"Mythical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... where the spices grow," or of the countries which produced the rich fabrics in which he trafficked: he knew only that they came to Alexandria or Damascus from Far Eastern lands. For from time immemorial the Orient had been the enemy's country, little known beyond the bounds of Syria, a half-mythical land of alien races, of curious customs and infidel faiths, a land of interminable distances, rich and populous, doubtless, certainly dangerous and inaccessible. But in the thirteenth century the veil which had long shrouded Asia in mystery was lifted, discovering to European ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... for some time, till they found the alarm was false." [Ib. i. 140.] Of Friedrich we see nothing, except as if by cloudy moonlight in an uncertain manner, through this and the other small Anecdote, perhaps semi-mythical, and true only in the essence ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... must have implied the previous existence of our present Gospels. I do not now allude to the presence in it of added traits, such as the cave of the Nativity and the fire on Jordan, which are of the nature of those mythical details that we find more fully developed in the Apocryphal Gospels. I do not so much refer to these—though, for instance, in the case of the fire on Jordan it is highly probable that Justin's statement is a translation into literal fact of the ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday
... Billy thought it improbable. The verses were very silly; and, recalling the big, blundering boy who had written them, Billy began to wonder—somewhat forlornly—whither he, too, had vanished. He and the girl he had gone mad for both seemed rather mythical—legendary as ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... so substantial and costly as in this. Pianfu is undoubtedly, as Magaillans again notices, P'ING-YANG FU.[3] It is the Bikan of Shah Rukh's ambassadors. [Old P'ing yang, 5 Lis to the south] is said to have been the residence of the primitive and mythical Chinese Emperor Yao. A great college for the education of the Mongols was instituted at P'ing-yang, by Yeliu Chutsai, the enlightened minister of Okkodai Khan. [Its dialect differs from the T'ai-yuan dialect, and is more like Pekingese.] The city, lying in a broad valley covered ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... of Wagner's texts! their mythical substance, their eternal substance"—Question: how is this substance, this eternal substance tested? The chemical analyst replies: Translate Wagner into the real, into the modern,—let us be even more cruel, and say into the bourgeois! And what will then become of him?—Between ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... letters had to meet their death at his hands. In due course he arrived home, but nothing could induce him to be drawn into a conversation about the missing correspondence. Time had made him more charitably disposed towards the mythical burglars of his precious documents, and no more threats were indulged in. The lady did not deem it wise to raise the question again, and seeing that nothing but harm could have arisen by doing it, I commend her for the wisdom of resisting the temptation ...
— The Shellback's Progress - In the Nineteenth Century • Walter Runciman
... navigate upon a felt rug, like the one we had seen in Piotr's cottage; and they disputed over the exact shade of meaning contained in the words which he was in the habit of using when he summoned a rich merchant vessel to surrender as his prize. Evidently, Stenka was no semi-epic, mythical hero to them, ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... atmosphere of the prime luminary, replenish its overflowing fountain of life. But we are not aware that he has yet discovered the anastomosis of this conversion, or quite established the fact. We are therefore not yet quite ready to resolve the universe of physical forces into the similitude of the mythical mill-stream, which, flowing round a little hill, came back and fed its own pond. Nevertheless, we believe the physicists have pretty generally agreed to assume as a law of Nature what they call the conservation of force, the principle we have been endeavoring ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... Saga is a story, or telling in prose, sometimes mixed with verse. There are many kinds of Sagas, of all degrees of truth. There are the mythical Sagas, in which the wondrous deeds of heroes of old time, half gods and half men, as Sigurd and Ragnar, are told as they were handed down from father to son in the traditions of the Northern race. Then there are Sagas recounting the history ...
— The story of Burnt Njal - From the Icelandic of the Njals Saga • Anonymous
... say of Cassano, the nearest town he came to, that "no other spot can boast of such advantages." In short, no man living who has written any book about it dares say that anybody has looked upon the certain site of Sybaris for more than a hundred years.[C] If a man wanted to write a mythical story, where could he find a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... his act? Averbuch, like most young Russian immigrants, undoubtedly believed in the mythical liberty of America. He received his first baptism by the policeman's club during the brutal dispersement of the unemployed parade. He further experienced American equality and opportunity in the vain efforts to find an economic master. In ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... thus form some idea of the general position of American exploration and discovery at the time when Cartier made his momentous voyages. The maritime nations of Europe, in searching for a passage to the half-mythical empires of Asia, had stumbled on a great continent. At first they thought it Asia itself. Gradually they were realizing that this was not Asia, but an outlying land that lay between Europe and Asia and that must be passed by the navigator before Cathay and Cipango ...
— The Dawn of Canadian History: A Chronicle of Aboriginal Canada • Stephen Leacock
... published by her son-in-law, Thomas Fleet, in 1719. But no one has identified any such publication and there is no evidence whatever that this old lady in cap and spectacles is other than purely mythical. ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... ever occurred, and hereafter this with the foolish and groundless story of one of the Lees going to see him when an exile at Breda, to offer him a crown and a refuge in Virginia, must be consigned to that oblivion which is likely, soon, we hope, to receive many of the mythical legends which have heretofore passed current for ...
— Colonial Records of Virginia • Various
... accepting, for the moment, the terms Puritan and Cavalier in the sense an effete sectionalism once sought to ascribe to them—descriptive labels at once classifying and separating North and South—verbal redoubts along that mythical line called Mason and Dixon, over which there were supposed by the extremists of other days to be no bridges—I am much disposed to say, "A ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... them in Neal's Puritans (ed. 1795), III. 311-324. The death of Henderson at so critical a moment, and so closely after his conferences with the King at Newcastle, made a deep impression at the time, and became an incident of even mythical value to the Royalists. Hardly was the breath out of his body when there began to run about a lying rumour to the effect that he had died of remorse, acknowledging that the King had convinced him, and confessing his repentance of all he had said or done against that wisest and best of monarchs. Baillie, ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... recalls, an Insurance Act. Wilson felt a special grievance because he employed an aged gardener, out of charity, two days a week. He talked, if I remember correctly, about a cruel fourpence and a mythical ninepence. He read fierce letters he had composed for the Press, and when the papers published them, which was seldom, he read them to us all over again. As an anti-insurance agitator Wilson now comes under the unemployment section of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, September 30, 1914 • Various
... whole mass of knowledge, viz.: the 'quantitative', relative determinations according to number and magnitude, and 'qualitative', material characters. Means of submitting phenomena to calculation. Atoms, mechanical methods of construction. Figurative representations; mythical conception of imponderable matters, and the peculiar vital forces in every organism. That which is attained by observation and experiment (calling forth phenomena) leads, by analogy and induction, to a knowledge of 'empirical laws'; their gradual simplification and generalization. Arrangement ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... greatest of a series of great Sultans. So was it as regards this house of Seljuk. Malek Shah, the son of Alp Arslan, the third sovereign, in whom its glories ended, is represented to us in history in colours so bright and perfect, that it is difficult to believe we are not reading the account of some mythical personage. He came to the throne at the early age of seventeen; he was well-shaped, handsome, polished both in manners and in mind; wise and courageous, pious and sincere. He engaged himself even more in the consolidation of his empire than in its extension. He ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... the East Northern including the Danish and Swedish; and the West Northern including the Icelandic, Norwegian, and Faroese. Danish literature boasts of some five hundred chivalric ballads (Kjaempeviser), on partly historical and partly mythical themes, which were composed between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. It was the Danish translator of the Bible who introduced his countrymen to Charlemagne and Ogier, whose legends received their finished forms at his hands. In 1555 Reynard the Fox was translated into Danish from the French, ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... honorable position in the line of progressive nations. So favorable is the climate that nearly the whole country might be turned into a botanical garden. Indeed, Australia would seem to be better entitled to the name of Eldorado (a mythical country abounding in gold), so talked of in the sixteenth century, than was the imaginary land of untold wealth so confidently believed by the adventurous Spaniards, to exist somewhere between the Orinoco ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... loves me for myself alone: it is my title which dazzles her. And I would that I had never made myself the emperor of Noumaria: for this emperor goes about everywhere in a fabulous splendor, and is, very naturally, resistless in his semi-mythical magnificence. Ah, but these imperial gewgaws distract the thoughts of Florimel from the real Jurgen; so that the real Jurgen is a person whom she does not understand at all. ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... ancestors of the present race; others consider that the history of the race has been forgotten through the lapse of ages; while the more intelligent and better educated look upon the Menehunes as a mythical class of gnomes or dwarfs, and the account of their exploits as having been handed down by tradition for social entertainment, as other peoples relate ...
— Hawaiian Folk Tales - A Collection of Native Legends • Various
... 1480-1554) was the first man of letters produced in Denmark. He edited and published, at Paris in 1514, the Latin text of the old chronicler, Saxo Grammaticus; he worked up in their present form the beautiful half-mythical stories of Karl Magnus (Charlemagne) and Holger Danske (Ogier the Dane). He further translated the Psalms of David and the New Testament, printed in 1529, and finally—in conjunction with Bishop Peder Palladius—the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... of this mythical Bible approached nearer to the burlesque than this excuse for having descendants of the ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... else—as great a mistake as Julius Caesar would have made if he had chosen to remain a fashionable lawyer instead of mixing in politics, or Achilles, if he had taken a necklace or a bracelet and left the sword in Ulysses' basket. You would have found your mythical duenna a nuisance in ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... is purely mythical; but there are historical incidents to reckon with. About the year 520 a certain northern chief, called by the chronicler Chochilaicus (who is generally identified with the Hygelac of the epic), led a huge ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... democratic spirit to everything in heaven and on earth, and redistributes the prizes from its points of view; he does not, except very briefly, sing the praises of science, but he launches his poems always from the scientific view of the world, in contradistinction to the old theological and mythical point of view. It is always the example, it is always the thing itself, he gives us. Few precepts, no sermon, no reproof. Does he praise candor? No, he is candor; he confesses to everything; he shows us the inmost working of his mind. We know him better than we know our nearest friends. Does he ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... cook I cleaned up handsomely, especially as it was while I was running the restaurant that Miner started his notorious stampede, when thousands of gold-mad men followed a will-o'-the-wisp trail to fabulously rich diggings which turned out to be entirely mythical. ...
— Arizona's Yesterday - Being the Narrative of John H. Cady, Pioneer • John H. Cady
... poetical contest, presiding on one of these occasions. I wondered whether Clemence Isaure had been anything like this terrible Toulousaine of to-day, who would have been a capital figure-head for a floral game. The lady in whose honour the picture I have just mentioned was painted is a somewhat mythical personage, and she is not to be found in the "Biographie Universelle." She is, however, a very graceful myth; and if she never existed, her statue at least does—a shapeless effigy transferred to the Capitol ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... favorable or unfavorable, but his frequent commendation in after years indicated that I gained his goodwill before the close of the war, if not when I first came to his notice; and a more intimate association convinced me that the cold and cruel characteristics popularly ascribed to him were more mythical than real. ...
— The Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan, Vol. I., Part 3 • P. H. Sheridan
... their knowledge to Gen. Putnam and are commissioned by him to play the role of detectives in the matter. They do so, and meet with many adventures and hairbreadth escapes. The boys are, of course, mythical, but they serve to enable the author to put into very attractive shape much valuable knowledge concerning one ...
— Robert Coverdale's Struggle - Or, On The Wave Of Success • Horatio, Jr. Alger
... fine side of Thugut's character. The well-known story of the destruction of Cobenzl's vase by Bonaparte at the last sitting, with the words, "Thus will I dash the Austrian Monarchy to pieces," is mythical. Cobenzl's own account of the scene is as follows;—"Bonaparte, excited by not having slept for two nights, emptied glass after glass of punch. When I explained with the greatest composure, Bonaparte started ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... countries and some of the islands of the Eastern Archipelago. Startling as this conclusion appeared to be, it was strangely in unison with the legends of the Singhalese themselves, that at an infinitely remote period Ceylon formed an integral portion of a vast continent, known in the mythical epics of the Brahmans by the designation of "Lanka;" so immense that its southern extremity fell below the equator, whilst in breadth it was prolonged till its western and eastern boundaries touch at once upon the shores of ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... demonstrate that the Prince fluttered the Courts, and that the Jacobite belief in English schemes to kidnap or murder him was not a mere mythical delusion. Only an opportunity was wanted. He had spared the Duke of Cumberland's life, even after the horrors of Culloden. But Hanbury Williams knows a Pole who will waylay him; Hyndford wants to carry him off to Siberia. It was not once only, on the other hand, but twice ...
— Pickle the Spy • Andrew Lang
... representation of which Chinese art has found its most grotesque expression. It is really an exaggerated lion; and the symbolical relation of the lion to Buddhism is well known. Statues of these mythical animals—sometimes of a grandiose and colossal execution—are placed in pairs before the entrances of temples, palaces, and tombs, as tokens of honor, and as emblems ...
— Some Chinese Ghosts • Lafcadio Hearn
... religious service, in which poetry, music, pantomime, and the dance lent themselves, under the forms of [Page 12] dramatic art, to the refreshment of men's minds. Its view of life was idyllic, and it gave itself to the celebration of those mythical times when gods and goddesses moved on the earth as men and women and when men and women were as gods. As to subject-matter, its warp was spun largely from the bowels of the old-time mythology into cords through which the race maintained vital connection with its mysterious ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... after all. Then the new-comer cheerfully came back: "Well, signora, whatever you please to give." I named half his price—an exorbitant sum, as I well knew—and in a moment more we were skimming along over the hard, smooth mountain-roads: we heard no more of those mythical beasts the oxen, and in two hours were ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... no words to come out. Why had this total stranger helped him, what could he say to show his appreciation? He knew that all humans weren't robe-haters, why it was even rumored that some humans treated robots as equals instead of machines. The driver must be one of these mythical individuals, there was no other way to explain ...
— The Velvet Glove • Harry Harrison
... originality. I conceive the only way to obtain any thing like a clear conception on this point would be what Lachman has begun, (see above,) patiently to collect and compare the various forms which the traditions have assumed, without any preconceived, either mythical or poetical, theory, and, if possible, to discover the original basis of the whole rich and fantastic legend. One point, which to me is strongly in favor of the antiquity of this poetic cycle, is, that the manners are so clearly anterior to chivalry, and to the influence ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... himself de Cyrano de Bury or Lord of Candeville. His wife's name was Nicolais, not Nicolai—a very important difference from the genealogical point of view. The Duplessis inheritance, though certainly existent, would seem to have had little more chance of realisation than the mythical Crawford millions of Madame Humbert. And yet, crippled with debt, without a penny in the world, this daring grocer of the Rue Beaubourg, for such was M. Derues' present condition in life, could cheerfully and confidently engage in a transaction ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... described by the terms Asiatic and Scandinavian. The Eastern view, it need scarcely be said, is the most prolonged, exceeding some five thousand years along the vista of time, where little else is discoverable but what is visionary, mythical, and unsubstantial. It is related—traditionally of course—that some three thousand years before our era there lived a King of Ceylon named Ravanon,[2] who invented a four-stringed instrument played with ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... much that is mythical and uncertain concerning Lycurgus that many have doubted whether he ever lived. Curtius, however, says, "There really lived in the ninth century B.C. a legislator of the name of Lycurgus." Lycurgus ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... than we imagine. They see nothing deplorable in a lot to which they have become accustomed; they are as our first parents before their eyes were opened to a knowledge of good or evil; or, to take a less mythical illustration, they are as the contented savage, to whom the refinements of European civilisation are objects of ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... with the earlier time, almost as freely as gods intervene in Homer. In short, the Homeric poet undeniably treats the age of his heroes as having already, in the phrase of Thucydides, "won its way to the mythical," and therefore as ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... hostages of —inhabitants of —township of Acharnians, date fixed —date of Adonis, festivals of Adultery, punishment of Aegaean, Islands of Aegeus, a mythical king Aeschylus, character from —plays after death Aesop, Fable of Aetolian, meaning of Age fixed for playwrights Agoracritus, crime imputed —meaning of Alcibiades, his father Amorgos silks Amphitheus, play on word Amyclae, town near Sparta Anagyra, ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... supply the models, and I have been credibly informed that the law is as good as the versification. Mr. Swinburne was in those days the favourite butt of young parodists, and the gem of the book is the dedication to "J.S." or "John Stiles," a mythical person, nearly related to John Doe and Richard Roe, with whom all budding jurists had in old days to make acquaintance. The disappearance of the venerated initials from modern ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... they are based by a poet on heroic songs and national traditions of the struggle with the Moors, and the fourth part opens with an elaborate setting forth of the history of the great hero of mediaeval Spain, the Cid Campeador. The Cid is the King Arthur, or the Roland, of the Spaniards, less mythical, but not less interesting, with incidents of a real life seen through the warm haze of Southern imagination. King Alfonso, in his Chronicle, transformed ballads and fables of the Cid into a prose digest that was looked upon as history. Robert Southey translated this ...
— Chronicle Of The Cid • Various
... and effectiveness, cavalry soldiers require much longer instruction than those of any other arm. They must become expert swordsmen, and acquire such skill in equitation that horse and rider shall resemble the mythical centaurs of the ancients—shall be only one individual in will. The horses should be as thoroughly trained as the riders. In European armies this is accomplished in training schools. The Governments keep constantly on hand large ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... my teachers, that all the supernatural must be eliminated from the Bible as mythical and unreliable, and so I was robbed of my Christ, my God and my Bible. Misguided by rationalism, I thought it my conscientious duty to accept, step by step, the dictates of destructive criticism until the Bible was only inspired to me in ...
— To Infidelity and Back • Henry F. Lutz
... find themselves in a square antechamber, paved roughly with tiles, and with a single small window looking out towards the Thames. The chamber is at the base of Lollards' Tower; in the centre stands a huge oaken pillar, to which the room owes its name of the "Post-room," and to which somewhat mythical tradition asserts Lollards to have been tied when they were "examined" by the whip. On its western side a doorway of the purest Early English work leads us directly into the ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... upland patches and cool dells of shade carpeted with golden buttercups, where cattle fed lazily. Once a herd of fallow deer browsing by the wayside scuttled away at the noisy approach of the brakes. Only afterward did Paul learn their name and nature: to him then they were mythical beasts of fairyland. Once also the long pile-of the Tudor house came into view, flashing-white in the sunshine. The teacher in charge of the brake explained that it was the Marquis of Chudley's residence. ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... begin to tell how much has been encompassed in these twenty-six years, but our bound volumes are full of his editorials and articles—the serious, the analytical, the constructive, the caustic, the witty and the amusing. He created The Piney Woods Clarion and in quotations from that mythical publication put a new light on the business. "Insurance Arabian Nights" which he declared were "translated from the Persian," contained more of the odd conceits that fairly flowed from his pen and these two series, with a marine policy-form insuring the "contents" of Noah's Ark, concocted in collaboration ...
— The Dead Men's Song - Being the Story of a Poem and a Reminiscent Sketch of its - Author Young Ewing Allison • Champion Ingraham Hitchcock
... inevitable article of diet is WINE. No one has dreamed of questioning its vast desirability under almost all circumstances. Even drunkenness is not always improper. It may be highly fitting, as putting one in a "divine frenzy," partaking of the nature of the gods. Museus the semi-mythical poet is made out to teach that the reward of virtue will be something like perpetual intoxication in the next world. Aeschines the orator will, ere long, taunt his opponent Demosthenes in public with being a "water drinker"; and Socrates on many occasions has given proof that he possessed ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... this epic of Suomi, descending unwritten from the mythical age to the present day, kept alive from generation to generation by minstrels, or song-men, is regarded as one of the most precious contributions to the literature of the world, made since the time of ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... sorry," he said, "that I am not myself acquainted with one of these mythical personages that I might return you the value of your marvelous information. If I dared think, however, that it would be in any way acceptable, I could offer you the diversion of a restaurant dinner-party for that night. The Duchess of Castleford has kindly offered ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... golf links we have what is called a Bogie score posted up. That is a score that a certain mythical Captain Bogie, supposed to be an average good player, could make on those links. On one typical club-course, for instance, the Bogie score is 42. Though it has been done in 37, the ordinary player congratulates himself when he gets down ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall
... himself? Notwithstanding all the attempts of the author of the Acts to mystify him into as mythical a character as the Gospels made of Jesus, Paul is an open book in history. We have his genuine epistles, in which he gives considerable account of himself and his exploits. We have one portion of the Acts in which, contrary to the rest of that book, the author narrates in the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... some period of Babylonian history is shown by the elaborate legend of his deeds for which, as in the case of Gilgamesh and Etana, we are justified in assuming an historical background. In fact, the legend of Dibbarra is naught but a poetic and semi-mythical disguise for severe conflicts waged against certain Babylonian cities by some rival power that had its seat ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... another stumbling-block. The geological difficulties of the Mosaic cosmogony were also at that time exciting attention. It was a novelty to me, that Arnold treated these questions as matters of indifference to religion; and did not hesitate to say, that the account of Noah's deluge was evidently mythical, and the history of Joseph "a beautiful poem." I was staggered at this. If all were not descended from Adam, what became of St. Paul's parallel between the first and second Adam, and the doctrine of Headship ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... the Grass River settlement who would have envied the mythical Prince Quippi also. For even at six years of age Leigh had the same quality that marked her uncle. People must love her if they cared for her at all; and they couldn't help caring for her. She fitted into the life of the prairie, too, as naturally as Thaine Aydelot did, who was born ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... beauty, affection, memory, hope. But never were such treasures of knowledge shared between lovers as between Prometheus and Elenko. Each possessed immeasurable stores, hitherto inaccessible to the other. How trifling seemed the mythical lore which Elenko had gleaned as the minister of Phoebus to that now imparted by Prometheus! The Titan had seen all, and been a part of all that he had seen. He had bowed beneath the sceptre of Uranus, he had witnessed his fall, and marked the ocean ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... ashes from scattering and to keep the fire compact. New tents were perfectly white; some of them were painted with red and black figures. These devices were generally derived from the dreams of the Amerindians, being some mythical monster or other hideous animal, whose description had been handed down from their ancestors. A large camp of such tents, pitched regularly on a level plain, had a fine effect at a distance, especially when numerous bands of horses were ...
— Pioneers in Canada • Sir Harry Johnston
... "William Tell's Address to His Native Mountains," by J. M. Knowles? And the story of William Tell,—is it not dear to every heart that loves liberty? Though modern history declares it to be purely mythical, its popularity remains unaffected. It will live forever in the traditions of Switzerland, dear to the hearts of her people as their native mountains, and even more full of interest to the stranger than ...
— Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life • Orison Swett Marden
... I repeated mythical tribe legends, gathered from Skenedonk on our long rides, making them as eloquent as I could. She listened, holding her breath, or ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... (paradigms and vocabularies), lists of omens and lucky and unlucky days, and letters and reports passing between kings and governors; the latter class includes cosmogonic poems, an epic poem in twelve books, detached mythical narratives, magic formulas and incantations, and prayers to deities (belonging to the ritual service of the temples). The prose pieces, with scarcely an exception, belong to the historical period, and may be dated with something like accuracy. The same thing is true of a part ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... the post-road was made by an unbeaten track over the Ala Tau mountains. From the Chu valley, dotted here and there with Kirghiz tent villages and their grazing flocks and herds, we pushed our wheels up the broken path, which wound like a mythical stairway far up into the low-hanging clouds. We trudged up one of the steepest ascents we have ever made with a wheel. The scenery was grand, but lonely. The wild tulips, pinks, and verbenas dotting the green slopes furnished the only pleasant diversion from our arduous ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben
... pecuniary gain has neither body nor soul. Its corporeal existence is mythical and ethereal. It suffers neither from cold nor from hunger, has neither fear of future punishment nor hope of future reward. It takes no interest in schools or in churches. It knows neither charity nor love, neither pity nor sympathy, neither justice ...
— The Railroad Question - A historical and practical treatise on railroads, and - remedies for their abuses • William Larrabee
... of the judgment to come, the bare announcement of which by Paul filled Felix, the Roman governor, with such dire consternation, is the subject of which we propose to set forth the philosophical and ethical explanation. In the Bible we have the mythical setting much as we have the mythical version of the agony of spirit undergone by Christ before he definitely committed himself to his prophetical work. It is for us to-day to disentangle the substantive truth from the maze of legend with which an imperfectly developed age has surrounded it and ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... the Japanese Hercules destroying the demons and other mythical heroes was a large alcove, or tokonoma, decorated with peacock, stork, and crane panels. Carvings and lacquer added to the beauty of it. A miniature chrysanthemum garden heightened the illusion. Carved hinoki wood ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... occupant of the Horselberg, and as the fairy queen in the tale of True Thomas of Ercildoune.' By the same method of comparative mythology, the whole series of the Arthurian stories are placed 'in that large family of heroic legends which have their origin in mythical phrases describing the phenomena of the outward world, and more especially those of the ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor
... stream from the neighborhood of Jaen, and, astonished to behold a sea of fresh water, exclaimed, "Hac mare an non?" Orellana's pretended fight with a nation of female warriors gave rise to the Portuguese name of the river, Amazonas (anglicized Amazon), after the mythical women in Cappadocia, who are said to have burnt off their right breasts that they might use the bow and javelin with more skill and force, and hence their name, [Greek: Amazones] from [Greek: a] and [Greek: mazos]. Orellana's story probably grew out of the fact that ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... form suited to his previous knowledge and conceptions. It would seem to him that The Wasp flew about the skies with the world in his mouth, as he carries a bluebottle fly; and that would be the astronomy of his tribe henceforth. Absurd enough: but—as every man who is acquainted with old mythical cosmogonies must know—no more absurd than twenty similar guesses on record. Try to imagine the gradual genesis of such myths as the Egyptian scarabaeus and egg, or the Hindoo theory that the world stood on an elephant, the elephant on a tortoise, the tortoise on that ...
— Scientific Essays and Lectures • Charles Kingsley
... cunning—valour with ferocity—inclination to war, yet faculties for the inventions of peace; such were the attributes most honoured among men, in the progressive, but still uncivilized age which makes the interval so pre-eminently Grecian— between the mythical and historic times. Vain and impotent are all attempts to identify that religion of Achaian warriors with the religion of oriental priests. It was indeed symbolical—but of the character of its believers; typical—but ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... be forgotten visit to the Wigwam. And she would see Betty and Betty's godmother and Papa Jack and the old Colonel and Mom Beck. The very names, as she repeated them in a whisper, sounded interesting to her. And the two little knights of Kentucky, and Miss Allison and the Waltons—they were all mythical people in one sense, like Alice in Wonderland and Bo-peep, yet in another they were as real as Holland or Hazel Lee, for they were household names, and she had heard so much about them that she felt a sort of kinship with ...
— The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor • Annie Fellows Johnston
... my own affairs, and I was out among my roses when Lloyd Inwood arrived. Clipping and pruning and tacking the climbers on the porch, with my mouth full of nails, and Lloyd following me about and lending a hand now and again, we fell to discussing the mythical race of invisible people, that strange and vagrant people the traditions of which have come down to us. Lloyd warmed to the talk in his nervous, jerky fashion, and was soon interrogating the physical properties and possibilities ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... Europe, is almost certainly a pure invention, and never existed; when you remember—as mentioned earlier in this book (1)—that it was more than five hundred years after the supposed birth of Jesus before any serious effort was made to establish the date of that birth—and that then a purely mythical date was chosen: the 25th December, the day of the SUN'S new birth after the winter solstice, and the time of the supposed birth of Apollo, Bacchus, and the other Sungods; when, moreover, you think for a moment what the state ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... made occasional slight attempts upon it; but none at all for a long time past. All attempts that way, as ineffectual for any purpose but stirring up strife, had been discontinued for many generations; [Buchholz, i. 148-151.] and the Crypto-Protestantism was again become a mythical romantic object, ignored by Official persons. However, in 1727, there came a new Archbishop, one "Firmian", Count Firmian by secular quality, of a strict lean character, zealous rather than wise; who had brought his orthodoxies with ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... Corygannt ('The House of the Korrigans') is situated in the same department, while near Penmarch, in Finistere, at the other end of the province, we find Ty C'harriquet ('The House of the Gorics' or 'Nains'). Other mythical personages are also credited with their erection, most frequently either the devil or Gargantua being held responsible for their miraculous creation. The phenomenon, well known to students of folk-lore, that an unlettered people speedily forgets the origin of monuments ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... narrow nature. And here are the Chopin compositions." The murder is out—I have jumped from Bach and Beethoven to Chopin without a twinge of my critical conscience. Why? I hardly know why, except that I was thinking of that mythical desert island and the usual idiotic question: What composers would you select if you were to be marooned on a South Sea Island?—you know the style of question and, alas! the style of answer. You may also guess the composers ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... truth became known, and it was seen that there was nothing of the mythical in the conspiracy against Forster's life, public indignation flamed up afresh at the treatment he had received. When he next came to Leeds, after the trial of the Invincibles, a crowd followed him through the streets from the railway ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... there until in Columbus there was found a man with faith strong enough to make the long flight beyond them to the unknown West. And yet the philosophers, and later the cartographers, true to their instinct for this pedestrian kind of imagination, put mythical lands and islands to the westward of the known islands as though they were really trying to make a way, to sink stepping stones into the deep sea that would lead their thoughts across the unknown space. In the Catalan map of the world, which was the ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... emblem of Persia from early times was a golden eagle with outstretched wings, resting on a spearhead like the Roman eagle, but he makes no allusion to a standard. Persian historians tell of a famous standard carried from the mythical time of Zohak to that of the last of the Pehlevi kings. Their story is that Kawah, a blacksmith, raised a successful revolt against the implacably cruel King Zohak in the earliest time of Persian sovereignty, and relieved the country from his terrible tyranny by putting ...
— Persia Revisited • Thomas Edward Gordon
... a number of things before he suddenly exclaimed: "Oh Katie, I must tell you. That fellow—what's his name? Mann? The mythical being known as the man who mends the boats is a fellow you'll have to avoid, should you ever see him again—which ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... very midst of it stood the outlaw in his familiar attitude, with one forefoot slightly raised, his head high, his nostrils distended, his dark eyes filled with fire. There had never been anything so bright and beautiful. His golden hide gleamed with planetary splendor, like the mythical horses of the sun. This was The Horse, the golden epiphany of the brute, the answer to all of Haig's fears and resolutions. And in the ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... to call him, Ulysses. Whether he was a real person or only a creation of the poet's fancy, it is impossible to say. But as it is now generally agreed that there was a siege of Troy, it follows that there was probably a Ulysses, and his adventures, while in the main mythical, are of value as having perhaps some foundation in truth, and giving, at all events, a picture of what the old Greeks thought a hero ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... every Christmas—not that Phoebe Metz had ever been taught to believe in that patron saint of the children—oh, no! Maria Metz would have considered it foolish, even sinful, to lie to a child about any mythical Santa Claus coming down the chimney Christmas Eve! Nevertheless, the smiling, rotund face of the red-habited Santa in the store window seemed so real and so emanative of cheer that Phoebe delighted in him each year and felt sure there must be a Santa Claus somewhere in the world, even though Aunt ...
— Patchwork - A Story of 'The Plain People' • Anna Balmer Myers
... reign (741) of Koken; earlier; in time of Tsunayoshi; result in stock farming; worship of; mythical and terrible beasts in early ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... nobly recalling Days of the mythical heroes of yore, Oft wilt thou haunt me when shadows are falling,— Beautiful gem of the ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... the catastrophe known as the deluge, which, it is claimed, took place either in Armenia, at Cashgar, or at some other place in the East, is observed, in later ages, to furnish a covering beneath which have been veiled the mythical doctrines of the priests. Of the catastrophes which from time to time have visited our planet, and of the belief which has come to be entertained by ecclesiastics that the earth will be destroyed by fire, ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... indeed, but ambitious souls who could not draw the line of demarcation between discovery and invention—the literary bones of these explorers are dotting the trackless wastes of the subway. While it is true that after the publication of the mythical language attributed to the dwellers along the Bowery certain of its pat phrases and apt metaphors were adopted and, to a limited extent, used in this locality, it was because our people are prompt in assimilating ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... the Himene Tatou Arearea. Kelly, the wandering I.W.W., self-acclaimed delegate of the mythical Union of Beach-combers and Stowaways, was at the valves of the accordeon, and about him squatted a ring of joyous natives. "Wela ka hao! Hot ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... Morning Calm is due, I suppose, in a large measure to the frequent Chinese invasions and constant intercourse of the Chinese with Corea. And yet, upon a less appropriate country, to my belief, he could hardly have been stranded, for, although he possesses all the good virtues of the other mythical creatures of which I have made mention taken together, he certainly is never presented as gifted with that delightful faculty which goes by the name of tranquillity. Restless in the extreme, this genius of the East is said to penetrate ...
— Corea or Cho-sen • A (Arnold) Henry Savage-Landor
... document are utterly at variance with the received belief in Holbein's humble Augsburg origin. Yet the most expert investigators who have carefully studied this subject agree in thinking that this grandson based the genealogical tree on mythical foundations, and therefore planted it remote from Augsburg itself. But be this as it may—and it seems hard to reconcile such discrepancies within a century of the time when both Hans Holbein the Elder and his son were well-known citizens of Augsburg,—the application ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... Mr. Anderson—if your name is Anderson. I don't know what you are trying to do, nor why you picked out steamfitting as your mythical life-work, but I do ...
— 32 Caliber • Donald McGibeny
... south. His quest was Surprise Lake and the mythical Two Cabins. His traverse was to cut the headwaters of the Indian River and cross the unknown region over the mountains to the Stewart River. Here, somewhere, rumour persisted, was Surprise Lake, surrounded by jagged mountains and glaciers, ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... twenty-three beautiful longbows behind. The only clothing the dead men had on was snail-shells fastened to the ends of their long locks of hair. The trappers now began to seek more anxiously for the mythical settlements. "A great many times each day," says Pattie, "we bring our crafts to the shore and go out to see if we cannot discover the tracks of horses and cattle." On the 18th they thought some inundated river entering was the cause of a ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... find yourself going back three hundred years in time. On the right hand of the road, walking eastward, what looks like a huge green mound is visible above a high ancient wall. This is all that is left of St. Triduana's Chapel, and she was a saint who came from Achaia with St. Regulus, the mythical founder of St. Andrews. She died at Restalrig on October 8, 510, and may have converted the Celts, who then dwelt in a crannog in the loch; at all events we hear that, in a very dry summer, the timbers of a crannog were found in the ...
— James VI and the Gowrie Mystery • Andrew Lang
... universal history that he could "beat" even Dardanelov. Kolya did indeed ask him the question, "Who founded Troy?" to which Dardanelov had made a very vague reply, referring to the movements and migrations of races, to the remoteness of the period, to the mythical legends. But the question, "Who had founded Troy?" that is, what individuals, he could not answer, and even for some reason regarded the question as idle and frivolous. But the boys remained convinced that Dardanelov did not know who founded Troy. Kolya had read ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... This side of Vaeroe lay the large island of Moskoe, between which and a large solitary rock in the middle of the strait dividing them, is the locality of the renowned Maelstrom—now, alas! almost as mythical as the kraaken or great sea snake of the Norwegian fjords. It is a great pity that the geographical illusions of our boyish days cannot retrain. You learn that the noise of Niagara can be heard 120 miles off, and that "some Indians, in their canoes, have ventured down it, with safety." ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... looked for all he was worth. He twiddled the glasses and put them out of focus, but naturally he failed to behold the mythical fox which was the product of his offspring's ...
— The Ffolliots of Redmarley • L. Allen Harker
... an eye around the uniquely decorated walls, upon which hung, here, the shrieking prospectus of a mythical gold-mine; there a small but venomous political placard, and on all sides examples of the uncouth or unusual in paid print; exploitations of grotesque quackeries; appeals, business-like, absurd, or even passionate, in the form of "Wants;" threats thinly disguised ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... view of the nature of disease, and by a long succession of most remarkable cures ... proved the truth of the theory.... Had he lived in a remote age or country, the wonderful facts which occurred in his practice would have now been deemed either mythical ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... of all ages to those time-honoured feats of legerdemain which once represented the sorcery of the mystic East. The simple Malay has not yet adopted the critical and unbelieving attitude which rubs the gilt off the gingerbread or the bloom off the plum, and his fervid faith in mythical heroes and necromantic exploits gives him the key to that kingdom of fancy often closed to a sadder if wiser world. The electric tram provides an excellent method of gaining a general idea of Batavia and Weltevreden; the winding route skirting canals and palm ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... of mythical heroes have some slight historical basis, they have been so adorned by the fancy of mediaeval bards, and so frequently remodeled with utter disregard of all chronological sequence, that the kernel of truth is very hard to find, and the stories must rather be considered as depicting customs and ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber
... the deer in mythology, however, is not usually so beneficent, and "the antelope, the gazelle, and the stag generally, instead of helping the hero, involve him rather in perplexity and peril. This mythical subject is amplified in numerous Hindoo legends." See de Gubernatis, Zooelogical Mythology, London, 1872, vol. ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer
... Carl Schurz, "Abraham Lincoln has already become a half mythical figure, which, in the haze of historic distance, grows to more and more heroic proportions, but also loses in distinctness of outline and figure." The last clause of this remark is painfully true. To the majority of people now living, ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... calmly, "there is no manner of doubt that Garibaldi is the only name that could collect ten thousand men at any given point in Italy; while in France, though her influence is mythical, the name of Mary-Anne is a name of magic. Though never mentioned, it is never forgotten. And the slightest allusion to it among the initiated will open every heart. There are more secret societies in France at this moment than at any period since '85, though you hear nothing ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... written down in Northumbria. It possesses great interest because of its antiquity, and because of the light it throws upon the life of the professional singer in those ancient times among the Teutons. It has a long list of kings and places, partly historical, partly mythical or not identified. The poem, though narrative and descriptive, is also lyrical. We find here the strain of elegiac sadness, of regretful retrospection, so generally present in Anglo-Saxon ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... Oscar Wilde and W.S. Gilbert had all not dubiously striven nor for shallow effect. They had, though labouring incessantly apart, built up a ghost which was in no fear of glimmering or dissolution; and now Berthold Tours, spright of another element of sentimental, I should say continental mythical music, upon the scene springs with his amazing apparatus of staves and octaves, aiding the chef-de-musique and his trained voices to make sound within the very presence chamber of Divine Worship this phantasmagoria ...
— Original Letters and Biographic Epitomes • J. Atwood.Slater
... catastrophe has been the miserable weakness displayed by the authorities of Johnstown and the surrounding boroughs. Johnstown needed them sadly for forty-eight hours. There is supposed to be a Burgess, but like most burgesses he is a shadowy and mythical personage. If there had been concerted and intelligent action the fire in the debris at the dam could have been extinguished within a short time after it started. Too many ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... him turn to the 104th Psalm and read, from Spinoza's point of view, the cosmic vision of the Hebrew seer. True, we can think no longer of the supernatural carpenter who works on "the beams of his chambers" above, or of the mythical engineer who digs deep in the darkness to "lay the foundations of the earth." For that is poetry, appealing by concrete images to the emotions. But it does not bind the intellect to a literal interpretation; and we are no longer tormented ...
— Pantheism, Its Story and Significance - Religions Ancient And Modern • J. Allanson Picton
... courthouse of such ample dimensions that the whole population of the town could have been accommodated therein. How the numerous barristers, solicitors, and the smaller legal fry lived was a mystery. Perhaps, like the mythical French town whose population supported themselves by doing each other's washing, the legal gentry of Bowen existed by performing each other's clerical work. Next in numbers—though not in social standing—were the Government officials connected with the Harbour and Lights Department, ...
— Tom Gerrard - 1904 • Louis Becke
... the fighter, From the unlucky French of Gallipolis he descended, Heir to Old World want and New World love of adventure. Vague was the life he led, and vague and grotesque were the rumors Through which he loomed on the people,—the hero of mythical hearsay, Quick of hand and of heart, impatient, generous, Western, Taking the thought of the young in secret love and in envy. Not less the elders shook their heads and held him for outcast, Reprobate, roving, ungodly, infidel, worse than a Papist, With his whispered fame of lawless exploits ...
— Poems • William D. Howells |
