"Stygian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... read Dante, else he would have said to himself that his anger often filled his heart with hell's dunnest gloom. The old Castle was never well lighted; but, with a father and a son in it like Cardoness and his heir, it was sometimes like the Stygian pool itself. Rutherford had need to write to her ladyship to have a soft answer always ready between such a father and such a son. If you have the Inferno at hand, and will read what it says about the Fifth Circle, you will see ...
— Samuel Rutherford - and some of his correspondents • Alexander Whyte
... (here) Coffee made, And ever since the rest drive on the trade; Me no good Engalash! and sure enough, He plaid the Quack to salve his Stygian stuff; Ver boon for de stomach, de Cough, de Ptisick And I believe him, for it looks like Physick. Coffee a crust is charkt into a coal, The smell and taste of the Mock China bowl; Where huff and puff, they labour out their lungs, Lest Dives-like they should bewail their tongues. ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... incarnation of all that is untamed, a wild spirit of the mountain stream, as free as a raindrop or a sunbeam. How solitary he is, a lone little bird, flitting from rock to rock through the desolate gorge, like some spirit in a Stygian world. Yet he sings continually as he takes his solitary way along the stream, and bursts of melody, so eerie and sylvan as to fire the imagination, come to the ear, sounding above the roar of the torrent. Like Orpheus, he seeks in the nether ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... her not; thy heat and stir The greater coyness breed in her: Yet thou may'st find, ere Age's frost, Thy long apprenticeship not lost, Learning at last that Stygian Fate Supples for him that knows to wait. The Muse is womanish, nor deigns Her love to him who pules and plains; With proud, averted face she stands To him who wooes with empty hands. Make thyself free of manhood's ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... obey'd:—and to his feet Bound the light wings of gold—wings ever fleet, Which over earth and sea, through yielding air, Swift as the wind the rapid herald bear; 305 And took the rod that calls the trembling ghost To light, or binds it to the Stygian coast, Gives balmy slumber, breaks the sweet repose, Weighs down the lid of dying eyes that close. Thro' storms and dripping clouds with this he glides; Now o'er the summit and the hoary sides 310 Of Atlas hangs, pois'd on whose shoulders rest The Heav'ns: his head eternal storms infest, ...
— The Fourth Book of Virgil's Aeneid and the Ninth Book of Voltaire's Henriad • Virgil and Voltaire
... Cocted in Stygian shades— Acids of wrinkles and pimples From faces of ancient maids— Acrid precipitates sunken From tempers of scolding wives Whose husbands, uncommonly drunken, Are commonly found in dives,— With this I baptize and appoint thee (to St. John.) ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... drawn to the farther wall. An archway gaped there. I walked across the room, passed under the archway. Instantly I was in complete, stygian darkness. ...
— Where the World is Quiet • Henry Kuttner
... layd on thing that likte him best, Or ever sleepe his eie-strings did untye, Should be his pray. And therefore still on hye He over him did hold his cruell clawes, Threatning with greedy gripe to doe him dye, And rend in peeces with his ravenous pawes, If ever he transgrest the fatal Stygian lawes. ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... and Marius's Villas, Agrippina's Tomb, Caligula's Bridge, &c., may be anything; they are nothing but shapeless fragments, only on a rock I saw a bit of marble or stucco in what they call Caesar's Villa. The Stygian Lake presented no horrors, nor the Elysian Fields any delights; the former is a great round piece of water, and the latter are very common-looking vineyards. When well wooded, which in the time of the Romans it was, this coast must have been a most delicious and luxurious retreat, so sequestered ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... horizon. The master gave another order into the speaking tube and their ship shot forward, faster and yet faster, with a speed that pressed them heavily into their seats. Behind them was the glory of the sunlit clouds; ahead the gloomy gray-black masses that must make a stygian night sky over this lonely world—a world cut off by that vaporous shell from ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... real and shining feet below. Unfortunately, there is the domain of the myths and immaterials, there is the home of the law and the force, there dwell the Odyles, the electricities, the magnetisms, and affinities, and there the speculative AEneas pursues shadows more fleeting than the Stygian ghosts, and the grasp of the metaphysician closes on shapes whose embrace is vacancy. The bark that ploughs within this mystic expanse, sheds from its cleaving keel but coruscations of phosphorescent sparkles, which glimmer and quench in a gloom that Egyptian ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... methinks, to me Belongs the office; Lady, when my tongue Is cold in death, believe me, unto thee My voice shall raise its tributary song. My soul, from this strait prison-house set free, As o'er the Stygian lake it floats along, Thy praises singing still shall hold its way, And make the waters ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... this scene, and asked the Sibyl to explain to him its meaning. "You see before you," she replied, "the deep pools of Cocytus, and the Stygian lake, by which the Gods are accustomed to swear when they take an oath which they dare not violate. All that crowd which Charon will not ferry across is composed of persons who after death received not the rites of burial; those only are permitted to enter the boat who ...
— The Children's Hour, Volume 3 (of 10) • Various
... veil, the blessing of universal nature, and in which the sleepy-looking heads, with a peculiar grace and refinement of somewhat advanced life in them, have just this half-weary posture. We see here, then, the Here of the world below, the Stygian Juno, the chief of those Elysian matrons who come crowding, in the poem of Claudian, to the marriage toilet of Proserpine, the goddess of the fertility of the earth and of all creatures, but still of fertility as arisen out of death;* and therefore she is not without ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... with my life expire, Or this world's light confine the boundless song: To thee, bright maid, in death I'll touch the lyre, And to my soul the theme shall still belong. When, freed from clay, the flitting ghosts among, My spirit glides the Stygian shores around, Though the cold hand of death has sealed my tongue, Thy praise the infernal caverns shall rebound, And Lethe's sluggish waves move slower to ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... Almighty Father, offended that any mortal should rise to the light of life from the infernal shades, struck the son of Phoebus with his forked lightning to the Stygian ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... Jug without a gleam of light! Could a man choke himself with his own fingers if the worst came to the worst? The Digger and Stygian darkness—now—when he was going mad! Men could not be so cruel.... 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 ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... now I stand and mourn at thine. Yet no breath of death strikes thence, no shadow of gloom, Only light more bright than gold of the inmost mine, Only steam of incense warm from love's own shrine. Not the darkling stream, the sundering Stygian ford, Not the hour that smites and severs as a sword, Not the night subduing light that perisheth, Smite, subdue, divide from us by doom abhorred, Life so sweet as this that dies and ...
— Astrophel and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne, Vol. VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... is the golden bowl! the spirit flown forever Let the bell toll!—a saintly soul floats on the Stygian river; And, Guy De Vere, hast thou no tear?—weep now or never more! See, on yon drear and rigid bier low lies thy love, Lenore! Come, let the burial rite be read—the funeral song be sung, 5 An anthem for the queenliest dead that ever died so young, A dirge for her the doubly ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... sat in the rear seat. Two small lamps served to light the way through the Stygian labyrinth of trees and rocks. O'Dowd had an electric pocket torch with which to pick his way ...
— Green Fancy • George Barr McCutcheon
... smoker he, Bard of the sofa and bohea— Complained his "dear friend Bull" not free From lowering Stygian smoke. ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various
... are devotedly attached to him; they admire him "that for the general safety he despised his own"; and the only scene of rejoicing recorded in the annals of Hell, before the Fall of Man, is at the dissolution of the Stygian Council, when the devils come forth "rejoicing in ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... were speaking near the curb-door. She turned her head involuntarily in this direction. There were no lights in the frontage before which stood her cab, which intervened between the Brocken haze in the street, throwing a square of Stygian shadow against the fog, with right and left angles of aureola. She could distinguish ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath
... wall. The passage over the water is also a death symbol. We have not only the anxiety about death caused by the moral conflict, but we have also to remember that the passage into the uterus is a passage to the beyond. The water is the Water of Death (stygian waters) and of Life. In narrower sense it is also seminal fluid and the amniotic liquor. It is overdetermined as indeed all symbols are. The water bears the death color black. In the Flying Post dream a black road ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... The third circle includes gluttons; the fourth misers and spendthrifts; each succeeding circle embracing what the poet deems a deeper shade of guilt, and inflicting appropriate punishment. The Christian and heathen systems of theology are here freely interwoven. We have Minos visiting the Stygian Lake, where heretics are burning; we meet Cerberus and the harpies, and we accompany the poet across several of the fabulous rivers of Erebus. A fearful scene appears in the deepest circle of the infernal abodes. Here, among those who have betrayed their ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... a little more !— Look forth, look forth! without the door There stands a robber old. He'll force your ev'ry lock and spring, And all your goods he'll take and fling On Stygian ...
— Songs of Labor and Other Poems • Morris Rosenfeld
... light, 425 Under your beames I will me safely shrowd, From dreaded storme of his disdainfull spight: To you th' inheritance belongs by right Of brothers prayse, to you eke longs his love. Let not his love, let not his restlesse spright, 430 Be unreveng'd, that calles to you above From wandring Stygian shores, where ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... From the sad retreats That hold thee, smothered with excess of sweets, Shade of a shadow, spectre of a dream, Glance thy wan eye across the Stygian stream! The slipshod dreamer treads thy fragrant halls, The sophist's cobwebs hang thy roseate walls, And o'er the crotchets of thy jingling tunes The bard of mystery scrawls his crooked "runes." Yes, thou art gone, with all the tuneful hordes That candied thoughts in amber-colored ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... hotter and hotter, while around us rolled an oppressive steam, which obscured and hid the sun; the guide, who was a few steps in advance of me, presently turned back, and seizing hold of me, hurried out of this Stygian exhalation. ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... over-quick digestion, and fills the stomach full of crudities. For a cold or headache the fumes of the pipe only are taken. His Majesty greatly loathes this new fashion, saying that the smoke thereof resembles nothing so much as the Stygian fume of the bottomless pit, and likewise that 'tis a branch of drunkenness, which he terms the root ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... his career. He was early sent to Western Virginia on a forlorn hope against Rosecrans, where he had no success; for success was impossible. Yet his lofty character was respected of all and compelled public confidence. Indeed, his character seemed perfect, his bath in Stygian waters complete; not a vulnerable spot remained: totus teres atque rotundus. His soldiers reverenced him and had unbounded confidence in him, for he shared all their privations, and they saw him ever unshaken of fortune. Tender and protecting love he did not inspire: such love is given to weakness, ...
— Destruction and Reconstruction: - Personal Experiences of the Late War • Richard Taylor
... doomed boat. All was foul, sullen, weird as witches' dream. If Amyas had seen a crew of skeletons glide down the stream behind him, with Satan standing at the helm, he would scarcely have been surprised. What fitter craft could haunt that Stygian flood? ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... Speak from thy silent grave; It doth not roll o'er thee, Death's dark and Stygian wave! Sweet! speak, I'm sick, to hear The heaven of thy voice, Which wont, while life was dear, ...
— Lays of Ancient Virginia, and Other Poems • James Avis Bartley
... from one to another, that so they might encourage them to virtue." 'Twas for a politic end, and to this purpose the old [6398]poets feigned those elysian fields, their Aeacus, Minos, and Rhadamanthus, their infernal judges, and those Stygian lakes, fiery Phlegethons, Pluto's kingdom, and variety of torments after death. Those that had done well, went to the elysian fields, but evil doers to Cocytus, and to that burning lake of [6399]hell with fire, and brimstone for ever to be tormented. 'Tis this which [6400]Plato labours for ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... it with impunity: You are neither—then he'll flatter Till he finds some trait for satire; Hunts your weak point out, then shows it Where it injures to disclose it, In the mode that's most invidious, Adding every trait that's hideous, From the bile, whose blackening river Rushes through his Stygian liver. Then he thinks himself a lover: Why I really can't discover In his mind, age, face, or figure: Viper-broth might give him vigor. Let him keep the caldron steady, He the venom has already. For his faults, he has but ONE— 'Tis but envy, ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... But after that—what? He laughed again at Carmen's pertinent question about the mind climbing up into the brain to see the vibrating nerve. But was it so silly a presumption, after all? Is the mind within the brain, awaiting in Stygian darkness the advent of the vibrations which shall give it pictures of the outside world? Or is the mind outside of the brain, but still slavishly forced to look at these vibrations of the optic nerve and then translate them into terms of things without? What could a vibrating ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... blood of Hydra, Lerna's bane, The juice of Hebon, and Cocytus breath, And all the poison of the Stygian pool." ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... center of the cavity when the soft ground beneath him gave way suddenly and he catapulted below into the darkness. Through the Stygian gloom he fell in what seemed to be an endless drop. He finally crashed upon something hard. The thin crust of the volcano's mouth had broken through, precipitating him ...
— The Jameson Satellite • Neil Ronald Jones
... Inn, on Regent Street, near Piccadilly Circus, was a haven of brightness in an otherwise Stygian London. It was one of those "old-fashioned" places—Restoration style of decoration, carried out in modern plastics. The oak panelling looked authentic enough, but it was just a little ...
— The Penal Cluster • Ivar Jorgensen (AKA Randall Garrett)
... reproached them. "Lay aside," she said, "your vainly-conceived terrors! You shall behold only a living and a human figure, whose accents you may listen to with perfect security. If this alarms you, what would you say if you should have seen the Stygian lakes, and the shores burning with sulphur unconsumed, if the Furies stood before you, and Cerberus with his mane of vipers, and the Giants chained in eternal adamant? Yet all these you might have witnessed unharmed; for all these would quail at the ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... huddled close to one another for warmth; while Mugambi built a fire close to them over which he crouched. Tarzan and Sheeta, however, were of a different mind, for neither of them feared the jungle night, and the insistent craving of their hunger sent them off into the Stygian blackness of the ...
— The Beasts of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... rayless, Cimmerian, pitchy, tenebrific, murk, murky, dingy, shadowy, shady, mirky, lowering, overcast, gloomy, sullen, Stygian, sombre; obscure, mysterious, incomprehensible, recondite abstruse, cabalistic, cryptic, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... gasped for breath, with bosom swelling: Her lips unclosed, while her large, luminous eyes Blazing like Stygian skies, With passion, on the audacious youth were dwelling: She raised her angry hand, that seemed to clasp Jove's thunder ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... handsome and geometric, their beauty fit and useful, their use gracious and remarkable, their stability unhurt and sharp. A splendid double pomp of windows displays riddles to the eyes, inscribing the citizens of the Heavenly City and the arms whereby they tame the Stygian tyrant.{22} And two are greater, like two lights; of these the rounded blaze, looking upon the quarters of north and south, with its double light, lords it over all windows. They can be compared to the common stars, but these two are one like the sun, the other like the moon. So ...
— Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln - A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England • Charles L. Marson
... of home-coming, mingled with a peculiar dream-like feeling, that they were arriving on a strange planet, after having been ferried across Stygian currents on a Charon's raft. Out there, on the ocean and over the ocean, hovered a gruesomeness of solitudes, in which the human being, himself seeing everything, remains unseen, unknown, forgotten by God and the world. To be happy in his heated, clustered ant nests, man ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... witty torturing Spain, The brain is vext to vex the brain, Where hereticks bare heads are arm'd In a close helm, and in it charm'd An overgrown and meagre rat, That peece-meal nibbles himself fat; So on the toads blew-checquer'd scull The spider gluttons her self full. And vomiting her Stygian seeds, Her poyson on his poyson feeds. Thus the invenom'd toad, now grown Big with more poyson than his own, Doth gather all his pow'rs, and shakes His stormer in's disgorged lakes; And wounded now, apace crawls on To his next plantane ...
— Lucasta • Richard Lovelace
... Opposite, a single arc-lamp on the corner of Cypress Street cast a white, cheerless light on the gelid pavement. The few stores along the avenue were dark, with the exception of the warmly lighted White Star restaurant directly opposite the Stygian spot ...
— Midnight • Octavus Roy Cohen
... to India to bloom forth as a Roger Bacon or even a Count St. Germain. Many take for their ideal Margrave with his ever-renewing youth, and care little for the soul as the price paid for it. Not a few, mistaking "Witch-of-Endorism" pure and simple, for Occultism—"through the yawning Earth from Stygian gloom, call up the meager ghost to walks of light," and want, on the strength of this feat, to be regarded as full blown Adepts. "Ceremonial Magic" according to the rules mockingly laid down by Eliphas Levi, is another imagined alter ego of ...
— Studies in Occultism; A Series of Reprints from the Writings of H. P. Blavatsky • H. P. Blavatsky
... very long time indeed—before any light stole in upon his Stygian darkness, and then, when the light did come, it came in skyrocket guise, and had its share of cons attached ...
— The Rejuvenation of Aunt Mary • Anne Warner
... of those limitless lands wherefrom the water had corroded all color and form, whose contours crumbled on all sides under the assault of the liquid putrescence that flowed across the broken bones of stakes and wire and framing; nor, rising above those things amid the sullen Stygian immensity, can I ever forget the vision of the thrill of reason, logic and simplicity that suddenly shook these men ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... past the long Slow smooth strong lapse of Lethe—past the toil Wherein all souls are taken as a spoil, The Stygian web of waters—if your song Be quenched not, O our brethren, but be strong As ere ye too shook off our ...
— Poems & Ballads (Second Series) - Swinburne's Poems Volume III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... were spent, 'Privilege of Parliament.' Now a new misfortune feels, Dreading to be laid by the heels. Never durst the muse before Enter that infernal door; Clio, stifled with the smell, Into spleen and vapours fell, By the Stygian steams that flew From the dire infectious crew. Not the stench of Lake Avernus Could have more offended her nose; Had she flown but o'er the top, She had felt her pinions drop, And by exhalations dire, Though a goddess, must expire. In a fright ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... the character of Friedrich, there is one British Writer whose curiosity concerning him would pretty soon have died away; nor could any amount of unwise desire to satisfy that feeling in fellow-creatures less seriously disposed have sustained him alive, in those baleful Historic Acherons and Stygian Fens, where he has had to dig and to fish so long, far away from the upper light!—Let me request all readers to blow that sorry chaff entirely out of their minds; and to believe nothing on the subject except what ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. I. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Birth And Parentage.—1712. • Thomas Carlyle
... enormous mound that stands there above the village on the side of the mountain, terraced and scalloped and fluted, and suggesting some vitreous formation, or rare carving of enormous, many-colored precious stones. It looks quite unearthly, and, though the devil's frying pan, and ink pot, and the Stygian caves are not far off, the suggestion is of something celestial rather than of the nether regions,—a vision of jasper walls, ...
— Camping with President Roosevelt • John Burroughs
... But there is in him a recognizable flash of magnanimity, of heroic enterprise and purpose; which is highly peculiar in that sordid element. And it can be said of him, as of lightning striking ineffectual on the Bog of Allen or the Stygian Fens, that his strength was never tried."—For the upshot of him we ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... water could not be forded for a distance of nearly three hundred feet, the Indians had constructed a bridge by cutting down two large trees and uniting the space that still remained between them in this Stygian lake, by tying logs together, with cross-poles for flooring. To add to the embarrassments of the Spaniards, apparently innumerable small bands of Indians were hovering on their track, assailing them with their sharp-pointed arrows, wherever they could get a shot, ...
— Ferdinand De Soto, The Discoverer of the Mississippi - American Pioneers and Patriots • John S. C. Abbott
... eyes, that full of rage and venom swell, Two beacons seem, that men to arms assemble, His feltered locks, that on his bosom fell, On rugged mountains briars and thorns resemble, His yawning mouth, that foamed clotted blood, Gaped like a whirlpool wide in Stygian flood. ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... formation in all directions are numberless curiosities, such as the Devil's Kitchen, Cupid's Cave, and the Stygian Cave. In many of these caves there is an accumulation of carbonic-acid gas sufficient to destroy animal life. This is especially true of ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... insensible they never knew. Justus Miles was the first to come to, and he found himself in Stygian blackness. "Rusty!" he called, feeling terribly sick and giddy. Only silence answered him. "Good God!" he thought, "what has happened?" His hand went out and recoiled from something soft and sticky. Gingerly ...
— The Heads of Apex • Francis Flagg
... Burton appeared to find the necessary comfort in the boast which he nursed to his heart, that his exit from the world, with which he had played ducks and drakes, was to be entirely voluntary and in no wise forced: that though he was closing life's door upon himself he was still crossing the Stygian threshold ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... laugh and dance above ground. But all caverns are much alike in their depressing and gloomy influences, and since there is so great opportunity to be wretched on the surface of the earth, why do people visit them? I do not know that this is more dispiriting or its stream more Stygian than another. ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... though he be from us, Virgil salutes him, and Theocritus; Catullus, mightiest-brained Lucretius, each Greets him, their brother, on the Stygian beach; Proudly a gaunt right hand doth Dante reach; Milton and Wordsworth bid him welcome home; Bright Keats to touch his raiment doth beseech; Coleridge, his locks aspersed with fairy foam, Calm Spenser, Chaucer suave, His equal friendship crave: And godlike spirits hail him guest, in speech ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... all speech; require not even contempt, only oblivion. Poor Teufelsdrockh!—Creature of mischance, miscalculation, and thousand-fold obstruction! Here nevertheless he is, as you see; has struggled across the Stygian marshes, and now, as a stitched pamphlet "for Friends," cannot be burnt or lost before his time. I send you one copy for your own behoof; three others you yourself can perhaps find fit readers for: as you spoke in the plural number, I thought there might be three; more would ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... President, with a Fouquier-Tinville for Attorney-General, and a Jury of such as Citizen Leroi, who has surnamed himself Dix-Aout, 'Leroi August-Tenth,' it will become the wonder of the world. Herein has Sansculottism fashioned for itself a Sword of Sharpness: a weapon magical; tempered in the Stygian hell-waters; to the edge of it all armour, and defence of strength or of cunning shall be soft; it shall mow down Lives and Brazen-gates; and the waving of it shed terror through the souls ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... of that! But the walls! Instead of the great hole in the plaster close by the bed, his eyes fell on a piece of rich old tapestry! Curtains of silk damask, all bespotted with quaintest flowers, each like a page of Chaucer's poetry, hung round his bed, quite other than fit sails for the Stygian boat. They had made the bed as different as the vine in summer from the vine in winter. A quilt of red satin lay in the place of the patchwork coverlid. Everything had been changed. He thought the ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... what is the local currency, whether Attic or Macedonian or Aeginetan; nor does it occur to them how much better it would be for the departed one if the fare were not forthcoming,—because then the ferryman would decline to take him, and he would be sent back into the living world. Lest the Stygian Lake should prove inadequate to the requirements of ghostly toilets, the corpse is next washed, anointed with the choicest unguents to arrest the progress of decay, crowned with fresh flowers, and laid out in sumptuous raiment; ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... way?[8.B.] Where Peleus' son? whom Hell in vain enthralled. His shade from Hades upon that dread day Bursting to light in terrible array! What! could not Pluto spare the Chief once more, To scare a second robber from his prey? Idly he wandered on the Stygian shore, Nor now preserved the walls he loved ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... crusted thickly with white frost. Carefully he laid flat on his belly and edged himself along until he could thrust his face into the abyss. The air felt very warm—a dank, damp warmth, such as exudes from the depths of a swamp in summer. He peered downward but his eyes could not penetrate the Stygian blackness out of which rose the monotonous wail of ...
— Connie Morgan in the Fur Country • James B. Hendryx
... bachelor of Oxford, of that dread sacrament by which Catiline bound the soul of his fellow-conspirators, in order that both by the daring of the deed he might have proof of their sincerity, and by the horror thereof astringe their souls by adamantine fetters, and Novem-Stygian oaths, to that wherefrom hereafter the weakness of the flesh might shrink. Wherefore, O Jack! we too have determined, following that ancient and classical example, to fill, as he did, a bowl with the lifeblood of our most heroic selves, ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... is the golden bowl! the spirit flown forever! Let the bell toll!—a saintly soul floats on the Stygian river. And, Guy de Vere, hast thou no tear?—weep now or never more! See! on yon drear and rigid bier low lies thy love, Lenore! Come! let the burial rite be read—the funeral song be sung!— An anthem for the queenliest dead that ever died so young— A dirge ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... yard. The grass out there was long and unkempt; roses bloomed on the fence; wistaria, in its deeper green of midsummer, ran riot over the trellis where Clarence had basely dodged his lovely mistress, and, after making a furry pin wheel of himself, had fled through the airhole into Stygian depths. ...
— The Green Mouse • Robert W. Chambers
... the world? You had not heard the news of Piacenza, which must be known to everyone by now; and you have never heard of the anchorite of Monte Orsaro!" She appealed by a gesture to Heaven against the Stygian darkness of ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... Fat Clemitson's widow Flits now a small shadow By Stygian hid ford; And good Master Clapton Has thirty years napt on, The ground he last hapt on, ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... from him. It was nourished by the sense of foreignness in the Greek ceremonies gradually introduced into the cult. It fed on the more sensational aspects of certain of the gods brought in: on the enthusiastic rites of Bacchus, on the miracle-working of Aesculapius, on the Stygian mystery of Dis and Proserpina. But its fulfilment was to come from the East, that inexhaustible fountain of religious energy. In the Magna Mater it recognised its own. This was the first undiluted Orientalism which came to Rome. But the state itself had ...
— The Religion of Numa - And Other Essays on the Religion of Ancient Rome • Jesse Benedict Carter
... was a guest of Sir Henry Marquis for a week-end at his country-house. The man fascinated me. He seemed a sort of bottomless Stygian vat of mysteries. He had been the secret hand of England for many years in India. Then he was made a Baronet and put at the head of England's ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... regal mantle dight, Maidens immers'd in thoughts profound, Spectres, that haunt the shades of night, And spread a waste of ruin round. These form thy never-varying theme, While, buried in thy Stygian stream, Religion mourns her wasted fires And Hymen's sacred torch low hisses, ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... forge was a machine which had been used to operate the crane. Beyond it was stygian ...
— The Whispering Spheres • Russell Robert Winterbotham
... blue. Presently he relaxed once more—this time in the final dissolution from which there is no quickening. Korak propped the dead body against the door frame. There it sat, lifelike in the gloom. Then the ape-man turned and glided into the Stygian darkness of the ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... was Carthoris of Helium, yet in the clutches of these unseen creatures of the pit's Stygian night he was helpless ...
— Thuvia, Maid of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... died away in endless echoes. The flash lighted up the scene for an instant, and for an instant only; like the sudden lightning, it revealed all around. I saw a wide expanse of water, black as ink—a Stygian pool; but no rocks were visible, and it seemed as though I had been carried into a ...
— A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder • James De Mille |
