"Sphinx" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... is not to despair—on the contrary. The experiences of this world teach us that the sum of our sorrows is not greater than that of our joys. The more the black period may be prolonged the more quickly will approach the dawn of proud aspirations at length realised. And the granite Sphinx which near at hand dreams on the desert sands, the Sphinx which saw the passage of Bonaparte, which saw Lesseps and his work, has not yet uttered its last word, has not murmured the supreme sentence. The more fiercely evil fortune may pursue us the more should ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh
... extraordinary. Cold and impenetrable in manner and expression, unbending in his haughty aloofness, he knew how with perfect courtesy to keep his own counsel and to refrain from giving utterance to an unguarded word. But behind this chilling and sphinx-like exterior was a mind of singular precocity, already filled with deep-laid schemes and plans for the future, confident that his opportunity would come, and preparing when the hour struck to seize it. One can well imagine how anxiously in their many personal interviews the council-pensionary ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... more wondrous and more awful than all else in the land of Egypt, there sits the lonely Sphinx. Comely the creature is, but the comeliness is not of this world. The once worshipped beast is a deformity and a monster to this generation; and yet you can see that those lips, so thick and heavy, were fashioned according to some ancient ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... are born to this profound insight as storm-petrels for the seas, needing not to be tutored, and are as men and women to whom we tell our secrets, scarce knowing why we do. But Shakespeare knows what the sphinx thinks, if anybody does. His genius is penetrative as cold midwinter entering every room, and making warmth shiver in ague fits. I think Shakespeare never errs in his logical sequence in character. He surprises us, seems unnatural to us, but because we have been superficial observers; ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... brown races, and collectively those masses will propound the general question, "What will you do with us, we hundreds of millions, who cannot keep pace with you?" If the New Republic emerges at all it will emerge by grappling with this riddle; it must come into existence by the passes this Sphinx will guard. Moreover, the necessary results of the reaction of irresponsible wealth upon that infirm and dangerous thing the human will, the spreading moral rot of gambling which is associated with irresponsible wealth, will have been working out, and will continue to work out, so long as there ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... it somewhat difficult to explain Jasmine's sphinx-like mysteries, and on certain points Wei showed a disposition to be anything but satisfied. Jasmine's engagement to Tu implied his rejection, and he was disposed to be splenetic and disagreeable about it. His pride was touched, and in his irritation he was inclined to impute treachery ...
— Stories by English Authors: Orient • Various
... examinations by frequent and pertinent objections, while Barton & Barton took occasional notes, which were afterwards passed to Sutherland and Montague, and by them used with telling effect in the cross-examinations, but the faces of one and all wore an expression inscrutable as that of the sphinx. ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour
... amiable willingness that she should take her leave without shaking more dust from her feet upon an already burdened household, had become impatient desire by the time I counted out her wages. Yet, here she stands, grim as the sphinx, fixed as Fate, with the inexorable requisition, "Me ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... if he had been given hind legs, they would be ready for a spring. So worn was the gargoyle that ears and chin and part of forehead had disappeared. But you can see the snarl just as you can see the Sphinx's smile. When a thing is well done, it is done for all time. If a poor workman had fashioned that gargoyle, there would have been no panther and no snarl when it was put up there. But a master worked the stone, and what he wrought is ineradicable. It will disappear ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons
... like some historical personage, probably the Sphinx, and repeated a guttural kind of incantation while George stretched his ears until they stood out more than usual in a struggle ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 29, 1919 • Various
... among the most fearless fighters in the world, and always put in a tight place on the French front. There is one man at the enlisting depot[9] who is a wonderful being, and can size up a new recruit at a glance. He is known as "Le Sphinx." You must give him your real name and reason for joining the Legion, and in exchange he gives you a number by which henceforth you are known. He knows the secrets of all the Legion, and they are never divulged to a living soul; he never forgets, nor do they ...
— Fanny Goes to War • Pat Beauchamp
... its claws. Rouge et noir, roulette, faro, keno, and stud-poker were going in full blast. The proprietor, his elegant diamonds flashing in the light, was seated on a raised platform from whence he could survey the entire company—his face, impassive as marble and unreadable as the sphinx, was turned toward the faro lay-out, which this evening appeared to ...
— Jim Cummings • Frank Pinkerton
... Ralph persevered so faithfully in acquiring a knowledge of his new duties, that he slowly won the approval of every one on board, unless it might have been the captain. Gary preserved a sphinx-like attitude, never sparing the boy, never praising him, nor manifesting by any sign an atom of that feminine graciousness of manner that had on shore first won ...
— Ralph Granger's Fortunes • William Perry Brown
... Nile. On the walls and lotus-shaped columns were processions of dark figures at the loom, at the work of irrigation, marching as soldiers, or mourners at funerals,—exact copies of the original delineations. There were sphinx and obelisk, coffins of kings, mummies of priest and chieftain, the fabrics they wore, the gems they cut, the scrolls they engrossed, the tomb in which they were buried. Stepping into another section, you were in Assyria, with the alabaster lions and plumed ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... especially produce silver, and some gold, with lead and copper ores. The silver mines of this region were worked at a very early period, as is proved by the discovery of an excavation a thousand feet in length, from which a stone sphinx was dug up, corroborating a statement of Herodotus that the Scythians possessed mines of gold and silver, which, according to his account, were guarded by monsters and griffins. Baron Humboldt supposes that he referred to the bones of elephants, and other gigantic ...
— The Mines and its Wonders • W.H.G. Kingston
... much like this," said the sheriff, sharply, "and you don't think so, neither. You wouldn't take a big price for your two hundred acres here now." He watched the other's countenance sharply as he spoke, but the training of slavery made the face of the black Ajax simply Sphinx-like ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... thinking about? Very wonderful things, no doubt! Unwritten history! Unfathomed mystery! Yet he laughs and cries, and eats and drinks, And chuckles and crows, and nods and winks, As if his head were as full of kinks And curious riddles as any sphinx! Warped by colic, and wet by tears, Punctured by pins, and tortured by fears, Our little nephew will lose two years; And he'll never know Where the summers go;— He need not laugh, for he'll ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... for twenty years a Colonel of Yeomanry. Greeting affably everyone he knew, he maintained a frank demeanour on all subjects, especially of Government policy, secretly enjoying the surmises and prognostications, so pleasantly wide of the mark, and the way questions and hints perished before his sphinx-like candour. He spoke cheerily too of Miltoun, who was 'all right again,' and 'burning for the fray' when the House met again in the autumn. And he chaffed Lord Malvezin about his wife. If anything—he said—could make Bertie ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... table for something else to "nash," but everywhere was the same depressing desolation. Only in the centre of the table towered in awful intact majesty the great Bar-mitzvah cake, like some mighty sphinx of stone surveying the ruins of empires, and the least reverent shrank before its austere gaze. But at last the Shalotten Shammos shook off his awe and stretched out his hand leisurely towards the cake, as became the master of ceremonies. But when Sugarman the Shadchan beheld his hand ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... think they will miss us. It is extraordinary how Zimbabwe gets into one's heart. I have never seen anything anywhere that appealed to me quite like those old walls, with their untold story and their patience of the ages. The Sphinx in Egypt may be older, but we know how it came to be there and who built it. One of Zimbabwe's fascinations seems to be the absence of all knowledge about it, of all why and wherefore." She broke off as a Cape cart drove up to the door. "Here is someone coming to call. I think ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... mind is to all except Lygia; how exclusively it is occupied with her, how it returns to her always, and circles above her, as a falcon above chosen prey. By Pollux! find her quickly, or that of thee which fire has not turned into ashes will become an Egyptian sphinx, which, enamored, as 'tis said, of pale Isis, grew deaf and indifferent to all things, waiting only for night, so as to gaze with stony eyes ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... the mine has petered out?" he asked Keith, with palpable suspicion. Keith glanced swiftly at Sandy sitting across the table from him in the little directors' room back of the bank proper. Sandy sat sphinx-like. As if by accident, his hands were on his hips, the fingers resting on his gun butts. Keith did not actually fear gunplay, but he was not sure of what Sandy might do. Sam's bullet, that had undoubtedly been sped in grim earnest, ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... and learned Fellows of the Royal Astronomical Society—I rather think I shall surprise them—I do not say startle—it is impossible to startle the Fellows of the Royal Astronomical Society—or even to astonish them—you might as well hope to tickle the Sphinx—but I fancy it will stir them up a little, especially my friend Professor Sylvanus Pettifer Possil. However, I must take care not to give them the slightest hint of what they are to expect beforehand, otherwise they will declare they ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... Archie, "aren't you going to tell us what the row was on Saturday night? What mysterious traffic is going on between you and Charlie? I was teasing him to tell me yesterday, but he was as silent as the Sphinx." ...
— Hollowmell - or, A Schoolgirl's Mission • E.R. Burden
... no use. The first class could only guess. No cadet knew, unless it were Holmes, what Prescott's intentions were about quitting the corps in the near future. And Greg, usually both chatty and impulsive, could be as cold and silent as a sphinx where his chum's secrets or ...
— Dick Prescotts's Fourth Year at West Point - Ready to Drop the Gray for Shoulder Straps • H. Irving Hancock
... learned to hold his tongue, he must be up to some dam' good thing," opined another; while a man with hooked features and of German extraction who was supposed to be agent for a Dutch crockery house—the famous "Sphinx" mark—broke in resentfully: ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... What is it that moves there? you ask yourself. Is it a blind monster or only a lost gleam from the universe? It occurred to me—don't laugh—that all things being dissimilar, she was more inscrutable in her childish ignorance than the Sphinx propounding childish riddles to wayfarers. She had been carried off to Patusan before her eyes were open. She had grown up there; she had seen nothing, she had known nothing, she had no conception ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... beyond description—so fierce and screeching as to be almost blood-curdling. It seems to come from all directions and distance out of measure! Vibrating over the sands and through the rocks, filling the immense void, crying out as it were for the sphinx, a veritable de profundis of the wastes. The vultures, who hold the fort during the day have given way to the night shift, the jackals. These come from all directions; from the caves in the earth, from among the rocks, from here, ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... some practice in humorous drawing, having drawn three years before for the "Will-o'-the-Wisp" and "The Sphinx." But his Punch work was merely occasional; his more serious labours were for the "Graphic," "The Pictorial World," and most notably, on Mr. Edmund Evans's suggestion, for the immortal children's books which ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... saintly court chaplain, Spener, Liana at last brought her perplexities. Here the history moves in veils. How he extorted from her the promise to renounce her Albano for ever is a mystery watched and hidden by the Great Sphinx of the oath she swore ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VII • Various
... Mona Lisa! What was he trying to express? Vasari found the "smile so pleasing that it was a thing more divine than human to behold"; Ruskin thought it archaic, Muentz "sad and disillusioned," Berenson supercilious, and Freud neurotic. Reymond calls it the smile of Prometheus, Faust, Oedipus and the Sphinx; Pater saw in it "the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the reverie of the Middle Ages with its spiritual ambitions and imaginary loves, the return to the pagan world, the sins of the Borgias." ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... they saw nothing but the piles of coin, the spinning needle, and the flashing hands of the woman that turned it. She all the while sat passionless and cold, looking on the scene as might some glittering and bejewelled sphinx. ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... inviting, and still gratifying, like a finished piece of music"; or he can strike us with the wit of the pure intellect, as when he condemns certain work for being "as trivial in thought and yet enigmatic in expression, as if Echo and the Sphinx had laid their heads together to construct it." But for the most part it is a kind of thinking aloud, and the form is wholly lost in the pursuit of ideas. With his love for the absolute, why is it that he does not seek after ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... of things that they are not," said Hadria, "especially to men. A poor benighted man might as well try to get on to confidential terms with the Sphinx, as to learn the real thoughts and wishes ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... the whole visible world on a march one needs to go to a really large desert. The Pyramids and the Sphinx have been partly buried, and parts of the valley of the Nile threatened, by hordes of sand hills marching in from the desert; cities have been buried and harbors filled up. Many of the harbors of the ancient civilizations ...
— Among the Forces • Henry White Warren
... us, who keeps down with a strong hand that which would revolt, so that we obey, as if we were charmed, without murmuring, but also without praising, for that is no music. Thus the sonata concludes, as it began, enigmatically, like a sphinx with a ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... window of his cell he pointed out with his finger the immense church of Notre-Dame, which, outlining against the starry sky the black silhouette of its two towers, its stone flanks, its monstrous haunches, seemed an enormous two-headed sphinx, seated in the middle ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... Allegory, representing a sphinx or chimaera—now framed with the rest as the centre of an ensemble—is from another and far inferior hand, and, moreover, of different dimensions. The so-called Venus of the Imperial Gallery at Vienna is, notwithstanding ...
— The Earlier Work of Titian • Claude Phillips
... to husband and use his best powers and his latent genius. These powers of body and mind have in the past been strangely wasted, dispersed, or forgotten. The shadow of a mighty Negro past flits through the tale of Ethiopia the Shadowy and of Egypt the Sphinx. Through history, the powers of single black men flash here and there like falling stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness. Here in America, in the few days since Emancipation, the black man's turning hither ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... back on the servant, and walked towards the light, while he tore open the envelope. It had the most minute sphinx in the corner, and the paper ...
— Three Weeks • Elinor Glyn
... grim sphinx clock on the black marble chimneypiece, as it remorselessly ticked away his last few moments of home-life, and he ingeniously set himself to crown his sorrow by reviving recollections ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... enemy's line, the remembrance that his own race died with him was not likely to be banished. The Countess brought Elsa forward and in a whisper urged her to plead for her kinsman before his judge. The girl's eloquence brought tears to the eyes of Beatrix, but the Count's impassive face was sphinx-like in its settled gloom. Only once during the appeal did he speak, and that was when Elsa offered herself as a sacrifice to his revenge, then he ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... arches, and painted ceilings and shining Doric columns, leads directly to the gallery; but it is thought too fine for working days, and is only opened for the public entrance on Sabbath. A little back stair (leading from a court, in which stand numerous bas-reliefs, and a solemn sphinx, of polished granite,) is the common entry for students and others, who, during the week, ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... only the latter, then let our heroes and our heroines be not what men and women are, but what they should be. Let Angelina be always spotless and Edwin always true. Let virtue ever triumph over villainy in the last chapter; and let us assume that the marriage service answers all the questions of the Sphinx. ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... to read the riddle of the sphinx, and your words are as enigmatical. I have not begun to find their clew," replied Madeleine, pausing in the garland she was forming, and letting the ivy ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... The sphinx is mobility itself compared with Mrs. Wilson's intense preservation of her status quo. The import of which is that the Professor's blunders are things of everyday occurrence—every minute, rather. She merely says ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... perplexing, questionable questions! It is already a long story; yet it seems as if it were hardly commenced. Is it any wonder if we at last grow distrustful, lose patience, and turn impatiently away? That this Sphinx teaches us at last to ask questions ourselves? WHO is it really that puts questions to us here? WHAT really is this "Will to Truth" in us? In fact we made a long halt at the question as to the origin of this Will—until at last we came to an absolute standstill before ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... understand us at all. Of course, we didn't mind that. It's no credit to carry an interlinear translation of your temperament on your face. So long as he kept in his own yard and quarreled with his own dog for not feeding on Freshmen more enthusiastically, we got along as nicely as the Egyptian Sphinx and John L. Sullivan. Even when he was elected police magistrate we didn't object. In fact, we didn't bumpity-bump to the situation until we went up ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... broken to the farm and went away healed. Clive was a Theosophist: all men were her brothers, and all women her sisters; but those especially among art-workers who fell by the wayside might share her bread and blanket. They called her Old Mother Sphinx, because of her inscrutable eyes, and the tenderness of ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... who had stood sphinx-like, his glasses directed upon the grey house, made every one turn. "I've spotted him," he called, his voice vibrating. "He's at the top-floor window nearest to us.... There he goes again.... I heard the 'ping' and saw ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... roared Perrin. "Mademoiselle Croizette's words: 'You love me, then!' and her kiss must have this moonlight. She is playing the Sphinx; that is the chief part in the play, and we must leave her the ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... the contract, one hundred thousand francs as advance payment for my expenses before departure. I was to play eight pieces: Hernani, Phedre, Adrienne Lecouvreur, Froufrou, La Dame aux Camelias, Le Sphinx, L'Etrangere, and La ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... wig, with pendent ringlets, and the whole clasped by a massive head-dress, following the contour of head and having as part of it, a curtain or veil, reaching down behind, across shoulders and approaching waist line. The Sphinx ...
— Woman as Decoration • Emily Burbank
... Chauvelin," added Marguerite, looking almost with defiance across at the placid, sphinx-like face of the Frenchman, "His Royal Highness should add that we ladies think of him as of a hero of old . . . we worship him . . . we wear his badge . . . we tremble for him when he is in danger, and exult with him in ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... betrayed no more expression than that of the Sphinx, though inwardly he was consumed with laughter; he himself was chief of the Bureau, and Clancy was his most trusted assistant! Certainly, the gods were contriving a spicy dish for the news-loving inhabitants ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... pagan forms of religion, which offered a very feeble, and also a very limited gamut for giving expression to the human capacities of sublimity or of horror. We read it in the fearful composition of the sphinx. The dragon, again, is the snake inoculated upon the scorpion. The basilisk unites the mysterious malice of the evil eye, unintentional on the part of the unhappy agent, with the intentional venom of some other malignant natures. But these horrid complexities of evil agency ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... with pink, of American Womanhood. You're the Queen of Hearts and all the rest of the trumps in the deck. You are also Cleopatra, and, and—Helen of Troy. But above all, of course, to me you are the Sphinx." ...
— Little Miss Grouch - A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith's - Maiden Transatlantic Voyage • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... now and slowed down before the gate—"I will see her to-morrow and perhaps learn a little more about her—if there is anything to learn. If not—well, women love to appear mysterious. There never was a woman yet who didn't long to rival the Sphinx and appear an enigma in the eyes of ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... show mercy to Hellas, later they may show justice to me. The war is far from ended. Can you not let me serve on some ship of the allies where none can recognize me? Thus let me wait a year, and trust that in that year the sphinx will ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... or at least could when he left college a few months back, but now his life, the life of his crew, the salving of the dock, and the winning of a possible fortune, depended upon his answering the riddle of this Twentieth Century Sphinx. It was like attempting to understand all mathematics, from addition to celestial mechanics, at ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... magnificent articles of ivory. Mr Layard, in his excavations at Nineveh, found 'in the rubbish near the bottom of a chamber, several ivory ornaments upon which were traces of gilding: among them was the figure of a man in long robes, carrying in one hand the Egyptian crux ansata—part of a crouching sphinx—and flowers designed ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal, No. 421, New Series, Jan. 24, 1852 • Various
... modern sphinx whose thundering interrogative society will be called upon to answer. You and I know too well that society hitherto has answered only with belching cannon and vain vapourings of law, religion, and duty. But the toiling sphinx, who has time only to ask terrible questions, will some day formulate ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... came he found Naomi looking toward the road that wound ribbon-like past the Bethlehem inn down into the land of the Pharaohs, the country of the Sphinx and the Pyramids. ...
— Christmas Light • Ethel Calvert Phillips
... and such, also, are Hector and Achilles of Troy. These songs mark the greatness and the waning of the heroic world In the Nibelungen-lied the final event is a great calamity that is akin to a half historical event of the North. Odin descends to the nether world to consult Hela; but she, like the sphinx of Thebes, will not reply save in an enigma, which enigma is to entail terrible tragedies, and lead to destruction the young hero who is ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... always so. Heavily weighs on me at times the burdensome reflection that I cannot honestly say I am confident as to the exact shape of the once-seen, oft-regretted Cube; and in my nightly visions the mysterious precept, "Upward, not Northward", haunts me like a soul-devouring Sphinx. It is part of the martyrdom which I endure for the cause of the Truth that there are seasons of mental weakness, when Cubes and Spheres flit away into the background of scarce-possible existences; when the Land of Three Dimensions seems almost as visionary as the Land of One or None; nay, when ...
— Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Illustrated) • Edwin A. Abbott
... of Time, we crouch and tug at the moss-velvet, daisy-sprinkled skirts of the mighty Mater, praying some lullaby from her to soothe our pain; but human woe frets not her sublime serenity, as deaf as desert sphinx, she fronts ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... time he heard a cock crow, he called it neighing. If such a mistake had been made by an Irishman, it would surely have been called a bull: it has, at least, as good pretensions to the title as many mistakes made by ignorant Hibernians; for instance, the well-known blunder relative to the sphinx:—An uninformed Irishman, hearing the sphinx alluded to in company whispered to a friend, "The sphinx! who ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... Anwet, Chloe,—what not! Young Mr. Lee in many a slight and pleasing set of verses addressed her as Sylvia, but to the community at large she was Darden's Audrey, and an enigma greater than the Sphinx. Why would she not marry Mr. Marmaduke Haward of Fair View? Was the girl looking for a prince to come overseas for her? Or did she prefer to a dazzling marriage the excitement of the theatre, the adulation, ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... against the pink palm of his right. The other train, the train to which they were to change, had not yet arrived. It was rather still; at the far end of the depot a locomotive, sitting back on its motionless drivers like some huge sphinx crouching along the rails, was steaming quietly, drawing long breaths. The repair gang in greasy caps and spotted blue overalls were inspecting the train, pottering about the trucks, opening and closing ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... hawk-god of Erment south of Thebes, who became in the eighteenth to {34} twentieth dynasties especially the god of war. He appears with the hawk head, or sometimes as a hawk-headed sphinx; and he became confused with Ra ...
— The Religion of Ancient Egypt • W. M. Flinders Petrie
... prince was to have his day of triumph before the doom. There was a certain wonderful creature called the Sphinx, which had been a terror to Thebes for many days. In form half woman and half lion, she crouched always by a precipice near the highway, and put the same mysterious question to every passer-by. None had ever been able to answer, and none had ever lived to ...
— Old Greek Folk Stories Told Anew • Josephine Preston Peabody
... his manner apparently indicated that the possibility of a repulse had never entered his mind. His eyes wandered restlessly from Mademoiselle Marguerite to the countenance of the old magistrate, who remained as impassive as a sphinx, and at last they lighted on a newspaper which was lying on the floor at the young girl's feet. "Do not deprive me ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... the chance to look this sphinx in the eyes, and, for five minutes, to watch him like a wild animal, at the moment of his greatest achievement and most splendid action. One saw a quiet-featured, quiet-voiced man in a red flannel ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... solve the riddle of this new Sphinx, or be devoured. Though Mr. Lincoln's policy in this critical affair has not been such as to satisfy those who demand an heroic treatment for even the most trifling occasion, and who will not cut their coat according to their cloth, ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... them must go to the smaller Purple-fringed Orchis, whose shorter spur holds out a certain prospect of reward; for, in these two cases, as in so many others, the flower's welcome for an insect is in exact proportion to the length of its visitor's tongue. Doubtless it is one of the smaller sphinx moths, such as we see at dusk working about the evening primrose and other flowers deep of chalice, and heavily perfumed to guide visitors to their feast, that is the great Purple-fringed Orchid's benefactor, since the length of its tongue is perfectly adapted to its needs. Attracted ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... kingdom of Kirke, daughter of the sun-god Helios, lies before us, bathed in glowing sunshine. The foreground is a luxurious garden whose groves of palms and fantastic southern trees extend in deepening shade into the background. {405} A colossal sphinx crouches at the gates of Kirke's palace on the left. Springs of water, represented by four attendant nymphs sing to their queen in melodious harmony. But Kirke—a lovely vision in soft flowing robes of yellow hue, with masses of red-gold hair, crowned with sun flowers—cannot ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... observer, continuing his study, would have forgotten the parcel, the white slaves, the gigantic negro, the self-willed hair and beard of pride—the face alone would have held him. The countenance of the Sphinx has no beauty now; and standing before it, we feel no stir of the admiration always a certificate that what we are beholding is charming out of the common lines; yet we are drawn to it irresistibly, and by a wish vague, foolish—so foolish we would hesitate ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... MOMENT after Boggs's last answer, I had an impulse to end the interview. I had a feeling I was facing a sphinx—a quiet, courteous sphinx in ...
— The Flying Saucers are Real • Donald Keyhoe
... You can still give yourself a counsel.' And Sugarman looked a conscious sphinx. 'You may ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... isle, Which way they lead the clueless wanderer To fields suburban, and the towers of men, I would confront the strangest things that haunt In horrid shades of brooding desolation: Griffin, or satyr, sphinx, or sybil ape, Or lop-eared demon from the dens of night, Let loose to caper out of Acheron. Ah me, my Theseus, wherefore art thou gone! Who left that crock of water at my side? Who stole my dog that loved no one but me? Why was the tent unstruck, I unawaked, I left, ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... but did not smile. He turned on his heel, and made his way slowly around the corner of the passage into the other part of the building, and paused at the open doorway of the Honourable Hilary's outer office. By the street windows sat the Honourable Brush Bascom, sphinx-like, absorbing wisdom and clouds of cigar smoke which emanated from the Honourable ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... want to know my views of the Sphinx, here they are. But I have only seen it once; and it is so extraordinarily well done, that it ought to ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 2 (of 3), 1857-1870 • Charles Dickens
... Cavendish? I watched her as she sat at the head of the table, graceful, composed, enigmatic. In her soft grey frock, with white ruffles at the wrists falling over her slender hands, she looked very beautiful. When she chose, however, her face could be sphinx-like in its inscrutability. She was very silent, hardly opening her lips, and yet in some queer way I felt that the great strength of her personality ...
— The Mysterious Affair at Styles • Agatha Christie
... and scrambled breakfast more and more irksome; and on Monday morning, with hands in trouser-pockets and legs stretched out, he leaned back in his chair and received his wife's alarming intimations as to the flight of time with a superior and sphinx-like smile. ...
— Night Watches • W.W. Jacobs
... A quarrel arises over the question of passing,—a quarrel as to the merit of which the legend is silent. Oedipus kills his antagonist, and that antagonist is his father. Then he delivers Thebes from the scourge of the Sphinx and receives the hand of Queen Jocasta as his due reward. He has forgotten the oracle, or imagines that he has eluded his foreordained fate by leaving Corinth; but the oracle has fulfilled itself, as the spectator knew from the beginning that it would. ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... songs . . . black butterflies! Wild words of all the wayward songs I sing . . . Called from the tomb of some enchanted past By that strange sphinx, my soul, they slowly rise And settle on white pages wing to wing . . . White pages like flower-petals fluttering Held spellbound there till some blind hour shall bring The perfect voice that, delicate and wise, Shall set them free in fairyland at last! That garden of all dreams and ecstasies ...
— The Inn of Dreams • Olive Custance
... eight thousand feet high, peaked with snow, rose to the right; but the great snow spectacle was to the left. There the proud crests of the Hoch Gall, Wild Gall and Schnebige Nock rose out of a vast white glittering amphitheatre, a peculiar, bare, conical rock standing like an Alpine sphinx strangely forth from this desert ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... its merits forms one of the principal occupations of the dwellers on the Pacific coast. It is indeed difficult to see how tourists could pass their time here without this topic of conversation, so infinite is its variety and so debatable are many of the conclusions drawn from it. It is the Sphinx of California; differing, however, from the Sphinx of Egypt in that it offers a new problem every day. The literature that treats of the Pacific coast fairly bristles with statistics on this subject, and many writers have found it impossible to resist the temptation of adorning their pages ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... soul.—'Soul! spirit!'—thus I often cried to myself laughing, and even now I cannot refrain from laughter,—'can there be anything else? And if this be so, in what does spirit differ from matter? where is the party wall between life and death?' In the spectral phantom of life, in the sphinx-born riddle of being, in that terrific fiat out of which the worlds sprang forth, to roll convulsively onward and evermore onward, till they can drop back into rest and nothingness—in this all contradictions and contrarieties are mixt up and confounded, to petrify into ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... subject than most people, having above my share of friends and relations who have been there. I have the clearest possible picture of the country—a stretch of sand, some pyramids in the background, and, in the centre foreground, smiling enigmatically—not the Sphinx, but my friend or relation. I at once gave Mr. LOW five marks out of ten upon discovering that none of his illustrations reproduced himself on either on or off a camel. On less personal grounds, I have no scruple in giving him the remaining ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 11, 1914 • Various
... serene and solemn, upon a sepulchre. Beneath him recline two vast mourning figures, one of each sex. One longs to challenge converse with the male figure, with the unfinished Sphinx-like face, who is stretched there at his harmonious length, like an ancient river-god without his urn. There is nothing appalling or chilling in his expression, nor does he seem to mourn without hope. 'Tis a stately recumbent figure, of wonderful anatomy, without any ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... swaying before her of something dark and tall and threatening, and before she could speak or move, or even stretch forth her hands to stay him, the seat before her was empty and darkness had filled the place where but an instant previous he had sat, a fearsome figure, erect and rigid as a sphinx. ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... Sphinx with golden nails ensnare, No Gorgon freeze it out of snaky folds, No Siren lull ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... antiquity which most excites the imagination, for, while the whole Bible history from Abraham to the Apostles covers a period of only 2,000 years, the known history of Egypt commenced as far back as 6,000 years ago! From the sphinx at Ghizeh, which is so ancient that no one knows its origin, to the great dam at Assuan, monument of its present day, each period of its history has left some record, some tomb or temple, which we may study, and it is this more than anything else ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Egypt • R. Talbot Kelly
... sterling for the expense of this undertaking. Colonel the Honorable Edward Cornwallis was gazetted Governor of Nova Scotia, May 9th, 1749, and sailed for the Province in the sloop-of-war SPHINX. On the 14th, of June, just a month after leaving home, the SPHINX made the coast of Nova Scotia, but having no pilot on board, cruised off the land until the 21st June. On that ...
— The Chignecto Isthmus And Its First Settlers • Howard Trueman
... Sphinx of life, everywhere and at all moments, sufficed to fill his days from one end of the year to the other. When some distant subject interested him, even on the most scorching days, he would put "his lunch in his pocket, an apple and a crust of bread," ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... soothsayer, augur, fortune teller, crystal gazer[obs3], witch, geomancer[obs3], aruspex[obs3]; aruspice[obs3], haruspice[obs3]; haruspex; astrologer, star gazer[obs3]; Sibyl; Python, Pythoness[obs3]; Pythia; Pythian oracle, Delphian oracle; Monitor, Sphinx, Tiresias, Cassandra[obs3], Sibylline leaves; Zadkiel, Old Moore; sorcerer &c. 994; interpreter &c. 524. [person who predicts by non-mystical (natural) means] predictor, prognosticator, forecaster; weather forecaster, weatherman. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... uttered a short "Indeed!" and looked more than ever like a sphinx. I began quietly to hate him, ...
— That Affair Next Door • Anna Katharine Green
... us when he said that," observed Upton to his wife, as he told her about the interview at dinner that evening. "He was as solemn as an Alp, and apparently as immovable as the Sphinx; and as for me, I simply withered on my stalk and crumbled away into dust. Wherefore, my love, I am through; and hereafter if you are going to make matches for my friends and need outside help, get a hired man to help you. I'm did. If I were you I'd ...
— The Booming of Acre Hill - And Other Reminiscences of Urban and Suburban Life • John Kendrick Bangs
... pleased, though his sphinx-like visage never relaxed. He was drawing the Factor, and making him break ground. Being a creature so elemental as to have room for but one idea at a time, Snettishane could pursue that one idea a greater ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... tell me, what did you guess after all?" said Porthos, settling himself into an armchair and assuming the airs of a sphinx. ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... surviving fragment, and he is figured slaying his enemy at Sinai before the god Thoth. In late times the priests of Denderah claimed Khufu as a benefactor; he was reputed to have built temples to the gods near the Great Pyramids and Sphinx (where also a pyramid of his daughter Hentsen is spoken of), and there are incidental notices of him in the medical and religious literature. The funerary cult of Khufu and Khafr[e] was practised under the twenty-sixth ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... they metaphorically came out of their shells and permitted an inspection. Above the railway I saw one of the few birds of my entire Rocky Mountain outing that I was unable to identify. That little feathered Sphinx—what could he have been? To quote from my note-book, "His song, as he sits quietly on a twig in a pine tree, is a rich gurgling trill, slightly like that of a house-wren, but fuller and more melodious, with an air about it that makes me feel almost like writing ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... smile, but he did not. He was listening with sphinx-like gravity. When I paused, my face and my ears burning, he said, with some embarrassment: "What is your business, may I ask?" "I am in the same line. Cloaks." "Are you?" With ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... not even glance at her. The affectionate cordiality of the hour of meeting had utterly vanished. He looked as cold, stern, and impenetrable as some half-buried sphinx of the desert. ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... have never seen Delphine since her marriage. The beautiful statuesque girl occupies a niche into which the blazing and magnificent intrigante cannot crowd. I do not wish to be disillusioned. She has read me a riddle,—Delphine is my Sphinx. ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... up from his feast, and for a full half minute they eyed each other. In a slow, pendulum-like motion the grizzly's huge head swung from side to side; the black was as motionless as a sphinx. ...
— The Grizzly King • James Oliver Curwood
... and Red Cross waggons and troops and dug-out camps. As we get closer the signs of shelling get worse, and children are seen no longer. Old men, though, occasionally observed working in a field quite unperturbed. Rarely a French soldier or an interpreter with his sphinx badges. All this quite lost on Hunt, who has "quite got used to abroad, thank you, sir." He is eating chocolate or something, half a horse-length (the ...
— Letters to Helen - Impressions of an Artist on the Western Front • Keith Henderson
... the two men faced each other across the room. The yellow lamplight plainly revealed their different expressions. The Padre's smile was inimitable in its sphinx-like obscurity, but ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... spinney. Rookery full. Usual butterflies in unusual numbers. Toward twilight several sphinx moths visited the privet. No net at hand so did not identify any. Pheasants in bad shape. Nobody to keep them down. Must arrange drives while ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers
... the whole universe, sun, and stars, and all, backing it by God's appointment, to keep it where it is and what it is; and till (as Lord Bacon has it) I have discovered and obeyed the will of God revealed in that pebble, it is to me a riddle more insoluble than the Sphinx's, a fortress more impregnable than Sevastopol. I may crush it: but destroying is not conquering: but I cannot even mend the road with it prudently, until I have discovered whether Almighty God has made it fit to mend roads with. I may have the genius of a Plato or of ...
— Scientific Essays and Lectures • Charles Kingsley
... all looking up here. I wonder why men are so shy. I'm glad I have my new frock on.... Fancy being married only a few hours ago! Tell me how you are feeling, can't you, Philip? You sit there looking like a sphinx. You are ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... dream-fast Love in raiment burning-red, Wreathed with white doves, quivered with burning gold? Pass with thy Triumph of Lovers, Aucassin, Tristram, and Pharamond, and Lancelot, Dante, and Rudel, all thy haughty kin, Princes in that high heaven, as we are not.— With some gilt couchant sphinx both casqued and crowned, All mailed in amethyst the new god comes, Whose brooding beautiful eyes at last have found Our uncanonical dark martyrdoms, Who from the sombre catacombs of these Brings ...
— The Hours of Fiammetta - A Sonnet Sequence • Rachel Annand Taylor
... beings, Ker, Harpy, Fury, Gorgon, Sphinx, and the like, appear to have been developed out of ghosts[1408]—whether or not this is true of the Babylonian demons the known material does not enable us to say. Organization of such beings was carried out fully by the Persians, but not by any other Indo-European people and ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... molten granite had been poured, preserving them eternally. The heads of great dogs, like the dogs of Ossian, sprang out in profile from the repulsing mainland; stupendous gargoyles grinned at them from dark points of excoriated cliff. Farther off, the face of a battered sphinx stared with unheeding look into the vast sea and sky beyond. From the dark depths of mystic crypts came groanings, like the roaring of lions penned ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... fierce the wrath wherewith he fronts the gate: Yet not unheralded he takes his stand Before the portal; on his brazen shield, The rounded screen and shelter of his form, I saw him show the ravening Sphinx, the fiend That shamed our city—how it glared and moved, Clamped on the buckler, wrought in high relief! And in its claws did a Cadmean bear— Nor heretofore, for any single prey, Sped she aloft, ...
— Suppliant Maidens and Other Plays • AEschylus
... to know that you are in sympathy with my "eloquent" address at the University of Virginia. You give me hope that I am on the right track. As for Harmon and representative government, you won't get either. ... Please see Mr. R. W. Emerson's Sphinx, ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... tread he passed over a hopscotch court with its forgotten pickeystone. Not a sinner. Near the timberyard a squatted child at marbles, alone, shooting the taw with a cunnythumb. A wise tabby, a blinking sphinx, watched from her warm sill. Pity to disturb them. Mohammed cut a piece out of his mantle not to wake her. Open it. And once I played marbles when I went to that old dame's school. She liked mignonette. Mrs Ellis's. And Mr? He opened the ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... at the bank nearly all day, and for a few weeks affairs went on at home very smoothly. At table Mrs. Pinkerton maintained a sphinx-like silence, and I directed my conversation to Bessie. When the old lady opened her mouth, it was to snub me. The snub direct, the snub indirect, the snub implied, and the snub far-fetched,—I submitted to all with ...
— That Mother-in-Law of Mine • Anonymous
... than a languid interest in watching you progress with this smiling sphinx," said Stanton, "and in the mean time shall ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... specimens of fossil insects, in the Swiss Alps. It was then that the first bird and the first butterfly appeared. The bird was the famous Archaeopteryx, found in the Solenhofen slate, and the first butterfly, to use an Irishism, was a moth, a sphinx moth, apparently about the size of the Convolvulus sphinx moth. This stone-embedded relic of the moth that sucked the juices of the plants of the Mesozoic world, incalculable ages before the time even of the gigantic mammals, is preserved in the ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish
... G.—The specimen you send is a sphinx moth, of which there are several varieties in the ...
— Harper's Young People, August 24, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... tells how differently different persons take death. Grim death lurks in the background of almost every work, casting a fearful gloom, mocking the life of man, laughing to scorn his joys and his sorrows, propounding, sphinx-like, the big riddle that no Oedipus will ever be able ...
— Savva and The Life of Man • Leonid Andreyev
... would descend from his heights to mingle a brief moment in the family talk. Al clerked in the National Cigar Company's store at Clark and Madison. His was the wisdom of the snake, the weasel, and the sphinx. A strangely silent young man, this Al, thin-lipped, smooth-cheeked, perfumed. Slim of waist, flat of hip, narrow of shoulder, his was the figure of the born fox-trotter. He walked lightly, on the balls of his feet, like an Indian, but without ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... sphinx unguessed, enthroned in azure skies, White as the swan, my heart is cold as snow; No hated motion breaks my lines' pure flow, Nor tears nor laughter ever ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... civilization—will be the race which remains longest upon it. The negro was here before the Anglo-Saxon was evolved, and his thick lips and heavy-lidded eyes looked out from the inscrutable face of the Sphinx across the sands of Egypt while yet the ancestors of those who now oppress him were living in caves, practicing human sacrifice, and painting themselves with woad—and the negro ...
— The Marrow of Tradition • Charles W. Chesnutt
... were weariness of continual triumph, had forever frozen this face, implacably gentle and of granite serenity. Osiris judging the souls could not have had a more majestic and calm expression. A large tame lion, lying by his side, stretched out its enormous paws like a sphinx on its pedestal, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... this woman. To this end, he asked Gilder and the District Attorney to withdraw, while he should have a private conversation with the prisoner. As she listened to his request, Mary smiled again in sphinx-like fashion, and there was still on her lips an expression that caused the official a pang of doubt, when, at last, the two were left alone together, and he darted a surreptitious glance toward her. Nevertheless, he ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... sometimes attacks the young, tender shoots of the vine. The moment they appear, take off the shoot, and crush it on a board with the foot. Leaf-rollers, the grape- vine sphinx, and caterpillars in general must be caught by hand and killed. Usually they are not very numerous. The horrid little rose-chafers or rose-bugs are sometimes very destructive. Our best course is to take a basin of water and jar them off into it—they fall readily—and ...
— The Home Acre • E. P. Roe
... your mouth, white and milk-warm sphinx, I taste a strange apocalypse: Your subtle taper finger-tips Weave me new heavens, yet, methinks, I know the wiles and each iynx That brought me passionate to your lips: I know you bare as laughter strips Your charnel beauty; yet my ...
— The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems • Aldous Huxley
... hitherto proved so inexpressibly unproductive! The secret of Man's Being is still like the Sphinx's secret: a riddle that he cannot rede; and for ignorance of which he suffers death, the worst death, a spiritual. What are your Axioms, and Categories, and Systems, and Aphorisms? Words, words. ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... lotus sips the waters Of ever-fruitful Nile, and the huge Sphinx In awful silence,—mystic converse with The stars,—doth see the pale moon hang her crescent on The pyramid's sharp peak,—e'en there, well in The straits of Time's perspective, Went out, by Caesarean gusts from Rome, The low-burned candle of the Ptolemies: ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... musing subtleties between the reader and the life he would present; often followed his theme into intricacies beyond his own power to resolve into the simple forms of art. Thus it has come about that misguided readers became enigma hunters, and the poet their Sphinx. ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... shelving ledges made of stone, with a sheet of water gliding down over them; here a long path, stretching down slopes and flights of steps, and arched over all the way with trellises and creepers; here a huge boulder, hewn, just as it lay, into the shape of a gigantic head and face, with mild, sphinx-like eyes, as if some buried Titan were struggling to free himself; here a fountain, so artfully formed of pipes set in circles, each set shooting the water higher than those outside, as to form a solid pyramid of glittering ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... that consciousness which he looks upon as open to the influx of the divine essence from which it came, and towards which all its upward tendencies lead, always aspiring, never resting; as he sings in "The Sphinx ":— ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... the words with no visible sensation. His sphinx-like reticence vexed Bird more and more, and intolerably deepened the mystification of his failure to do any of the things with his capital which Bird had promised himself and his fellow-citizens. He ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... Certainly the sphinx could have propounded no more puzzling riddles than those which Elizabeth thus suggested to Buckhurst. To make war without an army, to support an army without pay, to frame the hearts of a whole people ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... had testified surprise or any other emotion, at the discovery that white men had settled close to their 'sugar-bush,' and of course become joint proprietors. The inscrutable sphinx-like calm of these countenances, the strangeness of this savage life, detained Robert most of the afternoon as by a sort of fascination. Andy's wrath at the male indolence was renewed by finding that the squaw and her girls had to cut and carry all the ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... withstand. The trial began at Galesburg. Patsy was hugging the rear end of the day coach in order to keep out of the cruel storm, when his eyes rested upon the white face of a poorly clad woman. She stood motionless as a statue, voiceless as the Sphinx, with the cold rain beating upon her uplifted face, until Patsy cried "All aboard." Then she pulled herself together and climbed into the train. The conductor, leaving his white light upon the platform of the car, stepped down and helped the dripping woman into the coach. ...
— Snow on the Headlight - A Story of the Great Burlington Strike • Cy Warman
... impediment and bar, brings on A season, in the which, one sent from God, (Five hundred, five, and ten, do mark him out) That foul one, and th' accomplice of her guilt, The giant, both shall slay. And if perchance My saying, dark as Themis or as Sphinx, Fail to persuade thee, (since like them it foils The intellect with blindness) yet ere long Events shall be the Naiads, that will solve This knotty riddle, and no damage light On flock or field. Take heed; and as ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri |
