"Bacchanal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... vain: 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! ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... Tahitians are charitable in their regard of very open peccadilloes, especially those animated by passion or a desire for amusement, thinking probably that were stones to be thrown only by the guiltless, there would be none to lift one; certainly no white in Tahiti. The dithyramb of a bacchanal sounded, and the outlaw dentist was reminded of his former intimate friend, ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... reading of essays added to the entertainment of these gatherings. Stories were told, and bacchanal songs sung. No man could tell a better story, and few men could sing a better song than Benjamin Franklin. No one was deemed a suitable member of the club, who would not contribute his full quota to the entertainment or instruction. The questions proposed by Franklin ...
— Benjamin Franklin, A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago - American Pioneers and Patriots Series • John S. C. Abbott
... The 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
... he is so proud, on his small pug nose. As we passed the cross-roads, Straighty was trying to snatch a kiss. While we drove along the Front, the children waved their hands over the sides of the drosky, and shouted with delight. 'Twas a Bacchanal with laughter for wine. The Square turned out to witness our arrival. "Her's come!" the kiddies cried. Dane leapt out first, found a rabbit's head and bolted it whole. The rest of us scrambled out. The luggage was piled up ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... stiffness of the model in her attitudes. They had the charm of being unstudied and natural, and whether as a bacchanal, a peasant girl, or a Gaulish amazon, she looked the part equally well; her face was singularly mobile, and although this was an inferior consideration to the master, she never failed to represent the expression appropriate to the ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty
... bacchanal, with her luxuriant hair dishevelled beneath a crown of vine leaves, with her bright shoulders and superb bust displayed at every motion by the displacement of the panther's skin, which alone covered them, timing her graceful steps to the clang of the silver cymbals which she ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 2 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... according to their own customs, or to bring in contributions for common suppers and holy festivals, while they are not forbidden so to do even at Rome itself; for even Caius Caesar, our imperator and consul, in that decree wherein he forbade the Bacchanal rioters to meet in the city, did yet permit these Jews, and these only, both to bring in their contributions, and to make their common suppers. Accordingly, when I forbid other Bacchanal rioters, I permit these Jews to gather themselves together, ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... meanwhile, is 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 ...
— Elsie at Nantucket • Martha Finley
... Bacchus' that the poem in question deals. But coming to modern times, many of the Rhine drinking songs are also concerned to some extent with patriotism—an element which seems to go hand in hand with the bacchanal the world over!—and a typical item in this category is the Rheinweinlied of Georg Hervegh, a poet of the first half of the nineteenth century. A better patriotic song of Rhine-land, however, is one by a slightly earlier poet, Wolfgang Mueller, ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... 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 it, not a sacrament, ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... the young husband to fling Love's garland away in life's beautiful spring, To scatter the roses Hope wreath'd for her brow In the dust, and abandon his partner to woe? The wine-cup can answer. The Bacchanal's bowl Corrupted life's chalice, and poison'd his soul. It chill'd the warm heart, added fire to the brain, Gave to pleasure and passion unbridled the rein; Till the gentle endearments of children and wife Only roused the fell demon ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... their seats; 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. [3] 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 History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... the saint may chide, The sinner may scoff outright, The Bacchanal steep'd in the flagon's tide, Or the sensual Sybarite; But NOLAN'S name will flourish in fame, When our galloping days are past, When we go to the place from whence we came, Perchance to find rest ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... pay nothing now with the dipping of my pen For her brother's music when he drummed the tambourine And stamped his feet, which made the workmen passing grin, While his mouth-organ changed to a rascally Bacchanal dance "Over the hills and far away." This and his glance Outlasted all the fair, farmer and auctioneer, Cheap-jack, balloon-man, drover with crooked stick, and steer, Pig, turkey, goose, and duck, Christmas Corpses to be. Not even the kneeling ox had eyes ...
— Last Poems • Edward Thomas
... turned the leaves. "It's a bacchanal for the Duke," he said slowly.... "I've been looking up Violante's pose.—Here it is." He read the lines in ...
— Unfinished Portraits - Stories of Musicians and Artists • Jennette Lee
... but not play 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
... 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, wafting ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... the impression produced upon savage nations—suppose those early ages in which the spectacle of intoxication was presented for the first time. They saw a man under the influence of a force different from and in some respects inferior to, their own. To them the bacchanal appeared a being half inspired; his frenzy seemed a thing for reverence and awe, rather than for horror and disgust; the spirit which possessed him must be they thought, divine; they deified it, worshipped it under different names ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... tragedies of the Greeks, just before the final catastrophe, the chorus is supposed to advance to the centre of the theatre and sing a bacchanal of frensied exultation. ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... which met the eye, there were sounds of revelry which fell almost appallingly upon the ear. The wide expanse reverberated with bacchanal songs, and drunken shouts, and frenzied war-whoops. These were all blended in an inextricable clamor. With the unrefined eminently, and in a considerable degree with the most refined, noise is one of the essential elements of festivity. A thousand men were making all the noise they could in ...
— David Crockett: His Life and Adventures • John S. C. Abbott
... beginning, He sees himself thrown on the world, And into the vortex of sinning By Pleasure's strong arms he is hurled. He hears the sweet Christmas bells ringing, "Repent ye, repent ye, and pray"; But he joins with his comrades in singing A bacchanal lay. ...
— The Kingdom of Love - and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... now faint, But ever fever-sick, shook not his lyre With epileptic fervours. Sensual taint Of satyr heat, or bacchanal desire, Polluted not the passion of his song; No corybantic clangor clamoured through Its manly harmonies, as sane as strong; So that the captious few Found sickliness in pure Elysian balm, And coldness in such ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 15, 1892 • Various
... red as a bacchanal king, upon the purple hills, as we descended the rocky declivity and crossed the bridge ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... realists the Russians easily lead all other nations in fiction. There are descriptions of woodlands that recall a little scene from Turgenieff's Sportsman's Sketches; there are episodes, such as the bacchanal in the monastery, a moonlit ride in the canoe with a realistic seduction episode, and the several quarrels that would have pleased both Tolstoy and Dostoievsky; there is an old mujik who seems to have stepped out of ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... 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, and ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... pretty little foolscap volumes, delightfully hot-pressed, and exquisitely embellished; the contents of which will neither fatigue by the quantity, nor require the laborious effort of thought to comprehend. The jolly bon-vivant and Bacchanal will find abundance of the latest songs, toasts, and sentiments; and the Would-be-Wit will meet with Joe Miller in such an endless variety of new dresses, shapes, and sizes, that he may fancy he possesses all ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... thee, Anadyomene! What 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 reel the ...
— New Poems • Francis Thompson
... eye-witness, "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 nothing, was a copy, ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... rest of the Caesars successively advanced to their seats; 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 ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... brilliant one. Colville's party seemed to be always meeting the same maskers on the street, and the maskers did not greatly increase in numbers. There were a few more of them after nightfall, but they were then a little more bacchanal, and he felt it was better that the ladies had gone home by that time. In the pursuit of the tempered pleasure of looking up the maskers he was able to make the reflection that their fantastic and vivid ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... the 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
... ethical religion: "In him we have a poet and a profoundly religious man, who is really and entirely undaunted by the discoveries of science, past, present and prospective, and in his case poetry, with the joy of a bacchanal, takes her graver brother science by the hand, and cheers him with immortal laughter. By Emerson scientific conceptions are continually transmuted into the finer forms and warmer lines of an ideal world." It is in no spirit, therefore, of hostility to physical science or her methods that ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... oh, it was joy to loiter thus, At peace in the heart of the city's stir, Entombed, while life hurried over us, In our lazy bacchanal sepulchre. ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various
... Alburno, many long leagues away. On all other sides are forests, interspersed with rock. But near at hand lies a spacious green meadow, at the foot of a precipice. This is now covered with encampments in anticipation of to-morrow's festival, and the bacchanal ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... imagine how this news pleased Sylvia; who trembling with fear every moment, had expected Brilliard's coming, and found no other benefit by his negotiation, but she must bear what she cannot avoid; but it was rather with the fury of a bacchanal, than a woman of common sense and prudence; all about her pleaded some days in vain, and she hated Brilliard for not doing impossibilities; and it was some time before he could bring her to permit him to speak to her, ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn
... the Bacchanal's hair Over her eyebrows hiding her eyes; The wild vine slipping down leaves bare Her bright breast shortening into sighs; The wild vine slips with the weight of its leaves, But the berried ivy catches and cleaves To the limbs ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... with everything," 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
... 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 these lamps are, the light which they gave must have ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... eyelids benignly down, lips mildly closed. The girl's cheeks held colour to match a dawn yet unawakened though born. They were in a nest shading amid silks of pale blue, and there was a languid flutter beneath her chin to the catch of the morn-breeze. Bacchanal threads astray from a disorderly front-lock of rich brown hair were alive over an eyebrow showing like a seal upon the lightest and ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... title-deeds 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, My ...
— Dreams and Dust • Don Marquis
... whirlin around, Vent Hans mit de maiden In Bacchanal bound. She helt to his peard, Und dey gissed as if mad; I tont dink dat efer Vas dimes ...
— The Breitmann Ballads • Charles G. Leland
... nearly nine o'clock before the Bacchanal laugh began to ring out at intervals—so easily distinguished from the sober laugh, in that it carries in its closing tones the queer ring ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... witnessed, and unpardonable, unless by us, who have been infected by it,—which permits us to place the Madonna and the Aphrodite side by side in our galleries, and to pass, with the same unmoved inquiry into the manner of their handling, from a Bacchanal to a Nativity. ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... 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 that morning—not ...
— Working With the Working Woman • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... 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 ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... 'It's a Bacchanal group, after Poussin, sculptured by Marin. I bought it at Lord Breakdown's sale; it happened to be a wet day—much such a day as this—and things went for nothing. This you'll know, I presume?' observed Jawleyford, laying his hand on a life-size ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... one counted the cost. Supplied with fat purses, all flung themselves into a reckless orgy of high living and ordered without reckoning. It was the gay rendezvous of the girls and the Johnnies, the sporting men and the roues—in a word, the nightly bacchanal of New York qui s'amuse. In the atmosphere, heavily charged with tobacco smoke, floated a strange, indefinable perfume—an odor in which the vulgar smell of cooking struggled for the mastery with the subtle essences used by voluptuous women. Instantly, animalism was aroused, the passions ...
— The Easiest Way - A Story of Metropolitan Life • Eugene Walter and Arthur Hornblow
... 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; ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee) |
