"Semele" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with the common belief; hence, too, Hercules is considered so great and propitious a God among the Greeks, and from them he was introduced among us, and his worship has extended even to the very ocean itself. This is how it was that Bacchus was deified, the offspring of Semele; and from the same illustrious fame we receive Castor and Pollux as Gods, who are reported not only to have helped the Romans to victory in their battles, but to have been the messengers of their success. What shall we say of Ino, the daughter of Cadmus? Is she not called Leucothea by the Greeks, ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... fix'd on Beatrice, And with mine eyes my soul, that in her looks Found all contentment. Yet no smile she wore And, "Did I smile," quoth she, "thou wouldst be straight Like Semele when into ashes turn'd: For, mounting these eternal palace-stairs, My beauty, which the loftier it climbs, As thou hast noted, still doth kindle more, So shines, that, were no temp'ring interpos'd, Thy mortal ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... ascended to Saturn, Dante would have perished as did Semele, from excess of light. In Saturn dwelt the spirits of the contemplative, the monks and hermits, and here was Jacob's ladder, up and down whose bars of gold sparkled the spirits of the saints, silent for the same reason that ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... fair ones to offend, And fear those, that to fear them least intend. Who now will care the altars to perfume? Tut, men should not their courage so consume. Jove throws down woods and castles with his fire, But bids his darts from perjured girls retire. Poor Semele among so many burned, Her own request to her own torment turned. But when her lover came, had she drawn back, The father's thigh should unborn Bacchus lack. 40 Why grieve I? and of heaven reproaches pen? The gods have eyes, and breasts as well as men. Were I a god, I should give ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... Beatrice, who has grown more and more beautiful as they rise, explains, when Dante again gazes upon her, that she no longer dares smile, lest he be consumed like Semele when she beheld Jove. The magnetic power of her glance suffices again, however, to transfer him to the seventh heaven, that of Saturn (revolved by Thrones). This sphere is the abiding place of contemplative and abstinent ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... legend, as in "Tannhaeuser" and in the flight of Odysseus from the embraces of sensualism, had already appeared in the Greek myth of Zeus and Semele. Like the God from the cloudy Olympian realms, so Lohengrin from the boundless ether to which Christian imagination had assigned Olympus, descends to the human female in the natural longing of love. There was an old tradition in the legends of the people who ...
— Life of Wagner - Biographies of Musicians • Louis Nohl
... as acting consistently. If they were invisible in the ordinary world it was because they were aloof or because their "persons" were too splendid for weak human eyes. Moses was permitted a mitigated view of the person of the Hebrew God on Mount Horeb; and Semele, who insisted upon seeing Zeus in the glories that were sacred to Juno, was utterly consumed. The early Islamic conception of God, like the conception of most honest, simple Christians to-day, was clearly, in spite of the theologians, of a very exalted anthropomorphic personality ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... I would not like to be left in a room alone with the "Moses." How did the artist live amongst them, and create them? How did he suffer the painful labor of invention? One fancies that he would have been scorched up, like Semele, by sights too tremendous for his vision to bear. One cannot imagine him, with our small physical endowments and ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the appellations of the "many-named" god Dionysus. The son of Jupiter and Semele was to the Greeks ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... "Except!" Dr. Warton exclaims, "Is not this a high sort of poetry?" He mentions, likewise, that Congreve's opera, or oratorio, of Semele, was set to musick by Handel; ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson |
