"Parnassus" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... minor poet, he was modest and lovable. Perhaps his Oxford tutorship was sobering. At any rate his head remained unturned by his precocious fame, and to meet these other young men and women—his reverend seniors on the slopes of Parnassus—gave him more pleasure than the receipt of "royalties." Not that his publisher afforded him much opportunity of contrasting the two pleasures. The profits of the Muse went to provide this room of old furniture and roses, this beautiful garden a-twinkle with Japanese lanterns, like gorgeous ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... and dazzled with Homeric visions. He told his story well and with detail, combining the recollections of the scholar with the impressions of an artist. The pediment of the Parthenon, the oleanders of the Ilissus, the stream "that runs in rain-time," the naked peak of Parnassus, the green slopes of Helicon, the blue gulf of Argus, the pine forest beside Alpheus, where the ancients worshipped "Death the Gentle"—all of them passed in ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin
... would carry it. But though they made the greatest appearance in the field, and cried the loudest, the best of it is they are but a sort of French Huguenots, or Dutch boors, brought over in herds, but not naturalised: who have not lands of two pounds per annum in Parnassus, and therefore are not privileged to poll. Their authors are of the same level, fit to represent them on a mountebank's stage, or to be masters of the ceremonies in a bear-garden; yet these are they who have the ...
— Essays and Tales • Joseph Addison
... I sit astride Parnassus with my lyre, And pick with care the disobedient wire. That stupid shepherd lolling on his crook With deaf attention scarcely deigns to look. I bide my time, and it shall come at length, When, with a Titan's energy and strength, I'll grab ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... of Greece were particularly renowned for temples from which oracles were issued. The temple of Apollo at Delphi, situated upon a lofty rock near Parnassus, and that of Jupiter in the groves of Dodona, were celebrated for the responses of the Pythia and the priests; they were held in the greatest veneration for many ages, and their oracles were consulted even in the most enlightened times by philosophers themselves, who, in this ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 11, November, 1880 • Various
... the middle.—Ver. 168. Delphi, situated on a ridge of Parnassus, was styled the navel of the world, as it was supposed to be situate in the middle of the earth. The story was, that Jupiter, having let go two eagles, or pigeons, at the opposite extremities of the earth, with the view of ascertaining the central spot of it, ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... absorb'd, That memory cannot follow. Nathless all, That in my thoughts I of that sacred realm Could store, shall now be matter of my song. Benign Apollo! this last labour aid, And make me such a vessel of thy worth, As thy own laurel claims of me belov'd. Thus far hath one of steep Parnassus' brows Suffic'd me; henceforth there is need of both For my remaining enterprise Do thou Enter into my bosom, and there breathe So, as when Marsyas by thy hand was dragg'd Forth from his limbs unsheath'd. O power divine! If thou to me of shine impart so ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... ancients imagined, from Thrace, in the north, and went first to Jupiter upon Mount Olympus, who made them goddesses. Afterward they went southward, and spread over Greece, making their residence, at last, in a palace upon Mount Parnassus, which will be found upon the map just north of the Gulf of Corinth and west of Boeotia. They were worshiped all over Greece and Italy as the goddesses of music and dancing. In later times particular sciences and arts were assigned to them respectively, as history, astronomy, tragedy, ...
— Alexander the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... distinct ancestor had turned me over his knee and lambasted me to his heart's content. In spite of all this discipline, which one would have thought effective enough to take me out of the lists of Parnassus forever, it on the contrary served only to whet my thirst for writing, and from that time until now I have never gotten over my desire to chisel out sonnets, triolets, rondeaux and lyrics ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs
... creep, 70 How do your tuneful echoes languish, Mute, but to the voice of anguish! Where each old poetic mountain Inspiration breath'd around; Every shade and hallow'd fountain 75 Murmur'd deep a solemn sound: Till the sad Nine, in Greece's evil hour, Left their Parnassus for the Latian plains. Alike they scorn the pomp of tyrant Power, And coward Vice, that revels in her chains. 80 When Latium had her lofty spirit lost, They sought, O Albion! next ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray
... Parnassus be, And that my Muse, to some ears not unsweet, Tempers her words to trampling horses' feet More oft than to a chamber-melody,— Now blessed you bear onward blessd me To her, where I my heart, safe-left, shall meet; My Muse and I must you of duty greet With thanks and wishes, ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... Rigida. They are so remarkably smooth and glossy, that they at once distinguish their species. In shedding their seeds, they seem to expand very little.”[30] Mr. Lambert considers it to be the same species as the πεύκος, Pinus Picea of Greece, which grow on the high mountains, Olympus, Pindus, Parnassus, &c.; and quotes an extract from Dr. Sibthorp's papers, published in Walpole's Turkey, remarking that the πεύκος furnished a useful resin, used in Attica to preserve wine from becoming acid, and supplying tar and pitch for shipping. “The resinous parts of the wood,” he says, “are ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... Morris's Songs than in the writings of any other American poet.' Willis also tells us, as proof of the General's popularity with those shrewd dollar-loving men, the publishers, that 'he can, at any time, obtain fifty dollars for a song unread, when the whole remainder of the American Parnassus could not sell one to the same buyer for a single shilling!' He is the best-known poet of the country ...
— Poems • George P. Morris
... spring of Tilphusa, Copais lay bright in the moon, Helicon glass'd in the lake Its firs, and afar rose the peaks Of Parnassus, snowily clear; Thebes was behind him in flames, And the clang of arms in his ear, When his awe-struck captors led The Theban seer to the spring. Tiresias drank and died. Nor did reviving Thebes See such a ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... and 1635, and in 1636 Charles I and his Queen visited Oxford and were entertained in the newly-finished college. Much bad verse was written on this event, two lines of which as a specimen may be quoted from the quaintly-named poem, "Parnassus Biceps": ...
— The Charm of Oxford • J. Wells
... were near to see the patronising manner in which Arthurine introduced her to Mr. Foxholm, a heavily-bearded man, whose eyes she did not at all like, and who began by telling her that he felt as if he had crossed the Rubicon, and entering an Arcadia, had found a Parnassus. ...
— More Bywords • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of whose life, beyond the facts of its obscurity and seeming misery, little or nothing is known. He left several manuscript plays, of which the present at least, dated 1603[321] at 'Wolves Hill, my Parnassus,' possesses neither interest nor merit. It is an amateurish performance, partly in prose, partly in verse, either blank or rimed in couplets. Where the author adopts verse as a vehicle, his language becomes crabbed and ungrammatical ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... pleased to learn that the man in the moon is a poet. Possibly some uninspired groveller, who has never climbed Parnassus, nor drunk of the Castalian spring, may murmur that this is very likely, for that all poetry is "moonstruck madness." Alas if such an antediluvian barbarian be permitted to "revisit thus the glimpses of the moon, making night hideous" as he mutters his horrid blasphemy! ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... the welcome hint that you might come to America, it shall be to me a joyful hope. Come and found a new Academy that shall be church and school and Parnassus, as a true Poet's house should be. I dare not say that wit has better chance here than in England of winning world-wages, but it can always live, and it can scarce find competition. Indeed, indeed, you shall have the continent ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... gentle Reader, the Birth of a few Evenings, which, tho' it be the Offspring of the Night, is not the Abortive of Darkness, but will make it self known to be the Son of Apollo, with a certain Ray of Parnassus.' ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... vibrated with tender feeling,—his handsome features were softened into finer beauty by the passion which invigorated him, and his father looking at him, thought for a moment that so might the young gods of the fabled Parnassus have appeared in the height of their symbolic power and charm. His own eyes grew melancholy, as he studied this vigorous incarnation of ardent love and passionate resolve; and a slight sigh ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... scene of some of his 'Table Talk' is laid there, when he in his priestly capacity gives a dinner party in honour of the victor in the poetic contest at the Pythian games. Probably this office was a source of considerable income, and as the journey from Chaeronea to Delphi, across Mount Parnassus, is a very short one, it interfered but little with his literary and municipal business. In his essay on "Whether an old man should continue to take part in public life," he says, "You know, Euphanes, that I have for many Pythiads (that is, periods of four ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... shall SHAKSPEARE crave The Sculptor's skill, the pageant of the grave? HE needs it not—but Gratitude demands This votive offering at his Country's hands. Haply, e'er now, from blissful bowers on high, From some Parnassus of the empyreal sky, Pleased, o'er this dome the gentle Spirit bends, Accepts the gift, and hails us as his friends— Yet smiles, perchance, to think when envious Time O'er Bust and Urn shall bid his ivies climb, When Palaces and Pyramids shall fall— HIS PAGE SHALL TRIUMPH—still ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... burnished knuckles, And you'll elicit scornful chuckles From Muse and from Mechanic! Selections from the terms of trade Would put, I'm very much afraid, Parnassus ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, May 13, 1893 • Various
... to [277][Greek: titthe], and [Greek: titthos], in Greek. They were so denominated from their resemblance to a woman's breast; and were particularly sacred to Orus and Osiris, the Deities of light, who by the Grecians were represented under the title of Apollo. Hence the summit of Parnassus was [278]named Tithorea, from Tith-Or: and hard by was a city, mentioned by Pausanias, of the same name; which was alike sacred to Orus and Apollo. The same author takes notice of a hill, near Epidaurus, called [279][Greek: ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume II. (of VI.) • Jacob Bryant
... Future;" "A Modern Music Lord," dealing with Tschaikowsky (the only personal and professional study of the kind in print); "Strauss and Nietzsche;" "The Greater Chopin," an inquiry into what Chopin was and was not, that has no superior; "A Liszt Etude;" "The Royal Road to Parnassus," a fluent survey of modern primitive works; and last, "A Note ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... dignified classic figure supposed to be the model of fine taste",[15] His word was law in the realm of criticism, and for many years he was known, not alone in France, but throughout a large portion of Europe, as "The Lawgiver of Parnassus". Prof. Dowden, referring to ...
— English Satires • Various
... looking out over the future—the drawing stood there as the quintessence, the embodiment, of a whole generation. So might the young Odysseus have looked when he left his mother on his first journey to hunt the boar with his kinsfolk on Mount Parnassus. And with such an air had hundreds of thousands of English boys gone out on a deadlier venture since the great war began, with a like intensity of will, a like ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the least overtures of accommodation. This quarrel first began, as I have heard it affirmed by an old dweller in the neighbourhood, about a small spot of ground, lying and being upon one of the two tops of the hill Parnassus; the highest and largest of which had, it seems, been time out of mind in quiet possession of certain tenants, called the Ancients; and the other was held by the Moderns. But these disliking their present station, sent certain ambassadors ...
— The Battle of the Books - and Other Short Pieces • Jonathan Swift
... case thou didst attempt to climb Parnassus hill: Take time five hundred thousand years and longer, if thou will, Trowest thou to touch the top thereof by standing still? Again work out thy heart, and spend thyself with toil: Take time withal, or else I dare assure thee ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Robert Dodsley
... altering the position of the windows and stairs, and by throwing open new doors and shutting up old ones. So some towns have been altered for the better, as my native place,[609] which did lie to the west and received the rays of the setting sun from Parnassus, was they say turned to the east by Chaeron. And Empedocles the naturalist is supposed to have driven away the pestilence from that district, by having closed up a mountain gorge that was prejudicial to health by admitting the south wind to the plains. Similarly, ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... for a few days, at heavy expense. He had even then impressed the King as a jester, but Frederick felt nevertheless an infinite respect for the talent of the man. Voltaire was to him the greatest poet of all times, the master of ceremonies of Parnassus, where the King himself was so anxious to play a part. Frederick's desire to have this man in his train became stronger and stronger. He regarded himself as his pupil; he wished to have all his verses approved by ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... the Steelyard placed its contribution to the celebration of Anne Boleyn's coronation in the painter's hands. And the result was, as Stow tells us, "a costly and marvellous cunning pageant by the merchants of the Stilyard, wherein was the Mount Parnassus, with the Fountaine of Helicon, which was of white marble; and four streams without pipe did rise an ell high and mette together in a little cup above the fountaine; which fountaine ran abundantly with ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... MOUNT, mount Parnassus, the seat of the nine Muses (l. 485), the patronesses of the arts and of learning. Sacred and profane literature are beautifully blended in the thoughts of ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... the advantages that you possess, the walls parted and through them cavalcaded the strumpet whose name is Fame. In circumstances equally inspiring Bunyan entertained that hussy. Verlaine too. From a dungeon she lifted him to Parnassus, lifted him to the top. If I only had their luck—and yours! It is too good for you. You don't appreciate it. Besides you ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... end of it or its pretensions. It produces wits, scholars, novelists, musicians, artists in 'numbers numberless.' The name is alone a passport to the Temple of Fame. Those who bear it are free of Parnassus by birthright. The founder of it was himself an historian and a musician, but more of a courtier and man of the world than either. The secret of his success may perhaps be discovered in the following passage, where, in alluding to three ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... never think I have hit hard, unless it rebounds (ante, ii. 335), and, 'I would rather be attacked than unnoticed' (ante, iii. 375). When he was told of a caricature 'of the nine muses flogging him round Parnassus,' he said, 'Sir, I am very glad to hear this. I hope the day will never arrive when I shall neither be the object of calumny or ridicule, for then I shall be neglected and forgotten.' Croker's Boswell, p. 837. See ante, ii. 61, and pp. 174, 273. 'There was much laughter when ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... Drama! and the imitation is so beautiful, that the perception of the plagiarism rather increases than diminishes the pleasure with which we read either deathless work. Republican although he were, the great poet sits a throned king upon Parnassus, privileged to cull flowers where he listeth in right of ...
— Jesse Cliffe • Mary Russell Mitford
... identified with the will of the gods. But that time had passed. Pallas, the ethereal goddess of the Athenians, and the Sun god whose oracles, delivered from the temple between the twin summits of Parnassus, did so much for the Greek nationality, aided in keeping up a lofty ideal of religion; but when the enlightened men of Greece learnt to apply their keen faculty of reasoning to the system of their inherited belief, they became quickly conscious that the conceptions of the ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... poetics, poesy, Muse, Calliope, tuneful Nine, Parnassus, Helicon^, Pierides, Pierian spring. versification, rhyming, making verses; prosody, orthometry^. poem; epic, epic poem; epopee^, epopoea, ode, epode^, idyl, lyric, eclogue, pastoral, bucolic, dithyramb, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... Deity, or to his substitute Apollo. We read of [304][Greek: Lukiou Apollonos hieron]: of [305]Lycorus, a supposed son of Apollo: of [306]Lycomedes, another son: of [307]Lycosura, the first city which the Sun beheld. The people of Delphi were, of old, called [308]Lycorians: and the summit of Parnassus, [309]Lycorea. Near it was a [310]town of the same name; and both were sacred to the God of light. From Lucos, in this sense, came lux, luceo, lucidus, and Jupiter Lucetius, of the Latines; and [Greek: luchnos], [Greek: luchnia], [Greek: luchneuo], of the Greeks; also [Greek: Lukabas], ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume I. • Jacob Bryant
... do not look forward to it as any particular subject of exultation: the poor peasant, who can only contrive to treat himself to a joint of meat on a Sunday, considers it as an event in the week. So, in the old Cambridge comedy of the Return from Parnassus, we find this indignant description of the progress of luxury in those days, put into the mouth of ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... is no stigma, whether one derives it from Parnassus or the Bourse," continued Tricotrin. "Hold! Who is that I see, slouching over there? As I live, it's Pitou, the composer, whose dilemma I ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... poems have passages which are musical, vigorous, and peculiar, and hardly in any part can he be justly charged with prolonging an echo. He is not one of the many mocking-birds that infest the groves at the foot of Parnassus. Though portions of his songs be wild, fitful, and incoherent, they gush with the force and feeling of a heart loyal to its intuitions, and thus many strains captivate and keep the tuneful ear. Yet such charming lines make conspicuous the want of that high appreciation of form and proportion without ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... shut the door, good John! fatigued, I said, Tie up the knocker, say I'm sick, I'm dead. The dog-star rages! nay 'tis past a doubt, All Bedlam, or Parnassus, is let out: Fire in each eye, and papers in each hand, They rave, recite, and madden round the land. What walls can guard me, or what shades can hide? They pierce my thickets, through my grot they ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... General John Bidwell, of California, once made a longish step up the western slope of our American Parnassus by an account of his journey "across the plains" seven years before the lamented Mr. Marshall had found the least and worst of all possible reasons for making the "trek." General Bidwell had not the distinction to be a great writer, but in ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... clear stream in one of the far away Greek islands, grew a small flowering plant, with delicate stem and transparent white flower, called "Grass of Parnassus." ...
— Soap-Bubble Stories - For Children • Fanny Barry
... light eternal! Who hath become so pallid under the shadow of Parnassus, or hath so drunk at its cistern, that he would not seem to have his mind incumbered, trying to represent thee as thou didst appear there where in harmony the heaven overshadows thee, when in the open air ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... have cried at her hero's sudden lapse—from Parnassus to the scullery, from love to the commonplaces of living; but she had schooled herself to bear with him, since patience is a woman's part. Yet her honest blue eyes were not adapted to concealment and, furtively ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... Fontaine, Racine, and Moliere; author of "Satires" and "Epistles," "L'Art Poetique," "Le Lutrin," &c., in which he attached and employed his wit against the bad taste of his time; did much to reform French poetry, as Pascal did to reform the prose, and was for long the law-giver of Parnassus; was an imitator of Pope, but especially ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... Apollo was quaffing a gill With his pupils, the Muses, from Helicon's rill, (For all circles of rank in Parnassus agree In preferring cold water to coffee or tea) The discourse turned as usual on critical matters, And the last stirring news from the kingdom of letters. But when poets, and critics, and wits, and what ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... Morning A Description of a City Shower On the Little House A Town Eclogue A Conference To Lord Harley on his Marriage Phyllis Horace, Book IV, Ode ix To Mr. Delany An Elegy To Mrs. Houghton Verses written on a Window On another Window Apollo to the Dean News from Parnassus Apollo's Edict The Description of an Irish Feast The Progress of Beauty The Progress of Marriage The Progress of Poetry The South Sea Project Fabula Canis et Umbrae A Prologue Epilogue Prologue Epilogue Answer to Prologue and Epilogue On Gaulstown House The Country Life Dr. ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... written two poems upon the lark, in one of which he calls the bird "pilgrim of the sky." This is the one quoted by Emerson in "Parnassus." Here ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... And to the Laplander his Boreal gleam Endear not less than Phoebus' brighter beam, — Descend thou also on my native land, And on some mountain-summit take thy stand; Thence issuing soon a purer font be seen Than charmed Castalia or famed Hippocrene; And there a richer, nobler fane arise, Than on Parnassus met the adoring eyes. And tho', bright goddess, on the far blue hills, That pour their thousand swift pellucid rills Where Warragamba's rage has rent in twain Opposing mountains, thundering to the plain, No child of song has yet invoked thy aid 'Neath their primeval solitary shade, — Still, ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... we are living in an age of division of labor and specialism; and those who, like Robert Franz and Richard Wagner, devote themselves to a single branch of music have a better chance of reaching the summit of Parnassus than those who dissipate their energies in too many directions. Chopin was the pianoforte genius par excellence, and in his field he stands above the greatest of the German composers, whatever their names. Mendelssohn once wrote to his mother that Chopin "produces effects ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... a new plant in her hand]. This is the grass of Parnassus. It makes a good hair-ointment.—Pretty is the ...
— Hadda Padda • Godmunder Kamban
... since to depreciate and cry you down,—you were the cause of my madness, you and your damned foolish sensibility and melancholy; and he lamented with a true brotherly feeling that we ever met,—even as the sober citizen, when his son went astray upon the mountains of Parnassus, is said to have cursed wit, and poetry, and Pope. [2] I quote wrong, but no matter. These letters I lent to a friend to be out of the way for a season; but I have claimed them in vain, and shall not cease to regret their loss. Your packets ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... uniform good sense. To Chatterton, with whom this zealous friend and biographer has mentioned him, he is not to be compared. Chatterton has the force of a young poetical Titan, who threatens to take Parnassus by storm. White is a boy differing from others more in aptitude to follow than in ability to lead. The one is complete in every limb, active, self-confident, and restless from his own energy. The other, gentle, docile, and animated rather than vigorous. He began, as most youthful writers ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... and the Mersey; its docks, and ships, and warehouses, and bales, and anchors; and after descanting upon the abject times, when "his noble waves, inglorious, Mersey rolled," the poet breaks forth like all Parnassus with:— ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... London ceased to yawn. A violinist was communicating the passions of his heart to those who would listen, and amid great interest he went from house to house a-singing.... Eric Mackay is one of those wise men who have no immature volumes to haunt them. He first asked right of way on the road to Parnassus with a bundle of melodies which have never lost their appeal. While youth seeks the pink cheek, these Love Letters will command the homage of lovers. Your Petrarchs are not as common as sparrows.... These outpourings from a burning heart ...
— The Song of the Flag - A National Ode • Eric Mackay
... "Thou first directedst me Towards Parnassus, in its grots to drink, And first concerning God ...
— Dante's Purgatory • Dante
... they set up a broad dancing-ring, singing, "All hail, fair god of healing, Phoebus, all hail," and with them Oeagrus' goodly son began a clear lay on his Bistonian lyre; how once beneath the rocky ridge of Parnassus he slew with his bow the monster Delphyne, he, still young and beardless, still rejoicing in his long tresses. Mayst thou be gracious! Ever, O king, be thy locks unshorn, ever unravaged; for so is it right. And none but Leto, daughter ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius
... not imparted to us by inspiration or revelation. Christ does not personally teach us as He taught His Apostles. It is by hard study that the knowledge of His law is acquired by us. He does not lift us up on Angels' wings to the spiritual Parnassus. It is only by the royal road of earnest labor that we can attain those heights which will enable us to contemplate the Kingdom of heaven ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons
... have thought the sunrise tedious. If we may believe his biographer, Wordsworth might have said that he awoke and found himself in-famous, for the publication of the "Lyrical Ballads" undoubtedly raised him to the distinction of being the least popular poet in England. Parnassus has two peaks; the one where improvising poets cluster; the other where the singer of deep secrets sits alone,—a peak veiled sometimes from the whole morning of a generation by earth-born mists and smoke of kitchen fires, only to glow the more consciously ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... THE WORLD: 'We may find it hard to realise that Max may become a classic, but I see no other essayist who seems to have more chance of it.... There is no question of "reserved places" on Parnassus, but it is my individual conviction that where La Bruye're and Addison and Stevenson are, there Max will be.... It is perhaps his final charm as an essayist that, underneath a ceremonious style, an exquisite demeanour and advance, a low voice, ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... Aoenian and Actaeian lands Lies Phocis; fruitful were the Phocian fields While fields they were, but now o'erwhelm'd, they form A region only of the wide-spread main. Here stands Parnassus with his forked top, Above the clouds high-towering to the stars. To this Deucalion with his consort driven O'er ridgy billows in his bark clung close; For all was sea beside. There bend they down; The nymphs, and mountain gods adore, and she Predicting ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... have ascended higher peaks, since he is familiar with facts which only occur at a height of ten thousand feet or more above the sea—mountain-sickness and its accompaniments—of which his imaginary comrade Solinus tries to cure him with a sponge dipped in essence. The ascents of Parnassus and Olympus, of which he speaks, are perhaps ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... sounds, whether it chattered gently over stony shallows or leaped full-throated into deep pools, swimming with foam— were to me the never-ending joys of a "land of pure delight." Should I find a ripe wild strawberry in a patch under a particular rock I knew by heart?—or the first Grass of Parnassus, or the big auricula, or streaming cotton-plant, amid a stretch of wet moss ahead? I might quite safely explore these enchanted spots under male eyes, since they took no account, mercifully, of a child's boots and stockings—male tongues, ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Thibaut, to William of Lorris and John of Meung, to the fabliaux writers and the cyclists of Renart, in justification of her claims. She shut them up; she forgot them; she sneered at them whenever they were remembered; and she appointed as her attorneys in the court of Parnassus Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux and Francois ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... is an honourary A.M. of Yale. His most respectable volume, that on negro folksong, impresses one principally by its incompleteness. It may be praised as a sketch, but surely not as a book. The trouble with Krehbiel, of course, is that he mistakes a newspaper morgue for Parnassus. He has all of the third-rate German's capacity for unearthing facts, but he doesn't know how either to think or to write, and so his criticism is mere pretence and pishposh. W. J. Henderson, of the Sun, doesn't carry that handicap. He is as full of learning as Krehbiel, as his books on singing ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... the Jew, at the same time asking the king's pardon for what he called his giddiness. "This great poet is always astride of Parnassus and Rue Quincampoix," said the Marquis of Argenson. Frederick had written him on the 24th of February, 1751, a severe letter, the prelude and precursor of the storms which were to break off before long the intimacy between the king and ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... enough to make him what he was, a diverting and acute satirist, an agreeable moralist and critic in verse—which his master Horace had been so often—expert, dexterous, and possessing much authority. His Poetic Art for long was the tables of the law of Parnassus, and even now can be read not only with pleasure ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... Parnassus could never have lived till now without two heads—one to carry on with, while the other is being thumped to pieces. While the critics demolish one peak, the poet withdraws to the other, and assures himself that the general public, ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... queen. There, while the sun hung motionless in mid-heaven, Apollo descended from his burning chariot to join the feast. Artemis and Demeter came from the woods and fields to unite in the high assembly, and war was suspended while Ares made love to the goddess of Beauty. The Greek looked at Parnassus, "soaring snow-clad through its native sky," with its Delphic cave and its Castalian fount, or at the neighboring summits of Helicon, where Pegasus struck his hoof and Hippocrene gushed forth, and believed that hidden in these sunny ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... should have hedged their author, Heine was very caustic about this royal assault upon Parnassus. Ludwig riposted by banishing him from the capital. Still, if he disapproved of this one, he added to his library the output of other bards, not necessarily German. But, while Browning was there, Tennyson had ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... exigencies of romance. There is a species of dreaminess in the air. The landscape assumes soft tints unknown to a fiery sun. Tender shadows steal from undiscovered realms. It is permissible to believe that every night on Parnassus is ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... is not a 'society' man!" said Sir Morton, with a chuckle—"He lives on the heights of Parnassus—and looks down with scorn on the browsing sheep in the valleys below! He ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... lips until they mix With my poor quality their richer wine: Be my Parnassus now, and grow more green Each upward ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... of Parnassus carve urns of agate and of onyx; but inside the urns what is there?—Ashes. Their work lacks feeling, seriousness, sincerity, and pathos—in a word, soul and moral life. I cannot bring myself to sympathize with such a way of understanding poetry. The talent ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... Admetus. I put myself in a regimen of admiring a fine woman; and in proportion to the adorability of her charms, in proportion you are delighted with my verses. The lightning of her eye is the godhead of Parnassus, and the witchery of her smile ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... carriages, with the royal guard in their rear. In Fenchurch Street she was met by the children of the city schools; and at the corner of Gracechurch Street a masterpiece had been prepared of the pseudo-classic art, then so fashionable, by the merchants of the Styll Yard. A Mount Parnassus had been constructed, and a Helicon fountain upon it playing into a basin with four jets of Rhenish wine. On the top of the mountain sat Apollo with Calliope at his feet, and on either side the remaining Muses, holding lutes ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... and phorminx, mask and cothurn, took the first ship bound to Europe, and quietly sailed away. Their stay was short, but they left their mark. To this day Phoebes are numerous in Connecticut, and nine women to one man has become the customary proportion of the sexes. As Greece had Parnassus, Helicon, and Pindus, Connecticut had New Haven, Hartford, and Litchfield Hill,—halting-places of the illustrious travellers. There they scattered the seeds of poetry,—seeds which fell upon stony places, but, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... gazed on my discomfiture. The lovely lines of the hills, curving about the loch, and with their deepest dip just opposite where I sat, were all of a golden autumn brown, except in the violet distance. The grass of Parnassus grew thick and white around me, with its moonlight tint of green in the veins. On a hillside by a brook the countryfolk were winning their hay, and their voices reached me softly from far off. On the loch the marsh-fowl flashed and dipped, the ...
— Angling Sketches • Andrew Lang
... consideration for its thousands of English readers. There is, however, we are tolerably assured, a certain class of critics who venture to lament that this laughter-inspiring muse should have descended from the sunny Parnassus of its own vernacular to the meads below, where disport the unlearned and uninspired, the mere kids and lambs of its celestial audience: a generous absurdity, at which the very Devil of Delphos might have demurred. ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... always been of the gravest importance to the theatrical profession. It was a charge brought against the actors of Elizabeth's time, that they walked about the town in gaudy and expensive attire. The author of "The Return from Parnassus," first published in 1606, but held to have been written at an earlier date, specially refers to the prosperity, and the consequent arrogance of the players. He is believed to have had in view Alleyn ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... as "Mother Goose's Melodies" has the dignity of being already an undoubted classic among the most incipient cultivators of literature in the United States. It is a compilation taken mostly from "Gammer Gurton's Garland" or the "Nursery Parnassus," an English child's book about a century old, of which various editions have been published in London, Glasgow, and other places. It is stated in one of its late prefaces that it was originally issued at Stockton ...
— Chenodia - The Classic Mother Goose • Jacob Bigelow
... chain of evidence would have no weak link, if it were not for a passage in the play, "The Return from Parnassus," acted by the students in St. John's College the same year, 1601. In this there is a dialogue between Shakespeare's fellow-actors, Burbage and Kempe. Speaking of the ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... stones, ruts, and a pervading sense of the wisdom of rest and be thankful, most of us have little enough sense of the beautiful under these circumstances. The ordinary school-boy is precisely in this case. He finds Parnassus uncommonly steep, and there is no chance of his having much time or inclination to look about him till he gets to the top. And nine times out of ten he does not get to ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... Henagan was born November 22nd, 1822, in Marlboro County, S.C., Was the son of E.L. Henagan and wife, Ann McInnis. His father was a Scotch-Irishman. His mother Scotch. Was educated at Academy in Bennettsville and Parnassus. Was elected Sheriff of Marlboro County in October, 1852, and went into office February, 1853. In 1860 was elected to the Legislature. Was re-elected ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... passed on the poems of this noble minor, it seems we must take them as we find them, and be content; for they are the last we shall ever have from him. He is at best, he says, but an intruder into the groves of Parnassus; he never lived in a garret, like thorough-bred poets; and 'though he once roved a careless mountaineer in the Highlands of Scotland,' he has not of late enjoyed this advantage. Moreover, he expects no profit from his publication; and whether ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... claims of Parnassus—all these, fair lady, have withheld me from heretofore giving to beauty its proper meed of admiration and worship. To speak more plainly, I have undertaken, by order of our emperor, the not ungrateful task of weaving a few poetical ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... complained by a critic of Emerson's "Parnassus" that only two of Wasson's poems were to be found in that collection; and Alcott, who had a keen scent for superior literature, once turned a visitor out of his study for denying the superiority of Wasson's poetry. Many of his sonnets are gems, unsurpassed ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... beyond belief, and soared above all the natural powers of description! She was nature itself! she was the most exquisite work of art! She was the very daisy, primrose, tuberose, sweet-brier, furze-blossom, gilliflower, wallflower, cauliflower, aurica and rosemary! In short, she was the bouquet of Parnassus! Where expectation was raised so high, it was thought she would be injured by her appearance; but it was the audience who were injured; several fainted before the curtain drew up! but when she came to the scene of parting with her wedding-ring, all! what a sight was there! The fiddlers ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... plays have been thought to bear a greater or less part in the war of the theatres. Among them the most important is a college play, entitled "The Return from Parnassus," dating 1601-02. In it a much-quoted passage makes Burbage, as a character, declare: "Why here's our fellow Shakespeare puts them all down; aye and Ben Jonson, too. O that Ben Jonson is a pestilent fellow; he brought up Horace, giving the poets a pill, but our fellow Shakespeare ...
— The Poetaster - Or, His Arraignment • Ben Jonson
... acknowledging his obligation for it to a great predecessor? Chaucer again and again disclaims all boasts of perfection, or pretensions to pre-eminence, as a poet. His Canterbury Pilgrims have in his name to disavow, like Persius, having slept on Mount Parnassus, or possessing "rhetoric" enough to describe a heroine's beauty; and he openly allows that his spirit grows dull as he grows older, and that he finds a difficulty as a translator in matching his rhymes to his ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... dull, conceited hashes Confuse their brains in college classes! They gang in sticks and come out asses, Plain truth to speak, And syne they think to climb Parnassus By dint of Greek.[Footnote: ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... no avail that the Muse of Poetry be called, even by such a clarion note as Whitman's, to migrate from Greece and Ionia and to placard REMOVED and TO LET on the rocks of the snowy Parnassus. Calliope's call is not yet closed, nor are the epics of Asia ended; the Sphinx is not yet silent, nor the fountain of Castaly dry. For art is very life itself and knows nothing of death; she is absolute truth and takes no care of fact; she sees ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... had discovered his cloven hoof, as well as his overweening vanity and pretensions, and, when he got pompously classical, in his trip through Greece, they amused themselves at his expense by suggesting that the Acropolis "was a capital place for lunch;" Parnassus, "a regular sell;" Thermopylae, "great for water-cresses." Passing on from his companions—one of whom was a fellow of Oxford, and the other a captain in Her Majesty's service—he becomes grandly Byronic, ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... entire affair is obviously an effusion and an example of the same academic sagacity or lucidity of appreciation which found utterance in other contemporary protests of the universities against the universe. In that abyss of dulness "The Return from Parnassus," a reader or a diver who persists in his thankless toil will discover this pearl of a fact—that men of culture had no more hesitation in preferring Watson to Shakespeare than they have in preferring Byron to Shelley. The author of the one deserves to have been the author of the other. ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... or since have critics held so high a place in literature. The world was called upon to worship and do honour to the poet, but chiefly that it might admire the skill of the critic who could name the several sources of his beauties. The critic now ranked higher than a priest at the foot of Mount Parnassus. Homer was lifted to the skies that the critic might stand on a raised pedestal among the Muses. Such seems to be the meaning of the figures on the upper part of the well-known sculpture called the Apotheosis of Homer. It ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 10 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... for this last labor make me such a vessel of thy power as thou demandest for the gift of the loved laurel.[1] Thus far one summit of Parnassus has been enough for me, but now with both[2] I need to enter the remaining, arena. Enter into my breast, and breathe thou in such wise as when thou drewest Marsyas from out the sheath of his limbs. O divine Power, ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 3, Paradise [Paradiso] • Dante Alighieri
... in the country of Phocis still raised two peaks above the surrounding waters. It was the great Mount Parnassus. Toward this floated a boat containing Deucalion, the son of Prometheus, and his wife Pyrrha. No man, no woman, had ever been found who surpassed these in righteousness and piety. When, therefore, Jupiter, looking down from heaven upon the earth, saw that ...
— Famous Tales of Fact and Fancy - Myths and Legends of the Nations of the World Retold for Boys and Girls • Various
... the wise, at the end of yet another of those divergent ways, glows his painted philosophy in the Parnassus and the School of Athens, with their numerous accessories. In the execution of those works, of course, his antiquarian knowledge stood him in good stead; and here, above all, is the pledge of his immense understanding, at work on its own natural ground on a purely intellectual ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... improbable, that two Brothers should be such Poets as ROBERT and NATHANIEL BLOOMFIELD are, than that a Taylor should be a Poet. It remains then for Prejudice to vanish like Mists before the Sun: while the two BROTHERS sociably ascend PARNASSUS together; higher than ever Brothers have climbed before: I might add, each of them to an height which but few have ...
— An Essay on War, in Blank Verse; Honington Green, a Ballad; The - Culprit, an Elegy; and Other Poems, on Various Subjects • Nathaniel Bloomfield
... of Pope." It was a subject perhaps unworthy of his pen, but being an ardent admirer of Pope, he thought it his duty to "bowl him [Bowles] down." "I mean to lay about me," said Byron, "like a dragon, till I make manure of Bowles for the top of Parnassus." ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... demands from nature the same scale of proportions as are suggested by the works of man. Where these are chiefly remarkable for their height, much of their effect will be destroyed by the proximity of such hills as Acrocorinthus or Lycabettus, to say nothing of Taygetus or Parnassus. ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... edifying and licentious at the same time, a work audacious in every way, even from a literary point of view. Boccaccio knows it, and justifies his doings. To those who reproach him with having busied himself with "trifles," neglecting "the Muses of Parnassus," he replies: Who knows whether I have neglected them so very much? "Perhaps, while I wrote those tales of such humble mien, they may have come sometimes and seated themselves at my side."[533] They bestowed ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... consummately good. They were charmed and thrilled by the haunting melody of his verse and the weird horror of his tales. In his own country, recognition of his genius has grown rapidly of recent years. Within his own sphere, he is unquestionably the greatest artist America can boast—he climbed Parnassus higher than any of his countrymen, and if he did not quite attain a seat among the immortals, he at least caught some portion of ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... he, with the bland raillery of an Immortal, "has it at length occurred to thee that I may have been long enough away from Parnassus, filling thy place here while thou hast been disporting thyself amid heretics ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... which all nations seem to have preserved. He says, that the sea joined its waters to those falling from heaven. The words of Scripture are (Genesis, vii. 11), 'All the fountains of the great deep were broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened.' In speaking of the top of Parnassus alone being left uncovered, the tradition here followed by Ovid probably referred to Mount Ararat, where Noah's ark rested. Noah and his family are represented by Deucalion and Pyrrha. Both Noah and Deucalion were saved for their virtuous ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... Lamia, he views Mount Pindus far before him, and descending into the plain of the Sperchius, passes the straits of Thermopylae. Afterwards, ascending, Mount Oeta, he beholds opposite to him the snowy point of Lycorea, with the rest of Parnassus, and the villages and towns lying at its base: the whole plain of Elataia lying at his feet, with the course of the Cephissus to the sea. Passing to the summit of Parnassus, he looks down upon all the other mountains, plains, islands, and gulfs of Greece; but especially surveys the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... his genius as a humorist and anecdotalist can expand. Verse is a platform that tempts him at one moment into the performance of music-hall turns and the next into stump orations the spiritual home of which is Hyde Park Corner rather than Parnassus. Recessional surprises one like a noble recantation of nearly all the other verse Mr. Kipling has written. But, apart from Recessional, most of his political verse is a mere quickstep ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... civilization and freedom; for, as no one will attribute the degradation of the modern Greeks from the high moral cultivation of their ancestors, to any alteration in the climate of their country, so let us never despair of the return of virtue, of poetry, of the arts and sciences, whilst Parnassus and Helicon still enjoy the same glorious sun, and whilst the Isles are still gilded by eternal summer. We want no proofs that patriotism still lives in Greece, and with that feeling will ever be associated the powers that are able ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 334 Saturday, October 4, 1828 • Various
... assembled there. Now Allan Cameron comes to view, And William Stubbs, there he is too. Wellington Wright, too, I behold, And wild Jack Adamson, the bold. The Anderson's, both James and John, And Stephen Lett, my mother's son, Who stood upon Parnassus' crown By might of Genius, and looked down To where with errant steps I strayed Around its base beneath the shade. And many more were pupils there, Where are they? "echo answers, where?" In fancy I away have stepped From where his school James ...
— Recollections of Bytown and Its Old Inhabitants • William Pittman Lett
... an ancient city of Phocis in Achaia. It stood upon the declivity, and about the middle, of the mountain Parnassus, built upon a small extent of even ground, and surrounded with precipices, that fortified it without the help ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... each one of us to decide how widely our time and opportunities shall permit us to wander on the slopes of Mount Parnassus. 'The best time-savers are the love of soundness in all we learn to do, and a cheerful acceptance of inevitable limitations.'[23] Yet it is better to have wandered on the lowermost slopes of the mountain than never to have entered ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... other, in which they would relate our interviews, and we should appear like those puny conceited witlings in Shenstone's and Hughes's Correspondence, who give themselves airs from being in possession of the soil of Parnassus for the time being; as peers are proud, because they enjoy the estates of great men who went before them. Mr. Gough is very welcome to see Strawberry Hill; or I would help him to any scraps in ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... learned Greece her useful rules indites, When to repress and when indulge our flights. High on Parnassus' top her sons she showed, [94] And pointed out those arduous paths they trod; Held from afar, aloft, the immortal prize, And urged the rest by equal steps to rise. [97] Just precepts thus from great examples given, She drew from them what they derived from Heaven. The generous critic fanned ...
— An Essay on Criticism • Alexander Pope
... plateau, and came to grass, we found a gorgeous carpet of the huge couched blue gentian (G. acaulis, Fr. Gentiane sans tige), with smaller patterns put in by the dazzling blue of the delicate little flower of the same species (G. verna ); while the white blossoms of the grass of Parnassus, and the frailer white of the dryade a huit petales, and the modest waxen flowers of the Azalea procumbens and the airelle ponctuee (Vaccineum vitis idaea), tempered and set off the prevailing blue. There were groves, too, rather lower down, of Alpine roses (the first I ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... for the set of tapestries had entirely left the old method of pious interpretation and of mediaeval allegory and revelled in pictured tales of the Scriptures and of the gods and heroes of mystical Parnassus and of bellicose Greece, not forgetting those dainty exquisite impossibilities called grotesques. It was about the time of the death of Cosimo I (1574), the founder of the Medicean factory, that a new and unfortunate influence came into the directorship of the designs. This ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... distresses me. I know the difference that there is between the tumult of arms and the tranquillity of Parnassus. I know that the sounds of Apollo's lyre accord but ill with the trumpets of Mars; but if you have abandoned Parnassus, it has been only to fulfil the duties of a good citizen and of a vigilant chief. I am persuaded, at the same time, that in the midst of ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... writer famous in Italy for his fine criticism and bold satire. Cardinals Borghese and Cajetan were his patrons. His Ragguagli di Parnasso and la Secretaria di Parnasso, in which Apollo heard the complaints of the world, and dispensed justice in his court on Parnassus, were received with delight. Afterwards, in his Pietra di Parangone, he satirized the Court of Spain, and, fearing consequences, retired to Venice, where in 1613 he was attacked in his bed by four ruffians, who beat ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... and as fine talk brought us in sight of a high land, which Pantagruel discovering afar off, showed it Xenomanes, and asked him, Do you see yonder to the leeward a high rock with two tops, much like Mount Parnassus in Phocis? I do plainly, answered Xenomanes; 'tis the isle of Ganabim. Have you a mind to go ashore there? No, returned Pantagruel. You do well, indeed, said Xenomanes; for there is nothing worth seeing in the place. The people are all thieves; yet there is the finest ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... literary artists. Anatole France is a first-class literary artist and an Academician; but he makes a point of never going near the Academy. Perhaps the best writer among "devout" Academicians is Maurice Barres. Unhappily his comic-opera politics prove that in attempting Parnassus he mistook his mountain. Primrose Hill would have been more in his line. Still, he wrote "Le Jardin de Berenice": a novel which I am afraid to read again lest I should fail to recapture the first fine ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... hiring himself out to amuse, of practising the affectation of a modesty, an inspiration, an emotion he did not feel, of hearing the false plaudits of rivals who he knew carped at his verses in his absence and libelled his character, of running hither and thither over Parnassus dragging his poor muse at the heels of some selfish freedman; he was man enough and poet enough to wish to write something that would live, and so he left Rome to con over his mythological erudition ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... which tellers of the story have added as it passed down to later generations. When it was carried still farther afield, into the area of the Eastern Mediterranean, it was again adapted to local conditions. Thus Apollodorus makes Deucalion land upon Parnassus,(1) and the pseudo-Lucian relates how he founded the temple of Derketo at Hierapolis in Syria beside the hole in the earth which swallowed up the Flood.(2) To the Sumerians who first told the story, the great Flood appeared to have destroyed mankind, for Southern ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King
... — for a beacon bright To rift this changeless glimmer of dead gray; To spirit back the Muses, long astray, And flush Parnassus with a newer light; To put these little sonnet-men to flight Who fashion, in a shrewd, mechanic way, Songs without souls, that flicker for a day, To vanish in ...
— The Children of the Night • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... journalist, who had wit and malice, inserted the fragment of a letter which the poet Rousseau wrote to the younger Racine whilst he was at the Hague. These were the words: "I enjoy the conversation within these few days of my associates in Parnassus. Mr. Piron is an excellent antidote against melancholy; but"—&c. Des Fontaines maliciously stopped at this but. In the letter of Rousseau it was, "but unfortunately he departs soon." Piron was very sensibly ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... be friends and brethren of Telemachus. Come, then, and I will show you too a very trusty sign,—that you may know me certainly and be assured in heart,—the scar the boar dealt long ago with his white tusk, when I once journeyed to Parnassus ...
— The Children's Hour, Volume 3 (of 10) • Various
... her girlhood and still continued intermittently until this time. The Graces had not been bountiful the Peabody family, so, to compensate for this, they all cultivated the Muses, in whose society they ascended no little distance on the way to Parnassus. Elizabeth Peabody was quite a feminine pundit. She learned French and German, and studied history and archaeology; she taught history on a large scale at Sanborn's Concord School and at many others; she had a method of painting dates on squares, which fixed them indelibly in the minds of her ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... must at this moment be condoling With their unfortunate sister Gratitude, whose vagabond foundling has so basely disgraced her and herself. You fancied that Mrs. Yearsley was a spurious issue of a muse; and to be sure, with all their immortal virginity, the parish of Parnassus has been sadly charged with their bantlings; and, as nobody knows the fathers, no wonder some of the misses have turned ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... quite a tasteful thing, and so convenient, that he could lay himself down at the hearth, and roll out to its foot, after which he ascended it on his legs, with all the elasticity of a young poet triumphantly climbing Parnassus. ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... all night through; so that the night is nearly as hot as the day. At other times of the year, I believe, the climate is very pleasant. The 40th give a very good account of it. There is a great quantity of game there, and some of the best hog-hunting in India. Mount Aboo, called the Parnassus of India, is within fifty miles of it, and is a great place of resort during ...
— Campaign of the Indus • T.W.E. Holdsworth
... about Dryden as a critic we may conclude that the unsystematic character of his own scholarly work may have been a matter of principle as well as inclination. "Dryden," he wrote, "forebore, from prudence, indolence, or a regard for the freedom of Parnassus, to erect himself into a legislator."[490] The words remind us of comments made upon Scott's own work, as for example by Professor Masson, who spoke of "the shrewdness and sagacity of some of his critical prefaces to his ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... there's the word for it! The panting and shivering of that dead dumb wood, the human emotion conveyed through it—by what? had to me a greater significance than the St. Peter's of this Rome. O poet! do you not know that poetry is not confined to the clipped alleys, no, nor to the blue tops of 'Parnassus hill'? Poetry is where we live and have our being—wherever God works and man understands. Hein! ... if you are in a dungeon and a friend knocks through the outer wall, spelling out by knocks the words ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... good English." In the lines just quoted, indeed, the bad English adds nothing to the effect. In 1848 Lowell wrote A Fable for Critics, something after the style of Sir John Suckling's Session of the Poets; a piece of rollicking doggerel in which he surveyed the American Parnassus, scattering about headlong fun, sharp satire and sound criticism in equal proportion. Never an industrious workman, like Longfellow, at the poetic craft, but preferring to wait for the mood to seize ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... the Norwegian Storthing conferred upon Jonas Lie an annual "poet's salary" of about six hundred dollars. This is supposed to supply a warranty deed to a lot on Parnassus. It removes any possible flaw in the title to immortality. Lie was now lifted into the illustrious triumvirate in which Bjoernson and Ibsen were his predecessors. Great expectations were entertained of his literary future. ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... that he wrote history, not an epic poem. STRADA in his Prolusions, has given, among other imitations, a narrative in Lucan's manner; and, though he thinks that poet has not the skill of Virgil, he places him on the summit of Parnassus, managing his Pegasus with difficulty, often in danger of falling from the ridge of a precipice, yet delighting his reader with the pleasure of seeing him escape. This is the true character of Lucan. ...
— A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, Or The Causes Of Corrupt Eloquence • Cornelius Tacitus
... executed with very great art. He taught many of the rules of architecture to Raffaello da Urbino; designing for him, for example, the buildings that Raffaello afterwards drew in perspective in that apartment of the Pope wherein there is Mount Parnassus; in which apartment he made a portrait of Bramante taking measurements with a ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 04 (of 10), Filippino Lippi to Domenico Puligo • Giorgio Vasari
... faut. Among them were many marked faces, many fine heads; but in reading the works of poets we always fancy them about the age of Apollo himself, and I found with pain some of my favorites quite old, and very unlike the company on Parnassus as represented by Raphael. Some, however, were venerable, even noble, to behold. Indeed, the literary dynasty of France is growing old, and here, as in England and Germany, there seems likely to occur a serious gap before the inauguration of another, ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... Dumesnil made some for Mademoiselle de Launay, who made them in return for him, so that the Bastille was a true Parnassus. There was only Richelieu who dishonored the society ...
— The Regent's Daughter • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... and adorned with tapestry, sat Apollo, attended by the Nine Muses, all in classical costume; at the helm stood Neptune with his trident. The Muses executed some beautiful concerted pieces; Apollo twanged his lute. Having reached the landing-place, this deputation from Parnassus stepped on shore, and stood awaiting the arrival of the procession. Each professor, as he advanced, was gravely embraced and kissed by Apollo and all the Nine Muses in turn, who greeted their arrival besides with the recitation of an elegant Latin poem. This classical ceremony terminated, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley |
