"Pythoness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... your eyes the armour of the Gods; we shall force the sanctuaries; I will make you violate the pythoness!" ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert
... have writ and women have said they loved, but as the Pythoness stands by the altar, intense and ...
— American Poetry, 1922 - A Miscellany • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... ignorant people who visit her; but yet'—he paused. 'If ever you were in need of womanly counsel—if ever you wanted sympathizing and wise help—to find your way out of perplexities—I should say, go to Gyda. If any one could give that sort of help, she would. And it is almost like going to a pythoness', added Rollo thoughtfully; 'she is so cut off from the world ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner
... direction of his genius." Nature must "burst out with a kind of fine madness and divine inspiration." The madness must be fine. How can art aid it to this end? By knowledge of, by sympathy and emulation with, "the great poets and prose writers of the past." By these we may be inspired, as the Pythoness by Apollo. From the genius of the past "an effluence breathes upon us." The writer is not to imitate, but to keep before him the perfection of what has been done by the greatest poets. He is to look on them as beacons; he is to keep them as exemplars ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus
... responses ought to be ascribed to mere human contrivance or to the agency of evil spirits. The latter opinion has been most general in past ages. A third theory has been advanced since the phenomena of Mesmerism have attracted attention, that something like the mesmeric trance was induced in the Pythoness, and the faculty of clairvoyance really called ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... sat, a gentleman came in below, wishing to have his fortune told. I remember to have read that the Pythoness of Delphian oracle prepared herself for dukkerin, or presaging, by taking a few drops of cherry-laurel water. (I have had it prescribed for my eyes as R aq. laur. cerasi. fiat lotio,—possibly to enable me to see into the future.) Perhaps it was the cherry-brandy beloved of British matrons ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... quoth this Sompnour, "faithfully, Make ye you newe bodies thus alway Of th' elements?" The fiend answered, "Nay: Sometimes we feign, and sometimes we arise With deade bodies, in full sundry wise, And speak as reas'nably, and fair, and well, As to the Pythoness did Samuel: And yet will some men say it was not he. I *do no force of* your divinity. *set no value upon* But one thing warn I thee, I will not jape,* jest Thou wilt *algates weet* how we be shape: *assuredly ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... this spurring harangue; Lisbeth frightened her. The peasant-woman's face was terrible; her piercing black eyes had the glare of the tiger's; her face was like that we ascribe to a pythoness; she set her teeth to keep them from chattering, and her whole frame quivered convulsively. She had pushed her clenched fingers under her cap to clutch her hair and support her head, which felt too heavy; she was on ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... shore. Moreover the Greeks in general skilfully availed themselves even of extra-scenic matters, and made them subservient to the stage effect. Thus, I doubt not, but that in the Eumenides the spectators were twice addressed as an assembled people; first, as the Greeks invited by the Pythoness to consult the oracle; and a second time as the Athenian multitude, when Pallas, by the herald, commands silence during the trial about to commence. So too the frequent appeals to heaven were undoubtedly addressed to the real heaven; and when Electra on her first appearance ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... tries to make them sure that a large Union party will soon be forthcoming in the South, and again sounds his vaticinations of the sacramental ninety days. I am sorry for this his incurable passion to play the Pythoness. It is impossible that such repeated prophecies shall raise him high in the estimation of the European statesmen. Impossible! Impossible! whatever may be the contrary assertions of his adulators, such as an Adams, a Sandford, a Weed, a Bigelow, a Hughes, and ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... wonder and fear. Her countenance was as white as marble; and those features, so divine in their rare symmetry, might have served the Greek with a study for the Pythoness, when, from the mystic cavern and the bubbling spring, she first hears the voice of the inspiring god. Gradually the rigour and tension of that wonderful face relaxed, the colour returned, the pulse beat: ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... of the city are full of what in Ireland are termed "curiosities," to wit, holes; and my Arab had a habit, whenever he met an equine brother, and especially an equine sister, on the way, of screaming like a possessed Pythoness, and then of essaying to stand on his hind legs. However, with a Mexican saddle,—out of which you can scarcely fall, even though you had a mind to it,—and Mexican stirrups, and a pair of spurs nearly as big as Catharine-wheels, the Arab and I managed to reach the Church ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... under subjection to both art and nature when she seemed to abandon herself the most absolutely to the whirlwind of her passion. There were no undue excesses of posture, movement, or tone. Her attitudes, it was once said, were those of "a Pythoness cast in bronze." Her voice thrilled and awed at its first note: it was so strangely deep, so solemnly melodious, until, stirred by passion as it were, it became thick and husky in certain of its tones; but it ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... Shoreditch to the Gypsy Fair. At Goodwood, a few weeks after, you may see her in a beautiful half-riding dress, her hair fantastically plaited and adorned with pearls, standing beside the carriage of a Countess, telling the fortune of her ladyship with the voice and look of a pythoness. She is a thing of incongruities; an incomprehensible being! nobody can make her out; the writer himself has tried to make her out but could not, though he has spoken to her in his deepest Romany. It is true there is a certain old Gypsy, ...
— Romano Lavo-Lil - Title: Romany Dictionary - Title: Gypsy Dictionary • George Borrow
... Priesthood of Delphi employ throughout Hellas to find the fit natures for a Pythoness heard of her, and heard herself. She whom thou callest impostor gives the answer to perplexed nations from the Pythian shrine. But wherefore doubt her?—where the sorrow? I feel none. If love does rule the worlds beyond, and does ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... of thing; 880 And his failures arise (though he seem not to know it) From the very same cause that has made him a poet,— A fervor of mind which knows no separation 'Twixt simple excitement and pure inspiration, As my Pythoness erst sometimes erred from not knowing If 'twere I or mere wind through her tripod was blowing; Let his mind once get head in its favorite direction And the torrent of verse bursts the dams of reflection, While, borne with the rush of the metre along, The poet may chance ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell |
