"Parnassus" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... figure supposed to be the model of fine taste",[15] His word was law in the realm of criticism, and for many years he was known, not alone in France, but throughout a large portion of Europe, as "The Lawgiver of Parnassus". Prof. Dowden, referring to ...
— English Satires • Various
... a new plant in her hand]. This is the grass of Parnassus. It makes a good hair-ointment.—Pretty is the young ...
— Hadda Padda • Godmunder Kamban
... sings, "Milan is the new Athens! Here Lodovico holds his Parnassus; here rare and excellent artists flock as bees to seek honey from the flowers; here, chief among them all, is the new Apelles whom he has brought from Florence." In the volume of Bellincioni's Sonnets, published ...
— Beatrice d'Este, Duchess of Milan, 1475-1497 • Julia Mary Cartwright
... former days have graced the brow Of some, who lived and loved, and sang and died; Leaves that were gathered on the pleasant side Of old Parnassus from Apollo's bough; With palpitating hand I take thee now, Since worthier minstrel there is none beside, And with a thrill of song half deified, I bind them proudly on my locks of snow. There shall they ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... genius as a humorist and anecdotalist can expand. Verse is a platform that tempts him at one moment into the performance of music-hall turns and the next into stump orations the spiritual home of which is Hyde Park Corner rather than Parnassus. Recessional surprises one like a noble recantation of nearly all the other verse Mr. Kipling has written. But, apart from Recessional, most of his political verse is a mere quickstep of ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... bright and possessing capacity, pleasure-loving and ever impatient of restraint, we see in her the highly developed nervous temperament. She feared nothing save the "horrible nightmares" which frequently followed the big dinners-a child who could have been led to Parnassus, but who was driven nearly to Hell! She went through the public schools without conscious effort, but her buxom figure, the rich flush of health, her vivacity, her bearing, were irresistible to the youth of the community, and a series of escapades culminated in her dismissal from college; ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... the literary production of Colombia has excelled that of any other Spanish-American country. Menendez y Pelayo (Ant. Poetas Hisp.-Am., III, Introd.) speaks of Bogota as the "Athens of South America," and says further: "the Colombian Parnassus to-day excels in quality, if not in quantity, that of any other region of the New World." And Juan Valera in his Cartas americanas (primera serie, p. 121 f.) says: "Of all the people of South America the Bogotanos are the most devoted to letters, ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... in THE WORLD: 'We may find it hard to realise that Max may become a classic, but I see no other essayist who seems to have more chance of it.... There is no question of "reserved places" on Parnassus, but it is my individual conviction that where La Bruye're and Addison and Stevenson are, there Max will be.... It is perhaps his final charm as an essayist that, underneath a ceremonious style, an exquisite demeanour ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... fulfil his mission. The more he wrote the more he accustomed himself with the idea of being an author. He knew that the critic-folk, deep read in books, might scoff at the very suggestion of a ploughman turning poet, but he recognised also that they might be wrong. It was not by dint of Greek that Parnassus was to be climbed. 'Ae spark o' Nature's fire' was the one thing needful for poetry that ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... mountain outlines seen from Sparta, Corinth, Athens, Rome, Florence, Pisa, Verona, are of consummate beauty; and whatever dislike or contempt may be traceable in the mind of the Greeks for mountain ruggedness, their placing the shrine of Apollo under the cliffs of Delphi, and his throne upon Parnassus, was a testimony to all succeeding time that they themselves attributed the best part of their intellectual inspiration to the power of the hills. Nor would it be difficult to show that every great writer of either of those nations, however little definite regard he might ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... distinguish their species. In shedding their seeds, they seem to expand very little.”[30] Mr. Lambert considers it to be the same species as the πεύκος, Pinus Picea of Greece, which grow on the high mountains, Olympus, Pindus, Parnassus, &c.; and quotes an extract from Dr. Sibthorp's papers, published in Walpole's Turkey, remarking that the πεύκος furnished a useful resin, used in Attica to preserve wine from becoming acid, and supplying tar and pitch for shipping. “The resinous ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... Joseph disturbed the banquet only by entering with new triumphs of Art. Last came a climax-pie, —contents unknown. And when that dish, fit to set before a king, was opened, the poem of our supper was complete. J. B. sailed to the Parnassus where Ude and Vattel feast, forever cooking immortal banquets ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... joyful occasion, are described with much minuteness by our chroniclers, and afford ample indications that the barbarism of taste which permitted an incongruous mixture of classical mythology with scriptural allusions, was at its height in the learned reign of our eighth Henry. Helicon and Mount Parnassus appeared on one side; St. Anne, and Mary the wife of Cleophas with her children, were represented on the other. Here the three Graces presented the queen with a golden apple by the hands of their orator Mercury; there the four cardinal Virtues promised, in set ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... scent nor nectar, and yet attract insects by sham nectaries! In the herb-paris (Paris quadrifolia) the ovary glistens as if moist, and flies alight on it and carry away pollen to another flower; while in grass of parnassus (Parnassia palustris) there are a number of small stalked yellow balls near the base of the flower, which look like drops of honey but are really dry. In this case there is a little nectar lower down, ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... hard by, The flat-nosed she-goats browse the tender brush. We sing not to deaf ears; no word of ours But the woods echo it. What groves or lawns Held you, ye Dryad-maidens, when for love- Love all unworthy of a loss so dear- Gallus lay dying? for neither did the slopes Of Pindus or Parnassus stay you then, No, nor Aonian Aganippe. Him Even the laurels and the tamarisks wept; For him, outstretched beneath a lonely rock, Wept pine-clad Maenalus, and the flinty crags Of cold Lycaeus. The sheep too stood around- Of us they feel no shame, poet divine; Nor of the flock be thou ashamed: ...
— The Bucolics and Eclogues • Virgil
... song be roughly set? Parnassus' self is rough! Give thou the thought, The golden ore, the gems that few forget; In time the tinsel jewel will be wrought.... Stand thou alone and fixed as destiny; An imaged god that lifts above all hate, Stand thou serene and satisfied with fate. Stand thou as stands that lightning-riven ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... subject for the evening was Shakespeare, and Emerson read, by request, that mysterious little poem "The Phoenix and the Turtle," attributed to Shakespeare on rather doubtful evidence, but included for some reason in Emerson's volume of favorite selections, "Parnassus." He began by saying that he would not himself have chosen this particular piece, but as it had been chosen for him he would read it. And this he did, with that clean-cut, refined enunciation and subtle distribution of emphasis which made the charm ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... that should have hedged their author, Heine was very caustic about this royal assault upon Parnassus. Ludwig riposted by banishing him from the capital. Still, if he disapproved of this one, he added to his library the output of other bards, not necessarily German. But, while Browning was there, Tennyson had no place ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... Parnassus. Lily's Menagerie To Charlotte Love's Distresses The Musagetes Morning Lament The Visit The Magic Net The Goblet To the Grasshopper. After Anacreon From the Sorrows of Young ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... are too stupendous to be compared with this majestically magnificent mount of Tamalpais. The Himalaya in Asia are too brutish to be considered as a rival of this gentle and illustrious sky-scraper. The Olympus and Parnassus of Greece are out of season to be paralleled with this up-to-date marvelous throne of their Majesties the Kings of America. There is the Tamalpais Hotel, a real palace, where the guests can rest and from the verandas or the windows of their own rooms observe the animating sights on ...
— Conversion of a High Priest into a Christian Worker • Meletios Golden
... the burning sacrifice they set up a broad dancing-ring, singing, "All hail, fair god of healing, Phoebus, all hail," and with them Oeagrus' goodly son began a clear lay on his Bistonian lyre; how once beneath the rocky ridge of Parnassus he slew with his bow the monster Delphyne, he, still young and beardless, still rejoicing in his long tresses. Mayst thou be gracious! Ever, O king, be thy locks unshorn, ever unravaged; for so is it right. And none but Leto, daughter of Coeus, strokes them with her dear hands. And often ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius
... Come Muse migrate from Greece and Ionia, Cross out please those immensely overpaid accounts, That matter of Troy and Achilles' wrath, and AEneas', Odysseus' wanderings, Placard "Removed" and "To Let" on the rocks of your snowy Parnassus, Repeat at Jerusalem, place the notice high on jaffa's gate and on Mount Moriah, The same on the walls of your German, French and Spanish castles, and Italian collections, For know a better, fresher, busier sphere, a wide, ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... of it either. The chaste daughters of Apollo willingly left the slopes of Helicon and Parnassus at his call. Lady Helena paid him sincere compliments on his mythological visitants, and so did the Major, though he could ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... wrote. "A man of sensation, rather than sentiment," says Arnaud, "Monti cared only for the objective side of life. He poured out melodies, colors, and chaff in the service of all causes; he was the poet-advocate, the Siren of the Italian Parnassus." Of course such a man instinctively hated the ideas of the Romantic school, and he contested their progress in literature with great bitterness. He believed that poetry meant feigning, not making; and he declared that "the hard truth was the grave of the ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... he is familiar with facts which only occur at a height of ten thousand feet or more above the sea—mountain-sickness and its accompaniments—of which his imaginary comrade Solinus tries to cure him with a sponge dipped in essence. The ascents of Parnassus and Olympus, of which he ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... lace caps and gowns they look so like asses, Viva la Compagnie!" They'd rather have punch than the springs of Parnassus, Viva la Compagnie! What a nose the old gentleman has, by the way, Viva la Compagnie! Since he smelt out the Devil from Botany Bay,[1] Viva ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... enumerated all the principal beauties of the district, and intimated her superiority by concluding, that 'the fairest apple hung on the highest bough,' he received, in donatives from the individuals of the clan, more seed-barley than would have sowed his Highland Parnassus, the bard's croft, as it was called, ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... it there, that scar? It had been made long ago when a boar's tusk had ripped up the flesh of his foot. Odysseus was then a youth, and he had gone to the mountain Parnassus to visit there ...
— The Adventures of Odysseus and The Tales of Troy • Padriac Colum
... firm grip and said casually, "Foxglove harvest is over. This plant has to be taken when the leaves are in second year growth and at bloom time. I have stripped my mullein beds of both leaves and flowers. I finished a week ago. Beyond lies a stretch of Parnassus grass that made me think of you, it was so white and delicate. I want you to see it. It will be lovely in a few ...
— The Harvester • Gene Stratton Porter
... midst of the battle the youthful god came down through the roof of the temple, and the White Maidens left their own altars to aid him in driving back the barbarous foe. A great tempest arose, and rocks fell from Parnassus on the heads of the Gauls, and it seemed as if all the powers of heaven and earth had united to sustain the Greeks against their enemies. It is also written that the spectres of Greek heroes who had ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... was called Anticleia: she was the daughter of King Autolycus, who lived near Parnassus, a mountain on the mainland. This King Autolycus was the most cunning of men. He was a Master Thief, and could steal a man's pillow from under his head, but he does not seem to have been thought worse of for this. The Greeks had a God of Thieves, named Hermes, whom Autolycus worshipped, and people ...
— Tales of Troy: Ulysses the Sacker of Cities • Andrew Lang
... BIG DEVILS OF GRENADIERS (No date).—... "But, Sire, one is n't always perched on the summit of Parnassus; one is a man. There are sicknesses about; I did not bring an athlete's health to these parts; and the scorbutic humor which is eating my life renders me truly, of all that are sick, the sickest. I am absolutely alone from morning till night. My one solace is the necessary pleasure ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... Will love each peak that shows a kindred hue, Hail in each crag a friend's familiar face, And clasp the mountain in his Mind's embrace. Long have I roamed through lands which are not mine, Adored the Alp, and loved the Apennine, Revered Parnassus, and beheld the steep Jove's Ida and Olympus crown the deep: But 'twas not all long ages' lore, nor all Their nature held me in their thrilling thrall; The infant rapture still survived the boy, 290 And Loch-na-gar with Ida looked o'er Troy,[388] Mixed Celtic ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... awakening touch of a great civilization, and with improved ideals in living there came another great advance. The human sacrifices and abhorrent practices of the Druidical faith were abandoned, and Jupiter and Minerva and the gods of Parnassus supplanted the grim deities of a more ancient mythology. But while Rome was a powerful teacher, she was a cruel mistress—and shackles were galling to these free barbarians. In the midst of universal misery there came tidings of something better ...
— A Short History of France • Mary Platt Parmele
... existing between all the parts of dream thoughts, the dream is able to embody this matter into a single scene. It upholds a logical connection as approximation in time and space, just as the painter, who groups all the poets for his picture of Parnassus who, though they have never been all together on a mountain peak, yet form ideally a community. The dream continues this method of presentation in individual dreams, and often when it displays two elements close ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... grow cloyed to surfeiting With lyric draughts o'ersweet, from rills that rise On Hybla not Parnassus mountain: come With beakers rinsed of the dulcifluous wave Hither, and see a magic miracle Of happiest science, the bland Attic skies True-mirrored by an English well;—no stream Whose heaven-belying surface makes the stars Reel, with its restless idiosyncrasy; But ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... thought to bear a greater or less part in the war of the theatres. Among them the most important is a college play, entitled "The Return from Parnassus," dating 1601-02. In it a much-quoted passage makes Burbage, as a character, declare: "Why here's our fellow Shakespeare puts them all down; aye and Ben Jonson, too. O that Ben Jonson is a pestilent fellow; he brought up Horace, giving ...
— Sejanus: His Fall • Ben Jonson
... the position of the windows and stairs, and by throwing open new doors and shutting up old ones. So some towns have been altered for the better, as my native place,[609] which did lie to the west and received the rays of the setting sun from Parnassus, was they say turned to the east by Chaeron. And Empedocles the naturalist is supposed to have driven away the pestilence from that district, by having closed up a mountain gorge that was prejudicial to health by admitting the south wind to the plains. Similarly, as there are certain diseases of ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... place in literature. The world was called upon to worship and do honour to the poet, but chiefly that it might admire the skill of the critic who could name the several sources of his beauties. The critic now ranked higher than a priest at the foot of Mount Parnassus. Homer was lifted to the skies that the critic might stand on a raised pedestal among the Muses. Such seems to be the meaning of the figures on the upper part of the well-known sculpture called the Apotheosis of Homer. It was made in this ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 10 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... one must have "beautiful ideas." "Beautiful ideas" are the very best stock-in-trade a young writer can begin with. They are indispensable to every complete literary outfit. Without them, the short cut to Parnassus will never be discovered, even though one starts ...
— The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... with irony. Drayton, in his "Epistle to Reynolds," which Jonson must have seen, had compared him to Seneca and Plautus,[*] and Jonson seems to burlesque the compliment by comparing Drayton himself to every poet whom he had ever imitated, until his single person seems an epitome of all Parnassus. The poem and its companions had another edition in 1631, since which time it has been included in every edition of Drayton's works, but has never till now been published by itself. Even here it is graced with a satellite, the splendid Ballad of Agincourt ("To my Frinds the Camber-Britans ...
— The Battaile of Agincourt • Michael Drayton
... chief Parnassus be, And that my Muse, to some ears not unsweet, Tempers her words to trampling horses' feet More oft than to a chamber-melody,— Now blessed you bear onward blessd me To her, where I my heart, safe-left, shall meet; My Muse and I must you of duty greet ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... corresponding to each other, a figure midway between the two extremes, neither tall nor short, a vivid complexion, rather fair than dark, somewhat stooped in the shoulders, and not very lightfooted: this, I say, is the author of 'Galatea,' 'Don Quixote de la Mancha,' 'The Journey to Parnassus,' which he wrote in imitation of Cesare Caporali Perusino, and other works which are current among the public, and perhaps without the author's name. He is commonly called MIGUEL DE CERVANTES SAAVEDRA. He was for many ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... don't do it I warn you, Dear Mat, I'll raise such a clamor and cry On Parnassus the Muses will scorn you As mocker of poets and fly With bitter complaints to Apollo: "Her spirit is proud, her heart hollow, Her beauty"—they'll hardly deny, On ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... them not. I have no land to glut Thy dirty appetite, and make thee strut Nimrod of acres; I'll no speech prepare To court the hopeful cormorant, thine heir. For there's a kingdom at thy beck if thou But kick this dross: Parnassus' flow'ry brow I'll give thee with my Tempe, and to boot That horse which struck a fountain with his foot. A bed of roses I'll provide for thee, And crystal springs shall drop thee melody. The breathing ...
— Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, Volume II • Henry Vaughan
... too late, if heeded yet, The voice that chides thy mute repose, And bids thee pay at last the debt Thy genius to Parnassus owes. ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... sounded pleasantly; softly shot the sparkle of the twisting water, and you might dream things half-fulfilled. Knots of fern were about, but the tops of the mounds were firm grass, evidently well rolled, and with an eye to airy feet. Olympus one eminence was called, Parnassus the other. Olympus a little overlooked Parnassus, but Parnassus was broader and altogether better adapted for the games of the Muses. Round the edges of both there was a well-trimmed bush of laurel, obscuring only the feet of the dancers from the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the double or equal summit, is only found in Latin, though unquestionably AEolic; the other two derivations are classic Greek. Parnes, Parnettus, Parnassus. The name of the two mountains ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... Thiers; Orpheus is Verdi; Vulcan is Krupp; Apollo is any poet. Do you wish more? Well, then, Jupiter, a god who, if he were living now, would deserve to be put in jail, does not launch the thunderbolt, but the thunderbolt falls when electricity wills it. There is no Parnassus; there is no Olympus; there is no Stygian lake; nor are there any other Elysian Fields than those of Paris. There is no other descent to hell than the descents of Geology, and this traveller, every time he returns from ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... McTurtle found himself on the front seat of a motor lorry breasting the spurs of Mt. Parnassus. The dizziness of his path was invisible to him, for in a Grecian summer you can see nothing out of motor vehicles ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 4, 1919. • Various
... handy volumes, and so edited as to be of most service. Palgrave's "Golden Treasury" of the best songs and lyrical poems in the English language was edited with the advice and collaboration of Tennyson. His "Children's Treasury" of lyrical poetry is most attractive. Emerson's Parnassus, and Whittier's "Three Centuries of Song" are excellent collections of the most ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... exclaim: "Thank God, that debt is paid." Some of the people have singular tastes now and then; as for example there is a hill behind East Haddam that used to be called "Stagger-all-hill," but inquiring the other day, I was told its name was now "Mount Parnassus." ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... learn except when I am drawing," he said, and his slate was often so filled with designs, that the sums were jostled into the narrowest possible space, while his Latin grammar was similarly adorned. There sat the Muse in full beauty, enthroned upon Parnassus, close to musa musae; magister had a wig, and dominus a great rod; while the extraordinary physiognomies round facies faciei would have been worthy of any collection of caricatures. Moreover the illustrations of the verb amo commemorated the gentleman who was married on ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... Deucalion was a legendary king of Phythia in Thessaly. According to the legend, a deluge having been sent by Zeus, Deucalion, by advice of his father, built a wooden chest in which he and his wife were saved, landing after nine days on Mt. Parnassus. By them the human race, destroyed in the deluge, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume III (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland I • Francis W. Halsey
... now flashed forth the summons from Parnassus' snowy peak, "Near and far the undiscovered doer of this murder seek!" Now like a sullen bull he roves Through forest brakes and upland groves, And vainly seeks to fly The doom that ever nigh Flits o'er his head, ...
— The Oedipus Trilogy • Sophocles
... And then Parnassus would be left to me, And Pegasus should bear me up it gaily, Nor down a steep place run into the sea, As now he must be ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... love her all the better. Too true it is, she's bitten sadly With this new rage for rhyming badly, Which late hath seized all ranks and classes, Down to that new Estate, "the masses "; Till one pursuit all tastes combines— One common railroad o'er Parnassus, Where, sliding in those tuneful grooves, Called couplets, all creation moves, And the whole world runs mad in lines. Add to all this—what's even still worse, As rhyme itself, tho' still a curse, Sounds better to a chinking purse— ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... quite well, whether by art or instinct, just in the same way as he excels the rest in every other respect. In writing an Odyssey, he did not make the poem cover all that ever befell his hero—it befell him, for instance, to get wounded on Parnassus and also to feign madness at the time of the call to arms, but the two incidents had no probable or necessary connexion with one another—instead of doing that, he took an action with a Unity of the kind we are describing as the subject ...
— The Poetics • Aristotle
... composed a song in which he enumerated all the principal beauties of the district, and intimated her superiority by concluding; that 'the fairest apple hung on the highest bough,' he received, in donatives from the individuals of the clan, more seed-barley than would have sowed his Highland Parnassus, the Bard's croft as it was ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... inward trembling earth received the wound, And rising streams a ready passage found. Now seas and earth were in confusion lost,— A world of waters, and without a coast. A mountain of tremendous height there stands Betwixt the Athenian and Boeotian lands: Parnassus is its name, whose forky rise Mounts through the clouds, and mates the lofty skies. High on the summit of this dubious cliff, Deucalion, wafting, moored his little skiff: He, with his wife, were only left behind Of perished man; they two were human kind: The most upright ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... they must depend on the manuscript over which we scholars have bent with that insight into the poet's meaning which is closely akin to the mens divinior of the poet himself; unless they would flood the world with grammatical falsities and inexplicable anomalies that would turn the very fountain of Parnassus into a deluge of poisonous mud. But find the passage in the fifth book, to which Poliziano ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... unbearable shade, who kept buzzing and humming at everybody's shoulder a thousand poetic abstractions. He so often disturbed Pellisson, that the latter, raising his head, crossly said, "At least, La Fontaine, supply me with a rhyme, since you say you have the run of the gardens at Parnassus." ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... by no means my design, however, to expatiate upon the merits of what I should read you. These will necessarily speak for themselves. Boccalina, in his 'Advertisements from Parnassus', tells us that Zoilus once presented Apollo a very caustic criticism upon a very admirable book:—whereupon the god asked him for the beauties of the work. He replied that he only busied himself about the errors. On hearing this, Apollo, handing him a sack of unwinnowed wheat, bade ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... I and his Queen visited Oxford and were entertained in the newly-finished college. Much bad verse was written on this event, two lines of which as a specimen may be quoted from the quaintly-named poem, "Parnassus Biceps": ...
— The Charm of Oxford • J. Wells
... is destined by himself or his friends to become Lord Chancellor, and every private in the French army carries in his haversack the baton of a marshal, so it is a necessary ingredient of the dream on Parnassus, that it should embody itself in a form of surpassing brilliance. What distinguishes Milton, from the crowd of young ambition, "audax juventa," is the constancy of resolve. He not only nourished through manhood the dream of youth, ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... my pet production, which I deemed Sufficient to advance me to the highest peak Of difficult Parnassus, goal of which I've dreamed For many a weary year, came back to me last week. The Editor I cursed, that he should stand between My dear ambition and my scarcely dearer self; Whose unappreciation forced to blush unseen My one dear book, to gather ...
— Cobwebs from a Library Corner • John Kendrick Bangs
... it to me, and I will find a good look-out. How would Caucasus do? Or is Parnassus higher? Olympus, perhaps, is higher than either of them. Olympus! stay, that reminds me; I have a happy thought. But there is work for two here; I ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... married—oh! so genteelly!—a young man, very well born, who had wooed her before my father died. He had the villany to remain constant when she had not a farthing, and he was dependent on distant relations, and his own domains in Parnassus. The wretch was a poet! So they married. They spent their honeymoon genteelly, I dare say. His relations cut him. Parnassus paid no rents. He went abroad. Such heart-rending letters from her. They were destitute. How I worked! how I raged! But how ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Doth open to the bliss of seeing thee, The dearest treasure that the world contains,— Of falling on thy neck, and folding thee Within my longing arms, which have till now Met the embraces of the empty wind. Do not repulse me,—the eternal spring, Whose crystal waters from Parnassus flow, Bounds not more gaily on from rock to rock, Down to the golden vale, than from my heart The waters of affection freely gush, And round me form a circling sea of bliss. ...
— Iphigenia in Tauris • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... poems have passages which are musical, vigorous, and peculiar, and hardly in any part can he be justly charged with prolonging an echo. He is not one of the many mocking-birds that infest the groves at the foot of Parnassus. Though portions of his songs be wild, fitful, and incoherent, they gush with the force and feeling of a heart loyal to its intuitions, and thus many strains captivate and keep the tuneful ear. Yet such charming ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... life, love, Were the living! Just to cease from strife, love, And from grieving; Let the swift world pass us, You and me, Stilled from all aspiring,— Sinai nor Parnassus ...
— Songs from Vagabondia • Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey
... known as "Mother Goose's Melodies" has the dignity of being already an undoubted classic among the most incipient cultivators of literature in the United States. It is a compilation taken mostly from "Gammer Gurton's Garland" or the "Nursery Parnassus," an English child's book about a century old, of which various editions have been published in London, Glasgow, and other places. It is stated in one of its late prefaces that it was originally issued at Stockton ...
— Chenodia - The Classic Mother Goose • Jacob Bigelow
... inmost cell, and which no mortal hand dared touch, were seen lying before the temple door, as if Apollo was prepared himself to use them. As the Persians advanced by a rugged path under the steep cliffs of Mount Parnassus, and reached the temple of Athene Pronaea, a dreadful peal of thunder rolled above their affrighted heads, and two great crags, torn from the mountain's flank, came rushing down with deafening sound, and buried many of them beneath their weight. At the same ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... have said that it ill befits my time of life to ensue such matters, to wit, the discoursing of women, or endeavouring to pleasure them. And not a few, feigning a mighty tender regard to my fame, aver that I should do more wisely to keep ever with the Muses on Parnassus, than to forgather with you in such vain dalliance. Those again there are, who, evincing less wisdom than despite, have told me that I should shew sounder sense if I bethought me how to get my daily bread, than, going after these idle toys, to nourish myself upon the wind; while ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... Greece, just north of the Gulf of Corinth. Shut in on all sides by stupendous cliffs, among which flow the inspiring waters of the Castalian Spring, thousands of feet above which frowns the summit of Parnassus, on which Deucalion is said to have landed after the deluge, this romantic valley makes a deep impression on the mind of the visitor, and it is not strange that at an age when signs and wonders were looked for in every direction, it should have become ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... celebrated fountain of Vaucluse, near this town, where Petrarque composed his works, and established Mount Parnassus. This is the only part of France in which there is an Inquisition, but the Officers seem content with their profits ...
— A Year's Journey through France and Part of Spain, Volume II (of 2) • Philip Thicknesse
... which did never dream Upon Parnassus, nor did taste the stream Of Helicon; we therefore may suppose Those made not poets, but the ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... such a harmless insect," replied Philothea, smiling. "I hope there are none of them within hearing. You know the poets say they rose from the ashes of men, who, when the Muses first had existence, pined away for the love of song; and that after death they go to Parnassus, and inform the most ancient Calliope, the heavenly Urania, and the amorous Erato, concerning the conversation of their votaries. If they are truly the children of song, they will indeed forget their own resentments; but your conversation would be so unlikely ...
— Philothea - A Grecian Romance • Lydia Maria Child
... ancestress in the court of Elizabeth, the very Virgin Queen of Blues; and under her guidance Master Verdant was dragged with painful diligence through the first steps of the road that was to take him to Parnassus. It was a great sight to see her sitting stiff and straight, - with her wonderfully undeceptive "false front" of (somebody else's) black hair, graced on either side by four sausage-looking curls, - as, with spectacles on nose and dictionary in hand, she instructed her nephew in those ingenuous ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... her hero's sudden lapse—from Parnassus to the scullery, from love to the commonplaces of living; but she had schooled herself to bear with him, since patience is a woman's part. Yet her honest blue eyes were not adapted to concealment and, furtively taking ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... in different jails." No doubt, he and his companions Greene, Marlowe, and Peele, led very disorderly lives, and it is singular that all four died prematurely, the oldest of them probably not being forty years of age. It is certain that Nash was not living at the time when the "Return from Parnassus" was produced, which, though not printed until 1606, was written before the end of the reign of Elizabeth: his ashes are there spoken of as at rest, but the mention of him as dead, nearest to the probable date of that event, is to be found in [Fitzgeoffrey's ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... this day, who can afford a good dinner every day, do not look forward to it as any particular subject of exultation: the poor peasant, who can only contrive to treat himself to a joint of meat on a Sunday, considers it as an event in the week. So, in the old Cambridge comedy of the Return from Parnassus, we find this indignant description of the progress of luxury in those days, put into the mouth of ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... ragguagli di Parnasso: or, Advertisements from Parnassus; in two centuries ... put into English by ... Henry Earl of Monmouth. London, for Humphrey Moseley, ...
— The Library of William Congreve • John C. Hodges
... Lorris and John of Meung, to the fabliaux writers and the cyclists of Renart, in justification of her claims. She shut them up; she forgot them; she sneered at them whenever they were remembered; and she appointed as her attorneys in the court of Parnassus Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux and ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... faults of a great writer are not left in the ink-stand. Spain, in Cervantes' day, had passed the chivalric age, though many relics of it still remained in its legends, songs, and proverbs. Cervantes becomes his own critic in his "Supplement to a Journey to Parnassus," and speaking of his dramas, says: "I should declare them worthy the favor they have received were they not my own." Unfortunately, his comedy of "La Confusa" is among the lost ones. He alludes to it as a good ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... I had frequently in my ramblings loitered about Hempstead Hill; which is a kind of Parnassus of the metropolis. At such times I occasionally took my dinner at Jack Straw's Castle. It is a country inn so named. The very spot where that notorious rebel and his followers held their council of war. It is a favorite resort of citizens when rurally inclined, as it commands fine fresh air ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... eternal! Who hath become so pallid under the shadow of Parnassus, or hath so drunk at its cistern, that he would not seem to have his mind incumbered, trying to represent thee as thou didst appear there where in harmony the heaven overshadows thee, when in the open air thou ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... and firs give a flame mixed with thick smoke, and throw out little light. That which rises from sulphur and thick bitumen is bluish. Lighted straw gives out sparks of a reddish color. The large olive, laurel, ash of Parnassus, etc., trees which always retain their sap, throw a whitish light similar to that of a lamp. Thus, comets whose fires are formed of different materials, each take and preserve a color ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... that here's Mr William, wha has learned to speel Parnassus by a step-ladder, has come to hear the sang he made about ...
— Tales from Blackwood, Volume 7 • Various
... motionless in mid-heaven, Apollo descended from his burning chariot to join the feast. Artemis and Demeter came from the woods and fields to unite in the high assembly, and war was suspended while Ares made love to the goddess of Beauty. The Greek looked at Parnassus, "soaring snow-clad through its native sky," with its Delphic cave and its Castalian fount, or at the neighboring summits of Helicon, where Pegasus struck his hoof and Hippocrene gushed forth, and believed that hidden in these sunny woods might perhaps ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... while none human piety spurned. Often the Deities' Sire, in fulgent temple a-dwelling, Whenas in festal days received he his annual worship, Looked upon hundreds of bulls felled prone on pavement before him. Full oft Liber who roamed from topmost peak of Parnassus 390 Hunted his howling host, his Thyiads with tresses dishevelled. * * * * Then with contending troops from all their city outflocking Gladly the Delphians hailed their God with smoking of altars. Often in death-full war ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... when we appear, No one can then surpass us! Keep close, wide is the Blocksberg here As Germany's Parnassus. ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... some supplemental interest, because he united what are usually thought the incompatible characters of a poet and a political plotter, and very nearly reached the altitudes of the gallows as well as those of Parnassus. ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham
... that you possess, the walls parted and through them cavalcaded the strumpet whose name is Fame. In circumstances equally inspiring Bunyan entertained that hussy. Verlaine too. From a dungeon she lifted him to Parnassus, lifted him to the top. If I only had their luck—and yours! It is too good for you. You don't appreciate it. Besides you ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... Aoenian and Actaeian lands Lies Phocis; fruitful were the Phocian fields While fields they were, but now o'erwhelm'd, they form A region only of the wide-spread main. Here stands Parnassus with his forked top, Above the clouds high-towering to the stars. To this Deucalion with his consort driven O'er ridgy billows in his bark clung close; For all was sea beside. There bend they down; The ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... saw us together," answered Odysseus. But her words filled him with alarm, and recalled to his mind an old scar, just above the knee, caused by a wound which he had received from a wild boar while hunting in his boyhood in the valleys of Parnassus, during a visit to Autolycus, Penelope's father. If his old nurse should discover the scar she would be certain to recognise him, and the consequences of the premature discovery might be fatal. However, he had now no excuse for declining the bath, so he drew back his ...
— Stories from the Odyssey • H. L. Havell
... edifying and licentious at the same time, a work audacious in every way, even from a literary point of view. Boccaccio knows it, and justifies his doings. To those who reproach him with having busied himself with "trifles," neglecting "the Muses of Parnassus," he replies: Who knows whether I have neglected them so very much? "Perhaps, while I wrote those tales of such humble mien, they may have come sometimes and seated themselves at my side."[533] They bestowed ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... vanity, or fixed her soul on the mere triumphs of "literary reputation". While firm to her own creed, she fully enjoyed the success of those who scramble up—where she bore the standard to the heights of Parnassus; she was never more happy than when introducing some literary "Tyro" to those who could aid or advise a future career. We can speak from experience of the warm interest she took in the Hospital for the cure of Consumption, and the Governesses' Benevolent ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 7 - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 12, 1850 • Various
... Love should lose thy favour, Try the paths of honest fame, Climb Parnassus' summit hoary, Carve thy way by deeds of glory, Write on History's page thy name. Be no longer weary, weary, To the depth of sorrow hurl'd; Be no longer weary, weary, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume VI - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... poetics, poesy, Muse, Calliope, tuneful Nine, Parnassus, Helicon^, Pierides, Pierian spring. versification, rhyming, making verses; prosody, orthometry^. poem; epic, epic poem; epopee^, epopoea, ode, epode^, idyl, lyric, eclogue, pastoral, bucolic, dithyramb, anacreontic^, sonnet, roundelay, rondeau [Fr.], rondo, madrigal, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... I said to myself when I saw you so distrustful, and mistaking me for Corinne (whose improvisations bore me dreadfully), that in all probability dozes of Muses had already led you, rashly curious, into their valleys, and begged you to taste the fruits of their boarding-school Parnassus. Oh! you are perfectly safe with me, my friend; I may love poetry, but I have no little verses in my pocket-book, and my stockings are, and will remain, immaculately white. You shall not be pestered with the "Flowers of my Heart" in one or more volumes. And, finally, should ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... this. He grew tired of hiring himself out to amuse, of practising the affectation of a modesty, an inspiration, an emotion he did not feel, of hearing the false plaudits of rivals who he knew carped at his verses in his absence and libelled his character, of running hither and thither over Parnassus dragging his poor muse at the heels of some selfish freedman; he was man enough and poet enough to wish to write something that would live, and so he left Rome to con over his mythological erudition amid a less exciting environment, and woo the genius of poesy ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... his way along, until he came unto a mountain: And I know not surely whether it was called Parnassus, But he climbed it out of sight, and still I heard ...
— The White Bees • Henry Van Dyke
... beer—nectar of gods and coalheavers—mixed with hippocrene—the Muses' "cold without"—is at present our only beverage. The grouse are by us undisturbed in their bloomy mountain covert. We are now content to climb Parnassus and our garret stairs. The Albany, that sanctuary of erring bachelors, with its guardian beadle, are to us but memories, for we have become the denizens of a roomy attic (ring the top bell twice), and are only saluted by an Hebe of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 21, 1841 • Various
... only unintelligible, but which it is even impossible to decipher, or to guess at, are all the consequences of this error; and two-thirds of the new French books which now appear are made up of those ingredients. It is the new cookery of Parnassus, in which the still is employed instead of the pot and the spit, and where quintessences and extracts ate chiefly used. N. B. ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... redolent of aromatics—there flourishing greenhouses of all sorts of volumes: there academic meads trembling with the earthquake of Athenian peripatetics pacing up and down: there the promontories of Parnassus and the porticos ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... associations. This particular spot was well known to tradition and is still pointed out. "A bare isolated hillock of grey stone stands at the point where our road from Daulia meets the road to Delphi and a third road that stretches to the south.... The road runs up a frowning pass between Parnassus on the right hand and the spurs of the Helicon range on the left. Away to the south a wild and desolate valley opens, running up among the waste places of Helicon, a scene of inexpressible grandeur and ...
— Oedipus King of Thebes - Translated into English Rhyming Verse with Explanatory Notes • Sophocles
... vibrated with tender feeling,—his handsome features were softened into finer beauty by the passion which invigorated him, and his father looking at him, thought for a moment that so might the young gods of the fabled Parnassus have appeared in the height of their symbolic power and charm. His own eyes grew melancholy, as he studied this vigorous incarnation of ardent love and passionate resolve; and a slight sigh ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... the son of Hermes and father of Anticleia, mother of Odysseus. He lived at the foot of Mount Parnassus, and was famous as a thief and swindler. On one occasion he met his match. Sisyphus, who had lost some cattle, suspected Autolycus of being the thief, but was unable to bring it home to him, since he possessed the power of changing everything that was touched by his hands. Sisyphus accordingly ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... we found a gorgeous carpet of the huge couched blue gentian (G. acaulis, Fr. Gentiane sans tige), with smaller patterns put in by the dazzling blue of the delicate little flower of the same species (G. verna ); while the white blossoms of the grass of Parnassus, and the frailer white of the dryade a huit petales, and the modest waxen flowers of the Azalea procumbens and the airelle ponctuee (Vaccineum vitis idaea), tempered and set off the prevailing blue. There were groves, too, rather lower down, of Alpine roses (the first I had ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... best; Or stroll about where'er I list, Nor fear to be run over By sheep, contented to exist Only on grass and clover. In town, as through the throng I steer, Confiding in the Muses, My finest thoughts are drowned in fear Of cabs and omnibuses. I dream I'm on Parnassus hill, With laurels whispering o'er me, When suddenly I feel a chill— What was it passed before me? A lady bowed her gracious head From yonder natty brougham— The windows were as dull as lead, I didn't know her through them. She'll say I saw her, cut her ...
— Interludes - being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses • Horace Smith
... of your republic distresses me. I know the difference that there is between the tumult of arms and the tranquillity of Parnassus. I know that the sounds of Apollo's lyre accord but ill with the trumpets of Mars; but if you have abandoned Parnassus, it has been only to fulfil the duties of a good citizen and of a vigilant chief. I am persuaded, at the same time, that in the midst of arms you think of peace; ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... Armenia. These are obviously details which tellers of the story have added as it passed down to later generations. When it was carried still farther afield, into the area of the Eastern Mediterranean, it was again adapted to local conditions. Thus Apollodorus makes Deucalion land upon Parnassus,(1) and the pseudo-Lucian relates how he founded the temple of Derketo at Hierapolis in Syria beside the hole in the earth which swallowed up the Flood.(2) To the Sumerians who first told the story, the great Flood appeared ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King |
