"Bacchanal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... immortality, they will be marvellously happy, happier than any race of men has ever been. They will go through life in a rosy state of intoxication, from which they will never awake. The Men of Faith will play the cup-bearers at this lifelong bacchanal, filling and ever filling again with the warm liquor that the Intelligences, in sad and sober privacy behind the scenes, will brew for the ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... holiness thrills, And the music climbs and the maddening glamour, With the wild White Maids, to the hills, to the hills! Oh, then, like a colt as he runs by a river, A colt by his dam, when the heart of him sings, With the keen limbs drawn and the fleet foot a-quiver, Away the Bacchanal springs! ...
— Hippolytus/The Bacchae • Euripides
... its subject—be it drink or war or money—possesses the reader as a nightmare possesses the dreamer. For the time this place of wide prospect, the world, puts up its shutters; and life becomes all drink, all war, all money, while M. Zola (adaptable Bacchanal!) surrenders his brain to the intoxication of his latest theme. He will drench himself with ecclesiology, or veterinary surgery, or railway technicalities—everything by turns and everything long; but, like the gentleman in the comic opera, he "never mixes." Of late he almost ceased to add even ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... vine-outquickening life all creatures sup, Feel, for the air within its sapphire cup How it does leap, and twinkle headily! Feel, for Earth's bosom pants, and heaves her scarfing sea; And round and round in bacchanal rout ...
— New Poems • Francis Thompson
... make him happy; how the Yankees would be wiped out of the Peninsula as soon as Jack Magruder got his nails pared for fight; how three Yankees had been gobbled that day, and how others were in the net to be taken in the morning. The bacchanal was at its highest when Jack, dashing into the open doorway, placed himself between the drinkers and their arms, and cried, sternly, as he pointed his pistol ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... [Scot.], whisky, xeres^. drunkard, sot, toper, tippler, bibber^, wine-bibber, lush; hard drinker, gin drinker, dram drinker; soaker [Slang], sponge, tun; love pot, toss pot; thirsty soul, reveler, carouser, Bacchanal, Bacchanalian; Bacchal^, Bacchante^; devotee to Bacchus^; bum [U.S.], guzzler, tavern haunter. V. get drunk, be drunk &c adj.; see double; take a drop too much, take a glass too much; drink; tipple, tope, booze, bouse [Fr.], guzzle, swill [Slang], ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... poised, nodding and swaying—like goblins hovering over Titania's court; cacophony of Cathay accenting the Flower Maiden music of "Parsifal"; bizarrerie of the angled, fantastic beings that people the Javan pantheon watching a bacchanal of houris in ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... walked unchallenged through the skies. And reckless feet, fitful with wine and woe, And songs of revel that fall dead about Her ruined beauty—sadder than a wail— (As if the sweet maternal eve for pity Took out the joy, and, with a blush of twilight, Uncrowned the Bacchanal)—some outraged sister Passeth, be patient, think upon yon heaven, Where angels hail the Magdalen, look down Upon that life in death, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... to which Dorsenne could not remain altogether insensible. The atmosphere, impregnated with Russian tobacco and the bluish vapor which filled the room, revealed in what manner the betrayed lover had diverted his impatience, and in the centre of the writing-table a cup with a bacchanal painted in red on a black ground, of which Julien was very proud, contained the remains of about thirty cigarettes, thrown aside almost as soon as lighted. Their paper ends had been gnawed with a nervousness which betrayed the young ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... hat; and all the other enormities which fill the despatches of the ambassadors—regarding all this Burchard is silent. Even Vannozza he names but once, and then incorrectly. There are two passages in particular in his diary which have given the greatest offense: the report of the bacchanal of fifty harlots in the Vatican, and the attack made on the Borgias in the anonymous letter to Silvio Savelli. These passages are found in all the manuscripts and doubtless also in the original of the diary. That the letter to Silvio is a fabrication of neither Burchard nor of ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... this life Quadratilla broke like a thunder-squall. Whatever feelings had prompted her to leave her fashionable resort, her mood after she arrived was characteristically Bacchanal. She had a genius for making the tenderest feeling or the deepest conviction seem absurd. Rufus did not know whether to be more angry at her open hint to Pliny that his childlessness was like that of so many millionaires of the day, a voluntary ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson
... was perfectly clear, but he staggered a trifle as he followed the men along the edge of the dancing space to the stairway. The music crashed furiously. Fred's associates were giving all their attention to treading the uncertain steps of their tawdry bacchanal, ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... she could suffer no more. At the beginning of the winter of 1780, the celebration of St. Andrew's day by Charles Edward and his drinking companions, was followed by a scene over which Alfieri drops a modest veil, calling it vaguely a violent bacchanal which endangered the life of his lady. From the biographers of Charles Edward we learn that the Pretender roused his wife in the middle of the night with a torrent of insulting language which provoked her to vehement recriminations; that ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... strayed bacchanal October, who hangs her scarlet and wine-colored garlands on cloister and pinnacle, on wall and tower. And gradually the foliage of grove and garden, turns through shade of bluish metallic green, to the mingled splendor ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... plot, the kaleidoscopic shifting of harmonious colours, all these seem of the very essence of Arabia, and to coil directly from some bottle of a genie. Ah! what a bottle! As we whirl along in the vast and glowing bacchanal, we ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... and as they passed, the vices, the defects, the blemishes of their respective characters, were maliciously noticed by old Silenus, a laughing moralist, who disguised the wisdom of a philosopher under the mask of a Bacchanal. As soon as the feast was ended, the voice of Mercury proclaimed the will of Jupiter, that a celestial crown should be the reward of superior merit. Julius Caesar, Augustus, Trajan, and Marcus Antoninus, were selected as the most illustrious candidates; the effeminate Constantine was ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... story by falling in love with her. At this point the three conspirators, Don Pedro, Don Sallust, and Don Florio, enter, the first of whom has designs on the throne. They indulge in a buffo trio, which develops into a spirited bacchanal ("Wine, Wine, the Magician thou art!"). Observing Elvira's likeness to the Queen, they persuade her to personate her Majesty. She consents with feigned reluctance, and after accepting their escort in place of Manuel's, being sure that he will follow, she sings a quaint ...
— The Standard Operas (12th edition) • George P. Upton
... mouth watered now as he thought of that mad bacchanal banquet of choice wines and dishes, to which princes and lords had sat down on the dirty benches of the public-house. Goblets were drained in competition to the sound of cannon, and the judges who awarded the prize to the Prince, were presented by him with estates comprising hundreds of ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... "was so universal by the retailing of a liquor called gin, with which they could get drunk for a groat, that the whole town of London, and many towns in the country swarmed with drunken people of both sexes from morning to night, and were more like a scene from a Bacchanal than the residence of a civil society."[138] The sign which hangs over the inn-door in Hogarth's picture of Gin Lane, and announces that the customer can get drunk for a penny, dead drunk for twopence, and have straw for ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... season for novelty in any way, as both the court and the world are out of town. The few that I know are almost all dispersed. The old president Henault made me a visit yesterday: he is extremely amiable, but has the appearance of a superannuated bacchanal; superannuated, poor soul! indeed he is! The Duc de Richelieu is a lean old resemblance of old General Churchill, and like him affects still to have his Boothbies. Alas! ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... did believe that the stars were dancing to the tune of their temples, and they danced as men have never danced since. With this old pagan eudaemonism the sage of the Rubaiyat has quite as little to do as he has with any Christian variety. He is no more a Bacchanal than he is a saint. Dionysus and his church was grounded on a serious joie-de-vivre like that of Walt Whitman. Dionysus made wine, not a medicine, but a sacrament. Jesus Christ also made wine, not a medicine, but a sacrament. But Omar makes ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... immortal honor of illustrious Caesar, shall I be heard enrolling him among the stars and the council of Jove? I will utter something extraordinary, new, hitherto unsung by any other voice. Thus the sleepless Bacchanal is struck with enthusiasm, casting her eyes upon Hebrus, and Thrace bleached with snow, and Rhodope traversed by the feet of barbarians. How am I delighted in my rambles, to admire the rocks and ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... mask still sounded its flutelike note. And a sudden thought of death came to the priest as he saw her, so young and so radiant with beauty, half fainting beside that marble resting-place where fauns were rushing upon nymphs in a frantic bacchanal which proclaimed the omnipotence of love—that omnipotence which the ancients were fond of symbolising on their tombs as a token of life's eternity. And meantime a faint, warm breeze passed through the sunlit, silent garden, ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... prosaic toil seems to us more joyous than that holiday. Where its ancient exuberance passed the bounds of wisdom and even of virtue, its caperings seem frozen into the stillness of an antique frieze. In those gray old pictures a bacchanal seems as dull as an archdeacon. Their very sins seem colder than ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... more and more Flemish. Teniers could have given but a very imperfect idea of it. Let the reader picture to himself in bacchanal form, Salvator Rosa's battle. There were no longer either scholars or ambassadors or bourgeois or men or women; there was no longer any Clopin Trouillefou, nor Gilles Lecornu, nor Marie Quatrelivres, nor Robin Poussepain. All was universal license. The ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... strike other chords; Fill high the cup with Samian wine! Leave battles to the Turkish hordes, And shed the blood of Scio's vine! Hark! rising to the ignoble call— How answers each bold Bacchanal! ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... with a cup of green tea, into another room, and made a sign to Mannering to accompany him. In less than two minutes he washed his face and hands, settled his wig in the glass, and, to Mannering's great surprise, looked quite a different man from the childish Bacchanal he had seen a ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... but it is not child's play, nor an idiot's play, nor the play of a 'jigging' Bacchanal, who comes out on this grave, human scene, to insult our sober, human sense, with his mad humour, making a Belshazzar's feast or an Antonian revel of it; a creature who shows himself to our common human sense without ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... with lamps suspended between the branches. Another, a naked boy, beautifully wrought, with a lamp hanging from one hand, and an instrument for trimming it from the other, the lamp itself representing a theatrical mask. Beside him is a twisted column, surmounted by the head of a Faun, or Bacchanal, which has a lid in its crown, and seems intended as a reservoir of oil. The boy and pillar are both placed on a square plateau, raised upon lions' claws. But, beautiful as those lamps are, the light which they gave must have been weak and unsteady, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 581, Saturday, December 15, 1832 • Various
... countries to improve the color of the wine; so that the poetaster may be celebrating the virtues of the Poke without knowing it. Here are berries enough to paint afresh the western sky, and play the bacchanal with, if you will. And what flutes its ensanguined stems would make, to be used in such a dance! It is truly a royal plant. I could spend the evening of the year musing amid the Poke-stems. And perchance amid these groves might arise at last a new school of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... of a window, if this can be done without observation,—and most young men are not very observing at such times. Under the window, outside, sat a party of the cuirassiers drinking, about a dozen of whom made a sudden irruption into that bacchanal chamber, and, with little explanation, proceeded to clear it of its tenants and guests, knocking down, beating, and pitching them headlong down-stairs, until the work was done. There were sundry flesh-bruises inflicted, some small blood-vessels lying near ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... where, during the fair, assemble a prodigious number of people, of both sexes, and of all ages; there one may see wives supporting their husbands, daughters their fathers, tottering upon their horses or asses, a true image of a Bacchanal. The public-houses are full of drinkers, where the young women who wait, pour wine into goblets out of a large bottle with a long neck, without spilling one drop. They press you to drink with pleasantries the most agreeable in the world. ...
— Ebrietatis Encomium - or, the Praise of Drunkenness • Boniface Oinophilus
... wretched Astraea, who is the perfection of beauty and innocence, has long been thus condemned for life. The romantic tales of virgins devoted to the jaws of monsters, have nothing in them so terrible as the gift of Astraea to that Bacchanal. ...
— Isaac Bickerstaff • Richard Steele
... wash-hand basin and towel, with a cup of green tea, into another room, and made a sign to Mannering to accompany him. In less than two minutes he washed his face and hands, settled his wig in the glass, and, to Mannering's great surprise, looked quite a different man from the childish Bacchanal he bad ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... are gone, Still, still will satyr, nymph, and faun Through brake and covert pipe and call In dances bold and bacchanal— For them, for me, you hold in pawn, ...
— Dreams and Dust • Don Marquis
... of the "Collier's dochter," Burns bids Thomson add the following old Bacchanal: it is slightly altered from a rather ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... claret (a favorite wine with miners) and oysters are exhausted, brandied fruits are rarely seen, and even port-wine is beginning to look scarce. Old callers occasionally drop in, looking dreadfully sheepish and subdued, and so sorry, and people are evidently arousing themselves from the bacchanal madness into which they were so suddenly ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... little suite and by its order. Her housewifely mind, restless with long inactivity in a pension, seized on the bright pans of Marie's kitchen and the promise of the brick-and-sheetiron stove. She disapproved of Stewart, having heard strange stories of him, but there was nothing bacchanal or suspicious about this orderly establishment. Mrs. Boyer was a placid, motherly looking woman, torn from her church and her card club, her grown children, her household gods of thirty years' accumulation, that "Frank" might catch up ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... horrible. You are stunned by it as by the roar of a great waterfall. You see a wave of unusual magnitude rolling in from far beyond the wild revelry of waters on 'The Rips.' It leaps into the arena as if fresh and eager for the fray, clutches another Bacchanal like itself, and the two towering floods rush swiftly toward the shore. Instinctively you run backward to escape what seems an impending destruction. Very likely a sheet of foam is dashed all around you, shoe-deep, but you are safe—only the foam hisses ...
— Elsie at Nantucket • Martha Finley
... and Reason: An Apologue Starlight Recollections Wearies My Love of My Letters? Fare Thee Well, Love Thou Hast Woven the Spell Bessie Bell The Day is Now Dawning, Love When Other Friends are Round Thee Silent Grief Love Thee, Dearest? I Love the Night The Miniature The Retort Lines on a Poet The Bacchanal Twenty Years Ago National Anthem I Love Thee Still Look From Thy Lattice, Love She Loved Him The Suitors St. Agnes' Shrine Western Refrain The Prairie on Fire The Evergreen The May-Queen Venetian Serenade The Whip-Poor-Will The Exile to His Sister Near the Lake Where Drooped the Willow The Pastor's ...
— Poems • George P. Morris
... thou the festival din Of Death, and Destruction, and Sin, And Wealth crying "Havoc!" within? 'Tis the bacchanal triumph that makes ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... the Lord Mayor, as he toiled three parts round Trafalgar Square after the corybantic lady, who was dancing on ahead with the huge wreath held with both arms, swaying over her, as she danced a sort of bacchanal in front of ...
— The Tale of Lal - A Fantasy • Raymond Paton
... inn a sanctum sanctorum where only were allowed the bailies of the burgh, a tacksman of position, perhaps, from the landward part, or the like of the Duke's Chamberlain, who was no bacchanal, but loved the company of honest men in their hours of manumission. Here the bottle was of the best, and the conversation most genteel—otherwise there had been no Sim MacTaggart in the company where he reigned the ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... he yelled, like a mock-bacchanal. "We're the hearty fellows! We'll make a red night now we're at it!" And with that he took the heel of a bottle on his toe and sent it flying among the dishes on the dresser. A great plate fell, split ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... dismal enough during the morning; at noon all lights are turned off. Many of the workers went out for lunch, the rest got around in dismal corners, most of them singly, and ate by their machines, on the same hard seats they have been on since a quarter to 8. What a bacchanal festival of color and beauty now appeared the candy-factory whitewashed lunch room with the marble-topped tables! The airy sociability of it! I wandered about with my lunch in my hand, to see what I could see. Up amid the belts and power machines sat one of the girls who began ...
— Working With the Working Woman • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... Scholars in revelling roundelays, Belched out with hickups at bacchanal Go, Bellowed, till heaven's high concave rebound the lays, Are all for college carousals too low. Of dullness quite tired, with merriment fired, And fully inspired with amity's glow, With hate-drowning wine, boys, and punch all divine, boys, ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... grave, purchasing a drug for our poltroonery at the expense of our sanity. We uphold our wayward steps with the promises and the commandments for crutches, but on either side of us trudge the shadow Death and the bacchanal Sex, and we mumble prayers against the one, while we scourge ourselves for leering at the other. On one only of these can Browning be said to have spoken with novel force—the relations of sex, which he has treated with a subtlety and freedom, and ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... to dances and suppers at the houses of college acquaintances. Sometimes she one-stepped demurely; sometimes, in dread of life's slipping past, she turned into a bacchanal, her tender eyes excited, her throat tense, as she slid ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... the fool! It's the same insane orgy every year, the same waste of money when there's so much need and so much suffering! But I see! It's the orgy, the bacchanal, that is to still the ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal |
