"Polyphemus" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... people called these caves [Greek: Kooi.] [424][Greek: Enioi koous mallon ta toiauta koilomata legesthai phasin.] Hence he very truly explains a passage in Homer. The poet, speaking of Theseus, Dryas, Polyphemus, and other heroes of the Mythic age, mentions their encountering with the mountaineers of Thessaly, whom he styles [Greek: ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume I. • Jacob Bryant
... Lord, because he is as unlike what you would suppose a nobleman to be as possible. Then there is Polly. His real name is Skeffington Scoulding, which was voted too long, so, as poor fellow he has lost an eye, he was dubbed Polyphemus, which was soon turned into Polly. I haven't got a new name yet, so I hope to stick to my own. I have picked up a good many more bits of information during the three days I have been on board, but I have not time to tell them now. I will though, don't fear. I hope to be put in a watch when ...
— My First Cruise - and Other stories • W.H.G. Kingston
... which is not immediately apparent, it would seem that "VL." implied a play upon the initial letters of Ulysses and Ulricus. This syllable is put over the head of a person whose neck looks as if it were already the worse from unfortunate proximity to the terrible rock wielded by Polyphemus. I should be glad that "S.W.S." could see some manuscript verses in German, whcih are at the end of my copy of De Hutten's Conquestio ad Germanos. They appear to have been written by the author in 1520; and at the conclusion, he ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 19, Saturday, March 9, 1850 • Various
... cliff face had lately fallen, forming an avalanche of rocks that would have destroyed a village: this my guide informed me was the result of last year's excessive rain. I examined the heights above us with my glass, and observed some crags that Polyphemus would have delighted to hurl upon Acis when courting his Galatea; but as no Cyclops existed in this classical island I determined to risk the chances of a rock-displacement and to pitch the tent upon a flat surface among the fallen blocks. As a rule such localities should be avoided. It ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... where the rocks tower four hundred feet above the Pentland Firth, and floundering in the waters like an enormous whale; the herring shoals hurrying away from his unwieldy gambols, as from the presence of the real sea-born leviathan. Cacus in love was not more grand, or the gigantic Polyphemus, sighing at the feet of Galatea, or infernal Pluto looking amiable beside his ravished queen. Have you seen an elephant in love? If you have, you may conceive what Mr. Tims would be in ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 13, No. 359, Saturday, March 7, 1829. • Various
... village the batteries are thick. A great howitzer near the road lifts its huge muzzle slowly, fires and goes down again, and lifts again and fires. It is as though Polyphemus had lifted his huge shape slowly, leisurely, from the hillside where he was sitting, and hurled the mountain top, and sat down again. If he is firing pretty regularly you are sure to get the blast of one of them as you go by, ...
— Tales of War • Lord Dunsany
... extravagant to be mentioned" (Mainwaring). The title part was sung by Margherita Durastanti, and another singer who appeared in the opera was Boschi, the famous bass; both of them were to sing for Handel in London later on. It is fairly certain that Boschi must have sung the part of Polyphemus in Handel's Italian Aci e Galatea at Naples, for it bears a striking resemblance to other songs written for Boschi, whose voice was of exceptional range. The opera ...
— Handel • Edward J. Dent
... wondrous weapons, swords of incredible qualities, armor that defies mortal blades, bracelets of wondrous and cunning finish and singular properties—all here is miraculous, the workman, the process, and the work. The vividness with which Homer presents to us the one-eyed Polyphemus, with his tree-staff and his ponderous body, is exchanged by the Scandinavian for smallness, indistinctness of form and of power. The grand in the South is obtained by giving enlarged pictures of man as he is; in the North, by investing him ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... drunkard. Therefore, clap your hands to your pulpy sides, oh well-dressed, well-to-do London, and disdaining the pettiness of a simper, laugh an ogre's laugh at the rags of Manchester—grin like a tickled Polyphemus at ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 2, 1841 • Various
... buffoonery that Vulcan is not guilty of, while one with his polt-foot, another with his smutched muzzle, another with his impertinencies, he makes sport for the rest of the gods? As also that old Silenus with his country dances, Polyphemus footing time to his Cyclops hammers, the nymphs with their jigs, and satyrs with their antics; while Pan makes them all twitter with some coarse ballad, which yet they had rather hear than the Muses themselves, and chiefly ...
— The Praise of Folly • Desiderius Erasmus
... sisters a foreshadowing of the fate that they had to expect one day themselves. Beginning with the weakest cities, Assyria would naturally go on to absorb those which were stronger, and Tyre herself, the "anointed cherub,"[14136] could look for no greater favour than, like Ulysses in the cave of Polyphemus, to be devoured last. Luliya, or Elulaeus, the king of Tyre at the time,[14137] endeavoured to escape this calamity by gathering to himself a strength which would enable him to defy attack. He contrived to establish his dominion over almost the whole of Southern Phoenicia—over Sidon, Accho, ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... kindness to me, is like that miserable courtesy of Polyphemus to Ulysses; you reserve me to be devoured last: you would dig turfs out of my grave to feed your larks; that would be music to you. Come, I 'll lead ...
— The White Devil • John Webster
... you!" he exulted. "Your lines are right. The design balances and it's graceful. If I have any trouble it will be with the moth, and I think I can manage. I've got to decide whether to use cecropia or polyphemus before long. Really, on a walnut, and in the woods, it should be a luna, according to the eternal fitness of things——but I'm afraid of the trailers. They turn over and half curl and I believe I had better not tackle them for a start. I'll use the easiest to begin on, and ...
— The Harvester • Gene Stratton Porter
... bears the resemblance of a ship under sail: the ancients adapted the story to the phenomenon, and recognised in it the Phenician ship, in which Ulysses returned to his country, converted into stone by Neptune, for having carried away the slayer of his son Polyphemus. A more extensive acquaintance with the ocean, has shown that this appearance is not unique; a similar one on the coast of Patagonia, has more than once deceived both French and English navigators; and rock Dunder, in the West Indies, bears a resemblance, at a distance equally illusive. There ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... might appear," said the incredulous naturalist, "it was necessary to collect precise information on the subject." The scientific Ulysses regarded the reputed Cyclops with a calculating scepticism. Had Polyphemus been at hand, Peron would have politely requested him to permit himself to be weighed and measured, and would have written an admirable monograph on his ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott
... postquam Hylam amissum esse senserunt, magno dolore adfecti diu frustra quaerebant. Hercules autem et Polyphemus, qui vestigia pueri longius secuti erant, ubi tandem ad litus ...
— Ritchie's Fabulae Faciles - A First Latin Reader • John Kirtland, ed.
... he himself sharing the experience of many a fellow-artist? How often the creator deceived himself concerning the value of his own work! He had expected the greatest success from his Polyphemus hurling the rock at Odysseus escaping in the boat, and a gigantic smith had posed for a model. Yet the judges had condemned it in the severest manner as a work far exceeding the bounds of moderation, and arousing positive dislike. The clay figure had not been executed in stone or metal, and crumbled ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... age has witnessed. His intellect is at once solid and subtle, reminding you of veined and figured marble, so beautiful and evasive in aspect, that you must touch ere you are certain of its firmness. The motion of his mind is like that of dancing, but it is the dance of an elephant, or of a Polyphemus, with his heavy steps, thundering down the music to which he moves. Hence his humor often seems forced in motion, while always fine in spirit. The contrast between the slow march of his sentences, the frequent gravity of his spirit, the recondite ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... people, called Cyclopes; that insular race being said to be descended from Neptune and Amphitrite, just as the giant Antæus, the founder of Tangier on the African coast, was called the son of Neptune and Terra. If we take Polyphemus, the chief of a tribe of the Cyclops, for a type of this cognate race, what do we find in his story, divested of the fiction with which it was clothed by tradition, transmuted into the poetry of the Odyssey and the Æneid? The Grecian ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... that in point of feeling, and therefore of possible moral elevation, Falstaff is as undeniably the superior of Sancho as Sancho is unquestionably the superior of Panurge. The natural affection of Panurge is bounded by the self-same limits as the natural theology of Polyphemus; the love of the one, like the faith of the other, begins and ends alike ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... back instantly," he spoke in a hoarse whisper. "Tell that Polyphemus you call your master there that I will do his will. And tell him, too, that if ever the day comes for vengeance on him, on the Cyprian, on you,—my vengeance will ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... hidden limbs should be there to inform us of the existence of the rest.[63] He takes another instance, where a description that is admirable in poetry would be insupportable in painting. Who, he asks, could bear upon canvas the sight of Polyphemus grinding between his teeth the bones of one of the companions of Ulysses? Who could see without horror a giant holding a man in his enormous mouth, with blood dripping ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... finds these old systems have made some big mistakes in interpreting its sayings, when a newspaper blockhead comes along and says if he won't conform let him go out of the church. There's a one-eyed man for you, an ecclesiastical Polyphemus! Our politicians are just the same, without a broad, liberal idea to clothe their naked, thieving policies with. And the scientists! some of them stargazing, like Thales, so that they fall into the ditch of disrepute by failing to observe ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... acquiring this divine pleasure? It is thus that the poets who have represented Tiresias the Augur as a wise man and blind, never exhibit him as bewailing his blindness. And Homer, too, after he had described Polyphemus as a monster and a wild man, represents him talking with his ram, and speaking of his good fortune, inasmuch as he could go wherever he pleased and touch what he would. And so far he was right, for that Cyclops was a being of not much ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... sighed Fanny, musingly, counting the beads for the eye of the Polyphemus she was embroidering on a cushion for that gentleman's sofa meditations, 'he would entertain you, as well as ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... caves by the sea, where they keep their treasure. One giant, Unfoot (Ofoti), is a shepherd, like Polyphemus, and has a famous dog which passed into the charge of Biorn, and won a battle; a giantess is keeping goats in the wilds. A giant's fury is so great that it takes twelve champions to control him, when the rage ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... Neptune, whom we at once think of as the physical sea—certainly a great barrier. The wrath of Neptune is also set off with a tale of wonder, which gives the origin of Polyphemus, the Cyclops—a gigantic, monstrous birth of the sea, which produces so many strange and huge shapes of living things. But Neptune is now far away, outside of the Greek world, so to speak, among the Ethiopians. This implies a finite element in the Gods; they are here, there, and elsewhere; ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... a classic spot. Here was no less a place than the cave of Polyphemus, where Homer, at least, may have stood, if Ulysses didn't. And here is the identical stone with which the giant was wont to block up the entrance to ...
— The Dodge Club - or, Italy in 1859 • James De Mille
... wrytten in laten by the famous clerke. D. Eras- mus of Roterodame/ one called Polyphemus or the gospeller/ the other dysposyng of thynges and names/ translated in to Englyshe by Edmonde Becke. And prynted at Cantorbury in saynt Paules paryshe by John ...
— Two Dyaloges (c. 1549) • Desiderius Erasmus
... story we shall see the Devil and his companions overreaching themselves in a manner worthy of the Ingoldsby Legends, while in the Polyphemus story already referred to under Cosmopolitan Tales we find the Devil ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby
... Whirlwind shall swallow them quick in their den! O baneful, O wit-straying, in the Burg of London ye dwell, And ever of Profits and three per cent. are the tales ye tell, But the stark, strong Polyphemus shall answer you back again, Him whom "No man slayeth by guile and not by main." (By "main" I mean "main force," if aught at all do I mean. In the Greek of the blindfold Bard it is simpler the sense to glean.) You Polyphemus shall swallow ...
— New Collected Rhymes • Andrew Lang
... read everything in relation to the skeleton of Trapani, discovered in the fourteenth century, and which many persons chose to regard as that of Polyphemus, and the history of the giant dug up during the sixteenth century in the environs of Palmyra. You are well aware as I am, gentlemen, of the existence of the celebrated analysis made near Lucerne, in 1577, of the great bones ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... caves on the surrounding mountains, while we hid ourselves in fear in the most remote corners of the cave. The giants heard him and came running to help him, but they could not get into the cave. They stood near the stone, close to the door, and called out: 'What ails thee, Polyphemus? Is anyone trying to kill thee?' 'Woe is me!' cried Polyphemus, 'Nobody is trying to kill me.' 'Then why dost thou shout and cry for help?' said they. 'If nobody hurts thee, ...
— Odysseus, the Hero of Ithaca - Adapted from the Third Book of the Primary Schools of Athens, Greece • Homer
... their rattles and bright-colored balls, the children their hoops and balls, and what we call "Blindman's-buff" was a favorite game among them. Perhaps you know about the old giant Polyphemus, who was master of a race of one-eyed giants, and who devoured the Greeks that were round his cave, until they succeeded in putting out his eye, and how he still groped around and endeavored to find them, but in vain. Well, the boys and girls of Greece used to represent this story by this very ...
— Harper's Young People, March 16, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... woods alone. All the forest looks alike to those who don't know it, and you're lost in a minute. Besides, it's filled with strange and terrible creatures, Robin Hood—that's me, though I have some redeeming qualities—the Erymanthean boar, the Hydra-headed monster, Medusa of the snaky locks, Cyclops, Polyphemus with one awful eye, the deceitful Sirens, the Old Man of the Mountain, Wodin and Osiris, and, last and most terrible of all, ...
— The Shades of the Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... adventures. He had encountered the one-eyed giant Polyphemus, who feasted on the fattest of the Greeks, while the others escaped by boring out his single eye. He had passed the land of the Lotus-Eaters, to whose magic some of the Greeks succumbed. In the island of Circe some of his followers were turned into swine. But the ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... are past have in fellowship mingled with heroes Mightier even than you, yet among them I never was slighted. Never their like did I see, nor shall look on their equals hereafter— Such as Perithoeus was, or as Dryas the shepherd of people, Kaineus, Exadius too—the compeer of the bless'd, Polyphemus; AEgeus' glorious son, as a God in his countenance, Theseus. These of a truth were in might the supreme of the children of mankind; Mightiest they upon earth and with mightiest foes they contended, Centaurs nurs'd in the hills, whom in terrible ruin they trampled. These, the allies ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... towards the end of the ninth book of the Odyssey. He tells that, at the time Ulysses visited Sicily, it was inhabited by the Cyclops, who, as already mentioned, were said to have had each only one eye, situated in his forehead. Their king's name was Polyphemus, a huge giant who beguiled Ulysses and a portion of his crew into a cave, where he killed some of the crew and devoured them for his supper. Ulysses, fearing his turn might come next, persuaded Polyphemus to taste some strong wine he had with him, ...
— Wonders of Creation • Anonymous
... folded and cherished like birds in a nest. She could never have explained, she could only feel how. In the melody, with its drone bass, the very history of the enchanted island was surely breathed out. Ulysses stood to listen among the flocks of Polyphemus. Empedocles stayed his feet among the groves of Etna to hear it. And Persephone, wandering among the fields of asphodel, paused with her white hands out-stretched to catch its drowsy beauty; and Arethusa, turned into a fountain, hushed her music ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... that I have openly expressed regret, as a personal matter, even in the presence of women, for the missing books of Tacitus, and the entire loss of the Abacadabra of Polyphemus of Syracuse, I can find no words in which to beg for pardon. In reality I was just as much worried over the loss of the ichthyosaurus. More, indeed: I'd like to have seen it: but if the books Tacitus lost were like those he ...
— Behind the Beyond - and Other Contributions to Human Knowledge • Stephen Leacock
... not to be an occasional touch of comedy in it. For example, to cite only what we happen to recall, the scene between Menelaus and the portress of the palace. (Helen, Act I), and the scene of the Phrygian (Orestes, Act IV) The Tritons, the Satyrs, the Cyclops are grotesque, Polyphemus is a terrifying, Silenus a ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... flushings; Cynthia, beautiful in shades of olive green, sprinkled with black, crossed by bands of pinkish lilac and bearing crescents partly yellow, the remainder transparent. There are also the deep yellow Io, pale blue-green Luna, and Polyphemus, brown with pink bands of the Saturniidae; and light yellow, red-brown and grey Regalis, and lavender and yellow Imperialis of the Ceratocampidae, and their relatives. Modest and lovely Modesta belongs with the Smerinthinae group; and there are others, feeders and non-feeders, forming ...
— Moths of the Limberlost • Gene Stratton-Porter
... tears and entreated to be spared when Lady More wanted to make a match between her and the big porter, and had not her distress led Mistress Margaret to appeal to her father, who had said he should as soon think of wedding the silver-footed Thetis to Polyphemus. "Tilley valley! Master More," the lady had answered, "will all your fine pagan gods hinder the wench from starving on earth, ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... way with gifts and guidance (343-577). The voyage from Dyrrhachium and the first glimpse of Italy. They land and propitiate Juno: then coast along till they sight Mount AEtna (578-666). After a description of the rescue of Achemenides and the escape from Polyphemus, the voyage and the story end with the death ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... before he dies, and the thought of which sustains him in his trials and causes him to scorn all joys on his road thither. The thousand adventures of Ulysses, his sojourn with the nymph Calypso, his terrible perils in the cave of the giant Polyphemus and near the isle of the Sirens, the tempests which he survives, the hospitality he receives from King Alcinoues, the visit he pays to the dead—among whom is Achilles regretting the earth and preferring to be a ploughman among the living ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... Jali'ad and the Vizier Shammas is distinctly reported to have been translated from the Persian into Arabic. Even Greek sources have not been left untouched, if the picture of the cannibal in the adventures of Sindbad the Sailor be really a reflex of the story of Odysseus and Polyphemus. Arabic historians—such as Tabari, Masudi, Kazwini, al-Jauzi—and the Kitab al-Aghani, have furnished innumerable anecdotes and tales; while such old Arabic poets as Imr al-Kais, Alkamah, Nabhighah, etc., have contributed ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... which he will never leave again until the final act of the great drama is played out. Hitherto he has been pursued by the malice of Poseidon, who wrecked his fleet, drowned all his men, and kept him confined for seven years in Calypso's island, in vengeance for the blinding of his son Polyphemus. ...
— Stories from the Odyssey • H. L. Havell
... 407, where the gods descend into the battle, Minerva laughs at Mars when she has struck him with a huge stone so that he fell, his hair was draggled in the dust, and his armour clanged around him. In the Odyssey, Ulysses speaks of his heart laughing within him after he had put out Polyphemus' eye with a burning stick without being discovered. And in Book xviii, Ulysses strikes Irus under the ear and breaks his head, so that blood pours from his mouth, and he falls gnashing and struggling on the ground, at which, we are told, ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... could have made you such. You're far the fattest I have found; I'll take you for my eating.' And on the creature bleating He settled down. Now, sooth to say, This sheep would weigh More than a cheese; And had a fleece Much like that matting famous Which graced the chin of Polyphemus;[23] So fast it clung to every claw, It was not easy to withdraw. The shepherd came, caught, caged, and, to their joy, Gave croaker to his children for ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... knew by heart a score of little poems, or passages of verse, which Rolfe, disregarding the inept volumes known as children's anthologies, chose with utmost care from his favourite singers, and repeated till they were learnt. Stories from the Odyssey had come in of late; but Polyphemus was a doubtful experiment—Hughie dreamt of him. Great caution, too, was needful in the matter of pathos. On hearing for the first time Andersen's tale of the Little Tin Soldier, Hughie burst into tears, and ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... the parents of the Nereids, the most celebrated of whom were Amphitrite, Thetis, the mother of Achilles, and Galatea, who was loved by the Cyclops Polyphemus. Nereus was distinguished for his knowledge, and his love of truth and justice, and is described as the wise and unerring Old Man of the Sea. The gift of prophecy was also ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... and Zeus, the man-god, still quaffed the sacred ambrosia in its shady groves. The Sirens still sang their entrancing songs, while Scylla and Charybdis were ever stretching out eager arms toward unwary mariners. Gigantic one-eyed Cyclops, with Polyphemus as their leader, still patrolled the shores of Sicily, and kept their "ever-watchful eyes" turned toward ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... appeared in Monthly Chronicle of North Country Folk-Lore. Further parallels abroad are enumerated by Mr. Clouston in his Book of Noodles, pp. 184-5, and by the late Prof. Koehler in Orient und Occident, ii., 331. The expedient by which Ulysses outwits Polyphemus in the Odyssey by calling himself [Greek: outis] is clearly of ...
— More English Fairy Tales • Various
... tyranny, cruelty, injustice, and everything horrid and abominable. We paint the giant ravaging the country, plundering the innocent traveller, and afterwards gorged with his half-living flesh: such are Polyphemus, Cacus, and others, who make so great a figure in romances and heroic poems. The event we attend to with the greatest satisfaction is their defeat and death. I do not remember, in all that multitude of deaths with which the Iliad is filled, that the fall of any man, remarkable ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... port the Cone of Maritimo: it outlies Marsala, whose wine caused the blinding of Polyphemus, and since that time has brought on many an attack of liver. The world then became to us pontus et aer. Days and nights were equally uneventful; the diary tells only of quiet seas under the lee of Sardinia and ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... and of the body of Asterius, ten cubits long, of which Pausanias speaks. I have read the reports of the skeleton of Trapani, found in the fourteenth century, and which was at the time identified as that of Polyphemus; and the history of the giant unearthed in the sixteenth century near Palermo. You know as well as I do, gentlemen, the analysis made at Lucerne in 1577 of those huge bones which the celebrated Dr. Felix Plater affirmed to be those of a giant nineteen feet ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... out—that the "Odyssey"[7] is more romantic than the "Iliad:" is, in fact, rather a romance than a hero-epic. The adventures of the wandering Ulysses, the visit to the land of the lotus-eaters, the encounter with the Laestrygonians, the experiences in the cave of Polyphemus, if allowance be made for the difference in sentiments and manners, remind the reader constantly of the medieval romans d'aventure. Pater quotes De Stendhal's saying that all good art was romantic in its day. "Romanticism," ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... the jaws of the world. We have the phrase, that a man is himself under certain trying circumstances. There is no need to say it of Sir Willoughby: he was thrice himself when danger menaced, himself inspired him. He could read at a single glance the Polyphemus eye in the general head of a company. Lady Busshe, Lady Culmer, Mrs. Mountstuart, Mr. Dale, had a similarity in the variety of their expressions that made up one giant eye for him perfectly, if awfully, legible. He discerned the fact that his demon secret was abroad, universal. He ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... "Down, Polyphemus!" he said to the dog, which crept under a chair; while he, taking no notice of my presence, hurried ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... is not worth anything without a catalogue; it is a Polyphemus without an eye in his head—and you must confront the difficulties whatever they may be, of making ...
— The Guide to Reading - The Pocket University Volume XXIII • Edited by Dr. Lyman Abbott, Asa Don Dickenson, and Others
... the most remarkable of which are Andromeda and Perseus, Diana and Endymion, the Education of Bacchus, the Battle of Platea, &c. In one splendid mansion were discovered several pictures, representing Polyphemus and Galatea, Hercules and the three Hesperdies, Cupid and a Bacchante, Mercury and Io, Perseus killing Medusa, and other subjects. There were also in the store rooms of the same house, evidently belonging to a very rich family, ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... all alone with his flocks and herds, dwelt a huge and hideous one-eyed giant. Polyphemus was his name, and his father was ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 2 (of 12) • Various
... cured with smoke, like ham; and fresh pieces of human flesh were found stewing in earthen kettles, along with the flesh of parrots. Now at length, said Peter Martyr, was proved the truth of the stories of Polyphemus and the Laestrygonians, and the reader must look out lest his hair stand on end.[560] These western Laestrygonians were known as Caribbees, Caribales, or Canibales, and have thus furnished an epithet ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... extraordinary facility afforded him for introducing into his work that order of representation which is called the marvellous. For it is just as easy to the hearer to set before his fancy a giant or a pigmy, as a man; the one-eyed monster Polyphemus, as the beautiful, the graceful, the swift, the strong, the sublime, the terrible Achilles. It is just as easy for him to transport himself in fancy to the summit of Olympus, to the palace of Jupiter, and to the Council or to the Banquet of the Gods, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... Calvin, sometimes imitates the luxuriant abuse of his master. When he writes against Tillemont, a Lutheran minister, he bestows on him the following titles of honour:—"Polyphemus; an ape; a great ass, who is distinguished from other asses by wearing a hat; an ass on two feet; a monster composed of part of an ape and wild ass; a villain who merits hanging on the first tree we find." And Beza was, no doubt, desirous ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... pictures, which themselves are believed to be derived from Alexandrian originals. There are more curious coincidences than this. In the sixth idyl of Theocritus, Damoetas makes the Cyclops say that Galatea 'will send him many a messenger.' The mere idea of describing the monstrous cannibal Polyphemus in love, is artificial and Alexandrian. But who were the 'messengers' of the sea-nymph Galatea? A Pompeian picture illustrates the point, by representing a little Love riding up to the shore on the back of a dolphin, with a letter in his hand for Polyphemus. Greek art in Egypt suffered from ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... 168) the cannibal is called "Goul Eli-Fenioun" and Von Hammer remarks, "There is no need of such likeness of name to prove that al this episode is a manifest imitation of the adventures of Ulysses in Polyphemus's cave; * * * and this induces the belief that the Arabs have been acquainted with the poems of Homer." Living intimately with the Greeks they could not have ignored the Iliad and the Odyssey: indeed we know by tradition that they had translations, now ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... Cornelia, drawing back. "How can I give you what you wish, unless I am safe from that awful Polyphemus ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... Polyphemus had an eye for business; it was in the middle of his forehead. It served him admirably for the only two duties which are demanded in a modern financier and captain of industry: the two duties of counting sheep and of eating men. But when that one eye was put out he was done for. ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... humpback who eggs on Queen Kaikeyi to demand her two boons; the beautiful scene in which Sita insists on following Rama into the forest; the account of the somnolent giant Pot-ear, a character quite as good as Polyphemus. Other fine episodes are so briefly alluded to as to lose all their charm: for example, the story of the golden deer that attracts the attention of Rama while Ravana is stealing his wife; the journey of the monkey Hanumat to Ravana's fortress and his interview ...
— Translations of Shakuntala and Other Works • Kaalidaasa
... six hundred and fifty-two, there are fifty-nine hundred and seventy in Doctor Dyar's big catalogue. Perhaps the most interesting of these caterpillars are the big native silk-worms, like those of the cecropia moth, the luna moth, the polyphemus moth, or the promethia moth. These caterpillars are very large and are to be found feeding upon the leaves of different trees, and all spin strong silken cocoons. People have tried to reel these cocoons, ...
— Boy Scouts Handbook - The First Edition, 1911 • Boy Scouts of America
... awake to find myself a man. I don't care whether I sleep or not. I feel gloriously, exultingly young. I am but twenty. As I have never lived, I have never grown old. Life translates itself into music—a wild "Invitation to the Waltz" by some Archangel Weber. I laugh out loud. Polyphemus, who has been regarding me with his one bantering eye from Carlotta's corner on the sofa, leaps to the ground and grotesquely curvets round the room in a series of impish hops. Heigh, old boy? Do the pulsations of the music ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... his companions, for though they were dashed to the ground and dragged along by the Cyclops, they said not a word about Odysseus, nor did they show the stake of wood that had been put into the fire and prepared to put out Polyphemus' eye, but they would rather have been eaten alive than divulge secrets, such wonderful self-control and fidelity had they.[569] And so it was not amiss of Pittacus, when the king of Egypt sent him a victim, and bade him take from it the best and worst piece ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... distinctly Polyphemus; but the East had giants and cyclopes of her own (Hierozoicon ii. 845). The Ajaib al-Hind (chapt. cxxii.) makes Polyphemus copulate with the sheep. Sir John Mandeville (if such person ever existed) mentions men fifty feet high in the Indian Islands; ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... any freshly spun cocoons. She searched the bushes and low trees behind the garden and all around the edge of the woods on their land, and having little success, at last came to the road. Almost the first thorn bush she examined yielded a Polyphemus cocoon. Elnora lifted her head with the instinct of a hunter on the chase, and began work. She reached the swamp before she knew it, carrying five fine cocoons of different species as her reward. She pushed back her hair and gazed around longingly. A few rods inside she thought she ...
— A Girl Of The Limberlost • Gene Stratton Porter
... This is an imitation, perhaps; as is a noble picture of "Jesus Christ and the Children," by Flandrin: but the artists are imitating better models, at any rate; and one begins to perceive that the odious classical dynasty is no more. Poussin's magnificent "Polyphemus" (I only know a print of that marvellous composition) has, perhaps, suggested the first-named picture; and the latter has been inspired by a good enthusiastic study of ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... to me (the kind reader will please to fancy that I am alluding here to persons of the most ravishing beauty and lofty rank), always used to bear in mind that a time would come when they would be fond of somebody else. We are served a la Russe, and gobbled up a dish at a time, like the folks in Polyphemus's cave. 'Tis hodie mihi, cras tibi: there are some Anthropophagi who devour dozens of us, the old, the young, the tender, the tough, the plump, the lean, the ugly, the beautiful: there's no escape, and one after another, as ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... monometallist ought also to be a monoculist. Polyphemus, the old Cyclops, would be his ideal. Unfortunately our philosophers were not in the Garden of Eden at the time when the Creator made the mistake of endowing men with eyes in pairs. Perhaps it would not be too much to say that there ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... from the Flying Dutchman to his wife. I could linger no longer among books; for the afternoon was waning, and there was yet much to see. The bare mention of a few more curiosities must suffice. The immense skull of Polyphemus was recognizable by the cavernous hollow in the centre of the forehead where once had blazed the giant's single eye. The tub of Diogenes, Medea's caldron, and Psyche's vase of beauty were placed one within another. Pandora's box, without the lid, stood next, containing nothing but ...
— A Virtuoso's Collection (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... cream, and with rows of cheeses standing on the ledges of rock. While the Greeks were regaling themselves, a noise was heard, and great flocks of sheep and goats came bleating in. Behind them came a giant, with a fir tree for a staff, and only one eye in the middle of his forehead. He was Polyphemus, one of the Cyclops, sons of Neptune, and workmen of Vulcan. He asked fiercely who the strangers were, and Ulysses told him that they were shipwrecked sailors, imploring him for hospitality in ...
— Aunt Charlotte's Stories of Greek History • Charlotte M. Yonge
... like the water. This fact is certified to by old Homer, who knew Polyphemus; and the same observation will be found in all natural histories worthy of the name. Finette's master resembled Polyphemus. He roared with rage when he saw his slaves about to escape him. He ran hesitatingly along the shore; he flung huge masses of rock after the vessel, which happily ...
— Laboulaye's Fairy Book • Various
... everything she wanted him to. The fact is that he had eyes for nothing but her. The grotto of Polyphemus and the cave of Caecus would have appeared to him pleasanter than the gardens of Armida, if Clementine's little red jacket had ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About
... away, for to go forward seemed useless. In due course we reached it safely. Once a mass of snow as large as a church swept down just in front of us, and once a great boulder loosened from the mountain rushed at us suddenly like an attacking lion, or the stones thrown by Polyphemus at the ship of Odysseus, and, leaping over our heads, vanished with an angry scream into the depths beneath. But we took little heed of these things: our nerves were deadened, and no danger seemed to ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... be there?) is startling. Startling, too, are the tricks played on your nerves by the peepholes. You see a woman crazed by hunger about to cook one of her murdered children; beheaded men, men crushed by superior power, the harnessed body of Patroclus, Polyphemus devouring the companions of Ulysses, and other monstrous conceptions, are all painted with reference to the ills of the poor. Anton Joseph was a socialist in sentiment. If his executive ability had ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... Polyphemus answered nothing, but without more ado caught up two of the men, as a man might catch up the whelps of a dog, and dashed them on the ground, and tore them limb from limb, and devoured them, with huge draughts of milk between, leaving not a morsel, not even the very bones. But ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... Cyclops, whose name was Polyphemus (so famous in the Grecian fables), was that Ulysses, who with his company was driven on the coast of Sicily, where those Cyclops inhabited, coming to ask relief from Silenus and the Satyrs, who were herdsmen ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... of Parnassus, tell me, I pray you, was it a draught like this that the aged Chiron placed before Hercules, in the stony cave of Pholus? Was it nectar like this that made the mighty shepherd on Anapus' shore, Polyphemus, who flung the rocks upon Ulysses' ships, dance among his sheepfolds?—A cup like this ye poured out now upon the altar of Demeter, who presides over the threshing-floor. May it be mine, once more, to dig my big winnowing-fan through her heaps ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... cloud of smoke he breaks to light, And pours his specious miracles to sight; Antiphates his hideous feast devours, Charybdis barks, and Polyphemus roars. FRANCIS. ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... this mysterious lapse of time as the sequel of an adventure similar to that of Ulysses with Polyphemus. An old Lapp, having lost his way while hunting, came to a cottage. The door was open; and he entered to remain there the night, and began to cook in a pot he carried with him the game he had caught that day. Suddenly a witch entered, and asked him: "What is your name?" "Myself," ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... ramble and the sunshine lasted he would be all jest and gaiety, pelting me with dead leaves, chasing me in and out of the plantations, and telling me strange stories, half pathetic, half grotesque, of Dryads, and Fauns, and Satyrs—of Bacchus, and Pan, and Polyphemus—of nymphs who became trees, and shepherds who were transformed to fountains, and all kinds of beautiful wild myths of antique Greece—far more beautiful and far more wild than all the tales of gnomes and witches in my book ...
— Monsieur Maurice • Amelia B. Edwards
... Ulysses, "you must remember, my good friends, our misadventure in the cavern of one-eyed Polyphemus, the Cyclops! Instead of his ordinary milk diet, did he not eat up two of our comrades for his supper, and a couple more for breakfast, and two at his supper again? Methinks I see him yet, the hideous monster, scanning us with that great red eye, in the middle of his forehead, ...
— Tanglewood Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Caledonians (which, we dare say, are pleasant quadrilles to those who know them, and the Charmer does). Well, she is top, with young Hoy (heir to Sir Hobbedy), for a partner, a brave youth at quoits, cricket, boxing, or boating—his hands, horny as a tortoise and large as Polyphemus', over which he split three right-hand gloves:—a glance will suffice to show how much he is out of his, and she in her, element—Miss Charmer looking, Lark said, as if she would prefer performing the "first set" (or sit) upon a vacant seat, beside Arthur Beau, who has just ...
— Christmas Comes but Once A Year - Showing What Mr. Brown Did, Thought, and Intended to Do, - during that Festive Season. • Luke Limner
... lies in the fact that the Homer of the Iliad always knows what he is talking about, while the supposed Homer of the Odyssey often makes mistakes that betray an almost incredible ignorance of detail. Thus the giant Polyphemus drives in his ewes home from their pasture, and milks them. The lambs of course have not been running with them; they have been left in the yards, so they have had nothing to eat. When he has milked the ewes, the giant lets each one of them ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... schoolboy!—B., with his arms full of yellow weeds,—ore from the gold mines which he discovered long before we heard of California,—Y., born to millions, crazed by too much plum-cake, (the boys said,) dogged, explosive,—made a Polyphemus of my weak-eyed schoolmaster, by a vicious flirt with a stick,—(the multi-millonnaires sent him a trifle, it was said, to buy another eye with; but boys are jealous of rich folks, and I don't doubt the good people made ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... calling them from their graves. Faustus appointed another day for this, received the excited youths in a dark chamber, commanded them to be perfectly silent, and made the great men of the Greek bard rise up, one by one, before their eyes. At length Polyphemus appeared; and the one-eyed Cyclops, with his red hair, an iron spear in his hand, and, to designate him at once as a cannibal, two bloody human thighs in his mouth, looked so hideous, that the spectators were seized with horror and disgust, the more so that the wily magician ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... the hollows of cut reeds. I thereupon installed some hives of a new kind on the sunniest walls of my enclosure. They consisted of stumps of the great reed of the south, open at one end, closed at the other by the natural knot and gathered into a sort of enormous pan-pipe, such as Polyphemus might have employed. The invitation was accepted: Osmiae, Anthidia and Megachiles came in fairly large numbers, especially the first, to benefit by ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... assuming importance in California, and though the Chinese silk worm has not been successfully cultivated in the Eastern States, yet the American silk worm, Teleas Polyphemus (see frontispiece, male; Fig. 54, larva; 55, pupa; 56, cocoon), can, we are assured by Mr. Trouvelot, be ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... the immortal Gods know and have determined every step of man's life. He gives his sanction to Athene and Hermes to watch over and defend Odysseus. Again clouds hide the scene. When they part we find ourselves in Sicily before the cavern of Polyphemus the Cyclops. Here Odysseus carries out the cunning plan he has made to free his companions from certain death at the hands of the giant. He blinds the Cyclops with a red-hot stake, and escapes with his friends by clinging to the ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... tale, symbolically, the forest represents night; the crumbs and pebbles, stars; and the Ogre, the sun. Little Thumb, because of his cunning and invention, has been called the Ulysses of the fairy tales. His adventure with the Ogre at the rock, while not a parallel one, reminds one of Ulysses and Polyphemus. Both succeeded in getting the better of the giant. An English edition of this tale was illustrated by ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready
... can so much better be done by a catalogue. No one who uses books very much but sooner or later becomes grateful for the existence of an alphabet and an arrangement by A B C. Carlyle once said, 'A library is not worth anything without a catalogue; it is a Polyphemus without any eye in his head, and you must confront the difficulties, whatever they may be, of ...
— The Private Library - What We Do Know, What We Don't Know, What We Ought to Know - About Our Books • Arthur L. Humphreys
... be very much quoted in England, Bossu, in his discourse on the Epic Poem, had serious difficulties with the adventures of Ulysses, and his stories told in Phaeacia. The episodes of Circe, of the Sirens, and of Polyphemus, are machines; they are also not quite easy to understand. "They are necessary to the action, and yet they are not humanly probable." But see how Homer gets over the difficulty and brings back ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... and reigned in the time of the flood; Who begat Nembroth, Who begat Atlas, that with his shoulders kept the sky from falling; Who begat Goliah, Who begat Erix, that invented the hocus pocus plays of legerdemain; Who begat Titius, Who begat Eryon, Who begat Polyphemus, Who begat Cacus, Who begat Etion, the first man that ever had the pox, for not drinking fresh in summer, as Bartachin witnesseth; Who begat Enceladus, Who begat Ceus, Who begat Tiphaeus, Who begat Alaeus, Who begat Othus, ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... whom hapless guest ne'er saw "With safety; spurner of the power of Jove, "And all the host of heaven, what love is, feels! "Seiz'd with desire of me he flames, forgets "His flocks, and caverns. All thy anxious care "Thy beauty, Polyphemus! to improve, "And all thy anxious care is now to please. "And now with rakes thou comb'st thy rugged hair; "Now with a scythe thou mow'st thy bushy beard: "Thy features to behold in the clear brook, "And calm their fire employs thee. All his love "Of slaughter; ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... chain suggested, not the beams, which it was its office to transport, but the mastodons and mammoths which it might have served to harness; it had the air of the galleys, but of cyclopean and superhuman galleys, and it seemed to have been detached from some monster. Homer would have bound Polyphemus with it, and ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... 1825, some private affairs called me into the sister kingdom; and as I did not travel, like Polyphemus, with my eye out, I gathered a few samples of Irish character, amongst which was the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 402, Supplementary Number (1829) • Various
... entirely of his own creation, he determined to "begin at the beginning" in his original composition. But it matters little or nothing. We have, once more, a burlesque genealogy with known persons—Nimrod, Goliath, Polyphemus, etc. etc.—entangled in a chain of imaginaries, one of the latter, Hurtaly, forming the subject of a solemn discussion of the question why he is not received among the crew of the Ark. The unfortunate concomitants of the birth of ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... many conversations we had together on the state of Italy, his hatred of the archbishop (Visconti), his love of solitude and freedom, so necessary for study, and has resolved to imprison the Muses at that court? Whom may we trust again, if Silvanus, who once branded Il Visconti as the Cruel, a Polyphemus, a Cyclop, has avowed himself his friend, and placed his neck under the yoke of him whose audacity, and pride, and tyranny, he so deeply abhorred? How has Visconti obtained that which King Robert, which the pontiff, ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... Wonderland to Mogadore we plodded, Forty singing seamen in an old black barque, And we landed in the twilight where a Polyphemus nodded With his battered moon-eye winking red and yellow through the dark! For his eye was growing mellow, Rich and ripe and red and yellow, As was time, since old Ulysses made him bellow in the dark! Cho.—Since Ulysses bunged his eye up with ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... performed in the palace of the Bishop of Groswardein. Of late years there have been a number of theatrical representations of Mendelssohn's "Elijah." I have witnessed as well as heard a performance of "Acis and Galatea" and been entertained with the spectacle of Polyphemus crushing the head of presumptuous Acis with a stave like another Fafner while singing "Fly, thou massy ruin, fly" to the bludgeon which was playing understudy for the ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... our credit that after such an evening dish-washing was no longer a task, but rather a delightful prelude to another mythological feast. We wandered with Ulysses and shuddered at Polyphemus; we went in quest of the Golden Fleece, and watched the sack of Troy; we came to know Orpheus and Eurydice and Pyramus and Thisbe; and we sowed dragon's teeth and saw armed men spring up before us. Since those glorious evenings with grandmother the classic myths ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... having been made, repeated, and answered, we had the mortification to see the Agamemnon get upon the edge of the shoal, on the first attempt to leave her anchorage, where she remained immovable. A similar misfortune followed, in succession, to the Russell and Polyphemus; and the Jamaica frigate, with a convoy of gun-boats and small craft, having fallen in with a counter-current, made the signal of inability to come forward. A mind less invincible than Lord Nelson's, might have been discouraged. Though the battle was not began, yet he had approached the enemy; ...
— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. II (of 2) • James Harrison
... the young man: "I am sorry Not to be a proven hero, Neither have I conquered Ilium, Nor have blinded Polyphemus, Neither have I ever thus far Met with any Royal Princess, Who when spreading out the linen Felt for me a soft compassion. But with pleasure I obey you." On the bench he took his seat now By the stove all covered over With glazed tiles much ornamented. ...
— The Trumpeter of Saekkingen - A Song from the Upper Rhine. • Joseph Victor von Scheffel
... neither aspires to inflame passions nor to compose the great eirenikon. Those who approach with love or hatred are to go empty away; if indeed he does not try by turns to fill them both. He seeks his object not by standing aloof, as if the name that perplexed Polyphemus was the proper name for historians, but by running successively on opposing lines. He conceives that civilised Europe owes its preservation to the radiant centre of religious power at Rome, and ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... circling and crying "peent, peent" all the afternoon. If you can catch sight of him before the light fades too much you will see the white bar which crosses each wing beneath and looks exactly like a hole, as if the bird had transparencies in his pinions as has the polyphemus moth. Many a summer afternoon I have seen nighthawks circling erratically above Boston Common, and there their cry has sounded like a plaint. No doubt these birds fly there by choice and bring up their young on the tops of Back Bay buildings because they prefer ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... fighting, the "San Ildefonso" hauled down her colours to the "Defence." About this time the French "Achille" was seen to be ablaze and ceased firing. In the earlier stages of the fight she had been engaged successively with the "Polyphemus," "Defiance," and "Swiftsure." Her captain and several of her officers and nearly 400 men had been killed and wounded when she was brought to close action by the "Prince." Her fore-rigging caught fire, and the mast coming down across the decks started a blaze in several ...
— Famous Sea Fights - From Salamis to Tsu-Shima • John Richard Hale
... foam fingers fell on the pebbles that fringed the beach. From the deck of a schooner anchored off shore, floated the deep voice of a man singing Schubert's "Ave Maria"; and far, far away over the weird waste of waters, where a buoy marked a sunken wreck, its red beacon burned like the eye of Polyphemus, crouching in ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... history of a country. It contains, as it were, the confession which every generation, before it passed away, has made to posterity. "Without Literary History," as Lord Bacon says, "the History of the World seemeth to be as the Statue of Polyphemus with his eye out; that part being wanting which doth most shew the spirit and life of the person." From this point of view the historian of literature learns to value what to the critic would seem unmeaning and tedious, and he is loath to miss the works ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller |
