"Mythical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... impossible that we have in these passages a trace of some forgotten mythical personage. "Whitaker," says Mr. Wright, "supposes, without any reason, the 'Roberde's knaves' to be 'Robin Hood's men.'" (Vol. ii. p. 506.) It is singular enough, however, that as early as the time of Henry III. we find the term 'consors ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 51, October 19, 1850 • Various
... from the power of matter and translate him into the kingdom of light. According to the Gnostic teaching, Christ is one of these beings of light; he is one of the highest who appeared on earth, and is transformed into a mythical, allegorical being, with his human nature, his sufferings and death completely suppressed. The redeemed soul is then as a kind of angel, or ideal being, brought in triumph into the idealistic realm of light as soon as ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 11 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... withdrawn a hand's-breadth to give him a clear outlook on primordial chaos. Once across the mystic threshold, untrammeled by the hamperings of tradition, unterrified by the threat of the mythical future, the human atom becomes its own law, the arbiter of its own momentary destiny. What it wills to do, it may do—if iron-shod chance, blind and stumbling blindly, does not happen to trample on and efface it. Who first took it on him to say, ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... voice he touched lightly on vast and distant things. He talked of the great Saskatchewan, of Peace River, and the delta of the Mackenzie, of the winter journeys beyond Great Bear Lake into the Land of the Little Sticks, and the half-mythical lake of Yamba Tooh. He spoke of life with the Dog Ribs and Yellow Knives, where the snow falls in midsummer. Before her eyes slowly spread, like a panorama, the whole extent of the great North, with its fierce, hardy men, its dreadful journeys by ...
— Conjuror's House - A Romance of the Free Forest • Stewart Edward White
... on the coast of Thrace near the mouth of the Nestos, and almost opposite Thasos. Its mythical foundation was attributed to Heracles, its historical to a colony from Clazomenae in the 7th century B.C. But its prosperity dates from 544 B.C., when the majority of the people of Teos migrated to Abdera after the Ionian revolt to escape the Persian yoke ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... still think a woman so constituted a mythical personage?" persisted Flavia, nodding her ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... overflowing fountain of life. But we are not aware that he has yet discovered the anastomosis of this conversion, or quite established the fact. We are therefore not yet quite ready to resolve the universe of physical forces into the similitude of the mythical mill-stream, which, flowing round a little hill, came back and fed its own pond. Nevertheless, we believe the physicists have pretty generally agreed to assume as a law of Nature what they call the conservation of force, the principle we have been ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... Paine's body and took the bones home with him in 1819, with the avowed intention of erecting a magnificent monument to his memory by subscription. In the same manner, about two thousand two hundred and fifty years ago, the bones of Theseus, the mythical hero of Democracy, were brought from Skyros to Athens by some Attic [Greek: Kobbetaes]. The description of the arrival in England we quote from a Liverpool journal of the day:—"When his last trunk was ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... very conditions of domestic life give them a superabundance of clinical material. And if, by any chance, such material shows a falling off, they are uneasy and unhappy. Let a woman have a husband whose conduct is not reasonably open to question, and she will invent mythical offences to make him bearable. And if her invention fails she will be plunged into the utmost misery and humiliation. This fact probably explains many mysterious divorces: the husband was not too bad, but too good. For public opinion among women, remember, does ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... Preserved Smith, his latest American biographer, says there is a house shown at Eisleben as Luther's birthplace, but it is "not well authenticated." (p. 2.) There is a bar and a restaurant in this particular building now, for the accommodation of foreign visitors. It is possible that in this mythical birthplace of Luther you can get a stein of foaming "monk's brew" or a "benedictine" from the monastery at Fecamp, or a "chartreuse" from Tarragona, distilled according to the secret formula of the holy fathers of La Grande Chartreuse. ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... with mythical antiquity—the Chimaera has given us 'chimerical,' Hermes 'hermetic,' Pan 'panic,' Paean, being a name of Apollo, the 'peony,' Tantalus 'to tantalize,' Hercules 'herculean,' Proteus 'protean,' Vulcan 'volcano' and 'volcanic,' and Daedalus 'dedal,' ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... amused by the hour, in studying the devices and ornaments on the shelves and chiffonieres; and Blanche had romanced about it to the little ones, till they were erecting it into a mythical palace. ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... now to succeed the philosophy of nature. The Critias is also connected with the Republic. Plato, as he has already told us (Tim.), intended to represent the ideal state engaged in a patriotic conflict. This mythical conflict is prophetic or symbolical of the struggle of Athens and Persia, perhaps in some degree also of the wars of the Greeks and Carthaginians, in the same way that the Persian is prefigured by the Trojan war to the mind of Herodotus, or as the narrative of the ...
— Critias • Plato
... pale complexion," so untidy that on one occasion his appearance in the pulpit is said to have caused half the congregation to go out of church. He gave his whole mind and his whole soul to his work for God. Mythical tales are told of the length of some of his sermons, at a time when an hour's sermon was not considered long. Of one charity-sermon the story is that it lasted three hours and a half, and that Barrow ...
— Sermons on Evil-Speaking • Isaac Barrow
... relates the stirring tale of the Scottish War of Independence. The extraordinary valour and personal prowess of Wallace and Bruce rival the deeds of the mythical heroes of chivalry, and indeed at one time Wallace was ranked with these legendary personages. The researches of modern historians have shown, however, that he was a living, breathing man—and a valiant champion. The hero of the tale fought under both Wallace and Bruce, and while the strictest ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks
... of the entire weight of a man. Wherefore either the strength of the muscles ought to be increased or the weight of the human body must be decreased, so that the same proportion obtains in it as exists in birds. Hence it is deducted that the Icarian invention is entirely mythical because impossible, for it is not possible either to increase a man's pectoral muscles or to diminish the weight of the human body; and whatever apparatus is used, although it is possible to increase the momentum, the velocity or the power employed can never equal the resistance; and therefore ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... the Dresden Gallery is a scene from the mythical story of a goddess who fell in love with the youthful son of a faun and a naiad. Thus she excited the jealous fury of the cyclops, Polythemus, who is seen in the picture herding his flock of sheep upon the ...
— Pictures Every Child Should Know • Dolores Bacon
... long-term, constant funding, the Department of Defense could then give more thought to how to build the most modern, efficient military force within the dollars available. We would no longer define our forces against some mythical threat or scenario which generates impetus to protect force size rather than quality. The Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, and space forces would be required to build a team based on a salary cap. You might be willing to pay big bucks for a B-2 superstar quarterback, ...
— Shock and Awe - Achieving Rapid Dominance • Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade
... "Madame Sans-Gene," A singing Napoleon, Royalties in opera, Henry the Fowler, King Mark, Verdi's Pharaoh, Herod, Boris Godounoff, Macbeth, Gustavus and some mythical kings and dukes, et seq.—Mattheson's "Boris," Peter the Great, Sardou's play and Giordano's opera, Verdi on an operatic Bonaparte, Sardou's characters, "Andrea Chenier," French Rhythms, "Fedora," "Siberia," The historic Chenier, Russian local color, "Schone Minka," "Slava," "Ay ouchnem," ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... waving dark hair which framed it. The girl was one of those bright happy creatures whom men worship and women love, and whom envy can scarcely dislike. She was so infinitely superior to both father and mother, that a believer in hereditary attributes was fain to invent some mythical great-grandmother from whom the girl's graces might have been derived. But she had something of her father's easy good-nature and imprudent generosity; and was altogether one of those impulsive creatures whose lives are perpetual difficulties and dilemmas. More ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... on earth. The reptilian bodies of the elasmosaurs, seventy-five feet in length, with the forked tongues, distended jaws and fangs of a snake, were easily taken for the often described but probably mythical sea-serpent, as partially coiled they occasionally raised their heads twelve ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... that time was not shipping a bushel of wheat. The settlers were just taking care of their own wants, and were feeding the Lady of the Snows up North around Winnipeg. We now know that the snows of the Lady of the Snows are mostly mythical. She is supplying her own food, and we are looking toward her with ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... cases were intensified by the fact that the relationship between them was, in effect, that of servant and master; that Voltaire, under a very thin disguise, was a paid menial, while Frederick, condescend as he might, was an autocrat whose will was law. Thus the two famous and perhaps mythical sentences, invariably repeated by historians of the incident, about orange-skins and dirty linen, do in fact sum up the gist of the matter. 'When one has sucked the orange, one throws away the skin,' somebody told Voltaire that the King had said, on being asked how much longer ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... found himself in rather a deeper bog than usual, he used to justify himself by saying that he could not explain such or such a charge because "the papers referring to it were lost when Mr. Nolan was imprisoned in Texas." Finding this mythical character in the mythical legends of a mythical time, I took the liberty to give him a brother, rather more mythical, whose adventures should be on the seas. I had the impression that Wilkinson's friend was named Stephen,—and as such he is spoken of in this story at ...
— If, Yes and Perhaps - Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact • Edward Everett Hale
... is eager to know whether the boatman's much more complete and connected narrative is a popular mythical development in the years between 1820 and 1890, or whether the schoolmaster of Rannoch did not tell all he knew. It is unlikely, I think, that the siege of Seringapatam would have been remembered so long in connection with the Black Officer if it had not formed part of his original legend. Meanwhile ...
— Angling Sketches • Andrew Lang
... fabulous or mythical, but potent to lure, like the land of El Dorado, abounding in gold and jewels, which for two centuries spurred on Spanish exploration in America. Other than purely material motives may initiate or maintain such a movement, an ideal or a dream of good, like the fountain of eternal youth which ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... As Tigernmas, a mythical king of Ireland, was sacrificing "the firstlings of every issue, and the scions of every clan" to Crom Croich, the king idol, and lay prostrate before the image, he and three-fourths ...
— The Book of Hallowe'en • Ruth Edna Kelley
... arrangement; and then, when husband and wife leave for distant countries, Georges, who cannot bear the thought of being parted from his dear Picciola, enters the service of the young couple and accompanies them on their honeymoon." This mythical journey gives the author opportunities for the subtle psychological analysis of a young lady's heart, strongly inclined to revolt against some of the conventions laid down by ...
— In Bohemia with Du Maurier - The First Of A Series Of Reminiscences • Felix Moscheles
... on these women to have been John Graham of Claverhouse. But it is certain that the effect of his narrative has been, in the minds of most English-speaking men, to add this also to the long list of mythical crimes which have blackened the memory of the ...
— Claverhouse • Mowbray Morris
... Friedrich, at last, almost was,—had not his Infantry just then got in, and given their cannon-salvo. He lost about 200, the Lacy people hardly so many; and is now out of a considerable personal jeopardy, which is still celebrated in the Anecdote-Books, perhaps to a mythical extent. 'Two Uhlans [Saxon-Polish Light-Horse], with their truculent pikes, are just plunging in,' say the Anecdote-Books: Friedrich's Page, who had got unhorsed, sprang to his feet, bellowed in Polish to them: 'What are you doing here, fellows?' 'Excellenz ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... in the collection was that of three portraits belonging to the pre-historical age, and, according to mythical tradition, taken by the orders of a philosopher, whose origin and attributes were as much mixed up with symbolical fable as those of an Indian Budh ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... all my people here? No; the K[o]-l[o]-oo-w[)i]t-si (plumed serpent) is not here; he must come," and two of the K[o]k-k[o] (the Soot-[i]ke) were dispatched for him. This curious creature is the mythical plumed serpent whose home is in a hot spring not distant from the village of Tk[a]p-qu[e]-n[a], and at all times his voice is to be heard in the depths of ...
— The Religious Life of the Zuni Child - Bureau of American Ethnology • (Mrs.) Tilly E. (Matilda Coxe Evans) Stevenson
... of this mythical Bible approached nearer to the burlesque than this excuse for having descendants of the Jews write ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... his frequent commendation in after years indicated that I gained his goodwill before the close of the war, if not when I first came to his notice; and a more intimate association convinced me that the cold and cruel characteristics popularly ascribed to him were more mythical than real. ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... the uniquely decorated walls, upon which hung, here, the shrieking prospectus of a mythical gold-mine; there a small but venomous political placard, and on all sides examples of the uncouth or unusual in paid print; exploitations of grotesque quackeries; appeals, business-like, absurd, or even ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... sleep for the schoolmaster that night. With folded arms he paced his room in restless misery. Now that the die was cast, the ideal Miss Blakely faded from his mind; he felt instinctively that she was mythical. He saw clearly that he had forfeited the best possibilities of life for the sake of temporary convenience, that he had sold his birthright ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... thus form some idea of the general position of American exploration and discovery at the time when Cartier made his momentous voyages. The maritime nations of Europe, in searching for a passage to the half-mythical empires of Asia, had stumbled on a great continent. At first they thought it Asia itself. Gradually they were realizing that this was not Asia, but an outlying land that lay between Europe and Asia and that must be passed by the ...
— The Dawn of Canadian History: A Chronicle of Aboriginal Canada • Stephen Leacock
... from Milesius, mythical Spanish conqueror of Ireland; Evreux town in Normandy, France; a D'Uzes a member of an ancient noble ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper
... however, the effort was in vain; for the moment that sleep stole upon my exhausted frame visions of lakes and springs, murmuring brooks and sparkling fountains of cool, delicious, fresh water arose before me, and I suffered all the agonies of the mythical Tantalus. ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... kept him a bachelor up to the present hour of his life. For the girl on his breast in dark blue is a merely mythical personage, though indelibly stained into his skin by a needle's point and a pinch of gunpowder—done by one of his man-o'-war shipmates while he ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... turned south. His quest was Surprise Lake and the mythical Two Cabins. His traverse was to cut the headwaters of the Indian River and cross the unknown region over the mountains to the Stewart River. Here, somewhere, rumour persisted, was Surprise Lake, surrounded by jagged mountains and glaciers, ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... the right hand of the road, walking eastward, what looks like a huge green mound is visible above a high ancient wall. This is all that is left of St. Triduana's Chapel, and she was a saint who came from Achaia with St. Regulus, the mythical founder of St. Andrews. She died at Restalrig on October 8, 510, and may have converted the Celts, who then dwelt in a crannog in the loch; at all events we hear that, in a very dry summer, the timbers of a crannog were found in the sandy deposit of the lake margin. ...
— James VI and the Gowrie Mystery • Andrew Lang
... so, is a mystery still unsolved. It has always been believed that he found his way to Europe and met with some curious adventures there, and Poe himself certainly alleged that such was the case. Numbers of mythical stories have been invented to account for this chasm in the poet's life, and most of them self-evidently fabulous. In a recent biography of Poe an attempt had been made to prove that he enlisted in the army ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... "peering back into the vistas of the memories of yore," and yet also foreshadowing the images of future things upon the quivering curtains of the mental eye. At such a time the imagination can revel only in the marvellous, the mysterious, and the mythical. The forms of those we love are idealised and spiritualised into angelic shapes. The faces of those we have forgotten long, or else perchance have lost, once more return, seraphic from the realms of light. The lovely forms and winning graces of children ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... those mythical, strange sort of devils who come to earth, you know, and—and—make love to ladies—a sort of Satan like in Marie Corelli's lovely book. You remember, Tamara, the one you were so funny about, laughing when ...
— His Hour • Elinor Glyn
... consequences of uncontrolled power, irresponsibility and impunity. For the purpose of investing an address with the dignity and authority which spring from distant historical allusion, of brightening the prosaic present with something of the glamour of the half-mythical past, even of flattering his auditors with the suggestion that they were the descendants and heirs of the men who had seceded to the Aventine, it was necessary for a popular orator to touch on the great epoch of the struggle between the orders. But Memmius, while ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... through which we were now passing might contain properties that were absent elsewhere, and the special virtues attributed to some of the Saints' Wells in Cornwall in olden times might not have been altogether mythical. ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... there are distinct tendencies on the serpent's body in Tro. 27a. Nor does the fact, that under H's hieroglyph different personages are very often pictured, whom we cannot positively identify, compel the assumption that we have here not one, but two or more mythical figures, for the same is true of other hieroglyphs of gods. There are many places in the manuscripts where the text contains a definite well-known hieroglyph of a god, while the accompanying picture represents some other deity or some other figure ...
— Representation of Deities of the Maya Manuscripts • Paul Schellhas
... Christ. Plutarch was writing at the close of the first century after Christ, and in his parallel Lives of Greeks and Romans, the most famous of his many writings, he took occasion to paint an Ideal Commonwealth as the conception of Lycurgus, the half mythical or all mythical Solon of Sparta. To Plutarch's Life of Lycurgus, as well as to Plato, Thomas More and others have been indebted for some part of the shaping ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... Suomi, descending unwritten from the mythical age to the present day, kept alive from generation to generation by minstrels, or song-men, is regarded as one of the most precious contributions to the literature of the world, made since the time of Milton and the ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... ten years, and had no guns or anything else in her, and was as much a loss to our navy as the fishing up and burning of an old wreck would have been; and 8 gun-boats whose destruction was either mythical, or else which were not national vessels. By deducting all these we reduce James' total by 120 guns, and 2,600 tons; and a few more alterations (such as excluding the swivels in the President's tops, which he counts, etc.), brings his number down to that given above—and also affords a ...
— The Naval War of 1812 • Theodore Roosevelt
... inundations of the thirteenth century," when thousands of people perished. It was only after this inundation took place that the city of Amsterdam arose on the southwest shore of the Zuyder Zee. The story, with the exception of the inundation, is purely mythical.] ...
— Contes et lgendes - 1re Partie • H. A. Guerber
... the United States as instructor; and there the armistice had now caught him. Furthermore, then, before he realised what dreadful thing was happening to him, he had been politely assigned to that vague limbo supposedly inhabited by a mythical organisation known as The Officers' Reserve Corps, and had been given indefinite leave of absence preliminary to being mustered out of the service of ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... overloaded with huge masses of undigested and indigestible learning that they have had no chance of healthy development. But though I have often heard of this personage, I have never met him, and I believe him to be mythical. It is true, no doubt, that many learned people are dull; but there is no indication whatever that they are dull because they are learned. True dullness is seldom acquired; it is a natural grace, the manifestations of which, however modified by education, remain in substance the same. Fill a ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... Maoris "the power of making women fruitful is ascribed to trees. These trees are associated with the navel-strings of definite mythical ancestors, as indeed the navel-strings of all children used to be hung upon them down to quite recent times. A barren woman had to embrace such a tree with her arms, and she received a male or a female child according as she embraced the east or the west side." The ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... for nuns and monks at Streoneshalk in 657 A.D. In 867 the Danes burnt her abbey, and changed the name to Whitby, or Priest-by (white, or priest's house). The abbey was refounded, for monks only, under the Benedictine rule, in 1073, by William de Percy. The nuns in Scott's "Marmion" are mythical ones. The Ammonites of the Scar are said to be headless snakes turned into a coat of stone by ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII. No. 358, November 6, 1886. • Various
... been the fountain head of intellectual gifts, in the age which preceded or introduced the first formations of Human Society, in an era scarcely historical, we may dimly discern an almost mythical personage, who, putting out of consideration the actors in Old Testament history, may be called the first Apostle of Civilization. Like an Apostle in a higher order of things, he was poor and a wanderer, and feeble in the flesh, though he was to do such great things, and to live in the mouths ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... mingled not unfrequently with the "poison ivy" (Rhus toxicodendron). The Bermudians, especially the dark people, have a most exaggerated horror of this bush. They imagine that if one touch it or rub against it he becomes feverish, and is covered with an eruption. This is no doubt entirely mythical. The plant is very poisonous, but the perfume of the flower is rather agreeable, and we constantly plucked and smelt it without its producing any unpleasant effect. The tide was with us when we regained the Flats Bridge, and the galley shot down ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... distant and mythical past, sergeant, but he'd be mighty useful if we had him here. If even a single one of his hundred eyes were to light on Stonewall Jackson, it would be ...
— The Sword of Antietam • Joseph A. Altsheler
... is one of a series of tales dealing with mythical heroes of former times whose acts of prowess are still recounted ...
— Philippine Folk Tales • Mabel Cook Cole
... incredulous about our approaching relief. It has become such a regular thing, this siege life, and all other kinds of life are somehow so far away and so impossible after what we have gone through, that we look upon the outer world as something mythical.... Some men have their minds a little unhinged; two are absolutely mad. One, a poor devil of a Norwegian missionary, who has been living in misery for years in a vain effort to make converts, became so dangerous long ago that he had to be locked ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... continued to appear and disappear alternately for above 400 years, and who visited all the mythical nations of the earth. When not in the human form, he took the form of a ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... Houston was facing, and had two beings just then descended from the mythical regions, he could not have been more astonished than at sight of the pair approaching from the lake. The first was a young girl, apparently about sixteen, but tall and well developed, the scant garments that she wore revealing the beautifully rounded outlines of ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... profession this arose. His was a singular career. He pursued the fleeting testimonial through the mazy symptoms of disease (largely imaginary) and cure (wholly mythical). To extract from the great and shining ones of political life commendations of Certina; to beguile statesmen who had never tasted that strange concoction into asseverating their faith in the nostrum's infallibility for any and all ailments; to persuade into fulsome print solemnly asinine ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... iron-grey horses of the Camargue. All this crowd pushed and jostled before Tartarin's gate, the gate of this fine M. Tartarin who was going to kill lions in the country of the "Teurs". (In Tarascon: Africa, Greece, Turkey and Mesopotamia formed a vast, vague almost mythical country which was called the Teurs... that is the Turks). Throughout this mob the hat shooters came and went, proud of the triumph of their leader, and leaving in their wake, as it ...
— Tartarin de Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... in his mind," softly declared Professor Scotch. "Poor fellow! His brain was turned and he was brought to his death by his fruitless search for the mythical ...
— Frank Merriwell Down South • Burt L. Standish
... or not Duplessis will take that liberty I know not; but you must pardon me if I do. She is a very charming woman, full of talent; and that stream of the world which reflects the stars, with all their mythical influences on fortune, flows ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... tales of mythical heroes have some slight historical basis, they have been so adorned by the fancy of mediaeval bards, and so frequently remodeled with utter disregard of all chronological sequence, that the kernel of truth is very hard to find, and the stories must rather ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber
... Professor Felton has referred to this story, and has appended to it the contradiction of the worthy Doctor. "Amusing anecdotes, some true and many apocryphal, were handed down in College from class to class, and, so far from being yet forgotten, they are rather on the increase. One of these mythical stories was, that on a certain occasion one of the classes applied to the Doctor for what used to be called, in College jargon, a miss, i.e. an omission of recitation. The Doctor replied, as the legend run, 'Ye ask, and ye receive not, because ye ask a-miss.' Many ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... reflecting for the first time that though Polydore Pradel had perished and Berzelius Nibbidard Paragot reigned in his stead, my own borrowed or invented name remained unaltered. Augustus Smith lingered in my memory as a vague, mythical ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... to relegate dragons to the mythical period, or the early ages. I have never seen one any nearer than that old fellow, or with any more life in him. There are many queer signs about, and queer corners, but I think now we will go over to Salem Street and look at some of the pretty old houses, and ...
— A Little Girl in Old Boston • Amanda Millie Douglas
... very moment that disease passes into the category of vital processes, and is recognized as an occurrence absolutely necessary, inevitable, and as one may say, normal under certain given conditions of constitution and circumstance, the medicine-man loses his half-miraculous endowments. The mythical serpent is untwined from the staff of Esculapius, which thenceforth becomes a useful walking-stick, and does not ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... mistake he does not brush away the pigment. He obliterates it by pouring sand on it, and then draws the corrected design on the new surface. The forms of the gods do not appear as I have represented them in the first coat of color. The naked figures of these mythical beings are first completely and accurately drawn and then the clothing is put on. Even in the pictures of the "Long-bodies" (Plate XVII), which are drawn 9 feet in length, the naked body is first made in its appropriate color—white for the ...
— The Mountain Chant, A Navajo Ceremony • Washington Matthews
... remarked, it was Doria that kept him out of Persia. But I could not help thinking that this same Persian journey might have afforded a solution of the whole difficulty. Despatched suddenly to that vaguely known country, he could have taken the mythical manuscript to revise on the journey: the convoy could have been attacked by a horde of Kurds or such-like desperadoes, all could have been slain save a fortunate handful, and the manuscript could have been looted as an important political document and ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... more than a clever adaptation of Plautus to English manners and customs; but a comedy written soon after, Gammer Gurton's Needle, is really an Interlude cast in the Plautean mold. The first English tragedy, Gorboduc, closely imitative of Seneca, but on {30} a mythical British subject and written in English blank verse, did not appear until 1562, nearly a quarter of a century later. Seneca's tragedies had little action, slight characterization, and many extremely long speeches, which often display, however, ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... they engage in any vigorous mental exercise, they are troubled with giddiness and fulness of the head, all which they lay to the account of philosophy. The best thing that can happen to such wretches is to have done with life at once. He quotes mythical authority in support of this doctrine; and reminds his disciples that the practice of the sons of Aeculapius, as described by Homer, extended only to the cure ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... do not care a rush for what men who differ from me do or say, but it has grieved me a little, I confess, to see men who think as I do of the historical and mythical connected with Christianity, who yet repudiate me. It is like putting your hand in your pocket where you expect to find money and discovering that the gold is gone, and that only the copper ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... from heaven, and nothing comes to us in a dream.... The change in ideas, even to the creation of new methods of conception, has reflected little by little the experience of a new life. This, in the revolutions of the last two centuries, was little by little despoiled of the mythical, religious and mystical envelopes in proportion as it acquired the practical and precise consciousness of its immediate and direct conditions. Human thought, also, which sums up this life and theorizes upon it, has little by little been plundered of its theological and metaphysical ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte
... there is a statue which is supposed to be Memnon, the mythical king of Ethiopia, and which at daybreak was said to emit the music of ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... catastrophe has been the miserable weakness displayed by the authorities of Johnstown and the surrounding boroughs. Johnstown needed them sadly for forty-eight hours. There is supposed to be a Burgess, but like most burgesses he is a shadowy and mythical personage. If there had been concerted and intelligent action the fire in the debris at the dam could have been extinguished within a short time after it started. Too many cooks spoiled this ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... Inari Sama is the title under which was deified a certain mythical personage, called Uga, to whom tradition attributes the honour of having first discovered and cultivated the rice-plant. He is represented carrying a few ears of rice, and is symbolized by a snake guarding a bale of rice grain. The foxes wait upon him, and do his bidding. Inasmuch ...
— Folk Tales Every Child Should Know • Various
... learned from him. One of the young men appeared during the day wearing a wooden helmet. It was a helmet obviously patterned after his own, although it had no glass or plastic, and the openings in front of the eyes were left blank. The mythical Earth-hero, Prometheus, had brought fire down from the skies. He had brought the Helmet. He was ...
— Divinity • William Morrison
... intense dramatic imagination is needed, and nothing more. If Homer’s Achaian and Trojan heroes were falsely limned, not they, but Homer’s art, would suffer the injury. If for the purposes of art the poet unduly exalted this one or unduly abased that—if he misread one incident in the mythical life of Achilles, and another in the mythical life of Hector—he did wrong to his art undoubtedly, but none to the memory of a dead man, and none to the peace of a living one. But with him who would paint the portrait of Browning or Rossetti how different is the case! Although he requires ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... 1-119) says that all our data in this respect must be "classed amongst the mythical fables of mythology." He is very sure, but just a ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... of destruction," should have all this while been cutting a somewhat respectable figure in literature, science and the arts, and during most of that period paid its way in the solid and shining metal considered by our rulers to have merely a mythical significance. Or rather he seems to contend that civilization has in fact perished in France, that as "such a tendency to turbulence is destructive of all healthy national growth," the inevitable result has ensued. He admits that there are still some good scholars in ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... delusion, and talked over the old plans for redress of grievances, and a constitutional union with the mother country. With little or no belief in the possibility of either, they stood shivering on the banks of the Rubicon, that mythical river of irretrievable self-committal, hesitating to enter its turbid waters. A few of the bolder "shepherds of the people" tried to urge them onward; but no one was bold enough to dash in first and lead ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... Japanese Hercules destroying the demons and other mythical heroes was a large alcove, or tokonoma, decorated with peacock, stork, and crane panels. Carvings and lacquer added to the beauty of it. A miniature chrysanthemum garden heightened the illusion. Carved hinoki wood framed the panels, and the roof was supported by columns ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... how the idea and recollection of Uncle Brian had permeated through every branch of the Harper family. Almost every family has some such personage, mythical, sublime, exciting the wonder and hero-worship of all the young people. Little Brian opened wide his large grey eyes at the ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... and Miss Curtis undertakes to be convinced by that proof, provided it be one that should carry conviction to a clear, unbiassed mind. I undertake, on the other hand, that if the said proof should be effectual, a mythical personage called Simon Skinflint shall become a supporter of the Female Union ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... it was discredited, we were told that the mythical tendency would explain everything. It showed us how good men could tell lies without knowing it, and how the religious value of an alleged fact in an alleged historical revelation did not in the least depend on its being a fact. And that great discovery, which ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... doctor of laws by that university. Many pleasant and probably true anecdotes have been told to illustrate the good-fellowship of the young advocate among his comrades while a student. There are likewise narratives of his persuasive eloquence and of his influence as a patriot, but these sound mythical. In short, an organized effort of sycophantic admirers, who would, if possible, illuminate the whole family in order to heighten Napoleon's renown, has invented fables and distorted facts to such a degree that the entire ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... in the gradual cooling of the surface of our planet, and first raised sufficiently above the level of the ocean. Moreover, the poetical traditions of the ancient world describe high mountains as the scenes of the first mythical adventures of gods and men—as the resting-places on which celestial or aerial beings alighted from their cloudy habitations, to take up their abode with men, and to become the patriarchs of the human race. Lofty mountains are the points in the geography ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... known, and it was seen that there was nothing of the mythical in the conspiracy against Forster's life, public indignation flamed up afresh at the treatment he had received. When he next came to Leeds, after the trial of the Invincibles, a crowd followed him through the streets ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... Two of these are mentioned and carried back to their mythical sources. All the returning heroes are home from Troy except the chief one, Ulysses, whom Calypso detains in her grot, "wishing him to be her husband;" she, the unmarried, keeps him, the married, ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... if to be one is to permit men to fall into hurtful habits without offering protest against it. I'm losing faith in that friend Homeyer, who I strongly suspect is a mythical apology ...
— At Fault • Kate Chopin
... Cora Quemalusi, after the principal one of the five mythical men who in ancient times lived in the Sierra del Nayarit. Reports say an idol now hidden was once found here. A few miles east of Santa Teresa is a deep volcanic lake, the only remnant of the large flood, the Coras say. It is called "Mother," or "Brother," the last name containing ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... the temple, struck by a son of Pippin after a game of chess; and there is another well-known tradition as to the magnificent chess-board and set of men said to have been sent over as a present by the empress Irene to Charlemagne. But both tales are not less mythical than the romance which relates how the great Frankish monarch lost his kingdom over a game of chess to Guerin de Montglave; for van der Linde shows that there was no Bavarian prince of the name of Okar ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... The trappers killed six of them at one volley, and the rest ran away, leaving twenty-three beautiful longbows behind. The only clothing the dead men had on was snail-shells fastened to the ends of their long locks of hair. The trappers now began to seek more anxiously for the mythical settlements. "A great many times each day," says Pattie, "we bring our crafts to the shore and go out to see if we cannot discover the tracks of horses and cattle." On the 18th they thought some inundated river entering was the cause of a slackening of the current, and finally they ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... might indeed do well to learn at once by heart,—the twenty-seven lines of the Fourth Pythian, which describe the ploughing of Jason. There is nothing grander extant in human fancy, nor set down in human words: but this great mythical expression of the conquest of the earth-clay, and brute-force, by vital human energy, will become yet more interesting to you when you reflect what enchantment has been cut, on whiter clay, by the tracing of finer furrows;—what the delicate ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... are however personalities presiding over the diverse powers of nature or forming their very essence. They have therefore no definite, systematic and separate characters like the Greek gods or the gods of the later Indian mythical works, the Pura@nas. The powers of nature such as the storm, the rain, the thunder, are closely associated with one another, and the gods associated with them are also similar in character. The same epithets are attributed to different gods and it is only in a few specific qualities ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... Gamp lodged on the first floor, where doubtless she helped herself from the "chimley-piece" whenever she felt "dispoged." Here also the quarrel took place between that old lady and her friend Betsey Prig anent that mythical personage, "Mrs. Harris." We pass through Red Lion Square and up Bedford Row, and after proceeding along Theobald's Road for a short distance, turn up John Street, which leads into Doughty Street, where, at No. 48, Charles Dickens lived from 1837 to 1839. The house, situated on the east side ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes
... here given of Odin, Njord, Frey, Freyja, etc., with the purely mythological description of them in the Younger Edda, and with that in Norse Mythology. Upon the whole, Snorre has striven to accommodate his sketch to the Eddas, while he has had to clothe mythical beings with the characteristics of human kings. Like Saxo-Grammaticus, Snorre has striven to show that the deities, which we now recognize as personified forces and phenomena of nature, were extraordinary ...
— The Younger Edda - Also called Snorre's Edda, or The Prose Edda • Snorre
... me to pray, or rather, to say my prayers. I did not, could not, really pray. To me there was no real God. All was as misty and unreal as the mythical stories I had read about the fabled Greek gods. For hours I sought light, and help, and strength; but none came, and when daylight came I was ...
— Roger Trewinion • Joseph Hocking
... Not the semi-mythical Washington of some biographers, but a clear, comprehensive account of the man as he really appeared in camp, in the field, in the councils of his country, ...
— Little Lucy's Wonderful Globe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the ancient Astral worship divided into two distinct classes, the Esoterics, or Gnostics; and the Exoterics, or Agnostics; the former comprising those who knew that the Gods were mythical and the scriptures allegorical; and the latter, those who were taught that the Gods were real, and the scriptures historical; or, in other words, it was philosophy for the cultured few, and religion for the ignorant multitude. The initiates into the secrets of these two systems ...
— Astral Worship • J. H. Hill
... with Miss Ellen Nussey, and with Mr. Nicholls. Miss Nussey never, in all her visits to Haworth, heard a single reference to the Irish legends related by Dr. Wright, and firmly believes them to be mythical. Mr. Nicholls, during the six years that he lived alone at the parsonage with his father-in-law, never heard one single word from Mr. Bronte—who was by no means disposed to reticence—about these stories, and is also of opinion that they ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... Myths do not inspire the souls of men and women by thousands and tens of thousands with heroic zeal and courage, enabling them steadfastly to endure persecution and death for the truth's sake. It was love towards a crucified and risen Saviour in deed and in truth, not towards the mythical idea of such a Saviour, that made the primitive Christians victorious alike over inward sinful affection and outward persecution. To every one who reads the gospel narratives in the exercise of his sober judgment, it is manifest that they are intended to be plain unvarnished statements of facts. ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... to lead his readers on a mad-brained chase after non-existent motor-cars and mythical French gold. He hopes that his readers' patience has not been exhausted, because the ride may prove an instructive education in German methods and the standards of truth accepted in a country where ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... conquest of Kent, Sussex, and Wessex in the curious annals which form the opening of the compilation now known as the "English" or "Anglo-Saxon Chronicle," annals which are undoubtedly historic, though with a slight mythical intermixture. For the history of the English conquest of mid-Britain or the Eastern Coast we possess no written materials from either side; and a fragment of the Annals of Northumbria embodied in the later compilation ("Historia Britonum") which bears the name of Nennius ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... implied the previous existence of our present Gospels. I do not now allude to the presence in it of added traits, such as the cave of the Nativity and the fire on Jordan, which are of the nature of those mythical details that we find more fully developed in the Apocryphal Gospels. I do not so much refer to these—though, for instance, in the case of the fire on Jordan it is highly probable that Justin's statement is a translation ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday
... the war. I understand that this is believed to be the great palace where Belshazzar saw the handwriting on the wall. It is built of bricks, each one of which is stamped in cuneiform characters. There are very fine bas-reliefs of animals, both mythical and real. In the centre is the great stone lion, massively impressive, standing over the prostrate form of a man. The lion has suffered from fire and man; there have even been chips made in it recently by Arab rifles, ...
— War in the Garden of Eden • Kermit Roosevelt
... memory, hope. But never were such treasures of knowledge shared between lovers as between Prometheus and Elenko. Each possessed immeasurable stores, hitherto inaccessible to the other. How trifling seemed the mythical lore which Elenko had gleaned as the minister of Phoebus to that now imparted by Prometheus! The Titan had seen all, and been a part of all that he had seen. He had bowed beneath the sceptre of Uranus, he had witnessed his ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... The mythical realty company prospered, at least if prosperity is measured merely by the bank book. In less than a week the skilful pen and brush of Constance had secured them a balance, after straightening out Carlton's debts, that came well up to a hundred thousand dollars, mostly ...
— Constance Dunlap • Arthur B. Reeve
... Michele was a poor, sickly weed and very black; but he had his pride. He would not be seen smoking a huqa for anything; and he looked down on natives as only a man with seven- eighths native blood in his veins can. The Vezzis Family had their pride too. They traced their descent from a mythical plate-layer who had worked on the Sone Bridge when railways were new in India, and they valued their English origin. Michele was a Telegraph Signaller on Rs. 35 a month. The fact that he was in Government employ made Mrs. Vezzis lenient ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... for Bowen was the proud possessor of not only a resident judge, but also a new courthouse of such ample dimensions that the whole population of the town could have been accommodated therein. How the numerous barristers, solicitors, and the smaller legal fry lived was a mystery. Perhaps, like the mythical French town whose population supported themselves by doing each other's washing, the legal gentry of Bowen existed by performing each other's clerical work. Next in numbers—though not in social standing—were the Government ...
— Tom Gerrard - 1904 • Louis Becke
... truth, whatever it was, concerns us all equally. If the divisions created by that great convulsion are ever to be obliterated, it will be when we have learnt, each of us, to see the thing as it really was, and not rather some mythical or imaginative version of the thing—such as from our own point of view we like to think it was. Fiction in such matters may be convenient for our immediate theories, but it is certain to avenge itself in the end. We may make ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... try once to imagine what you are singing about! It is not an exercise—it is not a love song, either of which you would no doubt perform excellently. Conceive what is happening! Put yourself back into those mythical times. Believe, for this evening, in the story of the forfeited Paradise. There is strife between the Blessed and the Damned; the obedient and the disobedient. There are thick clouds in the heavens—smoke, fire, and sulphur—a clashing of swords in the serried ranks of the angels: can not you see ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... way to the heavier-bodied ancestors of the present race; others consider that the history of the race has been forgotten through the lapse of ages; while the more intelligent and better educated look upon the Menehunes as a mythical class of gnomes or dwarfs, and the account of their exploits as having been handed down by tradition for social entertainment, as other peoples ...
— Hawaiian Folk Tales - A Collection of Native Legends • Various
... hostages of —inhabitants of —township of Acharnians, date fixed —date of Adonis, festivals of Adultery, punishment of Aegaean, Islands of Aegeus, a mythical king Aeschylus, character from —plays after death Aesop, Fable of Aetolian, meaning of Age fixed for playwrights Agoracritus, crime imputed —meaning of Alcibiades, his father Amorgos silks Amphitheus, play on word Amyclae, town near Sparta Anagyra, town, ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... the significance of the fact that my first journey through the German Rhine district, so famous in legend, should have been made on my way home from Paris, it seemed an even more ominous coincidence that my first sight of Wartburg, which was so rich in historical and mythical associations, should come just at this moment. The view so warmed my heart against wind and weather, Jews and the Leipzig Fair, that in the end I arrived, on 12th April, 1842, safe and sound, with my poor, battered, half-frozen ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... right to certain noble arms. The claims put forward in this document are utterly at variance with the received belief in Holbein's humble Augsburg origin. Yet the most expert investigators who have carefully studied this subject agree in thinking that this grandson based the genealogical tree on mythical foundations, and therefore planted it remote from Augsburg itself. But be this as it may—and it seems hard to reconcile such discrepancies within a century of the time when both Hans Holbein the Elder and his son were ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... of Phaedrus is half-mythical, half-ethical; and he himself, true to the character which is given him in the Dialogue bearing his name, is half-sophist, half-enthusiast. He is the critic of poetry also, who compares Homer and Aeschylus in the insipid and irrational manner of the schools of the day, characteristically ...
— Symposium • Plato
... cried the girl; and she ran off, leaving the young sailor in the position of that mythical gentleman ...
— In the King's Name - The Cruise of the "Kestrel" • George Manville Fenn
... in which Mr. Blight spoke of the wedding chilled me. It was so absolutely settled that there was to be a wedding that in me there seemed to be embodied that mythical person who is commanded so sternly to speak or forever hold his peace. For a time I did hold my peace, but it was only because Rufus Blight evinced such a lively interest in my affairs that I had no opportunity to speak of those matters ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... were, a more inland but parallel track, crossing the rivers much lower down. Thus the Field River of Oxley is the NAMOI of Mitchell, Cunningham's Gwydir is recognised by the Surveyor-General, and is probably the mythical KINDUR or KEINDER, whilst the last found river, Mitchell's KARAULA, is formed by the junction of Cunningham's Dumaresque ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... out of the darkness—such a noise as a mythical dragon might have made when a stranger had invaded his home. The effect was instantaneous. The young sailor spun round and darted back to the mouth of the cave, where he half lowered himself down over the shelf facing ...
— The Adventures of Don Lavington - Nolens Volens • George Manville Fenn
... may give us sufficient ground for identifying the period with which a novel deals. Of course the question as to whether a particular person or event is truly historical, is not always an easy one to answer. By the adaptation in it of some purely mythical character or event, a novel is no more constituted "historical" than is a Fairy-tale by the adaptation of folklore. King Arthur and Robin Hood are unhistorical, and, if I have ventured to insert in my list certain tales which deal with the latter, ...
— A Guide to the Best Historical Novels and Tales • Jonathan Nield
... abundant in the river. The thickets of palmetto and the groves of magnolia filling the air with new and cloying fragrance, alternating with other unaccustomed odors which made the grove resemble an orchestra of perfumes, were to me a new and delightful experience. There was a mythical wild turkey in the woods around, and the hope of a shot at him carried me many a mile, though he proved only a myth; but of rattlesnakes and copperheads there was no lack. As I was collecting specimens for the natural-history museum of Cambridge, I canned ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... milliards of human beings who have inhabited the Earth, not one should have been found invariably to choose Good, proves how insufficient is the solution. Hence no one believes in the existence of the complete man under the present state of things. The Hj rejects all popular and mythical explanation by the Fall of Adam, the innate depravity of human nature, and the absolute perfection of certain Incarnations, which argues their divinity. He can only wail over the prevalence of evil, assume its foundation to be error, and purpose to abate it by unrooting that ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... come from? He had it not, and as land stood it was impossible to raise it. Ah, if only that great treasure which old Sir James de la Molle had hid away and died rather than reveal, could be brought to light, now in the hour of his house's sorest need! But the treasure was very mythical, and if it had ever really existed it was not now to be found. He went to his dispatch box and took from it the copy he had made of the entry in the Bible which had been in Sir James's pocket when he ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... recitations. Fairs, festivals, and marriages all over India are attended by the bards, who are always ready to perform for pay and drink. Mr. Leland believes the stories he obtained from the Christian Algonkins of New England, concerning the ancient heroes of the race and other mythical personages, to have once been delivered as poems from generation to generation and always chanted. The deeds of Maori warriors are handed down in song; just as we find in Beowulf, the story of Hrothgar's ancestors was sung before his own companions-in-arms by his gleemen to the accompaniment ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... intently. The name of the town had seemed to be familiar to me. Now I suddenly remembered that it was where Nicolas el Demonio, the pirate who was so famous as to be almost mythical, had ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... efficiency is carried far even in the liberal professions and in professional customs. We all know the story, perhaps a mythical one, of the judge who said to an earnest young barrister who was conscientiously elaborating a question of law: "Now, Mr. So and So, we are not here to discuss questions of law but to settle this business." He did not say ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... and they were all very highly polished. I was naturally excited by this, and an hour before it was time to dress for dinner I slunk upstairs and hurried into the bathroom and locked myself in and turned on all the taps at once. It was strangely disappointing. The sea-water was mythical. Many of the taps refused to function at the same time as any other, and the only two which were really effective were WAVE and FLOOD. WAVE shot out a thin jet of boiling water which caught me in the chest, and FLOOD filled ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 31, 1920 • Various
... what, to those who already have the full belief, must appear a low level. He takes, as it will be seen, the documents as they stand. He takes little more than the first three Gospels, and these as a whole, without asking minute questions about them. The mythical theory he dismisses as false to nature, in dealing with such a Character and such results. He talks in his preface of "critically weighing" the facts; but the expression is misleading. It is true that we may talk of criticism ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... think I have heard, was of the besieging party. [Siege is notorious enough; A.D. 1140: Kohler Reichshistorie, p. 167, who does not mention the story of the women; Menzel (Wolfgang), Geschichte der Deutschen, p. 287, who takes no notice that it is a highly mythical story,— supported only by the testimony of one poor Monk in Koln, vaguely chronicling fifty years after date and at that good distance.] Alas, thinks his Royal Highness, is there not a flower of Welfdom now in England; and I, unluckiest of Hohenzollerns, still far away from her here! It is at Windsor, ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... representative of heavenly justice. With such definitions a large number of customs of public worship and, above all, a number of stories about the gods, were in violent contradiction; thus we find even so old and so pious a poet as Pindar occasionally rejecting mythical stories which he thinks at variance with the sublime nature of the gods. This form of criticism of popular beliefs is continued through the whole of antiquity; it is found not only in philosophers and philosophically educated laymen, but appears spontaneously ...
— Atheism in Pagan Antiquity • A. B. Drachmann
... have the power of idealistic interpretation. To a mother her child is a wonderful being. To a true lover the girl he loves has sacredness. With Jesus the consciousness of a God of love revealed the beauty of men. The old gods were despotic supermen, mythical duplicates of the human kings and conquerors. The God of Jesus was the great Father who lets his light shine on the just and the unjust, and offers forgiveness and love to all. Jesus lived in the spiritual ...
— The Social Principles of Jesus • Walter Rauschenbusch
... earliest Greeks took up the religious and lyrical poetry of the Hebrews; and the schools of the prophets were, however partially and imperfectly, represented by the mysteries derived through the corrupt channel of the Phoenicians. With these secret schools of physiological theology, the mythical poets were doubtless in connexion, and it was these schools which prevented polytheism from producing all its natural barbarizing effects. The mysteries and the mythical hymns and paeans shaped themselves gradually into epic poetry and history on the one hand, and into the ethical tragedy and philosophy ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... contain very little that is valuable to the general reader. Their terms and signs are to the uninitiated suggestive of a doctor's prescription. But the anecdotes of the game are, many of them, remarkable; and we believe they are known to have less of the mythical about them than those told in other departments. One who knows the game will feel that it is sufficiently absorbing to be woven in with the textures of government, of history, and of biography. It is of the nature of chess gradually to gather up all the senses and faculties ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... her hair, fine in texture, and in colour golden-brown, grew very low in thick ripples on a broad forehead. The illusion of the remote or mythical was intensified by the symmetry of her slim figure, by her spiritual eyes, and beautiful, Pagan mouth. Tall and slender, her rounded arms and fine hands with their short pointed fingers seemed to terminate naturally in anything she held, such as a fan ...
— The Twelfth Hour • Ada Leverson
... attempt to return to England by way of the Spanish Main with a ship so heavily laden that she must sail slowly. It was then that legends of a North-East Passage came into his mind. He would sail northward in search of the strait that was supposed to lead through the continent to the Atlantic—the mythical strait of Anian. As the world knows, there was no such passage; but how far north did Drake sail seeking it? Some accounts say as far as Oregon; others, as far as the northern coast of California; but, at all events, as he advanced farther ...
— Pioneers of the Pacific Coast - A Chronicle of Sea Rovers and Fur Hunters • Agnes C. Laut
... citizens and the students, at a nocturnal fte in celebration of the burial of Euclid. The phraseology and some of the moral characteristics of Connecticut are quite peculiar. It is remarkable for learning, the useful arts, successful and energetic merchants and farmers; the mythical Sam Slick, the prince of pedlars; and his living equal, Barnum, the prince of showmen. A love of good order and a pervading religious sentiment appear to accompany great simplicity of manners in its rural population, though the Southerners, jealous of the virtues ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... mythical. He is reality. He is yet about three hundred yards distant. I might not have heard him, even with the aid of the cleft, but tonight Areskoui has given uncommon power to my ear, perhaps to aid us, ...
— The Masters of the Peaks - A Story of the Great North Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... because Apollo was the great leader of the Greek movement in Roman religion that Augustus chose to honour him. A far more important consideration guided him, for Apollo was especially attached to the Julian house in all its mythical and historical fortunes. The first great public evidence of Apollo's favour in Augustus's career was at the battle of Actium; but while this led to the first proclamation of the emperor's devotion to Apollo, it was ...
— The Religion of Numa - And Other Essays on the Religion of Ancient Rome • Jesse Benedict Carter
... Never that!" cried Bud, calling upon a sort of mythical patron saint whose identity he jealously concealed from his cousins. "When we start herding sheep, Professor, the world ...
— The Boy Ranchers at Spur Creek - or Fighting the Sheep Herders • Willard F. Baker
... again and again, each time to be driven out as before, squealing loudly. Notwithstanding these interruptions, we carried on a most interesting conversation with Guzman. He had been to Conservidayoc and had himself actually seen ruins at Espiritu Pampa. At last the mythical "Pampa of Ghosts" began to take on in our minds an aspect of reality, even though we were careful to remind ourselves that another very trustworthy man had said he had seen ruins "finer than Ollantaytambo" near Huadquina. Guzman did not seem to dread Conservidayoc as much as the other Indians, ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... works seem founded on astronomy vaporized under the influence of the idea that there are millions of universes all equally transitory and unsubstantial. There is no reason, so far as I see, to regard Gotama as a mythical solar hero, but the celestial Buddhas[78] clearly have many solar attributes. This is natural. Solar deities are so abundant in Vedic mythology that it is hardly possible to be a benevolent god without having something of the character ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... from that stream, owing to the wayward trick of Indian rivers carving out for themselves new channels during seasons of extraordinary flood. The city is old beyond the records of history, its name and fame glimmering faintly in the dim and distant perspective of ancient Hindostani legend and mythical tales. Within the last few hundred years, Kurnaul has been taken and retaken, plundered and destroyed, by Sikh, Rajput, Mogul, and Mahratta freebooters, and was occupied in 1795 by the celebrated adventurer George Thomas, who figured so largely in the military history ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... Achilles might possibly never have existed. But the Duke of Wellington was really alive, and Bony had not been long dead; therefore Mr. Poulter's reminiscences of the Peninsular War were removed from all suspicion of being mythical. Mr. Poulter, it appeared, had been a conspicuous figure at Talavera, and had contributed not a little to the peculiar terror with which his regiment of infantry was regarded by the enemy. On afternoons when ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... where fabulous treasures were not said to have been hidden by this worthy marooner. Now we are assured that he never was a pirate, and never did bury any treasure, excepting a certain chest, which he was compelled to hide upon Gardiner's Island—and perhaps even it was mythical. ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard Pyle
... Much the same may be said of Daedalus. It need not be discussed here whether an actual artist of this name ever existed. The information we have as to Daedalus is of two kinds; on the one hand, we find tales of a mythical craftsman and magician, to whose invention many of the most typical improvements in early Greek sculpture are attributed; on the other hand, we have records of many statues of the gods, extant in historical times ...
— Religion and Art in Ancient Greece • Ernest Arthur Gardner
... the free association test, [Footnote: See p. 380.] the stimulus word "dimple" calls up the previously made response of seeing a dimple in a cheek, and so leads to the word "cheek". In a controlled association test, where opposites are required, the stimulus word "mythical" arouses the previously made observation of the antithesis of mythical and historical, and so leads to the motor response of saying the ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... that Florimel loves me for myself alone: it is my title which dazzles her. And I would that I had never made myself the emperor of Noumaria: for this emperor goes about everywhere in a fabulous splendor, and is, very naturally, resistless in his semi-mythical magnificence. Ah, but these imperial gewgaws distract the thoughts of Florimel from the real Jurgen; so that the real Jurgen is a person whom she does not understand at all. And it is ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... and subtlety, gaining the favor of his god by a fidelity which expresses itself by vows and sacrifices and scarcely at all by morality; and hardly attractive except in the tenderness of his family relations. A mythical figure, he is a marvelous embodiment of the persistent race-traits of the Jew—tenacity, craft, devoutness—in the early phase. It is a very earthly phase, but with the germs of a marvelous development. Later, ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... Old Men, and torn with incurable feuds. And Tembinok' is no Bourbon; rather the son of a Napoleon. Of course he is well-born. No man need aspire high in the isles of the Pacific unless his pedigree be long and in the upper regions mythical. And our king counts cousinship with most of the high families in the archipelago, and traces his descent to a shark and a heroic woman. Directed by an oracle, she swam beyond sight of land to meet her revolting paramour, and received at sea the seed of a predestined family. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Kate fled down the alley, and Dick was left to explain whatever he pleased concerning the mythical lady whom he declared he had ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... of circumstances. These Plato proposes to leave to a younger generation of legislators. The action of courts of law in making law seems to have escaped him, probably because the Athenian law-courts were popular assemblies; and, except in a mythical form, he can hardly be said to have had before his eyes the ideal of a judge. In reading the Laws of Plato, or any other ancient writing about Laws, we should consider how gradual the process is by which not only a legal system, ...
— Laws • Plato |
