"Hermes" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... you didn't notice—but you should. He is like the Hermes—only grown older, and with a soul. But there is no Greek sculptor who could have done him justice. It would have wanted a Praxiteles; but ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Hermes, your craft cannot make me confident. I know my own steel to be almost spent, and therefore entreat my peace with you, in time: you are too cunning for me to encounter at length, and I think it my safest ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... Sly-scheming Hermes "winked" knowingly at Jupiter when he was "pitching his yarn" about the stolen oxen, and Jupiter "according to ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 24, 1891 • Various
... clouds decay, And all its varying rainbows die away; Wit shoots in vain its momentary fires, The meteor drops, and in a flash expires. As, one by one, at dread Medea's strain The sick'ning stars fade off the ethereal plain; As Argus' eyes, by Hermes' wand oppress'd, Closed one by one to everlasting rest;— Thus, at her fell approach and secret might, Art after Art goes out, and all is night. See skulking Faith to her old cavern fled, Mountains of casuistry heaped o'er her head; Philosophy, that leaned on Heaven before, Shrinks ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... extolled as beautiful, he replied, "That it had indeed the beauty of a bubble. The colours are gay," said he, "but the substance slight." Of James Harris's Dedication to his "Hermes," I have heard him observe that, though but fourteen lines long, there were six grammatical faults in it. A friend was praising the style of Dr. Swift; Mr. Johnson did not find himself in the humour ...
— Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson, LL.D. - during the last twenty years of his life • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... menace and of hatred. He was dressed in an ecclesiastical costume. At the moment when he stood forth from the crowd, Gringoire, who had not noticed him up to that time, recognized him: "Hold!" he said, with an exclamation of astonishment. "Eh! 'tis my master in Hermes, Dom Claude Frollo, the archdeacon! What the devil does he want of that old one-eyed fellow? He'll ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... the praises of Mrs. Thrale, he (Johnson) used to dwell with a peculiar delight, a paternal fondness, expressive of conscious exultation in being so intimately acquainted with her. One day, in speaking of her to Mr. Harris, author of 'Hermes,' and expatiating on her various perfections,—the solidity of her virtues, the brilliancy of her wit, and the strength of her understanding, &c.—he quoted some lines (a stanza, I believe, but from what author I know not[1]), with which ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... doorway of the temporary office. The Arizonan stepped in with his easy, swinging stride, a lithe, straight-backed Hermes showing strength of character back ...
— Gunsight Pass - How Oil Came to the Cattle Country and Brought a New West • William MacLeod Raine
... a curious, and almost godlike air of simplicity and native directness. He reminded her of an apparition, the young Hermes. ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... unsightly root, But of divine effect. Unknown, and like esteem'd, and the dull swain Treads on it daily with his clouted shoon; And yet more med'cinal is it than that moly That Hermes once to wise Ulysses gave; He call'd it haemony, and gave it me, And bade me keep it as of sovran use 'Gainst all enchantments, mildew, blast, or damp, Or ghastly furies' apparition. And now I find it true; ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... headed "The tale of Hemetes the Heremite, pronounced before the Queene's Maiestie," which Warton, who clearly never saw the book, calls the "Fable of Hermes." In fact, it is, with a few verbal changes, the tale of Hemetes, which George Gascoigne presented, in Latin, Italian, French, and English, to Queen Elizabeth, and of which the MS., with the portraits ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 6. Saturday, December 8, 1849 • Various
... with the satyrs; the birds are pecking at the grapes, the goats are nibbling at the vines; all is life, strong and splendid in its marble eternity. And the mutilated Venus smiles towards the broken Hermes; the stalwart Hercules, resting against his club, looks on quietly, a smile beneath his beard; and the gods murmur to each other, as they stand in the cloister filled with earth from Calvary, where hundreds of men lie rotting beneath the cypresses, "Death will not triumph ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... the birth of Bacchus by Cesarean section from the corpse of Semele. Greek mythology tells us of the birth of Bacchus in the following manner: After Zeus burnt the house of Semele, daughter of Cadmus, he sent Hermes in great haste with directions to take from the burnt body of the mother the fruit of seven months. This child, as we know, was Bacchus. Aesculapius, according to the legend of the Romans, had been excised from the belly of his dead mother, Corinis, who was already ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... the four "ultimate elementary particles" of Empedocles. The number was sacred to Hermes, and lay at the root of the physical philosophy of Pythagoras. The quotation in the text is from the "Golden Verses," given in Passow's lexicon under the word tetraktys: nai ma ton hametera psycha paradonta tetraktyn, pagan aenaou physeos. "The most ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... lips, that shape soft sayings Like crystals of the snow, With pretty half-betrayings Of things one may not know; Fair hand, whose touches thrill, Like golden rod of wonder, Which Hermes wields at will Spirit and flesh to sunder. Forth, Love, and find this maid, Wherever she be hidden; Speak, Love, be not afraid, But plead as thou art bidden; And say, that he who taught thee His yearning want ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... goes to Petersburgh, and converses with the Empress— Persuades the Russians and Turks to cease cutting one another's throats, and in concert cut a canal across the Isthmus of Suez—The Baron discovers the Alexandrine Library, and meets with Hermes Trismegistus—Besieges Seringapatam, and challenges Tippoo Sahib to single combat—They fight—The Baron receives some wounds to his face, but at last vanquishes the tyrant—The Baron returns to Europe, and raises the ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe
... doubted. There was another Mercury who also was very famous amongst the Egyptians for his rare knowledge; and of much greater antiquity than he of whom we have been speaking. Jamblicus, a priest of Egypt, affirms, that it was customary with the Egyptians, to affix the name of Hermes or Mercury to all the new books or inventions that were ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... in the memory and affections of most early people as wisdom, life, goodness, and the source of knowledge and science, under various names such as Toth, Hermes, Themis, the Kneph or Sophia of Egyptians and Gnostics, and Set, Shet, or ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... hitherto considered the quality of his food so much, it is probable that in these lower conditions it may prove to be quantity which will interest him most. He was greatly pleased with a curious kind of aromatic tube which Hermes ...
— Hypolympia - Or, The Gods in the Island, an Ironic Fantasy • Edmund Gosse
... accomplishment of the greatest good to the greatest number; I have believed the extension of science possible 'beyond the bounds of all imaginable experience' into the realms of the occult and hidden; I have wandered with Hermes by the banks of the Nile, with Gautama along the mud-flats of the Ganges. I have disgusted myself with the writings of those who would reduce all history and religion to solar myths, and I have striven to fathom the ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford
... himself. It is Hokusai who made him, delineating his paunch in that one soft summary curve, and echoing it in the curve of the wine-skin that swells around him. Himself, as a living man, were too loathsome for words; but here, thanks to Hokusai, he is not less admirable than Pheidias' Hermes, or the Discobolus himself. Yes! Swathed in his abominable surplusage of bulk, he is as fair as any statue of astricted god or athlete that ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... by the kingdom of Persia, and go to a city that is Clept Hermes, for Hermes the philosopher founded it. And after that they pass an arm of the sea, and then they go to another city that is clept Golbache. And there they find merchandises, and of popinjays, as great ...
— The Travels of Sir John Mandeville • Author Unknown
... gained much more substantial advantage from the popular approval on his condemnation than I should have got from his gratitude if he had been acquitted.[40] I am very glad to hear what you say about the Hermathena. It is an ornament appropriate to my "Academia" for two reasons: Hermes is a sign common to all gymnasia, Minerva specially of this particular one. So I would have you, as you say, adorn the place with the other objects also, and the more the better. The statues which you sent me before I have not yet ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... light to counterfeit a gloom, Far from all resort of mirth, Save the cricket on the hearth, Or the bellman's drowsy charm, To bless the doors from nightly harm. Or let my lamp at midnight hour Be seen on some high lonely tower, Where I may oft out-watch the Bear With thrice-great Hermes, or unsphere The spirit of Plato, to unfold What worlds, or what vast regions hold The immortal mind, that hath forsook Her mansion in this fleshly nook; And of those demons that are found In fire air, flood, or under ground, Whose power hath a true consent With planet, or ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... mentions Kennedy in his work on "Mythology," have highly reverenced Noah, and designated him as Noa, Noos, Nous, Nus, Nusas, Nusus (in India), Thoth, Hermes, Mercury, Osiris, Prometheus, Deucalion, Atlas, Deus, Zeus, and Dios. Dios was one of the most ancient terms for Noah, and whence was derived Deus—Nusus compounded of Dios and Nusos, which gives us Dionysus, ...
— A History of Pantomime • R. J. Broadbent
... Narcissus, which are in the Lord. Salute Tryphena and Tryphosa, who labour in the Lord. Salute the beloved Persis, which laboured much in the Lord. Salute Rufus, chosen in the Lord, and his mother and mine. Salute Asyncritus, Phlegon, Hermas, Patrobas, Hermes, and the brethren which are with them. Salute Philologus and Julia, Nereus and his sister, and Olympas, and all the saints which are ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... Alessandro, gesticulating with one hand, "may you be my Hermes, my swiftfoot messenger. Tell me what you know ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... Young Hermes next, a close-contriving god, Her brows encircled with his serpent rod; 70 Then plots, and fair excuses, fill'd her brain, The views of breaking amorous vows for gain, The price of favours, the ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... twenty. Nobody is less of a visionary theorist; nobody has drawn his speculations more from practice. No peer has condescended to superintend with more vigilance the declining franchises of the poor commons. "With thrice great Hermes he has outwatched the bear." Often have his candles been burned to the snuff, and glimmered and stunk in the sockets, whilst he grew pale at his constitutional studies; long sleepless nights has he wasted; long, laborious, ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... who is at once, by his own confession, 'God in Nature and a weed by the wall.' His weakness strives after infinite power. Conscious of a divinity within, he struggles to express it worthily; but ah! says Hermes Trismegistus,—'It is hard to conceive God, but impossible to express him.' Freedom within chafes at the iron necessity without, 'a necessity deep as the world,' all-controlling, imperial, which ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... it God. People three thousand years ago called it Mercury or Hermes. Both mean the same thing,—mere words to designate an unknown quality. Where are you going? Does ...
— Bebee • Ouida
... but I cannot bring it out. It may sound like a joke, but I do feel something corresponding to that tale of the Destinies falling in love with Hermes.' ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... took its origin from a fear lest the wayfaring man should be a Divinity in disguise. According to the Greek story, Orion owed his birth to the fact that the childless Hyrieus, his reputed father, had once received unawares Zeus, Poseidon, and Hermes, or, to call them by their Latin names, Jupiter, Neptune, and Mercury. In the beautiful story of Philemon and Baucis, Jupiter and Mercury reward the aged couple who had so hospitably received them by warning them of the approaching deluge. The fables of Phaedrus and Aesop represent Mercury and ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... thing; but not so radically as to prevent us, their posterity, from undoing it. They expelled the writing sufficiently to leave a field for the new manuscript, and yet not sufficiently to make the traces of the elder manuscript irrecoverable for us. Could magic, could Hermes Trismegistus, have done more? What would you think, fair reader, of a problem such as this—to write a book which should be sense for your own generation, nonsense for the next, should revive into sense for the next after ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... not beyond their Swan-pan. Of the same nature is the bold and unfounded assertion of another of the Jesuits, "that the musical system of the Chinese was borrowed from them by the Greeks and Egyptians, anterior to the time of Hermes or Orpheus!" ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... and reflects, the calm, pure, effulgent light of Nature's definite day, and I bathe myself in its happy warmth. Erst, I grovelled like a worm, blind and earth-fed: now, I shall speed through very space, winged heel and shoulder, a swift, untiring Hermes, who have drunk of the milk that flows rich in Nature's breasts, and am emancipate forever in the decorous freedom of the beautiful self-conscious spirit! Oh, the glory, oh, the boon of Art, the play-deity! Phoebus no longer ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... painfully broken,— Broken with painful remorses, with shrinkings of soul, and relentings, Foolish delays, more foolish evasions, most foolish renewals. But I am in for it now,—I have quitted the ship of Ulysses; Yet on my lips is the moly, medicinal, offered of Hermes. I have passed into the precinct, the labyrinth closes around me, Path into path rounding slyly; I pace slowly on, and the fancy, Struggling awhile to sustain the long sequences, weary, bewildered, Fain must collapse in despair; I yield, I am lost and know nothing; Yet in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... nature, they might gain such an insight into physical causes, as would enable them to perform actions, that should fill the vulgar with astonishment; and it is hardly to be doubted, but this was all the knowledge that many of them aspired to. In this sort of magic, Hermes Tresmegistus and Zoroaster excelled, and indeed it gained great reputation among the Egyptians, Chaldeans, Persians, Indians and Jews. In times of ignorance, a piece of clock-work, or some other curious machine, was sufficient to entitle ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... flock in a forest lost a Bull-calf from the fold. After a long and fruitless search, he made a vow that, if he could only discover the thief who had stolen the Calf, he would offer a lamb in sacrifice to Hermes, Pan, and the Guardian Deities of the forest. Not long afterwards, as he ascended a small hillock, he saw at its foot a Lion feeding on the Calf. Terrified at the sight, he lifted his eyes and his hands to heaven, and said: "Just now I vowed ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... one day, standing beside the writing-table in the Chilworth Street study, with David's portrait in her hand. It usually stood there, in a silver frame—a coloured photograph of a young man of thirty, stupid, and beautiful as the Praxitelean Hermes, resplendent in the gold and blue and scarlet of a crack Dragoon Regiment. Owen stood upon the hearthrug, for once in Mildred's company, and not thinking of Mildred. And with tears rising in her round, pretty, foolish eyes the girl looked from the face and figure enclosed within the silver ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... Shem, or Chem, the son of Noah, was an adept in the art, and thought it highly probable that the words chemistry and alchymy are both derived from his name." Others say, the art was derived from the Egyptians, amongst whom it was first founded by Hermes Trismegistus. Moses, who is looked upon as a first-rate alchymist, gained his knowledge in Egypt; but he kept it all to himself, and would not instruct the children of Israel in its mysteries. All the writers upon alchymy triumphantly cite ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... Christian Hero. He resided at Great Cherwell, near Lavington, where his house was still pointed out to visitors. A typical shepherd of Salisbury Plain was afterwards pictured by another lady, and described as "wearing a long black cloak falling from neck to heels, a round felt hat, like a Hermes cap without the wings to it, and sometimes a blue milk-wort or a yellow hawk-weed in the brim, and walking with his plume-tailed dog in front leading his sheep, as was customary in the East and as described in the Scriptures—"the ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... not enthusiastic; he does not set himself up as a prophet; he does not say that he is inspired by the gods. Thus I shall not put in the rank of philosophers either the ancient Zarathustra, or Hermes, or the ancient Orpheus, or any of those legislators of whom the nations of Chaldea, Persia, Syria, Egypt and Greece boasted. Those who styled themselves children of the gods were the fathers of ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... occult hint and sign, Holding the cunning-warded keys To all the woodcraft mysteries; Himself to Nature's heart so near That all her voices in his ear Of beast or bird had meanings clear, Like Apollonius of old, Who knew the tales the sparrows told, Or Hermes who interpreted What the sage cranes of ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... did the cultivators of magic acknowledge the potent master. He received from their homage a more mystic appellation, and was long remembered in Magna Graecia and the Eastern plain by the name of 'Hermes, the Lord of the Flaming Belt'. His subtle speculations and boasted attributes of wisdom, recorded in various volumes, were among those tokens 'of the curious arts' which the Christian converts most joyfully, yet most fearfully, burnt at Ephesus, depriving posterity of the proofs ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... the forme as it was founded, Wherof the names yit ben grounded 2600 Of hem that ferste it founden oute; And thus the fame goth aboute To suche as soghten besinesse Of vertu and of worthinesse. Of whom if I the names calle, Hermes was on the ferste of alle, To whom this art is most applied; Geber therof was magnefied, And Ortolan and Morien, Among the whiche is Avicen, 2610 Which fond and wrot a gret partie The practique of Alconomie; Whos bokes, pleinli as thei stonde Upon this craft, fewe understonde; ...
— Confessio Amantis - Tales of the Seven Deadly Sins, 1330-1408 A.D. • John Gower
... difference, however; it was now attempted to systematize the magical theory of the universe. While the common man held a store of traditional magical beliefs respecting the natural world, the learned man deduced these beliefs from the Neo-Platonists, from the Kabbala, from Hermes Trismegistos, and from a variety of other sources, and attempted to arrange this somewhat heterogeneous mass of erudite lore into ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax
... been described by Dr. Brownson—himself a convert to Catholicism—as the product of "a school formed, at first, outside of the Church, but now brought within her communion," and compared, in regard to its dangerousness, with the speculations of Hermes and Lamennais.[94] And a still more competent judge—Professor Sedgwick, of Cambridge[95]—has characterized it as "a monstrous compound of Popery and Pantheism," according to which "the Catholic faith is not a religion revealed to us in the Sacred Books we call canonical, and in the works of the ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... its gloom. Homer, both in the "Ilias" and "Odusseia," gives his readers frequent glimpses into the halls of Olympus; for messengers are continually flashing to and fro, like meteors, between the throne of Zeus and the earth. Sometimes it is Hermes sandalled with down; sometimes it is wind-footed Iris, who is winged with the emerald plumes of the rainbow; and sometimes it is Oneiros, or a Dream, that glides down to earth, hooded and veiled, through the shadow of night, bearing the behests of Jove. But however often we are permitted to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... Alvan, without looking back. 'That tree belongs to a plantation of the under world; its fellows grow in the wood across Acheron, and that tree has looked into the ghastliness of the flood and seen itself. Hecate and Hermes know about it. Phoebus cannot light it. That tree stands for Death blooming. We think it sinister, but down there it is a homely tree. Down there! When do we go? The shudder in that tree is the air exchanging ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... and this is all the ornament given to the figure. The hands are clasped across a sword laid flat upon the breast, and placed between the legs. Upon the chin is a little tuft of hair, parted, and curling either way; for the victor of Ravenna, like the Hermes of Homer, was [Greek: proton hypenetes], 'a youth of princely blood, whose beard hath just begun to grow, for whom the season of bloom is in its prime of grace.' The whole statue is the idealisation of virtu—that quality so highly prized ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... would be to design a morning cloud sailing before the wind. It is short, as we count shortness in after years, when the drag of lead pulls down to earth the foot that used to flutter with a winged impetuosity, and to float with the pulse of Hermes. But in memory, my childhood was long, long with interminable hours, hours with the pale cheek pressed against the windowpane, hours of mechanical and repeated lonely 'games', which had lost their savour, and were kept going by sheer inertness. ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... is anomalous. It has no centre, or, if it have, it is like that of the sphere of Hermes. It is divided into many systems, each revolving round its several sun, and often presenting to the rest only the faint glimmer of a milk-and-water way. Our capital city, unlike London or Paris, is not a great central heart, from ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... Hermes cunning Poor Argus funning, He made him drink like a buffer; To his great surprise Sew'd up all his eyes, And stole ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 380, July 11, 1829 • Various
... the Arbiter Elegantiarum at the court of Nero. "The question as to the date of the narrative of the adventures of Encolpius and his boon companions must be regarded as settled," says Theodor Mommsen (Hermes, 1878); "this narrative is unsurpassed in originality and mastery of treatment among the writings of Roman literature. Nor does anyone doubt the identity of its author and the Arbiter Elegantiarum of Nero, whose end ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... that when the teacher comes all the world will listen and obey. It seems to me that teacher after teacher has uttered the truth—Hermes, Zoroaster, Buddha, Confucius, Orpheus, Jesus—and that the trouble is not lack of teachers but lack of disciples. In the teachings of Jesus Christ, the world has a model wherewith to mould the old order ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... Old and of the New! The school of Hermes Trismegistus, Who uttered his oracles sublime Before the Olympiads, in the dew Of the early dawn and dusk of Time, The reign of dateless old Hephaestus! As northward, from its Nubian springs, The Nile, forever new and ...
— The Golden Legend • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... most conspicuously absent, she had hardly nervous energy left to wonder what could have become of Georgie. Never in all the years of his ministry had he failed to be at her elbow through the entire duration of her garden-parties, flying about on her errands like a tripping Hermes, herding her flocks if she wanted them in one part of the garden rather than another, like a sagacious sheep-dog, and coming back to heel again ready for further tasks. But today Georgie was mysteriously away, for he had neither applied for leave nor given any ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... further in deifying humanity than in humanising divinity. The Hermes of Olympia is a man made into a god; no Christian artist has ever done a tenth as well in presenting the image of God made Man. When imagination soars towards an invisible world it loses love of life ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... of argument. Forrester realized what had happened. "It's the priest from Hermes," he said. "The Healer. You forgot to tell the Captain of ...
— Pagan Passions • Gordon Randall Garrett
... far as Lyveden was concerned, an Olympian banquet. The assemblage, indeed, was remarkable, and the hostess—a very Demeter—must have been the oldest present by some twenty years. The sprightliness of Hermes alone, in the guise of the man called Berry, kept a lively ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... his name,— Hyperion, god of sun and song and silver speech, Condemned to serve a mortal for his sin To Zeus in sending violent darts of death, A raising hand irreverent, against The one-eyed forgers of the thunderbolt. For shepherd's crook he held the living rod Of twisted serpents, later Hermes' wand. Him sought the king, discovering soon hard by, Idle as one in nowise bound to time, Watching the restless grasses blow and wave, The sparkle of the sun upon the stream, Regretting nothing, living with the hour: For him, who had his light and song within, Was naught that did not shine, ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... Agamemnon bearing his sceptre, that Hephaistos had wrought curiously. Hephaistos gave it to king Zeus son of Kronos, and then Zeus gave it to the messenger-god the slayer of Argus [Or, possibly, "the swift-appearing"]; and king Hermes gave it to Pelops the charioteer, and Pelops again gave it to Atreus shepherd of the host. And Atreus dying left it to Thyestes rich in flocks, and Thyestes in his turn left it to Agamemnon to bear, that over many islands and all Argos ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer (Lang, Leaf, Myers trans.)
... about that Zeus was compelled to send a messenger down to the Underworld to bring Persephone back to the mother who grieved so much for the loss of her. Hermes was the messenger whom Zeus sent. Through the darkened places of the earth Hermes went, and he came to that dark throne where the lord Aidoneus sat, with Persephone beside him. Then Hermes spoke to the lord of the Underworld, saying that Zeus commanded that Persephone should ...
— The Golden Fleece and the Heroes who Lived Before Achilles • Padraic Colum
... and half dusky, and full of many blended colours, where the marbles and the pictures live, sole dwellers in the deserted dwellings of princes; to come out where the oranges are all aglow in the sunshine, and the red camellias are pushing against the hoary head of the old stone Hermes, and to go down the width of the mighty steps into the gay piazza, alive with bells tolling, and crowds laughing, and drums abeat, and the flutter of carnival banners in the wind; and to get away from it all with a ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... pleasant little adytum there, I see," said the stranger, looking through a latticed screen which divided the shop from a room of about equal size, opening into a still smaller walled enclosure, where a few bays and laurels surrounded a stone Hermes. "I suppose your conclave of ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... that mystic relationship, felt by Dante and all the poets, which he bears to the genius of imaginative love. What I allude to is a more humble, but quite as gracious function, of leading those he takes away (with the infinitely tender gesture of the antique funereal Hermes), not into vacuity and the horrid blackness of oblivion, but into a place of safe and serene memory. In this capacity Death can be, even like his master, Time, a giver of gifts to us. For those are gifts to us, those friends he gathers together under hazier, tenderer skies into our thoughts ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... the older man, and his very silence suggested his superior dignity. So he was taken for Jupiter (Zeus in the Greek), and the younger man for his inferior, Mercury (Hermes in the Greek), 'the messenger of the gods.' Clearly the two missionaries did not understand what the multitudes were shouting in their 'barbarous' language, or they would have intervened. Perhaps they had left the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... voice of waves) Aum! Hek! Wal! Ak! Lub! Mor! Ma! White yoghin of the gods. Occult pimander of Hermes Trismegistos. (With a voice of whistling seawind) Punarjanam patsypunjaub! I won't have my leg pulled. It has been said by one: beware the left, the cult of Shakti. (With a cry of stormbirds) Shakti Shiva, darkhidden ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... the eleven months of their absence the familiar rooms, recalling at every glance the woman to whom he had given all his loyalty, had grown intolerable. As the day approached for the arrival of the mail boat Hermes (the latest addition to the O. S. N. Co.'s splendid fleet), the doctor hobbled about more vivaciously, snapped more sardonically at simple and gentle ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... the God of Rice only; indeed, there are many Inari just as in antique Greece there were many deities called Hermes, Zeus, Athena, Poseidon—one in the knowledge of the learned, but essentially different in the imagination of the common people. Inari has been multiplied by reason of his different attributes. For instance, Matsue has a Kamiya-San-no-Inari-San, who is the God of Coughs and Bad Colds—afflictions ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... broke in: "Unless my eyes deceive me, I saw just now a pair of ears projecting from behind the pillar of Hermes, and these ass's ears can only belong ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg |
