"Bacchanalian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... not eat the grapes in my presence. There was to be an orgy, she said, a bacchanalian affair—she was going to place the grapes where she could look at them, and look at them until she could stand the sight no more, when she would fall on them like a wolf on the fold and devour them. She talked morbidly of the grapes—almost neurotically. ...
— The Spread Eagle and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... have sometimes been contrived to convey ingenious thoughts. Pannard, a modern French poet, has tortured his agreeable vein of poetry into such forms. He has made some of his Bacchanalian songs to take the figures of bottles, and others of glasses. These objects are perfectly drawn by the various measures of the verses which form the songs. He has also introduced an echo in his verses which he contrives so as not to injure their sense. This was practised by the old French ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... year, while the birds were singing their matutinal songs from the trees, I sallied forth from the dormitory of my seminary to enjoy the reflections so well suited to that auspicious occasion. I had not proceeded far before my ears were accosted with certain Bacchanalian sounds of revelry, which proceeded from one of those haunts of vicious depravity located at the cross-roads, near the place of my boyhood, and fashionably denominated a doggery. No sooner had I passed beyond the precincts of this diabolical rendezvous of rioting debauchees, ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VII. (of X.) • Various
... your Bacchanalian song? Witty, certainly, but the recollection of the scores a little ghastly for the occasion, perhaps. You have yourself sung into silence, too, all possible songs of Bacchus, as the ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... Ethiopia, the first or chief stars of the Husbandman [BOÖTES] sink achronically beneath the Western horizon; and then to begin their lamentations, or hold forth the signal for others to weep: and when his prolific virtues were supposed to be transferred to the vernal sun, bacchanalian revelry became devotion. ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... can the classic purity of this bas-relief be better understood than by comparing the original with a transcript made by Rubens from a portion of the "Triumph."[202] The Flemish painter strives to add richness to the scene by Bacchanalian riot and the sensuality of imperial Rome. His elephants twist their trunks, and trumpet to the din of cymbals; negroes feed the flaming candelabra with scattered frankincense; the white oxen of Clitumnus are loaded with ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... Where are you going at this time of night? It seems to me rather peculiar that a man who sits in his pew every Sunday and listens to eloquent homilies on the evils that result from the keeping of late hours and indulging in bacchanalian revels should be wending his way home in the small hours of the morning. Come, sir, give an account of yourself!" and he slapped Chappell familiarly on the shoulder, and stood right in his way, hindering ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... light and shade, or grouping the figures, in the battle of Constantine, as if designedly neglected, the better to correspond with the hurry and confusion of a battle. Poussin's own conduct in his representations of Bacchanalian triumphs and sacrifices, makes us more easily give credit to this report, since in such subjects, as well indeed as in many others, it was too much his own practice. The best apology we can make for this conduct is what proceeds from the association of our ideas, the prejudice we have in favour ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... them by St. Boniface, and the belief subsists even to the present day that people and animals that have leaped through these flames, or their smoke, are protected for a whole year from fevers and other diseases, as if by a kind of baptism by fire. Bacchanalian dances, which have originated in similar causes among all the rude nations of the earth, and the wild extravagancies of a heated imagination, were the constant accompaniments of this half-heathen, half-Christian ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... Montreal, in his red shirt and tan-colored shupac boots, all dripping wet after mooring an acre or two of raft, and now bent for his ashore-haunts in the Ste.-Marie suburb, to indemnify himself with bacchanalian and other consolations for long-endured hardship. Among other feats of strength attributed to him, I remember the following, which has an old, familiar taste, but was related to me as ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... in moresque Broke through her tender murmuring, And on her ceiling shades grotesque Reeled in a bacchanalian swing. Then all things swam, and like a ring Of bubbles welling from a spring Breaking in deepest coloring Flower-spirits paid her minist'ring. Sleep, fusing all her senses, soon Fanned over her in drowsy rune All night ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... must not neglect to bear in mind that they shared the spirit of the East; and did they not live on the very boundary-line between the East and the West? As those institutions were propagated farther to the west, they lost their original character. We know what the Bacchanalian rites became at Rome; and had they been introduced north of the Alps, what form would they have there assumed? But to those countries it was possible to {39} transplant the vine, not the service of the god to whom the vine was sacred. ...
— Mysticism and its Results - Being an Inquiry into the Uses and Abuses of Secrecy • John Delafield
... out into a loud Bacchanalian hymn, in which Philip could find no mirth, and from which the ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 3 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... Bacchanalian festivals of Hathor had interested her and aroused her curiosity, from the very first time that she had seen the figures of the dancing-girls, so realistically carved on the walls of the temple of Dendereh. She had read all that she could lay her hands on relating to ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... dined he kicks her away like a mangy dog till he is hungry again. In Ploss-Bartels[118] may be found an abundance of facts culled from various sources in all parts of the world, showing that the bestiality of many savages is not even restrained by the presence of spectators. At the phallic and bacchanalian festivals of ancient and Oriental nations all distinctions of rank and all family ties were forgotten in a carnival of lust. Licentious orgies are indeed carried on to this day in our own large cities; ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... worship. At Uji, not far from Kyoto, the capital of the Empire, for a thousand years and more, and the center of Buddhism, there was a shrine of great repute and popularity. Thither resorted the multitudes for bacchanalian purposes. Under the auspices of the Goddess Hashihime and the God Sumiyoshi, free rein was given to lust. Since the beginning of the new regime such revels have been forbidden and apparently stopped; the phallic symbols themselves are ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... tongue: To Linus, then to Pindar; and that done, I'll bring thee, Herrick, to Anacreon, Quaffing his full-crown'd bowls of burning wine, And in his raptures speaking lines of thine, Like to his subject; and as his frantic Looks show him truly Bacchanalian-like Besmear'd with grapes, welcome he shall thee thither, Where both may rage, both drink and dance together. Then stately Virgil, witty Ovid, by Whom fair Corinna sits, and doth comply With ivory wrists his laureate head, and steeps His eye in dew of kisses while he sleeps; ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... ear-rings; rich chains—thirty of these, if I remember; eighty-three very large and heavy crucifixes; five gold censers of great value; a prodigious golden punch-bowl, ornamented with richly chased vine-leaves and Bacchanalian figures; with two sword-handles exquisitely embossed, and many other smaller articles which I cannot recollect. The weight of these valuables exceeded three hundred and fifty pounds avoirdupois; and in this ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... have more of the intellectual part of the character, and seem vicious on reflection, and of set purpose. Rubens' are noble specimens of a class; Poussin's are allegorical abstractions of the same class, with bodies less pampered, but with minds more secretly depraved. The Bacchanalian groups of the Flemish painter were, however, his masterpieces in composition. Witness those prodigies of colour, character, and expression at Blenheim. In the more chaste and refined delineation of classic fable, Poussin was without a rival. Rubens, who was a match for him in the ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... nerveless smile, denoted a fondness for the juice of the grape, and seitel after seitel disappeared with rapidity. By-the-bye, old father Danube is as well entitled to be represented with a perriwig of grapes as his brother the Rhine. Hungary in general, has a right merry bacchanalian climate. Schiller or Symian wine is in the same parallel of latitude as Claret, Oedenburger as Burgundy, and a line run westwards from Tokay would almost touch the vineyards of Champagne. Csaplovich remarks in his quaint way, that the four principal ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... merit in deep drinking. For this reason it is their custom, at the conclusion of their meals, to challenge one another to drink, and he who empties the greatest number of goblets, is held in highest esteem. As the Turks drink no wine, their presence was some restraint that day on their usual bacchanalian contests, and as we neither could nor would compete with them, we were held in great contempt. The king was about forty years old, and of large make, with a strong resemblance to the Tartar countenance. We parted from the king of Georgia next day, and on the 22d of July, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. II • Robert Kerr
... the same word over and over again like a bell set jangling; another tries to keep the tumult within bounds; the steadiest will propose an orgy. If any one in possession of his faculties should come in, he would think that he had interrupted a Bacchanalian rite. ...
— Gobseck • Honore de Balzac
... all, it is the most beautiful language in Europe, and the most musical too. Why, even for your own peculiar taste in such matters, where can you find any language so rich in Bacchanalian ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... fall in torrents. They broke into the houses for shelter; insulted maids and matrons; tore down every thing combustible for their watch fires; massacred a few of the body-guard of the queen, and, with bacchanalian songs, roasted their horses for food. And thus passed the hours of this long and dreary night, in hideous outrages for which one can hardly find a parallel in the annals of New Zealand cannibalism. The immense gardens of Versailles were filled with ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... look at the "Bacchanals" in Madrid, or at the "Bacchus and Ariadne" in the National Gallery. How brimful they are of exuberant joy! you see no sign of a struggle of inner and outer conditions, but life so free, so strong, so glowing, that it almost intoxicates. They are truly Dionysiac, Bacchanalian triumphs—the triumph of life over the ghosts that love the gloom and chill and hate ...
— The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance - Third Edition • Bernhard Berenson
... of the feeble electorate of Brandenburg, which has since grown into the kingdom of Prussia. The elector, an ambitious man, who subsequently took the title of king, received them with an extravagant display of splendor. At one of the bacchanalian feasts, given on the occasion, the bad and good qualities of Peter were very conspicuously displayed. Heated with wine, and provoked by a remark made by La Fort, who was one of his embassadors, he drew his sword and called upon La Fort ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... gardens may be. Where trimness was desirable, they were as neat, as well-ordered, as stately as some old-world lady; where nature was allowed fuller sway, they luxuriated in a very riot of mad colour,—pagan, bacchanalian almost, yet in completest harmony, despite the ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... a). Benedict XII. was an enormous eater, and such a huge wine-drinker that he gave rise to the Bacchanalian expression, Bib[a]mus papaliter. ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... I could distinguish from a multitude of noises, which issued upwards from the forecastle; and then snatches of such Bacchanalian ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... patriotic bubble had exploded and the mist cleared away, he sang a bacchanalian song, which he wished every free man in the world would commit to memory. "What is the difference," said he, "between this and wine? Neither will hurt a man; it is your rum-drinking, gin-guzzling ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... of celestial light, tempted, in every direction, the more pious among the spectators. Cooks perambulated with their shops on their backs; rival slave-merchants shouted petitions for patronage; wine-sellers taught Bacchanalian philosophy from the tops of their casks; poets recited compositions for sale; sophisters held arguments destined to convert the wavering and ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... capacious bowl of punch was foaming in the centre, with beams of generous Port or Madeira radiating to it from each of the table corners. You got flustered, without knowing whence; tipsy upon words; and reeled under the potency of his unperforming Bacchanalian encouragements. ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... are the mystics of Islam, and their poetry, while often externally anacreontic—bacchanalian and erotic—possesses an esoteric, spiritual signification: the sensual world is employed to symbolise that which is to be apprehended only by the inward sense. Most of the great poets of Persia, Afghanistan, and Turkey are generally understood to ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... minutes of grace remaining to the child Monona, she was spinning on one toe with some Bacchanalian idea of making the most of the present. Di dominated, her ruffles, her blue ...
— Miss Lulu Bett • Zona Gale
... the bacchanalian songs and quarrels recorded above, as the prince stepped out of the house at about eleven o'clock, the general suddenly appeared ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... years before, in a fit of female spitefulness for having been banished to Constantinople, had sent her ring as a gage d'amour to the repulsive barbarian. He then retired to the Danube by the passes of the Alps, where he spent the winter in bacchanalian orgies and preparations for an invasion of the eastern provinces. But his career was suddenly cut off by the avenging poniard of Ildigo, a Bactrian or Burgundian princess, whom he had taken for one of his numerous wives, and whose ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... converted into temporary hotels, and many a jovial party were collected in both. Military music, church bells, drinking choruses, were all commingled in the din and turmoil; processions in honor of "Our Lady of Succor" were jammed up among bacchanalian orgies, and their very chant half drowned in the cries of the wounded as they passed on to the hospitals. With difficulty we pushed our way through the dense mob, as we turned our steps towards the seminary. We both felt naturally curious ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... toward him to manifest their respect, and to implore his blessing on their knees; the same people who precisely ten years before had closed the churches, driven the priests into exile, and consecrated their bacchanalian worship to ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach
... physiognomy, keen eyes semi-veiled by humorously drooping lids, the extreme corner of his mouth bulging round his everlasting cigar ... grimy lions in Trafalgar Square of a rainy afternoon ... the octagonal room of L'Abbaye Theleme at three in the morning, a swirl of Bacchanalian shapes ... Wertheimer's soldierly figure beside the telegraphers' table in that noisome cave at the Front ... the deck of a tender in darkness swept by a shaft of yellow light which momentarily revealed a group of folk with upturned faces, a ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... eating her heart out in her convent cell, her husband was finding ample compensation for her absence in Bacchanalian orgies and the company of his galaxies of favourites, from tradesmen's daughters to servant-maids of buxom charms, such as the Livonian peasant-girl, in whom he found ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... lordship of Bagnacavallo and Cotignola. When with Alberigo da Barbiano Italian armies and leaders appeared upon the scene, the chances of founding a principality, or of increasing one already acquired, became more frequent. The first great bacchanalian outbreak of military ambition took place in the duchy of Milan after the death of Giangaleazzo (1402). The policy of his two sons was chiefly aimed at the destruction of the new despotisms founded by the Condottieri; ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... vision met his eyes that arrested his steps upon the very threshold; the remains of a bacchanalian supper; a man's coat and hat and boots upon the floor; in the midst of the room the great, square, black opening; and beyond it standing upon the hearth, the form of Capitola, with disordered dress, dishevelled hair ...
— Capitola's Peril - A Sequel to 'The Hidden Hand' • Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth
... bibacity, drunkenness, carousal, guzzling, intemperance. Antonyms: temperance nephalism, abstinence, teetotalism. Associated Words: bibacious, bibulous, bibitory, dipsomania, alcoholism thirst, nectar, hobnob, bacchanalian, inebriant, potatory, oenomania, symposium, crapulence, supernaculum convivial, conviviality, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... of us. We inquired of an old fellow, who was tottering home under the same Bacchanalian auspices as ourselves, and found we were in ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... bacchanalian who stands next him, waving his glass in the air, has pulled off his wig, and, in the zeal of his friendship, crowns the divine's head. He is evidently drinking destruction to fanatics, and success to mother church, or a mitre to the jolly parson ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... all probability, some other Christmas customs are adopted from the festivals of the ancients, as decking with evergreens and mistletoe (relics of Druidism) and the wassail bowl. It is not surprising, therefore, that Bacchanalian illustrations have been found among the decorations in the early Christian Churches. The illustration on the following page is from a mosaic in the Church of St. Constantine, Rome, ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... you to be grand duke?" asked the sixth of the prince, with an expression of murderous glee on her lips and a look of Bacchanalian ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... morning of life, Cos formed the delight of regimental messes, and had the honour of singing his songs, bacchanalian and sentimental, at the tables of the most illustrious generals and commanders-in-chief, in the course of which period he drank three times as much claret as was good for him, and spent his doubtful ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... standing. A marble statue found in 1835 in the Sabine district, and now in the Villa Borghese, is said to represent Anacreon. Anacreon had a reputation as a composer of hymns, as well as of those bacchanalian and amatory lyrics which are commonly associated with his name. Two short hymns to Artemis and Dionysus, consisting of eight and eleven lines respectively, stand first amongst his few undisputed remains, as printed by recent ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... another class, which may be found in the same collection; I mean the bacchanalian. Men are invited here to sacrifice frequently at the shrine of Bacchus. Joy, good humour, and fine spirits, are promised to those, who pour out their libations in a liberal manner. An excessive use of wine, which injures the constitution, and stupifies the faculties, ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume I (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... often visited by tourists from Braemar. Here the stone is hollowed by the action of the water into circular cavities like those of the Caldron Linn; and in one of these the guides will have the audacity to tell you that a bacchanalian party once made grog by tossing in a few ankers of brandy, and that they consumed the whole ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... fanatical had thrown off every vestige of decency and indulged in Bacchanalian worship of a so-called "Goddess of Reason." This was a lewd female from the Paris half-world, flower-chapleted, flimsily draped, prancing in drunken frenzy atop a table surrounded ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon
... flickers, brutalized with excess of every kind; their heads of dishevelled hair bound with coronals of leaves, while, from goblets of an antique grace, they drain the fiery torrent which is destroying them. Around the bacchanalian feast stand, lofty upon pedestals, the statues of old Rome, looking with marble calmness and the severity of a rebuke beyond words upon the revellers. A youth of boyish grace, with a wreath woven in his tangled hair, and with red and drowsy eyes, sits listless ...
— The Potiphar Papers • George William Curtis
... in good spirits—or, rather, perhaps had a pretty good amount of spirits or beer in him—as he reeled somewhat in his gait, and, although it was Sunday, was trying in his cracked falsetto voice to chant a Bacchanalian ditty assertive of the fact that he wouldn't "go home ...
— On Board the Esmeralda - Martin Leigh's Log - A Sea Story • John Conroy Hutcheson
... an exquisite interior, by Steynwich, very small, and being a night effect, the shadows are amazingly rich. In the passage leading to the garden are the two ivory cups by Frainingo. One is much better carved than the other; it is copied from an antique vase. The figures are Bacchanalian. ...
— Recollections of the late William Beckford - of Fonthill, Wilts and Lansdown, Bath • Henry Venn Lansdown
... such a joyous meeting," Burns writes, "that Mr. Masterton and I agreed, each in our own way, that we should celebrate the business," and Burns's celebration of it was the famous bacchanalian song,— ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... deride their creed and denounce their hypocrisy, was regaling himself on dry bread in one of their dungeons. The bells rang out against each other with a wild glee as I paced my narrow floor. They seemed mad with intoxication of victory; they mocked me with a bacchanalian frenzy of triumph. Yet I smiled grimly, for their clamor was no more than the ancient fool's shout, "Great is Diana of the Ephesians." Great Christ has had his day since, but he in turn is dead; dead in man's intellect, dead in man's heart, dead in man's life; a mere ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... of the householders was Chat-oue. But when he grasped the honored hand, he also held it, fixing upon its owner a generous and somewhat bacchanalian smile. ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... with silent and self-respecting dignity through the crowds, gazing with quiet and observant eyes upon the shifting phantasmagoria that filled the circus grounds and the streets nearby. With these, too, there mingled a few of both old and young who, with bacchanalian enthusiasm, were swaggering their way through the crowds, each followed by a company of friends good-naturedly tolerant or ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... triumphs was invariably consummated at the end of harvest, for then a supper was given to the tenants and servants. This supper took place in the great hall of the castle—the hall that in ancient days had witnessed many a warlike meeting and Bacchanalian feast. ...
— Our Home in the Silver West - A Story of Struggle and Adventure • Gordon Stables
... At other seasons they "wandered from place to place, taking with them a veiled image or symbol of their goddess, and clad in women's apparel of many colours, and with their faces and eyes painted in female fashion, armed with swords and scourges, they threw themselves by a wild dance into bacchanalian ecstasy, in which their long hair was draggled through the mud. They bit their own arms, and then hacked themselves with their swords, or scourged themselves in penance for a sin supposed to have been committed against the goddess. In these scenes, got up to aid ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... workingman who stands upon a metropolitan street corner and observes this Bacchanalian revel and prodigality of expense, should not be embittered by a sense of the inequality of the conditions of life. But this is not the most mischievous effect of the spectacle. It is the example of what these people care for. With all their wealth ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... kissed, and, crowding up with a boisterous show of affection, were about to fall on my neck in a heap, after the old Hebrew fashion. The priest, clamorous for more, followed with glowing face, and the whole group had a riotous and bacchanalian character, which I should never have imagined could spring from such a ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... him, but was equally baffled. The old general listened for some time to the discussion, and then asked the parson if he had read Captain Morris's or George Stephens's or Anacreon Moore's bacchanalian songs; on the other replying in the negative, "Oh, then," said the general, with a sagacious nod, "if you want a drinking song, I can furnish you with the latest collection—I did not know you had a turn for those kind of things; and I can lend you the Encyclopaedia of Wit into the bargain. ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving
... as she looked in, in the midst of that Bacchanalian ditty, when she saw no less a person than the ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the company of merry mates, In spite of Temperance's if's and buts, So sure as Eating is set off with plates, His Drinking always was bound up with cuts! Howbeit, such Bacchanalian revels Bring very sad catastrophes about; Palsy, Dyspepsy, Dropsy, and Blue Devils, Not to forget the Gout. Sometimes the liver takes a spleenful whim To grow to Strasburg's regulation size, As if for those hepatical goose pies— Or out of depth the ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... of non-laughers and over-laughers would be entertained by reading The Rape of the Lock, or seeing a performance of Le Tartuffe. In relation to the stage, they have taken in our land the form and title of Puritan and Bacchanalian. For though the stage is no longer a public offender, and Shakespeare has been revived on it, to give it nobility, we have not yet entirely raised it above the contention of these two parties. Our speaking on the theme of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... in the rudeness of Thyrsis when contrasted with the rustic elegance of Aristaeus, a touch of simple feeling in Eurydice's lyrical outcry of farewell, a discrimination between the tender sympathy of Proserpine and Pluto's stern relenting, a spirited presentation of the Bacchanalian furore in the Maenads, an attempt to model the Satyr Mnesillus as apart from human nature and yet sympathetic to its anguish, these points constitute the chief dramatic features of the melodrama. Orpheus himself is a purely lyrical personage. Of character, he can scarcely be said to have ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... imagination of the poet must have indeed explored every situation of love to have led him to that which he in his own experience could not have known. Even the song Willie brewed a Peck o' Maut, the first of bacchanalian ditties, is the work of a man of sane mind and healthy appetite. It is not of the diseased imagination of drunken genius. But the greatest poem of this period, and one of Burns's biggest achievements, is Tam o' Shanter. This poem was written in answer to a request of Captain ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... and, growing unused to the conduct of the commonwealth, might leave the reins of government in his hands." Accordingly he devised those Carnival triumphs and processions which filled the sombre streets of Florence with Bacchanalian revellers, and the ears of her grave citizens with ill-disguised obscenity. Lorenzo took part in them himself, and composed several choruses of high literary merit to be sung by the masqueraders. One of these carries a refrain which ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... festal dances, and funeral dances, and military dances, and "mediatorial" dances, and bacchanalian dances. Queens and lords have swayed to and fro in their gardens; and the rough men of the backwoods in this way have roused up the echo of the forest. There seems to be something in lively and coherent sounds to evoke ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... utterly amazed at the entrance of these people into my chamber, and connecting them somewhat with the wild stories I had heard in the garden, I still had a sort of indefinite idea that the whole thing was a masquerading freak got up in my absence, and that the bacchanalian orgie I was witnessing was nothing more than a portion of some elaborate hoax of which I was to be the victim. But when my eyes turned to the corner where I had left a huge and cumbrous piano, and beheld a vast and sombre organ lifting its ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... metrical translation of the Psalms of David will be troubled again with doubts whether he was the writer also of "Macbeth," "Othello," and "Lear." Compared with these sterile, bald, and mechanical quatrains, the sacred hymns of Isaac Watts are howling and bacchanalian anacreontics, to be hiccoughed by drunkards in their most abandoned ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... stands by, stolid and immovable; the Magyar blood is not in her, hers is the languorous Oriental blood, the supple, sinuous movements of the Levant. She watches this bacchanalian whirligig with a sneer upon her thin, red lips. Beside her Eros Bela too is still, the scowl has darkened on his face, his one eye leers across the group of twirling dancers to that one couple ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... iron chest aboard of a suspicious craft that had stolen in to shore in a fog. This latter bogy was often seen riding up Hell Gate a-straddle of that very chest, snapping his fingers at the stars and roaring Bacchanalian odes, just as skipper Onderdonk's boatswain, who had been buried at sea without prayers, chased the ship for days, sitting on the waves, with his shroud for a sail, and shoving hills of water after the vessel with ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... a table and chairs, and played a certain game of cards, which was one of their simple amusements. Whether this meeting was intended as an exorcism of any evil influences which might threaten the new must about to be put in, or a mild bacchanalian tribute to the empty space from which they had drawn so much comfort and cheerfulness during the year, or whether the wine left some fine perfume behind it which they wished to inhale, tradition saith not. Maybe the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... with Hester Sheville, not because he wanted to but because she had insisted. He had been standing gloomily in the doorway watching the bacchanalian scene, listening to the tom-tom of the drums when ...
— The Plastic Age • Percy Marks
... doctrine which inculcates full enjoyment of the passing pleasure of the world, lest death might come and too suddenly end them; and how little poetry had been recited, except as roared forth in the form of bacchanalian choruses. 'And even this Bassus it were worth my while to condescend to, lest the notion might seize him to satirize me upon the public stage. And it was to conciliate him that I lost to him twenty sestertia ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... surrounded him; everywhere enormous boulders, heaped together, or scattered about in isolated grandeur; some pitched on their sides, others standing erect, still others suspended, as it were, in mid-air. It seemed to him that these boulders had formerly served for the games of bacchanalian Titans, who, after having used them as skittles or jack-stones, had ended by hurling them at one another's heads. It is most probable that He who constructed the Albula Pass, alarmed and confused by the hideous aspect ...
— Samuel Brohl & Company • Victor Cherbuliez
... zone. In the pine belt below the timber-line a pair of solitaires were observed flitting about on the ground and the lower branches of the trees, but vouchsafing no song. In the same woodland the mountain jays held carnival—a bacchanalian revel, judging from the noise they made; the ruby-crowned kinglets piped their galloping roundels; a number of wood-pewees—western species—were screeching, thinking themselves musical; siskins were flitting about, though not as numerous as they had been in the ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... not when labelled 'Heidsick' and 'Rheims.' 'But then the cork proves it, you know,'—for, by a strange superstition, it is assumed that when the cork is correct the wine is not less so; a theory which is exploded by a revelation in the following by no means Bacchanalian lyric:— ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... quantity of solid gold ornaments—nearly two hundred massive finger and ear rings; rich chains—thirty of these, if I remember; eighty-three very large and heavy crucifixes; five gold censers of great value; a prodigious golden punch-bowl, ornamented with richly chased vine-leaves and Bacchanalian[15] figures; with two sword handles exquisitely embossed, and many other smaller articles which I cannot recollect. The weight of these valuables exceeded three hundred and fifty pounds avoirdupois; and in this estimate ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... in these cases of Bacchanalian emergency, to stagger obstinately into his room on the ground-floor, to take the model-ship out of the cupboard, and to try if he could proceed with the never-to-be-completed employment of setting up the rigging. When he had smashed the tiny spars, and snapped asunder ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... sherry, sling [U.S.], uisquebaugh[Irish], usquebaugh, whisky, xeres[obs3]. drunkard, sot, toper, tippler, bibber[obs3], wine-bibber, lush; hard drinker, gin drinker, dram drinker; soaker*, sponge, tun; love pot, toss pot; thirsty soul, reveler, carouser, Bacchanal, Bacchanalian; Bacchal[obs3], Bacchante[obs3]; devotee to Bacchus[obs3]; bum* [U.S.], guzzler, tavern haunter. V. get drunk, be drunk &c. adj.; see double; take a drop too much, take a glass too much; drink; tipple, tope, booze, bouse[Fr], guzzle, swill*, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... the way, are you not quite vexed to think that those men of genius, for such they certainly were, who composed our fine Scottish lyrics, should be unknown? It has given me many a heart-ache. Apropos to bacchanalian songs in Scottish, I composed one yesterday, for an air I like much—"Lumps ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... in guileless youth, Flies tow'rds her Love with trusting wing, Bruises her heart 'gainst broken truth, And falls, like thee, a crippled thing. How man in bacchanalian sphere Soars to the heat of Pleasure's sun, Then, by gradations dark and drear, Sinks low as thee, poor wingless one: How hearts from proud Ambition's height Have drooped to darkest, lowest hell— From blazing noon to pitchy night, With pangs ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... had purchased a small piece of ground called Laggan, on the Nith. There took place the Bacchanalian scene which called forth "Willie brew'd a ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... swift little scouts were up and into the formation. The air crackled with the sound of Lewis-gun fire, machines reeled and staggered like drunken men, Tam's fighting Morane dipped and dived, climbed and swerved in a wild bacchanalian dance. Airplanes, British and German alike, fell flaming to the earth before the second in command of the ...
— Tam O' The Scoots • Edgar Wallace
... theatre or on any other public occasion, and thought extravagance useless even in the case of pleasure, should have been frugal in your grief. For not only ought the chaste woman to remain uncorrupt in Bacchanalian revels,[194] but she ought to consider her self-control not a whit less necessary in the surges of sorrow and emotion of grief, contending not (as most people think) against natural affection, but against the extravagant wishes of the soul. For we are indulgent to natural ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... such as nipping off the tails of sucking calves, catching chickens in her manger, and making various pieces of them, and kicking in the ribs of strange dogs and horned cattle. But to the eccentric habits and bacchanalian customs of her ex-military master, the old mare's dormant talents owed ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... it came about that Cimarosa, Paesiello, and Rossini fed the mystic, melancholy little boy, who was more than a little intoxicated by his draughts of the Asti spumante poured out for him, instead of milk, by these bacchanalian Satyrs, and the two lively, ingenuously, lasciviously smiling Bacchante of Naples and ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... wandering, unconsciously to themselves, into the elegiac—except when on one subject, whereon the muse of Scotia still warbles at first hand, and from the depths of her heart—namely, alas! the barley bree: and yet never, even on this beloved theme, has she risen again to the height of Burns's bacchanalian songs. ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... written down in honest Hungarian by the morning and to encourage him in his task he gave him two guldens and an order on the butler for as much punch as he could drink. By the morning all the punch was drunk, but the translation also was finished, to the tune of bacchanalian songs which Margari kept up with great spirit ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... into a roaring bacchanalian song, and continued to shout, and yell, and drink the brine until he was hoarse. But he did not seem to get exhausted; on the contrary, his eyes glared more and more brightly, and his face became scarlet as the fires that were raging ...
— Shifting Winds - A Tough Yarn • R.M. Ballantyne
... Bacchanalian measure! One time he gave an unconscious exhibition of his technical ability that, while regrettable, would have been of immense interest to psychologists who are seeking to prove that music depends upon a separate operation of a special "faculty." During his American ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... romance with Nelson or Bonaparte as the hero, or of finishing off in the full blaze of Trafalgar or in the rout of Waterloo; although with Marryat and Lever the English reader revelled in the dashing exploits or bacchanalian revels of sailors and soldiers. Lever did indeed give glimpses of Wellington or Napoleon; but his business was with Connaught Rangers and French guardsmen; while Marryat and Michael Scott gave us daring sea-captains and reckless sailors with ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... Bacchanalian Dance, by the Ceramic Painter Hieron. Description of some Greek Dances, the Geranos, the Corybantium, the Hormos, &c. Dancing Bacchante from a Vase and from Terra Cotta. The Hand-in-hand, and Panathenaeac Dance from Ceramic ...
— The Dance (by An Antiquary) - Historic Illustrations of Dancing from 3300 B.C. to 1911 A.D. • Anonymous
... Everything is represented, from the sigh of desire to the final ecstasy; it is a very history of love. I could not conceive a woman refusing her partner anything after this dance, for it seemed made to stir up the senses. I was so excited at this Bacchanalian spectacle that I burst out into cries of delight. The masker who had taken me to his box told me that I should see the fandango danced by the Gitanas ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... four hundred horses in his stables, a civil list of more than 100,000 crowns, a regiment of Uhlans for his guard, and a theater costing over 600,000 livres, while the life he leads, or which is maintained around him, resembles one of Rubens's bacchanalian scenes. As to the special and general provincial governors we have seen that, when they reside on the spot, they fulfill no other duty than to entertain; alongside of them the intendant, who alone attends ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... dreaded plague spot of the city were deserted; but from many a dirty window, and through many a red, dingy curtain, streamed forth into the darkness rages of ruddy light, while the sounds of the violin, and the noise of Bacchanalian orgies, betokened that the squalid and vicious population of that ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... faces, and the powder which they sprinkled upon their hair were not used to give them the semblance of youthful beauty, but rather to impart the purple hues of perpetual drunkenness, such as Rubens gave to his Bacchanalian deities, united with the blanched whiteness of premature old age. Licentiousness without shame, drunkenness without rebuke, gambling without honor, and frivolity without wit characterized, alas, a great proportion of that "upper class" who ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... crowd to the immediate scene of action, which was rendered peculiarly interesting by the discovery of a dainty bit of female beauty shewing fight with half a dozen watchmen, in order to extricate herself from the grasp of these guardians of our peace. She was evidently under the influence of the Bacchanalian god, which invigorated her arm, without imparting discretion to her head, and she laid about her with such dexterity, that the old files{2} were fearful of losing their prey; but the odds were fearfully against ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... roof, father, mother, daughter, son-in-law, big boy, and big girl all silently busy together. There were bees and wasps humming around the tubs of crushed grapes in the pale afternoon sun; the view of the lake and the mountains was inspiring; but there was nothing bacchanalian in the affair, unless the thick calves of the girl, as she bent over to cut the clusters, suggested a Maenad fury. These poor people were quite songless, though I am bound to say that in another vineyard I did hear some of the children singing. It had momentarily ...
— A Little Swiss Sojourn • W. D. Howells
... the kavis and ugijs (poets and priests) of the Veda with the evil spirits of the same names in the Avesta, like daeva deva. Compare, besides, the Indo-Iranian feasts, medha, that accompany this Bacchanalian liquor-worship.] ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... was ideal, and had nothing to do with ordinary life; it arose from the winter feasts of Bacchus, while comedy was the outcome of the harvest feasts, and the accompanying Bacchanalian processions, which were more in the nature of a frolic than of real acting. The influence of the Middle and New Greek comedy, especially, that of Menander, on the Roman comedy of Terence is well defined. Under Ennius and Plautus the ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... and the store relaxed into a bacchanalian chaos of trampled debris, merchandise strewn as if a flock of vultures had left their pickings—a battlefield strewn with gewgaws and the tinsel of Christmastide, and ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... scale, and I imparted considerable force and breadth to the design by "coaling in" the shadows with a charred stick. Then calling color to my aid, as far as my limited means admitted, I scraped from the edges of the moose-hide a portion of the red-streaked fat, and, having impasted therewith the bacchanalian nose of my subject, I stepped back a few paces to contemplate the effect. So ludicrous was the resemblance, that I laughed outright in the pride of my success,—a transient hilarity, nipped suddenly in the bud by the loud boom of a cannon, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... tendencies, to wish always to be part and parcel of this gayety, this rushing here and there; and he drank at times—due principally, as I thought, to my wildling art-director, who had no sense or reserve in matters material or artistic and who was all for a bacchanalian career, cost what it might. On more than one occasion I heard L—— declaring roundly, apropos of some group scheme of pilgrimage, "No, no! I will not. I am going home now!" He had a story he wanted ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... collection: a Holy Family by Leonardo da Vinci, a triptych by Perugino, and a Madonna by Correggio. Hardly less celebrated, but sharply at odds with the ecclesiastical subjects of the paintings, was the mantle, carved in a bacchanalian procession of satyrs and nymphs—a model said to have been made ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... many a cup and many a smile The festal moments we beguile. And while the harp, impassioned flings Tuneful rapture from its strings,[1] Some airy nymph, with graceful bound, Keeps measure to the music's sound; Waving, in her snowy hand, The leafy Bacchanalian wand, Which, as the tripping wanton flies, Trembles all over to her sighs. A youth the while, with loosened hair, Floating on the listless air, Sings, to the wild harp's tender tone, A tale of woe, alas, his own; And oh, the sadness in his sigh. ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al |
