"Styx" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... when the news spread through the city no sounds but those of wailing were heard. Only the voice of Psyche was silent among them. She moved about as one that was sleeping, and indeed she felt as if the boat, with its grim ferryman, had already borne her across the Styx. So the days passed on, and one evening a white-clad priest arrived from the shrine to bid the king ...
— The Red Romance Book • Various
... Styx she goes, She takes the fogs from thence that rose, And in a bag doth them enclose: When well she had them blended, She hies her then to Lethe spring, {114} A bottle and thereof doth bring, Wherewith she meant to work the thing Which ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... self sank back passive and numb, but now withall its power of suffering mysteriously transferred to the presence, so known, yet so unknown, at the opposite corner of herhearth. She was still Lizzie West, and he was still Vincent Deering; but the Styx rolled between them, and she saw his face through its fog. It was his face, really, rather than his words, that told her, as she furtively studied it, the tale of failure and slow discouragement which had so blurred its handsome lines. Shekept afterward no precise ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... twenty-six avenues, forty-seven domes, numerous rivers, eight cataracts, and twenty-three pits,—many of which are grand in the extreme. Some of the rivers are navigated by boats, and, as may be supposed, they have obtained appropriate names. Here we find the Dead Sea and the River Styx. One of the streams disappears beneath the ground, and then rises again in another portion of the cavern. But after all, as naturalists, the little eyeless fish should chiefly ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... immediate need of "siller"! However, it's mine for what it's worth; and it's one of yours, the devil take it; and you know, as well as Flaubert, and as well as me, that it is never done; in other words, it is a torment of the pit, usually neglected by the bards who (lucky beggars!) approached the Styx in measure. I speak bitterly at the moment, having just detected in myself the last fatal symptom, three blank verses in succession—and I believe, God help me, a hemistich at the tail of them; hence I have deposed the labourer, come ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... are fascinated by their shame, and loiter, till Virgil chides us and leads us away to that city turreted by giants where great Nimrod blows his horn. Terrible things are in store for us, and we go to meet them in Dante's raiment and with Dante's heart. We traverse the marshes of the Styx, and Argenti swims to the boat through the slimy waves. He calls to us, and we reject him. When we hear the voice of his agony we are glad, and Virgil praises us for the bitterness of our scorn. We tread upon ...
— Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde - with a Preface by Robert Ross • Oscar Wilde
... celebrity." But the happiest stroke in the controversy— as it seems to us—is one which escaped Mr. Lawrence, and occurs in the paper already referred to, where Charon and Mercury are shown denuding the luckless passengers by the Styx of their surplus impedimenta. Among the rest, approaches "an elderly Gentleman with a Piece of wither'd Laurel on his head." From a little book, which he is discovered (when stripped) to have bound close to his heart, ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... tangle of small launches, ferryboats, and cascoes. The Tondo Canal may be crossed on a covered barge, poled by an ancient boatman, who collects the fares—a copper cent of Borneo, Straits Settlements, or Hong Kong coinage—much in the same way as the pilot of the Styx collects the obolus. ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... lovely of form, and soft eyed Pluto, Perseis, Ianeira, Acaste, Xanthe, Petraea the fair, Menestho, and Europa, Metis, and Eurynome, and Telesto saffron-clad, Chryseis and Asia and charming Calypso, Eudora, and Tyche, Amphirho, and Ocyrrhoe, and Styx who is the chiefest of them all. These are the eldest daughters that sprang from Ocean and Tethys; but there are many besides. For there are three thousand neat-ankled daughters of Ocean who are dispersed far and wide, and in every place alike serve the earth and the deep waters, children who ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... desperate ruffian, you! O, villain, villain, arrant vilest villain! Who seized our Cerberus by the throat, and fled, And ran, and rushed, and bolted, haling off The dog, my charge! But now I've got thee fast. So close the Styx's inky-hearted rock, The blood-bedabbled peak of Acheron Shall hem thee in: the hell-hounds of Cocytus Prowl round thee; whilst the hundred-headed Asp Shall rive thy heart-strings: the Tartesian Lamprey, Prey ...
— The Frogs • Aristophanes
... fear that he will despise my hard and barren land, and go to some other country where he will build a more glorious temple, and grant richer gifts to the people who come to worship him." But Leto swore by the dark water of Styx, and the wide heaven above, and the broad earth around her, that in Delos should be the shrine of Phoebus, and that there should the rich offerings burn on his altar ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... is none to whom I can usefully bequeath my little fortune, my sisters having each married rich men. I shall not need even Charon's obolus when I am dead, for we have ceased to believe in him—which is a pity, as the trip across the Styx must have been picturesque. Why, then, should I not deal myself a happy lot and portion by squandering my money ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... shattered branches and bruised stems of forest-trees; and Dante, looking out with fear upon the foam and spray and vapour of the flood, saw thousands of the damned flying before the face of one who forded Styx with feet unwet. 'Like frogs,' he says, 'they fled, who scurry through the water at the sight of their foe, the serpent, till each squats and hides himself close to the ground.' The picture of the ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... unchecked by taste, They 'd smear the general sky with poster's paste And at Dan Phoebus seem to "take a sight." Colossal bottles blot the air, to tell That MUCKSON's Temperance drink is a great sell. Here's a huge hat, as black as sombre Styx, Flanked by the winsome legend, "Ten and Six." Other Sky-signs praise Carpets, Ginghams, Socks, Mugg's Music-hall, and "Essence of the Ox." Bah! GAY's trim Muse might sicken of her rhymes Had she to read these Sky-signs of ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99, September 6, 1890 • Various
... with no path for a human foot. The hills were a purple haze, the trees along their crests making fantastic pictures against the sky. Beyond the land of living men, it seemed, an owl hooted, and a belated dove called and called like a moaning spirit wandering in some lost tarn of the Styx. ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post
... left behind. For lo! the Sire of heaven on high, By whose fierce bolts the clouds are riven, To-day through an unclouded sky His thundering steeds and car has driven. E'en now dull earth and wandering floods, And Atlas' limitary range, And Styx, and Taenarus' dark abodes Are reeling. He can lowliest change And loftiest; bring the mighty down And lift the weak; with whirring flight Comes Fortune, plucks the monarch's crown, And decks therewith ...
— Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace • Horace
... ghastly stream, The satins that rustle and gems that gleam, Will grow pale and heavy, and sink away To the noisome River's bottom-clay! Then the costly bride and her maidens six, Will shiver upon the banks of the Styx, Quite as helpless as they were born— Naked souls, and very forlorn; The Princess, then, must shift for herself, And lay her royalty on the shelf; She, and the beautiful Empress, yonder, Whose robes are ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume III. (of X.) • Various
... had, what looked like a mountain in that subterranean region, rising from the ground, with a stream running at its base. We crossed several rivers; besides the "Echo," one called the "Styx," the other the "Lethe." Our guide had brought a net, with which he caught some fish and crawfish. On examining them we could discover no appearance of eyes, while, from being deprived of the warm rays of the sun, they were perfectly white. Uncle Denis remarked that ...
— With Axe and Rifle • W.H.G. Kingston
... perplexities have occurred in the publishing of my poor book, which perplexities I could only cut asunder, not unloose; so the MS., like an unhappy ghost, still lingers on the wrong side of Styx: the Charon of Albemarle Street durst not risk it in his sutilis cymba, so it leaped ashore again. Better days are coming, and new trials will end ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... Thou must meet inevitable ruin. Neptune has sworn by Styx—to gods themselves A dreadful oath,—and he will execute His promise. Thou canst not escape his vengeance. I loved thee; and, in spite of thine offence, My heart is troubled by anticipation For thee. But thou hast earn'd thy doom too well. Had father ...
— Phaedra • Jean Baptiste Racine
... delicacy full, and whim; 450 Whose tender nature could not bear The rudeness of the churlish air, Is doom'd, to mortify her pride, The change of weather to abide, And sells, whilst tears with liquor mix, Burnt brandy on the shore of Styx. Avaro[212], by long use grown bold In every ill which brings him gold, Who his Reedemer would pull down, And sell his God for half-a-crown; 460 Who, if some blockhead should be willing To lend him on his soul a shilling, A well-made bargain would esteem it, And have more sense ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... Question of MINIMUM; and quasi-scientific gentlemen to gather round, and express, with cheery capable look, their opinions,—still legible in the vanished JUGEMENS LIBRES (of Hamburg), GAZETTE DE SAVANS (Leipzig), and other poor Shadows of JOURNALS, if you daringly evoke them from the other side of Styx. Which, the whole matter being now so indisputably extinct, shadowy, Stygian, we will not here be guilty of doing; but hasten to the catastrophes, that have still ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... gazing through the window-panes at the opposite wall, but seeing nothing,—listening, however, to Birotteau. Evidently he heard and judged, and weighed the pros and cons with the inflexibility of a Minos who had crossed the Styx of commerce when he quitted the Quai des Morfondus for his little ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... animals, animals with no rudimentary organs of vision whatever, and the inception of whose ancestors, themselves wholly blind, probably took place thousands of years ago, show by their actions that light is exceedingly unpleasant to them. Thus, I have seen actinophryans taken from the River Styx in Mammoth Cave (which is their natural habitat), seeking to hide themselves beneath a grain of sand which happened to be drawn up in the pipette and dropped upon the glass slide beneath the object-glass ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... loved ones who have gone before, I do not know but that I should look forward with pleasure to the "passing across." Not having this belief, I am quite content to stay where I am as long as I can; and finally, when old Charon appears to row me over the river Styx, I shall be ...
— Fifty Years of Public Service • Shelby M. Cullom
... With these words she took an oath by the waters of Styx, which to all the gods is most dread and most awful, that the Harpies would never thereafter again approach the home of Phineus, son of Agenor, for so it was fated. And the heroes yielding to the oath, turned back ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius
... taking up this case. I believe science can really be used to detect crime, any crime, and in the present instance I've just pride enough to stick to this thing until - until they begin to cut ice on the Styx. Whew, but it will be cold out in the country to-night, Walter - speaking ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... ad Scythiam Rhipaeasque arduus arces Consurgit, premitur Libyae devexus in austros. Hic vertex nobis semper sublimis; at illum Sub pedibus Styx atra videt ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... his suspicions, and patted him on the shoulder as she answered: "Thou art a sad rogue, and very deep of wit, as anyone may see by these words of thine. Now hear me swear: Witness, thou earth, and the wide heaven above us, and the dark waterfall of Styx, the greatest and most awful thing by which a god may swear, that I intend no ill, but only ...
— Stories from the Odyssey • H. L. Havell
... sworn to water his horse in the Tennessee, or in Hell, on that night. It is certain that the animal did not quench his thirst in the terrestrial stream. If he drank from springs beyond the Styx, I am ...
— Camp-Fire and Cotton-Field • Thomas W. Knox
... interrogatories, on the principle that it is sometimes just as well to cut the Gordian knot as to waste precious time trying to untie it. The burrowing owl makes me think of a denizen of the other side of the river Styx, and why should one try to love that which nature has made unattractive, especially when one cannot ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... his son, "you must try to carry out intelligently a little manoeuvre which I shall explain to you, but you are not to ask the meaning of it; and if you guess the meaning I command you to toss it into that Styx which every lawyer and every man who expects to have a hand in the government of his country is bound to keep within him for the secrets of others. After you have paid your respects and compliments to Madame and Mademoiselle Mignon, to Monsieur and ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... contained many other rooms or caves, into which he conducted us, the first being known as the Bell House, and here the path we had been following suddenly came to an end at an arch about five yards wide, where there was a stream called the River Styx, over which he ferried us in a boat, landing us in a cave called the Hall of Pluto, the Being who ruled over the Greek Hades, or Home of Departed Spirits, guarded by a savage three-headed dog named Cerberus. The only way ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... a time in Charon's wherry Two Painters met, on Styx's ferry. Good sir, said one, with bow profound, I joy to meet thee under ground, And though with zealous spite we strove To blast each other's fame above, Yet here, as neither bay nor laurel Can tempt us to prolong our quarrel, I hope the hand which I extend Will meet the welcome ...
— The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems • Washington Allston
... of that sort of thing. I thought that people always kissed at such affairs, and there was general jollification and cake, but this seemed more like a newfangled funeral, with the dear departed acting as his own Charon and steering himself across the Styx." ...
— The Adventures of Captain Horn • Frank Richard Stockton
... desolate above all things, like disembarking from the Styx into the desolated underworld, was this landing at night. There was the raw, half-lighted, covered-in vastness of the dark place, boarded and hollow underfoot, with only desolation everywhere. Ursula had caught sight of the big, pallid, ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... guided by the Sibyl, after a great sacrifice, AEneas passed into a gloomy cave, where he came to the river Styx, round which flitted all the shades who had never received funeral rites, and whom the ferryman, Charon, would not carry over. The Sibyl, however, made him take AEneas across, his boat groaning under the weight of a human body. On the other side stood Cerberus, but the Sibyl threw him a cake ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... another letter for you, sir," said Johnson, handing in the third of the missives to come in that day's mail from beyond the Styx. ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... sentinelled with dismal larches. Close at hand they heard the moaning of a slow stream; beyond was the muffled thunder of some tremendous waterfall. They were soon convinced that they were on the confines of the Styx River, a dreary, forbidding stream of ink-black water which wallowed through a larch swamp for many miles till it reached the face of a bold cliff down which its flood went booming with the sound of thunder. At every step now the horses sank almost to the knee; but as ...
— Annette, The Metis Spy • Joseph Edmund Collins
... chilled by dreams of icy death, Whom air-blown bubbles of a poet's breath, Darkness and Styx in error's gulph have hurl'd, With fabled terrors of a fabled world; Think not, whene'er material forms expire, Consumed by wasting age or funeral fire, Aught else can die: souls, spurning death's decay, Freed from their old, new tenements of clay Forthwith assume, and wake to life again. ... All ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... we glided, I thought of the Styx, and of Charon rowing some solitary soul to the Land of Shades. Amidst the strange scene, with a chilly wind blowing in my face and midnight clouds dropping rain above my head; with two rude rowers ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... the kingdoms of infernal rule, Of Styx, of Acheron, and the fiery lake Of ever-burning Phlegethon, I swear That I do long to see the [109] monuments And situation of bright-splendent Rome: Come, therefore, ...
— Dr. Faustus • Christopher Marlowe
... water, and, in the dim mysterious light, tree-stems and other objects assumed the appearance of hideous living forms, so that he was enabled to indulge the uncomfortable fancy that they were traversing some terrestrial Styx into one of Dante's ...
— Blown to Bits - The Lonely Man of Rakata, the Malay Archipelago • R.M. Ballantyne
... Lutetia, softer than the down, Nigrina black, and Merdamente brown, Vy'd for his love in jetty bow'rs below, As Hylas fair was ravish'd long ago. Then sung, how shown him by the Nut-brown maids A branch of Styx here rises from the shades, That tinctured as it runs with Lethe's streams, And wafting vapors from the land of dreams, (As under seas Alpheus' secret sluice Bears Pisa's offering to his Arethuse) Pours ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... pillow is clean, and your pillow-beer, For I wash'd 'em in Styx last night, son, And your blankets both, and dried them upon The brimstony banks of Acheron— It is not the ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... want any more of these joints," Billy was saying vehemently to his harassed guide. "It's dark as the Styx now—let's ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... subjects; and upon the third shelf, amid unguent boxes, terra-cotta lamps, and a terra-cotta doll, is a curious vase containing bones, with a silver Athenian coin, attached to the jar by careful relatives, to pay for the deceased's transit across the Styx. A collection of terra-cotta figures are arranged upon the four shelves of case 37. These include an ancient comic actor as Hercules; Athenian ladies bearing water jugs, called Hydriophorae; Ceres; a dancing group from Athens; animals; stools; and dancing figures from the south of Italy. No ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold
... d'Alcacer, in the same tone. "Crossing the Styx—perhaps." He heard Mr. Travers utter an unmoved "Very likely," which he did not expect. Lingard, his hand on the tiller, sat like a ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... formation of sentences which contain all the letters of the alphabet, and each only once. No one has done it with v and j treated as consonants; but you and I can do it. Dr. Whewell and I amused ourselves some years ago with attempts. He could not make sense, though he joined words he gave me Phiz, styx, ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... been sucked in by the mud-nymphs, and how they have shown him a branch of Styx which here pours into the Thames, and diffuses its soporific vapours over the Temple and its purlieus. He is solemnly welcomed by Milbourn (a reverend antagonist of Dryden), who tells him to "receive these ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... perfectly dry. The excitement and warmth of the body had acted like a drying-room in a laundry. Then I laid down under a fence and went to sleep, and dreamed I was in hades, building a corduroy bridge across the Styx, and that the devil repremanded me for building it in the wrong place. When I awoke I was so stiff with rheumatism that I had to be helped up from under the fence, and they put me in an ambulance with a soldier who had his jaw shot off. He was not ...
— How Private George W. Peck Put Down The Rebellion - or, The Funny Experiences of a Raw Recruit - 1887 • George W. Peck
... future life were hazy, uncertain, doubtful and contradictory. Everybody knows Juvenal's famous lines: "That there are manes, a subterranean kingdom, a ferryman with a long pole, and black frogs in the whirlpools of the Styx; that so many thousand men could cross the waves in a single boat, to-day even children ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... come to a real heaven on earth, except for the river, which could have given points to the River Styx of ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... heathen deities contracted an indelible obligation if they swore by Styx, the Scottish Highlanders had usually some peculiar solemnity attached to an oath which they intended should be binding on them. Very frequently it consisted in laying their hand, as they swore, ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... the gold! You're not the man who misses A chance! You caught the wariest with your smile! "CARON!" The "h" is dropped, or we could fix (And so we can if Greek the name we make) You as the ancient Ferryman of Styx, Punting the Ghosts across the Stygian lake. The simile is nearly perfect, note, For you, with your Conspirators afloat, Were, as you've shown us, all in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 29, 1892 • Various
... brother pagans beyond the Styx; but Lisette blooms in evergreen youth. This young French person's theory of woman's rights is different from the one which obtains in New England; nor does she trouble herself at all to seek for woman's mission. She found it years ago. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... circum limus niger et deformis arundo Cocyti tardaque palus inamabilis unda Alligat, et novies Styx ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... and coteries know not how to mix. A barrier more impassable than Styx Is Philistine stupidity. Were mutual amusement meeting's aim, Mind must move maidenhood inert ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98 February 15, 1890 • Various
... vary let all be merry, And then if e'er a disaster befall, At Styx's ferry is Charon's wherry In ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... adventure to discover wide That dismal world, if any Clime perhaps Might yeild them easier habitation, bend Four ways thir flying March, along the Banks Of four infernal Rivers that disgorge Into the burning Lake thir baleful streams; Abhorred Styx the flood of deadly hate, Sad Acheron of sorrow, black and deep; Cocytus, nam'd of lamentation loud Heard on the ruful stream; fierce Phlegeton 580 Whose waves of torrent fire inflame with rage. Farr off from these a slow ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... to ask, seeing thou art a party interested in the matter. The emperor in whose care the jewel was left, hath sworn by the river Styx that unless the cup be brought back to the palace ere to-morrow's dawn, he will punish the innocent with the guilty, and that with no sparing hand. He hath already laid hands on some of the more wealthy citizens, ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... see any sticks," said ignorant Maurice, who had never learned that the old heathens believed the souls of dead people went in a ferryboat across a dark river called the Styx, and that the old man who rowed the boat was ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... realised to the full that I was nowhere, or to speak more correctly, a wanderer in empty space—that I had left one world behind me and was travelling to another, like a disembodied spirit crossing the gloomy Styx. A strange serenity took possession of my soul, and all that had polluted or degraded it in the lower life seemed to fall away from it like the shadow ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... Eurydice to life: Oh take the husband, or return the wife!' He sung, and hell consented To hear the poet's prayer: Stern Proserpine relented, And gave him back the fair. Thus song could prevail O'er death and o'er hell, A conquest how hard and how glorious! Though fate had fast bound her With Styx nine times round her, Yet Music and Love ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al
... procession to destruction, because he must make his living in that way. He is a sort of clean-aproned Charon on a whiskey Styx, ferrying the multitude to perdition on the other side of the river. But what is YOUR ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... was the sole survivor of a once famous trio. Two out of the three, Doc Dickson and Pap Spooner, had passed to the shades, and the legend ran that when their disembodied spirits reached the banks of Styx, the ruling passion of their lives asserted itself for the last time. They demurred loudly, impatiently, at the exorbitant fee, ten cents, ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... over by a cart and killed. But all that he affirmed was that to the soul the cart was no more real than its own imaginative reproduction of it, and perhaps the shade of the philosopher ran up to the first of his deriders who crossed the Styx with a triumphant "I told you so! The cart did not run over me, for here I am without ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... sketch of Fielding himself deserves quotation, whether drawn by his own hand or that of another. The Champion for May 24, 1740, contains a vision of the Infernal Regions, where Charon, the ghostly boatman, is busy ferrying souls across the River Styx. The ferryman bids his attendant Mercury see that all his passengers embark carrying nothing with them; and the narrator describes how, after various Shades had qualified for their passage, "A tall Man came ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... my way across the room till I found the lamp and lighted it. Then I sat down a minute to think. Two weeks is a very short time, but when you have been over the mountains and back, when you have hovered for days close to the banks of the Styx, when you have huddled for days close to the Shadrack stove, listening to the widow's stories of her John and Tip's praise of his wife, then a fortnight seems an age. But everything was as I had left it. Even the pen leaned against the inkwell and the scraps of paper littered the floor where I had ...
— The Soldier of the Valley • Nelson Lloyd
... slowly get ahead, Even when the right is visibly unclouded, That if all men are classed as quick and dead, The judges all are dead, though some unshrouded. Pray Jove that when they're actually crowded On Styx's brink, and Charon rows in sight, His bark prove worse than ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... times been forward in owning the Egyptians as their teachers in religion; and in the dog Cerberus, the judge Minos, the boat of Charon, and the river Styx of their mythology, we see a clear proof that it was in Egypt that the Greeks gained their faint glimpse of the immortality of the soul, a day of judgment, and a future state of rewards and punishments; and, now that Rome was in close intercourse with Egypt, the Romans were equally ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 11 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... a weariness! So many times had hopes been destroyed! Hundreds of tomorrows just like yesterday and today followed on, each similarly devoted to emptiness and waiting—to waiting for emptiness. Time no longer ran. The year was like a river Styx which encircles life with the circuit of its black and greasy waters, with its somber, watery, silky flood that seems no longer to move. Tomorrow? ...
— Pierre and Luce • Romain Rolland
... insane. They thought that I had the best field of activity open in Berlin, and could not comprehend why I should seek greater freedom of person and of action. Little really is known in Berlin about America, and to go there is considered as great an undertaking as to seek the river Styx in order to go to Hades. The remark that I heard from almost every quarter was, "What! you wish to go to the land of barbarism, where they have negro slavery, and where they do not know how to appreciate ...
— A Practical Illustration of Woman's Right to Labor - A Letter from Marie E. Zakrzewska, M.D. Late of Berlin, Prussia • Marie E. Zakrzewska
... instant death. Semele, suspecting no treachery, followed the advice of her supposed nurse; and the next time Zeus came to her, she earnestly entreated him to grant the favour she was about to ask. Zeus swore by the Styx (which was to the gods an irrevocable oath) to accede to her request whatsoever it might be. Semele, therefore, secure of gaining her petition, begged of Zeus to appear to her in all the glory of his divine power and majesty. As he had ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... head flew merely pictures of the cemetery, the assembled crowd, and Lygia, listening with her whole soul to the words of the old man, as he narrated the passion, death, and resurrection of the God-man, who had redeemed the world, and promised it happiness on the other shore of the Styx. ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... now indicates a slow movement, had at that time its original signification, meaning "going." It was an "allegro moderate." Haendel often wrote "andante allegro." Through ignorance of that fact the beautiful air of Gluck, "Divinities of the Styx," is sung too slowly and the air of Thaos in the "Iphigenia in Tauris" equally so. Berlioz recollected having heard at the opera in his youth a much more animated execution of ...
— On the Execution of Music, and Principally of Ancient Music • Camille Saint-Saens
... holy trees; Or where the pleasing Titaresius glides, And into Peneus rolls his easy tides; Yet o'er the silvery surface pure they flow, The sacred stream unmix'd with streams below, Sacred and awful! from the dark abodes Styx pours them forth, the ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... the test of actual conflict, to consider yourself as having been whipped? This, it must be confessed, was a shivering introduction to the world for Greece,—something like a Lacedaemonian baptism,—but it stood her in good stead. Like the dip in the Styx, it insured immortality. The menaces of despotism, coming from the East, gave birth to the impulses of freedom in the West; and the latter sustained themselves at a more exalted height, in proportion as the former were backed by substantial ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... world; it was both the rainbow (as in the Gothic legends) and the Milky Way; and, since the journey was long, they put boots into the coffin, (for it was made on foot,) and coins to pay the ferrying across a wide sea, even as the Greeks expected to be carried over the Styx by Charon. This abode of the dead, at the end of this long pathway, was an island, a ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... the dog won, but he was the most devastated small dog that I have ever seen, before or since, and had it not been for prompt surgical aid at his home nearby I dare say Charon might have ferried both shades over the Styx together. No, the woodchuck is not so easy to get. He is quite likely to whip his own weight in most anything that forces ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... he began to paint on the glass that covered the picture, and in a few minutes the scene was transformed. Instead of the beautiful bridge a hideous iron girder structure spanned the stream, which was no longer pellucid and clear, but black as the Styx; instead of the trees arose a monstrous mill with a tall chimney vomiting black smoke that spread in heavy clouds, hiding the sun and the blue sky. "That is* what you are doing with your scenery," concluded Mr. Ruskin—a true picture of the penalty we pay for trade, progress, and the ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield
... dreadful Styx, ye sufferings of the damned, and Chaos, for ever eager to destroy the fair harmony of worlds, and thou, Pluto, condemned to an eternity of ungrateful existence, Hell, and Elysium, of which no Thessalian witch shall partake, Proserpine, for ever cut off from thy health-giving ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... 32: To the Stygian shades.—Ver. 139. That is, in deep caverns, and towards the centre of the earth; for Styx was feigned to be a river of the Infernal Regions, situate in the depths ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... eleven figures which represented an episode in the Trojan war; it was the struggle of Ajax, Ulysses, and other Greek warriors to obtain the dead body of Achilles, which was held by the Trojans. The story is that the goddess Thetis had dipped her son Achilles in the river Styx for the purpose of making him invulnerable, or safe from wounds by weapons. But as she held him by the ankles they were not wetted, and so he could be wounded in them. During the siege of Troy Apollo guided ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... lovely place, but we cannot stay here any longer. We want to reach the underground stream of which we have heard so much—the "River Styx." ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton
... old celestial cant, Confess'd his flame, and swore by Styx, Whate'er she would desire, to grant— But wise Ardelia knew ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... on a sharp hill above the Styx, The bruised Christ upon his crucifix, And racked in anguish on his either side Hang Buddha and Mohammed crucified. Their heavy blood falls in a monotone Like deep well-water dropping on a stone. None moves, none breaks the silence; on those roods Eternal ...
— The Five Books of Youth • Robert Hillyer
... something going on somewhere all the time, and queens in demand. With a queen quoted so low as $100 a night, Henry can make nearly $5000 a week, or $260,000 a year, out of evening chaperonage alone; and when, in addition to this, yachting-parties up the Styx and slumming-parties throughout the country are being constantly given, the man's opportunity to make half a million a year is in plain sight. I'm told that he netted over $500,000 last year; and of course he had to advertise to get it, and this Xanthippe ...
— The Enchanted Typewriter • John Kendrick Bangs
... continuation of westerly winds* brought us in sight of St. Jago and Bravo, of the Cape de Verd Group; on passing which we got the North-East trade, and, after staying a part of the 10th and 11th at Fayal, where we met Her Majesty's Steamer Styx, Captain Vidal, who, on parting, gave us three hearty farewell cheers, we did not, in consequence of easterly winds, arrive at Spithead until the 30th day of September, after an absence of upwards of six years. During this period we only lost two men, and preserved throughout almost the ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... their palaces to be tenanted by the mermaids and spirits of the deep, for other occupants I could see none. Spectral fancies began to haunt my imagination. I conceived of the canal we were traversing as the Styx, our gondola as the boat of Charon, and ourselves as a company of ghosts, who had passed from earth, and were now on our silent way to the inexorable bar of Rhadamanthus. A more spectral procession we could not have made, with our spectral boat gliding noiselessly ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... other side, Pluto, fierce, in a mantle black as night, with a tiara of diamonds and a sceptre of ebony, is in the midst of an isle enclosed by the windings of the Styx;—and this ghostly stream rushes into the darkness, which forms under the cliff a great black gap, a ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert
... themselves," and thus leave him to his own devices. If Southey's, "The Curse of Kehama," happens to be nearest his plate, he will naturally begin with that as I did with the deviled eggs. Or he may nibble at "The House-Boat on the Styx" while some one is passing the Shakespeare along. He may like Emerson, and ask for a second helping, and that's all right, too, for that's a nourishing sort of food. Having partaken of this generously, he will enjoy all the more the jelly when it comes along in the form ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... concern. No Roman was ever more grieved at the thought of his unburied friend wandering a hundred years along the banks of the Styx than were the Samoans while they thought of the spirit of one who had been drowned, or of another who had fallen in war, wandering about neglected and comfortless. They supposed the spirit haunted them everywhere, ...
— Samoa, A Hundred Years Ago And Long Before • George Turner
... in order against a hasty exit from this vale of hatreds, Mr. Reardon, in unconscious imitation of all the condemned men who had preceded him on the voyage across the Styx, repaired to the dining saloon and partook of a hearty meal. He realized he had undertaken a contract that would require the employment of weapons more formidable than his hard fists, and devoutly he wished that, like the ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... with her at all opportunities, to be regarded by her as her only friend and chosen protector, tell me, ye gods, what heart, that was not perfectly invulnerable, that was not totally impregnated with the waters of the Styx, could have come off victorious from ...
— Italian Letters, Vols. I and II • William Godwin
... replied the old man, whose occupation, combined with his great age and flowing gray locks, yet stalworth form and unbroken strength, had conferred upon him the name of his infernal predecessor—the navigator of the River Styx. ...
— Cruel As The Grave • Mrs. Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... that work of our own mind, but no one's hands, the bridge prove to be objectively false, and we, walking over the bank into the water, be set free from that which is subjectively on the farther bank of Styx." ...
— Phaethon • Charles Kingsley
... journey to the happy land. We everywhere hear of a water which the soul must cross, and an opponent, either a dog or an evil spirit, which it has to contend with. We are all familiar with the dog Cerberus (called by Homer simply "the dog"), which disputed the passage of the river Styx over which the souls must cross; and with the custom of the vikings, to be buried in a boat so that they might cross the waters of Ginunga-gap to the inviting strands of Godheim. Relics of this belief are found in the Koran which describes the bridge el Sirat, thin as a ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... to doubt if this stream whereon we floated, whose waters plashed and tinkled about us, were the Thames, the Tigris, or the Styx. ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... blunders? is it not better to gibbet his body on a heath than his soul in an octavo? 'We know what we are, but we know not what we may be,' and it is to be hoped we never shall know, if a man who has passed through life with a sort of eclat is to find himself a mountebank on the other side of Styx, and made, like poor Joe Blackett, the laughing-stock of purgatory. The plea of publication is to provide for the child. Now, might not some of this 'sutor ultra crepidam's' friends and seducers have done a decent action without inveigling Pratt into biography? And then, his inscriptions split into ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... and still evening; and then with a fire crackling merrily at the prow, you may launch forth like a cucullo into the night. The dullest soul cannot go upon such an expedition without some of the spirit of adventure; as if he had stolen the boat of Charon and gone down the Styx on a midnight expedition into the realms of Pluto. And much speculation does this wandering star afford to the musing nightwalker, leading him on and on, jack-o'lantern-like, over the meadows; or, if he is wiser, he amuses himself with imagining what of human life, far in ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... dinner? "When I die," he exclaimed in a fine rapture, "should I go to heaven, I will fish in the water of life with a fly dressed with a feather from the wing of an angel; should I be unfortunately consigned to another destination, I shall nevertheless hope to angle in Styx with the worm that never dieth." To his editorial successor Spey was a trifle more gracious than she had been to Russel; but she did not wholly open her heart to this neophyte of her stream, serving him up in the pool of Dellagyl ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... hand the Duchess of Bolton, the original Polly: Steele and Addison left their cards as Captain Sentry and Sir Roger de Coverley: Swift came in and sat down without speaking a word, and quitted the room as abruptly: Otway and Chatterton were seen lingering on the opposite side of the Styx, but could not muster enough between them to pay Charon his fare: Thomson fell asleep in the boat, and was rowed back again—and Burns sent a low fellow, one John Barleycorn, an old companion of his who had conducted him to the other world, to say that he had during his lifetime been ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... JAMRACH THE FIRST, Now we weep for King JAMRACH THE SECOND. There's grief at the Zoo, all the Lions bohoo, And the Elephants dolefully trumpet; The Tiger's in tears, and the lonely Koodoo With sorrow's as cold as a crumpet. He was seventy-six; but to cross o'er the Styx At that age—for a JAMRACH—was premature; There are lots of young cubs who feel quite in a fix At the thought that he will not see them mature. They howl with wide gorges to think that St. George's Will see him no more—ah! no, never! He will not preside at their ...
— Punch, Volume 101, September 19, 1891 • Francis Burnand
... helm he clung, nor ever left his hold, And all the while the stars above his eyen toward them drew. But lo, the God brought forth a bough wet with Lethean dew, And sleepy with the might of Styx, and shook it therewithal Over his brow, and loosed his lids delaying still to fall: But scarce in first of stealthy sleep his limbs all loosened lay, When, weighing on him, did he tear a space of stern away, And rolled him, helm and wrack and all, into the ...
— The AEneids of Virgil - Done into English Verse • Virgil
... downcast appearance of the majority of the men, one might have thought that it was a funeral rather than a pleasure party, or that they were a contingent of lost souls being conducted to the banks of the Styx. The man who from time to time sounded the coachman's horn might have passed as the angel sounding the last trump, and the fumes of the cigars were typical of the smoke of their torment, which ascendeth up ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... they had no burying tools, stumbling on a limestone slab at last, that lay amid rank weeds near a tomb hollowed out of the rock that had been rifled, very likely, centuries ago. They lowered the already stiffened body into it, with a coin in its fingers for Charon's ferry-fare across the Styx, then set the heavy slab in place, all four of ...
— Caesar Dies • Talbot Mundy
... poisons, there would be a notable diminution in the yearly average of victims to arsenic and oxalic acid. But, alas! in the matter of apology, it is not from the excess of the dose, but the timid, niggardly, miserly manner in which it is dispensed, that poor Humanity is hurried off to the Styx! How many times does a life depend on the exact proportions of an apology! Is it a hairbreadth too short to cover the scratch for which you want it? Make your will,—you are a dead man! A life do I say?—a hecatomb of lives! How many wars would have been prevented, how many thrones ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... In this, they have more to overcome, probably, than in any other matter, for here they carry an inheritance of great weight, from the old slave days. Why should they be grateful? What chance to exercise the feeling! It became, like the eyes of the fish in the Styx of Mammoth Cave, useless, and to all appearances disappeared. But the germ is there, and with light it will again ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 10, October, 1889 • Various
... to her, and a dead face, like that of her father, would appear, and a voice would issue from the dead man's mouth, begging for the other piece of money, that he might pay for his passage, and get released from the doom of floating for ever in the grim flood of Styx. But still she was to keep silence, and to let the dead man cry out in vain; for all these, the voice told her, were snares prepared by Aphrodite, to make her let go the money, and to let fall the pieces of bread. Then, at the gate of the palace of Persephone she would ...
— Fairy Tales; Their Origin and Meaning • John Thackray Bunce
... become accustomed to the darkness, and presently I made out a bench ahead, with two black figures starting from it. One I should have known on the banks of the Styx. From each came a separate oath as I stopped abreast them, and called the duke ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... who cling about thee—who are they? And canst thou be that fabled boat, that waits On the dark banks of Styx for souls? Oh, say! Let me not burst in ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... that gay old misogynist Arthur Schopenhauer persuaded to cross the Styx and revisiting the earth. Apart from his disgust if forced to listen to the music of his self-elected disciple Richard Wagner, what painted work would be likely to attract him? Remember he it was who named ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... determined defense. There is no fear of personal danger; it is only the destruction of property that is dreaded. But, in my opinion, the Pawnee is about as likely to attempt the navigation of the River Styx, as to run up this river within ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... of renown, was cruising slowly along the Styx one pleasant Friday morning not long ago, and as he paddled idly on he chuckled mildly to himself as he thought of the monopoly in ferriage which in the course of years he had ...
— A House-Boat on the Styx • John Kendrick Bangs
... sea dusky figures flitted, bearing ladles filled with the yellow fluid, which they had replenished from its depths. From this lake diverging streams of the same mysterious flood penetrated like mighty rivers the cavernous distance. As they walked by the banks of this glittering Styx, Father Jose perceived how the liquid stream at certain places became solid. The ground was strewn with glittering flakes. One of these the Padre picked up and curiously examined. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various |
