"Odyssey" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... skill in criticism, and have been reading Greek for fifty years to none effect, or Chapman is far nearer Homer than any modern translator in any modern language. He is nearer in the Iliad than in the Odyssey—an advantage resulting from his choice of vehicle. In the Odyssey he chose the heroic couplet, which never can give the rise and fall of the hexameter. In the Iliad, after some hesitation between the two ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... neither read nor write. No more, most probably, could the author of the Odyssey. No more, for that matter, could Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, though they were plainly, both in mind and manners, most highly-cultivated men. Reading and writing, of course, have now become necessaries of humanity; and ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... publishing his stories for reasons which cast more discredit on the American editor than on Mr. Dwight, and accordingly it is a genuine pleasure to encounter "The Emperor of Elam," and to chronicle the hardihood of the editor of the Century Magazine. The story is a modern odyssey of adventure, set as usual in the Turkish background with which Mr. Dwight is most familiar. In it atmosphere is realized completely for its own sake, and as a motive power urging the lives of his ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... proximity of the rusty grate, where smoked and smouldered a pile of black turf from the bog—a deal table without a piece of baize to cover it, yet fraught with things not devoid of interest: a Bible, given by a mother; the Odyssey, the Greek Odyssey; a flute, with broad silver keys; crayons, moreover, and water colours, and a sketch of a wild prospect near, which, though but half finished, afforded ample proof of the excellence and skill of the boyish hand ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... story in rhyme of the fortunes of Helen, the theory that she was an unwilling victim of the Gods has been preferred. Many of the descriptions of manners are versified from the Iliad and the Odyssey. The description of the events after the death of Hector, and the account of the sack of Troy, is chiefly ...
— Helen of Troy • Andrew Lang
... that remarkable eleventh book of Homer's Odyssey, known as the Necromanteia, or Invocation of the Dead, and in it Ulysses descends into the regions of the departed spirits to invoke them and obtain advice as to his future adventures. One commentator ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... Fairyland, and captures of mortals by Fairies: the Editor has said his say in his edition of Kirk's Secret Commonwealth. The Nereids, in Modern Greece, practise fairy cantrips, and the same beliefs exist in Samoa and New Caledonia. The metamorphoses are found in the Odyssey, Book iv., in the winning of Thetis, the Nereid, or Fairy Bride, by Peleus, in a modern Cretan fairy tale, and so on. There is a similar incident in Penda Baloa, a Senegambian ballad (Contes Populaires de la Senegambie, Berenger Ferand, Paris, 1885). The dipping of Tamlane has precedents ...
— A Collection of Ballads • Andrew Lang
... Pope, born 1688, died 1744. The author of numerous poems and translations, all of them marked by the same lucid thought and polished versification. The Essay on Man, the Satires and Epistles, and the translations of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, are amongst the ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... population had become Hellenized at the time of the composition of the Homeric poems. In Corcyra, on the other hand, the original barbarism lasted longer. Such, at least, is the way in which I interpret the passages in the Odyssey concerning the Phaeacians (who were certainly not Greek), and the later language of Thucydides respecting the relations of the Corinthian colonies of Epidamnus, and Corcyra. The whole context leads to the belief that, originally, the {apoikoi} were Greeks in contact ...
— The Ethnology of the British Colonies and Dependencies • Robert Gordon Latham
... evidence derived from the books themselves showing similarities of style and method of treating subjects too great for us to admit non-identity in the writers. M. Reynaud lived at a time when it was all the fashion to suggest that old works that had come down to us, like the Iliad and the Odyssey, and even such national epics as the Cid and the Arthur Legends and the Nibelungenlied were to be attributed to several writers rather than to one. We have passed that period of criticism, however, and have reverted to the ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... and infinitely diversified pictures of all the passions and affections, public and private, incident to human nature,—the relations of son, of brother, parent, friend, citizen, and many others. Longinus preferred the Iliad to the Odyssey, on account of the greater number of battles it contains; but I can neither agree to his criticism, nor assent to the present objection. It is true, there is little action in this part of Milton's poem; but there is much ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... which lay over against the port of Alexandria, had been connected with the mainland in the middle by a narrow causeway. On it stood the lighthouse. (See Book IX, 1191.) Proteus, the old man of the sea, kept here his flock of seals, according to the Homeric story. ("Odyssey", Book IV, 400.) (26) Younger sister ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... gentlemen-adventurers, and merchant-adventurers should be studied in Hakluyt's collection of Principal Navigations, Voiages, Traffiques, and Discoveries; though many of his original authors were landsmen while a few were civilians as well. This Elizabethan Odyssey, the great prose epic of the English race, was first published in a single solemn folio the year after the Armada—1589. In the nineteenth century the Hakluyt Society reprinted and edited these Navigations and many similar works, though not without employing some editors who had no ...
— Elizabethan Sea Dogs • William Wood
... sun all tracks and ways In darkness lay enshrouded. And e'en thus The utmost limit of the great profound At length we reach'd, where in dark gloom and mist Cimmeria's people and their city lie Enveloped ever.—ODYSSEY (MUSGROVE) ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... cubits in breadth, and nine fathoms tall. They even threatened the immortals, raising the din of tumultuous war on Olympus, and strove to set Ossa upon Olympus and wood-clad Pelion upon Ossa, in order to scale heaven. But Jove destroyed them both." Odyssey, xi. 306-317. ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri
... that Homer was made up of detached fragments. Dr Johnson denied this; observing, that it had been one work originally, and that you could not put a book of the Iliad out of its place; and he believed the same might be said of the Odyssey. ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... proportions. I, for my part, believe a time will come when we shall see better than we see now what the Reformation was, and what we owe to it, and these sea-captains of Elizabeth will then form the subject of a great English national epic as grand as the 'Odyssey.' ...
— English Seamen in the Sixteenth Century - Lectures Delivered at Oxford Easter Terms 1893-4 • James Anthony Froude
... had come in contact, the poet became interested, and a friendly feeling was established between them. Several interviews took place, and the poet presented his good friend and namesake, the minister of Reay, with a copy of the subscription edition of the 'Odyssey' ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... a dead bird.]—The curious word, [Greek: empeplegmenen], seems to be taken from Odyssey xxii. 469, where it is applied to birds caught in a snare. As to the motives of Oedipus, his first blind instinct to kill Jocasta as a thing that polluted the earth; when he saw her already dead, ...
— Oedipus King of Thebes - Translated into English Rhyming Verse with Explanatory Notes • Sophocles
... the slave of M. Livius Salinator. He wrote both comedies and tragedies, of which Cicero (Brutus 18) speaks very contemptuously, as "Livianae fabulae non satis dignae quae iterum legantur,"—not worth reading a second time. He also wrote a Latin Odyssey, and some hymns, and died probably ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... government of Egypt under Pharaoh with that in China in the days of Confucius and with that of Greece in the days of the siege of Troy. Homer, Iliad and Odyssey; ...
— The Making of a Nation - The Beginnings of Israel's History • Charles Foster Kent and Jeremiah Whipple Jenks
... river pilot who signed himself "Mark Twain" took its soundings! Then came a series of far greater books—"Roughing It," "Life on the Mississippi," "The Gilded Age" (in collaboration ), and "Tom Sawyer" and "Huckleberry Finn"—books that make our American "Odyssey", rich in the spirit of romance and revealing the magic of the great river as no other pages can ever do again. Gradually Mark Twain became a public character; he retrieved on the lecture platform the loss of a fortune earned by his books; he enjoyed his honorary D. Litt. from Oxford University. ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... our day writing exactly in the spirit of the heroic ages, with no thought or feeling suggested by the experience of the last two thousand years, it will fully answer his expectations. The work is so far Greek as to read in many parts like Chapman's translation of the Odyssey; though it must be confessed that Homer is, if not a better Pagan, at least a greater poet than Mr. Morris. Indeed, it appears to us that Mr. Morris's success is almost wholly in the reflected sentiment and color of his work, and it seems, therefore, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... bequeathed the large collection he brought from Italy to Jesus College, Cambridge. It is scattered and gone from there, but books of Gunthorpe's survive in a good many libraries. One deserves special mention—a Latin prose version of the Odyssey, which he picked up (not in Italy, though it is an Italian book, but at Westminster) in 1475. Probably it was the first copy of the Odyssey in any form that had come to this country since Roman times, unless, indeed, Archbishop Theodore brought one over in the seventh century. Archbishop ...
— The Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts - Helps for Students of History, No. 17. • M. R. James
... sublime, says Longinus, is often nothing but the echo or image of magnanimity; and where this quality appears in any one, even though a syllable be not uttered, it excites our applause and admiration; as may be observed of the famous silence of Ajax in the Odyssey, which expresses more noble disdain and resolute indignation than any language can ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals • David Hume
... There was a kind of paper called papyrus, made from a reed which grew mostly in Egypt, but this was expensive. Rolls were made of sheets of it pasted together, and these were their books. One of the books the boys studied much was the poems of Homer—the Iliad and the Odyssey—which tell about the siege of Troy and the wanderings of Ulysses. Boys often learned these long poems by heart. They also stored away in their memories the sayings of other poets and wise men, so that they could generally know what to think, having with them so many good and wise thoughts put ...
— Introductory American History • Henry Eldridge Bourne and Elbert Jay Benton
... will. For this reason Aristotle (De Anima iii, 3) ascribed to those who held that intellect differs not from sense, the theory that "such is the will of men, as is the day which the father of men and of gods bring on" [*Odyssey xviii. 135] (referring to Jupiter, by whom they understand the entire heavens). For all the sensitive powers, since they are acts of bodily organs, can be moved accidentally, by the heavenly bodies, i.e. through those bodies being moved, whose acts ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... there truly begins to be himself. The battle of the Scamander, the funeral of Patroclus, and the high and solemn close of the whole bloody tale in tenderness and inexpiable sorrow, are wrought in a manner incomparable with anything of the same kind. The Odyssey is sweet, but there is nothing like this." About this time, prompted by Mrs. Gisborne, he began the study of Spanish, and conceived an ardent admiration for Calderon, whose splendid and supernatural fancy tallied with his own. ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... the fault of most of them is merely one of magnitude; they are not large enough; they travel in small orbits, they play on muted strings. They sing neither of the combats of Atriedes nor the labors of Cadmus, but of the tea-table and the Odyssey of the Rialto. Flaubert said that a drop of water contained all the elements of the sea, save one—immensity. Mr. Norris is concerned only with serious things, he has only large ambitions. His brush is bold, his color is taken fresh ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... of jesters at the courts of the barons? What should we do without the 'Vicar of Wakefield,' the 'Compleat Angler,' 'Pepys' Diary,' and all the rest of the ancient books? And, going back a few centuries, what an amount we should miss had we not 'AEsop's Fables,' the 'Odyssey,' the tales of the Trojan War, and so on. It is from the archaeologist that one must expect the augmentation of this supply; and just in that degree in which the existing supply is really a necessary part of our equipment, so archaeology, ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... Poeticks, mentions him by no other appellation than that of the Poet. He was the father of the drama as well as the epic; not of tragedy only, but of comedy also; for his Margites, which is deplorably lost, bore, says Aristotle, the same analogy to comedy as his Odyssey and Iliad to tragedy. To him, therefore, we owe Aristophanes as well as Euripides, Sophocles, and my poor Aeschylus. But if you please we will confine ourselves (at least for the present) to the Iliad, his noblest work; though neither Aristotle nor Horace give it the preference, ...
— Joseph Andrews, Vol. 2 • Henry Fielding
... O'Neill, O'Brien, O'Donnell, steps out of a past well-nigh co-eval with the heroisms and tragedies that uplifted Greece and laid Troy in ashes, and swept the Mediterranean with an Odyssey of romance that still gives its name to each chief island, cape, and promontory of the mother sea of Europe. Ireland, too, steps out of a story just as old. Well nigh every hill or mountain, every lake or river, bears the name today it bore a thousand, two thousand, years ago, and one recording ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... Mr. Br[oo]me ever asserted or complain'd, he was not gratify'd with a competent Sum for his Share in the Odyssey; nay did not own that ...
— Two Poems Against Pope - One Epistle to Mr. A. Pope and the Blatant Beast • Leonard Welsted
... one opens the Odyssey, he will find that the Phaeacians, three thousand years ago, were wonderfully like these youthful Marbleheaders. The blue-eyed Goddess who convoys Ulysses, under the disguise of a young maiden of the place, gives him some ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... of Helen; "The Fate of the Children of Lir," a story that has as its base the folk-tale that underlies "Lohengrin," but which takes us back farther into the past in its kinship to "Medea"; and "The Sons of Tuireann," which has been called the Irish Odyssey. Of these the first is incomparably the finest story, and Lady Gregory has told it nobly in "Cuchulain of Muirthemne," but it alone of all the stories in her three books of translations has enough of humanity in ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... and grandeur alone seemed to have value. From Hertz my sympathies went over to Christian Winther, from Baggesen to Homer, Aeschylus, the Bible, Shakespeare, Goethe. One of the first things I did as a student was to read the Bible through in Danish and the Odyssey in Greek. ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... with which Mistress Skerret and Lady Rich and the Countess of Bristol, languid Lord Hervey's mother, and adoring Mr. Pope received these marvellous letters, which were destined to rank with the epistles of the younger Pliny and of Madame de Sevigne. Mr. Pope—whose translation of the "Odyssey" had not yet made its appearance—may well have thought that Ulysses himself had not seen men and cities to greater advantage than the beautiful wanderer whom he was destined first {150} to love and then to hate. As we ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... The breakfast, as we hinted in the conclusion of the last chapter, was admirable. There was a pate de Perigord, over which a gastronome would have wished to live and die, like Homer's lotus eaters [see the Odyssey, chap. ix, where Odysseus arrives at the land of the Lotus eaters: "whosoever of them ate the lotus's honeyed fruit resolved to bring tidings back no more and never to leave the place, but with the Lotus eaters there desired to stay, to feed on lotus and ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... steady grubbing pace with which he was obliged to go over the classis ground at Grey Friars, scenting out each word and digging up every root in the way. Pen never liked to halt, but made his tutor construe when he was at fault, and thus galloped through the Iliad and the Odyssey and the charming, wicked Aristophanes. But he went so fast that though he certainly galloped through a considerable extent of the ancient country, he clean forgot it in after life. Besides the ancient poets, Pen read ...
— Boys and girls from Thackeray • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... resource. The point is to come out on the top. Odysseus yields to sensual delight, he is cruel, vindictive, and incredibly deceitful. It is evident that successful beguiling, the power of telling an elaborate, plausible, and imperturbable lie on occasions, is an heroic quality in the Odyssey. Odysseus is not a man who scorns to deceive, or who would rather take the consequences than utter a falsehood. His strength rather lies in his power, when at bay, of flashing into some monstrous fiction, dramatising the situation, playing ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Perhaps that was it—to barter his phantom greatness for money, to dazzle some rich fool of an American girl. In that case Karlov would be welcome. But wait a moment. The chap had come in from the west. In that event there should be an Odyssey of some kind ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... out that Homer calls great and good men "god-like" and "God's compeers," but the word Daemon is applied to the good and bad indifferently (see Odyssey, vi. 12; Iliad, xiii. 810, v. 438, iv. 31, &c.). Plato assigns to the Olympian Gods good things and the odd numbers, and the opposite to the Daemons. Xenocrates believed in the existence of a series of strong and powerful beings ...
— Legends Of The Gods - The Egyptian Texts, edited with Translations • E. A. Wallis Budge
... The servants in the Odyssey who cared for hogs and cattle etc. were certainly in a better condition in many respects than the peasants of Attica, who were free, but buried in debt until the time of Solon. Concerning the mildness of the treatment of slaves in very early Roman times, ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... with the antiquity of the dance, practically as we have it, from lines 187-8, Book VI. of the Odyssey: ...
— The Dawn and the Day • Henry Thayer Niles
... permitted, it has not been possible to deal with more than a small number of myths, and the well-known stories of Herakles, of Theseus, and of the Argonauts have been purposely omitted. These have been so perfectly told by great writers that to retell them would seem absurd. The same applies to the Odyssey and the Iliad, the translations of which probably take rank amongst the finest translations in ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... and they possess the rare and distinguished quality of being as true to fact and nature, as they are brilliant in poetical expression. Childe Harold's Pilgrimage is the most faithful descriptive poem which has been written since the Odyssey; and the occasional scenes introduced into the other poems, when the action is laid in Greece, ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... should not go on with the Iliad. That enterprise he should leave to powers which he admitted to be superior to his own. His only view, he said, in publishing this specimen was to bespeak the favour of the public to a translation of the Odyssey, in which he had ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... questions, which were unworthy of wise men, the dispute whether Homer wrote both the Iliad and Odyssey, and in what countries Ulysses wandered. Notwithstanding the "Stoic's philosophic pride," these inquiries have still an interest to minds of the highest order—such is the homage which genius extorts ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 476, Saturday, February 12, 1831 • Various
... principal statesmen of all Italy. Cato himself took a voyage, when he had the concern of an expedition lying upon him, to see and hear Athenodorus; and Scipio sent for Panaetius, when he was commissioned by the senate "to take a survey alike of the habits of men good and bad," ("Odyssey," xvii. 487.) as Posidonius says. Now what a pretty sort of return would it have been in Panaetius to send word back,—"If indeed you were in a private capacity, John a Nokes or John a Stiles, that had a mind to get into some obscure ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... the tale. Mr. Gladstone caught a glimpse of it at a friend's house and did not rest the next day until he had procured a copy for himself, and Andrew Lang said: "This is the kind of stuff a fellow wants. I don't know when, except Tom Sawyer and the Odyssey, that I ever liked a ...
— The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson for Boys and Girls • Jacqueline M. Overton
... Eim' Odysseus Daertiades hos pasi doloisi Anthropoisi melo, kai meu kleos ouranon ikei.] Odyssey, book ix., 19 ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... Thus began the oddest Odyssey on which ever mortals embarked. The man with the automobile, the corn-cure, and the baby grew to be legendary in the villages of Provence. When the days were fine, Jean in his basket assisted at the dramatic ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... v. I. In these we have either the taboo on the name, or the taboo on the touch of iron. In a widely diffused superstition iron 'drives away devils and ghosts,' according to the Scholiast on the eleventh book of the 'Odyssey,' and the Oriental Djinn also flee from iron. {82c} Just as water is fatal to the Aryan frog-bride and to the Red Indian beaver-wife, restoring them to their old animal forms, so the magic touch of iron breaks love between ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... literature itself. They date back to the very origin of polite letters, both prose and poetic. It matters nothing whether there was one Homer, or whether there may have been a score of Homers, so far as the fact of oral publication applies to the Iliad and the Odyssey, nearly a thousand years (900) before the foundation of Christianity. By the lips of a single bard, or of a series of bards, otherwise of public declaimers or reciters, the world was first familiarised with the many enthralling tales ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... but their experiments failed; and they lost, if not their money, at least a certain portion of their fame in the trial—while you touched the mantle of the divine bard, and imbibed his spirit. I hope we shall have the Odyssey soon from your happy hand; and I think I shall follow, with singular pleasure, the traveller Ulysses, who was an observer of men and manners, when he travels in your harmonious numbers. I love him much better than the hot-headed son ...
— Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e • Lady Mary Wortley Montague
... distinguishable from other forms of literature; but to talk at all fruitfully of any branch of art, it is needful to build our definitions on some more fundamental ground than binding. Why, then, are we to add "in prose"? "The Odyssey" appears to me the best of romances; "The Lady of the Lake" to stand high in the second order; and Chaucer's tales and prologues to contain more of the matter and art of the modern English novel than the whole treasury of Mr. Mudie. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... craving after a more advanced civilization was already powerfully stirring the minds of men. Instruction in the Greek language as it were spontaneously met this craving. The classical literature of Greece, the Iliad and still more the Odyssey, had all along formed the basis of that instruction; the overflowing treasures of Hellenic art and science were already by this means spread before the eyes of the Italians. Without any outward revolution, strictly speaking, in the character of the instruction the natural ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... at four o'clock in the morning, and were usually understood to mean soda biscuits and a dish of buffalo milk. And suppose that then you came across the complete works of Shakespeare—and that you had never read them—or the Odyssey and that you had never read that—or, better, suppose that there was a Steinway piano in your sitting-room, and that one day the boy who worked the punka for you dropped the rope and sat down at the piano and played Beethoven from beginning to end—as Rubenstein would ...
— The Spread Eagle and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... are what my labels symbolised and recalled to me. That lost collection was a running record of all my happiest hours; a focus, a monument, a diary. It was my humble Odyssey, wrought in coloured paper on pig-skin, and the one work I never, never was weary of. If the distinguished Ithacan had travelled with a hat-box, how finely and minutely Homer would have described it—its depth and girth, ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... elliptical way of saying that he was a philosopher, an artist, a traveller, a naturalist and a discoverer. But most of all he was a poet. In all his life he never wrote a line of verse; he lived his poetry. His Odyssey would have been a Limerick, had it been written. But, to linger with the primary proposition, ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... eminent painter, we believe Barry, said that, when he went into the street after reading it, men seemed ten feet high. Pope averred that the translation of the Iliad might be supposed to have been written by Homer before he arrived at years of discretion; and Coleridge declares the version of the Odyssey to be as truly an original poem as the Faery Queen. Chapman himself evidently thought that he was the first translator who had been admitted into intimate relations with Homer's soul, and caught by direct contact the sacred fury of his inspiration. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... in demons, but, different from the nations around them, considered the demons to be well-intentioned. Homer (c. 1000 B. C.) speaks frequently of demons, and in one instance in the Odyssey tells of a sick man pining away, "one upon whom a hateful demon had gazed." Empedocles (c. 490-430 B. C.) taught that demons "were of a mixed and inconstant nature, and are subjected to a purgatorial process which may ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... it will be found, was strictly in accordance with the manners of the ancient Greeks, among whom piracy was so far from being looked upon in any other light than that of an honourable profession, that Nestor himself, in the third book of the Odyssey, asks his guests, Telemachus and Mentor, as an ordinary question, whether business or piracy was the object of their voyage. But the Bucoli (herdsmen or buccaniers,) over whom Thyamis held command, should probably, notwithstanding their practice of rapine, be regarded not so much as robbers as ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... connected with war, as the hurling of a javelin or shooting of an arrow over the enemy's ranks as a "sacratio" to Woden of the foe at the beginning of a battle. This is recorded in the older vernacular authorities also, in exact accordance with the Homeric usage, "Odyssey" xxiv, 516-595. ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... our Pickwickian Odyssey that it can be followed in all its stages as in a diary. To put it all in "ship shape" as it were and enhance this practical feeling I have drawn out the route in a little map. It is wonderful how much the party saw and how much ground they covered, and it is not a far-fetched idea that were a similar ...
— Pickwickian Manners and Customs • Percy Fitzgerald
... there are "as it were sparks of virtue"—half-unconscious principles of love and gratitude; and these germs bear fruit, as the child develops into the man. We have also an instinct which attracts us towards the pursuit of wisdom; such is the true meaning of the Sirens' voices in the Odyssey, says the philosopher, quoting from the poet ...
— Cicero - Ancient Classics for English Readers • Rev. W. Lucas Collins
... more humble labours of the biographer: who, nevertheless, must not be permitted to boast much of extraordinary humility, if he pretends to combine, in a single picture, any tolerable portion of that sublime grandeur, and that delicate simplicity, which constitute the Iliad and the Odyssey of literature. ...
— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) • James Harrison
... from the 1949 book A Martian Odyssey and Others by Stanley G. Weinbaum, pp. 1-27. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication ...
— A Martian Odyssey • Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
... both by sea and land, experienced on the way as many adventures, vicissitudes, and mishaps, as the far-famed heroes of the Odyssey; they reached their destination at different times, bearing tidings to Mr. Astor of the unfortunate ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... himself as head of the clan the offices of chief in warfare and leader in priestly rites—like Agamemnon in Homer, or Saul or David in the Bible. As a magician he had influence over the fertility of the earth and, like the blameless king in the Odyssey, under his sway ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... since George, though a most amiable boy, and ill of the same fever in another room, was left to get well in the usual way, by medicine and slops, without any thumping certainly, but also without any extra consolations from either Iliad or Odyssey. But what ministered perpetual fuel to the thumping-mania of Francis Coleridge was a furor of jealousy—strangely enough not felt by him, but felt for him by his old privileged nurse. She could not inspire her ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... the Odyssey, and a flower finds the place; he begins to read . . . but she responds not, again the dark deep eyes are off "upon their search." Well, if the books were not its goal, the statues must be—and they will surely ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... failing to see that the real value of the actions or the thought of remarkable men does not lie in the material result which can be gathered from them, but in the heart and soul of those who do or utter them. Consider what Homer's "Odyssey" would be, ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... B.C., gives, in his "Odyssey," an account of ship-building in his time, to which antiquarians attach much importance, as showing the ideas then prevalent in reference to geography, and the point at which the art of ship-building had then arrived. Of course due allowance must be made for Homer's ...
— Man on the Ocean - A Book about Boats and Ships • R.M. Ballantyne
... the Greeks united in an expedition against Troy, which they took after a siege of ten years. Agamemnon, Achilles, Odysseus (Ulysses), Ajax son of Telamon, and Ajax son of Oileus, Diomedes, and Nestor were among the chiefs on the Greek side. Troy had its allies. The "Odyssey" relates to the long journey of Odysseus on his return to Ithaca, his home. That there was an ancient city, Troy, is certain. A conflict between the Greeks and a kindred people there, is probable. Not unlikely, there was a military expedition of Grecian tribes. Every thing beyond this ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... exclaimed one of the undergraduates, very thoughtlessly. "Why, my dear Colonel Prowley, you are blinder than ever he was! Don't you know that recent scholarship has demonstrated Homer to be nobody in particular? The 'Iliad' and 'Odyssey' are mere agglomerations of the poetical effusions of a variety of persons; and doubtless all of them could see as well as you ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... king of the Phaeacians, the father of Nausicaa, who figures in the Odyssey as the host of Ulysses, who had been shipwrecked on ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... is some indomitable Ulysses, who, scorning a blind immortalizer, recites his own rude Odyssey. What exploits! What adventures on the broad seas and in the new-found wildernesses of the West! Ah, but a man was a man then; there were no mythic gods to guide or to thwart him; and he rose or fell according to the might of his arm and ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... in a translation. Most men and women can say that they have read Homer, just as most of us can say that we have studied Johnson's Dictionary. But how few of us take him up, time after time, with fresh delight! How few have even read the entire "Iliad" and "Odyssey" through! Whether in the resounding lines of the old Greek, as fresh and ever-stirring as the waves that tumble on the seashore, filling the soul with satisfying silent wonder at its restless unison; whether in the quaint lines of Chapman, or ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... taken from our midst by an untimely death. He died before he had deserved success; it may be, he would never have deserved it; but his kind, comely, modest countenance still haunts the memory of all who knew him. Another - whom I will not name - has moved farther on, pursuing the strange Odyssey of his decadence. His days of royal favour had departed even then; but he still retained, in his narrower life at Barbizon, a certain stamp of conscious importance, hearty, friendly, filling the room, the occupant of several chairs; nor had he yet ceased his losing battle, ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... stories of great exploits of the past, and dreaming his own day dreams. But his sword was not for France. He pictured himself as her conqueror! One of his favorite books was Plutarch's "Lives of Illustrious Men." He devoured the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" whole. "With my sword by my side, and Homer in my pocket, I hope to carve my way through the world," he wrote to his mother. Another well-thumbed volume was Caesar's ...
— Boys' Book of Famous Soldiers • J. Walker McSpadden
... undoubtedly countenance this work. I will not gravely insist upon its usefulness, having said enough of it in the preface (Motteux' Preface to vol. I of Rabelais, ed. 1694.) to the first part. I will only add, that as Homer in his Odyssey makes his hero wander ten years through most parts of the then known world, so Rabelais, in a three months' voyage, makes Pantagruel take a view of almost all sorts of people and professions; with this difference, however, between the ancient mythologist and the modern, that while ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... to rouse Elsie when we came abreast of the Ionian Islands, and to remind her that 'Here was the home of Nausicaa in the Odyssey.' Elsie failed to respond; she was otherwise occupied. At last, I succumbed and gave it up. I remember nothing further till a day and a half later, when we got under lee of Crete, and the ship showed a tendency to resume the ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... painter, if he employ only his natural signs, cannot make the minds of his personages as visible as the poet can with the arbitrary signs at his command: yet it is only the sight of the mind that can reconcile us to certain exteriors. When Homer causes his Ulysses to appear in the rags of a beggar ["Odyssey," book xiii. v. 397], we are at liberty to represent his image to our mind more or less fully, and to dwell on it as long as we like. But in no case will it be sufficiently vivid to excite our repugnance or disgust. But if a painter, or even ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... Kestrel, my old friend of the Cretan days, and I decided to follow the track of Ulysses in his return to Ithaca from Troy. Beginning at Santa Maura we examined every point in the Ionian Islands to which any illusion is made in the "Odyssey" as far as Cerigo and Cerigotto, meeting a storm off the former island which might well have ended our trip. A well-found Greek brig foundered only a short distance from us in the gale, and we drifted all day and till early in the morning of the day ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... long and adventurous Odyssey and fifteen fruitless appeals I sighted a kind of green island shore, where a young man stood in an attitude of hauteur, surrounded by a number of pink and grey snakes and brightly ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 17, 1914 • Various
... some by others from time to time; but there is such equality and identity both of judgment and point of view in the narrative that it is plainly the work of one all-seeing, all-hearing gentleman. I looked into Pope's Odyssey yesterday: it is as correct and elegant after our canon of to-day as if it were newly written. The modernness of all good books seems to give me an existence as wide as man. What is well done I feel as if I did; what is ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... old enough, Alexander began to learn the Iliad and Odyssey by heart; and he loved to hear about the principal heroes, and especially ...
— The Story of the Greeks • H. A. Guerber
... that remained to him of life he embarked upon a veritable Odyssey: he scoured Scotland from the Border to St. Andrews, and finally contrived a journey oversea to Ireland, where he made the name of Daniel O'Brien a terror to well-doers. Insolent and careless, he lurched from ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... weeks afterward the minister of a small church in the hills inquired for him and insisted that he was still here. This last week, at the General Assembly, I heard of the wee Highlander from several sources. The tales of his escapes from the sheep-farm have grown into a sort of Odyssey of the Pentlands. I think, perhaps, if you had not continued to feed him, Mr. Traill, he might have remained ...
— Greyfriars Bobby • Eleanor Atkinson
... that he had never read through the Odyssey completely. Windham's Diary, p. 17. At college, he said, he had been 'very idle and neglectful of ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... A citation from the Odyssey was received in stony silence by the Dragon, who, however, remarked to her younger daughter that it was no use talking about Phineus and the Harpies, because they had to be at St. Pancras at 3.10, or ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... accomplishments, French, music, dancing, and riding, she learned to read Virgil, Horace, Terence, Lucian, Homer, in the original. She appears to have read all of Terence and Lucian, a great part of Horace, all the Iliad, and large portions of the Odyssey. "Cursed effects," exclaimed her ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... passes through the throngs in the city, All gaze upon him as some deity. ("Odyssey," ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... Canalis.—I did not expect so poetical an interruption; but since the memory of the Odyssey has been thus evoked, I shall ask the Chamber to kindly remember that Ulysses, though disguised as a beggar and loaded with insults, was yet able to string his bow and easily get the better of his enemies. [Violent murmurs ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... example, it has been the manifest destiny of every enterprising journalist to take an occasional trip across the continent, and personally inspect his subscribers. The latest overland Odyssey of this kind—transacted by three silent editors and one very public Speaker—is recorded in Mr. Bowles's new book; which proceeds, as one may observe, from his own publishing office and bindery, and may ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... mentioned, and next morning—if not the next morning, certainly not later than a few mornings after—I was writing 'Homesickness,' while the story of 'The Exile' was taking shape in my mind. 'The Exile' was followed by a series of four stories, a sort of village odyssey. 'A Letter to Rome' is as good as these and as typical of my country. 'So on He Fares' is the one that, perhaps, out of the whole volume I like the best, always excepting 'The Lake,' which, alas, was not included, but which belongs so strictly ...
— The Lake • George Moore
... accumulation of ages, the Romans were familiar. They knew nothing indeed of the solitary grandeur of the Jewish muse, or the mythological myths of the Ante-Homeric songsters; but they possessed the Iliad and the Odyssey, with their wonderful truthfulness, and clear portraiture of character, their absence of all affectation, their serenity and cheerfulness, their good sense and healthful sentiments, yet so original that the germ of almost every character which ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... rather to the tone of a nation than to its literal history—by which I mean that Achilles was more really a Greek hero than any Greek who ever lived, because he was the apotheosis of Greek chivalry, and as such was the expression of the Greeks rather than merely a Greek. The Iliad and the Odyssey are not merely epics of Greece—they ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... evidently the foundation of all that Homer says of the Sirens, in the twelfth book of the Odyssey; that they bewitched those who unfortunately listened to their songs; that they detained them in capacious meadows, where nothing was to be seen but bones and carcasses withering in the sun; that none who visit them ever again enjoy the embraces and congratulations of their wives and children; ...
— Roman Antiquities, and Ancient Mythology - For Classical Schools (2nd ed) • Charles K. Dillaway
... word,' said Monmouth at last, 'this is a young Ulysses, though his Odyssey doth but take three days in the acting. Scudery might not be so dull were she to take a hint from these smugglers' caves and sliding panels. How ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... "comeliness," "graciousness"—when he visualises or focusses his object. Does not that untranslatable liparos aither of Homer—the shining upper air—suggest not only the physical atmosphere breathed by the gods of Olympus and the great-hearted Odysseus, but also the poetic atmosphere of the Odyssey itself? ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... much, but Pani Celina suffered greatly, and indirectly, Aniela. My aunt was in a bad temper about the damage done to the park, and as usual, vented it on Chwastowski. The peppery old gentleman, who probably was caned often enough over his Homer, had evidently not forgotten the Odyssey, nor his ready speech either, for he replied to my aunt that if he were AEolus he would not serve her as agent, and bear with her unjust tantrums. My aunt gave way this time, merely because of the redoubled threats from ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... his hero's fame outliving that of the author. But is it not so with others - the writers of the Book of Job, of the Pentateuch, and perhaps, too, of the 'Iliad,' if not of the 'Odyssey'? ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... have been that, all unversed in the arts of the wily Greek, the deceiver of gods, the lover of strange women, the evoker of bloodthirsty shades, I yet longed for the beginning of my own obscure Odyssey, which, as was proper for a modern, should unroll its wonders and terrors beyond the Pillars of Hercules. The disdainful ocean did not open wide to swallow up my audacity, though the ship, the ridiculous and ancient ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... some idea of the importance attached by the women of Asia to this beautiful ornament, and of the extraordinary money value which it sometimes bore: and from the case of the necklace of gold and amber, in the 15th Odyssey, (v. 458,) combined with many other instances of the same kind, there can be no doubt that it was the neighboring land of Phoenicia from which the Hebrew women obtained their necklaces, and the practice ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... September 1857 upon "Le Gentilhomme Bohemien" (an essay which appears in his Ecrivains Modernes de l'Angleterre, between studies on "Mistress Browning" and Alfred Tennyson), Montegut remarks of Borrow's "humoristic Odyssey":— ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... and Book at close of day, Oh, what is sweeter, mortal, say? It matters not what book on knee, Old Izaak or the Odyssey, It matters ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various
... constituted the treasure from which a few favored individuals in the time of Petrarch and Boccaccio drew their inspiration. The former, as is well known, owned and kept with religious care a Greek Homer, which he was unable to read. A complete Latin translation of the Iliad and Odyssey, though a very bad one, vas made at Petrarch's suggestion, and with Boccaccio's help, by a Calabrian Greek, Leonzio Pilato. But with the fifteenth century began the long list of new discoveries, ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... surprise! And you could not come to dine with us? Well, sit down, both of you, and relate to me the Odyssey of the traveller," and, turning toward Maitland, who had followed her into the salon with the insolent composure of a giant ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... it struggled, on hands and knees, a human figure. He looked wildly up, and round, and then his head dropped again on his breast; and he lay clinging with outspread arms, like Homer's polypus in the Odyssey, as the wave drained back, in a thousand roaring cataracts, over the edge ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... L'Esprit dans l'Histoire. What shall we say to the story told by Zonaras and repeated by Pancirole, of the burning, in the reign of the Emperor Basilisc, of the library of Constantinople, containing one hundred and twenty thousand volumes, and among them a copy of the Iliad and the Odyssey, written in golden letters on parchment made from ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... the method was adopted independently in Ireland, or was due to foreign influences. Confining ourselves to "Conal Yellowclaw," it seems not unlikely that the whole story is an importation. For the second episode is clearly the story of Polyphemus from the Odyssey which was known in Ireland perhaps as early as the tenth century (see Prof. K. Meyer's edition of Merugud Uilix maic Leirtis, Pref. p. xii). It also crept into the voyages of Sindbad in the Arabian ...
— Celtic Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... laws. In Mrs. Leicester's School, with other Writings in Prose and Verse (Macmillan), Mr. Ainger has collected and annotated certain remains of Charles and Mary Lamb, too good to lie unknown to the present generation, in forgotten periodicals or inaccessible reprints. The story of the Odyssey, abbreviated [13] in very simple prose, for children—of all ages—will speak for itself. But the garland of graceful stories which gives name to the volume, told by a party of girls on the evening of their assembling at school, are in the highest ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... criticisms on Virgil, whom he seems to have held in great contempt, and to have regarded as inferior to Ovid. He says, 'Take away his imitation of Homer, and what do you leave him?' Of Homer his admiration was unbounded, although he says that he never read the whole of the 'Odyssey' in the original, but that everything which is most admirable in poetry is to be found in Homer. I care the less about remembering these things because they will probably appear in ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... fit of senile indignation, he seized his pencil and inscribed upon it, 'Tizianus fecit, fecit.' Still the most experienced judges are agreed that much may be learned, even from his latest works, in the same manner as the poets pronounce judgment upon the Odyssey, the product of old age, ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... the actors and their antagonists fell on each other's necks, and a Homeric poet, who had compiled an elegy for the evening on the "Gods coerced by the hosts of the new superstition," made up simply of lines culled from the Iliad and Odyssey, seized this favorable opportunity. He had begun to read it at the top of his voice, screaming down the general din, when everything was forgotten in the excitement caused by the entrance of a procession which was the successful result of many raids on the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... wood and ivory, dating from the 8th and 10th centuries before the Christian Era, or earlier. The Greeks and Romans also made use of it for costly furniture and ornamental sculpture; in Book 23 of the "Odyssey," Ulysses, describing to Penelope the bride-bed which he had made, says—"Beginning from this head-post, I wrought at the bedstead till I had finished it, and made it fair with inlaid work of gold, and of silver, and of ivory"; the statue and ...
— Intarsia and Marquetry • F. Hamilton Jackson
... poetic invention and journalistic report. Kellermann's most recent novel The Tunnel (1913), which sold inside of a few months to the number of a hundred thousand copies, cannot be regarded as a genuine work of art. It is not "the epic of iron and electricity, the Odyssey of modern engineering and capitalism" which it was perhaps intended to be, but a fantastic special article spun out into a moving-picture series of impressions of America and the possibilities of technical accomplishment. ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... Second Punic War, and consists almost exclusively of works fashioned on Greek models. The Latin metres, heroic, elegiac, lyric, and dramatic, are of Greek origin. The best Latin epic poetry is the feeble echo of the Iliad and Odyssey. The best Latin eclogues are imitations of Theocritus. The plan of the most finished didactic poem in the Latin tongue was taken from Hesiod. The Latin tragedies are bad copies of the masterpieces of Sophocles and Euripides. The Latin philosophy ...
— Lays of Ancient Rome • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... obscurity. He is the greatest, after Dryden, of all the second class poets of his country. His Rape of the Lock, the most original of his poems, established his fame. But his greatest works were the translations of the Iliad and Odyssey, the Dunciad, and his Essay on Man. He was well paid for his labors, and lived in a beautiful villa at Twickenham, the friend of Bolingbroke, and the greatest literary star of his age. But he was bitter and satirical, irritable, ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... But they'd say he was drunk. He would lie still and cling with all his strength and heart and soul to sanity. He would think of That Evening with Lucille—and of her kisses. He would recite the Odes of Horace, the Aeneid, the Odyssey as far as he could remember them, and then fall back on Shakespeare and other English poets. Probably he knew a lot more Greek and Latin poetry (little as it was) than he did ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... nurse's descent upon him he was determined that he would walk—not crawl, but walk in his socks and shoes—from his place by the window to the blue screen by the fire. There had been days, and those not so long ago, when so hazardous an Odyssey had seemed the vainest of Blue Moon ambitions; it had once been the only rule of existence to sprawl and roll and sprawl again; but gradually some further force had stirred his limbs. It was a finer thing to be ...
— The Golden Scarecrow • Hugh Walpole
... find they were to go by sea, since Telemachus did so in a Phoenician ship, and, in that odd dreamy way in which children blend fiction and reality, wondered if they should come on Calypso's island; and Arthur, who had read the Odyssey, delighted her and terrified Ulysse with the cave of Polyphemus. M. de Varennes could only go with his sister as far as Montpelier. Then he took leave of her, and the party proceeded along the shores of the lagoons, ...
— A Modern Telemachus • Charlotte M. Yonge
... without being conscious of break or line of division, to books on which the learned are content to write commentaries and dissertations, but which I found to be quite as nice children's books as any of the others. Old Homer wrote admirably for little folk, especially in the Odyssey; a copy of which,—in the only true translation extant,—for, judging from its surpassing interest, and the wrath of critics, such I hold that of Pope to be,—I found in the house of a neighbour. Next came the Iliad; not, however, in a complete copy, but represented ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... his essay on Homer says: "The authors of the Iliad and the Odyssey stand alone with Shakespeare far away above mankind." Paul's marginal note: "Add to them Milton, Goethe, the author of the ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... too. Women ought to be religious; faith was the natural fragrance of their minds. The more incredible the things they believed, the more lovely was the act of belief. To him the story of "Paradise Lost" was as mythical as the "Odyssey"; yet when his mother read it aloud to him, it was not only beautiful but true. A woman who didn't have holy thoughts about mysterious things far away would be prosaic ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... he made many mistakes, and the everlastingly warning calls of his name maddened him. In the theoretical work he was naturally far in advance of his comrades; for, despite idleness at school, this was mere child's play to his practised memory. He, who had had to learn hundreds of lines of the "Odyssey" by heart, could easily remember facts ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... of the hexameter in modern poetry is due to Johann Heinrich Voss, a man of genius, an admirable metrist, and, Schlegel's sneer to the contrary notwithstanding, hitherto the best translator of Homer. His "Odyssey," (1783,) his "Iliad," (1791,) and his "Luise," (1795,) were confessedly Goethe's teachers in this kind of verse. The "Hermann and Dorothea" of the latter (1798) was the first true poem written in modern ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... evident that the mediaeval schoolmen did practically treat Socrates as something of that sort—as a mythical, symbolic, or representative man. Socrates is the eternal burthen of their quillets, quodlibets, problems, syllogisms; for them he is the Ulysses of the Odyssey, that much-suffering man; or, to speak more adequately, for them he is the John Doe and the Richard Roe of English law, whose feuds have tormented the earth and incensed the heavens through a cycle of uncounted centuries, and must ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... not think that we can find in the forty-eight books of Homer even a dozen contributions to our unwritten system of the naive psychology of the nations. To be sure we ought not to omit in such a system the following reflections from the "Odyssey": "Wine leads to folly, making even the wise to love immoderately, to dance, and to utter what had better have been kept silent"; or "Too much rest itself becomes a pain"; or still better, "The steel blade itself often incites to deeds of violence." ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... reads his Bible and his Homer, his Virgil and Horace, his Caesar and Livy, but probably with the vaguest ideas of their relations to one another, or their respective positions in the world's chronology. Or it may be that the whole of one term is devoted to one or two books of 'the Iliad' and 'the Odyssey,' 'the AEneid' or the 'Odes,' which are ground out line by line and word by word, all the interest and flavour of the complete work being inevitably and hopelessly dissipated in the process. Even 'the college prizeman, and the college ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... station in sight; you have been brought, like so many sheep or cows, into the dismal goods station, and you look in vain for the people who should be there to welcome you, to throw flowers, and to cheer as you arrive at the first halt of your great Odyssey. However, you shake yourself, you bundle your valise out of the carriage on to the railway line, and, with your late carriage companions, you go across to the sentry and his ...
— Mud and Khaki - Sketches from Flanders and France • Vernon Bartlett
... it was a danger. This time, Kelly decided, I'll do something about it. He was the engineer and he had signed on the great odyssey to keep the ship going. But the Crew was part of the ship. Was not there an obligation even greater to ...
— Has Anyone Here Seen Kelly? • Bryce Walton
... wonderful promise even in those years of childhood. At the Kreuzschule, where his education began, he developed an ardent love for the Greek classics, and translated the first twelve books of the Odyssey, outside of school hours. He devoured all stories of mythology he could lay hands on, and soon began to create vast tragedies. He revelled in Shakespeare, and finally began to write a play which was to combine the ideas of ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... men and women of the Iliad and Odyssey are habitually religious. The language of religion is often on their tongues, as it is ever on the lips of every body in the East at this day. The thought of the gods, and of their providence and government of the world, is a familiar thought. They seem to have an abiding ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... Arkansas, Del Norte, and Gila Rivers, Washington, 1848. Emory's own vivid report is only one item in Executive Document No. 41, 30th Congress, 1st Session, with which it is bound. Lieutenant J. W. Albert's Journal and additional Report on New Mexico, St. George Cooke's Odyssey of his march from Santa Fe to San Diego, another Journal by Captain A. R. Johnson, the Torrey-Englemann report on botany, illustrated with engravings, all go to make this one of the meatiest of a number of meaty government ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... and if we were poets, I suppose we should before now have as good as drank some of that Long Island champagne. Speaking of poets reminds me that I did n't tell you how charmed I was with those translations from the Odyssey; the blank verse is so simple, clear, and ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... hexameter of Homer as two lines, you will, perhaps, more than suspect, tends to confirm this opinion. I think, somewhere, Sir Walter Scott recommends the translating Homer into short measure—you forget, perhaps, my making the trial upon the two first books of the Odyssey which I sent to you, and you returned, condemned; although, to tell you the truth, I was not displeased with my attempt, and expected your flattering commendation, and would even now deceive myself into a belief that you were not prepared for the novelty. Admire ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... the yellow horse. It finished its mysterious odyssey in the stables of Savoye-Rollin, where Licquet often visited it, as if he could thus learn its secret. For a doubt remained, and Real's suggestion haunted him: "If the horse had only served for Mme. Acquet's flight, they would not ...
— The House of the Combrays • G. le Notre
... episodes borrowed from the great Epic poems. The Messenger Cloud of this poet is not surpassed by any European writer of verse. The Ramayon and the Mahabharata are the two great Epic poems of India, and they exceed in conception and magnitude any of the Epic poems in the world, surpassing the Iliad, the Odyssey and the Jerusalem Delivered. The Ramayon, of seven Cantos, has twenty-five thousand verses, and the hero, Rama, in his wanderings and misfortunes, is not unlike Ulysses. The Mahabharata records the doings of gods, giants, and heroes, who are all fighting against ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... fit to say, amongst other evil things, which it really does deserve (though hardly in comparison with the German 'Homer' of the ear-splitting Voss), 'that Pope pocketed the subscription of the "Odyssey," and left the work to be done by his understrappers.' Don't tell fibs, Schlosser. Never do that any more. True it is, and disgraceful enough, that Pope (like modern contractors for a railway or a loan) let off to sub-contractors ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... upon Ajax in the foregoing Lines, puts me in mind of a Description in Homer's Odyssey, which none of the Criticks have taken notice of. [3] It is where Sisyphus is represented lifting his Stone up the Hill, which is no sooner carried to the top of it, but it immediately tumbles to the ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... the making or marring of the book lies elsewhere. I do not think that it lies in the construction, though Fielding's following of the ancients, both sincere and satiric, has imposed a false air of regularity upon that. The Odyssey of Joseph, of Fanny, and of their ghostly mentor and bodily guard is, in truth, a little haphazard, and might have been longer or shorter without any discreet man approving it the more or the less therefor. The real merits lie partly in the abounding humour and satire of ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... taken as a matter of course; until comparatively recent generations such an idea as that never had dawned on anybody's mind, and the story of the achievement of that progressive interpretation of history is one of the most fascinating narratives in the long record of man's mental Odyssey. In particular, the Christian who desires to understand the influences, both intellectual and practical, which are playing with transforming power upon Christianity today, upon its doctrines, its purposes, its institutions, and its social applications, must first of all understand the ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... bird, that most Delights itself in song.] I cannot think with Vellutello, that the swallow is here meant. Dante probably alludes to the story of Philomela, as it is found in Homer's Odyssey, b. xix. 518 rather than as later poets have told it. "She intended to slay the son of her husband's brother Amphion, incited to it, by the envy of his wife, who had six children, while herself had only two, but through mistake slew her own son Itylus, and for her punishment ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... ten years' siege of Troy: and their story is in the book which we call Homer, in two of the noblest songs on earth—the 'Iliad,' which tells us of the siege of Troy, and Achilles' quarrel with the kings; and the 'Odyssey,' which tells the wanderings of Odysseus, through many lands for many years, and how Alcinous sent him home at last, safe to Ithaca his beloved island, and to Penelope his faithful wife, and Telemachus his son, and Euphorbus the noble swineherd, and the old dog who licked his hand and ...
— The Heroes • Charles Kingsley
... stilled, a memory, Since you went eastward with the fighting ships, A hero of the great new Odyssey, And God has laid His finger ...
— A Treasury of War Poetry - British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 • Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by George Herbert Clarke
... with the goblin by watching in his mill till night. The ourisk then entered, and demanded the miller's name, and was informed that he was called Myself; on which is founded a story almost exactly like that of OUTIS in the "Odyssey," a tale which, though classic, is by no means an elegant or ingenious fiction, but which we are astonished to find in an obscure district, and in the Celtic tongue, seeming to argue some connexion or communication ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... immortality upon, at the same time that they receive it from, his character and adventures. In this point of view I have violated no rule of syntax in beginning my composition with a conjunction; the full stop which closes the poem continued by me being, like the full stops at the end of the Iliad and Odyssey, a full stop of a ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... the water, watery, Canale's chronicle, like Ariel's dirge; he has indeed, 'that intenseness of feeling which seems to resolve itself into the elements which it contemplates.' Here is nothing indeed, of 'the surge and thunder of the Odyssey', but the lovely words sparkle like the sun on the waters of the Mediterranean, and like a refrain, singing itself in and out of the narrative, the phrase recurs, 'Li tens estoit clers et biaus ... et lors quant ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... to himself, walled in with his own thoughts. A moment passed and the clouds rolled away; the delight faded, and this artist among gamblers for whom speculation possessed harmony and color and form, and whose life had been an Odyssey of Stocks, ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... intention at some later date to give to the Smithsonian Institution, to preserve for the benefit of those interested in the mysteries of the "Farthest North"—the frozen circle of silence. It is certain there are many things in Vedic literature, in "Josephus," the "Odyssey," the "Iliad," Terrien de Lacouperie's "Early History of Chinese Civilization," Flammarion's "Astronomical Myths," Lenormant's "Beginnings of History," Hesiod's "Theogony," Sir John de Maundeville's writings, and Sayce's "Records of the Past," that, to say the least, are strangely in harmony with ...
— The Smoky God • Willis George Emerson
... from the Odyssey, is also of an unknown antiquity. Ulysses, after many years of absence, returns to his home to find himself unrecognized by his family. With Eumaeus Ulysses walked ...
— Voices for the Speechless • Abraham Firth
... boldest book ever written. There are no similitudes in Ossian or the Iliad or the Odyssey so daring. Its imagery sometimes seems on the verge of the reckless, but only seems so. The fact is that God would startle and arouse and propel men and nations. A tame and limping similitude would fail to accomplish ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... The Odyssey of Homer, with the Hymns, Epigrams, and Battle of the Frogs and Mice. Literally translated, with Explanatory Notes, by Theodore Alois Buckley, B.A. New York. Harper L Brothers. 16mo. ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... avert their eyes, to clean forget for a season the actual world and lose themselves in the mazes of romance. In moments of despondency there is no greater relief to a fretted spirit than to turn to the "Odyssey" or Mr. Payne's exquisite translation of the "Arabian Nights." Great should be our gratitude to Mr. Morris for teaching us in golden verse that "Love is Enough," and for spreading wide the gates of his "Earthly Paradise." Lucian's "True History," that carries us over ...
— Life And Adventures Of Peter Wilkins, Vol. I. (of II.) • Robert Paltock
... of the 'Absentee,' which is perhaps the most admirable of her works. We may all remember how Macaulay once pronounced that the scene in the 'Absentee' where Lord Colambre discovers himself to his tenantry was the best thing of the sort since the opening of the twenty-second book of the 'Odyssey.' ...
— A Book of Sibyls - Miss Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs Opie, Miss Austen • Anne Thackeray (Mrs. Richmond Ritchie)
... a stormy petrel," he said. "I used to think the chief difficulty in writing a book would be to invent things to happen, but if I were to sit down and write the adventures I'd had with her it would be a regular Odyssey." ...
— Parnassus on Wheels • Christopher Morley
... its ordinary processes, let us consider its functions in those in whom it is unique. Fortunately scholars in every age have preserved important facts concerning the power of recollection. The classic orators contain repeated reference to traveling singers, who could recite the entire Iliad and Odyssey. In his "Declamations," speaking of the inroads disease had made upon him, Seneca remarks that he could speak two thousand words and names in the order read to him, and that one morning he listened to the reading of two hundred ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... wooded hills, soft meadows, fertile fields, neat gardens, hanging grapes, cloudy mountains, constant cheerfulness of plains, cliffs and ridges, and the surrounding sea, with such manifold variety are present in my mind; now is the "Odyssey" for the first time become to me ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... it during our odyssey home. But during post-mission leave, it kept bothering me. I checked, and came up with what I'd already known: Scott had been sole survivor, and the others were certified dead. But about Scott, I got a runaround. ...
— A Matter of Proportion • Anne Walker
... a life which has been an Odyssey, the picturesque life a tone poet can weather through as Mr. MacGill ...
— The Amateur Army • Patrick MacGill
... were buried in effigy, in all the different churches with which they were connected, and each sham burial service was entered in the parish registers, a snare and stumbling-block to the historian. This curious custom is very ancient. Thus we read in the Odyssey that when Menelaus heard in Egypt of the death of Agamemnon he reared for him a cenotaph, and piled an empty barrow "that the fame of the dead man might never be quenched." Probably this old usage gave rise to the claims of several Greek cities ...
— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang
... their comments did not rise above the stale inquiry as to where we kept our bombs, and the equally original advice bestowed upon Kosinksi to get 'is 'air cut. A half-hour's walk brought us to our destination, but our Odyssey was not so soon to end. The man who accompanied the carriage-builder when he showed us over the shop was waiting at the entrance to the yard, and, recognising me, he asked me to step into the office. He had a rather scared appearance, but I did not notice this particularly ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith |
