|
|
|
More "Sphinx" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of things that they are not," said Hadria, "especially to men. A poor benighted man might as well try to get on to confidential terms with the Sphinx, as to learn the real thoughts and ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... Wyoming folded distant and near things, and all Separ but those three inside the lighted window were in bed. Dark windows were everywhere else, and looming above rose the water-tank, a dull mass in the night, and forever somehow to me a Sphinx emblem, the vision I instantly see when I think of Separ. Soon I heard a door creaking. It was Billy, coming alone, and on seeing me he walked up and spoke in ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister
... listening to the grim sphinx clock on the black marble chimneypiece, as it remorselessly ticked away his last few moments of home-life, and he ingeniously set himself to crown his sorrow by reviving recollections of ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... of theft is stopp'd: Love's feeling is more soft and sensible, Than are the tender horns of cockled snails; Love's tongue proves dainty Bacchus gross in taste; For valour, is not love a Hercules, Still climbing trees in the Hesperides? Subtle as Sphinx; as sweet and musical, As bright Apollo's lute, strung with his hair; And when love speaks, the voice of all the gods Makes heaven drowsy with the harmony. Never durst poet touch a pen to write, Until his ink were temper'd with love's sighs; ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... what if it was human-faced like the Sphinx? There's no riddle to solve, whate'er the world thinks: The fiat that made it, from its heels to its hair, Wasn't simply 'Be man!' but 'Stand ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... whole visible world on a march one needs to go to a really large desert. The Pyramids and the Sphinx have been partly buried, and parts of the valley of the Nile threatened, by hordes of sand hills marching in from the desert; cities have been buried and harbors filled up. Many of the harbors of the ancient civilizations are mere miasmatic ...
— Among the Forces • Henry White Warren
... was a man trained as few men are trained to meet emergencies, to face crises with an impassiveness of countenance that would shame the Sphinx. He had lost thousands across the green cloth of gambling-tables without batting an eye. He had faced death and had killed men with a face absolutely devoid of expression, and upon numerous occasions his nerve—the consummate sang-froid of ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... feeling of astonishment on account of the vast energy, courage and industry of the men of old who could vanquish such gigantic difficulties. At the same time it will not do to assume that the Egyptian stone cutters were not artists. The great Sphinx of Giseh, huge as it is, is far from being a primitive and vulgar creation. "The portions of the head which have been preserved," says Mr. Charles Blanc, "the brow, the eyebrows, the corners of the eyes, the passage from the temples to the cheek-bones, and from the cheek-bones to the cheek, ...
— The Bay State Monthly - Volume 2, Issue 3, December, 1884 • Various
... his cell he pointed out with his finger the immense church of Notre-Dame, which, outlining against the starry sky the black silhouette of its two towers, its stone flanks, its monstrous haunches, seemed an enormous two-headed sphinx, seated in the middle ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... if the forces of the ancient valour fell away to right and left; and there opened a grand, smooth granite road right to the gate of Paris, down which the great Germania moved like a tall, unanswerable sphinx, whose pride could destroy all things and survive them. In her train moved, like moving mountains, Cyclopean guns that had never been seen among men, before which walled cities melted like wax, their mouths set insolently upwards ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... "Great Sphinx of Egypt!" said the youth to himself. "Have I got to keep the secrets of each one from all the others? And without even having the satisfaction of knowing what ...
— Her Mother's Secret • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... two girls entered Miss Patricia's room, Sally, accompanied by her sister, whose existence on earth she refused to recognize, considered that Miss Patricia appeared as implacable as a stone image. Yet one could scarcely compare her to the Sphinx. That ancient stone figure with the head of a woman and the body of a lioness looks as if she had devoted the many centuries since her creation to solving the riddles of ...
— The Campfire Girls on the Field of Honor • Margaret Vandercook
... alternate layers of the papyrus had adhered together and amalgamated into a substance identical with the old Egyptian parchment, though much coarser and rougher in quality. The girls were delighted with it. They borrowed a book on Egypt from Mr. Greville's library, and copied little pictures of the Sphinx, scarabs, Ra, the Sun god, and other appropriate bits, painting them in bold colors on their pieces of parchment, and feeling as if they had gone back a few thousand years in history, and were dwellers in Memphis or some other great city on the banks of the ...
— The Princess of the School • Angela Brazil
... the tent valance, a confused whirl of sastrugi leading in no direction particularly, a glistening sparkle here, there, and everywhere when the sun was shining, and the far distant land sitting Sphinx-like on the Western horizon, with its shaded white slopes, and its bare outcrops of black basalt. Wilson in our "South Polar Times" wrote some lines entitled, "The Barrier Silence"—sometimes the silence was broken ...
— South with Scott • Edward R. G. R. Evans
... Aryan races. This fact, which is so frequently referred to in Mr. Volney's writings, may perhaps solve the question as to the origin of all religions, and may even suggest a solution to the secret so long concealed beneath the flat nose, thick lips, and negro features of the Egyptian Sphinx. It may also confirm the statement of Dioderus, that "the Ethiopians conceive themselves as the inventors of divine worship, of festivals, of solemn assemblies, of sacrifices, and of every other ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... goddess, the work of Phidias, stood in the eastern chamber of the cella, and was composed of ivory and gold. It had but one rival in the world, the 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 ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... was convulsed with unquenchable laughter at that very bliss. My highest ecstacies could not bear down and silence the weight of my ridicule, which, in its turn, was powerless to prevent me from running into other and more gorgeous absurdities. I was double, not "swan and shadow," but rather, Sphinx-like, human and beast. A true Sphinx, I was a riddle ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... also pedestals supporting the figures of the Sphinx. Two magnificent flights of steps, several hundred feet long, all of granite, exceedingly well finished, and still in their places, are the only remains of a magnificent temple. In an angle of this platform where the temple stood, is the ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... practical statement of Nature's dual forces, and will prove of great value to Occult students. A rare treat is in store for you on The Sphinx and Pyramids of Egypt. Symbolism and Correspondence alone are worth many times the cost of this ...
— Within the Temple of Isis • Belle M. Wagner
... stretched his plump, white-clad legs towards the fire. Through the blackened shreds of the English papers the red glow beat upwards upon the beautiful, pallid, sphinx-like face—the face of a poet, of a philosopher—of anything rather than of a ruthless and ambitious soldier. I have heard folk remark that no two portraits of the Emperor are alike, and the fault does not ...
— Uncle Bernac - A Memory of the Empire • Arthur Conan Doyle
... who performed special services to the greater gods, like the Horae; and monsters, offspring of gods, like the gorgons, chimera, the dragon of the Hesperides, the Lernaean hydra, the Nemean lion, Scylla and Charybdis, the centaurs, the sphinx, and others. ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... they were complained of by the French government as libels; and the answer returned was, that the only means which the ministry possessed of punishing such offences, was by the verdict of a jury. The Attorney-general, in opening the case, described the paper. On its frontispiece, was a sphinx with a crown upon its head, the features closely resembling those of Bonaparte. A portion of the paper was devoted to a parody of the harangue of Lepidus against Sylla. It asks the French people, "Why they have fought against Austria, Prussia, Italy, England, ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... left was Tresca, director of the French National Conservatory of Arts and Trades; and next him, the sphinx of the committee—the most silent man I ever saw the rector of the Portuguese University of Coimbra. During the three months of our session no one of us ever heard him utter a word. Opposite was Jules Simon, eminent as an orator, philosopher, scholar, and man of ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... what questions has this Will to Truth not laid before us! What strange, perplexing, questionable questions! It is already a long story; yet it seems as if it were hardly commenced. Is it any wonder if we at last grow distrustful, lose patience, and turn impatiently away? That this Sphinx teaches us at last to ask questions ourselves? WHO is it really that puts questions to us here? WHAT really is this "Will to Truth" in us? In fact we made a long halt at the question as to the origin of ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... you come in time from the land of the sphinx," interrupted Jeanne gravely, and glancing intently at Micheline. "There is here, I assure you, a difficult enigma ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet
... and platinum. The Altai Mountains especially produce silver, and some gold, with lead and copper ores. The silver mines of this region were worked at a very early period, as is proved by the discovery of an excavation a thousand feet in length, from which a stone sphinx was dug up, corroborating a statement of Herodotus that the Scythians possessed mines of gold and silver, which, according to his account, were guarded by monsters and griffins. Baron Humboldt supposes that he referred to the bones of elephants, and other gigantic animals, ...
— The Mines and its Wonders • W.H.G. Kingston
... pressed till the iron railings cut her shoulders. She stretched the forefinger of her extended arm; at great peril of slipping forward and rasping her nose along the rails effected to scratch the top of the sphinx's head. ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... says of worming tobacco in Brazil: "The plants are much attacked by the caterpillar of a sphinx moth, which grows to a large size, and would completely devour the crop unless carefully picked off. Old men, and women, and children are therefore constantly employed going over a part of the field every day, and carefully examining the plants leaf by leaf till the insects ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... and closely compressed lips A strong aquiline nose and narrow bright blue eyes completed a physiognomy indicating great reserve and a remarkable degree of melancholy. It is no advantage to a man to possess a Sphinx-like head. The pretty faces apparently full of secrets offer easy deceptions, and one expects that the mouth when open will reveal all that the eyes seem to mean. One is half-angry and half-inclined to laugh when one discovers that the face of the Sphinx ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... anxious to see the Sphinx. Perhaps it would answer some of the family questions that troubled ...
— The Last of the Peterkins - With Others of Their Kin • Lucretia P. Hale
... silence that followed I could see Ajax pulling his moustache. Miss Birdie Dutton! Why, in the name of the Sphinx, should Jasperson have selected out of a dozen young ladies far more eligible Miss Birdie Dutton? She was our postmistress, a tall, dark, not uncomely virgin of some thirty summers. But, alas! one of her eyes ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... G.—The specimen you send is a sphinx moth, of which there are several varieties in the ...
— Harper's Young People, August 24, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... happy until he is in his grave," were the words of Solon. Here was a strong fresh proof of their truth. Every corpse is a sphinx of immortality. The sphinx in this sarcophagus might unveil its own mystery in the words which the living had himself ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... away then, leaving a smile behind her that would have coaxed the Sphinx, and rode down-street toward the ancient city on a big gray donkey guarded by two Bedouins ...
— The Lion of Petra • Talbot Mundy
... was a tingling at his finger-tips; to his startled senses the hut seemed to expand, to become a cavern, interminable and unfathomable, wide as the vaulted earth, filled with awful, shadowy places and strange, lurid lights. The mender of nets became a far-off sphinx-like figure. ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... whom the priest had just driven again to their rest on the second floor; past that sacred chamber on the third floor, and on up to the flume loft. There Monsieur De Bonaventure paused, with his head just above the boards, like a pleasant-faced sphinx. ...
— The Chase Of Saint-Castin And Other Stories Of The French In The New World • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... to know my views of the Sphinx, here they are. But I have only seen it once; and it is so extraordinarily well done, that it ought to be observed ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 2 (of 3), 1857-1870 • Charles Dickens
... her excitement, Damaris raised herself, from the small of her back, resting on her elbows, sphinx-like in posture, her hands and arms—from the elbows—stretched out in front of her across the pillows. Her face was flushed, her eyes blazed. There was storm and ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... will propound the general question, "What will you do with us, we hundreds of millions, who cannot keep pace with you?" If the New Republic emerges at all it will emerge by grappling with this riddle; it must come into existence by the passes this Sphinx will guard. Moreover, the necessary results of the reaction of irresponsible wealth upon that infirm and dangerous thing the human will, the spreading moral rot of gambling which is associated with irresponsible wealth, will have been working out, and will continue to work ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... men faced each other across the room. The yellow lamplight plainly revealed their different expressions. The Padre's smile was inimitable in its sphinx-like obscurity, but ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... sat still a moment, thinking, and gazing at the splendid Sphinx-browed creature before him with a mixture of hatred and respect. Then he ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... thought to-day lends a new emphasis. "We want," she said, "the touch of Christ's hand upon our literature, as it touched other dead things—we want the sense of the saturation of Christ's blood upon the souls of our poets that it may cry through them in answer to the ceaseless wail of the Sphinx of our humanity, expounding agony into renovation. Something of this has been perceived in art when its glory was at the fullest." It is this glory of divine sacrifice which is the Glory of the Trenches. It is because the writer recognises this that he is able to walk ...
— The Glory of the Trenches • Coningsby Dawson
... indifferent thy mind is to all except Lygia; how exclusively it is occupied with her, how it returns to her always, and circles above her, as a falcon above chosen prey. By Pollux! find her quickly, or that of thee which fire has not turned into ashes will become an Egyptian sphinx, which, enamored, as 'tis said, of pale Isis, grew deaf and indifferent to all things, waiting only for night, so as to gaze with stony eyes at ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... Frederic came across a small child with the strangest and most limited idea of full dress that probably ever occurred to mortal—a tiny coin strung on to one of her strong coarse hairs." Of the studies made during the journey, one is a woman's head, draped so as to have a singularly archaic and Sphinx-like effect. Another is the fine profile of a young peasant; and yet another, the head of an old ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys
... glad to hear about the Hedychium, and how soon you have got an answer! I hope that the wings of the Sphinx will hereafter prove to be bedaubed with pollen, for the case will then prove a fine bit of prophecy from the structure of a flower to special and new ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... of Darkness, lends you her cloak! Out!" Kenkenes cried, striking at his pet. The wary animal eluded the blow and for a moment revolved about another sphinx, pursued by his master, and then fled like a phantom out of the court by the path he came. By this time the priest had emerged from his refuge and was attempting to prevent the young man's interference with the will of ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... the riddle of the Sphinx, he solved it not—only delighted with pure pleasure of poetry and of subtle thought as he led one along the pathways of his Enchanted Garden, where I shall ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... naturse, he had precedent and regulation: but for arresting a mad Englishman, none. He held fully the opinion of his superiors, that there was no saying what an Englishman might not, could not, and would not do. He was a sphinx, a chimera, a lunatic broke loose, who took unintelligible delight in getting wet, and dirty, and tired, and starved, and all but lolled; and called the same "taking exercise:" who would see everything that ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... disguises. Now he is the most beautiful and noble of the Greek gods, Apollo; now he is Odin, with a single eye; now he is Hercules, the hero, with his twelve great labours for the good of men; now he is Oedipus, who met the Sphinx and solved her riddle. In the early times men saw how everything in the world about them drew its strength and beauty from the sun; how the sun warmed the earth and made the crops grow; how it brought gladness and hope and inspiration to men; and they made it the ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... slaves from Europe, in retaliation, to work upon their plantations in a cold climate near the South Pole—Arrives in England, and lays an account of his expedition before the Privy Council—Great preparations for a new expedition—The Sphinx, Gog and Magog, and a great company attend him—The ideas of Hilaro Frosticos respecting ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe
... him munching a sandwich and keeping his own eyes rather away from than on her own, she asked herself whether she had undertaken too much, and whether this sphinx-like face might hide danger for her. She at least knew it was far from being possible to tell by looking at the outside of a man's head what might be going on inside. Only the plight of her father's ...
— Laramie Holds the Range • Frank H. Spearman
... vines, and arrived at the broad and spacious portico. Before it, on either side of the steps, reposed the image of the Egyptian sphinx, and the moonlight gave an additional and yet more solemn calm to those large, and harmonious, and passionless features, in which the sculptors of that type of wisdom united so much of loveliness with awe; half way up the extremities of the steps darkened the green and massive foliage of ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... delights of this world, this beautiful garden of God, our inalienable inheritance. And therefore, because we have grasped so entirely all the consequences of that absolute spiritualism, we may believe that the Christian Catholic view of the world has reached its end. Every age is a sphinx, which casts itself into the abyss when man ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... smaller Purple-fringed Orchis, whose shorter spur holds out a certain prospect of reward; for, in these two cases, as in so many others, the flower's welcome for an insect is in exact proportion to the length of its visitor's tongue. Doubtless it is one of the smaller sphinx moths, such as we see at dusk working about the evening primrose and other flowers deep of chalice, and heavily perfumed to guide visitors to their feast, that is the great Purple-fringed Orchid's benefactor, since the length of its tongue is perfectly adapted to ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... itself is not the question as to the difference between the sexes, but the riddle: from where do children come? In a distorted form, which can easily be unraveled, this is the same riddle which was given by the Theban Sphinx. The fact of the two sexes is usually first accepted by the child without struggle and hesitation. It is quite natural for the male child to presuppose in all persons it knows a genital like his own, and to find it impossible to harmonize ...
— Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex • Sigmund Freud
... ("Fertilisation of Orchids," Edition II., page 163), is adapted to the visits of a moth with a proboscis of corresponding length. He points out that there is no difficulty in believing in the existence of such a moth as F. Muller has described ("Nature," 1873, page 223)—a Brazilian sphinx-moth with a trunk of 10 to 11 inches in length. Moreover, Forbes has given evidence to show that such an insect does exist in Madagascar ("Nature," VIII., 1873, page 121). The case of Angraecum ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... der Lieder at the poem in his preface—the song of the sphinx in the enchanted wood ... and how it clutched the seeker, the poet, to its monstrous but voluptuous woman's breasts as it ravished his soul with kisses. ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... ... across strange seas they call, Strange seas, and haunted coasts of time.... They startle me with wordless songs To which the Sphinx hath known the rhyme. ...
— Dreams and Dust • Don Marquis
... woman, or one of the Sphinx's children?" said a stormy, thrilling, imperious accent, from the wild purple and scarlet flower of the Strelitzia, that gradually shaped itself into gorgeous Oriental robes, rolled in waves of splendor from the lithe waist and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... Moses, starting; "no, he didn't; in fact, I had a pleasant call there; and there was that confounded old sphinx of a Miss Roxy there. Why don't she die? She must be somewhere near a hundred years old ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... matter of the outer cover for the next issue of The Aspirant, a henchman invaded his privacy. Sebastian looked over a pile of designs, and chose a flat but lurid young woman, in a sphinx-like attitude against a background of purple trees. Then came the more difficult question of an aphorism to be printed on the table against which the lurid young woman leaned. It was the habit of The Aspirant to convey, even on its outside, wisdom to the world, and ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... the bridge party Bernice strove in vain to master a rising uneasiness. She had offended Marjorie, the sphinx of sphinxes. With the most wholesome and innocent intentions in the world she had stolen Marjorie's property. She felt suddenly and horribly guilty. After the bridge game, when they sat in an informal circle and the conversation became ...
— Flappers and Philosophers • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... What is its future destined to be? Will it vanish away, will it pass into new phases, or will some form of it eventually receive the sanction of the nation? These are Sphinx questions, which one may be excused from endeavouring to answer, seeing that the strongest and most far-reaching heads are at this moment intent upon them—not, so far as can be seen, with any strikingly successful result. The ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... sat on the Prince's shoulder, and told him stories of what he had seen in strange lands. He told him of the red ibises, who stand in long rows on the banks of the Nile, and catch goldfish in their beaks; of the Sphinx, who is as old as the world itself, and lives in the desert, and knows everything; of the merchants, who walk slowly by the side of their camels, and carry amber beads in their hands; of the King of ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... a beetle; and this is the result. I will not tell you all the things I had found; I couldn't bear to describe them. Two such beauties of beetles—bright red wings, the body lilac blue, and glittering as any precious stone! Such a rare species! And an oleander-sphinx! And my magnificent caterpillar of the humming-bird moth!—you know, aunty, that one with yellow stripes and blue eye-spots. All trodden ...
— Gritli's Children • Johanna Spyri
... my charming sphinx," replied Podstadsky. "The god of love alone shall hear the secrets which are to fall from your coral lips. But, first, let me remove this envious ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... our power to save Pierrot: a skilful doctor came to see him, felt his pulse, sounded his lungs, and ordered him ass's milk. He drank the prescribed beverage very readily out of his own especial china saucer. For hours together he lay stretched upon my knee, like the shadow of a sphinx. I felt his spine under my finger tips like the beads of a rosary, and he tried to respond to my caresses by a feeble purr that resembled a death-rattle. On the day of his death he was lying on his side panting, and suddenly, with a supreme ...
— Concerning Cats - My Own and Some Others • Helen M. Winslow
... away from it with a quick, light step, as though hastening to keep some pleasurable appointment. After all the years of weak, bewildered subjection, of defeat and humiliation, her turn had come; she had found the answer to the Sphinx's ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... unequalled solemnity, while her young and gracious face, exquisite in expression and contour, is full of queenly beauty. But there is still this atmosphere of mystery, an enigmatic aloofness in spite of the warm human sentiment. The Sphinx's faces, with all their traditions of secrecy, contribute their share to the cryptic environment. Donatello uses them as the supports of the throne on which the Madonna is seated; behind it are Adam and Eve in relief: in front she herself shows the New Adam to the multitude, on whom ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... following three or four days the two unfortunates were worked unceasingly. Mr. Thomson complained bitterly, but the cook wore a sphinx-like smile ...
— Lady of the Barge and Others, Entire Collection • W.W. Jacobs
... beautiful as by a magician's stroke,—or, above all, the new First Lord, who is resolved that he will really build us a fleet, purge the dock-yards, and save us half a million a year at the same time? Phineas Finn was bent on unriddling the Irish sphinx. Surely something might be done to prove to his susceptible countrymen that at the present moment no curse could be laid upon them so heavy as that of having to rule themselves apart from England; and he thought that this might be the easier, as he became from day to day more thoroughly convinced ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... whole European continent was his stage. At all times and under all circumstances he knew the precise attitude that would impress the spectators most and he understood what words would make the deepest impression. Whether he spoke in the Egyptian desert, before the backdrop of the Sphinx and the pyramids, or addressed his shivering men on the dew-soaked plains of Italy, made no difference. At all times he was master of the situation. Even at the end, an exile on a little rock in the middle of the Atlantic, a sick man at the ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... minded to try another ruse in his desire to defeat the intelligence of this woman. To this end, he asked Gilder and the District Attorney to withdraw, while he should have a private conversation with the prisoner. As she listened to his request, Mary smiled again in sphinx-like fashion, and there was still on her lips an expression that caused the official a pang of doubt, when, at last, the two were left alone together, and he darted a surreptitious glance toward her. Nevertheless, he pressed ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... has been made the Sphinx of this particular occasion. Every one has determined to put you off the scent. The word, among other acceptations, has that of mal [evil], a substantive that signifies, in aesthetics, the opposite of good; of mal [pain, disease, complaint], ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Part First • Honore de Balzac
... "Seven against Thebes," which seven were contemporary with the fathers of the heroes engaged in the Trojan war, it becomes necessary to add sixty or seventy years to the Trojan date, in order to obtain that of dipus and the Sphinx. Out of the Hebrew Scriptures, there is nothing purely historic so old as this.] story in the Pagan records, older by two generations than the story of Troy, is that of dipus and his mysterious fate, which wrapt in ruin both himself and all his kindred. No story whatever continued so ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... have many weighty reasons, and will commend my miserable life to God, even if I am imprisoned or banished." (7, 85.) In a letter of August 10 he speaks of the corruptions "which are found in the Augsburg sphinx," and declares that he is determined faithfully to guard the doctrine of the Gospel. (97.) August 13, 1548, he wrote to Medler: "Brenz, Nopus [Noppius], Musculus, learned, pious, and most deserving men, have been driven ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... potatoes were looking fine, however, the elder made no response—unless a gout of tobacco smoke could be so counted. With eyes screwed up and mouth drawn down, he gazed off into space—a Highland sphinx, a Gaelic Rhadamanthus. ...
— Quaint Courtships • Howells & Alden, Editors
... therefore among the most fearless fighters in the world, and always put in a tight place on the French front. There is one man at the enlisting depot[9] who is a wonderful being, and can size up a new recruit at a glance. He is known as "Le Sphinx." You must give him your real name and reason for joining the Legion, and in exchange he gives you a number by which henceforth you are known. He knows the secrets of all the Legion, and they are never divulged to a living soul; he never forgets, nor do they ever pass his lips. ...
— Fanny Goes to War • Pat Beauchamp
... hand is extended in rigid gesture of warning. Brown-gold hair grows thick about the angel's neck; the shadowed profile is outlined against the hard, sad sky; the expression of the face is deep and sphinx-like; he has come, it is clear, from vast realms of light, where uncertainty and doubt are unknown. The Dove passes by him towards the Virgin. Look upon her again, crouching in her white bed, her knees ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... the Republican candidate for lieutenant-governor. After his defeat and Grant's election, he became surveyor of the port of New York, a supporter of Conkling, and the champion of a second term for the President. His silence, deepened by cold, dull eyes, justified the title of "Sphinx," while his massive head, with bulging brows, indicated intellectual and executive power. He was not an educated man. Passing at an early age from his studies at Ithaca Academy into business no time was left him, if the disposition had been his, to specialise any branch of political economic ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... her round eyes again to the sunshine outside, while the cat reposed within her folded arms in lordly beatitude and sphinx-like meditation. ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... You're the White Hope, becomingly tinged with pink, of American Womanhood. You're the Queen of Hearts and all the rest of the trumps in the deck. You are also Cleopatra, and, and—Helen of Troy. But above all, of course, to me you are the Sphinx." ...
— Little Miss Grouch - A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith's - Maiden Transatlantic Voyage • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... crisis presses on us; face to face with us it stands, With solemn lips of question, like the Sphinx in Egypt's sands! This day we fashion Destiny, our web of Fate we spin; This day for all hereafter choose we holiness or sin; Even now from starry Gerizim, or Ebal's cloudy crown, We call the dews of blessing or the bolts ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... exposed to view. Here, after a lapse of 1,500 years, the visitor may tread the streets and pavements, handle the implements which the old Romans used, admire their well-turned arches, and see the paint and plaster upon the walls of their apartments. The "Old Wall," so long a sphinx by the roadside, suggesting enigmas to passers-by, has found an interpreter in revelations which the spade and pickaxe have made within its shadow. From the time when its walls first fell down, it has furnished plunder to the country round. The old monks, finding it easier to take down ...
— Handbook to the Severn Valley Railway - Illustrative and Descriptive of Places along the Line from - Worcester to Shrewsbury • J. Randall
... whose monarch is Oh, a person very dangerous to name. Northward dwell the Lepracauns and the Men of Hunger, whose king is Clobhair. My people, who are ruled by Chiron, live even further to the north. The Sphinx pastures on yonder mountain; and now the Chimaera is old and generally derided, they say that Cerberus visits the Sphinx at twilight, although I was never the person to ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... York loomed nearer, she began to regret that she had not spoken, had not at least questioned him about the hints she had gathered on the way. He did not know the two ladies next to her, he did not even, as it chanced, know Mrs. Lorin Boulger; but he knew New York, and New York was the sphinx whose riddle she must read ...
— Autres Temps... - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... forward, the beldame's glittering eye held his horse motionless. 'Good woman,' cried Hind, flinging her a crown, 'I am in haste; pray let me pass.' 'Sir,' answered the witch, 'three days I have awaited your coming. Would you have me lose my labour now?' And with Hind's assent the sphinx delivered her message: 'Captain Hind,' said she, 'your life is beset with constant danger, and since from your birth I have wished you well, my poor skill has devised a perfect safeguard.' With this she ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... mistake—a foul plot—a base fiction!—At least, so thought the worthy gentleman, who was as ignorant of any wrong done him as the lunatic that resides in the moon. Had the sea-serpent been discovered in the back pond, a gold-mine been found in the dust-bin, or a Sphinx and Centaur been captured in Lincoln's Inn Fields, Mr. Brown could not have been more astounded!—He knows it to be an imputation that can be disproved in a twinkling, if Mr. Police Inspector will just step next door with ...
— Christmas Comes but Once A Year - Showing What Mr. Brown Did, Thought, and Intended to Do, - during that Festive Season. • Luke Limner
... thinking about? Very wonderful things, no doubt! Unwritten history! Unfathomed mystery! Yet he laughs and cries, and eats and drinks, And chuckles and crows, and nods and winks, As if his head were as full of kinks And curious riddles as any sphinx! Warped by colic, and wet by tears, Punctured by pins, and tortured by fears, Our little nephew will lose two years; And he'll never know Where the summers go;— He need not laugh, ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... Sphinx confronted them, after all, when they arrived at the theatre, the Sphinx and Lady Dolly. The older feminine presentment sent her belittling gaze over their heads and beyond them from the curtain; Lady Dolly turned a modish head to ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... Thou dream-fast Love in raiment burning-red, Wreathed with white doves, quivered with burning gold? Pass with thy Triumph of Lovers, Aucassin, Tristram, and Pharamond, and Lancelot, Dante, and Rudel, all thy haughty kin, Princes in that high heaven, as we are not.— With some gilt couchant sphinx both casqued and crowned, All mailed in amethyst the new god comes, Whose brooding beautiful eyes at last have found Our uncanonical dark martyrdoms, Who from the sombre catacombs of these Brings his ...
— The Hours of Fiammetta - A Sonnet Sequence • Rachel Annand Taylor
... said poor Miss Burke. Yet she was already beginning to suspect that the sphinx-like utterance might contain both the kernel of eternal feminine truth and the real ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... the rejecting foreign woman moved till she was out of his sight. And she never looked back at him. That was a keen arrow in her quiver. He fell into a deep reverie under the arcade and his face became suddenly like the face of a sphinx. ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... construe dead tongues, or at least could when he left college a few months back, but now his life, the life of his crew, the salving of the dock, and the winning of a possible fortune, depended upon his answering the riddle of this Twentieth Century Sphinx. It was like attempting to understand all mathematics, from addition to ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... friends of mine who are just home from Egypt. They say that when they first saw the Sphinx they sat down and looked at it for two hours without uttering ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... Poets" confesses that he knows nothing of him save "some beautiful verses to his wife, dissuading her from accompanying him on his travels abroad (see p. 318), and some quaint riddles in verse, which the Sphinx could ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... bondage to their instincts and automatic reflexes, is there no way out anywhere? Is there perhaps some ground for hope and consolation in the thought that we, of the twentieth century, no longer see ourselves, Man, as something final and fixed? Darwin changed Fate from a static sphinx into a chameleon flux. Just as certainly as man has arisen from something whose bones alone remain as reminders of his existence, we are persuaded man himself is to be the ancestor of another creature, differing ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... metaphysics. Enamoured of repose above all things, he was from every side stung to inquiry which seldom indeed afforded what seemed solution. Hence, in part at least, it came that he had begun to study not merely how to avoid awakening the Sphinx, but by what opiates to keep her stretched supine with her lovely woman face betwixt her fierce lion-paws. This also, no doubt, had a share in his becoming the associate of Geoffrey Brotherton, from whose company, if he had been at peace with himself, he ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... puzzles is not known, nor is it at all probable that the mystery surrounding their inception will ever be cleared away. The fabled founder is the Sphinx of Egypt, who, the mythologists inform us, propounded the first enigma. 2. It is an invariable custom to notify our readers of the appearance of new serial stories, and therefore you will receive due notice of those written by your ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls - Volume VIII, No 25: May 21, 1887 • Various
... to time she glanced back at the guard. His face was imperturbable, even sphinx-like in its steadiness. She decided to hold him personally to account. At the earliest available moment she would demand an explanation of his conduct, threatening him if necessary. If he proved obdurate ...
— Beverly of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... woman of the world, thirty-three years of age—no deception, Morgan—and, knowing you have lived twenty-eight, I naturally suspect the existence of those chapters, you darling sphinx. And when I suddenly come across a poem from your pen about a sweet little girl, my suspicion becomes almost ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... Franconia Notch. We saw the Great Stone Profile, which influenced Hawthorne's life. I heard people speaking of it as the profile of an "old man," but to Jack's eyes and mine it was young with eternal youth, the youth of the gods. It gave us the same mysterious thrill that the Sphinx gives; and its gaze, reading what sky and mountains, cathedral forests and rushing rivers have to tell, holds the same Secret that's in the stone ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... at any rate, to have to come to this—that if we wanted a solution for our sphinx enigma, no OEdipus was likely to rise and find it for us; and that if we wanted help, we must take it for ourselves. This only we found, that if we sinned in our regard for the unworthy animal, we shared our sin with the largest number of our own sex; comforted with the sense of good ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... these eggs and note their rapid growth. Keep the larvae in a box in the school-room and feed them on tomato leaves. Note their size and colour, the oblique stripes on the sides, the horn which is used for terrifying assailants, the habit of remaining rigid for hours—hence the name sphinx moth. ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education
... endless lorries and Red Cross waggons and troops and dug-out camps. As we get closer the signs of shelling get worse, and children are seen no longer. Old men, though, occasionally observed working in a field quite unperturbed. Rarely a French soldier or an interpreter with his sphinx badges. All this quite lost on Hunt, who has "quite got used to abroad, thank you, sir." He is eating chocolate or something, half a horse-length ...
— Letters to Helen - Impressions of an Artist on the Western Front • Keith Henderson
... persistently shunned all English people. It would surely have been better to have placed her at an Italian school than among girls of her own nationality. Lorna, naturally morbid and over-sensitive, shrank yet deeper into her shell, and became more sphinx-like than ever. Her one bright spot at the Villa Camellia was her devotion to her buddy. Half a dozen other girls had at various periods tried to "take Lorna up," but all had promptly dropped her, declaring that they could not get any further, and ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... Parliament; and if the announcement bore also the condition that the Parliament should be free, that was a condition to which none could fairly object, and which did not seem to lessen the soundness of Monk's Republicanism. If his sphinx-like attitude proceeded more from inability to discern the line of least resistance, than from conscious dissimulation, or any deliberate concealment of a far-seeing policy, it nevertheless was pursued with much adroitness, and no other course of action could ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik
... to study. I confess to being one of those who believe that the human heart, even in the history of a race, may be worth infinitely more than the human intellect, and that it will sooner or later prove itself infinitely better able to answer all the cruel enigmas of the Sphinx of Life. I still believe that the old Japanese were nearer to the solution of those enigmas than are we, just because they recognized moral beauty as greater than intellectual beauty. And, by way of conclusion, I may venture to quote from an article ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... sphinx-like look of her level brows and calm mouth held for an instant, then her face quivered, grew tremulous and tender. Her hands made a blind, passionate movement, and as he caught her to him he heard her sobbing that she ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... Monument containing the Code of Hammurabi (British Museum, London). Khufu (Cheops), Builder of the Great Pyramid. Menephtah, the supposed Pharaoh of the Exodus. Head of Mummy of Rameses II (Museum of Gizeh). The Great Pyramid. The Great Sphinx. A Phoenician War Galley. An Assyrian. An Assyrian Relief (British Museum, London). The Ishtar Gate, Babylon. The Tomb of Cyrus the Great. Darius with his Attendants. Rock Sepulchers of the Persian Kings. A Royal Name in Hieroglyphics (Rosetta Stone). ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... when she was still questioning the Sphinx instead of trying to find an answer to it, she ventured to tax her husband ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... England," writes Mr Kipling in one of his Indian tales, "spend a few weeks in India, walk round this great sphinx of the Plains, and write books upon its ways and its work, denouncing or praising it as their ignorance prompts. Consequently all the world knows how the Supreme Government conducts itself. But no one, not even the Supreme Government, ...
— Rudyard Kipling • John Palmer
... vertically slitted in jet into the midmost of amazing opals of greenish yellow, the eyes roved the room. They alighted on Cocky. Instantly the head portrayed that the cat had stiffened, crouched, and frozen. Almost imperceptibly the eyes settled into a watching that was like to the stony stare of a sphinx across aching and eternal desert sands. The eyes were as if they had so stared for ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... dramatic productions here brought together. A great deal has been done by a succession of editors to reduce the errors of the printer or copyist to a minimum; but, after all, there are places where it would require the assistance of the Sphinx to supply a chasm, or rectify a ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Volume I. • R. Dodsley
... Terrible and the Sphinx, had been appointed to accompany and aid the Great Eastern on her important mission. A gun was fired, and signals were made, to acquaint these with what had occurred while the fires were being got up in the boilers ...
— The Battery and the Boiler - Adventures in Laying of Submarine Electric Cables • R.M. Ballantyne
... Buch der Lieder at the poem in his preface—the song of the sphinx in the enchanted wood ... and how it clutched the seeker, the poet, to its monstrous but voluptuous woman's breasts as it ravished his soul with kisses. And the nightingale ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... to an Acolyte making his bacca light, A fleet-footed youth who could run like a crack o' light. "Run, Abraham, run! Hunt him over the plain, And drive back the brute to the desert again. The Sphinx is a-watching, the Pyramids frown on you, From those granite tops forty cent'ries look down on you— Run, Abraham, run! I'll bet half-a-crown on you." So Abraham ran; like a man did he go for him, But the goat made it clear each ...
— Saltbush Bill, J.P., and Other Verses • A. B. Paterson
... already walking and talking. He saw the watch below of stokers and trimmers bobbing out of the forecastle doors like rabbits from a warren and making their way aft over the rusty deck to the mustering of the port doctor. They were Chinese, with expressionless, Sphinx-like faces, and they walked in peculiar shambling fashion, dragging their feet as if the clumsy brogans were too heavy for their ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London
... but the bent and grizzled old woman Sally, who now came forward. She looked with blank brown eyes at the new-comer, herself inscrutable as the Sphinx. If she commented mentally on the droop of the young woman's mouth and eyes, at least she said nothing. It was not her place to ask what white folk did, or why. She took up the traveling-bags and led the way up the narrow stairway which made out of ...
— The Purchase Price • Emerson Hough
... Robespierre’s visions, had been for some time gathering in the corners of the room warned me that the hour had come for my trip back to Paris. Declining reluctantly an invitation to take potluck with my host, I was soon in the Avenue of the Sphinx again. As we strolled along, talking of the past and its charm, a couple of men passed us, carrying a piece of furniture rolled ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... Patty's Place next winter, too," she wrote. "Maria and I are going to run over Egypt. I want to see the Sphinx once ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... As she made this sphinx-like remark, Mr. Horace Clapp wished she would relinquish the pursuit of wealth long enough to put her work down and let him ...
— A Bookful of Girls • Anna Fuller
... and all his features became in quick succession types of thought and exponents of hidden feelings, while his inquisitive nose stood forth in the midst of their ceaseless play like a perpetual interrogation point that would have electrified the Sphinx into life, and set its stone lips gabbling answers ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putman Serviss
... went away healed. Clive was a Theosophist: all men were her brothers, and all women her sisters; but those especially among art-workers who fell by the wayside might share her bread and blanket. They called her Old Mother Sphinx, because of her inscrutable eyes, and the tenderness of ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... that the winds blow over, And none may fathom nor understand The charm it holds for the restless rover; A great grey chaos — a land half made, Where endless space is and no life stirreth; And the soul of a man will recoil afraid From the sphinx-like visage that Nature weareth. But old Dame Nature, though scornful, craves Her dole of death and her share of slaughter; Many indeed are the nameless graves Where her victims ...
— Rio Grande's Last Race and Other Verses • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... sixty-eight, and I have no more of it than at twenty-eight[1001].' BOSWELL. 'But, Sir, would not you wish to know old age? He who is never an old man, does not know the whole of human life; for old age is one of the divisions of it.' JOHNSON. 'Nay, Sir, what talk is this?' BOSWELL. 'I mean, Sir, the Sphinx's description of it;—morning, noon, and night. I would know night, as well as morning and noon.' JOHNSON. 'What, Sir, would you know what it is to feel the evils of old age? Would you have the gout? Would you have decrepitude?'—Seeing him heated, I would not argue any farther; but I was confident ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... Kilda. Then he polishes the drunk one off with chloroform, gets out of the cab, jumps into another, and after getting out at Powlett Street, vanishes—that's the riddle I've got to find out, and I don't think the Sphinx ever had a harder one. There are three things to be discovered—First, who is the dead man? Second, what was he killed for? And third, who ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... said Henrietta, "they are bringing Mademoiselle de Tonnay-Charente and her sphinx butterfly in grand ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... first, Ralph persevered so faithfully in acquiring a knowledge of his new duties, that he slowly won the approval of every one on board, unless it might have been the captain. Gary preserved a sphinx-like attitude, never sparing the boy, never praising him, nor manifesting by any sign an atom of that feminine graciousness of manner that had on shore ...
— Ralph Granger's Fortunes • William Perry Brown
... roared Perrin. "Mademoiselle Croizette's words: 'You love me, then!' and her kiss must have this moonlight. She is playing the Sphinx; that is the chief part in the play, and we must leave ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... see how she received the bad news. Marjorie's desire to cry left her. She leaned back in her seat and assumed an air of indifference far removed from her real state of mind. Then she calmly refolded the letter and placed it in its envelope with the impassivity of a young sphinx. ...
— Marjorie Dean High School Freshman • Pauline Lester
... rubbish near the bottom of a chamber, several ivory ornaments upon which were traces of gilding: among them was the figure of a man in long robes, carrying in one hand the Egyptian crux ansata—part of a crouching sphinx—and flowers designed with ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal, No. 421, New Series, Jan. 24, 1852 • Various
... being reached, the matter was further gone into. The solicitor, by adroit questioning, drew from Jimmie various bits of information relating to the accused man's past life. His own opinion—he had read all the papers—Mr. Tenby held in reserve behind a sphinx-like countenance, nor did he vouchsafe it when it was finally settled that he should ...
— In Friendship's Guise • Wm. Murray Graydon
... the sphinx question put to every thinking man, and on his answer hangs his life. For according to that answer, he will either flinch and turn back, or expend every drop of blood and grain of power in urging on ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... the discipline is of the severest. They are therefore among the most fearless fighters in the world, and always put in a tight place on the French front. There is one man at the enlisting depot[9] who is a wonderful being, and can size up a new recruit at a glance. He is known as "Le Sphinx." You must give him your real name and reason for joining the Legion, and in exchange he gives you a number by which henceforth you are known. He knows the secrets of all the Legion, and they are never divulged to a living ...
— Fanny Goes to War • Pat Beauchamp
... the voice of God; but these are old and worn with journeying—men and women who have outlived passions and ambitions and the fire heats of love, and who now, girt about with memories, stand face to face with the sphinx Eternity. ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... last two weeks. We're quite pals! I'm for playing the luck every time! When the jewels showed up to-day, I figured that to-night's the night—see? Cloran and I are going to supper together at the Silver Sphinx at about eleven o'clock—and this is where you shed the Gypsy Nan stuff, and show up as your own sweet self. Cloran'll be ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... there!"—and upon this Mr. Herbert pointed with his finger to Mr. Disraeli sitting on the Treasury Bench. The sting of invective is truth, and Mr. Herbert certainly spoke daggers if he used none; yet the Chancellor of the Exchequer sat impassive as a Sphinx. ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... of the poet is to present in a clear, comprehensive and palpable form the sphinx riddle of human existence, his work abounds nevertheless in a variety of interesting data, which throw considerable light upon the philosophical and theological theories in vogue among the thoughtful spirits of the Jewish community. ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon
... waning of the heroic world In the Nibelungen-lied the final event is a great calamity that is akin to a half historical event of the North. Odin descends to the nether world to consult Hela; but she, like the sphinx of Thebes, will not reply save in an enigma, which enigma is to entail terrible tragedies, and lead to destruction the young hero who is the prey of ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... four Engravings: 1.—The Invitation, with the Emperor and the Empress, and the Buff-tip Moth writing the Cards.—2. The Dance, with the Sphinx Hippophaes, the Pease Blossom, the Mouse, the Seraph, Satellite, Magpie, Gold Spangle, Foresters, Cleap Wings, &c.—3. The Alarm.—4. The Death's Head Moth. These are beautifully lithographed by Gauci. Their colouring, after Nature, is delightfully ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 471, Saturday, January 15, 1831 • Various
... MAL has been made the Sphinx of this particular occasion. Every one has determined to put you off the scent. The word, among other acceptations, has that of mal [evil], a substantive that signifies, in aesthetics, the opposite of good; of mal [pain, disease, complaint], ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Part First • Honore de Balzac
... all tides of feeling and all outbursts of passion. They are not even shocked at vulgarity. They are simply indifferent. They are calm, visibly calm, painfully calm; and it is not the eternal, majestic calmness of the Sphinx either, but a rigid, self-conscious repression. You would like to put a bent pin in their chair when they are about calmly ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... and saintly court chaplain, Spener, Liana at last brought her perplexities. Here the history moves in veils. How he extorted from her the promise to renounce her Albano for ever is a mystery watched and hidden by the Great Sphinx of the ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VII • Various
... affably everyone he knew, he maintained a frank demeanour on all subjects, especially of Government policy, secretly enjoying the surmises and prognostications, so pleasantly wide of the mark, and the way questions and hints perished before his sphinx-like candour. He spoke cheerily too of Miltoun, who was 'all right again,' and 'burning for the fray' when the House met again in the autumn. And he chaffed Lord Malvezin about his wife. If anything—he said—could ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... soberly quiet walls, to indulge in fancies about the secrets, financial and political, which must be discussed and locked up in human breasts there—to him the magic address, New Court, St. Swithin's Lane, was as full of potential mystery as the Sphinx is to an imaginative traveller. He glanced at its gates and at its sign now with an almost youthful awe and reverence—the reverence of the man of considerable wealth for the men of enormous wealth—and while his eyes were thus busy a taxi-cab came ...
— The Rayner-Slade Amalgamation • J. S. Fletcher
... warrant our believing that they would in time discover the cause of the queen's inability to follow them through the trellis? They have a very nice sense of proportion, and of the space required for the movement of bodies. In the regions where the hideous death's-head sphinx, the acherontia atropos, abounds, they construct little pillars of wax at the entrance of the hive, so restricting the dimension as to prevent the passage of the nocturnal ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... shorter spur holds out a certain prospect of reward; for, in these two cases, as in so many others, the flower's welcome for an insect is in exact proportion to the length of its visitor's tongue. Doubtless it is one of the smaller sphinx moths, such as we see at dusk working about the evening primrose and other flowers deep of chalice, and heavily perfumed to guide visitors to their feast, that is the great purple-fringed orchid's benefactor, since the length ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... general question, "What will you do with us, we hundreds of millions, who cannot keep pace with you?" If the New Republic emerges at all it will emerge by grappling with this riddle; it must come into existence by the passes this Sphinx will guard. Moreover, the necessary results of the reaction of irresponsible wealth upon that infirm and dangerous thing the human will, the spreading moral rot of gambling which is associated with irresponsible wealth, ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... in the centre, and went off by gradations into smaller garnets by the thousand. They flashed their blood-red flames in the African sun, and the head of Ucatella, grand before, became the head of the Sphinx, encircled with a coronet of fire. She bestowed a look of rapturous gratitude on Staines, and then glided away, like the stately Juno, to admire herself in the nearest glass like any other coquette, black, brown, yellow, copper, ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... seen the things that are put up in the shop windows here with my name under them, I have been in wondering admiration at the boundless loving-kindness of my English and Scottish friends, in keeping up such a warm heart for such a Gorgon. I should think that the Sphinx in the London Museum might have sat for most of them. I am going to make a collection of these portraits to bring home to you. There is a great variety of them, and they will be useful, like the Irishman's guideboard, which showed where the road did ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... blue-and-silver, which became him, though he is somewhat stomachy for such conspicuous colors. A handsome man, I would have said, honest but not particularly intelligent.... Walpole, in a fit of spleen, once called him 'a porcelain sphinx,' and the phrase sticks; but, indeed, there is more of the china-doll about him. He possesses the same too-perfect complexion, his blue eyes have the same spick-and-span vacuity; and the fact that the right orb is a trifle larger than its fellow gives his countenance, in repose, ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... her eyes: the sphinx-like look of her level brows and calm mouth held for an instant, then her face quivered, grew tremulous and tender. Her hands made a blind, passionate movement, and as he caught her to him he heard her sobbing that she ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... riddle of this new Sphinx, or be devoured. Though Mr. Lincoln's policy in this critical affair has not been such as to satisfy those who demand an heroic treatment for even the most trifling occasion, and who will not cut their coat according to their cloth, unless they can borrow the scissors ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... he had yet to learn its nature. He began to think with strange sadness over the hopes of the world, the young children. He saw them in his vision grow up, bear the burden in silence or ignorance; he saw how they joined in dragging onward that huge sphinx which men call civilization; there was no time for loitering amid the beautiful, for if one paused it was but to be trampled by the feet of the many who could not stay or rest, and the wheels of the image ground that soul ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... plan of reading them as we read Tennyson's In Memoriam, for instance, or the Sonnets from the Portuguese, by Mrs. Browning. In Mr. R.G. White's admirable edition of Shakespeare he confesses that he has no opinion upon the subject: "Mr. Thomas Thorpe appears in his dedication as the Sphinx of literature, and thus far he has not met his Oedipus." But herein have we not the main difficulty stated? The first great error committed by almost all students of the Sonnets, if we may be pardoned ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... could speak or move, or even stretch forth her hands to stay him, the seat before her was empty and darkness had filled the place where but an instant previous he had sat, a fearsome figure, erect and rigid as a sphinx. ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... just left met my scrutiny with a cold, impassive stare of its own—its look might have been the stare of the sphinx or of a good poker player. It gave no sign. My eyes traveled up to the roof, then back again to the ground, and only when my glance dropped did I see for the second time the lurking figure ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... doesn't understand," I protested, glancing at Miss Lyberg. I could have sworn that I detected a gleam in the woman's eyes and that the sphinx-like attitude of dull incomprehensibility suggested a strenuous effort. "She doesn't understand anything. She doesn't ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... because his great-grandfather was a Cheshire Cat, his smile gave him a wise and jovial look, as if the Sphinx of Egypt should suddenly see a joke. With a good heart he went daintily on his way, shaking the snow from his paws at times, until he reached the village green. Now in the middle of the green stood the pump, made of wood with a flat top. On this Tommie ...
— The Faery Tales of Weir • Anna McClure Sholl
... through the State to Henry Clay? It was not in the boy's blood to be driven an inch, and no one tried to drive him. In his own home he was a spectre of gnawing anguish to his mother and Margaret, of unspeakable bitterness and disappointment to his father, and an impenetrable sphinx to Dan. For in Dan there was no shaking doubt. He was the spirit, incarnate, of the young, unquestioning, unthinking, generous, ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox
... trying to tell its secret to the darkness. What depths, what subtleties, what unfailing revelations of beauty, and surely, too, of love, there were in Nature! And yet in Nature what terrible indifference there was: a powerful, an almost terrific inattention, like that of the sphinx that gazes at what men cannot see. Hermione moved away from the house. She walked to the brow of the island and sat down on the seat that Vere was fond of. Presently she would go to the bridge and look over into the ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... is represented by the Sphinx, had doubtless been adored as a pure abstraction, her worship being that of the universal female principle in Nature. She is pictured as the "Eldest Daughter of the Mythologies," and as "The Great First Cause." She represented the past and the future. She ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... been answered by our knowledge of their structure and mode of growth. The great works of Herold on the evolution of a caterpillar; of Lyonet on the anatomy of the Cossus; of Newport on that of the Sphinx; and of Siebold on the parthenogenesis of insects, are proofs that the moths have engaged the attention of some of the master ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... as those with which he had cursed the tules; and suddenly they stopped, checked by the Chinaman's expression. It was neither angry or alarmed, but intently observant, the eyes unblinking—an imperturbable, sphinx-like face against which the flood of ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... purely ornamental; whether, if it be purely ornamental, it may not weaken or obscure the general design; and finally, whether, if we decide to use it, we should do so grossly and notably, or in some conventional disguise: are questions of plastic style continually rearising. And the sphinx that patrols the highways of executive art has no more unanswerable ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... has petered out?" he asked Keith, with palpable suspicion. Keith glanced swiftly at Sandy sitting across the table from him in the little directors' room back of the bank proper. Sandy sat sphinx-like. As if by accident, his hands were on his hips, the fingers resting on his gun butts. Keith did not actually fear gunplay, but he was not sure of what Sandy might do. Sam's bullet, that had undoubtedly been ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... sense of the soul being near the surface of life. There is the same love of mystery and of symbolism; and in both may be observed the tendency to create strange composite figures to typify transcendental ideas, the sphinx seeming a blood-brother to the gargoyle. The conditions under which each architecture flourished were not dissimilar, for each was formulated and controlled by small well-organized bodies of sincerely religious and highly ...
— The Beautiful Necessity • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... their time—led with a curse or a jest on their tongues, and in their souls an unswerving faith in the God of Chance. But that merciful deity had been shut out from the present deal. They studied the face of Malemute Kid, but they studied as one might the Sphinx. As the quiet minutes passed, a feeling that speech was incumbent on them began to grow. At last the howl of a wolf-dog cracked the silence from the direction of Forty-Mile. The weird sound swelled with all the pathos of a breaking heart, then died ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London
... visible world on a march one needs to go to a really large desert. The Pyramids and the Sphinx have been partly buried, and parts of the valley of the Nile threatened, by hordes of sand hills marching in from the desert; cities have been buried and harbors filled up. Many of the harbors of the ancient civilizations ...
— Among the Forces • Henry White Warren
... the mud, still the beautiful sphinx, crouching in her seat, her eyes wandering aimlessly over the miry landscape. Of what is she thinking? What is she watching on those muddy roads, growing dim in the fading light, with that frown on her brow and that lip curled in disgust? Is she awaiting her destiny? ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... furniture of my museum, there was hidden away a unique thing that represented my first attempt at a journal. It looked like a sibyl's conjuring book, or an Assyrian manuscript; a seeming endless strip of paper was rolled upon a reed; at the head of this there were two varieties of the Egyptian sphinx and a cabalistic star drawn in red ink,—and under these mysterious signs I wrote down, upon the full length of the paper and in a cipher of my own invention, daily events and reflections. A year later, however, because of the labor involved in transcribing the cryptographic ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... a sculptor to imagine. Six feet tall,—strength and grace united throughout her whole figure from neck to heel; with that clear black skin which is beautiful to any but ignorant or prejudiced eyes; and the smooth, pleasing, solemn features of a sphinx,—she looked to me, as she towered there in the gold light, a symbolic statue of Africa. Seeing me smoking one of those long thin Martinique cigars called bouts, she begged one; and, not happening to have another, I gave her the price of a bunch of twenty,—ten sous. ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... an astonishing position, dominated by vast inaccessible ridges. Leaving the so-aptly named "Dead Man's Gully" on the left, you look up to the "Sphinx," that perfect position of the sniper, climb to "Battleship Hill," and then to Chunuk Bair. In an hour or so you may walk all the way we ever got. And we did not need to have got much further than Chunuk Bair. Down ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... by the intense bitterness in his tone. Truly this man, with his lightning changes from boorish incivility to whole-hearted hospitality, from apparently impenetrable reserve to an almost desperate outspokenness, was as incomprehensible as any sphinx. ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... phantasy (Indian or Brahmanical), and of being in self (Buddhistic). In the Persian (Zoroastrian) religion of light, the Syrian religion of pain, and the Egyptian religion of enigma, is prepared the way for the transformation into the religion of freedom. The Greek solves the riddle of the Sphinx by apprehending himself ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... and Mother and little cousins—Oh, no, that's what I say at night." Roger's voice now altered, assuming shrill singsong cadences. His pensive gravity would have appeared excessive if manifested by the Great Sphinx. "What I meant to say was that once upon a time when the Battle of Gettysburg was going on and houses were being robbed and burned, and my dear grandfather was being shot through the heart, a certain house, where ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... tell me, what did you guess after all?" said Porthos, settling himself into an armchair and assuming the airs of a sphinx. ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... risk a full load in the canoes, so we carried a part of our outfit over the ridge to a point where the river narrowed and deepened, then ran the rapid and picked up our stuff below. Not far from here we passed a hill whose head took the form of a sphinx and we noted it as a remarkable landmark. Stopping but once to climb a mountain for specimens, at twelve o'clock we landed on a sandy beach where Babewendigash River emptied its waters into Seal Lake. We could hardly believe our good fortune, and while Pete cooked dinner I climbed a hill to satisfy ...
— The Long Labrador Trail • Dillon Wallace
... matter of weeks. Mentally—the doctor was not so sure. The boy had gone through a terrible experience, and one which was still continuing—might continue no one knew how long. We were, said the doctor, up against a trick played by the great Sphinx, Nature, and one which, so far as he knew, had never before taken place in the ...
— Disowned • Victor Endersby
... like the Chancelier de l'Hopital on the peristyle of the Chamber of Deputies, Pillerault—a philosopher prepared for all events, and showing upon his countenance the wisdom of an Egyptian sphinx—was talking to Derville and his niece in a suppressed voice. Constance thought it best to consult the lawyer, whose discretion was beyond a doubt. With the balance-sheet written in her head, she explained ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... haff by chance with my cultivator among your potatoes already twenty pupae of the magnificent moth, Sphinx Atropos, upturned! See! Regard them, mademoiselle! What lucky chance! What fortune for me, an entomologist, this wonderful sphinx moth to discover encased ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... myself, in behalf of Veronica, whose calm face baffled me, "Enigma, Sphinx"; she turned to Desmond, holding out her right arm, and said, "You are the man ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... soul? To me it seems hopelessly inscrutable, and all effort to elucidate it, like the language of the Son of Maia, 'by night bringeth darkness before the eyes, and in the daytime nought clearer.' I shall as soon expect to wrest her buried secrets from the Sphinx, or to revive the lost ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... quivered with burning gold? Pass with thy Triumph of Lovers, Aucassin, Tristram, and Pharamond, and Lancelot, Dante, and Rudel, all thy haughty kin, Princes in that high heaven, as we are not.— With some gilt couchant sphinx both casqued and crowned, All mailed in amethyst the new god comes, Whose brooding beautiful eyes at last have found Our uncanonical dark martyrdoms, Who from the sombre catacombs of these Brings his ...
— The Hours of Fiammetta - A Sonnet Sequence • Rachel Annand Taylor
... the 'earnest' sage may scan, Portentious bore! their 'many-sided' man; A weak eclectic, groping, vague and dim, Whose every angle is a half-starved whim, Blind as a mole and curious as a lynx, Who rides a beetle which he calls a 'Sphinx.' ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... often hears of a "humming-bird" going the rounds of the garden, but at this hour it is usually the sphinx-moth hovering above the flower-beds — the one other creature besides the bee for which the bird is ever mistaken. The postures and preferences of this beautiful large moth make the mistake ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... to Thebes. The Sphinx is there; And thou shalt see her beauty rare, And thee the sorcery of her smile To read ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... my duty to deliver an opinion as to the possibility or on the prospects of an alliance with Germany, for I am as little acquainted as any here present with the intentions and plans of the German Emperor. William II. is the greatest sphinx of our age. He talks much, and his speeches give the impression of complete sincerity; but who can guess what is really behind them? That he has formulated a fixed programme as his life's work, and that he is the man to carry it out, regardless ...
— The Coming Conquest of England • August Niemann
... solemn functions the shop-girl would read with greedy envy, but the women who attended them would be half asleep behind their jewelled fans. It was typified to Montague by Mrs. Billy Alden's yachting party on the Nile; yawning in the face of the Sphinx, and playing bridge beneath the shadow of the pyramids—and counting the crocodiles and proposing to jump in by ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... all the claims our times avow, The ancient Sphinx still keeps the porch of shade; And comes Despair, whom not her calm may cow, And coldly on that adamantine brow Scrawls undeterred his bitter pasquinade. But Faith (who from the scrawl indignant turns) With blood warm oozing from her wounded ...
— John Marr and Other Poems • Herman Melville
... faultless monster which the world ne'er saw," but inscrutable as the Sphinx, whom it were vain, or worse, to question of the whence and whither. Under the other, the perfection of Nature, if relative, is multifarious and ever renewed; and much that is enigmatical now may find explanation in some ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... barbaric wares in which the shops abound, and, like the woods and the wild faces of the cliffs and precipices, help to keep the cataract remote, and to invest it with the charm of primeval loneliness. This group were women, and they sat motionless on the ground, smiling sphinx-like over their laps full of bead-work, and turning their dark liquid eyes of invitation upon the passers. They wore bright kirtles, and red shawls fell from their heads over their plump brown cheeks and down their ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... through the German lines. That was precisely the way that the Germans had just forbidden me to go. But this accomplice (if such she was) got no rise out of me. To all intents I was stone-deaf. Compared to me, she would have found the Sphinx garrulous indeed. She may have been as harmless as a dove but, after my escapade, I wouldn't have talked to my own mother without a written permit from the military governor. The Kaiser himself would have found it hard work breaking through my cast-iron spy-proof armor of formality. I had good reason, ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... singularly calm, watched this extraordinary scene that was like a menagerie in which the tamer himself had become a wild beast. From another corner, Rouletabille kept his eyes fixed on Natacha who ignored him. Ah, that girl, sphinx to them all! Even to him who thought a while ago that he could read things invisible to other vulgar men in her features, in her eyes! The impassive face of that girl whose father they had tried ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux
... astonishing number of things that they are not," said Hadria, "especially to men. A poor benighted man might as well try to get on to confidential terms with the Sphinx, as to learn the real thoughts and wishes of ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... planted on the Egyptian sands," reflected Miss Clarkson once, as she glanced at him. "He'd make a dear little brother to the Sphinx." She stopped a train-boy passing through the car and bought him a small box of chocolates, which he ate uninterruptedly, somewhat as the tiny hand of a clock marks the seconds. Later she presented him with ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... matter why, No matter how, in one who ought to dwell Fixed to the solid upper sphere, my friends, Would never be forgiven." Dancey stared In mute amazement, but that mask of gold Outstared him, sphinx-like, and inscrutable. ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes
... your Bodley pap Whence all the spice is spent! The splendour of its primal tap Was gone when Aubrey went; Behold that subtle Sphinx prepare Fresh liquors fit ...
— The Battle of the Bays • Owen Seaman
... and God be with him! as surely He will be, if the simple, faithful prayers of fair, sad Hepsy Ann are heard. Thus will he, thus only can any, solve that sphinx-riddle of life which is propounded to each passer to-day, as of old in fable-lands,—failing to read which, he dies the death of rusting discontent,—solving whose mysteries, he has revealed to him the deep secret of his life, and sees ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... was put to as part of the Exhibition. Looking at the jewels of Queen Aahotep, who lived and was lovely in the days of the Patriarchs, he pondered sadly over all that had been in the world and was no more. He pictured in fancy the black locks that had scented this diadem with the sphinx's head, the slim brown arms these, beads of gold and lapis lazuli had touched, the shoulders that had worn these vulture's wings, the peaked bosoms these chains and gorgets had confined, the breast that had once communicated ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... the subject, by being made the means of expression of a particular tendency. Instead of taking a passion for Rene, indeed, future generations will scorn and wonder at him; instead of a hero they will see in him a pathological case; but the work itself, like the Sphinx, will endure. A work of art will bear all kinds of interpretations; each in turn finds a basis in it, while the work itself, because it represents an idea, and therefore partakes of the richness and complexity which belong to ideas, suffices for all and survives all. A portrait proves whatever ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the afternoon the plaited corolla of this long trumpet-shaped flower expands to welcome the sphinx moths. So deep a tube implies their tongues; not that these are the benefactors to which the blossom originally adapted itself - they were doubtless left behind in Asia - but apparently our moths make ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... testified surprise or any other emotion, at the discovery that white men had settled close to their 'sugar-bush,' and of course become joint proprietors. The inscrutable sphinx-like calm of these countenances, the strangeness of this savage life, detained Robert most of the afternoon as by a sort of fascination. Andy's wrath at the male indolence was renewed by finding that the squaw and her girls had to cut and carry all the firewood ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... he went away, nor was he thenceforward so assiduous in his visits; indeed, even when I began to get about again, he plainly feared and deprecated my society, not as in distaste, but much as a man might be disposed to flee from the riddling sphinx. The villagers, too, avoided me; they were unwilling to be my guides upon the mountain. I thought they looked at me askance, and I made sure that the more superstitious crossed themselves on my approach. At first I set this down to my heretical opinions; but it began at length to dawn upon me ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the payment that landlords demand Was a source of continual woe, When the tenant preferred to adhere to his land, And the agent preferred him to go: When their claims to adjust and the balance to strike Was a riddle to baffle the Sphinx,— But they're reconciled now, by resolving alike That they never will pay for ...
— Lyra Frivola • A. D. Godley
... these great fathers as regards chronology is especially reflected from the tables of Eusebius. In these, Moses, Joshua, and Bacchus,—Deborah, Orpheus, and the Amazons,—Abimelech, the Sphinx, and Oedipus, appear together as personages equally real, and their positions ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... standing by his horse looking after her straight, slender figure as she walked toward the gate. His face was still sphinx-like but there was a speculative look in his shrewd eyes. Bruce's success "meant so much to her," did it? That, then, was why she had come. The distance she had travelled for the purpose of seeing him had not impressed ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... he loves the Sphinx and does not harm her. They say that he does not dare to harm the Sphinx. She has borne him many gods whom ...
— Plays of Gods and Men • Lord Dunsany
... English (Lord Lyons) is the most sphinx; he is taciturn, reserved, listens more than he speaks; the others ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... "There was a Sphinx in olden times," said he, "that propounded a riddle, and he who failed to solve it had to die. Your riddle will be the death of me, for ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... John would. lie down on his stomach with his forepaws close to his nose, and his nose close to the ground; nor until the animal vanished could he be induced to abandon an attitude in which he resembled a couching Sphinx. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... brigade commanded by Colonel Celliers had been directed to cut the railway line between Jakalswater and Sphinx. He was to attack the former place after blocking the way, in case any reenforcements should be sent by the enemy from Windhoek. Celliers succeeded in cutting the railway and seized a train containing supplies for the Germans, but his attack on Jakalswater was a failure, and ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... one of the Sphinx's children?" said a stormy, thrilling, imperious accent, from the wild purple and scarlet flower of the Strelitzia, that gradually shaped itself into gorgeous Oriental robes, rolled in waves of splendor ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... Leonie was one of those beautiful, brilliant enigmas, who irresistibly allure everyone like a Sphinx, for she was young, charming, and singularly lovely, and understood how to heighten her charms not a little by carefully-chosen dresses. She was a great lady of the right stamp, and was very intellectual into the bargain, which is not the case with all aristocratic ladies; she also took ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... gates of the strange city of Omdurman. Some parts of his action supported, even regrettably, the reputation of rigidity. But if any admirer had, in this hour of triumph, been staring at him as at a stone sphinx of inflexible fate, that admirer would have been very much puzzled by the next passage of his life. Kitchener was something much more than a machine; for in the mind, as much as in the body, flexibility is far more ...
— Lord Kitchener • G. K. Chesterton
... At any rate, the Sphinx had spoken and shown that she had some feeling, if only that of pique and unreason; and the despairing lover was able to take a little heart. After all, coquetry, even if carried to the verge of cruelty, holds more ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... Allegory, representing a sphinx or chimaera—now framed with the rest as the centre of an ensemble—is from another and far inferior hand, and, moreover, of different dimensions. The so-called Venus of the Imperial Gallery at Vienna is, notwithstanding the signature of Bellini ...
— The Earlier Work of Titian • Claude Phillips
Copyright © 2024 Free Translator.org
|
|
|
