"Stygian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... satire; Hunts your weak point out, then shows it Where it injures to disclose it, In the mode that's most invidious, Adding every trait that's hideous, From the bile, whose blackening river Rushes through his Stygian liver. Then he thinks himself a lover: Why I really can't discover In his mind, age, face, or figure: Viper-broth might give him vigor. Let him keep the caldron steady, He the venom has already. For his faults, ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... brandishing in one hand whips and iron chains, and in the other torches, with a smothering flame. Their robes are black, and their feet of brass, to show that their pursuit, though slow, is steady and certain. As they attended at the thrones of the Stygian and celestial Jupiter, they had wings to accelerate their progress through the air, when bearing the commands of the gods: they struck terror into mortals, either by war, famine, pestilence, or the numberless ...
— Roman Antiquities, and Ancient Mythology - For Classical Schools (2nd ed) • Charles K. Dillaway
... we gain, So called in Greece, where dwells, with Harpies, dire Celaeno, in the vast Ionian main, Since, forced from Phineus' palace to retire, They fled their former banquet. Heavenly ire Ne'er sent a pest more loathsome; ne'er were seen Worse plagues to issue from the Stygian mire— Birds maiden-faced, but trailing filth obscene, With taloned hands and looks ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... of the gods!" he continued. "And may I from across this Stygian lake (there was a little water collected in the haw-haw here from the recent rains) introduce Miss Lutworth to you—and Miss Clinker and Lord Freynault? Miss ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn
... time—a very long time indeed—before any light stole in upon his Stygian darkness, and then, when the light did come, it came in skyrocket guise, and had its share of cons attached to its very ...
— The Rejuvenation of Aunt Mary • Anne Warner
... laughed as they accepted his offer, assuring him that his suspicions were correct. For neither Kaffir laundrywoman or Hindu dhobi would go down any more to the washing troughs by the river, for fear of crossing that Stygian flood of blackness rivalling their own, supposing, as Beauvayse once suggested, that there is a third-class ferry for niggers and persons of colour? And from the waterworks on the Eastern side of the town the supply ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... Of thundering Etna, whose combustible And fuelled entrails, thence conceiving fire, Sublimed with mineral fury, aid the winds, And leave a singed bottom all involved With stench and smoke. Such resting found the sole Of unblest feet. Him followed his next mate; Both glorying to have scaped the Stygian flood As gods, and by their own recovered strength, Not by the sufferance of supernal Power. "Is this the region, this the soil, the clime," Said then the lost Archangel, "this the seat That we must change for Heaven?—this mournful ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... kitchens? (This he said, showing him the smoke of the gunpowder above the ships.) Thou never sawest so many damned souls since thou wast born; and so fair, so bewitching they seem, that one would swear they are Stygian ambrosia. I thought at first, God forgive me! that they had been English souls; and I don't know but that this morning the isle of Horses, near Scotland, was sacked, with all the English who had surprised it, by the ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... below. Unfortunately, there is the domain of the myths and immaterials, there is the home of the law and the force, there dwell the Odyles, the electricities, the magnetisms, and affinities, and there the speculative AEneas pursues shadows more fleeting than the Stygian ghosts, and the grasp of the metaphysician closes on shapes whose embrace is vacancy. The bark that ploughs within this mystic expanse, sheds from its cleaving keel but coruscations of phosphorescent sparkles, which glimmer and quench in a gloom that Egyptian seers never penetrated, and modern ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... goal, the Dark Moon! And they were prepared for Stygian darkness and a land of perpetual night. The almost invisible gas-clouds thinned; there was a glow ahead that grew brilliant as they watched; and then, with a blinding suddenness that made them shield their eyes, there flashed before ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... schools, he puts the whole Pagan world into hell-borders (with the exception of two or three, whose salvation adds to the absurdity), mingles the hell of Virgil with that of Tertullian and St. Dominic; sets Minos at the door as judge; retains Charon in his old office of boatman over the Stygian lake; puts fabulous people with real among the damned, Dido, and Cacus, and Ephialtes, with Ezzelino and Pope Nicholas the Fifth; and associates the Centaurs and the Furies with the agents of diabolical torture. It has pleased him also to elevate Cato of Utica to the office of warder of purgatory, ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... loomed an old abandoned fisherman's shack. They entered to find merely a barren room. The Russian stepped to the far side and manipulated a hidden lever. Half of the floor slid to one side, disclosing a flight of steps leading down into Stygian darkness. ...
— The Great Drought • Sterner St. Paul Meek
... first place men set themselves to master the psychology of the ancients, and tortured the letter of Aristotle for a decisive answer. In one of the Lucianic dialogues of the time, Charon tells Mercury how he questioned Aristotle on his belief in immortality, when the philosopher crossed in the Stygian boat; but the prudent sage, although dead in the body and nevertheless living on, declined to compromise himself by a definite answer—and centuries later how was it likely to fare with the interpretation of his writings? All the more eagerly did men dispute about his opinion ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... Of Cerberus and blackest midnight born, In Stygian Cave forlorn 'Mongst horrid shapes, and shreiks, and sights unholy. Find out som uncouth cell, Where brooding darknes spreads his jealous wings, And the night-Raven sings; There, under Ebon shades, and low-brow'd Rocks, As ragged as thy Locks, ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... Greek ceremonies gradually introduced into the cult. It fed on the more sensational aspects of certain of the gods brought in: on the enthusiastic rites of Bacchus, on the miracle-working of Aesculapius, on the Stygian mystery of Dis and Proserpina. But its fulfilment was to come from the East, that inexhaustible fountain of religious energy. In the Magna Mater it recognised its own. This was the first undiluted ...
— The Religion of Numa - And Other Essays on the Religion of Ancient Rome • Jesse Benedict Carter
... companions trembling; and thus she reproached them. "Lay aside," she said, "your vainly-conceived terrors! You shall behold only a living and a human figure, whose accents you may listen to with perfect security. If this alarms you, what would you say if you should have seen the Stygian lakes, and the shores burning with sulphur unconsumed, if the Furies stood before you, and Cerberus with his mane of vipers, and the Giants chained in eternal adamant? Yet all these you might have witnessed unharmed; for all these would quail at ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... else he would have said to himself that his anger often filled his heart with hell's dunnest gloom. The old Castle was never well lighted; but, with a father and a son in it like Cardoness and his heir, it was sometimes like the Stygian pool itself. Rutherford had need to write to her ladyship to have a soft answer always ready between such a father and such a son. If you have the Inferno at hand, and will read what it says about the Fifth Circle, you will see what went on sometimes ...
— Samuel Rutherford - and some of his correspondents • Alexander Whyte
... their depressing and gloomy influences, and since there is so great opportunity to be wretched on the surface of the earth, why do people visit them? I do not know that this is more dispiriting or its stream more Stygian than another. ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... the Stygian Life Insurance Company. I know you don't want to talk to me or listen to me; I know you have all the insurance you feel able to pay for. I am not here to tell you your chances of dying tonight, or of being hit by an automobile on leaving this building; neither shall I try to ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... he might yet be lifted by a rope. Behold the awful bench, on which he sat! He was as hard and ponderous wood as that: Yet when his sand was out, we find at last, That death has overset him with a blast. Our Boat is now sail'd to the Stygian ferry, There to supply old Charon's leaky wherry; Charon in him will ferry souls to Hell; A trade our Boat[5] has practised here so well: And Cerberus has ready in his paws Both pitch and brimstone, to fill up his flaws. Yet, spite of death and fate, I here maintain We may place Boat in his old ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... bridle. Untying the reins from the post, he leaped into the saddle. Then he swung Pat around, put light spurs to him, and urged him rapidly across the avenue. Beyond the avenue toward the north lay Stygian darkness. In these ...
— Bred of the Desert - A Horse and a Romance • Marcus Horton
... promise doth redden The rim of our Stygian night; Our bondage is breaking—O blessed awaking To melody merry and bright! My heart, long o'erloaded and leaden, Now bounds to the blue like a bird; The shadow has shifted; with paean uplifted I hail ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 5, 1916 • Various
... commonweal, then all his prowess was in vain. Some monk would surely see him in a vision, as St. Eucherius, Bishop of Orleans, saw Charles Martel (according to the Council of Kiersy), 'with Cain, Judas, and Caiaphas, thrust into the Stygian whirlpools and Acherontic combustion ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... woods. While laboriously making our way on all fours, carrying torches, we were suddenly horrified by fiendish hisses. Visions of snakes danced before our minds, the girls shrieked, the torches fell in our frantic scramble and we were left in Stygian darkness. A mocking, demoniacal laugh was heard, winged creatures dashed against ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... flight, And bold to combat in the standing fight, Not more in councils famed for solid sense, Than winning words and heavenly eloquence. "Gods! what portent (he cried) these eyes invades? Lo! Hector rises from the Stygian shades! We saw him, late, by thundering Ajax kill'd: What god restores him to the frighted field; And not content that half of Greece lie slain, Pours new destruction on her sons again? He comes not, Jove! without thy powerful will; Lo! still he lives, pursues, ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... devoid of important incidents yet it was filled for me with a strange charm of excitement and adventure which I think I must have hinged principally on the unguessable antiquity of these long-forgotten corridors. The things which the Stygian darkness hid from my objective eye could not have been half so wonderful as the pictures which my imagination wrought as it conjured to life again the ancient peoples of this dying world and set them once more to the labours, the intrigues, the mysteries and ...
— The Gods of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Camerelle to have a second face-blackening. All the ruins, said to be of Caesar's and Marius's Villas, Agrippina's Tomb, Caligula's Bridge, &c., may be anything; they are nothing but shapeless fragments, only on a rock I saw a bit of marble or stucco in what they call Caesar's Villa. The Stygian Lake presented no horrors, nor the Elysian Fields any delights; the former is a great round piece of water, and the latter are very common-looking vineyards. When well wooded, which in the time of the Romans it was, this coast must have been a most delicious and luxurious retreat, so sequestered ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... course; 110 There rouse Oblivion from her sable cave, Where dull she sits by Lethe's sluggish wave; Command her to secure the sacred bound. Where lives Content retired, and all around Diffuse the deepest glooms of Stygian night, And screen the virgin from the tyrant's sight; That the vain purpose of his life may try Still to explore, what still eludes his eye.' He spoke; loud praises shake the bright abode, And all applaud the ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... order, had ever failed for an instant of proper service. Candles, kerosene lamps and old gas fixtures, the rusty cocks of which had not been turned in a decade, were put hastily in use, while the streets were black with a blackness particularly Stygian, contrasted with the brilliantly illuminated squares supplied by the Consolidated Company. All night long the mechanical force, attended by the worried but painfully helpless Bobby, pounded and tapped and worked in the grime, but it was not until broad daylight that they were ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... him, must be appeased by a sop before access can be gained to his master. Perhaps Jones might have seen him in that light, and have recollected the passage where the Sibyl, in order to procure an entrance for Aeneas, presents the keeper of the Stygian avenue with such a sop. Jones, in like manner, now began to offer a bribe to the human Cerberus, which a footman, overhearing, instantly advanced, and declared, "if Mr Jones would give him the sum proposed, he would ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... of simples Cocted in Stygian shades— Acids of wrinkles and pimples From faces of ancient maids— Acrid precipitates sunken From tempers of scolding wives Whose husbands, uncommonly drunken, Are commonly found in dives,— With this I baptize and appoint thee (to St. John.) To marshal the vinophobe ranks. ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... nerves to be somewhat shaken. On the morrow I was to die some sort of nameless death for the diversion of a savage horde, but the morrow held fewer terrors for me than the present, and I submit to any fair-minded man if it is not a terrifying thing to lie bound hand and foot in the Stygian blackness of an immense cave peopled by unknown dangers in a land overrun by hideous beasts and reptiles of the greatest ferocity. At any moment, perhaps at this very moment, some silent-footed beast of prey might catch my scent where it laired in some contiguous passage, and might creep ...
— The People that Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Regent Street, near Piccadilly Circus, was a haven of brightness in an otherwise Stygian London. It was one of those "old-fashioned" places—Restoration style of decoration, carried out in modern plastics. The oak panelling looked authentic enough, but it was just a little too ...
— The Penal Cluster • Ivar Jorgensen (AKA Randall Garrett)
... groping with outstretched hands through the Stygian blackness of the room, his nostrils assailed and his brain tantalized by the delicate effluvia that had first assured him that his mate had been within this very room. And he had heard her dear voice combatting the base demands of the vile priest. Ah, if he had ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... alone, methinks, to me Belongs the office; Lady, when my tongue Is cold in death, believe me, unto thee My voice shall raise its tributary song. My soul, from this strait prison-house set free, As o'er the Stygian lake it floats along, Thy praises singing still shall hold its way, And make the waters of ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... amazed at this scene, and asked the Sibyl to explain to him its meaning. "You see before you," she replied, "the deep pools of Cocytus, and the Stygian lake, by which the Gods are accustomed to swear when they take an oath which they dare not violate. All that crowd which Charon will not ferry across is composed of persons who after death received not the rites of burial; those only are permitted to enter ...
— The Children's Hour, Volume 3 (of 10) • Various
... is the golden bowl! the spirit flown forever! Let the bell toll!—a saintly soul floats on the Stygian river; And, Guy De Vere, hast thou no tear?—weep now or never more! See! on yon drear and rigid bier low lies thy love, Lenore! Come! let the burial rite be read—the funeral song be sung!— An anthem for the queenliest ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... and dinner-hour impends, she bethinks herself, and crowds the fire below to a roaring heat, and finishes the process by a smart burn, involving the kitchen and surrounding precincts in volumes of Stygian gloom. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... Welcome an owner, not a sojourner. This peaceful seat my poverty secures; War seldom enters but where wealth allures: Nor yet despise it; for this poor abode Has oft received, and yet receives a God; A God victorious of the Stygian race Here laid his sacred limbs, and sanctified the place, 710 This mean retreat did mighty Pan contain: Be emulous of him, and pomp disdain, And dare not to debase ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... Alaric and Havoc on their way? Where Peleus' son? whom Hell in vain enthralled, His shade from Hades upon that dread day Bursting to light in terrible array! What! could not Pluto spare the chief once more, To scare a second robber from his prey? Idly he wandered on the Stygian shore, Nor now preserved the walls ...
— Childe Harold's Pilgrimage • Lord Byron
... pluck the fruits that glitter to thine eye; Content thyself with gazing on their glow— Short are the joys Possession can bestow, And in Possession sweet Desire will die. 'Twas not the ninefold chain of waves that bound Thy daughter, Ceres, to the Stygian river— She pluck'd the fruit of the unholy ground, And ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... unspeakable Which he once kindled, and the bones and ashes Of men will God himself again transform, And raise up mortals as they were before. And then will be the judgment, God himself Will sit as judge, and judge the world again. As many as committed impious sins Shall Stygian Gehenna's depths conceal 'Neath ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams
... hereticks bare heads are arm'd In a close helm, and in it charm'd An overgrown and meagre rat, That peece-meal nibbles himself fat; So on the toads blew-checquer'd scull The spider gluttons her self full. And vomiting her Stygian seeds, Her poyson on his poyson feeds. Thus the invenom'd toad, now grown Big with more poyson than his own, Doth gather all his pow'rs, and shakes His stormer in's disgorged lakes; And wounded now, apace crawls on To his next plantane ...
— Lucasta • Richard Lovelace
... symbol. We have not only the anxiety about death caused by the moral conflict, but we have also to remember that the passage into the uterus is a passage to the beyond. The water is the Water of Death (stygian waters) and of Life. In narrower sense it is also seminal fluid and the amniotic liquor. It is overdetermined as indeed all symbols are. The water bears the death color black. In the Flying Post dream a black road appears. The dreamer has conflicts ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... innocent thing" was the sonnet beginning "Not on sad Stygian shore," the first of those I have grouped under the heading "The Life after Death." It appears in his ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... lake whose lilies lie Like maidens in the lap of death, So pale, so cold, so motionless Its Stygian breast they press; They breathe, and toward the purple sky The pallid perfumes of their breath Ascend in spiral shapes, for there No wind disturbs the voiceless air— No murmur breaks the oblivious mood Of that tenebrean solitude— No Djinn, no Ghoul, no Afrit laves His giant limbs ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... the rich soil required to furnish corn and due sustenance, but men even descended into the entrails of the Earth; and riches were dug up, the incentives to vice, which the Earth had hidden, and had removed to the Stygian shades.[32] Then destructive iron came forth, and gold, more destructive than iron; then War came forth, that fights through the means of both,[33] and that brandishes in his blood-stained hands the clattering arms. Men live by rapine; the guest ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... and Haidee! they were So loving and so lovely—till then never, Excepting our first parents, such a pair Had run the risk of being damned for ever: And Haidee, being devout as well as fair, Had, doubtless, heard about the Stygian river, And Hell and Purgatory—but forgot Just in the very crisis ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... tilled the fields about delightful Titaresius, which pours its fair-flowing stream into the Peneus; nor is it mingled with silver-eddied Peneus, but flows on the surface of it like oil. For it is a streamlet of the Stygian wave, the dreadful ...
— The Iliad of Homer (1873) • Homer
... headlong fall, And leave their life beneath the soaring cloud. Moreover now nor change of fodder serves, And subtlest cures but injure; then were foiled The masters, Chiron sprung from Phillyron, And Amythaon's son Melampus. See! From Stygian darkness launched into the light Comes raging pale Tisiphone; she drives Disease and fear before her, day by day Still rearing higher that all-devouring head. With bleat of flocks and lowings thick resound Rivers and parched banks and sloping heights. At last ...
— The Georgics • Virgil
... to the farther wall. An archway gaped there. I walked across the room, passed under the archway. Instantly I was in complete, stygian darkness. But I ...
— Where the World is Quiet • Henry Kuttner
... the water." He pulled the rude shallop to her feet and they got in and went on, Jack not heeding her gibe. "These brackish, threatening deeps remind me of all sorts of weird and uncanny things; Stygian pools—Lethe—what not mystic and terrifying. See, the tiny waves that curl before our boat are like thin ink; a thousand roots and herbs and who knows what mysterious vegetable mixture colors these ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... And all around her shapes, wizard and brute, Laughing, and wailing, groveling, serpenting, Shewing tooth, tusk, and venom-bag, and sting! O such deformities! Old Charon's self, Should he give up awhile his penny pelf, And take a dream 'mong rushes Stygian, It could not be so phantasied. Fierce, wan, And tyrannizing was the lady's look, 510 As over them a gnarled staff she shook. Oft-times upon the sudden she laugh'd out, And from a basket emptied to ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats
... he be from us, Virgil salutes him, and Theocritus; Catullus, mightiest-brained Lucretius, each Greets him, their brother, on the Stygian beach; Proudly a gaunt right hand doth Dante reach; Milton and Wordsworth bid him welcome home; Bright Keats to touch his raiment doth beseech; Coleridge, his locks aspersed with fairy foam, Calm Spenser, Chaucer suave, His equal friendship crave: And godlike spirits hail him guest, in speech ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... Bacon or even a Count St. Germain. Many take for their ideal Margrave with his ever-renewing youth, and care little for the soul as the price paid for it. Not a few, mistaking "Witch-of-Endorism" pure and simple, for Occultism—"through the yawning Earth from Stygian gloom, call up the meager ghost to walks of light," and want, on the strength of this feat, to be regarded as full blown Adepts. "Ceremonial Magic" according to the rules mockingly laid down by Eliphas Levi, is another imagined ...
— Studies in Occultism; A Series of Reprints from the Writings of H. P. Blavatsky • H. P. Blavatsky
... unctuous oyly kind of roote as hath been found in some great tobacco takers, that after death were opened. A custom loathsome to the eye, harmful to the braine, dangerous to the lungs, and the black stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... stand 210 Amid the great Ionian folk: Celaeno holds the shores, And others of the Harpies grim, since shut were Phineus' doors Against them, and they had to leave the tables they had won. No monster woefuller than they, and crueller is none Of all God's plagues and curses dread from Stygian waters sent. A winged thing with maiden face, whose bellies' excrement Is utter foul; and hooked hands, and face for ever pale With hunger that ...
— The AEneids of Virgil - Done into English Verse • Virgil
... of the Montagnes d'Arree lies a vast and dismal peat bog known as the Yeun, which has long been regarded by the Breton folk as the portal to the infernal regions. This Stygian locality has brought forth many legends. It is, indeed, a remarkable territory. In summer it seems a vast moor carpeted by glowing purple heather, which one can traverse up to a certain point, but woe betide him who would advance farther, for, surrounded by what seems solid ground, lies ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... magic wonders wrought by aid Of Stygian angels summoned up from hell; Scorned and accursed be those who have essayed Her gloomy Dives and Afrites to compel. But by perception of the secret powers Of mineral springs in Nature's inmost cell, Of ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... her not; thy heat and stir The greater coyness breed in her: Yet thou may'st find, ere Age's frost, Thy long apprenticeship not lost, Learning at last that Stygian Fate Supples for him that knows to wait. The Muse is womanish, nor deigns Her love to him who pules and plains; With proud, averted face she stands To him who wooes with empty hands. Make thyself free of manhood's guild; Pull down thy barns and greater build; The wood, the mountain, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... I could not imagine what she meant. How could more light than there was ever come to this dreadful spot? While I was still wondering, suddenly, like a great sword of flame, a beam from the setting sun pierced the Stygian gloom, and smote upon the point of rock whereon we lay, illumining Ayesha's lovely form with an unearthly splendour. I only wish I could describe the wild and marvellous beauty of that sword of fire, laid across the darkness and rushing mist-wreaths ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... Melancholy, Of Cerberus and blackest Midnight born In Stygian cave forlorn 'Mongst horrid shapes, and shrieks, and sights unholy! Find out some uncouth cell Where brooding Darkness spreads his jealous wings And the night-raven sings; There, under ebon shades and low-browed rocks As ragged as thy locks, In dark ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... enough after supper to learn what a wild, weird, and pitch-black spot the outlaw leader had chosen. The little spaces of open ground between the huge-trunked pine-trees had no counterpart up in the lofty spreading foliage. Not a star could blink a wan ray of light into that Stygian pit. The wind, cutting down over abrupt heights farther up, sang in the pine-needles as if they were strings vibrant with chords. Dismal creaks were audible. They were the forest sounds of branch or tree rubbing one another, but which needed the corrective medium of daylight ...
— The Man of the Forest • Zane Grey
... ground on which we stept became hotter and hotter, while around us rolled an oppressive steam, which obscured and hid the sun; the guide, who was a few steps in advance of me, presently turned back, and seizing hold of me, hurried out of this Stygian exhalation. ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... smeared with honey? For no reason, except that the Greeks (not the Romans till very late in their history) always placed an obolos, or penny, beneath the tongue of the dead to pay his passage across the Stygian river of ghosts; for no reason, except that to these same Greeks honey was a sacred fluid, intimately associated in their minds with the mournful subject of Death; a fluid with which the bodies of the deceased were anointed, and sometimes—especially in Sparta and the Pelasgic South—embalmed; ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... lie, Traytorous Sempronius and proud Ptolomey, Go plead your cause fore the angry Rhadamant, 800 And tel him why you basely Pompey slew. And let your guilty blood appease his Ghost, That now sits wandring by the Stygian bankes, Vnworthy sacrifice to quite his worth, For Pompey though thou wert mine enemy, And vayne ambition mou'd vs to this strife; Yet now in death when strife and enuy cease. Thy princely vertues and thy noble minde, Moue me to rue ...
— The Tragedy Of Caesar's Revenge • Anonymous
... and mercilessly demanded brain-toil, which killed him, show their sepulchral grasp for many and many a year before their final victory; and the states of more or less dulled, distorted, and polluted imagination which culminate in Castle Dangerous, cast a Stygian hue over St. Ronan's Well, The Fair Maid of Perth, and Anne of Geierstein, which lowers them, the first altogether, the other two at frequent intervals, into fellowship with the normal disease which festers throughout the whole body ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... deliverance! Oh, silence, vast, immense, infuse into your soul some sound other than the heavy throbbing of this fast disintegrating heart! Oh, pitiless stone arches, let fall your crushing weight upon this Stygian monster! ...
— Violets and Other Tales • Alice Ruth Moore
... all his story; and when he came to your robbing master monk,—'O apostate!' cries the bell-wether, 'O spawn of Beelzebub! excommunicate him, with bell, book, and candle. May he be thrust down with Korah, Balaam, and Iscariot, to the most Stygian pot of the ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... but Glory had enjoyed it. When she had settled down to the physical discomfort of the blinding and choking dust, the humours of the road became amusing. This endless procession of good-humoured ruffianism sweeping through the most sacred retreats of Nature, this inroad of every order of the Stygian demi-monde on to the slopes of Olympus, was intensely interesting. Men and women merry with drink, all laughing, shouting, and singing; some in fine clothes and lounging in carriages, others ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... operation of iniquitous laws! is Magna Charta then a mockery? Why, in general (here I suppose you to ask a question) my spirits are pretty good, but I have my depressions, black as a smith's beard, Vulcanic, Stygian. At such times I have recourse to a pipe, which is like not being at home to a dun; he comes again with tenfold bitterness the next day.—(Mind, I am not in debt, I only borrow a similitude from others; it shows imagination.) ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... of these black tunnels, flouted their faces and disputed their progress. Don Jorge slapped wildly at them, and cursed low. Hitt took up a long club and struck savagely about him. On they stumbled, until the match flickered out, and they were left in Stygian blackness, with the imps of darkness whirring madly about them. Hitt struck another ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... the bed, his eyes fell on a piece of rich old tapestry! Curtains of silk damask, all bespotted with quaintest flowers, each like a page of Chaucer's poetry, hung round his bed, quite other than fit sails for the Stygian boat. They had made the bed as different as the vine in summer from the vine in winter. A quilt of red satin lay in the place of the patchwork coverlid. Everything had been changed. He thought the mattress felt soft under him—but that was only a fancy, for he saw before the fire ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... glass plate looking exactly as it did when we placed it in the shield. No eye, no microscope, can detect a trace of change in the white film that is spread over it. And yet there is a potential image in it,—a latent soul, which will presently appear before its judge. This is the Stygian stream,—this solution of proto-sulphate of iron, with which we will presently flood the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... caught the branch was such a physical relief that he almost forgot his errand. He slid quietly down the tree, pausing as he reached the bottom of it. The moon was just rising above the horizon, but under the trees the darkness was Stygian. John pushed quietly through the shrubberies, treading as lightly as possible. Every moment he expected to see the flash of a lantern, to hear Warde's voice, to feel an arresting hand upon the shoulder. It was quite impossible to guess with any reasonable accuracy what part ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... the formation in all directions are numberless curiosities, such as the Devil's Kitchen, Cupid's Cave, and the Stygian Cave. In many of these caves there is an accumulation of carbonic-acid gas sufficient to destroy animal life. This is especially ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... the nature of our intelligence and our sensations. Darkness is everywhere connected with the idea of death. The Grotto of Caripe is the Tartarus of the Greeks; and the guacharos, which hover over the rivulet, uttering plaintive cries, remind us of the Stygian birds. ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... local currency, whether Attic or Macedonian or Aeginetan; nor does it occur to them how much better it would be for the departed one if the fare were not forthcoming,—because then the ferryman would decline to take him, and he would be sent back into the living world. Lest the Stygian Lake should prove inadequate to the requirements of ghostly toilets, the corpse is next washed, anointed with the choicest unguents to arrest the progress of decay, crowned with fresh flowers, and laid out in sumptuous raiment; an obvious precaution, this last; it would not do for ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... numbers with my life expire, Or this world's light confine the boundless song: To thee, bright maid, in death I'll touch the lyre, And to my soul the theme shall still belong. When, freed from clay, the flitting ghosts among, My spirit glides the Stygian shores around, Though the cold hand of death has sealed my tongue, Thy praise the infernal caverns shall rebound, And Lethe's sluggish waves move slower ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... millions waited and longed for the hour of sunrise, hoping that then the stygian darkness would be dissipated, so that people might, at least, see where to go and what to do. Many, oppressed by the almost unbreathable air, gave up in despair, and no longer even ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... me, Speak from thy silent grave; It doth not roll o'er thee, Death's dark and Stygian wave! Sweet! speak, I'm sick, to hear The heaven of thy voice, Which wont, while life was dear, To ...
— Lays of Ancient Virginia, and Other Poems • James Avis Bartley
... a smaller unit, say a platoon, going to or returning from a certain place in the dark, rarely has any knowledge of the right bearing to work on, and if the night is cloudy, he is surrounded by a Stygian darkness in which he soon feels a little doubtful of his uncharted way. He begins to zigzag a bit, peering through the gloom for some familiar landmark. The men, who for the most part would be completely ...
— The Fifth Battalion Highland Light Infantry in the War 1914-1918 • F.L. Morrison
... helmsman of the course he should steer, to avoid collision with the shores. Canopies of weaving branches met in various directions far above their heads, and through these the schooner glided with a silence that might have called up the idea of a Stygian freight. Meanwhile, the men stood anxiously to their guns, concealing the matches in their water-buckets as before; and, while they strained both ear and eye through the surrounding; gloom to discover the slightest evidence of danger, grasped the handles ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... in the final dissolution from which there is no quickening. Korak propped the dead body against the door frame. There it sat, lifelike in the gloom. Then the ape-man turned and glided into the Stygian ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... over, when, between us and the border of the basin, arose a long neck, on the top of which, like the blossom of some Stygian lily, sat what seemed the head of a corpse, its mouth half open, and full of canine teeth. I went on; it retreated, then drew aside. The lady stepped on the firm land, but the leopardess between us, roused once more, turned, ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... upon the hot sands, most of us went ashore in surf-boats, paddled by the kind of men that figure prominently in the school geographies. It was a chapter from "Swiss Family Robinson,"—the white surf lashing the long yellow beach; the rakish palm-trees bristling in the wind; a Stygian volcano rising above a slope of tropic foliage; the natives gathering around, all open-mouthed with curiosity. At Camaguin, where the boat stopped at the sultry little city of Mambajo, an accident befell our miner. When we found ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... prisoned seed, buried in the dank and quickening soil, struggles instinctively toward the source of light and strength. But what instinct is there to guide the human soul that, quickened by unselfish love, is yet walled in by the Stygian darkness ...
— Blue Goose • Frank Lewis Nason
... asperse me rudely, and excuse Of ignorance hast none, far better taught; What words were these? How could'st thou thus reply? Now hear me Earth, and the wide Heav'n above! Hear, too, ye waters of the Stygian stream 220 Under the earth (by which the blessed Gods Swear trembling, and revere the awful oath!) That future mischief I intend thee none. No, my designs concerning thee are such As, in an exigence resembling thine, Myself, most ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer
... to keepe, That doest all things deface? ne lettest see The beautie of his worke? Indeede in sleepe, The slouth full body that doth love to steepe His lustlesse limbs, and drowne his baser mind, Doth praise thee oft, and oft from Stygian deepe, Calles thee his goddesse, in his errour blind, And great dame Nature's hand-maide, chearing every ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper
... Western Virginia on a forlorn hope against Rosecrans, where he had no success; for success was impossible. Yet his lofty character was respected of all and compelled public confidence. Indeed, his character seemed perfect, his bath in Stygian waters complete; not a vulnerable spot remained: totus teres atque rotundus. His soldiers reverenced him and had unbounded confidence in him, for he shared all their privations, and they saw ...
— Destruction and Reconstruction: - Personal Experiences of the Late War • Richard Taylor
... appeared to Palinurus during one of the watches of the night, and tried to persuade him to lie down and sleep, while he himself would stand at the helm and steer the ship. But Palinurus refused to quit his post. Then the treacherous god waved before his eyes a branch that had been dipped in the Stygian Le'the, the fabled river of forgetfulness, and soon the pilot dropped off into a deep slumber, during which Somnus leaning heavily upon him, plunged him ...
— Story of Aeneas • Michael Clarke
... heavy static gun ready, walked at Asher's back. They came out into another cavern that stretched beyond the powerful lights. The sound of their voices echoed like thunder of the drums of Thor, and Asher realized this cavern might stretch away in Stygian blackness for hundreds ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... stream of water by means of a narrow and slippery bridge, from which many were lost. The Zunis set apart a day in each year which they spent among the graves of their dead, communing with their spirits, and bringing them presents—a kind of All-souls-day. (Dorman, "Prim. Superst.," p. 35.) The Stygian flood, and Scylla and Charybdis, are found among the legends of the Caribs. (Ibid., p. 37.) Even the boat of Charon reappears in the traditions ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... safely shrowd, From dreaded storme of his disdainfull spight: To you th' inheritance belongs by right Of brothers prayse, to you eke longs his love. Let not his love, let not his restlesse spright, 430 Be unreveng'd, that calles to you above From wandring Stygian shores, ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... the character of Friedrich, there is one British Writer whose curiosity concerning him would pretty soon have died away; nor could any amount of unwise desire to satisfy that feeling in fellow-creatures less seriously disposed have sustained him alive, in those baleful Historic Acherons and Stygian Fens, where he has had to dig and to fish so long, far away from the upper light!—Let me request all readers to blow that sorry chaff entirely out of their minds; and to believe nothing on the subject except what they ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. I. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Birth And Parentage.—1712. • Thomas Carlyle
... this rubbish over disconsolately, for it is a material God, and does not respond to one spiritual nature. It seems rather to react against it. Alas! alas! I sink down into a Cimmerian darkness here; it seems as if the Stygian pools of blackness had closed over me, and a cry of anguish goes forth from my inmost soul, piercing the dark depths to learn what is spirit? and what is God? What manner of existence or unity of Being is He? Who is He? Where is He? And how can I ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur
... to represent, under a veil, the blessing of universal nature, and in which the sleepy-looking heads, with a peculiar grace and refinement of somewhat advanced life in them, have just this half-weary posture. We see here, then, the Here of the world below, the Stygian Juno, the chief of those Elysian matrons who come crowding, in the poem of Claudian, to the marriage toilet of Proserpine, the goddess of the fertility of the earth and of all creatures, but still of fertility as arisen out of death;* and therefore she is not without a certain pensiveness, ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... Hellward bound in Charon's wherry with food for both worlds, under and 35 upper, Lupine-seed and Hecate's supper, and never an obolus. (Though thanks to you, or this Intendant through you, or this Bishop through his Intendant—I possess a burning pocketful of zwanzigers) To pay Stygian Ferry! ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... holy Light!... Thee I revisit now with bolder wing, Escaped the Stygian pool, though long detained In that obscure sojourn, while in my flight Through utter and through middle ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... men all, that drink with glee This fanciful Philosophy, Pray tell me what good is it? If antient Nick should come and take, The same across the Stygian Lake, I guess we ne'er ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge |
