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More "Medusa" Quotes from Famous Books



... the shadow of the moment from that of the king of beasts which led to the tragedy under the walls of Babylon, where the blood of the lovers dyed the mulberry red! It is the evidence of a bloodless thing, a rotund and turreted medusa, the leader of a disorderly procession, soundless and feeble as becomes beings almost as impalpable as the sea itself. Shadows of fish exquisitely framed flit and dance. I see naught but shadows, dim and thin, for I doze and dream again; and so fantastic time, whose footfalls are beads and ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield

... "stalked" Crinoids (though not exclusively confined to this period) is Pentacrinus (fig. 162). In this genus, the column is five-sided, with whorls of "side-arms;" and the arms are long, slender, and branched. The genus is represented at the present day by the beautiful "Medusa-head Pentacrinite" (Pentacrinus caput-medusoe). Another characteristic Oolitic genus is Apiocrinus, comprising the so-called "Pear Encrinites." In this group the column is long and rounded, with a dilated base, and having its uppermost ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson

... heavenly Constellations dwell, My Planets of both Sexes whose degree Poor Heathen judg'd worthy a Diety; There's Orion arm'd attended by his dog; The Theban stout Alcides with his Club; The valiant Persens, who Medusa slew, The horse that kil'd Beleuphon, then flew. My Crab, my Scorpion, fishes you may see The Maid with ballance, twain with horses three, The Ram, the Bull, the Lion, and the Beagle, The Bear, the ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell

... tearing her breast, they beat themselves with their hands, and cried out so loud that I pressed close to the Poet through dread. "Let Medusa come, so we will make him of stone," they all said, looking down. "Ill was it we avenged not on Theseus ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri

... exposed it to a strong solar light, with the help of a magnifying glass was enabled distinctly to discern the moluscae. When magnified, they appeared about the size of a pin's head, of a yellowish brown colour, rather oval-shaped, and having tentaculae. The medusa is a genus of molusca; and I think M. le Seur told me he reckons forty-three or forty-four species ...
— A Ramble of Six Thousand Miles through the United States of America • S. A. Ferrall

... scant warrant for our conception of Emily Bronte's character. Her work is singularly impersonal. You gather from it that she loved the moors, that from her youth up the burden of a tragic fancy had lain hard upon her; that she had seen the face of sorrow close, meeting that Medusa-glance with rigid and defiant fortitude. So much we learn; but this is very little—a one-sided truth and therefore ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson

... off from the Sandwich Islands to the long swell of the Pacific, the slimy medusa lights covering the waters with a phosphorescent trail of fire all night, the rockweed and sea leek floating past by day telling their tale of some far land. Cook's secret commission had been very explicit: "You are to proceed on as direct a ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut

... enjoying the destruction of the unfortunate members of the upper classes with a truly democratic relish. One of them even attacked and commenced the swallowing of a Lizzia octopunctata, quite as good a medusa as itself. An animal which can pout out its mouth twice the length of its body, and stretch its stomach to corresponding dimensions, must indeed be "a triton among the minnows;" and a very terrific one too. Yet is this ferocious ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 423, New Series. February 7th, 1852 • Various

... was heard in the evening: whilst the cook was chopping his wood every blow was echoed round the bight, although we were eight miles from the shore. After leaving Port Keats we met with large quantities of a very beautiful species of medusa, it appeared to be the Medusa panopyra, figured in Peron's Atlas, (Plate 31 figure 2). It is from this animal that the French have named their Banc des Meduses. No turtle or snakes had for some time been seen and very few sharks; ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia - Performed between the years 1818 and 1822 • Phillip Parker King

... was found to be full of diatoms, which are flinty-shelled microscopic animals of every variety of shape, such as stars, crosses, semicircles, and spirals—yet soft as are the jelly-fish, they can consume them. This one medusa had in its stomach no less than seven hundred thousand diatoms, so that it would be rather difficult to compute how many the whole shoal consumed for their dinner—they in their turn having to be eaten ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston

... are as brave a youth as I believe you to be," replied King Polydectes, with the utmost graciousness of manner. "The bridal gift which I have set my heart on presenting to the beautiful Hippodamia is the head of the Gorgon Medusa, with the snaky locks; and I depend on you, my dear Perseus, to bring it to me. So, as I am anxious to settle affairs with the princess, the sooner you go in quest of the Gorgon, the better ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes

... Lonner had made a miscalculation, when he thought that Mr. Fabian would fall into the hands of the Medusa within the bed-curtains. The very thought of the humiliation he had undergone, and the fear of what was yet in store for him, inspired Mr. Fabian with an unusual degree of courage or ...
— The Home in the Valley • Emilie F. Carlen

... consume a great deal of raw spirit, to take the taste out of your mouth. And my 'Medusa' is to hang for the future in Mr. Mosenthal's dining-room! Will he ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore

... Splendid Outcast The Black Stone The Golden Bough The Secret Witness Paradise Garden The Yellow Dove The Flaming Sword Madcap The Silent Battle The Maker of Opportunities The Forbidden Way The Bolted Door Tony's Wife The Medusa Emerald ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs

... invitation of Victor Hugo to share his home, at a time when his fortunes were at their lowest ebb. Many literary men were here at different times, generously cared for by the host, who called the retreat "the raft of Medusa." There were many pets also, especially dogs, as Victor Hugo almost shared the sentiment of Madame de Stael concerning these animals, "The more I know men, ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold

... down on the edge of the bed, numb and without any clear idea where he was. From the stony look on his face, Grumbach might have carried the head of Medusa in his hand. The blood beat into his head with many strange noises. But by and by the world became clearer and brighter till all things took on the rosal tint of dawn. Free! If she was not a princess, ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath

... nature, or she would have been convinced that the only way to insure the friendship and assistance of your surrounding acquaintance is to convince them you do not require it, for when once the petrifying aspect of distress and penury appear, whose qualities, like Medusa's head, can change to stone all that look upon it; when once this Gorgon claims acquaintance with us, the phantom of friendship, that before courted our notice, will vanish into unsubstantial air, and the whole world before us appear a barren waste. Pardon me, ye dear spirits of benevolence, ...
— Charlotte Temple • Susanna Rowson

... comfort the millions who weep? Will you give them joy for their sorrow, sweet labour, and satisfied sleep? Sweet is the fragrance of flowers, and soft are the wings of the dove, And no goodlier gift is there given than the dower of brotherly love; But you, O May-Day Medusa, whose glance makes the heart turn cold, Art a bitter Goddess to follow, a terrible Queen to behold. We are sick of spouting—the words burn deep and chafe: we are fain, To rest a little from clap-trap, and probe the wild ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, April 30, 1892 • Various

... were, as they had been from the beginning, closed upon each other in that stony self-collected calm, which was only not a sneer. The wonder, if it was one, had passed: and now—did her eyes play her false, or were the snakes round that Medusa's head upon the shield all writhing, grinning, glaring at her with stony eyes, longing to stiffen her with ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley

... stone is full of shells, and bits of coral; and what are these wonderful things coiled and tangled together, like the snakes in Medusa's hair in the picture? Are ...
— Madam How and Lady Why - or, First Lessons in Earth Lore for Children • Charles Kingsley

... the growth of these animal forests. In and out among them, moved numbers of blue and red and yellow fishes, spotted and banded and striped in the most striking manner, while great orange or rosy transparent medusa floated along near the surface. It was a sight to gaze at for hours, and no description can do justice to its surpassing beauty and interest. For once, the reality exceeded the most glowing accounts I had ever read of the wonders of a ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace

... that if the head of the Medusa, instead of turning into stone those who looked at it, had given them wings to escape they could not have flown away faster than did those poor savages ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti

... windows in the alferez's house closed? Where was the masculine face and the flannel shirt of the Medusa or Muse of the Civil Guard while the procession was passing? Could she have understood how unpleasant was the sight of the swelling veins of her forehead, filled, it seemed, not with blood but with vinegar and bile; of her large cigar, ...
— Friars and Filipinos - An Abridged Translation of Dr. Jose Rizal's Tagalog Novel, - 'Noli Me Tangere.' • Jose Rizal

... (Minerva) had the head of the Gorgon Medusa in her shield; it turned all who looked ...
— Poemata (William Cowper, trans.) • John Milton

... the Freyberg gate when on the Emperor's orders it swung open to allow the emergence of a column of infantry of the Imperial Guard, the leading brigade of which was commanded by General Cambronne...It was as if the head of Medusa had appeared... The enemy recoiled horrified, their guns were captured at the double and the gunners killed on their mountings. Simultaneous sorties were made from all the gates of Dresden with the same results, and the allies, abandoning ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot

... match blows up the obstacle almost before it incommodes them. Their daily existence is a work of genius, a daily problem which they always succeed in solving by the aid of audacious mathematics. They would have forced Harpagon to lend them money, and have found truffles on the raft of the "Medusa." At need, too, they know how to practice abstinence with all the virtue of an anchorite, but if a slice of fortune falls into their hands you will see them at once mounted on the most ruinous fancies, loving the youngest and prettiest, drinking ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger

... analogous on normal planets. They aren't tall, the biggest not more than fifteen feet high, but they are from six to eight feet thick, with all the branches at the top, sprouting out in all directions and reminding me of pictures of Medusa. The outside bark is a hard shell, which grows during the beginning of our four hot seasons a year. Under that will be more bark, soft and spongy, and this gets more and more dense toward the middle; and then ...
— Four-Day Planet • Henry Beam Piper

... 'if Medusa had but one eye, and this dear creature two, I should die as miserably as the lady who loved the Apollo Belvidere. I have had oceans of knights errant—but such! I think of writing a ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... name is great, MEDUSA's head thou sure must own. Do as we will, Thy coming still Turns all our hard-earned cash ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 2, April 9, 1870 • Various

... head, she had not time to feel a sensation of real fear, when cautiously her doorknob was turned and a head intruded itself which struck her as dumb as though Medusa had appeared, and drove the life-blood in a ...
— Idle Hour Stories • Eugenia Dunlap Potts

... carried a cheap silver-backed brush, and her long dark hair was undone. She looked strikingly handsome, but the thick black strands hanging down on either side of the white face recalled to Mary a picture in the library at Lady MacMillan's. It was a clever painting of the Medusa, level-eyed, with a red mouth like a wound, and dimly seen, pale glimmering features, between the lazy writhing of dark snakes. The thing had fascinated Mary in her impressionable schoolgirl days, but now she tried to huddle the ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... men's bones And rear a phantom gibbet for a mast, Stitch shrouds together for a sail, with groans To fill it out, blood-stained and aghast; Although your rudder be a dragon's tail Long severed, yet still hard with agony, Your cordage, large uprootings from the skull Of bald Medusa, certes you would fail ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead

... besmeared with the last fee the hag got from Beelzebub or his imps! it will give me a right worshipful air. To match these choice morsels I have this green velvet petticoat, with its saffron lining, and this mask which would melt even Medusa to a grin. Thus accoutred I mean to lead the chorus of anti-graces, myself their mother-queen, to the bedroom. Make the best speed you can, and we will then go in solemn procession to fetch ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck

... the book is said to have originated in the cele- brated French painting by Gericault, "the Wreck of the Medusa," now in the Louvre gallery. The Medusa was a French frigate wrecked off the coast of Africa in 1816. Some of the survivors, escaping on a raft, were rescued by a passing ship after many days of torture. Verne, however, seems also to ...
— The Survivors of the Chancellor • Jules Verne

... have seen her; and by Cupid The young Medusa made me stupid! A face, that hath no lovers slain, Wants forces, and is near disdain. For every fop will freely peep At majesty that is asleep. But she—fair tyrant!—hates to be Gaz'd on with such impunity. Whose prudent rigour bravely bears And scorns the trick of whining tears, Or sighs, those ...
— Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, Volume II • Henry Vaughan

... and Melicertes. Change of the Theban women to rocks and birds. Cadmus and Hermione changed to serpents. Perseus. Transformation of Atlas to a mountain. Andromeda saved from the sea monster. Story of Medusa. ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid

... same room with it is Girodet's ghastly "Deluge," and Gericault's dismal "Medusa." Gericault died, they say, for want of fame. He was a man who possessed a considerable fortune of his own; but pined because no one in his day would purchase his pictures, and so acknowledge his talent. At present, a scrawl from his pencil brings an enormous price. All his ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray

... Orsino guessed that but for his own presence she would not have given it. The expression in her face changed rapidly from that which had been there when they had been alone, hardening very quickly until it reminded Orsino of a certain mask of the Medusa which had once made an impression upon his imagination. Her eyes were fixed and the pupils grew small while the singular golden yellow colour of the iris flashed disagreeably. She did not bend her head as she silently ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford

... sure. I told him that my resolution was definite. 'Pshaw! . . . replied he angrily. 'I knew well that you were opposed to me. If we had come to an action I should have sought you out on the field of battle. I would have shown you the Medusa's head. Would you have dared to fire on me?'—'Without doubt,' I replied. 'Ah! parbleu this is too much,' he said. 'But your troops would not have obeyed you. They had preserved all their affection ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne

... by the large cruisers Friedrich Karl, Prinz Adalbert, Prinz Heinrich, Furst Bismarck, Viktoria Luise, Kaiserin Augusta, and the small cruisers Berlin, Hamburg, Bremen, Undine, Arcona, Frauenlob, and Medusa. ...
— The Coming Conquest of England • August Niemann

... when Theron looked into them again, were still fixed upon the screen of foliage, and dilated like those of a Medusa mask. The blood had gone away, and left the fair face and neck as white, it seemed to him, as marble. Even her lips, fiercely bitten together, appeared colorless. The picture of consuming and powerless rage which she presented, and the shuddering tremor which ran over her form, as visible as the ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic

... be! All thence have evil drawn: It is a magic shape, a lifeless eidolon. Such to encounter is not good: Their blank, set stare benumbs the human blood, And one is almost turned to stone. Medusa's tale ...
— Faust • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

... ends with a solemn precession round the orchestra, with hymns of blessing, while the terrible Chorus of the Furies, clothed in black, with blood-stained girdles, and serpents in their hair, in masks having perhaps somewhat of the terrific beauty of Medusa-masks, are convoyed to their new sanctuary by a procession of children, women, and old men in purple robes with torches in their hands, after Athene and the Furies have sung, in response to each other, a chorus from which I must beg leave to give you ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley

... of the pure brows and by the long loose locks shivering with electric life, reminds us of those antique cameos on which we still admire the perfect features, the beautiful yet fatal brow, the haughty smile of the Medusa, whose gaze paralyzed and stopped the pulses of the human heart;—Madame Sand in vain sought another form for the expression of the emotions which tortured her insatiate soul. After having draped this figure with the highest art, accumulating every ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt

... and lurid glow in those solemn eyes, which looked as if they had been taken out of some Medusa's head to be set in her beautiful face. And there was a sinister threat in them too which seemed to say: 'Require nothing of her that I do not approve of, or you will be turned into stone on the spot.' She did not answer twenty words to my questions, and when ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... the oldest, of the many temples of the place. The material of the metope, as of the whole temple, is a local poros, and the work is executed in high relief. The subject is Perseus cutting off the head of Medusa. The Gorgon is trying to run away—the position given to her legs is used in early Greek sculpture and vase-painting to signify rapid motion—but is overtaken by her pursuer. From the blood of Medusa sprang, according to ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell

... clear, transparent substance like jelly, which were so thin as to be almost invisible to the naked eye. Thus I came to know that the beautiful phosphoric light, which I had so often admired before, was caused by animals; for I had no doubt that these were of the same kind as the medusa or jelly-fish, which are seen in all ...
— The Coral Island • R.M. Ballantyne

... last me but a week, but now it is as good as Fortunatus's purse, which was never empty. I eat my dinner at the hotel, and show them my twenty dollar note. The landlord turns away from it, as if it were the head of Medusa, and begs that I will pay another time. I buy every thing that I want, and I have only to offer my twenty dollar note in payment, and my credit is unbounded—that is, for any sum under twenty dollars. If they ever do give change again in New York it will make a very ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)

... Siphonophora has a very definite united will and a united sensibility, and yet each of the individual persons of which this stock (or Cormus) is composed has its own personal will and its own particular sensations. Each of these persons indeed was originally a separate Medusa, and the individual Siphonophora stock originated, by association and division of labour, out ...
— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel

... so many times since I looked upon her as a deified mortal, and now two small spots on another woman's pulseless throat had drawn a veil of blood over that beauty, and given to a child the attributes of a Medusa. Yet hope was not quite stilled. I would look again and perhaps discover that my own eyes had been at fault, that there were no marks, or if marks, not just the ones ...
— The House of the Whispering Pines • Anna Katharine Green

... said she, as she turned her back upon him. Her face of beauty seemed turned to stone, like unto the Medusa's head with its serpent locks. He descended to the street, a weak, lifeless thing; he entered his room like a night-walker, and in the rage of his grief, he seized his hammer, brandished it high in the air and sought to destroy ...
— The Ice-Maiden: and Other Tales. • Hans Christian Andersen

... them marched the grand procession of their apotheosized divinities. There Hercules perpetually wrought his mighty labors for the good of man; there flashed and faded the changeful star Algol, as an eye in the head of the snaky-haired Medusa; over them flew Pegasus, the winged horse of the poet, careering among the stars; there the ship Argo, which had explored all strange seas of earth, nightly sailed in the infinite realms of heaven; there Perseus perpetually killed the sea-monster by celestial aid, and perpetually ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren

... Lady Kirke was vowing with a toss of her head; and we none of us gave another look to the royal boxes that night, though all about the wits were cracking their jokes against M. Radisson's "Medusa locks," or "the king's idol, with feet of clay and face of brass," thereby meaning M. Radisson's moccasins and swarth skin. At the door we were awaiting M. Radisson's return when the royal company came out. I turned suddenly ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut

... regular features, and a single serpent wreathing the tresses like a bandeau—but such countenances!—such a hideous expression of malice, cunning, and cruelty!—and the effect is beyond conception appalling. Leonardo da Vinci worked upon the same grand principle of art in his Medusa...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson

... see Oliver: I hope he will keep his tongue quiet, about the tea-kettle; for, I shall not give it till I leave the Medusa. ...
— The Letters of Lord Nelson to Lady Hamilton, Vol. I. - With A Supplement Of Interesting Letters By Distinguished Characters • Horatio Nelson

... enabled us to add to our collection, firstly, a new species of Physsophorides (Agalma N.); secondly, a new Diphyes; thirdly, a new Pelagia, with a yellow skin on the belly, attached to which was a small Cirrhipede of the class Cineras; fourthly, a Medusa, with broad belly-bags, and four strong fins; fifthly, a Medusa of the same species, with five and six fins; sixthly, a very small Entomostracea of a flat form, and distinguished by its blue glossy colour, similar to that of ...
— A New Voyage Round the World, in the years 1823, 24, 25, and 26, Vol. 2 • Otto von Kotzebue

... the dew-wet grass of the lawns, came fairly within arm's-reach before he saw or heard them, remained a thing inexplicable. But when he looked up they were there, Miss Euphrasia straightening herself aloof in virtuous disapproval, and Ardea looking as if some one had suddenly shown her the head of Medusa. ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde

... the classical forms appear continuously through the Byzantine era and in Islam as soon as it recovered from the first shocks of its formation. Procopius (died ca. 535) describes a monumental water clock which was erected in Gaza ca. 500.[17] It contained impressive jackwork, such as a Medusa head which rolled its eyes every hour on the hour, exhibiting the time through lighted apertures and showing mythological interpretations of the cosmos. All these effects were produced by Heronic techniques, using hydraulic power ...
— On the Origin of Clockwork, Perpetual Motion Devices, and the Compass • Derek J. de Solla Price

... nature processes are but shadows and hints. In the former case he will be a pagan; in the latter, a spiritual idealist. In what remains of this lecture, we shall consider four of the most famous Greek legends—those of Prometheus, Medusa, Orpheus, and Apollo—in the light of ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman

... naturally indignant, had risen from her seat, and maddened with the excitement of the moment she made him a little speech in Arabic (not a word of which he understood), with a countenance almost as amiable as the head of Medusa. Altogether the mine en scene utterly astonished him. The woman Bacheeta, although savage, had appropriated the insult to her mistress, and she also fearlessly let fly at Kamrasi, translating as nearly as she could the complimentary address ...
— In the Heart of Africa • Samuel White Baker

... supply-waggons and Red Cross ambulances. Labouring through between them came detachments of British artillery, clattering gun-carriages, straight young figures on glossy horses, long Phidian lines of youths so ingenuously fair that one wondered how they could have looked on the Medusa face of war and lived. Men and beasts, in spite of the dust, were as fresh and sleek as if they had come from a bath; and everywhere along the wayside were improvised camps, with tents made of waggon-covers, where the ceaseless indomitable work of cleaning was being carried out in all ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton

... upon her! 'Tis not good! Forbear! 'Tis lifeless, magical, a shape of air, An idol. Such to meet with, bodes no good; That rigid look of hers doth freeze man's blood, And well-nigh petrifies his heart to stone:— The story of Medusa thou hast known. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... fees Of this foul sacrilege beyond report! For Rome still flays and sells him at the court, Where paths are closed to virtue's fair increase. Now were fit time for me to scrape a treasure! Seeing that work and gain are gone; while he Who wears the robe, is my Medusa still. God welcomes poverty perchance with pleasure: But of that better life what hope have we, When the blessed banner leads to ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella

... Senate can do is to remove the twenty and the sixty bad members, and replace them by well-disposed persons. The will of the nation is that the government may not be hindered from doing well, and that the head of Medusa may no longer be displayed in our Tribunes and in our Assemblies. The conduct of Sieyes in this circumstance proves perfectly that, after having concurred in the destruction of all the constitutions since 1791, he still wishes to try his hand against this one. It is very extraordinary that he ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt

... never," Peter protested. "You're not to go smirking through the age and down to posterity—I'd rather see you as Medusa crowned with serpents. That's what you look like when ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James

... nativite Such was the constellacion, That out of mannes nacion Fro kynde thei be so miswent, That to the liknesse of Serpent Thei were bore, and so that on Of hem was cleped Stellibon, That other soster Suriale, The thridde, as telleth in the tale, 400 Medusa hihte, and natheles Of comun name Gorgones In every contre ther aboute, As Monstres whiche that men doute, Men clepen hem; and bot on yhe Among hem thre in pourpartie Thei hadde, of which thei myhte se, Now hath it this, now hath it sche; After that cause and nede it ladde, Be throwes ech of hem ...
— Confessio Amantis - Tales of the Seven Deadly Sins, 1330-1408 A.D. • John Gower

... since the doors are open to every one there has been much talk of unknown and unrecognized genius. When, twelve years earlier, Ingres' "Courtesan," and that of Sigalon, the "Medusa" of Gericault, the "Massacre of Scio" by Delacroix, the "Baptism of Henri IV." by Eugene Deveria, admitted by celebrated artists accused of jealousy, showed the world, in spite of the denials of criticism, ...
— Pierre Grassou • Honore de Balzac

... see the air-roots of our trysting tree when more than a quarter of a mile away. I thought at the time how this tree, with its crown of luxuriant foliage and its writhing roots, might well pass for some gigantic Medusa-head with its streaming serpent-hair. As I neared the tree Lona stepped from behind it and awaited my approach. She was even more impatient than I, I thought, and my heart beat more wildly than ever. "Sweet saint, have I kept you waiting?" I asked, ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy

... insects, l. 90. The coral habitation of the Madrepora of Linneus consists of one or more star-like cells; a congeries of which form rocks beneath the sea; the animal which constructs it is termed Medusa; and as it adheres to its calcareous cavity, and thence cannot travel to its neighbours, is probably without sex. I observed great masses of the limestone in Shropshire, which is brought to Newport, to consist of the cells ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin

... physicians, Hippocrates, Galen, Dioscorides, and Theophrastus, and was attended by two footmen and four pike-bearers. Last of the allegorical personages came Minerva, prancing in complete steel, with lance in rest, and bearing her Medusa shield. Aristotle and Plato, Cicero and Virgil, all on horseback, with attendants in antique armor at their back, surrounded the daughter of Jupiter, while the city band, discoursing eloquent music from hautboy and viol, came upon the heels of ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... had grown to be a young man, the king urged him to go in search of adventures, and set him the task of bringing him the head of the terrible Gorgon named Medusa. Perseus asked the aid of the gods for this expedition, which he felt obliged to make, and in answer to his prayers, Mercury and Minerva, the patrons of adventurers, led him to the abode of the Graeae, the woman-monsters, so called because they had been born with gray hair. Perseus, ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, July 1878, No. 9 • Various

... the apartment of Francois'. Francois did the honours with the activity of a man who is not ashamed of his establishment. His room is comfortably furnished; two modern pendules mounted on bronze, a wardrobe with a Medusa's head, a high bed, and a handsome rose-coloured curtain. If the room was not overburdened with furniture, if there was not much of luxury, yet, to those not early accustomed to superfluities, it might even seem gay. It represented the tastes, opinions, and habits of its master. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 549 (Supplementary issue) • Various

... summit or apex of the helmet was placed a sphinx, with griffins on either side. The figure of the goddess was represented in an erect martial attitude, and clothed in a robe reaching to the feet. On the breast was a head of Medusa, wrought in ivory, and a figure of Victory about four cubits high. The goddess held a spear in her hand, and an aegis lay at her feet, while on her right, and near the spear, was a figure of a serpent, believed to ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker

... disengaged week, to accept his invitation to Knowl, from whence she was resolved to whisk me off to London, where, though I was too young to be presented at Court and come out, I might yet—besides having the best masters and a good excuse for getting rid of Medusa—see a great deal that would amuse and ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu

... team and gave me about as much chance to escape as if I'd been a horned toad sealed in a cornerstone. Gruenwald, of course, treated me as though my breath was deadly, my touch foul, and my presence evil. In Gruenwald's eyes, the only difference between me and Medusa the Gorgon was that looking at me did not turn him to stone. He kept at least one ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith

... I begin with the law of God. And, first, let us see what is alleged from Scripture for the ceremonies in general; then, after, let us look over particulars. There is one place which they will have in mythology to stand for the head of Medusa, and if they still object to us for all their ceremonies even that of the Apostle, "Let all things be done decently and in order," 1 Cor. xiv. 40. What they have drawn out of this place, Dr Burges(819) hath refined in this manner. He distinguished betwixt ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie

... atmosphere of savourless modernism? Then I asked myself: who comes to these regions, now that invalids have learnt the drawbacks of their climate? Decayed Muscovites, Englishmen such as you will vainly seek in England, and their painted women-folk with stony, Medusa-like gambling eyes, a Turk or two, Jews and cosmopolitan sharks and sharpers, flamboyant Americans, Brazilian, Peruvian, Chilian, Bolivian rastaqueros with names that read like a nightmare (see "List of Arrivals" in New York Herald)—the whole exotic riff-raff enlivened and perfumed ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas

... relentless monsters recede from their design. Never woman so ardently wished to be beautiful, as she did to become deformed, she would have rejoiced so have had her lovely face that moment changed into the likeness of Medusa; but all her prayers and tears were ineffectual; victim of force and rage.—-The cruel leader of these fiends had just effected his diabolical intentions, when a sudden noise of the trampling of horses and the distant voices of men, forced them to fly. ...
— The Princess of Ponthieu - (in) The New-York Weekly Magazine or Miscellaneous Repository • Unknown

... purpose of devouring the Andromeda of art. And now and then a Perseus, equipped with the shoes of swiftness of the ready writer, with the cap of invisibility of the editorial article, and it may be with the Medusa-head of vituperation, shows himself ready to try conclusions with the scientific dragon. Sir, I hope that Perseus will think better of it [laughter]; first, for his own sake, because the creature is hard of head, strong of ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various

... surface of his shield Perseus went down and down. He saw the third sister—she who was not immortal. She had a woman's face and form, and her countenance was beautiful, although there was something deadly in its fairness. The two scaled and winged sisters were asleep, but the third, Medusa, was awake, and she was tearing with her hands a lizard ...
— The Golden Fleece and the Heroes who Lived Before Achilles • Padraic Colum

... appalling things. Sir Charles had remained in the churchyard by the grave, he had looked about him from one to the other of the mounds of turf, his imagination already stimulated had been quickened by what he had seen; he stood with the face of a Medusa. ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason

... the poets, and represented by the sculptors and painters in a standing attitude, completely armed, with a composed but smiling countenance, bearing a golden breast-plate, a spear in her right hand, and the aegis in her left, having on it the head of Medusa, entwined with snakes. Her helmet was usually encompassed with olives, to denote that peace is the end of war, or rather because that tree was sacred to her: at her feet is generally placed the owl or ...
— Roman Antiquities, and Ancient Mythology - For Classical Schools (2nd ed) • Charles K. Dillaway

... Steamship "Griffon" wanted no "commanding sea-breeze," she found none of the difficulties which kept poor Tuckey's "brute of a transport" drifting and driving for nearly a week before he could anchor off Fuma or Sherwood's Creek, the "Medusa" of modern charts (?) and which made Shark Point, with its three-mile current, a "more redoubtable promontory than that of Good Hope was to early navigators." We stood boldly E.N.E. towards the high blue clump known as Bulambemba, and, with the dirty yellow breakers of Mwana Mazia Bank ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton

... stark cliff we went, then crossed the web Just as the red moon bloomed upon the hills And silvered all the Panticapean vale. The funnel of the web was in the mouth Of a vast tomb, whose outside, hewn on rock, Outlined a Gorgon's face with jaws agape— Some stern Medusa, Stheno, or Euryale, Changed to the stone that in the elder days She changed the sons of men who looked on her. We passed the funnel, entering the tomb. About my arms the spider threw his cords, And shackled them. ...
— Stories in Verse • Henry Abbey

... examined the original, afterwards a cast of it for many hours, then compared these impressions with observations made upon a human scull. In doing this he brings the work of art to nature, so as to substantiate or correct his impressions. We see him following the same method in the articles upon the Medusa and upon Asklepios. But this reference to nature is for the most part casual and incidental. It is not to nature but to literature that he resorts for help. He is not content to trust himself entirely to the method enunciated in the preface. He does not rest satisfied with ...
— The American Journal of Archaeology, 1893-1 • Various

... again with Ronald Kenna. In her room she lay exhausted and very still for a long time, with the feeling that she had escaped from a red-hot gridiron. She looked in her mirror on entering, expecting to see a vision of Medusa, hair hanging in streaks, eyes distraught, and deep ruts in the cheeks; but her face was charming and composed, and a fixed smile curved her mouth. She shuddered ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley

... hurried on from Great Gaunt Street, and knocking at the great bronze Medusa's head which stands on the portal of Gaunt House, brought out the purple Silenus in a red and silver waistcoat who acts as porter of that palace. The man was scared also by the Colonel's dishevelled appearance, and barred the way as if afraid that the other was going to force it. But Colonel ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray

... consternation as the features of Mr Bickers came to light, pale and stern. The sudden sight of Medusa's head could hardly have had a more petrifying effect. The victim himself was the first to recover. Stretching his arms and legs in relief, he ...
— The Master of the Shell • Talbot Baines Reed

... the petrifying effect of her sudden presence on a beauty-worshipping sex. She did not walk as other mortals walk, but floated in fragrantly and Skippy stood staring rock-still, as though Hippo had flashed the head of Medusa. None of which by the way was lost on the ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson

... turn you into stone!" he exclaimed. "She is a regular Gorgon, with those heavy eyes of hers. I never saw such eyes. I believe she would petrify me if I had to bear them. Don't you give Medusa one of those sweet almonds, Daisy—not one, ...
— Daisy • Elizabeth Wetherell

... discovery was the fact that the left hand was perfect, and did not hold a bow, but some soft, elastic substance which Stephani believes to be the aegis, or shield, of Jupiter, on which was the head of Medusa. The sight of this shield paralyzed those who saw it; and though it belonged to Jupiter and Minerva, Jupiter sometimes lent it to his son Apollo to aid him in his warfare; such instances are recorded by Homer. After ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement

... three strides after him and closed the doors, bolting them quietly. When he turned he saw a change in his stepmother. Her eyes regarded him with a Medusa-like stare; a spot of dull red smouldered in each cheek. Her lips seemed suddenly thin, were working slightly. He knew that her anger was even greater than his own, though she might express it in a ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell

... own apartment, he fixed an easel with impetuous haste, and by lamp-light again began to sketch the Medusa head of the old woman. Yielding himself up to this new frenzy, he succeeded beyond his hopes; a supernatural power seemed to guide his hand, and soon after midnight he had drawn to the life not only the appalling head, but the commanding and beautiful person, of the mysterious ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various

... fitted out by the French to go and resume possession of Senegal, which had been restored to them.—My father was reinstated in his place of resident attorney, and taking with him his family repaired immediately to Rochefort to embark on board the Medusa frigate. ...
— Thrilling Narratives of Mutiny, Murder and Piracy • Anonymous

... I believe it," panted Madame Balnokhazy, whose face in that moment was like a furious Medusa head. "I believe what you say. I have no doubts about it:" therewith she rose from her seat and turned to ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai

... last named he proposed to write a comprehensive biography and entered into correspondence with a publisher in Germany.[A] He confronted the formal culture of the Latin races with the character of the German mind, as it were the head of the Medusa, and the consciousness of his mission kept up his spirits under the most trying circumstances. With Paris as an art centre he had done. Like Mozart's "Idomeneo" to the Opera Seria, "Rienzi" was his last tribute to the Grand Opera. They have forever ...
— Life of Wagner - Biographies of Musicians • Louis Nohl

... history that you may judge how cold my heart must have been not to be warmed by his eloquent words and tender sympathy; and how he also being most unhappy we were well fitted to be a mutual consolation to each other, if I had not been hardened to stone by the Medusa head of Misery. The misfortunes of Woodville were not of the hearts core like mine; his was a natural grief, not to destroy but to purify the heart and from which he might, when its shadow had passed from over him, shine forth ...
— Mathilda • Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

... here were centuries old. Autumn had already shrivelled their tawny leaves, and their high branches, black and contorted, looked like horrid heads of hair, mingled with quaint reptiles such as the ancient sculptors have made on the head of Medusa. This place, which Mademoiselle found cheerful and in which she lived in the summer season, appeared to us as sad and funereal now. The soil was black and muddy from the recent rains and the rotting of the fallen leaves; the trunks of the trees were black and the sky above us was now, as if in mourning, ...
— The Mystery of the Yellow Room • Gaston Leroux

... you like it, ere you solicit a warrant. Prepare for white squalls, living gales and typhoons; read accounts of shipwrecks and horrible disasters; peruse the Narratives of Byron and Bligh; familiarise yourselves with the story of the English frigate Alceste and the French frigate Medusa. Though you may go ashore, now and then, at Cadiz and Palermo; for every day so spent among oranges and ladies, you will have whole ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville

... his neck bristles with serpents. Ovid in his Metamorphoses, x. 21, makes Orpheus, looking for dear Eurydice in Tartarus, declare that he did not go down in order that he might chain the three necks, shaggy with serpents, of the monster begotten of Medusa. His business also is settled for all time; he is the terrible, fearless, and watchful janitor, or guardian (janitor or custos) of Orcus, the Styx, Lethe, or the black Kingdom.[9] And so he remains for modern poets, as when Dante, ...
— Cerberus, The Dog of Hades - The History of an Idea • Maurice Bloomfield

... in bed and looking grotesquely terrible, they discussed the event. Caroline, like Medusa, but with hair curlers instead of snakes sprouting from her head, and Sophia with her heavy plait hanging over her shoulder and defying with its luxuriance the yellowness of her skin, they sat side by side, propped up with pillows, inured to the ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG

... waits patiently at the foot of the steps for her playmate; but will wait in vain, for though the face of Death is hidden from us, yet we can see from the terror in the boy's eyes and quivering lips, that, Medusa-like, this grey phantom turns all it looks upon to stone; and the wings of Love are rent and crushed. Except on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome, there are perhaps few paintings to compare with this in intensity of strength ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde

... shall be left upon a barren rock till a hideous monster shall come and devour her. And it is for this that men have paid her honours which were the portion only of the gods! Far better had she been born with the hair of Medusa and the hump ...
— The Red Romance Book • Various

... wings.—Well, so when he got to where the Gorgons were living, he caught them napping, I suppose, cut off Medusa's ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata

... conjoint effect; metal being actually mingled with the marble, brought thus to its daintiest point of refinement, as the little holes indicate, bored into the marble figures for the attachment of certain accessories in bronze,—lances, swords, bows, the Medusa's head on the aegis of Athene, and its fringe ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater

... dim, cold, far west, she said, there lived three sisters. One of them, Medusa, had been one of her priestesses, golden-haired and most beautiful, but when Athene found that she was as wicked as she was lovely, swiftly had she meted out a punishment. Every lock of her golden hair had been changed into a venomous snake. Her eyes, that had once ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang

... are found in large numbers, and of most varied devices, all showing the influence of classical art. A head (probably his own portrait) is often on the obverse, and on the reverse Apollo playing the lyre, or a Centaur, or a Victory, or Medusa, or Pegasus, or Hercules. Other types show a warrior on horse or foot, or a lion,[114] or a bull, or a wolf, or a wild boar; others again a vine-leaf, or an ear of bearded wheat. On a very few is found ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare

... 9[deg] from the latter. The most striking feature in Perseus is the so-called "segment of Perseus," a curve of stars beginning about 12[deg] below Cassiopeia, and curving toward Ursa Major. Note the famous variable Algol the Demon star. It represents the Medusa's head which Perseus holds in his hand. It varies from the second to the fourth magnitude in about three and one-half hours, and back again in the same time, after which it remains steadily brilliant for two and three-quarters days, when the same change recurs. Algenib and Algol ...
— A Field Book of the Stars • William Tyler Olcott

... which I had so readily dismissed while I was in Italy, began to find its way back to me again. My imagination now set to work at drawing pictures—startling pictures of Oscar as a changed being, as a Medusa's head too terrible to be contemplated by mortal eyes. Where would he meet us? At the entrance to the village? No. At the rectory gate? No. In the quieter part of the garden which was at the back of the house? Yes! There ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins

... strangest, swiftest retribution of his life came to him through the change in her face. How could flesh and muscle bring about such an alteration in human line and texture, the Mother of Sorrows transformed to a Medusa head? Her lips parted, trembling over words they could not bring themselves to say. Her eyes widened into darkness. Her brows drew together in a pitiful questioning. And her voice, when she did speak, was a vibrating protest against what her eyes ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown

... rest for me, which I have much needed; and shall remain here for about ten days more, and then home to work, which is my sole pleasure in life. I hope your splendid Medusa work and your experiments on pangenesis are going on well. I heard from my son Frank yesterday that he was feverish with a cold, and could not dine with the physiologists, which I am very sorry for, as I should have heard what they think about the ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin

... undeceived with respect to the idols whom they serve; that no one was less the dupe to those menaces which they so solemnly pronounce in their name, than themselves. In the hands of the priests of almost all countries, their divinities resembled the head of Medusa, which, without injuring him who shewed it, petrified all others. The priests are generally the most crafty of men, and many among ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach

... the most powerful imagination. Truly, the Crystal Palace, in all its departments, offers wonderful means of education. I marvel what will come of it. Among the things that I admired most was Benvenuto Cellini's statue of Perseus holding the head of Medusa, and standing over her headless and still writhing body, out of which, at the severed neck, gushed a vast exuberance of snakes. Likewise, a sitting statue, by Michel Angelo, of one of the Medici, full of dignity ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... God with a spear pierces a serpent's head. On a tablet from the Temple of Osiris at Philæ is a tree, with a man on one side, and a woman on the other, and in front of the woman an erect basilisc, with horns on its head and a disk between the horns. The head of Medusa was encircled by winged snakes, which, the head removed, left the Hierogram or Sacred Cypher of the Ophites or Serpent-worshippers. And the Serpent, in connection with the Globe or circle, is found upon the monuments of all the ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike

... stomachs of the medusae. It was found to be full of diatoms, which are flinty-shelled microscopic animals of every variety of shape, such as stars, crosses, semicircles, and spirals—yet soft as are the jelly-fish, they can consume them. This one medusa had in its stomach no less than seven hundred thousand diatoms, so that it would be rather difficult to compute how many the whole shoal consumed for their dinner—they in their turn having to be eaten by the ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston

... after him and closed the doors, bolting them quietly. When he turned he saw a change in his stepmother. Her eyes regarded him with a Medusa-like stare; a spot of dull red smouldered in each cheek. Her lips seemed suddenly thin, were working slightly. He knew that her anger was even greater than his own, though she might express ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell

... beyond, report: For Rome still flays and sells Him at the court, Where paths are closed, to virtue's fair increase, Now were fit time for me to scrape a treasure, Seeing that work and gain are gone; while he Who wears the robe, is my Medusa still. God welcomes poverty perchance with pleasure: But of that better life what hope have we, When the blessed banner leads ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds

... was accustomed to the petrifying effect of her sudden presence on a beauty-worshipping sex. She did not walk as other mortals walk, but floated in fragrantly and Skippy stood staring rock-still, as though Hippo had flashed the head of Medusa. None of which by the way was lost on the keenly ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson

... off her horrible night-mares, and I had once more started into identity, the anguish of the past day and night again seized me. Pains innumerable, and intolerable, rushed upon me. Each new thought was a new serpent. Mine was the head of Medusa: with this difference; my scorpions shed all their ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft

... if you are as brave a youth as I believe you to be," replied King Polydectes, with the utmost graciousness of manner. "The bridal gift which I have set my heart on presenting to the beautiful Hippodamia is the head of the Gorgon Medusa with the snaky locks; and I depend on you, my dear Perseus, to bring it to me. So, as I am anxious to settle affairs with the princess, the sooner you go in quest of the Gorgon, the ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various

... while it fascinated me, as if in those loathsome snakes, writhing and glittering round the expiring head, and those abhorred and fiendish abominations crawling into life, there still lurked the fabled spell which petrified the beholder. Poor Medusa! was this the guerdon of thy love? and were those the tresses which enslaved the ocean's lord? Methinks that in this wild mythological fiction, in the terrific vengeance which Minerva takes for her profaned temple, and in the undying snakes which for ever hiss round the ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson

... even at their sweetest could never lose their delicate cruelty, had no sweetness now. They were drawn into a square—inhuman as that of the Medusa; in her eyes were the fires of the pit, and her hair seemed to writhe like the serpent locks of that Gorgon whose mouth she had borrowed; all her beauty was transformed into a nameless thing—hideous, inhuman, blasting! If this was the true soul of Yolara springing ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt

... shield Perseus went down and down. He saw the third sister—she who was not immortal. She had a woman's face and form, and her countenance was beautiful, although there was something deadly in its fairness. The two scaled and winged sisters were asleep, but the third, Medusa, was awake, and she was tearing with her hands a lizard ...
— The Golden Fleece and the Heroes who Lived Before Achilles • Padraic Colum

... court. Modest travelling-equipage rolls up into the inner court; to the foot of the grand staircase there, whither only Princes come:—who can it be? The Queen sends to inquire. Heavens, it is the Hereditary Prince of Baireuth! "Medusa's Head never produced such effect as did this bit of news: Queen sat petrified; and I," by reflex, was petrified too! Wilhelmina passed the miserablest night, no wink of sleep; and felt quite ill in the morning;—in dread, too, of Papa's rough jests,—and wretched ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... in the provinces of Topago, and their chiefest strengths and retracts are in the islands situate on the south side of the entrance, some 60 leagues within the mouth of the said river. The memories of the like women are very ancient as well in Africa as in Asia. In Africa those that had Medusa for queen; others in Scythia, near the rivers of Tanais and Thermodon. We find, also, that Lampedo and Marthesia were queens of the Amazons. In many histories they are verified to have been, and in divers ages and provinces; but they which are not far from Guiana ...
— The Discovery of Guiana • Sir Walter Raleigh

... get a pail of snow, which will cool it faster. Ha, ha, ha! you do look handsome; suppose Meeta could see you with your jaws stuck fast together with the candy, and your face looking like the head of Medusa. While you are getting over the lock-jaw, I will trail some on this snow to take home to little Sue, who begged me to bring her back some maple candy. Now let us ride down home on the ox-sled, with the huge tin pails full of the hot syrup, which wont get half cold before it ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various

... for rest for me, which I have much needed; and shall remain here for about ten days more, and then home to work, which is my sole pleasure in life. I hope your splendid Medusa work and your experiments on pangenesis are going on well. I heard from my son Frank yesterday that he was feverish with a cold, and could not dine with the physiologists, which I am very sorry for, as I should have heard what they ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin

... by something terrible. He had sought to make this girl betray herself, if she had anything to betray. But this Medusa face! Those awful eyes! ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey

... small patches of a clear, transparent substance like jelly, which were so thin as to be almost invisible to the naked eye. Thus I came to know that the beautiful phosphoric light, which I had so often admired before, was caused by animals; for I had no doubt that these were of the same kind as the medusa or jelly-fish, which are seen in ...
— The Coral Island • R.M. Ballantyne

... being changed to "The Finish," and "The Song of the Outer Reef" to "The Song of the Coral Reef." In one case, an absolutely different title, a misappropriate title, was substituted. In place of his own, "Medusa Lights," the editor had printed, "The Backward Track." But the slaughter in the body of the poems was terrifying. Martin groaned and sweated and thrust his hands through his hair. Phrases, lines, and stanzas were cut out, interchanged, or juggled ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London

... executioner may, behind his mask, hide the traces of grief and pity. I do not blame you for your suspicions. I once had aspirations, perhaps as high, and purity of soul nearly as great as your own. But what are we? The creatures of fate; the victims of circumstances. We look upon the Medusa-head of destiny, with its serpent curls, and our wills, if not our souls, are turned into stone. God alone, who knows all, can judge the heart of man. But I am pledged, by ties the most awful, to a society which, however terrible its methods may be, is, ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly

... measurements of him who had bought the cap being to its present wearer's as five is to three, the effect of its proportions, in addition to the goggles and the ear-trumpet, was such as to have overawed a survivor of Medusa's stare. ...
— The Rejuvenation of Aunt Mary • Anne Warner

... and chasms and little hills and valleys, offering a variety of stations for the growth of these animal forests. In and out among them, moved numbers of blue and red and yellow fishes, spotted and banded and striped in the most striking manner, while great orange or rosy transparent medusa floated along near the surface. It was a sight to gaze at for hours, and no description can do justice to its surpassing beauty and interest. For once, the reality exceeded the most glowing accounts I had ever read of the wonders of a coral ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace

... as a team and gave me about as much chance to escape as if I'd been a horned toad sealed in a cornerstone. Gruenwald, of course, treated me as though my breath was deadly, my touch foul, and my presence evil. In Gruenwald's eyes, the only difference between me and Medusa the Gorgon was that looking at me did not turn him to stone. He kept at least one eye ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith

... pictures, most of them Flemish, covers the walls of these apartments. But nothing struck me more than a Medusa's head by that surprising genius Leonardo da Vinci. It appears just severed from the body, and cast on the damp pavement of a cavern: a deadly paleness covers the countenance, and the mouth exhales a pestilential vapour: the snakes, which ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford

... his army were changed into stone, as if the head of Medusa had gazed upon them. The solitary stone, still called the King Stone, is the ambitious monarch; the circle is his army; and the Five Whispering Knights are five of his chieftains, who were hatching a plot against him when ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield

... I always want to know, them—I want to know why Medusa turned into a gorgon? What was ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn

... penn'orth of potatoes as best you can. Life is about to become a hideous inferno. Let us pass quickly over this phase. Amid this lamentable chaos, my love for the insect ought to have gone under. Not at all. It would have survived the raft of the Medusa. I still remember a certain pine cockchafer met for the first time. The plumes on her antennae, her pretty pattern of white spots on a dark brown ground were as a ray of sunshine in the gloomy wretchedness of ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre

... is this?—what goblin sounds of Macbeth's witches?—Beethoven's Spirit Waltz! the muster-call of sprites and specters. Now come, hands joined, Medusa, Hecate, she of Endor, and all the ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville

... near Paris." M. de Villefort a second time raised his head, looked at Benedetto as if he had been gazing at the head of Medusa, and became livid. As for Benedetto, he gracefully wiped his lips with a fine ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... in Islam as soon as it recovered from the first shocks of its formation. Procopius (died ca. 535) describes a monumental water clock which was erected in Gaza ca. 500.[17] It contained impressive jackwork, such as a Medusa head which rolled its eyes every hour on the hour, exhibiting the time through lighted apertures and showing mythological interpretations of the cosmos. All these effects were produced by Heronic techniques, using hydraulic ...
— On the Origin of Clockwork, Perpetual Motion Devices, and the Compass • Derek J. de Solla Price

... so well beloved, is that abstracted Platonism. But verily the fear of imagination would far outbalance any love of it, if crime had peopled for a man that viewless world with spectres, and the Medusa-head of Justice were shaking her snakes in his face. And, by way of a parergon observation, how terrible, most terrible, to the guilty soul must be the solitary silent system now so popular among those cold legislative schemers, who have ground the poor ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... Goddess of Wisdom. Arachne. Her Challenge with Minerva. Minerva's Web. Arachne's Web. Transformation. Niobe Queen of Thebes. Mount Cynthus. Death of Niobe's Children. Changed to stone. The Gray-haired Sisters. The Gorgon Medusa. Tower of brass. Danae. Perseus. Net of Dicte. Minerva. King Atlas. Andromeda. Sea Monster. Wedding Feast. Enemies ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR

... Cement—Medusa Waterproofing Compound—Novoid Waterproofing Compound—Impermeable Coatings and Washes: Bituminous Coatings; Szerelmey Stone Liquid Wash; Sylvester Wash; Sylvester Mortars; Hydrolithic Coating; Cement Mortar Coatings; Oil and Paraffine Washes—Impermeable ...
— Concrete Construction - Methods and Costs • Halbert P. Gillette

... of monster rising out of the sea of modern thought with the purpose of devouring the Andromeda of art. And now and then a Perseus, equipped with the shoes of swiftness of the ready writer, with the cap of invisibility of the editorial article, and it may be with the Medusa-head of vituperation, shows himself ready to try conclusions with the scientific dragon. Sir, I hope that Perseus will think better of it [laughter]; first, for his own sake, because the creature is hard of head, strong of ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various

... if they had been boxed. I suppose I've been rather spoiled by men. Anyhow, not one ever before ran away at sight of me, as if I were Medusa. I'd been hoping that Doctor Paul and I might meet and make friends, so this was a blow: and it hurt a little that Dierdre O'Farrell should see me thus snubbed. I glanced at her; and her faint smile told that ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... of killing," Pertinax repeated, "but if we kill one monster, four or five others will fight for his place, unless, like Perseus, we have the head of a Medusa with which to freeze them into stone! There is no substitute for Commodus in sight. The only man whose face would freeze all ...
— Caesar Dies • Talbot Mundy

... The sight no health can bring. it is a magic shape, an idol, no live thing. To meet it never can be good! Its haggard look congeals a mortal's blood, And almost turns him into stone; The story of Medusa thou hast known. ...
— Faust • Goethe

... but now it is as good as Fortunatus's purse, which was never empty. I eat my dinner at the hotel, and show them my twenty dollar note. The landlord turns away from it, as if it were the head of Medusa, and begs that I will pay another time. I buy every thing that I want, and I have only to offer my twenty dollar note in payment, and my credit is unbounded—that is, for any sum under twenty dollars. If they ever do give change again in New York it will make a very unfortunate ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)

... Nurse Medusa. O monstrous men! What have ye done! It is King Herod's only son That ye ...
— The Golden Legend • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

... appreciation or profounder thought. Of the last named he proposed to write a comprehensive biography and entered into correspondence with a publisher in Germany.[A] He confronted the formal culture of the Latin races with the character of the German mind, as it were the head of the Medusa, and the consciousness of his mission kept up his spirits under the most trying circumstances. With Paris as an art centre he had done. Like Mozart's "Idomeneo" to the Opera Seria, "Rienzi" was his last tribute to the Grand Opera. ...
— Life of Wagner - Biographies of Musicians • Louis Nohl

... then crossed the web Just as the red moon bloomed upon the hills And silvered all the Panticapean vale. The funnel of the web was in the mouth Of a vast tomb, whose outside, hewn on rock, Outlined a Gorgon's face with jaws agape— Some stern Medusa, Stheno, or Euryale, Changed to the stone that in the elder days She changed the sons of men who looked on her. We passed the funnel, entering the tomb. About my arms the spider threw his cords, And shackled them. I dared not move, ...
— Stories in Verse • Henry Abbey

... Archduchess Christina of Austria. Napoleon called the rising sculptor to France, and he there executed the famous nude portrait of Napoleon now preserved in Milan. After his return to Italy he fashioned his Perseus with the Head of Medusa at Rome. When the Belvidere Apollo was carried off to France, this piece of statuary was thought not unworthy of the classic Apollo's place and pedestal in the Vatican. Among the later works of Canova are the colossal group of Theseus Killing the Minotaur, a Paris, and a ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson

... them came detachments of British artillery, clattering gun-carriages, straight young figures on glossy horses, long Phidian lines of youths so ingenuously fair that one wondered how they could have looked on the Medusa face of war and lived. Men and beasts, in spite of the dust, were as fresh and sleek as if they had come from a bath; and everywhere along the wayside were improvised camps, with tents made of waggon-covers, where the ceaseless indomitable work of cleaning was ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton

... elaborately pictorial. Poetry seems to have sought inspiration from painting, while painting, as we have said, inclined to genre, to luxurious representations of the amours of the gods or the adventures of heroes, with backgrounds of pastoral landscape. Shepherds fluted while Perseus slew Medusa. ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang

... 'Tis not good! Forbear! 'Tis lifeless, magical, a shape of air, An idol. Such to meet with, bodes no good; That rigid look of hers doth freeze man's blood, And well-nigh petrifies his heart to stone:— The story of Medusa thou hast known. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... weep? Will you give them joy for their sorrow, sweet labour, and satisfied sleep? Sweet is the fragrance of flowers, and soft are the wings of the dove, And no goodlier gift is there given than the dower of brotherly love; But you, O May-Day Medusa, whose glance makes the heart turn cold, Art a bitter Goddess to follow, a terrible Queen to behold. We are sick of spouting—the words burn deep and chafe: we are fain, To rest a little from clap-trap, and probe the wild promise of gain. For new gods we know not of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, April 30, 1892 • Various

... "You are filling up the measure of your iniquity. It is not enough that you drive your sister to despair; you revile your mother also! You say that we are furies; well, indeed, for we shall one day be such to you, and we will show you our Medusa-face, before which you will be stiffened to stone. Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, from this hour out, I am your implacable enemy; look out for the head on your shoulders, for my hand is raised against it, and in my hand is a sword! Guard well the secret that sleeps in your breast; for you ...
— Henry VIII And His Court • Louise Muhlbach

... many little feelers that hung down all around like so many mites of snakes, and so it was named Medusa, after that lady in the old times who wore snakes instead of hair, and who felt so badly because she couldn't do them up. Well, our little Medusa floated around and opened and shut her umbrella for a long time—a month, or a year, perhaps—we don't know how long. Then, one morning, ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten

... Pyrrha, escaping from the flood, repeopled the earth by casting behind them stones which became men and women; Heraulos was changed into stone for offending Mercury; Pyrrhus for offending Rhea; Phineus, and Polydectes with his guests, for offending Perseus: under the petrifying glance of Medusa's head such transformations became ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White

... through each glade, her soft and hallowing ray Stole like a maiden tiptoe, o'er the ground, Till every tiny blade of glittering grass Was doubled by its shadow. Can it be, That evil hearts throb near a scene like this? And yet how soon comes the Medusa, Thought, To chill the heart's blood of sweet fantasy! For, O bright orb! That glid'st along the fringe of those tall trees, Where a child's thought might grasp thee, Art thou not This night in thousand places hideous? To think Where thy pale beams may revel—on the brow Of ghastly ...
— Cromwell • Alfred B. Richards

... dead and wrapped in a ring of flames! ... Alone—all, all alone, she confronted Death in its most appalling shape.. her countenance was distorted, yet beautiful still with the beauty of a maddened Medusa, . . white and glittering as a fair ghost invoked from some deadly gulf of pain, she stood, a phantom-figure of mingled loveliness and horror, circled on ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli

... not time to feel a sensation of real fear, when cautiously her doorknob was turned and a head intruded itself which struck her as dumb as though Medusa had appeared, and drove the life-blood in a frozen current ...
— Idle Hour Stories • Eugenia Dunlap Potts

... the churchyard by the grave, he had looked about him from one to the other of the mounds of turf, his imagination already stimulated had been quickened by what he had seen; he stood with the face of a Medusa. ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason

... strand, which grew and grew in length till it was like a great rope of spun gold. Inch by inch, foot by foot it grew, until at last it lay coiled in her lap like a golden serpent, with a kind of tension which gave it life, such as Medusa's hair must have known as the serpent-life entered into it. There is—or was—in Florence a statue of Medusa, seated, in her fingers a strand of her hair, which is beginning to coil and bend and twist before her horror-stricken eyes; and this statue flashed ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... might have been the head of the Medusa, for Dr. Brunton felt suddenly as if turned to stone. When he went into his house all chance of an hour's sleep was gone. He met his sister in the passage: she stopped and said, "Oh, James, you must have passed the Ladies Moor as you ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various

... Jelly-Fish disk, with its four tubes radiating from the central cavity. The proboscis, so characteristic of all Jelly-Fishes, hangs from the central opening; and the tentacles, coiled within the internal cavity up to this time, now make their appearance, and we have a complete little Medusa growing upon the Hydroid head. Gradually the point by which it is attached to the parent-stock narrows and becomes more and more contracted, till the animal drops off and swims ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various

... to rally when they heard themselves called upon for another effort, and saw officers springing up the hill again towards that shot-fretted crest where several Engineers and bluejackets, with the Imperial Light Horse, still clung as if they had looked on Medusa's head, and become part of the rocks among which they lay, only that their forefingers were playing about the triggers, ready in a moment to give back shot for shot to the Boers. And when deeds of heroism ...
— Four Months Besieged - The Story of Ladysmith • H. H. S. Pearse

... haunt banks; and if the eight rocks, near the surface, which captain Vobonne mentions having seen in 1732, to the north of Porto Santo, really exist, we may suppose that this innumerable quantity of medusas had been thence detached; for we were but 28 leagues from the reef. We found, beside the Medusa aurita of Baster, and the Medusa pelagica of Bosc with eight tentacula (Pelagia denticulata, Peron), a third species which resembles the Medusa hysocella, and which Vandelli found at the mouth of the Tagus. It is known by its brownish-yellow colour, and by its tentacula, which are longer ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt

... preliminary impediments, and frightful medusa-heads of quackery, which deter many generous souls from entering, is of the half-articulate professions, and does not much invite the ardent kinds of ambition. The intellect required for medicine might be wholly human, and indeed should by all rules be,—the ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle

... the whole stock or polity of Siphonophora has a very definite united will and a united sensibility, and yet each of the individual persons of which this stock (or Cormus) is composed has its own personal will and its own particular sensations. Each of these persons indeed was originally a separate Medusa, and the individual Siphonophora stock originated, by association and division of labour, out of ...
— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel

... hack from Viceregal Lodge in the mists of the evening, they met a temporarily insane woman, on a temporarily mad horse, swinging round the corners, with her eyes and her mouth open, and her head like the head of the Medusa. She was stopped by a man at the risk of his life, and taken out of the saddle, a limp heap, and put on the bank to explain herself. This wasted twenty minutes, and then she was sent home in ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling

... of aught but fiends; the air too putrid for lungs that inhale that of pure and happy homes. We must shun those plague spots, else bear false witness to the world, for any true pen-picture of their hell-born horrors would, like Medusa's awful face, turn all who gazed ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... the reader in Hamburg, and Amsterdam. He takes a sip of coffee, puffs at his cigar, and comfortably settles back to a taste of more details of the catastrophe, whether observed or fabricated. What a hurrah for the newspaper publishers! A sensation! More readers! That is the Medusa into whose eyes we look, and who tells us what the genuine value of a cargo of human lives ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann

... sobs of my friend came across the bed, and as he called to her I seemed to hear the eternal Orpheus calling for his lost Eurydice. Poor lad!—poor maid! Here, naked and terrible, was all the tragedy of the world compressed into an hour, the Medusa-face of life that turns the bravest to stone. Surely, I felt, God owed more than He could ever repay to these two lovers, whom it had been so easy to leave to their simple joys. And from that night ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne

... Jupiter Olympus of the same famous artist. On the summit or apex of the helmet was placed a sphinx, with griffins on either side. The figure of the goddess was represented in an erect martial attitude, and clothed in a robe reaching to the feet. On the breast was a head of Medusa, wrought in ivory, and a figure of Victory about four cubits high. The goddess held a spear in her hand, and an aegis lay at her feet, while on her right, and near the spear, was a figure of a serpent, believed to ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker

... two German; one Lithuanian; and a Russian variant. There must be many more in Bolte's notes to Grimm, 60. These are sufficient to prove that the whole concatenation of incident is European, though it is difficult to understand how the Medusa incident got tacked on to the preceding three, with which it is very loosely combined, the only point of connection being with the Life Token. Strangely enough, in the ancient form of the folk-tale, the Gorgon is an almost essential part of the story, ...
— Europa's Fairy Book • Joseph Jacobs

... widely, but the heavens completely; and nightly over them marched the grand procession of their apotheosized divinities. There Hercules perpetually wrought his mighty labors for the good of man; there flashed and faded the changeful star Algol, as an eye in the head of the snaky-haired Medusa; over them flew Pegasus, the winged horse of the poet, careering among the stars; there the ship Argo, which had explored all strange seas of earth, nightly sailed in the infinite realms of heaven; there Perseus perpetually killed the sea-monster by celestial aid, and perpetually won the chained ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren

... it only the breath of Boreas which had brought about this accident, or had Eros, who delights to vex the hearts of men, amused himself by severing the string which had fastened the protecting tissue? However that may have been, Gyges was stricken motionless at the sight of that Medusa of beauty, and not till long after the folds of Nyssia's robe had disappeared beyond the gates of the city could he think of proceeding on his way. Although there was nothing to justify such a conjecture, he ...
— King Candaules • Theophile Gautier

... Rapidly the medusa disappeared from the window; more rapidly yet she came running down the steps, brandishing her husband's terrible whip. Don Tiburcio, supplicating both, threw himself between, but he could not have prevented the combat, had not ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal

... she came down again. Two somewhat trying hours, to judge from the expression on her face, which wore a look as grim as any ever sported by Medusa. Her eyes were cold and hard as she marched promptly to the closed study door and rapped upon it—a ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston

... sally seemed transfixing. I might have been Medusa. I had a welcome minute in which to contemplate the victims of my prowess and to exult unchristianly in their scars. Then the tableau dissolved, the three men sprang up, and I took action. As I emerged I had drawn out a handkerchief and I ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti

... her re-union with Oscar, that uneasiness of mind which I had so readily dismissed while I was in Italy, began to find its way back to me again. My imagination now set to work at drawing pictures—startling pictures of Oscar as a changed being, as a Medusa's head too terrible to be contemplated by mortal eyes. Where would he meet us? At the entrance to the village? No. At the rectory gate? No. In the quieter part of the garden which was at the back of the house? Yes! There he stood ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins

... resulted in scandal, the least thing that the Senate can do is to remove the twenty and the sixty bad members, and replace them by well-disposed persons. The will of the nation is that the government may not be hindered from doing well, and that the head of Medusa may no longer be displayed in our Tribunes and in our Assemblies. The conduct of Sieyes in this circumstance proves perfectly that, after having concurred in the destruction of all the constitutions since 1791, he still wishes to try his hand against this one. ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt

... steadily, but there was something in her aspect that moved him to wonderment and a curious touch of terror. The delicate rose-tint of her cheeks had faded to an ashy paleness, her lips were pressed together tightly and her eyes seemed to have gained a vivid and angry lustre which Medusa herself ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli

... devoured; in one story she offers a human arm, by way of a meal, to a girl who visits her. But she is also represented in one of the stories[178] as petrifying her victims. This trait connects her with Medusa, and the three sister Baba Yagas with the three Gorgones. The Russian Gorgo's method of petrifaction is singular. In the story referred to, Ivan Devich (Ivan the servant-maid's son) meets a Baba Yaga, who plucks one of her hairs, gives it to him, and says, ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston

... these "stalked" Crinoids (though not exclusively confined to this period) is Pentacrinus (fig. 162). In this genus, the column is five-sided, with whorls of "side-arms;" and the arms are long, slender, and branched. The genus is represented at the present day by the beautiful "Medusa-head Pentacrinite" (Pentacrinus caput-medusoe). Another characteristic Oolitic genus is Apiocrinus, comprising the so-called "Pear Encrinites." In this group the column is long and rounded, with a dilated base, and having its uppermost joints ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson

... in front of the ears, being what we call "banged." The only exception to this style of hair dressing I saw was the manner in which Ci-ha-ne, a negress, had disposed of her long crisp tresses. Hers was a veritable Medusa head. A score or more of dangling, snaky plaits, hanging down over her black face and shoulders gave her a most repulsive appearance. Among the little Indian girls the hair is simply braided into a queue and tied with a ribbon, ...
— The Seminole Indians of Florida • Clay MacCauley

... but for his own presence she would not have given it. The expression in her face changed rapidly from that which had been there when they had been alone, hardening very quickly until it reminded Orsino of a certain mask of the Medusa which had once made an impression upon his imagination. Her eyes were fixed and the pupils grew small while the singular golden yellow colour of the iris flashed disagreeably. She did not bend her head as she silently gave ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford

... potentially like itself; and the tendency of inquiries elsewhere has all been in the same direction. A plant may throw off bulbs, but these, sooner or later, give rise to seeds or spores, which develop into the original form. A polype may give rise to Medusae, or a pluteus to an Echinoderm, but the Medusa and the Echinoderm give rise to eggs which produce polypes or glutei, and they are therefore only stages in the cycle of ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley

... Moselle the road made a great curve round the base of a hill descending to the river, and then mounted a little spur of the valley wall. Beyond the spur the road went through lonely fields, in which were deserted farmhouses surrounded by acres of neglected vines, now rank and Medusa-like in their weedy profusion. Every once in a while, along a rise, stood great burlap screens so arranged one behind the other as to give the effect of a continuous line when seen from ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan

... is surmounted in the middle by the figure of a sphinx, and on either side of the helmet are griffins wrought in relief. The image of Athena stands upright, clad in a garment that reaches to her feet; on her breast is the head of Medusa wrought in ivory. She holds a Victory about four cubits high in one hand, and in the other hand a spear. At her feet lies a shield, and near ...
— A Trip to the Orient - The Story of a Mediterranean Cruise • Robert Urie Jacob

... of gold, for which a wooden one is substituted, as is the round stock at the other extremity which was of silver; its lower side has a figure of Bellona, a terminus, &c., carved out of it; its upper, a sphynx, head of Medusa, leaves, and numerous other ornaments upon it; the sides are also beautifully carved, and two steel escutcheons on its sides before the bridge have engraved on them ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19. No. 538 - 17 Mar 1832 • Various

... the aristocratic mansions built by Puget in the Rue du Grand Cours opposite the Medusa fountain, a second marriage feast was being celebrated, almost at the same hour with the nuptial repast given by Dantes. In this case, however, although the occasion of the entertainment was similar, the company was strikingly dissimilar. Instead of a rude mixture of ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... her; and by Cupid The young Medusa made me stupid! A face, that hath no lovers slain, Wants forces, and is near disdain. For every fop will freely peep At majesty that is asleep. But she—fair tyrant!—hates to be Gaz'd on with such impunity. Whose ...
— Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, Volume II • Henry Vaughan

... though some electric mechanism had been set in motion, they would suddenly lift a foot sideways and stand on one leg. Poised pathetically, as if waiting for the happy signal when they might put the other leg down, these men looked very sad, and I wished that the Medusa's head might be smuggled somehow into the room for their attitudes to be imperishably recorded in cold stone; it would have been a valuable addition to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 7th, 1920 • Various

... and their petty cares and dissipations, will forget that they possess a higher part, if indeed they do possess it. Like everything else in the world, they find their level. But with women like your Angela it is another thing. For them time only serves to increasingly unveil the Medusa-headed truth, till at last they see it as it is, and their hearts turn to stone. Backed with a sick longing to see a face that is gone from them, they become lost spirits, wandering everlastingly in the emptiness they have chosen, and finding no rest. Even ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard

... Amazons, notwithstanding the efforts of the Government, still continues. The pretty women keep aloof from the movement; the recruits who have already joined are so old and ugly that possibly they may act upon an enemy like the head of Medusa. ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere

... Isis; men dare not. The animal, awake, has no fictional escape from the Real because he has no imagination. Man, awake, is compelled to seek a perpetual escape into Hope, Belief, Fable, Art, God, Socialism, Immortality, Alcohol, Love. From Medusa-Truth he makes an appeal ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London

... and airy tongues that syllable men's names on sands, and shores, and desert wildernesses," until not one of the party, excepting myself, dared move or look round for fear of seeing some dread presence, some shapeless dweller upon the threshold, some horrible apparition, the sight of which, Medusa-like, should blast them into stone. Not infrequently the situation was rendered additionally harrowing by the cook, who would suddenly interrupt the narrative, send an icy thrill down our spines, and cause the unhappy Tim's scalp to bristle even more than usual, by ...
— The Rover's Secret - A Tale of the Pirate Cays and Lagoons of Cuba • Harry Collingwood

... and blithe goddess of the fields, whose children, if she has them, must be as the perfectly discreet and peaceful, unravished Kore; on the other hand, we have Persephone, as the wholly terrible goddess of death, who brings to Ulysses the querulous shadows of the dead, and has the head of the gorgon Medusa in her keeping. And it is only when these two contrasted images have been [95] brought into intimate relationship, only when Kore and Persephone have been identified, that the deeper mythology ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater

... with a humorist, on my travels, who had in his chamber a cast of the Rondanini Medusa, and who assured me that the name which that fine work of art bore in the catalogues was a misnomer, as he was convinced that the sculptor who carved it intended it for Memory, the mother of the Muses. In the conversation ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various

... I am so anxious to do so. Look here, Clement. I stood there among the crowd this evening, gazing upon that bleeding and dying woman, until the sight of her ghastly form and face seemed to affect me as the Medusa's head was said to have affected the beholder, and turn me into stone. Clement, I was so petrified that I could not move or speak, even when she appealed to us all to know whether any among us could believe ...
— Cruel As The Grave • Mrs. Emma D. E. N. Southworth

... globules appeared to consist of an animal of the medusa kind. It was from one-twentieth to one-thirtieth of an inch in diameter. Its surface was marked with twelve distinct patches, or nebulae, of dots of a brownish colour. These dots were disposed in pairs, four ...
— The Ocean and its Wonders • R.M. Ballantyne

... Fire," a picture of wounded men; and "A Hero's Death." The centre piece is devoted to "The Victor," the great general, the master of the feast, the responsible and beflattered chief. In the last three stories, physical pain exposes its hideous countenance like that of Medusa mutilated. The two opening stories deal with mental pain. The hero of the centre piece sees neither the one nor the other; his glory is throned on both; he finds life good, and war even better. From the first ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland

... hideous life; beneath the moon the poison might yet stir. The moon silvered the edge of things, drew illusion like a veil across the haunted ring; below, what hidden foulness!... Did the life there know its hideousness? Those lengths and coils, those twisting locks of Medusa, might think themselves desirable. These pulpy, starkly branching cacti, these shrubs that bred poignards, these fibrous ropes, dark and knotted lianas, binding all together like monstrous exaggerations ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston

... deification of Ino and Melicertes. Change of the Theban women to rocks and birds. Cadmus and Hermione changed to serpents. Perseus. Transformation of Atlas to a mountain. Andromeda saved from the sea monster. Story of Medusa. ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid

... pursue, chasing him down for his guilt. And all the time we vainly imagine that we are some victorious hero, some Perseus, especially favoured by the gods to fare scatheless over land and sea, and bear away the Medusa's head, and live renowned and happy forever." The reverie was becoming deeper and deeper; the Roman was beginning no longer to whisper merely to himself, he was half declaiming; then of a sudden, by a quick revolution of mind, he ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis

... squalls, living gales and typhoons; read accounts of shipwrecks and horrible disasters; peruse the Narratives of Byron and Bligh; familiarise yourselves with the story of the English frigate Alceste and the French frigate Medusa. Though you may go ashore, now and then, at Cadiz and Palermo; for every day so spent among oranges and ladies, you will have whole months of ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville

... fringed Medusa floats like light in light, Medusa, with the loveliest of all fays Pent in its irised bubble of jellied sheen, Trailing long ferns of moonlight, shot with green And crimson rays and white, Waving ethereal tendrils, ghostly sprays, Daring the deep, dissolving in the sun, The vanishing ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes

... down, when there was a breeze, bubbled a procession of milky-turquoise ghosts—the foam flung down by the hull of the Snark each time she floundered against a sea. At night the wake was phosphorescent fire, where the medusa slime resented our passing bulk, while far down could be observed the unceasing flight of comets, with long, undulating, nebulous tails—caused by the passage of the bonitas through the resentful medusa slime. And now and again, from out of the darkness on ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London

... of the nearer ship, which had been recently recovered by the divers, and were lying at the water's edge. And he had told her,—with a kindling eye—how he himself, within the last few months, had seen fresh trophies recovered from the water,—a bronze Medusa above all, fiercely lovely, the work of a most noble and most passionate art, not Greek though taught by Greece, fresh, full-blooded, and strong, the art of the ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... a great help to the manning of the fleet; but Clidemus ascribes this also to the art of Themistocles. When the Athenians were on their way down to the haven of Piraeus, the shield with the head of Medusa was missing; and he, under the pretext of searching for it, ransacked all places, and found among their goods considerable sums of money concealed, which he applied to the public use; and with this the soldiers and seamen were well provided ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough

... considered them as the offspring of brains to be pitied for their diseased state, and contented myself with writing on them in large letters, before I returned to the post-boy, a Seen; which, like the head of Medusa, no doubt petrified more than ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. I • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon

... other, O Phoebe! the form of thy nascent horns. There are some which bristle with twisted serpents. Shall I speak of those armies which have sometimes appeared in the air? of those clouds which follow as it were along a circle, or which resemble the head of Medusa? Have there not often been seen figures ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various

... where long ago, Above the sea that cries and breaks, Bright Perseus with Medusa's snakes Set free ...
— Helen of Troy and Other Poems • Sara Teasdale

... dark hair was undone. She looked strikingly handsome, but the thick black strands hanging down on either side of the white face recalled to Mary a picture in the library at Lady MacMillan's. It was a clever painting of the Medusa, level-eyed, with a red mouth like a wound, and dimly seen, pale glimmering features, between the lazy writhing of dark snakes. The thing had fascinated Mary in her impressionable schoolgirl days, but now she tried to huddle the idea ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... these animals, so much more highly organised than themselves, voraciously; apparently enjoying the destruction of the unfortunate members of the upper classes with a truly democratic relish. One of them even attacked and commenced the swallowing of a Lizzia octopunctata, quite as good a medusa as itself. An animal which can pout out its mouth twice the length of its body, and stretch its stomach to corresponding dimensions, must indeed be "a triton among the minnows;" and a very terrific one too. Yet is this ferocious creature one of the most delicate and graceful of the inhabitants ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 423, New Series. February 7th, 1852 • Various

... might have ordered a private to go on sentry-duty. Ten days earlier Billy would have jumped at the chance; ten days later he would probably have suggested it himself; but at that exact moment he would have as willingly contemplated matrimony with Alecto or Medusa or any of the Furies. Accordingly, he declined. Frederick R. Woods flew into a pyrotechnical display of temper, and gave him his choice between obeying his commands and leaving his house forever—the choice, in ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell

... wraith there of earth's vernal green? Even so as I have seen, In night's aerial sea with no wind blust'rous, A ribbed tract of cloudy malachite Curve a shored crescent wide; And on its slope marge shelving to the night The stranded moon lay quivering like a lustrous Medusa newly washed up from the tide, Lay in an oozy pool of its own ...
— Sister Songs • Francis Thompson

... far west, she said, there lived three sisters. One of them, Medusa, had been one of her priestesses, golden-haired and most beautiful, but when Athene found that she was as wicked as she was lovely, swiftly had she meted out a punishment. Every lock of her golden hair had been changed into ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang

... respects less contrasted than inferior organisms. As a class, mammals are higher than birds; and yet they are of lower temperature, and have smaller powers of locomotion. The stationary oyster is of higher organization than the free-swimming medusa; and the cold-blooded and less heterogeneous fish is quicker in its movements than the warm-blooded and more heterogeneous sloth. But the admission that the several aspects under which this increasing contrast shows itself bear variable ratios to one another, does not negative ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer

... out, and lay staring vacantly at the pale square of the window. And then, just when he was least expecting it, he saw the whole face, so close to him and so distinctly, that he started up on his elbow; and in the second or two it remained—a Medusa-face, opaquely white, with deep, unfathomable eyes—he recognised, with a shock, that his peace of mind was gone; that the sudden experience of a few hours back had given his life new meaning; that something had happened to him which could not be undone; in other words—with an incredulous ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson

... called by Ruskin the "'Queen of the Air,' in the heavens, in the earth, and in the heart"; is said to have been the conception of Metis, to have issued full-armed from the brain of Zeus, and in this way the child of both wisdom and power; wears a helmet, and bears on her left arm the aegis with the Medusa's head; the olive among trees, and the owl among ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... been convinced that the only way to insure the friendship and assistance of your surrounding acquaintance is to convince them you do not require it, for when once the petrifying aspect of distress and penury appear, whose qualities, like Medusa's head, can change to stone all that look upon it; when once this Gorgon claims acquaintance with us, the phantom of friendship, that before courted our notice, will vanish into unsubstantial air, and the whole world ...
— Charlotte Temple • Susanna Rowson

... sinks Italian submarine Medusa, this being the first instance on record of the sinking of one undersea boat by another; German Admiralty announces the loss of the submarine U-14, her crew being captured by the British; Athens reports that ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various









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