"Olympian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... object of satire in the mimus. "The trivial, prosaic, and libertine taste of the Macedonian princes of Egypt and Syria at last reigned alone in enslaved Greece." Then, under different forms and names, nothing remained but mimes, realistic representation of common life.[2030] The Olympian gods and Homeric heroes were burlesqued for fun. The mimus won acceptance at courts and in higher circles. It was developed into the so-called "hypothesis" and won a place on the stage. The most distinguished maker of hypotheses was Philistion,[2031] who lived at the beginning ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... held in various sectarian houses, the mood of which is doubtless reverent—though all the while the rippling water beckons to the high and dry canoes, and a gathering of many-tinted clouds is summoned in the windy west to tingle with Olympian laughter and Universal song. How much more wisely (if I may talk in Greek terms for the moment) the gods take Sunday, than their followers ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... is not of godlike physiognomy, any more than of imposing stature or costume: close-shut mouth with thin lips, prominent jaws and nose, receding brow, by no means of Olympian height; head, however, is of long form, and has superlative gray eyes in it. Not what is called a beautiful man; nor yet, by all appearance, what is called a happy. On the contrary, the face bears evidence of many sorrows, as they are termed, of much hard ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. I. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Birth And Parentage.—1712. • Thomas Carlyle
... no Olympian more heroic than he, and certainly none with so compelling a vitality. "Such a warm, kind light in them!" she thought of the eyes others had found hard ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... the rather, I think, because they are supposed to be obtained, either by an aptness of nature, which cannot be taught, or only by continual custom, which is soon prescribed which though it be not true, yet I forbear to note any deficiences; for the Olympian games are down long since, and the mediocrity of these things is for use; as for the excellency of them it serveth for the most ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... Homeric deities—how many years there were when the common people believed in the divine origin of the Odyssey, while the educated classes were more or less discreetly heretical, until at last the whole Olympian outfit became poetic myths. But strangely enough I do not recall just the date when we began to demand a god of ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... 294. THE OLYMPIAN VICE.—Despite the philosopher who, as a genuine Englishman, tried to bring laughter into bad repute in all thinking minds—"Laughing is a bad infirmity of human nature, which every thinking mind will strive to overcome" (Hobbes),—I would even allow myself to rank philosophers ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... frauds. A feature like that would be a doubtful thing to try in any cultured atmosphere. The thought of associating, ever so remotely, those three old bummers which he had conjured up with the venerable and venerated Emerson, Longfellow, and Holmes, the Olympian trinity, seems ghastly enough to-day, and must have seemed even more so then. But Clemens, dazzled by the rainbow splendor of his conception, saw in it only a rare colossal humor, which would fairly lift and bear his hearers along on a tide of mirth. He did not ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... satisfaction in the official cults. Such discussions are of the highest interest to the anthropologist and to the psychologist; but they have the disadvantage of fixing our attention too exclusively on what, to the ordinary Greek, appeared accidental or even morbid, and of making us regard the Olympian pantheon, with its clearly realised figures of the gods, as a mere system imposed more or less from outside upon the old rites and beliefs of the people. In the province of art, at least, the Olympian gods are paramount; and thus ...
— Religion and Art in Ancient Greece • Ernest Arthur Gardner
... spiritual supremacy arrogated by the Pope was, in the dark ages, productive of far more good than evil. Its effect was to unite the nations of Western Europe in one great commonwealth. What the Olympian chariot course and the Pythian oracle were to all the Greek cities, from Trebizond to Marseilles, Rome and her Bishop were to all Christians of the Latin communion, from Calabria to the Hebrides. Thus grew up ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Clarice felt this way about Hartman's coming; she has not waked up so, or come down from her Olympian clouds of indifference, in a long time. But still I thought it best to go around and make some more preparations. When I have a secret to carry, it oppresses my frank and open nature more than you would think; and I find that I can conceal ...
— A Pessimist - In Theory and Practice • Robert Timsol
... calm stock of us, and seeing that we were a pleasant-faced and by no means an antagonistic assembly—even Doria's curiosity lent her a semblance of a sense of humour—she relaxed her Olympian serenity and laughed a little, shewing teeth young ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... and most of the original Libels, in different parts of that sad Book (compiled by Travenol's Advocate, a very sad fellow himself): see also—OEuvres de Voltaire,—lxxiii. 355 n., 385 n.; IB. i. 97; BARBIER, ii. 487. All in a very jumbled, dateless, vague and incorrect condition.] Olympian Jove in distressed circumstances VERSUS a hungry Dog who had eaten dirty puddings. Paris, in all its Saloons and Literary Coffee-houses (figure the ANTRE DE PROCOPE, on Publication nights!), had, monthly or so, the exquisite malign banquet; and grinned over the Law Pleadings: ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... throttle And hunted about by thy ghost, Aristotle, Till a More or Lavater step into his place: Then the world turns and makes an admiring grimace. Once the men were so great and so few, they appear, Through a distant Olympian atmosphere, Like vast Caryatids upholding the age. Now the men are so many and small, disengage One man from the million to mark him, next moment The crowd sweeps him hurriedly out of your comment; And since we seek vainly (to praise in our songs) 'Mid our fellows the ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... artist will never sit calmly on Olympian heights, as we have become accustomed to represent them to ourselves. The thinker or the artist should suffer in company with the people, in order that he may find salvation or consolation. Besides this, he will suffer ...
— What To Do? - thoughts evoked by the census of Moscow • Count Lyof N. Tolstoi
... important religious movement and to incorporate rather than suppress. And this incorporation is more than mere recognition: the parvenu god borrows something from the manners and attributes of the olympian society to which he is introduced. The greater he grows, the more considerable is the process of fusion and borrowing. Hindu philosophy ever seeks for the one amongst the many and popular thought, in ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... original and barbarous character—with an almost Gothic quaintness, more properly belonging to a rich native ballad than to the poetry of Hellas. There was a certain impropriety in his knowing so much Greek—an unfitness in the idea of marble fauns, and satyrs, and even Olympian gods, lugged in under the oaken roof and the painted light of an odd, old Norman hall. But Methley, abounding in Homer, really loved him (as I believe) in all truth, without whim or fancy; moreover, he had a good deal of ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... The Olympian Hippodrome, or horse-course, was a space of ground of six hundred paces long, surrounded with a wall, near the city of Elis, and on the banks of the river Alpheus. It was uneven, and in some degree irregular, on account of the situation;—in ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 487 - Vol. 17, No. 487. Saturday, April 30, 1831 • Various
... That reminds me. Haven't settled that yet. Might as well do it right now," said the presiding genius of the place with Olympian decision. "Dr. De Vito, what's the newest ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... lay aside thy mantle! Clothe thee with nakedness, O Soul, that art its priestess! For lo, thy body is thy temple. Pass unto me a magnet's stream, O amber of the flesh, And let me drink of nectar drawn From Nakedness Olympian! ...
— Life Immovable - First Part • Kostes Palamas
... the rich heavens did so endow With eyes of power and Jove's own brow, With all the massive strength that fills Thy home-horizon's granite hills, With rarest gifts of heart and head From manliest stock inherited— New England's stateliest type of man, In port and speech Olympian; Whom no one met, at first, but took A second awed and wondering look (As turned, perchance, the eyes of Greece On Phidias' unveiled masterpiece); Whose words, in simplest home-spun clad, The Saxon strength of ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... courtesy and affability. From noon till dark, the time is spent in conversation, continued, various, and eloquent. What a presence is there in this humble, unpretending cottage! And as the stream of Olympian sweetness moves on, now in laughing ripples, and again in a solemn majestic flood, what a past do we bring before ourselves! what a present! For this is he that talked with Coleridge, that was the friend of Wilson,—and—what furnishes a more sublime suggestion—this is he that knows by ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... fresh, and blue, by the young and the old, the weak and the strong, who came to sun themselves in the god's presence, as procession and hymn rolled on, in the fragrant and tranquil courts of the great Olympian temple; while all the time those people consciously apprehended in the carved image of Zeus none but the personal, ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... sentinel Sits in the porch? What presence guards the gate? Know, that within, still fiercer and more fell, Wide-yawning with her fifty throats, doth dwell A Hydra. Tartarus itself, hard by, Abrupt and sheer, beneath the ghosts in Hell, Gapes twice as deep, as o'er the earth on high Towers up the Olympian steep, ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... above all things. Four months have slipped away in this Olympian calm, between the sea and the sky, and I fancy that the New Forest is the Highlands; but it is time to be up and doing, and next week I return to London, with a large stock of ...
— Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, C.B., D.C.L. - In Two Volumes. VOL. II. • John Knox Laughton
... yourself like a goddess, and disdain me from Olympian heights," he said. "I had the wit to guess it ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... religious practice, the Parthians were, naturally, tolerant of a variety of creeds among their subjects. Fire altars were maintained, and Zoroastrian zeal was allowed to nourish in the dependent kingdom of Persia. In the Greek cities the Olympian gods were permitted to receive the veneration of thousands, while in Babylon, Nearda, and Nisibis the Jews enjoyed the free exercise of their comparatively pure and elevated religion. No restrictions seem to have ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 6. (of 7): Parthia • George Rawlinson
... and gestures really touching to behold. She was very happy too to have him by her side, but she was a little embarrassed none the less, looking upon him as an all-powerful, strange being, exalting him in her artless innocence to the level of an Olympian encompassed by thunder-bolts and lightning-flashes, possessing the gift of omnipotence. She talked to him, inquired if he was still satisfied with his friends, with the condition of his affairs, but did not dare to ask the question she had asked ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... some beautiful writing in this fourth scene, which may be read after Mr. Wordsworth's equally beautiful reference to the Olympian gods and goddesses, in the fourth book of the "Excursion," entitled "Despondency Corrected." The last explains more completely than the other the attributes ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... Infinite?" Suppose that the story of the Incarnation (older than Jerusalem itself) be literally true—that the Almighty was the immediate father of Mary's child: Is not the birth of each and all of us as much a mystery, as great a "miracle," as though we sprang full-grown from the brow of Olympian Jove? Is it necessary that the Creator should violate his own laws to convince us that he does exist? Is it more wonderful that the sun should stand still upon Gibeon and the moon in the Valley of Ajalon than that the great world should spin forever, bringing ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... you rat, you toadstool. May I never grow an inch up or down if I don't push your master into a dunghill, and I'll give you the same medicine, I will, by Hercules, I will, no matter if you call down Olympian Jupiter himself! I'll take care of your eight inch ringlets and your two cent master into the bargain. I'll have my teeth into you, either you'll cut out the laughing, or I don't know myself. Yes, even if you had a golden beard. ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... all the religions of the Aryan race, which was missed indeed by every careful observer, but which formerly could be supplied by guess-work only. How the Persians came to worship Ormuzd, how the Buddhists came to protest against temples and sacrifices, how Zeus and the Olympian gods came to be what they are in the mind of Homer, or how such beings as Jupiter and Mars came to be worshipped by the Italian peasant:—all these questions, which used to yield material for endless and baseless speculations, ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... nations. In order to receive them, indeed, Rome had performed on them a cruel operation: they were enervated, bleached. Those great centralized deities became in their official life the mournful functionaries of the Roman Empire. But the decline of that Olympian aristocracy had in no wise drawn down the host of home-born gods, the mob of deities still keeping hold of the boundless country-sides, of the woods, the hills, the fountains; still intimately blended with the life of the country. These ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... black, silken tresses are braided from the forehead, and hang wavily on each side of the face, falling behind in a glossy cataract, that sparkles with such golden drops as might have glittered upon Danae, after the Olympian shower. A light tunic of pink or pale blue crape is covered with a long silk robe, open at the bosom, and buttoned thence downward to the delicately slippered little feet, that peep daintily from beneath the full silken trousers. Round the loins, rather than the waist, a cashmere shawl is ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... flat and without springs of water 11 and formed of mud: and the road as one goes inland from the sea to Heliopolis is about the same in length as that which leads from the altar of the twelve gods at Athens to Pisa and the temple of Olympian Zeus: reckoning up you would find the difference very small by which these roads fail of being equal in length, not more indeed than fifteen furlongs; for the road from Athens to Pisa wants fifteen furlongs of being fifteen hundred, while the road to ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 1(of 2) • Herodotus
... and TUM, Ye ghosts of gods Egyptian, If murmurs of our planet come To exiles in the precincts wan Where, fetish or Olympian, To help or harm no more ye list, Look down, if look ye may, and scan This monument ...
— Ballads in Blue China and Verses and Translations • Andrew Lang
... for which I summoned forth The people, was there one I compassed not? Thou, when slow time brings justice in its train, O mighty mother of the Olympian gods, Dark Earth, thou best canst witness, from whose breast I swept the pillars broadcast planted there, And made thee free, who hadst been slave of yore. And many a man whom fraud or law had sold For from his god-built land, an ...
— The Athenian Constitution • Aristotle
... some of the slimness of youth; but youthfulness is not the effect he aims at: his frock coat would befit a prime minister; and a certain high chested carriage of the shoulders, a lofty pose of the head, and the Olympian majesty with which a mane, or rather a huge wisp, of hazel colored hair is thrown back from an imposing brow, suggest Jupiter rather than Apollo. He is prodigiously fluent of speech, restless, excitable ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... if the men found it so. They had their revenge, however, for weary of plaguing puny mortals, who whimpered and cried when they saw they could not escape, the inevitable Nemesis turned her attention from actors to spectators, and made a clean sweep of the whole Olympian hierarchy. She smashed their altars, pulled down their statues, and after she had completed her malicious work, found that she had, vulgarly speaking, been cutting off her nose to spite her face, for she, too, became an object of derision and of disbelief, and was forced to retire to the same ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... demanded nothing; silent and proud he sat in the midst of his family circle; stoically listened to the ringing of the bell, and saw strangers enter his counting-room, too proud to show any excitement. He wrapped himself in an Olympian silence, and barricaded himself from the curious questions of his children by the stern reserve of ...
— Frederick the Great and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... legs, which were not yet done smarting; and the pain seemed to be an emphatic protest against circuses in general, and the "Great Olympian Circus" in particular. But whether he liked the circus or not, it was no longer safe for him to remain with the company. He had taken "French leave" of the manager, and had cheated him out of the tights which enveloped his body from neck to heels. This thought ...
— Work and Win - or, Noddy Newman on a Cruise • Oliver Optic
... their united glare pouring from its top and illuminating not only the surrounding treetops but the broad face of this uplifted disc, roused in the awed spectator a thrill such as in mythological times might have greeted the sudden sight of Vulcan's smithy blazing on Olympian hills. But the clang of iron on iron would have attended the flash and gleam of those unexpected fires, and here all was still save for that steady throb never heard in Olympus or the halls of Valhalla, the pant of the motor eager for flight in the ...
— Initials Only • Anna Katharine Green
... what wouldst thou say? I who can speak am dumb before thee. Thine eyes that drink Olympian day Where steeds of wings thy soul convey, With pride of eagles circling o'er thee: Thou ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... possesses is not only the most stupendous eloquence ever owned by man. It is profound knowledge of humanity, gathered by a keen and open-eyed Olympian contemplation of all sorts and conditions of men, from the egregious Bottom, and Dogberry the muddled, up to Hamlet and Imogen; it is the broad myriad-minded understanding which feels with every class, and, withal, suffers even fools gladly. His prime value is that he saw—saw ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... contrivance to be always with her: he would be her "comic." It was a new system which had come into fashion: the most plastic performances spoiled by the juxtaposition of their caricatures; acrobats, Olympian gods, parodied by a merry-andrew in a ridiculous coat: just as though Nunkie Fuchs, for instance, had taken it into his head to appear with his Three Graces and mimic their tricks, kicking about at the end of a wire with his fat, fatherly paunch ...
— The Bill-Toppers • Andre Castaigne
... before the invention of printing, at a time when it was more usual to listen to books read aloud than to read them oneself? Plutarch journeyed to Rome just as Herodotus went to Athens, or as he is said to have gone to the Olympian festival, in search of an intelligent audience of educated men. Whether his object was merely praise, or whether he was influenced by ideas of gain, we cannot say. No doubt his lectures were not delivered gratis, and that they were well attended seems evident from ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... chief-clerk in the office, the sub-agent, the head-agent. All these must be submissively approached and anxiously propitiated before the petitioner's prayers can reach the ears of Jove himself, seated aloft on his remote Olympian throne. He may be, and for the most part really is—if he belongs to the old stock of aristocratic divinities—generous and gracious, incapable of meanness, baseness, or cruelty. But the tenant has to do, not with the absentee divinity, but ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... when I returned to the station and saw how very lovely the country was, how fertile—the rounded mountains, when cleared of their royal forests, arable to their very summits, the air like Olympian nectar, the sunshine a divine balm, the whole scene a Sabbath-land of peace and of boundless plenty, awaiting only the cohorts of the North and of the white-cliffed isle—I would fain have cried, "Come, ye moderately pecunious ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... Archons are the true princes, or beginners of things; or leaders (as of an orchestra). The Merists are properly the Domini, or Lords of houses and nations. The Dicasts, properly, the judges, and that with Olympian justice, which reaches to heaven and hell. The violation of archic law is [Greek: hamartia] (error), [Greek: poneria] (failure), or [Greek: plemmeleia] (discord). The violation of meristic law is [Greek: anomia] (iniquity). The violation of critic law is [Greek: adikia] (injury). Iniquity is ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... Greek philosophers, but not from the Greek poets. They turned in disgust 'from the lewdness of our classical mythology, and denounced as an unpardonable blasphemy all connection between the impure Olympian Jove and the Most High God.' Draper traces still farther than Whewell the Arab elements in our scientific terms. He gives examples of what Arabian men of science accomplished, dwelling particularly on Alhazen, who was ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... cicerone-led, or even an opera-box serving, during a performance, for frame of a type observed from the stalls. One placed young gods and goddesses only when one placed them on Olympus, and it met the case, always, that they were of Olympian race, and that they glimmered for one, at the best, through their silver cloud, like the visiting apparitions ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... the book. "A matter of educated taste," he said. "You don't know beauty when you see it. If you walked into a drawing-room by the side of that marvelous being, do you think you'd win a look, my dear girl? Why, your great brows and your great, wild eyes and your face and form of an Olympian and your free grace of a forest beast—why, they wouldn't be noticed. Because, Joan, that queer, poor thing knew woman's work from A to Z. She's beautiful, Joan, beautiful as God most certainly never intended her to be. Why, it's a triumph—it's something ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... Rome, had merely hinted at Olympian desire, whereat some rich Antiochenes, long privileged, had been ejected with scant ceremony from a small marble pavilion on an islet, formed by a branch of the River Ladon that had been guided twenty years ago by Hadrian's engineers in curves ...
— Caesar Dies • Talbot Mundy
... has been wasting his talents and his drachmas at the game of Palamedes, or else it may be that he is disappointed at not having won the prize at the Olympian games. He had great ...
— King Candaules • Theophile Gautier
... all, inside every man instead of outside him; when he is told, such a thing must be so, there is immense authority and custom in favor of its being so, it has been held to be so for a thousand years, he answers with Olympian politeness, "But is it so? is it so to me?" Nothing could be more really subversive of the foundations on which the old European order rested; and it may be remarked that no persons are so radically detached from this order, no persons so thoroughly modern, as those who have felt ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... like old-fashioned Englishmen they were), by whom good wine was known and appreciated; especially certain exquisite Madeira, of the Bingham and Butler names, the like of which it was believed the world could not produce; but this was Olympian nectar, for the gods alone; and the usual custom of the best society, at the early three-o'clock dinner, was water-drinking. Nor had the immense increase of the German population then flooded Philadelphia ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... the young commandant of the fort, in whose pinnace they had come, and two or three French sailors and Canadians—stepped out upon the white sand of Biloxi beach, she was bound with invisible fetters hand and foot, by that Olympian rogue of a boy, who likes no better prey than a little maiden who thinks ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... without any real meaning. The God of nineteen-twentieths of the Christian world is only Bel, Moloch, Zeus, or at best Osiris, Mithras, or Adonaï, under another name, worshipped with the old Pagan ceremonies and ritualistic formulas. It is the Statue of Olympian Jove, worshipped as the Father, in the Christian Church that was a Pagan Temple; it is the Statue of Venus, become the Virgin Mary. For the most part, men do not in their hearts believe that God is either just or merciful. They fear and shrink from His lightnings and dread His ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... back to watch the witless hoverings of a big butterfly, or sleepily listen to the increasing sound of the tom-toms and the yells of the beaters, whose voices, as those of demons of the pit, rend the peaceful air and add to my sense of Olympian aloofness! ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... had sacrificed it recently to Jove,—for which all Rome gave him thanks, though people whispered to each other that he had sacrificed it because his beard, like that of his whole family, was red. In his forehead, projecting strongly above his brows, there remained something Olympian. In his contracted brows the consciousness of supreme power was evident; but under that forehead of a demigod was the face of a monkey, a drunkard, and a comedian,—vain, full of changing desires, swollen ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... "yes, why not? Man-making is almost equal to man-bearing. I have no son to spur up the Olympian heights; but what might I not do for Alymer, if... ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... wayward flight? Hast thou forgotten that I here attend, From the full noon until this sad twilight? A hundred times, at least, from the clear spring, Since the full noon o'er hill and valley glowed, I've filled the vase which our Olympian king Upon my care for thy sole use bestowed; That at the moment when thou should'st descend, A pure refreshment might ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller
... the reconstruction of the Capitolium, for which purpose he caused some columns of the temple of the Olympian Jupiter to be removed from Athens to Rome. Sulla's work was continued by Lutatius Catulus, and finished by Julius Caesar in 46 B. C. A second restoration took place in the year 9 B. C. under Augustus, a third A. D. 74 under Vespasian, and the last in the year ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani
... likeliest find Truce to his restless thoughts, and entertain The irksome hours, till his great Chief return. Part on the plain, or in the air sublime, Upon the wing or in swift race contend, As at th' Olympian games or Pythian fields; Part curb their fiery steeds, or shun the goal With rapid wheels, or fronted brigades form: As when, to warn proud cities, war appears Waged in the troubled sky, and armies rush To battle in the clouds; before each van Prick forth ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... very happiest people. Their real meetings must have been constant, for half of it was appointments and allusions, all swimming in a sea of other allusions still, tangled in a complexity of questions that gave a wondrous image of their life. If Lady Bradeen was Juno it was all certainly Olympian. If the girl, missing the answers, her ladyship's own outpourings, vainly reflected that Cocker's should have been one of the bigger offices where telegrams arrived as well as departed, there were yet ways in which, on the whole, she pressed the romance closer by reason of ...
— In the Cage • Henry James
... Gods was, then, a series of eight small hangings, four typifying the seasons and four the elements, with an appropriate Olympian forming the central point of interest and the excuse for an entourage of thrilling and graceful versatility. This set has been copied so many times that even the most expert must fail in trying to identify the date ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... was gold—yes, enormous quantities of gold in all directions. There was land of the finest quality to be had for next to nothing; work for all who were blessed with good bone and muscle; a constant demand for labour—skilled or unskilled—at high wages; a climate such as the Olympian gods might revel in, and—in short, if all England had heard the oration delivered by that man, and had believed it, the country would, in less than a month, have been depopulated of its younger men and women, and left to the tender mercies of the ...
— The Coxswain's Bride - also, Jack Frost and Sons; and, A Double Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... slander. Your own sex will be jealous of your eminence, considering your superiority an insult to their mediocrity; and mine will either ridicule or barely tolerate you; for men detest female competitors in the Olympian game of literature. If you fail, you will be sneered down till you become embittered, soured, misanthropic; a curse to yourself, a burden to the friends who sympathize with your blasted hopes. Edna, you have talent, you write well, you ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... Olympian mood is a fleeting one. I think of Paradis rising on one elbow out of the slime where he and his comrades were lying, waving his hand toward the ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... a very considerate recommendation, and very kind it was, indeed, from the great Louis XIV, one of the proudest monarchs that ever lived, to descend from his Olympian seat of majesty to the level of such details and to such minute instructions for ministering to the personal comforts of his remote Louisianan subjects. Many were the gibes and high was the glee on that occasion; ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... Homeric, in effect; a struggle of men with gods, for what were the gods but forces of nature personified'? If the God of the Falling Tide did not figure in the Olympian circle he is none the less a mighty divinity. Davies left his post. and rowed stroke. Under our united efforts the dinghy advanced in strenuous leaps, hurling miniature-rollers on the bank beside us. My palms, seasoned as they were, were smarting with watery blisters. The pace was too hot for ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... chronicling the news about base-ball than to any other topic that interests the American mind, and the most skillful player, the pitcher, often college bred, whose entire prowess is devoted to not doing what he seems to be doing, and who has become the hero of the American girl as the Olympian wrestler was of the Greek maiden and as the matador is of the Spanish senorita, receives a larger salary for a few hours' exertion each week than any college president is paid for a year's intellectual toil. Such has been the ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... of the Homeric men and the Homeric religion. It starts, after the introductory chapter, with a discussion of the several races then existing in Hellas, including the influence of the Phoenicians and Egyptians. It contains chapters on the Olympian system, with its several deities; on the Ethics and the Polity of the Heroic age; on the geography of Homer; on the characters of the Poems; presenting, in fine, a view of primitive life and primitive society as found in ...
— MacMillan & Co.'s General Catalogue of Works in the Departments of History, Biography, Travels, and Belles Lettres, December, 1869 • Unknown
... is so charming about them is that they are authoritative without being cocksure. What could be more admirable than the passage which points out that Southey, "who lived almost entirely with domestic women, actually died in the belief that he was a poet"? The pathos of the situation, and the Olympian stroke delivered in such a word as "domestic" cannot but fill any artisan of words with admiration. The essay, "Shakespeare and the Plain Man," is full of ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... rapture, if this had not been checked by awe at her own presumption. The idea that a Deity, other than some disgraced offender like Prometheus, could be the object of her compassion, would never have entered her mind. And now she pitied the whole Olympian cohort most sincerely, not so much for having fallen as for having deserved to fall. She could not conceal from herself how grievously they were one and all behind the age. It was impossible to make Zeus ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... yet found grace before the Olympian sire, He arm'd their hands, and fill'd their breasts with fire. The Greeks repulsed, retreat behind their wall, Or in the trench on heaps confusedly fall. First of the foe, great Hector march'd along, With terror clothed, and ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... that followed after, Light the derision of the sky, Light the divine Olympian laughter Of kindlier gods in days gone by: Low to her lover whispered Venus, "The shameless net be praised for this— When night herself no more could screen us It snared us one ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... returns to a general eulogy of the Jewish Law, on account of the faithful allegiance which it commands, and denounces the pagan idolatry in the manner of the Greek rationalists, who had made play with the Olympian hierarchy. While the inherent excellence of the Jewish Law is dependent on the sublime conception of God, the inherent defect of the Greek religion is that the Greek legislators entertained a low conception of God, ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... really loved by Lushington and by Logotheti; and since she had been famous she had made the acquaintance of a good many very high and imposing personages, whose names are to be found in the first and second part of the Almanack de Gotha, in the Olympian circle of the reigning or the supernal regions of the Serene Mediatized, far above the common herd of dukes and princes; they had offered her a share in the overflowing abundance of their admirative ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... perched on a stool before an easel, and on the other hand, Carmen had often been conscious of the fumes of a tobacco pipe penetrating her cloistered seclusion, and had seen across the passage, vaguely enveloped in the same nicotine cloud, an American Olympian, in a rocking chair, with his feet on the mantel shelf. They had once or twice met on the staircase, on which occasion Thatcher had greeted her with a word or two of respectful yet half-humorous courtesy,—a courtesy which never really offends a true woman, ...
— The Story of a Mine • Bret Harte
... of the race from two directions. We preserve the feeble and extirpate the strong. He who, in view of this amazing folly can believe in a constant, even slow, progress of the human race toward perfection ought to be happy. He has a mind whose Olympian heights are inaccessible—the Titans of fact can never scale them to storm ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... I saw the poor facade being pick-axed, I did not 'give' it more than a fortnight. I had no feeling but of hopeless awe and pity. The workmen on the coping seemed to me ministers of inexorable Olympus, executing an Olympian decree. And the building seemed to me a live victim, a scapegoat suffering sullenly for sins it had not committed. To me it seemed to be flinching under every rhythmic blow of those well-wielded weapons, praying for the hour when sunset should ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... through literature into politics. The ease with which he drifted from one to the other is also still to be evaluated. Did it show a certain slackness, a certain aimlessness, at the bottom of his nature? Had it, in a way, some sort of analogy—to compare homespun with things Olympian—to the vein of frivolity in the great Caesar? One is tempted to think so. Surely, here was one of those natures which need circumstance to compel them to greatness and which are not foredoomed, Napoleon-like, to seize greatness. Without encroaching ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... horses were fresher than ours and they separated when once in the shadow of the woods. They won't be slow, however, in leaving these parts, now they know we are here. I'm going to take a little well-earned rest between my scoutings, and make love to my cousin. Olympian humbugs! how handsome and haughty she has become! I didn't think the little minx had so ...
— Miss Lou • E. P. Roe
... asserted. "I don't believe I could if I tried. But there's something evidently troubling you. Let's have it. Oh, don't be afraid. You've no idea what an—Olympian position one finds himself in when he has got half-way across the Styx and come back. ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... Iapetus were Prometheus, Epimetheus, and Atlas. Kronos married his sister Rhea, and their children were Hestia, Demeter and Here; Hades, Poseidon, and Zeus,—all, except Hades or Pluto, belonging to the subsequent Olympian deities. ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... primal conception; there is nothing of which it is not the interpretation and ultimatum in its final form. The laws which rule the world as forces are, in it, thoughts and liberties. All the grand imaginations of men, all the glorified shapes, the Olympian gods, cherubic and seraphic forms, are but symbols and adumbrations of what it contains. As the sun, having set, still leaves its golden impress on the clouds, so does the absolute nature of man throw up ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... a book that offends against all sorts of rules; as a literary product it is eminently calculated to elicit, especially in England, the Olympian "this will never do." To begin with, it is not so much a novel as a novelle—a form of art little cultivated in this country, but which lends itself excellently to delicate artistic handling, and the creation ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... that no institution exercised greater influence than the public contests of Greece in molding national character and producing that admirable type of personal and intellectual beauty that we see reflected in her art and literature. These contests were held at four national festivals, the Olympian, the Pythian, the Nemean, and the Isthmean games. On these occasions every one stopped labor, truce was declared between the States, and the whole country paid tribute to the contestants for the highly-prized laurels of these games. ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... the least suggestion that the experiment might fail and call down upon them the implacable and destructive forces that could ruin them body and soul forever. For this, plainly expressed, was the form in which his terror attacked him when he thought about it. Skale was tempting the Olympian powers to crush him. ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood
... his significant exclamation at the end, his summary of modern society, a solemn grandiose figure of speech found in the legendary souvenirs of a glorious antiquity, a classic reminiscence of the noble Olympian games, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... itself by beatitude's breath. Surely no spirit or sense of a soul that was soft to the spirit and soul of our senses Sweetens the stress of surprising suspicion that sobs in the semblance and sound of a sigh; Only this oracle opens Olympian, in mystical moods and triangular tenses,— "Life is the lust of a lamp for the light that is dark till the dawn of the day when we die." Mild is the mirk and monotonous music of memory, melodiously mute as it may be, While the hope in the heart ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... Maison's, near Alfort. You come home by the left bank of the Seine, in the midst of a cloud of very black Olympian dust. The horse drags your family wearily along. But alas! your pride has fled, and you look without emotion upon his sunken flanks, and upon two bones which stick out on each side of his belly. His coat is roughened by the sweat which has repeatedly come out and dried upon him, and which, ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Part First • Honore de Balzac
... Solomon, the patience of Job, the generalship of Napoleon, and put her into a room in which every arrangement is conducive to physical discomfort, and even such a paragon will fail of attaining that ideal of happy order which she aims to realize in her children's reading room. The temper even of an Olympian is not proof ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... than Majesty moves, for a mean and a measure Of motion,—not faster than dateless Olympian leisure [38] Might pace with unblown ample garments from pleasure to pleasure,— The wave-serrate sea-rim sinks unjarring, unreeling, Forever revealing, revealing, revealing, Edgewise, bladewise, halfwise, wholewise,—'tis done! ...
— Poets of the South • F.V.N. Painter
... accompanied them along the platform to the carriages outside the station. Probably the chairman and directors of the company were also present, but our eyes were not for them. Directors were to us junior clerks, remote personalities, mythical beings dwelling on Olympian heights. ...
— Fifty Years of Railway Life in England, Scotland and Ireland • Joseph Tatlow
... bas-reliefs, friezes, and entablatures, and its twelve colossal statues of the Apostles looked like subordinate deities lining the approach to the master of the gods! And did not San Paolo, lately completed, its new marbles shimmering like mirrors, recall the abode of the Olympian immortals, typical temple as it was with its majestic colonnade, its flat, gilt-panelled ceiling, its marble pavement incomparably beautiful both in substance and workmanship, its violet columns with white bases and capitals, and its white entablature with violet frieze: everywhere, indeed, you ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... "What do I care about the tanner, since I do not fear the gods of the State? These gods, whose decline Aeschylus foretold long ago! Does not his Prometheus say that the Olympian Zeus will be overthrown by his own descendant—the son that will be born of a virgin? Is ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... rose out of the earth like Alps, and the roar in the morning was like large music. She knew she had been an Olympian in a recent life, because she found herself familiar with greater and more gorgeous speed than any 'bus attains, and with the divine discords that high ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson
... finer fed Feast and revel o'er our head, And we titmen are only able To catch the fragments from their table. Theirs is the fragrance of the fruits, While we consume the pulp and roots. What are the moments that we stand Astonished on the Olympian land! ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... her calm-eyed superiority. She was familiar and olympian, fenced in by the tea-table, that excellent symbol of domestic life in its lighter hour and its perfect security. In a few severely unadorned words she gave me to understand that she had ventured to hope for some really helpful suggestion from me. To this almost chiding declaration—because ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... his years, the West already knows Young AZIM'S fame;—beyond the Olympian snows Ere manhood darkened o'er his downy cheek, O'erwhelmed in fight and captive to the Greek,[37] He lingered there, till peace dissolved his chains;— Oh! who could even in bondage tread the plains Of glorious ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... asylums, abundant opportunity for observation of illness was afforded. Just as soon as Christianity came to be free to establish its institutions publicly, hospitals became very common. The Emperor Julian, usually known as the Apostate, who hoped to re-establish the old Roman Olympian religion, wrote to Oribasius, one of the great physicians of this time, who was also an important official of his household, that these Christians had established everywhere hospitals in which not only their own people, but also those who were not Christians, were received and cared ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... that she cared no more for Ephraim Smith than for the first man she might have solicited on the street—nor so much! God! It makes me sick to look at her and think of the price she paid for her present damn Olympian serenity." ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... made him rebellious against everything bearing the paternal name. He assailed the Father of the Hebrew theocracy with amazing bitterness, and joined Prometheus in cursing and dethroning Zeus, the Olympian usurper. With him, tyrant and father were synonymous, and he has drawn the old Cenci, in the play of that name, with the same fierce, unfilial pencil, dipped in blood and wormwood. Shelley was by nature, self-instruction, and inexperience of life, impatient ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... that two standing in a line had looked like one, and so deceived me. At last, all at once, when I was not thinking of it,—I declare to you it makes my flesh creep when I think of it now,—all at once I saw a great, green cloud swelling in the horizon, so vast, so symmetrical, of such Olympian majesty and imperial supremacy among the lesser forest-growths, that my heart stopped short, then jumped at my ribs as a hunter springs at a five-barred gate, and I felt all through me, without need of uttering ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... the Olympian god, more familiar even than the thunderbolt, is the eagle. AEschylus calls this bird "the winged hound of Zeus." This conception of the poet ruled in art as well as in literature. It was the popular idea of divine vengeance ...
— The New England Magazine Volume 1, No. 6, June, 1886, Bay State Monthly Volume 4, No. 6, June, 1886 • Various
... admiration, yea, the veneration, felt for him by every young man in that college and throughout the town,—indeed, throughout the whole North, for he was the pride and glory of the land. It was then that they called him godlike, looking like an Olympian statue, or one of the creations of Michael Angelo when he wished to represent majesty and dignity and power in repose,—the most commanding human presence ever seen in the Capitol ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XII • John Lord
... bays, In old Olympian golden days Of clamor thro' the clear-eyed morn, No bowed triumphant head hath borne, ...
— In Divers Tones • Charles G. D. Roberts
... intellect and a great nature. We are vexed by pedantries that recall the precieuses of the Hotel Rambouillet, but we know that she had the soul of the most heroic women in history. We crave more of the Olympian serenity that makes action natural and repose refreshing, but we cannot miss the edification of a life marked by indefatigable labour after generous purposes, by an unsparing struggle for duty, and by steadfast and devout fellowship with ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 3 of 3) - The Life of George Eliot • John Morley
... "Olympian Deity," he cried, "I must kneel to you!" And so he did, gaily adoring, with a kiss for the hem of her robe. They started in the highest spirits, Stefan correct this time in an immaculate evening suit which Mary had persuaded him to order. As they prepared ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... playing chess with Ferdinand" in Prospero's cell, (an early instance of "discovered mate,") the numberless Mirandas of Romance have played for and been played for mates. Chess has even its Mythology,—Caissa being now, we believe, generally received at the Olympian Feasts. True, some one has been wicked enough to observe that all chess-stories are divisible into two classes,—in one a man plays for his own soul with the Devil, in the other the hero plays and wins a wife,—and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... liege, No plan is fix'd, and no concerted measure. The fates are busy: wait the vast event. Trust to my truth and honour. Witness, gods, Here, in the temple of Olympian Jove, Philotas swears—— ...
— The Grecian Daughter • Arthur Murphy
... deemed himself, and this was odd, A sort of new Olympian god; And when the wise, who watched his whim, Sighed, "Have the gods demented him? Quem deus vult, et cetera" he Was just as mad as mad could be; And, just like other angry boys, Kicked over tables, smashed his ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, March 26, 1892 • Various
... call attention to the old-fashioned royal attitude under Louis XV and even Louis XVI. "Although I was advised," says Alfieri, "that the king never addressed ordinary strangers, I could not digest the Olympian-Jupiter look with which Louis XV measured the person presented to him, from head to foot, with such an impassible air; if a fly should be introduced to a giant, the giant, after looking at him, would smile, or perhaps remark.—'What a little ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... are not the Olympian," said the woman, half smiling at the pleasantry. Cimon interrupted them. Some of the party had caught a sun-burned shepherd in among the rocks, a veritable Pan in his shaggy goat-skin. The bribe of two obols brought him out with his pipe. Four of ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... Urania, by that name If rightly thou art called, whose voice divine Following, above th' Olympian hill I soar. Above the flight of Pegasean wing. The meaning, not the name, I call; for thou Nor of the Muses nine, nor on the top Of old Olympus dwell'st, but heavenly born: Before the hills appeared, ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... slightly inward, and thinking that she had made no mistake in her memory of this man. Certainly his features were altogether too regular, his head and body too perfectly moulded into that dark and graceful symmetry which she had hitherto vaguely associated with things purely and mythologically Olympian. ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... order now appears, having a voice; the supreme authority of the world is to utter its decree concerning the work. The poet at the start summons before us the governing principle of the universe in the persons of the Olympian deities. On the other hand, note the solitary individual Ulysses, in a lonely island, with his aspiration for home and country, with his plan—will it be realized? The two sides must come together somehow; the plan of the individual must fit into the plan of ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... of one amounts to so little. Remember it was by the patient toil of generations through centuries that the Colossus of Rhodes, Diana's Temple at Ephesus, the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, the Pyramids at Egypt, the Pharos at Alexandria, the Hanging Gardens at Babylon, the Olympian Zeus, the seven wonders of the world, grew day by day into enduring monuments to the greatness of humanity. By individual effort the grand result was at last achieved. So the ideal manhood and womanhood, so earnestly prophesied, ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... Greeks and Romans Greek myths Greek priests Greek divinities Greek polytheism Greek mythology Adoption of Oriental fables Greek deities the creation of poets Peculiarities of the Greek gods The Olympian deities The minor deities The Greeks indifferent to a future state Augustine view of heathen deities Artists vie with poets in conceptions of divine Temple of Zeus in Olympia Greek festivals No sacred books among ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... paper, traced a few lines on it, and at once blotted them out.... He recalled Gemma's wonderful figure in the dark window, in the starlight, set all a-fluttering by the warm hurricane; he remembered her marble arms, like the arms of the Olympian goddesses, felt their living weight on his shoulders.... Then he took the rose she had thrown him, and it seemed to him that its half-withered petals exhaled a fragrance of her, more delicate than the ordinary scent ...
— The Torrents of Spring • Ivan Turgenev
... discovery of the real culprit. What Harold had felt was not so much the imprisonment,—indeed he had very soon escaped by the window, with assistance from his allies, and had only gone back in time for his release,—as the Olympian habit. A word would have set all right; but of course that word was ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... should consider themselves as runners in the Olympian games, and never seek to trip, jostle, harass or annoy a rival, but run the race squarely and fairly, satisfied to be beaten if the other is the stronger and better man. An unfair victory gains only ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... In the Olympian courts Love laughed at Death, because he was unsightly, and because She couldn't help it, and because he never did anything worth doing, ...
— Fifty-One Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... decorations do not seem tawdry, nor the tinsel other than real. We move with pleasurable excitement with Lothair from palace to castle, and thence to battle-field and scenes of dark intrigue. The hint of the love affair with the Olympian Theodora appeals to our romance; the circumventing of the wily Cardinal and his accomplices is agreeable to the Anglo-Saxon Protestant mind; their discomfiture, and the crowning of virtue in the shape of a rescued Lothair married to the English ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... comprehension. He first declares atheism an open choice, and then he brands it with the most odious epithet in the accepted vocabulary of the hour. Danton followed practically the same line, though saying much less about it. 'If Greece,' he said in the Convention, 'had its Olympian games, France too shall solemnise her sans-culottid days. The people will have high festivals; they will offer incense to the Supreme Being, to the master of nature; for we never intended to annihilate the reign of superstition in order to set up the reign ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... of little things for Jack made Olympian merriment in Newspaper Row, for several men were in my office when I opened it. Jack is ten years old, small for his age, but quietly precocious. I cannot write more of him now. Address your next letter not to the office but to——; and when I open that letter ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... imperfect Christian draperies. Small blame it is therefore to Tegner that Schiller's poems furnished him with frequent suggestions and sometimes also with metres. Schiller had, in "The Gods of Greece," sung a glorious elegy on the Olympian age which stimulated his Swedish rival to write "The Asa Age," in which he regretted, though in a rather half-hearted way, the disappearance of Odin, Thor, and Freya. The poem, it must be admitted, falls much below Tegner at his ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... Anatole France is surely the reigning king. From the Olympian disenchantment of his tolerant urbanity, all eruptive seriousness foams back spray-tossed and scattered. And yet such a master of the art of "suspended judgment" was he, that he permits himself to ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... water amid the tumbled confusion of huge granite rocks and the open V-shaped valley, are nothing very remarkable or unusual. Then suddenly you are on the threshold of this hall of the elder gods. Demons and furies might lurk in the valley below, but here is the abode of the serene, beneficent Olympian deities. All is so calm, so hushed, so friendly, yet so towering, so stupendous, so unspeakably beautiful. You are in a mansion carved out of the granite foundations of the earth, with walls two or three thousand feet high, hung here and there with snow-white waterfalls, and ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... possible—for the quicker we get through them the better—we set about despatching what is always worth a ship-load of such riff-raff—videlicet, a good and extensive dinner. Oh, ye pagan gods of eating and drinking, Bacchus and—let me see who the presiding deity of good feeding was in the Olympian synod—as I'm an unworthy candidate I forget that topic of learning; but no matter, non constat. Oh, ye pagan professors of ating and drinking, Bacchus, and Epicurus, and St. Heliogabalus, Anthony ...
— Going To Maynooth - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... mythology the serpent Apap with an army of monsters strives daily to arrest the course of the boat of the luminous gods. While the Greek mythology described the Titans as "enchained once for all in their dark dungeons" yet Prometheus' threat remained to disturb the tranquillity of the Olympian Zeus. In the German mythology the army of darkness is led by Hel, the personification of twilight, sunk to the goddess who enchains the dead and terrifies the living, and Loki, originally the god of fire, but afterwards "looked ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... excellent, but these realities were not designed in so graceful a manner as to divert my attention from the mere descriptions Pausanias gives us of the works of Grecian artists, and I would at any time fall asleep in a Flemish cathedral, for a vision of the temple of Olympian Jupiter. But I think I hear, at this moment, some grave and respectable personage chiding me for such levities, and saying, "Really, Sir, you had better stay at home, and dream in your great chair, than give yourself the trouble of going post ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... exciting than for the whole school to learn by rumour the next morning that all the prefects of Bramhall House had been mysteriously withdrawn from their Olympian class-rooms to a special cabinet meeting under the presidency of Stanley, the gorgeous house-captain? Clearly some awful crime had been committed at Bramhall, and there would be a public whacking and an expulsion. ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... The simplicity of her apparel, the opulence of her form, her imposing stature, and the extraordinary sense of vigorous life that seemed to emanate from her like a perfume exhaled by a flower, made her beautiful with a beauty of a rustic and olympian order. To watch her reaching up to the clothes-line with both arms raised high above her head, caused you to fall a musing in a strain of pagan piety. Excellent Mrs. Hermann's baggy cotton gowns had some sort ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... strong men, choleric and powerful, thunder-bolts of war, diplomats with olympian heads, or men of genius, who can show this utter confidence, this generous devotion to weakness, this constant protection, this love without jealousy, this easy good humor with a woman. Good heavens! I ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... exhibiting his wound, he denounces Minerva who caused it. But, although Jupiter sternly rebukes his son, he takes such prompt measures to relieve his suffering, that Mars is soon seated at the Olympian board, where before long he is joined ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... merely sensuous in its appeal. Finally, therefore, the color and the composition of the portrait are but the point of meeting where we touch in energizing contact a powerful personality. Our spirit goes out into the night of these Palisades and dilates into immensity. This statue is Olympian majesty made visible, and in its presence we feel that we too are august. The symphony is a resolution of the struggle of our own tangled lives, a purification, ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... perfection the same tribe (and indeed we may here join, in some of those instances, the American tribes visited in the course of the present voyage) have carried their favourite amusements, the plaintive songs of their women, their dramatic entertainments, their dances, their olympian games, as we may call them, the orations of their chiefs, the chants of their priests, the solemnity of their religious processions, their arts and manufactures, their ingenious contrivances to supply the want of proper materials, and of effective tools and machines, and the wonderful ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... Olympian self-sufficiency is usually untroubled by what any mean other-person may say, at this cannot contain himself, but starting to his feet cries out a command for the blasphemous fool's annihilation! Before ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... Goethe. He, no richer than Shakespear, Ibsen, or Strindberg in specific talent as a playwright, is in the empyrean whilst they are gnashing their teeth in impotent fury in the mud, or at best finding an acid enjoyment in the irony of their predicament. Goethe is Olympian: the other giants are infernal in everything but their veracity and their repudiation of the irreligion of their time: that is, they are bitter and hopeless. It is not a question of mere dates. Goethe was an Evolutionist in 1830: many playwrights, even young ones, are still untouched by Creative ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... in was, in his way, a force almost as great and as worthy of regard as Mr. Sebastian Early himself—in fact no less a personage than the power behind the throne of that uncrowned king, William Barry. Though he did not sit on Olympian heights and play with the thunderbolts of jobs and contracts, as Barry did, yet he had an occasional way of interfering in the game, just as in Greek legend Fate loomed large behind the ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... fierce struggles within and without naturally deflected historical scholarship from the path marked out by Ranke, who had grown to manhood in the era of political stagnation following the downfall of Napoleon. The master's Olympian serenity was deplored by the group of hot-blooded scholars who are collectively known as the Prussian School, and who were firmly convinced that the principal duty of historians was to supply guidance and encouragement to their fellow-countrymen in the national and international ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... up before the portals of Alma Mater the first person we saw, standing on the steps of the porter's lodge, was Parsons. He was as Olympian as ever. As soon as you saw him you felt that, though they might abolish compulsory Greek or introduce a Finance Tripos, they would never be able to subdue the ancient spirit of the University. A single glimpse of Parsons, standing erect in all his traditional ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 14, 1919 • Various
... as shaggy of mind as of limb,— E. the clear-eyed Olympian, rapid and slim; The one's two thirds Norseman, the other half Greek, Where the one's most abounding, the other's to seek; C.'s generals require to be seen in the mass,— E.'s specialties gain if enlarged by the glass; C. gives nature and God his own fits of the blues. ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... a young man, strong and manly, yet full of dreams and schemes. His Olympian manners began even at Oxford: there was no harm in them: they were natural, not put on. The very sound of his voice and wave of his arm ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... Plutarchs opinion concerning those that are round about the Moone; as for the Moone it selfe, hee esteemes it to bee a lower kinde of Heaven, and therefore in another place hee cals it a terrestriall starre,[6] and an Olympian or celestiall earth answerable, as I conceive, to the paradise of the Schoolemen, and that Paradise was either in or neere the Moone, is the opinion of some later Writers, who derived it (in all likelihood) ...
— The Discovery of a World in the Moone • John Wilkins
... his sixty-fifth year by the august Roman hand of Pierre Corneille; a lyric symphony of spirit and of song fulfilled with all the colour and all the music that autumn could steal from spring if October had leave to go a Maying in some Olympian masquerade of melody and sunlight. And it is not easier, easy as it is, to discern and to define the three main stages of Shakespeare's work and progress, than to classify under their several heads the representative plays belonging to each period ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... may you blaspheme at fortune! I "threw Venus" (Ben, expound!) Never did I need importune Her, of all the Olympian round. Blessings on my benefactress! Cursings suit—for aught I know— Those who twitched her by the back tress, Tugged and thought ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... twenty-three feet wide and about fifty-six feet high, stands near the Zappeion, and formerly marked the boundary between ancient Athens and the more modern part of the city. Passing through this arch, I soon came to what remains of the temple of the Olympian Jupiter, which was commenced long before the birth of Christ and finished by Hadrian about A.D. 140. Originally this temple, after that of Ephesus said to be the largest in the world, had three rows of eight columns each, on the ...
— A Trip Abroad • Don Carlos Janes
... inflated wine-skins, and I observed that they were cut in the very spots in which I thought I had wounded the robbers. I had, indeed, invented a pleasantry for the festival of the god of laughter! The townspeople laughed with the inextinguishable laughter of the Olympian deities. They climbed up to the roof to get a good look at me; they swarmed up the pillars; they clung to the statues; they hung from the windows at the risk of their lives; all shouting at ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... birds fierce Monarch drops his vengeful ire; Perch'd on the sceptre of the Olympian King, The thrilling darts of harmony he feels, And indolently hangs his rapid wing, While gentle sleep his closing eye-lids seals; And o'er his heaving limbs, in loose array To every balmy gale the ...
— An Essay on the Lyric Poetry of the Ancients • John Ogilvie
... is the woman who has found the nearest approach to nectar and ambrosia in the uncooked fruits and vegetables of the earth, which, properly pounded, are digested, and make of our sluggish bodies fit receptacles for Olympian wisdom. There are the people who have discovered the one cause of all disease. It may be uric acid or cell proliferation or hard water—there is always a complementary cure. I listened one day with much interest to an exposition of the evils of salt. Salted food, ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... Belgian princess had given him the scented and crested note of introduction which was to open to him all doors and all ears? Was it not in her marvellous marble music-room—one of the boasts of Chicago—that he had mentally seen himself enthroned as the lord of the feast? And instead of these Olympian visions, lo! a typewritten note to clench his fist over—a note from a secretary regretting that the state of Mrs. Wilhammer's health forbade the pleasure of receiving a maestro with such ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... crowd edging the walk a man stepped. It was Adam Holcomb. He stood directly in front of Pasquale and his bride, blocking the way. There was a strange light in his eyes. It was as if he looked from the present far into the future, as if somehow he were a god, an Olympian who held in his hand the ...
— Steve Yeager • William MacLeod Raine
... the world are all heroic. They celebrate great events—the Trojan war, the founding of Rome, the loss of Paradise—and bring before us a large number of heroes, divinities, and angels. The "Iliad" is made up chiefly of battle scenes, in which mighty heroes and Olympian deities take part. AEneas is the hero of the "AEneid"; but back of the tribulations through which he passes, we recognize the agency of contending divinities. And in "Paradise Lost" Milton introduces the mighty beings of heaven and hell. The epic is ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... crystal rectangle facing broadside the main entrance and the bleached and sun-grilled street without, Miss Lola Hassiebrock, salient among many and with Olympian certainty of self, lifted two Junoesque arms like unto the handles of a vase, held them there in the kind of rigidity that accompanies a yawn, and ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... The Greeks had little regard for them, rating them as half barbarians; but since the kings of Macedon called themselves sons of Herakles they had been permitted to run their horses in the races of the Olympian games. This ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... are gone by when a SWINBURNE or BYRON Were loved for their love-locks and famed for their frizziness, When Olympian craniums, worthy of MYRON Or ANGELO, bowed to the hair-dresser's business, When Macassar's luxuriant essences fed At once metrical foot and ...
— Punch, Or the London Charivari, Volume 101, November 21, 1891 • Various |
