"Polyphemus" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... be very much quoted in England, Bossu, in his discourse on the Epic Poem, had serious difficulties with the adventures of Ulysses, and his stories told in Phaeacia. The episodes of Circe, of the Sirens, and of Polyphemus, are machines; they are also not quite easy to understand. "They are necessary to the action, and yet they are not humanly probable." But see how Homer gets over the difficulty and brings back these machines to the region of human probability. "Homre ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... Castalia, who dwell on the steeps of Parnassus, tell me, I pray you, was it a draught like this that the aged Chiron placed before Hercules, in the stony cave of Pholus? Was it nectar like this that made the mighty shepherd on Anapus' shore, Polyphemus, who flung the rocks upon Ulysses' ships, dance among his sheepfolds?—A cup like this ye poured out now upon the altar of Demeter, who presides over the threshing-floor. May it be mine, once more, to dig my big winnowing-fan through her heaps of corn; and may I see her smile ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... was slighted. Never their like did I see, nor shall look on their equals hereafter— Such as Perithoeus was, or as Dryas the shepherd of people, Kaineus, Exadius too—the compeer of the bless'd, Polyphemus; AEgeus' glorious son, as a God in his countenance, Theseus. These of a truth were in might the supreme of the children of mankind; Mightiest they upon earth and with mightiest foes they contended, Centaurs nurs'd in the hills, whom in terrible ruin they trampled. These, the allies of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... fierce countries the meadows seem like beautiful green ornaments enameled with jewels. The Mariposa Lily, on the other hand, is a poppy-shaped flower varying from white to purple, and with each petal decorated by an "eye" exactly like those on the great Cecropia or Polyphemus moths, so that their effect is that of a flock of gorgeous butterflies come to rest. They hover over the meadows poised. A movement would startle them to flight; only the proper movement ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... Ildefonso" hauled down her colours to the "Defence." About this time the French "Achille" was seen to be ablaze and ceased firing. In the earlier stages of the fight she had been engaged successively with the "Polyphemus," "Defiance," and "Swiftsure." Her captain and several of her officers and nearly 400 men had been killed and wounded when she was brought to close action by the "Prince." Her fore-rigging caught fire, ...
— Famous Sea Fights - From Salamis to Tsu-Shima • John Richard Hale
... Kalidasa: for example, the story of the jealous humpback who eggs on Queen Kaikeyi to demand her two boons; the beautiful scene in which Sita insists on following Rama into the forest; the account of the somnolent giant Pot-ear, a character quite as good as Polyphemus. Other fine episodes are so briefly alluded to as to lose all their charm: for example, the story of the golden deer that attracts the attention of Rama while Ravana is stealing his wife; the journey of the monkey Hanumat to Ravana's fortress ...
— Translations of Shakuntala and Other Works • Kaalidaasa
... them from Larisa came Polyphemus, son of Eilatus, who aforetime among the mighty Lapithae, when they were arming themselves against the Centaurs, fought in his younger days; now his limbs were grown heavy with age, but his martial spirit still remained, even as ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius
... that many people called these caves [Greek: Kooi.] [424][Greek: Enioi koous mallon ta toiauta koilomata legesthai phasin.] Hence he very truly explains a passage in Homer. The poet, speaking of Theseus, Dryas, Polyphemus, and other heroes of the Mythic age, mentions their encountering with the mountaineers of Thessaly, whom he ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume I. • Jacob Bryant
... Greeks were regaling themselves, a noise was heard, and great flocks of sheep and goats came bleating in. Behind them came a giant, with a fir tree for a staff, and only one eye in the middle of his forehead. He was Polyphemus, one of the Cyclops, sons of Neptune, and workmen of Vulcan. He asked fiercely who the strangers were, and Ulysses told him that they were shipwrecked sailors, imploring him for hospitality in the name of the gods. Polyphemus laughed at this, saying he ...
— Aunt Charlotte's Stories of Greek History • Charlotte M. Yonge
... romantic than the "Iliad:" is, in fact, rather a romance than a hero-epic. The adventures of the wandering Ulysses, the visit to the land of the lotus-eaters, the encounter with the Laestrygonians, the experiences in the cave of Polyphemus, if allowance be made for the difference in sentiments and manners, remind the reader constantly of the medieval romans d'aventure. Pater quotes De Stendhal's saying that all good art was romantic in its day. "Romanticism," says De Stendhal, "is the art ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... Polyphemus answered nothing, but without more ado caught up two of the men, as a man might catch up the whelps of a dog, and dashed them on the ground, and tore them limb from limb, and devoured them, with huge draughts of ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... the Odyssey. He tells that, at the time Ulysses visited Sicily, it was inhabited by the Cyclops, who, as already mentioned, were said to have had each only one eye, situated in his forehead. Their king's name was Polyphemus, a huge giant who beguiled Ulysses and a portion of his crew into a cave, where he killed some of the crew and devoured them for his supper. Ulysses, fearing his turn might come next, persuaded Polyphemus to taste some strong wine he had with ...
— Wonders of Creation • Anonymous
... one who uses books very much but sooner or later becomes grateful for the existence of an alphabet and an arrangement by A B C. Carlyle once said, 'A library is not worth anything without a catalogue; it is a Polyphemus without any eye in his head, and you must confront the difficulties, whatever they may be, ...
— The Private Library - What We Do Know, What We Don't Know, What We Ought to Know - About Our Books • Arthur L. Humphreys
... Ulysses, "you must remember, my good friends, our misadventure in the cavern of one-eyed Polyphemus, the Cyclops! Instead of his ordinary milk diet, did he not eat up two of our comrades for his supper, and a couple more for breakfast, and two at his supper again? Methinks I see him yet, the hideous monster, scanning us with ...
— Tanglewood Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Pentland Firth, and floundering in the waters like an enormous whale; the herring shoals hurrying away from his unwieldy gambols, as from the presence of the real sea-born leviathan. Cacus in love was not more grand, or the gigantic Polyphemus, sighing at the feet of Galatea, or infernal Pluto looking amiable beside his ravished queen. Have you seen an elephant in love? If you have, you may conceive what Mr. Tims would be in ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 13, No. 359, Saturday, March 7, 1829. • Various
... Sparta, go back instantly," he spoke in a hoarse whisper. "Tell that Polyphemus you call your master there that I will do his will. And tell him, too, that if ever the day comes for vengeance on him, on the Cyprian, on ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... no cure for Love, Plaster or unguent, Nicias, saving one; And this is light and pleasant to a man, Yet hard withal to compass—minstrelsy. As well thou wottest, being thyself a leech, And a prime favourite of those Sisters nine. 'Twas thus our Giant lived a life of ease, Old Polyphemus, when, the down scarce seen On lip and chin, he wooed his ocean nymph: No curlypated rose-and-apple wooer, But a fell madman, blind to all but love. Oft from the green grass foldward fared his sheep Unbid: while he upon the windy beach, Singing his Galatea, sat and pined ...
— Theocritus • Theocritus
... of supernatural powers wondrous weapons, swords of incredible qualities, armor that defies mortal blades, bracelets of wondrous and cunning finish and singular properties—all here is miraculous, the workman, the process, and the work. The vividness with which Homer presents to us the one-eyed Polyphemus, with his tree-staff and his ponderous body, is exchanged by the Scandinavian for smallness, indistinctness of form and of power. The grand in the South is obtained by giving enlarged pictures of man as he is; in the North, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... of possible moral elevation, Falstaff is as undeniably the superior of Sancho as Sancho is unquestionably the superior of Panurge. The natural affection of Panurge is bounded by the self-same limits as the natural theology of Polyphemus; the love of the one, like the faith of the other, begins and ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... youthful shepherd of Israel, who slew a lion and a bear, and killed Goliath, the gigantic champion of the Philistines. There were the Shepherd Kings, who ruled the land of Egypt. there was one-eyed Polyphemus, moving among his flocks on the mountain tops of Sicily; a monster, dreadful, vast, and hideous; able to roast and eat these three blackfellows at one meal. And nearer our own time was the youth whose immortal speech begins, "My name is Norval; on the Grampian Hills my father fed his flocks." ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... of which Pompey will be the Polyphemus, and Cicero the Siren. I would have the state imitate Ulysses: show no mercy to the former; but contrive, if it can be done, to listen to the enchanting voice of the other, without being seduced ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... their rattles and bright-colored balls, the children their hoops and balls, and what we call "Blindman's-buff" was a favorite game among them. Perhaps you know about the old giant Polyphemus, who was master of a race of one-eyed giants, and who devoured the Greeks that were round his cave, until they succeeded in putting out his eye, and how he still groped around and endeavored to ...
— Harper's Young People, March 16, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... a class of young children the story of Polyphemus and Ulysses, and just at the most dramatic moment in the story some impulse for which I cannot account prompted me to go off on a side issue to describe the personal appearance ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... entreaties and conjurings: Save me; save thyself. Seest thou not that thy own head is doomed; thou with a too fiery audacity; a Dantonist withal; against whom lie grudges? Are ye not all doomed, as in the Polyphemus Cavern; the fawningest slave of you will be but eaten last!—Tallien feels with a shudder that it is true. Tallien has had words of omen, Bourdon has had words, Freron is hated and Barras: each man 'feels his head if it yet stick ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... for in the pineal gland we find the last vestiges of that which was once a third eye, and which looked out into the world, if not from the centre of the forehead, at least from very near that point. There is alive to-day a little creature which would put to shame the one-eyed arrogance and pride of Polyphemus, and Arges, and Brontes, and Steropes, and all the rest of the single-eyed gentry who, in the days of myths and myth-makers, inhabited the "fair Sicilian Isle." The animal in question is a small lizard, called ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... Polyphemus had an eye for business; it was in the middle of his forehead. It served him admirably for the only two duties which are demanded in a modern financier and captain of industry: the two duties of counting sheep and of eating men. But when that one eye was put out he was done for. But ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... fear in the most remote corners of the cave. The giants heard him and came running to help him, but they could not get into the cave. They stood near the stone, close to the door, and called out: 'What ails thee, Polyphemus? Is anyone trying to kill thee?' 'Woe is me!' cried Polyphemus, 'Nobody is trying to kill me.' 'Then why dost thou shout and cry for help?' said they. 'If nobody hurts thee, then thou art ...
— Odysseus, the Hero of Ithaca - Adapted from the Third Book of the Primary Schools of Athens, Greece • Homer
... come,' sighed Fanny, musingly, counting the beads for the eye of the Polyphemus she was embroidering on a cushion for that gentleman's sofa meditations, 'he would entertain you, as ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Caledonians (which, we dare say, are pleasant quadrilles to those who know them, and the Charmer does). Well, she is top, with young Hoy (heir to Sir Hobbedy), for a partner, a brave youth at quoits, cricket, boxing, or boating—his hands, horny as a tortoise and large as Polyphemus', over which he split three right-hand gloves:—a glance will suffice to show how much he is out of his, and she in her, element—Miss Charmer looking, Lark said, as if she would prefer performing the "first set" (or sit) upon a vacant seat, beside Arthur Beau, who ...
— Christmas Comes but Once A Year - Showing What Mr. Brown Did, Thought, and Intended to Do, - during that Festive Season. • Luke Limner
... his breath and the noises from his groans; and when he turned over earthquakes shook the island. Many of the myths of the Greek poets were associated with the slopes of AEtna, such as Demeter, torch in hand, seeking Persephone, Acis and Galatea, Polyphemus and the Cyclops. ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... is rapidly assuming importance in California, and though the Chinese silk worm has not been successfully cultivated in the Eastern States, yet the American silk worm, Teleas Polyphemus (see frontispiece, male; Fig. 54, larva; 55, pupa; 56, cocoon), can, we are assured by Mr. Trouvelot, be made ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... repaired to our drawing-room car, and, as it was Sabbath eve, intoned some of the grand old hymns—"Praise God from whom," etc.; "Shining Shore," "Coronation," etc.—the voices of the men singers and of the women singers blending sweetly in the evening air, while our train, with its great, glaring Polyphemus eye, lighting up long vistas of prairie, rushed into the night and the Wild. Then to bed in luxurious couches, where we slept the sleep of the just and only awoke the next morning (Monday) at eight o'clock, to find ourselves at the crossing of the North ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... of Billy Tompkins was the last thing that Fred saw. It followed him home. The hot tears fell from his eyes, but they did not quench the flames that were consuming him. There is nothing so terrible as the just anger of a child,—terrible in its very powerlessness. Polyphemus is a giant, though the mountain ...
— The Uncalled - A Novel • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... want Common Sense amongst them. There's such a hurlyburly. Auditus is stark deaf, and wonders why men speak so softly that he cannot hear them. Visus hath drunk himself stark blind, and therefore imagineth himself to be Polyphemus. Tactus is raging mad, and cannot be otherwise persuaded but he is Hercules furens. There's such conceits ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... ship "Polyphemus" coming in, the surgeon, Mr Cockin, afforded him the medical assistance he so much required, and on the 14th of June he was sufficiently recovered to call on the bishop, attended by his Makololo followers. They had all been dressed in new robes of striped ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... the water. This fact is certified to by old Homer, who knew Polyphemus; and the same observation will be found in all natural histories worthy of the name. Finette's master resembled Polyphemus. He roared with rage when he saw his slaves about to escape him. He ran hesitatingly along the shore; he flung huge masses of rock after the ...
— Laboulaye's Fairy Book • Various
... bold!" replied Cornelia, drawing back. "How can I give you what you wish, unless I am safe from that awful Polyphemus up in Praeneste?" ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... of Corfu, which bears the resemblance of a ship under sail: the ancients adapted the story to the phenomenon, and recognised in it the Phenician ship, in which Ulysses returned to his country, converted into stone by Neptune, for having carried away the slayer of his son Polyphemus. A more extensive acquaintance with the ocean, has shown that this appearance is not unique; a similar one on the coast of Patagonia, has more than once deceived both French and English navigators; and rock Dunder, in the West Indies, ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... will neither quote Lucan, nor Statius, men of an unbounded imagination, but who often wanted the poize of judgment. The divine Virgil was not liable to that exception; and yet he describes Polyphemus thus: ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... brave eater of pottage, and reigned in the time of the flood; Who begat Nembroth, Who begat Atlas, that with his shoulders kept the sky from falling; Who begat Goliah, Who begat Erix, that invented the hocus pocus plays of legerdemain; Who begat Titius, Who begat Eryon, Who begat Polyphemus, Who begat Cacus, Who begat Etion, the first man that ever had the pox, for not drinking fresh in summer, as Bartachin witnesseth; Who begat Enceladus, Who begat Ceus, Who begat Tiphaeus, Who begat Alaeus, Who begat Othus, Who begat Aegeon, Who begat Briareus, that had a hundred ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... So we stopped and Omar said, 'come and see the Sheyk, ma'am.' I walked off and presently found about thirty people, including all my own men, sitting on the ground round St. Simon Stylites—without the column. A hideous old man like Polyphemus, utterly naked, with the skin of a rhinoceros all cracked with the weather, sat there, and had sat day and night, summer and winter, motionless for twenty years. He never prays, he never washes, he does not keep Ramadan, and yet he is a saint. Of course I expected ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... giant is distinctly Polyphemus; but the East had giants and cyclopes of her own (Hierozoicon ii. 845). The Ajaib al-Hind (chapt. cxxii.) makes Polyphemus copulate with the sheep. Sir John Mandeville (if such person ever existed) mentions men fifty feet high in the Indian Islands; and Al-Kazwini and Al- ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... Didymus, hast thou won indeed That Paradise which is thy meed? (Thy tale not all that run may read!) Thy sweet hath now no leaven! Now, like an onion in a cup Of mead, thou liest for Jove to sup, Could Polyphemus lift thee up With Titan ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... office to transport, but the mastodons and mammoths which it might have served to harness; it had the air of the galleys, but of cyclopean and superhuman galleys, and it seemed to have been detached from some monster. Homer would have bound Polyphemus ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... arms full of yellow weeds,—ore from the gold mines which he discovered long before we heard of California,—Y., born to millions, crazed by too much plum-cake, (the boys said,) dogged, explosive,—made a Polyphemus of my weak-eyed schoolmaster, by a vicious flirt with a stick,—(the multi-millonnaires sent him a trifle, it was said, to buy another eye with; but boys are jealous of rich folks, and I don't doubt the good people made him easy for ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... instances in support of his position, for in these cases Mr. Arnold would only object to his use of them in their slang sense. He himself would hardly venture to say that Hector was a brick, that Achilles cut Agamemnon, or that Ulysses sold Polyphemus. It is precisely because Hobbes used language in this way that his translation of Homer is so ludicrous. Wordsworth broke down in his theory, that the language of poetry should be the every-day speech of men and women, though he nearly succeeded in finally extirpating "poetic ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... and fifty-two, there are fifty-nine hundred and seventy in Doctor Dyar's big catalogue. Perhaps the most interesting of these caterpillars are the big native silk-worms, like those of the cecropia moth, the luna moth, the polyphemus moth, or the promethia moth. These caterpillars are very large and are to be found feeding upon the leaves of different trees, and all spin strong silken cocoons. People have tried to reel these cocoons, thinking that they might be able to use the silk to make silk cloth as with the domestic silk-worm ...
— Boy Scouts Handbook - The First Edition, 1911 • Boy Scouts of America
... condition "Sindbad," is a fanciful compilation, like De Foe's "Captain Singleton," borrowed from travellers' tales of an immense variety and extracts from Al- Idrisi, Al-Kazwini and Ibn al-Wardi. Here we find the Polyphemus, the Pygmies and the cranes of Homer and Herodotus; the escape of Aristomenes; the Plinian monsters well known in Persia; the magnetic mountain of Saint Brennan (Brandanus); the aeronautics of "Duke Ernest ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... brought other Cyclopes to the mouth of the cave, and they, naming him as Polyphemus, called out and asked him what ailed him to cry. "Noman," he shrieked out, "Noman is slaying me by guile." They answered him saying, "If no man is slaying thee, there is nothing we can do for thee, Polyphemus. What ails thee has been sent to thee ...
— The Adventures of Odysseus and The Tales of Troy • Padriac Colum
... are the tricks played on your nerves by the peepholes. You see a woman crazed by hunger about to cook one of her murdered children; beheaded men, men crushed by superior power, the harnessed body of Patroclus, Polyphemus devouring the companions of Ulysses, and other monstrous conceptions, are all painted with reference to the ills of the poor. Anton Joseph was a socialist in sentiment. If his executive ability had been on a par with his ideas, and if those ideas had been ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... another kind of imaginary landscape, not in rivalry with any one, but to please himself. Of course you all know the story of Ulysses and the one-eyed giant, Polyphemus, in the Odyssey of Homer? Turner chose for his picture the moment when Ulysses has escaped from the clutches of Polyphemus, and sailing away in his boat, taunts the giant, who stands by the water's edge, cursing Ulysses and bemoaning the loss of his sight. ...
— The Book of Art for Young People • Agnes Conway
... if she could gather any caterpillars or find any freshly spun cocoons. She searched the bushes and low trees behind the garden and all around the edge of the woods on their land, and having little success, at last came to the road. Almost the first thorn bush she examined yielded a Polyphemus cocoon. Elnora lifted her head with the instinct of a hunter on the chase, and began work. She reached the swamp before she knew it, carrying five fine cocoons of different species as her reward. She pushed back her hair and gazed around longingly. A few ...
— A Girl Of The Limberlost • Gene Stratton Porter
... am all white, I have got a lover of some sort; there is not a shepherd or a sailor or a boatman to care for any of you. Besides, Polyphemus is very musical. ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... mysterious lapse of time as the sequel of an adventure similar to that of Ulysses with Polyphemus. An old Lapp, having lost his way while hunting, came to a cottage. The door was open; and he entered to remain there the night, and began to cook in a pot he carried with him the game he had caught that day. Suddenly ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... many sacrifices in the land of Troy? Wherefore hast thou such wrath against him?" To her Zeus, the father of the gods, made reply: "What is this that thou sayest, my daughter? It is Poseidon that hath great wrath against Ulysses, because he blinded his son Polyphemus [Footnote: Pol-y-phe'-mus.] the Cyclops. [Footnote: Cy'-clops.] But come, let us take counsel together that he may return to his home, for Poseidon will not be able to contend ...
— The Story Of The Odyssey • The Rev. Alfred J. Church
... guided by me. Moreover I have been the familiar friend of men even greater than you are, and they did not disregard my counsels. Never again can I behold such men as Pirithous and Dryas shepherd of his people, or as Caeneus, Exadius, godlike Polyphemus, and Theseus son of Aegeus, peer of the immortals. These were the mightiest men ever born upon this earth: mightiest were they, and when they fought the fiercest tribes of mountain savages they utterly overthrew ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... his hatred of the archbishop (Visconti), his love of solitude and freedom, so necessary for study, and has resolved to imprison the Muses at that court? Whom may we trust again, if Silvanus, who once branded Il Visconti as the Cruel, a Polyphemus, a Cyclop, has avowed himself his friend, and placed his neck under the yoke of him whose audacity, and pride, and tyranny, he so deeply abhorred? How has Visconti obtained that which King Robert, which the pontiff, the ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... Thieves rolling in wealth that make profit of labouring men, Surely the Wights of the Whirlwind shall swallow them quick in their den! O baneful, O wit-straying, in the Burg of London ye dwell, And ever of Profits and three per cent. are the tales ye tell, But the stark, strong Polyphemus shall answer you back again, Him whom "No man slayeth by guile and not by main." (By "main" I mean "main force," if aught at all do I mean. In the Greek of the blindfold Bard it is simpler the sense ...
— New Collected Rhymes • Andrew Lang
... laughs at Mars when she has struck him with a huge stone so that he fell, his hair was draggled in the dust, and his armour clanged around him. In the Odyssey, Ulysses speaks of his heart laughing within him after he had put out Polyphemus' eye with a burning stick without being discovered. And in Book xviii, Ulysses strikes Irus under the ear and breaks his head, so that blood pours from his mouth, and he falls gnashing and struggling on the ground, at which, we are told, the suitors ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... burned in the open air, and steam unconfined by science; but, striking in the dark, and its blows meeting only the air, they recoil and bruise itself. It is destruction and ruin. It is the volcano, the earthquake, the cyclone;—not growth and progress. It is Polyphemus blinded, striking at random, and falling headlong among the sharp rocks by the impetus ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... maimed as you are, you bully at such a rate?" For a foul scar has disgraced the left part of Messius's bristly forehead. Cutting many jokes upon his Campanian disease, and upon his face, he desired him to exhibit Polyphemus's dance: that he had no occasion for a mask, or the tragic buskins. Cicirrus [retorted] largely to these: he asked, whether he had consecrated his chain to the household gods according to his vow; though he was a scribe, [he told him] his mistress's property in him was not ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... slight transposition of part of a line in Virgil describing Polyphemus, "Monstrum horrendum informe ingens," a monster ...
— Dramatic Romances • Robert Browning
... appear," said the incredulous naturalist, "it was necessary to collect precise information on the subject." The scientific Ulysses regarded the reputed Cyclops with a calculating scepticism. Had Polyphemus been at hand, Peron would have politely requested him to permit himself to be weighed and measured, and would have written an admirable monograph on his ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott
... derived from Alexandrian originals. There are more curious coincidences than this. In the sixth idyl of Theocritus, Damoetas makes the Cyclops say that Galatea 'will send him many a messenger.' The mere idea of describing the monstrous cannibal Polyphemus in love, is artificial and Alexandrian. But who were the 'messengers' of the sea-nymph Galatea? A Pompeian picture illustrates the point, by representing a little Love riding up to the shore on the back of ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... the crazy bandit jabbered thinly into his ear in spectral fellowship. "Behold the simple, Acis kissing the sandals of the nymph, on the way to her lips, all forgetful, while the menacing life of Polyphemus already sounds close at hand—if he could only hear it! ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... their way with gifts and guidance (343-577). The voyage from Dyrrhachium and the first glimpse of Italy. They land and propitiate Juno: then coast along till they sight Mount AEtna (578-666). After a description of the rescue of Achemenides and the escape from Polyphemus, the voyage and the story end with the death ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... ought also to be a monoculist. Polyphemus, the old Cyclops, would be his ideal. Unfortunately our philosophers were not in the Garden of Eden at the time when the Creator made the mistake of endowing men with eyes in pairs. Perhaps it would not be too much to say that there are probably few men whose eyes do not ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... swaddling clothes of densest textures, roll upon roll of silken coverlets; while our delicate butterflies hang uncovered, suspended only by a single loop of silk, exposed to the cold blast of every northern gale? Why do the caterpillars of our giant moths—the mythologically named Cecropia, Polyphemus, Luna, and Prometheus—show such individuality in the position which they choose for their temporary shrouds? Protection and concealment are the watchwords held to in each case, but how differently ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... flesh, and even of disguising its real nature, is implied in the tale, as it descends to us; and the next in order of times is perhaps the familiar passage in the Odyssey, recounting the adventures of Odysseus and his companions in the cave of Polyphemus. Here, again, we are introduced to a rude society of cave-dwellers, who eat human flesh, if not as an habitual diet, yet not only without reluctance, but ...
— Old Cookery Books and Ancient Cuisine • William Carew Hazlitt
... equality with the Church. The king's object was the establishment of Popery. To this the Church was the chief obstacle. That must be undermined and subverted first. That done, all other religious denominations would follow. All that the Nonconformists would gain by yielding, was the favour Polyphemus promised Ulysses, to be devoured last. Zealous as he was for the "liberty of prophesying," even that might be purchased at too high a price. The boon offered by the king was "good in itself," but not "so intended." So, as his biographer describes, when the regulators came, "he expressed his zeal ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... relation to the skeleton of Trapani, discovered in the fourteenth century, and which many persons chose to regard as that of Polyphemus, and the history of the giant dug up during the sixteenth century in the environs of Palmyra. You are well aware as I am, gentlemen, of the existence of the celebrated analysis made near Lucerne, in 1577, of the great bones which the celebrated Doctor Felix Plater declared belonged ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... beautiful in shades of olive green, sprinkled with black, crossed by bands of pinkish lilac and bearing crescents partly yellow, the remainder transparent. There are also the deep yellow Io, pale blue-green Luna, and Polyphemus, brown with pink bands of the Saturniidae; and light yellow, red-brown and grey Regalis, and lavender and yellow Imperialis of the Ceratocampidae, and their relatives. Modest and lovely Modesta belongs with the Smerinthinae group; and there are others, feeders ...
— Moths of the Limberlost • Gene Stratton-Porter
... his companions, for though they were dashed to the ground and dragged along by the Cyclops, they said not a word about Odysseus, nor did they show the stake of wood that had been put into the fire and prepared to put out Polyphemus' eye, but they would rather have been eaten alive than divulge secrets, such wonderful self-control and fidelity had they.[569] And so it was not amiss of Pittacus, when the king of Egypt sent him a victim, and ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... I suddenly awake to find myself a man. I don't care whether I sleep or not. I feel gloriously, exultingly young. I am but twenty. As I have never lived, I have never grown old. Life translates itself into music—a wild "Invitation to the Waltz" by some Archangel Weber. I laugh out loud. Polyphemus, who has been regarding me with his one bantering eye from Carlotta's corner on the sofa, leaps to the ground and grotesquely curvets round the room in a series of impish hops. Heigh, old boy? Do the pulsations of the music throb in your veins, too? ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... parents of the Nereids, the most celebrated of whom were Amphitrite, Thetis, the mother of Achilles, and Galatea, who was loved by the Cyclops Polyphemus. Nereus was distinguished for his knowledge and his love of truth and justice, whence he was termed an elder; the gift of prophecy was ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... adventures. He had encountered the one-eyed giant Polyphemus, who feasted on the fattest of the Greeks, while the others escaped by boring out his single eye. He had passed the land of the Lotus-Eaters, to whose magic some of the Greeks succumbed. In the island of Circe some of his followers ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... made, repeated, and answered, we had the mortification to see the Agamemnon get upon the edge of the shoal, on the first attempt to leave her anchorage, where she remained immovable. A similar misfortune followed, in succession, to the Russell and Polyphemus; and the Jamaica frigate, with a convoy of gun-boats and small craft, having fallen in with a counter-current, made the signal of inability to come forward. A mind less invincible than Lord Nelson's, might have been discouraged. Though the battle was not began, yet he had approached the enemy; ...
— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. II (of 2) • James Harrison
... this. Look at the lettering—that is, the labels lettered with the titles of books—in all libraries that are not of recent date. No man would believe that the very earliest attempt to impress a mark of ownership upon some bucket of the Argonauts, or the rudest scrawl of Polyphemus in forging a tarry brand upon some sheep which he had stolen, could be so bad, so staggering and illegible, as are these literary inscriptions. How much better to have had a thin tablet or veneering of marble or iron adjusted to the back ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey |
