"Silenus" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... aloud, just as the Duke had said. He went through the passage and met the steward, or butler, whom he despatched to see if the Countess were in the ladies' cabin. The rosy-cheeked, gray-haired priest of Silenus said her ladyship was there, "alone," he added with a little emphasis. Claudius walked in, and was not disappointed. There she sat at the side of the table in her accustomed place, dark and beautiful, and his heart beat fast. ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford
... more which we may well divine. But should we stay to speak, noontide would come, And thwart Silenus find his goats undrawn, 90 And grudge to sing those wise and lovely songs Of Fate, and Chance, and God, and Chaos old, And Love, and the chained Titan's woful doom, And how he shall be loosed, and make the earth One brotherhood: delightful strains which cheer 95 Our solitary twilights, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... unfold before the astonished stage folk a comprehensive theory of universal determinism. He went back to the origins of life, and, like the Silenus of Virgil, who, smeared with the juice of mulberries, sang to the shepherds of Sicily and the naiad Aglaia of the origin of the world, he broke out into a flood ...
— A Mummer's Tale • Anatole France
... Bacchus faithfully embodies the Greek spirit. The Greeks never forgot, in all their representations of Dionysos, that he was a mystic and enthusiastic deity. Joyous, voluptuous, androgynous, he yet remains the god who brought strange gifts and orgiastic rites to men. His followers, Silenus, Bacchantes, Fauns, exhibit, in their self-abandonment to sensual joy, the operation of his genius. The deity descends to join their revels from his clear Olympian ether, but he is not troubled by the fumes of intoxication. Michelangelo has ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... very dawntime of discovery, that he was almost justified in this delusion. Having caught the Proteus of the world, he tried to grasp him; but the god changed shape beneath his touch. Having surprised Silenus asleep, he begged from him a song; but the song Silenus sang was so marvellous in its variety, so subtle in its modulations, that Lionardo could do no more than recall scattered phrases. His Proteus was the spirit of the Renaissance. The Silenus from whom he forced the song ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds |
