"Mermaid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to be gained by fretting, however, and luckily other matters were soon absorbing Peggy's attention. She wrung the water from Dorothy's drenched hair and clothing, and set her in the sun to dry, a forlorn little figure of a mermaid. And then she performed a like service for herself, stopping at intervals to lift her voice ...
— Peggy Raymond's Vacation - or Friendly Terrace Transplanted • Harriet L. (Harriet Lummis) Smith
... the use of the trumpet, how many advertising tailors and pill-makers could testify to the soundness of Ellesmere's principle? And beyond the Atlantic it finds special favor. When Barnum exhibited his mermaid, and stuck up outside his show-room a picture of three beautiful mermaids, of human size, with flowing hair, basking upon a summer sea, while inside the show-room he had the hideous little contorted figure made of a monkey with a fish's tail attached to it, probably the proportion of ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... mastery. In one of the caverns stands a great throne of red gold, ornamented with graceful sea fringe, pearls and amber. From without one may gaze up to the amber-colored ceiling, or down to the pavement of lustrous pearl. It was this wondrous palace that the mermaid abandoned for the sake of ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... continued, "a twentieth-century writer, to build yourself a Tudor House would be as absurd as for Ben Jonson to have planned himself a Norman Castle with a torture-chamber underneath the wine-cellar, and the fireplace in the middle of the dining-hall. His fellow cronies of the Mermaid would have thought him stark, ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... "It's a mermaid," said the mate, who was inclined to be superstitious, as he peered doubtfully down at it. "Let it ...
— Many Cargoes • W.W. Jacobs
... serious illness had lasted a number of months, so that the end came as a release. True to his ruling passion, philosophy had claimed him to the last, a set of Schopenhauer's works receiving his attention when able to study; but this was varied with readings in the 'Mermaid Series' of old plays, in which he took much pleasure. His library, in addition to numerous works on philosophy and the fine arts, was composed of standard books of all classes, including, of course, a proportion of nautical literature. Especially ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... towards the sun. One sister promised the other to tell her what she saw, and what most pleased her the first day. Perhaps he will forgive you. She did not believe her own ears. He did not know that he had (has) to thank her [for] his life. She saved his life. The witch cut off the tongue of the mermaid. ...
— The Esperanto Teacher - A Simple Course for Non-Grammarians • Helen Fryer
... "Goat-Fish," which can truly be called the "Father of Dragons," as well as the prototype of the Indian makara, the mermaid, the "sea-serpent," the "dolphin of Aphrodite," and of most composite sea-monsters, see W. H. Ward's "Seal Cylinders of Western Asia," pp. 382 et seq. and 399 et seq.; and especially the detailed reports in de Morgan's Memoires ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... the mermaid's cave. Who, with a heart-felt joy, To her bright home beneath the wave, ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, May, 1878, No. 7. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... heart revives: her vespers done, Of all its wreathed pearls her hair she frees; Unclasps her warmed jewels one by one; Loosens her fragrant bodice; by degrees Her rich attire creeps rustling to her knees: Half-hidden, like a mermaid in sea-weed, Pensive awhile she dreams awake, and sees, In fancy, fair St. Agnes in her bed, But dares not look behind, or ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... Philip ran upstairs three at a time. He went first to the attics, and made a systematic search of every hall, room, and closet. He even peeped into the great tank, as if Patty might have been transformed into a mermaid. Then followed a thorough search of the second story, with all its rambling ells and side corridors; he tiptoed through the nursery, smiling at the sleeping baby and casting a casual glance at the still figure on the couch with the long, white ...
— Patty's Social Season • Carolyn Wells
... a meeting down Church," said Cass. "But you can come afterward. I'll wait for 'ee in Dollar Cove. That's the next cove to Church Cove on the other side of the Castle Cliff, and there's some handsome cave there. Years ago my granfa knawed a chap who saw a mermaid combing out her hair in Dollar Cove. But there's no mermaids been seen lately round these parts. My father says he reckons since they scat up the apple orchards and give over drinking cider they won't see ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... that faces the hostile Samnite Hills and (oh, the prosaic touch!) the modern railway-station. This gate remains in a tolerable state of preservation, and draws its name from the key-stone of its arch, which bears in low relief a much defaced design of a mermaid or siren, its counterpart on the inner keystone being a dolphin: two devices very appropriate to the entrance of a city dedicated to the Lord of Ocean. Passing the picturesque yellow-washed Villa Salati, ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... was probably the little silver tankard which she did for the Tiffany Company, a bit of modelling which involves the figures of a fisher-boy and a mermaid. The figure of Athena is large and correct; those of the fisher-boy and mermaid poetic and impassioned.... The boy kisses the maid when the lid is lifted. He is always looking over the edge, as if yearning for the ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... though he constantly brags of his success at Drury Lane, we take not his generalities for gospel, and the one exploit whose credibility is enforced with circumstance was pitiful both in conception and performance. A meeting of freeholders at the 'Mermaid Tavern,' Hackney, was the occasion, and after drawing blank upon blank, Vaux succeeded at last in extracting a silver snuff-box. Now, his clumsiness had suggested the use of the scissors, and the victim not only discovered the scission in his coat, but caught the thief with the ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... which thou hast "painted with delight." And such are the chances of mortal fame, our children's children may raise new idols on the site of thy holy altar, and cavil where their sires adored; but for thee the mermaid of the ocean shall wail in her coral caves, and the sprite that lives in the waterfalls shall mourn! Strange shapes shall hew thy monument in the recesses of the lonely rocks! ever by moonlight shall the fairies pause from their roundel when some wild note of their minstrelsy reminds ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Britain's pride, Once so faithful and so true, On the deck of fame that died, With the gallant good Riou, Soft sigh the winds of Heaven o'er their grave! While the billow mournful rolls, And the mermaid's song condoles, Singing glory to ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... positions, while further away in the deeper water rose up great feathery fronds and waving arms, like the tentacles of some giant octopus feeling for its prey. This bed of snake-like brown arms was a weird spot, which only wanted a mermaid or two to make it complete; but I, as a mere man, could only complete the picture by magnifying in my mind's eye the innumerable fishes which swam in and out among the luxuriance of marine vegetation, so as to fancy them mermaidens, and thus ...
— Jethou - or Crusoe Life in the Channel Isles • E. R. Suffling
... Prince Hal in his youth had lived among loose companions, and the tavern in Eastcheap came in to fill out his picture; although Mrs. Quickly and Falstaff and Poins and Bardolph were more likely to have been fallen in with by Shakespeare himself at the Mermaid, than to have been comrades of the true Prince Henry. It was enough for Shakespeare to draw real men, and the situation, whatever it might be, would sit easy on them. In this sense only it is that poetry is truer than History,—that it can make a picture more complete. It may take liberties ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... of Queen Elizabeth, tea, coffee, and chocolate were unknown save to travellers and savants, and the handmaidens of the good queen drank beer with their breakfast. When Shakespeare and Ben Jonson forgathered at the Mermaid Tavern, their winged words passed over tankards of ale, but later other drinks became the usual accompaniment of news, story, and discussion. In the sixteen-sixties there were no strident newspapers to destroy one's equanimity, and the gossip ...
— Cocoa and Chocolate - Their History from Plantation to Consumer • Arthur W. Knapp
... "I'm a mermaid! I can swim," she cried, "so the game's up." Her dress was torn across, and peace being established, she fetched a needle and thread and began to ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... thought of this, the wicked step-mother sprang to her, and thrust her on a sudden overboard. The young girl was carried away by the blue waves, and came to the mermaid who rules over all those who are drowned in ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends; Scandinavian • Various
... of gaping faces, Which seem'd to swallow up his sound advice; All jointly listening, but with several graces, As if some mermaid did their ears entice, Some high, some low, the painter was so nice; The scalps of many, almost hid behind, To jump up higher seem'd, to mock ...
— The Rape of Lucrece • William Shakespeare [Clark edition]
... upon a promontory, And heard a mermaid, on a dolphin's back, Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath, That the rude sea grew civil at her song; And certain stars shot madly from their spheres, ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... this breach of faith on the part of her husband, Melusina was compelled to leave her home. She regularly returned, however, before the death of any of the lords of her family, and by her wailings foretold that event. Her history is closely interwoven with the legends of the Banshee and Mermaid.] ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... lianes, matapalos, orchids, wild pines with long air-roots or gray beards; and last, but not least, that strange and lovely parasite, the Rhipsalis cassytha, which you mistake first for a plume of green sea-weed, or a tress of Mermaid's hair which has got up there by mischance, and then for some delicate kind of pendent mistletoe; till you are told, to your astonishment, that it is an abnormal form of Cactus—a family which it resembles, ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... imprisoned, and his goods confiscated; in prison he turned Catholic, but twelve years later reverted to Protestantism; the opening of the century brought an unpleasant difference with Dekker and Marston, and saw the famous Mermaid Club at its zenith; for nine years after Shakespeare's death he produced no dramas; in 1619 he received a degree, M.A., from Oxford, the laureateship, and a small pension from the king; now a widower, he founded with Herrick, Suckling, Carew, and others the ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... on the fine sand with never-ceasing regularity. In the background of another grotto, beneath a long semi-circle, a bed of polished white gravel, which the tide no doubt turns and makes fresh every day, seemed to be waiting to receive the body of a mermaid; but the bed is empty and has lost her forever! Only the moist seaweed remains on which she used to stretch her delicate nude limbs when she was tired of swimming, and on which she reclined till daybreak, in the pale light of ...
— Over Strand and Field • Gustave Flaubert
... appearing torn away. As well bid healthy children lie abed on a bright summer morning, as think of holding this fair young woman bound to the circle of safety when she has her view of pleasure sparkling like the shore-sea mermaid's mirror. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... cognizance of their distress. — I snatched out my sister by the hair of the head, and, dragging her to the bank, recollected that my uncle had, not yet appeared — Rushing again into the stream, I met Clinker hauling ashore Mrs Jenkins, who looked like a mermaid with her hair dishevelled about her ears; but, when I asked if his master was safe, he forthwith shook her from him, and she must have gone to pot, if a miller had not seasonably come to her relief. — As for Humphry, he flew like lightning, ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... Briar Rose" and "The Story of Perseus," though these were not completed for some years to come. In 1886, having been elected A.R.A. the previous year, he exhibited (for the only time) at the Royal Academy "The Depths of the Sea," a mermaid carrying down with her a youth whom she has unconsciously drowned in the impetuosity of her love. This picture adds to the habitual haunting charm a tragic irony of conception and a felicity of execution which ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... approached, absolute silence fell on the Indians, the silence of breathless excitement. The red-coat they had heard of, and in a general way they knew what he signified; but a white woman to them was as fabulous a creature as a mermaid or a hamadryad. Their eyes were saved for Clare. They fixed on her as hard, bright, and unwinking as jet buttons. They conveyed nothing but an animal curiosity. Clare nodded and smiled to them in her own way, but no muscle of any ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner
... among Mr Wells' romances. The realistic method remains, but the conception is touched with a poetic fancy of a kind that I have not found elsewhere in these books. The Venus Annodomini who came out of the sea at Folkestone in the form of an authentic mermaid was something more than a mere critic of our civilised conventions. She was that, too; she asked why people walked on the Leas "with little to talk about and nothing to look at, and bound not to do all ...
— H. G. Wells • J. D. Beresford
... novel has the gift of contrivance and the skill to sustain the interest of a plot through all its development. 'The Mermaid' is an odd ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... remarked David Duffy, who was no respecter of names or persons, "it ain't a wreck, it's a mermaid. I've bin told they weigh over six ton when young. Look out when she ...
— The Lively Poll - A Tale of the North Sea • R.M. Ballantyne
... nearly sealed the Mermaid's fate with Captain King, we found to lie half a mile north-west from the north-east end of Three ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes
... was. It lay in the Mermaid's hand, all glowing with its magic blue, pale and dark by turns, its wonderful veins panting as if it were a living thing, its threads of gold moving and twining underneath, round the red heart burning deep ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... commendatory verses to the great realist's play of 'The Fox,' it is fair to assume that through him they were brought together, and that both belonged to that brilliant circle of wits, poets, and dramatists who made famous the gatherings at the Mermaid Inn. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... you!" said Hilda, with a little laugh. Indeed, they were both streaming with water, and looked like a merman and mermaid very much ...
— Hildegarde's Neighbors • Laura E. Richards
... dramatic. I have not spoken of those glorious and fantastic guide-books which are, as it were, the textbooks of a whole science of Erratics. In these he is borne beyond the world with those poets whom Keats conceived as supping at a celestial "Mermaid." But the "Mermaid" was English—and so was Keats. And though Hilaire Belloc may have a French name, I think that ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... while the trials of Hewit and Slingsby were in progress. A few desperate cavaliers about town, the chief of whom were a Sir William Leighton, a Colonel Deane, and a Colonel Manley, holding commissions from Charles, had met several times at the Mermaid Tavern and elsewhere, and had arranged for a midnight tumult on Saturday the 15th of May. They were to attack the guard at St. Paul's, seize the Lord Mayor, raise a conflagration near the Tower, &c. The hour had ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... I used to fancy Russia as a giant devil-fish, whose arms extended from the Baltic to the Pacific, from the Black Sea to the Arctic Ocean. Then I would think of my native land as a beautiful mermaid, about whom the giant's cold, chilly arms were slowly creeping, and I feared that some day those arms would crush her. That day has come. The helpless mermaid lies prostrate in the clutch of the octopus. Not that the constitution of Finland has been annulled, as has been so often erroneously ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... day. His father, at the breakfast table, jovially prodded him about being late, until he barely caught himself on the verge of telling his queer secret. And so absent-minded was he at the office that he found he had entered the account of a prosaic old firm as "Mermaid & Nymph." ...
— The Mermaid of Druid Lake and Other Stories • Charles Weathers Bump
... generally termed Ie-ie-waena and Ie-ie-waho. Here the name Moana-nui-ka-lehua seems to be used to indicate the sea as well as the demigoddess, whose dominion it was. Ordinarily she appeared as a powerful fish, but she was capable of assuming the form of a beautiful woman (mermaid?). The title lehua was given her on account of ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... note about town hath or had its club. The Mermaid Tavern is immortalized as the house resorted to by Shakspeare, Jonson, Fletcher, and Beaumont; the Devil—which, Pennant informs us, stood on the site of Child's-place, Temple Bar—was the scene of many a merry meeting of the choice spirits in old days; at Will's Coffee-house, in the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 267, August 4, 1827 • Various
... dramatists in the Mermaid Series (T. Fisher Unwin); *Everyman and other Plays; ed. by ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... Drummond, the poet, then in the prime of life, and living as a bachelor in his romantic mansion of Hawthornden, on the Esk, seven miles from Edinburgh. It is probable that Drummond and Jonson had met before in London, and indulged together in the "wit-combats" at the Mermaid and similar scenes. Indeed, there is a prevalent belief in Scotland that it was mainly to see Drummond at Hawthornden that Jonson came so far from home, and certain it is, from Drummond's report of his 'Conversations,' that he designed 'to write a Fisher or Pastoral (Piscatory?) ...
— The Pennyles Pilgrimage - Or The Money-lesse Perambulation of John Taylor • John Taylor
... attached to their veteran dictator, his reminiscences, opinions, affections, and enmities. And we hear, too, of valorous potations; but in the words of Herrick addressed to his master, Jonson, at the Devil Tavern, as at the Dog, the Triple Tun, and at the Mermaid, ...
— Every Man In His Humour • Ben Jonson
... Then the girls presented the gifts they had made for the beloved uncle; Margaret's book, a fine old copy of the "Colloquies of Erasmus," bound by her own hands in gold-stamped brown leather, Peggy's mermaid-penwiper, with a long tail of sea-green sewing silk, and the pincushion on which Jean had spent many painful hours in her efforts to make the ferns look like ferns instead of like green hen feathers. Grace ...
— Fernley House • Laura E. Richards
... of the useful with the ridiculously ornamental. Here were the beautiful banks of a lake and Nature's embellishment of reeds and water plants, which, for a wonder, were left to grow in their native luxuriance, and in the midst a huge pasteboard or wooden swan, and a wooden mermaid of tasteless proportions blowing from a conchshell. In another part was a cottage with puppets the size of life moving by clock-work; a peasant smoking and turning a reel to wind off the thread ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... she set forth in her motor for Keefeport. Miss Upton's little establishment was in nice order by this time and the sign had been hung up over the door: "The Mermaid Shop." By the time Mrs. Barry's car stopped before it, the three residents had eaten their dinner and ...
— In Apple-Blossom Time - A Fairy-Tale to Date • Clara Louise Burnham
... rows of birds and animals in glass cases on either side, and she gave scarcely a glance at any of those objects, endeared by association, if not by intrinsic beauty, to the Boston play-goer. Gulliver, with the Liliputians swarming upon him; the painty-necked ostriches and pelicans; the mummied mermaid under a glass bell; the governors' portraits; the stuffed elephant; Washington crossing the Delaware; Cleopatra applying the asp; Sir William Pepperell, at full length, on canvas; and the pagan months and seasons in plaster,—if all these are, indeed, the subjects,—were dim phantasmagoria ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... pressed and dried, still kept their wonderful colors. Among these valuable water plants, I noted various seaweed: some Cladostephus verticillatus, peacock's tails, fig-leafed caulerpa, grain-bearing beauty bushes, delicate rosetangle tinted scarlet, sea colander arranged into fan shapes, mermaid's cups that looked like the caps of squat mushrooms and for years had been classified among the zoophytes; in short, ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... are in a shield supported by a merman and mermaid, the latter with a mirror in her hand. The Keys refer to St. Peter, the Patron ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 529, January 14, 1832 • Various
... I demand, A crystal brow, the moon's despair, Nor the snow's daughter, a white hand, Nor mermaid's yellow pride ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... an exception to the general rule of Browning's work. A large proportion of it is critical rather than creative, a criticism of critics; perhaps it would be at once more correct and concise to call it "Robert Browning's Apology." Pacchiarotto, At the "Mermaid", House, Shop and Epilogue, are all more or less personal utterances on art and the artist, sometimes in a concrete and impersonal way, more often in a somewhat combative and contemptuous spirit. The most important part of the volume, however, ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... latter to be a continuation of the bank on which Captain King had five fathoms, Point Pearce bearing North 22 degrees East 5 miles; and in order to record his visit we named it, after his vessel, Mermaid Bank. ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... when the black limber bone of the Greenland or Right whale was largely used in ladies' bodices. But this same bone is not in the tail; it is in the head, which is a sad mistake for a sagacious lawyer like Prynne. But is the Queen a mermaid, to be presented with a tail? An allegorical meaning may lurk here. There are two royal fish so styled by the English law writers — the whale and the sturgeon; both royal property under certain limitations, ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... but could not—revealing a notion that he meant something. But as soon as ever she left the lake, she was so altered, that the prince said to himself, "If I marry her, I see no help for it: we must turn merman and mermaid, and go out to sea ...
— The Light Princess and Other Fairy Stories • George MacDonald
... accompanying on the harmonium. The air was taking. It puzzled me at first. It was familiar and yet strange, and not till the children had reached the last verse did I recognise a wonderfully distorted form of the mermaid's song in Oberon, all the accents being altered. In this crypt is the tomb of a Neapolitan knight attached to the court of king Rene; and in the floor a well the water of which rises and falls with the river. In all probability this crypt was originally the baptistery of the first basilica erected ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... instant, when the embryon is secreted or formed. This difficulty ceases when we consider, that it is as easy to form an idea of feminine features with male organs of reproduction, or of male features with female ones, as the contrary; as we conceive the idea of a sphinx or mermaid as easily and as distinctly as of a woman. Add to this, that at the time of procreation the idea of the male organs, and of the female features, are often both excited at the same time, ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... part literary men. Here Page's sheer brilliancy of conversation showed at its best. Lord Bryce, Sir John Simon, John Morley, the inevitable companions, Henry James and John Sargent—"What things have I seen done at the Mermaid"; and certainly these gatherings of wits and savants furnished as near an approach to its Elizabethan prototype as London ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... tradition in the Isle of Man, that a mermaid becoming enamoured of a young man of extraordinary beauty took an opportunity of meeting him one day as he walked on the shore, and opened her passion to him, but was received with a coldness, occasioned by his horror and surprise at her appearance. This, however, was so misconstrued by ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... dark, and beautiful eye which stood the sternest human gaze, gave to the expression of her countenance such dignity and variety that we all agreed that it really was super-animal. The Scandinavian Scald, with such a mermaid before him, would find in her eye a metaphor so emphatic that he would have no reason to borrow the favourite oriental image of the gazelles from his ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... place, near Joppa. Where did the big fish go? When the sun went down under the earth, it was thought to be followed by the fish, which was said to swallow it, and carry it safely through the under world. The sun thus came to be represented as the body of a woman with the tail of a fish, and so the mermaid was born. Another strange thing is that all the sun gods were born near Christmas. The myth of Red Riding Hood, was known among the Aztecs. The myth of eucharist came from the story of Ceres and Bacchus. When the cakes made by the product of the field were ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... lagoon Like sunbeams, and all round our isle Swim thro' the lovely crescent moon, Glimpsing, for breathless mile on mile, The wild sea-woods that bloomed below, The rainbow fish, the coral cave Where vanishing swift as melting snow A mermaid's arm would wave. ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... enough of marriage, having been the skipper of a mermaid with a tongue. No, sir," he roared out another line of some song floating in his muzzy head, "a saucy bachelor am I," then changed to gruff talk, "and I intends being one all my days. Stand-by, I have—t'ain't a wife, but ...
— The Opal Serpent • Fergus Hume
... of the Macleans, who had transferred his services without afterthought on the occasion of the marriage. There was some tale of an unlucky creature, a sea-kelpie, that dwelt and did business in some fearful manner of his own among the boiling breakers of the Roost. A mermaid had once met a piper on Sandag beach, and there sang to him a long, bright midsummer's night, so that in the morning he was found stricken crazy, and from thenceforward, till the day he died, said only one form of words; what they ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... at night shed pale its light, The billows are gently swelling; See a mermaid merge from the briny surge, To Sir ...
— Targum • George Borrow
... whose waves seemed gathering upward to descend and crush the house he loved. As the hurrying waves rolled nearer and nearer to the stately mansion, the sleeper saw a pale, starry face looking out of the silvery foam, and knew that it was my lady, transformed into a mermaid, beckoning his uncle to destruction. Beyond that rising sea great masses of cloud, blacker than the blackest ink, more dense than the darkest night, lowered upon the dreamer's eye; but as he looked at the dismal horizon the storm-clouds slowly parted, and from ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... various of the suburbs:—1st, by way of Pershore Street, Moat Row, Bradford Street, and Moseley Road, to Moseley; 2nd, by way of Deritend, Bordesley, Camp Hill, along Stratford Road, to Sparkhill; 3rd, leaving Stratford Road (at the Mermaid) and along Warwick Road, to Acock's Green; 4th, striking off at Bordesley, along the Coventry Road to the far side of Small Heath Park; 5th, from Moat Row, by way of Smithfield Street to Park Street, Duddeston Row, Curzon Street, Vauxhall Road, ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... hobject!" exclaimed Joe Dumsby, a short, thickset, little Englishman, who, having been born and partly bred in London, was rather addicted to what is styled chaffing. "Was you arter a mermaid, shipmate?" ...
— The Lighthouse • R.M. Ballantyne
... death Newton was born, and the subsequent sections carry the story on to the modern observatory again. The form I have adopted is a development from that of an earlier book, "Tales of the Mermaid Tavern" where certain poets and discoverers of another kind were brought together round a central idea, and their stories told in a combination of narrative and lyrical verse. "The Torch-Bearers" flowed all the more naturally into a similar form in view of the fact that ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes
... do so Nancy flew back to the table and blew out the light, and the next minute Huldah Spiller, dripping like a mermaid, was standing in the middle of the darkened room, and Doss Provine, breathing short, was barring the ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan
... her why she wept so, and Aino replied: 'I weep, O mother, because thou hast promised me to the aged Wainamoinen, to be his comforter and caretaker in his old age. Far better if thou hadst sent me to the bottom of the sea, to live with the fishes and to become a mermaid and ride on the waves. This had been far better than to be an old ...
— Finnish Legends for English Children • R. Eivind
... you are dripping like a mermaid; pull my cloak round you: but I think you are feverish, Jane: both your cheek and hand are burning hot. I ask again, ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... have since, that it exceeds every other sight in interest and beauty. They passed to leeward of us, and out of hailing distance; but the captain could read the names on their sterns with the glass. They were the ship Helen Mar, of New York, and the brig Mermaid, of Boston. They were both steering westward, and were bound in for our ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... the verb ( allure, entice); as in C. of E. iii. 2. 45: "O, train me not, sweet mermaid, with thy note;" Scott's Lay, iii. 146: "He thought to train him to the wood," etc. James was much given to gallantry, and many of his travels in disguise were on adventures of this kind. See on i. 409 above and ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... lady who used to lie in a hammock under the roses every day and smile at my antics. She was young, I remember, and very pretty, but her face was as white as the marble mermaid in the fountain. The old gentleman and his wife always sat beside her when she lay in the hammock. Sometimes he read aloud, sometimes they talked, and sometimes a long silence would fall upon them, when the splashing of the fountain and the droning of the bees ...
— The Story of Dago • Annie Fellows-Johnston
... eye upon him, stood as sorely tempted and wavering a moment; then, abruptly stepping towards him, with a look of dissolved surrender, said: "When mermaid songs move figure-heads, then may glory, gold, and women try their blandishments on me. But a good fellow, singing a good song, he woos forth my every spike, so that my whole hull, like a ship's, sailing by a magnetic rock, caves in with acquiescence. Enough: when one has a heart ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... the gardenia?' replied a friend, idiomatically. 'That is Sir Runan Errand, the amateur showman—him that runs the Live Mermaid, the Missing Link, and Koot Hoomi, ...
— Much Darker Days • Andrew Lang (AKA A. Huge Longway)
... 14th of the month we spoke his Majesty's ship Mermaid, with a convoy from England to New York. On the 15th the Orpheus took a schooner from Martinique, with a cargo of claret, so that with another sloop she had taken she had now five prizes. It was not, however, till the 26th of the month that a boat boarded me from the ship, with written directions ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... dialect; but that is very different from continually letting out his ruling passion. This brings me, Sir, to the alteration you offer in the personage of Mrs. Winter, whom you wittily propose -to turn into a mermaid. I approve the idea much: I like too the restoration of Mrs. Vernon to a plain reasonable woman. She will be a contrast to the bad characters, and but a gradation to produce Barbara, without making her too glaringly bright without any intermediate shade. ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... and Narcissus already arranging for 'a night'—we obeyed a mutual instinct, and presently found ourselves in the snuggery of a quaint tavern, which was often to figure hereafter in our sentimental history, though probably little in these particular chapters of it. The things 'seen done at "The Mermaid "' may some day be written in another place, where the Reader will know from the beginning what to expect, and not feel that he has been induced to buy a volume ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... sides, piled full of a queen's emeralds. We loitered; we explored; and having descended sat down to rest, dangling irreverent feet over beryl depths, splashed with gold. Thus we whiled away an hour, perhaps. Then the Set, impressed at first, had had enough of the mermaid temple's tragic beauty. Sir John Biddell reminded me that it had been a long day for the ladies, and very hot. Hadn't we better get back to the Enchantress before sunset? But that was exactly what some of us did not want ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... negligence should grow into discredite: whereupon seeking helpe from God, the fountaine of all mercies, it pleased his diuine maiestie to moue my heart to prosecute that which I hope shall be to his glory, and to the contentation of euery Christian minde. Whereupon falling into consideration that the Mermaid, albeit a very strong and sufficient ship, yet by reason of her burthen was not so conuenient and nimble as a smaller bark, especially in such desperate hazzards; further hauing in account her great charge to the aduenturers being at 100. li. the moneth, and that at doubtfull seruice: all ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of The English Nation, Vol. XII., America, Part I. • Richard Hakluyt
... father, father, draw your dam!' Binnorie, O Binnorie! 'There's either a mermaid or a milk-white swan,' By ...
— Ballads of Romance and Chivalry - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - First Series • Frank Sidgwick
... when Dor smiled, and he began to be interested in living again in spite of himself. The girl, he thought, was somehow radiant—really lovely, in spite of her scales and fins. It was peculiar; he'd never liked women at all, and had certainly never thought he'd like a mermaid, but.... ...
— Stairway to the Stars • Larry Shaw
... which swallows the dead. "The worm shall eat them like wool", exclaimed Isaiah in symbolic language.[168] It lies in the ocean which surrounds the world in Egyptian, Babylonian, Greek, Teutonic, Indian, and other mythologies. The Irish call it "moruach", and give it a mermaid form like the Babylonian Nintu. In a Scottish Gaelic poem Tiamat figures as "The Yellow Muilearteach", who is slain by Finn-mac-Coul, ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... the limbo of Faery and Romance. They furnish examples of nearly all the root-ideas and typical tales which folklorists have discovered in the vast jungle of popular legends and superstitions—the Supernatural Birth, the Life and Faith Tokens, the Dragon Slayer, the Mermaid and the Despised Sister, Bluebeard of the Many Wives, the Well of Healing, the Magic Mirror, the Enchanted Horn, the Singing Bone, the Babes in the Wood, the Blabbing Popinjay, the Counterpart, the Transformation, the Spell, the Prophecy, the Riddle, the Return from ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... deep water; the blanched cornice was adorned with shell- shaped ornaments, and there were white mouldings like dolphins in the ceiling-angles. Even that one touch of colour visible in the red satin pincushion bore affinity to coral; even that dark, shining glass might have mirrored a mermaid. When I closed my eyes, I heard a gale, subsiding at last, bearing upon the house-front like a settling swell upon a rock-base. I heard it drawn and withdrawn far, far off, like a tide retiring from a shore of the upper ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... older and feebler. And did he communicate his views of Mackarel Lane? I saw him regarding, me as a species of mermaid or syren, evidently thinking it a great shame that I have not a burnt face. If he had only ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... red cheeks and sparkling eyes shone from among streaming mermaid tresses, and whose pretty ...
— Dick in the Everglades • A. W. Dimock
... the great marine lizards and flying dragons of the Jurassic Epoch. Such a picture is really just as absurd, or, to speak more correctly, a thousand times absurder, than if one were to speak of those grand old times when Homer and Virgil smoked their pipes together in the Mermaid Tavern, while Shakespeare and Moliere, crowned with summer roses, sipped their Falernian at their ease beneath the whispering palmwoods of the Nevsky Prospect, and discussed the details of the play they were to produce ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... that art, so far as a humble but laborious student and practitioner thereof knoweth. He could not for the life of him help admiring "Adeline," "Oriana," "Mariana," "The Ode to Memory." Yet he had nothing but scorn for the scarcely less exquisite "Mermaid" and "Sea Fairies"—though the first few lines of the latter, excluded by this and other pseudo-criticism from the knowledge of half a generation of English readers, equal almost anything that the poet has ever done. And only the lucky memory of a remark of Hartley Coleridge's (who ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... order to buy the bare necessities of life. Knowing that his death would leave Isabella quite alone in the world and practically penniless, her father brought her up more like a boy than a girl; she could ride a horse as gracefully as an Amazon, she could swim like a born mermaid, and even outdo her father in his favorite sport of fencing. Yet so sweet was the gentle nature which the girl had inherited from her mother, that this strange upbringing never spoiled ...
— The Firelight Fairy Book • Henry Beston
... there the little girl remained perched upon a rock, at the foot of which the waves now only sullenly washed, for the night was beautifully calm and clear. To a passer on the ocean she might have been mistaken for a mermaid who had left her watery bower to look ...
— Snarley-yow - or The Dog Fiend • Frederick Marryat
... attracted by a group of bathers—ladies, as I judged by their voices, though, as they were dressed in rather a fantastic style, I could not perceive any other indication of the sex. One of the party—a lively young girl of sixteen or seventeen—seemed to be a perfect mermaid. She plunged and swam, ducked and dived, kicked up her delicate little feet, and disappeared under the surf in a way that struck me with awe and admiration. Never was there such an enchanting picture of perfect abandonment to the enjoyment of the occasion. ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... strength broke down, and they were detained three days. Consequently, when they arrived in New York, they found that the Mermaid, in which they expected to take passage, had sailed. The Signor considered it imprudent to correspond with his wife on the subject, and concluded to go out of the city and wait for the next vessel. When they went on board, they found Madame, ...
— A Romance of the Republic • Lydia Maria Francis Child
... seized upon by consciousness as a presentation, and to the extent to which one is aware of this object of consciousness, he is said to recognize, or to know it. A state of consciousness is always, therefore, a state of knowledge, or of intelligence. Thus, whether we perceive this chair, imagine a mermaid, recall the looks of an absent friend, experience the toothache, judge the weight of this book, or become angry, our conscious state ...
— Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education • Ontario Ministry of Education
... drooped over, her hand supporting her chin and her knees supporting her elbows, her eyes fixed on the horizon-line. Her hair dried, too, but she did not touch it. It flowed down her back and spread into a pool of gold on the sand. She might have been a mermaid cast up by that sea on which she gazed with such a tragic wistfulness—and forever cut ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... which the Pearly Gates were first viewed, we stand facing the most beautiful of this imposing group of brilliant scenes, The Mermaid's Resort. This is a small cove with wave marks in the white beach sand, above which rises a projecting, sheltering cliff as purely white as freshly fallen snow, with a fine deposit of frost work in thick moss-like patterns ...
— Cave Regions of the Ozarks and Black Hills • Luella Agnes Owen
... war-wolf in the wood, Or was it mermaid in the sea, Or was it maid or lurdon auld, He'd ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... had popped in with a newspaper in his hand, to read me a curious account of a mermaid, that was seen singing a Gaelic song, and combing its hair with a tortoise-shell comb, someway terrible far north about Shetland, by a respectable minister of the district, riding home in the gloaming after a presbytery dinner. So, as he was just taking off his spectacles cannily, and saying to ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - tailor in Dalkeith • D. M. Moir
... caught the fair mermaid, and deep (The mermaid dances the floor upon) In the dungeon has placed her, to pine and to weep, Because his will she ...
— The Mermaid's Prophecy - and Other Songs Relating to Queen Dagmar • Anonymous
... Mr. Glowry. Mr. Glowry roared with pain in the ears of Mr. Toobad. Mr. Toobad's alarm so bewildered his senses that missing the door he threw up one of the windows, jumped out in his panic, and plunged over head and ears in the moat. Mr. Asterias and his son, who were on the watch for their mermaid, were attracted by the splashing, threw a net over him, and dragged ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... ever-fair light, And the many colored star lights, Blended in a great profusion, To the limits of our world, Which we best can know and search in. First, unto the boundless ocean, By the billow which returneth Echo to great Neptune's call, Where the mermaid host sojourneth In his ancient rocky hall; Where Leviathan, the mighty Keeper of all Neptune's treasure, Roams around the rocky caverns In majestic state, exploring. Let us see these mighty waters When they rise in foaming billows, Swallowing ...
— A Leaf from the Old Forest • J. D. Cossar
... may hear. These be the cocke's wordes, and not mine; I can no harm of no woman divine.* *conjecture, imagine Fair in the sand, to bathe* her merrily, *bask Lies Partelote, and all her sisters by, Against the sun, and Chanticleer so free Sang merrier than the mermaid in the sea; For Physiologus saith sickerly,* *certainly How that they singe well and merrily. And so befell that, as he cast his eye Among the wortes,* on a butterfly, *cabbages He was ware of this fox that lay full low. Nothing *ne list him ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... for our meals, little Katie and I ventured out alone in the canoe, which we anchored in any promising fishing spot, by fastening a harrow tooth to a piece of rope, and letting it drop from the side of little vessel. By the time she was five years old, my little mermaid could both steer and paddle the light vessel, and catch small fish, which ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... watered every day: she had a palace of pretty shells, where she kept all sorts of little water-creatures as fairy tenants; she had friends and playmates among the gulls and peeps, and learned curious things by watching crabs, horse-shoes, and jelly-fishes; and every day she looked for a mermaid. ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... to Grettir and pointed finger, and wagged head at him, and called him mermaid's son, ...
— The Story of Grettir The Strong • Translated by Eirikr Magnusson and William Morris
... leave us long in suspense, but obligingly came out, partly to comment on the low price of mutton and partly to tell the tale of the mammoth mermaid. By rights, of course, Mrs. Bruce's husband should have been the gallant captain of a bark which foundered at sea and sent every man to his grave on the ocean bed. The ship's figurehead should have been discovered ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... the imagining of an entirely new thing. All such scenes or things are compounded of objects, or parts of objects, which they have seen, and with which they are familiar. They can readily picture to themselves a centaur or a cerberus, a mermaid or a dragon,—creatures which have no existence, and which never did exist; but a little reflection will shew, that nothing which the mind conceives of these supposed animals is really new, but is merely a ...
— A Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education • James Gall
... listen to the seamew's cry. Do not weep for me. Amidst the myriad of bright and glowing things which flutter over the surface of this green creation, let one feeble, choking, over-burdened heart be forgotten! Follow me not—seek me not—for, like the mermaid on the approach of the mariner, I should shrink from the face of man into the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... and the waters rush down from the hills, and form waterfalls or Forces, which Turner has done so much to illustrate. The river Bain runs into the Yore at Bainbridge, which is supposed to be the site of an old Roman station. Over the door of the Grammar School is a mermaid, said to have been found in a camp on the top of Addleborough, a remarkable limestone hill which rises to the south-east of Bainbridge. It is in this grammar-school that we find the subject of ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... pearl, gave him what he considered its value—at all events enough to make Sulu ring with his generosity—and sent the pearl to China; but what became of it afterwards I could never distinctly trace; but I learned that a pearl in Bengal called 'The Mermaid' originally came from China, and as the one found in Sulu was said to be shaped like a woman's bust, ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... other mermaid, / Siegelind that hight: "I warn thee, son of Aldrian, / Hagen valiant knight, 'Twas but to gain her clothing / my cousin falsely said, For, comest thou to Hunland, / sorely shalt thou ...
— The Nibelungenlied - Translated into Rhymed English Verse in the Metre of the Original • trans. by George Henry Needler
... a mermaid on a dolphin's back, Utter such dulcet and harmonious breath, That the rude sea grew civil at ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... angel with book; (2) angel with shield bearing date 1489; (3) lion versus griffin; (4) griffin devouring human leg; (5) owl; (6) mermaid with mirror and hair-brush; (7) two pigs dancing to bagpipe played by a third; (8) Jonah thrown to the whale; (9) man wheeling another who holds a reed and a bag; (10) fox caught carrying off goose by dog and by woman with distaff; ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Ripon - A Short History of the Church and a Description of Its Fabric • Cecil Walter Charles Hallett
... boy, Will. Had tea been known in Shakespeare's time, how much more closely he would have brought his sexes, under one roof, instead of sending the more animal of the two off to The Boar's Head and The Mermaid, leaving the ladies to ...
— The Little Tea Book • Arthur Gray
... Judges and clerks were appointed and a vote taken. The Prophet received a majority of seventy-five, out of one hundred and twenty-five votes polled. This created a tremendous laugh, and we kept it up till we got to St. Louis. Here the most of us took the steamer Mermaid. ...
— The Mormon Menace - The Confessions of John Doyle Lee, Danite • John Doyle Lee
... she left about half of herself at eighteen years of age behind, and grafted the rest on to the relict of the late Mr F.; thus making a moral mermaid of herself, which her once boy-lover contemplated with feelings wherein his sense of the sorrowful and his sense of the comical were ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... before I quit this national trait. The English naval muse, which I presume must be a Mermaid, half woman and half fish, has, by her simple and half the time, nonsensical songs, done more for the British flag than all her gunnery, or naval discipline and tactics. This inspiration of the tenth muse, with libations of grog, have actually made the English believe they ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... coral islands in the sea, And dusky girls heartbroken for white men; This sailor knows of wondrous lands afar, More rich than Spain, when the Phoenicians shipped Silver for common ballast, and they saw Horses at silver mangers eating grain; This man has seen the wind blow up a mermaid's hair Which, like a golden serpent, reared and stretched To feel the air away beyond her head. He begged my pennies, which I gave with joy— He will most certainly return some time A self-made king of some new ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... off," he said, with a not unmusical laugh that was very infectious, "but Ned there, who carried me downstairs, wanted to tote me round the house in his arms like a baby to say ta-ta to you all. Excuse my not rising, but I feel as uncertain below as a mermaid, and as out of my element," he added, with a mischievous glance at his friend. "Ned concluded I must go on. But I must say good-by to the old lady first. Ah! here ...
— Snow-Bound at Eagle's • Bret Harte
... was the selfsame foreman whom we knew in Siegfried's younger days. But, be this as it may, he was at this time the master of all smiths, and no one ever wrought more cunningly. And men say that his grandfather was Vilkinus, the first king of that land; and that his grandmother, Wachitu, was a fair mermaid, who lived in the deep green sea; and that his father, Wada, had carried him, when a child, upon his shoulders through water five fathoms deep, to apprentice him to the cunning dwarfs, from whom he learned his trade. And if this story is true, he could not have been Veliant. ...
— The Story of Siegfried • James Baldwin
... travelling wax-works; the menagerie with a very mangy lion in an appallingly rickety cage; the fat Scotchman, a monster made more horrible to view by a dress of royal Stuart tartan; the penny theatre, and a mermaid ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... never seen anything so beautiful in all her life. She stopped and pulled off the soft, tender, green silken tassels, hanging them over her ears, and twisting some in her hair, as if she were a mermaid, her "sea-green ringlets braiding." Then springing from hillock to hillock, she reached the end of the field, and jumped over a fence that skirted a meadow, along which a clear, blue stream glided like an azure ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... out your first intention and conciliate him; for, remember, he has us in the hollow of his hand. Bestow the picture, by all means, and just as many smiles and compliments as he can stand, or you can afford to squander; for you are worse than a mermaid, Miss Harz, for fascination, all the gentlemen say so; and, as ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... as she spoke, and amidst her sincere admiration, her heart, very slightly, sank. She knew enough of painting to see that here was genius. The two fantasies, one representing the spirits of a wind-storm, the other a mermaid fleeing a merman's grasp, were brilliant in color, line and conception. They were things of beauty, but it was a beauty strange, menacing, subhuman. The figures that tore through the clouds urged on the storm with a wicked and abandoned glee. The face of the merman almost ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... come to live with you here, Neal, like a seal or a mermaid. No, no. I've brought you something to eat. Here, now, don't upset my little boat." She pushed the raft towards him. "Isn't it just like the boats we used to make long ago when we were little? Oh! do you remember how angry the salmon men were when you and Maurice ...
— The Northern Iron - 1907 • George A. Birmingham
... course of the evening." Lamb was undoubtedly "matchless as a fireside companion," inimitable as a table-talker, "great at the midnight hour." The "wit-combats" at his Wednesday-evening parties were waged with scarcely inferior skill and ability to those fought at the old Mermaid tavern between Shakspeare and Ben Jonson. Hazlitt, in his delightful essay intituled "Persons One would Wish to have Seen," gives a masterly report of the sayings and doings at one of these parties. It is to be regretted that he did not report the conversation ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... and saw that the sunbeams were running over the wet skerry, and the Mermaid was still sitting by his side. But presently the whole thing changed before his eyes. It was the sun shining through the window-panes, on a bed in the Finn's hut, and by his side sat the Finn girl supporting his back, for they thought he was about to die. He had lain there delirious ...
— Weird Tales from Northern Seas • Jonas Lie
... Having, therefore, discarded these notions, her fancy roved in the realms of the beautiful and fantastic, until it settled down upon a costume which, bespangled and with its garland of rushes, she declared to be that of a "mermaid of middle age." Nobody was in a condition to contradict her, inasmuch as nobody recollected ever having seen a "middle-aged" mermaid before. She floated, as a matter of fact, in a cloud of pink and sea-green laces. The capacious ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg
... strangely near to us. When seeking to solve that curious problem which is discussed in one of Hazlitt's best essays—what characters one would most like to have met?—and running over the various claims of a meeting at the Mermaid with Shakespeare and Jonson, a 'neat repast of Attic taste' with Milton, a gossip at Button's with Addison and Steele, a club-dinner with Johnson and Burke, a supper with Lamb, or (certainly the least ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... father's (the Bishop's) house was his home. That he may have resorted to the Golden Lion, and there have met with Shakespeare, is, therefore, quite as probable as that our great dramatist associated with Fletcher at the Falcon or the Mermaid, if good cause can only be shown for Shakespeare's having had as much reason to frequent Fulham as the Bank-side—or Borough ...
— A Walk from London to Fulham • Thomas Crofton Croker
... cheer, neither he himself conceals it, nor is evidence to the same effect wanting on the part of his contemporaries. Drayton says that he was in the habit of 'wearing a loose coachman's coat, frequenting the Mermaid Tavern, where he drank seas of Canary; then reeling home to bed, and, after a profuse perspiration, arising to his ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis
... that these fabulous beings frequented the sea-coasts of Wales to the great danger of the inhabitants. The description of the Welsh mermaid was just as it is all over the world; she is depicted as being above the waist a most lovely young woman, whilst below she is like a fish with fins and spreading tail. Both mermen and mermaids were fond, it is said, of combing their long hair, and the siren-like song of the latter was thought ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... the window: 'Wines from the Wood. Fine old Sherry, 10d., 8d., and 6d. per dock glass.' He had never tasted sherry. Sherry surely was the drink of many heroes. Shakespeare and Jonson drank it at the Mermaid. He entered the place, called for his wine—'Your best,' he said, as he threw his shilling on the counter—and sat down on a high stool to drink it. Before his glass was empty he had flashed back into high spirits again. He resumed his walk in a new exultation, ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... her hair, long as a mermaid's. Turning her head as she arranged it she saw her own face and form in the glass. Such reflections are soberizing to plain people: their own eyes are not enchanted with the image; they are confident then that the eyes of others can see in it no fascination. But the ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... visionary world where young girls were held aloft in the sunshine of luxury and love and happiness. One day she was lying on her back on the heather of the Peel hill, with her head on her arms, thinking of a story that Aunt Rachel had told her. It was of a mermaid who had only to slip up out of the sea and say to any man, "Come," and he came—he left everything and followed her. Suddenly the cold nose of a pointer rubbed against her forehead, a strong voice cried, "Down, sir!" and a young man of two ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... to add the expression of his approbation of the liberal and judicious assistance rendered to Mr. Oxley, by Lieutenant King, commander of His Majesty's colonial cutter, Mermaid, whose exertions are so justly appreciated by Mr. Oxley, in the following report; and his excellency desires both those gentlemen to accept his thanks for the service thus rendered by their ...
— Journals of Two Expeditions into the Interior of New South Wales • John Oxley
... mermaid's retreat of which the old captain had spoken, and of which the natives on Queen Charlotte's Island had such a strange superstition? Tite thought to himself. All the pleasant associations of home, all that he ...
— The Von Toodleburgs - Or, The History of a Very Distinguished Family • F. Colburn Adams
... hearties, yo heave ho! Anchor's up in Jolly Bay— Hey! Pipes and swipes, hob and nob— Hey! Mermaid Bess and Dolphin Meg, Paddle over Jolly Bay— Hey! Tars, haul in for Christmas Day, For round the 'varsal deep we go; Never church, never bell, For to tell Of Christmas Day. Yo heave ho, my hearties O! Haul in, ...
— Poems • Elizabeth Stoddard
... made strong running on Mermaid, Through furrows that led to the first stake-and-bound, The crack, half extended, look'd bloodlike and splendid, Held wide on the right where the headland ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... positive epoch in her career. How the people of Plainville would have been scandalized if they could have witnessed her shocking familiarity with a horse! She thought of an English girl who had been cut by the good society of Plainville because she dared to ride like a biped instead of a mermaid. And she laughed in a wild exultant freedom, while the wind whipped her hair about her shoulders, and she felt her mount firm beneath her as they cantered across ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... were talking loudly and pointing at something in the water, well ahead of the ship. One vowed it was a big sea-turtle asleep, another was willing to wager his silver-mounted pistols that it was a rum barrel, while a third announced that he'd stake his head on its being a mermaid or her husband. The after-deck brought a spy-glass to bear and perceived that the thing was splashing about. The tiller was shifted to bring it close aboard and soon Captain Bonnet exclaimed that it was, indeed, a merman ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... of scoffers my brier was known as the Mermaid. The mouth-piece was a cigarette-holder, and months of unwearied practice were required before you found the angle at which the bowl did ...
— My Lady Nicotine - A Study in Smoke • J. M. Barrie
... eclogue testifies to their intimacy. And in the 80th Sonnet, Shakespeare uses the same comparison of himself and his rival, to two ships of different bulk, which Fuller used to describe Shakespeare and Ben Jonson as they appeared at the Mermaid Tavern. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... xv. p. 691. The animal referred to by the informants of Onesicritus was the dugong, whose form and attitudes gave rise to the fabled mermaid. See AElian, lib. xvi. ch. xviii., who says it has the face of a woman and spines ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... in her arms and we broke into merry laughter. Then to please her I said that I would gather flowers for her hair—and she would be the stranded mermaid and I the fisherman whom she besought to put her back in the sea and rewarded with three wishes—and I sought flowers everywhere in the hollows and crevices of the bald old Watchman, where, through years, ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... I might turn into a mermaid instead of a fairy or a bird! I often think, though, I'd like a private aeroplane of my own. They're things that are bound to come sooner or later. I only hope I shan't be too old to use one when they do. What a ...
— Monitress Merle • Angela Brazil
... his berth with his head turned so that he could gaze through the open port-hole at the glorious, glistening sea, and as the doctor very softly pushed the door a little open there came clearly to the listeners' ears a scrap of the old sea song, "The Mermaid":— ...
— King o' the Beach - A Tropic Tale • George Manville Fenn
... thee: but see, O my sister, whether thy son be asleep or no." So she felt Badr and finding on him the signs of slumber said to Salih, "He is asleep; what hast thou to say and what is thine object in making sure his sleeping?" Replied he, "O my sister, know that I have bethought me of a Mermaid of the mermaids who befitteth thy son; but I fear to name her, lest he be awake and his heart be taken with her love and maybe we shall be unable to win to her; so should he and we and the Grandees of the realm be wearied in vain and trouble ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... lifted her skirt daintily, and went forward still. Numberless delicate little winged shells were scattered over the moist surface, tenantless homes of tiny bivalves, wonderfully tinted. Rose-pink, brilliant yellow, tawny-white, delicate lilac, it was as though a lapful of blossoms rifled from some mermaid's deep-sea garden, had been scattered by the spoiler at old Ocean's marge. Lynette cried out with pleasure at their beauty, stooped and gathered a palmful, then dropped them. She stood a moment longer drinking in the keen, stinging freshness, then turned ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... Lushington. Mr. Walker, our Surgeon. Mr. Powell, Surgeon. Corporal R. Auger, Corporal John Coles, and Private Mustard of the Corps of Sappers and Miners. J.C. Cox, a Stock-Keeper. Thomas Ruston, a Sailor who had been on the coast of Australia in the Mermaid with Captain King. Evan Edwards, a Sailor. Henry Williams ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 1 (of 2) • George Grey
... Ravenswood, the son of Allan. In love with Lucy Ashton, daughter of Sir William Ashton, lord-keeper of Scotland. The lovers plight their troth at the "Mermaid's Fountain," but Lucy is compelled to marry Frank Hayston, laird of Bucklaw. The bride, in a fit of insanity, attempts to murder the bridegroom, and dies in convulsions. Bucklaw recovers, and goes abroad. Colonel Ashton appoints ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... authorities at Halifax were informed of Allan's expedition and of what was going on at the River St. John they sent the warship "Mermaid" and the sloops "Vulture" and "Hope" with a detachment of troops under Major Studholme to put a stop to the proceedings. Allan's force at the mouth of the river consisted of about sixty men under command of Captains West and Dyer. The "Vulture" arrived on June ...
— Glimpses of the Past - History of the River St. John, A.D. 1604-1784 • W. O. Raymond
... It's an important picture. Really, Kelly, it's great stuff—a still, turquoise-tinted pool among wet rocks; ebb tide; a corking little mermaid caught in a pool left by the receding waves—all tones and subtle values," he declared, ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... "'Tis said a mermaid haunts yon water," said Mrs Harrington; "I have heard many marvellous tales of her, a few years ago. Strange enough, last night I dreamed she took away our little girl, and plunged with her into the water. But ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... threading her needle and deftly sewing a shining, silvery scale onto the mermaid's dress lying across her knees, "I'll take my chances with men. It's better fun to love a man not intended for me, and make him love me, and live happily and defiantly ever after, than to have a horrid old machine ...
— The Green Mouse • Robert W. Chambers
... coach up to London to hear that d—d Jew sing,—referring thus civilly to the respectable John Braham. I have sometimes wished that Shakspeare could make a similar descent, and face his critics. Ah! how much he could tell us over a single bottle of Rosa Solis at some new "Mermaid" extemporized for the occasion! What wild work would he make with the commentators long before we had exhausted the ordinate cups! and how, after we had come to the inordinate, would he be with difficulty ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... cape of Taenaron, From Thunder Mountain's End to Chalcedon, Thou passest now a mermaid of the sea And now a statue of ...
— Life Immovable - First Part • Kostes Palamas |
