"Serpent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... thou serpent curst, To begin I now intend; Below by thy feet, as is full meet, I soon shall make ...
— King Diderik - and the fight between the Lion and Dragon and other ballads - - - Translator: George Borrow • Thomas J. Wise
... in bed, with exceeding weakness. In the centre of the lofty ceiling of the room in which he lay, and where it had been his wont to work, there is a painting by his son. It depicts an eagle struggling with a serpent, and is illustrative of a superb passage in Shelley's "Revolt of Islam." What memories, what deep thoughts, it must have suggested; how significant, to us, the circumstance! But weak as the poet was, he yet did not see the shadow which had begun to chill the hearts of the watchers. Shortly before ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... Myuingwa (a vague conception of the god of the interior) and Baholinkonga (plumed serpent of enormous size, genius of water) their old men obtained a seed from which sprang a magic ...
— The Unwritten Literature of the Hopi • Hattie Greene Lockett
... nurse of abuse, infecting us with many pestilent desires, with a syren sweetness, drawing the mind to the serpent's tail of sinful fancies; and herein, especially, comedies give the largest field to ear, as Chaucer saith; how, both in other nations and ours, before poets did soften us, we were full of courage, given to martial exercises, the pillars of manlike liberty, and not lulled asleep ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... the return voyage from Troy by the bite of a serpent. The town Canoepos (Latin, Canopus) was built on the site ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... but return to our native sea-breezes, there to warm my frozen lungs; and has so filled my mother's fancy with stories of sick men, who were given up for lost in Germany and France, and yet renewed their youth, like any serpent or eagle, by going to Italy, Spain, and the Canaries, that she herself will be more ready to let me go than I to leave her all alone. And yet I must go, Amyas. It is not merely that my heart pants, as Sidney's does, ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... of Pons' collection; she had a clear record behind her of ten years of devotion, honesty, and disinterestedness; it was a magnificent investment, and now she proposed to realize. In one day, Remonencq's hint of money had hatched the serpent's egg, the craving for riches that had lain dormant within her for twenty years. Since she had cherished that craving, it had grown in force with the ferment of all the evil that lurks in the corners of the heart. How she acted upon ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... had wandered there the fresh June foliage was utterly blasted. That night we could no longer take pleasure in the spectacle; we could no longer fancy a joyous illumination. We seemed rather to behold the winding coils of some fiery serpent gliding farther and farther on its path of evil: a rattling, hissing sound accompanying its movement, the young trees trembling and quivering with agitation in the heated current which proclaimed its approach. The fresh flowers were all blighted by its scorching breath, ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Vol. I. No. 3, July 15, 1850 • Various
... with two pinases, the one called the Serpent, and the other the Mary Sparke of Plimouth, both of them belonging to Sir Walter Raleigh, written by John Euesham Gentleman, wherein were taken the gouernour, of the Isle of Sainct Michael, and Pedro Sarmiento ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of The English Nation, v. 7 - England's Naval Exploits Against Spain • Richard Hakluyt
... Camise, Candys, Camia, Cidaris, Mitra, Zona, and the like. The last was a sacred fillet, or girdle, which they esteemed an emblem of the orbit described by Zon, the Sun. They either represented their Gods as girded round with a serpent, which was an emblem of the same meaning; or else with this bandage, denominated [1010]Zona. They seem to have been secondary Deities, who were called Zoni and [1011]Azoni. The term signifies Heliadae: and they were looked upon as aethereal essences, ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume II. (of VI.) • Jacob Bryant
... resulting canyon, while at first not more than two hundred feet deep, rapidly increases this depth, as the strata run up and the river runs down. The canyon is narrow, and seen from a height resembles, as previously mentioned, a dark serpent lying across a plain. As the formation down to the Little Colorado is mainly a fine-grained grey marble, Powell concluded to call this division by a separate name, and gave it the title it now bears, Marble Canyon. ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... stop here for one minute to remark, though against myself, upon that security which innocence gives, that nevertheless had better have in it a greater mixture of the serpent with the dove. For here, heedless of all I could say behind her back, because she was satisfied with her own worthiness, she permitted me to go on with my own story, without interruption, to persons as great strangers ...
— Clarissa, Volume 5 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... clearness of his eyes, the sharpness of his nose, the liveliness of his forehead, lend to his countenance a decided expression of his belief in the resurrection of life. His principles are settled, not so much because that is required for the happiness of a good conscience, but because the old serpent has crammed the ways of man with so many deceits in this world of vanity and vexation of spirit, that a heart of the honesty of George Black, cannot possibly have any sympathy with the crooked ways of rogues and vagabonds; and so he is afflicted at their number and audacity, especially in ...
— The Eureka Stockade • Carboni Raffaello
... into the sea; there will be no conscious existence in the universe. Brahm himself will glide into a profound slumber from which he will awake after a vast season of repose. A rope lying on the road is taken for a serpent, but it is only a rope. There are hundreds of suns glancing on the waters, but there is only one sun. In reply we contend that illusion implies reality; that if there was no reality illusion would be impossible. If there was no serpent a rope would not be taken for it. ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... late, but he would say nothing more. So they were obliged to return and confess their want of success to the Mermaids, who sympathized with them, and agreed that it was very ill-natured of the Albatross. They proposed to go to the Sea-serpent and ask his advice, which the Sea-gulls thought a good plan. They set off at once for the deep seas, where he lived, inquiring of the fish they met whether any news had been heard. But the fish had nothing to tell, and the Mermaids came to the ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... young man looked with hers, and found the reason for the sudden scene. A serpent, some feet in length—one of the mottled, harmless species sometimes locally called the blow-snake—obviously had come out into the morning sun to warm himself, and his yellow body, lying loose and uncoiled, had been invisible to horse and rider until they were almost upon it. ...
— The Magnificent Adventure - Being the Story of the World's Greatest Exploration and - the Romance of a Very Gallant Gentleman • Emerson Hough
... he found that his Himalayan Paradise was not without its serpent. The three officers of the detachment were seated at dinner on the Mess verandah, Major Hunt with his back to the rough stone wall of the building. A swinging oil lamp with a metal shade ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly
... which the variation is slight, and thirteen in which it is marked. Of the distinctly free quotations in the Pentateuch (eleven in all), three may be thought to have a Messianic character (the burning bush, the brazen serpent, the curse of the cross), but in none of these does the variation appear to be due to this. Of the three free quotations from the Psalms two are Messianic, and one of these has probably been influenced by the Messianic application. In the free quotations from Isaiah it is not quite easy to say ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday
... Biographical Notice The Two Sisters The Siwash Rock The Recluse The Lost Salmon Run The Deep Waters The Sea-Serpent The Lost Island Point Grey The Tulameen Trail The Grey Archway Deadman's Island A Squamish Legend of Napoleon The Lure in Stanley Park Deer Lake A Royal ...
— Legends of Vancouver • E. Pauline Johnson
... now see what I could have done save endure. To have struggled with him in the street, or to have exacted any lower recompense from him than his heart's best blood, would have been futile and degrading. Moreover, he was a boy whom no man could hurt; an invulnerable and dodging serpent who, when chased into a corner, flew out again between his captor's legs, scornfully yelping. I wrote, however, to Mr. Trabb by next day's post, to say that Mr. Pip must decline to deal further with one who could so far forget what he owed ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... right; I'm no examining board. Just so you can run it and keep it running. Now I'll get a gang at the furnace, if the boys have got over their sea-serpent ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... the sea-serpent pie I've warmed up, and I've opened a can of elephant's heads by way ...
— Prince Vance - The Story of a Prince with a Court in His Box • Eleanor Putnam
... scenery, of sea and mountains combined, the fact that there is supposed to be not a snake nor a poisonous plant nor an insect worse than bees in all the islands, it would seem that this is truly a paradise, without even the serpent ...
— Wanderings in the Orient • Albert M. Reese
... unchangeable laws of Mind that there exists a perpetual necessity for presenting to men something which they can lay hold of as a sufficient ground for that change of mental attitude, by which alone they can be rescued from the fatal circle which is figured under the symbol of the Old Serpent. ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... "The Tiger, the Brahman, and the Jackal," and have there discussed the original form. Its interest, from the point of view of diffusion, lies in the fact that it occurs in India, both early (see Benfey, i., 117) and late (Temple, 12, Frere, 14), in Greece, both classical (AEsopic fable of the serpent in the bosom) and modern (Hahn, 87, Schmidt, p. 3), and in the earliest mediaeval collection of popular tales by Petrus Alfonsi (Disciplina clericalis, vii.), as well as in the Reynard cycle. Besides these quasi-literary sources ...
— Europa's Fairy Book • Joseph Jacobs
... whether you will destroy the man-child of true Freedom, Righteousness and Peace, in his resurrection. And now thou wilt either give us the tricks of a Soldier, face about, and return to Egypt, and so declare thyself to be part of the Serpent's seed that must bruise the heel of Christ. Or else to be one of the plain-hearted Sons of Promise, or Members of Christ, who shall help to bruise the Serpent's head, which is Kingly Oppression, and so bring in everlasting Righteousness and Peace into the ...
— The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth • Lewis H. Berens
... believed that the rattle is used to attract the attention of birds and other small creatures; and when they turn, and look into the eyes of the terrible serpent, they are so overcome with terror that they cannot fly away, and soon become its prey. This is commonly called snake charming; and a great many instances of it are related by people who are in the habit of telling the ...
— Stories of New Jersey • Frank Richard Stockton
... of, then least desired to bee seene or knowne, she-kinde of serpent; the venom'd sting of whose poysonous tongue, worse then the biting of a scorpion, proues more infectious farre then can be cured. Shee's of all other creatures most vntameablest, and couets more the last word in scoulding, then doth a Combater the last ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... claim descent from a God, for each family with this claim a myth of a separate divine amour was needed. Where there had existed Totemism, or belief in kinship with beasts, the myth of the amour of a wolf, bull, serpent, swan, and so forth, was attached to the legend of Zeus. Zeus had been that swan, serpent, wolf, or bull. Once more, ritual arose, in great part, from the rites ...
— The Homeric Hymns - A New Prose Translation; and Essays, Literary and Mythological • Andrew Lang
... blamed for pride and bad temper when the lion and serpent element in them disproportionately grows and ...
— The Republic • Plato
... formed the cup—kissubion—into which life entered, and from which it was drained as wine; so, too, from its wood was made the sacred chest (kiste) in which, in the Dyonisiac mysteries, the same secret was preserved under the form of a serpent, while in the Eleusinian it hid the dread pomegranate which Persephone had tasted. For they were all one and the same, this wine and serpent and pomegranate—the type of life and of knowledge—of human birth, and human intellect—of the world's generation ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... set eyes on him, there was a peculiar sympathy between us. We were drawn to each other. I felt instinctively he would be the man. I loved to hear him speak enthusiastically of the Brotherhood of Man—I, who knew the brotherhood of man was to the ape, the serpent, and the tiger—and he seemed to find a pleasure in stealing a moment's chat with me from his engrossing self-appointed duties. It is a pity humanity should have been robbed of so valuable a life. But it had to be. At a quarter to ten on the night of December 3rd he came to me. Naturally I said ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... that," said Mrs. French. Then Mrs. French went home, and early on the following morning it was thought good by Arabella that she also should pay a visit at Ottery St. Mary's. "Good-bye, Cammy," said Arabella as she went. "Bella," said Camilla, "I wonder whether you are a serpent. I do not think you can be so base a serpent as that." "I declare, Cammy, you do say such odd things that no one can understand what you ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... claimed by all churches and all creeds. This Hamilton, as I said, was exceedingly handsome, but it seems from the tradition that it was by the beauty of his eyes that Eva O'Neil was conquered, just as the first Eve was by the eyes and tongue of the serpent. Not, God knows, that the great Eve was any great shakes, for she left the world in a nice plight by falling in love with a serpent; but upon my credit she was not the first woman, excuse the blunder, who fell in love with a serpent, ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... retired life, squatted in a corner, hissing at all who passed near him. Perhaps he pined for water whereon to spread his wings and sail. Sometimes he quavered a plaintive remark on society as he found it, and sometimes he stretched up his neck to its longest length, a sinuous white serpent, and gazed wrathfully at the paneled ceiling. The firelight revealed him at this moment a bundle of glistening satin, wrapped in sleep and his wings from the ...
— The Lady of Fort St. John • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... best,—without seeing a reason for doing so. Serjeant Bluestone was still indignant, and Mr. Hardy was silent and moody. But the world at large were beginning to observe that in this, as in all difficult cases, the Solicitor-General tempered the innocence of the dove with the wisdom of the serpent. In the meantime Lady Anna by no means intended to allow the secret to pass her lips. Whether she ever could tell her mother, she doubted; but she certainly would not do so an hour too soon. "Why is ...
— Lady Anna • Anthony Trollope
... inherent disposition to pry into unknown things, which is said to mark her sex, and which was the weakness assailed by the serpent when he deluded Eve into disobedience, that now tempted Margery to go beyond the limits which Pigeonswing had set for her, with a view to explore and ascertain what might be found without. In doing this, however, she did ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... the tiny fire, he cooked himself a bit of the buffalo meat and ate it. Then he walked over to the river and procured a drink. On every side he could see nothing but the prairie, with the stream running through it like a huge serpent. Close to the water's edge were a few bushes, and some of these he pulled up with ease, with which ...
— On the Trail of Pontiac • Edward Stratemeyer
... navies that were the wonder of the North. Especially in building war-ships—the Crane, the Serpent, last of all the Long Serpent—he had, for size, for outward beauty, and inward perfection of equipment, transcended ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... the shriek as the Morton horde Hurry the victim beneath; And she feels their dead man's grasp on her skirt In the frenzy-terror of death; And the dastard King at her bosom cling With a serpent's poison-breath. ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... found that good young ladies, while of course they have all the innocence of the dove, do display upon emergencies a considerable share of the wisdom of the serpent. And on this same mother wit and wisdom, Rose called internally, when that day, about eleven o'clock, she was summoned to the library, ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... we next penetrate there are veritable dead bodies ranged on either side of us as we pass; their coffins are displayed in tiers one above the other; the air is heavy with the sickly odour of mummies; and on the ground, curled always like some huge serpent, the leather hoses are in readiness, for here indeed is the ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... in action already, with his gun on his shoulder. But the insurgents moved slowly. They had orders to make as little noise as possible. Thus the column advanced between the rows of elms like some gigantic serpent whose every ring had a strange quivering. The frosty December night had again sunk into silence, and the Viorne alone seemed ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... to mend the heart design'd, Quenching the fiery passions of mankind; When lurking hate and deadly rage combine, To charm the serpent of revenge is mine; By heavenly verse the furious deed restrain, And bid ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... and once more he threw him—so that Johnnie struck a wall, and lay for a moment, half stunned. Meanwhile, with his other hand, the longshoreman thrust Cis down into her chair. Then growling as he worked, he wound her in the rope as in the coils of a serpent, and bound her, body, ankles, and arms, to ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates
... the ground rose steep and high, and was covered with trees; but here in the hollow it was open. A stream ran along between us and the height. On this side of the stream stood a mighty tree, towards which my companion led me. It was an oak, with such a bushy head and such great roots rising in serpent rolls and heaves above the ground, that the stem ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... what a companion! during twelve hours, side by side with the man I despise and hate the most in the world! I would as soon travel with a serpent; my antipathy—" ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... make us some amends, we had no disturbance upon all the shores of this lake from any wild beasts; the only inconveniency of that kind was, that we met an ugly, venomous, deformed kind of a snake or serpent in the wet grounds near the lake, that several times pursued us as if it would attack us; and if we struck or threw anything at it, it would raise itself up and hiss so loud that it might be heard ...
— The Life, Adventures & Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton • Daniel Defoe
... of which I speak Is a most curious sort of freak. Though Serpent would its form describe, Yet it is of the feathered tribe. And 'tis the snake, I do believe, That tempted poor old Mother Eve, For never woman did exist Who could ...
— A Phenomenal Fauna • Carolyn Wells
... Doges, and the equestrian statues of many a doughty General. I admired them all, but liked nothing so much as a snug bas-relief I found out in a corner, which represents St. Mark and some other good souls a-prosing, whilst his lion and the old serpent squabble and scratch in the foreground of the sculpture, like cat and dog by the fireside. After dinner, when the shadows of domes and palaces began lengthening across the waves, ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... viewed through its lens, the most natural human relations appeared unnatural. Thus, not the primmest patterns of family life could hope for mercy in their eyes; over the family, too, man, as read by these young rigorists, was held to leave his serpent's ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... suddenly screamed in the bushes up behind the rocks just beyond my friends. Then it came rushing down over the rocks past them, flying and screaming, closely pursued by a long, slim red animal, that seemed to slide over the rocks like a serpent. Its legs were so short that one saw only the swift, gliding motion of its body. Across the road into the garden, within a yard of my friends, went the pursued and the pursuer, and into the garden rushed I and my dog. The ...
— Squirrels and Other Fur-Bearers • John Burroughs
... by name. This man was passionately attached to him and aided him in all his numerous manoeuvres. I do not intend to relate in detail all the exploits of my grand-uncle; he was possessed of such unbounded daring, such serpent-like resource, such inconceivable wiliness, such a fine and ready wit, that I must own I can understand the complete sway that unprincipled person exercised even over the ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... over her face. In a moment it was all wet; and she sat for some time with her beautiful head thrown back, and her snowy teeth set on her lovely under-lip, as though she suddenly felt the sting of a poisonous serpent, without removing the handkerchief from her face, lest he should see her ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... the westward of the Pin Portage is called Sandfly Lake; it is seven miles long and a wide channel connects it with the Serpent Lake, the extent of which to the southward we could not discern. There is nothing remarkable in this chain of lakes except their shapes, being rocky basins filled by the waters of the Missinippi, insulating the massy eminences and meandering with almost imperceptible current between ...
— The Journey to the Polar Sea • John Franklin
... them into argument—or if you must talk, stop when you have set them to talking. The listener is he who can best be wise as a serpent.... And now, dear friend, lend me your good sense. Thanks to the generosity of a kinsman, I am mistress of a residence in the city and this palace; and it is mine to choose between them. How healthful and charming life is with surroundings ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... writes, "seems very much afraid that my pen will be transformed into a venomous serpent when I employ it to address thee, my dear brother, and no wonder, for I like to pay my debts, and, as I received ten dollars' worth of scolding,[7] I should be guilty of injustice did I not return the favor. Well! such a lecture I ...
— The Grimke Sisters - Sarah and Angelina Grimke: The First American Women Advocates of - Abolition and Woman's Rights • Catherine H. Birney
... poison'd serpent cover'd all with flowers, Mother of sighs and murderer of repose; A sea of sorrows from whence are drawn such showers As moisture lend to every grief that grows; A school of guile, a net of deep deceit, A gilded hook ...
— Lyrics from the Song-Books of the Elizabethan Age • Various
... to wake in him the living impulse to take it. Just so with matters of personal neatness. He knows—oh, yes, knowing is his long suit!—he knows he "ought" to be neat; and he thinks he wants to be; but unless Eve and the serpent come along ...
— Happiness and Marriage • Elizabeth (Jones) Towne
... seven Churches of Asia. Of these seven revelations, the fourth is central both in place and meaning. It represents the kingdom of the world becoming the kingdom of Christ as the result of the coming of the Messiah, born of that glorious mother, the woman whose seed wars against the serpent (Gen. iii. 15), and the maiden who bears Immanuel (Isa. vii. 14), and who also represents the Church ...
— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan
... that of Greece and Italy—each, in its turn, the mistress of the world. I know, when, the term isothermal was used in my inaugural as Governor of Kansas, it was represented by some of our present rebel leaders, to the masses of the South, as some terrible monster, perhaps the Yankee sea serpent; but I now use the term again in no offence, from its important application to the present case, and knowing that what I now advise would produce incalculable benefits to the whole country, but ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... raised, and in the interval betwixt the poet's first action and his second, went out of his way—as it were, on prepense malice—to commit a fault; for he took his opportunity to kill a royal infant by the means of a serpent (that author of all evil) to make way for those funeral honours which he intended for him. Now if this innocent had been of any relation to his Thebais, if he had either farthered or hindered the taking ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... Bay and Davis' Straits, whilst we are looking for them beneath the arctic circle, we hear that they have pierced into the opposite region of polar cold, that they are at the antipodes, and engaged under the frozen Serpent of the South. Falkland Islands, which seemed too remote and romantic an object for the grasp of national ambition, is but a stage and resting-place in the progress of their victorious industry. Nor is the equinoctial heat more discouraging to them than the accumulated ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... toque, her cheeks faintly pink beneath the old lace veil—the devil!—it was a hard word to apply to the handsome, resolute young fellow who followed his mother up the gravel path, but at the moment Geoffrey Greville appeared in Mrs Ramsden's eyes as the destroyer of her happiness, the serpent who had brought discord into Eden! She was in truth an honest little Puritan in whose sight the good things of the world were but as snares and pitfalls. So far from feeling any pleasure in the thought that her daughter might one day ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... always carries with it the venom of a serpent. I have long known your history, though the world generally believed you to be the actual daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Marchmont, who adopted you when you were ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... the dreadful Spirit of Evil, As a serpent was depicted, As Kenabeek, the great serpent. Very crafty, very cunning, Is the creeping Spirit of Evil, Was ...
— The Song Of Hiawatha • Henry W. Longfellow
... three old cantors, one of them limping; then the trumpet ("serpent"), and last, the cur with his gold embroidered stole. He smiled and nodded a greeting; then, with his eyes half closed, his lips moving in prayer, his beretta well over his forehead, he followed his surpliced bodyguard, walking in ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... as a moment later she confidingly took his arm and strolled toward the library, it was evident that all her flutter and hesitancy, her seeming freedom and mimic show of war, were like those of some bright tropical bird fascinated by a remorseless serpent whose intent eyes and deadly purpose are creating a spell that cannot ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... of the Kshatriyas, became very angry and said, 'Stay, Stay'. In wrath, he commanded his charioteer, saying, 'Lead thou my car to where Salya is, so that I may slay him instantly as Garuda slays a serpent.' Then the Kuru chief fixed the Varuna weapon on his bow-string, and with it afflicted the four steeds of king Salya. And, O tiger among kings, the Kuru chief, then, warding off with his weapons those of his foe, slew Salya's charioteer. Then that first of men, Bhishma, the son ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa - Translated into English Prose - Adi Parva (First Parva, or First Book) • Kisari Mohan Ganguli (Translator)
... feelings does the scaly, venomous serpent inspire one when he approaches with slimy track and fetid breath, with stealthy, coil and sickening glare? Think you would not that fascinate with terror, cause a tremble of disgust, and produce insensibility and delirium that such a loathsome reptile should exist and breathe the same air? Yet ...
— The Duke's Prize - A Story of Art and Heart in Florence • Maturin Murray
... now—methinks I gaze upon thee now, As on a serpent in his agonies Awestricken Indians; what time laid low And crushing the thick fragrant reeds he lies, When the new year warm breathed on the earth, Waiting to light him with his purple skies, Calls to him by the fountain to uprise. Already with the pangs of a new birth Strain the hot ...
— The Suppressed Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... a great difficulty at the outset of the work is the finding or making of their necessarily indispensable mercury, which they also call green lion, mercurius animatus, the serpent, the dragon, ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... narrow balcony outside. It had a graceful balustrade, made of carved red-and-white mottled marble, and on the end of the balcony facing the city sat a great gold and silver jug, ten feet high, of rare design. The spout was formed by the body of a dragon with wings extended; the handle was a serpent with the extremity of its tail coiled around the ...
— The Land of the Changing Sun • William N. Harben
... brute was evidently beside itself with terror. It showed all its teeth, the slaver dropping from its jaws, and would certainly have bitten me if I had touched it. It did not seem to recognize me. Whoever has seen at the Zoological Gardens a rabbit, fascinated by a serpent, cowering in a corner, may form some idea of the anguish which the dog exhibited. Finding all efforts to soothe the animal in vain, and fearing that his bite might be as venomous in that state as in the madness of hydrophobia, I left him alone, placed my ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... the episodes in the story of the Christ, some in sculptured groups of figures, some by living actors. Before each group walks a penitent, barefoot and heavily veiled in black gown and hood, carrying an inscription to explain the group which follows. Abraham appears with Isaac, Moses with the serpent, Joseph and Mary, the Magi, and the flight into Egypt. Then come incidents from the life of Jesus, and the great tragedy of its close. The Host and its attendant priests conclude the procession. It is all very primitive and bizarre, but ...
— A Surgeon in Belgium • Henry Sessions Souttar
... woes of Actual Human Life— If thou could'st see the serpent strife Which the Greek Art has made divine in stone— Could'st see the writhing limbs, the livid cheek, Note every pang, and hearken every shriek Of some despairing lost Laocoon, The human nature would thyself subdue To share the human woe before thine eye— Thy cheek would pale, and all thy soul ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... dissociated from the parent zootheistic concept, and the sun is the mightiest animal as among many peoples, the thunder is the voice of the bear as among different woodland tribes or the flapping of the wings of the great ancient eagle as among the Dakota and cegiha, while lightning is the great serpent of the sky as among the Zuni. Subsequently the zoic concept fades, and the constant association of human intellectual qualities engenders an anthropic concept, when the sun becomes an anthropomorphic ...
— The Siouan Indians • W. J. McGee
... couldn't catch the stir and draw of muscles. And yet she slowly glided to the end; then began her wait. Her head sunk low, her body grew tense, her tail whipped softly back and forth, with as easy a motion as the swaying of a serpent. The light flamed and died and flamed and died again in her ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... eyes and soul that understood. He found her far less fair than in the heydey of his youth, when he reveled in her voluptuous charms and loved her well. Her face was hard and stern as that of some hag from Hell; the sunlight had faded from her hair, the cestus of red roses become a poisonous serpent, her fragrant breath a consuming flame, her robe of glory, a sackcloth suit, begrimed with ashes, torn by thorns and stained with blood. "Thou hast changed, O Life!" he cried in horror. "Not so," she said; "the change is thine. In youth you saw me not, but only ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... Eyraud protested against the suspicions directed against himself; they were, he wrote, merely unfortunate coincidences. Gouffe had been his friend; he had had no share whatever in his death; his only misfortune had been his association with "that serpent, Gabrielle Bompard." He had certainly bought a large trunk for her, but she told him that she had sold it. They had gone to America together, he to avoid financial difficulties in which he had been involved by the ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... coils of a deadly dragon, breathing forth poison and death into the air, which those beloved of God and himself must breathe, and crushing in its pestilential folds the bodies and souls of immortal men. He was one of the young St. Michaels called by God to give combat to that old serpent, called the Devil and Satan, which was deceiving ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... General did, the second he pitched being so well-aimed that it struck the serpent right amongst its thickest folds, when, in an instant, the creature was all in motion, with its scales glittering in the sun, and its head raised in angry menace, though it did not seem to see who had disturbed it, and ended by striking ...
— Off to the Wilds - Being the Adventures of Two Brothers • George Manville Fenn
... left furnished with a large metal wristband, meant to lessen the vibration of the string when he discharged an arrow from his triangular bow; and the right, ornamented by a bracelet in the form of a serpent in several coils, held a long gold scepter with a lotus bud at the end. The rest of his body was wrapt in drapery of the finest linen, minutely plaited, bound about the waist by a belt inlaid with small enamel and gold plates. Between the band and the belt his torso ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... hundred new tertiary species between the years 1870 and 1876. Meanwhile, in cretaceous strata, he unearthed remains of about two hundred birds with teeth, six hundred pterodactyls, or flying dragons, some with a spread of wings of twenty-five feet, and one thousand five hundred mosasaurs of the sea-serpent type, some of them sixty feet or more in length. In a single bed of Jurassic rock, not larger than a good-sized lecture-room, he found the remains of one hundred and sixty individuals of mammals, representing twenty species and nine genera; while ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... I have any personal knowledge of the matter, however: and if I were to repeat the current reports, Miss Elliott would call them gossip and repudiate them, and me too, perhaps. She has the reputation of having the 'wisdom of the serpent;' the slyness of the cat, ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson
... Coastguardsman arrived. The light was applied. Suddenly the group of spray-washed men, and a few pale-faced spectators who had ventured to descend, and part of the overhanging cliffs, burst into intense light as the great rocket went out to sea with a wild roar. It was like a horrid fiery serpent, and carried a line tied to its tail! It plunged into the waves, and all was dark again, but there was no cheer from the wreck. The aim had not been good, and the rocket-line ...
— The Thorogood Family • R.M. Ballantyne
... like pine cones; and there were many patterns in a low relief, like basket-work. Some of the pottery was decorated in color, red and brown, black and white, in graceful geometrical patterns. One day, on a fragment of a shallow bowl, she found a crested serpent's head, painted in red on terra-cotta. Again she found half a bowl with a broad band of white cliff-houses painted on a black ground. They were scarcely conventionalized at all; there they were in the black border, just ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... the tape had wound round and round his legs, his arms, his neck. It lay in a curling, coiling mat, like a serpent's head, upon his throat, where his hands clutched the collar ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips
... and the Greek, and preach just to a few folks and help a person that's needing a bit of help; but it's borne right in here upon me that what we need is the learning of the world, otherwise called the wisdom of the serpent. I never was a great hand to learn, and father he didn't make me, so it comes harder now; but I'll see to it that the young ones of our folks shall take to learning mighty early; and what we want is to be faithful in small things, and not stumble ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... the newspapers are hard up for news they get up something about the Philippines! It's the modern sea-serpent. When there's absolutely nothing else to print—no girl suicide in Brooklyn, or cyclone in Kansas, or joke on Chicago, then they give the Philippines a paragraph or an insurrection. Don't you ...
— Her Own Way - A Play in Four Acts • Clyde Fitch
... throne. For fourteen years China staggered under this awful scourge. Whole provinces were devastated and almost depopulated. For a long time the issue was uncertain. At length the united strength of foreigners and Chinese battered the serpent's head and destroyed ...
— Forty Years in South China - The Life of Rev. John Van Nest Talmage, D.D. • Rev. John Gerardus Fagg
... of half nature, such as that in Centaurs, dragons, and griffins. In the Assyrian cuneiform inscriptions lately deciphered, we read, of one Heabani, a semi-bovine hermit, supposed to have lived 2,200 B.C. Thus the accounts in Scripture of the serpent accosting Eve, and of Balaam arguing with his ass, would not have seemed so remarkable then as they do to us. In an Egyptian novel—the oldest extant, cir. 1,400 B.C.—a cow tells Bata that his elder brother ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... had seemed to be opening out before her was not, then, to be all beauty. Behind the flowers of this new Eden there hid a serpent of temptation; and she, Julia Cloud, disciple of the Lord Christ, was to be tried out to see what faith there was in her. For a moment she faltered, and closed her eyes, shuddering. How could she face it, ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... Natural Science for the last few Years," given an amusing account of the progress of sea-serpentism. It was read before the New York Lyceum, and is inserted in the American Journal of Science, although not thought conclusive by its learned editor, Dr. Silliman. The first sea-serpent was a steam-boat, which, being established at Boston to coast along the shore, and from its powers and capabilities competent to injure the business of small boats, was described as a sea-serpent that had ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 365 • Various
... disgust and are killed; the third is more prudent, and ultimately disenchants her husband, usually by burning his skin, which he puts on and off at pleasure. The typical story of this class is Pitre, No. 56, "The Serpent." To Pitre's copious references may be added: Comparetti, No. 9 (Monferrato), in which the prince resumes his shape after his third marriage without any further means of disenchantment; No 66 (Monferrato), the prince takes off ...
— Italian Popular Tales • Thomas Frederick Crane
... written that he was ambitious; and his ambition was vast, all-absorbing. Like the unhappy wretch from whose shoulders sprang the foul serpent, he loathed it, perhaps feared it; but he could not escape it—it was himself—nor rend it—it was his own flesh. He fought it with prayer, constant and earnest—Apollyon and Christian in ceaseless combat. What limit to set to his ability I know not, for he was ever superior ...
— Destruction and Reconstruction: - Personal Experiences of the Late War • Richard Taylor
... majestic Charles set down; Not David vanquished more to reach a crown. Praise him as Cowley did that Hebrew king: Thy theme's as great; do thou as greatly sing. Then thou may'st boldly to his favour rise, Look down, and the base serpent's hiss despise; From thund'ring envy safe in laurel sit, While clam'rous critics their vile heads submit, Condemned for treason at the ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... unobserved stole Susanna out of the room. She felt a sting in her heart; a serpent raged in her bosom. Driven by a nameless agonised disquiet, she hastened forth into the free air, and ascended, almost without being aware of it herself, the steep footpath up the mountain, where many a time, in calmer moments, she had admired the ...
— Strife and Peace • Fredrika Bremer
... had fallen and rolled into the wallow once more. It had taken a direct hit, just beneath the right ear, and even as Mike watched, its trunk writhed feebly like a dying serpent, then fell forward into the mud. The gigantic ears twitched, then flickered and flopped, and the huge body ...
— This Crowded Earth • Robert Bloch
... steep, scrambling miles, the road winding between the wavelike hills that rose and fell on every side of the horizon, with a long illimitable sinuous look, as if they were a part of the line of the Great Serpent, which the Norse legend says girdles the world. The day was lead-coloured; the road had stone factories alongside of it,—grey, dull-coloured rows of stone cottages belonging to these factories, and then we came to poor, hungry-looking fields;—stone fences everywhere, and trees nowhere. ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... that he was inconsistent in his lessons. He dragged in all that came to his hand for the astonishment of Liubka. Once he brought along for her a large self-made serpent—a long cardboard hose, filled with gunpowder, bent in the form of a harmonica, and tied tightly across with a cord. He lit it, and the serpent for a long time with crackling jumped over the dining room and ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... from side to side, like some savage animal, strong and lithe and full of deadly rage, but unable to spring, trapped and shut within iron bars. Her face had changed to a livid white, and looked hard and pitiless, and her eyes had a fixed stony stare like those of a serpent. And at intervals, as she moved about the room, she clenched her hands with such energy that the nails wounded her palms. And from time to time her rage would rise to a kind of frenzy, and find expression in a voice strangely harsh and unnatural, deeper than ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... Lowfield Heath, while day shaded away into twilight, and that deepened into night. At Kimberham Bridge the carriage-lamps were all lit, and it was wonderful, where the road curved downwards before us, to see this writhing serpent with the golden scales crawling before us in the darkness. And then, at last, we saw the formless mass of the huge Crawley elm looming before us in the gloom, and there was the broad village street with the glimmer ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... account we have of the devil is found in that purely scientific book called Genesis, and is as follows: "Now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made, and he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, ye shall not eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden? And the woman said unto the ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... us. In France inoculation had been widely practiced; on June 18, 1774, the young king Louis XVI., was inoculated for smallpox, and the fashionable ladies of the day wore in their hair a miniature rising sun and olive tree entwined by a serpent supporting a club, the "pouf a l'inoculation" of Mademoiselle Rose Bertin, the court milliner to Marie Antoinette. In Germany inoculation was in vogue all through the seventeenth century, as also in Holland, Switzerland, ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... associations, for there was something in the incident which made food distasteful and his sleep uneasy for many days afterwards. The memory of it however had almost passed away, when at the corner of a street in Pisa, he came upon an African showman exhibiting a great serpent: once more, as the reptile writhed, the former painful impression revived: it was like a peep into the lower side of the real world, and again for many days took all sweetness from food and sleep. He wondered at himself indeed, trying to puzzle out the secret of that repugnance, having ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... the origin of Satan and how such an incarnation of evil has come to exist. The Tartarus into which he and his angels were cast, according to Peter, is defined by leading lexicographers, as meaning the dark, void, interplanetary spaces, surrounding the world. Using the serpent as a medium, this apostate angel, thus cast out, plied our first parents with his temptation by preaching to them the immortality of the soul, "Thou shalt not surely die," and alas! seduced them also into rebellion. The dominion which was given to Adam (Gen. 1:28), ...
— Modern Spiritualism • Uriah Smith
... remember now that he had served in two galleys at least—in a three-decked Greek one under the black-haired "political man," and again in a Viking's open sea-serpent under the man "red as a red bear" who went to Markland. The devil prompted ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... impressive. Thus equipped and mightily incensed, I hurried to his house. I found him with a calm smiling countenance making playthings. "How can peace," I burst out, "how can peace find lodgment even for a single moment in your breast, so long as the memory of your horrible deed preys like a serpent upon you?" He gazed at me in amazement, and laid his chisel aside. "What do you mean, my dear sir?" he asked; "pray take a seat." But my indignation chafing me more and more, I went on to accuse him directly of having murdered Antonia, and to threaten him with the vengeance ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... promised to come on board. Meantime a number of boats brought off provisions. The ship was made ready to receive the Sultan, who soon came off in a handsome proa, with a large white silk flag at the head of the mast, edged round with red. In the middle was a green griffin trampling on a winged serpent, which threatened its adversary with open mouth. At the head of the proa sat the Sultan, with three of his sons and several of his nobles, while ten ministers as guards were standing on each side of him. Other guards ...
— Notable Voyagers - From Columbus to Nordenskiold • W.H.G. Kingston and Henry Frith
... darkness and moisture; their bodies were misshaped and horrible, and they suffered great misery, moaning and bewailing continually. Through the intervention of Myuingwa (a vague conception known as the god of the interior) and of Baholikonga (a crested serpent of enormous size, the genius of water), the "old men" obtained a seed from which sprang a magic growth of cane. It penetrated through a crevice in the roof overhead and mankind climbed to a higher plane. A dim light appeared in this stage and vegetation was produced. Another magic growth of cane ...
— Eighth Annual Report • Various
... came over me, as for one who had sustained a mortal hurt that was beyond the power of healing. Alas, that simplicity and uprightness of soul, and the boasted womanly intuitions, should be such poor safeguards against the wiles of the serpent! And yet, I knew that to argue with her at this moment would be worse ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... suddenly to a precipice, and sheer down, two thousand feet below, the waves foamed forward on the rocks, and from the foam to the remote horizon lay the mysterious sleeping sea—no, not sleeping, but rather causing all else to sleep in its presence, for it was full of serpent lines all moving toward the shore. The whole wild mountainous Crimean shore sat before ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... watching nations may not fling a slur Upon our honor as we cast adrift This alien race to face the world alone. Caesar: Sweet Francos, truly thou hast quick discerned The thought which wisdom fathered in my mind. "Be wise as serpent, harmless as the dove," Should be our watchword as we scuttle ship, For there be those who speak with venomed tongues Of serpents, as we cast them helpless off. But if we of politicos make use, And to their clamour lend approving smile, We may while coolly thrusting ...
— 'A Comedy of Errors' in Seven Acts • Spokeshave (AKA Old Fogy)
... Moreau. "Ah! my dear, your sin has found you out. It was well worth while to warm that young serpent in your bosom. How often I have ...
— A Start in Life • Honore de Balzac
... and ran round upon my side of the bo'sun, and I saw that one of the great cabbage-like things pursued him upon its stem, even as an evil serpent; and very dreadful it was, for it had become blood red in color; but I smote it with the sword, which I had taken from the lad, and ...
— The Boats of the "Glen Carrig" • William Hope Hodgson
... thought he was approaching the earthly paradise, the mountain-guarded Eden where our first parents lived, when he neared these lovely shores, inhaled the fragrance of fruits and flowers, heard the cries of birds and saw the flash of bright waters, is probable. That paradise he sought. The serpent of oppression and wrong has left it, and as America comes into her own, ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... study to account for this sad and unwarrantable change on the part of the Boers we will be following the trail of the serpent and track it right up to its Hollander lair and to its at first unsuspected product, the ...
— Origin of the Anglo-Boer War Revealed (2nd ed.) - The Conspiracy of the 19th Century Unmasked • C. H. Thomas
... into one—a man more like the black-maned lion of North Africa than anything else. But it was not his appearance that fascinated the serpentine one, it was the look he cast down upon those two lucky diggers; a scowl of tremendous hatred—hatred unto death. Instinct told the serpent there must be more in this than extempore envy. He waited and watched, and, when the black-maned one moved away, he followed him about everywhere till at last he got ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... excite awe and wonder." To his friend Hogg, in after-years, Shelley often spoke about another reptile, no mere creature of myth or fable, the "Old Snake," who had inhabited the gardens of Field Place for several generations. This venerable serpent was accidentally killed by the gardener's scythe; but he lived long in the poet's memory, and it may reasonably be conjectured that Shelley's peculiar sympathy for snakes was due to the dim recollection of his childhood's favourite. Some of the games he invented to please his ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... prove it," said Mr. Davis, fixing her with a glittering eye. "Do you remember the serpent I 'ad tattooed on ...
— Ship's Company, The Entire Collection • W.W. Jacobs
... lonely lake And serpent-haunted fen; Land of the torrent and the fire And forest-sundered men: Thou art not now as thou shalt be When the stern invaders come, In the hush before the hurricane, ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... the room; six or seven men, seemingly sea-faring people, were seated drinking and talking vociferously in Welsh. Their conversation was about the sea-serpent: some believed in the existence of such a thing, others did not. After a little time one said, "Let us ask ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... youth by a change of skin. The worship of Aesculapius was introduced into Rome in a time of great sickness, and an embassy sent to the temple of Epidaurus to entreat the aid of the god. Aesculapius was propitious, and on the return of the ship accompanied it in the form of a serpent. Arriving in the river Tiber, the serpent glided from the vessel and took possession of an island in the river, and a temple was ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... said he, 'that I shall go when it suits my own convenience; that I quit the castle, he dares to call his, as I would the nest of a serpent, and that this is not the last he shall hear from me. Tell him, I will not leave ANOTHER murder on his conscience, ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... thrown myself. It was as if I felt myself under the spell of some invisible influence that like the eye of a basilisk, held me enchained. I remember turning my head towards a certain quarter of the wall as if I half expected to encounter there the bewildering glance of a serpent. Yet far from being apprehensive of any danger, I only wondered over the weakness of mind that ...
— A Strange Disappearance • Anna Katharine Green
... to us as to allow of but one venomous reptile of the serpent kind in these kingdoms, and that is the viper. As you propose the good of mankind to be an object of your publications you will not omit to mention common salad-oil as sovereign remedy against the bite of the viper. A to the blind worm (anguis fragilis, so-called because it snaps in sunder ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 1 • Gilbert White
... come of its own accord out of his shoe and fling itself to the other side of the room; the other was crawling after it (!) but a maid espying that, with her hand drew it out, and it clasp'd and curl'd about her hand like a living eel or serpent. A barrel of salt of considerable quantity hath been observed to march from room to room without any human assistance,' and ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... her eyes from her, but sat like a bird held by the fascination of the serpent. She was blind to all else but those two—the man she loved, the woman to whom she ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... cautious step from his shelter, leaning far over to see, a smile of triumph baring his gleaming teeth; another step, while the crowd broke the stifling quiet with shifted feet. Morgan, quick as a serpent strikes, raised ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... excited to anger; and repent one day before thy death" (38). And (he further said), "Warm thyself by the fire of the wise, but beware of their glowing coals, lest thou be burnt, for their bite is the bite of the fox, and their sting is the scorpion's sting, and their hiss is the serpent's hiss, and all their words are like coals of fire" (39). 16. R. Joshua said, "The evil eye, the evil inclination (40), and hatred of his fellow-creatures (41), put a man out of the world." 17. R. Jose ...
— Pirke Avot - Sayings of the Jewish Fathers • Traditional Text
... mountains, and whose name was Studas. He was short and squat of figure and square of face, but was all made for strength; and he was churlish and morose of disposition, wherefore men called him Heime (which was the name of a strong and venomous serpent), instead of Studas, which was of right his name as well as his father's. One day Heime, having mounted his famous grey horse Rispa, and girded on his good sword Blutgang, announced to his father that he would ride southward over the mountains to Verona, and there challenge Theodoric to a ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... US TRACE THE STORY OF THE WORLD'S HATRED.—It was foretold in Eden. "I will put enmity," so God spoke to the serpent, "between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed." We are not disposed to treat that ancient record with which our Bible opens as romance or fairy story, but to regard it as containing a true and authentic record of what actually transpired. That ...
— Love to the Uttermost - Expositions of John XIII.-XXI. • F. B. Meyer
... Country, Friends, or Self, And does not feel Resentment in his Soul? Who is it sees their growing Strength and Power, And how we waste and fail by swift Degrees, That does not think it Time to rouse and arm, And kill the Serpent ere we feel it sting, And fall the Victims of its painful Poison? Oh! could our Fathers from their Country see Their ancient Rights encroach'd upon and ravag'd, And we their Children slow, supine, and careless To keep the Liberty and Land they left us, ...
— Ponteach - The Savages of America • Robert Rogers
... instantly opened my bag, and took out the top publication. It proved to be an early edition—only the twenty-fifth—of the famous anonymous work (believed to be by precious Miss Bellows), entitled THE SERPENT AT HOME. The design of the book—with which the worldly reader may not be acquainted—is to show how the Evil One lies in wait for us in all the most apparently innocent actions of our daily lives. The chapters best adapted ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... face lighted at what he thought was Dick's mistake, and forgetting himself, half turned in the revolving chair, while the muzzle of the revolver was shifted for just the fraction of a second. It was enough. With the quickness of a serpent, Dick's hand shot out, and the heavy weight caught the negro above the right ear, and with a groan he slid from the ...
— That Printer of Udell's • Harold Bell Wright
... sure, is thine. Do the Gods send to me to make them blest? Small bliss my race hath of the Gods obtained. Three mighty children to my father Lok Did Angerbode, the giantess, bring forth— Fenris the wolf, the Serpent huge, and me. Of these the Serpent in the sea ye cast, Who since in your despite hath wax'd amain, And now with gleaming ring enfolds the world; Me on this cheerless nether world ye threw, And gave me nine unlighted realms ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... views the rosy dawn. In vain they weave The fatal web below while far he flies. But when the arrow strikes him, there's a change. He moves but in the track of his spent pain, Whose red drops are the links of a harsh chain, Binding him to the ground, with narrow range. A subtle serpent then has Love become. I had the eagle in my bosom erst: Henceforward with the serpent I am cursed. I can interpret where the mouth is dumb. Speak, and I see the side-lie of a truth. Perchance my heart may pardon you this deed: But be no coward:—you that made Love bleed, ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... more intensely dramatic language Satan is pictured as standing before the woman waiting to destroy her child as soon as born. The child is born, a man-child, who is to rule all the nations with autocratic sway. He is caught up to heaven, and his mother flees into the wilderness from the serpent. This is the opening ...
— Quiet Talks on the Crowned Christ of Revelation • S. D. Gordon
... handmaid, and, by the Mosaical law, bound her to allegiance like a serf,—even they greeted, with solemn rapture, all great and holy women as heroines, prophetesses, judges in Israel; and, if they made Eve listen to the serpent, gave Mary as a bride to the Holy Spirit. In other nations it has been the same down to our day. To the Woman who could conquer a triumph was awarded. And not only those whose strength was recommended to the heart by association with goodness and beauty, but those who were bad, ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... continually pulling them from each other's arms. But the first influence which crosses the walls of their paradise, the first being to whom they speak, which possesses the semblance of a human voice, is most certainly Satan and that Old Serpent, who was a liar and a slanderer from the beginning, and whose counsels will lead inevitably to the withdrawal of God's presence and to the doom of a ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... him," said Nan, beginning to enjoy it, "as grandsir used to say, between wind and water. He looked down at the thing in his hands—the rags, you know—and dropped them into the wood-box. You see that was the real wiliness of the serpent, my telling him he was in drink. He's full of spiritual pride, all eat up with it. Then I played Charlotte some more. I told Mrs. Tenney to come in, and remarked that she'd get her death o' cold; and she did come in and her eyes—what eyes they are, Rookie!—they were ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... that speaks to her loudly, her bonesetter, her medicineman: me she slights. To the voice that will shrive and oil for the grave all there is of her but her woman's unclean loins, of man's flesh made not in God's likeness, the serpent's prey. And to the loud voice that now bids her be silent ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... promptly and quietly. Not for nothing was it written, "Let the Consuls look to it that the Republic takes no harm," and Georgie was glad to be back in authority when the holidays ended. Behind him, but not too near, was the wise and temperate Head, now suggesting the wisdom of the serpent, now counselling the mildness of the dove; leading him on to see, more by half-hints than by any direct word, how boys and men are all of a piece, and how he who can handle the one will assuredly ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... unheard, unthought of, and they stood now in grim horror, merciless and implacable. They advanced in a swooping body, after one moment of agonizing suspense, and snatched Adnah into their midst, glaring three kinds of loathing scorn upon the interloping serpent. ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume V. (of X.) • Various
... the horizon; like a vast serpent with ten thousand folds coiled all round the globe; yet so nigh, apparently, that it seemed as if ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... state of innocence and happiness, and prohibited to eat of one tree in the garden, which he calls the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, under the penalty of being subjected to death and misery; but that, being tempted by the serpent, they eat of this tree, and are driven out of Paradise. Many and various allegorical interpretations have been given of this fable, but the following, which has been adopted by some of the most eminent of the primitive fathers, and our modern divines, ...
— Critical Remarks on Sir Charles Grandison, Clarissa, and Pamela (1754) • Anonymous
... water-spirits. Not far from the Izaak Bridge, the equestrian statue of Peter the Great stands out in bold relief on a pedestal of granite; the mighty Czar, casting an eagle look over the waters of the Neva, while his noble steed rears over the yawning precipice in front, crushing a serpent beneath his hoof. The spirit of Peter the Great still lives throughout Russia; but it is better understood in the merciless blasts of winter than in the soft glow of ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... proud and serious. A more proper part for her was that of a heroine, a queenly heroine,—that of Theresa of Hungary, for example; or, better still, that of Brynhilda the Valkyrie, the beloved of Sigurd, the serpent-killer, who incurred the curse of Odin, because, in the tumult of spears, she sided with the young king, and doomed the old warrior to die, to whom Odin ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... his place by the slightest resistance or the slightest delay, and who expected to acquit himself thus of his word, and of the reciprocal engagement both had taken; and then he returned to fresh insults and fury against this serpent, as he said, whom he had warmed and nourished so many years ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... inspiration in the sight of armed men marching steadily together; men well disciplined, keeping step to the measured clank of their armor. Like a great serpent the soldiers of Cologne issued from the forest, coming down two and two, for the path was narrow. They would march four abreast when they reached the river road, and the evolutions which accomplished this doubling of the columns, without changing step or causing confusion, ...
— The Sword Maker • Robert Barr
... everything to his rival, leading Euryanthe, whom he believes to be false, into the wilderness to kill her. A serpent is about to sting him, when his bride throws herself between. He kills the reptile, but after her sacrifice he is unable to raise his arm against her and so leaves her to ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... to Betty with some trivial remark. As he spoke he was contrasting her with the splendid Zoraida and had he voiced the comparison Zoraida must have whitened with anger and mortification while Betty flushed up, startled. He would have said; "One is like a poison serpent and the other like a flower." But instead of ...
— Daughter of the Sun - A Tale of Adventure • Jackson Gregory
... those misdeeds, by reason of which these elements pass into bodies of animals or men of inferior development. "A drunken priest becomes a worm," says Manu, "a stealer of corn, a rat; the murderer of a Brahman, a dog, a tiger, or a serpent"—and this means that those elements which, in man, serve as a basis for the passions, at death, pass over into the bodies of animals that possess the same passions or ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... piece of water here called the Serpentine, because it curves round like a serpent, and anyone can hire a boat and go for a row, and sometimes the whole of the water is covered with boats. At other times in the winter, when the ice is safe, there are hundreds and hundreds of skaters ...
— The Children's Book of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... That would be—oh, inexpressible. He would be our house guest! The Earl of Brinstead! I fancy that would silence a few of these serpent tongues that are wagging so ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... into the church. The happy couple are allowed a brief time in which to demonstrate their joy in the Garden. Then Satan approaches from Hell and draws Adam into conversation over the barrier. His attempt to lure Adam to his Fall is vain, nor is he more successful the first time with Eve. But as a serpent he over-persuades her to eat of the forbidden fruit, and she gives it to Adam, with the well-known result. In his guilt Adam now withdraws out of sight, changes his red tunic for a costume contrived out of leaves, and reappears ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... standing in the water, while the brook murmurs on, and perhaps the kingfisher flits to and fro. Here you sit and fleet the time carelessly, till a trout rises. Then, indeed, duty demands that you shall crawl in the manner of the serpent till you come within reach of him, and cast a fly, which usually makes him postpone his dinner-hour. But he will come on again, there is no need for you to change your position, and you can always fill your basket easily—with ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, April 2, 1892 • Various
... the appearance of Jehovah. And Jehovah caused all of the beasts to pass before Adam. And Adam gave names to them after their kinds. And he called the beast which had hands and feet and stood upright as himself, Serpent. And Jehovah placed Adam in the vineyard to live, and gave to him the serpent to be his servant, in the garden of rest which he so named Eden. And Jehovah returned about and refrained from his work on the seventh day, and sanctified it as a day of rest. And Adam dwelt ...
— The Secret of the Creation • Howard D. Pollyen
... worth to direct public attention to the dangers of a practice which threatens to develop into an epidemical kind of plague, and carry the deteriorating trails of a serpent over our household families, unless promptly scotched by benevolent firmness of a ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... affair with three crests, the central one supported by a sphinx, the others by winged horses; the hinged cheek-pieces are turned up. At the left of the goddess is her shield, within which coils a serpent. On her extended right hand stands a Victory. The face of Athena is the most disappointing part of it all, but it is just there that the copyist must have failed most completely. Only the eye of faith, or better, the eye trained by much study of ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... deposited our load, and had just set out to return when the same sounds were repeated, much more loudly than at first, and accompanied this time by a loud prolonged hiss such as I should imagine could proceed only from some gigantic serpent. We were thoroughly terrified this time, and fled once more, not only to the cavern but thence into the open air, and home. I do not know how we may regard the matter in the morning; but at present I really do not feel as though I could ever venture ...
— The Pirate Island - A Story of the South Pacific • Harry Collingwood
... the fields, on the opposite side of the road to the residence of Justice Hare, and as Mr. Carlyle walked down the road to business in his unsuspicion (not one time in fifty did he choose to ride; the walk to and fro kept him in health, he said), Captain Levison would be strolling down like a serpent behind the hedge, watching all his movements, watching his interviews with Barbara, did any take place, watching Mr. Carlyle turn into the grove, as he sometimes did, and perhaps watch Barbara run out of the house to meet him. ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... of the theatre is occupied exclusively by the Mormons and their wives and children. They wouldn't let a Gentile in there any more than they would a serpent. In the side seats are those of President Young's wives who go the play, and a large and varied assortment of children. It is an odd sight to see a jovial old Mormon file down the parquette aisle with ten or twenty robust wives ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 4 • Charles Farrar Browne
... for a moment. They seemed to be fascinated by what they saw. It was a serpent at least ten yards in length—a serpent showing many bright colors, a thick, elongated head, a body at least ten inches in diameter, and a blunt tail. As it moved down the column of the tree it launched its head out level in the air as if anticipating a feast of Boy Scout. The shining head, ...
— Boy Scouts in the Canal Zone - The Plot Against Uncle Sam • G. Harvey Ralphson
... Michael and His angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, and prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven. And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him." ...
— Our Day - In the Light of Prophecy • W. A. Spicer
... can tell so exactly how the wind sets, as the pilot whose vessel is exposed to the storm. Besides, though you Protestants deny our priesthood the harmlessness of the dove, you are ready enough to allow us a full share of the wisdom of the serpent; in plain terms, their means of information are extensive, and they are not deficient in the power of applying it. I therefore wish you to have the benefit of their ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... leaf; shrinking as if a serpent were in his path; with a face which changed from white to red, from red to white, the stranger met these questions. But Rust's eye never left his face. There was no trace of anger nor emotion, in his marble features. He merely said: 'I want ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various |
