"Tantalus" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... silly, had given her husband no pleasures but those of paternity; she died young. Her libertine husband, fettered at the beginning of his commercial career by the necessity for working, and held in thrall by want of money, had led the life of Tantalus. Thrown in—as he phrased it—with the most elegant women in Paris, he let them out of the shop with servile homage, while admiring their grace, their way of wearing the fashions, and all the nameless charms ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... must be taken not to confound Attalus with Tantalus,—a blunder which, as Villani observes, [Footnote: Cron. Lib. I. c. vii.] is often committed by ignorant chroniclers. But Tantalus, as we all very well know, was the son of Jupiter, and grandson of Saturn. Now we are quite sure ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... plainly given to those truly initiated [16] in the mystery of self-command. Whereas despotism over unwilling slaves, the heavenly ones give, as it seems to me, to those whom they deem worthy to live the life of Tantalus in Hades, of whom it is written [17] "he consumes unending days in apprehension of ...
— The Economist • Xenophon
... cliff appear the nodules and bowlders that were too hard to be bitten into dust and have fallen out of the cliff, which is fifty feet high, as the sea eats it away. Some of these are sculptured into the likeness effaces and figures, solemn and grotesque. It is easy to find Pharaoh, Cleopatra, Tantalus, ...
— Among the Forces • Henry White Warren
... cigarette from the case his host held out, and Major Carstairs made a gesture towards the tantalus on the table. ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... honorable death. This is the twentieth year of sodden waiting. Fighting by land and sea and soldier's work, As hot as heart could wish,—boy generals,— Wars on all hands, in Holland, France, and Spain, With military honors falling thick;— And I, a Tantalus set in a lake of thirst, Up to my neck in battles all about, Without ...
— The Treason and Death of Benedict Arnold - A Play for a Greek Theatre • John Jay Chapman
... to which, as they alleged, they had all belonged long ago on the slopes of Mount Sipylos, between the valley of the Hermos and the Gulf of Smyrna. The traditional capital of this kingdom was Magnesia, the most ancient of cities, the residence of Tantalus, the father of Niobe and the Pelopidae. The Leleges rise up before us from many points at the same time, but always connected with the most ancient memories of Greece and Asia. The majority of the strongholds on the ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 5 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... superfluous; both sets have just what they deserve—one as hungry and thirsty and dry-mouthed as Tantalus, getting no further than gaping at the gold; and the other finding its food swept away from its very gullet, as the Harpies served Phineus. Come, be off with you; you will find Timon has ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... produced 'Le philosophe sans le savoir.' And now it has added, 'Le philosophe sans le vouloir,' and you have stumbled on him. What a life for an aged man! Fortunatus ille senex qui ludicola vivit. Tantalus handcuffed and glowering over a gambling-table; a hell in ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... soul fears to prove Tantalus torment first. De Clieu alone defies: While still that fatal thirst, Fierce, stifling, day by day his noble strength devours, And still a heaven of brass inflames the burning hours. With that refreshing draught his life he will not cheer; But drop by drop revives the plant he ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... officers and men is often brought out in their detachment reports. These reports reveal not only men of ability and insight, but throw light on the kind of people these Police in the north had to guide. Sergeant Frank Thorne, for instance, was in charge at a place called Tantalus. The man who gave that name to the elusive mining prospects of the region had a sense of humour and the fitness of things. Thorne says, "Hundreds of people landed at Tantalus en route to the new White Horse diggings. ...
— Policing the Plains - Being the Real-Life Record of the Famous North-West Mounted Police • R.G. MacBeth
... his veins is sullied with illegitimacy. Paint him the ruthless, the daring, the ambitious—so nigh greatness, yet debarred from it; so near to wealth, yet excluded from possessing it; a political Tantalus, ready to do or dare anything to terminate his necessities and assert his ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... Human Life, in which he professes to have already attained the age of one thousand and twenty-five years. [180] He must by this account have been born about one hundred years after our Saviour. He professed to have visited the infernal regions, and there to have seen Tantalus seated on a throne of gold. He is also said by some to be the same person, whose life has been written by Philostratus under the name of Apollonius of Tyana. [181] He wrote a book on the philosopher's stone, which ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... each individual his own peculiar adventures. Vossius refers the adventure of Niobe, the daughter of Phoroneus, to Jupiter Apis, the king of Argos, who reigned about B.C. 1770; and that of Danae to Jupiter Proetus, who lived about 1350 years before the Christian era. It was Jupiter Tantalus, according to him, that carried off Ganymede; and it was Jupiter, the father of Hercules, that deceived Leda. He says that the subject of the present Fable was Jupiter Asterius, who reigned about B.C. 1400. ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... Rechtsgelehrsamkeit in den Preussischen Staaten—(Berlin und Stettin), 1790, v. 215-260.] Other lights are to be gathered, with severe scrutiny and caution, from the circumambient contemporary rumor,—especially from the PREFACE to a "Comedy" so called of "TANTALE EN PROCES (Tantalus," Voltaire, "at Law");—which PREFACE is evidently Hirsch's own Story, put into language for him by some humane friend, and addressed to a "clear-seeing Public." [TANTALE EN PROCES (ascribed to Friedrich himself, by some wonderful persons!) is in—Supplement aux OEuvres Posthumes ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... beasts that scatter fire, Like Jason, when he sought the fleece of gold, Or change from man to beast three years entire, As King Nebuchadnezzar did of old; Or else have times as shameful and as bad As Trojan folk for ravished Helen had; Or gulfed with Proserpine and Tantalus Let hell's deep fen devour him dolorous, With worse to bear than Job's worst sufferance, Bound in his prison-maze with Daedalus, Who could wish evil to the state ...
— Poems & Ballads (Second Series) - Swinburne's Poems Volume III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... the situation of the vulgar, and would have regarded all these disquisitions with indolence and indifference. At present they seem to be in a very lamentable condition, and such as the poets have given us but a faint notion of in their descriptions of the punishment of Sisyphus and Tantalus. For what can be imagined more tormenting, than to seek with eagerness, what for ever flies us; and seek for it in a place, where it is impossible it can ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... European mansion. Later, as his sons and daughters grew able to advise, he built a bungalow, a spacious, rambling affair, as unpretentious as it was magnificent. Also, as time went by, there arose a mountain house on Tantalus, to which the family could flee when the "sick wind" blew from the south. And at Waikiki he built a beach residence on an extensive site so well chosen that later on, when the United States government ...
— The House of Pride • Jack London
... doom preparing for us; whatever might have been the wishes of Sheikh Hamed and the black chief, the voices of the marabouts and the people prevailed. We were doomed to a fate scarcely less terrible than that of Tantalus. We were condemned to be buried alive, with our heads above the sand,—water and food being placed just beyond our reach, so that we might see the means of saving life and yet be unable to profit thereby. Certainly, I think, ...
— Saved from the Sea - The Loss of the Viper, and her Crew's Saharan Adventures • W.H.G. Kingston
... As far as I was concerned, however, the effort was in vain; for the moment that sleep stole upon my exhausted frame visions of lakes and springs, murmuring brooks and sparkling fountains of cool, delicious, fresh water arose before me, and I suffered all the agonies of the mythical Tantalus. ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... suffocated by the fragrant odor of the viands, the Count and Countess de Breville and Monsieur and Madame Carre-Lamadon suffered the agonies of that torture which has ever been associated with the name of Tantalus. Suddenly the young wife of the cotton manufacturer gave a deep sigh. Every head turned towards her; she was as white as the snow outside, her eyes closed, her head fell forward—she had fainted. Her husband, distraught with fear, implored assistance ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... There was Tantalus, plagued for his great sins, standing up to the chin in water, which he can never taste, but still as he bows his head, thinking to quench his burning thirst, instead of water he licks up unsavoury dust. All fruits pleasant to the ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... taught, Who yields his arms, nor fends himself in fight? Was it a crime he for his country fought? Ill upon thee the sun bestows his light. Remorseless aera, which hast filled the page With Atreus', Tantalus', Thyestes' rage! ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... notorious Edinburgh murderer. Characters in fiction or drama, history or legend come to be standard words. Everyone knows what we mean when we speak of a Quixotic action, a Don Juan, a Galahad, a Chesterfield. To tantalize arises from the mythical perpetual frustration of Tantalus in the Greek story. Expressions that had a special meaning in the works of a philosopher or litterateur come to be generally used, as "Platonic love."[1] Again words that arise as mere popular witticisms or vulgarisms may be brought into the language as permanent ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... Pindar's first ode, which gives us the key to the right interpretation of the power of sculpture in Greece. You remember that I told you, in my Sixth Introductory Lecture (Sec. 151), that the mythic accounts of Greek sculpture begin in the legends of the family of Tantalus; and especially in the most grotesque legend of them all, the inlaying of the ivory shoulder of Pelops. At that story Pindar pauses—not, indeed, without admiration, nor alleging any impossibility in the circumstances themselves, ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... advance which would be accomplished by the association of the working class. Of what avail are all the hoarded wealth and all the fruits of civilization if they exist for only a few, and if the majority of the human race always remains the Tantalus who reaches in vain for these fruits! Worse than Tantalus—for he at least had not produced the fruits for which his parched lips were condemned to pant in vain! This, the mightiest advance of culture which history could know, would justify the helpful intervention of the State if anything would. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... account of the misfortunes of a luckless young man who goes to breakfast with an absent-minded pedagogue, and, being turned away empty, orders successive refreshments at different coffee-houses, each of which proves a feast of Tantalus. The idea is not bad; but the carrying out suits the stage better than the study, and is certainly far below such things as Maginn's adventures of Jack Ginger and his friends, with the tale untold that Humphries told Harlow. "A Few Remarks on the Rare Vice called Lying" is a most promising title; ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... pellucid wave; some making the valley vocal with their melodious warblings, and others filling it with harsh, stridulous cries. Burning with thirst, and faint from fatigue, he will fix his gaze on the glistening water, to be tortured as Tantalus, and descry the cool shade, without being able to rest his ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... Sharon with a new intent, Making no laws, but keen to circumvent The laws of Nature (since he can't repeal) That break his failing body on the wheel. As Tantalus again and yet again The elusive wave endeavors to restrain To slake his awful thirst, so Sharon tries To purchase happiness that age denies; Obtains the shadow, but the substance goes, And hugs the thorn, but cannot keep the rose; For Dead Sea fruits bids prodigally, eats, And then, ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... table there was a whisky decanter, taken from the tantalus-stand on the sideboard, and one glass. That, by the by," I added, "looked as though only one person ...
— Martin Hewitt, Investigator • Arthur Morrison
... bulwarks, avoid all pomp and ostentation, as if you meant to show your own eloquence; pass over these things as slightly as you can, and rather aim at being useful and intelligible. Observe how the great and sublime Homer acts on these occasions! as great a poet as he is, he says nothing about Tantalus, Ixion, Tityus, and the rest of them. But if Parthenius, Euphorion, or Callimachus, had treated this subject, what a number of verses they would have spent in rolling Ixion's wheel, and bringing the water up to the very lips of Tantalus! Mark, also, how quickly Thucydides, who is very sparing ...
— Trips to the Moon • Lucian
... dusk, my phone bell rang, and my state of mind became agonizing. It was maddening to think that someone, a friend, was virtually within reach of me, yet actually as far removed as if an ocean divided us! I tasted the hellish torments of Tantalus. I cursed fate, heaven, everything; I prayed; I sank into bottomless depths of despair and rose to dizzy pinnacles of hope, when a footstep sounded on the landing and a thousand wild possibilities, vague possibilities of rescue, poured into ...
— The Quest of the Sacred Slipper • Sax Rohmer
... for his Sunday dinner gave the famished wretch six ounces of bread and a can of water. He strapped one prisoner up in the pillory for twenty-four hours, and directed him to be fed in it. This prisoner had a short neck, and the cruel collar would not let him eat, so that the tortures of Tantalus were added to crucifixion. The earnest beast put a child of eleven years old into a strait-waistcoat for three days, then kept him three days on bread and water, and robbed him of his bed and his gas for ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... the plan of action decided on by Hilda and Philip; no misadventure came to mock them, dashing the Tantalus cup of joy to earth before their eyes. On the contrary, within forty-eight hours of the conversation recorded in the last chapter, they were as completely and irrevocably man and wife, as a special licence and the curate of a city church, ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... accomplishments, my aunt is a very fair accountant. She has found out that the girl cannot eat figs and candies in a year to the amount of sixty thousand florins, so she is not over-willing to part with her at all. But I am not going to play the Tantalus for years, and run the risk of having the girl snatched from me by some jackanapes or ...
— Dr. Dumany's Wife • Mr Jkai
... perfect Pandora's box to the negro, only there is no hope at the bottom. The wretchedness of his fate is not a little increased by being a constant witness of the unbounded freedom enjoyed by others: the slave's labor must necessarily be like the labor of Sisiphus; and here the torments of Tantalus ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child
... were such volumes as Mr. Pendennis ran up accounts for at Oxford. Narcissus had many other points in common with that gentleman. Such volumes as, morning after morning, sadden one's breakfast-table in that Tantalus menu, the catalogue. Black letter, early printed, first editions Elizabethan and Victorian, every poor fly ambered in large paper, etc. etc.; in short, he ran through the gamut of that craze which takes its turn in due time with marbles, peg-tops, beetles, ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... said such things, and touched the strings to his words, the bloodless spirits wept. Tantalus did not catch at the retreating water, and the wheel of Ixion stood still, {as though} in amazement; the birds did not tear the liver {of Tityus}; and the granddaughters of Belus paused at their urns; thou, too, Sisyphus, didst seat thyself ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... rather!" he said, the classic name of Ariadne suggesting the idea that the pseudonym of Tantalus might well ...
— Zibeline, Complete • Phillipe de Massa
... silks and fine array" William Blake The Flight of Love Percy Bysshe Shelley "Farewell! If ever Fondest Prayer" George Gordon Byron Porphyria's Lover Robert Browning Modern Beauty Arthur Symons La Belle Dame Sans Merci John Keats Tantalus—Texas Joaquin Miller Enchainment Arthur O'Shaughnessy Auld Robin Gray Anne Barnard Lost Light Elizabeth Akers A Sigh Harriet Prescott Spofford Hereafter Harriet Prescott Spofford Endymion Oscar Wilde "Love is a ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... rock, the Tantalus of the fable, man, plunged in this world of woe with his lips thirsty for happiness, stretches out his hand to pluck the bitter Dead-Sea fruits of this earth. With his profound instincts of the Infinite, his craving for the Absolute, he seizes madly upon every object which suggests their ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... they are, and to be asserting for them a more real and active existence than the old beliefs allowed. The subterranean kingdom of Hades (the "Invisible") is acquiring clearer shape. The punishments are described which certain great transgressors, such as Tantalus and Ixion, are there undergoing; and other details are also known. Of a different spirit is the conception of the Elysian plains in the far west, whither the hero is taken by the gods when he dies, and where there is no ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... looks. "What folly," said she, "is this!—to prefer beings whom you never saw to those who stand before your eyes! Why should Latona be honored with worship, and none be paid to me? My father was Tantalus, who was received as a guest at the table of the gods; my mother was a goddess. My husband built and rules this city, Thebes, and Phrygia is my paternal inheritance. Wherever I turn my eyes I survey the elements of my power; nor is my form and presence unworthy of a goddess. To all this let me ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... belongs to that heroic house whose tragic history was among the most terrible and the most familiar to a Greek audience. Tantalus, the founder of the family, for some offence against the gods, was suffering in Hades the punishment which is christened by his name. His son Pelops was stained with the blood of Myrtilus. Of the two sons of the next generation, Thyestes seduced ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... lived long enough to know that an interest by a woman in a man—especially a man beyond the beaten track of her observation—did not necessarily mean that she might marry him if he asked her. And yet—oh, Tantalus! here she was beside him, for one afternoon again his very own, their two souls ringing with the harmony of whirling worlds in sunlit space. He sought refuge in thin thought; he strove, in oblivion, to ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... picture to stand in your drawing-room as an artist puts his signature to a completed masterpiece, so that when you look around upon the furniture, the silver, the cut glass, the clocks, the engagement tablets, and the tantalus stands, the offerings of the rich whose names you have long ago forgotten, then you will confess to yourself in a burst of thankfulness to your fairy godmother that all this would never have been yours if it had not been ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... tormented for themselves, and grieved only for the innocent Orpheus who had lost Eurydice. Sisyphus, that fraudulent king (who is doomed to roll a monstrous boulder uphill forever), stopped to listen. The daughters of Danaus left off their task of drawing water in a sieve. Tantalus forgot hunger and thirst, though before his eyes hung magical fruits that were wont to vanish out of his grasp, and just beyond reach bubbled the water that was a torment to his ears; he did not hear it while ...
— The Children's Hour, Volume 3 (of 10) • Various
... a thousand wants, Pale Dropsy rears his bloated form, and pants; "Quench me, ye cool pellucid rills!" he cries, Wets his parch'd tongue, and rolls his hollow eyes. So bends tormented TANTALUS to drink, 420 While from his lips the refluent waters shrink; Again the rising stream his bosom laves, And Thirst consumes him 'mid circumfluent waves. —Divine HYGEIA, from the bending sky Descending, listens to his piercing cry; 425 Assumes bright DIGITALIS' dress and air, Her ruby cheek, ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... welcome: I thought to send for you. You must go do a message for us now: 'Tis nothing but to woo a wench, which you Can do. You must not woo her for yourself, But me. Tell her, I sit and pine like Tantalus; And, if you can, strain forth a tear for me. Tell her she shall be honoured in my love, And bear a child that one day may be king. Bid her not stand on terms, but send me word, Whether she be resolved to love me, yea or no. If she say no, tell her I can enforce her ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VI • Robert Dodsley
... you'd like to see the boss? Well, he's comin' right on over. Just now he's eatin' a mess o' bacon and beans and cawfee, over to the camp. My Gawd, that's good cawfee, too. Like to have some, eh?" But Wade refused to play Tantalus to the lure of this temptation and kept silent. ...
— Hidden Gold • Wilder Anthony
... Tantalus, as the old Greek fable tells us, was King of Lydia. Being invited by Jupiter to his table, he heard secrets which he afterwards divulged. To divulge a secret is to make it vulgar, or ...
— The Nursery, No. 107, November, 1875, Vol. XVIII. - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest Readers • Various
... is a moment when Tantalus rebels, crosses his arms, and defies hell, throwing up his part of the eternal dupe. That is what I shall come to if anything should thwart my plan; if, after stooping to the dust of provincial life, prowling like a starving tiger round these tradesmen, these electors, to secure their votes; if, ...
— Albert Savarus • Honore de Balzac
... tantalus, Murray," the Tenant said, and the youngest of the four handed the corncob-corked bottle to the eldest. Tenant Jones filled his cup, and then sat staring at it, while Verner Hughes thrust his pipe into the toe of the moccasin and filled ...
— The Return • H. Beam Piper and John J. McGuire
... escape from a horrible death by thirst once more—encounters with rattlesnakes—the discovery in a great open plain of the cause of a distant roaring sound like water, just at a time when it was once more wanted most. And there it was where they could look down, Tantalus-like, from the brink of a vast crack in the level plain and see a vast river foaming along half-a-mile below ...
— The Peril Finders • George Manville Fenn
... power for sketching, the Highlands on the Hudson were paradise. But though she saw in profusion what once would have delighted her, and what she now felt ought to be the source of almost unmingled happiness, she was still thoroughly wretched. It was the old fable of Tantalus repeating itself. Her sin and its results had destroyed her receptive power. The world offered her pleasures on every side; she longed to enjoy them, but could not, for her heart was preoccupied—filled and overflowing with fear, remorse, and a ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... outrageous decorations of the wall. The Mordaunt Estate took down the "To Let" sign, and went in search of a helper to unload the van. The deserted and denounced young man crawled into his own van and lay down with his head on a tantalus and his feet on the collected works of Thackeray, to consider what had happened to him. But his immediate memories were not conducive to sober consideration, shot through as they were with the light of deep-gray eyes ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... go through Germany in a hurried way, and am equally unsatisfied to fly through Italy; and shall, therefore, leaving my companions in Switzerland, take a servant to accompany me, and return hither, and hence to Rome for the autumn, perhaps the winter. I should always suffer the pain of Tantalus thinking of Rome, if I could not see it more thoroughly than I have as yet even begun to; for it was all outside the two months, just finding out where objects were. I had only just begun to know them, when I was ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... landlord, Mr. Doyle, he had taken the new premises in Prince's Street. And from that moment Lucy's horizon had changed, her ambitions had hardened and narrowed; she had begun to be impatient with her husband, first, that he could not make her rich faster, then, after their Tantalus gleam of wealth, that he would put mysterious and provoking obstacles in the way of ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... one, hungry and pale, beheld that breast and cried and agonized; the executioner said to the woman, a mother and a nurse, 'Abjure!' giving her her choice between the death of her infant and the death of her conscience. What say you to that torture of Tantalus as applied to a mother? Bear this well in mind sir: the French Revolution had its reasons for existence; its wrath will be absolved by the future; its result is the world made better. From its most terrible blows there comes forth a caress for the human race. I abridge, I stop, I have too ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... from the sentiments of Socrates. The poets inculcated a belief in Tartarus and Elysium. They have drawn a picture of Tartarus in the most gloomy and horrific colors, where men, who had been remarkable for impiety to the gods, such as Tantalus, Tityus and Sisyphus, were tormented with a variety of misery ingeniously adapted ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 11, November, 1880 • Various
... for I have many prologues to which he cannot possibly fit his catchword: "Pelops, the son of Tantalus, having started for Pisa on ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... house of the half-dozen houses belonging to Martha Scandwell. Her town-house, a few miles away in Honolulu, on Nuuanu Drive between the first and second "showers," was a palace. Hosts of guests had known the comfort and joy of her mountain house on Tantalus, and of her volcano house, her mauka house, and her makai house on the big island of Hawaii. Yet this Waikiki house stressed no less than the rest in beauty, in dignity, and in expensiveness of upkeep. Two Japanese yard-boys were trimming hibiscus, a third was engaged expertly ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... Amphitrionades! Why didst thou descend into my realms? The vulture who devours the entrails of Tityus has raised its head; Tantalus has had his lips moistened; and Ixion's ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert
... phantoms of the dark abyss: Bring, Tantalus, thy unextinguished thirst, And Sisyphus, thy still returning stone; Come, Tityus, with the vulture at thy heart; And thou, Ixion, bring thy giddy wheel; Nor let the toiling sisters stay behind. Pour your united griefs into this breast, And in low murmurs sing sad obsequies (If a despairing wretch ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... amusement of admiring the ladies, and being admired in return, not a boat having made its appearance. They often remarked, with the characteristic vivacity of their nation, that they were placed in the situation of Tantalus,—so many beauties in view, without the ...
— The Surrender of Napoleon • Sir Frederick Lewis Maitland
... women and the works For spears and strange men's faces, hast not thou One shaft of all thy sudden seven that pierced Seven through the bosom or shining throat or side, All couched about one mother's loosening knees, All holy born, engrafted of Tantalus? But if toward any of you I am overbold That take thus much upon me, let him think How I, for all my forest holiness, Fame, and this armed and iron maidenhood, Pay thus much also; I shall have no man's love For ever, and no face of children born Or feeding lips ...
— Atalanta in Calydon • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... Myers's translation: "To me it is impossible to call one of the blessed gods a cannibal.... Meet it is for a man that concerning the gods he speak honourably, for the reproach is less. Of thee, son of Tantalus, I will speak contrariwise to them who have gone before me." In avoiding the story of the cannibal god, however, Pindar tells a tale even more offensive ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... agreeable, or that a God who has created all things, every object the most desirable to the nourishment and health of man, should nevertheless forbid him their use? The Christian religion appears to doom its votaries to the punishment of Tantalus. The most part of the superstitions in the world have made of God a capricious and jealous sovereign, who amuses himself by tempting the passions and exciting the desires of his slaves, without permitting them the gratification of the one or the enjoyment ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach
... enumerate as many as I can remember of the words which have by this method been introduced into our language. To begin with mythical antiquity—the Chimaera has given us 'chimerical', Hermes 'hermetic', Tantalus 'to tantalize', Hercules 'herculean', Proteus 'protean', Vulcan 'volcano' and 'volcanic', and Daedalus 'dedal', if this word may on Spenser's and Shelley's authority be allowed. Gordius, the Phrygian king who tied that famous 'gordian' knot which Alexander cut, will supply a natural transition ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... contemplation, prospection[obs3], lookout; prospect, perspective, horizon, vista; destiny &c. 152. suspense, waiting, abeyance; curiosity &c. 455; anxious expectation, ardent expectation, eager expectation, breathless expectation, sanguine expectation; torment of Tantalus. hope &c. 858; trust &c. (belief) 484; auspices &c. (prediction) 511; assurance, confidence, presumption, reliance. V. expect; look for, look out for, look forward to; hope for; anticipate; have in ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... desert and then returned to deliver the world. If he had remained there all his life, and never met the Pharisees and high-priests, our forefathers would have rejected his law. For this reason there can be no more rest for the shy than for starving Tantalus; for this reason my flight into the East had been foredoomed ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... the area of the Campo Santo with that sacred soil! The old house stood upon about as perverse a little patch of the planet as ever harbored a half-starved earth-worm. It was as sandy as Sahara and as thirsty as Tantalus. The rustic aid-de-camps of the household used to aver that all fertilizing matters "leached" through it. I tried to disprove their assertion by gorging it with the best of terrestrial nourishment, until I became convinced ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... And sets th' avenging Thunderer in arms. I from the root thy guilty race will tear, 340 And give the nations to the waste of war. Adrastus soon, with gods averse, shall join In dire alliance with the Theban line; Hence strife shall rise, and mortal war succeed; The guilty realms of Tantalus shall bleed: Fix'd is their doom. This all-remembering breast Yet harbours vengeance ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... waters with his noise, And made stones, birds, and beasts, to lead a dance, Constrained the hilly trees to follow him, Thou couldst not move the judge of Erebus, Nor move compassion in grim Pluto's heart; For fatal Mors expecteth all the world, And every man must tread the way of death. Brave Tantalus, the valiant Pelops' sire, Guest to the gods, suffered untimely death, And old Tithonus, husband to the morn, And eke grim Minos, whom just Jupiter Deigned to admit unto his sacrifice. The thundering trumpets of blood-thirsty Mars, The fearful rage ...
— 2. Mucedorus • William Shakespeare [Apocrypha]
... me, I beseech you, are you afraid of the three-headed Cerberus in the shades below, and the roaring waves of Cocytus, and the passage over Acheron, and Tantalus expiring with thirst, while the water touches his chin; ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... episode of the cave of Mammon, in which the Money God appears first in the lowest form of a miser, is then a worker of metals, and becomes the god of all the treasures of the world; and has a daughter, Ambition, before whom all the world kneels for favours—with the Hesperian fruit, the waters of Tantalus, with Pilate washing his hands vainly, but not impertinently, in the same stream—that we should be at one moment in the cave of an old hoarder of treasures, at the next at the forge of the Cyclops, in a palace and yet in hell, all at once, with the shifting mutations ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... shall I be able to read Chinese, nor even Japanese; and the little Japanese poetry that I manage, with exceeding difficulty, to translate, contains so many allusions to Chinese stories of butterflies that I am tormented with the torment of Tantalus... And, of course, no spirit-maidens will even deign to visit so ...
— Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things • Lafcadio Hearn
... worse," sighed I, with a submissive mind, as I drew a lame table from the window where the wind and rain were not contented to stop outside. At that moment my eye fell upon a brilliantly blazing fire in a kitchen, which lay, Tantalus-like, directly opposite to my modest room, where the fireplace was ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors • Various
... to-day trust would be easier were it not for the terror lest God's plans involve us in fearful things from which we shrink. We have heard so much of the trials He sends; of the gifts of Tantalus He keeps forever in our sight but just beyond our reach; of the blessings He actually bestows upon us only to snatch them away when we have come to love them most—we have heard so much of this that we are often afraid of His will as the greatest among the ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... calculation of Alfred, whose mythology is not very safe. Charon welcomes the harper, "because he was desirous of the unaccustomed sound"; all sufferings cease at the melody of the harp; the wheel of Ixion ceases to turn; the hunger of Tantalus is appeased; the vulture ceases to torment King Tityus; and the prayer of Orpheus ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... nature so tenaciously recollects all the evil records, and is so oblivious of the noble acts furnished by history? Do cut the acquaintance of the huge family of on dits, who serve the community in much the same capacity as did the cook of Tantalus, when he dressed and garnished Pelops for the banquet table. Unluckily, devouring malice can not furnish the 'ivory shoulder' requisite to mend its mischief. We are all prone to forget the injunction, 'Judge not, that ye be not judged,' ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... and still he was insatiate and unappeased. Her husband's suspicions meanwhile had been aroused. She spent so much money in occult ways that he had been impelled to ask her father what he thought L—— was doing with so much money. Fettered thus, with the torments both of Prometheus and Tantalus—the vulture gnawing at her vitals, and the lost joys mocking her out of reach—she had at last in sheer desperation been driven to request her father to procure her the assistance of a ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... (destructive), ateires (stubborn), atreotos (fearless); and Pelops is o ta pelas oron (he who sees what is near only), because in his eagerness to win Hippodamia, he was unconscious of the remoter consequences which the murder of Myrtilus would entail upon his race. The name Tantalus, if slightly changed, offers two etymologies; either apo tes tou lithou talanteias, or apo tou talantaton einai, signifying at once the hanging of the stone over his head in the world below, and the misery which ...
— Cratylus • Plato
... I cannot wait and watch this Robin Hood Dangle the fruit of Tantalus before me, Then eat it in my sight! I have borne enough! He gave me like a fairing to my brother In Sherwood Forest; and I now must watch him, A happy bridegroom with the happy bride, Whose lips ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... and boldly drove Before him all the hosts of Erebus, Till he had conquered: and grim Cerberus Sang madrigals, the Furies rhymed of love, Old Charon sighed, and sonnets rang above The gloomy Styx; and even as Tantalus Was Proserpine discrowned in Tartarus, And Cupid regnant in the ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... No! I know her as a mystery; as Tantalus thirsting for the fruit which hangs ever beyond the reach, I know her; as a woman who is not what she seems, always masked, with or without the cambric. Know her?" with ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... sighed a long time at his study window, from whence he might discern the barges and boats about the Blackfriars stairs, suddenly brake out into a great distemper, and sware that his enemies had on purpose brought her majesty thither to break his gall in sunder with Tantalus's torments, that when she went away he might see death before his eyes; with many such like conceits. And, as a man transported with passion, he sware to Sir George Carew that he would disguise himself, and get into a pair of oars to ease his mind but with a sight of the queen, or else ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... as he might to take the full advantage of the lesser heat of the earlier hours, but his way led him through loose sand, down into cuts and gorges, up their steep sides, across fields of loose stones, which, shifting underfoot, made his striving for haste a pure work of Tantalus. At the end of the first hour the heat was already intense; at the end of the second he felt that his skin was as dry as the desert sands and that the moisture of his body was being sucked out of it by the thirsty air and that at every stride ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... pain it had caused, I was proud of Ernest's exclusive devotion, and the notice it attracted. I knew I was, by the mortification I experienced, when that devotion was withdrawn. It is true, I knew he was inflicting on himself torments to which the fabled agonies of Tantalus, Sisyphus, and Ixion combined could not be compared; but others did not; they saw the averted eye, the coldness, the distance, the estrangement, but they did not, could not see, the bleeding heart, the agonized ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... progress of life retarded by the vis inertiae, the mere repugnance to motion, and find multitudes repining at the want of that which nothing but idleness hinders them from enjoying. The case of Tantalus, in the region of poetick punishment, was somewhat to be pitied, because the fruits that hung about him retired from his hand; but what tenderness can be claimed by those who, though perhaps they suffer the pains of Tantalus, will never lift their ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... her. I and others galloped on, in the hopes that she might be driven still nearer; but, as we thought she was approaching, the current swept her away again into the middle of the stream. It was a melancholy exemplification of the story of Tantalus. There were those poor famished men floating down a river in the midst truly of plenty—for where can be found more fertile regions!—and yet they were unable to procure a mouthful of food to appease the ...
— Fred Markham in Russia - The Boy Travellers in the Land of the Czar • W. H. G. Kingston
... more those snowy breasts With azure riverets branched, Where, whilst mine eye with plenty feasts, Yet is my thirst not stanched; O Tantalus, thy pains ne'er tell! By me thou art prevented: 'Tis nothing to be plagued in Hell, But thus ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... outlines only through a surrounding glory. She would have shown herself without hesitation to a satyr or a eunuch. She had the self-possession of a goddess. To have made her nudity a torment, ever eluding a pursuing Tantalus, would have been an amusement ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... nine roods, lies Tityos accursed, The vulture at his vitals feeding slow; There Tantalus, whose bitter, burning thirst The fleeting ...
— The Elegies of Tibullus • Tibullus
... of five from April to October, instead of having, as you will most probably in the mountain, just one day's sport in the whole of your month's holiday. Deluded friend, who suffered in Scotland last year a month of Tantalus his torments, furnished by art and nature with rods, flies, whisky, scenery, keepers, salmon innumerable, and all that man can want, except water to fish in; and who returned, having hooked accidentally by the tail one salmon—which broke all and ween to sea—why did you not stay ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... features which they wore while living; that there is a hell and a heaven; that hell is below the earth, and heaven above the clouds; that the souls of the wicked sometimes wander the face of the earth, appearing occasionally to mortals. The story of Tantalus is found among the Chippewayans, who believed that bad souls stand up to their chins in water in sight of the spirit-land, which they can never enter. The dead passed to heaven across a stream of water by means ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... existence has its moments of fate, when the apples of the Hesperides hang ready upon the bough, but, alas! how few are wise enough to pluck them. The decision of an hour may open to us the gates of the enchanted garden where are flowers and sunshine, or it may condemn us, Tantalus-like, to reach evermore after some far-off and unattainable good. I dreamed that the clock of fate had struck the hour for me, that I had found my mission on earth, and that henceforth the "Peace be still" of the Master would calm ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... horizon, it would look as though immovable on a steep inclined plane, and it required the nicest handling to keep the plane truly horizontal. So with one's tea, which would alternately rush forward to be drunk and fly as though one were a Tantalus; so with all one's goods, which would be seized with the most erratic propensities. Still we were unable to imagine ourselves in any danger, save that one flaxen-headed youth of two-and-twenty kept ...
— A First Year in Canterbury Settlement • Samuel Butler
... depths of Hades the sounds sped on their way, and the hands of Time stood still. From his bitter task of trying to quaff the stream that ever receded from the parched and burning lips, Tantalus ceased for a moment. The ceaseless course of Ixion's wheel was stayed, the vulture's relentless beak no longer tore at the Titan's liver; Sisyphus gave up his weary task of rolling the stone and sat on the rock to listen, the Danaides rested from their labour ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... for he had sought to force 710 Latona, illustrious concubine of Jove, What time the Goddess journey'd o'er the rocks Of Pytho into pleasant Panopeus. Next, suff'ring grievous torments, I beheld Tantalus; in a pool he stood, his chin Wash'd by the wave; thirst-parch'd he seem'd, but found Nought to assuage his thirst; for when he bow'd His hoary head, ardent to quaff, the flood Vanish'd absorb'd, and, at his feet, adust The soil appear'd, dried, instant, ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer
... is the time; from Hell's abyss Come thirsting Tantalus, come Sisyphus Heaving the cruel stone, come Tityus With vulture, and with wheel Ixion come, And come the sisters of the ceaseless toil; And all into this breast transfer their pains, And (if such tribute to despair be due) Chant in ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... momentous calmly hast thou spoken. Him nam'st thou ancestor whom all the world Knows as a sometime favorite of the gods? Is it that Tantalus, whom Jove himself Drew to his council and his social board? On whose experienc'd words, with wisdom fraught, As on the language of an oracle, E'en gods ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... he is told, will be his bride if he will only accept her father's offers. Coldly rejoining that his troth is already plighted, Sir Guyon refuses, only to emerge from this hall into a garden, through whose branches he catches fleeting glimpses of the underworld. In one of its rivers he even beholds Tantalus, undergoing torments from hunger and thirst, in punishment for sins committed ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... of Tantalus, of Prometheus, or of Sisyphus are but the types of what his shall be. Let him try to hang, drown, stab himself—his efforts ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... there were showers enough to supply us well with their beneficent outpouring. As to the new cistern, it seems to be bewitched; for, while the spout pours into it like a cataract, it still remains almost empty. I wonder where Mr. Hosmer got it; perhaps from Tantalus, under the eaves of whose palace it must formerly have stood; for, like his drinking-cup in Hades, it has the property of filling itself forever, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... of the most distinguished of the Greek heroes, was the son of Atreus (king of Mycenae) and Aerope, grandson of Pelops, great-grandson of Tantalus and brother of Menelaus. Another account makes him the son of Pleisthenes (the son or father of Atreus), who is said to have been Aerope's first husband. Atreus was murdered by Aegisthus (q.v.), who took possession of the throne of Mycenae and ruled jointly ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... wastepaper basket, standing out in the hall near the sideboard, and a lady's worktable, with two chairs at it, towards the other side of the lounge. The writing table has also two chairs at it. On the sideboard there is a tantalus, liqueur bottles, a syphon, a glass jug of lemonade, tumblers, and every convenience for casual drinking. Also a plate of sponge cakes, and a highly ornate punchbowl in the same style as the keramic display in the pavilion. Wicker chairs and little ...
— Misalliance • George Bernard Shaw
... one after another of the various volumes, he began to fancy that a feast of Tantalus had been provided for him: one book was English, another German, a third Russian; there was even one in cabalistic letters that seemed Turkish. Was this a polyglottic joke the countess ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... hurt at my chum's indifference to my sufferings, envying the while every morsel he swallowed, and wondering when my suspense would cease; and, although I had not then heard of the tortures of the classic Tantalus, my feelings must have much resembled those of that mythical person during ...
— On Board the Esmeralda - Martin Leigh's Log - A Sea Story • John Conroy Hutcheson
... on talking all night, even about the events of an exciting day, and one by one our friends rolled themselves up in their coats and went off to sleep. And how the unfortunates on sentry-go envied them! That was an infliction which Tantalus escaped, but it might well compare with those which have caused his name to ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... sentenced after death to the unresting labour of rolling up a hill in Tartarus, a huge unhewn block of stone, which so soon as he gets it to the hill top, for all his efforts, rolls down again. In classical representation of the scene he is associated with Tantalus and Ixion; Tantalus, who, presuming too much on his relations with Zeus, was after death afflicted with an unquenchable thirst amidst flowing fountains and pellucid lakes—like the lakes of "The Thirst of the Antelope" in the marvellous mirages of Rajputana and Mesopotamia—that ever elude his ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... is that it was for passionate admirers the torment of Tantalus to see Chopin going about a whole evening in a salon and not to hear him. The mistress of the house took pity on us; she was indiscreet, and Chopin played, sang his most delicious songs; we set to these joyous or sad airs the words ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... out to full exercise again. After each effort or two the child should be given the object reached for to hold or play with for a moment; otherwise he grows to apprehend that the whole affair is a case of "Tantalus." In all these matters very much depends upon the knowledge and care of the experimenter, and his ability to keep the child in a normal condition of pleasurable muscular ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... a wheele,[*] For daring tempt the Queene of heaven to sin; And Sisyphus an huge round stone did reele Against an hill, ne might from labour lin; 310 There thirsty Tantalus hong by the chin; And Tityus fed a vulture on his maw; Typhoeus joynts were stretched on a gin, Theseus condemnd to endlesse slouth by law, And fifty sisters water in leake vessels ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser |
