"Fabled" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... learn'd The wondrous change upon my person done, And saw my thin hairs to those green leaves turn'd (Whence yet for them a crown I might have won); My feet wherewith I stood, and moved, and run— Thus to the soul the subject members bow— Become two roots upon the shore, not now Of fabled Peneus, but a stream as proud, And stiffen'd to a branch my either arm! Nor less was my alarm, When next my frame white down was seen to shroud, While, 'neath the deadly leven, shatter'd lay My first green hope that soar'd, too proud, ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... five elegantly decorated salons, in which there are tables of costly onyx, and on whose walls there are paintings of great splendor. On the ceiling above him exquisite frescoes tell the story of the old cavalier after whom the hotel is named, and of his patient and faithful search for the fabled fountain of youth which no one has yet found. At dinner the visitor is almost appalled by the magnificence of the service, and his appetite is apt to be injured by his reflections as to the cost of the silver and ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... country is fertile, populous, and well cultivated. Innumerable massive turrets, mellowed by the sun of a clear autumn, and rising from wide rolling waters, announced my approach to the shores of the Danube. I seemed entering one of those fabled strong holds, with which the early Italian artists adorned their landscapes. If Semendria be not the most picturesque of the Servian castles of the elder period, it is certainly by far the most extensive of them. Nay, it is colossal. The rampart next the Danube has been shorn ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... had been reputed to be under a sort of spell of evil and to be cursed by a dreadful visitant known as 'The Red Crawl'—a hideous and loathsome creature, neither spider nor octopus, but horribly resembling both—which was supposed to 'appear' at intervals in the middle of the night, and, like the fabled giants of fairy tales, carry off 'lovely maidens and ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... Maurice soon recovered his usual color, and Laura's natural, rich bloom came back by degrees. Their emotion at meeting was not to be wondered at, but there was no trace in it of the paralyzing influence on the great centres of life which had once acted upon its fated victim like the fabled head which turned the looker-on ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... excite the imagination and stimulate the enterprise of the bold and restless spirits of that period; so much so, indeed, that when the English, in 1739, declared war against Spain, the capture of one of these ships became to the English adventurer what the discovery of the fabled El Dorado had been to his predecessor of Elizabethan times. At length—in the year 1742, I think it was—it became whispered about among those restless spirits that a galleon had actually been captured, and that the captors had returned ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... Rory's the boy for a horse; he and his bit o' blood are notorious at all the meetings. In fact I never saw him out of the saddle: he is a perfect living specimen of the fabled Centaur—full of anecdotes of fox-chases, and steeple-chases; he amuses me exceedingly. I last encountered him in a green lane near Hornsey, mounted on a roadster —his "bit o' blood" had been sent forward, and he was leisurely making his way to the ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour
... prime-rose; in the 'Beauty of the Night' and the 'Morning Glory,' except when a pompous scientific terminology, would convert it into a convolvulus! So, too, the 'Anemone' ([Greek: anemos], the wind-flower), into which it is fabled Venus changed her Adonis. What a story of maiden's love does the 'Sweet William' tell; and how many charming associations cluster around the 'Forget-me-not!' Again, is there not poetry in calling a certain family of minute crustacea, whose two eyes meet and form a single round ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... variety of motives were his: the stern zeal of the crusader against the infidel; the ardent proselyting spirit which already had sent Franciscan monks into the heart of Asia; the hope of reestablishing intercourse with "Prester John's" fabled Christian empire of the East; the love of exploration; and a desire to gain for Portugal a ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... in his Souvenirs d'Enfance, tells of a Brittany legend, firmly believed in that wild land, of the vanished city of "Is," which ages ago disappeared beneath the waves. The peasants still point out at a certain place on the coast the site of the fabled city, and the fishermen tell how during great storms they have caught glimpses of its belfries and ramparts far down between the waves; and assert that on calm summer nights they can hear the bells chiming up from those depths. ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... "And fabled how the serpent, whom they called Ophion, with Eurynome, (the wide- Encroaching Eve perhaps,) had first the rule Of high Olympus, ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... Carter comes into a house where there is misery and darkness; where the sufferer is possessed by demons; unnameable apprehensions, which thicken his blood and make him cry for death, and they retreat precipitately, as their brethren were fabled to retreat at the sign of the cross. No man who is so blessed as to have a friend with that magnetic force in him need disbelieve in much of what is recorded as miraculous. Zachariah felt as if a draught of good wine had been poured down his throat. ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford
... you it was but a choice of evils, and this is the less. Nature has neither heart nor conscience, and she sets us a bad example. She has no continuity, no reliableness, no self-control. I can see none of the fabled sublimity in a storm; only the pettishness of a spoiled child, or of an angry man bent on breaking things. The sunset is better to look at, but it has no more moral meaning than a peep-show. Yet this is a return to primitive conditions, in ...
— A Pessimist - In Theory and Practice • Robert Timsol
... to reconstruct the plan upon which the American cracksman had operated. Poland had a persistent belief that Cohen had known where the fabled hoard of ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... thou Parnassus! whom I now survey Not in the frensy of a dreamer's eye, Not in the fabled landscape of a lay, But soaring snow-clad through thy native sky, In the wild pomp of mountain majesty! What marvel if I thus essay to sing? The humblest of thy pilgrims passing by Would gladly woo thine echoes with his string, ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... my meadow, my mead, my soft shady vine, and my arbor? Of all things desirable and delightful, the full- plumed sheaf, and my own right arm the band? Enough: no shore for me yet. One sweep of the helm, and our light prow headed round toward the vague land of song, sun, and vine: the fabled South. ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... Reate, famous for asses, which sometimes brought the enormous price of 60,000 sesterces, about $2320; Cutiliae, celebrated for its mineral waters; and Alba, in which captives of rank were secluded. In Latium were Ostia, the seaport of Rome; Laurentum, the capital of Latinus; Lavinium, fabled to have been founded by Aeneas; Lanuvium, the birthplace of Roscius and the Antonines; Alba Longa, founded four hundred years before Rome; Tusculum, where Cicero had his villa; Tibur, whose temple was famous through Italy; Praeneste, now Palestrio, remarkable for its citadel ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... never showed, as we need hardly mention, That fabled ignorance about the stars, From earliest days we spoke about 'declension,' And argued on the atmosphere of Mars; While parents we put up with, more attention We paid towards another kind of "pars."; Full soon was lit ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 29, 1892 • Various
... are the lot of contemporaries; truth seems reserved only for posterity; and, like the fabled Minerva, she is born of age at once. The secret history of this volume, which partially appeared, has been more particularly opened in one of Warburton's letters, who received it from Pope, who had been "let into the secret." Boyle wrote the Narrative, "which, too, ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... fabled bird of antiquity which lived a hundred years and then died in flames, only to rise young and strong again from its ashes. There was but one such bird in the world, and somewhere in Arabia was a tree, different from any other in the world, in which ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... able to answer, they were too horror-stricken at this sudden vision of their fabled god, whose fierce features of wood had become flesh; they only turned to fly. He waved his thin hand and they came to a standstill, like animals which have reached the end of their tether and are checked by the chains that bind them. There they stood in all sorts of postures, ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... ocean and the storm To match their strength, when the rude Argo sailed Upon that distant quest, and spurned the shore, Joining remotest nations in her flight, And gave the fates another form of death. Left too was Pholoe; pretended home Where dwelt the fabled race of double form (14); Arcadian Maenalus; the Thracian mount Named Haemus; Strymon whence, as autumn falls, Winged squadrons seek the banks of warmer Nile; And all the isles the mouths of Ister bathe Mixed with the tidal wave; the land through which ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... were the manners of the great, fabled to be so stiff and decorous," says the author, "that Lady Maxwell's daughter Jane, who afterward became the Duchess of Gordon, was seen riding a sow up the High Street, while her sister Eglantine (afterwards Lady Wallace of Craigie) thumped lustily ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... the same time, along with this detached and ironical way of thinking there is to be found in the Northern poetry the other, more reverent mode of shaping the inherited fancies; the mode of Pindar, rejecting the vain things fabled about the gods, and holding fast to the more honourable things. The humours of Thor in the fishing for the serpent and the winning of the hammer may be fairly likened to the humours of Hermes in ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... men, And the old passions weaving history, And strong and gentle things of sea and earth, And the poor passing of the life of man, But not in this. You have your great-heart courage For all such ardours as might make you seem Some fabled hero standing against fate, But not in this. In sifting vanity From the right honour, and building from ambition, You have a vision constant as the tides, But not in this. They may look Sussex over For any man who found a crooked word Ever upon your ...
— Preludes 1921-1922 • John Drinkwater
... little postern left unguarded, some little weak place in the wall left uncommanded by a battery; and there, where you never looked for him, the inevitable invader will come in. After all the plunging of the hero in the fabled waters that made him invulnerable, there was the little spot on the heel, and the arrow found its way there? There is nothing certain to happen, says the proverb, but the unforeseen. To-morrow will have its ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... sped southward across the Border to Carlisle; and so through the long December night she flew hither and thither, eastward and westward, flashing the red battle-signal over field and village and town; and wherever it shone armed men sprang up like the fruit of the fabled dragon's teeth, companies were mustered in streets and squares and fields and marched to railway stations; and soon long trains, one after another in endless succession, got into motion, all moving towards the south and east, all converging ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... It was impossible to escape from it; if he skulked between hedges, and crept away beyond the frozen pools, presently the serried stony lines confronted him like an army, and far and far they swept away into the night, as some fabled wall that guards an empire in the vast dim East. Or in that distorting medium of the mist, changing all things, he imagined that he trod an infinite desolate plain, abandoned from ages, but circled and encircled with dolmen and menhir ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... SWEZEY in the highest degree. He wrote a letter on the subject to the Chanticleer, a newspaper in Troy, Ill., of which he was a correspondent, and it was copied, with zinco-type illustrations, into all the journals of the habitable globe, and came back to England like the fabled boomerang. Meanwhile SWEZEY was cruising about, in town and country, looking out for persons wearing silver gridirons. He never found any, and the more he inquired, the more puzzled he became. He was informed that a treatise on the subject existed, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 14, 1893 • Various
... to Rome by sea, along the coast which his favourite Virgil had celebrated. The felucca passed the headland where the oar and trumpet were placed by the Trojan adventurers on the tomb of Misenus, and anchored at night under the shelter of the fabled promontory of Circe. The voyage ended in the Tiber, still overhung with dark verdure, and still turbid with yellow sand, as when it met the eyes of Aeneas. From the ruined port of Ostia, the stranger hurried to ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... me, when next we see the flaming advertisement advising us that the Madre d'Oro, Montezuma's fabled Mother Vein of Gold, has once more come to the surface of the earth on Manhattan Island or near Plymouth Rock; when next we read counsel that because mining pays in Michigan it ought to pay in Nevada; ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... enough by a few nights spent in the dark with the docile ass of the Cevennes; but here was one, sprung from sober Philadelphia blood, born in Indianapolis and baptized by Henry Ward Beecher, who had pioneered across the fabled Isthmus, lived in the roaring mining camps of Nevada, worked for a dressmaker in Frisco, and venturously taken her young children to Belgium and France to study art. She had been married at seventeen, had ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... broken off for ever. It is the close of the dialogue called 'Critias,' in which he describes, partly from real tradition, partly in ideal dream, the early state of Athens; and the genesis, and order, and religion, of the fabled isle of Atlantis; in which genesis he conceives the same first perfection and final degeneracy of man, which in our own Scriptural tradition is expressed by saying that the Sons of God intermarried with the daughters of men, ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... the more. If time were left me, I could hear well-pleased How Tarik fought up Calpe's fabled cliff, While I pursued the friends of Don Roderigo Across the plain, and drew fresh force from mine. Oh! had some other land, some other cause, Invited him and me, I then could dwell On this hard ...
— Count Julian • Walter Savage Landor
... by My ever watchful, burning, tearful eyes; And Balder too, the bloodless god looked down On me with frowning glances full of threats. Last night I pondered o'er my wretched fate. My resolution's taken; I remain Obedient victim at my brother's altar. Yet it is well I did not hear thee then, With fabled islands floating in the clouds Where evening's glowing twilights always show A flowery world of peace and happy love. Who knows how weak one is? My childhood dreams Though silent long, with joy rise up again, And whisper in my anxious ear with voice Familiar as a sister's kindly ...
— Fridthjof's Saga • Esaias Tegner
... think," asked the lawyer, who, like most lawyers, was a lover of romance, and was well read in legendary lore especially, "that there is any reason for supposing that Altruria is identical with the fabled Atlantis'?" ...
— A Traveler from Altruria: Romance • W. D. Howells
... literature and pleasures. It is dominated by a peculiar spirit which the apostle calls a lust or fashion, and resembles the German Zeit-Geist: an infection, an influence, a pageantry, a witchery; reminding us of the fabled mountain of loadstone which attracted vessels to itself for the iron that was in them, and presently drew the nails from the timbers, so that the whole fabric fell a helpless, shapeless mass into the waves. The votaries of the world attach themselves to the objects ...
— Love to the Uttermost - Expositions of John XIII.-XXI. • F. B. Meyer
... conversation to the country we had left; rather as if a leash had been attached to the collar of some lumpish and half-domesticated animal the tendency of whose movements had to be recognised. He spoke of it indeed as of some fabled planet, alien to the British orbit, lately proclaimed to have the admixture of atmospheric gases required to support animal life, but not, save under cover of a liberal afterthought, to be admitted into one's regular conception ...
— A Passionate Pilgrim • Henry James
... of nature; but supernatural agency is also vaguely suggested, and the reader's imagination is stimulated, without any absolute violence to his sense of reality. On the plane of everyday life, then, the Rat-Wife is a crazy and uncanny old woman, fabled by the peasants to be a were-wolf in her leisure moments, who goes about the country killing vermin. Coming across an impressionable child, she tells him a preposterous tale, adapted from the old "Pied Piper" legends, of her method of fascinating her victims. The child, whose imagination has long ...
— Little Eyolf • Henrik Ibsen
... north side of Mount Jackson, or La-o Yaina (La-o's Mountain), the eastern escarpment of which is known as La-o Rock, is a smooth field sloping a little toward the north which was a common playground for the fabled inhabitants of Gaywas and ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... and subterranean; cool, dimly-illuminated grottoes, some in basaltic, columnar rock, some in emerald-glowing stalactite, invited all the fantastic creatures of the sea, both fabled and real, who were promenading about on the floor of the deep, to a sweet, life-long siesta in their softly-gleaming recesses. On the second floor luxuriant equatorial palm-groves grew in startling proximity to the snow-laden pines of the North, ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... the subterranean vaults of the edifice, trembling as his little taper scarcely dispelled the dull, solemn gloom, and listening with breathless attention for the voices of those guardian spirits whose fabled habitation was made in the apartments of the sacred place. Or, when the multitude had departed for their amusements and their homes, he would steal into the lofty halls and wander round the pedestals of ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... contagious disease, in which the hair is said to become alive and bleed, forming inextricable knots or plaits of great length, like the fabled head of Medusa, with intolerable pain, so as to confine the sufferer on ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... has been celebrated by the Hebrews, Greeks, Romans, and Scandinavians. Some have thought that the first human pair were tempted by its fruit. Goddesses are fabled to have contended for it, dragons were set to watch it, and heroes were ...
— Wild Apples • Henry David Thoreau
... contemporary poets, Claudian and Prudentius. The singular and isolated figure of Claudian, the posthumous child of the classical world, stands alongside of that of the first great Christian poet like the figures which were fabled to stand, regarding the rising and setting sun, by the Atlantic gates where the Mediterranean opened ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... Gothic rule in Spain, and the various causes which finally led to the Moorish invasion, are somewhat involved in legend and mystery. But in spite of a scepticism which has been openly expressed by some authors, it seems more than probable that the fabled Rodrigo, from his capital at Toledo, actually ruled over Spain in the year 709, and that he was, directly or indirectly, the cause of the invasion of the Moors. According to the commonly accepted story, the moral condition of Spain at the beginning ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... Rig Veda the metals are bronze and gold, silver and iron being unknown.[22] Not less significant are the trees. The ficus religiosa, the tree later called the 'tree of the gods' (deva-sadana, acvattha), under which are fabled to sit the divinities in heaven, is scarcely known in the Rig Veda, but is well known in the Atharvan; while India's grandest tree, the nyagrodha, ficus indica, is known to the Atharvan and Brahmanic period, but is utterly foreign to the Rig ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... daily performance an area that would make an Atlantic seaboard State, and that with no peril, and, according to our way of thought, no particular difficulty. At any rate, it was not people who went into the desert merely to write it up who invented the fabled Hassaympa, of whose waters, if any drink, they can no more see fact as naked fact, but all radiant ...
— The Land Of Little Rain • Mary Hunter Austin
... only true gentry by adoption; the veritable change of blood, and not, as empirics have fabled, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... select for attention, and for a conclusion to these remarks, a particular scene. It shall be from Luke. This evangelist has been fabled a painter, and in the apotheosis of the old Church he was made the tutelar patron of that class of artists. If the individuality of his conceptions, the skill of his groupings, and the graphicness gave ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... fabled loveliness of which no story was too strange, of which all miracles seemed true. There, her hands folded on her lap, her head bowed—there sat she whose voice was the echo of all sweet voices, she whose shape was the mirror of all fair forms, she whose ...
— The World's Desire • H. Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang
... town of any importance, is now Afka, and is visited by most travellers and tourists. It was situated in a beautiful spot at the head of the Adonis river,[472] a sacred stream fabled to run with blood once a year, at the festival which commemorated the self-mutilation of the Nature-god Adonis. Aphaca was a sort of Delphi, a collection of temples rather than a town. It was dedicated especially to the worship of the Syrian goddess, Ashtoreth or Venus, sometimes ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... was greatly disgusted to learn that the agents of the canal companies had been before him, and described the locomotive to the farmers as a most frightful machine, emitting a breath as poisonous as the fabled dragon of old; and telling them that if a bird flew over the district where one of these engines passed, it would inevitably drop down dead! The application for the bill was renewed in 1826, and again failed; and at length it was determined to wait ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... door of my room as he passed out, carrying the box of jewels for my wife, and as I bade him a brief adieu, the well-worn story of Tristram and Kind Mark came to my mind. He, Guido, like Tristram, would in a short space clasp the gemmed necklace round the throat of one as fair and false as the fabled Iseulte, and I—should I figure as the wronged king? How does the English laureate put it in ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... flowery banquet table. Madame smilingly says it is the Goddess of Love, an exact copy of the one in the temple of Jupiter Olympus. Another just opposite, less voluptuous in its outlines, she adds, is intended for a copy of the fabled goddess, supposed by the ancients to have thrown off her wings to illustrate ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... Wise antiquity fabled Mercury carrying a rodde in his hand to relate newes from Heaven, and call backe the soules of the dead, but it hath beene the happinesse of our industrious age to see and admire Galilaeus the new Embassadour of the Gods furnished with his perspective to unfold the nature ...
— The Discovery of a World in the Moone • John Wilkins
... lord of life, and that in a vividly real sense—the sense of intoxication, of keenly thrilling pleasure, of wild delight, and headlong rushing joy. He was fabled to have given men the grape and wine—but to the Initiated of the mystery and orgie there was higher and more intoxicating wine than that of the grape—the wine of wild inspiration, drawn from the keenest relish of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... with magic the deeper for that. As the form faded from the silver halo, and passed more and more into mythology, it seemed, indeed, as if she had never lived for him at all, save in dreams, or on another star. Still, his memory held by those great shells, and he had come at last to the fabled country on the perilous quest—who of us dare venture such a one to-day?—of a 'lost saint.' Enquiry of his friends that evening, cautious as of one on some half-suspected diplomacy, told him that one with the name of his remembrance did live at the mill-house—with ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... go through the whole series of observations thus fabled, and only a few of the more striking features need be indicated. The discoveries are carefully graduated in interest. Thus we have seen how, after recognising basaltic formations, the observers discovered flowers: they next see a lunar forest, ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... The fabled effects of the basilisk, the serpent, and the evil eye, have probably all some facts for their foundation. The effect of the human eye in arresting the attacks of savage animals is better authenticated, and its influence upon ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... like Siegfried, the noble child, That song-and-saga wonder, Who, when his fabled sword was forged, His anvil cleft ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... was known In Heaven by many a tower'd structure high;— Nor was his name unheard or unador'd In ancient Greece; and in the Ausonian land Men called him Mulciber; and how he fell From Heaven, they fabled, thrown by angry Jove Sheer o'er the crystal battlements; from morn To noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve, A summer's day; and with the setting sun Dropt from the zenith like a falling star On Lemnos, the AEgean isle: thus they ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... turn to scorn; without those eyes dark with their own lustre, still bent on mine, and drawing the soul into their liquid mazes like a sea of love; without that name trembling in fancy's ear; without that form gliding before me like Oread or Dryad in fabled groves, what should I do? how pass away the listless, leaden-footed hours? Then wave, wave on, ye woods of Tuderley, and lift your high tops in the air; my sighs and vows uttered by our mystic voice breathe into me my former being, ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... AEschylus. I am sorry, Philip, that you are not familiar with ancient Greek life. There is so much I could tell you of, in that event, of the quaint cult of Kore, or Pherephatta, and of the swine of Eubouleus, and of certain ambiguous maidens, whom those old Grecians fabled—oh, very ignorantly fabled, my lad, of course—to rule in a more quietly lit and more tranquil world than we blunder about. I think I could explain much which now seems mysterious—yes, and the daffodils, also, that Herrick wrote of so constantly. But it ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... women and children and cattle may find security. If his special want had been of some blessing of another kind, no doubt another form of appearance, suited with precision to his need, would have been imposed upon these angel helpers. For God's gifts to us change their character; as the Rabbis fabled that the manna tasted to each man what each most desired. The same pure heavenly bread has the varying savour that commends it to varying palates. God's grace is Protean. It takes all the forms that man's necessities require. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... true that certain of the early provincial poets, of whom there were great numbers in the Nieuw Nederlandts, taking advantage of his mysterious exit, have fabled that, like Romulus, he was translated to the skies, and forms a very fiery little star, somewhere on the left claw of the crab; while others, equally fanciful, declare that he had experienced a fate similar ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... all the Chinese children came forth in carriages shaped like boats, turned up at both ends, painted red and yellow, and with white-fringed canopies over them. These were drawn by servants, and in the case of the wealthy, a train of servants accompanied each carriage. It was a sight worthy of a fabled age. The wealth of the East in all its gorgeousness was poured out upon these dignified and solemn infants, who wore coronals of gold and diamonds, stuffs of cloth of gold brocade, and satin sewn with pearls, and whose ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... European fields; Then three of ancient Babylonian stock,[15] Blood bay and glossy as rich Tyrian silk— Such horses Israel's sacred prophets saw Bearing their conquerors in triumph home, A race for ages kept distinct and pure, Fabled from Alexander's charger sprung; Then three from distant desert Tartar steppes, Ewe-necked, ill-favored creatures, lank and gaunt, That made the people laugh as they passed by— Who ceased to laugh when they had run the race— Such horses bore the mighty Mongol hosts[16] That with ...
— The Dawn and the Day • Henry Thayer Niles
... vaguely guessed at by those who study graves; their pathetic ending has long been pictured in our country's story as occurring amid the shadows of that dreadful midnight upon the banks of the Ocatahoola, when vengeful Frenchmen put them to the sword. Whence they came, whether from fabled Atlantis, or the extinct Aztec empire of the South, no living tongue can tell; whither fled their remnant,—if remnant there was left to flee,—and what proved its ultimate fate, no previous pen has written. Out from the darkness of the unknown, scarcely more than spectral ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... this be true of even mediocre poetry, for how much more are we indebted to the best! Like the fabled fountain of the Azores, but with a more various power, the magic of this Art can confer on each period of life its appropriate blessing: on early years Experience, on maturity Calm, on age Youthfulness. Poetry gives treasures "more golden than gold," leading us in higher ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... the news of his appointment to the government of Quito with undisguised pleasure; not so much for the possession that it gave him of this ancient Indian province, as for the field that it opened for discovery towards the east, - the fabled land of Oriental spices, which had long captivated the imagination of the Conquerors. He repaired to his government without delay, and found no difficulty in awakening a kindred enthusiasm to his own in the bosoms of his followers. In a short time, he mustered three hundred and fifty Spaniards, ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... a kind of wine. The insipid fruit (Unnab) which looks like an apple in miniature, is much used in stews, etc. It is the fruit (Nabak classically Nabik) of Rhamnus Nabeca (or Sidrat) also termed Zizyphus Jujuba, seu Spina Christi because fabled to have formed the crown of thorns: in the English market this plum is called Chinese Japonica. I have described it in Pilgrimage ii. 205, and have noticed the infusion of the leaves for washing the dead (ibid. ii. 105): this is especially the use of the "Ber" in India, where the ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... the romantic and the picturesque. Let me rather recur to her (although my heart be lacerated once more in the recollection) who was the presiding deity of the whole,—the being after whom, had I had the fabled power of Prometheus, I should have formed and animated the sharer of that sweet wild solitude, nor once felt that fancy, to whom I was so largely a debtor, had in aught been cheated of what she had, for a series of years, ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... the region of the Kur to that of the Phasis and thence down that river to the Black Sea, where on the Colchian coast the fleet under Servilius already awaited him. But it was for an uncertain idea, and an aim almost unsubstantial, that the army and fleet were thus brought to the richly fabled shores of Colchis. The laborious march just completed through unknown and mostly hostile nations was nothing when compared with what still awaited them, and if they should really succeed in conducting the force from the mouth of the Phasis to the Crimea, ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... lullaby Was on her lips—then such a cry, As souls in fabled realms below Might utter, voiced ...
— Poems of Sentiment • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... got." "I am fair and hard of heart, and riches shall be my lot." And all these are the good and the happy, on whom the world dawns fair. O son, when wilt thou learn of those that are born of despair, As the fabled mud of the Nile that quickens under the sun With a growth of creeping things, half dead when just begun? E'en such is the care of Nature that man should never die, Though she breed of the fools of the earth, and the dregs ...
— Poems By The Way & Love Is Enough • William Morris
... not only bearing cheerfully the great burden of his own cares and ills, but lifting up, as it were, from his companions, and assuming upon his own shoulders, the awful oppression of the polar night, as Atlas of old was fabled to support the heavens,—not even one's admiration at such force of soul can wholly exclude wonder at such fortitude of body. Whence, we ask, this power of endurance? We can trace it to no ordinary physical resource. It comes from no ordinary physical resource. It is pure brain-power. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... a shadowy figure yet it moved, arose, held out one hand, and a bird as large as the fabled roc alighted on the wrist of ...
— The Black Wolf Pack • Dan Beard
... doubtfully appeared a skeleton. Between two of the bookcases hung a looking-glass, presenting its high and dusty plate within a tarnished gilt frame. Among many wonderful stories related of this mirror, it was fabled that the spirits of all the doctor's deceased patients dwelt within its verge, and would stare him in the face whenever he looked thitherward. The opposite side of the chamber was ornamented with the full-length portrait of a young lady, arrayed in the faded ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... of the forest. More than once Uncle Dick had to tap Leo on the shoulder and make him wait for the others, for an Indian has no mercy on a weak or inexperienced person on a hunting-trail. Indeed, so little did he show the fabled Indian calm, he was more excited than any of the others when they began to approach a point from which they might expect to see their game. Uncle Dick reached out his hand for Leo's rifle and motioned for him to go ahead for a look. ...
— The Young Alaskans in the Rockies • Emerson Hough
... Garrucci (Vetri, XIII. 13) has a glass vessel in which Christ is represented with Daniel, who is giving cakes to the dragon (D.C.A. Jesus Christ, Representations of, p. 877b). In Paganism in Christian Art in the same Dictionary (p. 1535a), it is said, "Hercules feeding the fabled dragon with cakes of poppy-seed appears to have furnished the motive for the representation of the apocryphal story of Daniel killing the dragon at Babylon." Presumably this means the dragon Ladon in ...
— The Three Additions to Daniel, A Study • William Heaford Daubney
... stared with amazement—oh, no! You wouldn't have gone home with your mouth as wide open as your eyes, and have given a gasping account of what you had seen—by no means! You wouldn't have talked of feathered steam-engines, or of fabled rocs, or of winged elephants in the ...
— The Red Eric • R.M. Ballantyne
... unendurable. Hence I am silent so long as it does not speak for itself, which extremity might be prevented were circumstances other than they are. Since they are not, let it be borne with, say strength and resignation united with hope. 'Tis this that is fabled in Prometheus and Laocooen—and how ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... heard this circumstantial story, and with it many new tales concerning wicked mysteries practised by the Mormons in Fayette, he threw down his books, as long ago the fabled fruit that had turned to ashes was thrown down, and ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... following the packed moments of Montreal was one of luxurious indolence. The Royal train was heading for the almost fabled trout of Nipigon, where, among the beauties of lake and stream, the Prince was to take a long week-end fishing and preparing for more crowds and more strenuosity in ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... character which every age has reproduced, varying externally with climates and conditions, but materially the same from fabled Circe down to Lola Montes, or some less famous syren whose subjects are not kings. The same passions that in ancient days broke out in heaven-defying crimes; the same power of beauty, intellect, or subtlety; the same untamable spirit and lack ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... railway locomotive strayed from its track and taken up and housed in a farmer's waggon-shed, performs prodigies of activity and labor. Indeed, search the three realms through and through, and you would hardly find one on its own legs doing such remarkable varieties of work. Briareus, with all his fabled faculties, never had such numerous and supple fingers as this creature of human invention. When set a-going, they are clattering and whisking and frisking everywhere, on the barn-floor, on the hay-loft, in the granary, under the eaves, down cellar, ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... rejoicing in the consciousness of perfect nature, and of the mechanic or shopkeeper, whose life is spent in the cell of his trade, and whose body soon receives a shape and air that correspond to this!—and in the softer sex, what a contrast is there, between her who recalls to us the fabled Diana of old, and that other, who has scarcely trodden but on smooth pavements or carpets, and who, under any new circumstances, carries her person as awkwardly as something to the management of which ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 268, August 11, 1827 • Various
... see a blinding splash or explosion of light on the water—a flash so sudden and so astonishingly brilliant that it would make you catch your breath; then that blotch of light would instantly extend itself and take the corkscrew shape and imposing length of the fabled sea-serpent, with every curve of its body and the "break" spreading away from its head, and the wake following behind its tail clothed in a fierce splendor of living fire. And my, but it was coming at a lightning gait! Almost before ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... determination, defeated by his mother herself, at the time of all others when he feared that it pressed most. His advice, energy, activity, money, credit, all his resources whatsoever, were all made useless. If she had been possessed of the old fabled influence, and had turned those who looked upon her into stone, she could not have rendered him more completely powerless (so it seemed to him in his distress of mind) than she did, when she turned her unyielding face to his in ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... vegetables had made their entrance with perfect order and propriety, their exeunt was effected much in the manner of a retreat of militia. The point was to clear the board something after the fabled practice of the harpies, and by dint of scrambling, tossing, breaking, and spilling, the remnants of the overflowing repast disappeared. And now another series of processions commenced, by virtue of which a goodly display of pastry, with its usual ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... the masterful spirit of the young steel magnate, and Popova was led away to a remote apartment, where a single shelf, sparsely set with bottles, made a weak effort to reproduce the fabled splendors ...
— The Slim Princess • George Ade
... you like it," she said, "and I hope you'll get your share of the fabled wealth that it is supposed to grow—and, oh, yes, by the way, do you happen to need ...
— The Desert Fiddler • William H. Hamby
... great masters when he had not visited Italy, so little could a beer drinker assert that he had seen beer rightly drunk when he had not been in Munich. All over the world beer is regarded as a refreshment, but in Munich it is the elixir of life, the fabled fountain of youth and happiness. It is looked upon as nourishment by the lower classes, who drink for dinner two masses[E] of it, with soup and black bread. For the price of the beer they could procure a good portion of meat, but they universally maintain that they are ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... the king's eye.[24] And especial attention, in my opinion, must be paid to cultivating and exercising the memory of boys, for memory is, as it were, the storehouse of learning; and that was why they fabled Mnemosyne to be the mother of the Muses, hinting and insinuating that nothing so generates and contributes to the growth of learning as memory. And therefore the memory must be cultivated, whether boys have a good one by nature, or a bad one. For we shall so add to natural good ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... From heaven, they fabled, thrown by angry Jove Sheer o'er the crystal battlements; from morn To noon, from noon to dewy eve, A Summer's day, he fell; and with the setting sun Dropped from the zenith like a ...
— The Coming of Cuculain • Standish O'Grady
... things were pitifully different. People who ought not to die did so, and those who could well be spared clung to mortal existence as though they had drunk deeply of the fabled fountain of immortal youth. ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... which a certain craft was imparted and transmitted. The Dactyli, the Fingers, are the [210] first workers in iron; the savage Chalybes in Scythia the first smelters; actual names are given to the old, fabled Telchines— Chalkon, Argyron, Chryson—workers in brass, silver, and gold, respectively. The tradition of their activity haunts the several regions where those metals were found. They make the trident of Poseidon; but then Poseidon's trident is a real fisherman's instrument, ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... burnt before her eyes. And where had he gone? Back to his monastery? Should she never, never see him again? Was he tramping the long and weary way to the Dunmuir station, where the railway engine would presently come shrieking and sweeping out of the darkness, and, like a fabled monster in some old fairy tale, gather him into its embrace, and bear him away to a place whence ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... Not idly fabled they the Bards inspired, Who peopled Earth with Deities. They trod The wood with reverence where the DRYADS dwelt; At day's dim dawn or evening's misty hour They saw the OREADS on their mountain haunts. And felt their holy ...
— Poems • Robert Southey
... believing in superstitions, we are in danger of going to the other extreme, and believing in nothing at all which we cannot see with our eyes, and handle with our hands. Now that we have given up believing in the fabled supernatural; in ghosts, fairies, demons, witches, and such- like: we are in danger of giving up believing in the true and eternal supernatural, which is the Holy Spirit of God, by whom the whole creation is kept alive and sound. We are in ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... mighty scene I next presume to draw: Attend, great Anna, with religious awe. Expect not here the known successful arts To win attention, and command our hearts: Fiction, be far away; let no machine Descending here, no fabled god, be seen; Behold the God of gods indeed descend, And worlds unnumber'd his approach attend! Lo! the wide theatre, whose ample space Must entertain the whole of human race, At heaven's all-powerful edict is prepar'd, ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... bound together: "Atlas," a fabled giant who, according to the Greek notion bore ...
— New Word-Analysis - Or, School Etymology of English Derivative Words • William Swinton
... steps have been; These feet have pressed the sacred shore; These limbs that buoyant wave hath borne— Minstrel! with thee to muse, to mourn, To trace again those fields of yore, Believing every hillock green Contains no fabled hero's ashes, And that around the undoubted scene Thine own "broad Hellespont" still dashes,— Be long my lot! and cold were he Who there ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... Ariccia we flew; everywhere in the little town people, donkeys—an almost indistinguishable mass—filled the narrow streets; and thus on to Genzano and the Lago di Nemi, with its fabled fleet at ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... of doom, Ishmael, I have been a lonely, homeless, miserable wanderer over the wide world! The fabled Wandering Jew not more wretched than I!" And the bowed head, blanched complexion, and quivering features bore testimony ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... joys, while we remember our griefs. Perhaps this is because joy and its effects are so evanescent. Leland talks beautifully of 'the perfumed depths of the lotus-word, joyousness;' but in this world we only breathe the perfume. Could we eat the lotus!... The fabled lotus-eater wished never to leave the isle whence he had plucked it. Wrapped in dreamy selfishness, unnerved for the toil of reaching the far-off shore, he grew indifferent to country and friends.... So earth would be ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... For nearly two hundred years after its invention classic legend and ancient history provided the stories which the opera composer laid under tribute. Very properly dramatic song occupied itself at the outset with a celebration of that fabled singer at the sound of whose voice "rivers forgot to run and winds to blow." In the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, as told in what is set down in history as the first opera, music and love were mated; and they have not yet been divorced, though both have undergone many and great changes of character. ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... bite any more! Bring the man before me. The republic is an angry goddess, and demands a royal offering. Give this impostor into my hands, or something worse will happen! Go, and I advise you to bring me, before the sun goes down, the tidings that this fabled King Louis is arrested, or the sun of your good fortune is set forever! Now away! Go out through the little corridor, and then through the secret gate-you ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... with unquestioned ardour by the wives thereof. Was he not the gay Mr. Van Winkle, of New York? Was he not the plus- ultra representative of the most exclusive society in the United States? Was he not hand in glove with fabled ladies whose names were household words wherever the English language is broken? Yes! He was THE Van Winkle! The son of A Van Winkle! And what a WONDERFUL game of bridge he played! It was a pleasure to lose money ...
— Her Weight in Gold • George Barr McCutcheon
... 266. Kimpurushas were fabled creatures, half men and steeds. Not a mountain but had its Kimpurushas, according to the Hindu belief. Yakshas were a sort of superhuman beings ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... of certain other noblemen of nearly equal wealth, who were with him at the court of Peter the Great, as their sons now were at that of Elizabeth. Boris compared the splendor of these young noblemen with his own moderate estate, fabled a few "adventures" and drinking-bouts, and announced his determination of doing honor to the name which Prince Alexis of Kinesma had left behind him ...
— Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home • Bayard Taylor
... the Hollow were fully explored, traces of rude but apparently successful gold workings were found in the creeks which run through this romantic valley—long as invisible as the fabled ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... 'courtesy costs nothing'; but calculation might come to value love for its profit. Love is fabled to be blind, but kindness is necessary to perception; love is not a hood, but an eye-water. If you meet a sectary or a hostile partisan, never recognize the dividing lines, but meet on what common ground remains,—if only that the sun shines and the rain rains for both; the area will ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... sea. It is never seen on land; and naturalists have yet to discover where it reposes, and where it hatches its young; unless we adopt the idea of the poets, that it builds its nest upon the turbulent bosom of the deep. It is a sort of nautical sister of the fabled bird of Paradise, which was footless, and never alighted out of the air. Hundreds of miles from shore, in sunshine and in tempest, you may see the Stormy Petrel. Among the unsolvable riddles which nature propounds to mankind, we may reckon the ...
— Journal of an African Cruiser • Horatio Bridge
... an island off Tregastel, on the coast of the department of Cotes-du-Nord, is the fabled Isle of Avalon to which King Arthur, sore wounded after his last battle, was borne to be healed of his hurts. With straining eyes the fisherman watches the mist-wrapped islet, and, peering through the evening haze, cheats himself into the belief that giant forms are moving upon its ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... is indispensable in dress, but that, united to neatness, is all that is necessary—that is the fabled cestus of Venus which gave beauty to its wearer. Good taste involves suitable fabrics—a neat and becoming 'fitting' to her figure—colors suited to her complexion, and a simple and unaffected manner of wearing one's clothes. A worsted dress in a warm day, or ...
— How To Behave: A Pocket Manual Of Republican Etiquette, And Guide To Correct Personal Habits • Samuel R Wells
... saw how out of the drifting patch of spumy wrack there emerged a shape vague and indistinct and ghostly, but taking on instantly the sharpened outlines of one they recognized. It was the shape, not of Vida Monte, the fabled wrecker of lives, but the shape of her other self, Sarah Glassman, and the face it wore was not the face of the stage vampire, aflame with the counterfeited evil which the actor woman had so well known how to simulate but the real face of ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... unknown span Of years he gazes: what, to him, Are bounds and barriers, tales of Destiny, Death, and the fabled impotence of man? Already, in his marching dream, Men at his sun-like coming seem As with an inspiration stirr'd, and he To kindle with new thoughts degenerate nations, In sordid cares immersed so long; Thrill'd with ethereal exultations And a victorious expectancy, ...
— Primavera - Poems by Four Authors • Stephen Phillips, Laurence Binyon, Manmohan Ghose and Arthur Shearly Cripps
... base - Caught up into the heavens and clasped In white ethereal arms that make Thy mystery of size sublime! What eye or thought can measure now Thy grand dilating loftiness! What giant crest dispute with thee Supremacy of air and sky! What fabled height with thee compare! Not those vine-terraced hills that seethe The lava in their fiery cusps; Nor that high-climbing robe of snow, Whose summits touch the morning star, And breathe the thinnest air of life; Nor ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... streets you walk upon long tracts of grass, between houses with closed doors and windows, in a silence as profound as that of those fabled cities where all the inhabitants are sunk in a supernatural sleep. You pass over bridges overgrown with weeds, and long canals covered with a green carpet, through small squares that seem like convent courtyards; and then, suddenly, you reach a broad thoroughfare, ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various |
