"Inferno" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... depicted on all faces while he eyed them with a ghostly grin. I anticipated some such reception, he began with an eldritch laugh, for which, it seems, history is to blame. Yes, it is true. I am the murderer of Samuel Childs. And how I am punished! The inferno has no terrors for me. This is the appearance is on me. Tare and ages, what way would I be resting at all, he muttered thickly, and I tramping Dublin this while back with my share of songs and himself after me the like of a soulth or a bullawurrus? My hell, and Ireland's, is in this life. It ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... the rim of the crater, looking straight into the inferno. By means of the dull light that struggled through the grimy, grated windows, I discovered that we were in a corridor having an iron floor that sprang up and down under our feet. This was flanked by a line of steel cages—huge beast-dens really—reaching ...
— The Underdog • F. Hopkinson Smith
... certainly does not make for harmony in the kitchen. If a charcoal broiler is employed, somehow it never reaches the proper state of incandescence at the right time. If the fireplace is the scene of operation, it is invariably a roaring inferno at the time the steak should be cooked. One waits for the desired bed of coals, of course, while ominous head shakings and rumblings from the kitchen proclaim that the rest of the dinner is done, is dried up, ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... supernatural character to the scene. Thus canopied over, the water looked black as ink, and the atmosphere felt heavy and oppressive. The picture was one from which Dante might have drawn ideas for his "Inferno." ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... may bid farewell to repose. If he have any poetical remembrance of Dante, he may easily imagine he has entered the citta dolente, and he will seem to read on the granite rocks of Baraguan these lines of the Inferno: ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... then another and another. It seemed to fire gas-shells into the town, at this moment, ignoring the batteries playing upon it. It was still again, while the queer excrescence on its back moved vaguely and shells burst about it in a very inferno. ...
— Morale - A Story of the War of 1941-43 • Murray Leinster
... night of storm. Many times Pierrot and the dead princess mother had told her that—how on the night she had come into the world the crash of thunder and the flare of lightning had made the hours an inferno, how the streams had burst over their banks and the stems of ten thousand forest trees had snapped in its fury—and the beat of the deluge on their cabin roof had drowned the sound of her mother's pain, and of her own first ...
— Baree, Son of Kazan • James Oliver Curwood
... and retreat, or kill and advance, without intermission or rest for twenty hours, for fifty hours, for whole weeks of fatigue, hunger, cold, and murder—till their ghastly labour, worthy of a place amongst the punishments of Dante's Inferno, passing through the stages of courage, of fury, of hopelessness, sinks into ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... region; on all sides, vast tracts of ashen gray or black, as if burnt to a crisp, with no sign of life, animal or vegetable, the lurid lights flashing and playing in the distance, until it seemed as though they might be gliding through the borderland of Dante's Inferno. ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... ground and splashed. It spread out in a wide flat disk of intolerable brightness. The sleek hull of the ship which still rode the flame down glinted vividly as it settled into the inferno ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... results alone. Rule applies but to the merits of denial—to the excellencies which refrain. Beyond these, the critical art can but suggest. We may be instructed to build a "Cato," but we are in vain told how to conceive a Parthenon or an "Inferno." The thing done, however; the wonder accomplished; and the capacity for apprehension becomes universal. The sophists of the negative school who, through inability to create, have scoffed at creation, are now found the loudest in applause. What, in its chrysalis condition of principle, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... ending demurely, "Yours sincerely, Puck." But now and then there was a small cross scratched impulsively underneath the name, and the letters that bore this token accompanied Merryon through his inferno whithersoever he went. ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... great poem of his country, recollected that one of the ancestors of this family, and perhaps an occupant of this very mansion, had been pictured by Dante as a partaker of the immortal agonies of his Inferno. These reminiscences and associations, together with the tendency to heartbreak natural to a young man for the first time out of his native sphere, caused Giovanni to sigh heavily as he looked around the desolate ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... with this country. They told me to go to the Palmer House, which is overmuch gilded and mirrored, and there I found a huge hall of tessellated marble crammed with people talking about money, and spitting about everywhere. Other barbarians charged in and out of this inferno with letters and telegrams in their hands, and yet others shouted at each other. A man who had drunk quite as much as was good for him told me that this was "the finest hotel in the finest city on God Almighty's earth." By the way, when an American wishes to ...
— American Notes • Rudyard Kipling
... fidem, etsi inferni esse incendia finxissent, minim adhiberi pruidebant: Hecl ver stum, cuius rumor tardius ad eorum aures peruenit, huic commento vanissimo stabiliendo, magis inseruire putabant. Sed facessite: Deprhensa fraus est: Desinite posthac illam de inferno Heklensi opinionem cuiquam velle persuadere. Docuit enim & nos, & alios, vobis inuitis, consimilibus incendijs, operationes suas Natura, non Infernus. Sed videamus iam plura eiusdem farin vulgi mendacia, qu Historicis & ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries - of the English Nation, v. 1, Northern Europe • Richard Hakluyt
... mysterious, a mighty cavern, so black and high that it might well suggest a portal leading to the regions below, where Vulcan is supposed to stir those tremendous fires which have moulded much of the configuration of the world, and which are ever seething—an awful Inferno—under the thin crust of the globe on ...
— Blown to Bits - The Lonely Man of Rakata, the Malay Archipelago • R.M. Ballantyne
... sensation of awe and excitement. It was the first time she had ever found herself on the working side of the vast machinery of artistic pleasure, and her first impression was that she had been torn from an artificial paradise and was being dragged through an artificial inferno. Huge and unfamiliar objects loomed about her in the deep shadows; men with pale faces, in working clothes, stood motionless at their posts, listening and watching; others lurked in corners, dressed in mediaeval costumes that glittered ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... believe that those words which suggest to us so clear and coloured a vision of scenes often complex and uncommon, presented to his own mind only a comparatively simple and incomplete idea: the atmospheric effects, requiring a more modern painter than Turner, which we read between the lines of the "Inferno" and the "Purgatorio," most probably existed as little for Dante as they did for Giotto; the poet seeing and describing in reality only salient forms of earth and rock, monotonous in tint and deficient in air, like those in the backgrounds of mediaeval Tuscan ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... intention of committing them all over again manifesting itself in every turn of her head, every grin of her rouged lips, and every flash of her painted eyes! For these sections out of the French "Inferno," Notre Dame de Lorette is a good place to play penitence and feign prayer;—the Madeleine is too classic and serene and sombre in its interior to suggest anything but a museum, from which the proper custodian is absent,—Notre Dame de Paris ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... while still others will be in the gerund in e form; e.g., tovazunba cotaiezu, voxe raba tuxxinde qiqi [tovaz[u]ba ... vxe ... qiqe] (85v)[176] 'if they don't ask don't answer: if they speak listen carefully,' Deus no vo coto vo macoto ni uqe, go voqite mo camavaide, sono mama inferno ni vochita 'he did not believe in God, and he did not respect His precepts; therefore, he fell ...
— Diego Collado's Grammar of the Japanese Language • Diego Collado
... upper end of the town, I saw a sight that rivals the inferno. A number of ghouls had found a lot of fine groceries, among them a barrel of brandy, with which they were fairly stuffing themselves. One huge fellow was standing on the strings of an upright piano singing a profane song, every little while ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... menacing clouds. They rolled and seethed like foaming billows. It looked as if the demons of some underworld were engaged in a tremendous battle. Black, castle-like shapes piled up, to be tumbled into the abyss, the next second. It was an inferno through which a flash of lightning darted from time ...
— The Merriweather Girls in Quest of Treasure • Lizette M. Edholm
... a vengeance. A match, please?"—lighting his cigar. "But the walk is worth the trouble. If it were not that you must have heard it so often, Kirby, I would tell you that your works look like Dante's Inferno." ...
— Life in the Iron-Mills • Rebecca Harding Davis
... followed there came to her the certain knowledge that he was suffering, that he was in an inferno of torment that goaded him into fierce savagery against her, like a mad animal that will wreak its madness first upon the being most beloved. It was out of his torment that he did this thing. She saw him again agonizing in ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... they had made more than five miles, fired their torpedoes, and were on their way back. Then up came the British cruisers and converged on the Mainz, which went down fighting. "The Mainz," wrote one of the British officers who saw her, "was immensely gallant. With her whole midships a fuming inferno she kept one gun forward and another aft still spitting forth fury and defiance like a wild cat mad with wounds." In the mean time Jellicoe, rightly anxious about leaving British light craft unsupported by heavier vessels so close to the German Fleet, urged the Admiralty to change their plan ...
— Flag and Fleet - How the British Navy Won the Freedom of the Seas • William Wood
... monotony. He edged his way to the window as he spoke and looked out with Kazan. Westward there stretched the lifeless Barren illimitable and void, without rock or bush and overhung by a sky that always made Pelliter think of a terrible picture he had once seen of Dor's "Inferno." It was a low, thick sky, like purple and blue granite, always threatening to pitch itself down in terrific avalanches, and between the earth and this sky was the thin, smothered worldrM which MacVeigh had ...
— Isobel • James Oliver Curwood
... again the spectacle was different. There was a white and golden fury of flame above, beautiful and blinding; and below, farther back, an inferno of glowing fire, black-streaked, with trembling, exploding puffs and streams of yellow smoke. The aisles between the burning pines were smoky, murky caverns, moving and weird. Slone saw fire shoot from the tree-tops down the trunks, ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... that from the man's gestures. Even on ordinary days those low-ceiled dining-rooms, stretching far back from the street in a complicated vista of interiors, were apt to be crowded; for the quality of the eightpenny dinner could be relied upon. Edwin imagined what a stifling, deafening inferno of culinary odours and clatter they would be at one o'clock, at ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... to attempt. To watch V.C.s being won by wire cutting; to see the very figure and attitude of the hero; to be safe oneself except from the off chance of a shell,—was like being stretched upon the rack! All day we hung vis-a-vis this inferno. With so great loss and with so desperate a situation the white flag would have gone up in the South African War but there was no idea of it to-day and I don't feel afraid of it even now, in the dark of a moonless night, where evil thoughts ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... are, to all intents and purposes, a precis of a charter of release to the inhabitants of the twentieth century Christian Inferno which was drawn up by Dora Russell the day before she yielded to Ernshaw's year-long wooing, and consented to be his helpmeet as ...
— The Missionary • George Griffith
... fog rolled slowly upward. Dark figures, even at that great distance, were flitting to and fro across what seemed the mouth of the pit. The flame increased—multiplied—at one point after another; till by ten o'clock that night I seemed to be looking down upon Dante's Inferno, and to hear the multitudinous moan and wail of the lost spirits surging to and fro ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... thou didst not describe, in all thy apartments of Inferno, this tremendous repression of an existence half unfolded; this swoon as the soul was ready to ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... us like a bugle to the silly and atrocious field. For the immediate future, I can only hope, as I confidently believe, that the present age of capitalist war will pass, as the age of dynastic war has passed, for ever into the inferno where slavery and religious persecution now lie burning, though they seemed so natural and strong. I think it will not much longer be possible to fool the working classes into wars for concessions or the extension of empires. I believe that already the peoples of the greatest countries are ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... month in solitary was an event. And yet we could learn nothing from such transient and ofttimes stupid Dantes who would remain in our inferno too short a time to learn knuckle-talk ere they went forth again into the bright wide ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... end, beating time to the swing of the verse with a bedstead-leg. But he did most of his ravings in Greek or German. The man's mind was a perfect rag-bag of useless things. Once, when he was beginning to get sober, he told me that I was the only rational being in the Inferno into which he had descended—a Virgil in the Shades, he said—and that, in return for my tobacco, he would, before he died, give me the materials of a new Inferno that should make me greater than Dante. Then he fell asleep on a horse-blanket ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... resting on earth. The harbour was filled with volumes of smoke, purple and black, wreathing and sidling eastwards, from steamers and chimneys. The gigantic elevators and other harbour buildings stood mistily in this inferno, their heads clear and sinister above the mirk. It was impossible to decide whether an enormous mass of pitchy and Tartarian gloom was being slowly moulded by diabolic invisible hands into a city, or a city, the desperate and damned abode of ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... that under renewed pressure bursts upward like a volcano. All the winter the drifting pack changes—grows by freezing, thickens by rafting, and corrugates by pressure. If, finally, in its drift it impinges on a coast, such as the western shore of the Weddell Sea, terrific pressure is set up and an inferno of ice-blocks, ridges, and hedgerows results, extending possibly for 150 or 200 miles off shore. Sections of pressure ice may drift away subsequently and become ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... They then have a respite till two, and go in till five. Eight hours in hot water! Nothing can be more disgusting than the sight of these baths. Gustave Dore must have learned here how to make those ghostly pictures of the lost floating about in the Stygian pools, in his illustrations of the Inferno; and the rocks and cavernous precipices may have enabled him to complete the picture. On what principle cures are effected in these filthy vats, I could not learn. I have a theory, that, where so many diseases meet and mingle ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... ants. Solitary tree. An oven. Terrible night. And day. Wretched appearance of the horses. Mountains of sand. Hopeless view. Speculations. In great pain. Horses in agony. Difficulty in watering them. Another night of misery. Dante's Inferno. The waters of oblivion. Return to the pass. Dinner of carrion. A smoke-house. Tour to the east. Singular pinnacle. Eastern ranges. A gum creek. Basins of water. Natives all around. Teocallis. Horrid rites. A chip off the old block. A ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... at intervals and in places, the books of the Inferno were opened, and the tortures devised by the native pagans and Buddhists equalled in their horror those which Dante imagines, until finally, in 1636, even Japanese human nature, accustomed for ages to subordination and submission, could ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... California divided. And at this point there began the terrible part of the journey—the arid, alkaline, thirsty desert, short of game, horrible in its monotony, deadly with its thirst. It is no wonder that, weakened by their sufferings in this inferno, so many of the immigrants looked upon the towering walls of the Sierras with a sinking of ...
— The Forty-Niners - A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado • Stewart Edward White
... idea that any mundane pursuit as practising putting could appeal to his broken spirit now, Sam uttered a bitter laugh. It was as if Dante had recommended some lost soul in the Inferno to occupy his mind ...
— Three Men and a Maid • P. G. Wodehouse
... the cruelty I am repressing in myself? I don't care whether it is sadism or the spark of the divine in me. All I care about is that this inferno of pain must cease. ...
— A Dominie in Doubt • A. S. Neill
... Entdeckungen.] The ball which the Eastern emperors carried as an emblem of the world-wide extent of their rule, and which was borrowed from them by various mediaeval potentates, had probably not lost its meaning. Dante, in the Divina Commedia, not only plans his Inferno on the supposition of a spherical earth, but takes for granted the same conception, on the part of his readers. [Footnote: Inferno, canto 34, ...
— European Background Of American History - (Vol. I of The American Nation: A History) • Edward Potts Cheyney
... they had these visions or pilgrimages to Hell; the adventures were no doubt solemn to them—but it seemed absurd to attribute the origin of a sublime poem to such inferior, and to us even ludicrous, inventions. Every one, therefore, found out some other origin of Dante's Inferno—since they were resolved to have one—in other works more congenial to its nature; the description of a second life, the melancholy or the glorified scenes of punishment or bliss, with the animated shades of men who were no more, had been opened ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... and brought some relief to those who were suffering in the inferno of provincial ennui; but this is only the purgatory to the Paradise of battues. Yet September has its days of slaughter; and the young Duke gained some laurels, with the aid of friend Egg, friend Purdy, and Manton. And the Premier galloped down sixty miles in one morning. He sacked his ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... in "Locksley Hall," Tennyson says that "a sorrow's crown of sorrow is rememb'ring better things." The original is in Dante's words:- - "Nessun maggior dolore Che ricordarsi del tempo felice Nella miseria." — "Inferno," v. 121. ("There is no greater sorrow than to remember happy ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... political parties, Society hostesses, well-known dramatic authors and novelists, and distinguished aeroplanists were dimly recognizable in that doomed throng; noted lights of the musical-comedy stage flickered wanly in the shades of the Inferno, smiling still from force of habit, but with the fearsome smiling rage of baffled effort. The poster bore no fulsome allusions to the merits of the new breakfast food, but a single grim statement ran in bold letters along its base: "They cannot buy ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... Inferno of a city. As I turned the corner of Sixth Avenue, an elevated train came shrieking and rumbling, and a swirl of wind swept screeching round and round, enveloping me in a whirlpool of smoke and steam, until, dazed and choked in what seemed the scalding effervescence of a collision, ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... the writing rankle, 40 Let the wretch go festering through Florence)— Dante, who loved well because he hated, Hated wickedness that hinders loving, Dante standing, studying his angel— In there broke the folk of his Inferno. Says he—"Certain people of importance" Such he gave his daily dreadful line to) "Entered and would seize, forsooth, the poet." Says the poet—"Then I stopped my painting." You and I would rather see that angel, 50 Painted by the tenderness of Dante, Would we ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning
... sonorously. Rowland, who pronounced badly but understood everything, once said to him that Ariosto was not the poet for a man of his craft; a sculptor should make a companion of Dante. So he lent him the Inferno, which he had brought with him, and advised him to look into it. Roderick took it with some eagerness; perhaps it would brighten his wits. He returned it the next day with disgust; he had found it ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... can over the others. The heat was intense, and at times almost unbearable. The smoke, too, was blinding and suffocating. This, added to the heat and the roar of the fire, made their position a veritable inferno, from which there seemed no way of escape. So far as they could tell the country all around them ...
— Jess of the Rebel Trail • H. A. Cody
... the picture of torture with great ingenuity; the Apocalypse of Peter, following and expanding the description of Plato and Enoch, has an elaborate barbarous apparatus of punishment, and this scheme, continued through a series of works,[181] has its culmination in Dante's Inferno, where, however, the ethical element is pronounced, though colored by the ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... loomed; like an unhealthy, cancerous growth. And inside the enigmatic thing was another world. A dark world, mysterious, horrible, peopled by blind and terrible demons—a world like a Dante's dream of a second Inferno. ...
— The Raid on the Termites • Paul Ernst
... windows of this castle, with the spacious view to westward, I thought of Dante. For Dante in this castle was the guest of Moroello Malaspina, what time he was yet finishing the "Inferno." There is a little old neglected garden, full to south, enclosed upon a rampart which commands the Borgo, where we found frail canker-roses and yellow amaryllis. Here, perhaps, he may have sat with ladies—for this was the Marchesa's ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... Jonathan Edwards is very similar to that produced on me when I took the same mental bath. His was a mind whose grasp and intensity you cannot help feeling. He was a poet in the intensity of his conceptions, and some of his sermons are more terrible than Dante's 'Inferno.'" ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... might be so, and the elements conspired to help him. There were many storms and high tides that set the Island riding in safety. Father Anthony went up and down comforting those whose husbands, sons, and brothers were in the Inferno over yonder. The roses in his old cheeks withered, and his blue eyes were faded with many tears for his country and his people. He prayed incessantly that the agony of the land might cease, and that his own most helpless flock might be protected from the butchery ...
— An Isle in the Water • Katharine Tynan
... Steaming along past a fine coast, we reached Dellis about eight o'clock. I got Angelo to bring me my sheepskin and cloak, and preferred sleeping on deck to passing the night in a locality which, for the horrors it contained, might have figured as a scene in Dante's "Inferno." ...
— Notes in North Africa - Being a Guide to the Sportsman and Tourist in Algeria and Tunisia • W. G. Windham
... generations the body may go on perfecting, while the heart goes on degenerating; that, while the animal beauty is growing complete in the magic of proportion, the indescribable marvel that can even give charm to ugliness, is as steadily vanishing. Such a woman, like Branca d'Oria in the Inferno, is already damned, and only seems to live. Lady Ann was indeed born capable of less than most; but had she attempted to do the little she could, one would not have been where she was; she would have beep toiling up the hill of truth, with a success to be measured, like the ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... steadying hand on the windowsill, then gathered himself for the last great effort. The bed was invisible now, the room an inferno—he had to fight every step of the way back to the bed. Then he found what he sought, and fought the slow fight ...
— The Outdoor Girls in Army Service - Doing Their Bit for the Soldier Boys • Laura Lee Hope
... this inferno of misery were not enough, there were added the refugees! These were not Belgians, as I had imagined, but French. It appears that both English and French armies have to clear the civil population out ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... Inferno Dante went to Paris, where he met a great many scholars and wise men, who treated him with the utmost respect, but all the time he desired to be in his native city of Florence. When Henry of Luxembourg planned to lay siege to it, Dante encouraged ...
— A Treasury of Heroes and Heroines - A Record of High Endeavour and Strange Adventure from 500 B.C. to 1920 A.D. • Clayton Edwards
... strainer, straw-coloured infusion; still, it just saved our reason. H.C. felt that he should never write another line of poetry; the tobacco fumes had taken an opium effect upon me, and I began to see visions and imagined ourselves in Dante's Inferno. We looked with mild reproach at the waiter. He quite understood; a guilty conscience needed no words; and explained that the chef had let out the fire. As the chef was at that moment in the cafe playing cards, as absorbed and excited as anyone, ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 1, January, 1891 • Various
... He watched the ZX-2 wallow in her death throes, writhe in the fiery doom that had struck her in seconds, that was devouring her with awful rapidity while thousands of men, blanched and trembling, gazed on helplessly. He saw her plunge, a blazing inferno, into ...
— Raiders Invisible • Desmond Winter Hall
... episodes it is an enhancement of Gustave Dore, taking it as a whole, it is a false thing. It is full of apparitions worked out with mechanical skill, yet Dante's soul is not back of the fires and swords of light. It gives to the uninitiated an outline of the stage paraphernalia of the Inferno. It has an encyclopaedic value. If Dante himself had been the high director in the plenitude of his resources, it might still have had that hollowness. A list of words making a poem and a set of apparently equivalent pictures forming a photoplay may have an ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... goes on to state that the Mexicans believed the sun or light first appeared in the south, and that hell or inferno was in the north; then ...
— Notes on Certain Maya and Mexican Manuscripts • Cyrus Thomas
... liberty in Mantua, and the Mantuans, in their assembly of the Four Hundred and Ninety, voted full power into the hands of the destroyer. That Pinamonte Bonacolsi whom Dante mentions in the twentieth canto of the "Inferno," had been elected captain of the republic, and, feigning to fear aggression from the Marquis of Ferrara, he demanded of the people the right to banish all enemies of the state. This reasonable demand was granted, ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... as we're between the two fires," said Bob, as they began their perilous journey, "there is nothing much to fear, it seems to me. The next mile is No Man's Land with a vengeance; after that it will be Dante's Inferno with the ...
— With Haig on the Somme • D. H. Parry
... Ripper, is the product of absolute lunacy, and those gross national sins to which allusion has been made seem to point to collective national insanity. Surely, then, there is hope that no very terrible inferno is needed to further punish those who have been so afflicted upon earth. Some of our dead have remarked that nothing has surprised them so much as to find who have been chosen for honour, and certainly, without in any way condoning sin, ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle
... presently and turned in at the lane. Cullison, standing on the porch at the head of the steps looked like a man who was passing through the inferno. But he looked too a personified day of judgment untempered by mercy. His eyes bored like steel gimlets ...
— Crooked Trails and Straight • William MacLeod Raine
... man who dreads lest the hitherto immutable laws of nature are about to end in an inconceivable state of chaos. What would happen if the old order of things passed away and the abominable abolitionists obtained fall control? He felt as if the door of Dante's Inferno might be thrown wide at any moment. There was no elasticity in his nature, enabling him to cope with threatening possibilities; no such firmness and fortitude of soul as he might be required to exercise ...
— Miss Lou • E. P. Roe
... "Inferno," deals out to the lost souls various tortures suited with dramatic fitness to the past crimes of the victims, and had I to execute judgment on the criminal binders of certain precious volumes I have seen, where the untouched maiden sheets entrusted to their ...
— Enemies of Books • William Blades
... opposite side would take us to the foot of a darker streak in the wall which seems from here like a possible groove or gully and in fact is such. Unscalable as it seems, that is the magic stairway which leads up out of this rocky Inferno to the higher ledges and finally over glacier-fields to the Breche de Roland, (which is invisible from the Cirque itself,) and through this gateway on into Spain. Mountaineers and smugglers make the trip ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... was an inferno now. The battle, despite its tremendous beginning, increased in violence and fury. Although Grant himself was not there, the spirit that had animated him at Shiloh and Vicksburg was. He had communicated it to his generals, and Warren ...
— The Shades of the Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... while he listened to the tale of all the things that were made out of the carcasses of animals, and of all the lesser industries that were maintained there; now he found that each one of these lesser industries was a separate little inferno, in its way as horrible as the killing beds, the source and fountain of them all. The workers in each of them had their own peculiar diseases. And the wandering visitor might be skeptical about all the swindles, but he could not be skeptical about these, for the worker bore the evidence of them ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... found new horrors for the "Inferno" in the voyage as I made it. From Saturday morning till Sunday night, while the storm was at its height, the waves beat clean over the top of our vessel. A thousand times it rolled almost completely to one side, shivered, trembled, and recovered itself, only to yield again to the wrath and fury of ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... not yet exploited were the wonderful resources of coal and minerals which now glow above and below the furnace fires until, from a distance, Liege looks like a very Inferno. But the people were industrious and energetic in their crafts. It was a country of skilled workmen. The city of Liege is accredited with one hundred thousand inhabitants at this epoch, and the numbers reported slain in the various battles in which ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam
... gelid horror seizing you, to feel that these follies or these crimes displayed belong to that human nature, one and the same everywhere and always, of which also you yourself partake. Comedy, Dante, too, called his poem, which included the "Inferno." And a Dantesque quality, not of method, but of power, is to be ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... boom. Cypress Point is one of the most conspicuous of these projections, and its strange trees creep out upon the ragged ledges almost to the water's edge. These cypresses are quite as instinct with individual life and quite as fantastic as any that Dore drew for his "Inferno." They are as gnarled and twisted as olive-trees two centuries old, but their attitudes seem not only to show struggle with the elements, but agony in that struggle. The agony may be that of torture in the tempest, or of some fabled creatures fleeing ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... such thoughts occupied them we may see from Dante's great poem describing a vision of the Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise. This was written in the thirteenth century, and in the same period appeared a short Latin lyric, or hymn, called "Dies Irae," or the Day of Wrath, from an expression used by the old ...
— Michelangelo - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Master, With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... Helen on his back, and excites Faust's passion by the description of her beauty. He takes Faust to the prophetess Manto, daughter of the old blind Theban prophet Teiresias, and she conducts him to a dark fissure—a Bocca dell' Inferno—at the foot of Mount Olympus, such as that which you may have seen in the Sibyl's cave on Lake Avernus; and here (as once Orpheus did in search of Eurydice) he descends to the realms of the dead to seek the help of Persephone, Queen of Hades, in his quest for Helen. Meanwhile Mephisto has ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... made here. Ourrias is carried to the bottom of the river by the goblins and spirits that come out and hover over it at night. There is a certain terror in this termination, something that recalls parts of the Inferno. Ourrias's superstitious fears are the effect of his guilty conscience. The souls of the damned, their weird ceremonial, are but the outward rendering of ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... only shalt thou strive to follow. O, it is a business, as I fancy, that of weltering your way through Chaos and the murk of Hell! Green-eyed dragons watching you, three-headed Cerberuses,—not without sympathy of their sort! "Eccovi l' uom ch' e stato all' Inferno." For in fine, as Poet Dryden says, you do walk hand in hand with sheer Madness, all the way,—who is by no means pleasant company! You look fixedly into Madness, and her undiscovered, boundless, bottomless Night-empire; that you may extort new Wisdom ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... voice raised to the breaking pitch—"I never thought I'd get to hell so soon! Why, sir," he continued, knocking a cloud of dust from his hat, "this isn't nature, this is geology! I don't see how you ever discovered the damned country! The wind-swept wastes of Dante's Inferno are verdant in comparison! You're mad, there's no doubt of it!" he fumed, ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... into spectral shapes of sullen aspect, rose from the dusky, writhing mass, and the flaming of more than ten thousand eyeballs in the gloom presented a picture more terrible than ever came into the imagination of the writer of the Inferno. The spectacle, as observed by those some twenty feet from the ground, might be likened somewhat to a turbulent sea when a sturdy tide sets against the storm, and the mad waves tumble hither and ...
— The Story of Louis Riel: The Rebel Chief • Joseph Edmund Collins
... physical punishment increases deception not morality. In the history of humanity the effect of the teaching about hell and fear of hell illustrates the sort of morality produced in children's souls by corporal punishment, that inferno of childhood. Only with the greatest trouble, slowly and unconsciously, is the conviction of the superiority of the good established. The good comes to be seen as more productive of happiness to the individual himself and ...
— The Education of the Child • Ellen Key
... days in this inferno of fire a captured German officer told with his dying breath of a fresh division of Germans that was about to be thrown into the battle to attempt to wrest from the marines that part of the wood they had gained. The marines, who for days had been fighting only on their sheer nerve, who had been ...
— Our Navy in the War • Lawrence Perry
... inferno of nature, the enemy chose this mad moment to add his artillery to the cataclysm, and turned a merry whizz-bang battery on to the Top. For an hour the racket lasted, and then fell in gradual diminuendo; and Mac thought of sleep notwithstanding vermin, ...
— The Tale of a Trooper • Clutha N. Mackenzie
... books a sight to his pa and me. "The Divine Comedy," "The Inferno," "Bernadiso," "New Life," etc., etc. Thomas Jefferson thought "The Divine Comedy" a powerful work, showing the story of how a man wuz tempted, and how sorrow lifts up the soul ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... in Inferno, detto Malebolge, Tutto di pietra e di color ferrigno, Come la cerchia che d'intorno il volge. Nel dritto mezzo del campo maligno Vaneggia un pozzo assai largo e profondo, Di cui suo luogo contera l' ordigno. Quel cinghio che rimane adunque e tondo ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... appalling. The smoke, belching black from the funnels and white from the guns, made a suffocating pall overhead; while the dark, squat, hideous ironclad hulls seemed to have risen from a submarine inferno to stab each other with livid tongues of flame—so deadly close the two flotillas fought. When the awful hour was over the Confederates were not only defeated but destroyed; and a wail went up from the thousands of their anguished friends, as if the ...
— Captains of the Civil War - A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray, Volume 31, The - Chronicles Of America Series • William Wood
... hundreds of people huddled together there had the dress and looks of moderns; it was true, also, that the gloom was lighted for them by electric bulbs, and that electric radiators kept them warm; yet Dante himself, in painting the ninth circle of his Inferno, could not have imagined a drearier and more despondent group than these that slouched and drooped and muttered in that cavernous recess, seated with their heads fallen low upon their knees, or moodily pacing back and forth like ...
— Flight Through Tomorrow • Stanton Arthur Coblentz
... of the fight." It seems likely that Dante was present, probably under arms, in the later part of the same summer, at the surrender to the Florentines of the Pisan stronghold of Caprona, where, he says ('Inferno,' xxi. 94-96), "I saw the foot soldiers afraid, who came out under compact from Caprona, seeing themselves ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... could smoke without offence. The unrivalled leader, Thomas, had just lifted his baton—that magic wand whose graceful yet mysterious motion evokes with equal ease, seemingly, the thunder of a storm, the song of a bird, the horrid din of an inferno, or a harmony so pure and lofty as to suggest heavenly strains. One of Beethoven's exquisite symphonies was to be rendered, and Van Berg threw away his half-burned cigar, settled himself in his chair and glanced around with a congratulatory air, as if to say, "Now we are to have one of those ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... its demoralized Kahal rule of the days of conscription. Bogrov's account of his childhood and youth is not relieved by a single cheerful reminiscence, except that of a young Russian girl. The whole patriarchal life of a Jewish townlet of that period is transformed into a sort of inferno teeming with criminals ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... than nuns into convent gates. Life was cheap—cheap as reckoned by the popular standard of honor. The saddest feature was that honor, which was always in the agio, so to speak, was not always solid gold, but alloyed with baser metals. No one circle in the Inferno will boast of greater density of Japanese population than the seventh, to which Dante consigns all ...
— Bushido, the Soul of Japan • Inazo Nitobe
... novelist soon afterwards sent to Petrarch from Florence a beautiful copy of Dante's poem, written in his own hand, together with some indifferent Latin verses, in which he bestows the highest praises on the author of the Inferno. At that time, half the world believed that Petrarch was jealous of Dante's fame; and the rumour was rendered plausible by the circumstance—for which he has accounted very rationally—that he had not a copy of Dante in ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... energy from the cables was transformed to a tangible thing—a vast bulk of gas, of hydrogen and oxygen that had once been water, and the pressure of the gas made a roaring inferno of the exhausts. A spark plug ignited it, and the heat of combustion added pressure to pressure, while the quivering, invisible live steam poured forth to change to vaporous clouds ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... depressing moisture. In the streets people walked listlessly, perspired, mopped themselves, and abused their much-vaunted climate. Everyone who could manage it was out of town, either on the heights of Moss Vale or the Blue Mountains, escaping from the Inferno of Sydney. ...
— An Outback Marriage • Andrew Barton Paterson
... Inferno upon earth was born in an instant; up from the sun smile of the prairie rose a shadow of fiends. The walls of the pit, large as the Coliseum, were lined with Redskins of the murder caste. Bow-strings twanged; dag-spears, long-handled, were driven with vengeful swish into the ...
— The Outcasts • W. A. Fraser
... quotable quality of epigram. Yet suppose I were to observe, just here, that Marriage makes a promise to the ear and breaks it to the hope; or that Divorce is the martyr's crown after the tortures of Incompatibility; or that Marriage is the Inferno, the Divorce-Court the Purgatory, and Divorce itself the Paradiso of human life? You would not be likely to think the better of me, and I should certainly think less well of myself. Though I am conscious ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... Medusa. The Angel. The City of Dis. The Sixth Circle: Heresiarchs. X. Farinata and Cavalcante de' Cavalcanti. Discourse on the Knowledge of the Damned. XI. The Broken Rocks. Pope Anastasius. General Description of the Inferno and its Divisions. XII. The Minotaur. The Seventh Circle: The Violent. The River Phlegethon. The Violent against their Neighbours. The Centaurs. Tyrants. XIII. The Wood of Thorns. The Harpies. The Violent ...
— Divine Comedy, Longfellow's Translation, Hell • Dante Alighieri
... while returning along the rear of this position. Their shells sailed up across the woods to the south of the railway, bursting on an empty stretch of fields about a thousand yards away, and turned seven or eight hundred acres of virgin snow into an inferno of smoke and torn earth, but no single shell fell nearer than a thousand yards ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times
... individual drops. Gusts of wind tore at it, hurling the deluge into his face. He wiped his eyes clear and could barely make out the conical forms of two volcanoes on the horizon, vomiting out clouds of smoke and flame. The reflection of this inferno was a sullen redness on the clouds that raced ...
— Deathworld • Harry Harrison
... herself is said to have thrown a rose of that very bush's parent stem to her immortal lover. Every corner of the garden holds its story of meetings that made of it a paradise, of partings that made of it an inferno. What is paradise, but love? Inferno, but the sorrow of love? Down before us, and even up here on this terrace, scenes have been enacted in feud and in peace, horrible scenes of bloodshed and cruelty, and again scenes of splendor—gatherings of church, ceremonials ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... self-conscious sentiment, but those which steal noiselessly through their conduits until they reach the cisterns lying round about the heart; those tears that we weep inwardly with unchanging features;—such I did shed for her often when the imps of the boarding-house Inferno tugged at her ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... only the motions of life. Some had their hands strapped to their sides, others were almost naked. They sang, shouted, and laughed, prayed or were silent, according to their mental infirmities. It was an inferno all the more horrible because of its reality, a relentless nightmare from which ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... failures and successes of the wiser citizens in that struggle for order and good government which brought Dante to his long exile, we feel ourselves standing in the very midst of events out of which grew the threefold Poem of the After-World and face to face with the men who front us in the 'Inferno' and 'Paradise.' But this is not the world Dino stands in. Of what seem to us the greater elements of the life around him he sees and tells us nothing. Of art or letters his 'Chronicle' says never a word. The name ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... you can learn all right, but you won't make very much at first. All come together?... So! Well, then, I guess you'll want to work in the same room," and with that he ushered us into a very inferno of sound, a great, yawning chaos of terrific noise. The girls, who sat in long rows up and down the length of the great room, did not raise their eyes to the new-comers, as is the rule in less strenuous workrooms. Every pair of eyes seemed to be held in fascination upon the flying ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... envy of the gods. But a great love, unreciprocated, especially when admixed to it is the feeling of jealousy, is the most frightful of tortures; it will crush a man like nothing else will, and the victims of this emotional catastrophe are pitied by the inmates of the lowest inferno. ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... the person of the guerrilla chief, Rodrigo Galan. They had rebelled against the rebels, so were doubly rebel, doubly outlawed. Ye gods, it was bizarre! And as morning dawned on them trailing along a dreary inferno gorge of the Sierra Gorda, they blinked at each other ruefully. Poor waifs, they had lost their native country. And now, one rainy morning, they found they had lost an adopted one. But each man looked into a face likewise so rueful ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... Byron attributed everything to See, also 'Foscari, the Two; an Historical Tragedy' Foscolo, Ugo His 'Essay on Petrarch' Fountain of Arethusa, Lord Byron's visit to Fox, Right Hon. Charles James, notice of poems His Oratory ——, Henry 'Frament, A' 'FRANCESCA OF RIMINI; from the Inferno of Dante' Francis, Sir Philip, the probable author of 'Junius' 'Frankenstein,' Mrs. Shelley's Franklin, Benjamin Frederick the Second, 'the only monarch worth recording in Prussian annals' Free press in Greece Frere, Right Hon. John Hookham, his 'Whistlecraft' Fribourg ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... was to win this treasure. For an instant, in fact, there was something weakly ferocious, not quite sane, in this visage that had been familiar to her since childhood. Then his habitual, well-bred, wooden look, as a door might shut on a glimpse of an inferno. ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... spectacle. There's a green strip along the river, then bare sagebrush flats, and beyond the flats are sand dunes where nothing grows but cactus and mesquite, and here and there some tufts of grass as tough and dry as wire. In summer the dunes are a parched and blistered inferno. In October they are raw gray desolation. I don't want to know what they are like in winter. The wind never ceases there. It builds the dunes into new shapes every day, and the sagebrush is always bent and lopsided and torn, and the colors are the gray and ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... I was crossing the Burzil pass into the Gilgit district. As day broke on the 31st August, I dropped down several thousand feet from Doyen to Ramghat in the Indus valley, and it suddenly struck me I must have come down too low, and got into Dante's Inferno. As I passed under the crossbeam of the suspension bridge, I looked to find the motto, "All hope relinquish, ye who enter here." It wasn't there, but instead there was a sentry on the bridge, who, on being questioned, assured me that though there was not much to ...
— With Kelly to Chitral • William George Laurence Beynon
... enemy's last stronghold beyond the city. Before they went over, grey and green coated figures were being brought down. There were many other grey and green figures grotesquely contorted in the brown ribbed fields, and those of them who had escaped from the inferno fought it out intermittently, in the woods beyond the village. But their sniping was braved for a few days more, and then one night they staggered weakly back through nightmare villages to Germaine ...
— The Seventeenth Highland Light Infantry (Glasgow Chamber of Commerce Battalion) - Record of War Service, 1914-1918 • Various
... billet: "I am situated at present in country not unlike Welphine. Our billet is pretty decent, on the first floor of a large building, which bears a slight resemblance outwardly to a Workhouse. What an existence! Look up 'Dante's Inferno,' and you will get some idea of every soldier's environment." I am afraid that our mess is none too quiet at times itself, though at present they are all quietly playing cards and reading. To-day being Sunday Kitty ...
— Letters from France • Isaac Alexander Mack
... has," replied Cedric. "Carlyon senior is a dry, chippy sort of little man, as meek as a mouse and as good as gold. He is curate-in-charge of an iron church at Stokeley; it is in the Black Country, you know—a regular inferno of a place—nothing but tall chimneys and blasting furnaces, heaps of slag and rows of miners' cottages. Stokeley town is a mile or two farther on; it is a ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... will tell her nothing, and she has no eyes to see. What am I to her? I am a priest—no man. I am like a woman friend, and as such she is fond of me. No, I have sinned against Heaven, against myself, and her, and you. Alas! who could help it? She was like an angel in that Inferno, so kind, so sweet, so lovely, and the ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... annihilation of human faculties. Should he have the misfortune to be left here alone, no help, no consolation, no spark of hope, would soothe his last moments. One is involuntarily reminded of the famous inscription on the gate of the Inferno of Dante— ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... letters? Nay, am I not sure that you have been still more shocked by a crime that passes even the guilt of shedding the blood of poor Louis, to hear of atheism avowed, and the avowal tolerated by monsters calling themselves a National Assembly! But I have no words that can reach the criminality of such inferno-human beings, but must compose a term that aims at conveying my idea of them. For the future it will be sufficient to call them the French; I hope no other nation will ever deserve to ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... human heart, and these learned composers had merely used as pegs on which to hang their counterpoint. Not content with giving his ideas to the world in the form of a dialogue, Galilei composed two musical monologues, between 1581 and 1590, one to the scene of Count Ugolino, in Dante's "Inferno," and one to a passage in the Lamentations of Jeremiah. These the chroniclers tell us he sang very sweetly, accompanying himself on the lute. He was also a fine performer ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore
... an easy time of it; not because this passion is so powerful, but because it is insidious and passes for a harmless little thing in its ordinary disguise. And yet all wrath does not manifest itself thus exteriorly. Still waters are deepest. An imperturbable countenance may mask a very inferno of wrath ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... was fastened to his hat, that he might lose no time. They had brought him a little bread and wine for his evening meal, for often he went not home when the mood of work possessed him; and beside him was a writing of the man Savonarola—this and the Holy Evangel and the 'Inferno' fashioned his thoughts. He lived not long after that, for we were still in Rome when they made for him that great funeral in Santa Croce of Florence, the rumor of which is dear to artist hearts. ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... became still as death, save the groaning of the wounded soldiers in the hospital, or the calls and cries of those left upon the battlefield. Oh, such a night, the night after the battle! The very remembrance of it is a vivid picture of Dante's "Inferno." To lie during the long and anxious watches of the night, surrounded by such scenes of suffering and woe, to continually hear the groans of the wounded, the whispered consultations of the surgeons over the case of some poor boy who was soon to be robbed of a leg ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... Stokes gun battery was in reserve, and the other half in the firing-line. About noon the day after the first attack was made, word came out that one of our crew had caught it and asking for help and stretchers to carry out the wounded. So we made our way in through a perfect inferno and we found the crew—an officer and six men—all lying wounded in a dugout. We got busy and carried them out, and poor beggars, they got some awful bumps as we stumbled along through the darkness, over dead bodies and through shell ...
— Into the Jaws of Death • Jack O'Brien
... of farm-life toil, I had not been spared a realization of the narrowness and the dwarfing tendencies of the lives which the Negro farmers and their families were living, and, in my heart, I cursed the farm and all its environs as being in verity an inferno on earth. A broader knowledge of the causes which operated to produce the cheerless life against which my child-nature rebelled, and a clearer insight into the possibilities of rural life, have altered this early impression; ...
— Tuskegee & Its People: Their Ideals and Achievements • Various
... cloak, the first butterfly to be seen in spring, has passed the winter in my "Slabsides." The monarch migrates, probably the only one of our butterflies that does. It is a great flyer. I have seen it in the fall sailing serenely along over the inferno of New York streets. It has crossed the ocean and is spreading over the world. The yellow and black hornets lose heart as autumn comes on, desert their paper nests and die—all but the queen or mother hornet; she hunts out a retreat in the ground ...
— The Wit of a Duck and Other Papers • John Burroughs
... the live man's flesh for parchment, Loosed him, laughed to see the writing rankle, 40 Let the wretch go festering through Florence)— Dante, who loved well because he hated, Hated wickedness that hinders loving, Dante standing, studying his angel— In there broke the folk of his Inferno. 45 Says he—"Certain people of importance" (Such he gave his daily, dreadful line to) "Entered and would seize, forsooth, the poet." Says the ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... sorts of hatred in one," said Francesco Cei, impetuously, "and say he has won the hatred of all men who have sense and honesty, by inventing hypocritical lies. His proper place is among the false prophets in the Inferno, who walk with ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... rock stood in air for a hundred—two hundred—feet. Chet hardly dared estimate size in this place where all was so strange and unearthly. The hot rock had spouted high in the thin air, and it had frozen as it threw itself frantically out from the inferno of heat that had given it birth. The jets sprayed out like spume-topped waves; they were whipped into ribbons that the winds of this world could not tear down, and the ribbons shone, waving white in the earthlight. The tortured ...
— The Finding of Haldgren • Charles Willard Diffin
... picture; and its ghastly horror—the apparent fidelity of the descriptions, which makes one feel as if he had before him the evidence of an eye-witness—gives a measure of the power of the artist and the range of his imagination, from an earthly inferno to an earthly paradise, such as even the 'Commedia' does not give us. In this stupendous ensemble, the individual tales become mere details, filling in of the space or time; and, taken out of it, the whole falls into a mere story-book, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... activities be along its own special lines. The mob in the street may be roused by working on elemental passions—so roused it will kill or burn, but you cannot excite in it enthusiasm for Dante's Inferno, or induce it to contribute money or labor toward the preparation of a new annotated edition. To get such enthusiasm and stimulate such action you must work upon a body of men selected and brought together for ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... enormity of their sin. The theory that his friendship with Guido Novella, the nephew of Francesca, made Dante refrain from entering fully into the incident, will not hold, when it is remembered that the cantos of the Inferno were written in 1300, seventeen years before the poet reached Ravenna, and accepted the hospitality of the Polenta house. Dante's infinite compassion is, therefore, the cause for the compressed poetry of this ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Francesca da Rimini • George Henry Boker
... young genius produced an "Inferno," or "Chamber of Horrors," which, when completed, was an immense success—too immense, indeed, for it had to be closed because of the fearful impression it made upon the ladies, who fainted in their escorts' arms whenever they gazed upon its terrors. One is inclined to suspect ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... more than passing sounds of conflict rose to them; the pounding of running feet, sharp orders, a shot, and then another. But the landing without the bedroom door looked down by a high-set window into the narrow Tertasse; and from this, though the door was shut, rose an inferno of noise, the clash of steel, the cries of the wounded, the shouts of the fighters. The townsfolk, rallying from their first alarm, were driving the enemy out of the Rue de la Cite, penning him into the Tertasse, and preparing to ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... gently than was his wont. "I mean that I know the sort of inferno your life had been—a perpetual struggle against odds that were always overwhelming you. If it hadn't been so, you would never have come to me for shelter. Do you think I ever flattered myself that that was anything but a last resource—the final surrender to circumstance? ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell
... observing the concentration of the Seventh Division opposite Aubers, opened a vigorous fire upon that front. During the afternoon General Haig ordered a charge upon the German positions. The advance was made in short rushes in the face of a fire that seemed to blaze from an inferno. Inch by inch the ground was drenched with British blood. At 5.30 in the afternoon the men dug themselves in under the relentless German fire. Further ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... he has been sent to save Dante from the ravening wolf (which also personifies the papal or Guelf party), only to guide him through the horrors of the Inferno, and the sufferings of Purgatory, up to Paradise, where a "worthier" spirit will ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... of rapture deferred that were not lavished upon me by my dear Princess, herself ever a luring delight of promise flitting just beyond my reach. Every sweet lover's inferno unguessed of by Dante she led me through. Ah! Those swooning tropic nights, under our palm trees, the distant surf a langourous murmur as from some vast sea shell of mystery, when she, my Princess, all but melted to my yearning, and with her laughter, ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... given to historical talent—and there is good proof that such talent is not wanting in this year's Exhibition; Mr Patten has chosen a very grand subject from the Inferno of Dante. "Dante, accompanied by Virgil in his descent to the Inferno, recognizes his three countrymen, Rusticucci, Aldobrandi, and Guidoguerra"—Divina Commedia, Inferno. The subject is finely conceived by Mr Patten. Virgil and Dante stand ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... Sebastian were clanging the alarm, the good monks were toiling up the path toward the inferno which lit the heavens, when, black against the glare, they saw a giant figure approaching. It came reeling toward them, vast, mighty, misshapen. Not until it was in their very midst did they recognize their brother, Joseph. He was bent ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... capital of the present day can the sentiment expressed by Horace be felt and enjoyed more than in Rome, where it is so easy to forget the worries and frivolities of city life by walking a few steps outside the gates. The Val d'Inferno and the Via del Casaletto, outside the Porta Angelica, the Vigne Nuove outside the Porta Pia, and the Valle della Caffarella, to which I am now leading my readers, all are dreamy wildernesses, made purposely ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani
... Hook the pilot was dropped and the real voyage begun. Fifty feet below her deck, in an inferno of noise, and heat, and light, and shadow, coal-passers wheeled the picked fuel from the bunkers to the fire-hold, where half-naked stokers, with faces like those of tortured fiends, tossed it into the eighty white-hot mouths of the furnaces. In the engine-room, oilers passed to ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson
... for my patients that I haven't thought much about it for myself. At two places I had the satisfaction of personally seeing to the moving of the invalid from a little six-by-nine inferno of a bedroom to a big and airy sitting-room. It gave me the keenest pleasure to see it hurt the tidy housewife, who didn't want her best room mussed up." He chuckled. "In one case I made her take down the ...
— Mrs. Red Pepper • Grace S. Richmond
... countries, together with an identity in name, had given rise to a certain confusion, among the earlier historians, between him and Michael Scott the "wondrous wizard and magician" referred to by Dante in Canto xxmo of the "Inferno." Michael Scott studied such abstruse subjects as judicial astrology, alchemy, physiognomy, and chiromancy, and his commentary on Aristotle was considered to be of such a high order that it was printed in Venice in 1496. Sir Walter ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... the stairs and out into the silent court. The thought of Chilcote, his pitiable condition, his sordid environments, were things that required a firm will to drive into the background of the imagination; but a whole inferno of such visions would not have daunted Loder on that morning as, unobserved by any eyes, he left the little court-yard with its grass, its trees, its pavement—all so distastefully familiar—and passed down the Strand ...
— The Masquerader • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... other hand, many a sermon on Hell (and there are too few on the subject), it could possibly be said the average sermon on the subject, is a slander on a just and holy God. The sermon is drawn largely from Dante's Inferno or the distorted imagination of the preacher, with no reference to the fact that God will punish sinners differently according to their light and their ...
— God's Plan with Men • T. T. (Thomas Theodore) Martin
... increasing danger to Christianity arising from it. In the middle of the thirteenth century the Franciscans study him without evincing hatred. About the end of it Dante describes him still without reproaches, though he places him in the Inferno along with other heathen philosophers:(295) but half a century later, in the pictures of the last judgment which exist in several states of Italy, each a little historic satire with its own peculiarities, we find Averroes depicted as the type of incredulity and blasphemy. In a fresco of the Campo ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... Ireland, grows on a man like dram-drinking. Onomacritus is generally charged with the authorship of the poems which the ancients usually attributed to Orpheus, the companion of Jason. Perhaps the most interesting of the poems of Orpheus to us would have been his 'Inferno,' or [Greek text], in which the poet gave his own account of his descent to Hades in search of Eurydice. But only a dubious reference to one adventure in the journey is quoted by Plutarch. Whatever the exact truth about the Orphic poems may be (the reader may pursue ...
— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang
... reappears a pyjamaed figure followed by a steward carrying a mattress. This is spread, under its owner's direction, in a dark corner forward. With a sigh you in your turn plunge down into the sweltering inferno of your cabin, only to reappear likewise with a steward and a mattress. The latter, if you are wise, you spread where the wind of the ship's going will be full upon you. It is a strong wind and blows upon you heavily, so that the sleeves ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... and, what is more, this war is this war. I will not attempt to paint the picture. Every one must realise by now that the main concentration of all military effort is directed at creating in the trenches an ever-intenser inferno of heavy shells. In a great army there is every degree of risk to be run or immunity to be enjoyed; but at the very front, where all is stripped and laid bare, modern warfare is at times a furnace of horror. Its smoke ...
— Thoughts on religion at the front • Neville Stuart Talbot
... I was Virgil, our inferno was an endless procession of tortured faces—faces of women, haggard and mournful, faces of little children, starved and stunted, dulled and dumb. Several times we stopped to talk with these people—one little Jewess girl I knew whose three tiny sisters had been roasted alive in a ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... threatening. We were travelling directly west again, and no sunlight entered here, even when the sun shone. The walls had lost their brighter reds, and what colour they had was dark and sombre, a dirty brown and dark green predominating. The mythology of the ancients, with their Inferno and their River Styx, could hardly conjure anything more supernatural or impressive than ...
— Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico • E. L. Kolb
... Bonnie Bonnie Warld, Mavourneen, Kentucky Home, songs that she had kept fresh in her heart and sometimes played for Billy now and then. And then the old hymns. Did they echo far enough to reach him where he had gone, Mark sitting alone in his inferno? Billy holding his breath and trying to find a way out of his? Did ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... the traitor in the "Chanson de Roland", to whose charge is laid the defeat of Charlemagne's rear-guard at Ronceval, became the arch-traitor of mediaeval literature. It will be recalled that Dante places him in the lowest pit of Hell ("Inferno", xxxii. 122). (NOTE: There is a slight time discrepance here. Roland, Ganelon, and the Battle of Ronceval were said to have happened in 8th Century A.D., fully 300 years after Arthur and ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes
... dining and gaming rooms. The Cascade Plunge, from the looks of it, would have been something for Mihul.... "Our Large Staff of Traveler's Companions"—just what she needed. The Solido Auditorium "... and the Inferno—our Sensations Unlimited Hall." A dulcet voice informed her regretfully that Federation Law did not permit the transmission of full SU effects to individual cabins. It did, however, permit a few sample glimpses. Trigger took ...
— Legacy • James H Schmitz
... happen in New York in case of a break-down in water-supply, electric power, and communication? In an hour there would be a panic; in a day the city would be a hideous shambles of suffering, starvation, disease, and trampling maniacs. Dante's Inferno would be a lovely ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... the abode of the dead from inferno to heaven the two Cerberi are eo ipso also evicted. That follows of itself, even if we had not explicit testimony. A legend of the Br[a]hmana-texts, the Hindu equivalent of the Talmud, tells repeatedly that there are two dogs in heaven, and that these two dogs are Yama's dogs. ...
— Cerberus, The Dog of Hades - The History of an Idea • Maurice Bloomfield
... coming and going in this with projectile swiftness, and within this factory companies of printers, tensely active with nimble fingers—they were always speeding up the printers—ply their type-setting machines, and cast and arrange masses of metal in a sort of kitchen inferno, above which, in a beehive of little brightly lit rooms, disheveled men sit and scribble. There is a throbbing of telephones and a clicking of telegraph needles, a rushing of messengers, a running to and fro of heated men, clutching proofs and copy. Then begins ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... my new-found love, I was a giant. I feared nothing. I would work my will through it all, in spite of Wolf Larsen and of my own thirty-five bookish years. All would be well. I would make it well. And so, exalted, upborne by a sense of power, I turned my back on the howling inferno and climbed to the deck, where the fog drifted ghostly through the night and the air was ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... was begun as late as 1520 and not finished till 1612, and the transitional churches of St. Etienne and St. Eustache remind one, by the mingling of Gothic and Renaissance features, of the famous metamorphosis of Agnel and Cianfa in Dante's Inferno, and one is tempted to exclaim, Ome, come ti muti! Vedi, che gia non sei ne duo ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... Peter did not understand anything that he said, but he sat there with his eyes wide open and felt assured that it was all very useful to him and very important. The inferno continued around them, the air grew thicker with smoke, a barrel-organ began to play at the door, draughts and dominoes rattled against the long ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... think you will readily believe my statement." Continuing in the same half-bantering vein, I said: "I intend to immortalize all members of medical staff of State Hospital for Insane—when I illustrate my Inferno, which, when written, will make Dante's Divine Comedy look like ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers |
