"Helicon" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... suddenly opened upon our view. In the distance gleamed Lake Capais, and the hills beyond; in the west, the snowy top of Parnassus, lifted clear and bright above the morning vapors; and, at last, as we turned a shoulder of the mountain in descending, the streaky top of Helicon appeared on the left, completing the classic ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... a youth, singing in the dawn Of a new freedom, glowing o'er his lyre, Refining, as with great Apollo's fire, His people's gift of song. And thereupon, This Negro singer, come to Helicon Constrained the masters, listening to admire, And roused a race to wonder and aspire, Gazing which way their honest voice was gone, With ebon face uplit of glory's crest. Men marveled at the singer, strong ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... wasted his patrimony and ultimately came to want ("Works and Days", 34 ff.), Hesiod lived a farmer's life until, according to the very early tradition preserved by the author of the "Theogony" (22-23), the Muses met him as he was tending sheep on Mt. Helicon and 'taught him a glorious song'—doubtless the "Works and Days". The only other personal reference is to his victory in a poetical contest at the funeral games of Amphidamas at Chalcis in Euboea, where he won the prize, a tripod, which he dedicated to the Muses ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... like a brook you go, With sound of happy mirth and sheen Of daylight - whether by the green You fare that moment, or the gray; Whether you dwell in March or May; Or whether treat of reels and rods Or of the old unhappy gods: Still like a brook your page has shone, And your ink sings of Helicon. ...
— Underwoods • Robert Louis Stevenson
... England, in his fine Ode on the Departing Year, and I applied it, con amore, to the objects before me. That valley was to me (in a manner) the cradle of a new existence: in the river that winds through it, my spirit was baptized in the waters of Helicon! ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... while I was looking that way from a rising ground, lo! I saw a city, and on one side of it two small hills; that which was nearer to the city being lower than the other. "That city," said he, "is called Athens, the lower hill Parnassus, and the higher Helicon. They are so called, because in the city and around it dwell the wise men who formerly lived in Greece, as Pythagoras, Socrates, Aristippus, Xenophon, with their disciples and scholars." On my asking him concerning Plato and Aristotle, he said, "They and ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... Helicon, You should read Anacreon, Ovid's Metamorphoses, Likewise Aristophanes, And the works of Juvenal: These are worth attention, all; But, if you will be advised, ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... away. For once, a glance at the mountain sufficed him; and he directed his gaze through the trees at the Duncan house, engaging in a pleasant game of conjecture as to which was her window. In such weather the heights of Helicon seemed as attainable as the peak of Holdfast; and he had but to beckon a shining Pegasus from out a sun-shaft in the sky. Obstacles were mere ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... quietly sailed away. Their stay was short, but they left their mark. To this day Phoebes are numerous in Connecticut, and nine women to one man has become the customary proportion of the sexes. As Greece had Parnassus, Helicon, and Pindus, Connecticut had New Haven, Hartford, and Litchfield Hill,—halting-places of the illustrious travellers. There they scattered the seeds of poetry,—seeds which fell upon stony places, but, warmed by the genial ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... apartment and attendants, near the summit of snowy Olympus[31]." These Ladies, he tells us, "came to pay him a visit, and complimented him with a scepter and a branch of laurel, when he was feeding his flock on the mountain of Helicon[32]." Some tale of this kind it was usual with the Poets to invent, that the vulgar in those ages of fiction and ignorance might consider their persons as sacred, and that the offspring of their imaginations might be regarded ...
— An Essay on the Lyric Poetry of the Ancients • John Ogilvie
... closer observation shows that he means thereby the whole mental activity of the poet-scholars. This it is whose enemies he so vigorously combats—the frivolous ignoramuses who have no soul for anything but debauchery; the sophistical theologian to whom Helicon, the Castalian fountain, and the grove of Apollo were foolishness; the greedy lawyers, to whom poetry was a superfluity, since no money was to be made by it; finally the mendicant friars, described periphrastically, but clearly enough, who made free with their charges of paganism and immorality. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... a most lamentable complaint of his insufficiency and tenuity [slenderness] that he, poor thing! "hath no acquaintance with above a Muse and a half!" and "that he never drank above six quarts of Helicon!" and you "have put him here upon such a task" (perhaps the business is only, Which is the nobler creature, a Flea or a Louse?) "that would much better fit some old soaker at Parnassus, than his sipping ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... ancient name in poetry, the first upon record as inventor of verse and measure among the Grecians. There was a solemn custom among the Greeks, of bewailing annually their first poet. Pausanias informs us, that before the yearly sacrifice to the Muses on Mount Helicon, the obsequies of Linus were performed, who had a statue and altar erected to him in that place. In this passage Homer is supposed to allude ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... could see that for the mathematician, if for any one, Time stands still withal; he is winnowed of vanity and sin. French, German, and Latin, and a hasty tincture of Xenophon and Homer (a mere lipwash of Helicon) gave me a zeal for philology and the tongues. I was a member in decent standing of the college classical club, and visions of life as a professor of languages seemed to me far from unhappy. A compulsory course in philosophy convinced me that there was still much to learn; and I had a delicious ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... Sir, you are a man of sense, and express yourself well. I did, as you say, once make a small sally into Parnassus—took a sort of flying leap over Helicon; but if ever they catch me there again—sir, the town have a prejudice to my family; for, if any play could have made them ashamed to damn it, mine must. It was all over plot. It would have made half a dozen ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... productions is struck by Francini when he remarks that the heroes of England are accounted in Italy superhuman. If this is so, Dati may be justified in comparing a young man on his first and last foreign tour to the travelled Ulysses; and Francini in declaring that Thames rivals Helicon in virtue of Milton's Latin poems, which alone the panegyrist could read. Truly, as Smollett says, Italian is the language of compliments. If ludicrous, however, the flattery is not nauseous, for it is not wholly insincere. Amid all conventional exaggerations there is an under-note of genuine ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... en leur beaute." Contemporaries did not leave to posterity the care of crowning the great poets of the time. Italy, the mother of art, wished the laurel to encircle the brow of the living, not to be simply the ornament of a tomb. Rome had crowned, in 1341, him who, "cleansing the fount of Helicon from slime and marshy rushes, had restored to the water its pristine limpidity, who had opened Castalia's grotto, obstructed by a network of wild boughs, and destroyed the briers in the laurel grove": the illustrious Francis Petrarch.[478] Though ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... Muses, open Helicon, and let your song awake To tell what kings awoke to war, what armies for whose sake Filled up the meads; what men of war sweet mother Italy Bore unto flower and fruit as then; what flame of fight ran high: For ye remember, Holy Ones, and ye may tell the tale; But we—a ...
— The AEneids of Virgil - Done into English Verse • Virgil
... Now Helicon must needs pour forth for me, And with her choir Urania must assist me, To put in verse things ...
— Dante's Purgatory • Dante
... what hero, O Clio, do you undertake to celebrate on the harp, or the shrill pipe? What god? Whose name shall the sportive echo resound, either in the shady borders of Helicon, or on the top of Pindus, or on cold Haemus? Whence the woods followed promiscuously the tuneful Orpheus, who by his maternal art retarded the rapid courses of rivers, and the fleet winds; and was so sweetly persuasive, that he drew along ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... and polished floors. This must be the Great Adventure, not second even to a college course. What if the road out of Orchard Glen, which she had sought so persistently, and as yet without success, should not be the steep Path up Helicon, after all, but the rose hedged lane along which Mary had gone? Christina's heart left her no doubt as to which road she would choose, were the choice hers. But when one's True Knight was far away and merely nodded carelessly to one when he was near, what chance had one? She longed ...
— In Orchard Glen • Marian Keith
... at Fisher's[202] name; Who know these boasted sacred streams Were mere romantic, idle dreams, That Thames has waters clear as those Which on the top of Pindus rose, And that, the fancy to refine, Water's not half so good as wine; Who know, if profit strikes our eye, Should we drink Helicon quite dry, 70 The whole fountain would not thither lead So soon as one poor jug from Tweed: Who, if to raise poetic fire, The power of beauty we require, In any public place can view More than the Grecians ever knew; If wit into the scale is thrown, Can boast ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... bubbled the spring of Tilphusa, Copais lay bright in the moon, Helicon glass'd in the lake Its firs, and afar rose the peaks Of Parnassus, snowily clear; Thebes was behind him in flames, And the clang of arms in his ear, When his awe-struck captors led The Theban seer to the spring. Tiresias drank and died. Nor did reviving Thebes ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... his arrival he breakfasted with Admiral Hornby, who sent him over to Tangier in the "Helicon," giving the Bishop of Gibraltar a passage at the same time. This led him to note down,] "How the naval men love Baxter and all his works." [A letter from Dr. Hooker to Sir John Hay ensured him a most hospitable ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... whereas Hamilton Paul, their favourite and admired laureate of the north, has been heard to express his admiration of certain nymphs in a certain place; and that the said Hamilton Paul has ungratefully and feloniously neglected to speak with due reverence of the ladies of Helicon; that said Hamilton Paul shall be deprived of all aid in future from these goddesses, and be sent to draw his inspiration from the dry fountain of earthly beauty; and that, furthermore, all the favours taken from the said Hamilton Paul shall accrue ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... indeed the slightest gift or taste for political life. "Pity," said Mrs. Manley, the authoress of "The New Atlantis," speaking of Addison, "that politics and sordid interest should have carried him out of the road of Helicon and snatched him from the embraces of the Muses." But it seems quite unjust to ascribe Addison's divergence into political ways to any sordid interest. He had political friends who loved him, and he went with them into politics as he might have travelled in ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... poetry, poetics, poesy, Muse, Calliope, tuneful Nine, Parnassus, Helicon^, Pierides, Pierian spring. versification, rhyming, making verses; prosody, orthometry^. poem; epic, epic poem; epopee^, epopoea, ode, epode^, idyl, lyric, eclogue, pastoral, bucolic, dithyramb, anacreontic^, sonnet, roundelay, rondeau ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... boutade, 'that no one can understand the mysteries of this science who has had the least intercourse with the Muses or the Graces. All that you have learned in the way of bonae literae has to be unlearned first; if you have drunk of Helicon you must first vomit the draught. I do my utmost to say nothing according to the Latin taste, and nothing graceful or witty; and I am already making progress, and there is hope that one day ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... Minor, to the country of the [798]Hyperboreans upon the Ister, and the lake Maeotis; and from thence descended to Greece. Here he built Mycene, and Tiryns, said by many to have been the work of the Cyclopians. He established a seminary at Helicon: and was the founder of those families, which were styled Dorian, and Herculean. It is a doubt among writers, whether he came into Italy. Some of his family were there; who defeated the giant race in Campania, and who afterwards built Argiletum, and Ardea in Latium. ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume II. (of VI.) • Jacob Bryant
... was greatest in his conversation. In him was disproved that old maxim, that we should allow every one his share of talk. He would talk from morn to dewy eve, nor cease till far midnight; yet who ever would interrupt him? who would obstruct that continuous flow of converse, fetched from Helicon or Zion? He had the tact of making the unintelligible seem plain. Many who read the abstruser parts of his 'Friend' would complain that his works did not answer to his spoken wisdom. They were identical. But he had a tone in oral delivery ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... the army of Agesilaus, and penetrated as far as the baggage in the rear. But on the remainder of the line Agesilaus was victorious, and the Thebans now saw themselves cut off from their companions, who had retreated and taken up a position on Mount Helicon. Facing about and forming in deep and compact order, the Thebans sought to rejoin the main body, but they were opposed by Agesilaus and his troops. The shock of the conflicting masses which ensued was one of the ...
— A Smaller History of Greece • William Smith
... He has used his own sinews himself to distress, And had done vastly more had he done vastly less; In letters, too soon is as bad as too late; Could he only have waited he might have been great; But he plumped into Helicon up to the waist, And muddied the stream ere he ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... personal crimes, if any, were so little known, that he was on the point of being dismissed from the bar for want of an accuser. Pindar, in his red cap, with his many-stringed harp in his hand, was there; and all Helicon glowed like molten lead in his vindictive heart when he looked at the miserable pair. "What sentence shall we pass on the person called Grimod, ci-devant sub-collector of taxes, and the woman beside him, who has aided and abetted ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... Muses' stank, Castalia's burn, an' a' that; But there it streams an' richly reams, My Helicon I ca' ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... Monsieur Kinsayder, lifting up your leg, and pissing against the world? put up, man, put up, for shame! Methinks he is a ruffian in his style, Withouten bands or garters' ornament: He quaffs a cup of Frenchman's Helicon; Then roister doister in his oily terms, Cuts, thrusts, and foins, at whomsoever he meets, And strews about Ram-Alley meditations. Tut, what cares he for modest close-couch'd terms, Cleanly to gird our looser libertines? Give him plain naked words, stripp'd ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... 'poesie,' as closer observation shows that he means thereby the whole mental activity of the poet-scholars. This it is whose enemies he so vigorously combats—the frivolous ignoramuses who have no soul for anything but debauchery; the sophistical theologian, to whom Helicon, the Castalian fountain, and the grove of Apollo were foolishness; the greedy lawyers, to whom poetry was a superfluity, since no money was to be made by it; finally the mendicant friars, described periphrastically, ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... have heard him now And, since he pledged me in so rare a cup, I'll lift and drink to him, though lightnings fall From envious gods to scourge me. I will lift This cup in darkness to the soul that reigns In light on Helicon. Who knows how near? For I have thought, sometimes, when I have tried To work his will, the hand that moved my pen Was mine, and yet—not mine. The bodily mask Is mine, and sometimes, dull as clay, it sleeps With old Musaeus. Then strange flashes come, Oracular ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... the celebration of the nuptials, Phineus claims Andromeda, who has been betrothed to him; and together with Proetus, he and Polydectes are turned into stone. Pallas, who has aided Perseus, now leaves him, and goes to Helicon, to see the fountain of Hippocrene. The Muses tell her the story of Pyreneus and the Pierides, who were transformed into magpies after they had repeated various songs on the subjects of the transformation of the Deities into various forms of animals; the rape of Proserpine, ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... loqui, nisi mota mens. Then it riseth higher, as by a divine instinct, when it contemns common and known conceptions. It utters somewhat above a mortal mouth. Then it gets aloft and flies away with his rider, whither before it was doubtful to ascend. This the poets understood by their Helicon, Pegasus, or Parnassus; and this made Ovid ...
— Discoveries and Some Poems • Ben Jonson
... another volume; but they were written principally while Clifton Grove was in the press, or soon after, and do not now at all satisfy me. Indeed, of late, I have been obliged to desist, almost entirely, from converse with the dames of Helicon. The drudgery of an attorney's office, and the necessity of preparing myself, in case I should succeed in getting to college, in what little leisure I could boast, left no room for the ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... and whimsicality, founded by Johnson himself in conjunction with Sir J. Reynolds, was the Helicon of London Letters, and the temple which the greatest talker of his age had built for himself, and in which he took care to be duly worshipped. It met at the Turk's Head in Gerrard Street, Soho, every Friday; and from seven in the evening to almost any hour of night was ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... tube is bent round upon itself from the mouthpiece to the bell in the shape of a broad C and is strengthened by means of a bar across the curve, which the performer grasps while playing, in order to steady the instrument; the bell curves over his head or shoulder as in the modern helicon. Three Roman buccinas were found among the ruins of Pompeii and are now deposited in the museum at Naples. V. C. Mahillon, of Brussels[1] has made a facsimile of one of these instruments; it is in G and has almost the same harmonic series as the French horn and the trumpet. The buccina, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... Virgil, Ovid, Tully, and all the other noble poets and orators to me unknown. And also he hath read the nine Muses, and understands their musical sciences, and to whom of them each, science is appropred. I suppose he hath drunken of Helicon's well. Then I pray him and such others to correct, add, or minish whereas he or they shall find fault; for I have but followed my copy in French as nigh as to me is possible. And if any word be said therein well, I am glad; and if otherwise, I submit my said book to their correction. Which book ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... sweeter lays than builded Thebes' towers, Or them which charm'd the dolphins in the main, Or which did call Eurydice again, Thou sung'st away the hours, till from their sphere Stars seem'd to shoot thy melody to hear. The god with golden hair, the sister maids, Did leave their Helicon, and Tempe's shades, To see thine isle, here lost their native tongue, And in ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... name of president APOLLO, And other gentle folks, that follow: Such as URANIA and CLIO, To whom my fame poetic I owe; With the whole drove of rhyming sisters, For whom my heart with rapture blisters; Who swim in HELICON uncertain Whether a petticoat or shirt on, From vulgar ken their charms do cover, From every eye but Muses' lover; In name of every ugly GOD; Whose beauty scarce outshines a toad; In name of PROSERPINE and PLUTO, Who board in hell's ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... rang, A sound as when fleet-flying cranes forebode A great storm. Moaned the monsters of the deep Plaintively round that train of mourners. Fast On sped they to their goal, with awesome cry Wailing the while their sister's mighty son. Swiftly from Helicon the Muses came Heart-burdened with undying grief, for love And ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... on a part of the Acropolis of Athens, the rocky temple-crowned hill around which the city was built. There were other "museums," or seats of the Muses, in ancient Greece; those on the slopes of Mount Helicon and of Mount Olympus were the most famous. In modern times a picture gallery and art collection, that of the Louvre, in Paris, is called "the Musee," whilst "the Museum" (the Latin form of the same word) is the name distinctively applied in Paris to the collections of natural history ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... produces wherever known. Thus it lightens the toil of the weary laborer plodding along the highway of life. The student poring over musty tomes sees with a clearer perception as its fragrance accompanies him along the pathway of science and of history. The poet "as those wreathes up go" sees Helicon's fresh founts flowing clearer and purer. The musician "lord of sounds," evokes tones from his instrument never before heard by mortal ear. The warrior, "fresh from glory's field" is charmed by its fragrance as he dreams of shattered battalions and sleeping hosts. The farmer nurtured ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... be, just as he was in the early time, nothing more nor less than a "seer." He is always the man who is willing to take the age he lives in on trust, as the very best that ever was. Shakespeare did not sit down and cry for the water of Helicon to turn the wheels of his little private mill at the Bankside. He appears to have gone more quietly about his business than any other playwright in London, to have drawn off what water-power he needed from the great prosy current of affairs that flows alike for all and in spite ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... under their feet, rose Mount Helicon, 1,520 feet high, and round about the left rose moderate elevations, enclosing a small portion of the "Sea of Rains," under the name of the Gulf of Iris. The terrestrial atmosphere would have to be one hundred ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne
... Fairfield, at that period of his intellectual life, the softness of our Helicon descended as healing dews. In his turbulent and unsettled ambition, in his vague grapple with the giant forms of political truths, in his bias towards the application of science to immediate practical purposes, this lovely vision of the Muse came in the white robe of the Peacemaker; ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... a sort of privilege of poets to be egotists; but they should 'use it as not abusing it;' and particularly one who piques himself (though indeed at the ripe age of nineteen), of being 'an infant bard,'—('The artless Helicon I boast is youth;')—should either not know, or should seem not to know, so much about his own ancestry. Besides a poem above cited on the family seat of the Byrons, we have another of eleven pages, on the self-same subject, ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... afford ample indications that the barbarism of taste which permitted an incongruous mixture of classical mythology with scriptural allusions, was at its height in the learned reign of our eighth Henry. Helicon and Mount Parnassus appeared on one side; St. Anne, and Mary the wife of Cleophas with her children, were represented on the other. Here the three Graces presented the queen with a golden apple by the hands of ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... but setting their names to it, by their own disgracefulness, disgrace the most graceful poesy. For now, as if all the Muses were got with child, to bring forth bastard poets, without any commission, they do post over the banks of Helicon, till they make the readers more weary than post-horses: while in ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... wandered long in search of some enterprise, till at length he arrived at a small rivulet that issued from a fountain hard by, called, in the language of mortal men, Helicon. Here he stopped, and, parched with thirst, resolved to allay it in this limpid stream. Thrice with profane hands he essayed to raise the water to his lips, and thrice it slipped all through his fingers. Then he stopped prone on his breast, but, ...
— The Battle of the Books - and Other Short Pieces • Jonathan Swift
... seen indeed, poor child of mine, The breasts and flanks of Pallas bare in sight, But never shalt see more the dear sun's light; O Helicon, how great a pay is thine For some poor antelopes and wild-deer dead, My child's eyes hast thou taken ...
— Songs before Sunrise • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... pressure of political and religious strife, veiled in poetry during the greater part of Elizabeth's actual reign under the forms of pastoral and allegory, again imperiously breaks in upon the gracious but somewhat slender and artificial fashions of England's Helicon: the DIVOM NUMEN, SEDESQUE QUIETAE which, in some degree the Elizabethan poets offer, disappear; until filling the central years of the seventeenth century we reach an age as barren for inspiration of new song as the Wars of the Roses; although the great survivors from earlier years mask this ...
— A Selection From The Lyrical Poems Of Robert Herrick • Robert Herrick
... that in this blessed brook Do bathe your breast, Forsake your watery bowers and hither look At my request.... And eke you virgins that on Parnass dwell, Whence floweth Helicon, the learned well, Help me to blaze Her worthy praise, Which in ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... untold. And here Eurystheus bade me try my first Passage of arms, and slay that fearsome thing. So with my buxom bow and quiver lined With arrows I set forth: my left hand held My club, a beetling olive's stalwart trunk And shapely, still environed in its bark: This hand had torn from holiest Helicon The tree entire, with all its fibrous roots. And finding soon the lion's whereabouts, I grasped my bow, and on the bent horn slipped The string, and laid thereon the shaft of death. And, now all eyes, ...
— Theocritus • Theocritus
... here thy shepherd spent his wand'ring years And in these shades, dear nymph, he oft hath been; And here to thee he sacrificed his tears." Fair Arden, thou my Tempe art alone, And thou, sweet Ankor, art my Helicon! ...
— Elizabethan Sonnet Cycles - Idea, by Michael Drayton; Fidessa, by Bartholomew Griffin; Chloris, by William Smith • Michael Drayton, Bartholomew Griffin, and William Smith
... like Apollo, as I am going to tell you, was dozing, the two chief justices, and Lord B. Bubo read the play himself, "with handkerchief and orange by his side." But the curious part is a prologue, which I never saw. It represents the god of verse fast asleep by the side of Helicon: the race of modern bards try to wake him, but the more they repeat their works, the louder he snores. At last "Ruin seize thee, ruthless King!" is heard, and the god starts from his trance. This is a good thought, but will offend the bards so much, that I think Dr. Bentley's son will be ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... with your gown and cap quickly: here, here, your father will be a man of this room presently. Come, nay, nay, nay, nay, be brief. These verses too, a poison on 'em! I cannot abide them, they make me ready to cast, by the banks of Helicon! Nay, look, what a rascally untoward thing this poetry is; I could ...
— The Poetaster - Or, His Arraignment • Ben Jonson
... only affair in this world was to feed on its facts and colours, like a parasite upon blood. The ego was the all; and the praise of it was enunciated in madder and madder rhythms by poets whose Helicon was absinthe and whose Pegasus was the nightmare. This diseased pride was not even conscious of a public interest, and would have found all political terms utterly tasteless and insignificant. It was no longer a question of one man one vote, but of ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... the breath of inspiration which will bring them into life; and indeed, here and there, the breath has come, the warm, the true, the vital breath of Apollo. No one, surely, whose lips had not tasted of the waters of Helicon, could have ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... and extends at first south, and then east to the sea, nearly inclosing Thessaly, and dividing it from the rest of Greece. After throwing out the various spurs of Othrys, OEta, and Corax, it loses itself in those famous haunts of the Muses—the heights of Parnassus and Helicon, in Phocis and Boeotia, In the southern part of Greece are the mountains which intersect the Peloponnesus in almost every part, the principal of which are Scollis, Aroanii, and Taygetus. We can not enumerate the names of all these mountains; it is enough ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... fill up the Glass, To the next merry Lad let it pass, Come away with't: Come Set Foot to Foot, And but give our Minds to't, 'Tis Heretical Six that doth slay Wit, No Helicon like to the Juice of the Vine is, For Phoebus had never had Wit, nor Diviness, Had his Face been bow dy'd as ...
— Wit and Mirth: or Pills to Purge Melancholy, Vol. 5 of 6 • Various
... models, take the code Which to the ten wise men our fathers owed, The treaties made 'twixt Gabii's kings and Home's, The pontiffs' books, the bards' forgotten tomes, They'll swear the Muses framed them every one In close divan on Alba's Helicon. ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... cork, flexible, floating, full of pores and openings, and yet he could neither return nor transmit the waters of Helicon, much less the light of Apollo. The poet, by his side, was like a diamond, transmitting to all around, yet retaining for himself alone, the rays of the ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... am I the Muse's path to tread, And curs'd with Adam's unpoetic head, Who, though that pen he wielded in his hand Ordain'd the Wealth of Nations to command; Yet when on Helicon he dar'd to draw, His draft return'd and unaccepted saw. If thus like him we lay a rune in vain, Like him we'll strive some humbler prize ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... heart repine That Wealth and Power can ne'er be mine, And Love has flown— That Friendship changes as the breeze? Mine is a joy unknown to these; In Song's bright zone, To sit by Helicon serene, And hear the waves ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... completed the translation of the Psalms, which Fuller in his history says was at first derided and scoffed at as piety rather than poetry, adding that the good gentleman had drunk more of Jordan than of Helicon. In his Worthies, however, he says: "He was afterwards (saith my author) ab intimo cubiculo to King Edward the Sixth; though I am not satisfied whether thereby he meant gentleman of his privy chamber ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... lyre, awake, And give to rapture all thy trembling strings. From Helicon's harmonious springs A thousand rills their mazy progress take: The laughing flowers that round them blow, 5 Drink life and fragrance as they flow. Now the rich stream of music winds along, Deep, majestic, ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray
... told his story well and with detail, combining the recollections of the scholar with the impressions of an artist. The pediment of the Parthenon, the oleanders of the Ilissus, the stream "that runs in rain-time," the naked peak of Parnassus, the green slopes of Helicon, the blue gulf of Argus, the pine forest beside Alpheus, where the ancients worshipped "Death the Gentle"—all of them passed in recount ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... thyself compare With one who quaffs at Helicon; Whose playfellows the Muses are, And whom Apollo calleth son? Who, had he lived in olden day, With some fierce host had strode along; Like Taillefer to Hasting's fray, Cheering the Normans with ...
— Mollie Charane - and Other Ballads • Thomas J. Wise
... a splendid bridle, this man had, made of gold; and I forgot—the mountain the horse trotted round on was called Helicon. And the man mounted him, and went up, up, till they were nothing but specks ...
— Little Prudy's Sister Susy • Sophie May
... may—rest where we will, Eternal London haunts us still, The trash of Almack's or Fleet-Ditch— And scarce a pin's head difference WHICH— Mixes, though even to Greece we run, With every rill from Helicon! And if this rage for traveling lasts, If Cockneys of all sets and castes, Old maidens, aldermen, and squires, WILL leave their puddings and coal fires, To gape at things in foreign lands No soul among them understands— If Blues desert their coteries, To show off 'mong the Wahabees—- If neither ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... honey-dropping tops, ploughed by her breath, Which there reciprocally laboreth. In that sweet soil it seems a holy quire, Founded to th' name of great Apollo's lyre; Whose silver roof rings with the sprightly notes Of sweet-lipp'd angel imps, that swill their throats In cream of morning Helicon; and then Prefer soft anthems to the ears of men, To woo them from their beds, still murmuring That men can sleep while ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... themes enough for many a bout Of thought-entangled descant;—as to nerves— With cones and parallelograms and curves I've sworn to strangle them if once they dare To bother me—when you are with me there. 315 And they shall never more sip laudanum, From Helicon or Himeros (1);—well, come, And in despite of God and of the devil, We'll make our friendly philosophic revel Outlast the leafless time; till buds and flowers 320 Warn the obscure inevitable hours, Sweet meeting by ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... cencatogoramatic terms and words. I have been particularly careful to adorn it with some poetic spontaneous effusions, and although I own to you, that I have no pretensions to be an adept in poetry, as I have only moderately sipped of the Helicon Fountain; yet from my knowledge of Orthometry I can prove the correctness of it; by special and general metric analysis. In conclusion, I have not indulged in Rhetorical figures and Tropes, but have rigidly adhered to the use of figurative and literal language; finally I ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... put myself in a regimen of admiring a fine woman; and in proportion to the adorability of her charms, in proportion you are delighted with my verses. The lightning of her eye is the godhead of Parnassus, and the witchery of her smile the divinity of Helicon!" ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... these now engender in the learners both unspeakable delights and a marvellous height of spirit. And it doth in no wise beseem me, by comparing with these the fulsome debauchees of victualling-houses and stews, to contaminate Helicon and the Muses,— ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... the Paphian lute mellifluous play, And tune to plaintive lore the liquid lay: Their numbers every mental storm control, And lull to harmony the afflicted soul; With heavenly balm the tortured breast compose, 370 And soothe the agony of latent woes: The verdant shades that Helicon surround, On rosy gales seraphic tunes resound! Perpetual summers crown the happy hours, Sweet as the breath that fans Elysian flowers: Hence pleasure dances in an endless round, And love and joy, ineffable, ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... the following remarks from Maximus Tyrius peculiarly applicable:—'I am not now treating of that poetry which is estimated by the pleasure it affords to the ear—the ear having been corrupted, and the judgment-seat of the perceptions; but of that which proceeds from the intellectual Helicon, that which is dignified, and appertaining to human feelings, and entering into the soul.'—The 13th Sonnet for exquisite delicacy of painting; the 19th for tender simplicity; and the 25th for manly pathos, are compositions ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... he, "many are they who have been seduced by poetry; for, the instant a man has composed a verse in feet, and has woven a more delicate meaning into it by means of circumlocutions, he straightway concludes that he has scaled Helicon! Take those who are worn out by the distressing detail of the legal profession, for example: they often seek sanctuary in the tranquillity of poetry, as a more sheltered haven, believing themselves able more easily to compose a poem than a rebuttal charged with scintillating epigrams! ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... much sunshine at command, Why light with darkness mix? Why dash with pain our pleasure? Your Helicon with Styx? ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... virgins! for your sakes If e'er I suffer'd hunger, cold and watching, Occasion calls on me to crave your bounty. Now through my breast let Helicon his stream Pour copious; and Urania with her choir Arise to aid me: while the verse unfolds Things that do almost mock ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... threw himself, and just into the air Stretching his indolent arms, he took, O bliss! A naked waist: "Fair Cupid, whence is this?" A well-known voice sigh'd, "Sweetest, here am I!" At which soft ravishment, with doating cry They trembled to each other.—Helicon! O fountain'd hill! Old Homer's Helicon! That thou wouldst spout a little streamlet o'er 720 These sorry pages; then the verse would soar And sing above this gentle pair, like lark Over his nested young: but all ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats
... of Helicon were the monk's also, as witness Tuotilo and Bernard of Clairvaux; but it was by the waters of Jordan that his miracles were wrought. As Johnson somewhere says of Watts, "every kind of knowledge was by the piety of his mind converted into ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... the lore of antiquity, and the Aubades and Watch-Songs of the old Minnesingers. What do you think of the shoe-maker poets that came after them,—with their guilds and singing-schools? It makes me laugh to think how the great German Helicon, shrunk toa rivulet, goes bubbling and gurgling over the pebbly names of Zwinger, Wurgendrussel, Buchenlin, Hellfire, Old Stoll, Young Stoll, Strong Bopp, Dang Brotscheim, Batt Spiegel, Peter Pfort, and Martin Gumpel. And then the Corporation of the Twelve Wise Masters, ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... perished, with their walls and towers; whole nations with their people were consumed to ashes! The forest-clad mountains burned, Athos and Taurus and Tmolus and OEte; Ida, once celebrated for fountains, but now all dry; the Muses' mountain Helicon, and Haemus; Aetna, with fires within and without, and Parnassus, with his two peaks, and Rhodope, forced at last to part with his snowy crown. Her cold climate was no protection to Scythia, Caucasus burned, ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... for knowledge, in Helicon may slake it, If he has still, the Roman will, to find a ...
— A Daughter of the Land • Gene Stratton-Porter
... books, and the grave beauty Of England's Helicon, whose eternal light Shines like a lantern on that road of duty, Discerned by few in this ...
— The New Morning - Poems • Alfred Noyes
... night, as Apollo was quaffing a gill With his pupils, the Muses, from Helicon's rill, (For all circles of rank in Parnassus agree In preferring cold water to coffee or tea) The discourse turned as usual on critical matters, And the last stirring news from the kingdom of letters. But when poets, and critics, ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... we passed by the Island of Paris, and the Island of the bankes of Helicon, and the Island called Ditter, where are many boares, and the women bee witches. The same day also wee passed by the Castle of Timo, standing vpon a very high mountaine, and neere vnto it is the ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of - The English Nation, Vol. 11 • Richard Hakluyt
... by the king of the Citieans, and was of an admirable temper and lightness. The belt which he also wore in all engagements, was of much richer workmanship than the rest of his armor. It was the work of the ancient Helicon, and had been presented to him by the Rhodians, as a mark of their respect to him. So long as he was engaged in drawing up his men, or riding about to give orders or directions, or to view them, he spared Bucephalas, who was now ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... thence All baser feeling, and all earthly leaven, By the dear magic of that voice from heaven. Fair Priestess of the Beautiful! that bringest Missions of sweetness from above, and flingest In a rich flood of song—now faint, yet clear As Helicon's own murmurs to the ear, Now swelling till around our being floats In thrilling cadences thy bell-like notes,— The poetry of poetry, the deep Mysterious essences whose wavings steep Life in the bliss ...
— Eidolon - The Course of a Soul and Other Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... Marguerite. There is a little anecdote connected with the appellation. Marguerite of Scotland, the Queen of Louis the Eleventh, presented Marguerite Clotilde de Surville, a poetess, with a bouquet of daisies, with this inscription; "Marguerite d'Ecosse a Marguerite (the pearl) d'Helicon." ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... obedient, deploring the insanity pitiless. Then the flame-outsnorting horses were led forth: it was so decreed. They were yoked before the glad youth by his sister-ancillaries. Swift the ripple ripples follow'd, as of aureate Helicon, Down their flanks, while they impatient pawed desire of the distances, And the bit with fury champed. Oh! unimaginable delight! Unimagined speed and splendour in the circle of upper air! Glory grander than the armed host upon earth singing victory! ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... we opine, be sufficient to quench the curiosity of our readers, when we state that the above is a fair average specimen of Mr Sheldon's original productions. We presume that few will thirst for another draught from this pitcherful of the Border Helicon; and—as time presses—we shall now push forward to the consideration of the remodelled poetry. The first of these is called "Halidon Hill," and, as we are informed in the notes, it dates back to the respectable antiquity of 1827. The following magnificent stanzas will convey some idea of the spirit ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... of this one definition: but recollect, and take me for a son of leisure, an amateur tourist of Parnassus, an idling gatherer of way-side flowers in the vale of Thessaly, a careless, unbusied, "contemplative man," recreating himself by gentle craft on the banks of much-poached Helicon; and if you, my casual friend, be neither like-minded in fancy nor like-fitted in leisure, courteously consider that we may not travel well together: at this station let us stop, freely forgiving each other ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... captivate their hearts by her tales of charming sadness. She wore on her head a garland, composed of her father's myrtles twisted with her mother's cypress. One day as she sat musing by the waters of Helicon, her tears by chance fell into the spring; and ever since, the muses' spring has tasted of the infusion. Pity was commanded by Jupiter to follow the steps of her mother through the world, dropping balm into the wounds ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 326, August 9, 1828 • Various
... thy travail sore Sweet rest sease thee evermore, 50 That to give the world encrease, Shortned hast thy own lives lease; Here besides the sorrowing That thy noble House doth bring, Here be tears of perfect moan Weept for thee in Helicon, And som Flowers, and som Bays, For thy Hears to strew the ways, Sent thee from the banks of Came, Devoted to thy vertuous name; 60 Whilst thou bright Saint high sit'st in glory, Next her much like to ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... of thy book, The witty ancient you enrobe, You make the graceful Horace look As pitiful as Tom M'Lobe.[1] Ye Muses, guard your sacred mount, And Helicon, for if this log Should stumble once into the fount, He'll make it muddy as ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... also: I have rested in the groves of Helicon, and tasted of the fountain Hippocrene. But on every memorable spot in Greece conquest after conquest has set its seal, till there is a confusion of ownership even in ruins, that only close study and comparison could unravel. ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... he began to talk of the older poets who had worshipped nature with the ardor of lovers, and his eyes lighted up with pleasure when I happened to remember some almost forgotten stanza from England's "Helicon." It was an easy transition from the old bards to "Elia," and he soon went on in his fine enthusiastic way to relate several anecdotes of his eccentric friend. As I rose ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... here, O Apollo! Are haunts meet for thee. But, where Helicon breaks down In cliff ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... three neglected cannons thrust their muzzles idly over the rampart, and shepherds with their flocks roam at will within. A sharp wind was sweeping over the summit, and the mountains and islands—Parnassus, Cyllene, Helicon, Pentclicon, Salamis, AEgina—were veiled with a dull, opaque haze. While Basil, with stiff fingers, was sketching the view from the top, I wandered about with my other companion, picking spring flowers, reading ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... Helicon, So oft bedeawed with our learned layes, And speaking streames of pure Castalion, The famous witnesse of our wonted praise, They trampled have with their fowle footings trade*, And like to troubled puddles have them made. 276 ...
— The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, Volume 5 • Edmund Spenser
... that "at the song of the daughters of Pierus the sky became dark, and all nature was put out of harmony; but at that of the Muses the heavens themselves, the stars, the sea, and the rivers stood motionless, and Helicon swelled up with delight, so that its summit reached the sky." The Muses then, having turned the presumptuous maidens into chattering magpies, first took the name of Pi-er'i-des, from Pieria, ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson |
