"Sphinx" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... when she was still questioning the Sphinx instead of trying to find an answer to it, she ventured to tax her husband ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... England," writes Mr Kipling in one of his Indian tales, "spend a few weeks in India, walk round this great sphinx of the Plains, and write books upon its ways and its work, denouncing or praising it as their ignorance prompts. Consequently all the world knows how the Supreme Government conducts itself. But no one, not even the Supreme Government, ...
— Rudyard Kipling • John Palmer
... vertically slitted in jet into the midmost of amazing opals of greenish yellow, the eyes roved the room. They alighted on Cocky. Instantly the head portrayed that the cat had stiffened, crouched, and frozen. Almost imperceptibly the eyes settled into a watching that was like to the stony stare of a sphinx across aching and eternal desert sands. The eyes were as if they had so stared for ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... dramatic productions here brought together. A great deal has been done by a succession of editors to reduce the errors of the printer or copyist to a minimum; but, after all, there are places where it would require the assistance of the Sphinx to supply a chasm, or rectify a ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Volume I. • R. Dodsley
... Terrible and the Sphinx, had been appointed to accompany and aid the Great Eastern on her important mission. A gun was fired, and signals were made, to acquaint these with what had occurred while the fires were being got up in the boilers ...
— The Battery and the Boiler - Adventures in Laying of Submarine Electric Cables • R.M. Ballantyne
... Buch der Lieder at the poem in his preface—the song of the sphinx in the enchanted wood ... and how it clutched the seeker, the poet, to its monstrous but voluptuous woman's breasts as it ravished his soul with kisses. And the nightingale ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... to an Acolyte making his bacca light, A fleet-footed youth who could run like a crack o' light. "Run, Abraham, run! Hunt him over the plain, And drive back the brute to the desert again. The Sphinx is a-watching, the Pyramids frown on you, From those granite tops forty cent'ries look down on you— Run, Abraham, run! I'll bet half-a-crown on you." So Abraham ran; like a man did he go for him, But the goat made it clear each ...
— Saltbush Bill, J.P., and Other Verses • A. B. Paterson
... already walking and talking. He saw the watch below of stokers and trimmers bobbing out of the forecastle doors like rabbits from a warren and making their way aft over the rusty deck to the mustering of the port doctor. They were Chinese, with expressionless, Sphinx-like faces, and they walked in peculiar shambling fashion, dragging their feet as if the clumsy brogans were too heavy for their ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London
... but the bent and grizzled old woman Sally, who now came forward. She looked with blank brown eyes at the new-comer, herself inscrutable as the Sphinx. If she commented mentally on the droop of the young woman's mouth and eyes, at least she said nothing. It was not her place to ask what white folk did, or why. She took up the traveling-bags and led the way up the narrow stairway which made out of ...
— The Purchase Price • Emerson Hough
... Robespierre’s visions, had been for some time gathering in the corners of the room warned me that the hour had come for my trip back to Paris. Declining reluctantly an invitation to take potluck with my host, I was soon in the Avenue of the Sphinx again. As we strolled along, talking of the past and its charm, a couple of men passed us, carrying a piece of furniture rolled ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... Patty's Place next winter, too," she wrote. "Maria and I are going to run over Egypt. I want to see the Sphinx once ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... As she made this sphinx-like remark, Mr. Horace Clapp wished she would relinquish the pursuit of wealth long enough to put her work down and let him ...
— A Bookful of Girls • Anna Fuller
... and all his features became in quick succession types of thought and exponents of hidden feelings, while his inquisitive nose stood forth in the midst of their ceaseless play like a perpetual interrogation point that would have electrified the Sphinx into life, and set its stone lips gabbling answers ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putman Serviss
... went away healed. Clive was a Theosophist: all men were her brothers, and all women her sisters; but those especially among art-workers who fell by the wayside might share her bread and blanket. They called her Old Mother Sphinx, because of her inscrutable eyes, and the tenderness of ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... that the winds blow over, And none may fathom nor understand The charm it holds for the restless rover; A great grey chaos — a land half made, Where endless space is and no life stirreth; And the soul of a man will recoil afraid From the sphinx-like visage that Nature weareth. But old Dame Nature, though scornful, craves Her dole of death and her share of slaughter; Many indeed are the nameless graves Where her victims ...
— Rio Grande's Last Race and Other Verses • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... sixty-eight, and I have no more of it than at twenty-eight[1001].' BOSWELL. 'But, Sir, would not you wish to know old age? He who is never an old man, does not know the whole of human life; for old age is one of the divisions of it.' JOHNSON. 'Nay, Sir, what talk is this?' BOSWELL. 'I mean, Sir, the Sphinx's description of it;—morning, noon, and night. I would know night, as well as morning and noon.' JOHNSON. 'What, Sir, would you know what it is to feel the evils of old age? Would you have the gout? Would you have decrepitude?'—Seeing him heated, I would not argue any farther; but I was confident ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... Kilda. Then he polishes the drunk one off with chloroform, gets out of the cab, jumps into another, and after getting out at Powlett Street, vanishes—that's the riddle I've got to find out, and I don't think the Sphinx ever had a harder one. There are three things to be discovered—First, who is the dead man? Second, what was he killed for? And third, who ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... said Henrietta, "they are bringing Mademoiselle de Tonnay-Charente and her sphinx butterfly in grand ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... first, Ralph persevered so faithfully in acquiring a knowledge of his new duties, that he slowly won the approval of every one on board, unless it might have been the captain. Gary preserved a sphinx-like attitude, never sparing the boy, never praising him, nor manifesting by any sign an atom of that feminine graciousness of manner that had on shore ...
— Ralph Granger's Fortunes • William Perry Brown
... roared Perrin. "Mademoiselle Croizette's words: 'You love me, then!' and her kiss must have this moonlight. She is playing the Sphinx; that is the chief part in the play, and we must leave ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... see how she received the bad news. Marjorie's desire to cry left her. She leaned back in her seat and assumed an air of indifference far removed from her real state of mind. Then she calmly refolded the letter and placed it in its envelope with the impassivity of a young sphinx. ...
— Marjorie Dean High School Freshman • Pauline Lester
... rubbish near the bottom of a chamber, several ivory ornaments upon which were traces of gilding: among them was the figure of a man in long robes, carrying in one hand the Egyptian crux ansata—part of a crouching sphinx—and flowers designed with ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal, No. 421, New Series, Jan. 24, 1852 • Various
... being reached, the matter was further gone into. The solicitor, by adroit questioning, drew from Jimmie various bits of information relating to the accused man's past life. His own opinion—he had read all the papers—Mr. Tenby held in reserve behind a sphinx-like countenance, nor did he vouchsafe it when it was finally settled that he should ...
— In Friendship's Guise • Wm. Murray Graydon
... the sphinx question put to every thinking man, and on his answer hangs his life. For according to that answer, he will either flinch and turn back, or expend every drop of blood and grain of power in urging on ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... the discipline is of the severest. They are therefore among the most fearless fighters in the world, and always put in a tight place on the French front. There is one man at the enlisting depot[9] who is a wonderful being, and can size up a new recruit at a glance. He is known as "Le Sphinx." You must give him your real name and reason for joining the Legion, and in exchange he gives you a number by which henceforth you are known. He knows the secrets of all the Legion, and they are never divulged to a living ...
— Fanny Goes to War • Pat Beauchamp
... the voice of God; but these are old and worn with journeying—men and women who have outlived passions and ambitions and the fire heats of love, and who now, girt about with memories, stand face to face with the sphinx Eternity. ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... last two weeks. We're quite pals! I'm for playing the luck every time! When the jewels showed up to-day, I figured that to-night's the night—see? Cloran and I are going to supper together at the Silver Sphinx at about eleven o'clock—and this is where you shed the Gypsy Nan stuff, and show up as your own sweet self. Cloran'll be ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... there!"—and upon this Mr. Herbert pointed with his finger to Mr. Disraeli sitting on the Treasury Bench. The sting of invective is truth, and Mr. Herbert certainly spoke daggers if he used none; yet the Chancellor of the Exchequer sat impassive as a Sphinx. ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... of the poet is to present in a clear, comprehensive and palpable form the sphinx riddle of human existence, his work abounds nevertheless in a variety of interesting data, which throw considerable light upon the philosophical and theological theories in vogue among the thoughtful spirits of the Jewish community. ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon
... waning of the heroic world In the Nibelungen-lied the final event is a great calamity that is akin to a half historical event of the North. Odin descends to the nether world to consult Hela; but she, like the sphinx of Thebes, will not reply save in an enigma, which enigma is to entail terrible tragedies, and lead to destruction the young hero who is the prey of ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... four Engravings: 1.—The Invitation, with the Emperor and the Empress, and the Buff-tip Moth writing the Cards.—2. The Dance, with the Sphinx Hippophaes, the Pease Blossom, the Mouse, the Seraph, Satellite, Magpie, Gold Spangle, Foresters, Cleap Wings, &c.—3. The Alarm.—4. The Death's Head Moth. These are beautifully lithographed by Gauci. Their colouring, after Nature, is delightfully ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 471, Saturday, January 15, 1831 • Various
... MAL has been made the Sphinx of this particular occasion. Every one has determined to put you off the scent. The word, among other acceptations, has that of mal [evil], a substantive that signifies, in aesthetics, the opposite of good; of mal [pain, disease, complaint], ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Part First • Honore de Balzac
... all tides of feeling and all outbursts of passion. They are not even shocked at vulgarity. They are simply indifferent. They are calm, visibly calm, painfully calm; and it is not the eternal, majestic calmness of the Sphinx either, but a rigid, self-conscious repression. You would like to put a bent pin in their chair when they are about calmly ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... and saintly court chaplain, Spener, Liana at last brought her perplexities. Here the history moves in veils. How he extorted from her the promise to renounce her Albano for ever is a mystery watched and hidden by the Great Sphinx of the ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VII • Various
... affably everyone he knew, he maintained a frank demeanour on all subjects, especially of Government policy, secretly enjoying the surmises and prognostications, so pleasantly wide of the mark, and the way questions and hints perished before his sphinx-like candour. He spoke cheerily too of Miltoun, who was 'all right again,' and 'burning for the fray' when the House met again in the autumn. And he chaffed Lord Malvezin about his wife. If anything—he said—could ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... soberly quiet walls, to indulge in fancies about the secrets, financial and political, which must be discussed and locked up in human breasts there—to him the magic address, New Court, St. Swithin's Lane, was as full of potential mystery as the Sphinx is to an imaginative traveller. He glanced at its gates and at its sign now with an almost youthful awe and reverence—the reverence of the man of considerable wealth for the men of enormous wealth—and while his eyes were thus busy a taxi-cab came ...
— The Rayner-Slade Amalgamation • J. S. Fletcher
... warrant our believing that they would in time discover the cause of the queen's inability to follow them through the trellis? They have a very nice sense of proportion, and of the space required for the movement of bodies. In the regions where the hideous death's-head sphinx, the acherontia atropos, abounds, they construct little pillars of wax at the entrance of the hive, so restricting the dimension as to prevent the passage of the nocturnal ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... shorter spur holds out a certain prospect of reward; for, in these two cases, as in so many others, the flower's welcome for an insect is in exact proportion to the length of its visitor's tongue. Doubtless it is one of the smaller sphinx moths, such as we see at dusk working about the evening primrose and other flowers deep of chalice, and heavily perfumed to guide visitors to their feast, that is the great purple-fringed orchid's benefactor, since the length ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... general question, "What will you do with us, we hundreds of millions, who cannot keep pace with you?" If the New Republic emerges at all it will emerge by grappling with this riddle; it must come into existence by the passes this Sphinx will guard. Moreover, the necessary results of the reaction of irresponsible wealth upon that infirm and dangerous thing the human will, the spreading moral rot of gambling which is associated with irresponsible wealth, ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... in the centre, and went off by gradations into smaller garnets by the thousand. They flashed their blood-red flames in the African sun, and the head of Ucatella, grand before, became the head of the Sphinx, encircled with a coronet of fire. She bestowed a look of rapturous gratitude on Staines, and then glided away, like the stately Juno, to admire herself in the nearest glass like any other coquette, black, brown, yellow, copper, ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... seen the things that are put up in the shop windows here with my name under them, I have been in wondering admiration at the boundless loving-kindness of my English and Scottish friends, in keeping up such a warm heart for such a Gorgon. I should think that the Sphinx in the London Museum might have sat for most of them. I am going to make a collection of these portraits to bring home to you. There is a great variety of them, and they will be useful, like the Irishman's guideboard, which showed where the road did ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... blue-and-silver, which became him, though he is somewhat stomachy for such conspicuous colors. A handsome man, I would have said, honest but not particularly intelligent.... Walpole, in a fit of spleen, once called him 'a porcelain sphinx,' and the phrase sticks; but, indeed, there is more of the china-doll about him. He possesses the same too-perfect complexion, his blue eyes have the same spick-and-span vacuity; and the fact that the right orb is a trifle larger than its fellow gives his countenance, in repose, ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... her eyes: the sphinx-like look of her level brows and calm mouth held for an instant, then her face quivered, grew tremulous and tender. Her hands made a blind, passionate movement, and as he caught her to him he heard her sobbing that she ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... riddle of this new Sphinx, or be devoured. Though Mr. Lincoln's policy in this critical affair has not been such as to satisfy those who demand an heroic treatment for even the most trifling occasion, and who will not cut their coat according to their cloth, unless they can borrow the scissors ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... he had yet to learn its nature. He began to think with strange sadness over the hopes of the world, the young children. He saw them in his vision grow up, bear the burden in silence or ignorance; he saw how they joined in dragging onward that huge sphinx which men call civilization; there was no time for loitering amid the beautiful, for if one paused it was but to be trampled by the feet of the many who could not stay or rest, and the wheels of the image ground that soul ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... plan of reading them as we read Tennyson's In Memoriam, for instance, or the Sonnets from the Portuguese, by Mrs. Browning. In Mr. R.G. White's admirable edition of Shakespeare he confesses that he has no opinion upon the subject: "Mr. Thomas Thorpe appears in his dedication as the Sphinx of literature, and thus far he has not met his Oedipus." But herein have we not the main difficulty stated? The first great error committed by almost all students of the Sonnets, if we may be pardoned ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... could speak or move, or even stretch forth her hands to stay him, the seat before her was empty and darkness had filled the place where but an instant previous he had sat, a fearsome figure, erect and rigid as a sphinx. ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... Sphinx.*—It is not theoretical but practical interests which start the work of the investigation activity in the child. The threat to the conditions of his existence through the actual or expected arrival of a new child, the fear of the loss in ...
— Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex • Sigmund Freud
... just left met my scrutiny with a cold, impassive stare of its own—its look might have been the stare of the sphinx or of a good poker player. It gave no sign. My eyes traveled up to the roof, then back again to the ground, and only when my glance dropped did I see for the second time the lurking figure ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... doesn't understand," I protested, glancing at Miss Lyberg. I could have sworn that I detected a gleam in the woman's eyes and that the sphinx-like attitude of dull incomprehensibility suggested a strenuous effort. "She doesn't understand anything. She doesn't ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... because his great-grandfather was a Cheshire Cat, his smile gave him a wise and jovial look, as if the Sphinx of Egypt should suddenly see a joke. With a good heart he went daintily on his way, shaking the snow from his paws at times, until he reached the village green. Now in the middle of the green stood the pump, made of wood with a flat top. On this Tommie ...
— The Faery Tales of Weir • Anna McClure Sholl
... through the State to Henry Clay? It was not in the boy's blood to be driven an inch, and no one tried to drive him. In his own home he was a spectre of gnawing anguish to his mother and Margaret, of unspeakable bitterness and disappointment to his father, and an impenetrable sphinx to Dan. For in Dan there was no shaking doubt. He was the spirit, incarnate, of the young, unquestioning, unthinking, generous, ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox
... trying to tell its secret to the darkness. What depths, what subtleties, what unfailing revelations of beauty, and surely, too, of love, there were in Nature! And yet in Nature what terrible indifference there was: a powerful, an almost terrific inattention, like that of the sphinx that gazes at what men cannot see. Hermione moved away from the house. She walked to the brow of the island and sat down on the seat that Vere was fond of. Presently she would go to the bridge and look over into the ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... is represented by the Sphinx, had doubtless been adored as a pure abstraction, her worship being that of the universal female principle in Nature. She is pictured as the "Eldest Daughter of the Mythologies," and as "The Great First Cause." She represented the past and the future. She ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... been answered by our knowledge of their structure and mode of growth. The great works of Herold on the evolution of a caterpillar; of Lyonet on the anatomy of the Cossus; of Newport on that of the Sphinx; and of Siebold on the parthenogenesis of insects, are proofs that the moths have engaged the attention of some of the master ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... as those with which he had cursed the tules; and suddenly they stopped, checked by the Chinaman's expression. It was neither angry or alarmed, but intently observant, the eyes unblinking—an imperturbable, sphinx-like face against which the flood of ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... purely ornamental; whether, if it be purely ornamental, it may not weaken or obscure the general design; and finally, whether, if we decide to use it, we should do so grossly and notably, or in some conventional disguise: are questions of plastic style continually rearising. And the sphinx that patrols the highways of executive art has no more unanswerable ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... has petered out?" he asked Keith, with palpable suspicion. Keith glanced swiftly at Sandy sitting across the table from him in the little directors' room back of the bank proper. Sandy sat sphinx-like. As if by accident, his hands were on his hips, the fingers resting on his gun butts. Keith did not actually fear gunplay, but he was not sure of what Sandy might do. Sam's bullet, that had undoubtedly been ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... sense of the soul being near the surface of life. There is the same love of mystery and of symbolism; and in both may be observed the tendency to create strange composite figures to typify transcendental ideas, the sphinx seeming a blood-brother to the gargoyle. The conditions under which each architecture flourished were not dissimilar, for each was formulated and controlled by small well-organized bodies of sincerely religious and highly ...
— The Beautiful Necessity • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... their time—led with a curse or a jest on their tongues, and in their souls an unswerving faith in the God of Chance. But that merciful deity had been shut out from the present deal. They studied the face of Malemute Kid, but they studied as one might the Sphinx. As the quiet minutes passed, a feeling that speech was incumbent on them began to grow. At last the howl of a wolf-dog cracked the silence from the direction of Forty-Mile. The weird sound swelled with all the pathos of a breaking heart, then died ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London
... visible world on a march one needs to go to a really large desert. The Pyramids and the Sphinx have been partly buried, and parts of the valley of the Nile threatened, by hordes of sand hills marching in from the desert; cities have been buried and harbors filled up. Many of the harbors of the ancient civilizations ...
— Among the Forces • Henry White Warren
... the mud, still the beautiful sphinx, crouching in her seat, her eyes wandering aimlessly over the miry landscape. Of what is she thinking? What is she watching on those muddy roads, growing dim in the fading light, with that frown on her brow and that lip curled in disgust? Is she awaiting her destiny? ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... furniture of my museum, there was hidden away a unique thing that represented my first attempt at a journal. It looked like a sibyl's conjuring book, or an Assyrian manuscript; a seeming endless strip of paper was rolled upon a reed; at the head of this there were two varieties of the Egyptian sphinx and a cabalistic star drawn in red ink,—and under these mysterious signs I wrote down, upon the full length of the paper and in a cipher of my own invention, daily events and reflections. A year later, however, because of the labor involved in transcribing the cryptographic ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... a sculptor to imagine. Six feet tall,—strength and grace united throughout her whole figure from neck to heel; with that clear black skin which is beautiful to any but ignorant or prejudiced eyes; and the smooth, pleasing, solemn features of a sphinx,—she looked to me, as she towered there in the gold light, a symbolic statue of Africa. Seeing me smoking one of those long thin Martinique cigars called bouts, she begged one; and, not happening to have another, I gave her the price of a bunch of twenty,—ten sous. ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... an astonishing position, dominated by vast inaccessible ridges. Leaving the so-aptly named "Dead Man's Gully" on the left, you look up to the "Sphinx," that perfect position of the sniper, climb to "Battleship Hill," and then to Chunuk Bair. In an hour or so you may walk all the way we ever got. And we did not need to have got much further than Chunuk Bair. Down ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... by the intense bitterness in his tone. Truly this man, with his lightning changes from boorish incivility to whole-hearted hospitality, from apparently impenetrable reserve to an almost desperate outspokenness, was as incomprehensible as any sphinx. ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... phantasy (Indian or Brahmanical), and of being in self (Buddhistic). In the Persian (Zoroastrian) religion of light, the Syrian religion of pain, and the Egyptian religion of enigma, is prepared the way for the transformation into the religion of freedom. The Greek solves the riddle of the Sphinx by apprehending himself ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... and Mother and little cousins—Oh, no, that's what I say at night." Roger's voice now altered, assuming shrill singsong cadences. His pensive gravity would have appeared excessive if manifested by the Great Sphinx. "What I meant to say was that once upon a time when the Battle of Gettysburg was going on and houses were being robbed and burned, and my dear grandfather was being shot through the heart, a certain house, where ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... tell me, what did you guess after all?" said Porthos, settling himself into an armchair and assuming the airs of a sphinx. ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... risk a full load in the canoes, so we carried a part of our outfit over the ridge to a point where the river narrowed and deepened, then ran the rapid and picked up our stuff below. Not far from here we passed a hill whose head took the form of a sphinx and we noted it as a remarkable landmark. Stopping but once to climb a mountain for specimens, at twelve o'clock we landed on a sandy beach where Babewendigash River emptied its waters into Seal Lake. We could hardly believe our good fortune, and while Pete cooked dinner I climbed a hill to satisfy ...
— The Long Labrador Trail • Dillon Wallace
... matter of weeks. Mentally—the doctor was not so sure. The boy had gone through a terrible experience, and one which was still continuing—might continue no one knew how long. We were, said the doctor, up against a trick played by the great Sphinx, Nature, and one which, so far as he knew, had never before taken place in the ...
— Disowned • Victor Endersby
... like the Chancelier de l'Hopital on the peristyle of the Chamber of Deputies, Pillerault—a philosopher prepared for all events, and showing upon his countenance the wisdom of an Egyptian sphinx—was talking to Derville and his niece in a suppressed voice. Constance thought it best to consult the lawyer, whose discretion was beyond a doubt. With the balance-sheet written in her head, she explained ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... haff by chance with my cultivator among your potatoes already twenty pupae of the magnificent moth, Sphinx Atropos, upturned! See! Regard them, mademoiselle! What lucky chance! What fortune for me, an entomologist, this wonderful sphinx moth to discover encased ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... myself, in behalf of Veronica, whose calm face baffled me, "Enigma, Sphinx"; she turned to Desmond, holding out her right arm, and said, "You are the man ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... soul? To me it seems hopelessly inscrutable, and all effort to elucidate it, like the language of the Son of Maia, 'by night bringeth darkness before the eyes, and in the daytime nought clearer.' I shall as soon expect to wrest her buried secrets from the Sphinx, or to revive the lost ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... quivered with burning gold? Pass with thy Triumph of Lovers, Aucassin, Tristram, and Pharamond, and Lancelot, Dante, and Rudel, all thy haughty kin, Princes in that high heaven, as we are not.— With some gilt couchant sphinx both casqued and crowned, All mailed in amethyst the new god comes, Whose brooding beautiful eyes at last have found Our uncanonical dark martyrdoms, Who from the sombre catacombs of these Brings his ...
— The Hours of Fiammetta - A Sonnet Sequence • Rachel Annand Taylor
... the 'earnest' sage may scan, Portentious bore! their 'many-sided' man; A weak eclectic, groping, vague and dim, Whose every angle is a half-starved whim, Blind as a mole and curious as a lynx, Who rides a beetle which he calls a 'Sphinx.' ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... often hears of a "humming-bird" going the rounds of the garden, but at this hour it is usually the sphinx-moth hovering above the flower-beds — the one other creature besides the bee for which the bird is ever mistaken. The postures and preferences of this beautiful large moth make the mistake ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... to Thebes. The Sphinx is there; And thou shalt see her beauty rare, And thee the sorcery of her smile To read ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... my duty to deliver an opinion as to the possibility or on the prospects of an alliance with Germany, for I am as little acquainted as any here present with the intentions and plans of the German Emperor. William II. is the greatest sphinx of our age. He talks much, and his speeches give the impression of complete sincerity; but who can guess what is really behind them? That he has formulated a fixed programme as his life's work, and that he is the man to carry it out, regardless ...
— The Coming Conquest of England • August Niemann
... solemn functions the shop-girl would read with greedy envy, but the women who attended them would be half asleep behind their jewelled fans. It was typified to Montague by Mrs. Billy Alden's yachting party on the Nile; yawning in the face of the Sphinx, and playing bridge beneath the shadow of the pyramids—and counting the crocodiles and proposing to jump in by ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... all the claims our times avow, The ancient Sphinx still keeps the porch of shade; And comes Despair, whom not her calm may cow, And coldly on that adamantine brow Scrawls undeterred his bitter pasquinade. But Faith (who from the scrawl indignant turns) With blood warm oozing from her wounded ...
— John Marr and Other Poems • Herman Melville
... faultless monster which the world ne'er saw," but inscrutable as the Sphinx, whom it were vain, or worse, to question of the whence and whither. Under the other, the perfection of Nature, if relative, is multifarious and ever renewed; and much that is enigmatical now may find explanation in some ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... sphinx?" she asked Mr. Yocomb with a smile; while to me she said, in a low tone: "You are mistaken. You have had something to say to me almost daily for ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... barbaric wares in which the shops abound, and, like the woods and the wild faces of the cliffs and precipices, help to keep the cataract remote, and to invest it with the charm of primeval loneliness. This group were women, and they sat motionless on the ground, smiling sphinx-like over their laps full of bead-work, and turning their dark liquid eyes of invitation upon the passers. They wore bright kirtles, and red shawls fell from their heads over their plump brown cheeks and down their ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... through the German lines. That was precisely the way that the Germans had just forbidden me to go. But this accomplice (if such she was) got no rise out of me. To all intents I was stone-deaf. Compared to me, she would have found the Sphinx garrulous indeed. She may have been as harmless as a dove but, after my escapade, I wouldn't have talked to my own mother without a written permit from the military governor. The Kaiser himself would have found it hard work breaking through my cast-iron spy-proof armor of formality. I had good reason, ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... singularly calm, watched this extraordinary scene that was like a menagerie in which the tamer himself had become a wild beast. From another corner, Rouletabille kept his eyes fixed on Natacha who ignored him. Ah, that girl, sphinx to them all! Even to him who thought a while ago that he could read things invisible to other vulgar men in her features, in her eyes! The impassive face of that girl whose father they had tried ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux
... astonishing number of things that they are not," said Hadria, "especially to men. A poor benighted man might as well try to get on to confidential terms with the Sphinx, as to learn the real thoughts and wishes of ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... planted on the Egyptian sands," reflected Miss Clarkson once, as she glanced at him. "He'd make a dear little brother to the Sphinx." She stopped a train-boy passing through the car and bought him a small box of chocolates, which he ate uninterruptedly, somewhat as the tiny hand of a clock marks the seconds. Later she presented him with ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... matter why, No matter how, in one who ought to dwell Fixed to the solid upper sphere, my friends, Would never be forgiven." Dancey stared In mute amazement, but that mask of gold Outstared him, sphinx-like, and inscrutable. ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes
... your Bodley pap Whence all the spice is spent! The splendour of its primal tap Was gone when Aubrey went; Behold that subtle Sphinx prepare Fresh liquors fit ...
— The Battle of the Bays • Owen Seaman
... and God be with him! as surely He will be, if the simple, faithful prayers of fair, sad Hepsy Ann are heard. Thus will he, thus only can any, solve that sphinx-riddle of life which is propounded to each passer to-day, as of old in fable-lands,—failing to read which, he dies the death of rusting discontent,—solving whose mysteries, he has revealed to him the deep secret of his life, and sees ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... was put to as part of the Exhibition. Looking at the jewels of Queen Aahotep, who lived and was lovely in the days of the Patriarchs, he pondered sadly over all that had been in the world and was no more. He pictured in fancy the black locks that had scented this diadem with the sphinx's head, the slim brown arms these, beads of gold and lapis lazuli had touched, the shoulders that had worn these vulture's wings, the peaked bosoms these chains and gorgets had confined, the breast that had once communicated ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... the subject, by being made the means of expression of a particular tendency. Instead of taking a passion for Rene, indeed, future generations will scorn and wonder at him; instead of a hero they will see in him a pathological case; but the work itself, like the Sphinx, will endure. A work of art will bear all kinds of interpretations; each in turn finds a basis in it, while the work itself, because it represents an idea, and therefore partakes of the richness and complexity which belong to ideas, suffices for all and survives all. A portrait proves whatever ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the afternoon the plaited corolla of this long trumpet-shaped flower expands to welcome the sphinx moths. So deep a tube implies their tongues; not that these are the benefactors to which the blossom originally adapted itself - they were doubtless left behind in Asia - but apparently our moths make ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... testified surprise or any other emotion, at the discovery that white men had settled close to their 'sugar-bush,' and of course become joint proprietors. The inscrutable sphinx-like calm of these countenances, the strangeness of this savage life, detained Robert most of the afternoon as by a sort of fascination. Andy's wrath at the male indolence was renewed by finding that the squaw and her girls had to cut and carry all the firewood ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... he went away, nor was he thenceforward so assiduous in his visits; indeed, even when I began to get about again, he plainly feared and deprecated my society, not as in distaste, but much as a man might be disposed to flee from the riddling sphinx. The villagers, too, avoided me; they were unwilling to be my guides upon the mountain. I thought they looked at me askance, and I made sure that the more superstitious crossed themselves on my approach. At first I set this down to my heretical opinions; but it began at length to dawn upon me ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the payment that landlords demand Was a source of continual woe, When the tenant preferred to adhere to his land, And the agent preferred him to go: When their claims to adjust and the balance to strike Was a riddle to baffle the Sphinx,— But they're reconciled now, by resolving alike That they never will pay for ...
— Lyra Frivola • A. D. Godley
... these great fathers as regards chronology is especially reflected from the tables of Eusebius. In these, Moses, Joshua, and Bacchus,—Deborah, Orpheus, and the Amazons,—Abimelech, the Sphinx, and Oedipus, appear together as personages equally real, and their positions ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... standing by his horse looking after her straight, slender figure as she walked toward the gate. His face was still sphinx-like but there was a speculative look in his shrewd eyes. Bruce's success "meant so much to her," did it? That, then, was why she had come. The distance she had travelled for the purpose of seeing him had not impressed ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... him munching a sandwich and keeping his own eyes rather away from than on her own, she asked herself whether she had undertaken too much, and whether this sphinx-like face might hide danger for her. She at least knew it was far from being possible to tell by looking at the outside of a man's head what might be going on inside. Only the plight of her father's affairs had seemed to justify her; even this did ...
— Laramie Holds the Range • Frank H. Spearman
... he loves the Sphinx and does not harm her. They say that he does not dare to harm the Sphinx. She has borne him many gods whom ...
— Plays of Gods and Men • Lord Dunsany
... English (Lord Lyons) is the most sphinx; he is taciturn, reserved, listens more than he speaks; the others ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... "There was a Sphinx in olden times," said he, "that propounded a riddle, and he who failed to solve it had to die. Your riddle will be the death of me, for ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... John would. lie down on his stomach with his forepaws close to his nose, and his nose close to the ground; nor until the animal vanished could he be induced to abandon an attitude in which he resembled a couching Sphinx. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... brigade commanded by Colonel Celliers had been directed to cut the railway line between Jakalswater and Sphinx. He was to attack the former place after blocking the way, in case any reenforcements should be sent by the enemy from Windhoek. Celliers succeeded in cutting the railway and seized a train containing supplies for the Germans, but his attack on Jakalswater was a failure, and ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... one of the Sphinx's children?" said a stormy, thrilling, imperious accent, from the wild purple and scarlet flower of the Strelitzia, that gradually shaped itself into gorgeous Oriental robes, rolled in waves of splendor ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... Leonie was one of those beautiful, brilliant enigmas, who irresistibly allure everyone like a Sphinx, for she was young, charming, and singularly lovely, and understood how to heighten her charms not a little by carefully-chosen dresses. She was a great lady of the right stamp, and was very intellectual into the bargain, which is not the case with all aristocratic ladies; she also took ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... gates of the strange city of Omdurman. Some parts of his action supported, even regrettably, the reputation of rigidity. But if any admirer had, in this hour of triumph, been staring at him as at a stone sphinx of inflexible fate, that admirer would have been very much puzzled by the next passage of his life. Kitchener was something much more than a machine; for in the mind, as much as in the body, flexibility is far more ...
— Lord Kitchener • G. K. Chesterton
... At any rate, the Sphinx had spoken and shown that she had some feeling, if only that of pique and unreason; and the despairing lover was able to take a little heart. After all, coquetry, even if carried to the verge of cruelty, holds more ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... Allegory, representing a sphinx or chimaera—now framed with the rest as the centre of an ensemble—is from another and far inferior hand, and, moreover, of different dimensions. The so-called Venus of the Imperial Gallery at Vienna is, notwithstanding the signature of Bellini ...
— The Earlier Work of Titian • Claude Phillips |
