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proper noun
Tartarus  n.  (Class. Myth.) The infernal regions, described in the Iliad as situated as far below Hades as heaven is above the earth, and by later writers as the place of punishment for the spirits of the wicked. By the later poets, also, the name is often used synonymously with Hades, or the Lower World in general.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Tartarus" Quotes from Famous Books



... who follows him throughout his existences, and at death takes him to the lower world[137] for Judgment.[138] Many souls enter Acheron,[139] and, after a longer or shorter period, return to earth to be incarnated in new bodies. Unpardonable sins fling the soul into Tartarus.[140] ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal

... world, such as now we call indefinitely Heaven. That such probability did exist in the human forecast, as concerns a heaven and the form of God, let the testimony of all nations now be admitted to corroborate. Every shape from a cloud to a crocodile, and every place from AEther to Tartarus, have been peopled by man's not quite irrational device with their so-called gods. But we must not lapse into the after-argument: previous likelihood is our harder theme. Neither, in this section, will we attempt the probabilities of the ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... not look For any end, moreover, to this curse, Or ere some god appear to bear thy pangs On his own head vicarious, and descend With unreluctant step the darks of hell, And the deep glooms enringing Tartarus! Then ponder this: the threat is not growth Of vain invention—it is spoken and meant! For Zeus's mouth is impotent to lie, And doth complete the utterance in the act. So, look to it, thou! take heed! and nevermore Forget ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson

... bottom of the boat, warned us how thick the concourse was that had gathered below. Until that weariness which no terror is proof against set in, sleep was impossible, nor could we keep our anxious gaze from that glowing inferno beneath, where one would have thought all the population of Tartarus were holding high revel. Mercifully, at last we sank into a fitful slumber, though fully aware of the great danger of our position. One upward rush of any of those ravening monsters, happening to strike the frail shell of our boat, and a few fleeting seconds would have sufficed ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen

... Titan gods, seeing that the strife for them was vain, went over to the side of Zeus. These Zeus became friendly with. But the other Titans he bound in chains and he hurled them down to Tartarus. ...
— The Golden Fleece and the Heroes who Lived Before Achilles • Padraic Colum

... unteachable, so long as we remain what we are. The excellent doctrines which are current among the people, fortified with special authority, concerning freedom, duty and eternal life, change themselves for us into grotesque fables, like those of Tartarus and the Elysian fields, although we do not disclose the true opinion of our hearts, because we think it more advisable to keep the people in outward decency by means of these images. Or if we are less reflective, ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various

... the shadow of the under-world. Like the white-horsed twins of lake Regillus, like Phoebe, the queen of skyey plain and earthly forest, every boy and girl, every man and woman, that lives at all, has to divide many a year between Tartarus ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald

... be put to it to count the great number since. And they do not resemble English storms, but rather Arctic ones, in a certain very suggestive something of personalness, and a carousing malice, and a Tartarus gloom, which I cannot quite describe. That night at Guildford, after wandering about, and becoming very weary, I threw myself upon a cushioned pew in an old Norman church with two east apses, called St. Mary's, using a Bible-cushion for pillow, and placing some distance away a little tin lamp ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel

... diverted to other channels. Following for a few yards the sinuous stony way, worn here and there into smooth circular cavities like miniature wells, by the eddying of the ancient current and the grinding of pebbles, the travellers turned a sharp angle, and found themselves at the mouth of Tartarus. ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson

... we find in him the belief, found also in India and in Iceland, that an older and more savage race of gods once ruled, whom the present dynasty conquered and dethroned. Of that older set was Kronos, the father of Zeus, and the Titans, who are now cast down to Tartarus, the nethermost region of all. The world known to men was apportioned at the beginning of the present age to the three sons of Kronos, Zeus obtaining the upper world, including heaven, which is at the top of Mount Olympus in Thessaly; Poseidon the sea, and ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies

... So the New Zealanders, as we have seen, say, "The heaven which is above us, and the earth which is beneath us, are the progenitors of men and the origin of all things". Hesiod(2) somewhat differs from this view by making Chaos absolutely first of all things, followed by "wide-bosomed Earth," Tartarus and Eros (love). Chaos unaided produced Erebus and Night; the children of Night and Erebus are Aether and Day. Earth produced Heaven, who then became her own lover, and to Heaven she bore Oceanus, and the Titans, Coeeus and Crius, Hyperion and ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang

... other life the tastes, feelings, habits of this life. The other world is this one, shaded off and toned down. It is gray in its hue, wanting the color of this world; and is really inferior to it, and only its pale reflection. To the gods of Olympus the doings of men are matters of chief interest. Tartarus and the Elysian Fields are occupied by lymphatic ghosts, misty spectres, unsubstantial and unoccupied. When a living man enters, like Ulysses, AEneas, or Dante, they throng around him, delighted to have something in which ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke

... wicked, and an elysium for the good; but those who go to hell go there upon principles of justice, and those who go to elysium go there upon the same principles. It is justice that must place men in Tartarus, and it is justice that must place them in Elysium. In paganism, men must earn their heaven. The idea of mercy,—of clemency towards a transgressor, of pity towards a criminal,—is entirely foreign to the thoughts of Plutarch, so far as they can be gathered from this tract. It ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd

... St. Eucherius, Bishop of Orleans, saw Charles Martel (according to the Council of Kiersy), 'with Cain, Judas, and Caiaphas, thrust into the Stygian whirlpools and Acherontic combustion of the sempiternal Tartarus.' ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley

... with a peculiar shriek from the locomotive, from and to some point of the polar regions, as it seemed to me, like a flock of arctic snow-birds. But sometimes Squaw Walden had her revenge, and a hired man, walking behind his team, slipped through a crack in the ground down toward Tartarus, and he who was so brave before suddenly became but the ninth part of a man, almost gave up his animal heat, and was glad to take refuge in my house, and acknowledged that there was some virtue in a stove; or sometimes the frozen soil took a piece of steel ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau

... said Mr. Temple. "Goodnight. I think we will have good news in the morning. There will be an attack made on those men at Riverley to-morrow which will melt them like an iceberg in Tartarus." Mr. Temple was not classical, and, of course, did ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay

... among men; and now to purchase that profession I must 'teach young ideas' till the requisite sum is obtained. The daughters of Darius were condemned for the murder of their husbands to fill leaky vessels in Tartarus—that is, they became teachers! It is hard that those who have neither been nor murdered husbands ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various

... was Chaos. Next was broad-bosomed Earth, or Gaia. Then was Tartarus, dark and dim, below the earth. Next appears Eros, or Love, most beautiful among the Immortals. From Chaos came Erebus and black Night, and then sprang forth Ether and Day, children of Erebus and Night. ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke

... be the Thunderer's slave, he was too great: To be his friend and comrade,—but a man. His crime was human, and their doom severe; For poets sing, that treachery and pride Did from Jove's table hurl him headlong down, To grovel in the depths of Tartarus. Alas, and his ...
— Iphigenia in Tauris • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

... blackguards to seize him, and bind him in my presence, and I will bastinado him with my own hand. Furies and curses! I do not know what to do. Oh, this confounded vanity! Not contented with one disgrace, I have brought upon myself another, ten times more mortifying than the first. By Tartarus, and all the infernal gods, I believe I had better let it rest where it is! Wretch, wretch, that I am!" And he threw himself on the bed in an ...
— Damon and Delia - A Tale • William Godwin

... "Your glance sends fragrance sweeter than the lily, Your hands are visible bodiments of song You are the voice that April light has lost, Her silence that was music of glad birds. The wind's heart have you, and its mystery, When poet Spring comes piping o'er the hills To make of Tartarus forgotten fear. Yea all the generations of the world, Whose whence and whither but the gods shall know. Are vassal to your vows forevermore." And she, I knew, made answer, for her words Fell warm as womanhood with wordless things, ...
— Nirvana Days • Cale Young Rice

... it," replied he, "and double it; but it is hot as Tartarus in here. I feel like a grilled salmon." And indeed, Cadet's broad, sensual face was red and glowing as a harvest moon. He walked a little unsteady too, and his naturally coarse voice sounded thick, but his hard brain never gave way beyond a certain ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby

... election. The town, for a fortnight, more resembled the worst corner of Tartarus than a Christian borough. Drunkenness, riot, pumping on one another, spencering one another, all sorts of violence and abuse ruled and raged till the blood of all Stockington was at boiling heat. In the midst of the tempest were everywhere seen, ranged on the opposite sides, Mr. Spires, now old ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various

... them all. Still for this sorrow I weep, and bewail thy ruin. But ah, if I might have gone down like Orpheus to Tartarus, or as once Odysseus, or Alcides of yore, I too would speedily have come to the house of Pluteus, that thee perchance I might behold, and if thou singest to Pluteus, that I might hear what is thy song. Nay, sing to the Maiden some strain of Sicily, ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang

... keep me as a chosen food to draw His magian fish through hated fire and flame? O misery of hell! resistless, tame, Am I to be burnt up? No, I will shout, Until the gods through heaven's blue look out!— O Tartarus! but some few days agone 270 Her soft arms were entwining me, and on Her voice I hung like fruit among green leaves: Her lips were all my own, and—ah, ripe sheaves Of happiness! ye on the stubble ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats

... Thou lean sow, famine-stricken and most impure.... Thou wrinkled beast, of all beasts the most beastly.... Thou bestial and foolish drunkard.... Thou sooty spirit from Tartarus.... I cast thee down, O Tartarean boor, into the infernal kitchen.... Loathsome cobbler ... filthy sow ... envious crocodile.... Malodorous drudge ... swollen toad ... lousy ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen

... Old, nor New Testament, by any note of situation; but onely by the company: as that it shall bee, where such wicked men were, as God in former times in extraordinary, and miraculous manner, had destroyed from off the face of the Earth: As for Example, that they are in Inferno, in Tartarus, or in the bottomelesse pit; because Corah, Dathan, and Abirom, were swallowed up alive into the earth. Not that the Writers of the Scripture would have us beleeve, there could be in the globe of the Earth, which is not only finite, but also (compared to the height of the Stars) ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes

... granted, inasmuch as the horrible ravings that he feared repeating never passed his lips. If he had gone down to the smoke of Tartarus to restore his sister's lover, none of its blacks were cleaning to him; but whether conscious or wandering, the one thought of his wasted year seemed to be crushing him. It was a curious contrast between poor Mr. Fuller's absence of regret for a quarter of a century's supineness, ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge

... to know how fatal the request is to their prospects. It provokes the reader, to begin with. The reading of manuscript is frightful work, at the best; the reading of worthless manuscript—and most of that which one is requested to read through is worthless—would add to the terrors of Tartarus, if any infernal deity were ingenious enough to suggest it as ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... is only too glad to have me; he calls me to him. Athene always eyes me so! once when I flew close past her, quite by accident, with my torch, 'If you come near me,' she called out, 'I swear by my father, I will run you through with my spear, or take you by the foot and drop you into Tartarus, or tear you in pieces with my own hands'— and more such dreadful things. And she has such a sour look; and then on her breast she wears that horrid face with the snaky hair; that frightens me worst of all; the nasty bogy—I run ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata

... his brothers are various and somewhat contradictory. According to the most widely spread myth, Briareus and his brothers were called by Zeus to his assistance when the Titans were making war upon Olympus. The gigantic enemies were defeated and consigned to Tartarus, at the gates of which the three brothers were placed (Hesiod, Theog. 624, 639, 714). Other accounts make Briareus one of the assailants of Olympus, who, after his defeat, was buried under Mount Aetna (Callimachus, Hymn to Delos, 141). Homer mentions ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various

... the vale of Enna; and we think of Orpheus taking that fatal, wistful last look back at Eurydice, with the thought in his eyes that could not give her up even for a moment, when emerging to the outer air from the flames and smoke of Tartarus. Wistful glances back at all we have lost are embodied; and all these long, agonizing appeals of the eye against that fate of separation which cannot be longer combated with tongue or hand, are made over again ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford

... the remote west." (Murray's "Manual of Mythology," p. 258.) Atlas lived in these gardens. (Ibid., p. 259.) Atlas, we have seen, was king of Atlantis. "The Elysian Fields (the happy islands) were commonly placed in the remote west. They were ruled over by Chronos." (Ibid., p. 60.) Tartarus, the region of Hades, the gloomy home of the dead, was also located "under the mountains of an island in the midst of the ocean in the remote west." (Ibid., p. 58.) Atlas was described in Greek mythology as ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly

... our conceptions of the character of the age. An exception may perhaps be made in favor of an ingenious tournament that took place on Wednesday in the Hotel Bourbon. Here the Isles of the Blessed, the Elysian Fields, and Tartarus were represented by means of costly mechanisms. Charles and his brothers figured as knights defending Paradise, which Navarre and others, dressed as knights-errant, endeavored to enter by force of arms, but were repulsed and thrust into Tartarus. After some ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird

... was of it in my head; but this much was an accurate statement of my case; and yet less so now (I was thankful to reflect) than in the morning, when every wave was indeed a mountain, and its trough a Tartarus. I had learnt the lines at school; nay, they had formed my very earliest piece of Latin repetition. And how sharply I saw the room I said them in, the man I said them to, ever since my friend! I figured him even now hearing Ovid ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung

... "Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biographies and Mythology" we find it related that Uranos, or Coelus, was the progenitor of all the Grecian gods. His first children were the Centimanes; his next progeny were the Cyclops, who were imprisoned in Tartarus because of their great strength. This so angered their mother, Gaea, that she incited her next-born children, the Titans, into a rebellion against their father, Uranos. In the general turmoil that followed Uranos was deposed, and, so that he would be incapable of begetting any more children, ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino

... from such natural cause as this: one of the chasms of the earth is exceedingly large, and perforated through the entire earth, and is that which Homer[43] speaks of, 'very far off, where is the most profound abyss beneath the earth,' which elsewhere both he and many other poets have called Tartarus. For into this chasm all rivers flow together, and from it flow out again, but they severally derive their character from the earth through which ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various

... originally one of the Titans who was cast by Zeus into Tartarus. The word is thus used as a synonym for the lower world, especially those regions where ...
— La Legende des Siecles • Victor Hugo

... was only Chaos, Night, dark Erebus, and deep Tartarus. Earth, the air and heaven had no existence. Firstly, black-winged Night laid a germless egg in the bosom of the infinite deeps of Erebus, and from this, after the revolution of long ages, sprang the graceful Eros ...
— The Birds • Aristophanes

... executioner's axe, who for three years have been stretched upon the rack of your aversion? So I make sure that he has gone before me—so I have the sweet revenge of sending him to Tartarus, what care I how soon I ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach

... him, and only waits its season to break out. But really, my cousin, at present I feel no symptoms: and, to prove that I am ingenuous and sincere with you, these are my reasons for dissuasion. We believers in the Homeric family of gods and goddesses, believe also in the locality of Tartarus and Elysium. We entertain no doubt whatever that the passions of men and demigods and gods are nearly the same above ground and below; and that Achilles would dispatch his spear through the body of any shade who would lead ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor

... born, the old house, in the year of the Young Pretender, and, after serving six generations, perhaps as faithfully as it served us, it "fell on sleep." There should be a special Elysium, surely, for the houses where the fates have been kind and where people have been happy; and a special Tartarus for those—of Oedipus or Atreus—in which "old, unhappy, far-off things" seem to be always ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... bring up the three-headed watch-dog, Cerberus, from the doors of Tartarus. Mercury and Pallas both came to attend him, and led him alive among the shades, who all fled from him, except Medusa and one brave youth. He gave them the blood of an ox to drink, and made his way to Pluto's throne, where he asked leave to take Cerberus to the upper ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various

... no mistaking Marcian's earnestness. For the moment he had shaken off his visions of Tartarus, and was his ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing

... followed his instructions, and went into Meridie, and turned to the left when he had come to the great puddle where the adders and toads are reared, and so passed through the mists of Tartarus, with due care of the wild lightning, and took the second turn to his left—"always in seeking Heaven be guided by your heart," had been the advice given him by devils,—and thus avoiding the abode of Jemra, he crossed the bridge over the Bottomless Pit ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell

... came to exist in this world, they scarcely cared to inquire. There is no evil spirit in the mythology as an antagonist of the gods. There is the Erinnys as the avenger of monstrous villanies; a Tartarus where the darkest criminals suffer eternal tortures. But Tantalus and Ixion are suffering for enormous crimes, to which the small wickedness of common men offers no analogy. Moreover, these and other such stories are but curiously ornamented myths, representing physical ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude

... its foundations! Tartarus itself laid bare! The whole world torn asunder and turned upside down! Why, my dear friend, this is a perfect hurly-burly, in which the whole universe, heaven and hell, mortals and immortals, share ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus

... items expense and receipt. All throve, till an argosy, on its way home, With a cargo worth more than their capital sum, In attempting to pass through a dangerous strait, Went down with its passengers, sailors, and freight, To enrich those enormous and miserly stores, From Tartarus distant but very few doors. Regret was a thing which the firm could but feel; Regret was the thing they were slow to reveal; For the least of a merchant well knows that the weal Of his credit requires ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine

... Assyrian Babylon, with Egypt under the mad tyranny of Cambyses; or rather, denies that the latter empires can be held as parallels of guilt to the western Babylon; nay, he tells us that neither Avernus nor Tartarus can be ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch

... a labyrinth, a Tartarus, (Anecdot. c. 4,) were under the palace. Darkness is propitious to cruelty, but it is likewise favorable to ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon

... devious ways that have led to this, In the stream's consecutive line, Let memory lead thee back To where waves Morning her fleur-de-lys, Unflushed at the front of the roseate door Unopened yet: never shadow there Of a Tartarus lighted by Dis For souls whose cry is, alack! An ivory cradle rocks, apeep Through his eyelashes' laugh, a breathing pearl. There the young chief of the animals wore A likeness to heavenly hosts, unaware Of his love of himself; with the hours at leap. In a dingle away from a rutted highroad, Around ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... was so incensed against Apollo for having violated his daughter Coronis, that he set fire to the temple of that deity, by whose vengeance he was cast into Tartarus. See Virg. Aen. ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante

... betrayed in the sonnet proposing to "Laurence, of virtuous father virtuous son," a series of nice little dinners in midwinter and it blazes fully out in that untasted banquet which, elaborate as it was, Satan tossed up in a trice from the kitchen-ranges of Tartarus. ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... nature of a GENIUS meant to subdue time. Those studies that had gone so far to forestall the master-triumph of far later ages were exchanged for occupations that played with the toys of infant wisdom. O true Tartarus of Genius, when its energies are misapplied, when the labour but rolls the stone up the mountain, but pours water ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... some form or another, could not possibly be confined to Asia. The Greeks, though strangers to the mystic element of that Beauty-worship which in Asia became afterwards sufism, could not have exhibited a passion for concrete beauty such as theirs without feeling that, deeper than Tartarus, stronger than Destiny and Death, the great heart of Nature is beating to the tune of universal ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton

... character of William III. is said to be contained in a Cambridge prize essay on the subject, so the Culex contains the first draft of some of the greatest passages in Virgil's later works—the beautiful description of the charms of country life in the Georgics, for instance, and the account of Tartarus in the sixth book of the AEneid. The story is slight, as was usually the case in these little epics, where the purple patches are more important than the plot. A shepherd falls asleep in the shade by a cool fountain, just as he ...
— Greek and Roman Ghost Stories • Lacy Collison-Morley

... Hades corresponds with Amenthe; Pluto, with the subterranean Osiris; Mercury psychopompos, with Anubis, "the usher of souls;" Aacus, Minos, and Rhadamanthos, with the three assistant gods who help in weighing the soul and present the result to Osiris; Tartarus, to the ditch Tartar; Charon's ghost boat over the Styx, to the barge conveying the mummy to the tomb; Cerberus, to Oms; Acheron, to Acherusia; the Elysian Fields, to Elisout.12 Kenrick thinks the Greeks may have developed these views for ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger

... found in myrtle groves all who had died for love, among them, to his surprise, poor forsaken Dido. A little further on he found the home of the warriors, and held converse with his old Trojan friends. He passed by the place of doom for the wicked, Tartarus; and in the Elysian fields, full of laurel groves and meads of asphodel, he found the spirit of his father Anchises, and with him was allowed to see the souls of all their descendants, as yet unborn, who should raise the glory of their name. They are described on to the very time when the poet ...
— Young Folks' History of Rome • Charlotte Mary Yonge

... Fall into Tartarus! for I shall make This world my heaven for a little space. The sin was mine, if any sin there was. 'Twas I who nurtured murder in my heart, Sweetened my meats, seasoned my wine with it, And in my fancy slew the accursed Duke A hundred times a ...
— The Duchess of Padua • Oscar Wilde

... a wilder excitement, did I watch these eight hundred men, as they gathered themselves up for the charge. At the word, every man leaped forward on the full run, yelling as if all the spirits of Tartarus were loosed. In a moment comes the shock, the yells sink into muttered curses, and soon groans are heard, and the bayonet thrusts are quick and bloody. Brute strength and skill often meet, and skill and agility ...
— Thirteen Months in the Rebel Army • William G. Stevenson

... Christian ideas are, in this episode of the "Telemachus," superinduced upon pagan, after a manner hard, perhaps, to reconcile with the verisimilitude required by art, but at least productive of very noble and very beautiful results. First, one glimpse of Tartarus as conceived by Fenelon. It is the spectacle of kings who on earth abused their ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson

... as Poet Dryden says, you do walk hand in hand with sheer Madness, all the way,—who is by no means pleasant company! You look fixedly into Madness, and her undiscovered, boundless, bottomless Night-empire; that you may extort new Wisdom out of it, as an Eurydice from Tartarus. The higher the Wisdom, the closer was its neighbourhood and kindred with mere Insanity; literally so;—and thou wilt, with a speechless feeling, observe how highest Wisdom, struggling up into this world, ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle

... mules. The view from the top is magnificent. The contrast between the desolate aspect of the interior of the crater, and the smiling prospect which may be seen from its edge, has been well compared to looking out of Tartarus into Paradise. ...
— Wonders of Creation • Anonymous

... he passed into Christian theology. Between the Satan of the Book of Job and the mediaeval Devil the metamorphosis is as great as that which degraded the stern Erinys, who brings evil deeds to light, into the demon-like Fury who torments wrong-doers in Tartarus; and, making allowance for difference of circumstances, the process of degradation has been very nearly the same in ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske

... be but imperfectly paid,—he cannot make two words about his Images. The Wax-bust of Necker, the Wax-bust of D'Orleans, helpers of France: these, covered with crape, as in funeral procession, or after the manner of suppliants appealing to Heaven, to Earth, and Tartarus itself, a mixed multitude bears off. For a sign! As indeed man, with his singular imaginative faculties, can do little or nothing without signs: thus Turks look to their Prophet's banner; also Osier Mannikins have been burnt, and Necker's Portrait has erewhile ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle

... fail or falter—his own blood, and his wife's, and that of all his race forever! May vultures tear their eyes, yet fluttering with quick vision; may wolves tug at their heart-strings, yet strong with vigorous life; may infamy be their inheritance, and Tartarus receive ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert

... rendezvous, we separate. Mattie and Liz go off in one direction, and Em and I in another. From this our progress seems like a descent into Tartarus. Em pauses before a miserable-looking saloon, pushes open the low, swinging door, and we go in. It is a low-ceiled room, dingy with dirt, dim with the smoke, nauseating with the fumes of sour beer and ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth

... by Zeus' thunderbolt, and buried under Aetna. The gin on which he was tortured was probably the rack of the Middle Ages. Cf. the bed of Procrustes. Theseus, for attempting to carry off Persephone, was fixed to a rock in Tartarus. The "fifty sisters" are the fifty Danaides, who, for slaying their husbands, were condemned to pour water forever into a ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser

... treated altogether as a menial servant. No sooner did Mr. —- make his appearance than she went below stairs, brushed his shoes, coat, &c.; and, except when she was summoned to run an errand, she never emerged from the dismal Tartarus of the kitchen, &c., to the upper air until my welcome knock at night called up her little trembling footsteps to the front door. Of her life during the daytime, however, I knew little but what I gathered from her own account at ...
— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas De Quincey

... is as black as Tartarus, and it is raining heavily. Brother Boche, a prey to nervous qualms, is keeping his courage up by distributing shrapnel along our communication-trenches. Signal-wires are peculiarly vulnerable to shrapnel. Consequently ...
— All In It K(1) Carries On - A Continuation of the First Hundred Thousand • John Hay Beith (AKA: Ian Hay)

... knees, and she bent forward, with her eyes fixed on the door at which they entered. Her once dazzling beauty was now transformed to a haggard glare—the terrible lightning which gleamed on the face of Satan, when he sat brooding on the burning marl of Tartarus. ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter

... the scene, and in his conversation with Solomon declared that he alone survived of the angels who had come down from heaven. He reigned over all who are in Tartarus, and had a child in the Red Sea, which on occasion comes up to Beelzeboul and reveals to him what he has done. Next the demon of the Ashes, Tephros, appeared, and after him a group of seven female spirits, who declared themselves to be of the thirty-six elements of the darkness. ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG

... happened unto them, Although one would like to invest them With the glory of it, for the sake of the soul. But they were, to speak truth of them, A sort of journeyman work, Not a Phidian statuary, But a first cast of man, A rude draft of him; Huge gulfs, as of dismal Tartarus, Separating him from the high-born Caucasian. He, a mere Mongolian, As good, perhaps, in his faculties, As any Jap. or Chinaman— But not of the full-orbed brain, Star-blown, and harmonious With all sweet voices as of flutes in him, And ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... not only ambitious, but audacious, for it necessarily awakens reminiscences of Dante. Not unfrequently he is charmingly pathetic, as in his Helen and Psyche. There is considerable force and no small imagination in the description of some of the tortures in the 'Tartarus.' There is genuine poetical feeling in the 'Olympus.'... We might invite attention to many other passages. But it is more easy to give honest general praise than to single out particular ...
— Gycia - A Tragedy in Five Acts • Lewis Morris

... stories told me when I arrived in that land destined by nature to be a paradise, but of which the inhabitants were then making a Tartarus. To the horrors then perpetrated by robbers or highwaymen, justice could be done only by the pen of ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson

... drove Before him all the hosts of Erebus, Till he had conquered: and grim Cerberus Sang madrigals, the Furies rhymed of love, Old Charon sighed, and sonnets rang above The gloomy Styx; and even as Tantalus Was Proserpine discrowned in Tartarus, And Cupid regnant in ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell

... particulars. The description made by one of the characters he introduces speaks of visions caught by inhaling a stupefying gas. Under its influence hallucinations were produced in which Trophonios himself was thought to appear, and the tortures of Tartarus were revealed. On emerging from the cave into fresh air, the questioner fell into fits of delirium, and thought he still saw strange visions. In the biography of Apollonios of Tyana, Philostratus tells us that the sage and wonder-worker was very desirous to penetrate into the cave, but that ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould

... hell fire; everlasting fire, everlasting torment, eternal damnation; lake of fire and brimstone; fire that is never quenched; worm that never dies. purgatory, limbo, gehenna, abyss. [Mythological hell] Tartarus, Hades, Avernus[Lat], Styx, Stygian creek, pit of Acheron[obs3], Cocytus; infernal regions, inferno, shades below, realms of Pluto. Pluto, Rhadamanthus[obs3], Erebus[Lat]; Tophet. Adj. hellish, infernal, stygian. Phr. dies irae ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... sitting by a fire in a rug great coat. Your room is doubtless to a greater degree air tight than mine, or your notions of Tartarus would veer round to the Greenlander's creed. It is most barbarously cold, and you, I fear, can shield yourself from it, only by perpetual imprisonment. If any place in the southern climates were in a state of real ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle

... was Friedrich snatched by Morgante into Fairyland, carried by Diana to the top of Pindus (or even by Proserpine to Tartarus, through a bad sixteen hours), till the Battle whirlwind subsided. Friendly imaginative spirits would, in the antique time, have so construed it: but these moderns were malicious-valetish, not friendly; and wrapped the matter in mere stupid worlds of cobweb, which require burning. ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... little, by that shoeing-horn of idleness, and voluntary solitariness, melancholy this feral fiend is drawn on, [2608]et quantum vertice ad auras Aethereas, tantum radice in Tartara tendit, "extending up, by its branches, so far towards Heaven, as, by its roots, it does down towards Tartarus;" it was not so delicious at first, as now it is bitter and harsh; a cankered soul macerated with cares and discontents, taedium vitae, impatience, agony, inconstancy, irresolution, precipitate them unto unspeakable miseries. They cannot endure company, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior

... his opinion of a jobless faith, of a creed which dooms a man through life to a lean and plunderless integrity. He knows that human nature cannot and will not bear it; and if we were to paint a political Tartarus, it would be an endless series of snug expectations and cruel disappointments. These are a few of many dreadful inconveniences which the Catholics of all ranks suffer from the laws by which they are at present oppressed. Besides, look at human nature: what ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury

... from that, howling against the mighty precipice and through the rocky cliffs like ten thousand despairing souls. We lay there hour after hour in terror and misery of mind so deep that I will not attempt to describe it, and listened to the wild storm-voices of that Tartarus, as, set to the deep undertone of the spur opposite against which the wind hummed like some awful harp, they called to each other from precipice to precipice. No nightmare dreamed by man, no wild invention of the romancer, can ever equal the living horror of that ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard

... Testament the word represents (1) the,-original chaos (Gen. i. 2), (2) the Hebrew tehom ("a surging water-deep''), which is used also in apocalyptic and kabbalistic literature and in the New Testament for hell; the place of punishment (cf. Eurip. Phoen. for the "yawning chasm of Tartarus''); in the Revised (not the Authorized) version abyss is generally used for this idea. Primarily in the Septuagint cosmography the word is applied (a) to the waters under the earth which originally covered ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... a study altogether divorced from man's higher life and aspirations. So also were physics. What need had he of Cosmogonies? what need to trace the relations between man and the universe, or the universe and its Maker? He had his definite material Elysium and Tartarus, as the only ultimate relation between man and the universe; his dogma of an absolute fiat, creating arbitrary and once for all, as the only relation between the universe and its Maker: and further it was not lawful to speculate. The idea ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley

... before those tremendous gates, which resemble those of Tartarus, save only that they rather more frequently permit safe and honourable egress; although at the price of the same anxiety and labour with which Hercules, and one or two of the demi-gods, extricated themselves from the Hell of the ancient mythology, and sometimes, it is said, ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott

... Gegensatz meines inneren Lebens, damit mich dieses nicht durch sein Uebergewicht zerstoere."[229] To Moser (1823): "Hamburg? sollte ich dort noch so viele Freuden finden koennen, als ich schon Schmerzen dort empfand? Dieses ist freilich unmoeglich—"[230] "Hamburg!!! mein Elysium und Tartarus zu gleicher Zeit! Ort, den ich detestiere und am meisten liebe, wo mich die abscheulichsten Gefuehle martern und we ich mich dennoch hinwuensche."[231] Another letter to Moser is dated: "Verdammtes Hamburg, ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun

... of the globe vary in size and shape from that which we inhabit: but all are connected by passages and perforations in the interior of the earth. And there is one huge chasm or opening called Tartarus, into which streams of fire and water and liquid mud are ever flowing; of these small portions find their way to the surface and form seas and rivers and volcanoes. There is a perpetual inhalation and ...
— Phaedo - The Last Hours Of Socrates • Plato

... to be told twice. Earth yawned. The gates of Tartarus stood wide. They found themselves on the side of a steep mountain, down which they scoured madly, hand linked in hand. But fast as they ran, it was long ere they ceased to hear the ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett

... Western Ocean; and the Id. Alishe, or Elisha of the Prophets, the happy land. Jezkal (our Ezekiel) mentions that island; the Phoenicians called it Alizut, and some deem Madeira was meant, but it had neither men nor spirits! From this the Greeks made their Elysium and Tartarus placed near together, at first in Epirus, then Italy, next Spain, lastly in the ocean, as the settlers travelled west. The sacred and blessed islands of the Hindus and Lybians were in this ocean; Wilford thought they meant the British Islands. Pushcara, the farthest off, he says, was Iceland, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 206, October 8, 1853 • Various

... rasped backward over bare boards as one; at the same instant Fergus leapt to his feet in the earthly Tartarus his ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung

... Jupiter was concealed at his birth and grew to manhood. He compelled Saturn to disgorge his brothers and sisters, and in company with them waged a ten years' war against the Titans. They were overcome and hurled to the depths below Tartarus, while Jupiter usurped the throne ...
— Palamon and Arcite • John Dryden

... gives us a law, first to seek the good, and secondly the evil, and lastly to judge that worst which is neither good nor evil; as if any one should place infernal things next to celestial, thrusting the earth and earthly things into Tartarus, ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch

... gently, "that an unfaithful Vestal is buried alive in the Campus Sceleratus; but I know, too, that her seducer is beaten to death with rods. Accuse me, or attack me, and whatever be my fate, I can say that which will send your black soul down to Tartarus with guilt enough for Minos to punish. Your delicately anointed skin would be sadly bruised by the stripes falling upon it. And now, if these creatures will stand one side, I ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis

... unsown, which everlasting bloom'd. Untill'd the land its welcome produce gave, And unmanur'd its hoary crop renew'd. Here streams of milk, there streams of nectar flow'd; And from the ilex, drop by drop distill'd, The yellow honey fell. But, Saturn down To dusky Tartarus banish'd, all the world By Jove was govern'd. Then a silver age Succeeded; by the golden far excell'd;— Itself surpassing far the age of brass. The ancient durance of perpetual spring He shorten'd, and in seasons four the year Divided:—Winter, summer, lessen'd spring, And various temper'd autumn ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid

... foggy, frosty, snowy months passed away much as they had done before, fostering, amongst other hidden growths, that of Mrs Forbes' love for her semi-protegee, whom, like Castor and Pollux, she took half the year to heaven, and sent the other half to Tartarus. One notable event, however, of considerable importance in its results to the people of Howglen, took place this winter amongst ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald

... that is born to mortality; if I may be allowed, and you suffer me to speak the truth, laying aside[3] the artful expressions of a deceitful tongue; I have not descended hither {from curiosity} to see dark Tartarus, nor to bind the threefold throat of the Medusaean monster, bristling with serpents. {But} my wife was the cause of my coming; into whom a serpent, trodden upon {by her}, diffused its poison, and cut short her growing years. I was wishful to be able to endure ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso

... cui tres sint linguae tergeminumque caput. Virgil, in the AEneid, vi. 417, has huge Cerberus barking with triple jaws; his neck bristles with serpents. Ovid in his Metamorphoses, x. 21, makes Orpheus, looking for dear Eurydice in Tartarus, declare that he did not go down in order that he might chain the three necks, shaggy with serpents, of the monster begotten of Medusa. His business also is settled for all time; he is the terrible, fearless, and watchful janitor, or guardian (janitor or custos) of ...
— Cerberus, The Dog of Hades - The History of an Idea • Maurice Bloomfield

... "but my time is fulfilled," and straightway he gave up the ghost; and when officials came again from Antioch, demanding him, Simeon replied: "He who brought him came with a multitude of the heavenly host, and is able to send into Tartarus your city, and all who dwell in it, who also has reconciled this man to himself; and I was afraid lest he should slay me suddenly. Therefore weary me no more, a humble man ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley

... poor Edward, naked and reclining amidst darkness, upon cold rocks, like one of the ancient Greek damned, in Tartarus ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford

... take to have been a 'nervous gentleman' compared with Shakespeare, was visited with no such dreams as Dante. Or, if it was, he did not choose to make himself thinner (as Dante says he did) with dwelling upon them. He had twenty visions of nymphs and bowers, to one of the mud of Tartarus. Chaucer, for all he was 'a man of this world' as well as the poets' world, and as great, perhaps a greater enemy of oppression than Dante, besides being one of the profoundest masters of pathos that ever lived, had not the heart to conclude ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various

... fiery mount, surrounded by a circular rampart of rocks, and looked up at the immense towers of dark dolerite which ran up almost vertically to the height of twenty-five hundred feet above us, musing over the tremendous force which fashioned this awful amphitheatre—spacious enough for all the gods of Tartarus to hold high carnival—the clouds which hung in the thin air around the crest of the crater pealed forth thunder after thunder, which, reverberating from precipice to precipice, were answered by the crash of rocks let ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton

... am to pay my debt, to wit in coin of correspondence, and finally that I am to go to Tartarus: no but it is you have caught a Tartar (as the saying is), since after all these years employing my own vernacular tongue, and prettily enough for a hired penman, you have set about to drive me by means of your well composed and neatly turned epistles ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas

... sorceress," he replied, "and possessed of magic powers; she can draw down the heavens, make the earth heave, harden the running water, dissolve mountains, raise the shades of the dead, dethrone the gods, extinguish the stars, and set the very depths of Tartarus ablaze!" ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner

... Louis (with sorrowful voice, but not without divine inspiration, adds the chronicler), "we must be sustained by a heavenly consolation. If these Tartars, as we call them, arrive here, either we will hurl them back to Tartarus, their home, whence they are come, or they shall send us up to Heaven." About the same period, another cause of disquietude and another feature of attraction came to be added to all those which ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot

... of Corinth, was famous as a master of all manner of deceit, outwitting even the arch-thief Autolycus. He was finally cast into Tartarus for having discovered the amour of Zeus ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius

... explorations opens up an immense field of discussion and speculation that can here be only relegated to a note; we can treat at greater length none but those legends which bear directly on our subject. Odysseus visited Hades, Aeneas descended to Orcus or Tartarus, and they have their counterparts in every land and every mythology. Human aetiological tendencies supply explanations of any cavern or natural chasm—even a volcano must be the mouth of the entrance to hell or purgatory—from Taenarus, ...
— The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer-night's Dream' • Compiled by Frank Sidgwick

... were Death alone! But "Hell follows hard after." What a heaving Tartarus was Greece, when all hope of a true nationality was given up! From Corcyra to Rhodes, from Byzantium to Cyrene, one bloody scene of faction, "sedition, privy conspiracy, and rebellion." In the cities, in ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin

... true about the texts whose chief word is "Hell." The word "hell" occurs eighteen times in the Authorized Version. Once it is a translation of a Greek word Tartarus (2 Peter ii. 4) cast down to Hell to be reserved "unto the Day of Judgment." That certainly was not everlasting. Five times it is a translation of the word Hades whose meaning we already know, and which certainly ...
— The Gospel of the Hereafter • J. Paterson-Smyth

... We can give no account of it. It is irreconcilable with the hypothesis of an intelligent and good Providence. It has all the features of chance upon it. A god could not have done it unless he had been the god of Tartarus. Dark Pluto might, or the avenging Furies, were they supreme. But away with all such dreams! The slaves who were his proper attendants, have been scourged and crucified. That at first gave me some relief; but already I repent it. So it is with me; I rush suddenly ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware

... King, I keep, by him forbidden to unlock These adamantine gates; against all force Death ready stands to interpose his dart, Fearless to be o'ermatched by living might. But what owe I to his commands above, Who hates me, and hath hither thrust me down Into this gloom of Tartarus profound, To sit in hateful office here confined, Inhabitant of Heaven and heavenly born— Here in perpetual agony and pain, With terrors and with clamours compassed round Of mine own brood, that on my bowels feed? Thou art my father, thou my author, thou My being ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton

... Tartarus is the place These scoundrels you should send to— Should they behold my face. My ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan

... do literally reach downward to Tartarus, or to the regions of subterranean fire; and what is concealed far below is probably always more important in volume and extent than what is ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell

... I felt In me Life's longing win the victory. And while the nations twain, like maddened bulls Goad-driven, rushed upon each other's death, And stern Alecto spread about the flames Of Tartarus, I saw before mine eyes —O sight ...
— Life Immovable - First Part • Kostes Palamas

... should be. When art is consistent with itself, it guides everything more surely to its goal. If the Homeric Elysium is a long, long way from the ethereal charm, the angelic pleasureableness of Milton's Paradise, it is because under Eden there is a hell far more terrible than the heathen Tartarus. Do you think that Francesca da Rimini and Beatrice would be so enchanting in a poet who should not confine us in the Tower of Hunger and compel us to share Ugolino's revolting repast? Dante would have less charm, if he had less power. Have the fleshly naiads, the muscular Tritons, the ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot

... souls, whereof One twines from finest gracious daily things, Strong, constant, noticeless, as are heart-strings The golden cage wherein this song-bird sings; And the other's sun gives hue to all my flowers, Which else pale flowers of Tartarus would grow, Where ghosts watch ghosts of blooms in ghostly bowers; - For we do know The hidden player by his harmonies, And by my thoughts I know what still hands ...
— Sister Songs • Francis Thompson

... looked on life not more as a writer than as a man. The Laura, whom he celebrates, was not a vision of the mind; but a living fair one, whom he saw daily, and loved in the secrecy of his heart. His Gruppe aus dem Tartarus (Group from Tartarus), his Kindesmoerderinn (Infanticide), are products of a mind brooding over dark and mysterious things. While improving in the art of poetry, in the capability of uttering his thoughts in the form best adapted to express them, he was likewise improving ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle

... espoused Metis (Prudence), who administered a draught to Saturn which caused him to disgorge his children. Jupiter, with his brothers and sisters, now rebelled against their father Saturn and his brothers the Titans; vanquished them, and imprisoned some of them in Tartarus, inflicting other penalties on others. Atlas was condemned to bear up the heavens ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch



Words linked to "Tartarus" :   nether region, pit, Tartarean, hell, infernal region, inferno, perdition, Gehenna



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