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Penelope   /pənˈɛləpi/   Listen
Penelope

noun
1.
(Greek mythology) the wife of Odysseus and a symbol of devotion and fidelity; for 10 years while Odysseus fought the Trojan War she resisted numerous suitors until Odysseus returned and killed them.
2.
A genus of guans (turkey-like arboreal birds valued as game and food birds).  Synonym: genus Penelope.



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"Penelope" Quotes from Famous Books



... childish remembrances do not greatly mislead me) the iracund Lord Thurlow. Lovers and wooers this grim lawyer regarded as the most impertinent order of animals in universal zoology; and of these, in Miss Watson's case, he had a whole menagerie to tend. Penelope, according to some school-boy remembrance of mine, had one hundred and eighteen suitors. These young ladies had almost as many. Heavens! I what a crew of Comus to follow or to lead! And what a suitable ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey

... fidelity of Callixene, priestess of Ceres, who had been twice as constant as Penelope, and rewards her with the priesthood of the Phrygian goddess at Pessinus, (Julian. Epist. xxi.) He applauds the firmness of Sopater of Hierapolis, who had been repeatedly pressed by Constantius and Gallus to apostatize, (Epist. ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon

... thrifty cottage in New England comforts and adornments which, in the days of Queen Bess, were not known outside of the palace. Be mindful, then, that handicraft makes machines which are wonders of productive force—weaving tissues such as Penelope never saw, of woolen, cotton, linen, and silk, to carpet our floors, cover our tables, cushion our chairs, and clothe our bodies; machines of which Vulcan never dreamed, to point a needle, bore a rifle, cut a watch wheel, or rule a series of lines, measuring ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 497, July 11, 1885 • Various

... is some days later, in a certain southern suburb of Glasgow. Ulysses has come back to Ithaca, and is sitting by his fireside, waiting for the return of Penelope from the Neuk Hydropathic. There is a chill in the air, so a fire is burning in the grate, but the laden tea-table is bright with the first blooms of lilac. Dickson, in a new suit with a flower in his buttonhole, looks none the worse for his travels, save ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan

... and pass'd the barren spot, Where sad Penelope o'erlook'd the wave; And onward view'd the mount, not yet forgot. The lover's refuge, and the Lesbian's grave. But when he saw the evening star above Leucadia's far-projecting rock of woe, And hail'd the last resort of fruitless ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt

... traced briefly. Richard Stout, who seems to have been first of his name in America, was the son of John Stout, of Nottinghamshire, England. When a young man he came to New Amsterdam (New York City), where he met Penelope Van Princess, a young woman from Holland. She, with her first husband, had been on a ship from Amsterdam, Holland, bound for New Amsterdam. The ship was wrecked in the lower bay and driven on the New Jersey coast below Staten Island. The passengers and crew escaped ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer

... year 1819, a singular project, incited by the current stories of left-handed marriages and loving episodes, as in the case of the Prince of Capua and Miss Penelope Smith, was put into operation by one Sarah Seyton, widow of the Earl of M'Gregor. Her brother, the Honorable Tom Seyton, assisted her to the utmost, fully prepared to aid his sister in matrimonially entangling any crown-wearer whomsoever; ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue

... uishyng Lu- crecia, and all of his name banished.] commendacion be mencioned, and celebrated to al ages. Lu- cretia for her chastite, is perpetuallie to be aduanunced, wher- vpon the Romaines banished Tarquinius their kyng, his stocke and name from Rome. The rare chastite of Penelope, is remainyng as a example herein: So many snares laied to caste doune her vertuous loue towarde her housebande U- lisses. But Ulisses made hauocke by murder, on these gaie and gallante Ruffins, who in his absence sought to alienate [Sidenote: ...
— A booke called the Foundacion of Rhetorike • Richard Rainolde

... national art. Nothing can be pictured more beautiful than the combination of rich and varied colors, or more curious than the forms which art and genius had given them: here were dyes which might have rivaled those of Tyre, and fabrics of finer texture than a Penelope could have woven. At one end, toward which Marguerite's eyes were most anxiously turned, the models of the clocks were arranged. Dumiger's was placed in the center, for it was at the same time the largest model, and contained the most elaborate and complicated machinery; but, alas! the works remained ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 2, July 8, 1850 • Various

... her dog, and Master Bunbury looking out of the canvas with breathless eagerness, arouse a universal interest, which is entirely independent of their individuality. Miss Frances Harris, the serene, and Miss Penelope Boothby, the demure, will be loved as child ideals long after their ...
— Child-life in Art • Estelle M. Hurll

... beauty; Sensual love; Barrenness a cause of divorce; Chapter on Greek love; Champions of; Gladstone on the women of Homer; Achilles as a lover; Words versus actions; Odysseus, libertine and ruffian; Penelope as a model wife; Conjugal tenderness of Hector; Barbarous treatment of women; Love in Sappho's poems; Anacreon and others; Woman and love in AEschylus; In Sophocles; In Euripides; Romantic love for boys; Platonic love ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck

... news, and please to tell her that Captain Powell was oleways talking great deal about her, and was missing her very much. Oh, we shall never see nobody like him again. He went out in a small boat with two frinds to the steamer Penelope, Captain Parley, and coming back the boat was capsize and the three gentlemen was upset in the water. One was saved, but Captain Powell and Mr. Jones was drownded. Please to come and see about the funeral as soon as ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine

... had recovered, she would have fared badly, even at that late period, had she been in Salem; but the death-penalty has never been hastily inflicted in Portsmouth. The first execution that ever took place there was that of Sarah Simpson and Penelope Kenny, for the murder of an infant in 1739. The sheriff was Thomas Packer, the same official who, twenty-nine years later, won unenviable notoriety at the hanging of Ruth Blay. The circumstances are set forth by the late Albert Laighton in a ...
— An Old Town By The Sea • Thomas Bailey Aldrich

... contributed two Elegies to Henry FitzGeoffrey's Satyrs and Epigrames. These were on the Lady Penelope Clifton, and on 'the death of the three sonnes of the Lord Sheffield, drowned neere where Trent falleth into Humber'. Neither is remarkable save for far-fetched conceits; they were reprinted in 1610, and again, with many others, ...
— Minor Poems of Michael Drayton • Michael Drayton

... considered the greatest treasure of the collection, but I did not myself feel it to be so, nor indeed did I receive any strong impression of its excellence. I admired nothing so much, I think, as the face of Penelope (if it be her face) in the group supposed also to represent Electra and Orestes. The sitting statue of Mars is very fine; so is the Arria and Paetus; so are many other busts ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... carry out the royal orders, and thwarted by the King's secret agents. The King seems to have been too lazy to face his ministers, and compel them to take his own line, while he was energetic enough to work like Tiberius or Philip II. of Spain at his secret Penelope's task of undoing by night the warp and woof which his ministers wove by day. In these mysterious labours of his the Comte de Broglie, later a firm friend of d'Eon, was, with Tercier, one of his ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang

... the invitation to marriage, which refusal begets the mystic melody." Mr. Browne graciously accepts the Sonnets in their order, and professes to be unable to name the real mistress of Herbert, though he considers Lady Penelope Rich to be the object of their ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various

... and cooled, and Gerda, a cigarette stuck in one side of her mouth, a buttercup in the other, mumbled "Penelope's baby's come, by the way. A ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay

... difference caused all the wars and deaths of Trojans and Achaeans, and the deaths of the suitors of Penelope in their ...
— Alcibiades I • (may be spurious) Plato

... them gravely. The first letter really engrossed his attention. The last was merely an adjunct. The first would represent—or should represent—the real woman. He marshalled every possibility before him, merely to dismiss them: Patience, Phyllis, Prudence, Priscilla, Perpetua, Penelope, Persis, Phoebe, Pauline,—none were to his mind. The last appeared to him the most possible, and yet it did not truly belong. So he summed up its fitness. Yet, for the life of him, he could find no other. He had run through the whole gamut attached to the initial, so he told ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore

... them. He must live to punish. A sudden fear came upon him that his grief and rage might bring death or madness, and leave him incapable of vengeance. They would wish nothing better. No, he must live, and think rationally, and not give way. But the mind worked on in spite of the will. It sat like Penelope over the loom, weaving terrible fancies in blood and flame! the days that had been, the days that were passing; the scenes of love and marriage; the old house and its latest sinners; and the days that were to come, crimson-dyed, shameful; the dreadful loom worked as if by enchantment, scene following ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith

... of February, beeing egge Satterday, it pleased some gentlemen schollers in the towne to make a dauncing night of it. They had provided many new and curious daunces for the maske of Penelope's Woers, but the yeare beeing far spent and Lent drawing on and many other thinges to bee performed, the Prince was not able to bestow that state upon them which their love & skill deserved. But their ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson

... Propertius is peculiarly Alexandrian. He is continually drawing parallels and contrasts from Greek legend; e.g. i. 15, Cynthia how unlike Calypso! iii. 12, Aelia Galla a modern Penelope. Of Roman poets, he names as his predecessors in amatory verse Virgil, Varro Atacinus, Catullus, Calvus, and Cornelius Gallus (ii 34, 61-92). Once he dreams of writing an epic on the Alban kings in the vein of Ennius; iii. ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton

... dramatic incident of de Sevigne taking letters from Ninon de l'Enclos partly by ingenuity and partly by force, resembled his tale that he had left Ninon and that he did not care for her while all the time they were inseparable. He was truly a lover of Penelope, the bow of Ulysses having betrayed ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.

... blue waves, lingers one of the most insidious of all the old Greek legends, for it was past these lonely cliffs that the cunning Ulysses sailed during his long career of mazy wanderings in search of his island home and his faithful Penelope. In those days, so the Greek bard tells us, there dwelt upon these islets strange sea-witches with the faces and forms of most beautiful maidens, although their lower limbs had the resemblance of eagles' feet and talons. Two sirens only, says Homer, dwelt ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan

... Troy, Penelope apace did spin; And weavers wrought with mickle joy, Though little gains were coming in; For love ...
— English Songs and Ballads • Various

... about dress with the description of some ornaments, the specimens of which in Greek graves and in sculptural imitations are numerous. In Homer the wooers try to gain the favor of Penelope with golden breastpins, agraffes, ear-rings, and chains. Hephaistos is, in the same work, mentioned as the artificer of beautiful rings and hair-pins. The same ornaments we meet with again at a later period as important articles ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy

... eccentricities before this date (e.g. Shadwell's Epsom Wells and Rawlins' Tunbridge-Wells). Baker decorates his scene with such "humours" as Maiden, "a Nice Fellow that values himself upon all Effeminacies;" Squib, a bogus captain; Mrs. Goodfellow, "a Lady that loves her Bottle;" her niece Penelope, "an Heroic Trapes;" and Woodcock, the Yeoman, a rich, sharp, forthright, crusty old fellow with a pretty daughter, Belinda, whom he is determined never to marry but to a substantial farmer of her own class: her suitor, a clever ne'er-do-well named Reynard, of course ...
— The Fine Lady's Airs (1709) • Thomas Baker

... trailing out over the stern, and the experiences of the middle watch of the wind, whether rising or falling or squalling, and its effect on the sails and the ship. "If you keep her on her present course, she's all right, but if you try and bring her up any more she begins to shake. And, by the way, Penelope wants to be called at 4.30." Bowers' 'snotty,' who is Oates, probably makes some ribald remarks, such as no midshipman should to a full lieutenant, and they both disappear below. Campbell's snotty, myself, appears about five minutes afterwards ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard

... there, amid all the barbarity of an age of rapine and war, relations between men and women so tender, faithful and beautiful, that they may almost stand as universal types of the ultimate human ideal. Such for example is the relation between Odysseus and Penelope, the wife waiting year by year for the husband whose fate is unknown, wooed in vain by suitors who waste her substance and wear her life, nightly "watering her bed with her tears" for twenty weary years, till at last the wanderer ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson

... ancient Greece did not enjoy that delicate consideration which other refined nations accord to their sex, may be inferred from the inferiority of the apartments allotted to them. The famous Helen is said to have had her chamber in the attic; and Penelope, the queen of Ulysses, descended ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous

... her in my arms now. But there came in through the hall a pattering of little feet, and by the time Jock and Hurry had burst into the room I was at a garden window looking out, and Lucy had caught up from her work bag that Penelope's web of a silk necktie upon which she so often worked, and ...
— We Three • Gouverneur Morris

... to shoe, Mrs. Lathrop, an' you know what Gran'ma Mullins an' Lucy is when they take to discussin' Hiram. I'll take my Bible oath as when Gran'ma Mullins an' Lucy gets to discussin' Hiram they couldn't hear no steam penelope out of a circus, not if it was settin' full tilt right on their very own door-mat. So poor Mrs. Macy laid there an' hollered till Mrs. Sweet ...
— Susan Clegg and a Man in the House • Anne Warner

... of the work and the discipline, Don. We do everything at our camp, the cooking, washing and cleaning. We have been pretending that we were members of Penelope's household. If you have never read the 'Odyssey' you won't know what I am talking about. Joan Peters we sometimes call Penelope. She is everlastingly at her weaving, but does not unravel her web at night that she has woven in the daytime. She is not troubled by Penelope's importunate ...
— The Girl Scouts in Beechwood Forest • Margaret Vandercook

... and fro, backwards and for wards over the sunny garden the butterflies, white, sulphur, and brown, flitted and fluttered, lightly poising on currant-bush or flower, loving life as they basked in the sunshine; and Penelope lay and watched them. What did it matter to them that the garden was neglected, the grass rank and uncut, the currant-bushes barren from neglect, the lilacs old and blossomless? It mattered no more to them than ...
— The Carroll Girls • Mabel Quiller-Couch

... very neat thatched walls; the palm-thatch here, when it is made with care, being exceedingly pretty, fine, and smooth, and of a soft straw color. At the upper end stood an immense embroidery-frame, looking as if it might have served for Penelope's web, but in which was stretched an unfinished hammock of palm-thread, the senhora's work. She sat down on the low stool before it, and worked a little for my benefit, showing me how the two layers of transverse threads were kept apart by a thick, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various

... his arrival at Mr. Snap's, found only Miss Doshy at home, that young lady being employed alone, in imitation of Penelope, with her thread or worsted, only with this difference, that whereas Penelope unravelled by night what she had knit or wove or spun by day, so what our young heroine unravelled by day she knit again ...
— The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great • Henry Fielding

... placed them at the mercy of the enemy. 2dly, The troops were inadequate to the extent of the defences; so that, together with starvation, loss of sleep fell upon the fighting men. 3dly, As another effect from that cause, a perpetual Penelope's web was to be maintained; for as often as detachments went out from cantonments against the many neighbouring forts, before they could possibly have time to destroy these nests of hornets, back they were summoned to the defence of their ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various

... wealth, at present, of spare space, will be the ideal setting for my treasures. There be it that the public shall throng to steep itself in the splendour of possibilities, beholding, under glass, and perhaps in excellent preservation, Penelope's web and the original designs for the Tower of Babel, the draft made by Mr. Asquith for a reformed House of Lords and the notes jotted down by the sometime German Emperor for a proclamation from Versailles ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm

... dead," told by Plutarch in the de Defectu Oraculorum, ch. xvii. The news of this strange story reached the ears of Tiberius, who at once set the learned men about him to inquire into it; and they came to the no less strange conclusion that "this was the Pan who was born of Hermes and Penelope." S. Reinach has recently offered an explanation of this story, which is at least better than previous ones, in Cultes, mythes, et religions, vol. ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler

... children are not enough, why they can't seem to fill my cup of contentment as they ought. Now that their father is so much away, a great deal of their training is falling on my shoulders. And I must, in some way, be a model to them. So I'll continue to show them what a Penelope I can be. Perhaps, after all, they will prove our salvation. For our offspring ought to be the snow-fences along the wind-harried rails of matrimony. They should prevent drifting along the line, and from terminal to lonely terminal should keep traffic open ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer

... des regrets, L'homme s'agite, et s'use, et vieillit sans progres Sur sa toile de Penelope; Comme un sage mourant, puissions-nous dire en paix J'ai trop longtemps erre, cherche; je me trompais; Tout ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... Odysseus, that the Phaeacian night's entertainment has its place in the Odyssey. The Odyssey is the story of his home-coming, his recovery of his own. The great action of the drama of Odysseus is in his dealings with Penelope, Eumaeus, Telemachus, the suitors. The Phaeacian story is indeed episodic; the interest of those adventures is different from that of the meeting with Penelope. Nevertheless it is all kept in harmony with the stronger part of ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker

... Sabin interrupted, "I must protest. Lucille and I were married by a most respectable Episcopalian clergyman. We have documentary evidence. Besides, if Lucille is Calypso, what about Penelope?" ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... forehead, the skirts of his heavy overcoat hanging in a triangle on each side of the chair. And across the length of the table covered with brown oil-cloth Winnie, his wife, talked evenly at him the wifely talk, as artfully adapted, no doubt, to the circumstances of this return as the talk of Penelope to the return of the wandering Odysseus. Mrs Verloc, however, had done no weaving during her husband's absence. But she had had all the upstairs room cleaned thoroughly, had sold some wares, had seen Mr Michaelis several times. He had told ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad

... seem to you that you do her whom you love harm by persisting in that very love which is—yes, Philip, I must say it—unlawful? See, now, I am struck with the change in her since I beheld her last. The modesty which charmed me in Penelope Devereux seems vanished. Even now I hear her laugh, hollow and unreal, as she coquettes and lays herself out for the admiring notice of the gentlemen who are watching her movements. Yes, Philip, nothing but harm can come of ...
— Penshurst Castle - In the Days of Sir Philip Sidney • Emma Marshall

... plaything of a wealthy, well-meaning, whimsical person who lives about a mile off. He has a passion for brick and mortar, and, being too wise to meddle with his own residence, diverts himself with altering and re-altering, improving and re-improving, doing and undoing here. It is a perfect Penelope's web. Carpenters and bricklayers have been at work for these eighteen months, and yet I sometimes stand and wonder whether anything has really been done. One exploit in last June was, however, by no means equivocal. Our good neighbour fancied that the limes ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford

... to the renowned as well as evilly notorious Lady Penelope Rich, sister of the unfortunate Earl of Essex. She shone by her extraordinary beauty as well as by her intellectual gifts. Of her Sir Philip Sidney was madly enamoured, but she married a Croesus, Lord Rich. This union was a most unhappy one. Her ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis

... would do for a Penelope, but there is something singular in her eyes. Now if I had to make another star-gazing Urania, or a Sappho full of the deity, and with eyes fixed on the heavens in poetic rapture, that is what I would put into her! She is no longer young, but how pure ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... evidence that they were All delighted with his charming ugliness,—they being, it should seem, as fond of hideous pets as if they had been mere mortals, and endowed with a liberal share of humanity's bad taste. There are other accounts of the birth of Pan, one of which is, that he was the child of Penelope, born while she was waiting for the return of the crafty Ulysses, and that his fathers were all the aspirants to her favor,—a piece of scandal to be rejected, as reflecting very severely upon the reputation of a lady who is mostly regarded as having been a very model ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various

... celebrated for her conjugal fidelity during his twenty years' absence, in the later half of which an army of suitors pled for her hand, pleading that her husband would never return; but she put them all off by a promise of marriage as soon as she finished a web (called after Penelope's web) she was weaving, which she wove by day and undid at night, till their importunities took a violent form, when her husband ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... First of the important English sequences is the 'Astrophel and Stella' of Sir Philip Sidney, written about 1580, published in 1591. 'Astrophel' is a fanciful half-Greek anagram for the poet's own name, and Stella (Star) designates Lady Penelope Devereux, who at about this time married Lord Rich. The sequence may very reasonably be interpreted as an expression of Platonic idealism, though it is sometimes taken in a sense less consistent ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher

... marked the spot where the crumbling adobe walls of the casa had returned to the parent soil that gave it. The channel was deepened, the lagoon was drained, until one evening the magic mirror that had so long reflected the weary waiting of the Blue Grass Penelope lay dull, dead, lusterless, an opaque quagmire of noisome corruption and decay to be put away from the sight of man forever. On this spot the crows, the titular tenants of Los Cuervos, assembled in tumultuous congress, coming and ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte

... as thus: It is not unknowen to you that Sir Robert of Windsor, a man that you do not little esteem, hath long importuned me of Love; but rather then I will be found false or unjust to the Marques Lubeck, I will, as did the constant lady Penelope, undertake ...
— Fair Em - A Pleasant Commodie Of Faire Em The Millers Daughter Of - Manchester With The Love Of William The Conquerour • William Shakespeare [Apocrypha]

... to go and meet her, his eyes suddenly fell with a start of recognition upon a woman standing on the landing-place. She was not young, but still very handsome, as some of us may know her from Gainsborough's portrait; and she was no other than Penelope Lady Ligonier, for whom Alfieri had been so mad twenty years before, for whom he had fought his famous duel in St. James' Park, and got himself disgracefully mixed up in a peculiarly disgraceful divorce suit. He had several times inquired after her, and ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)

... opportunity of throwing soup to Cerberus, and exhibiting colour-blindness, has been given the slip, though the door is perhaps still open (even at past eleven o'clock P.M.) for retracing the false step and web of Penelope. ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey

... iniquitous proscription. Nero himself might have fared as well as Augustus, had he possessed as much wit. Heaven and earth might have been his enemies to no purpose, had he known how to keep friends with good authors. Homer makes the Greeks victorious, the Trojans a poor set, and Penelope undergo a thousand wrongs rather than be unfaithful to her husband; and yet, if you would have the real truth of the matter, the Greeks were beaten, and the Trojans the conquerors, and Penelope was a —. [16] See, on the other hand, what infamy has become ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt

... moonlit night, and carried off a maiden. She at first refused to wed him, but consented to remain his servant. One evening, however, he overheard two of her kindred speaking of her, and caught her name—Penelope. When she found that he had learnt her name she gave way to grief: evidently she now knew that her fate was sealed. On his importunity being renewed, she at length consented to marry him, but on the condition that he should not strike her with iron. Here again the ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland

... Shakespeare's; and instance, for chief ideal types of human beauty and faith, the simple mother's and wife's heart of Andromache; the divine, yet rejected wisdom of Cassandra; the playful kindness and simple princess-life of happy Nausicaa; the housewifely calm of that of Penelope, with its watch upon the sea; the ever patient, fearless, hopelessly devoted piety of the sister, and daughter, in Antigone; the bowing down of Iphigenia, lamb-like and silent; and finally, the expectation of the resurrection, made clear to the soul ...
— Sesame and Lilies • John Ruskin

... for lighthouse of Abaco (built by the English) showed her charitable and revolving radiance. But our ship, Penelope-like, undoes by night what she has performed by day, and her course is backward and crabbish. A delicious smell of violets is ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca

... barred sunshine, at peace with himself and the pleasant solitudes, Sundown relaxed and fell to dreaming of Andalusian castles builded in far forests of the south, and of some Spanish Penelope—possibly not unlike the Senorita Loring—who waited his coming with patient tears and rare fidelity. "Them there true-be-doors," he muttered, "like Billy used to say, sure had the glad job—singin' ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs

... definite plot and a greater dramatic intensity were given to these tales of adventure by the addition of an erotic element which often took the form of two separated lovers. Some use is made of this element, for instance, in the relations of Odysseus and Penelope, perhaps in the episode of AEneas and Dido, and in the story of Jason and Medea. The intrusion of the love motif into the stories told of demigods and heroes, so that the whole narrative turns upon it, is illustrated by such ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott

... of all crimes. Only one of the kings held back for awhile and needed much persuasion to join the league. This was Odysseus of Ithaca, who could well consider himself at the time the happiest of mortals, for he had lately married Penelope, one of the fairest and most virtuous maidens of Greece. He had an infant son of great beauty and promise, and he owned much land and countless herds of cattle, sheep, and swine. Added to that, all the petty nobles of the island ...
— Odysseus, the Hero of Ithaca - Adapted from the Third Book of the Primary Schools of Athens, Greece • Homer

... seemed harsher, yet the lines of his face, his outer man, his whole personality, did not seem altered, but his soul had changed its nature, a different mind looked forth from those eyes. Bertrande knew him for her husband, and yet she hesitated. Even so Penelope, on the return of Ulysses, required a certain proof to confirm the evidence of her eyes, and her long absent husband had to remind her of secrets ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - MARTIN GUERRE • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE

... with her worthiest consort she will strain, In honoured and in splendid rivalry, Which best shall prize the virtues' goodly train, And widest ope the gates to courtesy. If he by Taro, and in Naples' reign, ('Tis said), from Gauls delivered Italy, 'Twill be replied. Penelope the chaste, As such, ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto

... witch, singing her magic song as she fares to and fro before her golden loom; to rest and pine in the islet of Calypso, the kind sea-goddess; to meet with Nausicaa, loveliest of mortal maids; to reach his Ithaca, and do battle with the Wooers, and age in peace and honour by the side of the wise Penelope. The day is yet afar when, as he sailed out to the sunset and the ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley

... bands from Epirus; Crescia, the Epirote chief, commanded a body of Albanian cavalry.—The waning Dudley star; Leicester, who was near the end of his miserable career.—Astrophel; Sidney celebrated his love for Penelope Devereux, Lady Rich, in the series of Sonnets and Lyrics named Astrophel and Stella:—posthumously published in 1591.—After, or with Shakespeare's Sonnets, this series seems to me to offer the most powerful picture of the passion of love in the ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave

... nor Medea wise, I crave to see, nor win much lore, Nor list to Orpheus' minstrelsies; Nor Her'cles would I see, that o'er The wide world roamed from shore to shore; Nor, by St. James, Penelope, - Nor pure Lucrece, such wrong that bore: To ...
— Ballads in Blue China and Verses and Translations • Andrew Lang

... was, of all agonies that could have fallen to his lot, the sharpest and most bitter. Not Ugolino sitting silent amidst his famishing children—not Helen, when she would fain that the tempest had swept her from earth's surface on that evil day when she was born—not Penelope, when she cried on Diana, the high-priestess of death, to release her from the weariness of her days—not Agamemnon, when the fatal edict had gone forth, and his fair young daughter looked into his face, and asked him ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon

... Switzerland Penelope in Venice Penelope's Prints of Wales Penelope in Devon Penelope ...
— Penelope's Postscripts • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... endure. Endures the Trojan fame, And how Penelope's wise nights were passed. So Nemesis and Delia have a name,— A poet's earliest passion and ...
— The Elegies of Tibullus • Tibullus

... Winslow. We may imagine this elderly matron, sitting in the Winslow arm-chair, with its mark, "Cheapside, 1614," [Footnote: This chair and the cape are now In Pilgrim Hall, Plymouth; here also are portraits of Edward Winslow and Josiah Winslow and the latter's wife, Penelope.] perhaps wearing the white silk shoulder-cape with its trimmings of embossed velvet which has been preserved, proud that she was privileged to be the mother of this son, the first child born of white parents in New England, ...
— The Women Who Came in the Mayflower • Annie Russell Marble

... Iliad and Odyssey little is said about love directly; and yet it is not to be forgotten that the moving force of the Trojan war was the beauty of Helen, and the central interest of the return of Odysseus is the passionate fidelity of Penelope.[1] Yet more than this; when the poet has to speak of the matter, he never fails to rise to the occasion in a way that even now we can see to be unsurpassable. The Achilles of the Iliad may speak scornfully of Briseis, as insufficient ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail

... for some years Dr. E. Cobham Brewer, best known for his Dictionary of Phrase and Fable; whilst in a house that stood beside the stream lived William—afterwards Sir William—Boothby, the uncle of pretty Penelope, whose white marble tomb is one of the wonders ...
— The Dukeries • R. Murray Gilchrist

... the more vulgar accounts, by making the former so eminent, at the cost of the other heroes, in his Jerusalem Delivered. Thus Virgil transformed by his magical power the chaste Dido into a distracted lover; and Homer the meretricious Penelope into a moaning matron. It is not requisite for poets to be historians, but historians should not be so frequently poets. The same charge, I have been told, must be made against the Grecian historians. The Persians are viewed to great disadvantage in Grecian history. It would ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli

... gifted, because she was so sane, so conscientious, and above all, because she was so sure. Her efficiency was like a beacon to lightly anchored men, and in the intervals between her marriages she had as many suitors as Penelope. Whatever else they saw in her at first, her competency so impressed and delighted them that they gradually lost sight of everything else. Her sterling character was the subject of her story. Once, as she said, she very nearly escaped her destiny. With Blasius Bouchalka ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather

... of human beings, obviously, but a culture far removed from his. A slight path of white began at his feet and expanded as it fell slightly, ramplike, over and into the city. The buildings were whiter than the gate of false dreams that Penelope sung of and the streets and avenues were blue, not gray. The people wore white and milled about in the streets below him. They shouted as one; their voices were not cries but songs and they sang ...
— Pleasant Journey • Richard F. Thieme

... with express condition that there should be absolute undertaking on the part of the United Provinces never to send or maintain troops in the duchies. Tedious and futile correspondence followed between Brussels, the Hague, London, Paris. But the difficulties grew every moment. It was a Penelope's web of negotiation, said one of the envoys. Amid pertinacious and wire-drawn subtleties, every trace of practical business vanished. Neuburg departed to look after his patrimonial estates; leaving his interests in the duchies to be watched over by the Archduke. Even Count Zollern, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... repeating himself, when he fell into that hopeless captivity; and we know that Ulysses felt so manifest an ennui under similar circumstances that Calypso herself furthered his departure. There is indeed a report that he afterward left Penelope; but since she was habitually absorbed in worsted work, and it was probably from her that Telemachus got his mean, pettifogging disposition, always anxious about the property and the daily consumption of meat, no inference can be drawn from this already ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot

... Philip Sydney; Mr. Secretary Walsingham, in his gown and wrought cap; Mary Countess of Pembrok, sister of Sir Philip Sydney; the last Lady Abbess of Wilton (Lady Anna Gawen), a pretty, beautiful, modest Penelope; with many others now forgotten ...
— The Natural History of Wiltshire • John Aubrey

... such a conclusion is. There is more freshness, subtilty, spontaneity, variety, in womanly characters than in manly. Their range, between the extremes of the demure and the hoydenish, is greater. The feminine types, Helen and Penelope, or Clytemnestra and Antigone, are as distinct as the masculine types, Agamemnon and Ulysses, or OEdipus and Philoctetes. The injustice of the vulgar saying, "It is just like a woman," implying that there are no differences among women, makes one indignant. Have we not seen women to whom death ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger

... he had a job, my gentleman sat withinside tailor-wise and busily stitching. I say, when he had a job; but such customers as came were rather for Secundra, and the Master's sewing would be more in the manner of Penelope's. He could never have designed to gain even butter to his bread by such a means of livelihood: enough for him that there was the name of Durie dragged in the dirt on the placard, and the sometime heir of that proud family set up cross-legged in public for a reproach ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson

... in this letter is as good as anything in La Bruyere. The next letter (without date in Cottle's "Reminiscences", but which must be 1803) is to Miss Cruikshank, of Nether Stowey. The Penelope referred to is Penelope Poole, the cousin ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull

... "Penelope maketh such cheer as she may," he added, after glancing at the contents: "but I see nothing of your ...
— St George's Cross • H. G. Keene

... presented by the Pasha of Egypt to the king of England, was conveyed to Malta under the charge of two Arabs, and was from thence forwarded to London in the "Penelope," which arrived on the 11th of August, 1827. She was conveyed to Windsor two days afterward, and was kept in the royal menagerie at the Sandpit-gate. George the Fourth took much interest in this animal, visiting her generally twice or thrice a week, and sometimes twice ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various

... said that, when Ulysses was Ten years at Troy, and ten years more, alas! Wandering abroad as chance and fortune led, Penelope supposing him for dead: But he, providing still for afterclaps, When he had 'scap'd a thousand hard mishaps, It did him good to reckon up at last Unto his wife his travails he had pass'd, And sweetly ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VI • Robert Dodsley

... every one night and day with tears, kneeled down and prayed, so that they all wept sore and fell on his neck: Romeo took a last embrace of Juliet in the vault, and sealed the doors of breath with a righteous kiss: Penelope embraced Ulysses, who was welcome to her as land is welcome to shipwrecked swimmers escaping from the grey seawater—there have, we say, been some remarkable embraces on this earth since time began, but none more remarkable than that on the steps of the ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford

... obnoxious individuals, is by no means unfrequently alluded to in the annals of Bohemia. These two emissaries of a detested party escaped, indeed, unhurt; for they fell upon a bed of manure, and were carried off, and nursed, and aided in their subsequent flight by the Princess Penelope of Lobkowitz. But throughout the Hussite troubles, and in times anterior to them, the right of putting to death by casting from towers and over windows, was claimed and exercised by those in power; nay, and more curious still, it was justified ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig

... Penelope!" said Richard, just wetting his mouth. The carriage was at the door: a couple of dire organs, each grinding the same tune, and a vulture-scented itinerant band (from which not the secretest veiled wedding can escape) worked harmoniously without in ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... Arcadia we shall have to return later in this chapter. It is his other great work, the sequence of sonnets entitled Astrophel and Stella, which concerns us here. They celebrate the history of his love for Penelope Devereux, sister of the Earl of Essex, a love brought to disaster by the intervention of Queen Elizabeth with whom he had quarrelled. As poetry they mark an epoch. They are the first direct expression of an intimate and personal experience in English literature, struck ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair

... dark ocean of a corporeal life, but by the assistance of Mercury, who may be considered as the emblem of reason, he will at length be enabled to quit the magic embraces of Calypso, the Goddess of Imagination, and to return again into the arms of Penelope, or Philosophy, the long lost and proper object of ...
— An Essay on the Beautiful - From the Greek of Plotinus • Plotinus

... and Naomi could not read, and Boaz probably would never have married into the family had they possessed that accomplishment,—that the Spartan women did not know the alphabet, nor the Amazons, nor Penelope, nor Andromache, nor Lucretia, nor Joan of Arc, nor Petrarch's Laura, nor the daughters of Charlemagne, nor the three hundred and sixty-five wives of Mohammed; but that Sappho and Madame de Maintenon could read altogether too well; while the case of Saint Brigitta, ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson

... your horse's head, with the two reins firmly nipped by the thumbs resting on top of the fore-fingers. This is the way recommended in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, in Colonel Dodge's 'Patroclus and Penelope,' and you will see it in ...
— In the Riding-School; Chats With Esmeralda • Theo. Stephenson Browne

... called upon all the Greek heroes to remember their oath, and help him to recover his wife, and take vengeance on Paris. Everyone replied to the call; but the wise Ulysses, grandson of Sisyphus, and king of the little isle of Ithaca, could not bear to leave his home, or his fair young wife Penelope, for a war which he knew would be long and terrible, so he feigned to be mad, and began furiously ploughing the sea shore with a yoke of oxen. However, the next cleverest hero, Palamedes, to prove him, ...
— Aunt Charlotte's Stories of Greek History • Charlotte M. Yonge

... toy; If thou lovest me, think no[97] more of it. I'll cull thee out the fairest courtezans, And bring them every morning to thy bed: She whom thine eye shall like, thy heart shall have, Be she as chaste as was Penelope, As wise as Saba,[98] or as beautiful As was bright Lucifer before his fall. Hold, take this book, peruse it ...
— The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus • Christopher Marlowe

... together, duetwise, formed together some very curious harmonies. Thus, while the Captain was whispering the softest nothings, the Corporal was shouting the fiercest combats of the war; and, like the gentleman at Penelope's table, on it exiguo pinxit ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray

... entertains and honours him. Once more does Odysseus approach the world and its joys, and the spirit which is attached to the world, Nausicaa, awakes within him. But he finds the way home, to the divine. At first nothing good awaits him at home. His wife, Penelope, is surrounded by numerous suitors. Each one she promises to marry, when she has finished weaving a certain piece of work. She avoids keeping her promise by undoing every night what she has woven by day. Odysseus is obliged to vanquish the suitors before he can be reunited to his wife ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner

... home the triumph of our Victory," Sings SPENSER. From wide wanderings you have come Victorious, yet, as all the world may see, Your sweetest, crowning triumph find—at home. Say, would ULYSSES care again to roam Wed with so winning a PENELOPE As STANLEY'S DOROTHY? Loyal like her of Ithaca, and dowered With charms that in the Greek less fully flowered, The charms of talent and of character, Which blend in her Who, won, long waited, and who, waiting, won The virile, valiant son Of our adventurous England. May the bays ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, July 12, 1890 • Various

... and expressive; but without those adjuncts, the blaze was softer and more tempered: they had that look which the French call veloute, or velvety; and he appeared altogether ten years younger. If our Ulysses, thus rejuvinated by his Minerva, has not fully made up his mind to make a Penelope of Miss Jemima, all I can say is, that he is worse than Polyphemus, who was only ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various

... of the Suitors, of his return to Ithaca, and his death at the hands of Telegonus, his son by Circe. The epic ended by disposing of the surviving personages in a double marriage, Telemachus wedding Circe, and Telegonus Penelope. ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod

... which they began; and a contracting sun and a diminished light and a lowered temperature and the narrower orbits in which the planets shall revolve, prophesy that 'the elements shall melt with fervent heat,' and that all things which have been made must one day cease to be. Nature is the true Penelope's web, ever being woven and ever being unravelled, and in the most purely physical and scientific sense the world is passing away. But then, because you and I belong, in a segment of our being, to that which thus is passing ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... reached a large and magnificent saloon. It was hung with tapestry, upon which were represented the figures of Sappho sweeping the lyre; of the Spartan mother bending over the body, and counting the wounds of her son; of Penelope in the midst of her maidens, carefully unravelling the funeral web of her husband; of Lucretia inflicting upon herself a glorious and voluntary death; and of Arria teaching her husband in what manner a Roman should expire. These stories had been miraculously ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin

... where I was before I digressed to explain to you how that frightful and incurable disease, membranous croup,[Diphtheria D.W.] was ravaging the town and driving all mothers mad with terror, I called Mrs. McWilliams's attention to little Penelope, and said: ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain



Words linked to "Penelope" :   Greek mythology, Cracidae, Anas penelope, family Cracidae, genus Penelope, mythical being, bird genus



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