"Prometheus" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was in me only the parent of remorse., . . I know it too well not to hate and fear it. Why do you reproach me, if I try to abjure it, and cast away the burden which I am too weak to bear? I am weak—Would you have me say that I am strong? Would you have me try to be a Prometheus, while I am longing to be once more an infant on a mother's breast? Let me alone . . . I am a weary child, who knows nothing, can do nothing, except lose its way in arguings and reasonings, and "find no ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... all their powers are derived. That higher law is the Law of God, that supreme authority is the God of Justice. To this eternally just God, innocence, under oppression and wrong, has made its proud appeal, like that of Prometheus to the elements, to the witnessing clouds, to coming ages, and has been sustained and comforted. And to that higher law the weak have confidently appealed against the unrighteous enactments of the strong, and have finally conquered. The last and inmost ground of all obligation ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... NICOLAS SEBASTIEN ADAM (1705-1778), known as Adam le jeune, born in Nancy, worked under equal encouragement. His first work of importance was his "Prometheus chained, devoured by a Vulture,', executed in plaster in 1738, and carved in marble in 1763 as his "reception piece'' when he was elected into the Academy. He produced the reliefs of the "Birth'' and "Agony of Christ'' for the Oratory in Paris, but his chief ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... the soul knows how to seek, it cannot fail to obtain. This is the Law and the Prophets. Knock and it shall be opened; seek and ye shall find. It is demonstrated; it is a maxim. Man no longer paints his proper nature in some form, and says, "Prometheus had it; it is God-like;" but "Man must have it; it is human." However disputed by many, however ignorantly used, or falsified by those who do receive it, the fact of an universal, unceasing revelation has been too clearly stated ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... when PROMETHEUS braved the Thunderer's ire, 370 Stole from his blazing throne etherial fire, And, lantern'd in his breast, from realms of day Bore the bright treasure to his Man of clay;— High on cold Caucasus by VULCAN bound, The lean impatient Vulture fluttering round, 375 His writhing limbs in vain he ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... Thus, when enwrapt, Prometheus strove to trace Inspir'd perceptions of celestial grace, Th' ideal spirit, fugitive as wind, Art's forceful spells in adamant confin'd; Curv'd with nice chisel, floats the obsequious line, From stone unconscious, beauty beams divine, ...
— Poetic Sketches • Thomas Gent
... may be held to be no more real a personage than Prometheus, and if the story of the Fall is merely an instructive "type," comparable to the profound Promethean mythus, ...
— The Lights of the Church and the Light of Science - Essay #6 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... sins of an upper world. Virgil gave a glimpse, as it were, into that scene of retribution; Minos and Rhadamanthus passing judgment on the successive spirits brought before them; the flames of Tartarus, the rock of Sisyphus, the wheel of Ixion, the vulture gnawing Prometheus. But with Homer and Virgil, the descent into the infernal regions was a brief episode; with Dante it was the whole poem. Immense was the effort of imagination requisite to give variety to such a subject, to prevent the mind from experiencing weariness ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... any — repentance. Seated alone upon a fallen tree one day, the face of poor Harry came back to him, as he saw it first, poring over Polexander in the library; and, full of the joy of life himself, notwithstanding his past troubles, strong as a sunrise, and hopeful as a Prometheus, the quivering perplexity of that sickly little face smote him with a pang. "What might I not have done for the boy! He, too, was in the hands of the enchantress, and, instead of freeing him, I became her slave to enchain him further." Yet, even in this, he did Euphra ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... intended by an author is hardly ever the lesson the world chooses to learn from his book. What attracts and impresses us in El Burlador de Sevilla is not the immediate urgency of repentance, but the heroism of daring to be the enemy of God. From Prometheus to my own Devil's Disciple, such enemies have always been popular. Don Juan became such a pet that the world could not bear his damnation. It reconciled him sentimentally to God in a second version, and clamored for his canonization for a whole century, ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... were open and fixed; the mouth was curled like a scroll, and every lean feature firm as in life; while the whole face, now wound in curls of soft blue flame, wore an aspect of grim defiance, and eternal death. Prometheus, blasted by fire ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... prove to mankind a blessing or a curse?—like the fire which Prometheus stole from heaven to vivify his statue, may it not be followed by the evils of ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... knew that her whole frame would be relaxed in an instant. Then she would have bounded—oh! with what speed—into the other room, where her immortal part was helplessly watching the conflict, and interceded at the risk of her life. Alas! Prometheus was tied to the rock not more firmly than she to that ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... world-neglected persecuted man—some patient toil-worn son of science, whom Genius loves to call her own—though, haply, to the schools, to fortune and to fame unknown. One whose transcendent, superconscious mind has dared, Prometheus-like, to snatch from heaven the fire of the immortal gods and offer it in benefits ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... single march, Whose path was through one long triumphal arch! Oh bloody and most bootless Waterloo! Which proves how fools may have their fortune too, Won half by blunder, half by treachery: Oh dull Saint Helen! with thy gaoler nigh— Hear! hear Prometheus[294] from his rock appeal To Earth,—Air,—Ocean,—all that felt or feel His power and glory, all who yet shall hear A name eternal as the rolling year; 230 He teaches them the lesson taught so long, So oft, so vainly—learn ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... that he was a shepherd, because that in the desert and high places, he did mark the course of the moon. And they gave him also the pipe because that the high places are blown with wind, or else because he sought out the consonancy of figures. Prometheus also, being a wise man, sought the course of the star, which is called the eagle in the firmament, his nature and place; and when he was, as it were, wasted with the desire of learning, then at last he ...
— The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher • Anonymous
... of numerous other useless narrations upon low and frivolous subjects which important authors would scorn to relate. All these narrations appear to be fables, as much as those invented about the industry of Prometheus, the box of Pandora, the war of the Giants against the Gods, and similar others which the poets have invented to amuse ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... is jesting; but how serious and important this art of divination must have appeared even to the most cultivated Athenians may be gathered from a passage of the tragedian Aeschylus, where he mentions it as one of the benefits conferred by Prometheus on mankind, and puts it on a level with the arts of building, metal-making, sailing, and the like, and the ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... give him the burthen that was on his back. The silly ass accepted the condition, and so the restoration of youth (sold for a draught of water) passed from men to serpents."—The Wisdom of the Ancients (Prometheus, xxvi.). ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 193, July 9, 1853 • Various
... reign is over; look to the beasts for other victims. I know that I am not holy and never can become so; and how could you be holy, if I resemble you? Eternal father, Jupiter or Jehovah, we have learned to know you; you are, you were, you ever will be, the jealous rival of Adam, the tyrant of Prometheus. ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... from any part of Western Europe, may easily visit the great mountain-chain on which Prometheus was found, by crossing the Black Sea from Constantinople or from Odessa, and landing at Poti, where the Russians have constructed a railway to Tiflis, once the capital of Georgia, now the residence of the Governor-General ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... anything but Chinese territory. P'an-ku's epoch, millions of years ago, was followed by ten distinct periods of sovereigns, including the "Heavenly emperors," the "Terrestrial emperors," and the "Human emperors," the Yu-ch'au or "Nest-builders," and Sui-joen, the "Fire Producer," the Prometheus of the Chinese, who borrowed fire from the stars for the benefit of man. Several of the characteristic phases of cultural progress and social organization have been ascribed to this mythological period. Authors of less fertile imagination refer them to later times, when the heroes ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... they may know nothing but their holy duties,—while men are torturing and denouncing their fellows, and while we can hear day and night the clinking of the hammers that are trying, like the brute forces in the "Prometheus," to rivet their adamantine wedges right through the breast of human nature,—I have been ready to believe that we have even now a new revelation, and the name of ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... III. He has conducted the Sun Dial in the New York Evening Sun since 1912. He stands out as one of the most penetrating satirists and resonant scoffers at folderol that this continent nourishes. He is far more than a colyumist: he is a poet—a kind of Meredithian Prometheus chained to the roar and clank of a Hoe press. He is a novelist of Stocktonian gifts, although unfortunately for us he writes the first half of a novel easier than the second. And I think that in his secret heart and at the bottom of the old haircloth ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... revolutionary spirit of the time. Shelley, of all the poets of his generation, had the most prophetic fervor in regard to the progress of the democratic spirit. All his greatest poems are informed with this fervor, but it is especially exhibited in the 'Prometheus Unbound', which is, in the words of Todhunter, "to all other lyrical poems what the ninth symphony is to all other symphonies; and more than this, for Shelley has here outsoared himself more unquestionably than Beethoven in his last great orchestral work. . . . The Titan Prometheus is ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... endeavoureth to secure himselfe against the evill he feares, and procure the good he desireth, not to be in a perpetuall solicitude of the time to come; So that every man, especially those that are over provident, are in an estate like to that of Prometheus. For as Prometheus, (which interpreted, is, The Prudent Man,) was bound to the hill Caucasus, a place of large prospect, where, an Eagle feeding on his liver, devoured in the day, as much as was repayred in the night: So that man, which looks too far before him, in the care of future ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... career as a midshipman, he suffered a mortifying interruption of the active life which had long since become essential to his comfort. He had contrived to get appointed on board a fire ship, the Prometheus, (chiefly with a wish to enlarge his experience by this variety of naval warfare,) at the time of the last Copenhagen expedition, and he obtained his wish; for the Prometheus had a very distinguished station assigned ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... latter alone was mortal, (Hesiod. "Theogony", 276.) Phorcus was a son of Pontus and Gaia (sea and land), ibid, 287. (21) The scimitar lent by Hermes (or Mercury) to Perseus for the purpose; with which had been slain Argus the guardian of Io (Conf. "Prometheus vinctus", 579.) Hermes was born in a cave in Mount Cyllene in Arcadia. (22) The idea seems to be that the earth, bulging at the equator, casts its shadow highest on the sky: and that the moon becomes eclipsed ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... day, as I discover moment by moment the wealth of his nature, leaves the printing-house more and more to me. Why, I guess. Our poverty, yours, and ours, and our mother's, is heartbreaking to him. Our adored David is a Prometheus gnawed by a vulture, a haggard, sharp-beaked regret. As for himself, noble fellow, he scarcely thinks of himself; he is hoping to make a fortune for us. He spends his whole time in experiments in paper-making; he begged me to take his place and look after the business, and gives ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... PROMETHEUS. Life, like ancient Thebes, has a hundred gates. You close one, and others will open. You are the last of your species? Then another better species will come, made not of clay, but of the light itself. Yes, last of men, all the common spirits will perish forever; the flower of ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... had a brother who was the wisest of all Beings—Prometheus called the Foreseer. But Epimetheus himself was slow-witted and scatter-brained. His wise brother once sent him a message bidding him beware of the gifts that Zeus might send him. Epimetheus heard, but he did not heed the warning, and thereby he brought upon the race ...
— The Golden Fleece and the Heroes who Lived Before Achilles • Padraic Colum
... is sufficiently familiar to us in the exposition of Bacon. Line 12: repeats the same idea. Facts presented by Nature are of more value than any Ipse dixit. Line 14: he compares himself not without reason to Prometheus; for twenty-five years spent in prison were his reward for the revelation which has added a new sphere to ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... ethereal and corporeal, ideal and actual, be accepted as exact, there are all the possibilities and capabilities of corporeal transference, guided always by an unimprisonable will or intelligence." As he paused I murmured the lines from Shelley's "Prometheus Unbound": ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker
... living and dying for, Though all the devils on earth and in Hell spit at me their disdain. It is stern work, it is perilous work, to thrust your hand in the sun And pull out a spark of immortal flame to warm the hearts of men: But Prometheus, torn by the claws and beaks whose task is never done, Would be tortured another eternity to go ...
— Main Street and Other Poems • Alfred Joyce Kilmer
... the richest in the world, and yet somehow in moments when words count most we generally choose the wrong ones. The adjective "cross" as a description of his Jove-like wrath that consumed his whole being jarred upon Derek profoundly. It was as though Prometheus, with the vultures tearing his liver, had been asked if he ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... community where such ideas prevailed about women as Aeschylus unfolds in the few places where he condescends to notice such inferior beings. The only kind of sexual love of which he shows any knowledge is that referred to in the remarks of Prometheus and Io regarding the designs of Zeus on ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... rule The rest was wanting. Then he finish'd MAN! Or by the world's creator, power supreme, Form'd from an heavenly seed; or new-shap'd earth Late from celestial ether torn, and still Congenial warmth retaining, moisten'd felt, Prometheus' fire, and moulded took the form Of him all-potent. Others earth behold Pronely;—to man a face erect was given. The heavens he bade him view, and raise his eyes High to the stars. Thus earth of late so rude, So shapeless, man, ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... say, then, that Prometheus, when he grew to man's estate, found mankind, though they were like him in form, utterly brutish and ignorant, so that, as ...
— Phaethon • Charles Kingsley
... Symphonies. The Ninth. Minuet and Interlude. Music for the ballet of "Prometheus." "Egmont." "King Stephen." "The Ruins of Athens." "Wellington's Victory at Vittoria." March to "Tarpeia." Gratulation ...
— Beethoven's Letters 1790-1826 Vol. 2 • Lady Wallace
... social order is to be calmly abolished because founded upon blind prejudice; the constituent atoms called men are to be rearranged in an ideal order as in a mathematical diagram. Shelley gives the translation of this theory into poetry. The 'Revolt of Islam' or the 'Prometheus Unbound,' with all its unearthly beauty, wearies the imagination which tries to soar into the thin air of Shelley's dreamworld; just as the intellect, trying to apply the abstract formulae of political metaphysics to any concrete problem, feels as though ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... the mechanism of art, such as precision and certainty in working even the hardest materials, the Egyptians, though they have so long stood still in other points, are still far before us; but to model form with freedom, to breathe, like Prometheus, a soul into the stone, they will never learn until their old notions on this subject have been entirely abandoned. Even the pleasing varieties of corporeal life cannot be represented by a system of mere proportions, much less those which are inner and spiritual. Look at the countless ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... evident, that, in the beginning, Paine did not aspire to be the political Prometheus of England. He rather looked to the Whig party and to Mr. Burke as the leaders in such a movement. As for himself, a veteran reformer from another hemisphere, he was willing to serve as a volunteer in the campaign against the oppressors of mankind. He had adopted for his motto, "Where liberty is ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... clear intimations, scattered here and there in Greek literature, indicate faith that man in the past had improved his lot. Aeschylus saw men lifted from their hazardous lives in sunless caves by the intervention of Prometheus and his sacrificial teaching of the arts of peace; Euripides contrasted the primitive barbarism in which man began with the civilized estate which in Greece he had achieved—but this perceived advance ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... some confusion by laughing frequently and unexpectedly, because Paul's disguise as Mrs. Bouncer affected him powerfully in spite of the efforts made by Sam Wardwell, as the Printer, to restrain him. The tableaux pleased the audience greatly; even that of "Prometheus," with Ned Johnston as the sufferer, and Mrs. Battle's big red rooster as the vulture, brought down ...
— Harper's Young People, October 19, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... I know thou too shalt know; the place Is all to great Poseidon consecrate. Hard by, the Titan, he who bears the torch, Prometheus, has his worship; but the spot Thou treadest, the Brass-footed Threshold named, Is Athens' bastion, and the neighboring lands Claim as their chief and patron yonder knight Colonus, and in common bear his name. Such, stranger, ...
— The Oedipus Trilogy • Sophocles
... his work on "Mythology," have highly reverenced Noah, and designated him as Noa, Noos, Nous, Nus, Nusas, Nusus (in India), Thoth, Hermes, Mercury, Osiris, Prometheus, Deucalion, Atlas, Deus, Zeus, and Dios. Dios was one of the most ancient terms for Noah, and whence was derived Deus—Nusus compounded of Dios and Nusos, which gives us Dionysus, the Bacchus of the Greeks, and the chief god of ...
— A History of Pantomime • R. J. Broadbent
... truly noble, and almost all the portraits good, of what I saw; for many are not hung up, and half of those that are, my lord Duke does not know. The Earl of Warwick is delightful; the Lady Mandeville, attiring herself in her wedding garb, delicious. The Prometheus is a glorious picture, the eagle as fine as my statue. Is not it by Vandyck? The Duke told me that Mr. Spence found out it was by Titian—but critics in poetry I see are none in painting. This was all I was shown, for I was not even carried into ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... story told in most effective fashion. To realize this value, one needs to recall only the efforts of Prometheus in bringing down fire for man and his heroic endurance of vengeful tyranny as a result. The work of Hercules in slaying the many-headed serpent or in cleansing the Augean stables, the adventures ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... god,' Mirabeau answered. 'Yes, it is true and it is right. Has he not, like Jove, hurled the lightning of heaven in his right hand? Is he not an unpunished Prometheus? Is he not breaking the ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... the father, and Maui, the son. Instead of going through a rock, their entrance was down through a reed bush. And, instead of a stipulation for the fire, they say that the youth Maui, like another Prometheus, stole it, ran up the passage, and before his father could catch him, he had set the bush in flames in all directions. The father tried to put it out, but in vain; and they further add, that ever since the exploit of young ...
— Samoa, A Hundred Years Ago And Long Before • George Turner
... a great number of stout fellows before Agamemnon, may not unreasonably induce us to conclude that similar heroes were to succeed him. Shakspeare made a better man when his imagination moulded the mighty figure of Macbeth. And if you will measure Satan by Prometheus, the blind old Puritan's work by that of the fiery Grecian poet, does not Milton's angel surpass AEschylus's—surpass him by "many ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... pock-marked, ugly, slovenly, surly to the point of ferocity, whimsical to the brink of mania, egotistic to the environs of self-idolatry, diseased and deaf, embittered, morose—all the brutal epithets you wish to hurl at him. But withal he had the majesty of a Prometheus chained to the rocks; like Prometheus, he had stolen the very fires of heaven; like Prometheus, he did not suffer in silence, but roared or moaned his demigodlike anguishes in ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... supposed at last secure; Forsake this ample, proud Messenian realm; To some small, humble, and unnoted strand, Some rock more lonely than that Lemnian isle Where Philoctetes pined, take ship and flee! Some solitude more inaccessible Than the ice-bastion'd Caucasian Mount Chosen a prison for Prometheus, climb! There in unvoiced oblivion sink thy name, And bid the sun, thine only visitant, Divulge not to the far-off world of men What once-famed wretch he there did espy hid. There nurse a late remorse, and thank the Gods, And thank thy bitterest foe, that, having lost All things ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... know the story of Prometheus, friend Jonathan? It is, of course, a myth, but it serves as an illustration of my present point. Prometheus, for ridiculing the gods, was bound to a rock upon Mount Caucasus, by order of Jupiter, where daily for thirty years a vulture ...
— The Common Sense of Socialism - A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg • John Spargo
... symbol, but what it teaches us is that every Christian man who has passed through the experiences which make him Christ's envoy, receives the equipment of a new life, and that that life is the gift of the risen Lord. This Prometheus came from the dead with the spark of life guarded in His pierced hands, and He bestowed it upon us; for the Spirit of life, which is the Spirit of Christ, is granted to all Christian men. Dear brethren! we have not lived up to the realities of our Christian ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... at once the most difficult and the easiest of all arts. You have but to copy a model, and the task is done; but to give it a soul, to make it typical by creating a man or a woman—this is the sin of Prometheus. Such triumphs in the annals of sculpture may be counted, as we may count the few poets among men. Michael Angelo, Michel Columb, Jean Goujon, Phidias, Praxiteles, Polycletes, Puget, Canova, Albert Durer, are the brothers of Milton, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Tasso, Homer, and Moliere. And such ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... in the minds of his friends, with the loveliest scenes of the countries which he inhabited. In early life he visited the most beautiful parts of this country and Ireland. Afterwards the Alps of Switzerland became his inspirers. "Prometheus Unbound" was written among the deserted and flower-grown ruins of Rome; and, when he made his home under the Pisan hills, their roofless recesses harboured him as he composed the "Witch of Atlas", "Adonais", and "Hellas". In the wild but beautiful Bay of Spezzia, the winds and waves ...
— Notes to the Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley • Mary W. Shelley
... colors too deep and strong. Prometheus bound to the rock, with the beak of the vulture in his bleeding breast, suffering daily renewing pangs, his wounds healed only to be torn open afresh, is an emblem of the victim of that vulture passion, which the word of God declares to be cruel ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... satisfied as they ought to be. Not to have to pay any rent is very delightful, certainly, but they scarcely dare believe in such good fortune. Thus when Orpheus, trying to rescue Eurydice from "the infernal regions," interrupts with "his harmonious strains" the tortures of eternal punishment, Prometheus did not doubtless show as much delight as he ought to have done, on discovering that the beak of the vulture was no longer gnawing at his vitals, "scarcely daring to believe in such good fortune." Orpheus is the Commune; ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... four miles farther away to the west. On visiting the Circus, I found the water-hole was full and deep. This was very different from its state when I had seen it last. The recording eagle still was sitting immovable on his crag, Prometheus-like, apparently chained ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... be the subject matter of my poetry. I believed that if Morris had set his stories amid the scenery of his own Wales (for I knew him to be of Welsh extraction and supposed wrongly that he had spent his childhood there) that if Shelley had nailed his Prometheus or some equal symbol upon some Welsh or Scottish rock, their art had entered more intimately, more microscopically, as it were, into our thought, and had given perhaps to modern poetry a breadth and stability like that of ancient poetry. The statues of Mausolus ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... imperfect nisus which might be remarked in some former works has at length reached the fulness of dramatic energy: in the Idylls we have nothing vague or dreamy to complain of: everything lives and moves, in the royal strength of nature: the fire of Prometheus has fairly caught the clay: every figure stands clear, broad, and sharp before us, as if it had sky for its background: and this of small as well as great, for even the "little novice" is projected on the canvas with the utmost ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... somnambulistic being, a ray of living light, to be sure, but without an object to color, and therefore a blankness in itself. God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever; that vulture the very creature he creates. .. Since the above was written, the statement is happily borne out by an official circular, issued by Lieutenant Maury, of the National Observatory, Washington, ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... the daring plan to secure the sovereignty is in a fair way to succeed. Meantime various quacks and charlatans, each with a special scheme for improving things, arrive from earth, and are one after the other exposed and dismissed. Presently arrives Prometheus, who informs Epops of the desperate straits to which the gods are by this time reduced, and advises him to push his claims and demand the hand of Basileia (Dominion), the handmaid of Zeus. Next an embassy from the Olympians ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... we should have perpetual night for all the stars, as Heraclitus says, so man for all his senses, if he had no mind or reason, would be little better than the beasts. But as it is, it is not by fortune or chance that we are superior to them and masters of them, but Prometheus, that is reason, is the ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... exchanged signals with two or three others of our ships, which I took care to explain were on the look-out for my guest; and he seemed by this time pretty well convinced that an attempt to elude our cruisers would have been fruitless. On the latter day, the Prometheus showed her number, while we were at dinner: when Buonaparte expressed a wish to know whether the ships at Brest had hoisted the white flag or not. I sent for the officer of the watch, and desired him to ask the question by telegraph. In a few minutes he ...
— The Surrender of Napoleon • Sir Frederick Lewis Maitland
... Isis is said by some authors to be the daughter[FN262] of Hermes, [FN263] and by others of Prometheus, both of them famous for their philosophic turn of mind. The latter is supposed to have first taught mankind wisdom and foresight, as the former is reputed to ...
— Legends Of The Gods - The Egyptian Texts, edited with Translations • E. A. Wallis Budge
... of Dibdin A Sketch from Life On the Portrait of the Son of J.G. Lambton, Esq. Written in the Album of the Lady of Counsellor D. Pollock The Heliotrope Sonnet On seeing a Young Lady I had previously known, confined in a Madhouse Prometheus Rosa's Grave The Sibyl. A Sketch Love On a delightful Drawing in my Album Stanzas Shakspeare Impromptu. To Oriana, on attending with her, as Sponsors, at a Christening To my Spaniel Fanny Widowed Love Written to the Lady of Dr. George Birkbeck The Chain-pier, Brighton. ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... hardly necessary to point out the parallel between Loki and Prometheus, also both helper and enemy of the Gods, and agent in their threatened fall, though in the meantime a prisoner. In character Loki has more in common with the mischievous spirit described by Hesiod, than with the heroic figure of Aeschylus. ...
— The Edda, Vol. 1 - The Divine Mythology of the North, Popular Studies in Mythology, - Romance, and Folklore, No. 12 • Winifred Faraday
... playwright's fittest material; because, while the inward savagery moves the passions of the audience, the outward civilisation brings the character near enough to them to give them a likeness of themselves in their worst moments, such as no 'Mystery of Cain' or 'Tragedy of Prometheus' ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... divine substance, a breath of God, miraculously breathed by Him into every creature at the commencement of its existence, often reappears, and plays a prominent part in the history of psychological opinions. It corresponds with the beautiful Greek myth of Prometheus, who is fabled to have made a human image from the dust of the ground, and then, by fire stolen from heaven, to have animated it with a living soul. So man, as to his body, is made of earthly clay; ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... were with my sister Circe in her fairy island in the West, far away from sore temptation and thoughts which tear the heart! But if it must be so—for why should you die?—I have an ointment here; I made it from the magic ice-flower which sprang from Prometheus' wound, above the clouds on Caucasus, in the dreary fields of snow. Anoint yourself with that, and you shall have in you seven men's strength; and anoint your shield with it, and neither fire nor sword can harm you. But what you begin ...
— The Heroes • Charles Kingsley
... Rome than any which even now I can send you.... And now, my dear Mrs. Martin, I mean to thank you, as I ought to have done long ago, for your kindness in offering to procure for me the Archbishop of Dublin's[13] valuable opinion upon my 'Prometheus. I am sure that if you have not thought me very ungrateful, you must be very indulgent. My mind was at one time so crowded by painful thoughts, that they shut out many others which are interesting to me; and among other things, ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... by the Arabians Schahan. One of the old constellations in the northern hemisphere, near Aquila and Delphinus. It is fabled to have been the arrow with which Hercules slew the vulture that was devouring the liver of Prometheus who was, like Jesus, ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... PROMETHEUS for September-November is a journal of unusual literary and artistic value, edited by our poet-laureate, Miss Olive G. Owen. The paper well lives up to its sub-title, "A Magazine of Aspirations Dreamed into Reality". ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... said Albinia. 'Prometheus and his kin do most abound when Ulick's head is worst, and papa is in greatest danger of ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... he himself (Prometheus) was the master-maker, and Athena worked together with him, breathing into the clay, and caused the moulded things to have soul ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... recommend to you a play of Eschylus (the Prometheus), published and translated by poor old Morel], who is a good scholar, and an acquaintance of mine. It will be but half a guinea, and your name shall be put in the list I am making for him. You will ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... Adams, John, the Southwell carrier Lord Byron's epitaph on Addison, Joseph, his character as a poet His conversation His 'Drummer' 'Adolphe,' Benjamin Constant's Adversity 'AEneid, the,' written for political purposes AEschylus His 'Prometheus' His 'Seven before Thebes' 'Agathon,' Wieland's history of Aglietti, Dr., MS. letters in his profession offered to Mr. Murray Albania Albanians, their character and manners Alberoni, Cardinal Albrizzi, Countess, some account of Her conversazioni Her 'Ritratti di ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... The Revolt of Islam, published in 1819. It is in the Spenserian stanza. Also, in the same year, he published The Cenci, a tragedy, a dark and gloomy story on what should be a forbidden subject, but very powerfully written. In 1820 he also published The Prometheus Unbound, which is full of his irreligious views. His remaining works were smaller poems, among which may be noted Adonais, and the odes To the ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... heartlessness? That is the one compensation time brings, when men and women have killed the best in our natures. Teeth ache fiercely; then the nerve dies, and we have surcease from pain, and find comfort in knowing that the darkening wreck can throb no more. There was a time when the pangs of Prometheus seemed only pastime to mine, but all things end; and now I get on as comfortably without a heart, as the victims of vivisection—the frogs, and guinea pigs, and rabbits—do ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... lonely prison-block, Grim fragment 'neath a tropic sky, Where, like Prometheus on his rock, The ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... are humbugs, all literary men are humbugs; directly a man begins to sell his feelings for money he's a humbug. If a poet gets a pain in his side from too good a dinner, he bellows Ai Ai louder than Prometheus." ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... gentle-breathing south-east wind will act more mildly; it will woo you to the country, induce you to sit down in a shady place, smoke, and 'muse.' That incarnate essence of enterprise, business, industry, economy, sharpness, shrewdness, and keenness—that Prometheus whose liver was torn by the vulture of cent per cent—eternally tossing, restless DOOLITTLE, was one day seen asleep, during bank hours, on a seat in the Villa Madama. The scirocco blew that day: ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... various poetical forms which have reached us. As far as can be ascertained, death was regarded in one early Greek myth as the punishment of indulgence in forbidden curiosity. Men appear to have been free from death before the quarrel between Zeus and Prometheus. In consequence of this quarrel Hephaestus fashioned a woman out of earth and water, and gave her to Epimetheus, the brother of the Titan. Prometheus had forbidden his brother to accept any gift from the gods, but ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... and not dependent on them. But the melancholy Jacques of our ordinary experience either uses some narcotic or stimulant to excess, or else has trouble with his liver or kidneys. "Liver complaint," says Zangwill, "is the Prometheus myth done into modern English." Already historical criticism has shown that the Bloody Assizes had its origin in disease of the bladder, and most forms of vice and cruelty resolve themselves into decay ...
— The Philosophy of Despair • David Starr Jordan
... prompter's bell at eight o'clock precisely, and dash went the orchestra into the overture to 'The Men of Prometheus.' The pianoforte player hammered away with laudable perseverance; and the violoncello, which struck in at intervals, 'sounded very well, considering.' The unfortunate individual, however, who had undertaken to play the flute accompaniment 'at sight,' found, from fatal experience, ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... Ben's history was that he fell in love. Just as you did,—with the difference, of course: though the hot sun, or the perpetual foot upon his breast, does not make our black Prometheus less fierce in his agony of hope or jealousy than you, I am afraid. It was Nan, a pale mulatto house-servant, that the field-hand took into his dull, lonesome heart to make life of, with true-love defiance of caste. I think Nan liked him very truly. She was lame and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... seems to be mostly relinquished. . . What should we think of a German critic that selected his specimens of British literature from 'The Castle Specter,' Mr. Lewis' 'Monk,' or the 'Mysteries of Udolpho,' and 'Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus'?. . . 'Faust,' for instance, passes with many of us for a mere tale of sorcery and art magic. It would scarcely be more unwise to consider 'Hamlet' as depending for its main interest on the ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... of necessity be in accordance with the fitting and right. Could we conceive of Omnipotence commanding what is intrinsically unfit and wrong, the virtuous man would not be the God-server, but the Prometheus suffering the implacable vengeance of an unrighteous Deity. 3. Though everlasting happiness be the result of virtue, it is not the ground or the reason for it. Were our being earth-limited, virtue ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... under over-material-production of every sort and degree, as on all hands is now acknowledged. The foundations of Manchester tremble under the ponderous piles of Cobden's calicoes, in Cobden's warerooms, ever, like the liver of Prometheus, undiminished, though daily devoured by the vulture of consumption. The sight of the Pelion upon Ossa, accumulated masses of pig upon bar iron, immovable as the cloud-capped Waen and Dowlais of Merthyr Tydvil themselves, should almost generate burning fever, intense enough, among the unfortunate ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... Allegiance to AEschylus. Oh, those two OEdipuses! but then that Agamemnon! Well: one shall be the Handel and 'tother the Haydn; one the Michel Angelo, and 'tother the Raffaelle, of Tragedy. As to the famous Prometheus, I think, as I always thought, it is somewhat over-rated for Sublimity; I can't see much in the far famed Conception of the Hero's Character: and ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... it — the oldest idea known to human thought. He knew that if he asked an Asiatic its meaning, not a man, woman, or child from Cairo to Kamtchatka would have needed more than a glance to reply. From the Egyptian Sphinx to the Kamakura Daibuts; from Prometheus to Christ; from Michael Angelo to Shelley, art had wrought on this eternal figure almost as though it had nothing else to say. The interest of the figure was not in its meaning, but in the response of the observer. ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... proportion of each constituent; but they never could put them together again, or, by any similar compound produce the primordial egg or organic germ, from which a living being would arise. A connecting link—a vital spark, or animating soul—is always wanting to complete the existence of the Prometheus of the laboratory. Mark, too, the "if," and the "might," in this most lame and impotent hypothesis:—"If, therefore, these globules be identical with the cells which are held to be reproductive, it might be said," &c. Globules can be easily produced; ...
— An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" • Anonymous
... plot. The Agamemnon is human, though legendary the Prometheus presents to us the gods of Olympus in the days when mankind crept like emmets upon the earth or dwelt in caves, scorned by Zeus and the other powers of heaven, and—still aided by Prometheus the Titan—wholly without art or science, letters or handicrafts. For his benevolence towards oppressed mankind, Prometheus is condemned by Zeus to uncounted ages of pain and torment, shackled and impaled in a lonely cleft of a Scythian ...
— Suppliant Maidens and Other Plays • AEschylus
... from one supposition to another, to find in what manner evil has crept into the world. Indeed it has been for this purpose, which perhaps after all will never be satisfactorily explained, that the doctrine of free-agency was introduced; that the fable of Prometheus and the box of Pandora was imagined; that the history of the Titanes was invented; notwithstanding, it must be evident that these things as well as all the other trappings of superstition, are not more difficult of comprehension ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... was to follow the fall of Zeus. But dramatically with that fall the action ceases, and the drama should have ceased with it. A final chorus, or choral series, of rejoicings (such as does ultimately end the drama where Prometheus appears on the scene) would have been legitimate enough. Instead, however, the bewildered reader finds the drama unfolding itself through scene after scene which leaves the action precisely where it found it, because there is no ...
— Shelley - An Essay • Francis Thompson
... out that he grew in force whenever he touched his mother earth, and therefore, lifting him up in those mightiest of arms, the hero squeezed the breath out of him. By and by he came to Mount Caucasus, where he found the chained Prometheus, and, aiming an arrow at the eagle, killed the tormentor, and set the Titan free. Atlas undertook to go to his daughters, and get the apples, if Hercules would hold up the skies for him in the meantime. ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... sense of water, or wind, or light, in the [33] moulding of eye and brow; to arrest it, or rather, perhaps, to set it free, there, as human expression. The body of man, indeed, was for the Greeks, still the genuine work of Prometheus; its connexion with earth and air asserted in many a legend, not shaded down, as with us, through innumerable stages of descent, but direct and immediate; in precise contrast to our physical theory of our life, ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... accursed race Dare look divine Astrea in the face; Chaos return and with confusion Involve the world with strange disunion; For Pluto sits in that adored chair Which doth belong unto Minerva's heir. O hecatombs! O catastrophe! From Midas' pomp to Trus' beggary! Prometheus, who celestial fire Did steal from heaven, therewith to inspire Our earthly bodies with a sense-ful mind, Whereby we might the depth of nature find, Is ding'd to hell, and vulture eats his heart Which did such deep philosophy impart To ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... you down. This was a wrong out of measure! Thieves ye are and pickpockets! Ye that were not worth changing from one to another, no more than you'd change a pinch of dust off the road into a puff of ashes. Stealing away my lovely blasts, bad luck to ye, the same as Prometheus stole the makings of a fire from ...
— Three Wonder Plays • Lady I. A. Gregory
... woke I saw Mulvaney, the night-dew gemming his moustache, leaning on his rifle at picket, lonely as Prometheus on his rock, with I know not what ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... proper for an Heroick Poem, which ought to appear credible in its principal Parts. I cannot forbear therefore thinking that Sin and Death are as improper Agents in a Work of this nature, as Strength and Necessity in one of the Tragedies of Eschylus, who represented those two Persons nailing down Prometheus to a Rock, [5] for which he has been justly censured by the greatest Criticks. I do not know any imaginary Person made use of in a more sublime manner of thinking than that in one of the Prophets, who describing God ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... Napoleon had broken forth from Elba, and everything was in confusion. Vast military preparations were again made, our own corps was levied anew, and my brother became an officer in it; but the danger was soon over, Napoleon was once more quelled and chained for ever, like Prometheus, to his rock. As the corps, however, though so recently levied, had already become a very fine one, thanks to my father's energetic drilling, the Government very properly determined to turn it to some account, and, as disturbances were apprehended in Ireland about this period, it occurred to them ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... see Those eyes which burn through smiles that fade in tears, Like stars half quenched in mists of silver dew. Prometheus Unbound, SHELLEY. ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... heroes to soar to the height the real hero would gain, their weapons would fall to the ground, and the drama itself become peace—the peace of enlightenment. It is only in the Passion of Christ, the Phaedo, Prometheus, the murder of Orpheus, the sacrifice of Antigone—it is only in these that we find the drama of the sage, the solitary drama of wisdom. But elsewhere it is rarely indeed that tragic poets will allow a sage to appear on the scene, though it be for an instant. They are afraid of a lofty soul; for ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... Arvales in Latin! Homer is so modern; even though he certainly belongs to the tenth or eleventh century. That was a time in which the Hellenic mind sang the history of the creation in the deep myth of Prometheus, the son of Iapetos, with his three brothers, the emblem of humanity; a poem which Homer ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... one of the high hils, which I specially recited in my former booke, by his entrailes (like Prometheus) feedeth the Tynners pecking, or picking bils, with a long liued profit, albeit, their scarcle Eagle eyes sometimes mistake the shadow for the substance, and so offer vp degenerate teares, as a late sacrifice ...
— The Survey of Cornwall • Richard Carew
... as some say the Maiotian river Tanais and the Kimmerian ferry); nor can I learn who those persons were who made the boundaries, or for what reason they gave the names. Libya indeed is said by most of the Hellenes to have its name from Libya a woman of that country, and Asia from the wife of Prometheus: but this last name is claimed by the Lydians, who say that Asia has been called after Asias the son of Cotys the son of Manes, and not from Asia the wife of Prometheus; and from him too they say the Asian tribe in Sardis has its name. As to Europe however, it is neither known by any ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 1(of 2) • Herodotus
... forgotten his wrongs and his rage against mankind. I have always thought of him and of Marlborough as the two greatest men of that age. I have read his books (who doth not know them?) here in our calm woods, and imagine a giant to myself as I think of him, a lonely fallen Prometheus, groaning as the vulture tears him. Prometheus I saw, but when first I ever had any words with him, the giant stepped out of a sedan-chair in the Poultry, whither he had come with a tipsy Irish servant parading before him, who announced him, ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... dynasties. Nothing can be more impressive than the picture of Saturn in his palsy of affliction, and of the mighty goddess his grand-daughter, or than the secret signs of coming woe in the palace of Hyperion. These things grew from darker creeds than Greece had ever known since the elder traditions of Prometheus—creeds that sent down their sounding plummets into far deeper wells within the human spirit. What had been meant, by the question proposed to Shelley, was no doubt— How so young a man as Keats, not having had the advantage of a regular classical ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... in the subdivision of the universe between Zeus and his brothers, he taking the heavens, Poseidon the sea, and Hades the under world, all having the earth as their common theatre of action. The moral is prefigured by such myths as those of Prometheus and Epimetheus, the fore-thinker and the after-thinker; the historical in the deluge of Deucalion, the sieges of Thebes and of Troy. A harmony with human nature is established through the birth and marriage of the gods, and likewise by their sufferings, ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper |
