"Bacchanal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the wild White Maids, to the hills, to the hills! Oh, then, like a colt as he runs by a river, A colt by his dam, when the heart of him sings, With the keen limbs drawn and the fleet foot a-quiver, Away the Bacchanal springs! ...
— Hippolytus/The Bacchae • Euripides
... "was so universal by the retailing of a liquor called gin, with which they could get drunk for a groat, that the whole town of London, and many towns in the country swarmed with drunken people of both sexes from morning to night, and were more like a scene from a Bacchanal than the residence of a civil society."[138] The sign which hangs over the inn-door in Hogarth's picture of Gin Lane, and announces that the customer can get drunk for a penny, dead drunk for twopence, and have straw for nothing, was a copy, not an invention. ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... thrown on the world, And into the vortex of sinning By Pleasure's strong arms he is hurled. He hears the sweet Christmas bells ringing, "Repent ye, repent ye, and pray"; But he joins with his comrades in singing A bacchanal lay. ...
— The Kingdom of Love - and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... horrible. You are stunned by it as by the roar of a great waterfall. You see a wave of unusual magnitude rolling in from far beyond the wild revelry of waters on 'The Rips.' It leaps into the arena as if fresh and eager for the fray, clutches another Bacchanal like itself, and the two towering floods rush swiftly toward the shore. Instinctively you run backward to escape what seems an impending destruction. Very likely a sheet of foam is dashed all around you, shoe-deep, but you are safe—only the foam hisses away ...
— Elsie at Nantucket • Martha Finley
... their seats; and as they passed, the vices, the defects, the blemishes of their respective characters, were maliciously noticed by old Silenus, a laughing moralist, who disguised the wisdom of a philosopher under the mask of a Bacchanal. [3] As soon as the feast was ended, the voice of Mercury proclaimed the will of Jupiter, that a celestial crown should be the reward of superior merit. Julius Caesar, Augustus, Trajan, and Marcus Antoninus, were selected as the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... The last bacchanal painted by Renovales was in a fashionable bar in New York. His pageant of the Abruzzi was in one of the noblest castles in Russia. Another picture, representing a dance of countesses disguised as shepherdesses in a field of violets, was in the possession of a Jewish baron, ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... turned the leaves. "It's a bacchanal for the Duke," he said slowly.... "I've been looking up Violante's pose.—Here it is." He read the lines in ...
— Unfinished Portraits - Stories of Musicians and Artists • Jennette Lee
... wish of thee, Anadyomene! What vine-outquickening life all creatures sup, Feel, for the air within its sapphire cup How it does leap, and twinkle headily! Feel, for Earth's bosom pants, and heaves her scarfing sea; And round and round in bacchanal rout ...
— New Poems • Francis Thompson
... proud, on his small pug nose. As we passed the cross-roads, Straighty was trying to snatch a kiss. While we drove along the Front, the children waved their hands over the sides of the drosky, and shouted with delight. 'Twas a Bacchanal with laughter for wine. The Square turned out to witness our arrival. "Her's come!" the kiddies cried. Dane leapt out first, found a rabbit's head and bolted it whole. The rest of us scrambled out. The luggage was piled ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... und wilder, All whirlin around, Vent Hans mit de maiden In Bacchanal bound. She helt to his peard, Und dey gissed as if mad; I tont dink dat efer ...
— The Breitmann Ballads • Charles G. Leland
... strike other chords; Fill high the cup with Samian wine! Leave battles to the Turkish hordes, And shed the blood of Scio's vine! Hark! rising to the ignoble call, How answers each bold Bacchanal! ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... masterpiece, the sepia "Judith" in Florence, is like an exquisite, pathetically lovely Eurydice, who has stepped unconscious and lifeless out of a Praxitelian bas-relief. And there are stranger works than even the Judith; strange statuesque fancies, like the fight of Marine Monsters and the Bacchanal among Mantegna's engravings. The group of three wondrous creatures, at once men, fish, and gods, is as grand and even more fantastic than Leonardo's Battle of the Standard: a Triton, sturdy and muscular, with sea-weed beard and hair, wheels round his finned ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... Carnival that year was not a brilliant one. Colville's party seemed to be always meeting the same maskers on the street, and the maskers did not greatly increase in numbers. There were a few more of them after nightfall, but they were then a little more bacchanal, and he felt it was better that the ladies had gone home by that time. In the pursuit of the tempered pleasure of looking up the maskers he was able to make the reflection that their fantastic and vivid dresses sympathised in a striking way with the architecture of the city, and gave him ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... shape of a black toad, as at Bordeaux in 1610. But it was easy to make it up to them by a grand display of splendid stage scenery. The affair of Provence owed much of its success to Madeline's desolate wildness and the terror of Sainte-Baume. Loudun was regaled with the uproar and the bacchanal frenzy of a host of exorcisers distributed among several churches. Lastly, Louviers, as we shall presently see, put a little new life into this fading fashion by inventing midnight scenes, in which the demons who possessed the ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... enough. That very letter, which was written to clear my character, excited the most violent hatred against me amongst those who did not know the facts. This foul villain went rushing about in the midst of the market-place like any bacchanal; he kept opening the letter and proclaiming, 'Apuleius is a sorcerer! She herself describes her feelings and her sufferings! What more do you demand?' There was no one to take my part and reply, 'Give us ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... instance, were surmounted by women, female furies, drinking, shouting, and uttering cries of unspeakable savageness and blasphemy against priests, nobles, and kings; and, mingled with all this, were choruses of bacchanal songs, accompanied with shouts of laughter. It was now near midnight; and my anxiety for the condition of my unfortunate friend at last urged me to make a desperate attempt to force my way through the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... the fool! It's the same insane orgy every year, the same waste of money when there's so much need and so much suffering! But I see! It's the orgy, the bacchanal, that is to still the lamentations of ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... still sounded its flutelike note. And a sudden thought of death came to the priest as he saw her, so young and so radiant with beauty, half fainting beside that marble resting-place where fauns were rushing upon nymphs in a frantic bacchanal which proclaimed the omnipotence of love—that omnipotence which the ancients were fond of symbolising on their tombs as a token of life's eternity. And meantime a faint, warm breeze passed through the sunlit, silent garden, ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... cost. Supplied with fat purses, all flung themselves into a reckless orgy of high living and ordered without reckoning. It was the gay rendezvous of the girls and the Johnnies, the sporting men and the roues—in a word, the nightly bacchanal of New York qui s'amuse. In the atmosphere, heavily charged with tobacco smoke, floated a strange, indefinable perfume—an odor in which the vulgar smell of cooking struggled for the mastery with the subtle essences used by voluptuous women. Instantly, animalism was aroused, the passions ...
— The Easiest Way - A Story of Metropolitan Life • Eugene Walter and Arthur Hornblow
... the township; an event that had been looked forward to by everybody for months past. English people are given to associating the idea of a "spree" with that of a bacchanal orgy. Not so we. With us the word is simply colonial for a festivity of any kind, private or public. And whatever may be the primary object of the spree, it is pretty certain to ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... drunkenness and chastity. The wretched Astraea, who is the perfection of beauty and innocence, has long been thus condemned for life. The romantic tales of virgins devoted to the jaws of monsters, have nothing in them so terrible, as the gift of Astraea to that bacchanal. ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... appearance which ridicule and pleasantry take from the different manners of every age. They will not pass for sisters, but for very distant relations. The Muse of Aristophanes and Plautus, to speak of her with justice, is a bacchanal at least, whose malignant tongue is dipped in gall, or in poison dangerous as that of the aspick or viper; but whose bursts of malice, and sallies of wit, often give a blow where it is not expected. The Muse of Terence, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... to dances and suppers at the houses of college acquaintances. Sometimes she one-stepped demurely; sometimes, in dread of life's slipping past, she turned into a bacchanal, her tender eyes excited, her throat tense, as she ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... revelling roundelays, Belched out with hickups at bacchanal Go, Bellowed, till heaven's high concave rebound the lays, Are all for college carousals too low. Of dullness quite tired, with merriment fired, And fully inspired with amity's glow, With hate-drowning wine, boys, and punch all divine, boys, ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... has the country endured the offenses of the leaders of a party which once knew greatness. Too long have we been blind to the bacchanal of corruption. Too long have we listlessly watched the assembling of the forces that threaten our country and ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... corn, mammoth squashes, huge apples and potatoes want the beauty and quality that belong to them out of doors, when they are gathered into the sections of a county fair-house; piles of melons fail of their poetry on a wooden floor, and heaps of grapes cannot assert themselves in a very bacchanal profusion against the ignominy of being spread upon long tables and ticketed with the names ...
— The Coast of Bohemia • William Dean Howells
... boy, beautifully wrought, with a lamp hanging from one hand, and an instrument for trimming it from the other, the lamp itself representing a theatrical mask. Beside him is a twisted column surmounted by the head of a Faun or Bacchanal, which has a lid in its crown, and seems intended as a reservoir of oil. The boy and pillar are both placed on a square plateau raised upon lions' claws. But beautiful as these lamps are, the light which they gave must have been weak and unsteady, and little superior to that of the old-fashioned ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... red port wine" with the performer upon catgut cables; and everything was progressing allegro, when Cupid wickedly stimulated the double-bass to chuck Susan's double chin, and then, with the frenzy of a Bacchanal, to attempt the impossibility of encircling the ample waist of his Dulcinea. This was carrying the joke a leetle too far, and Susan, equally alarmed for her reputation and her habit-shirt, struggled to free herself from the embrace of the votary of Apollo; but the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... saint may chide, The sinner may scoff outright, The Bacchanal steep'd in the flagon's tide, Or the sensual Sybarite; But NOLAN'S name will flourish in fame, When our galloping days are past, When we go to the place from whence we came, Perchance to find ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... believe that the stars were dancing to the tune of their temples, and they danced as men have never danced since. With this old pagan eudaemonism the sage of the Rubaiyat has quite as little to do as he has with any Christian variety. He is no more a Bacchanal than he is a saint. Dionysus and his church was grounded on a serious joie-de-vivre like that of Walt Whitman. Dionysus made wine, not a medicine, but a sacrament. Jesus Christ also made wine, not a medicine, but a sacrament. But Omar makes it, ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton |
