"Orpheus" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... mourn;— So, when by Bacchanalians torn, On Thracian Hebrus' side The tree-enchanter Orpheus fell, His head alone remained to tell The cruel death ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... Orpheus in hades, seemed to soothe all unpropitious powers with a sudden spell. The Fire began to slacken, the kettles began to lull, the meat began to cook, the irons began to cool, the clothes began to behave, the spirits began to rise, and the collar was finished ...
— A Modern Cinderella - or The Little Old Show and Other Stories • Louisa May Alcott
... romantic love in Greek literature, an editorial writer in the London Daily News exclaimed: "Why, it would be less wild to remark that the Greeks had nothing but love-stories." After referring to the stories of Orpheus and Eurydice, Meleager and Atalanta, Alcyone and Ceyx, Cephalus and ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... whose readiness to oblige him had been so miraculously evinced. She saved him the trouble of long cogitation, an exercise of intellect to which he was never too ardently inclined. There was a gentleman of the court, celebrated for his sedateness and solemnity; my aunt was piqued into emulating Orpheus, and, six weeks after her confinement, she put this rock into motion,—they eloped. Poor gentleman! it must have been a severe trial of patience to a man never known before to transgress the very slowest of all possible walks, to have had two events of the most rapid nature ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... shepherds piped and the stars sang, that was the day of musicians! But the triumph of Phoebus Apollo himself was not so wonderful as the triumph of a mortal man who lived on earth, though some say that he came of divine lineage. This was Orpheus, that best of harpers, who went with the Grecian heroes of the great ship Argo in search of the ...
— Old Greek Folk Stories Told Anew • Josephine Preston Peabody
... expressed—the following forecast{13} of the importance of the survival of the fittest. "With respect to extinction, we can easily see that a variety of the ostrich (Petise{14}), may not be well adapted, and thus perish out; or on the other hand, like Orpheus{15}, being favourable, many might be produced. This requires the principle that the permanent variations produced by confined breeding and changing circumstances are continued and produce according ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin
... persons were picked people of her own choice—brilliant persons in their various capacities, each bringing a store of wit or some accomplishment to swell the general gaiety. Artists, dilettanti noblemen, epicures, and persons who would have accompanied Orpheus in all his explorations for the ...
— The Old Countess; or, The Two Proposals • Ann S. Stephens
... I went to church I sang Orpheus' Hymn to my viall. After that to Mr. Gunning's, an excellent sermon upon charity. Then to my mother to dinner, where my wife and the maid were come. After dinner we three to Mr. Messum's where we met Mons. L'Impertinent, who got ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... with his flute would go, Piping a ditty sad for Bion's fate; And cross the unpermitted ferry's flow, And relax Pluto's brow, And make leap up with joy the beauteous head Of Proserpine, among whose crowned hair Are flowers first open'd on Sicilian air, And flute his friend, like Orpheus, ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... the various elements and powers of nature, Chaos, Eros, Uranus, Gaea, the Giants, Styx, Erebus, Hemera, AEther, &c, became, with the poets and philosophers after Homer, matters of speculation, of which the theogonies of Hesiod, Orpheus, Pherecydes, and ...
— A Comparative View of Religions • Johannes Henricus Scholten
... Pausanias, the Spartan commander;[53] or the [Greek: nekyomanteion], the oracle of the dead, by the River Acheron, in Threspotia, to which Periander, the famous tyrant of Corinth, had recourse;[54] and it was here, according to Pausanias, that Orpheus went down to the lower world in ...
— Greek and Roman Ghost Stories • Lacy Collison-Morley
... said to himself as he went, "of her foolish parents' receiving so little company that for the free exercise of her great talent she is driven to such as this! For song must have audience, however unfit! There was Orpheus with his! Genius was always eccentric! If he could but be her protection against that political father, that Puritan mother, and that idiotic brother of hers, and put an end to this sort of thing before it ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... rhythms or scales, or mingle instruments and human voices, or confuse the manners and strains of men and women, or of freemen and slaves, or of rational beings and brute animals. They do not practise the baser sorts of musical arts, such as the 'matured judgments,' of whom Orpheus speaks, would ridicule. But modern poets separate metre from music, and melody and rhythm from words, and use the instrument alone without the voice. The consequence is, that the meaning of the rhythm and of the time are not understood. ...
— Laws • Plato
... 375th on Virtue in Distress,] the 525th on Conjugal Love, and two or three other very fine ones among those which are not lettered at the end, will soon publish a noble Poem, Intitled An Ode to the Creator of the World, occasioned by the Fragments of Orpheus. ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... Good. I thank you. (He looks at them): Heavens! my cherished leaves! The poems of my friends! Torn, dismembered, to make bags for holding biscuits and cakes!. . .Ah, 'tis the old tale again. . .Orpheus and ...
— Cyrano de Bergerac • Edmond Rostand
... those who are true judges, and who are said to judge there, Minos and Rhadamanthus, AEacus and Triptolemus, and such others of the demi-gods as were just during their own life, would this be a sad removal? At what price would you not estimate a conference with Orpheus and Musaeus, Hesiod and Homer? I indeed should be willing to die often, if this be true. For to me the sojourn there would be admirable, when I should meet with Palamedes, and Ajax, son of Telamon, and any other of the ancients ...
— Apology, Crito, and Phaedo of Socrates • Plato
... on the windlass, he sat and sang; and from the ribald jests so common to sailors, the men slid into silence at every verse. Hushed, and more hushed they grew, till at last Harry sat among them like Orpheus among the charmed leopards and tigers. Harmless now the fangs with which they were wont to tear my zebra, and backward curled in velvet paws; and fixed their once glaring eyes in fascinated and fascinating brilliancy. Ay, still and hissingly all, for a time, they relinquished ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... amazement. The hands of the steersman held the wheel listlessly. Brandon's own soul was filled with the fullest effects. He stood watching her figure, with its inspired lineaments, and thought of the fabled prodigies of music spoken of in ancient story. He thought of Orpheus hushing all animated nature to calm by the magic of his song. At last all thoughts of his own left him, and nothing remained but that which the song of Beatrice swept over ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... pursue the bells of foam Wash'd, eddying, from this bank, their home. Those gipsies, so your thoughts I scan, Are less, the poet more, than man. They feel not, though they move and see; Deeper the poet feels; but he Breathes, when he will, immortal air, Where Orpheus and where Homer are. In the day's life, whose iron round Hems us all in, he is not bound; He leaves his kind, o'erleaps their pen, And flees the common life of men. He escapes thence, but we abide— Not deep ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... "Literary Chronicle." City men can make a budget popular or the reverse, and therefore the Mills Happertons of the day were welcome. Rising barristers might be wanted to become Solicitors-General. The pet Orpheus of the hour, the young tragic actor who was thought to have a real Hamlet within him, the old painter who was growing rich on his reputation, and the young painter who was still strong with hope, even the little trilling poet, though he trilled never so faintly, ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... acquaintance. My amusement was, to make some comparison between the two countries, which I knew would immediately bring on the conflict I desired; and not without danger, for I sometimes expected, in the ardour of their patriotism, to meet with the fate of Orpheus. ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... the shore, Let those adore The god Apollo, and his Nine, Parnassus' hill, And Orpheus' skill; But ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... cheered, death comforted; the house Of sorrow smiles to listen. Once again - O thou, Orpheus and Heracles, the bard And the ...
— Underwoods • Robert Louis Stevenson
... as make verses, do you not—you, whose music opened the gates even of Valmy? Indeed, I heard you just now. You are another Orpheus, and Valmy a very similar interior. You don't like me to say so? Very well, my lute is in your hand, and I am waiting. Did they teach you in Poitou ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... call the Mantuan swan, perhaps because he was not born in that city, he considered one of the most terrible pedants ever produced by antiquity. Des Esseintes was exasperated by his immaculate and bedizened shepherds, his Orpheus whom he compares to a weeping nightingale, his Aristaeus who simpers about bees, his Aeneas, that weak-willed, irresolute person who walks with wooden gestures through the length of the poem. Des Esseintes ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... hillside, where I will point ye out the right path of a virtuous and noble education; laborious indeed at the first ascent, but else so smooth, so green, so full of goodly prospect and melodious sounds on every side that the harp of Orpheus ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... not begun until July. The poems in it were written at various times. In the manuscript, Hafbur and Signy is dated February 4, 1870; Hildebrand and Hillilel, March 1, 1871; and Love's Reward, Kelmscott, April 21, 1871. Meeting in Winter is a song from The Story of Orpheus, an unpublished poem intended for The Earthly Paradise. The last poem in the book, Goldilocks and Goldilocks, was written on May 20, 1891, for the purpose of adding to the bulk of the volume, which was then being prepared. A few of the vellum covers were ...
— The Art and Craft of Printing • William Morris
... mind wrapp'd like his mantle, while her eyes Follow'd his steps, and her neck regal white Turn'd—syllabling thus, "Ah, Lycius bright, And will you leave me on the hills alone? Lycius, look back! and be some pity shown." He did; not with cold wonder fearingly, But Orpheus-like at an Eurydice; For so delicious were the words she sung, It seem'd he had lov'd them a whole summer long: 250 And soon his eyes had drunk her beauty up, Leaving no drop in the bewildering cup, And still the cup was full,—while he, ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... car and horses in the sky, The clouds on which they hold their way, Proclaim him all the God of Day. Nay, learned sir, his dirty plight More fit beseems the God of Night. Besides, I cannot well divine How mud like this can ever shine.— Then look at that a little higher.— I see 'tis Orpheus, by his lyre. The beasts that listening stand around, Do well declare the force of sound: But why the fiction thus reverse, And make the power of song a curse? The ancient Orpheus soften'd rocks, Yours changes living things to blocks.— Well, this ...
— The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems • Washington Allston
... 6. Orpheus, and other proper names ending in -eus, form the Vocative Singular in -eu (Orpheu, etc.). But in prose the other cases usually follow the second declension; as, ...
— New Latin Grammar • Charles E. Bennett
... round the angle of the palace, that its inscriptions are no longer legible, and great part of its figures are gone. Selvatico states them as follows: Solomon, the wise; Priscian, the grammarian; Aristotle, the logician; Tully, the orator; Pythagoras, the philosopher; Archimedes, the mechanic; Orpheus, the musician; Ptolemy, the astronomer. The fragments actually ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... 1827, came on, Hector tried again, and this time passed the preliminary test. The task set for the general competition was to write music for Orpheus torn by the Bacchantes. An incompetent pianist, whose duty it was to play over the compositions, for the judges, could seem to make nothing of Hector's score. The six judges, headed by Cherubini, the Director of the Conservatoire, voted against the aspirant, ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... northwards from Morocco and Algiers; and with our English nightingales, black-caps, willow-wrens, and whitethroats, are other songsters which never find their way to these isles, for which you must consult the pages of Mr. Gould or Mr. Bree—and chief among them the dark Orpheus, and the yellow Hippolais, surpassing the black-cap, and almost equalling the nightingale, for richness and variety of song—the polyglot warbler which penetrates, in summer, as far north as the shores of the British ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... torrent; but, alas! nearly a dozen innocent victims were splashed and spattered by the disastrous accident,—among them four or five bacchantes, who were furious at seeing their toilets injured, and would fain have made an Orpheus of the clumsy infant. While he was being rescued with great difficulty from their clutches by the German governess, a voice was heard amid the hubbub,—that of a pretty little blonde, saying to a small Scottish youth with whom she had danced the ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... order of battle in which the illustrious commander ranked his troops at Blenheim; but the ground covered is so extensive, and the trees now so luxuriant, that the spectator is not disagreeably conscious of their standing in military array, as if Orpheus had summoned them together by beat of drum. The effect must have been very formal a hundred and fifty years ago, but has ceased to be so,—although the trees, I presume, have kept their ranks with even more fidelity ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... bore Have died by Neptune's ruined shrines, And her hull is the drift of the deep sea floor, Though shaped of Pelion's tallest pines. You may seek her crew in every isle, Fair in the foam of Aegean seas, But out of their sleep no charm can wile Jason and Orpheus and Hercules. ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... (Orpheus returning from the lower world in a farce called "The Olympic Devils," which used to be played when ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... Torrens went on:—"It doesn't matter. If you had ever done so, I believe you would confirm my experience of the position. If Orpheus had whistled, instead of singing to a lute, Eurydice would have stopped with Pluto, and Orpheus would have cut a very poor figure. I began to perceive that Achilles wasn't going to respond, and I knew the hare wouldn't, all along. So I walked on and got to a wood of oaks with an interesting ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... instead of being rough and underground, would be smooth and heavenly. Most curious, he said, was the spectacle—sad and laughable and strange; for the choice of the souls was in most cases based on their experience of a previous life. There he saw the soul which had once been Orpheus choosing the life of a swan out of enmity to the race of women, hating to be born of a woman because they had been his murderers; he beheld also the soul of Thamyras choosing the life of a nightingale; birds, on ...
— The Republic • Plato
... goblin shank of hoary sage. Then pomp of gloom breaks into bloom, The Temple's arch cracks as we sigh, A clashing sound above that spoke Blind wrath unto each Wizard's rage, Revealed the chasm of stark Doom. Unto the peaks and gables black, Syrian airs like Orpheus Lull sequestered afrites to sleep, A witch smites her high biforous— A symbol of king Typhon's wrack! Where crystal lamps shine most glorious, Twin legions lie in cajons bleak,— Tokens of Hell invidious! ...
— Betelguese - A Trip Through Hell • Jean Louis de Esque
... the frenzy of thy grief For thy lost son, provoke to wrath the Lord Of Gods and men. Lo, even sons of Zeus, The Thunder-king, have perished, overborne By evil fate. Immortal though I be, Mine own son Orpheus died, whose magic song Drew all the forest-trees to follow him, And every craggy rock and river-stream, And blasts of winds shrill-piping stormy-breathed, And birds that dart through air on rushing wings. Yet I endured mine heavy sorrow: Gods Ought not with ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... of the most distinguished Grecian heroes came to Jason's aid, while Argus, the son of Phrixus, under the guidance of Athena, built the ship, inserting in the prow, for prophetic advice and furtherance, a piece of the famous talking oak of Dodona. Tiphys was the steersman, and Orpheus joined the crew to enliven the weariness of their sea-life with ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... Orpheus the So his, which Women slue, Thracian Poet. And it int' Hebrus threw, Caput, Hebre, Such sounds yet forth it sent, lyramque Excipis. The Bankes to weepe that drue, &c. Ouid. lib. 11. As downe the streame it went. 40 Metam. Mercury inuentor That by the Tortoyse shell, of the ...
— Minor Poems of Michael Drayton • Michael Drayton
... Little avails it Orpheus that his sire Was more than man; for though his songs restrain The wolves of Ismara, his love-lorn lyre Wails in the wildwood gloom ...
— The Elegies of Tibullus • Tibullus
... Crossways"; and "The Man on the Moor," though its origin is far from their origins, is also a reweaving. In certain of his writing of this time Sharp passes over virtually into criticism or comparative mythology, as in "Queens of Beauty" and "Orpheus and Oisin," and in many of the papers of "Where the Forest Murmurs." These all have interest; but some smell much of the lamp; and none of them are to be compared to the best of his "Seanchas," to "The Harping of Cravetheen," ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... Polynices, Tydeus, and Eteocles; Apollonius of Tyre; Alexander; Hero and Leander; Cadmus of Thebes; Jason and the sleepless Dragon; Hercules; Demophoon and Phyllis (a hard passage); Narcissus; Pluto and the wife of Orpheus ("Sir Orfeo"); David and Goliath; Samson and Dalila; Judas Maccabeus; Julius Caesar; the Round Table, and how the king had an answer for all who sought him; Gawain and Yvain ("of the lion that was companion of the knight whom Lunete rescued"[91]); of the British maiden ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... thee fan their wings— Behind, the maddened fir-tree springs, As when by Orpheus fired: The poles whirl round with swifter motion, When in the dance, like waves o'er Ocean, Thy ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... England believe that angels pipe to children who are about to die; and in Scandinavia, youths are said to have been enticed away by the songs of elf-maidens. In Greece, the sirens by their magic lay allured voyagers to destruction; and Orpheus caused the trees and dumb beasts to follow him. Here we reach the explanation. For Orpheus is the wind sighing through untold acres of pine forest. "The piper is no other than the wind, and the ancients ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... retirement in Palestine. The sentiments of Mammaea were adopted by her son Alexander, and the philosophic devotion of that emperor was marked by a singular but injudicious regard for the Christian religion. In his domestic chapel he placed the statues of Abraham, of Orpheus, of Apollonius, and of Christ, as an honor justly due to those respectable sages who had instructed mankind in the various modes of addressing their homage to the supreme and universal Deity. A purer faith, as well as worship, was openly professed ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... himself fainted.[100] This is declared to have happened no longer ago than the year 1869. The writer, apparently a pious Roman Catholic, who vouches for the fact, probably never heard the touching tale of Orpheus and Eurydice. ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... other's life, I trow, Would cordially delight them! As Orpheus' lyre the beasts, so now The bagpipe doth ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... dressed in blue serge with brown boots and a bowler hat, turned down the lane and advanced towards the double door of the Academy, which was surmounted by an allegorical group of plaster figures designed by Le Beau himself, and representing Orpheus teaching trees and animals to dance. The allusion was not complimentary to his pupils, for if Le Beau figured as Orpheus, what were the animals? However, the hot-tempered little man refused to change his allegory and the group remained. Jennings ...
— The Secret Passage • Fergus Hume
... Prior John of Cambridge in the vacancy of the abbot was in charge of the house. The prior was a man skilled in all the arts of his day. In sweetness of voice, in knowledge of sacred song, his eulogists pronounced him superior to Orpheus, to Nero, and to one yet more illustrious in the Bury cloister though obscure to us, the Breton Belgabred. John was "industrious and subtle," and subtlety and industry found their scope in suit after suit ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green
... of cameo portraits. Thomas Crawford (1814-57), one of the greatest if not the greatest sculptor of America, was of Scottish descent. His works include "Armed Liberty" (bronze doors), Beethoven, bust of John Quincy, Washington, "Orpheus," etc. Frederick William MacMonnies, born in Brooklyn in 1863 of Scottish parents (his father was a native of Whithorn, Wigtownshire), is sculptor of the statue of Nathan Hale in City Hall Park, New York; "Victory" at West Point, etc. Robert Ingersoll Aitken, born ...
— Scotland's Mark on America • George Fraser Black
... upon all the poems of the epic cycle as Homeric, did not feel an aesthetic but a material singularity when it pronounced the name "Homer." This period regards Homer as belonging to the ranks of artists like Orpheus, Eumolpus, Daedalus, and Olympus, the mythical discoverers of a new branch of art, to whom, therefore, all the later fruits which grew from the new ...
— Homer and Classical Philology • Friedrich Nietzsche
... of many graceful songs is Charles Fonteyn Manney, who was born in Brooklyn in 1872, and studied theory with William Arms Fisher in New York, and later with J. Wallace Goodrich at Boston. His most original song is "Orpheus with His Lute," which reproduces the quaint and fascinating gaucheries of the text with singular charm. He has also set various songs of Heine's to music, and a short cantata for Easter, ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... their power over sickness, they had visited the land of spirits. In the mythology of all countries there is sure to be a hero who has made the descent to Hades and returned to tell the tale, and the Kayans are no exceptions; they have their Orpheus, only his name ...
— Folk-lore in Borneo - A Sketch • William Henry Furness
... was a long, oblong sala with a banquette running all round it. Upon this the dancers seated themselves, drew out their husk cigarettes, chatted, and smoked, during the intervals of the dance. In one corner half a dozen sons of Orpheus twanged away upon harp, guitar, and bandolin; occasionally helping out the music with a shrill half-Indian chant. In another angle of the apartment, puros, and Taos whisky were dealt out to the thirsty mountaineers, who made the ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... into any form? Then if she should awake! But how to awake her? A kiss awoke the Sleeping Beauty! a kiss cannot reach her through the incrusting alabaster." I kneeled, however, and kissed the pale coffin; but she slept on. I bethought me of Orpheus, and the following stones—that trees should follow his music seemed nothing surprising now. Might not a song awake this form, that the glory of motion might for a time displace the loveliness of rest? Sweet sounds can go where kisses may not enter. I sat and thought. Now, although ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... unprincipled methods of their persecutors, they expanded the original writings of such historians as Hecataeus, who had spoken in a commendatory way of the Jews. They even went so far as to insert long passages into the writings of the famous Greek poets, such as Orpheus, Hesiod, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Menander, so as to transform them into ardent champions of the persecuted race. The culmination of this illegitimate form of defence was to insert in the famous Sibylline Books (III) a long passage describing the ...
— The Makers and Teachers of Judaism • Charles Foster Kent
... king that I was peculiarly impressed with the supreme genius of Schwanthaler. These chambers, eight in number, are painted in encaustic, with subjects from the Greek poets, of which Schwanthaler supplied the designs. The ante-chambers are devoted to Orpheus and Hesiod, and the ornaments are in the oldest Greek style; severely simple; archaic, but not rude; the figures of the friezes in outline, and without relief. The saloon of reception, on the contrary, is Homeric; and ...
— Sketches • Benjamin Disraeli
... few will recognise in this fragment an offshoot of the classical story of Orpheus and Eurydice. The ballad, however, cannot be said to be derived directly from the classical tale: rather it represents the debris of the mediaeval romance of Orfeo and Heurodis, where the kingdom ...
— Ballads of Mystery and Miracle and Fyttes of Mirth - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Second Series • Frank Sidgwick
... most part, see what he "likes" with them; and is, by divine law, answerable for his liking. And, even at this late hour of the day, it is still conceivable that such of them as would verily prefer to see, suppose, instead of a tramp with a harmonium, Orpheus with his lute, or Arion on his dolphin, pleased Proteus rising beside him from the sea,—might, standing on the "pleasant lea" of Margate or Brighton, have ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... consumed there. They address themselves, in the part of the song which Homer gives, not to the passions of Ulysses, but to his vanity, and the only man who ever came within hearing of them, and escaped untempted, was Orpheus, who silenced the vain imaginations by singing the praises of ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... knew sorrow well, but would not luxuriate in it; he took the beauty of the universe more seriously than himself. To him wickedness was a matter of imps and monsters rather than of villains, and of imps and monsters that could be exorcized by music. He was the Orpheus of the world who might tame the beast in all of us if we would listen to him, the wandering minstrel whom the world left to play out in the street. And yet his ultimate seriousness and the last secret of his beauty is ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... this Pagan fairyland is a genuine reality to these men. We feel this in nearly all the work of that sort—least, in the archaeological Mantegna's. We see it beginning in the mere single figures—the various drawings of Orpheus, "Orpheus le doux menestrier jouant de flutes et de musettes," as Villon called him, much about that time—piping or fiddling among little toy animals out of a Nuremberg box; the drawing of fauns ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... radiant figure passing swiftly through the streets, plain as the house from which it came, regal with royalty beyond that of kings; the ceaseless charity untold; the strong sustaining heart of private friendship; the eloquence which, like the song of Orpheus, will fade from living memory into a doubtful tale; that great scene of his youth in Faneuil Hall; the surrender of ambition; the mighty agitation and the mighty triumph with which his name is forever blended; the consecration of a life ...
— Phrases for Public Speakers and Paragraphs for Study • Compiled by Grenville Kleiser
... were used sixteen ells and a quarter of the same cloth, and it was fashioned on the top like unto a triumphant arch, most gallantly fastened with two enamelled clasps, in each of which was set a great emerald, as big as an orange; for, as says Orpheus, lib. de lapidibus, and Plinius, libro ultimo, it hath an erective virtue and comfortative of the natural member. The exiture, outjecting or outstanding, of his codpiece was of the length of a yard, jagged and pinked, and withal bagging, and strutting ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... passage, speaking of Poliziano's Orfeo, Symonds remarks that 'while Arcady became the local dreamland of the new ideal, Orpheus took the place of its hero.' Without inquiring too closely how far the writers of the renaissance actually connected the hero of music, as a power of civilization, with their newly discovered country, ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... floating in the air; to see it drawing towards it its allied atoms, and these arranging themselves as if they moved to music, and ended with rendering that music concrete." Thus do the Alpine winds, like Orpheus, build their walls ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... Uffizi: Lucretia. London. Cornelia and her Children. Paris. Venus and Cupid. Rome. Villa Borghese: Toilet of Minerva. Venice. Academy: The Marriage of Cana; Madonna in Glory; Vanity, Orpheus, and Eurydice; Rape of Proserpine; Virgin in Glory. Verona. Man and Woman playing Chess; Triumph of Bacchus. Vienna. Woman taken in Adultery; ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... no news yet of Pleyel? Or is your work to be at a dead stop, until the allies set our modern Orpheus at liberty from the savage thraldom of democrat discords? Alas the day! And woe is me! That auspicious period, pregnant with the happiness of millions. * * ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... almost impossible to take it without artillery. But there was nobody to resist. Mr. Akerman, the keeper, acted with great courage, and did his duty loyally, but he could not hold the place alone. Crowbars, pickaxes, and fire forced an entrance into the prison. "Not Orpheus himself," wrote Crabbe, "had more courage or better luck" than the desperate assailants of the prison. They broke into the blazing prison, they rescued their comrades, they set all the other prisoners free. Into the ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... 1820'. Another composition, in blank verse, curiously similar to Mary's own work, entitled Orpheus, has been allotted by Dr. Garnett (Relics of Shelley, 1862) to the same category. [Footnote: Dr. Garnett, in his prefatory note, states that Orpheus 'exists only in a transcript by Mrs. Shelley, who has written in playful allusion to her toils as amanuensis Aspetto fin che il diluvio cala, ed allora cerco di posare argine alle sue parole'. The poem is thus supposed to have been Shelley's attempt at improvisation, ...
— Proserpine and Midas • Mary Shelley
... the convenience of the people, loan offices were instituted for lending money at a moderate rate of interest. In religious matters Alexander preserved an open mind. In his private chapel he had busts of Orpheus, Abraham, Apollonius of Tyana and Jesus Christ. It is said that he was desirous of erecting a temple to the founder of Christianity, but was dissuaded by the pagan priests. There is no doubt that, had Alexander's many excellent qualities been supported by the energy ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... but being vain, stopped to put on white dresses, to outdo the others. When they finally appeared on the dancing-ground, the singer had already gone—and now, summer and winter, year in and year out, they keep their white dresses on, to be prepared, when Orpheus returns and the lute ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... is in the facility and elaboration, and may be measured in Space and Time; but the Ideal is ever the same and immeasurable. Homer is hard to read; but when once you have read him you have read all poetry. Or suppose that Orpheus, instead of striving with his mythic brother Cheiron, were to engage in a musical contest with Mozart, and you, reader? were to adjudge the prize. Undoubtedly you would give the palm to Mozart. Not that Mozart is the better musician; the difficulty is all in your ear, my friend. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... most conclusively that Orpheus, Homer, and Hesiod,[160] who are usually designated "the theologians" of Greece, but who were in fact the depravers and corrupters of pagan theology, do not teach the existence of a multitude of unmade, self-existent, ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... gaiety of nations. In this country, at least, however it may have been in the States, Josh Billings was by no means the favourite or leading American humorist. If phonetic spelling were universal, much of his fun would disappear. His place was nearer that of Orpheus C. Kerr than of Artemus Ward, or of Mark Twain. It has long been the English habit to look for most of our broad fun across the Atlantic. Americans say we are not a funny people. A chivalrous and mediaeval French writer, not unfrequently quoted, once made ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... exchange of salutations and the episcopal benediction the suffragan began with a voice so mild that I never heard a sweeter, so that if head and heart had only been in unison, Orpheus and Apollo would have been obliged to yield to him in grace, and Demosthenes and the Gracchi in eloquence. In vain would I attempt to communicate to you the discourse entire. It was confused and much too long. Meanwhile I had noted down the chief points in my tablets. ...
— The Life and Times of Ulric Zwingli • Johann Hottinger
... frightened they did not move nor growl for fear of disturbing their master, but kept quite still, glaring at the soldiers with big yellow eyes. The men were so astonished at the sight that they stole away without capturing an animal or saying a word to Saint Blaise, for they thought he must be Orpheus or some heathen god who charmed wild beasts. They went to the Governor and told him what they had ...
— The Book of Saints and Friendly Beasts • Abbie Farwell Brown
... disciples of Protagoras is the most famous, and intends to make sophistry his profession. A train of listeners followed him; the greater part of them appeared to be foreigners, whom Protagoras had brought with him out of the various cities visited by him in his journeys, he, like Orpheus, attracting them his voice, and they following (Compare Rep.). I should mention also that there were some Athenians in the company. Nothing delighted me more than the precision of their movements: they never got into his way at all; but when he and those who were ...
— Protagoras • Plato
... it; and, for heaven's sake, ma fille sauvage, don't think I'm here to fight for the man! He is not Orpheus; and our modern education teaches us that it's we who are to be run ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... our life in the Hecht yielded nothing, in point of activity, to our life in the Hotel Baur. The excuse for all this, as I have said, was the society concert of the musical club of St. Gall. At the rehearsal, to my genuine delight, Liszt impressed two of his compositions, Orpheus and the Prelude, upon the orchestra with complete success, in spite of the limited resources at his command. The performance turned out to be a really fine one, and full of spirit. I was especially delighted ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... often we employ the same terms in the same way at the present time. We will give a few examples of a similar use of language outside of the Scriptures. That which threatens or produces death is sometimes, by a figure, identified with death. Orpheus, in the Argonautika, speaks of "a terrible serpent whose yawning jaw is full of death." So Paul says he was "in deaths oft." Ovid says, "The priests poured out a dog's hot life on the altar of Hecate at ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... He had, after many misgivings, consented to appear in "vaudeville." The financial inducement was large, and he soothed his artistic conscience with the argument that his music would tend to elevate the vaudeville rather than that the vaudeville would tend to degrade him. It was at the Orpheus Theatre in San Francisco, and it was his first appearance. He played one or two selections, and being tremendously applauded, and correspondingly gratified, he returned and answered the encore with the well-known ...
— Famous Violinists of To-day and Yesterday • Henry C. Lahee
... of the eighteenth century—especially of the Connecticut press—abound in advertisements of horses of the "true Narragansett breed," yet it is said that in the year 1800 but one full-blooded Narragansett Pacer was known to be living. In the War of 1812 the British man-of-war Orpheus cruised the waters of Narragansett Bay, and her captain endeavored through agents to obtain a Narragansett Pacer as a gift for his wife, but in vain—not a horse of the true ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... virgin-mother. When Confucius, the great Chinese philosopher, happened to hear, on a certain occasion, some divine music, he became so greatly enraptured that he could not take any food for three months. The music which produced the miraculous effect was that of Kouei, the Orpheus of the Chinese, whose performance on the king, a kind of harmonicon constructed of slabs of sonorous stone, would draw wild animals around him and make ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... taken from antiquity, rather in the framing than in the ground work, as in the titles "A Modern Sappho," "The New Sirens," "Stagyrus," and "In utrumque paratus." It is Homer and Epictetus and Sophocles who "prop his mind;" the immortal air which the poet breathes is "Where Orpheus and where Homer are;" and ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... centered around the offices of the Golden Era. In a letter that follows Clemens would seem to have scorned this publication, but he was a frequent contributor to it at one period. Joaquin Miller was of this band of literary pioneers; also Prentice Mulford, Charles Warren Stoddard, Fitzhugh Ludlow, and Orpheus C. Kerr. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the other hand, the tale of which the birth of the sun and the moon forms a part, namely, the visit of Izanagi to hades in search of Izanami, is an obvious reproduction of the Babylonian myth of Ishtar's journey to the underworld in search of Du'uzu, which formed the basis of the Grecian legend of Orpheus and Eurydice. Moreover, Izanami's objection to return, on the ground of having already eaten of the food of the underworld, is a feature of many ancient myths, among which may be mentioned the Indian story of Nachiketas, where the name Yama, the Indian god ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... said, was my second and last attempt. On returning baffled from the first, in which I had vainly essayed to repeat the miracle of Orpheus with the Brummagem patriot, I dined with the tradesman who had introduced me to him. After dinner he importuned me to smoke a pipe with him, and two or three other illuminati of the same rank. I objected, both ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... great fathers as regards chronology is especially reflected from the tables of Eusebius. In these, Moses, Joshua, and Bacchus,—Deborah, Orpheus, and the Amazons,—Abimelech, the Sphinx, and Oedipus, appear together as personages equally real, and their positions in chronology ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... is ridiculous of me, but I have heard the signals and the music more than once and wondered. I did not know"—he smiled the smile of the flaneur—"I did not know it was, let me say, Orpheus and Eurydice, Orpheus with his lyre restored from among the constellations, and forgetting something of its old wonder. Madame, I hope Orpheus will not en-rheum ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... sun is as potent as the glamour of the moon at Wellesley. High noon is magical on Tree Day, for then the mythic folk of ancient Greece, the hamadryads and Dian's nymphs, Venus and Orpheus and Narcissus, and all the rest, come out and dream a dance of old days on the great green billows of the lawn. To see veiled Cupid, like a living flame, come streaming down among the hillside trees, down, swift as fire, to the waiting Psyche, is never to forget. No wood near Athens ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse
... understanding; and a woman who is ugly enough to know that she is so, knows that she has nothing left for it but her understanding, which is consequently and probably (in more senses than one) her weak side. But these are secrets which you must keep inviolably, if you would not, like Orpheus, be torn to pieces by the whole sex; on the contrary, a man who thinks of living in the great world, must be gallant, polite, and attentive to please the women. They have, from the weakness of men, more or less influence in all courts; they ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... An Orpheus! An Orpheus!—yes, Faith may grow bold, And take to herself all the wonders of old;— Near the stately Pantheon you'll meet with the same, In the street that from Oxford hath borrowed ...
— Poems In Two Volumes, Vol. 2 • William Wordsworth
... tasteless meats, and joyless wines, And luxury with sighs her slave resigns. Approach, ye minstrels, try the soothing strain, [bb]Diffuse the tuneful lenitives of pain: No sounds, alas! would touch th' impervious ear, Though dancing mountains witness'd Orpheus near; Nor lute nor lyre his feeble pow'rs attend, Nor sweeter musick of a virtuous friend; But everlasting dictates crowd his tongue, Perversely grave, or positively wrong. The still returning tale, ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... a second Orpheus, Spiegelberg, you have charmed to sleep that howling beast, conscience! Take me as I stand, I ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... strain: it seemed to be supplicating, imploring; it filled me with a restless pain. That cry of "Eurydice!" "Eurydice!" so beseeching, so passionate, so exhausted by longing, drew me with an irresistible power. Gluck certainly achieved the effect he attempted, and showed us what the fabled power of Orpheus was. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... making of a nation's ballads, and I will let you make its laws." This was, in our opinion, a speech of considerable boldness; and if Fletcher really made it, he must have had a high estimate of his own poetical powers. Why then, in the name of Orpheus, did he not set about it incontinently? We presume that there was nothing whatever to have prevented him from concocting as many ballads as he chose; or from engaging, as engines of popular promulgation, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... my early years our old Harvard Alma Mater sat still and lifeless as the colossi in the Egyptian desert. Then all at once, like the statue in Don Giovanni, she moved from her pedestal. The fall of that "stony foot" has effected a miracle like the harp that Orpheus played, like the teeth which Cadmus sowed. The plain where the moose and the bear were wandering while Shakespeare was writing Hamlet, where a few plain dormitories and other needed buildings were scattered about in my school-boy days, ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... to behold once and for one moment, Nature grown perfect and divine, the Ideal at last, I would give all that I possess.... Nay, Beauty divine, I would go to seek thee in the dim land of the dead; like Orpheus, I would go down into the Hades of Art to bring back the life of art from among the ...
— The Unknown Masterpiece - 1845 • Honore De Balzac
... of Philothea was too deeply engraven to be washed away by the waters of oblivion. He seldom speaks; but when he does, you are ever in his visions. The sound of a female voice accompanying the lyre is the only thing that makes him smile; and nothing moves him to tears save the farewell song of Orpheus to Eurydice. In his drawings there is more of majesty and beauty than Phidias or Myron ever conceived; and one figure is always there—the Pythia, the Muse, the Grace, or something combining all these, more spiritual ...
— Philothea - A Grecian Romance • Lydia Maria Child |
