"Vestal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... what wisdom the Vestal Virgins showed in never letting their fire go out, another crash came at the door, followed by the war-whoop of a scalp-hunter. "I seem to recognise that noise," he thought, "but I can't possibly open ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... writing. That I was shipped at sea I well remember, but whether there delivered of my babe, by the holy gods I cannot rightly say; but since my wedded lord I never shall see again, I will put on a vestal livery and never ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... doubt aware that the subsequent lines, referring to "a fair vestal throned by the west," are commonly understood to have been meant as a piece of delicate flattery to Queen Elizabeth. Mr. Halpin has recently given to this famous passage a new interpretation or application, ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... dejection worn On the dropt eye, and lip no smile illumes; Not all this pomp of sorrow, that presumes It pays Affection's debt, is due concern To the FOR EVER ABSENT, tho' it mourn Fashion's allotted time. If Time consumes, While Life is ours, the precious vestal-flame Memory shou'd hourly feed;—if, thro' each day, She with whate'er we see, hear, think, or say, Blend not the image of the vanish'd Frame, O! can the alien Heart expect to prove, In worlds of light and life, a ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... outside, and the weeds and wild vines each year grew still more ambitious to get quite to the top of the cabin, and peep down into the mysterious crater of a chimney that forever smoked in a mournful and monotonous sort of way, as if watchers were there—Vestal virgins, who dared not let their fires perish, on penalty ...
— Shadows of Shasta • Joaquin Miller
... close of the oration, as in the defense of Cluentius, Caelius, Milo, and Flaccus; the most striking instances of which are the poetical bursts of feeling with which he addresses his client, Plaucius, and his picture of the desolate condition of the vestal Fonteia, should her brother be condemned. At other times his peroration contains more heroic and elevated sentiments, as in the invocation of the Alban Altars, and in his defense of Sextius, and that on liberty at the ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... They are in a large measure the ancient prototype of the modern nun, and their house is the prototype of the convent. Six nobly-born young women, sworn to chastity, and dressed in a ritual garb, live in an edifice of much magnificence under the rule of one who is the chief Vestal, a sort of Mother Superior. Many pedestals of the statues of such chief priestesses still remain, and we can clearly trace the arrangement of their abode, with its open court—once containing a garden and cool cisterns of pure ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... are, of course, as common and frequent in our temples as in our homes. Gentlemen, can any amount of esoteric whitewashing justify these disgraceful and fairly incredible practices? Then there are the deva dasies, our 'vestal virgins,' of whom even small and poor temples have one or two to boast. They are the recognized prostitutes of the country, and many sociologists are of opinion that no 'civilized' human society can completely get rid of such a class. Is that any reason why we should ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... for how many an age when Pontiff and Vestal sleep in the eternal silence. Let the slave of the iron gods chatter what he will; for him flows no Falernian, for him the Muses have no smile, no melody. Ere the sun set, and the darkness ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... alike in these stages. (Aloud.) No, my Vestal. We're going along the quietest road we ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... house of Baldassini, also, near S. Agostino, they executed scenes and sgraffiti, with some heads of Emperors over the windows in the court. On Montecavallo, near S. Agata, they painted a facade with a vast number of different stories, such as the Vestal Tuccia bringing water from the Tiber to the Temple in a sieve, and Claudia drawing the ship with her girdle; and also the rout effected by Camillus while Brennus is weighing the gold. On another wall, round the corner, are Romulus and his brother being suckled by the wolf, and the terrible ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 05 ( of 10) Andrea da Fiesole to Lorenzo Lotto • Giorgio Vasari
... the beauty of this scenery so much as Clara. Before we quitted Milan, a change had taken place in her habits and manners. She lost her gaiety, she laid aside her sports, and assumed an almost vestal plainness of attire. She shunned us, retiring with Evelyn to some distant chamber or silent nook; nor did she enter into his pastimes with the same zest as she was wont, but would sit and watch him with sadly tender smiles, and eyes bright with tears, yet without ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... a vestal maid, I warrant, The bride of Heaven—Come—we may shake your purpose; For here I bring in hand a jolly suitor Hath ta'en degrees in the seven sciences That ladies love best—He is young and noble, Handsome and valiant, gay, ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... the victor of the day? Thou of the delicate form, and golden hair, And manhood glorious in its midst of May; Thou who upon thy shield of argent bearest The bold device, "The loftiest is the fairest!" As bending low thy stainless crest, "The vestal throned by the west" Accords the old Provencal crown Which blends her own with thy renown; Arcadian Sidney, nursling of the muse, Flower of fair chivalry, whose bloom was fed With daintiest Castaly's most silver ...
— With Spurs of Gold - Heroes of Chivalry and their Deeds • Frances Nimmo Greene
... her face was very sweet, very pure and noble. She would have gone without another word, but Haward caught her by the sleeve. "Stay awhile!" he cried. "I too am a dreamer, though not like you, you maid of Dian, dark saint, cold vestal, with your eyes forever on the still, white flame! Audrey, Audrey, Audrey! Do you know what a pretty name you have, child, or how dark are your eyes, or how fine this hair that a queen might envy? Westover ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... aera, when we read the story of Caius Silanus, the Proconsul of Asia, who, accused of malversation and peculation, is first banished to the island of Gyarus, but when the Prince pleads for him, and he is backed by the intercession of a Vestal Virgin of sanctity,—corresponding to a Christian nun or abbess of exemplary piety,—Silanus is removed to the more bearable place of exile, the island ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... ties For him, the dear One in thine eyes, Broke it no more. Thy heart was withered to it's Core, It's hopes, it's fears, it's feelings o'er: Thy Blood grew Ice when his was shed, And Thou the Vestal ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... men, and thousands falter and fall beneath it and are swept downwards to their doom. Were it otherwise, were women the passionless creatures some doctors delight to paint them, all our encomiums of female virtue were idle mockery. It is because we realize that in the veins of the vestal virgin runs the same fierce tide which Egypt's Queen nor Russia's Empress could control, and which flamed in battle-splendor in the ten years' war of Troy, that with uncovered heads we render her the tribute of our respect. Women admit all this in demanding ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... innuendoes which will be their portion when they come to us in the next hunting season. Our conscience, at least, will be pure and undefiled, and we shall pass to the end of our pilgrimage sans peur, though perchance, even then, not sans reproche. "Servitudes," as Miggs, the veteran vestal remarked, "is no inheritance," but there are natures who thrive rarely in this tranquil and inglorious condition. Such men live, as a rule, pretty contentedly to a great old age, and die in the odor of intense ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... final causes in science, and an illustration of some of the manifold errors and absurdities which their hasty assumption is apt to involve—considerations probably equivalent to those which induced Lord Bacon to liken final causes to "vestal virgins." So, if any one, it is here Bacon that "sitteth in the seat of the scornful." As to Darwin, in the section from which the extracts were made, he is considering a subsidiary question, and trying to obviate a particular difficulty, but, ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... all the good temper in the world, I outdo Rousseau, a bar length—for I keep neither man or boy, or horse, or cow, or dog, or cat, or any thing that can eat or drink, except a thin poor piece of a Vestal (to keep my fire in), and who has generally as bad an appetite as myself—but if you think this makes a philosopher of me—I would not, my good people! give a rush ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... those gifts to Caesar they allowed the vestal virgins to employ one lictor each, because one of them had been insulted, owing to not being recognized, while returning home from dinner toward evening. The offices in the City they assigned for a greater number of years in advance, thus at the ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol. III • Cassius Dio
... next representative of opera in France, was an Italian, born in 1774. He went to Paris in 1803, where, through the influence of the Empress Josephine, he was enabled to have several small operas performed; finally in 1807 his "Vestal," written to a French text, was given with great success. In this, his greatest work, he followed Gluck's footsteps, not only in the music, but also in the choice of a classic subject. In 1809, he branched out into a more romantic vein with the opera of "Fernando Cortez." His other ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... document;[72] a weakness rendered the less excusable, if indeed, as Sully broadly asserts: "Henry was not so blind but that he saw clearly how this woman sought to deceive him. I say nothing of the reasons which he also had to believe her to be anything rather than a vestal; nor of the state intrigues of which her father, her mother, her brother, and herself had been convicted, and which had drawn down upon all the family an order to leave Paris, which I had quite recently signified to them in the ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... leaves; Phoebus is dumb, and votaries crowd no more The Delphian mountain and the Delian shore, And lone and still the Lybian Ammon stands, His utterance stifled by the desert sands. No more in Cnydian bower, or Cyprian grove The golden censers flame with gifts to Love; The pale-eyed Vestal bends no more and prays Where the eternal fire sends up its blaze; Cybele hears no more the cymbal's sound, The Lares shiver the fireless hearthstone round; And shatter'd shrine and altar lie o'erthrown, Inscriptionless, ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... malefactors should dispread Infamous ruin with their liberty. There's not a man—the fairest of ye all— Who is not fouler than he seems. This life Is one unending struggle to conceal Our baseness from our fellows. Here stands one In vestal whiteness with a lecher's lust;— There sits a judge, holding law's scales in hands That itch to take the bribe he dare not touch;— Here goes a priest with heavenward eyes, whose soul Is Satan's council-chamber;—there a doctor, With nature's secrets ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Francesca da Rimini • George Henry Boker
... the vestal fire begun, Which might be borrowed from no earthly flame, Devised a vessel to receive the sun, Being stedfastly opposed to the same; Where with sweet wood laid curiously by art, On which the sun might by reflection beat, Receiving strength ...
— Elizabethan Sonnet Cycles - Idea, by Michael Drayton; Fidessa, by Bartholomew Griffin; Chloris, by William Smith • Michael Drayton, Bartholomew Griffin, and William Smith
... for the first time in fiction, a correct and adequate account of the Vestal Virgins, their powers and privileges, as well as of many ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... fables and vain imaginations. Error has never yet made a complete and universal conquest. In the darkest ages and most benighted regions, it has been found impossible utterly to extinguish the light of reason. There always have been some in whose souls the torch of truth has been kept burning with vestal watchfulness: we can discern its glimmer here and there through the deepest night that has yet settled upon the earth. In the midst of the most extravagant superstition, there have been individuals who have disowned the popular belief, and considered it a mark of wisdom and true philosophy ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... as splendid as your career is going to be. I want to be a great and shining lady in your life. I can't always live as I do now, dependent on my mother, whirled about by her movements, living in her light. Why should I be just a hard-up Vestal Virgin, Stephen, in your honor? You will not be able to marry me for years and years and years—unless you neglect your work, unless you throw away everything that is worth having between us in order just ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... heavy carbine, a short-bladed dagger, and two antelope horns fixed to their heads by a band of iron. The artillery-women have a blue-and-red tunic, and, as weapons, blunderbusses and old cast cannons; and another brigade, consisting of vestal virgins, pure as Diana, have blue tunics and white trousers. If we add to these Amazons, five or six thousand men in cotton drawers and shirts, with a knotted tuft to increase their stature, we shall have passed in review ...
— Rubur the Conqueror • Jules Verne
... by a Dutch officer, who sat gasping without his coat, and so far exhausted by the heat, though he had been ten years in Batavia, that his pipe hung dangling as if he had not breath sufficient to keep its vestal fire alive, and a lady with two children besides living intruders. A net from the top was filled with bags, baskets, and band-boxes. Our night was sad indeed, and the groans of our fellow-travellers and the ineffectual fluttering of a fan which the Officer used proved how little ...
— Before and after Waterloo - Letters from Edward Stanley, sometime Bishop of Norwich (1802;1814;1814) • Edward Stanley
... Rome is indeed far more poetical than anything else in Latin literature. The loves of the Vestal and the God of War, the cradle laid among the reeds of Tiber, the fig-tree, the she-wolf, the shepherd's cabin, the recognition, the fratricide, the rape of the Sabines, the death of Tarpeia, the fall of Hostus Hostilius, the struggle of Mettus Curtius through the marsh, the ...
— Lays of Ancient Rome • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Albert and his guides, who, holding torches in their hands, had emerged from a vomitarium at the opposite extremity of the Colosseum, and then again disappeared down the steps conducting to the seats reserved for the Vestal virgins, resembling, as they glided along, some restless shades following the flickering glare of so many ignes-fatui. All at once his ear caught a sound resembling that of a stone rolling down the staircase opposite the one by which he had himself ascended. There was nothing ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... dull, stifling anguish he could not control. Does he hear in a dream, through the buzz of the crowd, The Duke's blithe associates, babbling aloud Some comment upon his gay humor that day? He never was gayer: what makes him so gay? 'Tis, no doubt, say the flatterers, flattering in tune, Some vestal whose virtue no tongue dare impugn Has at last found a Mars—who, of course, shall be nameless, That vestal that yields to Mars ONLY is blameless! Hark! hears he a name which, thus syllabled, stirs All his heart into tumult?... Lucile de Nevers With the Duke's ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... written by her husband, and the jewels; and she looked on the paper, and said, "It is my lord's writing. That I was shipped at sea, I well remember, but whether there delivered of my babe, by the holy gods I cannot rightly say; but since my wedded lord I never shall see again, I will put on a vestal livery, and never more have joy." "Madam," said Cerimon, "if you purpose as you speak, the temple of Diana is not far distant from hence; there you may abide as a vestal. Moreover, if you please, a niece of mine shall there ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb
... through it, and there are many strokes of the most melting tenderness. Cartesmunda, the Fair Nun of Winchester, inspires the King with a passion for her, and after a long struggle between honour and love, she at last yields to the tyrant, and for the sake of Canutus breaks her vestal vows. Upon hearing that the enemy was about to enter the Cloister, Cartesmunda breaks out into the following ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... will be. They will be charred to ashes." And turning tail, she fled to the kitchen, pursued by her lover. There, dead to the surprise of the servant, David Brandon fed his eyes on the fair incarnation of Jewish domesticity, type of the vestal virgins of Israel, Ministresses at the hearth. It was a very homely kitchen; the dressers glistening with speckless utensils, and the deep red glow of the coal over which the pieces of fish sputtered and crackled in their bath of oil, ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... Ascanius, the son of AEneas, and his descendants for three hundred years were the Latin tribes. After eleven generations of kings, Amulius usurps the throne, which belonged to Numitor, the elder brother, and dooms his only daughter, Silvia, to perpetual virginity as a Vestal. Silvia, visited by a god, gives birth to twins, Romulus and Remus. The twins, exposed by the order of Amulius, are suckled by a she-wolf, and brought up by one of the king's herdsmen. They feed their flocks on the Palatine, but a quarrel ensuing between them and the herdsmen of Numitor on the Aventine, ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... done with the vivacious Ricord, whom I remember calling the Voltaire of pelvic literature,—a sceptic as to the morality of the race in general, who would have submitted Diana to treatment with his mineral specifics, and ordered a course of blue pills for the vestal virgins. ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... poem, the "Faerie Queen," as he said, to extol "the glorious person of our sovereign Queen." Shakespeare is reported to have written the "Merry Wives of Windsor" for her amusement, and in his "Midsummer Night's Dream" he addresses her as the "fair vestal in the West." The translators of the Bible spoke of her as "that bright Occidental Star," and the common people loved to sing and shout the praises of their "good Queen Bess." After her death at Richmond, when her body was being ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... crossing to the right-hand side of the slope, which the via Sacra now follows, and reach the Forum by the fornix Fabiana. Close by to our left is the round temple of Vesta, where the sacred fire of the State is kept ever burning by its guardians, the Vestal Virgins, and here too is their dwelling, the Atrium Vestae, and also that of the Pontifex Maximus (Regia), in whose potestas they were; these three buildings, then insignificant to look at, constituted the religious focus of the oldest Rome.[31] A little farther again to the left is ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... pitched upon its right object; it flamed up in direct fervors of devotion to God, and in collateral emissions of charity to its neighbor. It was not then only another and more cleanly name for lust. It had none of those impure heats that both represent and deserve hell. It was a vestal and a virgin fire, and differed as much from that which usually passes by this name nowadays as the vital heat from the burning of ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Vol. 2 (of 10) • Grenville Kleiser
... ancient Rome. [He seats himself on the edge of the table]. Ive just come to the period when the propertied classes refused to get married and went in for marriage settlements instead. A few of the oldest families stuck to the marriage tradition so as to keep up the supply of vestal virgins, who had to be legitimate; but nobody else dreamt of getting married. It's all very interesting, because we're coming to that here in England; except that as we dont require any vestal virgins, nobody will get married at all, except ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... Lagus; and what would become of our commerce with Cos if I did not purchase the finest bombyx stuffs, since those who sell it make no profits out of you, the queen—and you cover yourself, like a vestal virgin, in garments of tapestry. Give me a wreath for my head—aye and another to that, and new wine in the cup! To the glory of Rome and to your health, Publius Cornelius Scipio, and to our last critical conjecture, my Aristarchus—to subtle ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Haydn's "Creation" and other works. The musical stimulation of this boy was meager indeed. Not until he was thirteen years of age did he hear an opera; and not until he was fifteen a really first-class work, Spontini's "Vestal," in 1812. Three years later he probably heard Gluck's "Iphigenie en Tauride," a work which in his estimation eclipsed them all. During the same year there were the sixth and seventh symphonies, the choral fantasia and portions of the mass in C, and the overture to "Coriolanus," ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... ones gathered nightly round the shining household hearth, What to them is brighter, better than the choicest things of earth? Ask that dearer one, whose loving, like a ceaseless vestal flame, Sets my very soul a-glowing at the mention of her name; Ask her why the loved, in dying, feels her spirit linked with his In a union death but strengthens? she will tell ...
— Incidents of the War: Humorous, Pathetic, and Descriptive • Alf Burnett
... a change from the almost vestal quiet of "Aunt Mary's" life, to all this open-windowed, open-eyed screaming of "poltroon," "nefarious ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... of magic and the inspection of the entrails of animals capital offences, he proceeded to prohibit sacrifices, A.D. 391, and even the entering of temples. He alienated the revenues of many temples, confiscated the estates of others, some he demolished. The vestal virgins he dismissed, and any house profaned by incense he declared forfeited to the imperial exchequer. When once the property of a religious establishment has been irrevocably taken away, it is needless to declare its ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... are but thoughts, found her a Vestal Virgin in Pagan Rome when brutes were kings, and lust stalked rampant through the streets. She was the bride of Christ, and her fair, frail body was flung to the wild beasts, and torn limb from limb while the multitude feasted ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... shoulder: Leopoldine, Jensine, and little Rebecca. All three barefooted. The Margravine, Inger herself, is not with them; she is indoors preparing the meal. Tall and stately, as she moves about her house, a Vestal tending the fire of a kitchen stove. Inger has made her stormy voyage, 'tis true, has lived in a city a while, but now she is home; the world is wide, swarming with tiny specks—Inger has been one of them. All but nothing in all ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... of Wagner she worshipped; the nerves of his score had never been laid bare to her. She took her mother's tumult in good faith, and ridiculed singers of more frigid temperaments. When she writhed in Tristan's arms this vestal sat in front, a piano score on her lap, carefully listening, and later, ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... of her hair, tied up in a piece of blue ribbon, conveyed to the happy Bell the result of the Vestal's conference with herself. Thrice before had she snipt off one of her auburn ringlets, and given them away. The possessors were faithless, but the hair had grown again: and Martha had indeed occasion to say that men were deceivers ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Law of Love is not destined to be solved so easily; nor had it ever been solved in centuries dead by Egyptian, Mongol, or Greek—by priest or princess, prophet or singer, or by any vestal or acolyte ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... Expedition. His narrative of Bigfoot's Adventures is the rollickiest and the most flavorsome that any American frontiersman has yet inspired. The tiresome thumping on the hero theme present in many biographies of frontiersmen is entirely absent. Stanley Vestal wrote Bigfoot Wallace also, ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... He tells us that he himself wrote books on history with his own hands in large letters, that the boy might start in life with a useful knowledge of what his forefathers had done, and he was as careful not to use an indecenr expression before his son as he would have been before the vestal virgins. He never bathed with him; which indeed seems to have been customary at Rome, as even fathers-in-law scrupled to bathe naked before their sons-in-law. In later times, however, the Romans learned from the Greeks ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... What claim it has to this title, except by the rule of contraries, we are at a loss to guess; seeing that the style of its decorations is very far from corresponding with that purity of thought and manners which we are accustomed to associate with the title of vestal. The paintings are numerous and beautiful, and the mosaics remarkably fine. Upon the threshold here, as in several other houses, we find the word "Salve" (Welcome), worked in mosaic. One may be seen in cut ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... generous wine penetrated, perhaps, to some inner cells of her heart, and brought forth thoughts in sparkling words which otherwise might have remained concealed; but there was nothing in what she thought or spoke calculated to give umbrage either to an anchoret or to a vestal. A word or two she said or sung about the flowing bowl, and once she called for Falernian; but beyond this her converse was chiefly of the rights of man and the weakness of women, of the iron ages that were past, and of the golden time ...
— Stories By English Authors: Italy • Various
... sportiveness on his part as his reason in seeking her—something in her quite antipathetic to that side of him which had been occupied with literary study and the magnificent Christminster dream. It had been no vestal who chose THAT missile for opening her attack on him. He saw this with his intellectual eye, just for a short; fleeting while, as by the light of a falling lamp one might momentarily see an inscription on a wall before being ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... avenue Selah Adams sat upon the front veranda, looking like the vestal virgin of ...
— The Co-Citizens • Corra Harris
... served to bring about a complete change in his style. Thus his one-act opera "Milton," dedicated to Empress Josephine, may be regarded as the first of his truly original works. Empress Josephine appointed him her chamber composer, and secured a hearing for his new opera "The Vestal," produced at the Grand Opera. Napoleon awarded to him the prize for the best dramatic work of that year. In 1810, Spontini became the director of the Italian opera, and there staged Mozart's "Don Giovanni." Dismissed in 1812, on charges of financial ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... of insignia, with red and white chalk or clay, follow her from the village to some remote nook in the jungle, where the lodge is tiled. Sentinels are stationed around whilst business is transacted before a vestal fire, which must burn for a fortnight or three weeks, in the awe- compelling presence of a brass pipkin filled with herbs, and a basin, both zebra'd like the human limbs. The Rev. William Walker was once detected playing "Peeping Tom" ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... pale, impressive face, would have made a fine study for a painter. By such men, the embers of learning and of science were nursed into a faint but steady flame, burning through the long, gloomy night of the dark ages, unseen by profane eyes, like the vestal fire in ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... north wind, nor an innumerable succession of years, and the flight of seasons, shall be able to demolish. I shall not wholly die; but a great part of me shall escape Libitina. I shall continualy be renewed in the praises of posterity, as long as the priest shall ascend the Capitol with the silent [vestal] virgin. Where the rapid Aufidus shall murmur, and where Daunus, poorly supplied with water, ruled over a rustic people, I, exalted from a low degree, shall be acknowledged as having originally adapted the Aeolic verse to Italian measures. Melpomene, assume that pride which ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... delight is to immortalize—Alexander was begot by a Salamander, that visited his Mother in the form of a Serpent, because he would not make King Philip jealous; and that famous Philosopher Merlin was begotten on a Vestal Nun, a certain King's Daughter, by a most beautiful young Salamander; as indeed all the Heroes, and ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... his eyes shone—'rise and look yonder. Do you see the citadel? Under its marble floor there is a grave. It is that of one who kissed a vestal and was buried alive. There are sacred people in Rome, and among them is this daughter of my beloved Publius. Go you to your palace, son of Herod, and, hereafter, forget not that ...
— Vergilius - A Tale of the Coming of Christ • Irving Bacheller
... According to Plutarch she urged her husband to take vigorous action against Catiline, who had compromised her half-sister Fabia, a vestal virgin; also to give evidence against Clodius, being jealous ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... spring out of, chasms of blackness. But moonlight shrouds the Coliseum in mystery. It opens deep vaults of gloom where the eye meets only an ebon wall, upon which the fancy paints innumerable pictures in solemn, splendid, and tragic colors. Shadowy forms of emperor and lictor and vestal virgin and gladiator and martyr come out of the darkness, and pass before us in long and silent procession. The breezes which blow through the broken arches are changed into voices, and recall the shouts and cries of a vast audience. By day, the ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various
... once, when she was a romping child. He was thinking of her unselfishness, her sturdy sincerity, her undaunted courage. Now he repeated it, thinking of her as this letter revealed her, a white-souled vestal maiden who took the stars as a symbol of her duty, and who would not swerve a hair's-breadth from the orbit which she thought was ...
— Mary Ware's Promised Land • Annie Fellows Johnston
... burn it upon the funeral-pile, and mourn over him. Ay, upon my knees, amid the dust and blood of the arena, I begged that boon, while all the Roman maids and matrons, and those holy virgins they call vestal, and the rabble, shouted in mockery, deeming it rare sport, forsooth, to see Rome's fiercest gladiator turn pale, and tremble like a very child, before that piece of bleeding clay; but the Prtor drew back as if I were pollution, and sternly said, 'Let ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... her, as did almost all the so called men of her court; though he did certainly flatter her after a fashion in which few queens can be flattered. His description of the belligerent old Gorgon as the "Fair Vestal throned by the West" seems like the poetry and fancy of the beautiful Fairy Queen wasted ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... to one that was fruitful: if, on the other hand, they take a decayed fellow, they are in a worse condition in marriage than either maids or widows. We think them well provided for, because they have a man to lie with, as the Romans concluded Clodia Laeta, a vestal nun, violated, because Caligula had approached her, though it was declared he did no more but approach her: but, on the contrary, we by that increase their necessity, forasmuch as the touch and company of any man ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... malady, worse ten thousand times than the leprosy which our forefathers brought from the East. Could they have done this, if they had not been actuated by some strong, some vehement, some perennial passion, which, burning like the Vestal fire, chaste and eternal, never suffers generous sympathy to grow cold in maintaining the rights of the injured or in denouncing the crimes ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... mighty King of Akkad. My mother was a vestal (priestess), my father an alien, whose brother inhabited the mountain.... When my mother had conceived me, she bare me in a hidden place. She laid me in a vessel of rushes, stopped the door thereof with pitch, and cast me adrift on the river.... The river floated me to Akki, the water drawer, who, ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... expired.[345] At Rome the sacred fire in the temple of Vesta was kindled anew every year on the first of March, which used to be the beginning of the Roman year;[346] the task of lighting it was entrusted to the Vestal Virgins, and they performed it by drilling a hole in a board of lucky wood till the flame was elicited by friction. The new fire thus produced was carried into the temple of Vesta by one of the virgins ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... fire. To exiles like these, any country, any climate would seem good; to flaccid, crushed natures of this type, every belief would seem authoritative, every religion holy and divine. Fifteen hundred years ago these nuns would have made excellent vestal virgins, watchful and resigned. What they need is abstinence, prohibitions, thwartings, things contrary to nature. By conforming to most rigorous rules, they consider themselves suffering beings who deserve heavy recompense; and the Carmelite or Trappist sister, who macerates herself by the hair-shirt ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... The censors hold a lustrum, and find the number of the citizens to be two hundred and seventy-one thousand two hundred and twenty-four. [Y. R. 479. B. c. 273.] A treaty of alliance formed with Ptolemy, king of Egypt. Sextilia, a vestal, found guilty of incest, and buried alive. Two colonies sent forth, to Posidonium and Cossa. [Y. R. 480. B. C. 272.] A Carthaginian fleet sails, in aid of the Tarentines, by which act the treaty is violated. Successful operations against the Lucanians, ...
— The History of Rome; Books Nine to Twenty-Six • Titus Livius
... and strongly individualized by a certain moral grandeur, a saintly grace, something of vestal dignity and purity, which render her less attractive and more imposing; she is "severe in youthful beauty," and inspires a reverence which would have placed her beyond the daring of one unholy wish or thought, except in ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... indeed a pleasant thing, Although one must be damn'd for you, no doubt: I make a resolution every spring Of reformation, ere the year run out, But somehow, this my vestal vow takes wing, Yet still, I trust it may be kept throughout: I 'm very sorry, very much ashamed, And mean, next winter, to ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... fall, a life which we call the honest life of the family. Think what a perversion of ideas must arise when the happiest situation of man, liberty, chastity, is looked upon as something wretched and ridiculous. The highest ideal, the best situation of woman, to be pure, to be a vestal, a virgin, excites fear and laughter in our society. How many, how many young girls sacrifice their purity to this Moloch of opinion by marrying rascals that they may not remain virgins,—that is, superiors! Through ...
— The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... a beautiful open fireplace, but which was now walled up with broken bricks, and surmounted by a mantel of Italian marble sculptured with the story of Prometheus's boon to mankind, and supported on either end by caryatides in the shape of vestal virgins bearing flaming brands in their hands. Overhead the ceiling showed great patches of bare lath, where the plaster had fallen away, and the uncarpeted floor was strewn with bread-crumbs and marked by a trail of coal-siftings from the stove to a closet-door from ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... naivete.... All her charm lies in her complexion, and even that I find wan rather than white; a very beautiful neck. It was this mixture of unique licence, they say, which she combined with the airs of innocent ignorance and vestal severity, that captivated ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... mildest, meekest maid— Hail! purest Pearl that time's great sea hath borne— May our white souls, in purity arrayed, Shine, as if they thy vestal robes had worn; Make our hearts pure, as thou thyself art pure, Make safe the rugged pathway of our lives, And make us pass to joys that will endure When the dark ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... not afeard, Mrs. Deans," said the dairy-vestal, addressing Jeanie, who sat, not in the most comfortable state of mind, by the side of Archibald, who himself managed the helm.—"are you not afeard of these wild men with their naked knees, and of this nut-shell of a thing, that seems bobbing up and down like a skimming-dish ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... behold thee glide, Cluster'd by all thy family of stars, Like a lone widow, through the welkin wide, Whose pallid cheek the midnight sorrow mars;— Sometimes I watch thee on from steep to steep, Timidly lighted by thy vestal torch, Till in some Latmian cave I see thee creep, To catch the young Endymion asleep,— Leaving thy ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... December, but by luck we found a halcyon morning which had got lost in the year's procession. It was a Sunday morning, and it had not been ashore. It was still virgin, bearing a vestal light. It had not been soiled yet by any suspicion of this trampled planet, this muddy star, which its innocent and tenuous rays had discovered in the region of night. I thought it still was regarding us as a lucky find there. Its light was tremulous, as if with ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... only the lines lengthened a little, if you press closer to the Blue Ridge part of the way. The gaps through the Blue Ridge I understand to be about the following distances from Harper's Ferry, to wit: Vestal's, five miles; Gregory's, thirteen; Snicker's, eighteen; Ashby's, twenty-eight; Manassas, thirty-eight; Chester, forty-five; and Thornton's, fifty-three. I should think it preferable to take the route nearest ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... the remonstrances of her subjects, where marriage was spoken of, there was something in the very unapproachableness of her state which both commanded the respect and excited the imagination of her people. As a woman, they regarded her just as she wished them to regard her, as the throned Vestal, the watery Moon, whose chaste beams could quench the fiery darts of Cupid. She was to them, in fact, the Belphoebe of Spenser, "with womanly graces, but not womanly affections—passionless, pure, self-sustained, and self-dependent"; shining "with a cold lunar light and ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... charming prison, whose walls were overrun with flowering vines, and whose cells were pretty vestal bowers, entered the bard and the young girl, to be met on the front porch by the wardeness herself, a mite of a woman, with wavy yellow hair, fine complexion and washed-out blue eyes. Sensitive almost ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... great-grandsire's square-skirted coat, and a waistcoat that extended its immense flaps to his knees; his brown locks, also, hung down behind, in a mode unknown to our times. By his side was a sweet young damsel, her fair features sheltered by a prim little bonnet, within which appeared the vestal muslin of a cap; her close, long-waisted gown, and indeed her whole attire, might have been worn by some rustic beauty who had faded half a century before. But that there was something too warm and life-like in them, I would here have compared this ...
— The Snow Image • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... 'Thou makest the vestal violate her oath; Thou blow'st the fire when temperance is thaw'd; Thou smother'st honesty, thou murder'st troth; Thou foul abettor! thou notorious bawd! Thou plantest scandal and displacest laud: Thou ravisher, thou traitor, thou false ...
— The Rape of Lucrece • William Shakespeare [Clark edition]
... Vesta, called Vestales or Vestal Virgins, played a conspicuous part in these festivals. They were six in number, and were chosen—between the ages of six and ten—from the noblest families in Rome. Their term of office was thirty years. During ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... come to judgment? What voice was in the fountain of Vaucluse? Under what nodding oxlip did Shakespeare find Titania asleep? When did the Mother of Love come down, chaster in her unclothed loveliness than vestal in her veil, and with such vision of her ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... than in the field. Henry IV., who loved his jests whether at his own expense or that of friend or foe, was wont to observe that there were three things which nobody would ever believe, and which yet were very true; that Queen Elizabeth deserved her title of the, throned vestal, that he was himself a good Catholic, and that Cardinal Albert was a good general. It is probable that the assertions were all ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... moonlight. Culpepper leaned against the low fence, and gazed long and earnestly at the building. Then the moonlight vanished ghostlike from one of the windows, a material glow took its place, and a girlish figure, holding a candle, drew the white curtains together. To Culpepper it was a vestal virgin standing before a hallowed shrine; to the prosaic observer I fear it was only a fair-haired young woman, whose wicked black eyes still shone with unfilial warmth. Howbeit, when the figure had disappeared he stepped out briskly into the moonlight ...
— Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... deal of language from books and tongues; not, indeed, the Norman-French and demi-Latin and jargon of the schools, printed for English in impotent old trimestrials for the further fogification of cliques, but he had laid by a fair store of the best—of the monosyllables—the Saxon—the soul and vestal fire of the ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... pauses and wonders: had she any love for children? He finds in her "a plentiful lack of inborn baby-worship"; she is unworthy to compare in this with George Eliot, "the spiritual mother of Totty, of Eppie, and of Lillo". "The fiery-hearted Vestal of Haworth," he says, "had no room reserved in the palace of her passionate and high-minded imagination as a nursery for inmates of such divine and delicious quality." There was little Georgette in Villette, to say nothing of Polly, and there was ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... creators; and the controversialists have debated, whether indeed the All-Plastic Power itself can do more than mold. In all the universe is but one original; and the very suns must to their source for their fire; and we Prometheuses must to them for ours; which, when had, only perpetual Vestal tending will ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... greatly agitated. She had always looked on Alice as excluded by her misfortune from the usual destiny of her sex, as consecrated from her birth for a vestal's lot. She had never thought of her being wooed as a wife, and she repelled the ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... sagacity and the overweening petulance of hard-earned and late-acquired wisdom. They do not fall in love with every meretricious extravagance at first sight, or mistake an old battered hypothesis for a vestal, because they are new to the ways of this old world. They do not seize upon it as a prize, but are safe from gross imposition by being as wise and no wiser than ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... the tomb of Christ, when they find the stone rolled away and, looking around, see the Saviour's figure before them. The scene is low and cavern-like, with a brilliant light surrounding the tomb. This artist also painted "The Vestal Virgin," "King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid," "Pan and Psyche," "The Golden Stairs," and "Love Among ...
— Pictures Every Child Should Know • Dolores Bacon
... from the ear, which it does in compliance with the old Greek observance of its being bent there by the pressure of the helmet. That rippling of it down her shoulders comes from the Athena of Corinth; the raising of it on her forehead, from the knot of the hair of Diana, changed into the vestal fire of the angels. But chiefly, the calmness of the features in the one face, and their anxiety in the other, indicate first, indeed, the characteristic difference in every conception of the schools, the Greek never representing ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... seniority. Amulius drove out his brother and seized the kingdom: he added crime to crime, murdered his brother's male issue, and, under pretence of doing honour to his brother's daughter, Rea Silvia, having chosen her a Vestal Virgin,[2] deprived her of all hopes of issue by the obligation of ...
— Roman History, Books I-III • Titus Livius
... Elizabeth House, and she paused on the broad steps under the shelter of the veranda. With her back toward the door she looked down upon him as he stood on the sidewalk, his umbrella deeply shadowing his head and shoulders. She stood before him like a vestal guarding her temple from desecration. She was conscious of a sharp revulsion of feeling, and a sudden fierce anger burned in her heart. She spoke ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... one of the finest funeral orations over delivered over a corpse. He was also awarded a few triumphant arches. Publications: Omnes Gallia est divisa in tres parses. Ambition: Rome: Address: Capitol, Rome. Clubs: Gladiators, Vestal. Was also a member of the Society for the Protection of Roman Ruins. Epitaph: ...
— Who Was Who: 5000 B. C. to Date - Biographical Dictionary of the Famous and Those Who Wanted to Be • Anonymous
... her strange views. His lurking fear that she might one day marry and leave him was aroused at the thought, and his heart contracted with jealousy. She possessed in his eyes something of the sanctity of a vestal virgin, one who must not be profaned by marriage. In such an event, also, his cherished hope that she might complete the quadrangle of St. George's Hall was likely to be frustrated forever. These fears moved him to argue with ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... cheek was a trace of tears; Over all his face a shade of pain That deepened and vanished, and came again. Fixed he his woeful eyes on me— Through my very soul they seemed to see. And lightly he laid his hand on mine— His hand was cold as the vestal shrine. "'Tis haunted," he said, "haunted, and he Who dares at night-noon go with me To this cursed place, by phantoms trod, Must fear not devil, man, nor God." "Tell me the story," I cried, "tell me!" And frightened was I at my bravery. A curious smile his thin lips curved, That well had my ...
— Debris - Selections from Poems • Madge Morris
... foot is yours; where'er it falls, It treads your well-wrought leather, On earthen floor, in marble halls, On carpet, or on heather. Still there the sweetest charm is found Of matron grace or vestal's, As Hebe's foot bore nectar round Among the ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... train with sympathetic smile. 'Beware of Love! she cried, ye Nymphs, and hear 'His twanging bowstring with alarmed ear; 'Fly the first whisper of the distant dart, 'Or shield with adamant the fluttering heart; 430 'To secret shades, ye Virgin trains, retire, 'And in your bosoms guard the vestal fire.' —The obedient Beauties hear her words, advised, And bow with laugh ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... meet, year after year, one of these—to whom the seed sown in London ball-rooms and German watering-places had produced nothing yet but those tiresome garlands of the vestal—I look curiously to see how she wears, thinking of the courtier's answer to Louis XIV. when the latter asked if he was looking older: "Sire, I see some more victories written on your forehead." It is more defeats that one can read so ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... and the Salian priests and the Vestal Virgins, and regulated all departments of our ecclesiastical policy with the most pious care. In the ordinance of sacrifices, he wished that the ceremonial should be very arduous and the expenditure very light. He thus appointed many observances, whose knowledge ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... waiting alone for the bridal hour Of nymph and naiad from woodland bower; Till vestal pearls that on leaflets lay, Ravished with beauty ...
— Poems • Mary Baker Eddy
... in the temple of the sun The vestal fires of being burn; Thence beauty's finest fibres run, And ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... at Hong Kong, where we found the Castor, Vixen, and Espiegle. The next day the Agincourt, Daedalus, Vestal, and Wolverine, arrived from Borneo, having been engaged with the pirates of Maludu Bay. The squadron had suffered a loss of one officer and eighteen men killed, and about double the number wounded. This heavy loss was occasioned by their ...
— Borneo and the Indian Archipelago - with drawings of costume and scenery • Frank S. Marryat
... conspicuously walks the Rialto now, and what does he or she wear? Are the trees still green in Madison Square, or have they grown brown and dusty? Does the chaste Diana on the Garden Theatre still keep her vestal vows through all the exasperating changes of weather? Who has your brother's old studio now, and what misguided aspirants practice their scales in the rookeries about Carnegie Hall? What do people go to see ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... for gladiators. Highly carved marble columns supported the roofs and the rarest statues stood in niches. The bathing capacity was the largest ever planned. To sit there alone and people it, as when it was at its best, with all the glory of the emperor, the court ladies, the vestal virgins, senators, warriors, artists, men of letters and the rest, is a treat to the imagination that cannot be ...
— A Fantasy of Mediterranean Travel • S. G. Bayne
... and feast, and buy, and sell; and this [Greek: demos] they walled about for its safety, and called [Greek: ten polin] the city: and this I take to have been the original of Villages, Market-Towns, Cities, common Councils, Vestal Temples, Feasts and Fairs, in Europe: the Prytaneum, [Greek: pyros tameion], was a Court with a place of worship, and a perpetual fire kept therein upon an Altar for sacrificing: from the word [Greek: Hestia] fire, came the name Vesta, which at length the people turned into ...
— The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended • Isaac Newton
... and moreover, she is not a woman, but a noble virgin. I discern a distinction, though you may not. The Vestal's fire burns straight." ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... sick poor, and each city had five, seven or ten, according to its size. Rome had fourteen of these officers, besides one for the vestal virgins, and one for the gymnasia. They were paid by the Government for attending the poor, but were not restricted to this class of practice, and were well paid by their prosperous patients. Their office was more lucrative but not so honourable as that of the archiaters of ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... round the abbess. They had been accustomed to look up to her as all-powerful, and they now implored her protection. The mother abbess looked with a rueful eye upon the treasures of beauty and vestal virtue exposed to such imminent peril. Alas! how was she to protect them from the spoiler! She had, it is true, experienced many signal inter-positions of providence in her individual favor. Her early days ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... reached the street, Benda said in a tone of compassion: "They are three delicate creatures; they live their lonely lives like vestal virgins guarding ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... gained the Capitol—her foot is on the stair; She stands a form of matchless grace, the queen of thousands there. Bring forth the wreath that threw afresh a lustre round his name, Whose genius burned, a vestal fire, with never-dying flame. ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 449 - Volume 18, New Series, August 7, 1852 • Various
... they all do! I got there, I threw myself into a chair. "What shocking weather! How tiring the streets are!" Then some gossip: "Mademoiselle Lemierre was to have taken the part of Vestal in the new opera, but she is in an interesting condition for the second time, and they do not know who will take her place. Mademoiselle Arnould has just left her little Count: they say she is negotiating with Bertin.... That poor Dumesnil no longer knows either ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... the comedies of Aristophanes were unworthy of presentation in a country tavern! One is tempted to believe that the father was a man of robuster judgment in such matters than the son, whose own rather mediocre literary equipment, made him the easy prey of that acidulous vestal of literature, Voltaire. However that may be, he left a useful and unexpected legacy to his son, provided, indeed, the sinews for the making ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... the Romans had not yet adopted it in Cato's day, but by the time of Varro and Virgil it was well established in Italy. In Columella's day it was already a feature of the agriculture of Andalousia, and there the Moors, who loved plants, kept it alive, as it were a Vestal fire, while it died out of Italy during the Dark Ages: from Spain it spread again all over Southern Europe, and with America it was a fair exchange for tobacco. Alfalfa has always been the subject of high praise wherever it has been known. The Greek ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato
... were brought from Troy. Numitor chose the kingdom; but Amulius, having the money, and being able to do more with that than Numitor, took his kingdom from him with great ease, and, fearing lest his daughter might have children, made her a Vestal, bound in that condition forever to live a single and maiden life. This lady some call Ilia, others Rhea, and others Silvia; however, not long after, she was, contrary to the established laws of the Vestals, discovered to be with child, and should have suffered the most cruel punishment, had not ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... will or the respect due to seniority: for Amulius, having expelled his brother, seizes the kingdom; he adds crime to crime, murders his brother's male issue; and under pretence of doing his brother's daughter, Rhea Sylvia, honour, having made her a vestal virgin, by obliging her to perpetual virginity he deprives her of all hopes ...
— The History of Rome, Books 01 to 08 • Titus Livius
... love! O wretched we! why were we hurried down This lubrique and adulterate age (Nay, added fat pollutions of our own), To increase the streaming ordures of the stage? What can we say to excuse our second fall? Let this thy Vestal, Heaven, atone for all! Her Arethusian stream remains unsoil'd, Unmixt with foreign filth, and undefil'd; Her wit was more than man, her innocence ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... were the Penates, or familiar household gods, the guardians of the home, whose fire on the sacred hearth was perpetually burning, and to whom every meal was esteemed a sacrifice. These included a Lar, or ancestral family divinity, in each house. There were Vestal virgins to guard the most sacred places. There was a college of pontiffs to regulate worship and perform the higher ceremonies, which were complicated and minute. The pontiffs were presided over by one called Pontifex Maximus,—a title ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... say, goes back to the walls of Troy. The form of it passed with the windmills that Don Quixote charged. It is with you to keep the high spirit of it an ever-burning vestal fire. It was a deadly play of old—it is a harmless play to you this day. But the prowess of the game is unchanged; for the skill to strike those pendent rings is no less than was the skill to strike armor-joint, visor, or ...
— A Knight of the Cumberland • John Fox Jr.
... Numitor chose the kingdom; but Amulius, having the money, and being able to do more with that than Numitor, took his kingdom from with great ease, and, fearing lest his daughter might have children who would supplant him, made her a Vestal, bound in that condition forever to live a single and maiden life. This lady some call Ilia, others Rhea, and others Silvia; however, not long after, contrary to the established laws of the Vestals, she had two sons of more than human size and beauty, whom Amulius, ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... monikin society, for their unusual graces of person, general attainments, mutual amiableness of disposition, harmony of thought, and soundness of principles. Everything was propitious to the gentle flame which was kindled in the vestal bosom of Chatterissa, and which was met by a passion so ardent and so respectful, as that which glowed in the heart of young No. 8 purple. The friends of the respective parties, so soon as the budding sympathy between them was observed, in order ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... novice unprofessed, Lovely and gentle, but distressed. She was betrothed to one now dead, Or worse, who had dishonoured fled. Her kinsmen bade her give her hand To one who loved her for her land; Herself, almost heart-broken now, Was bent to take the vestal vow, And shroud, within Saint Hilda's gloom, Her ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... say that Christ was miraculously born of a virgin, the Pagans had said before them that Remus and Romulus, the founders of Rome, were miraculously born of a vestal virgin named Ilia, or Silvia, or Rhea Silvia; they had already said that Mars, Argus, Vulcan, and others were born of the goddess Juno without sexual union; and, also, that Minerva, goddess of the sciences, sprang from ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... greener shades, far fresher flowers. Ages and climes remote to Thee impart What charms in Genius, and refines in Art; Thee, in whose hand the keys of Science dwell, The pensive portress of her holy cell; Whose constant vigils chase the chilling damp Oblivion steals upon her vestal-lamp. The friends of Reason, and the guides of Youth, Whose language breath'd the eloquence of Truth; Whose life, beyond preceptive wisdom, taught The great in conduct, and the pure in thought; These still exist, by Thee to Fame consign'd, [x] ...
— Poems • Samuel Rogers
... horizon a thin, fleecy scarf of clouds was silvered by the rising moon, the west was a huge shrine of beryl whereon burned ruby flakes of vapor, watched by a solitary vestal star; and the sapphire arch overhead was beautiful and mellow as any that ever vaulted above the sculptured marbles of Pisan ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans |
