"Mythical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a pure invention, and never existed; when you remember—as mentioned earlier in this book (1)—that it was more than five hundred years after the supposed birth of Jesus before any serious effort was made to establish the date of that birth—and that then a purely mythical date was chosen: the 25th December, the day of the SUN'S new birth after the winter solstice, and the time of the supposed birth of Apollo, Bacchus, and the other Sungods; when, moreover, you think for a moment what the state of historical criticism must have been, and the general ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... destroyed at Washington," which had been a condemned hulk for ten years, and had no guns or anything else in her, and was as much a loss to our navy as the fishing up and burning of an old wreck would have been; and 8 gun-boats whose destruction was either mythical, or else which were not national vessels. By deducting all these we reduce James' total by 120 guns, and 2,600 tons; and a few more alterations (such as excluding the swivels in the President's tops, which he counts, etc.), brings his number down to that given above—and also affords ...
— The Naval War of 1812 • Theodore Roosevelt
... The mythical hero of this shadowy romance has long embodied in his person the virtues of the typical avenger of the wrongs of the poor and the oppressed against the tyranny of the rich and the powerful; his name has been honored and his manly deeds have been lauded in prose and verse by thousands ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... some ancient authorities the oldest of the logographi (q.v.). Modern scholars, who accept this view, assign him to about 550 B.C.; others regard him as purely mythical. A confused notice in Suidas mentions three persons of the name: the first, the inventor of the alphabet; the second, the son of Pandion, "according to some" the first prose writer, a little later than Orpheus, author of a history of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... have been still amused by the hour, in studying the devices and ornaments on the shelves and chiffonieres; and Blanche had romanced about it to the little ones, till they were erecting it into a mythical palace. ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... Honeysuckle") relates an episode from the loves of Tristan and Isolde, the famous lovers, legendary even at that time. Tristan and Isolde, Lancelot and Guinevere, Fleur and Blanchefleur—these were the admired and mythical lovers of whom the poets sang and dreamed. All the world knew their adventures; all the world repeated them again and again, reverently preserving the identical words and yet unconsciously remoulding them. At the recital of their loves, hand clasped hand; "on ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... teachers, that all the supernatural must be eliminated from the Bible as mythical and unreliable, and so I was robbed of my Christ, my God and my Bible. Misguided by rationalism, I thought it my conscientious duty to accept, step by step, the dictates of destructive criticism until the Bible was only inspired to me in religion as Kant in philosophy, Milton ...
— To Infidelity and Back • Henry F. Lutz
... difficulties of the Mosaic cosmogony were also at that time exciting attention. It was a novelty to me, that Arnold treated these questions as matters of indifference to religion; and did not hesitate to say, that the account of Noah's deluge was evidently mythical, and the history of Joseph "a beautiful poem." I was staggered at this. If all were not descended from Adam, what became of St. Paul's parallel between the first and second Adam, and the doctrine of Headship and Atonement founded on it? If the world was not made in six days, how ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... relics of antiquity exhumed from the rocks or exposed upon the surface by the wear and tear of natural agencies. In earliest times such things were variously considered as curious freaks of geological formation, as sports of nature, or as the remains of the slain left upon the battle-ground of mythical Titans. Some of the Greeks supposed that fossils were parts of animals formed in the bowels of the earth by a process of spontaneous generation, which had died before they could make their way to the surface. They were ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... women—a woman who cannot be induced to accept anything but a bouquet—can be as dangerous an acquaintance for a young man as any opera girl of former days. As a matter of fact, the opera girl is an almost mythical being. As things are now at the theatres, dancers and actresses are about as amusing as a declaration of the rights of woman, they are puppets that go abroad in the morning in the character of respected and respectable mothers of families, and ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac
... belongs) shall stand upon my dust," and we shall see how much was to be done towards the mere exegesis of the text. This is an extreme instance, and no one will question the general beauty and majesty of our translation; but there are many mythical and physical allusions scattered over the poem, which, in the sixteenth century, there were positively no means of understanding; and perhaps, too, there were mental tendencies in the translators themselves which ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... and of the subjects of poets. (As if it were necessary to trot back generation after generation to the eastern records! As if the beauty and sacredness of the demonstrable must fall behind that of the mythical! As if men do not make their mark out of any times! As if the opening of the western continent by discovery, and what has transpired in North and South America, were less than the small theatre of the antique, or the ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... the Low Latin "antimonium" and the Span. Althimod are by metathesis for Al-Ithmid. The dictionaries define the substance as a stone from which antimony is prepared, but the Arabs understand a semi-mythical mineral of yellow colour which enters into the veins of the eyes and gives them Iynx-like vision. The famous Anz nicknamed Zarka (the blue eyed) of Yamamah (Province) used it; and, according to some, invented Kohl. When her ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... In its later form Albyn it long remained as loosely equivalent to North Britain, and as Albany it still survives in a like connection. Ireland Aristotle calls Ierne, the later Ivernia or Hibernia; a word also found in the Argonautic poems ascribed to the mythical Orpheus, and composed probably by Onomacritus about 350 B.C., wherein the Argo is warned against approaching "the Iernian islands, the home of dark and noisome mischief." This is the passage familiar to the readers of ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare
... brother of Artemis and son of Zeus and Leto. The island of Delos was his mythical birthplace and his principal oracle ...
— Odysseus, the Hero of Ithaca - Adapted from the Third Book of the Primary Schools of Athens, Greece • Homer
... beautiful after her fashion; as yet without sex, proud, untamed, splendid in her savage, primal independence—a thing untouched and unsullied by civilization. She seemed to him some Bradamante, some mythical Brunhilde, some Valkyrie of the legends, born out of season, lost and unfamiliar in this end-of-the-century time. Her purity was the purity of primeval glaciers. He could easily see how to such a girl the love of a man would appear only in the light of a humiliation—a degradation. ...
— Moran of the Lady Letty • Frank Norris
... introduces one of those quaint sagas, which, however mythical in themselves, are true enough to the peculiar mode of thought of the Mongols to make them very instructive. The saga ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume VI. • Various
... of a man. Wherefore either the strength of the muscles ought to be increased or the weight of the human body must be decreased, so that the same proportion obtains in it as exists in birds. Hence it is deducted that the Icarian invention is entirely mythical because impossible, for it is not possible either to increase a man's pectoral muscles or to diminish the weight of the human body; and whatever apparatus is used, although it is possible to increase the momentum, ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... believed, then, that nothing more beautiful had ever happened; for it was the first time a man had ever sent me roses. Nineteen years old, and my first roses! They made me so happy. Paris seemed very far away; the convent was a mythical place I had seen in a dream; nothing was real but Dad, and America, and the roses ...
— Cupid's Understudy • Edward Salisbury Field
... dynast of the house of the Aleuadae. Lucian mentions Anacreon amongst his instances of the longevity of eminent men, as having completed eighty-five years. If an anecdote given by Pliny (Nat. Hist. vii. 7) is to be trusted, he was choked at last by a grape-stone, but the story has an air of mythical adaptation to the poet's habits, which makes it somewhat apocryphal. Anacreon was for a long time popular at Athens, where his statue was to be seen on the Acropolis, together with that of his friend Xanthippus, the father of Pericles. On several coins of Teos he is represented, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... of his themes seem to you to be of his own invention? Name those based, ostensibly at least, upon the poet's own experience. To what extent do you find his narrative work purely objective, i. e., without admixture of reflective or didactic elements? What themes are of mythical or legendary origin? Of those having a historical basis, how many are drawn from English sources? Does his use of narrative material ever show a deficiency of emotion; i. e., could the story have been better told in prose? ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... privileges of the young men. They are also permitted to use all the books belonging to the library and to attend many of the lectures. No college-building is appropriated for this purpose, but recitation-rooms are provided in private houses. A witty Cambridge lady called this mythical college the "Harvard Annex"; the public adopted the name, and many people suppose that there is such a building. From the last annual report of the "Private Collegiate Instruction for Women," it appears that in 1885 sixty-five women availed themselves ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... step-ladder, and they were all very highly polished. I was naturally excited by this, and an hour before it was time to dress for dinner I slunk upstairs and hurried into the bathroom and locked myself in and turned on all the taps at once. It was strangely disappointing. The sea-water was mythical. Many of the taps refused to function at the same time as any other, and the only two which were really effective were WAVE and FLOOD. WAVE shot out a thin jet of boiling water which caught me in the chest, and FLOOD filled the bath with cold ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 31, 1920 • Various
... in a passion; and at that moment her face, with her knitted eyebrows, became like that of a mythical Fury. "Try it,"—with these words dashing the knife down into the table, which it pierced to the depth ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... bound up with the appetites, in consequence of its connexion with the body, and as preserving power and consciousness after its separation from the body. What he believed, however, to be its condition after death is far less certain, as his ideas on this subject are expressed in a mythical form. ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... emanating upward from it. The small, black lines on the lower border represent rain. To the left of the altar, on the same wall, appears the typical Hopi sun symbol, and on the left side wall that of the mythical water serpent, Balolookang. All of these wall pictures, however, are not an ...
— The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It, • George Wharton James
... so much as dissatisfaction in him. Hence there is far more happiness among the poor than we imagine. They see nothing deplorable in a lot to which they have become accustomed; they are as our first parents before their eyes were opened to a knowledge of good or evil; or, to take a less mythical illustration, they are as the contented savage, to whom the refinements of European civilisation are objects of ridicule rather ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... teaching is fatal to piety, let him turn to the 104th Psalm and read, from Spinoza's point of view, the cosmic vision of the Hebrew seer. True, we can think no longer of the supernatural carpenter who works on "the beams of his chambers" above, or of the mythical engineer who digs deep in the darkness to "lay the foundations of the earth." For that is poetry, appealing by concrete images to the emotions. But it does not bind the intellect to a literal interpretation; and we are no ...
— Pantheism, Its Story and Significance - Religions Ancient And Modern • J. Allanson Picton
... REST.—A mythical period between being relieved and relieving in the trenches, which is usually spent in walking away from the line and returning straight back in poor weather and ...
— The Stars & Stripes, Vol 1, No 1, February 8, 1918, - The American Soldiers' Newspaper of World War I, 1918-1919 • American Expeditionary Forces
... capital of Persia, the ruins of which are known as "the throne of Jemshid," after a mythical king. ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... to the Origin of Species and the Antiquity of Man, could not better employ their speculative minds than in determining the origin and antiquity of the venerable "joes" which have been in circulation beyond the remembrance of that mythical personage, ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... that man is the most unmentionable. He is eloquent in his estimation of you, Mr Intelligence. I told him that I could not agree with him upon any one point he put forward, and that it would be childish in the extreme to waste 2500 men in chivvying a mythical 200. He then grew angry, and told me he had got his orders and had given me mine. Well, if this is what is meant by co-operation, I'll never get within speaking distance of a column with which I am told to co-operate again. Issued ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer
... ill-favor with his own order, and had excited the suspicion against him of dealing in magic and forbidden arts, seem to have sown the seed of the popular traditions which at once took root around his name. Friar Bacon soon became, and indeed has remained almost to the present day, a half-mythical character. To the imagination of the common people, he was a great necromancer; he had had dealings with the Evil One, who had revealed many of the secrets of Nature to him; he had made a head of brass that could speak and foretell future events; and to him were attributed other not less wonderful ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... reconstructed in Margaret's mind the proper proportion of time as applied to the history and evolution of the world's civilization. The deeds and the victories of Cyrus, the grandson of Nebuchadnezzar, were not mythical deeds because they belonged to a mythical and lost age. In Egypt they had seemed to her legends of a comparatively late date. Darius, the Mede, to whom Biblical authority awards the succession of the kingdom of the vanquished and slain Belshazzar, was ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... Good Women; but no Legend of Good Men. I would take Spenser, and show you how all his fairy knights are sometimes deceived and sometimes vanquished; but the soul of Una is never darkened, and the spear of Britomart is never broken. Nay, I could go back into the mythical teaching of the most ancient times, and show you how the great people,—by one of whose princesses it was appointed that the Lawgiver of all the earth should be educated, rather than by his own kindred;—how ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... of Phaedrus is half-mythical, half-ethical; and he himself, true to the character which is given him in the Dialogue bearing his name, is half-sophist, half-enthusiast. He is the critic of poetry also, who compares Homer and Aeschylus in the insipid and irrational ...
— Symposium • Plato
... him is that he lamented the loss of his wife—a feeling very much older than the poet of Colophon—and consoled himself by writing an elegy named [Greek: Ludae], in which he brought together from mythical and traditional sources a number of sad tales. Conjugal grief does not take us very far toward so complicated an altruistic state of mind as I have shown romantic love ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... scarcely a hand was down in answer to the first question, and pencils flew over the paper in answer to the second. What does it mean? It does not condemn the school, nor does it hold the school responsible but it does suggest that there might be some substitute characters for the mythical ones of ancient history, or that possibly the lives of great and noble women might be studied with greater profit by the girls of today than certain abstract problems in physics. In many of the classes where the questions were asked that fresh, clear, vitalizing atmosphere ...
— The Girl and Her Religion • Margaret Slattery
... the line of progressive nations. So favorable is the climate that nearly the whole country might be turned into a botanical garden. Indeed, Australia would seem to be better entitled to the name of Eldorado (a mythical country abounding in gold), so talked of in the sixteenth century, than was the imaginary land of untold wealth so confidently believed by the adventurous Spaniards, to exist somewhere between the ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... which the public have never been made acquainted. His deeds were quite black enough without further blackening with printer's ink, and it would be a pity if the real Motor Pirate were lost sight of in mythical haze such as has gathered about the name of his great ...
— The Motor Pirate • George Sidney Paternoster
... if not more distinct personalities. One is the hero chief of the Yadavas, who fought in the battle of the Pandavas and Kauravas, migrated to Gujarat and was killed there. As he was chief of the Yadavas this Krishna must stand for the actual or mythical personality of some leader of the immigrant nomad tribes. The other Krishna, the boy cowherd, who grazed cattle and sported with the milkmaids of Brindaban, may very probably be some hero of the indigenous non-Aryan tribes, who, then as now, lived in the forests and were shepherds ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... on the coast of Thrace near the mouth of the Nestos, and almost opposite Thasos. Its mythical foundation was attributed to Heracles, its historical to a colony from Clazomenae in the 7th century B.C. But its prosperity dates from 544 B.C., when the majority of the people of Teos migrated to Abdera after the Ionian revolt to escape the Persian yoke (Herod. i. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... canons of belief have been established, which it is not safe to disregard. Great occurrences, such as the Trojan War and the Siege of Thebes, not long ago faithfully described by all historians of Greece, have been found to be part of the common mythical heritage of the Aryan nations. Achilleus and Helena, Oidipous and Iokasta, Oinone and Paris, have been discovered in India and again in Scandinavia, and so on, until their nonentity has become the legitimate inference from their very ubiquity. Legislators ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... wife of another. The crusader exercised a strong influence upon the literature of medieval Europe, and that influence we find in a very marked degree in the legends of the Rhine. Again, a number of these tales undoubtedly consist of older materials not necessarily mythical in origin, over which a later medieval colour has been cast. Unhappily many of these beautiful old legends have been greatly marred by the absurd sentimentality of the German writers of the early nineteenth century, and their dramatis personae, instead of exhibiting the characteristics of sturdy ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... policeman put up his hand. The 'bus rumbled on down the street. Names that had always been remotely mythical to her now met her eye and became realities. Maillard's. And that great red stone castle was the Waldorf. Almost historic, and it looked newer than the smoke-grimed Blackstone. And straight ahead—why, that must be the Flatiron building! It loomed up like the ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... Did the semi-mythical Cave Man (who is perhaps only a pseudo-scientific creation) on his return from a prehistoric hunt find his leafy spouse all in tears over her staglocythic house-cleaning, or the conduct of the youngest cave ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... Mr. Blight spoke of the wedding chilled me. It was so absolutely settled that there was to be a wedding that in me there seemed to be embodied that mythical person who is commanded so sternly to speak or forever hold his peace. For a time I did hold my peace, but it was only because Rufus Blight evinced such a lively interest in my affairs that I had ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... inform you that your imprisonment is likely to be very short. You are to know that the harmony supposed to exist in Stolzenfels is largely mythical: I left behind me the seeds of discord. I proposed that the glum niece of Treves, whom you met at our historic lunch, should be the future Empress. This nomination was seconded by Mayence himself, and received with unconcealed joy by ...
— The Sword Maker • Robert Barr
... Russian "Njemez," that is, "speechless." In Isaiah (xxxiii, 19) the Assyrians are called a people "of a stammering tongue, that one cannot understand." The common use of the expression "tongueless" and "speechless," so applied, has probably given rise, as TYLOR suggests, to the mythical stories of actually speechless tribes of savages, and the considerations and instances above presented tend to discredit the many other accounts of languages which are incomplete without the help of gesture. ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... that these mythical happenings and magical practices do not agree with his actual knowledge in no way disturbs the Tinguian. It is doubtful if he is conscious of a conflict; and should it be brought to his attention, he would explain it ...
— The Tinguian - Social, Religious, and Economic Life of a Philippine Tribe • Fay-Cooper Cole
... [381] just as many primitive races believe that if they make a doll as a model of an enemy and stick pins into or otherwise injure it, the man himself is similarly affected. A kindred belief prevails concerning certain mythical old kings of the Golden Age of India, of whom it is said that to destroy their opponents all they had to do was to collect a bundle of juari stalks and cut off the heads, when the heads of their enemies ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... and a half.' Disraeli and others pretended that they had foreseen the failure of the conversion. Mr. Gladstone proved that, as matter of recorded fact, they had done nothing of the sort. 'This is the way in which mythical history arises. An event happens without attracting much notice; subsequently it excites interest; then people look back upon the time now passed, and see things not as they are or were, but through the haze of distance—they see them as they wish them ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... to raise it. Ah, if only that great treasure which old Sir James de la Molle had hid away and died rather than reveal, could be brought to light, now in the hour of his house's sorest need! But the treasure was very mythical, and if it had ever really existed it was not now to be found. He went to his dispatch box and took from it the copy he had made of the entry in the Bible which had been in Sir James's pocket when he was murdered in the courtyard. ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... the idea that he took trouble over anything: "taking trouble has never been a weakness of mine": but in what might be termed a large and loose way he really did take immense trouble over what interested him. King Alfred is not an almost mythical figure like King Arthur and an outline of his story with legendary fringes can be traced in the Wessex country and confirmed by literature. Gilbert wanted this general story: he did not want antiquarian exactness ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... GARCIAS, DON PEDRO, a mythical don mentioned in the preface to "Gil Blas" as buried with a small bag of doubloons, and the epitaph, "Here lies interred the ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... "He is not mythical. He is reality. He is yet about three hundred yards distant. I might not have heard him, even with the aid of the cleft, but tonight Areskoui has given uncommon power to my ear, perhaps to aid ...
— The Masters of the Peaks - A Story of the Great North Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... this circuitous way you see I have reached my present subject, which is, Ogres. You fancy they are dead or only fictitious characters—mythical representatives of strength, cruelty, stupidity, and lust for blood? Though they had seven-leagued boots, you remember all sorts of little whipping-snapping Tom Thumbs used to elude and outrun them. They were so stupid that they gave into the most shallow ambuscades and artifices: witness that well-known ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... contrary did him honor and showed him kindness and therewith sent him away." Colleccao de Livros Ineditos de Historia Portugueza, II. 178-179. It will be noted that according to this account Columbus said he had discovered Cipango and Antilia, a mythical island which is represented on the maps of the fifteenth century, and that Columbus is called Colombo his Italian name, and not ...
— The Northmen, Columbus and Cabot, 985-1503 • Various
... it; but none at all for a long time past. All attempts that way, as ineffectual for any purpose but stirring up strife, had been discontinued for many generations; [Buchholz, i. 148-151.] and the Crypto-Protestantism was again become a mythical romantic object, ignored by Official persons. However, in 1727, there came a new Archbishop, one "Firmian", Count Firmian by secular quality, of a strict lean character, zealous rather than wise; who had brought his orthodoxies with him ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... the senses. These appeared during the years 1859 and 1872. Each of the Idylls, which has a connecting thread binding it to its fellow-allegory, takes its plot or fable from the legendary lore that has clustered round the name of Arthur, mythical King of the Britons about the era of the first invasion by the English. Out of the mass of material which was gathered by Sir Thomas Malory for his prose history of Arthur and his Knights, Tennyson takes the chief incidents and noblest heroic traits of character in the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... This gulf was caused by "the terrific inundations of the thirteenth century," when thousands of people perished. It was only after this inundation took place that the city of Amsterdam arose on the southwest shore of the Zuyder Zee. The story, with the exception of the inundation, is purely mythical.] ...
— Contes et lgendes - 1re Partie • H. A. Guerber
... the besieging party. [Siege is notorious enough; A.D. 1140: Kohler Reichshistorie, p. 167, who does not mention the story of the women; Menzel (Wolfgang), Geschichte der Deutschen, p. 287, who takes no notice that it is a highly mythical story,— supported only by the testimony of one poor Monk in Koln, vaguely chronicling fifty years after date and at that good distance.] Alas, thinks his Royal Highness, is there not a flower of Welfdom now in England; and I, unluckiest ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... Grass River settlement who would have envied the mythical Prince Quippi also. For even at six years of age Leigh had the same quality that marked her uncle. People must love her if they cared for her at all; and they couldn't help caring for her. She fitted into the life of the prairie, too, as naturally as Thaine Aydelot did, who was born to it. ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... unmistakably those of a child. As the hands wandered up and down the keyboard, the ear now and then took notice of a broken string. There were many of these broken strings. The instrument plainly announced itself to be a remote, well-nigh mythical ancestor of the modern piano, preternaturally lingering on amid an innumerable deafening progeny. It suggested a superannuated human being whose loudest utterances have sunk to ghostly whispers in ...
— A Cathedral Singer • James Lane Allen
... of Mr. Marrier. Edward Henry and Mr. Marrier were now in regular relations. Before Edward Henry had paid his final bill at Wilkins's and relinquished his valet and his electric brougham, and disposed for ever of his mythical "man" on board the Minnetonka, and got his original luggage away from the Hotel Majestic, Mr. Marrier had visited him and made a certain proposition. And such was the influence of Mr. Marrier's incurable smile and of his solid optimism and of his obvious talent for getting things done on the spot ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... know the mythical tragedy of Paradise? Therein dwelt our first parents in a state of perfect health and perfect innocence, and Jahwe gave them to eat of the tree of life and created all things for them; but he commanded them not to taste of the ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... he was breakfasting at such and such a cafe. At the cafe, in answer to inquiries of the waitress, made after surmounting unspeakable repugnance, Lucien heard that Finot had just left the place. Lucien, at length tired out, began to regard Finot as a mythical and fabulous character; it appeared simpler to waylay Etienne Lousteau at Flicoteaux's. That youthful journalist would, doubtless, explain the mysteries that enveloped the paper for which ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... old Imperial phraseology and Yuan Shih-kai, even before his "election," was memorialized as though he were the legitimate successor of the immense line of Chinese sovereigns who stretch back to the mythical days of Yao and Shun (2,800 B.C.). The beginning of December saw the voting completed and the results telegraphed to Peking; and on the 11th December, the Senate hastily meeting, and finding that "the National Convention of Citizens" ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... capitals. Everywhere the lotus, the mani, and the chirki (or wheel with three rays, emblematic of the Boodhist Trinity), were introduced; "Om Mani Padmi hom" in gilt letters, adorned the projecting end of every beam;* [A mythical animal with a dog's head and blood-red spot over the forehead was not uncommon in this chapel, and is also seen in the Sikkim temples and throughout Tibet. Ermann, in his Siberian Travels, mentions it as occurring in the Khampa Lama's ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... defeat on the Conscription issue; (2) as a retaliation on Sinn Fein, because it had succeeded in peacefully supplanting English rule by a system of Volunteer Police, Sinn Fein Courts, Sinn Fein Local Government, etc. The only pretext on which this provocation was pursued was on account of a mythical "German plot," which Lord Wimbourne never heard of, which Sir Bryan Mahon, Commander-in-Chief, told Lord French he flatly disbelieved in, and which, when, after more than two years, the documents are produced, proves to be a stale rehash of negotiations before the Easter Week Rising, with ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... Our men were not mythical heroes exalted by the gods above the limitations of nature. They were human beings, with wives and children, or mothers and sisters, whom they desired to see again. They hated this war. Death had no allurement for them, except now and then as an escape from ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... him under arrest, and talking to the astonished host, who could not understand what it was all about. I told the landlord the mythical history of the abbe debt to me, and handed over the trunk, telling him that he had nothing to fear with regard to the bill, as I would take care that he should be ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... enough—that if one or two thousand years hence, when the history of the late Emperor Napoleon the Third, his rise and fall, shall come to be subjected to critical analysis by future Philistine historians of New Zealand or Australia, it will be proved by them to be utterly mythical, incredible, monstrous—and that all the more, the more the actual facts remain to puzzle their unimaginative brains. What will they make two thousand years hence, of the landing at Boulogne with the tame eagle? Will not that, and stranger ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... eternal remembrance, and this I have the more at heart because from all ages scarce three or four pairs of friends are on record, [Footnote: Those referred to probably Theseus and Peirithous, Achilles and Patroclus, Orestes and Pylades, Damon and Phintius,—all but the last, perhaps the last also, mythical] on which list I cannot but hope that the friendship of Scipio and Laelius will be ...
— De Amicitia, Scipio's Dream • Marcus Tullius Ciceronis
... which no discretion is exercised, or by which discretion is set to sleep—in a word, with bubble investments; and the history of many of the most promising of these speculations may be read in the following brief and not altogether mythical biography, of an interesting specimen which suddenly fell into a declining way, and is supposed to have lately ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 460 - Volume 18, New Series, October 23, 1852 • Various
... famous of those early Arabic writers is the somewhat mythical Geber, who lived in the first half of the eighth century, and whose writings had an extraordinary influence throughout the Middle Ages. The whole story of Geber is discussed by Berthelot in his "La chimie au moyen age" (Paris, 1896). The transmission ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... calmly, "there is no manner of doubt that Garibaldi is the only name that could collect ten thousand men at any given point in Italy; while in France, though her influence is mythical, the name of Mary-Anne is a name of magic. Though never mentioned, it is never forgotten. And the slightest allusion to it among the initiated will open every heart. There are more secret societies in France at this moment than at any period since ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... of Roses. Since that time, he says, we have taken leave of society, preferring the path of seclusion; for there is safety in solitude. Angelus Silesius,[1] a very gentle and Christian writer, confesses to the same feeling, in his own mythical language. Herod, he says, is the common enemy; and when, as with Joseph, God warns us of danger, we fly from the world to solitude, from Bethlehem to Egypt; or else suffering and ...
— Counsels and Maxims - From The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... valleys, illimitably far from the land of Spain. It seemed full not so much of magic as mere sleep, either sleep in an unknown country of alien men, or sleep in a land dreamed sleeping a long while since. As the travellers heard it they thought of things far away, of mythical journeys ...
— Don Rodriguez - Chronicles of Shadow Valley • Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Baron, Dunsany
... American biographer, says there is a house shown at Eisleben as Luther's birthplace, but it is "not well authenticated." (p. 2.) There is a bar and a restaurant in this particular building now, for the accommodation of foreign visitors. It is possible that in this mythical birthplace of Luther you can get a stein of foaming "monk's brew" or a "benedictine" from the monastery at Fecamp, or a "chartreuse" from Tarragona, distilled according to the secret formula of the holy fathers of La Grande Chartreuse. If you sip a sufficient quantity of ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... Scots Magazine for 1700. The author had learned from the monks the story of Bellerophon,[7] along with that of Perseus and Andromeda, and from these materials fabricated a romance in which the hero is a mythical character, who is supposed to have given name to Loch Fraoch, near Dunkeld. Belonging to the same era is the "Aged Bard's Wish,"[8] a composition of singular elegance and pathos, and remarkable for certain allusions to the age and imagery of Ossian. This has frequently been translated. ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... researches that have been made, we yet find the secret of the beginning of the soul shrouded among the fathomless mysteries of the Almighty Creator, and must ascribe our birth to the Will of God as piously as it was done in the eldest mythical epochs of the world. Notwithstanding the careless frivolity of skepticism and the garish light of science abroad in this modern time, there are still stricken and yearning depths of wonder and sorrow enough, profound and awful shadows of ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... their nature. The mind loves to dwell on the supernatural, the unreal; and in those lonely, dreary, darkened lives mythological legends flourished as mushrooms in a cellar. The population literally feasted on the mythical, just as the twentieth century society revels in Christian Science, Theosophy, ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... much a son of the Middle Ages and spent a great deal of time and wasted a lot of money upon a search for the mysterious "Presser John," the mythical Christian Priest who was said to be the Emperor of a vast empire "situated somewhere in the east." The story of this strange potentate had first been told in Europe in the middle of the twelfth century. For three hundred years ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... strikingly expressive of the build of his mind, as sketched above. It is the colouring of a realist in so far as it is always caught from life, and never fantastic or mythical. But it is chosen with an instinctive and peremptory bias of eye and imagination—the index of a mind impatient of indistinct confusions and placid harmony, avid of intensity, ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... He endeavored by a mental process to eliminate himself and see but a mythical some one else in a mythical background. A short person; a tall one? What kind of person would the imaginary individual be, anyhow? And what had he done, what crime committed? Mr. Heatherbloom tried to think with the minds of all these other people on the ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... the poet, and even bestows rare gifts from that wealth of imagination which a host of imitators could not exhaust,—still I am far from wishing to deny that the author of these great poems found a rich fund of tradition, a well-stocked mythical storehouse, from whence he might derive both subject and embellishment. But it is one thing to use existing romances in the embellishment of a poem, another to patch up the poem itself from such materials. What consistency of style and execution ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... (variously spelled) was intended to ridicule the mythical country of Avalon, somewhat as Cervantes' Don Quixote later ridicules the romances of chivalry. In Luxury Land everything was good to eat; houses were built of dainties and shingled with cakes; buttered larks fell instead of rain; the streams ran with good wine; and roast geese passed ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... enough—his speech may be mythical; but as written by Richard of Ely, only one generation after, it must describe faithfully what the place was like—the wonders of the isle: its soil the richest in England, its pleasant pastures, its noble hunting-grounds, ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... to relegate dragons to the mythical period, or the early ages. I have never seen one any nearer than that old fellow, or with any more life in him. There are many queer signs about, and queer corners, but I think now we will go over to Salem Street and look at some of the pretty old houses, and then along the Mill ...
— A Little Girl in Old Boston • Amanda Millie Douglas
... before the war ended, I married Mary. You, of course, understand. Mary was the daughter of an ancient and honorable house, but she was living as a dependent in the family of a very remote relative—so remote that the kinship was rather mythical ...
— A Captain in the Ranks - A Romance of Affairs • George Cary Eggleston
... turned south. His quest was Surprise Lake and the mythical Two Cabins. His traverse was to cut the headwaters of the Indian River and cross the unknown region over the mountains to the Stewart River. Here, somewhere, rumour persisted, was Surprise Lake, surrounded by jagged mountains and glaciers, its bottom paved with ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... still refused to abandon the pleasing delusion, and talked over the old plans for redress of grievances, and a constitutional union with the mother country. With little or no belief in the possibility of either, they stood shivering on the banks of the Rubicon, that mythical river of irretrievable self-committal, hesitating to enter its turbid waters. A few of the bolder "shepherds of the people" tried to urge them onward; but no one was bold enough to dash in first and lead them through. Paine seized the opportunity. He had a mind whose eye always saw a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... to a mythical story current in Poland, three brothers, Lech, Czech, and Rus, were the founders of the Polish, Bohemian, and Russian ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... encountered in the direction of Saarbrueck, and, although I do not believe it, I shall go there to-morrow and see for myself. I will be back within the twelve hours. May I ride over to tell you about these mythical ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers
... some idea of the general position of American exploration and discovery at the time when Cartier made his momentous voyages. The maritime nations of Europe, in searching for a passage to the half-mythical empires of Asia, had stumbled on a great continent. At first they thought it Asia itself. Gradually they were realizing that this was not Asia, but an outlying land that lay between Europe and Asia and that must be passed by the navigator before Cathay and ...
— The Dawn of Canadian History: A Chronicle of Aboriginal Canada • Stephen Leacock
... upon, other records millenniums older? If the Christian historian, hampered by his chronology, and the freethinker by lack of necessary data, feel bound to stigmatize every non-Christian or non-Western chronology as "obviously fanciful," "purely mythical," and "not worthy of a moment's consideration," how shall one, wholly dependent upon Western guides get at the truth? And if these incompetent builders of Universal History can persuade their public ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... favorable or unfavorable, but his frequent commendation in after years indicated that I gained his goodwill before the close of the war, if not when I first came to his notice; and a more intimate association convinced me that the cold and cruel characteristics popularly ascribed to him were more mythical than real. ...
— The Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan, Vol. I., Part 3 • P. H. Sheridan
... keen enjoyment than any book since "Graustark." Full of picturesque life and color and a delightful love-story. The scene of the story is Wallaria, one of those mythical kingdoms in Southern Europe. Maritza is the rightful heir to the throne, but is kept away from her own country. The hero is a young Englishman of noble family. It is a pleasing book of fiction. Large 12 mo. size. Handsomely bound in cloth. White coated wrapper, with Harrison Fisher ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... promises and no fulfillment. The rumor of an approaching French squadron which was to make junction with de Ruyter, who had now been placed in command of the Dutch fleet, caused the English government to make the grave mistake of detaching Prince Rupert with 20 ships to look for the mythical French force. This division left Monk, who was again in command of the fleet, with only 57 ships. Hearing that de Ruyter was anchored on the Flanders coast, Monk went out to find him. De Ruyter left his anchorage to meet the English, and on June 1, 1666, the two forces ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... Inari Sama is the title under which was deified a certain mythical personage, called Uga, to whom tradition attributes the honour of having first discovered and cultivated the rice-plant. He is represented carrying a few ears of rice, and is symbolized by a snake guarding a bale of rice grain. The foxes wait upon him, and do ...
— Folk Tales Every Child Should Know • Various
... contain very little that is valuable to the general reader. Their terms and signs are to the uninitiated suggestive of a doctor's prescription. But the anecdotes of the game are, many of them, remarkable; and we believe they are known to have less of the mythical about them than those told in other departments. One who knows the game will feel that it is sufficiently absorbing to be woven in with the textures of government, of history, and of biography. It is of the nature ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various |
