"Sibylline" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... said, with something of a sibylline air. Evidently he was thinking how clever it was of her to have guessed it, and indeed she thought it was a remarkable example of her instinctive understanding of men. And Yaverland, on his side, was letting ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... among the sibylline secrets which lie mysteriously between you and me, O reader, that these papers, besides their public aspect, have a private one proper to the bosom of mine own particular family. They are not merely an ex post facto protest in regard to that carpet and parlor of celebrated memory, ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... contrived with the intention to keep up the national spirit, and diffuse hopes of the new enterprise of Vasco de Gama, who had just sailed on a voyage of discovery to the Indies. Three stones were discovered near Cintra, bearing in ancient characters a Latin inscription; a sibylline oracle addressed prophetically "To the Inhabitants of the West!" stating that when these three stones shall be found, the Ganges, the Indus, and the Tagus should exchange their commodities! This was the pious fraud of a Portuguese poet, sanctioned by the approbation of the king. When the stones ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... following caution should be borne in mind by the reader. "To the completion," says Coleridge, "of these four works I have literally nothing more to do than to transcribe; but, as I before hinted, from so many scraps and Sibylline leaves, including margins of blank pages that unfortunately I must be my own scribe, and, not done by myself, they will be all but lost." As matters turned out he was not his own scribe, and the difficulty which Mr. Nelson Coleridge experienced in piecing ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... the sting in the tail must surely have been made by a Hebrew or an Oriental student, who mechanically looked for the commencement of the Histrio-Mastix where he would have looked for that of a Hebrew Bible. Successive licensers had given the work a sort of go-by, but, reversing the order of the sibylline books, it became always larger and larger, until it found a licenser who, with the notion that he "must put a stop to this," passed it without examination. It got a good deal of reading immediately afterwards, especially from Attorney-General ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... excite hope; bid fair, promise, lead one to expect; be the precursor &c 64. [predict by mathematical or statistical means from past experience] extrapolate, project. Adj. predicting &c v.; predictive, prophetic; fatidic^, fatidical^; vaticinal, oracular, fatiloquent^, haruspical, Sibylline; weatherwise^. ominous, portentous, augurous^, augurial, augural; auspicial^, auspicious; prescious^, monitory, extispicious^, premonitory, significant of, pregnant with, bit with the fate of. Phr. coming events cast their shadows ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... the journalist's bag, as time is sure to prove. If we had newspaper-accounts of the age of Augustus, the chances are that no other epoch in history would be so absolutely problematical, and Augustus himself would be lucky, if he were not resolved into a myth, and the journal into sibylline oracles. The dissertational department is equally faulty; for to first impressions everything on earth is chameleon-like. The Scandinavian Divinities, the Past, the Present, and the Future, could look upon each other, but neither of them upon herself. But in the journal the Present is trying to behold ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... Sibylline books? How often they were offered, and the terms? It is not too late, Messer Blondel—even now. While there is life there is hope, there is more ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... the path, I rode out of the glade; but with very different feelings from those I had on entering it. The words of this ill-starred maiden—attainted with that sibylline cunning peculiar to her race—had filled my heart with most dire forebodings. Her speech could not be mere conjecture, put forth to vex and annoy me? She had scarcely motive enough for this; besides, her display of a positive ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... mood of physical restlessness. She walked and rode and went out golfing, and played tennis, and rowed on the river, and did a thousand things, while Mrs. Morres made her delicate wheels and trefoils, and smiled a more Sibylline smile ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... of the study are a body of reports, of treatises, and of statutes, in this country and in England, extending back for six hundred years, and now increasing annually by hundreds. In these sibylline leaves are gathered the scattered prophecies of the past upon the cases in which the axe will fall. These are what properly have been called the oracles of the law. Far the most important and pretty nearly the whole meaning of every new effort of legal thought is to make ...
— The Path of the Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
... turns, the Poet wary, And Thumbs his Carmen Seculare, To PHOEBUS and to DIAN prays, Who tune Men's Lyres of Holidays, He reads of the Sibylline Shades, Of Stainless Boys and chosen Maids. He turns, and reads the other Page, Of docile Youth, and placid Age, Then Sings how, in this golden Year Fides Pudorque reappear, - And if they don't appear, you know it Were quite ...
— New Collected Rhymes • Andrew Lang
... not give other details. Her sibylline science extended no further. During this chiromantic interlude, the dancing kept up, until finally, about three in the ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... the Phoebean singer; to him the Renaissance reveals her joy and dowers him with her gift of melody. Correggio is the Ariel or Faun; he has surprised laughter upon the face of the universe, and he paints this laughter in ever-varying movement. Michael Angelo is the prophet and Sibylline seer; to him the Renaissance discloses the travail of her spirit; him she endues with power; he wrests her secret, voyaging, like an ideal Columbus, the vast abyss of thought alone. In order that this revelation of the Renaissance in painting should be complete, ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... sometimes uttered in a tone of vexation, but more frequently of satisfaction. She was so original and eccentric, had such an inexhaustible store of ghost stories and fairy tales, sang so many crazy old ballads, that children gathered round her, as a Sibylline oracle, and mothers, who were not troubled with a superfluity of servants, were glad to welcome one to their household who had such a wondrous talent for amusing them, and keeping them still. In spite of all her ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... been peculiar in having such a list of them, but I now believe that half the children of the same age go through the same experiences. No Roman soothsayer ever had such a catalogue of OMENS as I found in the Sibylline leaves of my childhood. That trick of throwing a stone at a tree and attaching some mighty issue to hitting or missing, which you will find mentioned in one or more biographies, I well remember. Stepping on or over certain particular ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... all," went on her brother-in-law. "Now listen to me. I have been living beyond my means. Last year the canvass to get on the board of guardians of the Sibylline Books—in which that graceless son-in-law of Cicero's, Publius Dolabella, defeated me—cost a deal of money. This year I have the consulship. But it has taken every denarius I own, and more too. All my estates are involved, so that it will require years to ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... presence of man amidst the majestic dominance of nature; here, to the right, across the savage gorge, with its cliffs and with its currents in the deep trough, the nearest slope of the mountain, with the great gaunt bare space showing that face of ill omen, sibylline, sinister, definite indeed,—he wondered how his eyes were holden that he should not have discerned it at once; and in the immediate foreground the equestrian figure of the mountaineer, booted and spurred, the very "moral," as Hite would have called it, of an athlete, ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... consulted to discover the religious observances necessary to avert great calamities and to expiate prodigies. During the reign of Augustus they were removed to the Temple of Apollo on the Palatine Hill, and all the false Sibylline leaves which were extant were collected and burned. They remained here until shortly after the year 400 A.D., when they were publicly burned by Stilicho, a famous general of Christian Rome, as impious ...
— Historic Tales, Volume 11 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... succeeded to the throne (534-510). He was energetic in war, and conquered many neighboring places, among which was Ardea, a city of the Rutuli. He finished the temple of Jupiter, begun by his father. He also obtained the SIBYLLINE BOOKS. A woman from Cumae, a Greek colony, came to him, and offered for sale nine books of oracles and prophecies; but the price seemed exorbitant, and he refused to purchase them. The sibyl then burned three, and, returning, asked the same price for the remaining six. The king ...
— History of Rome from the Earliest times down to 476 AD • Robert F. Pennell
... SIBYLLES ANTIQUES; concerning the sibyls, sibylline books, and sibylline leaves consult a classical dictionary. 23. VERBE; used currently for the second person of the Trinity; here it goes back to a passage in the first division of the poem, where speaking of God's process of ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... another: it is here a pretty lady, there a great lord; but speechless, all;—whereas, with these twenty-five men, each picture or statue is not merely another person of a pleasant society, but another chapter of a Sibylline book. ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... crumbling to pieces at intervals, and every fresh downfall had marked the death of an Amal. Now the last remains went down, to the very feet, and the Romans believed that it foretold the end of the Amal dynasty. There was a Sibylline oracle too; ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... regarded as divine or as capable of ministering to divinity. The prophetic powers of woman were universally recognized. The oracles at Delphi, Argos, Epirus, Thrace and Arcadia were feminine. Indeed the Sibylline prophetesses were known ...
— Taboo and Genetics • Melvin Moses Knight, Iva Lowther Peters, and Phyllis Mary Blanchard
... eight lines each, with little of the alliteration by which the Scalds were afterwards distinguished. One of the oldest and most interesting is the "Voluspa," or Song of the Prophetess, a kind of sibylline lay, which contains an account of the creation, the origin of man and of evil, and concludes with a prediction of the destruction and renovation of the universe, and a description of the future abodes of happiness and misery. "Vafthrudnir's Song" is in the form ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... Parthian satraps. A large section of the people cherished a somewhat simple theodicy. How could God allow the wicked and dissolute Romans to prosper and the chosen people to be oppressed? The Hellenistic writers of Sibylline oracles and the Hebrew writers of Apocalypses, imitating the doom-songs of Isaiah and Ezekiel, announced the coming overthrow of evil and the triumph of good. Evil had reached its acme in Nero, and the time had come when God would break the "fourth horn" of Daniel's vision ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... mysterious sibylline look returning immediately to her face, that had just seemed so frank and simple. 'She ain't got to die; she's only got to beg. But I shall ha' to leave you now. I can't do you no more good. And ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... to pour out another cup of tea, and having mixed and flavored it, she looked in a weird and sibylline ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... needless expense he had gone to in paying for a second, as one would have sufficed to acquit him. This man, such in his own nature, and now inflamed by Catiline, false prophets and fortune-tellers had also corrupted with vain hopes, quoting to him fictitious verses and oracles, and proving from the Sibylline prophecies that there were three of the name Cornelius designed by fate to be monarchs of Rome; two of whom, Cinna and Sylla, had already fulfilled the decree, and that divine fortune was now advancing with the gift of monarchy for the remaining third Cornelius; and that therefore he ought ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... that point to a history all unwritten save in some few brief sentences in pits and excavations, of oil operations along the Oil Valley. These detached fragments, like the remains of the Sibylline Oracles, but cause us to regret more earnestly the loss of the volumes which contained the whole. A grand and wonderful history has been that of this American continent, but it has never been graven in the archives ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... a considerable portion of the Poem while he was abroad; and his feelings, on hearing it recited by the Author (after his return to his own country) are recorded in his Verses, addressed to Mr. Wordsworth, which will be found in the 'Sibylline Leaves,' p. 197, edition 1817, or 'Poetical Works, by S. T. Coleridge,' vol. ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... Mount Nysa, was not supposed to have been buried there. (22) See Book VII., line 20. (23) This warning of the Sibyl is also alluded to by Cicero in a letter to P. Lentulus, Proconsul of Cilicia. (Mr. Haskins' note. See also Mommsen, vol. iv., p. 305.) It seems to have been discovered in the Sibylline books at the time when it was desired to prevent Pompeius from interfering in the affairs of Egypt, in B.C. 57. (24) That is, by their weeping for Iris departure they treated him as a mortal and not as a god. Osiris was the soul of Apis (see on line 537), and when that animal grew ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... beneath the dignity of a Professor of the occult Sciences. Yet these very Friends, I suppose, would have thought it had added lustre to his high Station, to have new-furbished out some dull northern Chronicle, or dark Sibylline AEnigma. But let it not be thought that what is here said insinuates any thing to the discredit of Greek and Latin criticism. If the follies of particular Men were sufficient to bring any branch of Learning into disrepute, I don't know any that would stand in a ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... arrangements for repairing the damage done by an earthquake, he passed through Nisaea to the frontier of Gallo-Graecia, and then turning to the right, he went to Pessinus, to see the ancient temple of Cybele; from which town in the second Punic war, in accordance with the warning of the Sibylline verses, the image of the goddess was removed to ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... breaches. If our object is, as we hear it said, to appease the Irish, we shall have to give them the Parliament their leader demands. It might once have been much less; it may be worried into a raving, perhaps a desperate wrestling, for still more. Nations pay Sibylline prices for want of forethought. Mr. Parnell's terms are embodied in Mr. Gladstone's Bill, to which he and his band have subscribed. The one point for him is the statutory Parliament, so that Ireland may civilly govern herself; and standing ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... "if you will pardon my interrupting you, I can throw your observations together—make your Sibylline leaves into a book. Your lordship will find the matter, and I will not ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... be in my power for the third time to endeavour that you should be the means of submitting my works to the public. For this I shall be ever ready to make great sacrifices, and let me therefore hope that when I next offer my volumes to your examination, like the Sibylline books, their inspiration ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... seating himself once more. "It amounts to nothing. It is a Sibylline answer which nowise prejudices what he may do in future. We still hope," he added, "that the Sacred College may refuse the investiture. Pier Luigi Farnese is not in ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... curious misconception which turned it into a prophecy of the birth of Christ outlasted in its effects any serious belief in its historical truth: even modern critics cite Isaiah for parallels, and are apt to decry it as a childish attempt to draw a picture of some actual golden age. But the Sibylline verses which suggested its contents and imagery were really but the accidental grain of dust round which the crystallization of the poem began; and the enchanted light which lingers over it is hardly distinguishable from that which saturates ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... be able to accuse their author of violating the laws of the state with his poetry or of destroying the traditional ideas of the procedure about the gods he concealed the truth under a veil. That holds good also of the Apocalyptists and the poets of the Christian Sibylline sayings.] ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... Camille Desmoulins, from the Cafe de Foy, rushing out, sibylline in face; his hair streaming, in each hand a pistol! He springs to a table: the Police satellites are eyeing him; alive they shall not take him, not they alive him alive. This time he speaks without stammering:—Friends, shall we die like hunted hares? Like sheep hounded into their pinfold; ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... paint and brushes. Though he was undoubtedly sensitive somewhere to the mystic side of Nature, her Wordsworthian "intimations," you would hardly have guessed it from his talk. "A bully bit of colour," would be his craftsmanlike way of describing a twilight full of sibylline suggestiveness to the literary mind. But, strangely enough, when he brought you his sketch, all your "sibylline suggestiveness" was there, which of course means, after all, that painting was his way of seeing and ...
— October Vagabonds • Richard Le Gallienne
... mean'st thou, maiden? There is a strange light In the sweet lustre of thy thrilling eye, There is a bright spot on thy velvet cheek; Thy throat of arched fall is now thrown back, As one had check'd a white Arabian steed; Thy nostril wide dilates, Sibylline, grand; Thy moist and crimson lip tempts wildly—come! For thou art beautiful, and thy light step Shall on the hills be glorious, when thou'rt given A ...
— Cromwell • Alfred B. Richards
... than eighteen months have the volume of Poems, entitled SIBYLLINE LEAVES, and the present volume, up to this page, been printed, and ready for publication. But, ere I speak of myself in the tones, which are alone natural to me under the circumstances of late years, I would fain present ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... delivered, is even more prisonlike and sepulchral than the others in its eternal shadow. High up in a wall the black hole of a kind of grotto opens, to which a secret corridor coming from the depths used to lead. It was there that the face of the priest charged with the announcement of the sibylline words appeared—and the ceiling of his niche is all covered still with the smoke from the flame of his lamp, which was extinguished more than two thousand ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... certain Sibylline woman namely, from whose lips Socrates in the Symposium is supposed to quote what follows) Try to apply your mind as closely as possible to what I am going to say. For he who has been led thus far in the discipline of love, beholding beautiful objects ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... window, holding aside the faded blue cotton curtain, and the mid-day glare falling upon her, showed every curve of her tall full form; every line in the calm, pale Sibylline face. The large steel gray eyes were shaded by drooping lids, heavily fringed with black lashes, but when raised in a steady gaze the pupils appeared abnormally dilated; and the delicately traced black brows that overarched them, contrasted conspicuously with the wealth of deep auburn hair ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... in 1774, in the diocese of Muenster, the child of poor peasants. From her infancy she had conversations with the Virgin, and possessed the gift which also was given to Saint Sibylline of Pavia, Ida of Louvain, and more recently to Louise Lateau, of discerning, when she looked at, or touched them, objects which had been blessed from those which had not. She entered, as a novice, the Augustinian convent at ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... the most ancient Greek colony of Italy on the coast, and the last survivors of the Tarquinii died here. This is the most classic of all these legendary coast towns near Naples, as it was here that the Cumaean Sibyl dwelt with the mysterious sibylline leaves,—the books that were carried to Rome. A colossal Acropolis was once here, fragments of whose walls are now standing; and the rocky foundation is honeycombed with secret passages and openings. ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... course. That is the way to see a country in a Sibylline manner, by inner consciousness: but you might have seen the pierced rock in your drive up, or down, if the clouds broke: not that there is much to see in it; one of the crags of the aiguille-edge, on the southern slope of it, is struck sharply through, as by an awl, into ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... and the felicities attending it, I could not but observe a remarkable parity between many of the thoughts, and those in the 'Pollio' of Virgil. This will not seem surprising, when we reflect, that the eclogue was taken from a Sibylline prophecy on the same subject. One may judge that Virgil did not copy it line by line, but selected such ideas as best agreed with the nature of pastoral poetry, and disposed them in that manner which ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al
... Virgin, the mother of God. The poet Virgil foretold her in Sibylline verses before she was born and, in angelical tones he sang Jam redit et virgo. Throughout heathendom prophetic figures of her have been made, like that which you, O Marcus, have placed upon this altar. And without doubt it is ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... to behave themselves so, Heaven at the very beginning of the next year by striking with a thunderbolt the statue of Jupiter erected on the Alban hill, delayed the return of Ptolemy some little time. For when they had recourse to the Sibylline verses they found written in them this very passage: "If the king of Egypt come requesting some aid, refuse him not friendship altogether, nor yet succor him with any great force: otherwise, you will have both toils and dangers." Thereupon, amazed at the coincidence between the verses and the events ...
— Dio's Rome • Cassius Dio
... may have converted by thousands: still nothing, according to natural laws, could save the empire. It was doomed. Retributive justice must march on in its majestic course. The empire had accomplished its mission. The time came for it to die. The Sibylline oracle must needs be fulfilled: "O haughty Rome, the divine chastisement shall come upon thee; the fire shall consume thee; thy wealth shall perish; foxes and wolves shall dwell among thy ruins: and then what land that thou hast enslaved shall be thy ally, and which of thy gods shall save thee? ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... cockle and nimbus; an angel must look like an angel on the ground, as well as in the air; and the much-denounced pre-Raphaelite faith that a saint cannot look saintly unless he has thin legs, is not more absurd than Michael Angelo's, that a Sybil cannot look Sibylline unless she has ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... Jupiter, and the shops round the forum, were struck by lightning; that, at Vulturnum, in the mouth of the river, two ships were struck by lightning, and burnt to ashes. On occasion of these prodigies, the decemvirs, being ordered by a decree of the senate to consult the Sibylline books, declared, that "a fast ought to be instituted in honour of Ceres, and the same observed every fifth year; that the nine days' worship ought to be solemnized, and a supplication for one day; and that they should observe the supplication, ...
— History of Rome, Vol III • Titus Livius
... thousand years, And marks the revel shine; Her dusky face is lit with sober light, Sibylline, yet benign. ...
— John Marr and Other Poems • Herman Melville
... Christian writings, I may mention "The Sibylline Books," "The Apocalypse of Paul," "The Apocalypse of Peter," "The Revelation of Bartholomew," and "The Ascension of Isaiah," and there is also another "Apocalypse of John," a feeble imitation of the one with which our canon closes. These books appeared in the second, ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... daughter; the tambourine, assumed garb, and prophet's beard had deceived him. Impostors! But of what incredible caliber, of what illusion-creating power! For years he could not see a Salvation Army girl without a sense of cerebral exaltation. If he could have met Debora again, he would have forgiven her sibylline deceptions, her father's chicanery. And how did they spin their web? Ferval, student of the occult, greedy of metaphysical problems, at first set it down to Indian Yogi magic. But the machinery—the hideously discordant human orchestra, the corybantic ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... poets, such as Orpheus, Hesiod, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Menander, so as to transform them into ardent champions of the persecuted race. The culmination of this illegitimate form of defence was to insert in the famous Sibylline Books (III) a long passage describing the glories of the Jewish race and voicing the hopes with which they regarded the future. It was in this atmosphere and under the influence of these methods that the anti-Semitic spirit was born in ancient ...
— The Makers and Teachers of Judaism • Charles Foster Kent
... a name given to the jewelled plate which lay upon the breast of the high priest of the Jews. They had a very special feeling of reverence for it—something of the feeling which an ancient Roman might have for the Sibylline books in the Capitol. There are, as you see, twelve magnificent stones, inscribed with mystical characters. Counting from the left-hand top corner, the stones are carnelian, peridot, emerald, ruby, lapis lazuli, ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... in the intellectual severity of her outline, and bears marks of age which will grow stronger every year, and make her ugly before long. Still it will be a grandiose, gypsy, or rather Sibylline ugliness, well adapted to the expression of some tragic parts. Only it seems as if she could not live long; she expends force enough upon a part to furnish out a dozen ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... not the superstitions of the populace; the republic supported six augurs charged with predicting the future. It carefully preserved a collection of prophecies, the Sibylline Books. It had sacred chickens guarded by priests. No public act—assembly, election, deliberation—could be done without the taking of the auspices, that is to say, observation of the flight of birds. ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... noter she'd be Of all that's worth mentioning over the sea, For a woman must surely see well, if she try, The whole of whose being's a capital I: She will take an old notion, and make it her own, By saying it o'er in her Sibylline tone, Or persuade you 'tis something tremendously deep, By repeating it so as to put you to sleep; 1170 And she well may defy any mortal to see through it, When once she has mixed up her infinite me through ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... canvas with a few slight sketches on it, he discovered behind it the profile portrait of a lady in a white dress folded simply across her bosom, and showing her beautiful neck and shoulders. Her head was dressed with a sort of sibylline turban, and she supported it upon a most lovely hand and arm, her elbow resting on a large book, toward which she bent, and on the pages of which her eyes were fixed, the exquisite eyelid and lashes hiding the ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... of Friedrich, in this Custrin epoch, and indeed in all epochs and parts, is still little other than a whirlpool of simmering confusions, dust mainly, and sibylline paper-shreds, in the pages of poor Dryasdust, perhaps we cannot do better than snatch a shred or two (of the partly legible kind, or capable of being made legible) out of that hideous caldron; pin them down at their proper dates; and try if the reader can, by such means, catch a glimpse ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... his honour every five years, accompanied by solemn processions. Herodas (Mimes, 4) gives a description of one of his temples, and of the offerings made to him. His worship was introduced into Rome by order of the Sibylline books (293 B.C.), to avert a pestilence. The god was fetched from Epidaurus in the form of a snake and a temple assigned him on the island in the Tiber (Livy x. 47; Ovid, Metam. xv. 622). Aesculapius was a favourite subject of ancient artists. He is commonly represented standing, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... found in the cave of the Cumsean Sibyl, near Naples, where they had remained for centuries, outlasting the changes of nature and, when found, being still two hundred and fifty years in advance of the time foretold. The accounts are all written on the sibylline leaves; they are in all languages, ancient and modern; and those concerning this ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti
... caused much concern. The dismay of the people the pontiffs tried to alleviate by all the means in their power, by consultation of the augurs, soothsayers and professional prophets, and by official consultation of the Sibylline Books. The general anxiety was somewhat allayed by their placards and proclamations, announcing that Meffia's death was wholly due to her personal weakness and was not to be regarded as a portent, in particular that it in no way indicated the wrath of the gods or their rejection ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... had the charge of the sibylline books; inspected them by the appointment of the senate in dangerous junctures, and performed the sacrifices which ...
— Roman Antiquities, and Ancient Mythology - For Classical Schools (2nd ed) • Charles K. Dillaway
... their baldricks till they had mounted the Capitol, and they arrived within three days' march of Rome. At every appearance of this formidable enemy the alarm at Rome was great. The senate raised all its forces and summoned its allies. The people demanded a consultation of the Sibylline books, sacred volumes sold, it was said, to Tarquinius Priscus by the sibyl Amalthea, and containing the secret of the destinies of the Republic. They were actually opened in the year 228 B.C., and it was with terror found that the Gauls would twice take possession ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... deny anything she told me, and I could not see that her satisfaction in being justified by the event made poor Dolcino's throat any better. The truth is that, as the sequel proved, Miss Ambient had some of the qualities of the sibyl, and had therefore, perhaps, a right to the sibylline contortions. Her brother was so preoccupied that I felt my presence to be an indiscretion, and was sorry I had promised to remain over the morrow. I said to Mark that, evidently, I had better leave them in the morning; to which he replied that, on the contrary, if he was to pass ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... audience. In a very long discourse, which is still extant, the royal preacher expatiates on the various proofs still extant, the royal preacher expatiates on the various proofs of religion; but he dwells with peculiar complacency on the Sibylline verses, [59] and the fourth eclogue of Virgil. [60] Forty years before the birth of Christ, the Mantuan bard, as if inspired by the celestial muse of Isaiah, had celebrated, with all the pomp of oriental ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... great problems of the universe, as he understands them, and educes from their application to certain circumstances the character of the man. The one is sagacious, argus-eyed; the other oracular, sibylline. And yet Emerson, perhaps unconsciously, through admiration of the liberal views and unquestioned bravery of his contemporary, adopted something like his peculiarities of style and domesticated foreign idioms, that yet, like tamed tigers, are not to be relied on in general society. As Carlyle ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... in his Confessions and elsewhere, anybody who chooses may put those Sibylline leaves together for himself. It would only appear certain that for ten years he led the life of a recluse student and a hard laudanum-drinker, varied by a little society now and then; that in 1816 he married Margaret Simpson, a dalesman's daughter, of whom we have hardly ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... a growl when they had followed it for half a minute. The women, in ragged black or dark, checked skirts, with torn red woollen shawls hanging from their heads, glanced sidelong at Veronica, when they were still young; but the older ones went by without giving her a look, their leathern, Sibylline faces set, their old lids wrinkled by everlasting effort till they almost hid the small dark eyes. The most of them carried something in their hands,—faggots, covered baskets, small sacks of potatoes, or corn, or beans; and when the ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford |
