to doe him dye, And rend in peeces with his ravenous pawes, If ever he transgrest the fatal Stygian lawes. ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... crusted thickly with white frost. Carefully he laid flat on his belly and edged himself along until he could thrust his face into the abyss. The air felt very warm—a dank, damp warmth, such as exudes from the depths of a swamp in summer. He peered downward but his eyes could not penetrate the Stygian blackness out of which rose the monotonous ...
— Connie Morgan in the Fur Country • James B. Hendryx
... Stygian gloom violence was done swiftly, surely, and without mercy; with pity, yes, and with regret. Lanyard was sorry for the man at the wheel. But what was to be done could not be done in any ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... brilliant, flickering illuminations, bewildering to the senses. Several times she was forced to turn away her head, but only for a second, as she was compelled by some strange fascination to look upon the wonderful spectacle. Flash upon flash, racing gleam upon gleam, Stygian darkness and crashing thunder intermingled in an appalling confusion. Jean felt that she could endure the sight no longer. Her body trembled, and her eyes ached. She was about to go back to Mammy, when her father laid his hand upon ...
— The King's Arrow - A Tale of the United Empire Loyalists • H. A. Cody
... a sort of home-coming, mingled with a peculiar dream-like feeling, that they were arriving on a strange planet, after having been ferried across Stygian currents on a Charon's raft. Out there, on the ocean and over the ocean, hovered a gruesomeness of solitudes, in which the human being, himself seeing everything, remains unseen, unknown, forgotten by God and the world. To ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... to what lies beyond the gates of death, still he hoped for the brighter and better life, and when that beautiful smile overspread his face when he died, those who beheld it felt that he had realized his hopes, and in the shadowy realm that bounds the Stygian river had met his little girl Inez, whose untimely death at the age of barely 12 years, had worked such havoc in his heart. Mr. Brann loved nature, not only when the gorgeous god of day threw over earth and sky the ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... discontent there is in all countries a general grievance and general suffering. The surface of society is not incessantly disturbed without a cause. I recollect in the poem of the greatest of Italian poets, he tells us that as he saw in vision the Stygian lake, and stood upon its banks, he observed the constant commotion upon the surface of the pool, and his good instructor and guide explained to him ...
— Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Volume 1 • John Bright
... fell. He was between them now. Stretched full length on the floor, Jimmie Dale raised the lower portion of the canvas away from in front of his face. He could see nothing; the place was in Stygian blackness; but it had been close and stifling, and, at least, it gave him ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... the panic, and some began to pray who had not prayed for years. The pious and the educated (and there were plenty of both in Barbados) were not proof against the infection. Old letters describe the scene in the churches that morning as hideous—prayers, sobs, and cries, in Stygian darkness, from trembling crowds. And still the darkness continued and the ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... Leroi, who has surnamed himself Dix-Aout, 'Leroi August-Tenth,' it will become the wonder of the world. Herein has Sansculottism fashioned for itself a Sword of Sharpness: a weapon magical; tempered in the Stygian hell-waters; to the edge of it all armour, and defence of strength or of cunning shall be soft; it shall mow down Lives and Brazen-gates; and the waving of it shed terror through the ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... (here) Coffee made, And ever since the rest drive on the trade; Me no good Engalash! and sure enough, He plaid the Quack to salve his Stygian stuff; Ver boon for de stomach, de Cough, de Ptisick And I believe him, for it looks like Physick. Coffee a crust is charkt into a coal, The smell and taste of the Mock China bowl; Where huff and puff, they labour out their lungs, Lest Dives-like they should bewail their tongues. ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... if we part to meet no more This side the misty Stygian river, Be sure of this: On yonder shore Sweet cheer awaiteth such as we— A Sabine pagan's heaven, O friend— And fellowship that knows ...
— Echoes from the Sabine Farm • Roswell Martin Field and Eugene Field
... over the water is also a death symbol. We have not only the anxiety about death caused by the moral conflict, but we have also to remember that the passage into the uterus is a passage to the beyond. The water is the Water of Death (stygian waters) and of Life. In narrower sense it is also seminal fluid and the amniotic liquor. It is overdetermined as indeed all symbols are. The water bears the death color black. In the Flying Post dream a black ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... has been the friend and confidant of Four Dogs who have helped to humanize him for a quarter of a century and more, and who have souls to be saved, he is sure. And when he crosses the Stygian River he expects to find, on the other shore, a trio of dogs wagging their tails almost off, in their joy at his coming, and with honest tongues hanging out to lick his hands and his feet. And then he is going, with these faithful, devoted dogs at his heels, to talk about dogs with Dr. John ...
— A Boy I Knew and Four Dogs • Laurence Hutton
... ill lighted, except where a blaze of illumination poured from the bigger saloons. The interims were dark, and the side streets and alleys stygian. "None too safe, either," Sansome understated the case. Many people were abroad, but Keith noticed that there seemed to be no idlers; every one appeared to be going somewhere in particular. After a short stroll they entered ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... a lake whose lilies lie Like maidens in the lap of death, So pale, so cold, so motionless Its Stygian breast they press; They breathe, and toward the purple sky The pallid perfumes of their breath Ascend in spiral shapes, for there No wind disturbs the voiceless air— No murmur breaks the oblivious mood Of that tenebrean solitude— No Djinn, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... long time indeed—before any light stole in upon his Stygian darkness, and then, when the light did come, it came in skyrocket guise, and had its share of cons attached ...
— The Rejuvenation of Aunt Mary • Anne Warner
... mesa or escarpment, I gave it a name to suit my fancy; and as flushing, fading, its glory changed, sometimes I rechristened it. Jupiter's Chariot, brazen wheeled, stood ready to roll into the clouds. Semiramis's Bed, all gold, shone from a tower of Babylon. Castor and Pollux clasped hands over a Stygian river. The Spur of Doom, a mountain shaft as red as hell, and inaccessible, insurmountable, lured with strange light. Dusk, a bold, black dome, was shrouded by the shadow of a giant mesa. The Star of Bethlehem glittered from the brow of ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... "And gamble for gold on Freedom's shrine!" Thus saying, the Ghost, as he took his flight, Gave a Parthian kick to the Benthamite, Which sent him, whimpering, off to Jerry— And vanisht away to the Stygian ferry! ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... heat and stir The greater coyness breed in her: Yet thou may'st find, ere Age's frost, Thy long apprenticeship not lost, Learning at last that Stygian Fate Supples for him that knows to wait. The Muse is womanish, nor deigns Her love to him who pules and plains; With proud, averted face she stands To him who wooes with empty hands. Make thyself free of manhood's guild; Pull down thy barns and greater build; ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... course; 110 There rouse Oblivion from her sable cave, Where dull she sits by Lethe's sluggish wave; Command her to secure the sacred bound. Where lives Content retired, and all around Diffuse the deepest glooms of Stygian night, And screen the virgin from the tyrant's sight; That the vain purpose of his life may try Still to explore, what still eludes his eye.' He spoke; loud praises shake the bright abode, And all applaud the justice of ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... never forget the look of those limitless lands wherefrom the water had corroded all color and form, whose contours crumbled on all sides under the assault of the liquid putrescence that flowed across the broken bones of stakes and wire and framing; nor, rising above those things amid the sullen Stygian immensity, can I ever forget the vision of the thrill of reason, logic and simplicity that suddenly shook these men like a ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... swear, and yon broad Heav'n above, And Stygian stream beneath, the weightiest oath Of solemn pow'r to bind the blessed Gods; By thine own sacred head, our nuptial bed, Whose holy tie I never could forswear; That not by my suggestion and advice Earth-shaking ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... sons, as many blooming maids, In one sad day beheld the Stygian shades; These by Apollo's silver bow were slain, Those Cynthia's arrows stretched upon the plain." ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black stinking fume thereof nearest resembling the stygian smoke of the pit that ...
— Agriculture in Virginia, 1607-1699 • Lyman Carrier
... to hope, That he might yet be lifted by a rope. Behold the awful bench, on which he sat! He was as hard and ponderous wood as that: Yet when his sand was out, we find at last, That death has overset him with a blast. Our Boat is now sail'd to the Stygian ferry, There to supply old Charon's leaky wherry; Charon in him will ferry souls to Hell; A trade our Boat[5] has practised here so well: And Cerberus has ready in his paws Both pitch and brimstone, to fill up his flaws. Yet, spite of death and fate, I here maintain We may place ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... brutes All involved in wild disputes, Roaring till their lungs were spent, 'Privilege of Parliament.' Now a new misfortune feels, Dreading to be laid by the heels. Never durst the muse before Enter that infernal door; Clio, stifled with the smell, Into spleen and vapours fell, By the Stygian steams that flew From the dire infectious crew. Not the stench of Lake Avernus Could have more offended her nose; Had she flown but o'er the top, She had felt her pinions drop, And by exhalations dire, Though a goddess, ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... water." He pulled the rude shallop to her feet and they got in and went on, Jack not heeding her gibe. "These brackish, threatening deeps remind me of all sorts of weird and uncanny things; Stygian pools—Lethe—what not mystic and terrifying. See, the tiny waves that curl before our boat are like thin ink; a thousand roots and herbs and who knows what mysterious vegetable mixture colors these dark deeps? I could fancy myself ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... cries, there came faintly to the keen ears of the ape-man, the agonized moan of a child. No longer did Tarzan hesitate. Hurling the door aside, he sprang into the dark opening. Narrow and black was the corridor; but long use of his eyes in the Stygian blackness of the jungle nights had given to the ape-man something of the nocturnal visionary powers of the wild things with which he ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... rob me, you will do A thing extremely pleasing to my heart.' 700 Then Mercury swore by the Stygian dew, That he would never steal his bow or dart, Or lay his hands on what to him was due, Or ever would employ his powerful art Against his Pythian fane. Then Phoebus swore 705 There was no God or Man ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... chilly Dodona, and those who tilled the fields about delightful Titaresius, which pours its fair-flowing stream into the Peneus; nor is it mingled with silver-eddied Peneus, but flows on the surface of it like oil. For it is a streamlet of the Stygian wave, the ...
— The Iliad of Homer (1873) • Homer
... the shadow of heaven and earth, the oblivion of all goodness; the pains unspeakable, the griefs unremovable, the dwelling of the devils. Dragons, serpents, adders, toads, crocodiles, and all manner of venomous and noisome creatures; the puddle of sin, the stinking far ascending from the Stygian lake, brimstone, pitch, and all manner of unclean metals, the perpetual and unquenchable fire, the end of whose miseries was never purposed by God. Yea, yea, Faustus, thou sayest I shall, I must, nay, I will tell thee the secrets of our kingdom, for thou buyest it dearly, and thou must and shalt ...
— Mediaeval Tales • Various
... sacrament by which Catiline bound the soul of his fellow-conspirators, in order that both by the daring of the deed he might have proof of their sincerity, and by the horror thereof astringe their souls by adamantine fetters, and Novem-Stygian oaths, to that wherefrom hereafter the weakness of the flesh might shrink. Wherefore, O Jack! we too have determined, following that ancient and classical example, to fill, as he did, a bowl with the lifeblood of our most ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... be gained to his master. Perhaps Jones might have seen him in that light, and have recollected the passage where the Sibyl, in order to procure an entrance for Aeneas, presents the keeper of the Stygian avenue with such a sop. Jones, in like manner, now began to offer a bribe to the human Cerberus, which a footman, overhearing, instantly advanced, and declared, "if Mr Jones would give him the sum proposed, he would conduct him to the lady." ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... was going, and finally they began to abuse one another. Anno abused Stanislaus, because he had disarranged her hat and hair, and Stanislaus, Anno, because he couldn't hear all she said, and because what he did hear was silly. Then the Stygian darkness of the great pines grew; and the silence of wonder fell on the two quarrellers. On, on, on rolled the droshky, a monotonous rumble, rumble, that sounded very loud amid the intense hush that had suddenly fallen on the forest. ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... de Revaillon. It had for me a peculiar attraction on account of the gloomy grandeur of the scene at the entrance. When I saw it for the first time I understood at once the supernatural horror in which the peasant has learnt to hold such places. It responds to impressions left on the mind of the 'Stygian cave forlorn,' the entrance to Dante's 'City of Sorrow,' and that other cave where Aeneas witnessed in cold terror the prophetic fury of ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... to me, Speak from thy silent grave; It doth not roll o'er thee, Death's dark and Stygian wave! Sweet! speak, I'm sick, to hear The heaven of thy voice, Which wont, while life was dear, To thrill me ...
— Lays of Ancient Virginia, and Other Poems • James Avis Bartley
... command". 300 Jove spoke—His son obey'd:—and to his feet Bound the light wings of gold—wings ever fleet, Which over earth and sea, through yielding air, Swift as the wind the rapid herald bear; 305 And took the rod that calls the trembling ghost To light, or binds it to the Stygian coast, Gives balmy slumber, breaks the sweet repose, Weighs down the lid of dying eyes that close. Thro' storms and dripping clouds with this he glides; Now o'er the summit and the hoary sides 310 Of Atlas hangs, pois'd on whose shoulders rest The Heav'ns: his head ...
— The Fourth Book of Virgil's Aeneid and the Ninth Book of Voltaire's Henriad • Virgil and Voltaire
... Escaped the Stygian pool, though long detained In that obscure sojourn; while, in his flight Through utter and through middle darkness borne, He sang ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... and hotter, while around us rolled an oppressive steam, which obscured and hid the sun; the guide, who was a few steps in advance of me, presently turned back, and seizing hold of me, hurried out of this Stygian exhalation. ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... under our stern, and vanished silently down stream. We all became hushed and apprehensive. The night was gigantic and terrible. There were a few stars, but the flood slid along too swiftly to reflect them. The whole scene seemed some Stygian imagination of Dante. As we drew further and further into that lightless land, little twists and curls of vapour wriggled over the black river-surface. Our homeless, irrelevant, tiny steamer seemed to hang between ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... the long Slow smooth strong lapse of Lethe—past the toil Wherein all souls are taken as a spoil, The Stygian web of waters—if your song Be quenched not, O our brethren, but be strong As ere ye too shook ...
— Poems & Ballads (Second Series) - Swinburne's Poems Volume III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... sea, the Strophades we gain, So called in Greece, where dwells, with Harpies, dire Celaeno, in the vast Ionian main, Since, forced from Phineus' palace to retire, They fled their former banquet. Heavenly ire Ne'er sent a pest more loathsome; ne'er were seen Worse plagues to issue from the Stygian mire— Birds maiden-faced, but trailing filth obscene, With taloned hands and looks ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... the necessary elementary knowledge. But the commander of a smaller unit, say a platoon, going to or returning from a certain place in the dark, rarely has any knowledge of the right bearing to work on, and if the night is cloudy, he is surrounded by a Stygian darkness in which he soon feels a little doubtful of his uncharted way. He begins to zigzag a bit, peering through the gloom for some familiar landmark. The men, who for the most part would be completely lost in three minutes on their own, are critical ...
— The Fifth Battalion Highland Light Infantry in the War 1914-1918 • F.L. Morrison
... scene, no multiplicity of selfish pleasures will in the long run enable them to escape it. As Carlyle says, 'The restless, gnawing ennui which, like a dark, dim, ocean flood, communicating with the Phlegethons and Stygian deeps, begirdles every human life so guided—is it not the painful cry even of that imprisoned heroism?... You ask for happiness. "Oh give me happiness," and they hand you ever new varieties of covering for the skin, ever new kinds of supply for the digestive apparatus.... Well, rejoice ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... of simples Cocted in Stygian shades— Acids of wrinkles and pimples From faces of ancient maids— Acrid precipitates sunken From tempers of scolding wives Whose husbands, uncommonly drunken, Are commonly found in dives,— With this I baptize and appoint thee (to St. John.) ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... the sonnet beginning "Not on sad Stygian shore," the first of those I have grouped under the heading "The Life after Death." It appears in his notebooks with this ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... the Sun, Before the Heavens, thou wert, and at the voice Of God, as with a mantle, didst invest The rising World of waters dark and deep, Won from the void and formless Infinite! Thee I revisit now with bolder wing, Escaped the Stygian Pool, though long detained In that obscure sojourn, while in my flight, Through utter and through middle Darkness borne, With other notes than to the Orphean lyre I sung of Chaos and eternal Night, Taught by the Heavenly Muse to venture down The dark descent, and up to re-ascend, ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... I stand and mourn at thine. Yet no breath of death strikes thence, no shadow of gloom, Only light more bright than gold of the inmost mine, Only steam of incense warm from love's own shrine. Not the darkling stream, the sundering Stygian ford, Not the hour that smites and severs as a sword, Not the night subduing light that perisheth, Smite, subdue, divide from us by doom abhorred, Life so sweet as this that ...
— Astrophel and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne, Vol. VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... women, sunk in that putrefying well of abominations; they have oozed in upon London, from the universal Stygian quagmire of British industrial life; are accumulated in the well of the concern, to that extent. British charity is smitten to the heart, at the laying bare of such a scene; passionately undertakes, by enormous subscription ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... Edmundsbury Monk and Boswell, now seven centuries old, how remote is it from us; exotic, extraneous; in all ways, coming from far abroad! The language of it is not foreign only but dead: Monk-Latin lies across not the British Channel, but the ninefold Stygian Marshes, Stream of Lethe, and one knows not where! Roman Latin itself, still alive for us in the Elysian Fields of Memory, is domestic in comparison. And then the ideas, life-furniture, whole workings and ways of this worthy Jocelin; covered deeper ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... a new, patent, jointless fishing-rod, guv'nor," rejoined Sam, in a Stygian aside. "Nobody 'ere'll 'ave the slightest notion ...
— Mr. Punch Awheel - The Humours of Motoring and Cycling • J. A. Hammerton
... 'Behold the Stygian mountains,' replied Manto. 'Through their centre runs the passage of Night which leads to the regions ...
— The Infernal Marriage • Benjamin Disraeli
... But words responded tremulous and weak, And mustering his dissipated strength, A sitting posture he assumed at length,— "Whate'er thou art, thou harbinger of gloom, Thou fiend or ghoul, fresh from the new made tomb, Thou vampire, diabolical and fell, Thou stygian shade or denizen of hell, I charge thee, thing of evil, to confess Why thou hast thus disturbed my sore distress. Why hast thou burst my chamber's bolted door Where guest unbidden never trod before? Break this ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... the doctor's orders, and must soon be back again to that unkindly haunt "upon the mountains visitant"—there goes no angel there but the angel of death.[37] The deaths of last winter are still sore spots to me.... So, you see, I am not very likely to go on a "wild expedition," cis-Stygian at least. The truth is, I am scarce justified in standing for the chair, though I hope you will not mention this; and yet my health is one of my reasons, for the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the Stygian gloom a torrent of sheet-lightning rolled down across the heavens, bringing in its wake a moment of terrible light. It was in one of these brief moments of illumination that the wan watchers at Hall's Harbor discerned a long gray ship being swept like a specter before ...
— Great Pirate Stories • Various
... trip on this river of Stygian darkness. With oil lanterns that emit but a feeble flickering flame you see ghostlike figures, goblins and grim cave monsters that loom before you; your imagination peoples these subterranean halls and their titanic masonry with fantastic forms of its own creation. At this place these ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... and tried to persuade him to lie down and sleep, while he himself would stand at the helm and steer the ship. But Palinurus refused to quit his post. Then the treacherous god waved before his eyes a branch that had been dipped in the Stygian Le'the, the fabled river of forgetfulness, and soon the pilot dropped off into a deep slumber, during which Somnus leaning heavily upon him, plunged him headlong into ...
— Story of Aeneas • Michael Clarke
... years Dean of St. Patrick's before he produced those famous letters which have left their mark so indelibly upon the course of Irish politics. Swift's part in this Stygian pool of the eighteenth century is rather a difficult one to explain. He was not in any sense an Irish champion, indeed, objected to being called an Irishman at all, and regarded his life in Ireland as one of all but unendurable ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... of New York more successfully developed than the use of electricity for transportation. The last night of the ten years found the city buried in stygian gloom, because the duty of lighting its streets is still a matter of private profit; and the insolent corporation which fattens upon this franchise surrendered the privilege of murdering its linemen unpunished, only when its poles were cut and its wires torn down. A more classic application ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... several hundred yards above Steve's nook a part of a high railroad bridge. The gaunt trestle ran out past midstream, then stopped, all the portion toward the northern shore burned away. It stood against the intensely lit sky and stream like the skeleton of some antediluvian monster, then vanished into Stygian darkness. The thunder crashed at once, an ear-splitting clap followed by long reverberations. As these died, in the span of silence before should come the next flash and crash, Steve became conscious of another sound, dull and distant at first, then nearer and rushingly ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... to my state of mind I am with Achilles shouting in the Trenches, or with Theocritus in the Vales of Sicily. Or I throw my whole being into Troilus, and repeating those lines, 'I wander like a lost soul upon the Stygian Banks staying for waftage,' I melt into the air with a voluptuousness so delicate that I am ...
— The Enjoyment of Art • Carleton Noyes
... zone, lies the region of perpetual night and cold—the Dark Country. This area embraces the rest of the planet, comprising something less than half of its entire surface. Here is eternal night—a night of Stygian darkness, unlighted even by the stars, since the same atmosphere ...
— The Fire People • Ray Cummings
... giant god was Carthoris of Helium, yet in the clutches of these unseen creatures of the pit's Stygian night he was helpless as ...
— Thuvia, Maid of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... second mate's voice I turned, and saw, dead astern, a thin streak of ghostly white, drawn horizontally across the curtain of Stygian darkness in that quarter. The line lengthened and broadened with amazing rapidity; and presently a low ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... drawn to the farther wall. An archway gaped there. I walked across the room, passed under the archway. Instantly I was in complete, stygian darkness. But I ...
— Where the World is Quiet • Henry Kuttner
... inexhaustible reservoir of tar, with more and more picturesque results. The caldron had been elevated upon bricks and was not perfectly balanced; and under a heavy impact of the struggling group it lurched and went partly over, pouring forth a Stygian tide which formed a deep pool in ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington
... bloomed on the fence; wistaria, in its deeper green of midsummer, ran riot over the trellis where Clarence had basely dodged his lovely mistress, and, after making a furry pin wheel of himself, had fled through the airhole into Stygian depths. ...
— The Green Mouse • Robert W. Chambers
... Welcome an owner, not a sojourner. This peaceful seat my poverty secures; War seldom enters but where wealth allures: Nor yet despise it; for this poor abode Has oft received, and yet receives a God; A God victorious of the Stygian race Here laid his sacred limbs, and sanctified the place, 710 This mean retreat did mighty Pan contain: Be emulous of him, and pomp disdain, And dare not to ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... more—this time in the final dissolution from which there is no quickening. Korak propped the dead body against the door frame. There it sat, lifelike in the gloom. Then the ape-man turned and glided into the Stygian darkness of ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... shores, And others of the Harpies grim, since shut were Phineus' doors Against them, and they had to leave the tables they had won. No monster woefuller than they, and crueller is none Of all God's plagues and curses dread from Stygian waters sent. A winged thing with maiden face, whose bellies' excrement Is utter foul; and hooked hands, and face for ever pale With hunger ...
— The AEneids of Virgil - Done into English Verse • Virgil
... fanatic Gregory, the worldly Urban, the austere Innocent the Tenth, the affable Alexander the Seventh, all concurred in assuring me that it was deeply to be regretted that I should ever have been emancipated from the restraints of the Stygian realm, to which I should do well to return with all possible celerity; that it would much conduce to the interests of the Church if my name could be forgotten; and that as for doing anything to revive its memory, they would just as soon ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... Station glowed frigidly. Opposite, a single arc-lamp on the corner of Cypress Street cast a white, cheerless light on the gelid pavement. The few stores along the avenue were dark, with the exception of the warmly lighted White Star restaurant directly opposite the Stygian spot ...
— Midnight • Octavus Roy Cohen
... your beames I will me safely shrowd, From dreaded storme of his disdainfull spight: To you th' inheritance belongs by right Of brothers prayse, to you eke longs his love. Let not his love, let not his restlesse spright, 430 Be unreveng'd, that calles to you above From wandring Stygian shores, ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... rubber boots which, mutatis mutandis, were very like those Davies was wearing. Her hair, like his, was spangled with moisture. and her rose-brown skin struck a note of delicious colour against the sullen Stygian background. ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... forge was a machine which had been used to operate the crane. Beyond it was stygian darkness. He might ...
— The Whispering Spheres • Russell Robert Winterbotham
... the shrouds, and the dashing of the waves, mingle with the roar of the thunder. The swelling sea seems lifted up to the heavens, to scatter its foam among the clouds; then sinking away to the bottom assumes the color of the shoal—a Stygian blackness. ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... unctuous oyly kind of roote as hath been found in some great tobacco takers, that after death were opened. A custom loathsome to the eye, harmful to the braine, dangerous to the lungs, and the black stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... and hopeless blank in Kelly, the watchman. Mr. Kelly's films ran smoothly up to a certain point, after which they were not even a blur. The Stygian darkness of his hiatus refused to lift by questioning. He had neither seen nor heard anything suspicious or out of the ordinary. About one o'clock in the morning he had laid down his pipe to rest his long-suffering ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... dire guilt away, and calm'd his fears. The sensual vapour, with Circean fume, Involved his royal son in deeper gloom, And dimm'd his glory, till, immersed in vice, His heart renounced the Ruler of the Skies, Adopting Stygian gods.—The changeful hue Of his incestuous brother meets your view, Who lurks behind: observe the sudden turn Of love and hatred blanch his cheek, and burn! His ruin'd sister there, with frantic speed, To Absalom recounts the direful deed.— Samson behold, ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... lying in the great Ionian sea, which boding Celaeno and the other Harpies inhabit since Phineus' house was shut on them, and they fled in terror from the board of old. Than these no deadlier portent nor any fiercer plague of divine wrath hath issued from the Stygian waters; winged things with maidens' countenance, bellies dropping filth, and clawed hands and faces ever wan ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... boiling pours itself down to a foss Sluic'd from its source. Far murkier was the wave Than sablest grain: and we in company Of the' inky waters, journeying by their side, Enter'd, though by a different track, beneath. Into a lake, the Stygian nam'd, expands The dismal stream, when it hath reach'd the foot Of the grey wither'd cliffs. Intent I stood To gaze, and in the marish sunk descried A miry tribe, all naked, and with looks Betok'ning rage. They with their hands alone Struck not, but with the head, the breast, ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... what it is impossible they should understand, and by his sophistries alienating them from their venerable parent? Not so, by Hercules! I should ill deserve my office of supreme guardian of the honor and liberties of Rome, did I not mew him up in the Fabrician dungeons, or send him lower still to the Stygian shades.' ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... and dinner-hour impends, she bethinks herself, and crowds the fire below to a roaring heat, and finishes the process by a smart burn, involving the kitchen and surrounding precincts in volumes of Stygian gloom. From such preparations has arisen the very current medical opinion that fried meats are indigestible. They are indigestible, if they are greasy; but French cooks have taught us that a thing has no more need to be greasy because emerging from ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... mortal prayers are heard in hell, Hear, Goddess dread, invisible! Monarch of the regions drear, Aidoneus, hear, O hear! By a gentle, tearless doom Speed this stranger to the gloom, Let him enter without pain The all-shrouding Stygian plain. Wrongfully in life oppressed, Be ...
— The Oedipus Trilogy • Sophocles
... looking exactly as it did when we placed it in the shield. No eye, no microscope, can detect a trace of change in the white film that is spread over it. And yet there is a potential image in it,—a latent soul, which will presently appear before its judge. This is the Stygian stream,—this solution of proto-sulphate of iron, with which we will presently ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... this scene, and asked the Sibyl to explain to him its meaning. "You see before you," she replied, "the deep pools of Cocytus, and the Stygian lake, by which the Gods are accustomed to swear when they take an oath which they dare not violate. All that crowd which Charon will not ferry across is composed of persons who after death received not the rites of burial; those only are permitted to enter the boat who have been interred ...
— The Children's Hour, Volume 3 (of 10) • Various
... water could not be forded for a distance of nearly three hundred feet, the Indians had constructed a bridge by cutting down two large trees and uniting the space that still remained between them in this Stygian lake, by tying logs together, with cross-poles for flooring. To add to the embarrassments of the Spaniards, apparently innumerable small bands of Indians were hovering on their track, assailing them with their sharp-pointed arrows, wherever they could get a shot, ...
— Ferdinand De Soto, The Discoverer of the Mississippi - American Pioneers and Patriots • John S. C. Abbott
... came many of the ante-Homeric legends—the accusation of the dead, the trial before the judges of hell; the reward and punishment of every man, from the Pharaoh who had descended from his throne to the slave who had escaped from his chain; the dog Cerberus, the Stygian stream, the Lake of Oblivion, the piece of money, Charon and his boat, the fields of Aahlu or Elysium, and the islands of the blessed; thence came the first ritual for the dead, litanies to the sun, and painted or illuminated missals; ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... Is like an ant-hill which a twig disturbs, But twig stilled never. And to see her face, Broad with sleek homely beams; her babied hands, Ever like 'lighting doves, and her small eyes— Blue wells a-twinkle, arch and lewd and pious— To darken all sudden into Stygian gloom, And paint disaster with uplifted whites, Is life's epitome. She prates and prates— A waterbrook of words o'er twelve small pebbles. And when she dies—some grey, long, summer evening, When the bird shouts ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume I. • Walter de la Mare
... of the corridor, I descended half a dozen stairs, I got to the middle of the gallery overlooking the large entrance hall—below me, above me, on all sides of me, was Stygian darkness. I stopped, and there suddenly rang out, apparently from close at hand, a loud, clear, most appallingly clear, blood-curdling cry, which, beginning in a low key, ended in a shriek so horrid, ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... a gleam of light! Could a man choke himself with his own fingers if the worst came to the worst? The Digger and Stygian darkness—now—when he was going mad! Men could not be so cruel.... But they'd say he was drunk. He would lie still and cling with all his strength and heart and soul to sanity. He would think of That Evening with Lucille—and of her kisses. He would recite the Odes of Horace, ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... Caesar's and Marius's Villas, Agrippina's Tomb, Caligula's Bridge, &c., may be anything; they are nothing but shapeless fragments, only on a rock I saw a bit of marble or stucco in what they call Caesar's Villa. The Stygian Lake presented no horrors, nor the Elysian Fields any delights; the former is a great round piece of water, and the latter are very common-looking vineyards. When well wooded, which in the time of the Romans it was, this coast must have been a most delicious and luxurious ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... he should not perjure himself, but believe that there was some deity in the temple, or at the ensanguined altar! That the souls of the departed are anything, and the realms below, and the punt-pole and frogs of the Stygian pool, and that so many thousands pass over in one boat, not even the boys believe, except those who are too young to ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... regal mantle dight, Maidens immers'd in thoughts profound, Spectres, that haunt the shades of night, And spread a waste of ruin round. These form thy never-varying theme, While, buried in thy Stygian stream, Religion mourns her wasted fires And Hymen's sacred torch ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... finds some trait for satire; Hunts your weak point out, then shows it Where it injures to disclose it, In the mode that's most invidious, Adding every trait that's hideous, From the bile, whose blackening river Rushes through his Stygian liver. Then he thinks himself a lover: Why I really can't discover In his mind, age, face, or figure: Viper-broth might give him vigor. Let him keep the caldron steady, He the venom has already. For his faults, he has but ONE— 'Tis but envy, when all's done. He but pays ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... that illumined her figure emanated from, it did not perceptibly dispel the Stygian gloom all about her. She was bathed in dazzling light, but framed ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... of the rapids, he is the incarnation of all that is untamed, a wild spirit of the mountain stream, as free as a raindrop or a sunbeam. How solitary he is, a lone little bird, flitting from rock to rock through the desolate gorge, like some spirit in a Stygian world. Yet he sings continually as he takes his solitary way along the stream, and bursts of melody, so eerie and sylvan as to fire the imagination, come to the ear, sounding above the roar of the torrent. Like Orpheus, he seeks ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... stalk about her door Like a strange soul upon the Stygian banks Staying for waftage. O, be thou my Charon, And give me swift transportance to these fields Where I may wallow in the lily beds Propos'd for the deserver! O gentle Pandar, from Cupid's shoulder pluck his painted wings, and fly ...
— The History of Troilus and Cressida • William Shakespeare [Craig edition]
... a small pause. The vessel seemed to have lost way altogether, to swim like a spirit ship that Stygian tide. The lieutenant moved forward, leaving Lanyard alone. The voice of the leadsman was stilled. By the wheel the captain stood absolutely motionless, his body vaguely silhouetted against the glow of the binnacle. The hands that gripped the wheel so savagely were as steady as if carven out ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... and politics. In the first, they were content that their mothers and wives should dwell with them, but in the second, no kid slipper was ever to be set. Horace Mann had warned women to stand back, saying: "Politics is a stygian pool." I insisted that politics had reached this condition through the permit given to Satan to turn all the waste water of his mills into that pool; that this grant must be rescinded and the pool drained at all hazards. Indeed ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... failed for an instant of proper service. Candles, kerosene lamps and old gas fixtures, the rusty cocks of which had not been turned in a decade, were put hastily in use, while the streets were black with a blackness particularly Stygian, contrasted with the brilliantly illuminated squares supplied by the Consolidated Company. All night long the mechanical force, attended by the worried but painfully helpless Bobby, pounded and tapped and worked in the grime, but it was not until broad daylight that they were able to ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... and I tried hard to make one, for myself, through German pantheism. But I turn this rubbish over disconsolately, for it is a material God, and does not respond to one spiritual nature. It seems rather to react against it. Alas! alas! I sink down into a Cimmerian darkness here; it seems as if the Stygian pools of blackness had closed over me, and a cry of anguish goes forth from my inmost soul, piercing the dark depths to learn what is spirit? and what is God? What manner of existence or unity of Being is He? Who is He? Where is He? And how can I attain to a knowledge ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur
... to him; they admire him "that for the general safety he despised his own"; and the only scene of rejoicing recorded in the annals of Hell, before the Fall of Man, is at the dissolution of the Stygian Council, when the devils come forth ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... of worth and sensibility it is of some little consequence whether contemporaries believe, and posterity be taught to believe, that his debauched and reprobate life cast a Stygian gloom over the evening of his father's days, saved him the trouble of feigning a character completely detestable, and succeeded, at last, in bringing his "grey hairs with sorrow to ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... Cerberus and blackest Midnight born In Stygian cave forlorn 'Mongst horrid shapes, and shrieks, and sights unholy! Find out some uncouth cell Where brooding Darkness spreads his jealous wings And the night-raven sings; There, under ebon shades and low-browed rocks As ragged as thy locks, In dark ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... compounded of brimstone and Stygian hatred, offered by Calvin and the Catholics, and after the plethoric gorge of good cheer at Gargantua's table, the mild sedative of Montaigne's conversation comes like a draft of nepenthe or the fruit of the lotus. In him we find no blast and blaze of propaganda, ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... Egyptian! Glorious sorceress of the Nile, Light the path to Stygian horrors With the splendors of thy smile. Give the Caesar crowns and arches, Let his brow the laurel twine; I can scorn the Senate's triumphs, Triumphing ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... great Marlborough,—he could not have been. But there is in him a recognizable flash of magnanimity, of heroic enterprise and purpose; which is highly peculiar in that sordid element. And it can be said of him, as of lightning striking ineffectual on the Bog of Allen or the Stygian Fens, that his strength was never tried."—For the upshot of him we ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... his father's seat, Might presently be banish'd into hell, And aged Saturn in Olympus dwell. They granted what he crav'd; and once again Saturn and Ops began their golden reign: Murder, rape, war, and lust, and treachery, Were with Jove clos'd in Stygian empery. But long this blessed time continu'd not: As soon as he his wished purpose got, He, reckless of his promise, did despise The love of th' everlasting Destinies. They, seeing it, both Love and him abhorr'd, And Jupiter unto his place restor'd: And, but ...
— Hero and Leander and Other Poems • Christopher Marlowe and George Chapman
... plodding pony stood still, with a slight neigh and ears erect. They were at that moment winding around the face of a precipice, with the wall on the left rising to a height of a hundred feet or more, and sloping downward on the right into a gorge of Stygian blackness. The path was a yard or over in width, so there was plenty of foothold, and the halt could not be due to any ...
— Up the Forked River - Or, Adventures in South America • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... favorites. His love is showered upon all alike. His gifts are for all His children. It was never the Divine intent that a favored few should bask in the sunshine of His grace while the majority suffered want and deprivation. These false ideas have been the procurers of darkness: of the Stygian ...
— The Planet Mars and its Inhabitants - A Psychic Revelation • Eros Urides and J. L. Kennon
... same, because they have their source in the nature of our intelligence and our sensations. Darkness is everywhere connected with the idea of death. The Grotto of Caripe is the Tartarus of the Greeks; and the guacharos, which hover over the rivulet, uttering plaintive cries, remind us of the Stygian birds. ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... Regent Street, near Piccadilly Circus, was a haven of brightness in an otherwise Stygian London. It was one of those "old-fashioned" places—Restoration style of decoration, carried out in modern plastics. The oak panelling looked authentic enough, but it was just a little ...
— The Penal Cluster • Ivar Jorgensen (AKA Randall Garrett)
... in the Stygian darkness of the grove it was easy to note how the pines protect their own. On the beach the smothering onrush of the gale beat me down, drove me before it. Yet I had but to walk inland a dozen yards to find a calm. The outermost trees shunted the ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... but was afterwards conveyed to Rouen, when Rollo embraced Christianity. Other causes also contributed to the migration of these remains: they were often summoned in order to dignify acts of peculiar solemnity, or to be the witnesses to the oaths of princes, like the Stygian ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... it belongs to the spirit of that century, and was almost within its borders. The Iliad had been the glory of international literature for centuries. Greece held it in veneration from the beginning of its authentic history; and that work had blazed with a solar luster out of the Stygian darkness of prehistoric times. The book had made an epoch in literature. The cyclic poets, who, for centuries after the appearance of the Iliad and Odyssey, were the only Greek bards, were confessedly disciples of one Homer, the reputed ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... there were the grim stories of unsolved tragedy and crime. All in all Bridge could not have denied that he was glad of the room at the end of the hall with its suggestion of safety in the door which might be closed against the horrors of the hall and the Stygian ...
— The Oakdale Affair • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Etna, whose combustible And fuelled entrails, thence conceiving fire, Sublimed with mineral fury, aid the winds, And leave a singed bottom all involved With stench and smoke. Such resting found the sole Of unblest feet. Him followed his next mate; Both glorying to have scaped the Stygian flood As gods, and by their own recovered strength, Not by the sufferance of supernal Power. "Is this the region, this the soil, the clime," Said then the lost Archangel, "this the seat That we must change for Heaven?—this mournful gloom For that celestial ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... you?) is in the rules of the Fleet. Cruel creditors! operation of iniquitous laws! is Magna Charta then a mockery? Why, in general (here I suppose you to ask a question) my spirits are pretty good, but I have my depressions, black as a smith's beard, Vulcanic, Stygian. At such times I have recourse to a pipe, which is like not being at home to a dun; he comes again with tenfold bitterness the next day.—(Mind, I am not in debt, I only borrow a similitude from others; it shows imagination.) I have done two books since the ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas |
