"Mythical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of ours, when rumors of war are again in the air, one’s thoughts revert with pleasure to the half-mythical figure on the threshold of the century, and to legends of the clear-eyed giant, with the quizzical smile and the tender, loyal heart, whose life’s work makes him a more lovable model and a nobler example to hold up before the youth ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... The explanation offered is an attack of insanity. Herndon, 215; I,anon, 239-242. As might be expected Lincoln's secretaries who see him always in a halo give no hint of such an event. It has become a controversial scandal. Is it a fact or a myth? Miss Tarbell made herself the champion of the mythical explanation and collected a great deal of evidence that makes it hard to accept the story as a fact Tarbell, I, Chap. XI. Still later a very sane memoirist, Henry B. Rankin, who knew Lincoln, and is not at all an apologist, takes the same view. His most effective argument is that such an event ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... gospel were few in those days; and the words of form were usually spoken by a Jesuit missionary. Or, if the Pioneer had objections to Catholicism—as many had—his place was supplied by some justice of the peace, of doubtful powers and mythical appointment. If neither of these could be procured, the father of the bride, himself, sometimes assumed the functions, pro hac vice, or pro tempore, of minister or justice. It was always understood, however, that such left-handed marriages were to be confirmed ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... then, but an imaginary existence?" exclaimed the master. "And have not mythical beings the power to influence men! Consider mythology, Monsieur Goubin, and you will perceive that they are not real beings but imaginary beings that exercise the most profound and lasting influence on the mind. Everywhere and always, beings who have no more reality than Putois have inspired ...
— Putois - 1907 • Anatole France
... ancient than this corporeal birth." The idea of Reincarnation spread so fast amongst the early Christians that Justinian was obliged to suppress it by passing a law in the Council of Constantinople in 538 A.D. The law was this: "Whoever shall support the mythical presentation of the pre-existence of the soul, and the consequently wonderful opinion of its return, let him be Anathema." The Gnostics and Manichaeans propagated the tenets of Reincarnation amongst the mediaeval sects such ...
— Reincarnation • Swami Abhedananda
... to return again and again, each time to be driven out as before, squealing loudly. Notwithstanding these interruptions, we carried on a most interesting conversation with Guzman. He had been to Conservidayoc and had himself actually seen ruins at Espiritu Pampa. At last the mythical "Pampa of Ghosts" began to take on in our minds an aspect of reality, even though we were careful to remind ourselves that another very trustworthy man had said he had seen ruins "finer than Ollantaytambo" near Huadquina. ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... of the giant plesiosaurs, dinosaurs, and elasmosaurs, whose remains are preserved in the museums on earth. The reptilian bodies of the elasmosaurs, seventy-five feet in length, with the forked tongues, distended jaws and fangs of a snake, were easily taken for the often described but probably mythical sea-serpent, as partially coiled they occasionally raised their heads ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... was this? Not the coveted string of wampum, the official token, its significance not to be argued away, or overlooked, or mistaken—but instead a necklace of pearls, the fine freshwater gems of the region, so often mentioned by the elder writers and since held to be mythical or exaggeration of the polish of mere shell beads till the recent discoveries have placed once more the yield of the Unio margaritiferus of the rivers of ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... lead his readers on a mad-brained chase after non-existent motor-cars and mythical French gold. He hopes that his readers' patience has not been exhausted, because the ride may prove an instructive education in German methods and the standards of truth accepted in a country ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... by the Persian poet Sadi, in his Garden of Roses. Since that time, he says, we have taken leave of society, preferring the path of seclusion; for there is safety in solitude. Angelus Silesius,[1] a very gentle and Christian writer, confesses to the same feeling, in his own mythical language. Herod, he says, is the common enemy; and when, as with Joseph, God warns us of danger, we fly from the world to solitude, from Bethlehem to Egypt; or else ...
— Counsels and Maxims - From The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... sputtering," snapped Manison. "What were you doing at six years old, Brennan? Did you have the brains to leave home and protect yourself by cooking up the plausible front of a very interesting character such as the mythical Hermit of Martin's Hill? Were you writing boys' stories for a nationwide magazine of high circulation and accredited quality? Could you have planned your own dinner and prepared it, or would you have dined on chocolate bars ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... Chapel, and Mantegna's in the Eremitani, although, as Mr. Sumner said, the gray old city is well worth a visit for many other reasons. The antiquity of its origin, which its citizens are proud to refer to Antenor, the mythical King of Troy, accounts for the thoroughly venerable appearance of some quarters. It is difficult, however, to believe that it was ever the wealthiest city in upper Italy, as it is reported to have been under the ...
— Barbara's Heritage - Young Americans Among the Old Italian Masters • Deristhe L. Hoyt
... supposed debauchery is not, to a great extent, "copy." The majority of the too celebrated "jests" attributed to George Peele are directly traceable to Villon's Repues Franches and similar compilations, and have a suspiciously mythical and traditional air to the student of literary history. There is something a little more trustworthily autobiographical about Nash. But on the whole, though we need not doubt that these ancestors of all ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... to pray, or rather, to say my prayers. I did not, could not, really pray. To me there was no real God. All was as misty and unreal as the mythical stories I had read about the fabled Greek gods. For hours I sought light, and help, and strength; but none came, and when daylight came I was ...
— Roger Trewinion • Joseph Hocking
... I remind you that, almost at our first meeting, we struck up a sort of friendship, on the very equivocal ground of a common country. We agreed that each of us claimed for their native land the mythical Bohemia, and we agreed, besides, that the natives of that country are admirable colleagues, but ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... grander mythical synthesis was the representation of the whole world under the form of the sacred ash tree Yggdrasil. This was the world tree which united heaven, earth, and hell. Its branches stretched across the world and reached up to the skies, and its roots spread in different directions—one ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... his knee. "Trot, trot, trot; how do you enjoy that, my little man? Isn't that nice?" "Yes, sir," replied the child, "but not so nice as on the real donkey, the one with the four legs." It is true, the mythical character has redeeming traits; but then he breaks the Sabbath, obstructs people going to mass, steals cabbages, and is undergoing sentence of transportation for life. While the real man, who lives in a ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... whose mutual alliance for purposes of sustenance and defence constituted the basis of tribal society. The latter clusters were the clans, and they originated during the beginnings of the human family. Every clan formed a group of supposed blood-relatives, looking back to a mythical or traditional common ancestor. Descent from the mother being always plain, the clan claimed descent in the female line even if every recollection of the female ancestor were lost, and theoretically all the members ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... still think a woman so constituted a mythical personage?" persisted Flavia, nodding her ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... their families, and their friends in the town, and concerts and dances were given in it. It seems that the Heidelberg "Museum" comes nearest to the original meaning of the word as "a seat of Muses," for nearly all those mythical ladies were remarkable for their special patronage ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... at Heraclea in Lydia, and at Magnesium on the Meander or Magnesium at Sipylos, all in Asia Minor. It was called the "Heraclean Stone" by the people, but came at length to bear the name of "Magnet" after the city of Magnesia or the mythical shepherd Magnes, who was said to have discovered it by the ...
— The Story Of Electricity • John Munro
... the hunter, the fighter, From the unlucky French of Gallipolis he descended, Heir to Old-World want and New-World love of adventure. Vague was the life he led, and vague and grotesque were the rumors Wherethrough he loomed on the people, the hero of mythical hearsay,— Quick of hand and of heart, insouciant, generous, Western,— Taking the thought of the young in secret love and in envy. Not less the elders shook their heads and held him for outcast, Reprobate, roving, ungodly, infidel, worse than a Papist, With his whispered fame ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... introduces one of those quaint sagas, which, however mythical in themselves, are true enough to the peculiar mode of thought of the Mongols to make them very instructive. The saga ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume VI. • Various
... opening of the ice in the spring, there glided down into the Niagara the first keel that ever cut the water of the Upper Lakes, the forerunner of to-day's enormous {234} tonnage. Her figure-head was a mythical monster, and her name the "Griffin," both taken ...
— French Pathfinders in North America • William Henry Johnson
... in the English May-pageants as fortuitous, notwithstanding the coincidence of the May King sometimes appearing on horseback in Germany, and notwithstanding our conviction that Kuhn is right in maintaining that the May King, the Hobby-Horse, and the Dragon-Slayer are symbols of one mythical idea. This idea we are compelled by want of space barely to state, with the certainty of doing injustice to the learning and ingenuity with which the author has supported his views. Kuhn has shown it to be extremely probable, first, that the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... benefits. Given the prospect of long-term, constant funding, the Department of Defense could then give more thought to how to build the most modern, efficient military force within the dollars available. We would no longer define our forces against some mythical threat or scenario which generates impetus to protect force size rather than quality. The Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, and space forces would be required to build a team based on a salary ...
— Shock and Awe - Achieving Rapid Dominance • Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade
... that things had moved very fast in the last five minutes, and that all at once, in some unexpected fashion, all that elaborate barrier of laissez-passers, sauf-conduits, and so on, had been swept aside, and, quite as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world, I was spinning out to that almost mythical "front." ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... importance, and that its affirmative answer would not be conclusive, as it would still leave open other questions; such, for instance, as those which enter into the theories of Paulus and other Rationalists, and such as are not even excluded from the incidental adjuncts of Strauss's mythical theory. It might also be urged, that, allowing the question to be paramount in its relation to the whole issue, it is one which is not so judiciously dealt with in the discursiveness of dialogues after dinner, as in the solitary study, with piles of huge tomes, ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... Brassey has to say about the Patagonians, of whom the early voyagers brought home such mythical accounts. They owe their name to the fanciful credulity of Magellan, who thus immortalized his conviction that they were of gigantic proportions—Patagons, or Pentagons, that is, five cubits high. Sir ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... origin. Much the same may be said of Daedalus. It need not be discussed here whether an actual artist of this name ever existed. The information we have as to Daedalus is of two kinds; on the one hand, we find tales of a mythical craftsman and magician, to whose invention many of the most typical improvements in early Greek sculpture are attributed; on the other hand, we have records of many statues of the gods, extant in historical times in various shrines of Greece, which were attributed ...
— Religion and Art in Ancient Greece • Ernest Arthur Gardner
... signal Hammasoloe suddenly sprang on the boards and began the mythical movement known as the cannibal dance. It was symbolic of a curious legend current among the Indians of Vancouver island, of a strange spirit that dwells among the mountains and spends most of his time eating the fat members of the Quackahl tribe. Hammasoloe took the part of the spirit ...
— The Adventures of Uncle Jeremiah and Family at the Great Fair - Their Observations and Triumphs • Charles McCellan Stevens (AKA 'Quondam')
... a legendary hero of Switzerland. The events of this drama are represented as occurring in 1307 A.D., when Austria held Switzerland under her control. Gesler, also a purely mythical personage, is one of the Austrian bailiffs. The legend relates that Gesler had his cap placed on a pole in the market place, and all the Swiss were required to salute it in passing in recognition of his authority. Tell refusing to do this was arrested, and condemned to death. This and the ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... probable that it could be made a profitable calling in Texas.—X.Y.Z. Perpetual motion stands at the head of the absolute impossibilities of life; therefore, the government has never offered a prize for the solution of this mythical problem.—RANGER. Nitro-glycerine is one of the most dangerous explosives known; consequently, we cannot conscientiously describe its manufacture in this place, thus jeopardizing the lives of thoughtless persons who might attempt to make it if such a formula was furnished. —E.C.S. If ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls, Vol. XIII, Nov. 28, 1891 • Various
... Kent, Sussex, and Wessex in the curious annals which form the opening of the compilation now known as the "English" or "Anglo-Saxon Chronicle," annals which are undoubtedly historic, though with a slight mythical intermixture. For the history of the English conquest of mid-Britain or the Eastern Coast we possess no written materials from either side; and a fragment of the Annals of Northumbria embodied in the later compilation ("Historia Britonum") which bears ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... visited and named by poets. My birthplace grows unfamiliar when I take down an atlas and run my finger over the parti-colored divisions of the Norfolk County of Massachusetts and trace the perimeter which confines Bellingham to its oblong precinct, surrounded by those mythical lands of Mendon, Milford and Medway. They wear an authoritative appearance on the map; but for me they occupied no such positions in my childhood and stand as stubborn realities hindering my feet when I wish to return to the Red House of my fathers. Once there, memory ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee
... mythical and heathen; but it is clarified by natural filtration through the Christian mind of the poet. Not only are the heathen myths inoffensive, but they are positively favourable to a train of Christian thought. Beowulf's descent into the abyss to ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... developed and systematized aspect of a science, and canons of belief have been established, which it is not safe to disregard. Great occurrences, such as the Trojan War and the Siege of Thebes, not long ago faithfully described by all historians of Greece, have been found to be part of the common mythical heritage of the Aryan nations. Achilleus and Helena, Oidipous and Iokasta, Oinone and Paris, have been discovered in India and again in Scandinavia, and so on, until their nonentity has become the legitimate inference from their very ubiquity. Legislators like Romulus and Numa, ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... despot and each the slave. But few of the Philosophers accepted it entirely. Most of them desired the constant interference of the government for one purpose or another, and many believed in the power, almost the omnipotence, of a mythical personage, borrowed in part from Plutarch ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... them. The trappers killed six of them at one volley, and the rest ran away, leaving twenty-three beautiful longbows behind. The only clothing the dead men had on was snail-shells fastened to the ends of their long locks of hair. The trappers now began to seek more anxiously for the mythical settlements. "A great many times each day," says Pattie, "we bring our crafts to the shore and go out to see if we cannot discover the tracks of horses and cattle." On the 18th they thought some inundated ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... mythical in their character, a circumstance that may not affect the evidence of the existence of the custom in itself, but is important as regards the statistics of its frequency. As a rule, the 'Olah occurs only in conjunction with Zebahim, and when this is the ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... is hard to read; in some of it the interest lies so close to the surface that it grips us with the first glance. Such is the kind we read in the beginning. The adventures of King Arthur, the Cid, Robin Hood, and other half mythical heroes are history in the making—the history that grew up when the world was young, and its great men were something like overgrown boys. That is why we who have boyish hearts like to read about them. ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester
... up, and as I had always been a good cook I cleaned up handsomely, especially as it was while I was running the restaurant that Miner started his notorious stampede, when thousands of gold-mad men followed a will-o'-the-wisp trail to fabulously rich diggings which turned out to be entirely mythical. ...
— Arizona's Yesterday - Being the Narrative of John H. Cady, Pioneer • John H. Cady
... table, for the reek of his Sabbath cigar had not penetrated to the old man's nostrils. It was a great night for Pinchas; wrought up to fervid nationalistic aspirations by the memory of the Egyptian deliverance, which he yet regarded as mythical in its details. It was a terrible night for Hannah, sitting opposite to him under the fire of his poetic regard. She was pale and rigid, moving and speaking mechanically. Her father glanced towards her every now and again, compassionately, but with trust that the worst was over. Her ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... of preserving and publishing these texts seems to me to be manifest. They reveal to us the undoubtedly authentic spirit of the ancient religion; they show us the language in its most archaic form; they preserve references to various mythical cycli of importance to the historian; and they illustrate the alterations in the spoken tongue adopted in the esoteric dialect of the priesthood. Such considerations will, I trust, attract the attention of scholars to these fragments ...
— Rig Veda Americanus - Sacred Songs Of The Ancient Mexicans, With A Gloss In Nahuatl • Various
... a religious service, in which poetry, music, pantomime, and the dance lent themselves, under the forms of [Page 12] dramatic art, to the refreshment of men's minds. Its view of life was idyllic, and it gave itself to the celebration of those mythical times when gods and goddesses moved on the earth as men and women and when men and women were as gods. As to subject-matter, its warp was spun largely from the bowels of the old-time mythology into ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... castle, monastery, or hall has not its traditional subterranean passage? Certainly the majority are mythical; still, there are some well authenticated. Burnham Abbey, Buckinghamshire, for example, or Tenterden Hall, Hendon, had passages which have been traced for over fifty yards; and one at Vale Royal, Nottinghamshire, has ...
— Secret Chambers and Hiding Places • Allan Fea
... Benecke's imagination. The works of Antimachus are lost, and all that we know about them or him is that he lamented the loss of his wife—a feeling very much older than the poet of Colophon—and consoled himself by writing an elegy named [Greek: Ludae], in which he brought together from mythical and traditional sources a number of sad tales. Conjugal grief does not take us very far toward so complicated an altruistic state of mind as I have ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... awakened in his mind recollections, doubtless often stirred, but very vague, perhaps, almost mythical to him, after so long a time in which nothing like the same experience had come to him. Yet that they were dear to him was evident. They were concerned with his vigorous manhood, though he was a youthful grandfather when the Casco brought Robert Louis Stevenson to Tahiti to live in the ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... The mythical Fitzgerald origin of the clan, hitherto accepted by most of its leading members, is exhaustively dealt with, I venture to hope effectively, if not completely and finally disposed of. That it is now ...
— History Of The Mackenzies • Alexander Mackenzie
... under arrest, and talking to the astonished host, who could not understand what it was all about. I told the landlord the mythical history of the abbe debt to me, and handed over the trunk, telling him that he had nothing to fear with regard to the bill, as I would take care that ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... encompassed in these twenty-six years, but our bound volumes are full of his editorials and articles—the serious, the analytical, the constructive, the caustic, the witty and the amusing. He created The Piney Woods Clarion and in quotations from that mythical publication put a new light on the business. "Insurance Arabian Nights" which he declared were "translated from the Persian," contained more of the odd conceits that fairly flowed from his pen and these two series, with a marine ...
— The Dead Men's Song - Being the Story of a Poem and a Reminiscent Sketch of its - Author Young Ewing Allison • Champion Ingraham Hitchcock
... But I could not help thinking that this same Persian journey might have afforded a solution of the whole difficulty. Despatched suddenly to that vaguely known country, he could have taken the mythical manuscript to revise on the journey: the convoy could have been attacked by a horde of Kurds or such-like desperadoes, all could have been slain save a fortunate handful, and the manuscript could have been looted as an important political document and carried off into Eternity. Doria would ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... links we have what is called a Bogie score posted up. That is a score that a certain mythical Captain Bogie, supposed to be an average good player, could make on those links. On one typical club-course, for instance, the Bogie score is 42. Though it has been done in 37, the ordinary player congratulates himself when he gets down ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall
... the lord ruling the castle above." Karara produced the first rational and complete answer. "But for some reason he is not accepted by his own kind. Perhaps," she added on her own, "it is because he is crippled. The sea is his home, as he expresses it, and he believes me to be some mythical being out of it. He saw me swimming, masked, and with the dolphins, and he is sure I change shape ...
— Key Out of Time • Andre Alice Norton
... words—γῆ and γένω, and signifies earth-born, sons of the earth.[81] The word αὐτόχθνονες (autochthones) has a cognate meaning; Liddell and Scott render it, “of the land itself; Latin, terrigenæ, aborigines, indigenæ, of the original race, not settlers.” The mythical account of the origin of the “giants” concurs with this etymology. It paints them as the sons of Cœlus and Terra—Heaven and Earth. In the poetry of Hesiod, they spring from the earth imbued with ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... "Boston, 42 (in reality 32), destroyed at Washington," which had been a condemned hulk for ten years, and had no guns or anything else in her, and was as much a loss to our navy as the fishing up and burning of an old wreck would have been; and 8 gun-boats whose destruction was either mythical, or else which were not national vessels. By deducting all these we reduce James' total by 120 guns, and 2,600 tons; and a few more alterations (such as excluding the swivels in the President's tops, which he counts, etc.), brings his number ...
— The Naval War of 1812 • Theodore Roosevelt
... from time to time as to how this mythical trick has been done. The most amusing is that which was quoted at the Mass Meeting referred to above, and as far as my memory goes I ...
— Indian Conjuring • L. H. Branson
... as his prolonged sojourn in the distant land of a fairy queen, who was proffering him, not the delights of her love, but healing for his wounds, in order that when he was made whole again he might return "to help the Britons." Historic, mythical, and romantic tradition have combined to produce the version that Layamon records. Geoffrey of Monmouth (xi. 2), writing in the mock role of serious historian and with a tendency to rationalisation, says not a word ...
— Arthurian Chronicles: Roman de Brut • Wace
... Herren, just try once to imagine what you are singing about! It is not an exercise—it is not a love song, either of which you would no doubt perform excellently. Conceive what is happening! Put yourself back into those mythical times. Believe, for this evening, in the story of the forfeited Paradise. There is strife between the Blessed and the Damned; the obedient and the disobedient. There are thick clouds in the heavens—smoke, fire, and sulphur—a clashing of swords in the serried ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... upon Milman's 'History of Christianity,' which Melbourne praised, the religious opinions of Locke, of Milman himself, the opinion of the world thereupon, and so on to Strauss's book and his mythical system, and what he meant by mythical. Macaulay began illustrating and explaining the meaning of a myth by examples from remote antiquity, when I observed that in order to explain the meaning of 'mythical' it was not necessary to ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... long supposed that the story of Herodotus about the pigmies of Africa was mythical, but within the past twenty years abundant evidence has accumulated of the existence of a number of tribes of curious little folks in equatorial Africa. The chief among these tribes are the Akka, whom Schweinfurth found northwest of Albert Nyassa; the Obongo, discovered ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, March 1887 - Volume 1, Number 2 • Various
... then, that nothing more beautiful had ever happened; for it was the first time a man had ever sent me roses. Nineteen years old, and my first roses! They made me so happy. Paris seemed very far away; the convent was a mythical place I had seen in a dream; nothing was real but Dad, and America, and the ...
— Cupid's Understudy • Edward Salisbury Field
... Washington. They communicate their knowledge to Gen. Putnam and are commissioned by him to play the role of detectives in the matter. They do so, and meet with many adventures and hairbreadth escapes. The boys are, of course, mythical, but they serve to enable the author to put into very attractive shape much valuable knowledge concerning one phase of the ...
— Adrift on the Pacific • Edward S. Ellis
... as you will," Babbalanja, "but say little aloud, unless in a merry and mythical way. Lay down the great maxims of things, but let inferences take care of themselves. Never be special; never, a partisan. In safety, afar off, you may batter down a fortress; but at your peril you essay to carry a single turret by escalade. And if doubts distract ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... Roland or the Arthur of Saxony, though fancy has not gone so far in his case as in that of the French paladin and the Welsh hero of knight-errantry, for, though he and his predecessor Hermann became favorite characters in German ballad and legend, the romance heroes of that land continued to be the mythical Siegfried and his partly fabulous, partly historical companions of the epical song ...
— Historical Tales, Vol 5 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality, German • Charles Morris
... for Irish, from Milesius, mythical Spanish conqueror of Ireland; Evreux town in Normandy, France; a D'Uzes a member of an ancient noble ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper
... overhasty I, who drove him upon it! This disgrace, loss nigh ruinous; in fine, this infernal Campaign (CETTE CAMPAGNE INFEMALE)!" The Anecdote-Books abound in details of Friedrich's behavior at Wilsdruf that day; mythical all, or in good part, but symbolizing a case that is conceivable to everybody. Or would readers care to glance into the very fact with their own eyes? As happens ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... physical character today is their fragility. A woman cannot lift as much as a man. She cannot walk as far. She cannot exert as much mechanical energy in any other way. Even her alleged superior endurance, as Havelock Ellis has demonstrated in "Man and Woman," is almost wholly mythical; she cannot, in point of fact, stand nearly so much hardship as aman can stand, and so the law, usually an ass, exhibits an unaccustomed accuracy of observation in its assumption that, whenever husband and wife are exposed alike to fatal ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... southern China. This wood, from which was extracted a highly valued dye, made a particularly strong impression on the mediaeval imagination. European travellers in India gave accounts of its being burned there for firewood, as their strangest tale of luxury and waste. It gave its name to a mythical island of Bresil, in the western seas, which was the subject of much speculation and romance. The same name was eventually applied to the South American country that now bears it, because it produced a similar dye-wood in large quantities. Sandal-wood and aloe-wood, which were valuable for their ...
— European Background Of American History - (Vol. I of The American Nation: A History) • Edward Potts Cheyney
... in nature had its myth. We have been too practical and too full of haste in these latter days to listen to nature or to myths, but let us inspire the children to do so. Who among us has not regretted his lack of knowledge of some mythical person, in song, ...
— Classic Myths • Retold by Mary Catherine Judd
... men. They talked with fire and enthusiasm, the intellectual stimulant stirring them as he had seen drink and anger stir other men. What he heard was no longer the philosophy of the dry, printed word, written by half-mythical demigods like Kant and Spencer. It was living philosophy, with warm, red blood, incarnated in these two men till its very features worked with excitement. Now and again other men joined in, and all followed the discussion with ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... people perished. It was only after this inundation took place that the city of Amsterdam arose on the southwest shore of the Zuyder Zee. The story, with the exception of the inundation, is purely mythical.] ...
— Contes et lgendes - 1re Partie • H. A. Guerber
... called The Keys. To the south was a wide inlet with a ship seemingly in the act of sailing towards it. The eastward edge of this inlet was labelled Cape Fea and just around from this, in an easterly direction wa a small cove called Try-Again Inlet. In the sea to the west of the island was drawn a mythical sea-monster. ...
— Poison Island • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... long as we remained here Pisha, the chief, used to sing, reciting mythical events, thereby attracting good antohs (spirits) and keeping the evil ones away, to the end that his people might be in good health and protected against misfortune. His efforts certainly were persevering, ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz
... attentively the various phases of public opinion on religious subjects during the last twenty years or more, without noticing a growing tendency to the accumulation of difficulties on the subject of Revelation. Geology, ethnology, mythical interpretation, critical investigation, and inquiries of other kinds, have raised their several difficulties; and, in consequence, infidels have rejoiced, candid inquirers have been perplexed, and even those who have held with firmness decided views on the ...
— Thoughts on a Revelation • Samuel John Jerram
... learn the true spirit of an old classic poet from our pedantic philologists, as the true sense of holy Scripture from our scholastic theologians. What with their grammar twistings, their various readings, their dubious punctuations, their mythical, and who knows what other meanings, their hair-splittings, and prosy vocable tiltings, we find at last that they are willing to teach us everything but that which really concerns us, and, like the Danaides, they let the water of life run through ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V1 • William Mienhold
... a statue which is supposed to be Memnon, the mythical king of Ethiopia, and which at daybreak was said to emit the music ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... that this writer suppresses the fact that the miracles of St. Walburga are treated by the author of her Life as mythical? yet that is the tone of the whole composition. This writer can notice it in the Life of St. Neot, the first of the three Lives which he criticises; these are his words: "Some of them, the writers, for instance, of Volume 4, which contains, among others, ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... Miss Wendover, and asked Brian to take Miss Palliser, while Peter was told off to Miss Rylance, leaving Bessie and the clinging Blanche like twin cherries on one stem. It was curious for Ida to find herself seated presently beside the wealthy cousin of whom she had heard as a far-off and almost mythical personage, of very little account in her life; since it was so improbable that any of his wealth would ever come ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... The geological difficulties of the Mosaic cosmogony were also at that time exciting attention. It was a novelty to me, that Arnold treated these questions as matters of indifference to religion; and did not hesitate to say, that the account of Noah's deluge was evidently mythical, and the history of Joseph "a beautiful poem." I was staggered at this. If all were not descended from Adam, what became of St. Paul's parallel between the first and second Adam, and the doctrine of Headship and Atonement founded on it? If the world was ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... Swinburne, Clough, Rossetti, and James Rhoades supply the models, and I have been credibly informed that the law is as good as the versification. Mr. Swinburne was in those days the favourite butt of young parodists, and the gem of the book is the dedication to "J.S." or "John Stiles," a mythical person, nearly related to John Doe and Richard Roe, with whom all budding jurists had in old days to make acquaintance. The disappearance of the venerated initials from modern ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... these mythical happenings and magical practices do not agree with his actual knowledge in no way disturbs the Tinguian. It is doubtful if he is conscious of a conflict; and should it be brought to his attention, he would explain it by reference ...
— The Tinguian - Social, Religious, and Economic Life of a Philippine Tribe • Fay-Cooper Cole
... but his frequent commendation in after years indicated that I gained his goodwill before the close of the war, if not when I first came to his notice; and a more intimate association convinced me that the cold and cruel characteristics popularly ascribed to him were more mythical ...
— The Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan, Vol. I., Part 3 • P. H. Sheridan
... thought it improbable. The verses were very silly; and, recalling the big, blundering boy who had written them, Billy began to wonder—somewhat forlornly—whither he, too, had vanished. He and the girl he had gone mad for both seemed rather mythical—legendary as King Pepin. ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... than conjecture upon this subject, and the continent called Lemuria is as mythical as the Ethiopia of Ptolemy and the Atlantis of Plato. It is a convenient theory, as it places the cradle of the race near the five great rivers, the Tigris, Euphrates, Indus, Ganges, and the Nile. The supposed ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... among civilized man brings about an entirely different series of associations, and therefore results in a different type of explanation. A sudden explosion will associate itself in his mind, perhaps, with the tales he has heard in regard to the mythical history of the world, and consequently will be accompanied by superstitious fear. When we recognize that neither among civilized men nor among primitive men the average individual carries to completion the attempt at causal explanation of phenomena, but carries it only so far as to amalgamate it ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... justice. With such definitions a large number of customs of public worship and, above all, a number of stories about the gods, were in violent contradiction; thus we find even so old and so pious a poet as Pindar occasionally rejecting mythical stories which he thinks at variance with the sublime nature of the gods. This form of criticism of popular beliefs is continued through the whole of antiquity; it is found not only in philosophers and philosophically ...
— Atheism in Pagan Antiquity • A. B. Drachmann
... with the constitution of Saul's monarchy about 1100 B.C. All that precedes this—the deluge, the dispersal of mankind, Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, the captivity in Egypt, Moses, Joshua, and the conquest of Canaan, is more or less mythical. ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... derived from, and based upon, other records millenniums older? If the Christian historian, hampered by his chronology, and the freethinker by lack of necessary data, feel bound to stigmatize every non-Christian or non-Western chronology as "obviously fanciful," "purely mythical," and "not worthy of a moment's consideration," how shall one, wholly dependent upon Western guides get at the truth? And if these incompetent builders of Universal History can persuade their public to accept as authoritative their chronological ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... first of all consider the cases in which persons have caused themselves to vanish and reappear at will. This power of becoming visible and invisible to others is not limited to mythical times, but may be reproduced today by artificial means. If a sensitive subject be hypnotized (and there is some analogy to the hypnotic pass in the fact that the fairy invariably waved her wand before the eyes of the onlooker), hallucinations of various types may be induced. Thus, our subject ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... duty, possibility, and destiny. Life threatens to be extinguished by its own shadow, by the debris kept in the current by countless tenacious records. Its essence escapes to heaven or into new forms, but its ghosts still walk the earth in print. Like that mythical serpent which advanced only as it grew in length, so knowledge spans the whole length of the ages. Some philosopher conceived of history as the migration and growth of reason throughout time, culminating ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... do not soften our lives with an atmosphere of gracious supernaturalism, and fresco our azure ceiling with angels—it is assumed that the mythopoetic instinct is dead. Far from it! It is as lively as ever, and we may watch it at play in the building up of legends, in the creation of mythical figures; in the shaping of the Boulanger legend, the Napoleonic legend, the Beaconsfield legend with its poetical machinery of the primrose, the Booth legend, the Blavatsky legend; in the fathering of epigrams upon typical wits ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... circumstances with which the public have never been made acquainted. His deeds were quite black enough without further blackening with printer's ink, and it would be a pity if the real Motor Pirate were lost sight of in mythical haze such as has gathered about the name of his great prototype, ...
— The Motor Pirate • George Sidney Paternoster
... Round Table bears witness to a more distinct and keener sense of sin: and on the whole, a deeper, broader, and more manly view of human character, life, and duty. It is in effect more like what the Carlovingian cycle might have been had Dante moulded it. It hardly needs to be added that it is more mythical, inasmuch as Arthur of the Round Table is a personage, we fear, wholly doubtful, though not impossible; while the broad back of the historic Charlemagne, like another Atlas, may well sustain a world of mythical accretions. This slight comparison, be ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... the individual whose excellent natural gifts have been so overloaded with huge masses of undigested and indigestible learning that they have had no chance of healthy development. But though I have often heard of this personage, I have never met him, and I believe him to be mythical. It is true, no doubt, that many learned people are dull; but there is no indication whatever that they are dull because they are learned. True dullness is seldom acquired; it is a natural grace, the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... undoubtedly, as Magaillans again notices, P'ING-YANG FU.[3] It is the Bikan of Shah Rukh's ambassadors. [Old P'ing yang, 5 Lis to the south] is said to have been the residence of the primitive and mythical Chinese Emperor Yao. A great college for the education of the Mongols was instituted at P'ing-yang, by Yeliu Chutsai, the enlightened minister of Okkodai Khan. [Its dialect differs from the T'ai-yuan dialect, and is more like Pekingese.] The city, ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... "Novellen" themselves were continued by all those eminent writers whom we have already named. The Divan, with its bent toward immutable relations, prepares the way for the new lyric, until finally, with the second part of Faust, mythical world-poetry and symbolism complete the circle, just as the cycle of German literature finishes with Nietzsche, Stefan George, Spitteler and Hofmannsthal. At the same time new forces are starting to form the new cycle, or, to speak like Goethe, the newest spiral: Hauptmann, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... we are a lonely folk. No, I cannot believe that Florimel loves me for myself alone: it is my title which dazzles her. And I would that I had never made myself the emperor of Noumaria: for this emperor goes about everywhere in a fabulous splendor, and is, very naturally, resistless in his semi-mythical magnificence. Ah, but these imperial gewgaws distract the thoughts of Florimel from the real Jurgen; so that the real Jurgen is a person whom she does not understand at all. And it is ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... See p. 380.] the stimulus word "dimple" calls up the previously made response of seeing a dimple in a cheek, and so leads to the word "cheek". In a controlled association test, where opposites are required, the stimulus word "mythical" arouses the previously made observation of the antithesis of mythical and historical, and so leads to the motor response ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth |
