"Myth" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the acquisition of pelf. Some will remember the definition given of it in Grose's "Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue:" "to squeeze out a man's eye with the thumb; a cruel practice used by the Bostonians in America." A curious illustration of the belief in this myth occurred to Cooper. One of his friends in England was an amiable and pleasant man of letters, named William Sotheby, little heard of in these days; and even in his own days he had to endure the double degradation of being called a small poet by the small poets themselves. He was at this time ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... you made a sort of myth of him? Isn't he only a fable to us now? And haven't we got real facts ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... successor of Menes, about the sixtieth of the series, and the builder of Thebes, those better informed by the Egyptians rejected him altogether. Various esoterical explanations were given of the myth, and the name not found as a king was recognized as that of the tomb of Osiris. Busiris is here probably an earlier and less accurate Graecism than Osiris for the name of the Egyptian god Usiri, like Bubastis, Buto, for the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... Chandogya Upanishad, where it is said that in the beginning there existed nothing but the sat, 'that which is,' and that feeling a desire of being many it emitted out of itself ether, and then all the other elements in due succession. The former is a primitive cosmogonic myth, which in its details shows striking analogies with the cosmogonic myths of other nations; the latter account is fairly developed Vedanta (although not Vedanta implying the Maya doctrine). We may admit that both accounts show a certain fundamental similarity ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... Hudson Bay turned to fur trading and won wealth, and discovered an empire while pursuing the little beaver across a continent, the beginning of all this was not the beaver, but a myth—the North-West Passage—a short way round the world to bring back the spices and silks and teas of India and Japan. It was this quest, not the lure of the beaver, that first brought men into the heart of New World wilds ...
— The "Adventurers of England" on Hudson Bay - A Chronicle of the Fur Trade in the North (Volume 18 of the Chronicles of Canada) • Agnes C. (Agnes Christina) Laut
... myth, but Englishmen have been the mythmakers. They have for generations delighted in picturing him. He represents a combination of qualities which they admire. Dogged, unimaginative, well-meaning, honest, full of whimsical prejudices, ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... myth of mares being impregnated by the wind was known to the Classics of Europe; and the "sea-stallion" may have arisen from the Arab practice of picketing mare asses to be covered by the wild ass. Colonel J. D. Watson of the Bombay Army suggests to me that Sindbad was wrecked at the mouth ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... humanity chiefly at night time or in dim uncertain lights. She has never been afraid to face the honest daylight, and that, in my opinion, has always been a great factor in establishing her claim to genuineness. A ghost who is seen by sane people, in full daylight, cannot surely be a mere legendary myth! ...
— Indian Ghost Stories - Second Edition • S. Mukerji
... in what may almost be called a scientific way. Once discovered, it is, of course, stolen from the original proprietors. A savage cannot believe that the first owners of fire would give the secret away. The inventors of the myth of Prometheus ...
— Australian Legendary Tales - Folklore of the Noongahburrahs as told to the Piccaninnies • K. Langloh Parker
... the camp Meriem asked for Baynes. For the moment her fears had been allayed by the sight of the camp, which she had come to look upon as more or less a myth. Hanson pointed toward the single tent that stood in the center ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... which he did not think it advisable to prejudice by wholesale surrender. Therefore he, in order to taste the forbidden joys of individualistic philosophy, meat, food and strong drink, created "Chesterton." This mammoth myth, he decided, should enjoy all the forms of fame which Shaw had to deny himself. Outwardly, he should be Shaw's antithesis. He should be beardless, large in girth, smiling of countenance, and he should be licensed to sell paradoxes only in essay ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... reading by either process is so annoying that most readers prefer to let an allusion pass unapprehended rather than submit to it. Moreover, such sources give us only the dry facts without any of the charm of the original narrative; and what is a poetical myth when stripped of its poetry? The story of Ceyx and Halcyone, which fills a chapter in our book, occupies but eight lines in the best (Smith's) Classical ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... the carpenter's shop at Nazareth had come a personality infinitely greater than any made by myth and legend, and one, strangely enough, destined to reveal to the world the mystical meaning of wine and the real beauties of the lilies of the field as none, either on Cithaeron or Enna, has ever done. The ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... Antiquaries. Then Mr. Collier presented the treasure to the Duke of Devonshire, who again lent it for examination to the British Museum. Mr. Hamilton published in the Times (July, 1859) the results of his examination of the old corrector. It turned out that the old corrector was a modern myth. He had first made his corrections in pencil and in a modern hand, and then he had copied them over in ink, and in a forged ancient hand. The same word sometimes recurred in both handwritings. The ink, which looked old, was ...
— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang
... till 1793 that Mr. (after Sir A.) Mackenzie discovered the river now named after him, and crossed the continent of North America from Atlantic to Pacific. One of the reasons for this late exploration of the north-west of North America was a geographical myth started by a Spanish voyager named Juan de Fuca as early as 1592. Coasting as far as Vancouver Island, he entered the inlet to the south of it, and not being able to see land to the north, brought back a report of ...
— The Story of Geographical Discovery - How the World Became Known • Joseph Jacobs
... 'Lethe' is another classic myth. It is [Greek: ho tes lethes potamos]—the river of forgetfulness, 'the oblivious pool.' Perhaps is it that all of us, as well as the son of Thetis, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... easily given by evolving a legend that he was a spirit, escaped from purgatory or the grave, to fulfil a definite purpose. The rarity of such purposeful ghosts in an age like ours, so rich in ghost stories, must have a cause. That cause is, probably, a dwindling of the myth-making faculty. ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang
... moved multitudes it was by the spreading abroad of countless legends which sprang up wherever she passed and made way before her. And indeed, there is much food for thought in that dazzling obscurity, which from the very first enwrapped the Maid, in those radiant clouds of myth, which, while concealing her, rendered ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... Resurrection was closely connected with such hopes as those expressed in Ezekiel's vision of the re-animation of Israel's dry bones (Ezek. xxxvii.). Thus popular theology adopted many ideas based on the Resurrection. The myth of the Leviathan hardly belongs here, for, widespread as it was, it was certainly not regarded in a material light. The Leviathan was created on the fifth day, and its flesh will be served as a banquet for the righteous at the advent of Messiah. The ...
— Judaism • Israel Abrahams
... up short. "I've been priding myself on keeping up the myth I'm a wide-awake young man and pilot. Never have I passed out before—never. I feel like a washed-out cadet. You've had your fun baiting—now, what made ...
— A Fine Fix • R. C. Noll
... story-book of Klim the Russian robber, {15} and the most poetical part of Tom Shone's history, namely, that in which he threatens to cut off the hand of the reluctant bride unless she performs her promise, is, in all probability, an offshoot of the grand myth of "the severed hand," which in various ways figures in the stories of most nations, and which is turned to considerable account in the tale of the above-mentioned Russian ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... public in this manner, but has, so far, by the aid of money, freely used, managed to keep out of the Penitentiary. When my friend presented the ticket, and demanded the two hundred dollar prize, they offered him stock in an oil well out West, which (well) is all a myth. So I concluded to retain the percentage, and forfeit the 'prize.' In one of the circulars it is announced that a second 'grand distribution' will take place this winter, and I make this matter public that none of your readers may ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin
... than the search for the Western Sea. Marquette, Jolliet, and La Salle had followed the trail that Radisson had blazed and explored the valley of the Mississippi; but like a will-o'-the-wisp beckoning ever westward was that undiscovered myth, the Western Sea, thought to lie like a narrow strait between America ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut
... called Prunicus[45] and Holy Spirit, through whom I brought into being the Angels, and the Angels brought into being the world and men." (He claimed) that this was the Helen of old, on whose account the Trojans and Greeks went to war. And he related a myth with regard to these matters, that this Power descending from above changed its form, and that it was about this that the poets spake allegorically. And through this Power from above—which they call Prunicus, ...
— Simon Magus • George Robert Stow Mead
... insistence, we have sedulously fostered the Santa Claus myth, but it doesn't meet with much credence. "Why didn't he ever come before?" was Sadie Kate's skeptical question. But Santa Claus is undoubtedly coming this time. I asked the doctor, out of politeness, to play the chief role at our Christmas ...
— Dear Enemy • Jean Webster
... of the Australian race, Curr believes, were Africans, and may have arrived in one canoe. The distance from Africa to Australia is, however, great, and there are innumerable details of structure, color, custom, myth, implements, language, etc., which have led the latest authorities to conclude that the Australian race was formed gradually by a mixture of Papuans, Malayans, and Dravidians of Central India.[151] Topinard has given reasons for ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... the region where poetry and myth and tradition have placed a most ancient civilization,—the Black-Land, or Land of the Nile: we search its royal sepulchres, its manifold history written in funereal records, in kingly genealogies, in inscriptions, and in the thousand relics preserved ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... expedition, Lieutenant Dawson, RN, and the Reverend C New, had resigned, for reasons which Mr Stanley fully explains. He himself was not over well pleased with some of the remarks made in the papers about himself, some having regarded his expedition into Africa as a myth. ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... slate-blue foothills lifted their sharp-edged shoulders three miles away, but only blank walls of Soledad faced the hills, all portals of the old mission appeared to have faced south, as did Soledad. The door facing the hills was a myth. And as Rhodes stood north of the old wall, and searched its thirty-mile circle, he could understand how four generations of gold seekers had failed to find even a clue to the wealth those unknown padres had looked on, and sent joyous evidence of to the viceroy of the south. It would take years ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... pig-faced person, thou hast not the property thou namest, and even wert thou the Lord of the earth, yet still would I take thy head!" To which the fallen warrior made answer: "I am Tangaloa, the high-chief of Leatatafili, in Savai'i, and the property I speak of is no myth, and all of it thine if thou wilt spare me." To which O'olo replied: "And when I should claim it, verily thou wouldst forget thy covenant, and order thy young men to chastise me forth, they laughing at the cheat, and I with neither head nor property, ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... the endless strife and insoluble contradiction of the dogmatic and sceptical spirits. We may disagree with much else in the Kantian system. Even here we may say that we have not two reasons, but only two functionings of one. We have not two worlds. The philosophical myth of two worlds has no better standing than the religious myth of two worlds. We have two characteristic aspects of one and the same world. These perfectly interpenetrate the one the other, if we may help ourselves with the language of space. Each is everywhere present. Furthermore, ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... the turret, but omits the statement (previously made by him) that he deprived Ruthven of his dagger, a very improbable tale, told falsely at first, no doubt, as Robertson the notary at first invented his fable about meeting with Henderson, coming out of the dark staircase. This myth Robertson narrated when examined in September, but omitted it in the trial in November. Henderson now explained about his first opening the wrong window, but he sticks to it that he took the garter from Ruthven, of which James says nothing. He vows that he turned the key of the door on the ...
— James VI and the Gowrie Mystery • Andrew Lang
... the Desert of Sahara there stands the world-famous Sphinx with its inscrutable face turned toward the East, ever greeting the sun as its rising rays herald the newborn day. It was said in the Greek myth that it was the wont of this monster to ask a riddle of each traveler. She devoured those who could not answer, but when Oedipus solved the riddle ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... nor red ripe summer, with its wealth of roses, nor the rich fruit-harvest of autumnal suns, bring wisdom's goodness. The various months teach him no lesson. Let him go. He came like a shadow into our plot, so let him depart. He is not a myth, however, but flesh and blood mortality; and though we have only outlined his weakness—his love of gold, his cold, intriguing spirit—yet the sketch is such that, if he looks at it, he will have the felicity of seeing himself as ...
— Daisy's Necklace - And What Came of It • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... Merryweather at Calcutta, who will receive your signature just as if it was mine." Before going away, he introduced Clive to F. and M.'s corresponding London house, Jolly and Baines, Fog Court—leading out of Leadenhall—Mr. Jolly, a myth as regarded the firm, now married to Lady Julia Jolly—a Park in Kent—evangelical interest—great at Exeter Hall meetings—knew Clive's grandmother—that is, Mrs. Newcome, a most admirable woman. Baines represents a house in the Regent's Park, with an emigrative tendency towards ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... those behind plunged over them, unable to stop. Soon it was a fearful jumble; men and beasts, hoofs and steel, curses and shrill neighing. Then the firing began, a woof of fine red threads through the warp of pale-green reeds. The guerrillas yet fought. The myth of their own heavier numbers kept them from panic. Ragged fellows with feet bare in the stirrups leaned over to slash at heads between the tasselled stalks. They squirmed like snakes from under ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... hermaphrodite we define as the individual who possesses the reproductive organs of the male and the female, both testes and ovaries. So rare is such a combination in man that for a long time its occurrence was doubted, descriptions of it regarded as myth. However, undoubted cases are on record, examined by the most careful of observers, of ovo-testis or mixed reproductive organs. Strangely enough, the history of these cases, shows that at one time the masculine set, and ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... for which he is known, he wrote some narrative and lyric verse. Marpessa (1890), a blank verse poem, is a beautiful treatment of the old Greek myth, in which Apollo, the god, and Idas, the mortal, woo Marpessa. Marlowe might have written the lines in which Apollo promises to take her to a home above the world, where movement is ecstasy and repose is thrilling. ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... it. It was built as a defence against the raids of the northern tribes, though for this purpose it was a failure; but it still stands, though some of the English newspapers only a few years ago treated it as a myth; yet there is no doubt whatever of its existence, for it has been visited by many reliable English and American travellers. It was begun two hundred and fourteen ...
— Four Young Explorers - Sight-Seeing in the Tropics • Oliver Optic
... three attendants, still ahead of his Army, appeared at Schonbrunn, a Schloss and Village, five or six miles south from Strehlen; [THIS is the Warkotsch Schonbrunn; not the other near Schweidnitz, as Archenholtz believes: see ARCHENHOLTZ, ii. 287, and the bit of myth he has gone into in consequence.] and did the owner, Baron von Warkotsch, an acquaintance of his, the honor of lodging there. Before bedtime,—if indeed the King intended bed at all, meaning to be off in four hours hence,—Friedrich ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... like wax (Koran xxi. xxxiv., etc.). Hence a good coat of mail is called "Davidean." I have noticed (First Footsteps, p. 33 and elsewhere) the homage paid to the blacksmith on the principle which made Mulciber (Malik Kabir) a god. The myth of David inventing mail possibly arose from his peculiarly fighting career. Moslems venerate Daud on account of his extraordinary devotion, nor has this view of his character ceased : a modern divine preferred him to "all ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... do not suppose you will take any legal steps until after those concerts. Until then, please keep up the fiction that the house of Fyfe still stands on a solid foundation—a myth that you've taken no measures to dispel since you left. When it does come, it will be a sort of explosion, and I'd rather have it that way—one amazed yelp from our friends and ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... the other the demon of night and of darkness, as false and treachorous as he is malignant.{HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS} The latter (as his name Vritra, from var, to veil, indicates) is pre-eminently the thief who hides away the rain-clouds.{HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS} But the myth is yet in too early a state to allow of the definite designations which are brought before us in the conflicts of Zeus with Typhon and his monstrous progeny, of Apollon with the Python, of Bellerophon with Chimaira of Oidipous with the Sphinx, of Hercules with Cacus, ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... the cold, sometimes in the dress of a monk, but always with a strong impress of real character and incident from the veritable streets' of the town itself. From this strange design Mr. Pater has fashioned a curious mediaeval myth of the return of Dionysus among men, a myth steeped in colour and passion and old romance, full of wonder and full of worship, Denys himself being half animal and half god, making the world mad with a new ecstasy ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... took everythink, or practically everythink worth takin'. They stormed Lala Baba and captured Chocolate 'ill—in fac' they made the landin'; and the Xth and XIth Divisions are simply a myth accordin' ...
— At Suvla Bay • John Hargrave
... with respect. Indian commentators and comparative mythologists agree that he is a solar deity. His chief exploit is that he took (or perhaps in the earlier version habitually takes) three strides. This was originally a description of the sun's progress across the firmament but grew into a myth which relates that when the earth was conquered by demons, Vishnu became incarnate as a dwarf and induced the demon king to promise him as much space as he could measure in three steps. Then, appearing in his true form, he strode across earth ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... illumines, but does not destroy. She knows and implies that he is not only this. But she greets the light, no matter to what darkness it be allied. She reverences the god who forms one half of him, so long as the monster which constitutes the other, remains out of sight; a poetic myth is made to illustrate this feeling. The gravity, however, is short-lived. The lower self in Aristophanes springs up again, and ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... shores are haunted with these vague Pagan influences that two convents have risen there to purge the atmosphere? From the Capuchin terrace you look across at the grey Franciscan monastery of Palazzuola, which is not less romantic certainly than the most obstinate myth it may have exorcised. The Capuchin garden is a wild tangle of great trees and shrubs and clinging, trembling vines which in these hard days are left to take care of themselves; a weedy garden, if there ever was one, but none the less charming for that, in the deepening dusk, with ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... conditions, and not dependent on them. But the melancholy Jacques of our ordinary experience either uses some narcotic or stimulant to excess, or else has trouble with his liver or kidneys. "Liver complaint," says Zangwill, "is the Prometheus myth done into modern English." Already historical criticism has shown that the Bloody Assizes had its origin in disease of the bladder, and most forms of vice and cruelty resolve themselves into decay of the nerves. It is natural that degeneration should bring discouragement ...
— The Philosophy of Despair • David Starr Jordan
... John, this game of life is strange; we bring nothing with us, so how can we lose? We take nothing away, so how can we win? We think; we plan; we stack these plans with precision, but Chance always sits at our right, waiting to cut the cards. You speak of 'justice.' It's a myth. The statue above the court-house stands first on one foot, then on the other, tired of waiting, tired of the sharp rocks of technicality, tired of the pompous farce. Why, Dale," he waved a hand toward an opposite corner, ...
— The Angel of Lonesome Hill • Frederick Landis
... "fringe"[12] of this word is especially good. It calls up ideas of information handed down from generation to generation orally, the only way of teaching under the old type of management. It recalls the idea of the inaccurate perpetuation of unthinking custom, and the "myth" element always present in tradition,—again undeniable accusations against the old type of management. The fundamental idea of the tradition, that it is oral, is the essence of the difference of the old type of management from science, ...
— The Psychology of Management - The Function of the Mind in Determining, Teaching and - Installing Methods of Least Waste • L. M. Gilbreth
... eminently precious, not as a record of outward fact, but as a mirror of the evolving heart, mind, and soul of man. They are true because they have been developed in accordance with the laws governing the evolution of truth in human history, and because in poem, chronicle, code, legend, myth, apologue, or parable they reflect this development of what is best in the onward march of humanity. To say that they are not true is as if one should say that a flower or a tree or a planet is not ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... dangerous portions of the river. Colonel Williamson stated in March, 1868, that he could obtain no information of importance with regard to the "Big" canyon except that contained in Dr. Parry's account of White's alleged journey, which journey, as I have pointed out, was a myth. ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... invention or a work of art, a story of the past or a prophecy, a cure or a devastating curse. Moreover, social tradition treasures the memory of these revelations, and, blending them with the contributions of humbler folk—for all of us dream our dreams—provides in myth and legend and tale, as well as in manifold other art-forms, a stimulus to the inspiration of future generations. For most purposes fine art, at any rate during its more rudimentary stages, may be studied in ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... Ohio and the valley of the Mississippi. But Wood was a private adventurer. For years his exploit had been forgotten. No record of it remained but an account written by his men, Batts and Hallam. The French declared the record was a myth, and it has, in fact, been so regarded by the most of historians. Yet, curiously enough, ranging through some old family papers of the Hudson's Bay Company in the Public Records, London, I found with Wood's own signature his record of the trip across the ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... world in which it had been ignored so long; and in the passion, the energy, the industry of realisation, with which Botticelli carries out his intention, is the exact measure of the legitimate influence over the human mind of the imaginative system of which this is perhaps the central myth. The light is indeed cold—mere sunless dawn; but a later painter would have cloyed you with sunshine; and you can see the better for that quietness in the morning air each long promontory, as it slopes down ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... of bronchitis caught in a supper 'al fresco' at the old castle, was duly transmitted to Rochebriant by the Princess; and the shock to Alain and his aunt was the greater because they had seen so little of the departed that they regarded him as a heroic myth, an impersonation of ancient chivalry, condemning himself to voluntary exile rather than do homage to usurpers. But from their grief they were soon roused by the terrible doubt whether Rochebriant could still be retained in the family. Besides the mortgagees, creditors from half the capitals in Europe ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... without showing an amount of incredulity scarcely becoming a sane man, to deny the existence of the traveler, and the reality of that voyage which I believed all along to have been a myth—the mystification of ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... is a myth; we're all a little neurotic, and the | | study of neurosis has been able to classify the general | | types of disturbance which are most common. And some types | | (providing the subject is not suffering so extreme a case as | | to have crossed the border into psychosis) ...
— The Hills of Home • Alfred Coppel
... perpetuate their race; others eke out a half dormant existence as minute larvae, others pass the winter in the egg state. In fact, each species has its idiosyncrasy. [Footnote: Here, perhaps, I may explode that myth and "enormous gooseberry" of the mild winter or early spring, headed in the newspaper every year as "Extraordinary Mildness of the Season": "We are credibly informed that, owing to the mildness of the past week, Mr. William ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... narrative partly for the sake of the reflection with which Mr. Froude concludes. He says: 'But though passed over and unheeded at the time, and lying buried for three hundred years, the bloody stain comes back to the light again, not in myth or legend, but in the original account of the nobleman by whose command the deed was done; and when the history of England's dealings with Ireland settles at last into its final shape, that hunt among the caves at Rathlin will not be forgotten.'[1] It ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... the whole idea of the Holy Grail was simply a poetic legend and myth, had the feeling that he had suddenly been transmigrated, like his own Connecticut Yankee, back into the Arthurian days; but he made no question, suggested no doubt. Whatever it was, it was to them the materialization ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... explain what is meant by the loess, a step the more necessary as a French geologist for whose knowledge and judgment I have great respect, tells me he has come to the conclusion that "the loess" is "a myth," having no real existence in a geological sense or as holding a definite place in the ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... simply carrying out the Divine decrees? And what answer could be given? None that we know of which would satisfy the reason. And what, then? This—viz., that in the light of the drama of the fall, the doctrine of universal foreordination must be given up as a myth which ignores philosophy, and reflects injuriously upon ...
— The Doctrines of Predestination, Reprobation, and Election • Robert Wallace
... satisfactory intercourse, if we only know all is well. When De Sauty got his original cable going, he had not much to tell after all; only that consols were a quarter per cent higher than they were the day before. "Send me news," lisped he—poor lonely myth!—from Bull's Bay to Valentia,—"send me news; they are mad for news." But how if there be no news worth sending? What do I read in my cable despatch to-day? Only that the Harvard crew pulled at Putney yesterday, which ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... Euripides' Hippolytus is called a myth, but that same tragedy is played out over and over again, year by year, in all time, and is as true now as it was then. The slighted goddess takes her revenge at last. As he walked on, the sound of some tom-toms dulled by distance came to his ears. He hesitated at a crossing ...
— Six Women • Victoria Cross
... housewife, I tell you frankly there is no moral to this little episode. It throws no light on what to eat, or on the purchasing power of an English shilling, or on the ethical training of young children, or on the nature of neurasthenia. Fairyland, of course, is a childish fiction, Apollo a solar myth, a road is a road, grass is grass and heaven is a state of mind. I quite agree with you. But let me whisper something in your ear. If you should ever blunder across your Boundary, don't be surprised if things look queer on the ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... I sketched for the first time the complete myth of the "Nibelungen", such as it henceforth belongs to me as my poetic property. My next attempt at dramatizing the chief catastrophe of that great action for our theatre was "Siegfried's Death". After much wavering I was at last, in the autumn of 1850, on the point of sketching the ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... arm of God, luminous and impalpable, surrounded by a vortex of atoms;—she who had known such glorious apparitions, clothed with the purple and golden glories of the setting sun. The realm of fantasy had no myth with whose ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... which purports to be a plain historical narrative of actual events, that book is the book of Genesis. In nine-tenths of its details, it is as human, and as matter of fact, as any book of Biography or History that ever was penned. Why the first page of it is to be torn out, treated as a myth or an allegory, and in short explained away,—I am utterly at a loss to discover. There is no difference in the style. Long since has the theory that Genesis is composed of distinguishable fragments, been exploded[294]. ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... Donatello in Mr. Hawthorne's new romance. His likeness to the lovely statue of Praxiteles, his happy animal temperament, and the dim legend of his pedigree are combined with wonderful art to reconcile us to the notion of a Greek myth embodied in an Italian of the nineteenth century; and when at length a soul is created in this primeval pagan, this child of earth, this creature of mere instinct, awakened through sin to a conception ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... one who doubts these statements has no inkling of those facts which are the crown as well as the foundation of the Chinese group-system, and which must be patiently studied in the village-life of the country to be fitly appreciated. To be quite frank, absolutism is a myth coming down from the days of Kublai Khan when he so proudly built his Khan-baligh (the Cambaluc of Marco Polo and the forebear of modern Peking) and filled it with his troops who so soon vanished like the snows of winter. An elaborate pretence, a deliberate policy ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... yet dead; it emits a faint gleam which, in default of eyes, serves to distinguish the path. If one regards this as a mere image, it may be allowed to approach close to a conceit; but it suggests a series of incidents and figurative details which may rather count as a compendious myth. ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... of English literature besides, by a long line of native productions adapting classic forms to new ages and a new speech. The epic, the lyric, the pastoral, the comedy, the tragedy, the elegy, the satire, the myth, even the fable, have been classic, have usually been literature. But the novel has never been a preserve for the learned, although it came perilously near to that fate in the days of Shakespeare; has ever been written for cash or for popular ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... fiction, tale, anecdote, romance, novel, fable, legend, myth, parable, apologue, chronicle, record, history, narrative, narration, yarn, rehearsal, recital, tradition, jeremiad; falsehood, canard; ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... were said to be written by Moses. Moses was not, and could not have been, the author of those books. There is, indeed, no reliable evidence to prove that Moses ever existed. Whether he was a fictitious hero, or a solar myth, or what ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... tome is musty with dank superstition From which we shrink recoiling, to th' extreme Of an unfaith that with material vision, Accounts as myth or dream ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... Agriculture (here, perhaps by confusion with Apis, figured as a Bull), was torn to pieces by Typho and embalmed after death in a sacred chest. This myth, reproduced in Syria and Greece in the legends of Thammuz, Adonis, and perhaps Absyrtus, represents the annual death of the Sun or the Year under the influences of the winter darkness. Horus, the son of Osiris, as the New Year, in his turn overcomes Typho.—It suited ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... were stilled, pens forgotten, chisels thrown aside, brushes were useless, and oratory was silent, dumb. Yet we know the man Pericles quite as well as the popular mind knows George Washington, who lived but yesterday, and with whom myth and fable ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... you about myself, who and what I am! My name is surrounded with such hate and fear that no one can judge what is the truth and what is false, what is history and what myth. Some time you will write about it, remembering your trip through Mongolia and your sojourn at the ...
— Beasts, Men and Gods • Ferdinand Ossendowski
... dilutes and renders as transitory as possible the sense of the universal in the whole.... And as it laid great stress upon the letter in the book of nature, it fell into polytheism. The particular symbol of the divine, or of the Godhead, became a myth of some special deity."—Lange's "Bible-work," Genesis, ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... Household, had been invited to dinner by the Regent. Another yet states that Brummell, being asked to ring the said bell, replied, 'Your Royal Highness is close to it.' No one knows the truth of the legend, any more than whether Homer was a man or a myth. It surely does not matter. The friends quarrelled, and perhaps it was time they should do so, for they had never improved one another's morals; but it is only fair to the Beau to add that he always denied the whole affair, and that he himself gave as the cause ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... the general attitude, and the hopes and fears of both fighting men and civilians. Not only is this voluminous book a brilliantly written commentary on the opening months of the war, it is also infused with an inner sadness that could well be considered a precursor to the post-war "lost generation" myth, which is yet another indicator at how well Gibbs could gage the feel of the times and assess its impact ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... Chinese popular religion is not exactly myth or legend but religious romance. A writer starts from some slender basis of fact and composes an edifying novel. Thus the well-known story called Hsi-Yu-Chi[560] purports to be an account of Hsuan Chuang's journey to India but, except that it represents the ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... railroads and crystal palaces, peace and plenty, cockaigne and dilettantism, to the end of time? Is it not full sixty whole years since the first French revolution, and six whole years since the revolution of all Europe? Bah!—change is a thing of the past, and tragedy a myth of our forefathers; war a bad habit of old barbarians, eradicated by the spread of an enlightened philanthropy. Men know now how to govern the world far too well to need any divine visitations, much less divine punishments; and Stangrave was an Utopian dreamer, only to be excused by the fact ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... Foreword to the Fooling of Gylfe, becomes interesting when we compare it with Snorre's account of that hero in Heimskringla, and then compare both accounts with the Roman traditions about neas. Of course the whole story is only a myth; but we should remember that in the minds and hearts of our ancestors it served every purpose of genuine history. Our fathers accepted it in as good faith as any Christian ever believed in the gospel of Christ, and so it had a similar influence in moulding the social, religious, political ...
— The Younger Edda - Also called Snorre's Edda, or The Prose Edda • Snorre
... aerial ocean, depending upon the influence of light — the primary condition of all organic vitality — on the solid and liquid surface of our planet. It might be said, in accordance with a beautiful expression of Lavoisier, that the ancient marvel of the myth of Prometheus was ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... the poet, after wandering over heaven, returns with bleeding feet. Less tragic in its merely temporal aspect than the life of Keats or Coleridge, the life of Shelley in its moral aspect is, perhaps, more tragical than that of either; his dying seems a myth, a figure of his living; the material shipwreck a ...
— Shelley - An Essay • Francis Thompson
... condescend to enter into a special covenant with His poor Brethren's people, and take us as his peculiar property." For that statement there is not a shadow of evidence. The whole story of the "special covenant" is a myth. In consulting the Lot the Brethren showed their faith; in passing their resolution they showed their wisdom; and the meaning of the resolution was that henceforth the Brethren rejected all human authority in spiritual matters, recognized ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... put the money into their horrible little hands, and they ran away with strange small cries and wild, half-noiseless laughter—if laughter can be anything but noisy. Let such words pass as come; for no words of our tongue can quite tell all Veronica saw and heard on that day. The great Italian myth survives in foreign nations; it has even more life, perhaps, in Italy itself, north of the Roman line; but only those know what Italy is, who have trudged on foot, and ridden by mountain paths, and driven ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... a science, not a myth. It is a very real fact, a very real power which can be developed only by careful research. To most people it is merely a curiosity. They sit, for instance, in a crowded room at some uninteresting lecture, and stare continually at the back of some unsuspecting companion until that companion, by ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... live was a hard and fearful thing. Yet honour said, Die and be satisfied that you are doing right. Did honour always command what was easiest for a man to do? Again, what was it? He had but a few moments left to live, and in a lifetime he had served honour scrupulously. What if it were but a myth, but a legend of fools, a destroying idol worshipped by brave and brainless visionaries, who had more courage than intelligence, more desire to do right than discernment to sift right from wrong? Pity that so many ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... tell you what I found there in a minute. But, briefly, beyond learning that the story of the invalid Lady Coverly was a myth, I discovered nothing likely to help the inquiry. I seriously debated the idea of putting Dr. Damar Greefe under arrest; but finally I determined to watch him for a time without showing my hand. I had the ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... this one question, and exerting all his skill and pertinacity, Saunders succeeded in convincing the court that the Hard Cash was a myth: a pure chimera. The defendant's case looked up; for there are many intelligent madmen ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... observed also that Bracciolini himself insists on the probable myth of the whole tale; the learned Goth is "unreliable"; he maintains that he is "telling no fib"; Bracciolini doubts himself whether what he hears is "true," but he can "see no reason why the man should lie": thus repeatedly in a very short letter he strongly ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... in a maelstrom of motors, cabs, street cars, newsboys, skyscrapers, pedestrians, policemen, subway stations. Where was the South American languor? Where the Argentine inertia? The rush and roar of it, the bustle and the bang of it made the twenty-three-day voyage seem a myth. ...
— Emma McChesney & Co. • Edna Ferber
... Damaris about the myth, she would have told them everything quite simply and truthfully. This would have cleared up the mist but spoilt the feeling ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... followed by the Encyclopaedia Britannica, tells a story of Raynal visiting the House of Commons; the Speaker, says the writer, learning that he was in the gallery, "suspended the discussion until a distinguished place had been found for the French philosopher." This must be set down as a myth. The journals have been searched, and there is no official confirmation of the statement, improbable enough on the face ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... myth, Jessie. I never heard of your being lost. To me you have been ever present, walking in the sunlight, a divine reality. Not the mere appearance of a woman; but a real woman, and my wife. Pray do not lose yourself now! Do not recede from an actual flesh and blood ...
— The Hand But Not the Heart - or, The Life-Trials of Jessie Loring • T. S. Arthur
... revelation— revolutionary revelation, I may say—that the earth is embosomed in the infinite heavens the same as the stars that shine above us, that the creative energy is working now and here underfoot, the same as in the ages of myth and miracle; in other words, that God is really immanent in his universe, and inseparable from it; that we have been in heaven and under the celestial laws all our lives, and knew it not. Science thus kills religion, poetry, and romance ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... careers on a fresh register before taking another chance in the world above, Ulysses chose that of a stay-at-home proprietor, with a resolve, born of experience, never again to roam. If Plato had made a Myth of the Birds, he might have alleged some such reason to explain how it is that while most of them are incessant wanderers, ever flitting uncertain between momentary points of rest, so few remain fixed and constant, as if they had sworn at some ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish
... proudly sweeping to the sea, Dark and deep and grand, forever wrapt in myth and mystery. Lo he laughs along the highlands, leaping o'er the granite walls: Lo he sleeps among the islands, where the loon her lover calls. Still like some huge monster winding downward through the prairie plains, Seeking rest but never ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... That is, lyre; alluding to the myth of the origin of the instrument, which Mercury was said to have made from the shell of a tortoise. Cf. Collins, Passions, 3: "The Passions oft, to hear ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray
... every business house working to full capacity, and all at first glance going well. The children, and especially those of the working class, look healthy and full of life. Starving Vienna seems somewhat of a myth. ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... otherwise than their parents did. They criticise him openly and frankly. Their parents no longer understand how to inspire blind, terrified obedience. Little boarding-school girls discuss Uncle Reuben and wonder if he is anything but a myth. A six-year-old child proposes that he should prove by experiment that it is impossible to catch a mortal cold ...
— Invisible Links • Selma Lagerlof
... permission of evil is explained by the predominantly good results which follow from it (not, as in physical evil, for the sufferer himself, but for others)—from the crime of Sextus Tarquinius sprang a great kingdom with great men (of. the beautiful myth in connection with a dialogue of Laurentius Valla, Theodicy, iii. 413-416). Finally, reference is made again to the contribution which evil makes to the perfection of the whole. Evil has the same function in the world as the discords in a piece of music, or the shadows ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... 'That was a curious myth you were telling us, about the Polong, the Familiar Spirits,' he said. 'I have heard of it before from natives, but there is a thing I have never spoken of, and always swore that I would keep to myself, that I have a good mind to tell you now, if you will promise not to call ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... on the borderland of myth—King Arthur, Charlemagne, Holger Danske—believed that in their country's need these would arise from the shades to lead their people to victory; and at Bideford one feels that, should any 'knight of the sea' return, he would find a town ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... plaything, but the very name of Cyprus had always excited my imagination, and the thought of the island having thus by chance been revived in me, I began to feel that a visit to it would be a very charming adventure, and that Sir Samuel's story of the marble, even if it should prove to be a myth, would at least be a plausible excuse for embarking on so long a journey. Moreover, it provided Sir Samuel with an excuse for writing to Sir Henry Bulwer, then governor of the island, and asking him to do what he could in the way of securing accommodation ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... world. The profession of singing in public, then, presupposed that the singer was no longer the more or less imaginary young girl, the hothouse flower of the social garden, whose perfect bloom the merest breath of worldly knowledge must blight for ever. Margaret might smile at the myth, but she could not ignore the fact that she was already as much detached from it in men's eyes as if she had entered the married state. The mere fact of realising that the hothouse blossom was part of the social legend proved the change ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... reflexion on myth—two processes: (1) rejection of the grosser myths; (2) refinement of ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... had gravely remonstrated with the President for inviting Sir Charles Dilke to his table. Then followed articles defending the course taken by the President, and so for some time the ball was kept up. The remonstrance of the Ambassador was a myth; Lord Lyons was a friend of Sir Charles, but the latter was suspect at the time, both in England and France—in England for his speeches and motion on the Civil List; in France because, with Frederic Harrison, he had ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... Olympus. Crude in its art, angular in its execution, there still was something of the soul of the worker stitched with the canvas. To Stephen La Mothe, touched at times by a poet's comprehension, it seemed not altogether a myth,—a type, perhaps; only, being very human, he hungered with a bitter hunger for the crowning of the peace and the divinity of love while life was life. It requires a robust faith to believe that Olympus can bring anything better ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... her talk of Switzerland, as if it were just around the corner," marveled Ruth. "It has always seemed to me like some myth or fable." ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... "chia," a myth; white jade form the Halls; gold compose their horses! The "A Fang" Palace is three hundred li in extent, but is no fit residence for a "Shih" of Chin Ling. The eastern seas lack white jade beds, and the "Lung Wang," king of the Dragons, has come to ask for one of the Chin Ling Wang, (Mr. ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... Consul Campbell addressed us, saying: 'African cotton is no myth. A vessel has just arrived from Lagos with 607 bales on board, on native account. Several hundred bales more have been previously ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... though, in inflicting this punishment, Zeus was soon visited with a relenting heart, for it was by express commission from him that Hercules, as a son of his, scaled the rock and slew the eagle. The myth is one of the deepest significance, reflecting an old belief, and one which has on it the seal of Christ, as sanctioned of Heaven, that the world was made for man and not man for the world, only there is included within it an expression of the jealousy with which Heaven watches the use mankind ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... historical facts. Perhaps some real hero had indeed performed daring deeds, and had made the world around him happier and better. It was easy to liken him to Sigurd, or to some other mythical slayer of giants; and soon the deeds of both were ascribed to but one. And thus many myth-stories probably contain some historical facts blended with the mass of poetical fancies which mainly compose them; but, in such cases, it is generally impossible to distinguish what is fact ...
— The Story of Siegfried • James Baldwin
... harvest-god, with which was connected another tale, that of the rape of the Sabines. All the associations of this quarter point to the agricultural character of the early Romans; both cattle and harvesting have their appropriate myth. But nothing is visible here now, except the pretty little round temple of a later date, which is believed to have been that of Portunus, the god of the landing-place from ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... comedies and dramas it is not the individual that is drawn, but the type. Where the individual alone is real, the type is a myth of the imagination—a pure invention. And invention is the mainspring of the theatre, which rests purely upon illusion, and does not please us unless it begins by ...
— Widger's Quotations from The Immortals of the French Academy • David Widger
... evidently a myth for them all," he murmured. "But he will soon be found a terrible reality, and it's Roddy Hardinge ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance
... some deliberation, "I find it impossible to express such an opinion of this story as will be likely to gratify, in the smallest degree, your pride of authorship. Pray let me advise you never more to meddle with a classical myth. Your imagination is altogether Gothic, and will inevitably Gothicize everything that you touch. The effect is like bedaubing a marble statue with paint. This giant, now! How can you have ventured to thrust his huge, disproportioned mass among the seemly outlines of Grecian fable, ...
— The Three Golden Apples - (From: "A Wonder-Book For Girls and Boys") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... banking world we may be pretty sure that the views expressed concerning the neglect of local interests by the enormous banks which have grown up with London centres in the last thirty years is to a great extent a myth. It has now announced, however, that the whole problem involved by the amalgamation process is to be sifted by a committee to be ...
— War-Time Financial Problems • Hartley Withers
... and had to do, or try doing, in God's practical Earth, he could not by any means precisely get to know; believes that it does not itself in the least precisely know. Believes that nobody knows;—that it is a mystery, a kind of Heathen myth; and stranger than any piece of the old mythological Pantheon; for it practically presides over the destinies of many ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... that kind of social myth Where every guest (and each a rum one) Is Somebody, because the kith Or ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, April 4, 1891 • Various
... Williams, "The Virginia Gentry and the Democratic Myth", Main Problems in American History, 3rd. ed. (Dorsey Press, ...
— The Road to Independence: Virginia 1763-1783 • Virginia State Dept. of Education
... point; for while there are those, like Father Colgan, whose clear faith accepts Saint Patrick just as he stands in history and tradition, yet, on the other hand, there are sceptics, like Ledwick, who contend that the saint is nothing but a prehistoric myth, floating about in the imagination of the ...
— Saint Patrick - 1887 • Heman White Chaplin
... Praeneste, thinks that all the opus quadratum walls were built as surrounding walls for the great sanctuary of Fortuna. But the facts will not bear out his theory. Ovid, Fasti VI, 61-62, III, 92; Preller, Roem. Myth., 2, 191, are ...
— A Study Of The Topography And Municipal History Of Praeneste • Ralph Van Deman Magoffin
... to whether we should or should not teach children the Santa Claus myth pops up anew with Christmas time; and puzzles anew anyone who regards this festival ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... were fixed on the Campanile of Airolo. But he saw instead the fair myth of Endymion. This woman was a goddess to the end. For her no love could be degrading: she stood outside all degradation. This episode, which she thought so sordid, and which was so tragic for him, remained supremely beautiful. To such a height was he lifted, ...
— Where Angels Fear to Tread • E. M. Forster
... I). I own that it is ridiculous to make the Lawgiver lead his fugitives into a veritable cul-de-sac, then a centre of Egyptian conquest. Evidently we have still to find the "true Mount Sinai," if at least it be not a myth, pure and simple. The profound Egyptologist, Dr. Heinrich Brugsch-Bey, observes that the vulgar official site lies to the south of and far from the line taken by the Beni Israil, and that the papyri show no route leading to it; whilst many have ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... is not a myth at all as I rather thought he might be; and that money may be buried over there somewhere, you know. And the cousin's laying himself out to annoy the camp in every way possible, even going the length of trying to starve 'em out. There's a stack of supplies at the Huddleston station ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... paper business, the holiday season had crept up almost unnoticed. Santa was an exploded myth, these years, but the stereotyped cut of the jovial, fat-cheeked saint at the top of the page brought John a thrill of anticipation, nevertheless. Christmas was coming. What ...
— A Son of the City - A Story of Boy Life • Herman Gastrell Seely
... those rapid transitions, that force of eloquence, that opulence of imagery which is ever true to nature. Like the sea when it retires upon itself and leaves its shores waste and bare, henceforth the tide of sublimity begins to ebb, and draws us away into the dim region of myth ...
— Stories from the Odyssey • H. L. Havell
... The myth of the black pot assumed serious proportions. I attempted to benefit the tribes among the Boers of Magaliesberg by placing native teachers at different points. "You must teach the blacks," said Mr. Hendrick Potgeiter, the commandant in chief, "that they ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... thus significant for Romantic interest in myth in two ways. First, he provides a clear statement of what can be loosely called the antimythic position, that rationalist condescension and derogation of all myth and all religion that was never far from the surface during the Romantic ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... hidden and secret; they are revealed only under long and patient observation, in talk and debate and the conduct they inspire. You have probably heard of Momus's indictment of Hephaestus; if not, you shall have it now. According to the myth, Athene, Posidon, and Hephaestus had a match in inventiveness. Posidon made a bull, Athene planned a house, Hephaestus constructed a man; when they came before Momus, who was to judge, he examined their productions; I need not trouble you ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... Faiths, is a drawing from the original, by Colonel Coombs, of the "Temptation," or of the ancient tree-and-serpent myth in Genesis. This drawing, in which it is observed that the Jewish idea of woman as tempter is reversed, was copied from the inner walls of a cave in Southern India. The picture is said to be a faithful representation of the version of the story as accepted ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... be blamed if in that paper on Minneola, before the Old Settlers' Association, he let out the pent-up wrath of thirty years; and also if in the discussion General Ward unsealed his lips for the first time and blighted the myth that told how a hundred Minneola men had captured the court-house yard on the night that John Barclay and Bob Hendricks rode home from their captivity to sign the tax levy. Legend has always said that Lige Bemis, riding half a mile ahead of the others that night, came ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... law and its administration on the eve of the Revolution. Robespierre did not hold his office long. Every one has heard the striking story, how the young judge, whose name was within half a dozen years to take a place in the popular mind of France and of Europe with the bloodiest monsters of myth or history, resigned his post in a fit of remorse after condemning a murderer to be executed. 'He is a criminal, no doubt,' Robespierre kept groaning in reply to the consolations of his sister, for women are more ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... Holy Spirit was the mother of Jesus, and Joseph was his father. But according to the prevailing opinion, as represented in the first and third synoptists, the relationship was just the other way. With greater apparent plausibility, the divine aeon was substituted for the human father, and a myth sprang up, of which the materialistic details furnished to the opponents of the new religion an opportunity for making the most gross and exasperating insinuations. The dominance of this theory marks the era at which our first and third synoptic gospels were composed,—from ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... upstairs and soon returned with the pleasing information that I was to be shown the whole house and garden. So I pardoned him the myth about the missus, happening to know that at that particular moment she was at Brighton, sixty ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... shouted, "Give it to 'em, boys, Burnside is here," and the boys went in with renewed confidence. But, alas, at nightfall Burnside had played out, and the hearts of our brave fellows went down with the sun. Burnside is now regarded as a myth, a fictitious warrior, who is said to be coming to the rescue of men sorely pressed, but who never comes. When an improbable story is told to the boys, now, they express their unbelief by the simple word "Burnside," sometimes adding, "O yes, ...
— The Citizen-Soldier - or, Memoirs of a Volunteer • John Beatty
... and physician, with servants to lay the table and bring supper. Glenfernie ate and drank with the two men. His lordship was reported better, would doubtless be up to-morrow. The talk fell upon Greece, to which country the nobleman was, in the end, bound. Greek art, Greek literature, Greek myth. Here the secretary proved scholar and enthusiast, a liker especially of the byways of myth. He and Alexander voyaged here and there among them. "And you remember, too," said the ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... Arizona may be likened to that wild and rugged mountain region in Central Asia, where, according to Persian myth, untold treasures are guarded by the malign legions of Ahriman, the spirit of evil. Two of the great elemental forces have employed their destructive agencies upon the surface of the country until it might serve for an ideal ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... at her elbow, Dolly was reading the evening paper. It was all about Charles-Norton Sims, the paper, though it did not mention him by name, but variously, according to the temperaments of its correspondents, as a condor, an ichthyosaurus, the moon, an aeroplane, a Japanese fleet, a myth, a cloud, a hallucination, a balloon, and a goose. As she read, she alternately frowned and laughed. Her brows would draw together very seriously, and then suddenly her red lips would part to let through a sparkling rocket ...
— The Trimming of Goosie • James Hopper
... cosmological myths, the Chaldaeans had a vast number of so-called heroic and nature myths. The most noted of these form what is known as the Epic of Izdubar (Nimrod?), which is doubtless the oldest epic of the race. This is in twelve parts, and is really a solar myth, which recounts the twelve labors of the sun in his yearly passage through the twelve signs of the ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... Rhampsinitus, after playing at dice with Ceres in Ilades, by investing one of their body with a cloak made in a single day, [Greek: pharos autemeron exyphenantes], Euterpe, cxxii. Gray, in his ode of The Fatal Sisters, has embodied the Scandinavian myth in which the twelve weird sisters, the Valkiriur, weave "the crimson web of war" between the rising ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... their preoccupation with the Canadian preachers and The Citizens. The people accept it in the most matter-of-course manner, and are already entirely absorbed once more in their own affairs, and even in their sports. British courage and independence have been no more than a myth for many years past—a bubble which your Majesty's triumphantly successful policy has ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... now,' broke in Beetles. 'Religion is all right, is a good thing, and I believe a necessary thing for the race, but no one takes seriously any longer the Christ myth.' ...
— Black Rock • Ralph Connor
... of Greece assigned to each wind a separate cave, in which it was supposed to await the commands of its sovereign Aeolus, or Aeolos. It is to this myth that ...
— Lucasta • Richard Lovelace
... government existed in efficiency, there was neither crime nor punishment"—a shadowy tradition, I presume, of the state of innocence! It may also be true that "the mythology of the Nile agrees with that of the Ganges." But it would not follow that the cross is a myth derived from the mysteries of Egypt or the astronomy of India. It would still remain an unquestionable fact, that the cross, for ages an instrument of ignominious torture under Pagan Rome, only ceased to be so when Christianity had won its way through all ranks of society up ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 214, December 3, 1853 • Various
... social bow. "Come to see me some time and have some of my dawn, only don't come before eleven A.M. or you might get mixed up, for its awful dark in the blue room until that hour." And like a real fairy Dorothy shook her golden hair and, stooping low in myth fashion, made a ...
— The Bobbsey Twins at the Seashore • Laura Lee Hope
... Sheaf, not 'Scyld the son of Scaf'; for it is too inconsistent, even in myth, to give a patronymic to a foundling. According to the original form of the story, Scef was the foundling; he had come ashore with a sheaf of corn, and from that was named. This form of the story is preserved ...
— Beowulf • James A. Harrison and Robert Sharp, eds.
... Voltaire adopted it, with improvements, especially in the little Harangue; and from Voltaire gratefully the rest of mankind. [Voltaire, Siecle de Louis XV., c. 6 (OEuvres, xxviii. 78); Coxe, House of Austria, iii. 270; and innumerable others (who give this Myth)]; Maria Theresiens Leben, p. 44 n. (who cites the Vienna Pamphleteers, without much believing them); Mailath (a Hungarian), Geschichte des OEsterrichischen Kaiser-Staats (Hamburg, 1850), v. 11-13 ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... I shall bring that up against you, dear heart," he said. "Delgratz ought to advertise itself as a sure cure for ambition. I liked the people; but I hated the job, and Kosnovia is already becoming a myth in my mind. I am rejoicing in my new name, Alexander Talbot. I hope you like it. My mother tells me that my father was one of the strong men of the West. I am called after him, it seems, and although my own name sounds strange ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... rarely-seen world around them of fairies, ghosts, spirits and witches. In some out-of-the-way corners in England—even in these days of board schools and competitive examinations, when we are told that King Arthur never existed and that William Tell is a "sun-myth"—some remnants of this belief still linger. In Devonshire folks speak shyly and with bated breath of the "good people;" and even in the year of grace 1879 a Warwickshire laborer was had up before the magistrates for having with a pitchfork ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... stands for Ra, the sun-god, and the eater of the ass is darkness or some eclipse, represented as one of the foes of Ra, in the vignette figured as a serpent on the back of an ass. Compare the Babylonian myth of ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... There is a myth abroad that college towns are intellectual centers; but the number of people in a college town (or any other) who really think, is ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... a myth. He had no sympathy with the students, and, being arbitrary, tyrannical, and unjust, they "hated him with a perfect hatred." It was certainly best that he should go; for in whatever vessel he was, ...
— Dikes and Ditches - Young America in Holland and Belguim • Oliver Optic
... be discovered that the British Army is a myth, and that the British Navy is a snare and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 7, 1893 • Various
... had read in Marco Polo of the islands of MASCULIA and FEMININA in the Indian Seas and noted the passage in his copy. See ch. XXXIII. of pt. III. of Marco Polo. On the other hand there is evidence for an indigenous Amazon myth in the New World. The earliest sketch of American folk-lore ever made, that of the Friar Ramon Pane in 1497, preserved in Ferdinand Columbus's Historie and in a condensed form in Peter Martyr's De Rebus Oceanicis (Dec. I., lib. IX.), tells the story of the culture-hero Guagugiona, ...
— The Northmen, Columbus and Cabot, 985-1503 • Various
... confirmed by later researches, but yet not easily to be explained away or accounted for. Such observations Humboldt described as belonging to the myths of an uncritical period; and it is in that sense that I employ the term 'astronomical myth' in this essay. I propose briefly to describe and comment on some of the more interesting of these observations, which, in whatever sense they are to be interpreted, will be found ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... creation myth of the earth, sea, and sky from an egg, but instead of the heroes living in some supernatural home of their own, they come down from heaven, distribute gifts among men, and work their wonders by aid of magic, at the same time ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie |
