|
|
|
More "Vestal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... called the August, I being his favorite, bestowed his name Upon me, and I hold it still in trust, In memory of him and of his fame. I am the Virgin, and my vestal flame Burns less intensely than the Lion's rage; Sheaves are my only garlands, and I claim The golden Harvests as ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... meet, year after year, one of these—to whom the seed sown in London ball-rooms and German watering-places had produced nothing yet but those tiresome garlands of the vestal—I look curiously to see how she wears, thinking of the courtier's answer to Louis XIV. when the latter asked if he was looking older: "Sire, I see some more victories written on your forehead." It is more defeats that one can read so plainly ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... of these fifteen was Amulius, who took the throne from his brother Numitor, who had a daughter named Rhea Silvia, a Vestal virgin. In Greece, the sacred fire of the goddess Vesta was tended by good men, but in Italy it was the charge of maidens, who were treated with great honor, but were never allowed to marry under pain of death. So there was great anger when Rhea Silvia became the mother of ...
— Young Folks' History of Rome • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... friend, noble and brave, and I begged his body, that I might burn it upon the funeral-pile, and mourn over him. Ay, upon my knees, amid the dust and blood of the arena, I begged that boon, while all the Roman maids and matrons, and those holy virgins they call vestal, and the rabble, shouted in mockery, deeming it rare sport, forsooth, to see Rome's fiercest gladiator turn pale, and tremble like a very child, before that piece of bleeding clay; but the Prtor drew back as if I were pollution, and sternly said, 'Let the carrion ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... floats down the arcade of centuries. "Ave, Imperator, morituri te salutant," nineteenth century womanhood frowns, and deplores the brutal depravity which alone explains the presence of that white-veiled vestal band, whose snowy arms are thrust in signal over the parapet of the bloody arena; yet fair daughters of the latest civilization show unblushing flower faces among the heaving mass of the "great unwashed" who crowd our court-rooms—and listen to revolting details more repugnant to genuine modesty, ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... young astronomer, he reflected, who had helped to crystallise her strange views. His lurking fear that she might one day marry and leave him was aroused at the thought, and his heart contracted with jealousy. She possessed in his eyes something of the sanctity of a vestal virgin, one who must not be profaned by marriage. In such an event, also, his cherished hope that she might complete the quadrangle of St. George's Hall was likely to be frustrated forever. These fears moved him to argue with a ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... certainly the lowest in intellect of the human creation. The tribes on the western shores of Spencer's Bay are positively ignorant of any method of obtaining fire: they say that it originally came down from the north. Like the vestal virgins, the women keep it constantly lighted, and carry it about with them in firesticks when they travel: should it happen to go out, they procure a fresh supply from a neighboring encampment. Then their manners are so atrociously savage. ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... order was observed in the ceremonial pageant; first came Augustus as Emperor and Pontifex Maximus, next the Consuls, the Senate, the Quindecemviri and other colleges of priests, then followed the Vestal Virgins, and a group of one hundred and ten matrons (as many as there were years in the saeculum) selected from among the most exemplary matres familiae ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani
... been a religion among them; and seeing that the worship had been carried on without fail, that the vestal fire had never gone down upon the hearth, I should not have said that the Dales had walked their ways without high principle. To this religion they had all adhered, and the new heir had ever entered in upon his domain without other encumbrances than those with which ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... of Science and the People—those opposite poles! They will crush between their arms of steel all that opposes the higher civilization. The State, the immemorial vestal fire of all civilization—what a good phrase! I must write that ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... inner cells of her heart, and brought forth thoughts in sparkling words, which otherwise might have remained concealed; but there was nothing in what she thought or spoke calculated to give umbrage either to an anchorite or to a vestal. A word or two she said or sung about the flowing bowl, and once she called for Falernian; but beyond this her converse was chiefly of the rights of man and the weakness of women; of the iron ages that were past, and of the golden time ...
— Mrs. General Talboys • Anthony Trollope
... universe,' and of Viracocha, 'Foam of the Sea,' a name strikingly recalling that of Venus Aphrodite, the female second principle in all ancient mythologies. Not less curious was the institution of the Vestal Virgins of the Sun, who were buried alive if detected in an intrigue, and whose duty it was to keep burning the sacred fire obtained at the ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... drawn him to her which made it necessary that he should assert mere sportiveness on his part as his reason in seeking her—something in her quite antipathetic to that side of him which had been occupied with literary study and the magnificent Christminster dream. It had been no vestal who chose THAT missile for opening her attack on him. He saw this with his intellectual eye, just for a short; fleeting while, as by the light of a falling lamp one might momentarily see an inscription on a wall before being enshrouded ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... child, lying ailing there, Waning and waning slowly away, Yet waxing more beautiful every day, As if she were drawing from spheres above, Before she got there, the spirit of love, Which shone as a light through the silken lire, Pure as was that of the vestal fire; And ever she kissed in hysterical mood The bit of the cross all red with blood. "Oh mother dear! I wish—I fear The time of my going is drawing near: Last night, at the mirk and midnight hour, A voice seemed ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume XXIV. • Revised by Alexander Leighton
... stone for his pillow; by Moses, when he drew aside to see the burning bush; by David, before he had left "those few sheep in the wilderness"; and by the prophet who "was in the deserts till the time of his showing unto Israel." Its primary "institution," for Europe, was Numa's, in that of the Vestal Virgins, and College of Augurs; founded on the originally Etrurian and derived Roman conception of pure life dedicate to the service of God, and practical wisdom ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... Cleopatra, whom they had most resisted in her design of being present in the war, came over to Caesar, and gave information of the contents of Antony's will, with which they were acquainted. It was deposited in the hands of the vestal virgins, who refused to deliver it up, and sent Caesar word, if he pleased, he should come and seize it himself, which he did. And, reading it over to himself, he noted those places that were most for ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... Troy's extinguish'd glory Revived in Latium's later story, When, by her auspices, her son Laurentia's royal damsel won. She vestal Rhea's spotless charms Surrender'd to the War-god's arms; She for Romulus that day The Sabine daughters bore away; Thence sprung the Rhamnes' lofty name, Thence the old Quirites came; And thence the stock of high renown, The blood of Romulus, handed down Through ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... long-distance records for insect voices. To another group, known as Fulgorids, gigantic heads and streamers of wax have been allotted. Those possessing the former rejoice in the name of Lantern Flies, but they are at present unfaithful vestal bugs, though it is extremely doubtful if their wicks were ever trimmed or lighted. To see a big wax bug flying with trailing ribbons slowly from tree to tree in the jungle is to recall the streaming trains of a flock of peacocks on ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... wooing sped, No fortress might resist His billets-doux of lisping lead, The bayonets in his fist,— With kisses from his cannons' mouth He made his passion known Till Vicksburg, vestal of the South, ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... graciously withdrew their claims, and pledged their cordial support to the regular nominee of the convention.[157] Such machine-like precision warmed the hearts of Democratic politicians. The editor of the People's Advocate declared the integrity of Douglas to be "as unspotted as the vestal's fame—as untarnished and as ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... during the holidays. They carried down some basket chairs, tacked a few coloured pictures from annuals on its bare walls, and made it look quite pretty. Tom lighted them a blazing fire every day, and tended it during their absence with the care of a vestal virgin, so they were extremely cosy and jolly there. The joiner's bench and the glue-pot gave facilities for any hobbies they wished to carry on; they could make as much noise as they liked, and walk in and out ...
— Monitress Merle • Angela Brazil
... himself on the edge of the table]. Ive just come to the period when the propertied classes refused to get married and went in for marriage settlements instead. A few of the oldest families stuck to the marriage tradition so as to keep up the supply of vestal virgins, who had to be legitimate; but nobody else dreamt of getting married. It's all very interesting, because we're coming to that here in England; except that as we dont require any vestal virgins, nobody will get married at all, except ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... things were executed according to a decree of the senate. The extinction of the fire in the temple of Vesta struck more terror upon the minds of men than all the prodigies which were reported from abroad, or seen at home; and the vestal, who had the guarding of it for that night, was scourged by the command of Publius Licinius the pontiff. Although this event was not appointed by the gods as a portent, but had happened through human neglect, yet it was thought proper that it should be expiated with victims of the ...
— History of Rome, Vol III • Titus Livius
... baser passion of sense, or transfigures it so that we know it no longer. The idea-driven is callous to the blandishments of beauty, for his is a love stronger than the love to woman. The vestal, the virgin, the eunuch for the kingdom of heaven's sake are the exemplars of the love ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... all pleasure in accepting pain sinks down and down to the lowest depth of penury and degradation. It is only when we invoke the aid of pain for our self-gratification that she becomes evil and takes her vengeance for the insult done to her by hurling us into misery. For she is the vestal virgin consecrated to the service of the immortal perfection, and when she takes her true place before the altar of the infinite she casts off her dark veil and bares her face to the beholder as a ...
— Sadhana - The Realisation of Life • Rabindranath Tagore
... thou principle of life! precious flame over which all nature, like a careful vestal, incessantly watches in the temple of God! Center of all, by whom all exists! The spirit of destruction would itself die, blowing at thy flame! I am not astonished that thy name should be blasphemed, for they do not know who thou art, they who think they have ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... Had she indeed any life in her? It was a mystery. Yet I saw plainly that once she must have been young and beautiful; fair, with all the charm of simplicity, perfect as some Greek statue, with the brow of a vestal. ...
— Christ in Flanders • Honore de Balzac
... hair, tied up in a piece of blue ribbon, conveyed to the happy Bell the result of the Vestal's conference with herself. Thrice before had she snipt off one of her auburn ringlets, and given them away. The possessors were faithless, but the hair had grown again: and Martha had indeed occasion to say that men were deceivers when she handed over this token ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Austen! The lady squirmed but she rallied, the more readily perhaps since now Cassy had gone, and she said and pleasantly enough: "What a charming vestal! Such an engaging manner! Seemed, too, so at home! Let me see? It was she, was it not, who was singing last night? Rather ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... consult and worship in, and feast, and buy, and sell; and this [Greek: demos] they walled about for its safety, and called [Greek: ten polin] the city: and this I take to have been the original of Villages, Market-Towns, Cities, common Councils, Vestal Temples, Feasts and Fairs, in Europe: the Prytaneum, [Greek: pyros tameion], was a Court with a place of worship, and a perpetual fire kept therein upon an Altar for sacrificing: from the word [Greek: Hestia] fire, came the name Vesta, which at length the people turned into a Goddess, and ...
— The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended • Isaac Newton
... which it does in compliance with the old Greek observance of its being bent there by the pressure of the helmet. That rippling of it down her shoulders comes from the Athena of Corinth; the raising of it on her forehead, from the knot of the hair of Diana, changed into the vestal fire of the angels. But chiefly, the calmness of the features in the one face, and their anxiety in the other, indicate first, indeed, the characteristic difference in every conception of the schools, the Greek never representing ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... from the extreme west corner of a great petted rose bush on the Wainwright lawn, reaching through an elaborate iron fence to get it as he went cross-lots back to school. He would call it stealing now to do that same, but then it had been in the nature of a holy rite offered to a vestal virgin. Yet he must have cast it down with the grin of an imp, boorish urchin that he was; and he remembered blushing hotly in the dark afterwards at his presumption, as he thought of it alone at night. And all the time she had been liking it. The little girl—the little sweet girl! She ...
— The Search • Grace Livingston Hill
... ancient prototype of the modern nun, and their house is the prototype of the convent. Six nobly-born young women, sworn to chastity, and dressed in a ritual garb, live in an edifice of much magnificence under the rule of one who is the chief Vestal, a sort of Mother Superior. Many pedestals of the statues of such chief priestesses still remain, and we can clearly trace the arrangement of their abode, with its open court—once containing a garden and cool cisterns ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... constellations blaze, Leaving uncounted worlds behind thee far,— Listen—"I am THE BRIGHT AND MORNING STAR !" He says—and does not thought more gladly stray, Where the meek herald of the rising day Sits like a peaceful vestal bearing high Her radiant urn on the soft eastern sky?— Thence, rising, seek the Morning Star of Heaven, Who to Night's myriad suns their light has given, And, bowing low Light's sacred Fount before, ...
— Poems of the Heart and Home • Mrs. J.C. Yule (Pamela S. Vining)
... from the almost vestal quiet of "Aunt Mary's" life, to all this open-windowed, open-eyed screaming of "poltroon," "nefarious ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... silken awnings were stretched over the arena and the auditorium. When the theatre was full, it presented a scene of dazzling splendour. In the best places sat senators in purple-bordered togas, the priests of the various temples, the Vestal virgins in black veils, warriors in gold-embroidered uniforms. There sat Roman citizens in white or coloured togas, bareheaded, beardless, and closely cropped, eagerly talking in a language as euphonious as French and Italian. All strangers who were ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... very time I marked—but thou could'st not— Flying between the cold moon and the earth, Cupid all armed. A certain aim he took At a fair vestal throned by the west, And loosed his love-shaft smartly from his bow As he would pierce a hundred thousand hearts. But I might see young Cupid's fiery dart Quenched in the chaste beams of the watery moon, And the imperial votaress passed on In maiden ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... every detail of the entertainment, and its various accessories:—the sunshine, filtered into soft gold by the vela, with their serpentine patterning, spread over the more select part of the company; the Vestal virgins, taking their privilege of seats near the empress Faustina, who sat there in a maze of double-coloured gems, changing, as she moved, like the waves of the sea; the cool circle of shadow, in which the wonderful toilets of the fashionable told so ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... from her greatness stoop so low, 395 To be the rival of a cow: Others to prostitute their great hearts, To he baboons' and monkeys' sweet-hearts; Some with the Dev'l himself in league grow, By's representative a Negro. 400 'Twas this made vestal-maids love-sick, And venture to be bury'd quick: Some by their fathers, and their brothers, To be made mistresses and mothers. 'Tis this that proudest dames enamours 405 On lacquies and valets des chambres; Their haughty stomachs overcomes, And makes 'em stoop to dirty grooms; ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... the most melting tenderness. Cartesmunda, the Fair Nun of Winchester, inspires the King with a passion for her, and after a long struggle between honour and love, she at last yields to the tyrant, and for the sake of Canutus breaks her vestal vows. Upon hearing that the enemy was about to enter the Cloister, Cartesmunda breaks out into the ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... doom. Were it otherwise, were women the passionless creatures some doctors delight to paint them, all our encomiums of female virtue were idle mockery. It is because we realize that in the veins of the vestal virgin runs the same fierce tide which Egypt's Queen nor Russia's Empress could control, and which flamed in battle-splendor in the ten years' war of Troy, that with uncovered heads we render her the tribute of our respect. Women admit all this in demanding the "single standard of morals." ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... he was the most scrupulous of all mankind, he ran to an excess of blood-guiltiness,] killing four of the vestal virgins, one of whom—so far as he was able—he had forcibly outraged. For latterly all his sexual power had disappeared, as a result of which it was reported that he satisfied his vileness in a different way; and associated with him were others of similar inclinations, who not only admitted that ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol VI. • Cassius Dio
... window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun. Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon, Who is already sick and pale with grief That thou, her maid, art far more fair than she. Be not her maid, since she is envious; Her vestal livery is but sick and green.... Two of the fairest stars in all the heaven, Having some business, do entreat her eyes To twinkle in their spheres till they return. What if her eyes were there, they in her head? The brightness in her cheek would shame those stars, As daylight doth a lamp; her ...
— How to Use Your Mind • Harry D. Kitson
... magnificent temple of Edessa and the serapis of Alexandria, uniting the colossal grandeur of Egyptian with the graceful harmony of Grecian art. At Rome not only was the property of the temples confiscated, but also all privileges of the priesthood. The Vestal virgins passed unhonored in the streets. Whoever permitted any Pagan rite—even the hanging of a chaplet on a tree—forfeited his estate. The temples of Rome were not destroyed, as in Syria and Egypt; but as all their revenues were confiscated, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... February, captain Hood, of his majesty's frigate the Vestal, belonging to a small squadron commanded by admiral Holmes, who had sailed for the West Indies in January, being advanced a considerable way ahead of the fleet, descried and gave chase to a sail, which proved to be a French frigate called the Bellona, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... will not discuss either now or at any other time," said Ludovico, with a look that showed he was in earnest. "But, as for La Diva Bianca, I have no objection to tell all I know to anybody. My belief is that she is as correct and proper, and all that sort of thing, as a Vestal." ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... could'st trample and despise The holiest chain of human ties For him, the dear One in thine eyes, Broke it no more. Thy heart was withered to it's Core, It's hopes, it's fears, it's feelings o'er: Thy Blood grew Ice when his was shed, And Thou the Vestal of the Dead. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... and wonders: had she any love for children? He finds in her "a plentiful lack of inborn baby-worship"; she is unworthy to compare in this with George Eliot, "the spiritual mother of Totty, of Eppie, and of Lillo". "The fiery-hearted Vestal of Haworth," he says, "had no room reserved in the palace of her passionate and high-minded imagination as a nursery for inmates of such divine and delicious quality." There was little Georgette in Villette, to say nothing of Polly, and there ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... various deities, of which the classic example is the institution of the Vestal Virgins at Rome, and the fact that at Thebes and elsewhere even the male deities had their priestesses as well as priests, are other indications that at this time woman was regarded as divine or as capable of ministering to divinity. The prophetic powers of woman were universally ...
— Taboo and Genetics • Melvin Moses Knight, Iva Lowther Peters, and Phyllis Mary Blanchard
... lustrum, and find the number of the citizens to be two hundred and seventy-one thousand two hundred and twenty-four. [Y. R. 479. B. c. 273.] A treaty of alliance formed with Ptolemy, king of Egypt. Sextilia, a vestal, found guilty of incest, and buried alive. Two colonies sent forth, to Posidonium and Cossa. [Y. R. 480. B. C. 272.] A Carthaginian fleet sails, in aid of the Tarentines, by which act the treaty is violated. Successful operations against ...
— The History of Rome; Books Nine to Twenty-Six • Titus Livius
... time I saw (but thou couldst not), Flying between the cold moon and the earth, Cupid, allarm'd: a certain aim he took At a fair vestal, throned by the west; And loos'd his love-shaft smartly from his bow, As it should pierce a hundred thousand hearts: But I might see young Cupid's fiery shaft Quench'd in the chaste beams of the watery moon; And the imperial vot'ress passed on, In ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... "Ah Vestal maiden," laughed Verus. "I am meanwhile punishing you by withholding from you a great secret which interests us all. No, no, I am not going to tell—but I beg you my lady wife to take her to task, and teach her to exercise some indulgence ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... horizon new flushed in the first Uncertain ray of Altruism, thou seem'st More ghost than human. Yet thou lovest, loving ghost, And thy fierce parent flame thyself snuffed out Scarce later than the dark'ning of the fire Thou gav'st to be eternal vestal of Thine Antony's spirit. Thou didst love and die Of love; let, therefore, no light tongue, brazen In censure, say that nothing in thy life Became thee like the leaving it. The cloth From which humanity ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... the marriage of the universal patroness of poets, Lucy Harington, to Edward Russell, third earl of Bedford, on December 12, 1594; or that of William Stanley, earl of Derby, at Greenwich on January 24, 1594-5. The elaborate compliment to the Queen, 'a fair vestal throned by the west' (II. i. 157 seq.), was at once an acknowledgment of past marks of royal favour and an invitation for their extension to the future. Oberon's fanciful description (II. ii. 148-68) of the spot where he ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... Fohn did not materialise; in the walnut and chestnut forest around them not a leaf stirred; and gradually the mountains cleared, became inartistically distinct, and turned a beautiful but disturbing dark-blue colour. And Thusis wore her vestal veil in the full sun ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers
... would have been less fervent had she known that, for the time being, her protegee had assumed the role of a Vestal virgin, and that Elisabeth's care of the fires that winter was not fulfilment of a duty but part of a game. This, however, was Elisabeth's way; she frequently received credit for performing a duty when she was really only taking part in a performance; ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... Mahometans, and Papists have continual lamps burning in their churches all day and all night, lights at funerals and in their graves; lucernae ardentes ex auro liquefacto for many ages to endure (saith Lazius), ne daemones corpus laedant; lights ever burning as those vestal virgins. Pythonissae maintained heretofore, with many such, of which read Tostatus in 2 Reg. cap. 6. quaest. 43, Thyreus, cap. 57, 58, 62, &c. de locis infestis, Pictorius Isagog. de daemonibus, &c., see more in them. Cardan would have ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... led the way through the Forum, where his wife, an ardent worshipper of the gods, stopped to lay a bunch of roses on the base of a large statue of Ceres, standing near the Temple and a building dedicated to the use of the Vestal Virgins. ...
— Virgilia - or, Out of the Lion's Mouth • Felicia Buttz Clark
... yet I thank Heaven that you are mine for these few fleeting moments, for they have taken me back to the days of my youth and its beautiful illusions! Ah, Therese, from the first hour when I beheld you advancing on your father's arm to greet me, proud as an empress, calm as a vestal, beautiful as Aphrodite, my heart acknowledged you as its mistress! Since then I have been your slave, kissing your shadow as it went before me, and yet riot conscious of my insane passion until your father saw me with that rose—and then I knew that I loved you forever! ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... remonstrances of her subjects, where marriage was spoken of, there was something in the very unapproachableness of her state which both commanded the respect and excited the imagination of her people. As a woman, they regarded her just as she wished them to regard her, as the throned Vestal, the watery Moon, whose chaste beams could quench the fiery darts of Cupid. She was to them, in fact, the Belphoebe of Spenser, "with womanly graces, but not womanly affections—passionless, pure, self-sustained, and self-dependent"; shining "with ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... presentation in a country tavern! One is tempted to believe that the father was a man of robuster judgment in such matters than the son, whose own rather mediocre literary equipment, made him the easy prey of that acidulous vestal of literature, Voltaire. However that may be, he left a useful and unexpected legacy to his son, provided, indeed, the sinews for the making of a ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... of Vesta, called Vestales or Vestal Virgins, played a conspicuous part in these festivals. They were six in number, and were chosen—between the ages of six and ten—from the noblest families in Rome. Their term of office was thirty years. During the first ten years, they were initiated in their religious duties, during ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... after the supposed date of this bloody edict, Constantius visited the temples of Rome; and the decency of his behavior is recommended by a pagan orator as an example worthy of the imitation of succeeding princes. "That emperor," says Symmachus, "suffered the privileges of the vestal virgins to remain inviolate; he bestowed the sacerdotal dignities on the nobles of Rome, granted the customary allowance to defray the expenses of the public rites and sacrifices; and, though he had embraced a different religion, he never attempted to deprive ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... virtues with a vestal fidelity; mark this day, by your verdict, your horror of their profanation; and believe me, when the hand which records that verdict shall be dust, and the tongue that asks it, traceless in the grave, many a happy home will bless its consequences, and many a ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... fervors of devotion to God, and in collateral emissions of charity to its neighbor. It was not then only another and more cleanly name for lust. It had none of those impure heats that both represent and deserve hell. It was a vestal and a virgin fire, and differed as much from that which usually passes by this name nowadays as the vital heat from the burning ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Vol. 2 (of 10) • Grenville Kleiser
... what a perversion of ideas must arise when the happiest situation of man, liberty, chastity, is looked upon as something wretched and ridiculous. The highest ideal, the best situation of woman, to be pure, to be a vestal, a virgin, excites fear and laughter in our society. How many, how many young girls sacrifice their purity to this Moloch of opinion by marrying rascals that they may not remain virgins,—that is, superiors! Through fear of ...
— The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... Don Carlos other objects must remain, when his hopes of personal felicity have been cut off; she would change his love for her into love for the millions of human beings whose destiny depends on his. A meek vestal, yet with the prudence of a queen, and the courage of a matron, with every graceful and generous quality of womanhood harmoniously blended in her nature, she lives in a scene that is foreign to her; the happiness she should have had is beside her, the misery she ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... thus," the urchin, sighing, said, "When hope and gladness crowned the new-born earth. In Eden's bowers, beneath a myrtle's shade, Before man was, Love sprang to birth. While Heaven around me balmy fragrance shed, With rosy chains the infant year I bound; And as my bride young Nature blushing led In vestal beauty o'er the ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... reminds me of his wife, the daughter of Carlo Maratti, the painter. She was so beautiful that she was her father's favourite model for his Nymphs, Madonnas, and Vestal Virgins; and to her charms she added virtue, and to her virtue uncommon musical and literary talents. Among her poems, there is a sonnet addressed to a lady, once beloved ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... of magic and the inspection of the entrails of animals capital offences, he proceeded to prohibit sacrifices, A.D. 391, and even the entering of temples. He alienated the revenues of many temples, confiscated the estates of others, some he demolished. The vestal virgins he dismissed, and any house profaned by incense he declared forfeited to the imperial exchequer. When once the property of a religious establishment has been irrevocably taken away, it is needless to declare its worship a ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... timorous, they are afraid even of those things that preserve them. Consider the pettish, they are angry with their best and dearest friends. Consider the amorous and lascivious, in the height of their fury they dare violate a Vestal. For custom is very powerful to draw the temper of the body to anything that is suitable to it; and he that is apt to fall will stumble at everything that lies in his way. So it is no wonder that those that have raised in themselves an envious and bewitching habit, if according to the ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... of the noblest families, the Vestals, were charged with keeping the hearth, for it was necessary that the flame should never be extinguished, and the care of it could be confided only to pure beings. If a Vestal broke her vow, she was buried alive in a cave, for she had committed sacrilege and had endangered the whole ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... philosophy. It is these gifted minds that enliven our habitations, and contribute so largely to those every-day delights, which constitute, after all, the chief part of mortal happiness. Such minds are ever active—their light, like the vestal lamp, is ever burning—and in my opinion the man who refines the common intercourse of life, and wreaths the altars of our household gods with flowers, is more deserving of respect and gratitude than all the sages who waste their lives in elaborate speculations, which tend to nothing, and which ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... acquired great liberty under the old civilizations. In Rome she had not only secured remarkable personal and property rights,[178] but she officiated as priestess in the most holy offices of religion. Not only as Vestal Virgin did she guard the Sacred Fire, upon whose preservation the welfare of Rome was held to depend, but at the end of every consular period women officiated in private worship and sacrifice to the Bono Dea, with ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... eyes! O that the task were mine, To guard the liquid fires that shine, And round your orbits play— To watch them with a vestal's care, And feed with smiles a light so fair, That ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel , Volume I. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... shall hem his ashes in: The vestal virgins with their holy notes Shall sing his famous, though too fatal, death. I and my Fulvia with dispersed hair Will wait ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VII (4th edition) • Various
... of stiff draperies is specially shown, is that of the women at the tomb of Christ, when they find the stone rolled away and, looking around, see the Saviour's figure before them. The scene is low and cavern-like, with a brilliant light surrounding the tomb. This artist also painted "The Vestal Virgin," "King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid," "Pan and Psyche," "The Golden Stairs," and ...
— Pictures Every Child Should Know • Dolores Bacon
... her hand on his mouth. "Silence," she said. "I am studying you. I am unbridled desire, immaculate. I am a vestal bacchante. No man has known me, and I might be the virgin pythoness at Delphos, and have under my naked foot the bronze tripod, where the priests lean their elbows on the skin of the python, whispering questions to the invisible ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... occasional appearance of inconsistency will be afterwards explained, and the English and French forms given in each case are the terms which would be used in answering the rapid question, 'Of what order is this flower?' the answer being, It is a 'Cyllenid,' a 'Pleiad,' or a 'Vestal,' as one would answer of a person, he is a Knight of St. John or Monk of St. Benedict; while to the question, of what gens, we answer, a Stella or an Erica, as one would answer of a person, a Stuart or ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... her with gestures of exquisite grace and devout humility, while she, enthroned in supreme fairness, with her tigress crouched beside her, looked down on them like a goddess calmly surveying a crowd of vestal worshippers. Their salutations done, they rushed pell-mell, like a shower of white rose-leaves drifting before a gale, into the exact centre of the hall, and there poising bird-like, with their snowy arms upraised as ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... then, has brought you back into this realm, my hero, my troubadour?" inquired Mr. Kecskerey. "Some love-adventure, some notable affair, I'll be bound. I'll dare to guess that you have abducted some Hindu vestal from Budhur?" ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... requested to leave the house, and discontinue his visits to Madame Lebrun. This simple proceeding let loose all the winds of heaven; poor Lebrun was pounced upon by the whole female sex. Even his old mother turned against him; even his sister, a sour vestal of thirty-seven, sided with her injured sister-in-law; and what had the wretched poet to say for himself? He suspected nothing improper—a good easy man—he adored his "Fanny"—he wanted her to come back—but that horrid fellow Grimod!—he would not have ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... mildest, meekest maid— Hail! purest Pearl that time's great sea hath borne— May our white souls, in purity arrayed, Shine, as if they thy vestal robes had worn; Make our hearts pure, as thou thyself art pure, Make safe the rugged pathway of our lives, And make us pass to joys that will endure When the dark term ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... above, For tongues of angels and for hymns of love! O wretched we! why were we hurried down This lubrique and adulterate age (Nay, added fat pollutions of our own), To increase the streaming ordures of the stage? What can we say to excuse our second fall? Let this thy Vestal, Heaven, atone for all! Her Arethusian stream remains unsoil'd, Unmixt with foreign filth, and undefil'd; Her wit was more than man, her innocence ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... and Jonas was content; Till a tall maiden by her sire was seen, In all the bloom and beauty of sixteen; He gazed admiring;—she, with visage prim, Glanced an arch look of gravity on him; For she was gay at heart, but wore disguise, And stood a vestal in her father's eyes: Pure, pensive, simple, sad; the damsel's heart, When Jonas praised, reproved her for the part. For Sybil, fond of pleasure, gay and light, Had still a secret bias to the right; Vain as she was—and flattery ...
— Tales • George Crabbe
... must be done within the next month. If on Miss Baker was to fall the honour of being Lady Bertram, she must not only receive him within the month, but, having done so, must also agree to wear her vestal zone yet a little longer, till that troublesome old gentleman ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... aware that the subsequent lines, referring to "a fair vestal throned by the west," are commonly understood to have been meant as a piece of delicate flattery to Queen Elizabeth. Mr. Halpin has recently given to this famous passage a new interpretation or application, which is ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... for how many an age when Pontiff and Vestal sleep in the eternal silence. Let the slave of the iron gods chatter what he will; for him flows no Falernian, for him the Muses have no smile, no melody. Ere the sun set, and the darkness fall ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... alone for the bridal hour Of nymph and naiad from woodland bower; Till vestal pearls that on leaflets lay, Ravished with beauty the eye ...
— Poems • Mary Baker Eddy
... the country; and the stain Appears a spot upon a vestal's robe, The worse for what it soils. The fashion runs Down into scenes still rural, but alas, Scenes rarely graced with rural manners now. Time was when in the pastoral retreat The unguarded door was safe; men did not watch To invade another's right, or guard their own. ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... this critical moment, so the Mystic Seven filed off like vestal virgins to feed the fire which Miss Gibbs, with her accustomed energy, had already lighted. Their contribution of wood was so substantial that it drew comment from the rest of the party, but they received the congratulations with due modesty, and did not divulge the source of ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... tells us that he himself wrote books on history with his own hands in large letters, that the boy might start in life with a useful knowledge of what his forefathers had done, and he was as careful not to use an indecenr expression before his son as he would have been before the vestal virgins. He never bathed with him; which indeed seems to have been customary at Rome, as even fathers-in-law scrupled to bathe naked before their sons-in-law. In later times, however, the Romans learned from the Greeks the habit of bathing naked, and have taught ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... has made for me with her own hands? Oh, am I worthy of such kindness; have I done any thing entitling me to such a proof of condescension on her part, and am I thus honored by her who is the guardian angel of Prussia!—whom Napoleon hates, because he fears her zeal and fidelity. As a vestal, she has kept alive the fire of patriotism on the altar of her country. When all despair, she still hopes for the redemption of her people from a victorious but merciless enemy. I will consecrate my life anew to her, though unworthy of the distinguished regard ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... reason to imagine the lady to have been of the vestal kind when his amour began; yet, as he was thoroughly ignorant of the town, and had very little acquaintance in it, he had no knowledge of that character which is vulgarly called a demirep; that is to say, a woman who intrigues ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... insisted that Severus should be declared a public enemy by the senate. He entreated that the Pannonian general might be associated to the empire. He sent public ambassadors of consular rank to negotiate with his rival; he despatched private assassins to take away his life. He designed that the Vestal virgins, and all the colleges of priests, in their sacerdotal habits, and bearing before them the sacred pledges of the Roman religion, should advance in solemn procession to meet the Pannonian legions; and, at the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... direction and motive. At Rome, "in the days of the republic, every famine, pestilence, or drought was followed by a searching investigation of the sacred rites, to ascertain what irregularity or neglect had caused the divine anger, and two instances are recorded in which vestal virgins were put to death because their unchastity was believed to have provoked a national calamity."[517] In the Roman law is found a proposition which was often quoted in the Middle Ages: "That which is done against divine ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... Rome. After changing his place of concealment nearly every night [8], although he was suffering from a quartan ague, and having effected his release by bribing the officers who had tracked his footsteps, he at length obtained a pardon through the intercession of the vestal virgins, and of Mamercus Aemilius and Aurelius Cotta, his near relatives. We are assured that when Sylla, having withstood for a while the entreaties of his own best friends, persons of distinguished rank, at last yielded to their importunity, ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... Pleasure's streamlet glides Fann'd by soft winds to curl in mimic tides; Where Mirth and Peace beguile the blameless Day; And where Friendship's fixt star beams a mellow'd Ray; 50 Where Love a crown of thornless Roses wears; Where soften'd Sorrow smiles within her tears; And Memory, with a Vestal's meek employ, Unceasing feeds the lambent flame of Joy! No more thy Sky Larks less'ning from my sight 55 Shall thrill th' attund Heartstring with delight; No more shall deck thy pensive Pleasures sweet With wreaths of sober hue my evening seat! Yet dear to [My] Fancy's ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... number of typical variations of the scene galante by Pater. We next note 659, a fine portrait group by Nattier: Mlle. de Lambec as Minerva, arming her brother the young Count of Brienne. To the same skilful portraitist are due: 660, a Knight of Malta; and 661, A Daughter of Louis XV. as a Vestal Virgin. By Boucher are: 48, R. of entrance, The Painter in his Studio, and R. wall, 47, The Three Graces; 46 and 49, L. wall, Venus and Vulcan, and Vulcan's Forge. Fragonnard is represented by some of his characteristic ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... of the occasion, yet, strangely enough her mind was neither with the events of the day nor the dead, but her thoughts were resting now where they had wandered many times throughout the day, namely, to her little handmaid and special attendant, as well as Vestal in the ...
— Within the Temple of Isis • Belle M. Wagner
... A vestal virgin with a husband and two children, a Roman Lothario, with an Irish friend, a Druidical temple, a gong, and an auto-da-fe, mix up charmingly with Bellini's quadrille-like music to form a pathetic opera; and sympathetic dilettanti weep ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, December 11, 1841 • Various
... to sacred lamps burning day and night in sanctuaries and before statues of gods and heroes. On birthdays and festivals the houses of the Romans were specially ornamented with burning lamps. The Vestal Virgins in Rome maintained the sacred fire which had been brought by fugitives from Troy. In ancient Rome when the fire in the Temple of Vesta became extinguished, it was rekindled by the rubbing ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... round the abbess. They had been accustomed to look up to her as all-powerful, and they now implored her protection. The mother abbess looked with a rueful eye upon the treasures of beauty and vestal virtue exposed to such imminent peril. Alas! how was she to protect them from the spoiler! She had, it is true, experienced many signal inter-positions of providence in her individual favor. Her early days had been passed amid the temptations of a court, where her virtue had ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... afterwards explained, and the English and French forms given in each case are the terms which would be used in answering the rapid question, 'Of what order is this flower?' the answer being, It is a 'Cyllenid,' a 'Pleiad,' or a 'Vestal,' as one would answer of a person, he is a Knight of St. John or Monk of St. Benedict; while to the question, of what gens, we answer, a Stella or an Erica, as one would answer of a person, ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... ignorant the Australians are: they are certainly the lowest in intellect of the human creation. The tribes on the western shores of Spencer's Bay are positively ignorant of any method of obtaining fire: they say that it originally came down from the north. Like the vestal virgins, the women keep it constantly lighted, and carry it about with them in firesticks when they travel: should it happen to go out, they procure a fresh supply from a neighboring encampment. Then their manners are so atrociously savage. Their mode of courtship ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... soon have overtaken him, but he had powerful relations, whom Sylla did not care to offend. Aurelius Cotta, who was perhaps his mother's brother, Mamercus Aemilius, a distinguished patrician, and singularly also the College of the Vestal Virgins, interceded for his pardon. The Dictator consented at last, but with prophetic reluctance. "Take him," he said at length, "since you will have it so—but I would have you know that the ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... the Voltaire of pelvic literature,—a sceptic as to the morality of the race in general, who would have submitted Diana to treatment with his mineral specifics, and ordered a course of blue pills for the vestal virgins. ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... in Valerius Maximus renders it probable that the Cimbrian states were of this number: "The wives of the Teutones besought Marius, after his victory, that he would deliver them as a present to the Vestal virgins; affirming that they should henceforth, equally with themselves, abstain from the embraces of the other sex. This request not being granted, they all strangled themselves the ensuing night."—Lib. ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus
... itself well-placed: we know not whence It gleans the straws that thatch its humble bower: We can but say we found it in the heart, Spring of all sweetest thoughts, arch foe of blame, Sower of flowers in the dusty mart, Pure vestal of the poet's holy flame,— This is enough, and we have done our part If we but keep it spotless as ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... they lay and looked into the room, It wavered, changed, dissolved beneath the sun, Which mingled both the mornings in their eyes, Till the true conquered, and the unreal passed. No walls, but woods bathed in a level sun; No ceiling, but the vestal sky of morn; No bed, but flowers floating 'mid floating leaves On water which grew audible as they stirred And lifted up their heads. And a low wind That flowed from out the west, washed from their eye The last films of the dream. And they sat up, Silent for one long ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... of animals capital offences, he proceeded to prohibit sacrifices, A.D. 391, and even the entering of temples. He alienated the revenues of many temples, confiscated the estates of others, some he demolished. The vestal virgins he dismissed, and any house profaned by incense he declared forfeited to the imperial exchequer. When once the property of a religious establishment has been irrevocably taken away, it is needless to declare its worship a ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... blast, and eager is the air; With flakes of feather'd snow the ground is spread; To step, with mincing pace, to early prayer, Our clay-cold vestal leaves her ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... history of Rome is indeed far more poetical than anything else in Latin literature. The loves of the Vestal and the God of War, the cradle laid among the reeds of Tiber, the fig-tree, the she-wolf, the shepherd's cabin, the recognition, the fratricide, the rape of the Sabines, the death of Tarpeia, the fall of Hostus Hostilius, ...
— Lays of Ancient Rome • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... yes. I have the words [reads]: 'Woman is to the front of man, holding the vestal flower of a purer civilization. I see,' he says, 'the little taper in her hands transparent round the light, against ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... — N. purity; decency, decorum, delicacy; continence, chastity, honesty, virtue, modesty, shame; pudicity[obs3], pucelage[obs3], virginity. vestal, virgin, Joseph, Hippolytus; Lucretia, Diana; prude. Adj. pure, undefiled, modest, delicate, decent, decorous; virginibus puerisque[Lat]; simon-pure; chaste, continent, virtuous, honest, Platonic. virgin, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... tides; Where Mirth and Peace beguile the blameless Day; And where Friendship's fixt star beams a mellow'd Ray; 50 Where Love a crown of thornless Roses wears; Where soften'd Sorrow smiles within her tears; And Memory, with a Vestal's meek employ, Unceasing feeds the lambent flame of Joy! No more thy Sky Larks less'ning from my sight 55 Shall thrill th' attund Heartstring with delight; No more shall deck thy pensive Pleasures sweet With wreaths ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... O murderess, I am dead, And that thou think'st thee free From all solicitation from me, Then shall my ghost come to thy bed, And thee, feign'd vestal, in worse arms shall see: Then thy sick taper will begin to wink, And he, whose thou art then, being tired before, Will, if thou stir, or pinch to wake him, think Thou call'st for more, And, in false sleep, will from thee shrink; And then, ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... prison, whose walls were overrun with flowering vines, and whose cells were pretty vestal bowers, entered the bard and the young girl, to be met on the front porch by the wardeness herself, a mite of a woman, with wavy yellow hair, fine complexion and washed-out blue eyes. Sensitive almost to shyness, Mademoiselle de Castiglione appeared more adapted for the seclusion of the ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... back to the walls of Troy. The form of it passed with the windmills that Don Quixote charged. It is with you to keep the high spirit of it an ever-burning vestal fire. It was a deadly play of old—it is a harmless play to you this day. But the prowess of the game is unchanged; for the skill to strike those pendent rings is no less than was the skill to strike armor-joint, visor, or plumed crest. It was of old an exercise for deadly combat on ...
— A Knight of the Cumberland • John Fox Jr.
... old the Sun, our sire, Came wooing the mother of men, Earth, that was virginal then, Vestal fire to his fire. Silent her bosom and coy, But the strong god sued and pressed; And born of their starry nuptial joy Are all ...
— Poems of To-Day: an Anthology • Various
... her personal attentions, on the sick and the poor, she will find all she has done of good at home an invaluable prompter and aid. For the sake, therefore, of others, as a social and responsible being, let the flame she would support on the public altar be kindled from the vestal fire of the ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey
... tidings which had spread rapidly through the streets, of what had occurred. The soldiers whom Claudius had sent forward, were making arrests in the streets, and searching the houses. In the midst of this excitement, Messalina, with her children, attended by one of the vestal virgins, named Vibidia, whom she had prevailed upon to accompany her and plead her cause, came forth from her palace on foot, and proceeded through the streets, her hair disheveled, her dress in disorder, ...
— Nero - Makers of History Series • Jacob Abbott
... the New England heart is deep and strong, if not demonstrative and fervent. It is not like the sweep of the winds, nor the rush of the torrents; its faith may be burning, but it is the steady burning of the hidden fire, a vestal flame, not the glare of the conflagration. It rather reminds me, in its depth and strength and purity, of the ocean, calm, uniform, and monotonous outwardly, but concealing under its surface many a swift current and strong countercurrent, many a fair expanse, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Wallace, who was in the Mier Expedition. His narrative of Bigfoot's Adventures is the rollickiest and the most flavorsome that any American frontiersman has yet inspired. The tiresome thumping on the hero theme present in many biographies of frontiersmen is entirely absent. Stanley Vestal wrote Bigfoot Wallace also, ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... the white wonder of dear Juliet's hand And steal immortal blessing from her lips, Who, even in pure and vestal modesty, Still blush, as thinking ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... twanging bowstring with alarmed ear; 'Fly the first whisper of the distant dart, 'Or shield with adamant the fluttering heart; 430 'To secret shades, ye Virgin trains, retire, 'And in your bosoms guard the vestal fire.' —The obedient Beauties hear her words, advised, And bow with laugh repress'd, and ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... responsible for many changes for the better in the lives of these people. Her very presence in a room was an inspiration for cleanliness. Her clothes were no better than theirs but she stood out among them like a vestal virgin. She came into their quarters and made the women ashamed that the rooms were not better fitted to receive so pure a being. You would scarcely have recognized Michele's rooms at the end of the first year. The windows were cleaned, the floors scrubbed, and even ...
— One Way Out - A Middle-class New-Englander Emigrates to America • William Carleton
... white rose our Tuscan poet saw, With saints for petals. When this rose was perfect Its hundred thousand petals were not saints, But senators in their Thessalian caps, And all the roaring populace of Rome; And even an Empress and the Vestal Virgins, Who came to see the gladiators die, Could not give sweetness to a rose like this. The sand beneath our feet is saturate With blood of martyrs; and these rifted stones Are awful witnesses against a people Whose pleasure was the pain ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... few remains in Rome of the domus or private house. Two, however, have left remarkably interesting ruins—the Atrium Vest, or House of the Vestal Virgins, east of the Forum, awell-planned and extensive house surrounding a cloister or court; and the House of Livia, so-called, on the Palatine Hill, the walls and decorations of which are excellently preserved. ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... the fatal Ides of March, and was carried back a bloody corpse from the Curia of Pompey. It ceased to become the residence of the Pontifex when Augustus bought the house of Hortensius on the Palatine, and elected to dwell there instead; and was therefore given over to the Vestal Virgins to increase their scanty accommodation. The Atrium Vestae, or convent of the Vestal Virgins, adjoined the Regia, and behind it, along the lower slope of the Palatine, stretched the sacred grove of Vesta, which seems to ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... by her husband, and the jewels; and she looked on the paper, and said, "It is my lord's writing. That I was shipped at sea, I well remember, but whether there delivered of my babe, by the holy gods I cannot rightly say; but since my wedded lord I never shall see again, I will put on a vestal livery, and never more have joy." "Madam," said Cerimon, "if you purpose as you speak, the temple of Diana is not far distant from hence; there you may abide as a vestal. Moreover, if you please, a niece of ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb
... us to look a little deeper into its heart, we will attempt to celebrate that unpublished and vestal wisdom written there. Age does us only indirect justice,—by the value it gives to memory. It slights and forgets its own present. This day with its trivialities dwindles and vanishes before the teeming hours ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... brought up her son Cosimo III foolishly, and altogether was a misfortune to Florence. Sustermans the painter she held in the highest esteem, and in return he painted her not only as herself but in various unlikely characters, among them a Vestal ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... inherited his great-grandsire's square-skirted coat, and a waistcoat that extended its immense flaps to his knees; his brown locks, also, hung down behind, in a mode unknown to our times. By his side was a sweet young damsel, her fair features sheltered by a prim little bonnet, within which appeared the vestal muslin of a cap; her close, long-waisted gown, and indeed her whole attire, might have been worn by some rustic beauty who had faded half a century before. But that there was something too warm and life-like in them, I would here have compared this couple to the ghosts of ...
— The Snow Image • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Bellingham-Castle. He partook of his frugal meal, and talked of the joyous regales he would provide for his tenantry. He was no longer the existing root of a tree that had been hewn down; one fatal shot had not smitten his Eustace, and doomed his Isabel to remain a vestal mourner over her brother's grave. De Vallance and Eustace were now cementing that bond of virtuous friendship which would distinguish them in happier times; and those times would soon return. The generous feelings of English nobles ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... Longa. He, and his descendants after him, reigned over the town for many years. At length Numitor and Amulius, two brothers, quarrelled about the kingdom. Amulius seized the crown by force, cast out Numitor, and made his daughter, Rhea Silvia, a Vestal Virgin. The Vestal Virgins, the priestesses of the goddess Vesta, were sworn to celibacy. But Rhea Silvia broke her vow, and gave birth, by the god Mars, to the twins, Romulus and Remus. For this offence she was buried alive, the usual punishment accorded to ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... appearance of naivete.... All her charm lies in her complexion, and even that I find wan rather than white; a very beautiful neck. It was this mixture of unique licence, they say, which she combined with the airs of innocent ignorance and vestal ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... Ships left the village and went by them to sea gay with the bunting of a first voyage, with a fair wind, and on a fine morning; and when such a ship came back long after as an old plank bearded with sea moss, to the dunes under which it stranded the day was still the same, vestal and innocent; for they were on a voyage of greater length and import. They had buried many ships; but, as time moved to them, all on the ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... she began to appear thoughtful and depressed. Her dejection increased day by day; her face became wan and pale, and her eyes were often filled with tears. They asked her what was the cause of her trouble. She said that she was sick. She was soon afterward excused from her duties in the Vestal temple, and went away, and remained for some time shut up in retirement and seclusion. There at length two children, ...
— Romulus, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... called Vestales or Vestal Virgins, played a conspicuous part in these festivals. They were six in number, and were chosen—between the ages of six and ten—from the noblest families in Rome. Their term of office was thirty years. During the first ten years, they were initiated ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... with far greener shades, far fresher flowers. Ages and climes remote to Thee impart What charms in Genius, and refines in Art; Thee, in whose hand the keys of Science dwell, The pensive portress of her holy cell; Whose constant vigils chase the chilling damp Oblivion steals upon her vestal-lamp. The friends of Reason, and the guides of Youth, Whose language breath'd the eloquence of Truth; Whose life, beyond preceptive wisdom, taught The great in conduct, and the pure in thought; These still exist, by Thee to Fame consign'd, [x] Still ...
— Poems • Samuel Rogers
... still thickest came, As near the centre motion doth increase; Till he, press'd down by his own weighty name, Did, like the vestal,[13] ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... fine portrait group by Nattier: Mlle. de Lambec as Minerva, arming her brother the young Count of Brienne. To the same skilful portraitist are due: 660, a Knight of Malta; and 661, A Daughter of Louis XV. as a Vestal Virgin. By Boucher are: 48, R. of entrance, The Painter in his Studio, and R. wall, 47, The Three Graces; 46 and 49, L. wall, Venus and Vulcan, and Vulcan's Forge. Fragonnard is represented by some of his characteristic works executed with wonderful sleight of hand, 292-301. The prevailing ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... PRIMEVAL FIRE! YOUR vestal train Hung with gold-tresses o'er the vast inane, Pierced with your silver shafts the throne of Night, 100 And charm'd young Nature's opening eyes with light; When LOVE DIVINE, with brooding wings unfurl'd, Call'd from the rude abyss the ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... a father's wish or the respect due to seniority. Amulius drove out his brother and seized the kingdom: he added crime to crime, murdered his brother's male issue, and, under pretence of doing honour to his brother's daughter, Rea Silvia, having chosen her a Vestal Virgin,[2] deprived her of all hopes of issue by the obligation ...
— Roman History, Books I-III • Titus Livius
... bodies. As the groups of women walk about, their toe-rings and ankle-ornaments jingle against the marble, and their particolored raiment and barbarous gewgaws look curiously out of place here. The place seems more appropriate to vestal virgins, robed in white, than to dusky Hindoo females, arrayed in all the colors of the rainbow. Many of these people are pilgrims who have come hundreds of miles to see the Taj, and to pay tribute to the memory of Shah Jehan, and his faithful wife the Princess Arjumund, ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... and advertise Bertie's danger? So vague were her ideas relative to the limits of extradition, that she had regarded Canada as a city of refuge; considered its protection of United States' criminal fugitives as efficacious, as meeting a Vestal Priestess on the way to his execution, proved in rescuing a Roman malefactor from the penalty of violated law; but this shred of comfort had parted, when most she ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... Berenice conceived a dance series of her own. One was to be "The Terror"—a nymph dancing in the spring woods, but eventually pursued and terrorized by a faun; another, "The Peacock," a fantasy illustrative of proud self-adulation; another, "The Vestal," a study from Roman choric worship. After spending considerable time at Pocono evolving costumes, poses, and the like, Berenice finally hinted at the plan to Mrs. Batjer, declaring that she would enjoy the artistic outlet ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... was thinking what wisdom the Vestal Virgins showed in never letting their fire go out, another crash came at the door, followed by the war-whoop of a scalp-hunter. "I seem to recognise that noise," he thought, "but I can't possibly open the ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... feelings, pretty Vestal, From the smooth Intruder free; Cage thy heart in bars of chrystal, Lock it with a golden key: Thro' the bars demurely stealing, Noiseless footstep, accent dumb, His approach to none revealing— Watch, or watch not, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... are many strokes of the most melting tenderness. Cartesmunda, the Fair Nun of Winchester, inspires the King with a passion for her, and after a long struggle between honour and love, she at last yields to the tyrant, and for the sake of Canutus breaks her vestal vows. Upon hearing that the enemy was about to enter the Cloister, Cartesmunda breaks out ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... records for insect voices. To another group, known as Fulgorids, gigantic heads and streamers of wax have been allotted. Those possessing the former rejoice in the name of Lantern Flies, but they are at present unfaithful vestal bugs, though it is extremely doubtful if their wicks were ever trimmed or lighted. To see a big wax bug flying with trailing ribbons slowly from tree to tree in the jungle is to recall the streaming trains of a flock of ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... then graciously withdrew their claims, and pledged their cordial support to the regular nominee of the convention.[157] Such machine-like precision warmed the hearts of Democratic politicians. The editor of the People's Advocate declared the integrity of Douglas to be "as unspotted as the vestal's fame—as untarnished and as ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... force consisted of La Chiffone, frigate, Capt. Wainwright, as commodore. The Caroline of thirty-eight guns; and eight of the East India Company's cruisers, namely, the Mornington, Ternate, Aurora, Prince of Wales, Ariel, Nautilus, Vestal and Fury, with four large transports, and the Stromboli bomb-ketch. The fleet sailed from Bombay in September, and after a long passage they reached Muscat, where it remained for many days to refresh and arrange their future plans; they sailed ...
— The Pirates Own Book • Charles Ellms
... I got there, I threw myself into a chair. "What shocking weather! How tiring the streets are!" Then some gossip: "Mademoiselle Lemierre was to have taken the part of Vestal in the new opera, but she is in an interesting condition for the second time, and they do not know who will take her place. Mademoiselle Arnould has just left her little Count: they say she is negotiating with Bertin.... That poor Dumesnil no ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... joyousness. By no means! The generous wine penetrated, perhaps, to some inner cells of her heart, and brought forth thoughts in sparkling words, which otherwise might have remained concealed; but there was nothing in what she thought or spoke calculated to give umbrage either to an anchorite or to a vestal. A word or two she said or sung about the flowing bowl, and once she called for Falernian; but beyond this her converse was chiefly of the rights of man and the weakness of women; of the iron ages that were past, and of the golden time that was ...
— Mrs. General Talboys • Anthony Trollope
... mortal bites, but was subsequently treated by native remedies and carried before the altar of Baphomet to be cured by the special intervention of the good God Lucifer. This ceremony was accomplished by the intervention of a lovely Indian Vestal, by the prayers of the Grand Master, a silk-mercer by commercial persuasion, and by the mock baptism of a serpent, after which the sufferer rose to his feet and the inconvenient venom spurted of itself out of his wounds. From the Sanctuary of the Serpents the company ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... of imagining her not human like the other women and the men I had known, but a creature apart and in a class apart, I stood day after day gaping at that very door, and wondering how I could open it, how penetrate even to the courtyard of that vestal citadel. So long as my old-fashioned belief that good women were more than human and bad women less than human had influenced me only to a sharper lookout in dealing with the one species of woman I then came in ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... unsuspected perils. One of the most charming ladies of my acquaintance, remonstrating with her mother for letting the fire go out on a rather chilly day, exclaimed, "O dear mamma, how could you be so careless? If you had been a Vestal Virgin you would have been bricked up." When the London County Council first came into existence, it used to assemble in the Guildhall, and the following dialogue took place between a highly cultured councillor and ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... less liable to be led astray by their own sagacity and the overweening petulance of hard-earned and late-acquired wisdom. They do not fall in love with every meretricious extravagance at first sight, or mistake an old battered hypothesis for a vestal, because they are new to the ways of this old world. They do not seize upon it as a prize, but are safe from gross imposition by being as wise and no wiser than those ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... very unapproachableness of her state which both commanded the respect and excited the imagination of her people. As a woman, they regarded her just as she wished them to regard her, as the throned Vestal, the watery Moon, whose chaste beams could quench the fiery darts of Cupid. She was to them, in fact, the Belphoebe of Spenser, "with womanly graces, but not womanly affections—passionless, pure, self-sustained, and self-dependent"; shining "with a cold lunar light and not ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... heart, Lest the freed malefactors should dispread Infamous ruin with their liberty. There's not a man—the fairest of ye all— Who is not fouler than he seems. This life Is one unending struggle to conceal Our baseness from our fellows. Here stands one In vestal whiteness with a lecher's lust;— There sits a judge, holding law's scales in hands That itch to take the bribe he dare not touch;— Here goes a priest with heavenward eyes, whose soul Is Satan's council-chamber;—there a doctor, With nature's secrets wrinkled round a brow Guilty ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Francesca da Rimini • George Henry Boker
... bewildered your understanding," exclaimed the lady. "Whatever my ambition may be, my morality is unimpeached; a vestal would lose none of her purity ...
— Turns of Fortune - And Other Tales • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... wonderful job—for Ella Monahan. I wish I had the gift of eloquence. I wish I had the right to spank you. I wish I could prove to you, somehow, that with your gift, and heritage, and racial right it's as criminal for you to be earning your thousands at Haynes-Cooper's as it would have been for a vestal virgin to desert her altar fire to stoke a furnace. Your eyes are bright and hard, instead of tolerant. Your mouth is losing its graciousness. Your whole face is beginning to be stamped with a look that says shrewdness and experience, ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... career is going to be. I want to be a great and shining lady in your life. I can't always live as I do now, dependent on my mother, whirled about by her movements, living in her light. Why should I be just a hard-up Vestal Virgin, Stephen, in your honor? You will not be able to marry me for years and years and years—unless you neglect your work, unless you throw away everything that is worth having between us in order just to ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... if it had not accomplished the impossible and transmuted the pirate of body into the pure of soul. It would not be true to say that he never thought lewdly of her; he would have thought lewdly of an angel or a vestal maid; that was ingrain in the composition of the man; but he thought well of her as he had never thought well of women before since he first scorched his stripling's fingers, and he would have killed twenty men to keep her from hearing a foul word. Sometimes when ...
— The Lady of Loyalty House - A Novel • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... refrain from exhausting the theme and the reader? Some few passages of coquetry it would certainly be pleasant to give in outline; the story of Mme. de Beauseant's demurs and sweet delayings, that, like the vestal virgins of antiquity, she might fall gracefully, and by lingering over the innocent raptures of first love draw from it its utmost strength and sweetness. M. de Nueil was at an age when a man is the dupe of these caprices, of the fence which women delight to prolong; either ...
— The Deserted Woman • Honore de Balzac
... The vestal virgins, whose duty it was to keep the fire burning on the altar in the temple of Vesta. Vesta was the goddess of the home, and the vestal virgins were bound by oath never ...
— Narrative and Lyric Poems (first series) for use in the Lower School • O. J. Stevenson
... expense or that of friend or foe, was wont to observe that there were three things which nobody would ever believe, and which yet were very true; that Queen Elizabeth deserved her title of the, throned vestal, that he was himself a good Catholic, and that Cardinal Albert was a good general. It is probable that the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Milk-white and vestal-chaste the hollyhock Grows tall, clove, sweetgale nightly shed forth spice, Long woodbines leaning over scent the ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Jean Ingelow
... a trace of tears; Over all his face a shade of pain That deepened and vanished, and came again. Fixed he his woeful eyes on me— Through my very soul they seemed to see. And lightly he laid his hand on mine— His hand was cold as the vestal shrine. "'Tis haunted," he said, "haunted, and he Who dares at night-noon go with me To this cursed place, by phantoms trod, Must fear not devil, man, nor God." "Tell me the story," I cried, "tell me!" And frightened was I at my bravery. A curious smile his ...
— Debris - Selections from Poems • Madge Morris
... make of the artist's own strong interest in what he had to say. In both pictures he succeeded in showing the Colosseum as no longer a ruin, but as, so to speak, a living place peopled by the swarm of the Roman populace, with the emperor and his court, and the College of the Vestal Virgins, and, for chief actors, the hapless wretches who are "butchered to make a Roman holiday." Another picture that greatly increased Gerome's reputation, was his "Death of Julius Caesar," though it must be confessed there was a touch ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... legislative and by judicial remedy, the cure of this Indian malady, worse ten thousand times than the leprosy which our forefathers brought from the East. Could they have done this, if they had not been actuated by some strong, some vehement, some perennial passion, which, burning like the Vestal fire, chaste and eternal, never suffers generous sympathy to grow cold in maintaining the rights of the injured or in denouncing the crimes of ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... charged with effeminacy: and Pompey's scratching his head with one finger was construed in the same way, though both these men were very far from effeminacy or wantonness. And Crassus was accused of an intrigue with one of the Vestal Virgins, because he wished to purchase from her a pleasant estate, and therefore frequently visited her and waited upon her. And Postumia, from her readiness to laugh and talk somewhat freely with men, got accused and even had ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... among his ancestors the great Agrippa, the builder of the Pantheon, because his very obscure origin seemed a blot upon the semi-divine purity of his race. He had the title of Augusta and all the privileges of the vestal virgins bestowed upon his grandmother Antonia, the daughter of Mark Antony and the faithful friend of Tiberius; he had these same vestal privileges bestowed upon his three sisters, Agrippina, Drusilla, and Livilla; he had assigned to them a privileged position ...
— The Women of the Caesars • Guglielmo Ferrero
... beauty of the upper classes in England to the men having long selected the more beautiful women.) Here is a more curious case; the priestesses who attended the temple of Venus Erycina at San- Giuliano in Sicily, were selected for their beauty out of the whole of Greece; they were not vestal virgins, and Quatrefages (3. 'Anthropologie,' 'Revue des Cours Scientifiques,' Oct. 1868, p. 721.), who states the foregoing fact, says that the women of San-Giuliano are now famous as the most beautiful in the island, and are sought by artists as models. ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... lacking the finer sensibility, this might be; not a villainous rush, just drifting. That was it, the superlative excellence of the Gulab; the very quality that attracted, was the shield, the immaculate robe that clothed her and preserved her like a vestal virgin from such violation. Barlow could not word all these things; subconsciously they swayed him—like the magnetic needle, always toward the ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser
... her as performing the ordinary acts of a mortal world. He had the feeling that she moved on higher levels—that she was a creature too shy and perfect to be made the instrument of passion. She should be guarded in her purity like a vestal virgin, so that her straight young body might be forever valiant and her eyes might never ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... letters, that the boy might start in life with a useful knowledge of what his forefathers had done, and he was as careful not to use an indecenr expression before his son as he would have been before the vestal virgins. He never bathed with him; which indeed seems to have been customary at Rome, as even fathers-in-law scrupled to bathe naked before their sons-in-law. In later times, however, the Romans learned from the Greeks ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... gained the Capitol—her foot is on the stair; She stands a form of matchless grace, the queen of thousands there. Bring forth the wreath that threw afresh a lustre round his name, Whose genius burned, a vestal fire, with never-dying flame. ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 449 - Volume 18, New Series, August 7, 1852 • Various
... have almost reached the tops of your boots will find "Mrs. Overtheway's Remembrances," by Mrs. Ewing, very interesting. "Unknown to History," by Miss Yonge, and "Number XIII., the Story of the Lost Vestal," by Emma Marshall, are slightly historical in character, and are stories of absorbing interest, the one containing old English, and the other ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 34, July 1, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... of them that the modern world most sharply disputes. You complain of Catholicism for setting up an ideal of virginity; it did nothing of the kind. The whole human race set up an ideal of virginity; the Greeks in Athene, the Romans in the Vestal fire, set up an ideal of virginity. What then is your real quarrel with Catholicism? Your quarrel can only be, your quarrel really only is, that Catholicism has achieved an ideal of virginity; that it is no ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... arrayed gorgeously in his coffin, lying in high state, not by the sacred altar of a church, but in the Grand Opera House, which had so long been the centre of his magnificence. Buried in flowers snow-white, as if gathered for the tomb of a vestal, glittering with gold, with clouds of perfume floating over him—in all the pomp of a monarch he was taken from New York, and carried for a ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... Potomac to the Gulf; and the clarion-call James R. Randall so nobly used—"There's Life in the Old Land Yet!"—warmed every southern heart, by the dead ashes on its hearth. Who does not remember "Beechenbrook," that pure Vestal in the temple of Mars? Every tear of sympathy that fell upon its pages was a jewel above rubies, in the crown of its ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... light blue livery announced Counsellor Daly and dinner, for both came fortunately together. Taking the post of honour, Miss Riley's arm, I followed Tom, who I soon perceived ruled the whole concern, as he led the way with another ancient vestal in black stain and bugles. The long procession wound its snake-like length down the narrow stair, and into the dining-room, where at last we all got seated; and here let me briefly vindicate the motives of my friend—should any unkind person be found to impute ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 2 • Charles James Lever
... DRURY LANE VESTAL. A woman of the town, or prostitute; Drury-lane and its environs were formerly the residence of ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... precisely, that he has destroyed the kingdom of the demons, and delivered us from their tyranny, for us possibly to think rationally that they still possess that power over us which they had formerly, so far as to work wonderful things which appeared miraculous; such as they relate of the vestal virgin, who, to prove her virginity, carried water in a sieve; and of her who by means of her sash alone, towed up the Tiber a boat, which had been so completely stranded that no human power could move it. Almost all the holy ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... Matches; Vestai is the Roman goddess of the hearth, worshiped in a temple containing the sacred fire tended by the vestal virgins. ...
— Things To Make • Archibald Williams
... yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun. Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon, Who is already sick and pale with grief That thou, her maid, art far more fair than she. Be not her maid, since she is envious; Her vestal livery is but sick and green.... Two of the fairest stars in all the heaven, Having some business, do entreat her eyes To twinkle in their spheres till they return. What if her eyes were there, they in her head? The brightness in her cheek would shame those stars, As daylight doth ...
— How to Use Your Mind • Harry D. Kitson
... old man had closed his eyes, and his attendants believed him to be asleep. The house contained two large rooms and as many small ones. One of the former served for kitchen and sitting room; in the other lay the father of Birch; of the latter, one was the sanctuary of the vestal, and the other contained the stock of provisions. A huge chimney of stone rose in the center, serving, of itself, for a partition between the larger rooms; and fireplaces of corresponding dimensions were in each apartment. A bright flame was burning in that of the common room, and within the ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... Portia, and strongly individualized by a certain moral grandeur, a saintly grace, something of vestal dignity and purity, which render her less attractive and more imposing; she is "severe in youthful beauty," and inspires a reverence which would have placed her beyond the daring of one unholy wish or thought, except in such a man ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... under the old civilizations. In Rome she had not only secured remarkable personal and property rights,[178] but she officiated as priestess in the most holy offices of religion. Not only as Vestal Virgin did she guard the Sacred Fire, upon whose preservation the welfare of Rome was held to depend, but at the end of every consular period women officiated in private worship and sacrifice to the Bono Dea, with mystic ceremonies which ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... those virtues with a vestal fidelity; mark this day, by your verdict, your horror of their profanation; and believe me, when the hand which records that verdict shall be dust, and the tongue that asks it, traceless in the grave, many a happy home will bless its consequences, and many a mother teach her little child ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... Honourable Lady Foljambe was the Abbess of Saint Roque's Nunnery, like herself a conscientious, rigid, and devoted Papist. When the house of Saint Roque was despotically dissolved by the fiat of the impetuous monarch, the Lady Foljambe received her friend into her spacious mansion, together with two vestal sisters, who, like their Abbess, were determined to follow the tenor of their vows, instead of embracing the profane liberty which the Monarch's will had thrown in their choice. For their residence, the Lady Foljambe contrived, with all secrecy—for Henry might not have ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... That I was shipped at sea I well remember, but whether there delivered of my babe, by the holy gods I cannot rightly say; but since my wedded lord I never shall see again, I will put on a vestal livery and never ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... for Deceit, she has an Aspect as Innocent as the famed Lucrece, but a Mind as Wild as the more famed Cleopatra. Her Face speaks a Vestal, but her Heart a Messalina. Who that beheld Omnamante's negligent unobserving Air, would believe that she hid under that regardless Manner the witty Prostitute, the rapacious Wench, the prodigal Courtesan? She can, when she pleases, adorn those ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... without his tyranny; Napoleon without his selfishness, and Washington without his reward. He was as obedient to authority as a servant, and royal in authority as a true king. He was gentle as a woman in life, and modest and pure as a virgin in thought; watchful as a Roman vestal in duty; submissive to law as Socrates, and grand in ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... be a vestal maid, I warrant, The bride of Heaven—Come—we may shake your purpose; For here I bring in hand a jolly suitor Hath ta'en degrees in the seven sciences That ladies love best—He is young and noble, Handsome and valiant, gay, ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... votaries crowd no more The Delphian mountain and the Delian shore, And lone and still the Lybian Ammon stands, His utterance stifled by the desert sands. No more in Cnydian bower, or Cyprian grove The golden censers flame with gifts to Love; The pale-eyed Vestal bends no more and prays Where the eternal fire sends up its blaze; Cybele hears no more the cymbal's sound, The Lares shiver the fireless hearthstone round; And shatter'd shrine and altar lie o'erthrown, Inscriptionless, save where Oblivion lone Has dimly traced his name upon the mouldering stone. ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... was parted over her serene forehead, and above it rested a simple matronly cap of finest lace. Emily Beauchamp was still a beautiful woman—beautiful even as when in the early prime of youth and love she had stood in the light of the new-born day, clad in her robes of vestal whiteness. The change in her was but the change from morning to evening—from spring to autumn; and to some hearts the waning light and the fading leaves have a charm which sunshine and spring-time cannot boast. ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... bordered by, and spring out of, chasms of blackness. But moonlight shrouds the Coliseum in mystery. It opens deep vaults of gloom where the eye meets only an ebon wall, upon which the fancy paints innumerable pictures in solemn, splendid, and tragic colors. Shadowy forms of emperor and lictor and vestal virgin and gladiator and martyr come out of the darkness, and pass before us in long and silent procession. The breezes which blow through the broken arches are changed into voices, and recall the shouts and cries of a vast audience. By day, the Coliseum is an impressive ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various
... her face was very sweet, very pure and noble. She would have gone without another word, but Haward caught her by the sleeve. "Stay awhile!" he cried. "I too am a dreamer, though not like you, you maid of Dian, dark saint, cold vestal, with your eyes forever on the still, white flame! Audrey, Audrey, Audrey! Do you know what a pretty name you have, child, or how dark are your eyes, or how fine this hair that a queen might envy? Westover has ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... anger takes The sunshine and the blast! Who is the victor of the day? Thou of the delicate form, and golden hair, And manhood glorious in its midst of May; Thou who upon thy shield of argent bearest The bold device, "The loftiest is the fairest!" As bending low thy stainless crest, "The vestal throned by the west" Accords the old Provencal crown Which blends her own with thy renown; Arcadian Sidney, nursling of the muse, Flower of fair chivalry, whose bloom was fed With daintiest Castaly's most silver ...
— With Spurs of Gold - Heroes of Chivalry and their Deeds • Frances Nimmo Greene
... no smile illumes; Not all this pomp of sorrow, that presumes It pays Affection's debt, is due concern To the FOR EVER ABSENT, tho' it mourn Fashion's allotted time. If Time consumes, While Life is ours, the precious vestal-flame Memory shou'd hourly feed;—if, thro' each day, She with whate'er we see, hear, think, or say, Blend not the image of the vanish'd Frame, O! can the alien Heart expect to prove, In worlds of light and life, ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... set, and the night came, and the stars glittered; but still he walked alone, inspired, exalted, full of generous and loving schemes: of sweet and tender fancies: a heart on fire; and youth the fuel, and the flame vestal. ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade
... gardens to the eastern shore Sends up its annual rite[4] to her whose beams Bring the sweet time of night-flowers and dreams; The nymph who dips her urn in silent lakes And turns to silvery dew each drop it takes;— Oh! not our Dian of the North who chains In vestal ice the current of young veins, But she who haunts the gay Bubastian[5] grove And owns she sees from her bright heaven above, Nothing on earth to match that heaven but Love. Think then what bliss will ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... to Caesar they allowed the vestal virgins to employ one lictor each, because one of them had been insulted, owing to not being recognized, while returning home from dinner toward evening. The offices in the City they assigned for a greater number of years in advance, thus at the same time giving honor ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol. III • Cassius Dio
... she reached the Ostian gate, and mounted the rubbish-cart of a market gardener which happened to be passing. But Narcissus absorbed both the looks and the attention of the Emperor by the proofs and the narrative of her crimes, and, getting rid of the Vestal by promising her that the cause of Messalina should be tried, he hurried Claudius forward, first to the house of Silius, which abounded with the proofs of his guilt, and then to the camp of the Praetorians, where swift vengeance was taken on the whole band ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... done no good to anyone. I understood perfectly that I had acted in an unpardonable manner; for Her Majesty's Maids of Honour were kept, or were supposed to be kept, in very great seclusion at home, as if they were Vestal virgins—which was indeed a very great supposition. Tale after tale came back to my mind of those Maids in the past—of Mademoiselle de la Garde herself, of Miss Stewart, Miss Hyde, Miss Hamilton, and others like them—some of whom were indeed good, but had the greatest difficulty ...
— Oddsfish! • Robert Hugh Benson
... talk of love To Marcia, whilst her father's life's in danger? Thou might'st as well court the pale, trembling vestal, When she beholds the holy ...
— Cato - A Tragedy, in Five Acts • Joseph Addison
... right-hand side of the slope, which the via Sacra now follows, and reach the Forum by the fornix Fabiana. Close by to our left is the round temple of Vesta, where the sacred fire of the State is kept ever burning by its guardians, the Vestal Virgins, and here too is their dwelling, the Atrium Vestae, and also that of the Pontifex Maximus (Regia), in whose potestas they were; these three buildings, then insignificant to look at, constituted the religious ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... as in duty bound, and as sisters of her future husband. She passed "long mornings" with them—the most dreary and serious of forenoons. She drove out solemnly in their great family coach with them, and Miss Wirt their governess, that raw-boned Vestal. They took her to the ancient concerts by way of a treat, and to the oratorio, and to St. Paul's to see the charity children, where in such terror was she of her friends, she almost did not dare be affected by the hymn the children sang. Their house was comfortable; their papa's table rich and ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... fence, and gazed long and earnestly at the building. Then the moonlight vanished ghostlike from one of the windows, a material glow took its place, and a girlish figure, holding a candle, drew the white curtains together. To Culpepper it was a vestal virgin standing before a hallowed shrine; to the prosaic observer I fear it was only a fair-haired young woman, whose wicked black eyes still shone with unfilial warmth. Howbeit, when the figure had disappeared he stepped out briskly into the moonlight of the ...
— Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... many an age when Pontiff and Vestal sleep in the eternal silence. Let the slave of the iron gods chatter what he will; for him flows no Falernian, for him the Muses have no smile, no melody. Ere the sun set, and the darkness ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... should have saved money. I did the thing well. I told the furniture people I wanted it just as it stood in the picture: "Design for bedroom and boudoir combined, suitable for young girl, in teak, with sparrow blue hangings." We had everything: the antique fire arrangements that a vestal virgin might possibly have understood; the candlesticks, that were pictures in themselves, until we tried to put candles in them; the book-case and writing-desk combined, that wasn't big enough to write on, and out of which ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... been ill-used by Cleopatra, whom they had most resisted in her design of being present in the war, came over to Caesar, and gave information of the contents of Antony's will, with which they were acquainted. It was deposited in the hands of the vestal virgins, who refused to deliver it up, and sent Caesar word, if he pleased, he should come and seize it himself, which he did. And, reading it over to himself, he noted those places that were most for his purpose, and, having summoned the senate, read them publicly. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... brought forth thoughts in sparkling words which otherwise might have remained concealed; but there was nothing in what she thought or spoke calculated to give umbrage either to an anchoret or to a vestal. A word or two she said or sung about the flowing bowl, and once she called for Falernian; but beyond this her converse was chiefly of the rights of man and the weakness of women, of the iron ages that were past, and of the golden ...
— Stories By English Authors: Italy • Various
... accomplished pair had early distinguished each other, in monikin society, for their unusual graces of person, general attainments, mutual amiableness of disposition, harmony of thought, and soundness of principles. Everything was propitious to the gentle flame which was kindled in the vestal bosom of Chatterissa, and which was met by a passion so ardent and so respectful, as that which glowed in the heart of young No. 8 purple. The friends of the respective parties, so soon as the budding sympathy between them was observed, in order to prevent the blight of wishes so appropriate, ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... Creative fancy's wild magnificence, And all the dread sublimities of song: These, Virtue, these to thee alone belong: Chill'd, by the breath of vice, their radiance dies, And brightest burns when lighted at the skies: Like vestal flames to purest bosoms given, And kindled only by a ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... his courage. All must be done within the next month. If on Miss Baker was to fall the honour of being Lady Bertram, she must not only receive him within the month, but, having done so, must also agree to wear her vestal zone yet a little longer, till that troublesome old ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... with their tails of fish, Reeking at church over the chafing-dish! A vestal turf, enshrin'd in earthen ware, Fumes through the loopholes of a wooden square; Each to the temple with these altars tend, But still does place it at her western end; While the fat steam of female sacrifice Fills the priest's nostrils, and puts out ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... through the buzz of the crowd, The Duke's blithe associates, babbling aloud Some comment upon his gay humor that day? He never was gayer: what makes him so gay? 'Tis, no doubt, say the flatterers, flattering in tune, Some vestal whose virtue no tongue dare impugn Has at last found a Mars—who, of course, shall be nameless, That vestal that yields to Mars ONLY is blameless! Hark! hears he a name which, thus syllabled, stirs All his heart into tumult?... Lucile de Nevers ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... "Sacred fire! vestal virgins, too, I suppose! can they be Romans?" reasoned Aunt Maria, beginning to doubt ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... [He seats himself on the edge of the table]. Ive just come to the period when the propertied classes refused to get married and went in for marriage settlements instead. A few of the oldest families stuck to the marriage tradition so as to keep up the supply of vestal virgins, who had to be legitimate; but nobody else dreamt of getting married. It's all very interesting, because we're coming to that here in England; except that as we dont require any vestal virgins, nobody will get married at all, except the ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... muslin, who had trembled under his tyranny, and afflicted me so much by her sorrows, now seated familiarly on his knee, and quaffing from the same tankard. Harlequin lay asleep on one of the benches; and monks, satyrs, and Vestal virgins were grouped together, laughing outrageously at a broad story told by an unhappy count, who had been barbarously murdered in the tragedy. This was, indeed, novelty to me. It was a peep into another ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... indeed a pleasant thing, Although one must be damn'd for you, no doubt: I make a resolution every spring Of reformation, ere the year run out, But somehow, this my vestal vow takes wing, Yet still, I trust it may be kept throughout: I 'm very sorry, very much ashamed, And mean, next winter, to be ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... for I always goes with father, and he trusts me with every thing. I saw the paper signed. The king's ship is called the Vestal, and the captain who signed the paper, signed it ...
— The Privateer's-Man - One hundred Years Ago • Frederick Marryat
... the groom, that they who were most affected by it, did not, at first, fully comprehend the extent of the disgrace that was so publicly heaped upon them The innocent and unpractised Christine stood resembling the cold statue of a vestal, with the pen raised ready to affix her as yet untarnished name to the contract, in an attitude of suspense, while her wondering look followed the agitation of the multitude, as the startled bird, before it takes wing, regards a movement among the leaves of the bush. But there was no ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... farther down the avenue Selah Adams sat upon the front veranda, looking like the vestal virgin of the moon. ...
— The Co-Citizens • Corra Harris
... a distance. She went swiftly up the road, and straight to the railway tracks. She entered the house, the dark, wrecked house, where from the second story window, a perpetual look-out was kept, like the watch of the Vestal Virgins. They came to the open door, and heard her ascend to the room ...
— Young Hilda at the Wars • Arthur Gleason
... relaxations of "England's queen" with her maids of honour were not, if we may credit the existing memoirs of her court, precisely such as modern fastidiousness would assign to the "fair vestal throned by ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... to his face and light to his eyes, Mrs. Gerome had dropped her head once more on her arms, and the weary, despairing expression of her countenance, as she looked at the gilded horizon, where sea and sky seemed divided only by a belt of liquid gold,—might have served for the face of some careless Vestal, who, having allowed the fire to expire on the altar she had sworn to guard sleeplessly, sat hopeless, desolate, and doomed,—watching from the dim, cheerless temple of Hestia, the advent of that sun whose ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... brought from the hysterical sanctuary of her room by the pressing sense of the necessity of looking after the kitchen fire, and coming back to her duties like a vestal of old, found her dreaded enemy cheerfully eating in the kitchen, while Norah sat near and carried on a one-sided conversation with every appearance of friendliness, with Tait sleepily lying beside her—at ...
— Mates at Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... will court you, their whole delight is to immortalize—Alexander was begot by a Salamander, that visited his Mother in the form of a Serpent, because he would not make King Philip jealous; and that famous Philosopher Merlin was begotten on a Vestal Nun, a certain King's Daughter, by a most beautiful young Salamander; as indeed all the Heroes, and Men of ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... gave him. "Nobody is good enough for little Mary Ware," he had said once, when she was a romping child. He was thinking of her unselfishness, her sturdy sincerity, her undaunted courage. Now he repeated it, thinking of her as this letter revealed her, a white-souled vestal maiden who took the stars as a symbol of her duty, and who would not swerve a hair's-breadth from the orbit which she thought ...
— Mary Ware's Promised Land • Annie Fellows Johnston
... takes her to his bosom knows, Lost in the magic crystal of her eyes, Upon her vestal cheek a fairer rose, What rapture and what passionate surprise Awaits his kiss beneath her mask of snows, And what strange fire beneath her ...
— A Jongleur Strayed - Verses on Love and Other Matters Sacred and Profane • Richard Le Gallienne
... alliance of Science and the People—those opposite poles! They will crush between their arms of steel all that opposes the higher civilization. The State, the immemorial vestal fire of all civilization—what a good phrase! I must write that down for my ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... the grave where Laura lay, Within that temple where the vestal flame Was wont to burn: and, passing by that way To see that buried dust of living fame, Whose tomb fair Love and fairer Virtue kept, All suddenly I saw the Fairy Queen, At whose approach the soul of Petrarch wept; And from henceforth those graces were not seen, For they this Queen attended; in ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... and insupportable old women who haunt the tables d'hote of every hotel in Europe, who spoil Italy, poison Switzerland, render the charming cities of the Mediterranean uninhabitable, carry everywhere their fantastic manias, their petrified vestal manners, their indescribable toilettes, and a certain odor of india-rubber, which makes one believe that at night they slip themselves into a case of that material. When I meet one of these people in a hotel, I act like birds which see a ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... have been so busy, I have found time to read a good deal.... I have lately read "Wilhelm Tell" by Schiller, and "The Lost Vestal."... Now I am reading "Nathan the Wise" by Lessing and "King ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... nearest human habitation. And then perhaps he remembered the soothing fact for he allowed a gleam to light up his eyes, like the reflection of some inward fire tended in the sanctuary of his heart by a devotion as pure as that of any vestal. ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... with utensils for their religious services, and with the ashes of some of their Aztec princes who had fancied this airy sepulcher. Before each sanctuary stood an altar, with that undying fire upon it, the extinction of which boded as much evil to the empire as that of the Vestal flame would have done in ancient Rome. Here also was the huge cylindrical drum made of serpents' skins, and struck only on extraordinary occasions, when it sent forth a melancholy, weird sound, that might be heard for miles" ...
— The Story of Extinct Civilizations of the West • Robert E. Anderson
... Rome became one vast family, Vesta became the goddess of this public home, and her temple was the fireside of the city, in which burned always the sacred fire, watched by the vestal virgins. In this worship, and its associations, we find the best side of Roman manners,—the love of home, the respect for family life, the hatred of impurity and immodesty. She was also called "the mother," and qualified as Mater Stata, that is, ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... of Alexandria, that fact was patent even to the great son of Lagus; and what would become of our commerce with Cos if I did not purchase the finest bombyx stuffs, since those who sell it make no profits out of you, the queen—and you cover yourself, like a vestal virgin, in garments of tapestry. Give me a wreath for my head—aye and another to that, and new wine in the cup! To the glory of Rome and to your health, Publius Cornelius Scipio, and to our last critical conjecture, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... the little flames grow into big flames, and spreading her hands to the warmth. Her face, arms, throat, and the front of her white dress became golden. She looked more like some lovely vestal of fire-worship than an ambitious American girl, determined to achieve fame in ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris
... fire has, in fact, been in use from the most ancient times, and in all parts of the world. It was, as Lafitau remarks, the very method which was prescribed for rekindling the vestal fire at Rome, when it was accidentally extinguished. This writer describes it as in use also among several tribes of the Indians of South America. Among them, however, it is somewhat more artificially managed than it appears to be among the New Zealanders, inasmuch as their practice is first ...
— John Rutherford, the White Chief • George Lillie Craik
... lay and looked into the room, It wavered, changed, dissolved beneath the sun, Which mingled both the mornings in their eyes, Till the true conquered, and the unreal passed. No walls, but woods bathed in a level sun; No ceiling, but the vestal sky of morn; No bed, but flowers floating 'mid floating leaves On water which grew audible as they stirred And lifted up their heads. And a low wind That flowed from out the west, washed from their eye The last films of the dream. And they sat up, Silent for one long cool delicious breath, ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... their infernal altar, and to swear the same immortal hatred to England which was sworn in the succession of all the short-lived constitutions that preceded it. With them everything else perishes almost as soon as it is formed; this hatred alone is immortal. This is their impure Vestal fire that never is extinguished: and never will it be extinguished, whilst the system of Regicide exists in France. What! are we not to believe them? Men are too apt to be deceitful enough in their ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... was guilty or because he feared an even heavier punishment if he denied it. For Domitian was in a great rage and was boiling over with fury because his witnesses had left him in the lurch. His mind was set upon burying alive Cornelia, the chief of the Vestal Virgins, as he thought to make his age memorable by such an example of severity, and, using his authority as Chief Pontiff, or rather exercising the cruelty of a tyrant and the wanton caprice of a ruler, ...
— The Letters of the Younger Pliny - Title: The Letters of Pliny the Younger - - Series 1, Volume 1 • Pliny the Younger
... thy other softer magic move Us less thy fam'd Etesia to love; Where such a character thou giv'st, that shame Nor envy dare approach the vestal dame: So at bright prime ideas none repine, They safely ...
— Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, Volume II • Henry Vaughan
... hear in a dream, through the buzz of the crowd, The Duke's blithe associates, babbling aloud Some comment upon his gay humor that day? He never was gayer: what makes him so gay? 'Tis, no doubt, say the flatterers, flattering in tune, Some vestal whose virtue no tongue dare impugn Has at last found a Mars—who, of course, shall be nameless, That vestal that yields to Mars ONLY is blameless! Hark! hears he a name which, thus syllabled, stirs All his heart into tumult?... Lucile de Nevers With the Duke's coupled gayly, ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... unwilling, to their accustomed passions. Consider the timorous, they are afraid even of those things that preserve them. Consider the pettish, they are angry with their best and dearest friends. Consider the amorous and lascivious, in the height of their fury they dare violate a Vestal. For custom is very powerful to draw the temper of the body to anything that is suitable to it; and he that is apt to fall will stumble at everything that lies in his way. So it is no wonder that those that have raised ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... galante by Pater. We next note 659, a fine portrait group by Nattier: Mlle. de Lambec as Minerva, arming her brother the young Count of Brienne. To the same skilful portraitist are due: 660, a Knight of Malta; and 661, A Daughter of Louis XV. as a Vestal Virgin. By Boucher are: 48, R. of entrance, The Painter in his Studio, and R. wall, 47, The Three Graces; 46 and 49, L. wall, Venus and Vulcan, and Vulcan's Forge. Fragonnard is represented by some of his characteristic works executed with wonderful sleight of hand, 292-301. ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... o' the world, and beats all wing of rhyme, And knows not; 'twixt the sun and moon Her inexpressible front enstarred Tempers the wrangling spheres to tune; Their divergent harmonies Concluded in the concord of her eyes, And vestal dances of her glad regard. I see, which fretteth with surmise Much heads grown unsagacious-grey, The slow aim of wise-hearted Time, Which folded cycles within cycles cloak: We pass, we pass, we pass; this does not pass away, But holds the furrowing ...
— New Poems • Francis Thompson
... on me when Nettie and I stood there watching this cute little banjo. So I says to myself, 'Here, my morbid vestal, is where I put you sane; here's where I hurl an asphyxiating bomb into the trenches of the New Dawn.' Out loud I only says, 'Let's go in and see if Wilbur has got some ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... the men I had known, but a creature apart and in a class apart, I stood day after day gaping at that very door, and wondering how I could open it, how penetrate even to the courtyard of that vestal citadel. So long as my old-fashioned belief that good women were more than human and bad women less than human had influenced me only to a sharper lookout in dealing with the one species of woman I then came in contact with, no harm to me resulted, but on the contrary good—whoever got into ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... therefore, be conceived that I mean to degrade or vilify the literary character, when I would only separate the Author from those polluters of the press who have turned a vestal into a prostitute; a grotesque race of famished buffoons or laughing assassins; or that populace of unhappy beings, who are driven to perish in their garrets, unknown and unregarded by all, for illusions which even ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... and buy, and sell; and this [Greek: demos] they walled about for its safety, and called [Greek: ten polin] the city: and this I take to have been the original of Villages, Market-Towns, Cities, common Councils, Vestal Temples, Feasts and Fairs, in Europe: the Prytaneum, [Greek: pyros tameion], was a Court with a place of worship, and a perpetual fire kept therein upon an Altar for sacrificing: from the word [Greek: Hestia] fire, came the name Vesta, which at length the people turned into ...
— The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended • Isaac Newton
... Aristophanes were unworthy of presentation in a country tavern! One is tempted to believe that the father was a man of robuster judgment in such matters than the son, whose own rather mediocre literary equipment, made him the easy prey of that acidulous vestal of literature, Voltaire. However that may be, he left a useful and unexpected legacy to his son, provided, indeed, the sinews for the making ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... forgot my turbulent and worser self and felt the nobler regenerated by the innocent companionship you gave me. I wanted you, but it was not the touch of hands or lips, the soft encounter of eyes, the tones of tenderness, I wanted most. It was that something beyond my reach, vital and vestal, invisible, yet irresistible; that something, be it heart, soul, or mind, which drew me to you by an attraction genial and genuine as itself. My Sylvia, that was love, and when it came to me I took it in, sure that whether its fruition was granted or denied I should be a manlier man for having ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... Vestal, From the smooth Intruder free; Cage thine heart in bars of chrystal, Lock it with a golden key; Thro' the bars demurely stealing— Noiseless footstep, accent dumb, His approach to none revealing— Watch, or watch not, LOVE WILL COME. His approach ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... thousand times than the leprosy which our forefathers brought from the East. Could they have done this, if they had not been actuated by some strong, some vehement, some perennial passion, which, burning like the Vestal fire, chaste and eternal, never suffers generous sympathy to grow cold in maintaining the rights of the injured or in denouncing ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... single community—still possessed its third of the common domain, and had its proportional representation in the burgess-force and in the council of the elders. In ritual also, the number divisible by three of the members of almost all the oldest colleges—of the Vestal Virgins, the Salii, the Arval Brethren, the Luperci, the Augurs— probably had reference to that three-fold partition. These three elements into which the primitive body of burgesses in Rome was divided have had theories of the most extravagant absurdity engrafted ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... hers of younger, fairer birth. Though oft her fruitful beauty glides between And robs me of his countenance, I will Ne'er hate her, but yield up my borrowed sheen To make her hallowed nights more hallowed still. Burn then, my pale and vestal flame, make fair The nuptials of the amorous Earth with night! My sickle reaps the lurking stars in air, My argent shield hangs lucent on the height. Yet he that chafes and wounds the Earthen shores, And flees though she embrace—the yearning Sea,— Is shackled ...
— The Masque of the Elements • Herman Scheffauer
... conceived a dance series of her own. One was to be "The Terror"—a nymph dancing in the spring woods, but eventually pursued and terrorized by a faun; another, "The Peacock," a fantasy illustrative of proud self-adulation; another, "The Vestal," a study from Roman choric worship. After spending considerable time at Pocono evolving costumes, poses, and the like, Berenice finally hinted at the plan to Mrs. Batjer, declaring that she would enjoy the artistic outlet it would afford, and indicating ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... the rude sea grew civil at her song, And certain stars shot madly from their spheres, To hear the sea maid's music. That very time I saw, but thou could'st not, Flying between the cold moon and the earth, Cupid all arm'd; a certain aim he took At a fair vestal throned by the West, And loosed his love-shaft smartly from his bow. As it should pierce a hundred thousand hearts; But I might see young Cupid's fiery shaft Quench'd in the chaste beams of the watery moon, And the imperial votaress passed ...
— Shakespeare's Christmas Gift to Queen Bess • Anna Benneson McMahan
... sort, And on my foes work iust and sharpe reuenge. Ile lead my freend Horatio through those feeldes Where neuer-dying warres are still inurde; Ile lead faire Isabella to that traine Where pittie weepes but neuer feeleth paine; Ile lead my Bel-imperia to those ioyes That vestal virgins and faire queenes possess; Ile lead Hieronimo where Orpheus plaies, Adding sweet pleasure to eternall daies. But say, Reuenge,—for thou must helpe or none,— Against the rest how shall my hate ...
— The Spanish Tragedie • Thomas Kyd
... various fermentations thereafter till I came to "good, sweet, wholesome bread,"—the staff of life. Leaven, which some deemed the soul of bread, the spiritus which fills its cellular tissues, which is religiously preserved like the vestal fire,—some precious bottleful, I suppose, brought over in the Mayflower, did the business for America, and its influence is still rising, swelling, spreading in cerulean billows over the land,—this seed I regularly and faithfully procured ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg
... Delphian mountain and the Delian shore, And lone and still the Lybian Ammon stands, His utterance stifled by the desert sands. No more in Cnydian bower, or Cyprian grove The golden censers flame with gifts to Love; The pale-eyed Vestal bends no more and prays Where the eternal fire sends up its blaze; Cybele hears no more the cymbal's sound, The Lares shiver the fireless hearthstone round; And shatter'd shrine and altar lie o'erthrown, Inscriptionless, save where Oblivion lone Has dimly traced his name upon the mouldering ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... equal; the fear that love will rob her of her freedom and independence; the horror that love or the joy of motherhood will only hinder her in the full exercise of her profession—all these together make of the emancipated modern woman a compulsory vestal, before whom life, with its great clarifying sorrows and its deep, entrancing joys, rolls on without touching or ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... instance as we require of the lowest supposable phase of immodest or licentious art in music; the "inner consciousness of good" being dim, even in the musician and his audience, and wholly unsympathized with, and unacknowledged by the Delphian, Vestal, and all other prophetic and cosmic powers. This represented scene came into my mind suddenly one evening, a few weeks ago, in contrast with another which I was watching in its reality; namely, a group of gentle school-girls, leaning over Mr. Charles Halle, as ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... when Catholic Ireland seemed to be crushed, and Ireland lay supine beneath the double weight of the penal laws and the commercial restrictions of England—an Ireland pictured for all time by the keen, merciless pen of Dean Swift—still the vestal flame was not quite extinguished. Captured by ascendancy, dominated by fanaticism, narrowed to one faith, or even to one section of that faith, the Irish Parliament still always provided a framework and machinery for a possible moment of ...
— Home Rule - Second Edition • Harold Spender
... famine, pestilence, or drought was followed by a searching investigation of the sacred rites, to ascertain what irregularity or neglect had caused the divine anger, and two instances are recorded in which vestal virgins were put to death because their unchastity was believed to have provoked a national calamity."[517] In the Roman law is found a proposition which was often quoted in the Middle Ages: "That which is done against divine religion ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... always kept liberalism alive in Rome. Appius had already displayed some of the restless individuality of his ancestors. When the senate had refused him a triumph after a war with the Salassi, he had celebrated the pageant at his own expense, while his daughter, a vestal, walked beside the car to keep at bay the importunate tribune who attempted to drag him off.[314] A similar unconventionality was manifested in the present betrothal. The story runs that Appius broached the ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... beautiful open fireplace, but which was now walled up with broken bricks, and surmounted by a mantel of Italian marble sculptured with the story of Prometheus's boon to mankind, and supported on either end by caryatides in the shape of vestal virgins bearing flaming brands in their hands. Overhead the ceiling showed great patches of bare lath, where the plaster had fallen away, and the uncarpeted floor was strewn with bread-crumbs and marked by a trail of coal-siftings from the stove to a closet-door from which the fire ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... the avenue Selah Adams sat upon the front veranda, looking like the vestal virgin ...
— The Co-Citizens • Corra Harris
... at Hong Kong, where we found the Castor, Vixen, and Espiegle. The next day the Agincourt, Daedalus, Vestal, and Wolverine, arrived from Borneo, having been engaged with the pirates of Maludu Bay. The squadron had suffered a loss of one officer and eighteen men killed, and about double the number wounded. This heavy loss was occasioned by their having to cut through a large boom which the pirates ...
— Borneo and the Indian Archipelago - with drawings of costume and scenery • Frank S. Marryat
... Vestales or Vestal Virgins, played a conspicuous part in these festivals. They were six in number, and were chosen—between the ages of six and ten—from the noblest families in Rome. Their term of office was thirty years. During the first ten years, they were initiated ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... brought you back into this realm, my hero, my troubadour?" inquired Mr. Kecskerey. "Some love-adventure, some notable affair, I'll be bound. I'll dare to guess that you have abducted some Hindu vestal from Budhur?" ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... destroyed the kingdom of the demons, and delivered us from their tyranny, for us possibly to think rationally that they still possess that power over us which they had formerly, so far as to work wonderful things which appeared miraculous; such as they relate of the vestal virgin, who, to prove her virginity, carried water in a sieve; and of her who by means of her sash alone, towed up the Tiber a boat, which had been so completely stranded that no human power could ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... the vestal fire begun, Which might be borrowed from no earthly flame, Devised a vessel to receive the sun, Being stedfastly opposed to the same; Where with sweet wood laid curiously by art, On which the sun might by reflection beat, Receiving strength for every secret part, The fuel kindled ...
— Elizabethan Sonnet Cycles - Idea, by Michael Drayton; Fidessa, by Bartholomew Griffin; Chloris, by William Smith • Michael Drayton, Bartholomew Griffin, and William Smith
... a man of simple mind, Gamaliel Nibbs by name, Whose early faith in human kind Burned like a Vestal flame; No wind of doubt that stirs the dust Fluttered that bright and constant taper; But oh, he had his dearest trust Pinned to his ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 11, 1914 • Various
... to those gifts to Caesar they allowed the vestal virgins to employ one lictor each, because one of them had been insulted, owing to not being recognized, while returning home from dinner toward evening. The offices in the City they assigned for a greater number of years in advance, thus at the same time giving ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol. III • Cassius Dio
... field. Henry IV., who loved his jests whether at his own expense or that of friend or foe, was wont to observe that there were three things which nobody would ever believe, and which yet were very true; that Queen Elizabeth deserved her title of the, throned vestal, that he was himself a good Catholic, and that Cardinal Albert was a good general. It is probable that the assertions were ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... occurred. The soldiers whom Claudius had sent forward, were making arrests in the streets, and searching the houses. In the midst of this excitement, Messalina, with her children, attended by one of the vestal virgins, named Vibidia, whom she had prevailed upon to accompany her and plead her cause, came forth from her palace on foot, and proceeded through the streets, her hair disheveled, her dress in disorder, and her whole appearance marked by ...
— Nero - Makers of History Series • Jacob Abbott
... well-informed school-girl already knows much more of it than she will find in this "Tale of the Jewish Dispersion." "Adonijah" is simply the feeblest kind of love story, supposed to be instructive, we presume, because the hero is a Jewish captive and the heroine a Roman vestal; because they and their friends are converted to Christianity after the shortest and easiest method approved by the "Society for Promoting the Conversion of the Jews;" and because, instead of being ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... as flagons of cod-liver oil to me. Who conspicuously walks the Rialto now, and what does he or she wear? Are the trees still green in Madison Square, or have they grown brown and dusty? Does the chaste Diana on the Garden Theatre still keep her vestal vows through all the exasperating changes of weather? Who has your brother's old studio now, and what misguided aspirants practice their scales in the rookeries about Carnegie Hall? What do people go to see at the theaters, and what do they eat and drink there in the world nowadays? ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... permit us to look a little deeper into its heart, we will attempt to celebrate that unpublished and vestal wisdom written there. Age does us only indirect justice,—by the value it gives to memory. It slights and forgets its own present. This day with its trivialities dwindles and vanishes before the teeming hours wherein it learned and felt and suffered;—so the circles, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... evil. Nature must needs be lavish with the mother and creator of men, and centre in her all the possibilities of life. And a few critical years can decide whether her life is to be full of sweetness and light, whether she is to be the vestal of a holy temple, or whether she will be the fallen priestess of a desecrated shrine. There are women, it is true, who seem to be capable neither of rising much nor of falling much, and whom a conventional life saves from any ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... porter's wife with her dubious mob-cap, and the hard, flaunting grisette with her melancholy feathers and determined chapeau, are equally removed from the white cap of the "young person." To maintain it in its vestal candor and proud sincerity is not always an easy task in a land where every careless student and idle nobleman is eager to tumble it with his fingers or to pin among its frills the blossom named love-in-idleness: Mimi Pinson has to wear her cap very close to her ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... content; Till a tall maiden by her sire was seen, In all the bloom and beauty of sixteen; He gazed admiring;—she, with visage prim, Glanced an arch look of gravity on him; For she was gay at heart, but wore disguise, And stood a vestal in her father's eyes: Pure, pensive, simple, sad; the damsel's heart, When Jonas praised, reproved her for the part. For Sybil, fond of pleasure, gay and light, Had still a secret bias to the right; Vain as she was—and flattery made ...
— Tales • George Crabbe
... when the pale figure in light blue livery announced Counsellor Daly and dinner, for both came fortunately together. Taking the post of honour, Miss Riley's arm, I followed Tom, who I soon perceived ruled the whole concern, as he led the way with another ancient vestal in black stain and bugles. The long procession wound its snake-like length down the narrow stair, and into the dining-room, where at last we all got seated; and here let me briefly vindicate the motives of my friend—should any unkind person be found to impute to his selection of a residence, any ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 2 • Charles James Lever
... been the counter or "bar" of the saloon, gorgeous in white and gold, now sawn in two and divided, was set up on opposite sides of the room as separate dressing-tables, decorated with huge bunches of azaleas, that hid the rough earthenware bowls, and gave each table the appearance of a vestal altar. ...
— Devil's Ford • Bret Harte
... Spirit, it must needs be perfect, clearly indicating its origin by an exemption from all that besets ordinary human feelings, that it must be a strong, uniform, never flickering, never darkening, and perpetual light, a kind of vestal fire burning always on the altar of the heart! The passage before us, and all others that speak about the matter, give us the directly opposite notion. The Divine Spirit, when it enters into the narrow room of the human spirit, condescends to submit itself, not wholly, but to ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... Rome is indeed far more poetical than anything else in Latin literature. The loves of the Vestal and the God of War, the cradle laid among the reeds of Tiber, the fig-tree, the she-wolf, the shepherd's cabin, the recognition, the fratricide, the rape of the Sabines, the death of Tarpeia, the fall of Hostus Hostilius, the struggle of Mettus Curtius through the marsh, the women ...
— Lays of Ancient Rome • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... elephant-huntresses, have a heavy carbine, a short-bladed dagger, and two antelope horns fixed to their heads by a band of iron. The artillery-women have a blue-and-red tunic, and, as weapons, blunderbusses and old cast cannons; and another brigade, consisting of vestal virgins, pure as Diana, have blue tunics and white trousers. If we add to these Amazons, five or six thousand men in cotton drawers and shirts, with a knotted tuft to increase their stature, we shall have passed in ...
— Rubur the Conqueror • Jules Verne
... be. I want to be a great and shining lady in your life. I can't always live as I do now, dependent on my mother, whirled about by her movements, living in her light. Why should I be just a hard-up Vestal Virgin, Stephen, in your honor? You will not be able to marry me for years and years and years—unless you neglect your work, unless you throw away everything that is worth having between us in order just ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... these Vestals. They are in a large measure the ancient prototype of the modern nun, and their house is the prototype of the convent. Six nobly-born young women, sworn to chastity, and dressed in a ritual garb, live in an edifice of much magnificence under the rule of one who is the chief Vestal, a sort of Mother Superior. Many pedestals of the statues of such chief priestesses still remain, and we can clearly trace the arrangement of their abode, with its open court—once containing a garden and cool cisterns of pure water—its separate room for each Vestal, its baths, and ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... despise The holiest chain of human ties For him, the dear One in thine eyes, Broke it no more. Thy heart was withered to it's Core, It's hopes, it's fears, it's feelings o'er: Thy Blood grew Ice when his was shed, And Thou the Vestal of ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... personal attentions, on the sick and the poor, she will find all she has done of good at home an invaluable prompter and aid. For the sake, therefore, of others, as a social and responsible being, let the flame she would support on the public altar be kindled from the vestal fire of ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey
... value of our guiltless ore Makes no man atheist, and no woman whore; Yet why should hallow'd vestal's sacred shrine Deserve more honour than a flaming mine? These pregnant wombs of heat would fitter be, Than a few embers, for a deity. Had he our pits, the Persian would admire No sun, but warm 's devotion at our fire: He'd leave the trotting whipster, and prefer ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... wicked as you imagine, continued the gentleman; for I assure you they were all vestal virgins for anything which I knew to the contrary. The reputation of intriguing with them was all I sought, and was what I arrived at: and perhaps I only flattered myself even in that; for very probably the persons to whom I showed their billets knew as well as I that they were counterfeits, ...
— Joseph Andrews, Vol. 2 • Henry Fielding
... nation she might have been a distinguished dame de salon. As it was, she was sufficiently harassed and overworked in her double office of decorous, authoritative chaperon and qualified guide, philosopher, and friend to the girls under her charge. These might be vestal virgins or nymphs of Minerva, but they were also girls, so long as the world lasted—the most of them half curious, half friendly where May was concerned. This was true even of the wonderful young American who came and stayed with no other object ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... come not now to print the lea, In freak and dance around the tree, Or at the mushroom board to sup And drink the dew from the buttercup. A scene of sorrow waits them now, For an Ouphe has broken his vestal vow He has loved an earthly maid, And left for her his woodland shade; He has lain upon her lip of dew, And sunned him in her eye of blue, Fanned her cheek with his wing of air, Played in the ringlets ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... Don't worry about the vestal virgin. He won't have time in this game to bother with poor relations, no matter how pretty they may happen ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... imaginations. Error has never yet made a complete and universal conquest. In the darkest ages and most benighted regions, it has been found impossible utterly to extinguish the light of reason. There always have been some in whose souls the torch of truth has been kept burning with vestal watchfulness: we can discern its glimmer here and there through the deepest night that has yet settled upon the earth. In the midst of the most extravagant superstition, there have been individuals who have disowned the popular belief, and considered it a mark of wisdom and true philosophy ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... Heaven the sacred fire And swept to earth with it o'er land and sea. He lit the vestal flames of poesy, Content, for this, ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... the Christian aera, when we read the story of Caius Silanus, the Proconsul of Asia, who, accused of malversation and peculation, is first banished to the island of Gyarus, but when the Prince pleads for him, and he is backed by the intercession of a Vestal Virgin of sanctity,—corresponding to a Christian nun or abbess of exemplary piety,—Silanus is removed to the more bearable place of exile, the island of Cythaera ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... illustrious prefect of the city has in a memorial set forth three propositions which he considers of force—that Rome, he says, asks for her rites again, that pay be given to her priests and vestal virgins, and that a general famine followed upon the refusal ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... and earnestly at the building. Then the moonlight vanished ghostlike from one of the windows, a material glow took its place, and a girlish figure, holding a candle, drew the white curtains together. To Culpepper it was a vestal virgin standing before a hallowed shrine; to the prosaic observer I fear it was only a fair-haired young woman, whose wicked black eyes still shone with unfilial warmth. Howbeit, when the figure had disappeared he stepped out briskly into the moonlight of the high-road. Here he ...
— Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... decorated the foyer of the Grand Opera in Paris; is best known as the author of the "Punishment of a Vestal Virgin" and the ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... jumble of those blind men who look straight before them and the mutes who cough, I only see the nurse, because of her whiteness. She goes from one shadow to another, and stoops over the motionless. She is the vestal virgin who, so far as she can, ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... for we can never know the life that was in them. We know that here and there was a temple to Venus or there an altar to Vesta; but who knows or pretends to know what he really felt about Venus or Vesta? Was a Vestal Virgin like a Christian Virgin, or something profoundly different? Was he quite serious about Venus, like a diabolist, or merely frivolous about Venus, like a Christian? If the spirit was different from ours ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... the whisky bills, and the record of a "jamboree" at Tooley's, the vague expenses whereof footed up $275, were received with enthusiastic cheers by the audience. A single milliner's bill for $125 was hailed with delight; $100 expended in treating the Vestal Virgin Combination Troupe almost canonized his memory; $50 for a simple buggy ride with Deacon Fisk brought down the house; $500 advanced, without security, and unpaid, for the electioneering expenses of Assemblyman Jones, who ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... have the happiness of being able to send you an account of the capture of Seringapatam. The news is brought by a letter from a Dr. Abercromby, who was sent with Lord Cornwallis's despatches, in the 'Vestal.' He put this letter on board another vessel in the Channel, and it comes by express ...
— Memoirs of the Court and Cabinets of George the Third, Volume 2 (of 2) - From the Original Family Documents • The Duke of Buckingham
... dreams should vex thee, I did bring That worshipped wafer by the Vestal given; Then, with loose robes and linen stole, did sing Nine prayers to ...
— The Elegies of Tibullus • Tibullus
... waistcoat that extended its immense flaps to his knees; his brown locks, also, hung down behind, in a mode unknown to our times. By his side was a sweet young damsel, her fair features sheltered by a prim little bonnet, within which appeared the vestal muslin of a cap; her close, long-waisted gown, and indeed her whole attire, might have been worn by some rustic beauty who had faded half a century before. But that there was something too warm and life-like in them, I would here ...
— The Snow Image • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... steady, and are less liable to be led astray by their own sagacity and the overweening petulance of hard-earned and late-acquired wisdom. They do not fall in love with every meretricious extravagance at first sight, or mistake an old battered hypothesis for a vestal, because they are new to the ways of this old world. They do not seize upon it as a prize, but are safe from gross imposition by being as wise and no wiser than ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... stringency of the obligation will be felt an increasing sense of our failure to fulfil it. Character is built up, for good or for evil, by slow degrees. Conscience is quickened by being listened to, and stifled by being neglected. A little speck of mud on a vestal virgin's robe, or on a swan's plumage, will be conspicuous, while a splash twenty times the size will pass unnoticed on the rags of some travel-stained wayfarer. The purer we become, the more we shall know ourselves ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... each year grew still more ambitious to get quite to the top of the cabin, and peep down into the mysterious crater of a chimney that forever smoked in a mournful and monotonous sort of way, as if watchers were there—Vestal virgins, who dared not let their fires ...
— Shadows of Shasta • Joaquin Miller
... some get born with. I know a girl carried hers around in a little wooden box for luck. Well, you got that white-veil kind of look that would blacklist you for the Vestal Virgin Sextet. I can pick 'em every time. You look to me like—say, I got a little mud puddle of my own to play in without wetting my feet ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... village and went by them to sea gay with the bunting of a first voyage, with a fair wind, and on a fine morning; and when such a ship came back long after as an old plank bearded with sea moss, to the dunes under which it stranded the day was still the same, vestal and innocent; for they were on a voyage of greater length and import. They had buried many ships; but, as time moved to them, all ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... glory Revived in Latium's later story, When, by her auspices, her son Laurentia's royal damsel won. She vestal Rhea's spotless charms Surrender'd to the War-god's arms; She for Romulus that day The Sabine daughters bore away; Thence sprung the Rhamnes' lofty name, Thence the old Quirites came; And thence the stock of high renown, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... many changes for the better in the lives of these people. Her very presence in a room was an inspiration for cleanliness. Her clothes were no better than theirs but she stood out among them like a vestal virgin. She came into their quarters and made the women ashamed that the rooms were not better fitted to receive so pure a being. You would scarcely have recognized Michele's rooms at the end of the first ...
— One Way Out - A Middle-class New-Englander Emigrates to America • William Carleton
... Augustus. In the gymnastic exercises, which he presented in the Septa, while they were preparing the great sacrifice of an ox, he shaved his beard for the first time, and putting it up in a casket of gold studded with pearls of great price, consecrated it to Jupiter Capitolinus. He invited the Vestal Virgins to see the wrestlers perform, because, at Olympia, the priestesses of Ceres are allowed the privilege of witnessing ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume II (of X) - Rome • Various
... my wife to fall, a life which we call the honest life of the family. Think what a perversion of ideas must arise when the happiest situation of man, liberty, chastity, is looked upon as something wretched and ridiculous. The highest ideal, the best situation of woman, to be pure, to be a vestal, a virgin, excites fear and laughter in our society. How many, how many young girls sacrifice their purity to this Moloch of opinion by marrying rascals that they may not remain virgins,—that is, superiors! Through ...
— The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... dire monument of thy black roome, Wher now that vestal flame thou dost intombe, As in the inmost cell of all ...
— Lucasta • Richard Lovelace
... in giving greater zest to scandal. It was a favourite recreation of the youth of quality to disfigure or mutilate the images of the gods in the streets by night.(15) Ordinary love affairs had for long been common, and intrigues with married women began to become so; but an amour with a Vestal virgin was as piquant as the intrigues with nuns and the cloister-adventures in the world of the Decamerone. The scandalous affair of 640 seq. is well known, in which three Vestals, daughters of the noblest families, and ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... and an occasional exhibition of the services of worship. There are women—tell us not of her of Ephesus!—that have embalmed you, and have quitted the world to keep the tapers alight, and a stranger comes, and they, who have your image before them, will suddenly blow out the vestal flames and treat you as dust to fatten the garden of their bosoms for a fresh flower of love. Sir Willoughby knew it; he had experience of it in the form of the stranger; and he knew the stranger's feelings toward his ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... busy daughter in her cooking and cleaning; from all alike we hear of an active, genial, warm-hearted girl, full of humour and feeling to those she knew, though shy and cold in her bearing to strangers. A different being to the fierce impassioned Vestal who has seated herself in Emily's ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... They're all alike in these stages. (Aloud.) No, my Vestal. We're going along the quietest road ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... he till his work stood perfected, A woman beautiful with youth and grace, But like a Vestal singled from her sex To show the beauty of pure innocence. Her form was such as rapt Endymion Saw on the heights of Latmos when he slept And dreamed Heaven down to him. A glorious shape That to the brightness of ethereal charms Join'd the ...
— Eidolon - The Course of a Soul and Other Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... caution against the inconsiderate use of final causes in science, and an illustration of some of the manifold errors and absurdities which their hasty assumption is apt to involve—considerations probably equivalent to those which induced Lord Bacon to liken final causes to "vestal virgins." So, if any one, it is here Bacon that "sitteth in the seat of the scornful." As to Darwin, in the section from which the extracts were made, he is considering a subsidiary question, and trying to obviate a particular difficulty, ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... coach to herself. Jack Hamlin, a gambler, having once silently ridden with her in the same coach, afterward threw a decanter at the head of a confederate for mentioning her name in a barroom. The over-dressed mother of a pupil whose paternity was doubtful had often lingered near this astute Vestal's temple, never daring to enter its sacred precincts, but content to worship ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various
... rose our Tuscan poet saw, With saints for petals. When this rose was perfect Its hundred thousand petals were not saints, But senators in their Thessalian caps, And all the roaring populace of Rome; And even an Empress and the Vestal Virgins, Who came to see the gladiators die, Could not give sweetness to a rose like this. The sand beneath our feet is saturate With blood of martyrs; and these rifted stones Are awful witnesses against a people Whose pleasure was ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... dejection worn On the dropt eye, and lip no smile illumes; Not all this pomp of sorrow, that presumes It pays Affection's debt, is due concern To the FOR EVER ABSENT, tho' it mourn Fashion's allotted time. If Time consumes, While Life is ours, the precious vestal-flame Memory shou'd hourly feed;—if, thro' each day, She with whate'er we see, hear, think, or say, Blend not the image of the vanish'd Frame, O! can the alien Heart expect to prove, In worlds of light and life, a ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... marked—but thou could'st not— Flying between the cold moon and the earth, Cupid all armed. A certain aim he took At a fair vestal throned by the west, And loosed his love-shaft smartly from his bow As he would pierce a hundred thousand hearts. But I might see young Cupid's fiery dart Quenched in the chaste beams of the watery moon, And the imperial votaress passed on In ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... then perhaps he remembered the soothing fact for he allowed a gleam to light up his eyes, like the reflection of some inward fire tended in the sanctuary of his heart by a devotion as pure as that of any vestal. ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... his cheek was a trace of tears; Over all his face a shade of pain That deepened and vanished, and came again. Fixed he his woeful eyes on me— Through my very soul they seemed to see. And lightly he laid his hand on mine— His hand was cold as the vestal shrine. "'Tis haunted," he said, "haunted, and he Who dares at night-noon go with me To this cursed place, by phantoms trod, Must fear not devil, man, nor God." "Tell me the story," I cried, "tell me!" And frightened was I at my bravery. A curious smile his thin lips curved, ...
— Debris - Selections from Poems • Madge Morris
... how to tie her lower limbs together with a belt so that, whatever the agonies of death might be, her corpse be found in utmost modesty with the limbs properly composed. Is not a caution like this worthy of the Christian Perpetua or the Vestal Cornelia? I would not put such an abrupt interrogation, were it not for a misconception, based on our bathing customs and other trifles, that chastity is unknown among us.[25] On the contrary, chastity was a pre-eminent virtue of the samurai woman, held ...
— Bushido, the Soul of Japan • Inazo Nitobe
... carved marble columns supported the roofs and the rarest statues stood in niches. The bathing capacity was the largest ever planned. To sit there alone and people it, as when it was at its best, with all the glory of the emperor, the court ladies, the vestal virgins, senators, warriors, artists, men of letters and the rest, is a treat to the imagination that cannot be ...
— A Fantasy of Mediterranean Travel • S. G. Bayne
... perceive I am not much flattered with the imputation. There must be new personages at least, before I write on any side. Mr. Pitt and the Duke of Newcastle! I should as soon think of informing the world that Miss Chudleigh is no vestal. You will like better to see some words which Mr. Gray has writ, at Miss Speed's request, to an old air of Geminiani: the thought is ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... the abbess. They had been accustomed to look up to her as all-powerful, and they now implored her protection. The mother abbess looked with a rueful eye upon the treasures of beauty and vestal virtue exposed to such imminent peril. Alas! how was she to protect them from the spoiler! She had, it is true, experienced many signal inter-positions of providence in her individual favor. Her early days had been passed amid the temptations of a ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... in the hands of a friend, or in a temple with the keeper of it. Thus Julius Caesar is said to have intrusted his testament to the oldest of the vestal virgins. ...
— Roman Antiquities, and Ancient Mythology - For Classical Schools (2nd ed) • Charles K. Dillaway
... once prayed to him!") and she always wore a scarab ring. She had bought both in an antique-shop just off Washington Street. I thought this rather a far cry from Thebes, myself, but The Author insisted that if a Theban vestal of the time of Sesostris had to reincarnate, she would naturally and inevitably come to ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... thy solemn Feast to hold In vestal February; Not rather choosing out some rosy day From the rich coronet of the coming May, When all things meet to marry! O, quick, praevernal Power That signall'st punctual through the sleepy mould The Snowdrop's time to flower, Fair as the rash oath of virginity Which is first-love's ...
— The Unknown Eros • Coventry Patmore
... every other respect, too, the pomp and circumstance of the funeral was past description. In awe of the veterans all the priests of all the sacred fraternities were there in full robes, with the Vestal Virgins, and all the senators, and all the magistrates, each in his garb of office. Next, in array that contrasted with theirs, came the knights of Rome in column; then all the men whom Sulla had commanded in his wars, and who had vied with each other in hastening there, ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley
... the remonstrances of her subjects, where marriage was spoken of, there was something in the very unapproachableness of her state which both commanded the respect and excited the imagination of her people. As a woman, they regarded her just as she wished them to regard her, as the throned Vestal, the watery Moon, whose chaste beams could quench the fiery darts of Cupid. She was to them, in fact, the Belphoebe of Spenser, "with womanly graces, but not womanly affections—passionless, pure, self-sustained, and self-dependent"; ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... the first time in fiction, a correct and adequate account of the Vestal Virgins, their powers and privileges, as well as of many strange ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... the sail of the Trojan for Latium bound; Her favour that won her Aeneas a bride on Laurentian ground, And anon from the cloister inveigled the Virgin, the Vestal, to Mars; 70 As her wit by the wild Sabine rape recreated her Rome for its wars, With the Ramnes, Quirites, together ancestrally proud as they drew From Romulus down to our Caesar—last, best of that bone, of that thew. Now learn ye to love who loved never—now ye who have ...
— The Vigil of Venus and Other Poems by "Q" • Q
... smiles; but if she chance to chide, Ill luck 'twill bode to th' bridegroom and the bride. Tell me, Anthea, dost thou fondly dread The loss of that we call a maidenhead? Come, I'll instruct thee. Know, the vestal fire Is not by marriage quench'd, but ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... oh when the cloud of some darkening hour O'ershadows the soul with its gloom, Then where is the light of the vestal pow'r, The lamp of pale Hope to illume? Oh! the light ever lies In those bright fond eyes, Where Heaven has impressed its own blue As a seal from the skies As my heart relies On that gift of ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... great patience. There were certainly parts of her recital sufficiently cruel and mortifying; for the intention, at least, of the infidelity was so obvious, that she had not even taken the trouble to disguise it. She could never have imagined that G—— M—— meant to venerate her as a vestal. She must therefore clearly have made up her mind to pass at least one night with him. What an avowal for a lover's ears! However, I considered myself as partly the cause of her guilt, by having been the first to let her know G—— M——'s sentiments towards her, and by the silly ...
— Manon Lescaut • Abbe Prevost
... Ah! those words forbear to sing, Which on zephyr's wanton wing Thou shouldst waft not on the air. All is wrong, how sweet it be, That the vestal's thoughts reprove: What is jealousy? what is love? That they should be sung by thee? Think this wood is consecrated To Diana's service solely, Not to Venus: it is holy. Why then wouldst thou desecrate it With thy songs? Does 't not ...
— The Two Lovers of Heaven: Chrysanthus and Daria - A Drama of Early Christian Rome • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... risen dead come to judgment? What voice was in the fountain of Vaucluse? Under what nodding oxlip did Shakespeare find Titania asleep? When did the Mother of Love come down, chaster in her unclothed loveliness than vestal in her veil, and with such vision of her make obscure ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... saw (but thou couldst not), Flying between the cold moon and the earth, Cupid, allarm'd: a certain aim he took At a fair vestal, throned by the west; And loos'd his love-shaft smartly from his bow, As it should pierce a hundred thousand hearts: But I might see young Cupid's fiery shaft Quench'd in the chaste beams of the watery moon; And the imperial vot'ress passed on, In ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... had no reason to imagine the lady to have been of the vestal kind when his amour began; yet, as he was thoroughly ignorant of the town, and had very little acquaintance in it, he had no knowledge of that character which is vulgarly called a demirep; that ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... the dear ones gathered nightly round the shining household hearth, What to them is brighter, better than the choicest things of earth? Ask that dearer one, whose loving, like a ceaseless vestal flame, Sets my very soul a-glowing at the mention of her name; Ask her why the loved, in dying, feels her spirit linked with his In a union death but strengthens? she will ...
— Incidents of the War: Humorous, Pathetic, and Descriptive • Alf Burnett
... considerable importance. It fought with Rome in the time of Tarquinus Priscus and Servius Tullius, and subsequently became the refuge of the expelled Tarquins. After the invasion of the Gauls in 390 B.C., the vestal virgins and the sacred objects in their custody were conveyed to Caere for safety, and from this fact some ancient authorities derive the word caerimonia, ceremony. A treaty was made between Rome and Caere in the same year. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... assert mere sportiveness on his part as his reason in seeking her—something in her quite antipathetic to that side of him which had been occupied with literary study and the magnificent Christminster dream. It had been no vestal who chose THAT missile for opening her attack on him. He saw this with his intellectual eye, just for a short; fleeting while, as by the light of a falling lamp one might momentarily see an inscription on a wall ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... On the white wonder of dear Juliet's hand And steal immortal blessing from her lips, Who, even in pure and vestal modesty, Still blush, as thinking ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... much and more of herself, "I counterfeited honesty, as if I had been virgo virginissima, more than a vestal virgin, I looked like a wife, I was so demure and chaste, I did add such gestures, tunes, speeches, signs and motions upon all occasions, that my spectators and auditors were stupefied, enchanted, fastened all to their places, like so many stocks and stones." Many silly gentlewomen ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... acanthus is the base of Vesta's Temple, adjoining the atrium of the Virgins' house surrounded with their portrait statues: their names are engraved on each pedestal, but one is carefully erased, its original having, it is supposed, violated her vestal vow. We pause upon the spot where Caesar's body was burned, and beside the rostra whence Cicero thundered, and Antony spoke his "Friends, Romans, countrymen"; return finally to the Capitoline Museum, nucleus and centre of the ancient mistress of the world, to gaze ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... of Christ, when they find the stone rolled away and, looking around, see the Saviour's figure before them. The scene is low and cavern-like, with a brilliant light surrounding the tomb. This artist also painted "The Vestal Virgin," "King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid," "Pan and Psyche," "The Golden Stairs," and "Love Among ...
— Pictures Every Child Should Know • Dolores Bacon
... Terentia, whose half-sister was a Vestal, seems to have taken sanctuary with the Vestals, as did the mother and sister of Augustus in B.C. 43. The special indignity of which Cicero complains is that she had been forced to leave the sanctuary and appear at the bank of Valerius, ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... I woo? Because her spirit's vestal grace Provokes me always to pursue, But, spirit-like, eludes embrace; Because her womanhood is such That, as on court-days subjects kiss The Queen's hand, yet so near a touch Affirms no mean familiarness; Nay, rather marks more fair the height Which ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... society school—not to shrink from flirtations that might mean nothing to the man but would be damnation to the girl. Even the name of this big, blue-eyed, fair-skinned young votary of science had much about it that made her fairly bristle, for she had once been described as an "austere vestal" by Lieutenant Blake, of the regiment preceding them at Sandy, the ——th Cavalry—and a mutual friend had told her all about it—another handicap for Blakely. She had grown, it must be admitted, somewhat gaunt and ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... Expedition. His narrative of Bigfoot's Adventures is the rollickiest and the most flavorsome that any American frontiersman has yet inspired. The tiresome thumping on the hero theme present in many biographies of frontiersmen is entirely absent. Stanley Vestal wrote Bigfoot Wallace also, ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... that I had made a great fool of myself, having injured my own prospects and done no good to anyone. I understood perfectly that I had acted in an unpardonable manner; for Her Majesty's Maids of Honour were kept, or were supposed to be kept, in very great seclusion at home, as if they were Vestal virgins—which was indeed a very great supposition. Tale after tale came back to my mind of those Maids in the past—of Mademoiselle de la Garde herself, of Miss Stewart, Miss Hyde, Miss Hamilton, and others ...
— Oddsfish! • Robert Hugh Benson
... the extreme west corner of a great petted rose bush on the Wainwright lawn, reaching through an elaborate iron fence to get it as he went cross-lots back to school. He would call it stealing now to do that same, but then it had been in the nature of a holy rite offered to a vestal virgin. Yet he must have cast it down with the grin of an imp, boorish urchin that he was; and he remembered blushing hotly in the dark afterwards at his presumption, as he thought of it alone at night. And all the time she had been liking it. The little girl—the little sweet girl! She ...
— The Search • Grace Livingston Hill
... variations of the scene galante by Pater. We next note 659, a fine portrait group by Nattier: Mlle. de Lambec as Minerva, arming her brother the young Count of Brienne. To the same skilful portraitist are due: 660, a Knight of Malta; and 661, A Daughter of Louis XV. as a Vestal Virgin. By Boucher are: 48, R. of entrance, The Painter in his Studio, and R. wall, 47, The Three Graces; 46 and 49, L. wall, Venus and Vulcan, and Vulcan's Forge. Fragonnard is represented by some of his characteristic works executed with wonderful sleight of hand, 292-301. The ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... unknown, unloved, or hostile society of the outer world is allowed to cross the threshold, it ceases to be home; it is then only a part of the outer world which you have roofed over and lighted fire in. But so far as it is a sacred place, a vestal temple, a temple of the hearth watched over by household gods, before whose faces none may come but those whom they can receive with love,—so far as it is this, and roof and fire are types only of a nobler shade and light,—shade as of a rock in a weary land, and ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... nor small, Which quantum sufficit the doctors call; Let this estate from parents' care descend: The getting it too much of life does spend. Take such a ground, whose gratitude may be A fair encouragement for industry. Let constant fires the winter's fury tame, And let thy kitchens be a vestal flame. Thee to the town let never suit at law, And rarely, very rarely, business draw. Thy active mind in equal temper keep, In undisturbed peace, yet not in sleep. Let exercise a vigorous health maintain, Without which all the composition's vain. In the same weight prudence and innocence ...
— Cowley's Essays • Abraham Cowley
... 'Thou makest the vestal violate her oath; Thou blow'st the fire when temperance is thaw'd; Thou smother'st honesty, thou murder'st troth; Thou foul abettor! thou notorious bawd! Thou plantest scandal and displacest laud: Thou ravisher, thou traitor, thou false thief, Thy honey turns to gall, ...
— The Rape of Lucrece • William Shakespeare [Clark edition]
... the things among which she was crouching. Had she indeed any life in her? It was a mystery. Yet I saw plainly that once she must have been young and beautiful; fair, with all the charm of simplicity, perfect as some Greek statue, with the brow of a vestal. ...
— Christ in Flanders • Honore de Balzac
... good enough for little Mary Ware," he had said once, when she was a romping child. He was thinking of her unselfishness, her sturdy sincerity, her undaunted courage. Now he repeated it, thinking of her as this letter revealed her, a white-souled vestal maiden who took the stars as a symbol of her duty, and who would not swerve a hair's-breadth from the orbit which she ...
— Mary Ware's Promised Land • Annie Fellows Johnston
... delay arose, during the first act, through the evolutions of a triumphal march. With the most vociferous emphasis the master expressed intense dissatisfaction with the apathetic demeanour of our populace during the procession of vestal virgins. He was quite unaware of the fact that, in obedience to our stage manager's instructions, they had fallen on their knees upon the appearance of the priestesses; for he was so excited, and withal so terribly short-sighted, that nothing which ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... of the convent, into which we must otherwise have been precipitated. The Champion of Scotland was saved in the desperate attempt, but I who fell among a heap of stones and rubbish, I the disobedient daughter, wellnigh the apostate vestal, waked only from a long bed of sickness, to find myself the disfigured wretch, which you now see me. I then learned that Malcolm had escaped from the fray, and shortly after I heard, with feelings less keen perhaps than they ought to have been, that my father was slain in one of the ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... buy, and sell; and this [Greek: demos] they walled about for its safety, and called [Greek: ten polin] the city: and this I take to have been the original of Villages, Market-Towns, Cities, common Councils, Vestal Temples, Feasts and Fairs, in Europe: the Prytaneum, [Greek: pyros tameion], was a Court with a place of worship, and a perpetual fire kept therein upon an Altar for sacrificing: from the word [Greek: Hestia] fire, came the ...
— The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended • Isaac Newton
... of simple mind, Gamaliel Nibbs by name, Whose early faith in human kind Burned like a Vestal flame; No wind of doubt that stirs the dust Fluttered that bright and constant taper; But oh, he had his dearest trust Pinned to his ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 11, 1914 • Various
... binding, he always chose the copies with red covers. Even the wooden framework of the reflecting telescope which he used was painted a brilliant red. He liked a gay carpet on the floor, and the walls of the family sitting-room in the house on Vestal street were covered with paper resplendent with bunches of pink roses. Suspended by a cord from the ceiling in the centre of this room was a glass ball, filled with water, used by Mr. Mitchell in his experiments ...
— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell
... withdrew their claims, and pledged their cordial support to the regular nominee of the convention.[157] Such machine-like precision warmed the hearts of Democratic politicians. The editor of the People's Advocate declared the integrity of Douglas to be "as unspotted as the vestal's fame—as untarnished and as pure as ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... life! precious flame over which all nature, like a careful vestal, incessantly watches in the temple of God! Center of all, by whom all exists! The spirit of destruction would itself die, blowing at thy flame! I am not astonished that thy name should be blasphemed, for they do not know who thou art, they who think they have seen thy face ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... their portion when they come to us in the next hunting season. Our conscience, at least, will be pure and undefiled, and we shall pass to the end of our pilgrimage sans peur, though perchance, even then, not sans reproche. "Servitudes," as Miggs, the veteran vestal remarked, "is no inheritance," but there are natures who thrive rarely in this tranquil and inglorious condition. Such men live, as a rule, pretty contentedly to a great old age, and die in the odor of intense respectability. Salubrious, it seems, as well as ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... as nature's poet sweetly sings, Was once milk-white, and hearts-ease was its name; Till wanton Cupid pois'd his roseate wings, A vestal's ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... steals up yonder aisle, with rows of columns high, A female form, with timid step and downcast modest eye;— A girl she seems by the fresh bloom that decks her lovely face— With locks of gold and vestal brow, and ...
— The Poetical Works of Mrs. Leprohon (Mrs. R.E. Mullins) • Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon
... was caught, but escaped the gallows. C. was honored with one of the finest funeral orations over delivered over a corpse. He was also awarded a few triumphant arches. Publications: Omnes Gallia est divisa in tres parses. Ambition: Rome: Address: Capitol, Rome. Clubs: Gladiators, Vestal. Was also a member of the Society for the Protection of ...
— Who Was Who: 5000 B. C. to Date - Biographical Dictionary of the Famous and Those Who Wanted to Be • Anonymous
... otherwise bore a resemblance. During the cold months, a very desirable alteration for the better appeared in his outward man. His cheeks were plump and sanguine; his eyes bright and cheerful; and the tip of his nose glowed with a Bardolphian fire,—a flame, indeed, which Hugh was so far a vestal as to supply with its necessary fuel at all seasons of the year. But, as the spring advanced, he assumed a lean and sallow look, wilting and fading in the sunshine that brought life and joy to every animal and vegetable ...
— Fanshawe • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Tuscan poet saw, With saints for petals. When this rose was perfect Its hundred thousand petals were not saints, But senators in their Thessalian caps, And all the roaring populace of Rome; And even an Empress and the Vestal Virgins, Who came to see the gladiators die, Could not give sweetness to a rose like this. The sand beneath our feet is saturate With blood of martyrs; and these rifted stones Are awful witnesses against a people Whose pleasure was the ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... Frederick without his tyranny; Napoleon without his selfishness, and Washington without his reward. He was as obedient to authority as a servant, and royal in authority as a true king. He was gentle as a woman in life, and modest and pure as a virgin in thought; watchful as a Roman vestal in duty; submissive to law as Socrates, and grand ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... there are many strokes of the most melting tenderness. Cartesmunda, the Fair Nun of Winchester, inspires the King with a passion for her, and after a long struggle between honour and love, she at last yields to the tyrant, and for the sake of Canutus breaks her vestal vows. Upon hearing that the enemy was about to enter the Cloister, Cartesmunda breaks out ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... queen" with her maids of honour were not, if we may credit the existing memoirs of her court, precisely such as modern fastidiousness would assign to the "fair vestal throned by the west." ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... extinguish'd glory Revived in Latium's later story, When, by her auspices, her son Laurentia's royal damsel won. She vestal Rhea's spotless charms Surrender'd to the War-god's arms; She for Romulus that day The Sabine daughters bore away; Thence sprung the Rhamnes' lofty name, Thence the old Quirites came; And thence the stock of high renown, The blood of Romulus, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... we require of the lowest supposable phase of immodest or licentious art in music; the "inner consciousness of good" being dim, even in the musician and his audience, and wholly unsympathized with, and unacknowledged by the Delphian, Vestal, and all other prophetic and cosmic powers. This represented scene came into my mind suddenly one evening, a few weeks ago, in contrast with another which I was watching in its reality; namely, a group of gentle school-girls, leaning over Mr. Charles Halle, as he was playing a variation on ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... not merely to admire him. All his pagan remains are but sublime fossils; for we can never know the life that was in them. We know that here and there was a temple to Venus or there an altar to Vesta; but who knows or pretends to know what he really felt about Venus or Vesta? Was a Vestal Virgin like a Christian Virgin, or something profoundly different? Was he quite serious about Venus, like a diabolist, or merely frivolous about Venus, like a Christian? If the spirit was different from ours we cannot ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... prospects and done no good to anyone. I understood perfectly that I had acted in an unpardonable manner; for Her Majesty's Maids of Honour were kept, or were supposed to be kept, in very great seclusion at home, as if they were Vestal virgins—which was indeed a very great supposition. Tale after tale came back to my mind of those Maids in the past—of Mademoiselle de la Garde herself, of Miss Stewart, Miss Hyde, Miss Hamilton, and others like them—some of whom were indeed good, ...
— Oddsfish! • Robert Hugh Benson
... you are indeed a pleasant thing, Although one must be damn'd for you, no doubt: I make a resolution every spring Of reformation, ere the year run out, But somehow, this my vestal vow takes wing, Yet still, I trust it may be kept throughout: I 'm very sorry, very much ashamed, And mean, next winter, to ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... virgins to various deities, of which the classic example is the institution of the Vestal Virgins at Rome, and the fact that at Thebes and elsewhere even the male deities had their priestesses as well as priests, are other indications that at this time woman was regarded as divine or as capable of ministering to divinity. The prophetic powers of woman were ...
— Taboo and Genetics • Melvin Moses Knight, Iva Lowther Peters, and Phyllis Mary Blanchard
... even irritation. What business had she touching the bits of pasteboard like that—like some old gambler. Such a slight slip of a thing, with all the beauty of early youth in her face, and all the guilelessness of a vestal in the pure white of her garb. He fancied he would have felt different if he had seen her playing cards in that Indian dress; it would not have brought such a discord with it. And it was not merely that she played, but it was the way she played that brought ...
— That Girl Montana • Marah Ellis Ryan
... centuries of supremacy to Rome, from the year 748 or 750 B. C.— cooperated with the endless other Pagan superstitions in anchoring the whole Pantheon to the Capitol and Mount Palatine. So long as Rome had a worldly hope surviving, it was impossible for her to forget the Vestal Virgins, the College of Augurs, or the indispensable office and the indefeasible privileges of the Pontifex Maximus, which (though Cardinal Baronius, in his great work, for many years sought to ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... what wisdom the Vestal Virgins showed in never letting their fire go out, another crash came at the door, followed by the war-whoop of a scalp-hunter. "I seem to recognise that noise," he thought, "but I can't possibly open ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... a large print of the Circus Maximus, with crowded tiers mounting toward the sky, and awninged boxes where sat the Vestal Virgins and the Emperor high above a motley, serried group on the sand. At the mouth of a tunnel a lion stood motionless, menacing, regarding them. The ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... with a vestal fidelity; mark this day, by your verdict, your horror of their profanation; and believe me, when the hand which records that verdict shall be dust, and the tongue that asks it, traceless in the grave, many a happy home will bless its ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... gladiators. Highly carved marble columns supported the roofs and the rarest statues stood in niches. The bathing capacity was the largest ever planned. To sit there alone and people it, as when it was at its best, with all the glory of the emperor, the court ladies, the vestal virgins, senators, warriors, artists, men of letters and the rest, is a treat to the imagination that cannot be ...
— A Fantasy of Mediterranean Travel • S. G. Bayne
... expired.[345] At Rome the sacred fire in the temple of Vesta was kindled anew every year on the first of March, which used to be the beginning of the Roman year;[346] the task of lighting it was entrusted to the Vestal Virgins, and they performed it by drilling a hole in a board of lucky wood till the flame was elicited by friction. The new fire thus produced was carried into the temple of Vesta by one of the virgins ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... of Cluentius, Muraena, Caelius, Milo, Sylla, Flaccus, and Rabirius Postumus; the most striking instances of which are the poetical burst of feeling with which he addresses his client Plancius,[251] and his picture of the desolate condition of the Vestal Fonteia, should her brother be condemned.[252] At other times, his peroration contains more heroic and elevated sentiments; as in his invocation of the Alban groves and altars in the peroration of the Pro ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... all she has done of good at home an invaluable prompter and aid. For the sake, therefore, of others, as a social and responsible being, let the flame she would support on the public altar be kindled from the vestal fire ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey
... little flames grow into big flames, and spreading her hands to the warmth. Her face, arms, throat, and the front of her white dress became golden. She looked more like some lovely vestal of fire-worship than an ambitious American girl, determined to achieve fame in ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris
... Sempronius! wouldst thou talk of love To Marcia, whilst her father's life's in danger? Thou might'st as well court the pale, trembling vestal, When she ...
— Cato - A Tragedy, in Five Acts • Joseph Addison
... sacer, crossing to the right-hand side of the slope, which the via Sacra now follows, and reach the Forum by the fornix Fabiana. Close by to our left is the round temple of Vesta, where the sacred fire of the State is kept ever burning by its guardians, the Vestal Virgins, and here too is their dwelling, the Atrium Vestae, and also that of the Pontifex Maximus (Regia), in whose potestas they were; these three buildings, then insignificant to look at, constituted the religious focus of the oldest Rome.[31] A little farther ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... and strongly individualized by a certain moral grandeur, a saintly grace, something of vestal dignity and purity, which render her less attractive and more imposing; she is "severe in youthful beauty," and inspires a reverence which would have placed her beyond the daring of one unholy wish or thought, except in ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... themselves at a first representation.' All this is very true, but not at all applicable in this instance. This time Racine is well judged. The denouement is the most ridiculous I ever heard. Imagine that silly, conceited Junia turning vestal, as if Madame de Sennes were to enter the Ursuline Convent. Heaven forbid that I should play the scholar; but I have read in Menage that it required other formalities to take the veil in the convent of ladies of the society of Vesta. I forgot the most essential. Your little Desoeuillet played like ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... in this "Tale of the Jewish Dispersion." "Adonijah" is simply the feeblest kind of love story, supposed to be instructive, we presume, because the hero is a Jewish captive and the heroine a Roman vestal; because they and their friends are converted to Christianity after the shortest and easiest method approved by the "Society for Promoting the Conversion of the Jews;" and because, instead of being written in plain language, it is adorned with that peculiar style of grandiloquence which is ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... had been the counter or "bar" of the saloon, gorgeous in white and gold, now sawn in two and divided, was set up on opposite sides of the room as separate dressing-tables, decorated with huge bunches of azaleas, that hid the rough earthenware bowls, and gave each table the appearance of a vestal altar. ...
— Devil's Ford • Bret Harte
... became subdued, though still calm, while he added, in a lowered tone, like that angel whisper) "that thy bridal bed will be in William Wallace's grave!" She spoke not, but at this assurance turned her tearful eyes upon him, with a beam of delight; with such delight, the vestal consigns herself to the cloister; with such delight, the widowed mourner lays her head to rest on the tomb of him she loved. But with such delight none are acquainted who know not what it is to be wedded to the soul of a beloved being, when the body which ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... to a Cigar Evening Amusement Trip to MATANZAS—El Casero Slave Plantation Sugar Making Luxuriant Vegetation Punic Faith and Cuban Cruelty H.M.S. "Vestal" Bribery Admiralty Wisdom Cigars and Manufactory Population—Chinese Laws of Domicile—Police and Slavery Increase of Slaves and Produce Tobacco, Games, and Lotteries Cuban Jokes Sketch of Governors ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... the coach to herself. Jack Hamlin, a gambler, having once silently ridden with her in the same coach, afterward threw a decanter at the head of a confederate for mentioning her name in a bar-room. The over-dressed mother of a pupil whose paternity was doubtful had often lingered near this astute Vestal's temple, never daring to enter its sacred precincts, but content to ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... painter, decorated the foyer of the Grand Opera in Paris; is best known as the author of the "Punishment of a Vestal Virgin" and the ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... I saw the grave where Laura lay, Within that temple where the vestal flame Was wont to burn: and, passing by that way To see that buried dust of living fame, Whose tomb fair Love and fairer Virtue kept, All suddenly I saw the Fairy Queen, At whose approach the soul of Petrarch ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... She had always looked on Alice as excluded by her misfortune from the usual destiny of her sex, as consecrated from her birth for a vestal's lot. She had never thought of her being wooed as a wife, and she repelled the idea as ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... time I saw, but thou could'st not, Flying between the cold moon and the earth, Cupid all-arm'd: a certain aim he took At a fair Vestal throned by the West, And loos'd his love-shaft smartly from his bow, As it should pierce a hundred thousand hearts; But I might see young Cupid's fiery shaft Quench'd in the chaste beams of the watry moon, And the Imperial Votress passed ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... worlds, those eyes! there Laughter lightly toss'd His gleaming cymbals; Large and most divine Pity stood in their crystal doors with hands All generous outspread; in their pure depths Mov'd Modesty, chaste goddess, snow-white of brow, And shining, vestal limbs; rose-fronted stood Blushing, yet strong; young Courage, knightly in His virgin arms, and simple, russet Truth Play'd like a child amongst her tender thoughts— Thoughts white as daisies snow'd ...
— Old Spookses' Pass • Isabella Valancy Crawford
... that Mary, brought from the hysterical sanctuary of her room by the pressing sense of the necessity of looking after the kitchen fire, and coming back to her duties like a vestal of old, found her dreaded enemy cheerfully eating in the kitchen, while Norah sat near and carried on a one-sided conversation with every appearance of friendliness, with Tait sleepily lying beside her—at which astonishing spectacle Mary promptly shrieked ...
— Mates at Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... for the first time in fiction, a correct and adequate account of the Vestal Virgins, their powers and privileges, as well as of many ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... entrails of animals capital offences, he proceeded to prohibit sacrifices, A.D. 391, and even the entering of temples. He alienated the revenues of many temples, confiscated the estates of others, some he demolished. The vestal virgins he dismissed, and any house profaned by incense he declared forfeited to the imperial exchequer. When once the property of a religious establishment has been irrevocably taken away, it is needless to declare its worship a ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... his body, that I might burn it upon the funeral-pile, and mourn over him. Ay, on my knees, amid the dust and blood of the arena, I begged that boon, while all the Roman maids and matrons, and those holy virgins they call vestal, and the rabble, shouted in mockery, deeming it rare sport, forsooth, to see Rome's fiercest gladiator turn pale, and tremble like a very child, before that piece of bleeding clay; but the praetor drew back as if I were pollution, and ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... the rebuilding the Capitol. On an auspicious day, beneath a serene sky, the ground chosen for the foundation was surrounded with ribbons and flowers. Soldiers, selected for their auspicious names, brought into the enclosure branches from the trees sacred to the gods. The Vestal virgins, followed by a band of children, sprinkled the place with water drawn from three fountains and three rivers. The praetor and the pontiff next sacrificed a swine, a sheep, and a bull, and besought Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... "Perhaps that's the worst of it. If I should lose your esteem I should go into a convent." She dropped his hand, and snatching a bunch of violets from the table, fixed them in his button-hole, looking up in his face with vestal sweetness. "You ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... The pagan party was led by Quintus Aurelius Symmachus (q.v.), consul in 391, who presented to Valentinian II. a forcible but unsuccessful petition praying for the restoration of the altar of Victory to its ancient station in the hall of the senate, the proper support of seven vestal virgins, and the regular observance of the other pagan ceremonies. To this petition Ambrose replied in a letter to Valentinian, arguing that the devoted worshippers of idols had often been forsaken ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Sylvanus Stall in his great works on sex hygiene—lewdness most horrible! But there is no need to proceed further. Every kiss, hug and tickle of the chin in the chronicle is laboriously snouted out, empanelled, exhibited. Every hint that Witla is no vestal, that he indulges his unchristian fleshliness, that he burns in the manner of I Corinthians, VII, 9, is uncovered to the ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... mighty King of Akkad. My mother was a vestal (priestess), my father an alien, whose brother inhabited the mountain.... When my mother had conceived me, she bare me in a hidden place. She laid me in a vessel of rushes, stopped the door thereof with pitch, and cast me adrift on the river.... The river floated me to Akki, the water drawer, ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... lady, and refrain from exhausting the theme and the reader? Some few passages of coquetry it would certainly be pleasant to give in outline; the story of Mme. de Beauseant's demurs and sweet delayings, that, like the vestal virgins of antiquity, she might fall gracefully, and by lingering over the innocent raptures of first love draw from it its utmost strength and sweetness. M. de Nueil was at an age when a man is the dupe of these caprices, of the ...
— The Deserted Woman • Honore de Balzac
... supplication for one day. These things were executed according to a decree of the senate. The extinction of the fire in the temple of Vesta struck more terror upon the minds of men than all the prodigies which were reported from abroad, or seen at home; and the vestal, who had the guarding of it for that night, was scourged by the command of Publius Licinius the pontiff. Although this event was not appointed by the gods as a portent, but had happened through human ...
— History of Rome, Vol III • Titus Livius
... would be damnation to the girl. Even the name of this big, blue-eyed, fair-skinned young votary of science had much about it that made her fairly bristle, for she had once been described as an "austere vestal" by Lieutenant Blake, of the regiment preceding them at Sandy, the ——th Cavalry—and a mutual friend had told her all about it—another handicap for Blakely. She had grown, it must be admitted, somewhat gaunt and forbidding in these ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... and indelicate than in the plays we see posted at the doors of our theatres. The French of the time of Louis XIV. must have been a much more refined people than the contemporary English. At least, Thalia in Paris was a vestal, compared with her tawdry, indecent, and drunken London sister. One is ashamed to be seen reading the unblushing profligacy of Wycherley, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... victories still thickest came, As near the centre motion doth increase; Till he, press'd down by his own weighty name, Did, like the vestal,[13] under spoils decease. ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... at this critical moment, so the Mystic Seven filed off like vestal virgins to feed the fire which Miss Gibbs, with her accustomed energy, had already lighted. Their contribution of wood was so substantial that it drew comment from the rest of the party, but they received the congratulations with due ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... into talking of the head of the establishment; and she very speedily gratified Lord Linden by communicating as much of Mademoiselle Melanie's history as she herself knew. But had Mademoiselle Melanie lovers? Or was her vestal-like demeanor genuine? This was difficult and delicate ground to tread upon; yet his lordship was too much in earnest not to venture ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... high. Wherever the Temple of Vesta may have stood, it is evident that from its eternal fires was borrowed the custom, still extant in Catholic churches, of keeping up a perpetual flame by means of tapers. Six Vestal Virgins sworn to perpetual virginity, used to watch the sacred flame upon the altar in the Temple of Vesta, and it is an impressive sight to see the same sacred and eternal flame still burning around ...
— The Youthful Wanderer - An Account of a Tour through England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany • George H. Heffner
... and waning slowly away, Yet waxing more beautiful every day, As if she were drawing from spheres above, Before she got there, the spirit of love, Which shone as a light through the silken lire, Pure as was that of the vestal fire; And ever she kissed in hysterical mood The bit of the cross all red with blood. "Oh mother dear! I wish—I fear The time of my going is drawing near: Last night, at the mirk and midnight hour, A voice seemed to come through my chamber door— For the ear of the dying ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume XXIV. • Revised by Alexander Leighton
... town has tinged the country; and the stain Appears a spot upon a vestal's robe, The worse for what it soils. The fashion runs Down into scenes still rural, but alas, Scenes rarely graced with rural manners now. Time was when in the pastoral retreat The unguarded door was safe; men did not watch To invade another's right, or guard their own. ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... and gold that were brought from Troy. Numitor chose the kingdom; but Amulius, having the money, and being able to do more with that than Numitor, took his kingdom from with great ease, and, fearing lest his daughter might have children who would supplant him, made her a Vestal, bound in that condition forever to live a single and maiden life. This lady some call Ilia, others Rhea, and others Silvia; however, not long after, contrary to the established laws of the Vestals, she had two sons of ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... steamer-feathers is ludicrous; the price, too, is proportionately cheaper, for the feathers are infinitely better. Long, white, full, and curly feathers can be bought for much less than you give for them in England. We drove down to the town, finished our business transactions, and then went in the 'Vestal's' steam launch on board the 'Gamma,' one of the new Chinese gunboats on her ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... looking man there burned something pure as the vestal fire, and in that flame dwelt a mind that called forth life and poetry out of dust, and grasped the highest ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... not only painted us a sweet picture of the domestic Woman, in his Economics, but in the Cyropedia has given, in the picture of Panthea, a view of Woman which no German picture can surpass, whether lonely and quiet with veiled lids, the temple of a vestal loveliness, or with eyes flashing, and hair flowing to the free wind, cheering on the hero to fight for his God, his country, or whatever name his duty might bear at the time. This picture I shall copy by and by. Yet Xenophon grew up in ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... drops and slowly builds them up into a shroud of ice which creeps gradually about the three slight figures: the feet vanish, the waist is encircled, the head is covered, the piteous uplifted arms disappear, as if each were a Vestal Virgin entombed alive for her transgression. They vanishing entirely, the fountain yet plays on unseen; all winter the pile of ice grows larger, glittering organ-pipes of congelation add themselves outside, and by February a great ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... great Consumption of Cards. It is also said, that they observe the law in Ben. Johnson's Club, which orders the Fire to be always kept in (focus perennis esto) as well for the Convenience of lighting their Pipes, as to cure the Dampness of the Club-Room. They have an old Woman in the nature of a Vestal, whose Business it is to cherish and perpetuate the Fire [which [2]] burns from Generation to Generation, and has seen the Glass-house Fires in and ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... had so solemnly plighted, she had rejected the proposition of her mercenary parent; and, having no idea but that her lover had shared the fate of all Christian captives, she had shut herself up from the world, and vowed to live the life of a vestal. ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - Tailor in Dalkeith, written by himself • David Macbeth Moir
... all alike we hear of an active, genial, warm-hearted girl, full of humour and feeling to those she knew, though shy and cold in her bearing to strangers. A different being to the fierce impassioned Vestal who has seated herself in ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... who was in the Mier Expedition. His narrative of Bigfoot's Adventures is the rollickiest and the most flavorsome that any American frontiersman has yet inspired. The tiresome thumping on the hero theme present in many biographies of frontiersmen is entirely absent. Stanley Vestal wrote Bigfoot Wallace ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... fair vestal is stirring abroad?" said the only man she met, who was one of the menials; but Catharine passed on without notice or reply, and gained the ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... its translation, contained a most comprehensive curse upon any man who ventured to interfere with the personal sanctity of this same Royal Lady of Amada, who, apparently in virtue of her office, was doomed to perpetual celibacy like the vestal virgins. I do not remember all the terms of the curse, but I know that it invoked the vengeance of Isis the Mother, Lady of the Moon, and Horus the Child upon anyone who should dare such a desecration, and in so many words doomed him to death by violence "far from his own country ...
— The Ancient Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... escaped destruction in this unequal contest with an enemy then wielding the whole thunders of the state, is somewhat surprising; and historians have sought their solution of the mystery in the powerful intercessions of the vestal virgins, and several others of high rank amongst the connections of his great house. These may have done something; but it is due to Sylla, who had a sympathy with every thing truly noble, to suppose him struck with powerful admiration for the audacity of ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... Rhea Sylvia have felt praying before her Vestal altar when Mars first appeared to her ...
— Six Women • Victoria Cross
... done any thing entitling me to such a proof of condescension on her part, and am I thus honored by her who is the guardian angel of Prussia!—whom Napoleon hates, because he fears her zeal and fidelity. As a vestal, she has kept alive the fire of patriotism on the altar of her country. When all despair, she still hopes for the redemption of her people from a victorious but merciless enemy. I will consecrate my life anew to her, though unworthy of the ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... and the flight of seasons, shall be able to demolish. I shall not wholly die; but a great part of me shall escape Libitina. I shall continualy be renewed in the praises of posterity, as long as the priest shall ascend the Capitol with the silent [vestal] virgin. Where the rapid Aufidus shall murmur, and where Daunus, poorly supplied with water, ruled over a rustic people, I, exalted from a low degree, shall be acknowledged as having originally adapted the Aeolic verse to Italian measures. Melpomene, assume that pride which your merits have acquired, ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... you imagine, continued the gentleman; for I assure you they were all vestal virgins for anything which I knew to the contrary. The reputation of intriguing with them was all I sought, and was what I arrived at: and perhaps I only flattered myself even in that; for very probably the ...
— Joseph Andrews, Vol. 2 • Henry Fielding
... much the more striking when placed in obvious contrast to the ingenuous nature and calm purity that shone in every lineament of the face of Ghita. One might very well have passed for an image of the goddess Circe; while the other would have made no bad model for a vestal, could the latter have borne the moral impression of the sublime and heart-searching truths that are inculcated by the real oracles of God. Then the lady was a woman in the meridian of her charms, aided by all the cunning of the toilet and a taste that ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... colour. On the house of Baldassini, also, near S. Agostino, they executed scenes and sgraffiti, with some heads of Emperors over the windows in the court. On Montecavallo, near S. Agata, they painted a facade with a vast number of different stories, such as the Vestal Tuccia bringing water from the Tiber to the Temple in a sieve, and Claudia drawing the ship with her girdle; and also the rout effected by Camillus while Brennus is weighing the gold. On another wall, round ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 05 ( of 10) Andrea da Fiesole to Lorenzo Lotto • Giorgio Vasari
... to crystallise her strange views. His lurking fear that she might one day marry and leave him was aroused at the thought, and his heart contracted with jealousy. She possessed in his eyes something of the sanctity of a vestal virgin, one who must not be profaned by marriage. In such an event, also, his cherished hope that she might complete the quadrangle of St. George's Hall was likely to be frustrated forever. These fears moved him to argue with a bitterness that served only ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... the bunting of a first voyage, with a fair wind, and on a fine morning; and when such a ship came back long after as an old plank bearded with sea moss, to the dunes under which it stranded the day was still the same, vestal and innocent; for they were on a voyage of greater length and import. They had buried many ships; but, as time moved to them, ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... those gifts to Caesar they allowed the vestal virgins to employ one lictor each, because one of them had been insulted, owing to not being recognized, while returning home from dinner toward evening. The offices in the City they assigned for a greater number of years in advance, ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol. III • Cassius Dio
... not her social equal; the fear that love will rob her of her freedom and independence; the horror that love or the joy of motherhood will only hinder her in the full exercise of her profession—all these together make of the emancipated modern woman a compulsory vestal, before whom life, with its great clarifying sorrows and its deep, entrancing joys, rolls on without touching or gripping ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... shawls, the finest of pelisses, the brilliantest of bonnets and wreaths, and a power of rings, cameos, brooches, chains, bangles, and other nameless gimcracks; and ribbons of every breadth and colour of the rainbow flaming on her person. Miss Amory appeared meek in dove-colour, like a vestal virgin—while Master Francis was in the costume, then prevalent, of Rob Roy Macgregor, a celebrated Highland outlaw. The Baronet was not more animated than ordinarily—there was a happy vacuity about him which ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... thanksgiving, however, would have been less fervent had she known that, for the time being, her protegee had assumed the role of a Vestal virgin, and that Elisabeth's care of the fires that winter was not fulfilment of a duty but part of a game. This, however, was Elisabeth's way; she frequently received credit for performing a duty ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... is the Roman goddess of the hearth, worshiped in a temple containing the sacred fire tended by the vestal virgins. ...
— Things To Make • Archibald Williams
... this very detachment had drawn him to Valentine more than to any other human being. But to-night he began suddenly to feel that to be actually side by side with his friend would be a very glorious thing. He could never hope to walk perpetually upon the vestal heights. If Valentine did really come down towards the valley, what then? Just at first the idea had shocked him. Now he began almost to wish that it might be so, to feel that he was shaking hands with Valentine more ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... attended the sick poor, and each city had five, seven or ten, according to its size. Rome had fourteen of these officers, besides one for the vestal virgins, and one for the gymnasia. They were paid by the Government for attending the poor, but were not restricted to this class of practice, and were well paid by their prosperous patients. Their office was more lucrative but not so honourable as that of the archiaters ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... till his work stood perfected, A woman beautiful with youth and grace, But like a Vestal singled from her sex To show the beauty of pure innocence. Her form was such as rapt Endymion Saw on the heights of Latmos when he slept And dreamed Heaven down to him. A glorious shape That to the brightness of ethereal charms Join'd the familiar ...
— Eidolon - The Course of a Soul and Other Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... reigned Ascanius, the son of AEneas, and his descendants for three hundred years were the Latin tribes. After eleven generations of kings, Amulius usurps the throne, which belonged to Numitor, the elder brother, and dooms his only daughter, Silvia, to perpetual virginity as a Vestal. Silvia, visited by a god, gives birth to twins, Romulus and Remus. The twins, exposed by the order of Amulius, are suckled by a she-wolf, and brought up by one of the king's herdsmen. They feed their flocks on the Palatine, ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... the street, Benda said in a tone of compassion: "They are three delicate creatures; they live their lonely lives like vestal virgins guarding ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... of the past, and so art thou. Thou art forbidden by thy office to love other than the goddess, but I tell thee woman must love, and in secret I know thou must keep this love aglow—eternally so—like a vestal flame; and woe, I say, to the woman that crosses thy path to kill this light, to put out this flame! Now, such a being is Nika—Nika, the Roman girl; she attempts it. I have told thee; I ...
— Saronia - A Romance of Ancient Ephesus • Richard Short
... which could not be discovered but by the Devil? And have not men been seen to do things which are above humane Strength, that no man living could do without Diabolical Assistances? Claudia was seen by Witnesses enough, to draw a Ship which no humane Strength could move. Tuccia a Vestal Virgin was seen to carry Water in a Sieve: The Devil never assists men to do supernatural things undesired. When therefore such like things shall be testified against the accused Party not by Spectres which are Devils in the Shape of Persons ...
— The Wonders of the Invisible World • Cotton Mather
... his return to Rome, when he was thirty, he married Terentia, a noble lady, of whom we are informed that she had a good fortune, and that her sister was one of the Vestal Virgins.[77] Her nobility is inferred from the fact that the virgins were, as a rule, chosen from the noble families, though the law required only that they should be the daughters of free parents, ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... that centuries of power can lend. To the tawdry is opposed the splendid, the Roman general in his chiselled corselet and dyed mantle faces the Greek actor in his tinsel; the band of painted, half-clad, bedizened dancing-girls falls back cowering in awestruck silence as the noble Vestal passes by, high-browed, white-robed, untainted, the incarnation of purity in an age of vice. And the old Senator in his white cloak with its broad purple hem, his smooth-faced clients at his elbows, his silent slaves before him and behind, meets the low-chattering knot of Hebrew money-lenders, ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... this sign to be married under any circumstance, the idea being that it represented some internal malformation that would prevent her bringing children into the world. In such cases these women were made Vestal Virgins in the temples. Perhaps the old Greek Priest was right in his idea, for if this first Bracelet is found rising into the hand in the form of an arch, both men and women possessing it are delicate internally, and especially so in ...
— Palmistry for All • Cheiro
... social realities, so religion witnessed the foundering of a system of ethics contrary to the moral code that had slowly been established. The idea of collective responsibility contained in a number of beliefs is one instance. If a vestal violated her vow of chastity the divinity sent a pest that ceased only on the day the culprit was punished. Sometimes the angry heavens granted victory to the army only on condition that a general or soldier dedicate himself ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... paper, and said, "It is my lord's writing. That I was shipped at sea, I well remember, but whether there delivered of my babe, by the holy gods I cannot rightly say; but since my wedded lord I never shall see again, I will put on a vestal livery, and never more have joy." "Madam," said Cerimon, "if you purpose as you speak, the temple of Diana is not far distant from hence; there you may abide as a vestal. Moreover, if you please, a niece of mine shall there attend you." This proposal was accepted ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb
... the dire monument of thy black roome, Wher now that vestal flame thou dost intombe, As in the inmost cell of all ...
— Lucasta • Richard Lovelace
... the baser passion of sense, or transfigures it so that we know it no longer. The idea-driven is callous to the blandishments of beauty, for his is a love stronger than the love to woman. The vestal, the virgin, the eunuch for the kingdom of heaven's sake are the exemplars of the love ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... ornament; and rooms are furnished as a setting for themselves. The lives of millions of workers go to the adornment of women. In painting they sometimes excel, but a Madame Le Brun does her best work when she paints herself and her child, and when Angelica Kauffmann would paint a vestal virgin, she drapes a veil over her own head and transfers her features to the canvas. Sculpture and architecture are too impersonal and abstract to attract much attention from women at present. Even a sculptor like Mrs. Bessie ...
— Woman in Modern Society • Earl Barnes
Copyright © 2025 Dictionary One.com
|
|
|
