"Inferno" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the end, beating time to the swing of the verse with a bedstead-leg. But he did most of his ravings in Greek or German. The man's mind was a perfect rag-bag of useless things. Once, when he was beginning to get sober, he told me that I was the only rational being in the Inferno into which he had descended—a Virgil in the Shades, he said—and that, in return for my tobacco, he would, before he died, give me the materials of a new Inferno that should make me greater than Dante. Then he fell asleep on a horse-blanket ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... he breathes does not feed my lungs. Up yonder, above the clouds of human weakness, my vertebrae become unhinged, my bones inarticulate, and I collapse. I meet missionaries, and I hear the music of the spheres; and I long to descend again to the circles of the everyday inferno where my friends are. ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... London slums, is but another putting of the words of the serious, scientific observer of facts, Huxley himself, who has described an East End parish in which he spent some of his earliest years. Over that parish, he says, might have been written Dante's inscription over the entrance to the Inferno: "All hope abandon, ye who enter here." After speaking of its physical misery and its supernatural and perfectly astonishing deadness, he says that he embarked on a voyage round the world, and had the opportunity of seeing savage life in all conceivable conditions of savage degradation; ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell
... promessa che mi hai fatta. Non potrei mai dirti la satisfazione ch' io ne provo!—sono tanti i sentimenti di piacere e di confidenza che il tuo sacrificio m'inspira."—"Mi reveresce solo che Don Giovanni non resti all' Inferno." ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... possibility of such a future; reason told him that such a future was probable, and conscience told him that it was before him in veritable truth. He felt that wherever he carried memory and his present character he would be most miserable, whether it were in Dante's Inferno, Milton's Paradise, or the heaven ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... passages in "Woodnotes" and "Voluntaries." They are not in Dante's matchless measure, but they have much of his grace, and more of his inflexible will. This warning against mercenary marriages might be compared to Dante's answer to the embezzling Pope Nicholas III. in Canto XIX. of the Inferno: ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... village a group of men were at work, putting up tents for a hospital. Some thirty miles ahead was the front, and you heard the guns off and on, a low sullen roar, punctuated with hammer-strokes f big fellows. Millions of dollars every hour were being blown to nothingness in that fearful inferno; a gigantic meat-mill that was grinding up the bodies of men and had never ceased day or night for nearly four years. You could be a violent pacifist in sound of those guns, or you could be a violent militarist, but you could not be indifferent to the war, you could not be ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... likely quarters. We hope to float at 6.15 to-morrow morning, but to make sure of being able to get her off, we have been transferring some ballast to the dinghy, by way of lightening the yacht—a horrid business handling the pigs of lead, heavy, greasy, and black. The saloon is an inferno, the deck like a collier's, ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... again. It shot streaking through the streets of the town ahead, and, dully, over its own inferno, echoed shouts, cries, and execrations of an outraged populace—then out into the night again, roaring its ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... this terrace end Beatrice herself is said to have thrown a rose of that very bush's parent stem to her immortal lover. Every corner of the garden holds its story of meetings that made of it a paradise, of partings that made of it an inferno. What is paradise, but love? Inferno, but the sorrow of love? Down before us, and even up here on this terrace, scenes have been enacted in feud and in peace, horrible scenes of bloodshed and cruelty, and again scenes of splendor—gatherings of church, ceremonials ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... was ordered to move on, and as they marched through the great gateway in the massive walls Foster felt as if he were entering the portals of Dante's Inferno, and had left all hope behind. But his feelings misled him. Hope, thank God! is not easily extinguished in the human breast. As he tramped along the narrow and winding streets, which seemed to him an absolute labyrinth, he began to take interest in the curious sights and sounds that greeted ...
— The Middy and the Moors - An Algerine Story • R.M. Ballantyne
... 25.—FEAR AND AGONY. "Amid this dread exuberance of woe ran naked spirits wing'd with horrid fear."— Dante's "Inferno," Canto XXIV, lines 89, 90. all the stimuli reached the brain-cells simultaneously, the cells would find themselves in equilibrium and no motor act would be performed. But if all the pain receptors of the body but one were equally stimulated, and this one ...
— The Origin and Nature of Emotions • George W. Crile
... marriage and divorce which should have the detachable and quotable quality of epigram. Yet suppose I were to observe, just here, that Marriage makes a promise to the ear and breaks it to the hope; or that Divorce is the martyr's crown after the tortures of Incompatibility; or that Marriage is the Inferno, the Divorce-Court the Purgatory, and Divorce itself the Paradiso of human life? You would not be likely to think the better of me, and I should certainly think less well of myself. Though I am conscious of a homespun quality of thought and diction, I must keep within the limits set ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... with 50,000. Many multitudes were put to death by the sword and stake, but many, many thousands fled to England, to begin anew their lives as manufacturers and mariners; and for years Belgium was one quaking peril, an inferno, whose torturers were Spaniards. The visitor in Antwerp is still shown the rack upon which they stretched the merchants that they might yield up their hidden gold. The Painted Lady may be seen. Opening her arms, she embraces the victim. The Spaniard, with his spear, forced the merchant ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... last hour comes are resigned to the order of nature and the will of God. They are not thinking of Dante's 'Inferno' or 'Paradiso,' or of the 'Pilgrim's Progress.' Heaven and Hell are not realities to them, but words or ideas—the outward symbols of some great mystery, they ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... to Gehenna; yet, assuming that Mandeville died before Dante; still, though Dante took the census of Hell, we find not Sir John, under the likeness of a roasted neat's tongue, in that infernalest of infernos, The Inferno. ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... the canyon about half-past six in the morning. I'd heard of that place from the Indians. Say, it was a fearsome spot! a kind of crooked, gaping split in the prairie like the pictures in Dante's Inferno. The walls were as bare and hard and cold as black ice; and way down in the bottom there was a horrible jelly-like water swirling around without making any noise. Seems if you couldn't breathe good when you got into the place! Minded me of the ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... such productions as "The Cloud Confines" was his voice as stirring as a trumpet-note; but where he excelled was in some of the pathetic portions of "The Vita Nuova" or the terrible and sonorous passages of "L'Inferno," when the music of the Italian language found full expression indeed. His conversational powers I am unable adequately to describe, for during the four or five years of my intimacy with him he suffered too much to be a brilliant ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... for which there was not any solution, not even in the hidden corners of the man's heart. His name wasn't Warrington; and he had rubbed elbows with the dregs of humanity, and still looked you straight in the eye because he had come through inferno without bringing any ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... was silence, and then, without any warning, came a tearing crack, the thunder as of 100 heavy guns, a metallic din, and a cloud of smoke rose; and while we forced ourselves to stay and watch, the inferno below thundered a roaring echo, the walls shook, and a thousand dark specks flew up like a swarm of frightened birds. They were lava blocks, and they fell back from the height of the crater, rattling on the rocks, or were swallowed up by the invisible gorge. Then a thick cloud surrounded everything, ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... Giannotti in his Dialogue De' giorni che Dante consumo nel cercare l'Inferno e 'l Purgatorio. The date of its ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... liberty in Mantua, and the Mantuans, in their assembly of the Four Hundred and Ninety, voted full power into the hands of the destroyer. That Pinamonte Bonacolsi whom Dante mentions in the twentieth canto of the "Inferno," had been elected captain of the republic, and, feigning to fear aggression from the Marquis of Ferrara, he demanded of the people the right to banish all enemies of the state. This reasonable demand ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... unreciprocated, especially when admixed to it is the feeling of jealousy, is the most frightful of tortures; it will crush a man like nothing else will, and the victims of this emotional catastrophe are pitied by the inmates of the lowest inferno. ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... that Van Praag had forced on him, and the men sat talking of their prospects, and smoking until the room looked like an inferno. ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein
... pitch—"I never thought I'd get to hell so soon! Why, sir," he continued, knocking a cloud of dust from his hat, "this isn't nature, this is geology! I don't see how you ever discovered the damned country! The wind-swept wastes of Dante's Inferno are verdant in comparison! You're mad, there's no doubt of it!" he fumed, stamping up ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... to the group on the porch. "I should much prefer to stay here," said he gallantly, "but business reasons impel me to seek that inferno out yonder. What Jarve finds interesting in that sort ...
— Strawberry Acres • Grace S. Richmond
... and again the spectacle was different. There was a white and golden fury of flame above, beautiful and blinding; and below, farther back, an inferno of glowing fire, black-streaked, with trembling, exploding puffs and streams of yellow smoke. The aisles between the burning pines were smoky, murky caverns, moving and weird. Slone saw fire shoot from the tree-tops down the trunks, and he saw fire shoot up ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... and I was Virgil, our inferno was an endless procession of tortured faces—faces of women, haggard and mournful, faces of little children, starved and stunted, dulled and dumb. Several times we stopped to talk with these people—one little Jewess girl I knew whose three tiny sisters had been ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... The first part (the Inferno) is wonderfully impressive with its Francesca da Rimini interlude, in which burn all the fires of Italian passion. The second part (Purgatory and Paradise) combines the most intense and poignant charm. It contains a fugue ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens
... Rule applies but to the merits of denial—to the excellencies which refrain. Beyond these, the critical art can but suggest. We may be instructed to build a "Cato," but we are in vain told how to conceive a Parthenon or an "Inferno." The thing done, however; the wonder accomplished; and the capacity for apprehension becomes universal. The sophists of the negative school who, through inability to create, have scoffed at creation, are now found the loudest in applause. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... of the moon" the sweet cantilena goes on, now for soprano, now for tenor. The middle piece is of a more dramatic character perhaps. This is followed by an intermezzo, like a quick minuet, which is very successful; and this in turn by a rhapsody, which bears a motto from Dante's "Inferno," "Those who enter here leave hope behind"—surely not a very inviting suggestion to the student who takes it for the first time. Fortunately the period when hope forsakes the reader is short, being really of only one page, after which a sort of mitigated grief ensues, ...
— The Masters and their Music - A series of illustrative programs with biographical, - esthetical, and critical annotations • W. S. B. Mathews
... park where the troops had bivouacked during the strike, the encircling buildings were brilliantly outlined in the evening mist by countless points of light. The scene from Twelfth Street north to the river, flanked by railroad yards and grim buildings, was an animated circle of a modern inferno. The cross streets intersecting the lofty buildings were dim, canon-like abysses, in which purple fog floated lethargically. The air was foul with the gas from countless locomotives, and thick with smoke and the mist of the lake. And through this earthy steam, the myriad lights from the ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... and understood clearly: Whatever is true of London in the way of poverty and degradation, is true of all England. While Paris is not by any means France, the city of London is England. The frightful conditions which mark London an inferno likewise mark the United Kingdom an inferno. The argument that the decentralisation of London would ameliorate conditions is a vain thing and false. If the 6,000,000 people of London were separated into one hundred cities each with a population of 60,000, misery would be ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... racing, and rode or drove fiery steeds, and who lived on, and swindled through, the noblest of all animals. Mr Mosk, a lean light-weight, who wore loud check suits, tight in the legs and short in the waist, was the presiding deity of this Inferno, and as the Ormuz to this Ahrimanes, Gabriel Pendle was the curate of the district, charged with the almost hopeless task of reforming his sporting parishioners. And all this, with considerable irony, was placed almost in the shadow of the ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... warm sea, brought on its wings a heavy depressing moisture. In the streets people walked listlessly, perspired, mopped themselves, and abused their much-vaunted climate. Everyone who could manage it was out of town, either on the heights of Moss Vale or the Blue Mountains, escaping from the Inferno of Sydney. ...
— An Outback Marriage • Andrew Barton Paterson
... was painted by Domenico di Michelino, the portrait of Dante being prepared for him by Alessio Baldovinetti, who probably took it from Giotto's fresco in the chapel of the Podesta at the Bargello. In this picture Dante stands between the Inferno and a concentrated Florence in which portions of the Duomo, the Signoria, the Badia, the Bargello, and Or San Michele are visible. Behind him is Paradise. In his hand is the "Divine Comedy". I say no more of the poet here, because a large part of the chapter on the Badia ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... energy from the cables was transformed to a tangible thing—a vast bulk of gas, of hydrogen and oxygen that had once been water, and the pressure of the gas made a roaring inferno of the exhausts. A spark plug ignited it, and the heat of combustion added pressure to pressure, while the quivering, invisible live steam poured forth to change to vaporous clouds ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... of sins and the most hateful. Dante placed Lucifer, the embodiment of selfishness, down below all other sinners in the dark pit of the Inferno, frozen in a sea of ice. Well did the poet know that this sin lay at the root of all others. Think, if you can, of one crime or vice which has not ...
— Parent and Child Vol. III., Child Study and Training • Mosiah Hall
... deposited on the floor of the ship, and a disc formed of artificial matter plugged the hole in its side. Another took a piece of the relux from the broken Thessian ship, pushed it into the hole on the ship. The space about the scene of operation was a crackling inferno of energy breaking down into heat and light. Arcot dematerialized his tremendous tools, and the wall of the Ancient Mariner was neatly patched with relux smoothed over as perfectly as before. A second time, using some of the relux he had brought within the ship, and the inner ...
— Invaders from the Infinite • John Wood Campbell
... inferno of rattling noises, but excellent engines, I believe. At the after end of the engine-room are the two main switchboards, of whose manner of working I am ...
— The Diary of a U-boat Commander • Anon
... of tourists were looking over the inferno of Vesuvius in full eruption. "Ain't this just like hell?" ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... alone as regarded the economical follies of this age, but equally as touched its moral abominations, scales had fallen from my eyes since that vision of another century. No more did I look upon the woful dwellers in this Inferno with a callous curiosity as creatures scarcely human. I saw in them my brothers and sisters, my parents, my children, flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood. The festering mass of human wretchedness about me offended not now my senses merely, but pierced my heart like a knife, so that I could ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... she would go to Hell. As a special kindness some generous relative had, on Joan's seventh birthday, given her an edition of Dante's "Inferno," with illustrations by Dore. From it she was able to form some notion of what her eternity was likely to be. And God all the while up in His Heaven, surrounded by that glorious band of praise-trumpeting angels, watching her out of the corner of His eye. Her ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... you deem yourself a supernumerary in your present vocation, suppose you allow me to pack you off in the return-cart to the Eternal City, that is said to sit over the mouth of Il Inferno. You may kiss the toe of his Holiness, and humbly ask penance for the rest of your mortal life for having presumed to be a Protestant missionary's wife, and carried the Bible ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... covered the floor. In each sat a man with only his head and shoulders showing, looking as if he were being boiled to death. In the mists of the heated atmosphere and in the dim light of candles, one was reminded of Dore's illustrations of Dante's Inferno. In one of them he represents a certain type of sinner as being tormented forever in ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... "Inferno" supremely exemplifies the sustaining energy of poetic imagination, that by its sublimating light it can forever hold before the mind, in tearful, irresistible beauty, one of the most woful forms of human suffering, death by starvation. In that terrific picture, in front of which all the ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... shipping seas, always slithery, never a dry place to sit down upon, with people always standing, sixty hours at a time, without sleep, on the bridge to see that she doesn't burst asunder and go down—a floating—when she does float—a floating inferno of misery—here it is—I can tell you all about it—any child in a board school could tell you—an inferno of misery in which you would be always hungry, always sleepless, always suffering from indigestion, always wet through, always violently ill ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... black and high that it might well suggest a portal leading to the regions below, where Vulcan is supposed to stir those tremendous fires which have moulded much of the configuration of the world, and which are ever seething—an awful Inferno—under the thin crust of the globe on which ...
— Blown to Bits - The Lonely Man of Rakata, the Malay Archipelago • R.M. Ballantyne
... glorious. It was terrible. It was inspiring. Through an inferno of destruction and death, of murder and horror, we lived ...
— Private Peat • Harold R. Peat
... just saved our reason. H.C. felt that he should never write another line of poetry; the tobacco fumes had taken an opium effect upon me, and I began to see visions and imagined ourselves in Dante's Inferno. We looked with mild reproach at the waiter. He quite understood; a guilty conscience needed no words; and explained that the chef had let out the fire. As the chef was at that moment in the cafe playing cards, as absorbed and excited ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 1, January, 1891 • Various
... deferred that were not lavished upon me by my dear Princess, herself ever a luring delight of promise flitting just beyond my reach. Every sweet lover's inferno unguessed of by Dante she led me through. Ah! Those swooning tropic nights, under our palm trees, the distant surf a langourous murmur as from some vast sea shell of mystery, when she, my Princess, all but melted ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... the upper end of the town, I saw a sight that rivals the inferno. A number of ghouls had found a lot of fine groceries, among them a barrel of brandy, with which they were fairly stuffing themselves. One huge fellow was standing on the strings of an upright piano singing a profane song, every ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... silence that followed there came to her the certain knowledge that he was suffering, that he was in an inferno of torment that goaded him into fierce savagery against her, like a mad animal that will wreak its madness first upon the being most beloved. It was out of his torment that he did this thing. She saw him again agonizing in ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... fleet touched a button, and simultaneously every generator in every Triplanetary vessel burst into furious activity. Instantly the hollow volume of the immense cone became a coruscating hell of resistless energy, an inferno which, with the velocity of light, extended itself into a far-reaching cylinder of rapacious destruction. Ether-waves they were, it is true, but vibrations driven with such fierce intensity that the screens of deflection surrounding the pirate vessels could not handle even a fraction ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith
... this inferno was the chief pleasure of the evening, and any romantic ideas I may have had with respect to "flower-boats" will remain ...
— Life and sport in China - Second Edition • Oliver G. Ready
... down a coarser, earthier quality springs from fat land where the valley broadens. The northern hillsides to a very considerable height above the river are covered with vineyards. The southern slopes on the left bank of the Adda, lying more in shade, yield but little. Inferno, Grumello, and Perla di Sassella are the names of famous vineyards. Sassella is the general name for a large tract. Buying an Inferno, Grumello, or Perla di Sassella wine, it would be absurd to suppose that one obtained it precisely from the eponymous estate. ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... sandbags and strengthening the parapet, ducking hastily and crouching low when a shell roared past overhead, but hurriedly resuming work the instant it had passed. Then came the fresh German attack, preceded by five minutes' intense artillery fire, concentrated on the half-wrecked trench. The inferno of noise, the rush and roar of the approaching shells, the crash and earth-shaking thunder of their explosions, the ear-splitting cracks overhead of high-explosive shrapnel, the drone and whirr ...
— Action Front • Boyd Cable (Ernest Andrew Ewart)
... word to signify those compartments which he feigns in his Hell." (Per similitudine di quelle valigie, che s'aprono per lo lungo, a guisa di cassa, significa quegli spartimenti, che Dante finge nell' Inferno.) The reader will think of the homely figurative names in Bunyan, and the contempt which great and awful states of mind have for conventional notions of rank in phraseology. It is a part, if well ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... date of Folgore. Mr. Rossetti does not dispute the commonly assigned date of 1260, and takes for granted that the Messer Nicolo of the Sonnets on the Months was the Sienese gentleman referred to by Dante in a certain passage of the 'Inferno':[1]— ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... Liddell and Scott, Stubbs on the Charters, The works of La Motte, The Seasons by Thomson, And Paul de Verlaine, Theodore Mommsen And Clemens (Mark Twain), The Rocks of Hugh Miller, The Mill on the Floss, The Poems of Schiller, The Iliados, Don Quixote (Cervantes), La Pucelle by Voltaire, Inferno (that's Dante's), And Vanity Fair, Conybeare-Howson, Brillat-Savarin, And Baron Munchausen, Mademoiselle De Maupin, The Dramas of Marlowe, The Three Musketeers, Clarissa Harlowe, And the Pioneers, Sterne's Tristram Shandy, The Ring and the Book, And Handy Andy, And ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... forget yourself to write one; and La Reine Fantasque, though not bad, is not good. Madame de Villeneuve may, for ought I know, have been an excellent person in other ways, but she deserves one of the worst bolgias in the Inferno of literature for lengthening, muddling, and altogether spoiling the ever-beloved "Beauty and the Beast." Mlle. de Lussan, they say,[241] was too fond of eating, and died of indigestion. A more indigestible thing than her own Les Veillees de Thessalie, which figure ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... coast, we reached Dellis about eight o'clock. I got Angelo to bring me my sheepskin and cloak, and preferred sleeping on deck to passing the night in a locality which, for the horrors it contained, might have figured as a scene in Dante's "Inferno." ...
— Notes in North Africa - Being a Guide to the Sportsman and Tourist in Algeria and Tunisia • W. G. Windham
... this inferno I do not know. Buffeted and blinded, stumbling and scrambling to my feet again, turning this way or that way to avoid the thickest centres of the strife, oppressed and paralyzed by a feeling of impotence that put an iron band around my heart, ...
— The Valley of Vision • Henry Van Dyke
... old chronicle of the Conquest of Guinea, but measured by its importance to the general story of the expansion of Europe, there is no lasting value in any one of the last chapters of Azurara's voyages,—his description of the Canaries, and of the "Inferno" of Teneriffe, "of how Madeira was peopled, and the other islands that are in that part, of how the caravel of Alvaro Dornellas took certain of the Canarians, of how Gomes Pires went to the Rio d'Ouro and of the Moors that he took, of the caravel that went to Meca (in Marocco) and of the Moors ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... her head towards some book lying on the dresser by her. I softly rose, and as softly went into the kitchen, and looked over her shoulder; before she was aware of my neighbourhood, I had seen that the book was in a language unknown to me, and the running title was L'Inferno. Just as I was making out the relationship of this word to 'infernal', she started and turned round, and, as if continuing her thought as she spoke, ...
— Cousin Phillis • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... upon them one night in Rimini and killed them both with one thrust of his sword. The tragedy, however, should only be told in the immortal words of Dante, who recounts the tale Francesca told him in the second circle of the Inferno. For seeing Francesca and her lover floating for ever in each other arms "light before the wind," as the wind swayed them towards Virgil and himself ...
— Ravenna, A Study • Edward Hutton
... dell with its frightful woods," said the baronet to his smiling daughter, "one might as well be sequestered in Dante's Inferno. Look at those awful rocks—my mind misgives me as I view them. Sure there ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 392, Saturday, October 3, 1829. • Various
... off the power control on the Tele-screen and watched the image fade away with a depleted whine of dying energy. That incandescent inferno out there— Grimly he tried to recall the name of the man who had said that, philosophically, energy is not actually ...
— Rescue Squad • Thomas J. O'Hara
... Power rose from his chair and walked to the window. Below spread the roaring inferno of New York, greatest city in the Solar System, a strange place of queer beauty and weighty materialism, dreamlike in its super-skyscraper construction, but utilitarian in its purpose, for it was a port of ...
— Empire • Clifford Donald Simak
... of Mother Earth herself, the mound loomed; like an unhealthy, cancerous growth. And inside the enigmatic thing was another world. A dark world, mysterious, horrible, peopled by blind and terrible demons—a world like a Dante's dream of a second Inferno. ...
— The Raid on the Termites • Paul Ernst
... there began the terrible part of the journey—the arid, alkaline, thirsty desert, short of game, horrible in its monotony, deadly with its thirst. It is no wonder that, weakened by their sufferings in this inferno, so many of the immigrants looked upon the towering walls of the Sierras with a sinking of ...
— The Forty-Niners - A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado • Stewart Edward White
... and atrocious field. For the immediate future, I can only hope, as I confidently believe, that the present age of capitalist war will pass, as the age of dynastic war has passed, for ever into the inferno where slavery and religious persecution now lie burning, though they seemed so natural and strong. I think it will not much longer be possible to fool the working classes into wars for concessions ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... foie gras—truffles on toast; salad; olives; Alice Fallstaff; Italian ham "Prosciutto;" soup—semino Italiani with Brodo de Cappone; pompano a la papillote; tortellini with fungi a funghetto; fritto misto; spring chicken saute; Carcioffi all'Inferno; Capretto al Forno con Insallata; omelet Celestine; fruit; cheese, and ...
— Bohemian San Francisco - Its restaurants and their most famous recipes—The elegant art of dining. • Clarence E. Edwords
... ushered by the aged janitor, who regarded us with looks of mute reproach. He was evidently subdued to what he worked in. His world consisted of two classes—criminals and police; and without any further ceremony of trial and sentence, the very fact of our descending into his Inferno was clear evidence that we belonged ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... he had told me of that Cairene inferno, oddly enough—yet why oddly, for the world is all coincidence!—had thrown a flood of light on certain events which had happened some three years previously and which ever since had remained shrouded in mystery. The conduct of the business afterwards came into my ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... the Inferno Dante went to Paris, where he met a great many scholars and wise men, who treated him with the utmost respect, but all the time he desired to be in his native city of Florence. When Henry of Luxembourg planned to lay siege to ...
— A Treasury of Heroes and Heroines - A Record of High Endeavour and Strange Adventure from 500 B.C. to 1920 A.D. • Clayton Edwards
... often extremely difficult for me. I remember during my first term at Oxford reading in Pater's Renaissance—that book which has had such strange influence over my life—how Dante places low in the Inferno those who wilfully live in sadness; and going to the college library and turning to the passage in the Divine Comedy where beneath the dreary marsh lie those who were 'sullen in the sweet air,' saying for ever and ...
— De Profundis • Oscar Wilde
... the puddle. There they would stick and become chilled if they were not constantly stirred. The whole charge must be mixed and mixed as it steadily thickens so that it will be uniform throughout. I am like some frantic baker in the inferno kneading a batch of iron bread ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis
... repeated it to a gaunt little parson, and his look of unmitigated horror caused me to hide my diminished head. I knew from his manner—he did not condescend a reply—what chamber in the Inferno was being heated up for my especial benefit. Well, well! the sentiment is doubtless creditable to his ...
— Trifles for the Christmas Holidays • H. S. Armstrong
... the Lustful, it is clear that he realized the enormity of their sin. The theory that his friendship with Guido Novella, the nephew of Francesca, made Dante refrain from entering fully into the incident, will not hold, when it is remembered that the cantos of the Inferno were written in 1300, seventeen years before the poet reached Ravenna, and accepted the hospitality of the Polenta house. Dante's infinite compassion is, therefore, the cause for the compressed ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Francesca da Rimini • George Henry Boker
... moment, steadying hand on the windowsill, then gathered himself for the last great effort. The bed was invisible now, the room an inferno—he had to fight every step of the way back to the bed. Then he found what he sought, and fought the slow fight back ...
— The Outdoor Girls in Army Service - Doing Their Bit for the Soldier Boys • Laura Lee Hope
... months of this inferno the Captain was ordered to a distant station; and, as his wife refused point-blank to accompany him, was by no means reluctant to "be rid of the brat" by sending her back to her home. Here, however, the child-wife found herself ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... into and filling up the vast craters caused by the explosions. The attack seemed fiercest at certain points, perhaps a quarter of a mile apart around the circle, and after a time the watchers perceived that at those points, under the edge of the apron, in that indescribable inferno of boiling lava, destructive rays, and disintegrating copper, there were enemy machines at work. These machines were strengthening the protecting apron and extending it, very slowly, but ever wider and ever deeper as the ground under it and before it was volatilized ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... he made his way as close to the car as the intense heat would let him. The gasoline-tank, he understood, had burst with the shock, and, taking fire, had wrapped the car in an Inferno of unquenchable flame. Now, the woodwork was entirely gone; and of the wheels, as the long machine lay there on its back, only a few blazing spokes were left. The steel chassis and the engine were red-hot, ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... I did again just what I had done as a child. I have enjoyed, too, my rests, my recuperations, my breathing times, my very prostrations after strife; but rather would I be dragged through all the circles of the foolish Italian's Inferno than through the pleasures of Europe. That is what has made this place of eternal pleasures so deadly to me. It is the absence of this instinct in you that makes you that strange monster called a Devil. It is the success with which you have diverted ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... man, the beast that is in man, the fiend that is in man—was there, with hands uplifted, to slay the Lamb. The servants of the Husbandman were beating to death the beloved Son whom He had sent to seek their welfare. It was amidst the human inferno of ingratitude and hatred that these words of infinite grace and beauty fell from the lips of Love Immortal. Long nails had just pierced the torn flesh and quivering nerves of His dear hands and feet; and while He watched His murderers' awful delight in His agony, ...
— Our Master • Bramwell Booth
... other capital of the present day can the sentiment expressed by Horace be felt and enjoyed more than in Rome, where it is so easy to forget the worries and frivolities of city life by walking a few steps outside the gates. The Val d'Inferno and the Via del Casaletto, outside the Porta Angelica, the Vigne Nuove outside the Porta Pia, and the Valle della Caffarella, to which I am now leading my readers, all are dreamy wildernesses, made purposely to give to our thoughts fresher and healthier inspirations. Sometimes indistinct sounds ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani
... stigma, Bit into the live man's flesh for parchment, Loosed him, laughed to see the writing rankle, Let the wretch go festering through Florence)— Dante, who loved well because he hated, Hated wickedness that hinders loving, Dante standing, studying his angel— In there broke the folk of his Inferno. Says he—"Certain people of importance" (Such he gave his daily dreadful line to) "Entered and would seize, forsooth, the poet." Says the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... of conventional offices, and continual obedience to their Lamaic superiors is for them a means of escape from personal damnation in a form which is more terrible perhaps than any monk- conjured Inferno. For others they do not profess to have even a passing thought. Now this is a distinction which goes to the very root of the matter. The fact is rarely stated in so many words, but it is the truth that Christianity is daily judged by one standard, and by one standard ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... gates. Life was cheap—cheap as reckoned by the popular standard of honor. The saddest feature was that honor, which was always in the agio, so to speak, was not always solid gold, but alloyed with baser metals. No one circle in the Inferno will boast of greater density of Japanese population than the seventh, to which Dante consigns all ...
— Bushido, the Soul of Japan • Inazo Nitobe
... miles, miles, miles! The last day's ride to the Big Colorado was unforgettable. We rode toward the head of a gigantic red cliff pocket, a veritable inferno, immeasurably hot, glaring, awful. It towered higher and higher above us. When we reached a point of this red barrier, we heard the dull rumbling roar of water, and we came out, at length, on a winding ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... anthems" to the Creator. His paintings have a freshness and fragrance of the dawn; a mystery seems to hang over them. The very spirit of the morn broods over that classic landscape of his "Dante and Vergil." In the opening words of Dame's Inferno he gives us the vivid setting of this ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... did not use torture. It interfered with all manner of moral offences such as that of Eleanor Dalok, a 'communis skandalizatrix,' who 'utinizavit' (supposed to be a perfect of utinam) 'se fuisse in inferno quamdiu Deus erit in caelo, ut potuisset uncis infernalibus vindicare se de quodam Johanne Gybbys mortuo.' The wrath provoked by this and more vexatious interferences makes intelligible the sweeping away of the whole system in 1640. With this is connected the long ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... rain had fallen: and for ten deafening minutes the little party rode in silence through an inferno of reiterate light and sound. Once or twice Quita glanced at her husband, cantering beside her, and wondered vaguely when she would hear him speak again; wondered, too, at her own matter-of-fact acceptance of that which ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... for the pen of Ariosto to rehearse, in epic, the scolding of that momentous eve,—or rather, let me invoke the shade of Dante to inspire me, for none but the author of the Inferno could properly preside over such an attempt. But, perhaps, where the pen might fail, the pencil would succeed. What a group!—Mrs. B. the principal figure; you cramming your ears with cotton, as the only antidote to total deafness; Mrs.——in vain endeavouring ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... sous, costs twenty-two sous. Sugar, from twenty sous, advances to four francs ten sous; a candle costs seven sous. France, pushed on by the Jacobins, approaches the depths of misery, entering the first circle of its Inferno; other circles follow down deeper and deeper, narrower still and yet more somber; under Jacobin impulsion is she to descend ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... of the signs of the change that had come over her, and she disliked it, and sometimes despised herself for it, though she was quite unable to resist the impulse. The appetite for flattery which comes of living on it may be innocent, but it is never harmless. Dante consigned the flatterers to Inferno, and more particularly to a very nasty place there: it is true that there were no musical critics in his day; but he does not say much about the flattered, perhaps because they suffer enough when they find out the truth, or lose the gift for which ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... had passed through that inferno of the deep sea which sprang up to destroy the mightiest ...
— Sinking of the Titanic - and Great Sea Disasters • Various
... maxim of his, which might do some good to the common, narrow-minded conceptions of love,—'Bocca baciata non perde ventura; anzi rinnouva, come fa la luna'?" Dante and Petrarch remained the objects of his lasting admiration, though the cruel Christianity of the "Inferno" seemed to him an ineradicable blot upon the greatest of Italian poems. Of Petrarch's "tender and solemn enthusiasm," he speaks with the sympathy of one who understood the ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... deck was now a seething inferno. The foremast, a pillar of thin name, flickered like a pennon of gold until it broke in the middle and sent up a shower of sparks. The shrouds and ratlines which went with it had barred the black heavens with ruddy lines. From all the openings ...
— Dan Merrithew • Lawrence Perry
... thoughtful and subdued. They descended in a complete silence the dusty street, blazing in the late afternoon sun, and passed into the inferno of a crowded city square in midsummer. As they stood before the waiting-room, Lydia asked suddenly: "Godfather, how can we, any ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... a month in solitary was an event. And yet we could learn nothing from such transient and ofttimes stupid Dantes who would remain in our inferno too short a time to learn knuckle-talk ere they went forth again into the bright wide world ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... every hue of the rainbow. In short, with every mile of our advance the scenery grew more wildly and romantically beautiful, yet withal there were spots, deep narrow glens and ravines shut in by towering cliffs and overshadowing trees, where the effect was as weird as a scene copied from Dante's Inferno, and in the midst of which one felt that the strangest happenings would have excited ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... seeing an inferno of many circles. But the coward in him did not rise again. There was the gleam of a distant light upon him, unquenchable and serene. He doubted the eternity of the triumph of this Valentine, though he knew not why he doubted, nor upon ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... success of the experiment your power ceases?—you cannot foretell whether the unimprisoned creature will take its course to an inferno of suffering or a heaven of ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... me into a teeming Inferno of darkness and lost spirits who (spent with eight hours' monotonous toil in this Circle) had dropped asleep, sitting half-naked in the line of boxes which would bear them away to a spell of rest. They had ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... French Illuminati, too far in the regions of spirit and of faith. As Dante, with a powerful satire, filled his poem with the personages of the day, assigning his enemies to the girone of the Inferno, so Milton vents his gentler spleen by placing cowls and hood and habits in the limbo of vanity ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... massed with a body of air, that they might feel the fire." Mackenzie's Scottish Writers: vol. i., 49. All this may be ingenious enough; of its truth, a future state only will be the evidence. Very different from that of Scotus is the language of Gregory Narienzen: "Exit in inferno frigus insuperabile: ignis inextinguibilis: vermis immortalis: fetor intollerabilis: tenebrae palpabiles: flagella cedencium: horrenda visio demonum: desperatio omnium bonorum." This I gather from the Speculum ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... adventures were no doubt solemn to them—but it seemed absurd to attribute the origin of a sublime poem to such inferior, and to us even ludicrous, inventions. Every one, therefore, found out some other origin of Dante's Inferno—since they were resolved to have one—in other works more congenial to its nature; the description of a second life, the melancholy or the glorified scenes of punishment or bliss, with the animated shades of men who were no more, had been opened to the ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... Longshaw, years before, had driven a sow to market, and derived a tremendous advertisement therefrom, but Bursley had no wish to rival Longshaw in any particular. Bursley regarded Longshaw as the Inferno of the Five Towns. In Bursley you were bidden to go to Longshaw as you were bidden to go to ... Certain acute people in Hillport saw nothing but a paralyzing insult in the opinion of the Signal (first and foremost a Hanbridge organ), that Bursley ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... the beginning," said all, and were led from the Inferno across a cool, green yard, into a building specially devoted to the pots. In a great bin lay masses of soft brown clay in its crude condition, and upon the floor were heaped fragments of broken pots, calcined by use in the furnaces, and now waiting to be ground up into a fine powder between ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... Duchess Beatrice died," wrote the poet, Vincenzo Calmeta, "everything fell into ruin, and that court, which had been a joyous paradise, was changed into a black Inferno." ...
— Beatrice d'Este, Duchess of Milan, 1475-1497 • Julia Mary Cartwright
... five minutes. Never drew a line till September 26 (last) and never took lessons in my life. I think you will readily believe my statement." Continuing in the same half-bantering vein, I said: "I intend to immortalize all members of medical staff of State Hospital for Insane—when I illustrate my Inferno, which, when written, will make Dante's Divine Comedy look ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... I, who with them on the cross am placed, . . . . truly My savage wife, more than aught else, doth harm me.' Inferno, ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... come voi principe e duce Giu nell' Inferno, e 'l primo e Belzebue, Chi una cosa, e chi altra conduce, Ognuno attende alle faccende sue; Ma tutto a Belzebu, poi si riduce Perche Lucifer relegato fue Ultimo a tutti, e nel centro piu imo, Poi ch' egli intese esser nel Ciel su primo. Canto XV. ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... cup. He drank hastily and went on. Now it was by a field hospital, ghastly sights and ghastly sounds, pine boughs set for torches. He shut his eyes in a moment's faintness. It looked a demoniac place, a smoke-wreathed platform in some Inferno circle. He met a staff officer coming up from the plain. "General Lee has ridden to the right. He is watching for McClellan's next move. There's a rumour that everything's in motion toward the James. If it's true, there's a chase before us to-morrow, eh?—A. ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston |
