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More "Demigod" Quotes from Famous Books



... told me. I think it was a relief to speak to some one. I held my cheek against her hand all the time. It seemed that a sort of demigod of the name of Kingston had alighted in her life when she was nineteen (I felt with a pang that I had still a whole year to wait) and he was twenty-one. Aunt Emmy waxed boldly eloquent in her description of his unique and heroic character, shyly ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley

... asked curiously. "I have heard his name constantly since I have been here. People talk of him as though he were a demigod. Why are ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie

... fraudulent banker or some rather over-extortionate tax-collector! For as to the Greeks, they will think, as they behold the innocence of your life, that one of the heroes of their history, or a demigod from heaven, has come down into the province. And this I say, not to induce you to act thus, but to make you glad that you are acting or have acted so. It is a splendid thing to have been three years in supreme power in Asia ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero

... might do as he pleased on land; but far beyond the range of outlook from the white watch-tower of Olympus rolled the immeasurable waves of the wine-purple deep, acknowledging only the Enosigaios Poseidon. Consequently, while Zeus allotted to this and that hero and demigod Argos and Mycene and the woody Zacynthus, each to each, the ocean remained unbounded and unmeted. Nation after nation, race after race, has tried its temporary lordship, but only at the pleasure of the sea itself. Sometimes the ensign of sovereignty has been an eagle, sometimes a winged lion,—now ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various

... would derive the name of their nation), galliard, pleasant, and pliable to all company; the Spaniard quite contrary retired, austere, rigid, proud. And indeed their are something of truth in it; for who knows not the pride of the Castilian: if a Castilian then a Demigod. He thinks himselfe ex meliore luto natus then the rest ...
— Publications of the Scottish History Society, Vol. 36 • Sir John Lauder

... scarecrow, toothless and senile, lying here in its filthy rags, with the hand raised in an impotent menace, was once the brilliant Sesostris, the master of kings, and by virtue of his strength and beauty the demigod also, whose muscular limbs and deep athletic chest many colossal statues at Memphis, at Thebes, at Luxor, reproduce and try to ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti

... of this series, "The Son of the Thunder-God," represents this demigod as actually selling his soul to the Devil, and tricking the Devil out of it. The Thunder-God is here called Paristaja, and also Vana Kou; but in other tales he is usually called Pikne, and is no doubt identical ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby

... a sort of demigod in the place. Everybody believed and trusted in him; and nobody could die in peace without him any more than without my father. I was delighted at the thought of being his patient. I think I see him now standing with his back to ...
— Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood • George MacDonald

... is a cynic, in South America an overworked slave, in Africa a citizen, but in India an imp,—I mean to the eye of the Western stranger, for in the estimation of the native he is mythologically a demigod, and socially a guest. At Ahmedabad, the capital of Guzerat, there are certainly two—Mr. De Ward says three—hospitals for sick and lame monkeys, who are therein provided with ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various

... walk over my tomb, and will seek me in vain!" Then, O my friend, I could instantly, like a true and noble knight, draw my sword, and deliver my prince from the long and painful languor of a living death, and dismiss my own soul to follow the demigod whom my ...
— The Sorrows of Young Werther • J.W. von Goethe

... of each, and at the same time reiterate all the best maxims of Hinduism. Some centuries later, the pronounced Vedantist Sancarakarya revamped the poem and gave its philosophy a more pantheistic character; later still the demigod Krishna was raised to full rank as the supreme Vishnu—the Creator and ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood

... having been summoned by the inhabitants of Lindos to make them an image of their tutelary hero Hercules, obtained from the son of Jupiter that he should appear to him in a dream, and thus enable him worthily to portray the perfections of a demigod. Might we not be tempted to believe that the divine son of Semele had vouchsafed a similar boon to the happy sculptor ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)

... Cabot's school, not at all ashamed to say she could not afford this or that, simple and unaffected but self-respecting and proud; a girl who was at all times herself and retained her poise and common sense even in the presence of handsome young demigod who had made ...
— Mary-'Gusta • Joseph C. Lincoln

... tea-table, did not think so. She loved her brother very much, but she considered Mr. Vivian a hero, a demigod, something a little lower, perhaps, than the angels, but not very much. Kitty was only sixteen, which accounts, possibly, for her delusion on this subject. She was slim, and round, and white, with none of ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant

... to his triumphal chariot. There was a truce to recriminations. For a moment the caustic wit of the Parisians turned into profound admiration. The great conqueror, in light of his apotheosis, was more like a demigod than a man. Every one was eager to look upon him and his ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand

... again we must judge the work by the standards of its own age and admit that it is vastly better than the popular but fictitious biographies of Washington written by Weems and other romancers. Even in Irving's day Washington was still regarded as a demigod; his name was always printed in capitals; and the rash novelist who dared to bring him into a story (as Cooper did in The Spy) was denounced for his lack of reverence. In consequence of this false attitude practically all Washington's biographers ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long

... bourgeois. But her husband and child were all the society she wanted. With them any wilderness would have been a paradise. Her affection increased with time, and Imlay, though discovered not to be a demigod, grew ever dearer to her. Her love for her child, which she confessed was at first the effect of a sense of duty, developed soon into a deep and tender feeling. With Imlay's wants to attend to, the little Fanny, at one time ill with small-pox, to ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell

... on Davidge in his swivel-chair as a kind of despondent demigod, a Titan weary of the eternal strife. She tried to rise beyond a poetical height to the ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes

... an angel, a saint, and a demigod; he has been caricatured as a self-indulgent sensualist, a vulgar Lothario, a buffoon, a joker ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier

... was afforded and eagerly embraced. It is possible, as Dr. Holland remarks, that he "needed the influence of this visit to restore a healthy tone to his feelings, and to teach him that the person whom his imagination had transformed into a demigod was only a man, possessing the full measure of weaknesses common to men. In 1846 Lincoln learned that Clay was to deliver a speech at Lexington, Kentucky, in favor of gradual emancipation. This event seemed to give him an excuse ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne

... thump. The steel demigod was before her, she unprepared. The fire was laid, but wanted kindling. Prosper kindled ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett

... yet it pleased to know myself so fair, Because I loved the Beautiful. We met! Dark, fierce, and full of power thy features were, Yet finely cut, chiselled and sculptured well, Reminding me of antique demigod. The dream of the wild Greek, maddened with light From Beauty's sun, before me living stood. Ah! not of marble were thy features pale! Like summer's lightning, lights and shadows danced As feelings surged within thy stormful ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... man to hold her, despite herself? If he were primal man of primal nature, the demigod raptor who seizes his mate? Yes, she would forgive him—if only he were that man. If, as such, he would but hold her from her duty, from her sacrifice, despite herself, if—if—if——And so her daring fancy raced, raced as desire and hope to outrun sorrow. ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle

... from the lips of politicians, and had found at the same time almost on all sides great social admiration for the people so abused. He had observed that every Englishman of distinction was received in the States as a demigod, and that some who were not very great in their own land had been converted into heroes in his. English books were read there; English laws were obeyed there; English habits were cultivated, often at the expense ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope

... foreign land one is apt to have strange caprices, I allowed myself to become the prey of a desire to see the arcanum concealed at the other end of all the wires; and thus, one day, under the high protection of a demigod of the electrical world, I paid a visit to a telephone-exchange in New York, and saw therein what nine hundred and ninety-nine out of every thousand of the most ardent telephone-users seldom think about ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett

... and translate the surviving tragedies of Aeschylus, one feels inclined to repeat the words used by a powerful critic about one of the greatest of modern poets—"For man, it is a weary way to God, but a wearier far to any demigod." We shall not discover the full sequel of Aeschylus' mighty dramatic conception: we "know in part, and we prophesy in part." The Introduction (pp. xvi.-xviii.) prefixed by Mr. A. O. Prickard to his edition of the Prometheus is full of persuasive ...
— Suppliant Maidens and Other Plays • AEschylus

... a remarkable resemblance between the Babylonian account of Gilgamesh's journey through the mountain tunnel to the garden and seashore, and the Indian story of the demigod Hanuman passing through the long cavern to the shoreland palace of the female ascetic, when he was engaged searching for Sita, the wife of Rama, who had been carried away by Ravana, the demon king of Ceylon. In the version of the latter narrative which is given in the Mahabharata, ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie

... gave him a deal of trouble—and no wonder; for in the way he has put it there never was a man yet living who could have done the same thing. Mathematicians regard the achievement now as men might stare at the work of some demigod of a bygone age, wondering what manner of man this was, able to wield such ponderous ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge

... Narg. Of marble and porphyry are the houses, and roofed with glittering gold that reflects the rays of the sun and enhances the splendour of the cities as blissful gods view them from the distant peaks. Fairest of all is the palace of the great monarch Dorieb, whom some say to be a demigod and others a god. High is the palace of Dorieb, and many are the turrets of marble upon its walls. In its wide halls may multitudes assemble, and here hang the trophies of the ages. And the roof is of pure gold, ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft

... word bowulf, says Grimm, meant originally bee-wolf, or bee-enemy, one of the names of the woodpecker. Sweet thinks the bear was meant. But the word is almost certainly a compound of Bow (cf.O.E. bow grain), aDanish demigod, and wulf ...
— Anglo-Saxon Grammar and Exercise Book - with Inflections, Syntax, Selections for Reading, and Glossary • C. Alphonso Smith

... will speedily destroy the remnant of your mistress's former beauty by the exhaustion of sleepless nights—I know better. It was not love which drew Antony after me, not love that trampled in the dust the radiant image of reckless courage, not love that constrained the demigod to follow the pitiful track ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... French at Arapiles, and rescued us from the thraldom of those wicked people. I never respected my house so much as I have done since they honoured it with their presence. They were heroes, and one was a demigod." He then burst into a most eloquent panegyric of El Gran Lord, as he termed him, which I should be very happy to translate, were my pen capable of rendering into English the robust thundering sentences of ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow

... may one be crowned with light and joy, in vain may one taste the grand purple hour of life, happy love, such shocks would force even the archangel in his ecstasy, even the demigod in his ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo

... Malwa, which adjoins it on the west and south, hardly ever suffers at all.[5] There is a couplet, which, like all other good couplets on rural subjects, is attributed to Sahdeo [Sahadeva], one of the five demigod brothers of the Mahabharata, to this effect: 'If you hear not the thunder on such a night, you, father, go to Malwa, I to Gujarat;'—that is, there will be no rain, and we must seek subsistence where rains never fail, and the ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman

... Empire can have no idea of the general enthusiasm that still lingered in France in Louis Philippe's reign, round memories of the glories of Napoleon. Men might not wish him back again, but they worshipped him as the national demigod. After Sedan he was pulled down literally and metaphorically from his pedestal; and the old feelings about him which half a century ago even foreign nations seemed to share, now seem obsolete and extravagant to readers of Lanfrey ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer

... dear duke. Did you forget that this great man, this hero, this demigod, is attacked with a malady of the skin which worries him ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... was reposeful in nature seemed to have become an irony and a mockery to us—who knew how an evil demigod had his sacrificial altars amid our sweetest groves. This idea ruled strongly in my mind ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer

... himself had wandered here A-strolling through this sordid city, And piping to the civic ear The prelude of some pastoral ditty! The demigod had crossed the seas,— From haunts of shepherd, nymph, and satyr, And Syracusan times,—to these Far shores and ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various

... is known as the Sri Sampradaya and its members as the Sri Vaishnavas. As among the Sivaites revelation is often supposed to be made by Siva through Sakti, so here the Lord is said to have revealed the truth to his consort Sri or Lakshmi, she to a demigod called Visvaksena, and he to Namm'arvar, from whom Ramanuja was eighth in spiritual descent. Though the members of the sect are sometimes called Ramaites the personality of Rama plays a small part in their faith, especially as expounded by Ramanuja. ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot

... meet: In their waters crystalline Bathe him clean of weed and brine, Comb him, wipe his pretty eyes, Then to Zeus who rules the skies Call, assembling in a round Every fish that can be found— Whale and merman, lobster, cod, Tittlebat and demigod:— "Lord of all the Universe, We, thy finny pensioners, Sue thee for the little life Hurried hence by Hades' wife. Sooner than she call him her dog, Change, O change him to a mer-dog! Re-inspire the vital spark; ...
— Wandering Heath • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... replied Harley. He was moved by the little man's childlike and absolute faith and his reverence for Jimmy Grayson as a demigod. It was not without pathos, and Harley at once took him into the next car and introduced him to Grayson, who received him with the natural cordiality that never deserted him. Plover, the little man said was his name—William ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler

... [Greek: logos tou theou]. But now there is no mistaking a new element everywhere. In the case of the Christologies which include a kind of [Greek: theopoiesis], it is found in the fact that the deified Jesus was to be recognised not as a Demigod or Hero, but as Lord of the world, equal in power and honour to the Deity. In the case of those Christologies which start with Christ as the heavenly spiritual being, it is found in the belief in an actual incarnation. ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack

... how far that extraordinary blackguard of an Erik humbugged him."—The Persian, by the way, spoke of Erik sometimes as a demigod and sometimes as the lowest of the low—"Poligny was superstitious and Erik knew it. Erik knew most things about the public and private affairs of the Opera. When M. Poligny heard a mysterious voice tell him, in Box Five, of the manner in which he used to spend his time ...
— The Phantom of the Opera • Gaston Leroux

... metals, the use of writing, and in general all the early arts of civilization are ascribed to the fallen angels, whose children are represented in the Book of Genesis[1452] as the culture-heroes of the olden time. The introduction of writing into Greece is ascribed by the Greeks to the mythical hero or demigod Cadmus.[1453] Fire is in India the production of the god Agni[1454] (who is simply fire elevated to the rank of a personal divinity); in the Greek myth it is stolen and given to men by the demigod Prometheus[1455] against ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy

... Apache,—the home of the bear and the buffalo? What city-bred boy could "hold a candle" to the glaring halo about the head of two who could claim personal acquaintance with the great war chiefs Red Cloud and Spotted Tail?—who had actually been to ride and hunt with that then just dawning demigod of American boyhood,—Buffalo Bill? Sneer and scoff and cavil as did their little rivals for a time, calumny was crushed and scoffers blighted that wonderful March morning when, before the whole assembled school, ...
— Under Fire • Charles King

... Tweed, shall never be knowing about Flora's beauties;[106] but how I should like to have a talk with him about trees!" I mentioned how much any one must be struck with the majestic beauty of Goethe's countenance (the noblest certainly by far that I have ever yet seen): "Well," said he, "the grandest demigod I ever saw was Dr. Carlyle, minister of Musselburgh, commonly called Jupiter Carlyle, from having sat more than once for the king of gods and men to Gavin Hamilton—and a shrewd, clever old carle was he, no doubt, but no more a poet than his precentor. As ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart

... only a decayed old gentleman now. I rather think some of you have called him a "dotard;" you have taunted him with his age and the loss of his physical vigour. What fine heroes you are yourselves! Men like you have a right to trample on what is mortal in a demigod. Scoff at your ease; your scorn can never ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte

... "though I should be pressed to death were it whispered in Carthage that I said so; but at present we can do nothing. Had the great Hamilcar Barca lived I believe that he would have set himself to work to clear out this Augean stable, a task greater than that accomplished by our great hero, the demigod Hercules; but no less a hand can accomplish it. You know how every attempt at revolt has failed; how terrible a vengeance fell on Matho and the mercenaries; how the down trodden tribes have again and again, when victory seemed in their hands, ...
— The Young Carthaginian - A Story of The Times of Hannibal • G.A. Henty

... certain Emperor insisted that some porcelains should be made for him according to a model which he gave. It was answered that the thing was simply impossible; but all such remonstrances only served to excite his desire more and more.... The officers charged by the demigod to supervise and hasten the work treated the workmen with great harshness. The poor wretches spent all their money, took exceeding pains, and received only blows in return. One of them, in a fit of despair, ...
— Some Chinese Ghosts • Lafcadio Hearn

... thou dost breathe thine invocation, My voice to hear, to gaze upon my brow; Me doth thy strong entreaty bow— Lo! I am here I—What cowering agitation Grasps thee, the demigod! Where's now the soul's deep cry? Where is the breast, which in its depths a world conceiv'd And bore and cherished? which, with ecstasy, To rank itself with us, the spirits, heaved? Where art thou, Faust? whose voice I heard resound, Who towards me press'd with energy profound? ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

... girl he had been very fond of had been attacked and killed by a horse in a field in a very horrible manner. These things had wounded and tortured him, but they hadn't broken him. They had, it seemed to me, made a kind of crippled and ugly demigod of him. He was, I began to perceive, so much better than I had any right to expect. At first I had been rather struck by his unkempt look, and it made my reaction all the stronger. There was about him something, a kind of raw and bleeding faith in the deep things ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells

... force of 'narrow' here; as if Caesar were grown so enormously big that even the world seemed a little thing under him. Some while before this, the Senate had erected a bronze statue of Caesar, standing on a globe, and inscribed to "Caesar the Demigod," but this inscription ...
— The New Hudson Shakespeare: Julius Caesar • William Shakespeare

... printing! Who knows what shape the fable of Columbus will at length assume, to be confounded with that of Jason and the expedition of the Argonauts. And Franklin,—there may be a line for him in the future classical dictionary, recording what that demigod did, and referring him to some new genealogy. "Son of——and——. He aided the Americans to gain their independence, instructed mankind in economy, and drew ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau

... many hardships of a peculiar nature, yet her position, compared with that of the man, is higher and freer than that of the white woman. Why will people look only on one side? They either exalt the Red man into a Demigod or degrade him into a beast. They say that he compels his wife to do all the drudgery, while he does nothing but hunt and amuse himself; forgetting that, upon his activity and power of endurance as a hunter, depends the support of his family; that this is labor of the most fatiguing ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller

... he reckon enough with the forces which made for culture, enlightenment? Was he really high-minded? Did he not have the gesture and the touch of the magician, the abandonment of the indifferent demigod—indifferent to the higher and the deeper currents of man's life? I tried to formulate some of these nebulous ideas to Reverdy, but found myself running into denials, facts of contradiction in Douglas' attitude and thinking. Reverdy was equally unable to state the case against Douglas, ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters

... find I here? Fair Portia's counterfeit. What demigod Hath come so near creation; Here's the scroll, The continent and summary of my fortune— If you be well pleased with this, And hold your fortune for your bliss, Turn you where your lady is And claim her with ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce

... brilliant period of the Georgian age, so the name of Irving must always be linked with the later brilliant period of the Victorian. To the younger generation of theatre-goers he is fast becoming like a half-mythical demigod—one of those whom the elder folk mention with regretful shakings of the head when newer favourites are lauded. The actor was not born in Cornwall, but in Somerset; his mother, however, was a Cornish woman named Behenna, ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon

... strain of negro and probably also of Indian blood. Born in Hincha, he had left his native town during the troubles of the early part of the century and settled in the province of Seibo, where he acquired an ascendency over the population that made him a kind of local demigod. ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich

... patriotic spirit which burned in every manly heart, that not a soldier, no matter how humble, came near or passed before a group of these animated beauties who was not literally bathed in the radiance of kindly smiles,—transformed into a demigod by the ...
— Memories - A Record of Personal Experience and Adventure During Four Years of War • Fannie A. (Mrs.) Beers

... is a poor old man to do? Here am I, prepared to calculate and balance chances of this young man's conversion,—the pros and cons of a serious matter; and here this young lady branches off into a magnificent apotheosis of her young demigod! What has the cold yellow candle light of reason to do in the camera obscura of the human heart? Let us fling open the shutters, and let in ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan

... Washington has recently begun to veer away from the vision of an eighteenth century demigod in a wig,—an old-fashioned statue in dusky bronze, stern and forbidding. We are swinging around toward the idea of a loveable, fallible, very human personality with humor, a hot temper, and a ...
— Washington's Birthday • Various

... Bible, she especially enjoying Isaiah, Jeremiah, and St. Paul's Epistles. Then they read Max Muller's works, Shakespeare, Milton, Scott, and whatever was best in English, French, and German literature. Milton she called her demigod. Her husband says she had "a limitless persistency in application." Her health was better, and she gave promise of doing more great work. When urged to write her autobiography, she said, half sighing and half smiling: "The only thing I should care much to dwell on would be the absolute despair ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton

... was overpowered. This demigod had brought HER a gift. He had thought about her—insignificant her! True, she had talked with him, had even taken walks with him, but those things had not been significant. It had seemed he merely condescended to the daughter of ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland

... the coming of the god and the demigod to the little town, Barbara Finn and her friend had thus come to understand each other as they walked along the Shannon side. "I am sure, my dear, that he is engaged to ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope

... the heathens round them, steeped in superstitions like their neighbours, attending freely their immoral games and dances, and sharing in the sins connected with them. Thus Arianism had many affinities with heathenism, in its philosophical idea of the Supreme, in its worship of a demigod of the vulgar type, in its rhetorical methods, and in its generally lower moral tone. Heathen influences ...
— The Arian Controversy • H. M. Gwatkin

... guide, From stormy Hellespont explored the way, And sought the limits of the Midland sea; Before Alcides form'd his impious plan To check the sail, and bound the steps of man, This hand had led them to this rich abode, And braved the wrath of that strong demigod. ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow

... Sabina had said, the great glittering thing, lying all alone in the depths of the earth, an enormous golden demigod ...
— The Heart of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford

... under the able leadership of Hannibal, threatened to wrest from the queen of the Seven Hills the rule of the world. Now its streets are covered with grass; the wild scream of the bird of solitude and the moanings of the night-owl mingle with the sobs of a fallen demigod who once made the earth shake ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly

... your art. I've clung to your art merely to attract your attention. Did Heaven create a man like you to let you make a clown of yourself night after night? Are you not ashamed of boasting of it? You see that I am willing to overlook your being an artist. What wouldn't one overlook in a demigod like you? And if you were a convict, Oscar, I could not feel differently toward you. I have lost all control over myself! I should still lie in the dust before you as I am doing now! I should still implore your mercy as I am doing now! My own self would still be abandoned to you as it is now! I ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various

... Then the demigod vanished; he remained scarcely a man. His head hanging down, his eye dull, his speech slow and painful, Athos would look for hours together at his bottle, his glass, or at Grimaud, who, accustomed to obey him by signs, read in the faint glance of his master his least desire, and satisfied it ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... such trees as the beech, the elm, the ilex, and, above all, the sovereign pinaster, whose enormous trunks seem to have condescended to arrange themselves into avenues; the most charmingly artificial glades of the glossiest verdure, and vistas haunted by legions of dim waning statues; hero or demigod, nymph or faun, for ever intermingling but never interfering with each other; their various places of rendezvous emblazed with flowers of a thousand colours, and flashing with fountains of the most graceful fancies possible; while every vista ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various

... patronage of Home, Blair, Adam Fergusson, and Dr Carlyle, (the once famous 'Jupiter Carlyle,' minister of Inveresk—called 'Jupiter' because he used to sit to sculptors for their statues of 'Father Jove,' and declared by Sir Walter Scott to have been the 'grandest demigod he ever saw,') published, in a small volume of sixty pages, his 'Fragments of Ancient Poetry, translated from the Gaelic or Erse language.' This brochure became popular, and Macpherson was provided ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan

... his superfluity of parents. He adjusted himself to the circumstances with tact and a sympathetic consideration which would scarcely have been expected of him. He managed the two fathers with consummate skill, divided his attentions honorably between them, and played the role of demigod to perfection. When Livinius and Eudemius were together, he was circumspect, careful lest he arouse parental jealousy on either side; but when he and Eudemius were alone, he cast aside restraint and called him "father" to Eudemius's heart's content. More ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor

... countenance of the speaker. The coarseness and roughness of the man,—chopped out, as it seemed by an axe, with his rough bark still left on him,—and the stupid ignorance of his features, made him seem, for the moment, like some half-savage demigod. He stood stock-still in a prophetic attitude, as though he were the Genius of Brittany rising from a slumber of three years, to renew a war in which victory could only be followed ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac

... each hole to Von Wetten's satisfaction, that demigod dropped one or more of his small packages into it, and arranged them snugly with the iron rod. While he did so, Herr Haase eased himself upright, wiped the sweat from his brow, and gazed across at the other two. He saw the young man dipping a brush in ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon

... stranger scornfully. "Two-legged creatures like those that run about everywhere, a crowing, clucking crowd! And then one of them crows himself up in the big barnyard to the position of a demigod! Lord, how the fellow must be bored with the rest ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various

... the shadow of death. He had seen, very near, that dread presence before which the angels of faith and love can avail nothing. Fearless as Alcides had he gone down to the realms of darkness; triumphant and glad as the demigod he returned from the under-world, bearing his precious burden in his strong arms. The struggle had been dire, the agony of suspense a supreme torture; but from the awful contest the man came forth a better and a wiser man. Whatever strength of principle had been wanting ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon

... government] government, public; national, federal; his majesty's [Brit.], her majesty's; state, county, city, &c N.. Phr. a dog's obeyed in office [Lear]; cada uno tiene su alguazil [Sp.]; le Roi le veut [Fr.]; regibus esse manus en nescio longas [Lat.]; regnant populi [Lat.]; the demigod Authority [Lat.Tran] [Measure for Measure]; the right divine of kings to govern wrong [Pope]; uneasy lies the head that wears ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... Court of the Cascade of that most magnificent of the Frascati villas, namely that of the Aldobrandini, whoso lists may see to-day two fountains; the greater, figuring the demigod Atlas, well-nigh crushed under the weight of our terrestrial globe, is niched conspicuously to the fore of the grand terrace; but the other is in a hidden pleasance, and is but a lop-sided vase, considered to have settled thus awry from the natural subsidence of the soil rather than to have been ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney

... rest, was there, but for scarce ten minutes, and, as usual, received little more than a distant salutation, coldly and gravely returned, from Gertrude Chattesworth, to whom Mr. Beauchamp, whom she remembered at the Stafford's dinner, addicted himself a good deal. That demigod appeared in a white surtout, with a crimson cape, a French waistcoat, his hair en papillote, a feather in his hat, a couteau de chasse by his side, with a small cane hanging to his button, and a pair of Italian greyhounds at ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu

... winter's night, unless it was the frost; the trees, the streets, the benches—everything recalled Putois, the children's Putois, a local and mythical being. He did not equal in grace and poetry the dullest satyr, the stoutest fawn of Sicily or Thessaly. But he was still a demigod. He had quite a different character for our father; he was symbolical and philosophical. Our father had great compassion for men. He did not think them altogether rational; their mistakes, when they were not cruel, amused him and ...
— Putois - 1907 • Anatole France

... good, have powerfully affected the destinies of the United States. He is a great historical character,—the peer of Webster and Clay in congressional history, and more unsullied than either of them in the virtues of private life. In South Carolina he was regarded as little less than a demigod, and until the antislavery agitation began he was viewed as among the foremost statesmen of the land. His elevation to commanding influence in Congress was very rapid, and but for his identification with partisan interests and a bad institution, there was ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XII • John Lord

... event as wholly a masterpiece of human genius, many historians have attributed also this accomplishment to a prodigious, well-nigh divine wisdom on the part of the Romans, and Julius Caesar is regarded as a demigod who had fixed his gaze upon the far, far distant future. However, it is not difficult, studying the ancient documents with critical spirit, to persuade oneself that even if Caesar was a man of genius, he was not a god; that from ...
— Characters and events of Roman History • Guglielmo Ferrero

... severely there above her. She had not realized before that she knew how to tease anybody, least of all the demigod who had rescued her from the shadows of the reception-halls at home. But his kissing her had done something to her—it always seemed to, she reflected—and his matter-of-fact explanation of it had exasperated her to the point of ...
— The Wishing-Ring Man • Margaret Widdemer

... never be knowing about Flora's beauties;[106] but how I should like to have a talk with him about trees!" I mentioned how much any one must be struck with the majestic beauty of Goethe's countenance (the noblest certainly by far that I have ever yet seen): "Well," said he, "the grandest demigod I ever saw was Dr. Carlyle, minister of Musselburgh, commonly called Jupiter Carlyle, from having sat more than once for the king of gods and men to Gavin Hamilton—and a shrewd, clever old carle was he, no doubt, but no more a poet than his precentor. As for poets, I have seen, I believe, ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart

... the force of 'narrow' here; as if Caesar were grown so enormously big that even the world seemed a little thing under him. Some while before this, the Senate had erected a bronze statue of Caesar, standing on a globe, and inscribed to "Caesar the Demigod," but this inscription ...
— The New Hudson Shakespeare: Julius Caesar • William Shakespeare

... his guest had come from, and what was his previous history, but as Zeppa always met such inquiries with one of his sweetest smiles, and with no verbal reply whatever, the chief felt unusually perplexed, dropped the subject, and began to regard the madman as a species of demigod. Of course no one else dared to question him, so that ever afterwards he remained in the eyes of his entertainers as a ...
— The Madman and the Pirate • R.M. Ballantyne

... sullen roar of an ocean storm, or the wind soughing through the dark lonely forest. It was a grand and imposing scene, and when the President, with pale face and his soul flashing through his eyes, advanced to speak, he looked more like a demigod than a man crowned with the fleeting days ...
— Behind the Scenes - or, Thirty years a slave, and Four Years in the White House • Elizabeth Keckley

... brief and fatal sovereignty. In the sequel we shall find other examples of a dying criminal representing a dying god. For we must not forget that, as the case of the Shilluk kings clearly shows, the king is slain in his character of a god or a demigod, his death and resurrection, as the only means of perpetuating the divine life unimpaired, being deemed necessary for the salvation of ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer

... much a line, to garble facts, insult foreign nations and calumniate private individuals; and which are now the source of glory, so that if a man's name be often enough printed there, he becomes a kind of demigod; and people will pardon him when he talks back and forth, as they do for Mr. Gladstone; and crowd him to suffocation on railway platforms, as they did the other day to General Boulanger; and buy his literary works, as I hope you have just done for me. Our fathers, when ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson

... rather think some of you have called him a "dotard;" you have taunted him with his age and the loss of his physical vigour. What fine heroes you are yourselves! Men like you have a right to trample on what is mortal in a demigod. Scoff at your ease; your scorn can never ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte

... means "herdsman'' (cf. the name Jabal), and a distinction is drawn between the pastoral Abel and the agriculturist Cain. If Cain is the eponym of the Kenites it is quite possible that Abel was originally a South Judaean demigod or hero; on this, see Winckler, Gesch. Israels, ii. p. 189; E. Meyer, Israelitein, p. 395. A sect of Abelitae, who seem to have lived in North Africa, is mentioned by Augustine (De Haeresibus, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... strife and sorrow are the elements; they were like things to be seen only in the holiday of nature, so glorious and so fresh were their youth, their beauty, and their love. They seemed out of place in the harsh and every-day earth; they belonged of right to the Saturnian age, and the dreams of demigod and nymph. It was as if the poetry of life gathered and fed itself in them, and in their hearts were concentrated the last rays of the sun of Delos and ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton

... his progenitors With pride remembers, to the listener tells The story of their greatness, of their deeds, And, silently rejoicing, sees himself The latest link of this illustrious chain! For seldom does the selfsame stock produce The monster and the demigod: a line Of good or evil ushers in, at last, The glory or the terror of the world.— After the death of Pelops, his two sons Rul'd o'er the city with divided sway. But such an union could not long endure. His brother's honor first Thyestes wounds. In vengeance Atreus ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... or two before the coming of the god and the demigod to the little town, Barbara Finn and her friend had thus come to understand each other as they walked along the Shannon side. "I am sure, my dear, that he is engaged to nobody," said ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope

... dost breathe thine invocation, My voice to hear, to gaze upon my brow; Me doth thy strong entreaty bow— Lo! I am here I—What cowering agitation Grasps thee, the demigod! Where's now the soul's deep cry? Where is the breast, which in its depths a world conceiv'd And bore and cherished? which, with ecstasy, To rank itself with us, the spirits, heaved? Where art thou, Faust? whose voice I ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

... Pan himself had wandered here A-strolling through this sordid city, And piping to the civic ear The prelude of some pastoral ditty! The demigod had crossed the seas,— From haunts of shepherd, nymph, and satyr, And Syracusan times,—to these Far shores and twenty ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various

... virility, velocity, alacrity, and the rest of the twenty-eight virtues of his governor-general, even more seriously than did John Baptist Houwaerts. The unfortunate archduke would have needed to be, in all earnestness, a mythological demigod to do the work required of him. With the best part of his army formally maintained by him in recognised mutiny, with the great cities of the Netherlands yielding themselves to the republic with hardly an attempt on the part of the royal ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... effects, in expressive musical delineation, and in majestic solemnity, the Siegfried funeral march must take precedence of all other dirges. In truth it is a colossal and heroic funeral poem fit to celebrate the death of a demigod. In the last scene Siegfried's body is borne back to the hall of the Gibichungs amid loud lamenting. When Gutrune learns what has occurred, she bitterly curses Hagen and throws herself on Siegfried's corpse. Hagen and Gunter quarrel for the possession of ...
— The Standard Operas (12th edition) • George P. Upton

... the great man ride, Shiplike, the swelling human tide 50 That floods to bear him into port, Trophied from Senate-hall and Court; Thy magnetism, I feel it there, Thy rhythmic presence fleet and rare, Making the Mob a moment fine With glimpses of their own Divine, As in their demigod they see Their cramped ideal soaring free; 'Twas thou didst bear the fire about, That, like the springing of a mine, 60 Sent up to heaven the street-long shout; Full well I know that thou wast here, It was thy breath that brushed my ear; But vainly ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell

... exactly tell what he was like, he was so awful nice. Through the sentences Elsie Cameron could make out a picture of him: big, handsome, honest, whole-hearted, and as tender as a woman with his shy little sweetheart; but in Miss Arabella's worshiping eyes he was a very demigod. ...
— Treasure Valley • Marian Keith

... quite as freely as she did of the fashionable Misses Cabot's school, not at all ashamed to say she could not afford this or that, simple and unaffected but self-respecting and proud; a girl who was at all times herself and retained her poise and common sense even in the presence of handsome young demigod who had made two touchdowns ...
— Mary-'Gusta • Joseph C. Lincoln

... her sister, in equal parts. She was, however, clever, and kind, and affectionate. In all matters, within the house, she was ready to accept a situation below her sister's; but this was not by her sister's doing. The demigod of the family seemed to assume this position, but on Ada's part there was no assumption. Edith, however, felt her infirmity. Among girls this is made to depend more on physical beauty than on other gifts, and ...
— The Landleaguers • Anthony Trollope

... city of imperial Rome herself, and, under the able leadership of Hannibal, threatened to wrest from the queen of the Seven Hills the rule of the world. Now its streets are covered with grass; the wild scream of the bird of solitude and the moanings of the night-owl mingle with the sobs of a fallen demigod who once made the earth shake ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly

... were in his shirt, and the unnatural shine on his tawny hair too plainly revealed the perfumeries that crowded the young squire's dressing-table. With the purest intentions of kindness Eustace had done his best to disguise a demigod as a lout. ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge

... Raphael—did not confine himself to one art, but practised many. And though it would be unjust to compare such a man as Cellini with the greatest of all, yet he was great not only as a sculptor and a goldsmith, but as a man of letters and as a man of the world. His Perseus, a little less than a demigod, is indeed not so lovely as the wax model he made for it, which is now in the Bargello; but in the gesture with which he holds out the severed head from him, in the look of secret delight that is already ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton

... own folly suddenly seized upon her with such overmastering power that she looked away from the sovereign toward the singers, who were summoning the whole world to pay homage to yonder broken-down man, as though he were a demigod. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... in general all the early arts of civilization are ascribed to the fallen angels, whose children are represented in the Book of Genesis[1452] as the culture-heroes of the olden time. The introduction of writing into Greece is ascribed by the Greeks to the mythical hero or demigod Cadmus.[1453] Fire is in India the production of the god Agni[1454] (who is simply fire elevated to the rank of a personal divinity); in the Greek myth it is stolen and given to men by the demigod Prometheus[1455] ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy

... puritanical opposition to its government and rites. Through neither could Dorothy come to any true idea of the questions which agitated the politics of both church and state. To her, the king was a kind of demigod, and every priest a fountain of truth. Her religion was the sedate and dutiful acceptance of obedient innocence, a thing of small account indeed where it is rooted only in sentiment and customary preference, but of inestimable value in such cases as ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald

... his verses, for whatever there is of merit in his writings is of the nature of poetry—our poet of childhood and of poverty, was born at Odense, a town of Funen, one of the green, beech-covered islands of Denmark. It bears the name of the Scandinavian hero, or demigod, Odin; Tradition says he lived there. The parents of Andersen were so poor that when they married they had not wherewithal to purchase a bedstead, or at least thought it advisable to make shift by constructing one out of the wooden tressels which, a little time before, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various

... or several centuries. It is therefore possible—for, in these matters, we must go straight to extremes or else leave them alone—it is therefore possible that a seer mightier than any of to-day, some god, demigod or demon, some unknown, universal or vagrant intelligence, saw that procession a million years ago, at a time when nothing existed of that which composes and surrounds it and when the very earth on which it moves had not yet risen from ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck

... flying about just then—must roughen her darling's bed. The softest lawn, the downiest, most delicate woollens, were hardly good enough to wrap her treasure. She had solemn interviews with a regiment of nurses before she could discover a woman who seemed worthy to be guardian of this infant demigod. And Mr. Granger showed himself scarcely less weak. It almost seemed as if this boy was his first child. He had been a busy man when Sophia was born—too entirely occupied by the grave considerations of commerce to enter into the details ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon

... regard her brother as a demigod, caught herself blushing for him. She was angry with herself. She caught M. Raoul's murmur, "Heaven distributes to us our talents, Monsieur," and was angry with him, understanding and deprecating the raillery ...
— The Westcotes • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... mucker, that they might take him from behind. The battle could not last long, so unequal were the odds. She saw the room beyond filled with surging warriors all trying to force their way within reach of the great white man who battled like some demigod of old in the close, dark, evil warren ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... nothing," he said feebly after a moment. "Only the foolishness of it all ... I can forget like a boy ... the thing will never come to pass ... never, never, never! There stands the hero, splendid with success, rich in experience, eager, willing, a demigod whom the Irish could worship ... his word would destroy faction, wipe out treason, weed out fools, hold the clans in solid union ... if we could give him an army, back him with a government, provide him with money! We ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith

... the streets, the benches—everything recalled Putois, the children's Putois, a local and mythical being. He did not equal in grace and poetry the dullest satyr, the stoutest fawn of Sicily or Thessaly. But he was still a demigod. He had quite a different character for our father; he was symbolical and philosophical. Our father had great compassion for men. He did not think them altogether rational; their mistakes, when they were not cruel, amused him and made him smile. The belief ...
— Putois - 1907 • Anatole France

... Demigod For Britain's ancient Genius mov'd (If our afflicted land Have expiated at length the guilty sloth Of her degen'rate sons) Shall terminate our impious feuds, And discipline, with hallow'd voice, recall? 30 Recall the Muses too Driv'n from their antient seats In Albion, and well-nigh from Albion's ...
— Poemata (William Cowper, trans.) • John Milton

... the Georgian age, so the name of Irving must always be linked with the later brilliant period of the Victorian. To the younger generation of theatre-goers he is fast becoming like a half-mythical demigod—one of those whom the elder folk mention with regretful shakings of the head when newer favourites are lauded. The actor was not born in Cornwall, but in Somerset; his mother, however, was a Cornish woman named Behenna, and ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon

... Private would exclaim, 'Well, I guess now you're puttin' on airs, a'n't you?' Pompous colonels strutted about in a blaze of new uniforms, and even line officers then considered themselves of some consequence; while a brigadier-general was a sort of a demigod—a man to be revered as something infallible. Now-a-days old veterans care very little for even the two stars of a major-general, unless they know that the wearer has some other claims to respect than ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... sometimes tempted to desert; but he hunted them down, secured one or more chiefs as hostages, or by some common-sense method recovered the absentees. At some of the islands Cook was extremely popular with the inhabitants, and was regarded as a superior being, even a demigod, in many of them. When he was compelled to resort to extreme severity, he did not begin with cannon, loaded with grape, but trusted first to the loud report, terrific to the savages, fired over their ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various

... of war in his latest avatar. While this was absurd, and in the end injurious to McClellan, it was of service to his Government; for it strengthened his loins to the task before him—a task demanding the highest order of ability and the influence of a demigod. A great war was to be carried on, and a great army, the most ...
— Destruction and Reconstruction: - Personal Experiences of the Late War • Richard Taylor

... to fly before his eyes, and masses of molten iron to creep about like living things over walls and floor.—And over by the forge was something more defined, a misty shape, that grew in size and clearness and stood at last a bearded, naked demigod, with fire in one hand and sledgehammer in ...
— The Great Hunger • Johan Bojer

... insensibility to pure line and deficiency in constructional power have been elevated by his admirers into sorry virtues. Yet is Rodin justly appraised? Do his friends not overdo their glorification, his critics their censure? Nothing so stales a demigod's image as the perfumes burned before it by his worshippers; the denser the smoke the sooner crumble the feet of ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker

... but concretely. And this is the charm of Burns and the glory of Scott. Carlyle has written the best histories and biographies of modern times, because he sees man with such fierce and steadfast eyes. Emerson sees him also, but he is not interested in him as a man, but mainly as a spirit, as a demigod, or as a ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs

... back to him and say whatever is Irish in me he kindled to life, and I am humble when I read his epic tale, feeling how much greater a thing it is for the soul of a writer to have been the habitation of a demigod than to have had ...
— The Coming of Cuculain • Standish O'Grady

... city-bred boy could "hold a candle" to the glaring halo about the head of two who could claim personal acquaintance with the great war chiefs Red Cloud and Spotted Tail?—who had actually been to ride and hunt with that then just dawning demigod of American boyhood,—Buffalo Bill? Sneer and scoff and cavil as did their little rivals for a time, calumny was crushed and scoffers blighted that wonderful March morning when, before the whole assembled school, there suddenly appeared ...
— Under Fire • Charles King

... with intent either to make the man a demigod or else to damn him as a rogue who has hoodwinked the world. Of the first-mentioned class, Weems' "Life of Washington" must ever stand as the true type. The author is so fearful that he will not think well of his subject that he conceals every attribute ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard

... took its most offensive form in Nicholas's attitude toward Europe. He was the very incarnation of reaction against revolution, and he became the demigod of that horde of petty despots who infest Central Europe. Whenever, then, any tyrant's lie was to be baptized, he stood its godfather; whenever any God's truth was to be crucified, he led on those who passed by, reviling and wagging their ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne

... bestowing upon Abd-el-Kader: she is as solicitous in her behalf as a physician is anxious to avoid curing a rich hypochondriac. Between the two, Caroline and Madame de Fischtaminel invent occupations for dear Adolphe, when neither of them desire the presence of that demigod among their penates. Madame de Fischtaminel and Caroline, who have become, through the efforts of Madame Foullepointe, the best friends in the world, have even gone so far as to learn and employ that feminine free-masonry, the rites of ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Second Part • Honore de Balzac

... standard to which he attained. Perhaps a soft and somewhat undecided nature had something to do with my failure. I say not this by way of excuse but explanation. Whatever the cause, I felt so very far below my friend that I looked up to him as a sort of demigod. Strange to say, his affection for me was also very strong. He never seemed to perceive my weak points—but, then, he was of a large-hearted, generous disposition, and he came to be loved not only by me and the Indians, but by the men of the expedition, some of whom, although good ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne

... been idealized as an angel, a saint, and a demigod; he has been caricatured as a self-indulgent sensualist, a vulgar Lothario, a buffoon, a joker of ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier

... at the individual for a moment, who smiled and smirked to himself applause, and then I turned my eyes upon the hearse proceeding slowly up the almost endless street. This man, this Byron, had for many years past been the demigod of England, and his verses the daily food of those who read, from the peer to the draper's assistant; all were admirers, or rather worshippers, of Byron, and all doated on his verses; and then I thought of those ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow

... embarrassed by his superfluity of parents. He adjusted himself to the circumstances with tact and a sympathetic consideration which would scarcely have been expected of him. He managed the two fathers with consummate skill, divided his attentions honorably between them, and played the role of demigod to perfection. When Livinius and Eudemius were together, he was circumspect, careful lest he arouse parental jealousy on either side; but when he and Eudemius were alone, he cast aside restraint and called him "father" to Eudemius's heart's content. More and more the two came to ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor

... which took place increasingly, led to animosity on the part of the Dutch. Rightly or wrongly, it was taken as a matter of course that Rhodes favoured the idea of a total annihilation of the Cape Dutch. And as he was considered a kind of demigod by so many the idea was widely circulated, and became at last deeply rooted in the minds of most of the white population of South Africa, who, without being able to say why, considered it in consequence a part of its duty to exaggerate ...
— Cecil Rhodes - Man and Empire-Maker • Princess Catherine Radziwill

... the life she gave; so that she is, in her highest power, Persephone, the avenger and purifier of blood—"The voice of thy brother's blood cries to me out of the ground." Then, side by side with this queen of the earth, we find a demigod of agriculture by the plough—the lord of grain, or of the thing ground by the mill. And it is a singular proof of the simplicity of Greek character at this noble time, that of all representations left to us of their deities by their art, few are so frequent, and none perhaps ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin

... the people despised and rejected her, and she was thrust forth, and her babe was born in a stable, and cradled in the manger. Who should baptize the babe? The god of the wilderness refused, and Wainamoinen would have had the young child slain. Then the infant rebuked the ancient Demigod, who fled in anger to the sea, and with his magic song he built a magic barque, and he sat therein, and took the helm in his hand. The tide bore him out to sea, and he lifted his voice and sang: 'Times go by, and ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang

... defeats as they would; and further told him how Balder had seen his foster-sister Nanna while she bathed, and been kindled with passion for her; but counselled Hother not to attack him in war, worthy as he was of his deadliest hate, for they declared that Balder was a demigod, sprung secretly from celestial seed. When Hother had heard this, the place melted away and left him shelterless, and he found himself standing in the open and out in the midst of the fields, without a vestige of shade. Most ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")

... spreading the Scriptures in Europe,—and all this great light wilfully hidden, not under a bushel, but under a dunghill. He is somewhat like Socrates in face, and in character likewise; in him, as in Socrates, the demigod and the satyr, the man and the ape, are struggling for the mastery. In Socrates, the true man conquers, and comes forth high and pure; in Rabelais, alas! the victor is the ape, while the man himself sinks down in cynicism, sensuality, practical jokes, foul ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley

... ball, Had to his footstool gravely summon'd all Men, quadrupeds, and nullipeds, together With all the bird-republics, every feather,— The goddess of the hundred mouths, I say, Thus having spread dismay, By widely publishing abroad This mandate of the demigod, The animals, and all that do obey Their appetite alone, mistrusted now That to another sceptre they must bow. Far in the desert met their various races, All gathering from their hiding-places. Discuss'd was many a notion. At last, it ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine

... Amma? And what had happened to Aleema? For she had been dismayed at the fray, though knowing not what it could mean; and she had heard the priest's name called upon in lamentations. These questions for the time I endeavored to evade; only inducing her to fancy me some gentle demigod, that had come over the sea from her own fabulous Oroolia. And all this she must verily have believed. For whom, like me, ere this could she have beheld? Still fixed she her eyes upon me strangely, and hung upon the ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville

... neighbours, attending freely their immoral games and dances, and sharing in the sins connected with them. Thus Arianism had many affinities with heathenism, in its philosophical idea of the Supreme, in its worship of a demigod of the vulgar type, in its rhetorical methods, and in its generally lower moral tone. Heathen influences therefore ...
— The Arian Controversy • H. M. Gwatkin

... Sri Vaishnavas. As among the Sivaites revelation is often supposed to be made by Siva through Sakti, so here the Lord is said to have revealed the truth to his consort Sri or Lakshmi, she to a demigod called Visvaksena, and he to Namm'arvar, from whom Ramanuja was eighth in spiritual descent. Though the members of the sect are sometimes called Ramaites the personality of Rama plays a small part in their faith, especially as expounded by Ramanuja. As names for the deity ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot

... from Apollo, a breastplate from Vulcan, a robe from Minerva. Many streams from many sources bring to him their united strength. How else could the great man be equal to his time and task? What was true of the Greek Demigod was likewise true of Charles Sumner. His study of the law for instance formed but a part of his great preparation. The science of the law, not its practice, excited his enthusiasm. He turned instinctively from the ...
— Charles Sumner Centenary - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 14 • Archibald H. Grimke

... pleasant, and pliable to all company; the Spaniard quite contrary retired, austere, rigid, proud. And indeed their are something of truth in it; for who knows not the pride of the Castilian: if a Castilian then a Demigod. He thinks himselfe ex meliore luto natus then the rest of the ...
— Publications of the Scottish History Society, Vol. 36 • Sir John Lauder

... his nature was manly. He had little education, but his heart was true, and his arm was strong. Compared with Mr. Belcher, with all his wealth, he was nobility personified. Compared with the sordid men around her, with whom he would be an object of supercilious contempt, he seemed like a demigod. His eccentricities, his generosities, his originalities of thought and fancy, were a feast to her. There was more of him than she could find in any of her acquaintances—more that was fresh, piquant, stimulating, and vitally appetizing. ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland

... incidental, while the idea thus typified was the real incentive to worship. This was also the age that produced hero worship, and the great man who won the praise and admiration of the people by his exalted qualities, or his prowess in arms, was considered as a demigod, or one in favor with the tenants of Olympus, and his statue was accordingly erected, to stand beside that, perhaps, of Mars, Apollo, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... sequence; but with the normal woman love must act as pilot for passion—so much is she our moral superior. Every woman is a day-dreamer and a worshiper. During girlhood she pictures to herself some perfect man—some impossible demigod—who is to drift within the little circle of her life and make her the proudest of women, the happiest of wives. In grace or beauty, in genius or bravery—or all these attributes—he is to be the paragon, to tower like Saul above his brethren. Her husband is to be a man of whom she will be intensely ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... Ribera agonizes chained to his rock. His gigantic limbs are flung about in the fury of immortal pain. A vulture, almost lost in the blackness of the shadows, is tugging at his vitals. His brow is convulsed with the pride and anguish of a demigod. It is a picture of horrible power. Opposite hangs one of the few Zurbarans of the gallery,—also a gloomy and terrible work. A monk kneels in shadows which, by the masterly chiaroscuro of this ascetic artist, are made to ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay

... art a dreamer. Thou shouldst have a planet all thine own, and, after setting up thy kings governing each particular section of thine orb, thou then shouldst sit enthroned above them all and play the mighty demigod.' ...
— Saronia - A Romance of Ancient Ephesus • Richard Short

... in my imagination for years before I saw you. When we first met you treated me insufferably. If you had known how my childish fancy had predisposed me to worship you, you might have vouchsafed me some more consideration, and I might have gone on believing you a demigod to the end of the chapter. I have hardly forgiven you yet ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw

... with Hume during that last fortnight of 1765, though there is no actual evidence that he did. Before leaving, moreover, Hume would have time to introduce his friend to the famous men of Paris itself, and to initiate him into those literary and fashionable circles in which he had moved like a demigod for the preceding two years. The philosophe was then king in Paris, and Hume was king of the philosophes, and everything that was great in court or salon fell down and did him obeisance. "Here," he tells ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae

... type of man who had at last conquered the world. It was not a superman that had been waited for so long, not a demigod armed with powers of light; not man raising himself above his stature, building towers on earthly foundations that should reach to heaven; but just man, utterly true to himself and his instincts, walking humbly before his God; looking for a ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson

... master. The cloud-compelling Zeus might do as he pleased on land; but far beyond the range of outlook from the white watch-tower of Olympus rolled the immeasurable waves of the wine-purple deep, acknowledging only the Enosigaios Poseidon. Consequently, while Zeus allotted to this and that hero and demigod Argos and Mycene and the woody Zacynthus, each to each, the ocean remained unbounded and unmeted. Nation after nation, race after race, has tried its temporary lordship, but only at the pleasure of the sea itself. Sometimes the ensign of sovereignty has been an eagle, sometimes a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various

... Ellen again was to incur the risk of seeing my reason once more wrecked, and the fatal chimera which had been the source of all my misery start into life again. If we are to believe what poets say, love ennobles man and exalts him into a demigod. It may be so, but it turns him likewise into a fool and a madman. That was my case. At any cost I was to guard against that fatal passion. I argued seriously with myself, and I determined to let the past be, and to reject every ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: German • Various

... a common, ordinary, garden-sort of fool. The Musgraves always are, in one fashion or another," he sulkily concluded. And now the demigod was merely Rudolph Musgrave again, and she was not afraid any ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell

... who, old, and cold, and vain, At Weimar sat, a demigod, And bowed with Jove's imperial nod His votaries in and ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... after another, which will speedily destroy the remnant of your mistress's former beauty by the exhaustion of sleepless nights—I know better. It was not love which drew Antony after me, not love that trampled in the dust the radiant image of reckless courage, not love that constrained the demigod to follow the pitiful track of ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... Bennett, "she believes Rantoul is a demigod. Everything he will do will be the most wonderful thing in the world, and to have a little person you are madly in love ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson

... of the young person, he thought the bottle-dealer had a good countenance, and he admired the face full of violent tones. The mother and daughter hovered about the easel, marvelling at all his preparations; they evidently thought him a demigod. This visible admiration pleased Fougeres. The golden calf threw upon the family its ...
— Pierre Grassou • Honore de Balzac

... respectful fear. One might have thought that these fixt eyes were searching for eternity and the Infinite; they never seemed to rest on surrounding objects. The satiety of pleasures, the surfeit of wishes satisfied as soon as exprest, the isolation of a demigod who has no equal among mortals, the disgust for perpetual adoration, and as it 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 ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various

... in Hincha, he had left his native town during the troubles of the early part of the century and settled in the province of Seibo, where he acquired an ascendency over the population that made him a kind of local demigod. ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich

... straight and just as tall as his small stature would permit, and looked oddly silvery and strange on his long, dark hair. Little Shikara, son of Khoda Dunnoo, was waiting for the return of a certain idol and demigod who was even now riding home in his howdah from the ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various

... years of experience, a world-wide reputation, and a major role in the development of at least one design, tool, or game used by or known to more than half of the hacker community. To qualify as a genuine demigod, the person must recognizably identify with the hacker community and have helped shape it. Major demigods include Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie (co-inventors of {{Unix}} and {C}), Richard M. Stallman (inventor of {EMACS}), Linus Torvalds ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0

... It would be quite in my line. I should arrange him, form him, bring him into Society, even against Society's will! There is a certain excitement in the adventure. As for Maurice, he is no doubt in your eyes a demigod—in mine," with infinite ...
— The Hoyden • Mrs. Hungerford

... tighter about the vitals of the Confederacy—the cry of the people was raised to their chief; demanding the cause of it all. The first warm impulses of patriotic and inflammable masses had pedestaled him as a demigod. The revulsion was gradual; but, with the third year of unrelieved blockade, it became complete. And this was due, in part, to that proclivity of masses to measure men by results, rather than by their means for accomplishment; it was due in greater part, perhaps, to the President's ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon

... looked on Davidge in his swivel-chair as a kind of despondent demigod, a Titan weary of the eternal strife. She tried to rise beyond a poetical height to ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes

... son of Poseidon; it is no matter to us at present whom it is meant for, but the fact that we cannot know, is itself of the greatest import. We cannot say, with any certainty, unless by discovery of some collateral evidence, whether this head is intended for that of a god, or demigod, or a mortal warrior. Ought not that to disturb some of your thoughts respecting Greek idealism? Farther, if by investigation we discover that the head is meant for that of Phalanthus, we shall know nothing of the character of Phalanthus from the face; for ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin

... into light. She came out into the sun, into the garden with its blaze of wintry summer, its whispering life and the free air over it. The man standing in the middle of it, for all his pot hat and Gothic stick, was none the less its demigod waiting for her, laughing. He might well laugh that she who had written that unflinching letter should come thus flying at his call; but there was more than laughter, there was more than mischief in him. The high tide of his spirits was ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain

... Second Empire can have no idea of the general enthusiasm that still lingered in France in Louis Philippe's reign, round memories of the glories of Napoleon. Men might not wish him back again, but they worshipped him as the national demigod. After Sedan he was pulled down literally and metaphorically from his pedestal; and the old feelings about him which half a century ago even foreign nations seemed to share, now seem obsolete and extravagant to readers of Lanfrey and ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer

... thirdly, well gotten wealth; fourthly, the pleasure of youth among friends." "Life," says Longfellow, "without health is a burden, with health is a joy and gladness." Empedocles delivered the people of Selinus from a pestilence by draining a marsh, and was hailed as a Demigod. We are told that a coin was struck in his honor, representing the Philosopher in the act of staying ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock

... so entirely in accord with the patriotic spirit which burned in every manly heart, that not a soldier, no matter how humble, came near or passed before a group of these animated beauties who was not literally bathed in the radiance of kindly smiles,—transformed into a demigod by the light of ...
— Memories - A Record of Personal Experience and Adventure During Four Years of War • Fannie A. (Mrs.) Beers

... part, I chiefly wonder that his recognition dawned as brightly as it did while he was still living. There must have been something very grand in his immediate presence, some strangely impressive characteristic in his natural behavior, to have caused him to seem like a demigod so soon." ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold

... and breadth of aforetime convent gardens, which you reach from the Street of the Serpents by the Street of the Love of God, and are then startled by the pagan presence of two mighty columns lifting aloft the figures of Caesar and of the titular demigod. Statues and pillars are alike antique, and give you a moment of the Eternal City the more intense because the promenade is of an unkempt and broken surface, like the Cow-field which the Roman Forum used to be. Baedeker calls it shady, and I dare say it is shady, but ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells

... from this bloody and barbarous scene. The king is the most absolute despot in the world. He is heir-at-law to all his subjects. He is regarded as a demigod. It is unlawful to indicate that the king eats, sleeps, or drinks. No one is allowed to approach him, except his nobles, who at a court levee disrobe themselves of all their elegant garments, and, prostrate upon the ground, they crawl into his royal presence. The whole ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams

... laid aside at once as too contemptible to be considered, but the other interested him. Gorham was setting himself above other men who held enviable positions in the business and social world. If this affidavit was true—and Covington saw no reason to doubt its authenticity—this demigod might hesitate to emphasize his superiority. With the legality of his marriage questioned, his Czarship might be weakened; and this, as Covington saw it, meant advantage to himself in the Consolidated Companies, and an ...
— The Lever - A Novel • William Dana Orcutt

... recovered her self-possession and was prepared to meet calmly the man who was a demigod to ...
— The Touchstone of Fortune • Charles Major

... the dim and mighty outline of the HEROIC AGE. The careful and skeptical Thucydides has left us, in the commencement of his immortal history, a masterly portraiture of the manners of those times in which individual prowess elevates the possessor to the rank of a demigod; times of unsettled law and indistinct control;—of adventure—of excitement;—of daring qualities and lofty crime. We recognise in the picture features familiar to the North: the roving warriors and the pirate kings who scoured the seas, descended upon unguarded coasts, ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... seasoned. To disclaim the possession of lofty attributes thus ascribed to great men is a degree of humility which is not often exercised. But even when this species of modesty is displayed, it never fails to defeat its object. It but calls forth a deeper homage, and fixes the demigod more firmly ...
— The Martyrs of Science, or, The lives of Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler • David Brewster

... after the decease of Menestheus in that expedition, returned to Athens, and recovered the government. But in succeeding ages, beside several other circumstances that moved the Athenians to honor Theseus as a demigod, in the battle which was fought at Marathon against the Medes, many of the soldiers believed they saw an apparition of Theseus in arms, rushing on at the head of them against the barbarians. And after the Median war, Phaedo being ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch

... country he had heard vehement abuse of the old land from the lips of politicians, and had found at the same time almost on all sides great social admiration for the people so abused. He had observed that every Englishman of distinction was received in the States as a demigod, and that some who were not very great in their own land had been converted into heroes in his. English books were read there; English laws were obeyed there; English habits were cultivated, often at the expense of American ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope

... just published in London two volumes of "Personal Adventures" in the Hungarian war. She is herself a Hungarian, and she saw her husband fall while cheering his men to defend a barricade at Vienna. In this book Kossuth is her hero, her prophet, her demigod; and she sacrifices all other celebrities without compunction at the altar of his greatness. Dembinsky she treats with manifest injustice; Georgey comes out on her pages as a very Mephistopheles. Klapka himself does ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various

... sought the limits of the Midland sea; Before Alcides form'd his impious plan To check the sail, and bound the steps of man, This hand had led them to this rich abode, And braved the wrath of that strong demigod. ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow

... the Syrian Ba'al Tammuz and Astarte, and the Grecian Dionaea and Adonis, the anthropomorphic forms of the two greater lights. The site, Apheca, now Wady al-Afik on the route from Bayrut to the Cedars, is a glen of wild and wondrous beauty, fitting frame-work for the loves of goddess and demigod: and the ruins of the temple destroyed by Constantine contrast with Nature's work, the glorious fountain, splendidior vitro, which feeds the River Ibrahim and still at times Adonis runs purple ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton

... and at the same time reiterate all the best maxims of Hinduism. Some centuries later, the pronounced Vedantist Sancarakarya revamped the poem and gave its philosophy a more pantheistic character; later still the demigod Krishna was raised to full rank as the supreme Vishnu—the Creator and Upholder ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood









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