"Hercules" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... timid, by the slave of passion and the dupe of opinion, by the lover of sense and the despiser of truth. The dangers and difficulties in the undertaking are such as can be sustained by none but the most hardy and accomplished adventurers; and he who begins the journey without the strength of Hercules, or the wisdom and patience of Ulysses, must be destroyed by the wild beasts of the forest, or perish in the storms of the ocean; must suffer transmutation into a beast through the magic power of Circe, or be exiled for life by the detaining ...
— Introduction to the Philosophy and Writings of Plato • Thomas Taylor
... yours which has gagged my mouth these five or six months. I can as little write good things as apologies to the man I owe money to. O the supreme misery of making three guineas do the business of five! Not all the labours of Hercules not all the Hebrews' three centuries of Egyptian bondage, were such an insuperable business, such an infernal task! Poverty, thou half-sister of death, thou cousin-german of hell! where shall I find force or execration equal to the ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... stage, employ your great strength in pushing forward the ponderous woods of Bondy you have painted? Have I not seen you dash off dungeon in the Castle of Udolpho with all the vigour of Rembrandt, roll it forward on the stage with the strength of Hercules, and then murder the turnkey in it with the power and elegance of Thurtell? But it is not the multifariousness of your merits that makes me proud of calling you my friend: no, it is the modesty with which you bear your ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... and commonplace—by no means the conception one forms of a Russian nobleman. I was much more struck by the appearance of his companion. This was a tall young man, surprisingly handsome, with a dark, fierce face, and the limbs and chest of a Hercules. He had his hand under the other's arm as they entered, and helped him to a chair with a tenderness which one would hardly have ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... O'Grady, "if we'd asked him to unveil a statue of Hercules in Ballymoy, would he have gone round consulting the librarians of London and Oxford to find out whether there was such a person as Hercules or not? Would he have said he was insulted? Would he have sent you here to ask for an apology? You ...
— General John Regan - 1913 • George A. Birmingham
... all the magnificent muscular development which this man possessed, there was nothing of the Hercules about him. The grace of strength was wanting, the curved lines were lacking; all was gaunt, angular, and square. The chest was broad enough, but flat, a framework of bones hidden by a rough hairy skin; the breasts did not swell up like the rounded ...
— The Toilers of the Field • Richard Jefferies
... antique sculpture, in plaster;—the selection being dictated, it is said, by no less an adviser than Canova. The Apollo, the Laocoon, the Venuses, Diana, the head of the Phidian Jove, Bacchus, Antinous, the Torso Hercules, the Discobolus, the Gladiator Borghese, the Apollino,—all these, and more, the sumptuous gift of Augustus Thorndike. It is much that one man should have power to confer on so many, who never saw him, a benefit so pure ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... organizer. At letter-writing, the one means of communication in those days, he was a Hercules. His pen never wearied. He soon had a compact party. It included not only most of the Anti-Federalists, but the small politicians, the tradesmen and artisans, who had worked themselves into a ridiculous frenzy over the French Revolution and who despised Washington for his ...
— The Boss and the Machine • Samuel P. Orth
... morning on the moor, grouse shooting, and mid-day had brought me for an hour's welcome rest to the lonely cottage, where the old superannuated keeper, father to the stalwart velvet-jacketed Hercules who had acted as my guide throughout the forenoon, lived from year's end to year's end with his son and half-a-dozen dogs for company. The level beams of the glowing August sun bathed in a golden glow the miles of purple moorland lying round us; air and scenery were good ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... what had been done to the Titans, conspired to dethrone Zeus. In order to scale heaven, they piled Mount Ossa upon Pelion, and would have succeeded in their attempt if Zeus had not called in the assistance of his son Hercules.] ...
— An Essay on Criticism • Alexander Pope
... very fine, and the only one in Rome which is comfortably furnished, and looks as if it was inhabited. A great many good pictures, and Canova's Hercules and Lycus, which I do not admire. In the evening to the Convent of SS. Giovanni e Paolo, which is remarkably clean and well kept. There are forty-five friars (Passionisti), whose vows were not irrevocable, and, though the cases do not often occur, they can lay aside ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... enough to blight any young candidate's prospects, supposing that mankind respected such a verdict; if not to make him cut his throat, granting that the victim should be sensitive as Keats. The generous review in question may be judged of by its first line and last sentence; as Hercules from his advancing foot, or Cuvier's Megatherium from the relics of its great toe. ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... "By Hercules, it is! She is mine! She is in my arms! She is on my bosom! I have her in my galley! She speeds with me to my home! I see it all, even as ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 5 November 1848 • Various
... tune also is known) appears to have come down, scarcely mutilated, from the time when it was the burthen of the song of the gleo-mann or scald, or the invocation of a heathen Angle warrior, before the northern Hercules and the blood-red lord of battles had yielded to the ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... I know every gentleman is a Hercules—at least, he chooses to be considered one! But, notwithstanding my firm faith in the fact, I have a little womanly conscience left that is ...
— The Seaboard Parish Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... column in the storming of Eryx, and was the first to mount the ladders. Previous, however, to advancing for the attack, he performed a grand religious ceremony, in which he implored the assistance of the god Hercules in the encounter which was about to take place; and made a solemn vow that if Hercules would assist him in the conflict, so as to enable him to display before the Sicilians such strength and valor, and to perform such feats as should be worthy of his name, his ancestry, ...
— Pyrrhus - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... alone know how long they had been good and faithful partners in life—thereupon set to hooking at one another with their horny, dragon-like beaks, gripping with black-taloned yellow claws that even a Hercules would shake hands with just once, beating with monster wings that would knock you or me silly, snapping horny, resounding snaps, and generally "not 'arf a-carryin' on" in the approved and correct ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... desired me (says Boswell) to change spreads into burns. I thought this alteration not only cured the fault, but was more poetical, as it might carry an allusion to the shirt by which Hercules was inflamed." She has written in the margin: "Every fever burns I believe; but Bozzy could think only on Nessus' dirty shirt, or Dr. Johnson's." In another marginal note she disclaims that attention to the Doctor's costume for which Boswell gives her credit, when, after relating how ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... can be obtained besides that of True Blue having been a stranger, who settled here, and acquired some property, which after his decease was disposed of. It has been conjectured that he lived here under a feigned name. One Hercules True, about 1645, kept a house at Windsor, to which deer-stealers were accustomed to resort; and he uttered violent threats against a person, whose son, having been killed in attempting to resist the deer-stealers in the Great Park, Thomas Shemonds prosecuted the murderers, and True ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 216, December 17, 1853 • Various
... the gray Azores, Behind the Gates of Hercules; Before him not the ghost of shores: Before him only shoreless seas. The good mate said: "Now must we pray, For lo! the very stars are gone. Brave Adm'r'l, speak; what shall I say?" "Why, say: 'Sail ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... she met Stephen. The strong, bare-armed Hercules, whom she had watched tossing the sheep around for his shears as easily as if they had been kittens under his hands, was now dressed in a handsome tweed suit, and looking quite as much of a gentleman as the most fastidious maiden could desire. ...
— The Squire of Sandal-Side - A Pastoral Romance • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... or opium in some form or other, are now recognized as evidences of degeneration. Men of genius, both in the Old World and in the New, have shown this form of degeneration. Says Lombroso: "Alexander died after having emptied ten times the goblet of Hercules, and it was, without doubt, in an alcoholic attack, while pursuing naked the infamous Thais, that he killed his dearest friend. Caesar was often carried home intoxicated on the shoulders of his soldiers. Neither Socrates, nor Seneca, nor ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... the sun is moving towards the constellation of Hercules with a velocity of about 18,000 miles per hour, and the problem to be faced is, what is the effect of the sun's orbital velocity upon the circular motion of the planets? By solving that problem, we shall arrive at a physical conception for the first ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... the English are in their own strongholds, but Benares—at any rate the parts which the tourist must visit—is least scrupulous in such matters. The canonization of the cow must needs carry a penalty with it, and Benares might be described as a sanctified byre without any labouring Hercules in prospect. Godliness it may have, but cleanliness is very distant. The streets, too, seem to be narrower and more congested than those in any other city; so that it is often embarrassingly difficult to treat the approaching ruminants with the respect ...
— Roving East and Roving West • E.V. Lucas
... have been had he loitered at home? no Hercules, but Eurystheus. And in his wanderings through the world how many friends and comrades did he find? but nothing dearer to him than God. Wherefore he was believed to be God's son, as indeed he was. So then in obedience to Him, he went about ...
— The Golden Sayings of Epictetus • Epictetus
... invent, or decide upon, any one given type or form of head-dress. So many are the wants of a man in covering his head, so widely differing from each other are the exigencies of different people, that uniformity in hats is to be given up as a bad job: to attempt it would foil the strength of a Hercules: the utmost we can hope to effect is to lay down certain limits for the variations of this ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... Pisan pulpit, Madonna assumes the haughty pose of Theseus' wife; while the high priest, in the "Circumcision," displays the majesty of Dionysus leaning on the neck of Ampelus. Nor again is the naked vigour of Hippolytus without its echo in the figure of the young man—Hercules or Fortitude—upon a bracket of the same pulpit. These sculptures of Pisano are thus for us a symbol of what happened in the age of the Revival. The old world and the new shook hands; Christianity and Hellenism kissed each other. And yet they still remained antagonistic—fused ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... the late Mr. Henry Stevens of Vermont, under the pseudonym of ' Mr. Secretary Outis,' projected and initiated a literary Association entitled THE HERCULES CLUB. The following extracts from the original prospectus of ...
— Thomas Hariot • Henry Stevens
... of St. Dunstan had a curious clock, which was considered a very wonderful piece of mechanism, almost a work of witchcraft. Standing out on the side of the church, in full view of the passers-by, were two figures of Hercules, holding clubs, with which they struck on two bells the hours and the quarters. All children took delight in watching these gigantic figures, but none so much as the little Marquis of Hertford, whose kind ...
— Stories and Legends of Travel and History, for Children • Grace Greenwood
... bear to be near him. He was left on the Island of Lemnos and the host lost memory of him. But Odysseus remembered, and he took ship to Lemnos and brought Philoctetes back. With his great bow and with the arrows of Hercules that were his, Philoctetes shot at Paris upon the wall of Troy and slew ...
— The Adventures of Odysseus and The Tales of Troy • Padriac Colum
... a pretty anecdote for the history of the Emperor Joseph, had he been discovered in a street brawl with a carman," said he to himself. "A little more, and my imperial face would have been pounded into jelly by that Hercules of a fellow! It is not such an easy matter as I had supposed, to mix on equal terms with other men! But I shall learn by bitter experience ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... God. God creates mankind. All the man-made gods are fashioned after the similitude of Caliban's Setebos. They are grotesque, carnal, devilish. Paganism was but an installment of Caliban's theory. God was a bigger man or woman, with aggravated human characteristics, as witness Jove and Venus and Hercules and Mars. Greek mythology is a commentary on Caliban's monologue. For man to evolve a god who shall be non-human, actually divine in character and conduct, is historically impossible. No man could create Christ. The attempt to account for religion ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... admire sixteen plowed fields and a hill as much as I do a lawn and flower-beds, I elect to be flirted, and my what do ye call 'em?—my stagnant current—turned into a whirlpool." Ere the laugh had well subsided, caused by this imitation of Hercules and his choice, he struck up again, "Good news for you, young gentleman; I smell a ball; here is a fiddle-case making ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... and ill-chosen words were as the voice of an angel, and our eager minds filled in the details and supplied all that was wanting in his narratives. In one evening we have engaged a Sallee rover off the Pillars of Hercules; we have coasted down the shores of the African continent, and seen the great breakers of the Spanish Main foaming upon the yellow sand; we have passed the black ivory merchants with their human cargoes; we have faced the terrible storms which blow ever around the Cape de Boa Esperanza; ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... me, and the offer was tempting; but I steeled my soul against it, and, strange as it may seem, 'twas the remembrance of Mistress Lucy that put an end to all wavering. Once I had had no higher aim than to win Captain Galsworthy's praise; now I felt—but dimly—that I would endure the toils of Hercules to win a lady's favor. 'Twas the budding of young love within me—and I never knew that a lad was ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
... The Hercules, quite cool as to my conjuration, seized the box once again by the handle, and gave it a violent tug, but this time the box resisted, and, spite of his most vigorous attacks, would not ...
— The Lock and Key Library/Real Life #2 • Julian Hawthorne
... fiery fluid must have covered her from head to foot; if Lawrence had not caught the falling lamp, if he had lost one moment in smothering the lighted gown, she must have perished in agony before our eyes; but he was strong as a young Hercules, and, half suffocated and bruised as she was, Jill knew from what ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... instances. What resistance can the infant make to the insidious serpents, which thus, as it, were, steal into its cradle, and infuse their poison into its soul? The guardians of its helplessness are heedless or unconscious of its danger, and, alas! it has not the fabled strength of the infant Hercules to crush its venomous assailants. Surely such a view of the frequent origin of crime must awaken our commiseration for its miserable victims, and excite in us a desire to become the ...
— The Infant System - For Developing the Intellectual and Moral Powers of all Children, - from One to Seven years of Age • Samuel Wilderspin
... or gems, and the Epidaurian snake is at his side. Up-stairs we saw specimens of fruits from Pompeii, barley, beans, the carob pod, pine kernels, as well as bread, sponge, linen: and the sponge was obviously such, and so was the linen. A bronze Hercules treading on the back of a stag, which he has overtaken and subdued, is justly considered as one of the most perfect bronzes discovered at Pompeii. A head of our Saviour, by Corregio, is exquisite in conception, and such as none but a person long familiar with ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... wear the shoes, and not to bear them on his back, as Theobald supposed, and therefore would read shows. The 'shoes of Hercules' were as commonly alluded to by our old poets, as the ex pede Herculem was a familiar allusion of the learned." (Mr. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 193, July 9, 1853 • Various
... the view of reading it once more. I sat down, placed them on my great Bible, and examined the whole. I then got up, walked about, read, and thought, "If I do not answer," said I, "he will think he has terrified me at the mere appearance of such a philosophical hero, a very Hercules in his own estimation. Let us show him, with all due courtesy, that we fear not to confront him and his vicious doctrines, any more than to brave the risk of a correspondence, more dangerous to others than to ourselves. I will teach him ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico
... de St. Aignan. France! France!" and, like a reaper cutting a field of corn, his sword flew round, and cut down its harvest of men; the delicate favorite—the Sybarite—seemed to have put on with his cuirass the strength of a Hercules; and the infantry, hearing his voice above all the noise, and seeing his sword flashing, took fresh courage, and, like the cavalry, made a new effort, and returned to ...
— The Forty-Five Guardsmen • Alexandre Dumas
... role and, seizing a club from one of his bodyguard, hurled himself on the nearest Red Bones—a raving, ravening demon of destructiveness whose glaring eyes smote terror into those fronting him and whose weapon swung like the club of Hercules. His bowmen and blowgun men, at last out of missiles, came charging in with bare hands or weapons seized from fallen warriors. Maneuvering had ended. Henceforth the fight was a ...
— The Pathless Trail • Arthur O. (Arthur Olney) Friel
... harbor, the ship passed slowly along between the "Pillars of Hercules," for so many centuries the western limit of the Old World, and entered the blue Mediterranean. And was this low dark line on the right really Africa, the Dark Continent, which until then had seemed ...
— Barbara's Heritage - Young Americans Among the Old Italian Masters • Deristhe L. Hoyt
... still unfit for an offensive campaign against a regular army. To the practised eye of an able and experienced soldier who accompanied McClellan, the Federal host was an army only in name. He likened it to a giant lying prone upon the earth, in appearance a Hercules, but wanting the bone, the muscle, and the nervous organisation necessary to set the great frame in motion. Even when the army was landed in the Peninsula, although the process of training and organisation had been going on for over six months, it was still a most ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... says: "That the Egyptians report, to the honour of the Athenians, that they contributed to defeat certain kings who came with a numerous army by sea from the great island of Atlantis, which, beginning beyond the Pillars of Hercules, is larger than all Asia and Africa together, and is divided into ten kingdoms which Neptune gave among his ten sons, Atlas, the eldest, having the largest and most valuable share." Plato adds several remarkable particulars concerning the customs ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. IV. • Robert Kerr
... despatched to procure a fresh supply of nectar, which Bacchus declared would nearly exhaust his stock. At last the table was spread in the most delightful part of Tempe, and the top of Ossa was occupied by Hercules with his club to see that no mortal intruded on the revels of the gods, when Jupiter discovered something at a distance running at full speed towards them. "Heyday! what have we here?" he exclaimed; "as I live, my old friend Cerberus, with a note in his ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XX. No. 556., Saturday, July 7, 1832 • Various
... and he thought, "When have I clasped such a hand before? It could help a Hercules. At any rate he would like to hold it, for it ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... wind rose, and they sailed eastward, by Tartessus on the Iberian shore, till they came to the Pillars of Hercules, and the Mediterranean Sea. And thence they sailed on through the deeps of Sardinia, and past the Ausonian Islands, and the capes of the Tyrrhenian shore, till they came to a flowery island, upon a still, ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... last nights of August, and there was no moon. Innumerable in the deep starry vault, the constellations throbbed and palpitated with ardent life. The two Bears, Hercules, Cassiopeia, glittered with so rapid a palpitation that they seemed almost to approach the earth, to penetrate the terrestrial atmosphere. The Milky Way flowed wide like a regal aerian river, a confluence of the waters of Paradise, over a bed of crystal between starry banks. Brilliant meteors cleft ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... his curt "Ha ha!" as he reached out a long arm to turn on all the lights. "Who was that chap, Hercules was it, that pulled the temple on his own head? By God, if my life's gone to pieces, I'll take some of you with me. You, Val, I was always fond of you: tell your daddy, or shall I, what you did ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... Hercules, mine was pure love; her manners charmed me, and her friendliness. If I wanted money, if she had earned an as, she gave me a semis. If I had money, I gave it into her keeping. Never was woman more trustworthy. Her husband died at a farm which they possessed in the country. I left no means untried ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... briskness, thriftiness, energy, and alacrity, it is hard to find his match. He has made a book of travels, and will make a hundred, unless somebody finds him a place at home where he will have an indefinite number of labors-of-Hercules to keep him busy,—or unless some African prince cuts his head off, or he happens to call upon the Battas ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... Twenty-four hours, fifteen degrees to each, in all three hundred and sixty degrees. It is held that the Greeks and the Romans knew fifteen of these hours. They stretched their hand from Gibraltar and Tangier, calling them Pillars of Hercules, to mid-India. Now in our time we have the Canaries and the King of Portugal's new islands—another hour, mark you! Sixteen from twenty-four leaves eight hours empty. How much of that is water and how much ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston
... that this climbing was good for little children. He had lured these citizens into places dangerous for health, growth, strength, and comfort. And so he was compelled to erect a statue typical of strength, and a small hospital for infants, as his penalty. That spirited Hercules, which stands in front of the market, was a part of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... a very different light, being supposed to express the distress of Nature at earthly calamities. The Greeks believed that darkness overshadowed the earth at the deaths of Prometheus, Atreus, Hercules, Aesculapius, and Alexander the Great. The Roman legends held that at the death of Romulus there was darkness for six hours. In the history of the Caesars occur portents of all three kinds; for at the death of Julius the earth was shrouded in darkness, ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... relay-channels from North America to Europe. It would reach Japan via the Aleutians and a relay-ship, by wire from Japan to all Asia and—again relayed—to Australia. South Africa would get the coverage by land-wire down the continent from the Pillars of Hercules. The Mediterranean basin, the Near East, Scandinavia, and even Iceland would see the spectacle. Detailed instructions were given to Gail to give ...
— Long Ago, Far Away • William Fitzgerald Jenkins AKA Murray Leinster
... giant and a prodigy, and I can understand many turning away from the contemplation of such a character, feeling that it is too far removed from them to interest them, and that it is too unapproachable to help them—that it is like reading of Hercules or Hector, mythical heroes whose achievements the actual living mortal can not hope to rival. Well, that is true enough; we have not received intellectual faculties equal to Mr. Gladstone's, and can not ...
— Successful Methods of Public Speaking • Grenville Kleiser
... to corrupt the judges. The speech for the prosecution was so weak as to invite a failure, and Gabinius was acquitted by a majority of purchased votes. "You ask me how I endure such things," Cicero bitterly wrote, in telling the story to Atticus; "well enough, by Hercules, and I am entirely pleased with myself. We have lost, my friend, not only the juice and blood, but even the color and shape, of a commonwealth. No decent constitution exists in which I can take a part. How can you put up with ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... the greatest genius nature ever produced was born. Here he first lisped his native tongue; here first conceived the embryos of those compositions which were afterwards to charm a listening world; and on these plains the young Hercules first played. And here, too, in this lowly hut, with a few friends, he happily spent the decline of his life, after having retired from the great theatre of that busy world whose manners he had so ...
— Travels in England in 1782 • Charles P. Moritz
... possible hints from the inspiration and experience of the past, I studied some of the ancient statues. The specimens of Grecian statuary at the Boston Athenaeum were objects of my frequent contemplation,—especially the Farnesian Hercules. From this I derived a proper conception of the bodily outline compatible with the exercise of the greatest amount of strength. I was particularly struck by the absence of all exaggeration in the muscular ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... a Zeuxis, Timanthes, or Protogenes, of whose performances the two accomplished critics above mentioned, speaks in terms of rapture and admiration. The statues that have escaped the ravages of time, as the Hercules and Laocoon for instance, are still a stronger demonstration of the power of the Grecian artists in expressing the passions; for what was executed in marble, we have presumptive evidence to think, might also have been executed in colours. Carlo ...
— Essays on Wit No. 2 • Richard Flecknoe and Joseph Warton
... spirit were like whistling in the teeth of a north wind. You cannot alter a psychological condition with a made-to-order editorial. It is urged that we should sing small, as we are "not prepared for war." We are always prepared. Hercules did not need a Krupp cannon—he was capable of doing terrible execution with a club. Samson did not wait to forge a Toledo blade—he waltzed into his enemies with an old bone and scattered their shields of iron and helmets of brass to the four winds of Heaven. ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... the Egyptians credit the goddess Isis with the discovery, the Greeks Minerva, the Chinese the Emperor Yao. It is related of Hercules, that, when in love with Omphale, he debased himself by taking the spindle and spinning a thread at her feet. This form of work was considered to belong only to women, and by spinning for her in this position he was thought to have ...
— The Story of the Cotton Plant • Frederick Wilkinson
... double Hercules for such a set of stables as that," said Felix; and then with the slight ceremony to which I have before adverted he took his leave for ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... display his pride and arrogance in Rome! They told of a soiree of the Marchesa di Paduli which Alexis Orloff had attended. As they there begged of him to give some proof of the very superior strength which had acquired for him the name of "the Russian Hercules," he had taken one of the hardest apples from a silver plateau that stood upon the table and playfully crushed it with two fingers of his left hand. But a fragment of this hard apple had hit the eye of the Duke of Gloucester, who was standing near, and seriously ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... girl; Such flaws are found in the most worthy natures; A laughing, toying, wheedling, whimpering, she, Shall make him amble on a gossip's message, And take the distaff with a hand as patient As e'er did Hercules. ...
— Jane Shore - A Tragedy • Nicholas Rowe
... image," "the invisible body," "the aerial body," "the shade." Sometimes they called it "the sensuous soul," and described it as "all eye and all ear,"—expressions which cannot fail to suggest the phenomena of clairvoyance. The "shade" of Hercules is described by poets as dwelling in the Elysian Fields, while his body was converted to ashes on the earth, and his soul was dwelling on Olympus with the gods. Swedenborg speaks of himself as having been ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... Ceres, are treated with so sweet and beautiful a simplicity of touch that Milton may not impossibly have embalmed and transfigured some reminiscence of these scenes in a passage of such heavenly beauty as custom cannot stale. Another episode, and one not even indirectly connected with the labors of Hercules, is the story of Semele, handled with the same simple and straightforward skill of dramatic exposition, the same purity and fluency of blameless and spontaneous verse, that distinguish all parts alike of this dramatic chronicle. The second of the ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... came on, but at length she began to make signals, and we signalled in return, and then we soon found out that she was not an enemy, but a friend. She proved to be the Hercules, 74, and as she was homeward-bound, her captain said that he would keep us company, to help fight ...
— Marmaduke Merry - A Tale of Naval Adventures in Bygone Days • William H. G. Kingston
... to Darke. This second survey of the worthy proved to me that he was what is succinctly styled "half-drunk." But drink appeared not to have exhilarated him. It seemed even to have made him more morose. In the eyes and lips of the heavily bearded Hercules could be read a species of gloomy ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... was read to him out of the eighth Aeneid he generously pitied the unhappy fate of that great man, to whom he thought Hercules much too severe: one of his schoolfellows commending the dexterity of drawing the oxen backward by their tails into his den, he smiled, and with some disdain said, HE COULD HAVE TAUGHT HIM A ...
— The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great • Henry Fielding
... Caucasus, and sent an eagle every day to gnaw away his liver, which grew again every night ready for fresh torments. For thirty years Prometheus endured this fearful punishment; but at length Zeus relented, and permitted his son Heracles (Hercules) to kill the eagle, and the sufferer ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... the savages, though no decided conflict is known to have occurred from its construction to its quiet rotting away within the present generation. Those were the days when Frederick in Maryland and Chambersburg in Pennsylvania were frontier points, the Alleghanies were Pillars of Hercules, and all beyond ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... with wearied wings about your ark, When Cadiz towers did fall beneath your sword, To rest herself did single out that bark, So my meek Muse,—from all that conquering rout, Conducted through the sea's wild wilderness By your great self, to grave their names about The Iberian pillars of Jove's Hercules,— Most humbly craves your lordly lion's aid 'Gainst monster envy, while she tells her story Of Britain's princes, and that royall maid In whose chaste hymn her Clio sings your glory, Which if, great Lord, you grant, ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... M. Babington, of Dacre's House, was on the horns of a dilemma. Circumstances over which he had had no control had brought him, like another Hercules, to the cross-roads, and had put before him the choice between pleasure and duty, or, rather, between pleasure and what those in authority called duty. Being human, he would have had little difficulty in making his decision, had not the path of pleasure been so hedged ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... But for real true love, love at first sight, love to devotion, love that robs a man of his sleep, love that 'will gaze an eagle blind,' love that 'will hear the lowest sound when the suspicious tread of theft is stopped,' love that is 'like a Hercules still climbing trees in the Hesperides,'—we believe this best age is from forty-five to seventy; up to that, men are ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... to write. Within few dayes after imbarking my selfe at Tripolis the 22. of December, I arriued (God be thanked) in safety here in the riuer of Thames with diuers English marchants, the 26. of March, 1588, in the Hercules of London, which was the richest ship of English marchants goods that euer was knowen to come into ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, - and Discoveries of The English Nation, Volume 10 - Asia, Part III • Richard Hakluyt
... of that ill-gotten gain to the treasury under the Capitol.[3] Virgil imagines the bank clothed with wood, and in the wood—where afterwards was the Forum Boarium, a crowded haunt—Aeneas finds Evander sacrificing at the Ara maxima of Hercules, of all spots the best starting-point for a walk through the heart of the ancient city. To the right was the Aventine, rising to about a hundred and thirty feet above the river, and this was the first of the hills of Rome to be ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... repressing a revolt among the Gothic nobles. However the case may have been, Mousa, the Berber chieftain, sent his bravest sheik, Tarik, with a goodly following, to lead the invasion. The white-turbaned warriors crossed the strait between what had always been called the Pillars of Hercules, and landed upon that great rock which has ever since borne that leader's name, Gebel-al-Tarik—Gibraltar—the "rock of Tarik." Rodrigo, with an army of about eighty thousand men, which he had hastily gathered together, ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... Aurora just comes in in her automobile rig and talks about her 'bubble.' Mercury has a bicycle; he's a trick rider, and does all sorts of stunts. And Venus is a summer girl, dressed up in a stunning gown and a Paris hat. And Hercules has a punching-bag—to make himself stronger, you know. And Niobe has quantities of handkerchiefs, dozens and dozens of them; ...
— Patty at Home • Carolyn Wells
... found him in the blacksmith shop at Latonia, lazily observing the smith's efforts to unite Fan Tan and a set of new-made, blue-black racing-plates. I explained how a city editor had bowed my shoulders with the labors of Hercules during the last week, and began to acquire knowledge of the uncertainties connected ...
— Blister Jones • John Taintor Foote
... almost have made a census of the valley. That this frail man should have resisted him, that those thin hands should have been raised against him, that the intellectual Professor should have knocked down the Hercules of our village, was beyond my comprehension. So my friend across the table saw amazement welling up from my ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... really helpless he was! He could not force her hand because she held all the cards and he none. Yet he was determined this time to play the game to the end, even if the task was equal to all those of Hercules rolled into one, and none of the gods ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... said Roejean, 'that Hercules declined, and that was eating that vile mortadella. He was a strong man; but that was stronger. Wait a moment, till I fill a pipe with caporal, and have a smoke; for if I meet another man with that delicacy, I shall have to give up the Grotto—unless I have a pipe under my ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... motive for destroying so much that was valuable was neither fanaticism nor religion. It was the simple greed for gain. No sentiment restrained their cupidity. The great statue of the Virgin which ornamented the Taurus was sent as unhesitatingly to the furnace as the figure of Hercules. No object was sufficiently sacred, none sufficiently beautiful, to be worth saving if it could be converted into cash. Amid so much that was destroyed it is impossible that there were not a considerable ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume VI. • Various
... on the dress of a religious, Gilles the weeds of a pilgrim from Jerusalem. Then Cogia bought them asses in Gratz and led them down to Trieste. They found a ship going to Bordeaux, went on board, had a fair passage, passed the Pillars of Hercules on their tenth day out, and were in the Gironde in five more. At Bordeaux they separated. Gilles went to Poictiers in a company of pilgrims; Jehane, having learned that Queen Berengere was at Cahors, turned her face to the Gascon hills. But she had left behind her a prisoner to whom death could ...
— The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay • Maurice Hewlett
... nations. Had the race been self-respecting, sturdy, upright, stubbornly industrious, all this savage neglect would have mended itself. Being what it is—excitable, imaginative, spasmodic, given over to ideas rather than to facts, and trusting to Hercules in the clouds rather than to its own brawny shoulders—this squalor continues and is not dependent on poverty. Time alone will show whether changed agrarian conditions will alter it. So far as his power goes, the priest does ...
— About Ireland • E. Lynn Linton
... warre to the benefit of their people and countries, by inuention of any noble science, or profitable Art, or by making wholesome lawes or enlarging of their dominions by honorable and iust conquests, and many other wayes. Such personages among the Gentiles were Bacchus, Ceres, Perseus, Hercules, Theseus and many other, who thereby came to be accompted gods and halfe gods or goddesses [Heroes] & had their commedations giuen by Hymne accordingly or by such other poems as their memorie was therby made famous to the ...
— The Arte of English Poesie • George Puttenham
... the heavy responsibilities of the last few years, though he worked as he always must do, and, now a major-general, in April 1882 set sail for the Cape, where the governor of the colony, sir Hercules Robinson, wanted his advice on the settlement and administration of Basutoland. But when Gordon arrived he found his views on the subject so totally different from those of the men in power that he resigned and left, and from London he carried out the great longing of his life—a ...
— The Red Book of Heroes • Leonora Blanche Lang
... with a rosy color mounting to her cheeks and an ominous flash in her eyes, "when I was in New Moscow I was invited to the Hercules dinner." ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... its primitive inhabitants and first colonists, whether Corsus, the supposed leader of a band of immigrants, who gave his name to the island, was a son of Hercules or a Trojan, are facts lost in the mist of ages, through which the origin of few races can be penetrated. An inquiry into such traditions would be a waste of time, and is foreign to ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... above named, the constellation Hercules lies towards the east. A quadrant taken from the zenith to the eastern horizon passes close to the last star ([eta]) of the Great Bear's tail, through [beta], a star in Bootes' head, near [beta] Herculis, between the two "Alphas" which mark the heads of Hercules and Ophiuchus, and so past ...
— Half-hours with the Telescope - Being a Popular Guide to the Use of the Telescope as a - Means of Amusement and Instruction. • Richard A. Proctor
... could do without him! The centre of his influence, a small room in the suburbs of the dining-room, which he calls the dispence, or dispence-khana, is a place of unwholesome sights and noisome odours, which it is good not to visit unless as Hercules visited the stables of Augeas. The instruments of his profession are there, a large handie full of very greasy water, with bits of lemon peel and fragments of broken victuals swimming in it, and a short, stout stick, with a little ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA
... great pains, could we not make it light enough? We might choose the finer fibres of the hemp; and spin and weave it with scrupulous care. Ossaroo here is a perfect Omphale in his way. I'll warrant he could beat Hercules ...
— The Cliff Climbers - A Sequel to "The Plant Hunters" • Captain Mayne Reid
... evident that the author of the Revelation was a Kabalist; and the writer of the Gospel of Saint John a Gnostic or a Neoplatonist. The Gospel of Nicodemus is scarcely more than a copy of the Descent of Hercules into the Infernal Regions; the Epistle to the Corinthians is a distinct reminiscence of the initiatory Mysteries of Eleusis; and the Roman Ritual, according to H. P. Blavatsky, is the reproduction of the ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... as he was a good swordsman, but, with bitter anger in my heart and a vision of the haunted wood before my eyes, I think I could have wrestled with Hercules and won. Presently I threw him, and, pinning him down with my knee upon his breast, cried to Sparrow to cut the bridle reins from Black Lamoral and throw them to me. Though he had the Italian upon his hands, he managed to obey. With my free hand and my teeth I drew a thong about my lord's arms ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... beggar a kingdom to enrich themselves: these were the vermin whom to his eternal honour his pen was continually pricking and goading; a pen, if not so happy in the success, yet as generous in the aim, as either the sword of Theseus, or the club of Hercules; nor was it less sharp than that, or less weighty than this. If he did not take so much care of himself as he ought, he had the humanity however, to wish well to others; and I think I may truly affirm he did the world as much good by a right application ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... of the writers of his age. He wrote moral essays, philosophical letters, physical treatises, and tragedies. Of the last, the best are HERCULES FURENS, PHAEDRA, ...
— History of Rome from the Earliest times down to 476 AD • Robert F. Pennell
... but Rea is only a surname: rea femmina often occurs in Boccaccio, and is used to this day in Tuscany to designate a woman whose reputation is blighted; a priestess Rea is described by Vergil as having been overpowered by Hercules. While Rea was fetching water in a grove for a sacrifice the sun became eclipsed, and she took refuge from a wolf in a cave, where she was overpowered by Mars. When she was delivered, the sun was again eclipsed and the statue of Vesta covered its eyes. Livy has here ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... before those tremendous gates, which resemble those of Tartarus, save only that they rather more frequently permit safe and honourable egress; although at the price of the same anxiety and labour with which Hercules, and one or two of the demi-gods, extricated themselves from the Hell of the ancient mythology, and sometimes, it is said, by the ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... of man's existence to his latest breath, in health and in sickness, rich or poor, water is always requisite. Baths were dedicated by the ancients to the divinities of medicine, strength, and wisdom, namely, AEsculapius, Hercules, and Minerva, to whom might properly be added the goddess of health, Hygeia. The use of water has been enforced as a religious observance, and water has been adopted as one of ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter
... Temple's Oman maid Moty were standing beside the Hilton's car—and so was another Oman, like none ever before seen. Six feet four; shoulders that would just barely go through a door; muscled like Atlas and Hercules combined; skin a gleaming, satiny bronze; hair a rippling mass of lambent flame. Temple came to a full stop and ...
— Masters of Space • Edward Elmer Smith
... no urging, however. They worked as if their lives depended on their exertions. Dick Varley, in particular, laboured like a young Hercules, and Henri hurled masses of snow about in a most surprising manner. Crusoe, too, entered heartily into the spirit of the work, and, scraping with his forepaws, sent such a continuous shower of snow behind him that he was speedily ...
— The Dog Crusoe and His Master - A Story of Adventure in the Western Prairies • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... place of it? It would surely seem more reasonable to have the small perforations in the thin, easily permeable membrane of the foetus, and the opening in the adult heart, rather than the reverse. From all this Harvey drew his correct conclusions, declaring earnestly, "By Hercules, there ARE no such porosities, and they cannot ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... up as long as one would be saying a credo, with another spring he brought himself to the ground, and the same instant Master Pedro ran in great haste and fell upon his knees before Don Quixote, and embracing his legs exclaimed, "These legs do I embrace as I would embrace the two pillars of Hercules, O illustrious reviver of knight-errantry, so long consigned to oblivion! O never yet duly extolled knight, Don Quixote of La Mancha, courage of the faint-hearted, prop of the tottering, arm of the fallen, staff and counsel of ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... not the cold bath was esteemed by the ancient Greeks for its invigorating properties may be inferred from a dialogue of Aristophanes, in which one of the characters says, 'I think none of the sons of the gods ever exceeded Hercules in bodily and mental force.' Upon which the other asks, 'Where didst thou ever see a cold bath dedicated ...
— Intestinal Ills • Alcinous Burton Jamison
... guest salt as an act of friendship, and as such it is partaken of. The classic Ancients consecrated salt before using it, and the salt cellar was placed upon the table together with the first fruits "for the gods," those to whom they were offered being generally Hercules or Mercury. The Greek salt cellars were shaped like bowls, and as the salt became an important feature as a dividing line between rich and poor, the size of the cellar grew. To realize the importance of the salt cellar in mediaeval England, we have only to visit the Tower of London, where the great ...
— Chats on Household Curios • Fred W. Burgess
... vigour about him, and—strange to say—his bear-like figure was not without a certain grace of its own, proceeding, perhaps, from his absolutely placid confidence in his own strength. It was hard to decide at first to what class this Hercules belonged: he did not look like a house-serf, nor a tradesman, nor an impoverished clerk out of work, nor a small ruined landowner, such as takes to being a huntsman or a fighting man; he was, in fact, quite individual. No one knew where he came from ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... said so; but at present we can do nothing. Had the great Hamilcar Barca lived I believe that he would have set himself to work to clear out this Augean stable, a task greater than that accomplished by our great hero, the demigod Hercules; but no less a hand can accomplish it. You know how every attempt at revolt has failed; how terrible a vengeance fell on Matho and the mercenaries; how the down trodden tribes have again and again, when victory seemed in their hands, been ...
— The Young Carthaginian - A Story of The Times of Hannibal • G.A. Henty
... and there is something more substantive about a woman than ever there can be about a man. I can conceive a great mythical woman, living alone among inaccessible mountain-tops or in some lost island in the pagan seas, and ask no more. Whereas if I hear of a Hercules, I ask after Iole or Dejanira. I cannot think him a man without women. But I can think of these three deep-breasted women, living out all their days on remote hilltops, seeing the white dawn and the purple even, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... wanted nothing more. Such matters were too grand for him. He had beaten the dog of Hercules, who had only brought the purple dye—a thing requiring skill and art and taste to give it value. But gold does well without all these, and better in their absence. From handling many little nuggets, and hearkening to Suan Isco's tales of treachery, theft, and murder done by white ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... regard as a gigantic commonplace—thus ignoring the innumerable deeds of derring-do which distinguished that immortal contest—blinding their eyes to the "lines of empire" in the "infant face of that cradled Hercules," and the tremendous sprawlings of his nascent strength—and seeking to degrade those forests into whose depths a path for the sunbeams must be hewn, and where, lightning appears to enter trembling, and to withdraw in haste; forests which must one day drop down a poet, whose genius shall be worthy ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... the voice of a Stentor. He was also a Hercules of strength. Here and there the narrow street seemed blocked with vehicles; but when he did not terrorize the drivers into immediate flight at the sound of his voice and the sight of his club he would calmly lift the encumbrance and set it ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... savage, sunken eyes, gave a character almost bestial to this man's physiognomy. His broad, brawny shoulders overhung a form that was as low in stature as it was athletic in build; you looked on him and saw the sinews of a giant strung in the body of a dwarf. And yet this deformed Hercules was no solitary error of Nature—no extraordinary exception to his fellow-beings, but the actual type of a whole race, stunted and repulsive as himself. He was ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... attaining that ideal, of doing anything considerable towards its attainment, or towards its defence against the powers of absolutist reaction whose triumph would have rendered its attainment for ever impossible, he was no more capable than he was of performing the labours of Hercules. ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... we have the worst of it in having so much money to pay. Thence I to the Exchequer again, and thence with Creed into Fleet Street, and calling at several places about business; in passing, at the Hercules pillars he and I dined though late, and thence with one that we found there, a friend of Captain Ferrers I used to meet at the playhouse, they would have gone to some gameing house, but I would not but parted, and staying ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... multiplied; the addition of an individual has made all this difference. Lady Austen and we pass our days alternately at each other's Chateau. In the morning I walk with one or other of the ladies, and in the evening wind thread. Thus did Hercules, and thus probably did Samson, and thus do I; and were both those heroes living, I should not fear to challenge them to a trial of skill in that business, or doubt to beat them both." It was perhaps while he was winding thread that Lady Austen told him the story of John Gilpin. ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith
... "Yes; Hercules himself could not have kept that quarter clean; the Augean stables were nothing to it. But look at these fellows we are coming to now. You seem to be a bit of a military critic; what do you think of them, and how do you like ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... see how it was done, he had Bob Woodfall by the nape of the neck and the band of his trousers and lifted the long body high above the crowd at full-length of his terrible arms, brandishing it helpless, like some Mongolian Hercules a Norse Antaeus; took three steps to the stone wall of the stable-yard, and would have flung the village hero over it to break upon the cobble-stones, but for a gloved hand laid upon his shoulder, and a soft, high-pitched voice, saying: "Taroh, ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming
... Victoire, who woke with a start. "I've brought you the indomitable chief of our enemies, the Hercules of the gang. Have you a feeding-bottle ...
— The Crystal Stopper • Maurice LeBlanc
... and Monteverde, acting as a good-natured mediator, a tolerant kindly father. When the famous master took off his mask of fierceness, he was a poor fellow about whom people talked with pity: they compared him with Hercules, dressed as a woman and spinning at the feet ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... society. In the infancy of nations, the different tribes, occupied with their domestic feuds, found few occasions to wander beyond the mountain chain or broad stream that formed the natural boundary of their domains. The Phoenicians, it is true, are said to have sailed beyond the Pillars of Hercules, and to have launched out on the great western ocean. But the adventures of these ancient voyagers belong to the mythic legends of antiquity, and ascend far beyond the ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... Allusions to it are tolerably frequent in the poets. Virgil's "Munimen ad imbres" [Footnote: "A shelter for the shower."] probably has nothing to do with Umbrellas, but more definite mention of them is not wanting. Ovid speaks of Hercules ...
— Umbrellas and their History • William Sangster
... should guide us. Wishing to shut your eyes, Theseus unseals them; His hatred, stirring a rebellious flame Within you, lends his enemy new charms. And, after all, why should a guiltless passion Alarm you? Dare you not essay its sweetness, But follow rather a fastidious scruple? Fear you to stray where Hercules has wander'd? What heart so stout that Venus has not vanquish'd? Where would you be yourself, so long her foe, Had your own mother, constant in her scorn Of love, ne'er glowed with tenderness for Theseus? What boots it to affect ...
— Phaedra • Jean Baptiste Racine
... of sand 320 Immersed and lost; while these intrepid bands, Safe in their horses' speed, out-fly the storm, And scouring round, make men and beasts their prey. The grisly boar is singled from his herd As large as that in Erimanthian woods. A match for Hercules. Round him they fly In circles wide; and each in passing sends His feathered death into his brawny sides. But perilous the attempt. For if the steed Haply too near approach; or the loose earth 330 His footing fail; the watchful angry ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... triumphs of art." Even in the time of those latest triumphs, however, the same fault was committed in another way; and a boy of eight or ten was commonly represented—even by Raffaelle himself—as a dwarf Hercules, with all the gladiatorial muscles already visible in stunted rotundity. Giotto probably felt he had not power enough to give dignity to a child of three years old, and intended the womanly form to be rather typical of the Virgin's advanced ...
— Giotto and his works in Padua • John Ruskin
... a busyish month for a sick man. First, Faauma—the bronze candlestick, whom otherwise I called my butler—bolted from the bed and bosom of Lafaele, the Archangel Hercules, prefect of the cattle. There was a deuce to pay, and Hercules was inconsolable, and immediately started out after a new wife, and has had one up on a visit, but says she has "no conversation"; and I think he will take back the erring and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... performing a very ancient ceremony, practised by those bold voyagers, the Carthaginians; to them there is little doubt that the secret of the mariner's compass was known. On sailing between the Pillars of Hercules into the wide Atlantic they were visited, not by Hercules himself, but by his representative priests, to whom they were wont to deliver certain votive offerings that the propitiated divinity might protect ...
— James Braithwaite, the Supercargo - The Story of his Adventures Ashore and Afloat • W.H.G. Kingston
... Kimberley and Lord Derby, the case of Sendall—an Assistant Secretary in the Local Government Board, who had been previously appointed Governor of Natal, and then withdrawn on account of Natal feeling that he would be too much under the control of Sir Hercules Robinson, the Governor of the Cape. There being nothing against Sendall, I thought that we were bound to find him another Governorship, and Horace Seymour, Mr. Gladstone's secretary, was in strong agreement with me. The matter was brought to a point at this moment by the selection ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... would not desert a man. He could not see his comrades left to die before his very eyes, those men who came right from his own mountain town, his own boy friends, the ones who had enlisted under him, marched and drilled with him. Rather would he perish in the swamp with them. He worked like a Hercules, encouraging, helping, carrying some of the more exhausted. A wet, straggling remnant reached Newberne. Even then, when Captain Conwell found that two of his own company were missing, he plunged back into the swamp to rescue them. Hours passed, ...
— Russell H. Conwell • Agnes Rush Burr
... lad," he said, "and not as much seasoned in the bark as the rest of us who are older. I'll be sure to wake you when the battle begins, and then you'll be so much the better for a nap that you'll be a very Hercules in ...
— The Rulers of the Lakes - A Story of George and Champlain • Joseph A. Altsheler
... stomach, which destroys all feeling as it arises in him. Which is the stronger? The man or the disease? One has need be a great man, truly, to keep the balance between genius and character. The talent grows, the heart withers. Unless a man is a giant, unless he has the thews of a Hercules, he must be content either to lose his gift or to live without a heart. You are slender and fragile, you will give way," he added, as he turned ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... the vilest bloodhounds ever laid on by heretics. And to make them shoot one another: it was rare; it was rare, my lad. Now ask us anything in reason; thou canst carry any honours, on thy club, like Hercules. What is ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... branch of any tree inclining over the water from the opposite side. The larger and stronger members of the tribe now assemble, leaving the younger ones to gambol and frisk about among the boughs, and amuse themselves in juvenile monkey fashion. One monkey— the Hercules probably of the tribe—twisting his tail round the outer end of the branch, now hangs by it with his head downwards, at his full length. Another descends by the body of the first, round which he coils his tail. A third adds another link to the ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... horizontal bands of red (top), yellow (double width), and red with the national coat of arms on the hoist side of the yellow band; the coat of arms includes the royal seal framed by the Pillars of Hercules, which are the two promontories (Gibraltar and Ceuta) on either side of the eastern end ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Judah, Moses, Joshua, Gideon, Samuel, Phineas, Elijah, Elisha, Isaiah, and the God-bearing Virgin of whom he prophesied, David, Hezekiah, Josiah, John the Baptist, Peter and Paul; there also Hercules, Theseus, Socrates, Aristides, Antigonus, Numa, Camillus, the Catos and the Scipios; there Louis the Pious, and thy forefathers, the Louises, Philips, Pepins, as many of whom as walked by faith. In fine, never has there been a noble man, never has there existed a pure spirit, a true ...
— The Life and Times of Ulric Zwingli • Johann Hottinger
... unobservant are disposed to confess, these two most brilliant events in the painter's life—his first successful work of art and the triumph of his scientific discovery—were brought together, as it were, in a manner singularly fitted to impress the imagination. Six copies of his "Dying Hercules" had been made in London, and the mold was then destroyed. Four of these were distributed by the artist to academies, one he retained, and the last was given to Mr. Bulfinch, the architect of the Capitol—who was engaged at the ...
— Scientific American, Vol. 17, No. 26 December 28, 1867 • Various
... told the Ithacan chief that before Troy could be taken three things must be done. First, he said, the Greeks must get the arrows of Hercules; next, they must carry away the sacred Palladium, for as long as it remained within the walls the city was safe; and, lastly, they must have the help of ...
— The Story of Troy • Michael Clarke
... The Fountain of Hercules, laxative and tartaric, had proved its efficacy in cases of enlarged spleen, hare-lip, vertigo, apoplexy, cachexia, cacodoria, cacochymia senilis and chilblains. It was also considered to be a sovereign remedy for that distressing and ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... no brilliant self-display Like knocking down or even setting up: Much bustle these necessitate; and still To vulgar eye, the mightier of the myth Is Hercules, who substitutes his own For Atlas' shoulder and supports the globe A whole day,—not the passive and obscure Atlas who bore, ere Hercules was born, And is to go on bearing that same load When Hercules turns ash on Oeta's top. 'Tis the transition-stage, the tug and strain, ...
— Making the Most of Life • J. R. Miller
... island, their cloaks were so much worn, that their majesties were extremely out at elbows. It cannot be said that they were ragged, but they had nothing to cover them but the skins of beasts in their natural state, not even a shoe or stocking; so that they resembled the pictures of Hercules in the lion's skin; and being overgrown with beard, and hair upon their bodies, they appeared the most savage figures that the human ...
— The Pirates Own Book • Charles Ellms
... while Fallowby with very bad grace, hammered on the table, consoling himself a little with the hope that the exercise would increase his appetite. Hercules, the black and tan, fled under the bed, from which retreat he yapped and whined until dragged out by Guernalec and ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... the dog was a fact. He arrived one morning at Diana's lodgings, with a soldier to lead him, and a card to introduce:—the Hercules of dogs, a very ideal of the species, toweringly big, benevolent, reputed a rescuer of lives, disdainful of dog-fighting, devoted to his guardian's office, with a majestic paw to give and the noblest satisfaction in receiving caresses ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the awful name of Him whom he had denied. The courtier laid his hand on the jewelled clasp which fastened his girdle; perhaps the movement was accidental, perhaps he wished to direct the attention of his companion to the figures of Hercules and the Nemean lion which were embossed on the gold. "You forget," observed Pollux, "that I am a worshipper of the deities of Olympus, that I sacrifice to the ...
— Hebrew Heroes - A Tale Founded on Jewish History • AKA A.L.O.E. A.L.O.E., Charlotte Maria Tucker
... in mighty pain to defend myself now from the light of the candles. after the play done, we met with W. Batelier and W. Hewer and Talbot Pepys, [Of Impington, Ob. 1681, aet. suae 35.] and they followed us in a hackney-coach: and we all stopped at Hercules' Pillars; and there I did give them the best supper I could, and pretty merry; and so home between ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys |
