"Olympian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... arrangement is conducive to physical discomfort, and even such a paragon will fail of attaining that ideal of happy order which she aims to realize in her children's reading room. The temper even of an Olympian is not proof ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... commences Song's hilarious rhapsody, Just to please himself and me! Primo Cantante! Scherzo! Andante! Piano, pianissimo! Presto, prestissimo! Hark! are there nine birds or ninety and nine? And now a miraculous gurgling gushes Like nectar from Hebe's Olympian bottle, The laughter of tune from a rapturous throttle! Such melody must be a hermit-thrush's! But that other caroler, nearer, Outrivaling rivalry with clearer Sweetness incredibly fine! Is it oriole, redbird, or bluebird, Or some strange, un-Auduboned ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... was a hideous Walhalla, a fit abode for the savage giant gods of the old Scandinavians. Thor and Woden would have been at home in it. The Cyclops and Titans would have been too little for it. The Olympian deities could not be conceived of as able or willing to exist in such a hideous chaos. No creature of the Greek imagination would have been a suitable inhabitant for it except Prometheus alone. Here his eternal agony and boundless despair ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... can get used to anything. Our lot is mitigated, too, by the knowledge that we are all in the same boat. The most olympian N.C.O. stands like a ramrod when addressing an officer, while lieutenants make obeisance to a company commander as humbly as any private. Even the Colonel was seen one day to salute an old gentleman who rode on to the parade-ground during morning drill, ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... all changed; such a change as few bodies, politic or other, can experience in this world. Say perhaps, such as poor Nymph Semele's body did experience, when she would needs, with woman's humour, see her Olympian Jove as very Jove;—and so stood, poor Nymph, this moment Semele, next moment not Semele, but Flame and a Statue of red-hot Ashes! France has looked upon Democracy; seen it face to face.—The Cimmerian Invaders will rally, in ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... Scarcely inferior to these Olympian deities were Hades (Pluto), who presided over the infernal regions; Helios, the sun; Hecate, the goddess of expiation; Dionysus (Bacchus), the god of the vine; Leto (Latona), the goddess of the concealed powers; Eos (Aurora), goddess of the morn; Nemesis, god of vengeance; AEolus, the ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... suggestion that the experiment might fail and call down upon them the implacable and destructive forces that could ruin them body and soul forever. For this, plainly expressed, was the form in which his terror attacked him when he thought about it. Skale was tempting the Olympian powers ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood
... choruses that no one but he can hear. Mr. George Moore collects every fragment of Irish paganism that the forgetfulness of the Catholic Church has left or possibly her wisdom preserved. There are innumerable persons with eye-glasses and green garments who pray for the return of the maypole or the Olympian games. But there is about these people a haunting and alarming something which suggests that it is just possible that they do not keep Christmas. It is painful to regard human nature in such a light, but it seems somehow possible that ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... gentlemen (very like old-fashioned Englishmen they were), by whom good wine was known and appreciated; especially certain exquisite Madeira, of the Bingham and Butler names, the like of which it was believed the world could not produce; but this was Olympian nectar, for the gods alone; and the usual custom of the best society, at the early three-o'clock dinner, was water-drinking. Nor had the immense increase of the German population then flooded Philadelphia with perennial ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... guards the gate? Know, that within, still fiercer and more fell, Wide-yawning with her fifty throats, doth dwell A Hydra. Tartarus itself, hard by, Abrupt and sheer, beneath the ghosts in Hell, Gapes twice as deep, as o'er the earth on high Towers up the Olympian steep, the ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... century, to the Fall of Constantinople, to the Revival of Learning, ere we can find a fitting parallel to match the importance of this recent find. Not since the spade of the excavator uncovered from its shroud of earth the flawless beauty of the Olympian Hermes has such a delightful acquisition been made to our knowledge of Greek literature. The name of Professor Lachsyrma has long been one to conjure with, and all of us should experience pleasure (where surprise in his case is out of the question) on learning that ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... like angels shining all a-row, While overhead the empyrean seats Of gods were steeped in paradisic glow. The Pleiades with rarer fires were tipt, Hesper sat throned upon his jewelled chair, The belted giant's triple stars were dipt In all the splendour of Olympian air, On high to bless, the Southern Cross did shine, Like that ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... to many famous cities, containing laws and ordinances; and appointed certain of his companions— under the name of death-messengers—to scatter abroad these missives. Finally, at the close of the Olympian games he erected a funeral pile; and when it was all ablaze, he threw himself into it, and perished in the flames. "There is very strong reason for believing" says Dr. Lightfoot, "that Lucian has drawn his picture, at least in part, from the known circumstances of Ignatius' ...
— The Ignatian Epistles Entirely Spurious • W. D. (William Dool) Killen
... light and music were at one, that was the task of Shelley! "To ask you for anything human," you said, "was like asking for a leg of mutton at a gin-shop." Nay, rather, like asking Apollo and Hebe, in the Olympian abodes, to give us beef for ambrosia, and port for nectar. Each poet gives what he has, and what he can offer; you spread before us fairy bread, and enchanted wine, and shall we turn away, with a sneer, because, ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... her desolation, took the child Demophoon to nurture him as her own on the food of gods, and to plunge him through the flames of a fire that would give him immortal life. As the pusillanimous and sordid fears of the mortal mother lost to the child for evermore the possession of Olympian joys and of perpetual youth, so did the craven and earthly cares of bodily needs hold the artist back from the radiance of the life of the soul, and drag him from the purifying fires. Yet he had not been utterly discouraged; he strove against the Metanira of circumstance; ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... youthfulness. Lionardo's S. John is a Faun of the forest, ivy-crowned and laughing, on whose lips the word "Repent" would be a gleeful paradox. For the painters of the full Renaissance, Roman martyrs and Olympian deities—the heroes of the Acta Sanctorum, and the heroes of Greek romance—were alike burghers of one spiritual city, the city of the beautiful and human. What exquisite and evanescent fragrance was educed from these apparently diverse blossoms by their interminglement ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... Jerusalem itself) be literally true—that the Almighty was the immediate father of Mary's child: Is not the birth of each and all of us as much a mystery, as great a "miracle," as though we sprang full-grown from the brow of Olympian Jove? Is it necessary that the Creator should violate his own laws to convince us that he does exist? Is it more wonderful that the sun should stand still upon Gibeon and the moon in the Valley of Ajalon than that the great world should spin forever, bringing ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... bays, In old Olympian golden days Of clamor thro' the clear-eyed morn, No bowed triumphant head hath borne, Victorious in all ...
— In Divers Tones • Charles G. D. Roberts
... Hellenes Thee of yore the gods had given Another Muse, another Grace Had crowned the Olympian heaven. ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... imitation of Cornelius Nepos, the pseudo-Suetonius, Valerius Maximus, Plutarch (Mulierum virtutes), Jerome (De viris illustribus), and others: or they wrote of imaginary triumphal processions and Olympian assemblies, as was done by Petrarch in his 'Trionfo della Fama,' and Boccaccio in the 'Amorosa Visione,' with hundreds of names, of which three-fourths at least belong to antiquity and the rest to the Middle Ages. By and by this new and comparatively ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... us are indebted for unparalleled skill in eating spaghetti with one tool—they use the putting iron all the way round. Our cousins, the English, excel at archery, tea-drinking and putting the fifty-six pound protest. Thus we lead the world at contesting Olympian games and winning them, and they lead the world at losing them first and then contesting them. In catch-as-catch-can wrestling between Suffragettes and policemen the English also hold the present championship at all weights. ...
— Cobb's Bill-of-Fare • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... constantly thrown back by a picturesque action of the hand. The features were large and regular, the complexion dark, the eyes a pale blue, under bushy brows. The whole aspect of the man, indeed, was not unworthy of the adjective "Olympian," already freely applied to it by some of the enthusiastic women students attending his now famous lectures. One girl artist learned in classical archaeology, and a haunter of the British Museum, had made a charcoal study of a well-known archaistic "Diespiter" of the Augustan period, on the ...
— A Great Success • Mrs Humphry Ward
... to bear yourself like a goddess, and disdain me from Olympian heights," he said. "I had the wit to guess ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... that followed after, Light the derision of the sky, Light the divine Olympian laughter Of kindlier gods in days gone by: Low to her lover whispered Venus, "The shameless net be praised for this— When night herself no more could screen us It snared us one ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... being; while she, as a stranger, for a stranger, preserves the young plant for those for whom the god has not blighted it in the bud. And I will show you a proof of this assertion; one may become a father without a mother. There stands by a witness of this in the daughter of Olympian Zeus, who was not even nursed [much less engendered or begotten] in the darkness of the womb" (115. 211). "This is akin to the wild discussion in the misogynistic Middle Ages about the possibility of lucina sine concubitu. ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... difficulty, the manner which would be correct in their relative positions; accepted the curtsey before stretching out a hand, guaranteed Olympian, to the plains below. "My dear Mrs. Thrale," said she, choking back excitement to chat-point, "I really am more grateful to you than I can say for taking charge of this dear old lady. I was quite at my wits' end what to do with her. You see, I had to go up to London, because of my cousin's ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... I marked thee, prince, with curious eye, Foreboding of some mystery deep enshrined Within thy laboring breast. This day, impatient, Thy lips have burst the seal; and unconstrained Confess a lover's joy;—the gladdening chase, The Olympian coursers, and the falcon's flight Can charm no more:—soon as the sun declines Beneath the ruddy west, thou hiest thee quick To some sequestered path, of mortal eye Unseen—not one of all our faithful train Companion of thy solitary way. Say, why so long concealed ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... outline of Capri and the fantastically blue mountains of the coast, to Vesuvius lifting its torch above the plain—this prodigal response to fancy's claims suggested the boundless invention of some great scenic artist, some Olympian Veronese with sea and sky for a palette. And then the city itself, huddled between bay and mountains, and seething and bubbling like a Titan's cauldron! Here was life at its source, not checked, directed, utilised, but gushing forth uncontrollably through every fissure of the brown ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... has welcomed all who were worthy of welcome, from the pale clergyman who came to breathe the sea-air with its medicinal salt and iodine, to the great statesman who turned his back on the affairs of empire, and smoothed his Olympian forehead, and flashed his white teeth in merriment over the long table, where his wit was the keenest and his story ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... awkwardness of manner, but with the most urban-like courtesy and affability. From noon till dark, the time is spent in conversation, continued, various, and eloquent. What a presence is there in this humble, unpretending cottage! And as the stream of Olympian sweetness moves on, now in laughing ripples, and again in a solemn majestic flood, what a past do we bring before ourselves! what a present! For this is he that talked with Coleridge, that was the friend of Wilson,—and—what furnishes a more sublime suggestion—this is he that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... vaguely remember that the Orphic Alcott invaded the Sahara of silence with a solemn "saying", to which, after due pause, the honorable member for blackberry pastures responded by some keen and graphic observation; while the Olympian host, anxious that so much good material should be spun into something, beamed smiling encouragement upon all parties. But the conversation became more and more staccato. Miles Coverdale, a statue of night and silence, sat, a little removed, under ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... England, so the chance has fled! Olympian years to come shall knot not The athlete's guerdon for thy head But crown the wigs ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, January 28, 1914 • Various
... renounced their art who have been unable to equal the beauty of the Talysus[58] which we have seen at Rhodes, or of the Coan Venus. Nor have subsequent sculptors been so far alarmed at the statue of the Olympian Jove, or of the Shield-bearer, as to give up trying what they could accomplish, or how far they could advance; and, indeed, there has been so vast a multitude of those men, and each of them has obtained so much credit in his own particular walk, that, while we admire the most perfect ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... this. The supernatural, in the ancient world, was something vague and indefinite: and the classical theologies at any rate, though they were to some extent formal embodiments of it, could embody really but a very small part. Zeus and the Olympian hierarchies were dimly perceived to be encircled by some vaster mystery; which to the popular mind was altogether formless, and which even such men as Plato could only describe inadequately. The supernatural was like a dim and diffused light, brighter in some places, and darker in ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... in this way we may prove the existence of anything—Titans, Chimaeras, or the Olympian Gods; we have but to define them as existing, and the proof is complete. But, this objection summarily set aside; none of these beings are by hypothesis absolutely perfect, and, therefore, of their existence we can conclude nothing. ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... something much more impressive. The simplicity of her apparel, the opulence of her form, her imposing stature, and the extraordinary sense of vigorous life that seemed to emanate from her like a perfume exhaled by a flower, made her beautiful with a beauty of a rustic and olympian order. To watch her reaching up to the clothes-line with both arms raised high above her head, caused you to fall a musing in a strain of pagan piety. Excellent Mrs. Hermann's baggy cotton gowns had ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... grazing in the roadside pastures or resting beneath a tree. If I could have my will I would spend the remainder of my days rambling once more and every day those familiar roads and lanes, like Juno descending the Olympian path— ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee
... Tennessee Valley. It was a manly sport which gave him great pleasure, just as would the physical development of one of his race horses. Had he lived in the early days of Greece, he would have won in the Olympian wrestling match. ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... York society, for a lady to address her parlour-maid as "my dear one," and send her out on an errand wrapped in her own opera-cloak; and Archer, through all his deeper feelings, tasted the pleasurable excitement of being in a world where action followed on emotion with such Olympian speed. ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... O whither fleets to-day thy wayward flight? Hast thou forgotten that I here attend, From the full noon until this sad twilight? A hundred times, at least, from the clear spring, Since the full noon o'er hill and valley glowed, I've filled the vase which our Olympian king Upon my care for thy sole use bestowed; That at the moment when thou should'st descend, A pure refreshment might ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller
... Golden Grouse came there, And the Pobble who has no toes, And the small Olympian bear, And the Dong with a luminous nose. And the Blue Baboon who played the flute, And the Orient Calf from the Land of Tute, And the Attery Squash, and the Bisky Bat,— All came and built on the lovely Hat Of ...
— Required Poems for Reading and Memorizing - Third and Fourth Grades, Prescribed by State Courses of Study • Anonymous
... writings a large amount of glory and reputation. Shrinking from the fatigue involved in the labour of visiting successively one after another the chief cities of the Athenians, the Corinthians, and the Lacedaemonians, he ingeniously hit upon the notion of appearing in person at the Olympian Games, and of there addressing himself simultaneously to the very pick and flower of the whole Greek population. Providing himself beforehand with the choicest portions or select passages from his great narrative, ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... retort, "It's the only word that expresses it! You know as well as I do that she cared no more for Ephraim Smith than for the first man she might have solicited on the street—nor so much! God! It makes me sick to look at her and think of the price she paid for her present damn Olympian serenity." ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... had merely hinted at Olympian desire, whereat some rich Antiochenes, long privileged, had been ejected with scant ceremony from a small marble pavilion on an islet, formed by a branch of the River Ladon that had been guided twenty years ago by Hadrian's engineers in curves of exquisitely studied ...
— Caesar Dies • Talbot Mundy
... I? And am I two? Do I still exist? I am no longer conscious of being. All about me is the infinite: I have the soul of a statue, with large tranquil eyes, filled with Olympian peace...." ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... thinking, he puts the standard, once for all, inside every man instead of outside him; when he is told, such a thing must be so, there is immense authority and custom in favor of its being so, it has been held to be so for a thousand years, he answers with Olympian politeness, "But is it so? is it so to me?" Nothing could be more really subversive of the foundations on which the old European order rested; and it may be remarked that no persons are so radically detached from this order, no persons so thoroughly modern, ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... needs to-day is a new Empedocles! Would you not like me to show you the way to his statue, Excellence? I will be your guide among the ruins here. I will show you the temple of Castor and Pollux, the temple of the Olympian Jupiter, the temple of the Lucinian Juno, the antique well, the tomb of Theron, and the Gate of Gold! All the professional guides are asses; but we—we shall make excavations, if you are willing—and we shall ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... worship of the Tyrian Baal, who is also called Melkart (king of the city), and is often identified with the Greek Heracles, but sometimes with the Olympian Zeus, we have many accounts in ancient writers, from Herodotus downwards. He had a magnificent temple in insular Tyre, founded by Hiram, to which gifts streamed from all countries, especially at the great feasts. The solar character ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... is not a bad woman. Let people overburdened with credulity believe that she is bad," cried Doederlein, with the expression and in the tone and gesture of the royal Lear, and shook his Olympian locks. "The fact is that violence has been practised on her; she has been driven into ruin! Men have stolen the sweet love of my dearly beloved daughter through the use of vile tricks and artifices. Where is she, the unfortunate, betrayed child? With what is she ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... they are at their ripest. Then, with baskets, we sally out; I taking the middle rank, and the children the outer spray of boughs. Even now we gather those only which drop at the touch; these, in a brimming saucer, with golden Alderney cream and a soupcon of powdered sugar, are Olympian nectar; they melt before the tongue can measure their full soundness, and seem to be mere ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... I saw the poor facade being pick-axed, I did not 'give' it more than a fortnight. I had no feeling but of hopeless awe and pity. The workmen on the coping seemed to me ministers of inexorable Olympus, executing an Olympian decree. And the building seemed to me a live victim, a scapegoat suffering sullenly for sins it had not committed. To me it seemed to be flinching under every rhythmic blow of those well-wielded weapons, praying for the hour when sunset should bring it surcease from that ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... V-shaped valley, are nothing very remarkable or unusual. Then suddenly you are on the threshold of this hall of the elder gods. Demons and furies might lurk in the valley below, but here is the abode of the serene, beneficent Olympian deities. All is so calm, so hushed, so friendly, yet so towering, so stupendous, so unspeakably beautiful. You are in a mansion carved out of the granite foundations of the earth, with walls two or three thousand feet ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... interest to the anthropologist and to the psychologist; but they have the disadvantage of fixing our attention too exclusively on what, to the ordinary Greek, appeared accidental or even morbid, and of making us regard the Olympian pantheon, with its clearly realised figures of the gods, as a mere system imposed more or less from outside upon the old rites and beliefs of the people. In the province of art, at least, the Olympian gods are paramount; and thus we are ...
— Religion and Art in Ancient Greece • Ernest Arthur Gardner
... two men came together in a friendly intimacy. At the same time there was nothing like ill-will on Goethe's part. He recognized Schiller's talent, praised 'The Gods of Greece' and was half pleased with the review of 'Egmont', which might well have nettled a less Olympian temper. In the fall of 1788 'The Defection of the Netherlands' was published and favorably received. About the same time a vacancy occurred in the Jena faculty, and Schiller's friends proposed him for the position. Goethe took the matter up with the various governments ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... school of hope deferred. When I was—what I was, I still believed that this dingy carcass swaddled a Roman spirit. In the pomp of my pallet I dreamed Olympian dreams. And the dreams have ...
— If I Were King • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... English plant life and ignore the Caribbean flora! School children in Ceylon are compelled to study a long and unfamiliar list of errors in English speech current only in the London streets, in order to identify and correct them on the Oxford papers, distributed with Olympian impartiality to all parts of the Empire. Such insularity of mind seems to justify Bernard Shaw's description of Britain as an island whose natives regard its manners and customs as laws of nature. ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... in luck should study the career of Robert Lansing. Mr. Lansing probably thinks that the goddess of chance played him a scurvy trick, after having admitted him to the Olympian heights, to break him as suddenly ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... physician. The Arabs encouraged translations from the Greek philosophers, but not from the Greek poets. They turned in disgust 'from the lewdness of our classical mythology, and denounced as an unpardonable blasphemy all connection between the impure Olympian Jove and the Most High God.' Draper traces still farther than Whewell the Arab elements in our scientific terms. He gives examples of what Arabian men of science accomplished, dwelling particularly on ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... not much inquired; the rather, I think, because they are supposed to be obtained, either by an aptness of nature, which cannot be taught, or only by continual custom, which is soon prescribed which though it be not true, yet I forbear to note any deficiences; for the Olympian games are down long since, and the mediocrity of these things is for use; as for the excellency of them it serveth for the most part but ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... 3, 1876, at Olympian Springs, Bath County, Kentucky, flakes of a substance that looked like beef fell from the sky—"from a clear sky." We'd like to emphasize that it was said that nothing but this falling substance was visible ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... reconstruction of the Capitolium, for which purpose he caused some columns of the temple of the Olympian Jupiter to be removed from Athens to Rome. Sulla's work was continued by Lutatius Catulus, and finished by Julius Caesar in 46 B. C. A second restoration took place in the year 9 B. C. under Augustus, a third A. D. 74 under ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani
... that were really touching, the huge man threw himself on the ground at her feet. She was very happy to have him there, so dearly near, but she was just a little shy. She looked upon him as an all-powerful being, extraordinary, raising him, in her simplicity, to the greatness of an Olympian commanding the thunder and lightning. She spoke to him, asking about his friends, his business, but not daring to put the question she had asked de Gery: "Why haven't my grandchildren come?" But he spoke of them ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... horses, and, by a short cross-cut, arrive there before you, discover the intended elopement of the bride, and carry off you and her as criminals. You will of course offer to fight every one of them, until all, the bride included, will burst out into Olympian laughter, and you stand stunned and bewildered. But, pray, show me how to insert the germ properly ...
— Dr. Dumany's Wife • Mr Jkai
... Committee on Music, and Refreshments, and Olympian Games, and all that sort of thing?' interrupted Polly, who had not the slightest conception of parliamentary etiquette; 'and why don't you hurry up and put ...
— A Summer in a Canyon: A California Story • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... kingdom, Anatole France is surely the reigning king. From the Olympian disenchantment of his tolerant urbanity, all eruptive seriousness foams back spray-tossed and scattered. And yet such a master of the art of "suspended judgment" was he, that he permits himself to dally very pleasantly with the most passionate illusions of the human race. He is too deep a sceptic ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... of clouds, like drifted snow Suffused with a faint Alpine glow, Was heaped together, vast and high, On which a shattered rainbow hung, Not rising like the ruined arch Of some aerial aqueduct, But like a roseate garland plucked From an Olympian god, and flung Aside in his ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... greatest of the religious festivals among the Greeks. It was held at Olympia every four years in honor of Zeus (Olympian Jove), and was celebrated by games and contests lasting several weeks. All Greece sent delegations to attend and ...
— The Two Great Retreats of History • George Grote
... fierce Monarch drops his vengeful ire; Perch'd on the sceptre of the Olympian King, The thrilling darts of harmony he feels, And indolently hangs his rapid wing, While gentle sleep his closing eye-lids seals; And o'er his heaving limbs, in loose array To every balmy gale the ruffling ...
— An Essay on the Lyric Poetry of the Ancients • John Ogilvie
... Nearly a hundred years after Rossbach Frederick had the strange good fortune to captivate the wayward genius of Carlyle. It is difficult to understand how Carlyle, who all through life hesitated between the Christian Puritanism of John Knox and the Olympian paganism of Goethe, could have been fascinated by the Potsdam cynic. We can only seek for an explanation in the deeply rooted anti-French and pro-German prejudices of Carlyle. Frederick was the arch-enemy of France, and that ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... occasionally turned her head to see if she could get a glimpse of the Olympian creature who as the coachman had truly observed, hardly ever descended from her clouds into the Tempe of the parishioners. But she could discern nothing of the lady. She also looked for Miss Melbury and Winterborne. ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... congratulations, and have to smile" in a ghastly manner. "The King and Queen despise me. I put myself in their way last Levee, bowing to the ground; but they did not even condescend to look." 'Notre grand petit-maitre,' little George, the Olympian Jove of these parts, "passed on as if I had not been there." 'Chesterfield, they say, is to go, in great pomp, as Ambassador Extraordinary, and fetch the Princess over. And—Alas, in short, Once I was hap-hap-happy, but now ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... us all together to our troops, And give them leave to fly that will not stay, And call them pillars that will stand to us; And if we thrive, promise them such rewards As victors wear at the Olympian games. This may plant courage in their quailing breasts, For yet is hope of life and victory.— Forslow no longer; ...
— King Henry VI, Third Part • William Shakespeare [Rolfe edition]
... entertainment shall be worthy of the occasion. The world will not see the grand epoch of my majority twice. I think I shall have a lofty throne for you, Godmamma, or rather two, one on the lawn and another in the ballroom, that you may sit and look down upon us like an Olympian goddess." ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... When the Olympian Games were held in Sweden, and all the champion athletes of the world took part, it was the ambition of each to win one event, or even to run one-two-three in it. There were five events in the Pentathlon and ten in the Decathlon. Jim ...
— Injun and Whitey to the Rescue • William S. Hart
... it appears to one at least of those unfortunate "outsiders" for whose judgment or whose "meddling" Mr. Whistler has so imperial and Olympian a contempt.... ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... fishing was really incidental. To be sure it was exciting, and they had an excellent catch, but Bettina's hat was off and Justin could see her hair. And Justin, standing up in the bow of the boat with his line outflung, was, in Bettina's eyes, more than ever like a young Olympian god. ...
— Glory of Youth • Temple Bailey
... tints. Beneath these colours lurked the unconquerable chalk, and wherever the soil was poor it emerged. The grassy track, so gay with scabious and bedstraw, was snow-white at the bottom of its ruts. A dazzling amphitheatre gleamed in the flank of a distant hill, cut for some Olympian audience. And here and there, whatever the surface crop, the earth broke into little embankments, little ditches, little mounds: there had been no lack of drama ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... bees of violent progress. Was it a thicket? Was it a bacchanalia? Was it a fortress? Vertigo seemed to have constructed it with blows of its wings. There was something of the cess-pool in that redoubt and something Olympian in that confusion. One there beheld in a pell-mell full of despair, the rafters of roofs, bits of garret windows with their figured paper, window sashes with their glass planted there in the ruins awaiting the cannon, ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... Otus and Ephialtes, in ancient Greek legend, the twin-sons of Poseidon by Iphimedeia, wife of Aloeus. They were celebrated for their extraordinary stature and strength. According to Homer (Od. xi. 305). they made war upon the Olympian gods and endeavoured to pile Pelion upon Ossa in order to storm heaven itself; had they reached the age of manhood, their attempt would have been successful, but Apollo destroyed them before their beards began to grow. In the Iliad (v. 365) Ares is imprisoned ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... paced along the wall, wrapped in their dark cloaks; and over all the scene, one snowtopped peak rose white on the horizon, like some classic virgin assisting at an Olympian solemnity. ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... first principles of Being and Thought, whether the air of Anaximenes, or the fire of Herakleitos, or the Nous or Mind of Anaxagoras, was readily identified with Zeus and the other divine persons of Olympian mythology. Metrodoros, the contemporary of Anaxagoras, went even farther. While Anaxagoras would have been satisfied with looking upon Zeus as but another name of his Nous, the highest intellect, the mover, the disposer, the governor of all things, Metrodoros resolved ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller
... footman,—Madam Waldoborough's footman, O heaven! I was thrown into great trepidation by the stupendous event, and eagerly inquired if Madam herself was in her carriage, and was immensely relieved to learn she was not; for, unspeakably gratifying as such condescension, such an Olympian compliment, would have been under other circumstances, I should have felt it more than offset by the mortification of knowing that she knew, that her own eyes had beheld, the very humble quarter in which a lack of means had ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... the Pastor fido, and attained its height in the following century in Marino's epic of Adone. We find it infusing the scene of Mirtillo's first meeting with Amarilli, which may be said to set the tone of the rest of the poem. Happening to see the nymph at the Olympian games, Mirtillo at once fell in love and contrived to introduce himself in female attire into the company of maidens to which she belonged. Here, the proposal being made to hold a kissing match among themselves, Amarilli was unanimously chosen judge, and, ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... much as stimulates the eye to the finest delicacies of colour and form. These friendships, often the caprices of a moment, make Winckelmann's letters, with their troubled colouring, an instructive but bizarre addition to the History of Art, that shrine of grave and mellow light around the mute Olympian family. The impression which Winckelmann's literary life conveyed to those about him was that of excitement, intuition, inspiration, rather than the contemplative evolution of general principles. The quick, susceptible ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... invasions, had never failed to destroy the temples and insult the fanes of the bestial gods. The impunity with which these sacrileges had been perpetrated had made a profound impression, and did no little to undermine Hellenic faith. But now the worshiper of the vile Olympian divinities, whose obscene lives must have been shocking to every pious man, was brought in contact with a grand, a solemn, a consistent religious system having its foundation on a philosophical basis. Persia, as is ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... holy detachment. He simply did not see it. He would lean back in his chair at a comfortable angle, and conduct from the score on his desk. But he never smiled at a joke, he never beamed upon a clever turn, he never even exchanged glances with the stars. He was Olympian. I think he must have met Irving as a young man, and have modelled himself on his idiosyncrasies. Certainly every pose that ever a musician or actor practised was doubled in him. I believe he must have posed in ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... highly remarkable that the only comic scenes in the first and greatest of epics are those in which the gods are the chief actors—as when the lame Hephaestus takes upon him the office of cupbearer at the Olympian banquet, or when Artemis gets her ears boxed by the angry Hera. It would almost seem as if there were a vein of deliberate satire running through these descriptions, so daring is the treatment of ...
— Stories from the Odyssey • H. L. Havell
... spirit elect and consecrate By love and reverence of the Olympian sire Whom I too loved and worshipped, seeing so great, And found so gracious toward my long desire To bid that love in song before his gate Sound, and my lute be loyal to his lyre, To none save one it now may dedicate Song's new burnt-offering on a century's pyre. And though ...
— Studies in Song • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... sordid commonplace life closes in around it, and the burned-out case, falling back to earth, lies useless and uncared for, slowly smoldering into ashes. Once, breaking loose from our prison bonds, we dare, as mighty old Prometheus dared, to scale the Olympian mount and snatch from Phoebus' chariot the fire of the gods. Happy those who, hastening down again ere it dies out, can kindle their earthly altars at its flame. Love is too pure a light to burn long ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... the merely speculative powers of man,—the fulfilment of which mission justly entitled him to all the privileges incident to the vantage-ground thus gained,—privileges widely significant in a survey of that field where chiefly these practical powers hold their Olympian supremacy, the field of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... Urania, by that name If rightly thou art called, whose voice divine Following, above th' Olympian hill I soar. Above the flight of Pegasean wing. The meaning, not the name, I call; for thou Nor of the Muses nine, nor on the top Of old Olympus dwell'st, but heavenly born: Before the hills appeared, or fountain flowed, Thou with eternal Wisdom didst converse, Wisdom thy sister, ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... who came in was, in his way, a force almost as great and as worthy of regard as Mr. Sebastian Early himself—in fact no less a personage than the power behind the throne of that uncrowned king, William Barry. Though he did not sit on Olympian heights and play with the thunderbolts of jobs and contracts, as Barry did, yet he had an occasional way of interfering in the game, just as in Greek legend Fate loomed large behind ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... work, and one which raised the fame of Phidias to the highest point, was the statue of the Olympian Zeus, made for the Eleans. In this statue, Phidias essayed to embody the Homeric ideal of the supreme divinity of the people of Greece sitting on his throne as a monarch, and in an attitude of majestic repose. The ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... in emulation of Hercules, being ambitious that as the Greeks, by that hero's appointment, celebrated the Olympian games to the honor of Jupiter, so, by his institution, they should celebrate the Isthmian to the honor of Neptune. At the same time he made an agreement with the Corinthians, that they should allow those that came from Athens to the ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... called these two, and regarded even her father as somewhat outside that special pale; esteemed Grannie as an Olympian, benevolently inclined, but dwelling on a remote and loftier plane; and feared and detested Tom as ...
— A Maid of the Silver Sea • John Oxenham
... the floor at her feet, with cajoling words and gestures really touching to behold. She was very happy too to have him by her side, but she was a little embarrassed none the less, looking upon him as an all-powerful, strange being, exalting him in her artless innocence to the level of an Olympian encompassed by thunder-bolts and lightning-flashes, possessing the gift of omnipotence. She talked to him, inquired if he was still satisfied with his friends, with the condition of his affairs, but did not dare to ask the question she had asked de Gery: "Why ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... our case, the conqueror did not assume a material form very remarkable for its dignity. Had Creation resolved itself into its original elements, had Chaos come again, or even old Coelus, the indignity might have been endured; but to be baffled by an Olympian juste milieu, and to find, after all the clamour, that nothing has been changed save the places, is, ...
— The Infernal Marriage • Benjamin Disraeli
... vs altogether to our Troopes, And giue them leaue to flye, that will not stay: And call them Pillars that will stand to vs: And if we thriue, promise them such rewards As Victors weare at the Olympian Games. This may plant courage in their quailing breasts, For yet is hope of Life and Victory: Foreslow no ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... to trip me up in my passage through their ranks; and surmounting all difficulties, found myself within three feet of the master's high desk, or pulpit, from which he looked down upon me like the Olympian Jupiter upon ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... increasing in gorgeousness every year, until true Pantomime will be overlaid with jewelled armour, crushed under velvet and gold, and be lying helpless under the weight of its own gorgeosity. We should question whether the Olympian BARNUM has done much good for himself, seeing how gigantic the expenses must be; and certainly he can't have done good to the theatres. As to Shows, "The more the merrier" does not hold good. "The fewer the better" is nearer the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 8, 1890 • Various
... shadows accurately inwards upon the wall. Thus it threw shadows of these obscure and homely figures every evening with as much care over each contour as if it had been the profile of a court beauty on a palace wall; copied them as diligently as it had copied Olympian shapes on marble facades long ago, or the outline of ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... canonization of the Condes, it has now become the fashion to denigrate them to an equal excess. The traditional figure of the Grand Conde, Olympian and sublime, has been exposed by pitiless documentary evidence. La Bruyere's latest and most learned editor, M. Emile Magne, gives a terrible picture of the Prince's meanness and dirtiness; Harpagon in an ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... the "bugs," however firmly pinned down, took their flight. Johnny's father and mother "moved"—that was the brief, unadorned, sufficing formula. It was all accepted as inevitable; hardly for a boy a little past twelve, like myself, to question the movements of Olympian elders; nor even, in fact, to feel an abiding interest in them when I had seen them but three or four times in all. I never speculated—never asked where they had come from; never considered the nature of their tenure (not wondering how much Johnny's father may have been ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... What he possesses is not only the most stupendous eloquence ever owned by man. It is profound knowledge of humanity, gathered by a keen and open-eyed Olympian contemplation of all sorts and conditions of men, from the egregious Bottom, and Dogberry the muddled, up to Hamlet and Imogen; it is the broad myriad-minded understanding which feels with every class, and, ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... called the mother of the child Is not its parent, but the nurse of seed Implanted in begetting. He that sows Is author of the shoot, which she, if Heaven Prevent not, keeps as in a garden-ground. In proof whereof, to show that fatherhood May be without the mother, I appeal To Pallas, daughter of Olympian Zeus, In present witness here. Behold a plant, Not moulded in the darkness of the womb, Yet nobler than ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... THE OLYMPIAN for September-February well sustains the lofty traditions of that magazine. Mr. Cole defines with considerable precision his latest editorial policy and his true attitude toward the United, revealing only the more strongly, however, his remarkable ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... commanding intellect and a great nature. We are vexed by pedantries that recall the precieuses of the Hotel Rambouillet, but we know that she had the soul of the most heroic women in history. We crave more of the Olympian serenity that makes action natural and repose refreshing, but we cannot miss the edification of a life marked by indefatigable labour after generous purposes, by an unsparing struggle for duty, and by steadfast and ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 3 of 3) - The Life of George Eliot • John Morley
... Shelley's mind to the end, and made him rebellious against everything bearing the paternal name. He assailed the Father of the Hebrew theocracy with amazing bitterness, and joined Prometheus in cursing and dethroning Zeus, the Olympian usurper. With him, tyrant and father were synonymous, and he has drawn the old Cenci, in the play of that name, with the same fierce, unfilial pencil, dipped in blood and wormwood. Shelley was by nature, self-instruction, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... paper, traced a few lines on it, and at once blotted them out.... He recalled Gemma's wonderful figure in the dark window, in the starlight, set all a-fluttering by the warm hurricane; he remembered her marble arms, like the arms of the Olympian goddesses, felt their living weight on his shoulders.... Then he took the rose she had thrown him, and it seemed to him that its half-withered petals exhaled a fragrance of her, more delicate than the ordinary scent ...
— The Torrents of Spring • Ivan Turgenev
... with the curiosities brought from those temples, together with the houses he lay at when he traveled all over Italy; whence he did not scruple to give a command that the statue of Jupiter Olympius, so called because he was honored at the Olympian games by the Greeks, which was the work of Phidias the Athenian, should be brought to Rome. Yet did not he compass his end, because the architects told Memmius Regulus, who was commanded to remove that statue of Jupiter, that the workmanship was such as would be spoiled, and would not bear the removal. ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... high and pure thy muse Enthroned doth sit amongst the stars and snows; And from thy harp olympian music flows, Of glacier heights and gleaming mountain dews. Of western sea and burning sunset hues. And we who look up—who on the plain repose, And catch faint glimpses of the mount that throws Athwart thy poet-sight diviner views. And not alone from starry shrine is strung Thy lyre, ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... American Scouts, planned to develop them mentally and physically, to make better citizens and wiser men and women, had its counterpart in the lives of the early Greeks, centered about their Olympian games. ...
— The Girl Scouts in Beechwood Forest • Margaret Vandercook
... not very unfortunate, monsieur," said Mousqueton, smiling. "Thursday, Olympian pleasures. Ah, monsieur, that is superb! We get together all monseigneur's young vassals, and we make them throw the disc, wrestle, and run races. Monseigneur can't run now, no more can I; but monseigneur throws the disc as nobody else can throw ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... healthily as did the cheeks of those who spied on him. On this question the Muse declines to take sides. For certain his naked body, after these ministrations, glowed delicious within the bath-gown as he mounted again to his Olympian chamber. There he allowed Manasseh to wash out his locks in fresh water (the Collector had a fine head of hair, of a waved brown, and detested a wig), to anoint them, and tie them behind with a fresh black ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... native American boys, organized in 1855, whose highest ambition, for many years, was to play the Philadelphia Club, "barring Tom Senior," then the only fast round-arm bowler in the country. Next came the Olympian, the Delphian, the Keystone Cricket Clubs, and a host of lesser lights, whose head-quarters were at West Philadelphia; and soon after the now famous Young America Cricket Club was formed by the lamented Walter S. Newhall, partly as a training-club for the Germantown. Well did it fulfill its purpose ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... happened in 425, while he himself preferred to connect it with an event of 453. The inscription on the pedestal is indecisive on this point. It runs in these terms: "The Messenians and Naupactians dedicated [this statue] to the Olympian Zeus, as a tithe [of the spoils] from their enemies. Paeonius of Mende made it; and he was victorious [over his competitors] in making the acroteria for the temple." The later of the two dates mentioned by Pausanias has been generally accepted, though ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... the teacher of which is the Logos himself. "It produces neither poets, nor philosophers, nor rhetoricians; but it makes mortals immortal and men gods, and leads them away upwards from the earth into super-Olympian regions." Through Christian knowledge the soul returns to its Creator: [Greek: dei gar apokatatathenai ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... quantities of gold in all directions. There was land of the finest quality to be had for next to nothing; work for all who were blessed with good bone and muscle; a constant demand for labour—skilled or unskilled—at high wages; a climate such as the Olympian gods might revel in, and—in short, if all England had heard the oration delivered by that man, and had believed it, the country would, in less than a month, have been depopulated of its younger men and women, and left to the tender mercies ...
— The Coxswain's Bride - also, Jack Frost and Sons; and, A Double Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... certain that Byron will inspire them with more love, both as man and poet—a love increased even by the fact of the great injustice hitherto shown to him. While Goethe held himself aloof from us, and from the height of his Olympian calm seemed to smile with disdain at our desires, our struggles, and our sufferings—Byron wandered through the world, sad, gloomy, and unquiet; wounded, and bearing the arrow in the wound. Solitary and unfortunate in his infancy; unfortunate in his first love, and still more ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... maid-servant brought in the trout, which proved to be piping hot and of a golden-brown; and the two men commenced a dinner which, as compared with the famous, or infamous one, of the London restaurant, was Olympian. The landlord himself brought in a bottle of claret, which actually was sound, and another of port, in a wicker cradle, which even Howard deigned to approve of; and the two men, after they had lingered over their dinner, got into easy-chairs ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... Rome had performed on them a cruel operation: they were enervated, bleached. Those great centralized deities became in their official life the mournful functionaries of the Roman Empire. But the decline of that Olympian aristocracy had in no wise drawn down the host of home-born gods, the mob of deities still keeping hold of the boundless country-sides, of the woods, the hills, the fountains; still intimately blended with the life of the country. These ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... So the Greeks began, under Prince Ipsilanti, who had served in the Russian army, to march into the provinces on the Danube; but they were not helped by the Russians, and were defeated by the Turks. Ipsilanti fled into Austria; but another leader, called George the Olympian, lived a wild, outlaw life for some years longer, but as he had no rank the Greeks were too proud to join him. At last he shut himself up in the old convent of Secka, and held it out against the Turks for thirty-six hours, until, finding that he could defend it no longer, ...
— Aunt Charlotte's Stories of Greek History • Charlotte M. Yonge
... listened, and hesitated: before her lay the dry, dusty road, the solitary journey by land and sea, the doubtful welcome at home. And here by her side stood the wealthy lover, the very embodiment of protecting power—is not every girl's first lover in her eyes as Olympian Jove?—eager to take upon himself the burden of her life, to make ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... breathed; "yes, why not? Man-making is almost equal to man-bearing. I have no son to spur up the Olympian heights; but what might I not do for Alymer, if... if ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... and on the other hand, Carmen had often been conscious of the fumes of a tobacco pipe penetrating her cloistered seclusion, and had seen across the passage, vaguely enveloped in the same nicotine cloud, an American Olympian, in a rocking chair, with his feet on the mantel shelf. They had once or twice met on the staircase, on which occasion Thatcher had greeted her with a word or two of respectful yet half-humorous courtesy,—a courtesy which ...
— The Story of a Mine • Bret Harte
... accordingly a flattering description of General Washington, compounded of Stuart's portrait and Greenough's statue of Olympian Jove with Washington's features, in the Capitol Square. Miss Dare listened with an expression of superiority not unmixed with patience, and then ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... he regarded as the Radical doctor's dupe, fell in for a share of his view of the doctor, and Mr. Romfrey became less fitted to observe Nevil Beauchamp's doings with the Olympian gravity ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... of Germany after fierce struggles within and without naturally deflected historical scholarship from the path marked out by Ranke, who had grown to manhood in the era of political stagnation following the downfall of Napoleon. The master's Olympian serenity was deplored by the group of hot-blooded scholars who are collectively known as the Prussian School, and who were firmly convinced that the principal duty of historians was to supply guidance and ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... overwhelmed with business for a week or two, and finally despatched to the country in time for the hunting season, which nowadays most of them were too much impoverished to enjoy. Lord CURZON condescended a little from his usual Olympian heights, and declared that one of the drawbacks to conducting business in that House was the difficulty of inducing noble Lords to attend it ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, June 30th, 1920 • Various
... character and the interest of the Egyptians,—in spite of all that tended to a fusion of Hellenism and Orientalism, it never came to a proper amalgamation. The contradiction between the free-thought philosophy of Greece, which was fast outgrowing its polytheism and Olympian worship, and the deeply rooted sacerdotal system of the Pharaonian institutions, was too great and too flagrant. Thus there never was an Egypto-Hellenic phase of thought. But there was another civilisation of great antiquity, possessing peculiar features, ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 10 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... De Launay or mademoiselle, the high gods must have laughed in irony as old Jim Banker raved and flung his hands toward their Olympian fastness. ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... the golden fleece. When the sweet music of Orpheus stilled the wild storm that arose on the sea and threatened to wreck the Argo, stars appeared upon the heads of Castor and Pollux, for their great love for each other was known to the Olympian gods who had ...
— Classic Myths • Retold by Mary Catherine Judd
... them thus, out of the midsummer noonday: so that those things might be felt as warm, and fresh, and blue, by the young and the old, the weak and the strong, who came to sun themselves in the god's presence, as procession and hymn rolled on, in the fragrant and tranquil courts of the great Olympian temple; while all the time those people consciously apprehended in the carved image of Zeus none but the ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... to the other is also still to be evaluated. Did it show a certain slackness, a certain aimlessness, at the bottom of his nature? Had it, in a way, some sort of analogy—to compare homespun with things Olympian—to the vein of frivolity in the great Caesar? One is tempted to think so. Surely, here was one of those natures which need circumstance to compel them to greatness and which are not foredoomed, Napoleon-like, to seize greatness. Without encroaching ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... and further from the charmed atmosphere of his Olympian girl his face grew sad with a new sort of sadness. A perception of the dilemma in which his love had placed him came back in full force. In spite of Eustacia's apparent willingness to wait through the period of an unpromising engagement, till he should be established in his new pursuit, he ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... One machine chased a train for miles a few hundred feet above, derailed it, and spat bullets at the lame coaches until driven off by enemy craft. Another made what was evidently an inspection of troops by some Boche Olympian look like the riotous disorder of a Futurist painting. A pilot with some bombs to spare spiralled down over a train, dropped the first bomb on the engine, and the second, third, fourth, and fifth on the soldiers who scurried from the carriages. When a detachment of cavalry really did break ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... externally conformists, hid joyous pagan souls under imperfect Christian draperies. Small blame it is therefore to Tegner that Schiller's poems furnished him with frequent suggestions and sometimes also with metres. Schiller had, in "The Gods of Greece," sung a glorious elegy on the Olympian age which stimulated his Swedish rival to write "The Asa Age," in which he regretted, though in a rather half-hearted way, the disappearance of Odin, Thor, and Freya. The poem, it must be admitted, falls much below Tegner at his ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... Bromfield started to cap the pose, as low persons always do in these boarding-houses, but Father changed the subject, in a slightly peppery manner. Father could be playful with Mother, but, like all men who are worth anything, he could be as Olympian as a king or a woman author or a box-office manager when he was afflicted by young men who chewed gum and were chatty. He put his gold-bowed eye-glasses on the end of his nose and looked over them so wealthily that the summerites ...
— The Innocents - A Story for Lovers • Sinclair Lewis
... by one day with one little pony in the shafts, and a second harnessed in some way at the side, so as to assist in pulling, but without bearing any share of the load. On this shutter eight men and boys balanced themselves; enough for the Olympian height of a four-in-hand. Eight fellows perched round the edge like shipwrecked mariners, clinging to one plank. They were so balanced as to weigh chiefly on the axle, yet in front of such a mountain of men, such a vast bundle of ragged clothes, the ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... It is also plain enough that with this diversity there had been antagonism. As sources illustrative of these propositions which lie at the base of all true comprehension of the religion—which may be called Olympian from its central seat—I will point to the numerous signs of a system of nature-worship as prevailing among the Pelasgian masses; to the alliance in the war between the nature-powers and the Trojans as against the loftier Hellenic mythology; to the legend in Iliad, i., 396-412, of the great ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... water during two yearly periods of twenty days. There is the woman who has found the nearest approach to nectar and ambrosia in the uncooked fruits and vegetables of the earth, which, properly pounded, are digested, and make of our sluggish bodies fit receptacles for Olympian wisdom. There are the people who have discovered the one cause of all disease. It may be uric acid or cell proliferation or hard water—there is always a complementary cure. I listened one day with much interest to an exposition of the evils of salt. Salted food, I was told, is ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... almost hath its peculiar walks, cloisters, terraces, groves, theatres, pageants, games, and several recreations; every country, some professed gymnics to exhilarate their minds, and exercise their bodies. The [3272]Greeks had their Olympian, Pythian, Isthmian, Nemean games, in honour of Neptune, Jupiter, Apollo; Athens hers: some for honour, garlands, crowns; for [3273]beauty, dancing, running, leaping, like our silver games. The [3274]Romans had their feasts, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... knew at Oxford as an undergraduate, and whom I watched and admired to the end of his life, was Matthew Arnold. He was beautiful as a young man, strong and manly, yet full of dreams and schemes. His Olympian manners began even at Oxford; there was no harm in them, they were natural, not put on. The very sound of his voice and the wave of his hand were Jovelike.... Sometimes at public dinners, when he saw himself surrounded by his contemporaries, most ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... unheard-of satisfaction of an inconceivable pride. If he had hated her he could not have flung that enormous fortune more brutally at her head. And his unrepentant death seemed to lift for a moment the curtain on something lofty and sinister like an Olympian's caprice. ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... been so brief that Roy had only just become aware that his cherished dream was actually trembling in the balance—when Nevil stood up and faced him, flatly defying Jane and Olympian irony. ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... been wasting his talents and his drachmas at the game of Palamedes, or else it may be that he is disappointed at not having won the prize at the Olympian games. He had great faith in ...
— King Candaules • Theophile Gautier
... village-greens of New England hamlets, and its pot-pourri of artistic ideas was rich in helmeted Minervas, vine-wreathed Bacchuses, winged Apollos and nameless classic nymphs, all staring downward from the spandrels of pointed arches with quite as much at-homeness as Olympian heroes would feel amid the mystic shades of the Scandinavian Walhalla. This room was magnificent with crimson upholstery, upon which rested a multitude of scarlet-embroidered cushions that seemed to the color-loving eye like a dream of plum-pudding after a nightmare of mince-pie. Through this ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... the least hint that condescension had been displayed. He is wholly unruffled, distant, objective. There is also a quiet tone of finality, almost the tone one might use in gently but firmly correcting a child. The Olympian impertinence of the Thoughts had struck out of Lincoln the first flash of that approaching masterfulness by means of which he was to ride out successfully such furious storms. Seward was too much the man of the ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... appeared, and when Amherst had been named to him, and had received his Olympian nod, Bessy anxiously ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... incarnadined by her pink doublet and hose, and reflected in upon her face. She only required a cloud to rest on instead of the green silk net which actually supported her reclining figure for the moment, to be quite Olympian; save indeed that in place of haughty effrontery there sat on her countenance only the healthful sprightliness ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... it would be better if he left in other hands the making of thunderbolts. Vulcan undertook the task. Soon his furnaces glowed with bolts of two kinds; one that hits its mark with a deadly unerring—and that is the sort which any of the Olympian gods will hurl; whilst the other sort was that which becomes scattered on its course and does damage only to the mountain tops, or perchance is even lost on the way. It is this kind of thunderbolt that Jupiter sends. His ...
— The Original Fables of La Fontaine - Rendered into English Prose by Fredk. Colin Tilney • Jean de la Fontaine
... un vieux rigaudon qui s'essaie dans le requiem. The truth is, that some idealists were disappointed to find Puvis to be a sane, healthy, solidly built man, a bon vivant in the best sense of the phrase, without a suggestion of the morbid, vapouring pontiff or haughty Olympian. Personally he was not in the least like his art, a crime that sentimental persons seldom forgive. A Burgundian—born at Lyons, December 14, 1824—he possessed all the characteristics of his race. Asceticism was the last quality ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... middle life will find him in that category. He has still some of the slimness of youth; but youthfulness is not the effect he aims at: his frock coat would befit a prime minister; and a certain high chested carriage of the shoulders, a lofty pose of the head, and the Olympian majesty with which a mane, or rather a huge wisp, of hazel colored hair is thrown back from an imposing brow, suggest Jupiter rather than Apollo. He is prodigiously fluent of speech, restless, excitable (mark the snorting nostril ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw |
