"Hercules" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... females.—Tyro, who when she lived was the paramour of Neptune, and by him had Pelias, and Neleus. Antiope, who bore two like sons to Jove, Amphion and Zethus, founders of Thebes. Alcmena, the mother of Hercules, with her fair daughter, afterwards her daughter-in-law, Megara. There also Ulysses saw Jocasta, the unfortunate mother and wife of Oedipus; who ignorant of kin wedded with her son, and when she had discovered the unnatural alliance, for shame and grief hanged herself. ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... he dared not utter the awful name of Him whom he had denied. The courtier laid his hand on the jewelled clasp which fastened his girdle; perhaps the movement was accidental, perhaps he wished to direct the attention of his companion to the figures of Hercules and the Nemean lion which were embossed on the gold. "You forget," observed Pollux, "that I am a worshipper of the deities of Olympus, that I sacrifice ...
— Hebrew Heroes - A Tale Founded on Jewish History • AKA A.L.O.E. A.L.O.E., Charlotte Maria Tucker
... that 'illustrious and glorious school of virtue.'[49] What the repairs then made exactly involved is unfortunately not stated. But, according to Scylitzes, they were so extensive that 'to tell in detail what the emperor and empress did for the embellishment of the church would surpass the labour of Hercules.'[50] Probably they concerned chiefly ...
— Byzantine Churches in Constantinople - Their History and Architecture • Alexander Van Millingen
... interrupting. "Shall I change the damask cloak to a tiger's skin? One claw just hanging over the white shoulder—Omphale, you know—in a modern drawing-room—a small cast of the Farnese Hercules upon a bracket, there, on the right. Decidedly, here is an idea. Do you ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford
... the air, as Hercules invaded hell. The discovery of fire put us in possession of a forbidden secret. Is this unnatural conquest of nature safe or wise? Nil ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... hear the speeches, descriptive of Peregrinus's life, delivered before the decisive act. A certain Theagenes, an admirer of Peregrinus, delivers a bombastic eulogy, 3-7, repelling the charge of vanity imputed to him, and comparing his proposed death with that of Hercules, &c. Lucian opposes to this some invectives delivered by another, whose name he professes to have forgotten, which refer, 7-30, to the history of Peregrinus to which Theagenes had alluded; tracing his crimes, his journeys from land to land, his turning Christian ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... patience by now, answered me shortly that the reptile was the sculptor's pious symbolization of sin, which St. Hercules ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... warm and not the cold bath was esteemed by the ancient Greeks for its invigorating properties may be inferred from a dialogue of Aristophanes, in which one of the characters says, 'I think none of the sons of the gods ever exceeded Hercules in bodily and mental force.' Upon which the other asks, 'Where didst thou ever see a cold ...
— Intestinal Ills • Alcinous Burton Jamison
... bestrown. Yea, and e'en now the Caspian realms quake at his coming, shown By oracles of God; and quakes the far Maeotic mere, 799 And sevenfold Nile through all his mouths quakes in bewildered fear. Not so much earth did Hercules o'erpass, though he prevailed To pierce the brazen-footed hind, and win back peace that failed The Erymanthus' wood, and shook Lerna with draught of bow; Nor Liber turning vine-wreathed reins when he hath will to go Adown from Nysa's lofty head in tiger-yoked ...
— The AEneids of Virgil - Done into English Verse • Virgil
... gave his curt "Ha ha!" as he reached out a long arm to turn on all the lights. "Who was that chap, Hercules was it, that pulled the temple on his own head? By God, if my life's gone to pieces, I'll take some of you with me. You, Val, I was always fond of you: tell your daddy, or shall I, what you ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... the fiery fluid must have covered her from head to foot; if Lawrence had not caught the falling lamp, if he had lost one moment in smothering the lighted gown, she must have perished in agony before our eyes; but he was strong as a young Hercules, and, half suffocated and bruised as she was, Jill knew from ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... wildly over his forehead, he stood, enormous, with his legs apart, his eyes shining, blood coming from a cut in his cheek, and in one of his hands was a thick cudgel. Standing there in the doorway, he might have been some ancient Hercules, some mighty Achilles. ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... Pausanias, x. 12: 8; Justin Martyr, Cohort ad Graecos, 37, p. 34 c (ed. 1742). According to another account, the remains of the Sibyl were enclosed in an iron cage which hung from a pillar in an ancient temple of Hercules at Argyrus (Ampelius, Liber Memorialis, ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... fears. He neither looked to the past with regret nor to the future with apprehension. He might have been a zealot—he was never a hypocrite; he might have been eccentric—he was never ridiculous. He was a Hercules rather than an Adonis. In his warfare he fired hot shot; he did not send in flags of truce; he led forlorn hopes; he did not follow in the wake of charges. When he went forth with his sledge-hammer logic and his saw-mill philosophy, all who stood in the path of his righteous wrath ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... voyageur was addressed to Everard. This Everard was considered by her to be a superior man. He was so much above the average height that George Sand advised him to sit down when he was with other men, as when standing he was too much above them. She compares him to Atlas carrying the world, and to Hercules in a lion's skin. But among all her comparisons, when she is seeking to give the measure of his superiority, without ever really succeeding in this, it is evident that the comparison she prefers is that of Marius at Minturnae. ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic
... very closely. It wouldn't have been—er—what do you call it?—proper. And of course I could not see clearly at night, anyway. But I did notice he was about six feet tall. Imagine me, poor little me, looking up to six feet! With broad shoulders; an athletic, muscular figure, like a young Hercules; a well-shaped head, like Apollo's, covered with curls of fair hair; a smooth, clear skin, with the tint of the rose in his cheek that deepened to blood-red when his blue eyes, in which the skies of all the world seemed ...
— One Day - A sequel to 'Three Weeks' • Anonymous
... Wynne was a frowning Hercules as he entered the pleasant smoke-filled room. Merriton's arm lay upon his sleeve, and he endured because ...
— The Riddle of the Frozen Flame • Mary E. Hanshew
... his side and, looking through the window, saw Rayel running across the lawn with the lion on his shoulders. When the beast sprang down he seized it by the mane and tossed it about like one with the strength of Hercules. Here was a man who exercised his ...
— The Master of Silence • Irving Bacheller
... the tears of Oedipus in the crises. I am compelled to believe that Sophocles erred as regarded nature; for in cases so transcendent as this Greek nature and English nature could not differ. In the great agony on Mount Oeta, Hercules points the pity of his son Hyllus to the extremity of torment besieging him on the humiliating evidence of the tears which they extorted from him. 'Pity me,' says he, 'that weep with sobs like a girl: a thing that no one could have charged upon the man' (pointing to himself); 'but ever without ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... from the bell-tower of Saint Mark's to a window of the palace, where he presented a nosegay to his Serenity and was caught up again to his airy vaulting-ground. After this ingenious feat came another called the "Force of Hercules," given by a band of youths who, building themselves into a kind of pyramid, shifted their postures with inexhaustible agility, while bursts of fireworks wove yellow arches through the midday light. Meanwhile the crowds in the streets ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... I wanted nothing more. Such matters were too grand for him. He had beaten the dog of Hercules, who had only brought the purple dye—a thing requiring skill and art and taste to give it value. But gold does well without all these, and better in their absence. From handling many little nuggets, ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... his foot every time the cutter took a fresh whirl, and called his favourite Odin to witness his dilemma; but Odin paid as much deference to his prayers as Hercules did, of yore, to the waggoner who got the wheel of his cart in the rut. The cutter wearied not in her waltz; but, whether she felt the want of a partner, or the power of the wind, I know not; for when the pilot had lighted his pipe, and given his soul to its soporific ward, she darted unexpectedly ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... to be a favourite subject for scholastic disputation: WHETHER HERCULES IS IN THE MARBLE. The image is that of the sculptor, who sees the statue lie, so to speak, imbedded in the marble block, and whose duty is so to carve it, neither cutting too deep or too shallow, so that the perfect form ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... was celebrating a solemn feast to Hercules, together with his only son Pallas, and his senate, welcomed the warriors to his modest home, promised his alliance, and sent forth with Aeneas his son Pallas and four hundred knights. He also advised him to go to Argylla, whose people were stirred up against ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... battle with death. At last the right moment came. Without an instant's hesitation he plunged over the side into the raging waters. Then rising again, in a moment or two, to the surface, like a perfect Hercules, he fought his way through the billows, his strong arm and massive chest defying their power. On, on he went, now riding on the top of a huge boiling mountain of water, now down in the hollow, with the raging sea ...
— Cornwall's Wonderland • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... of the lives of great men is both interesting and profitable. In such a study we are amazed at the records of the deeds of the men whom the world calls great. The results of the labors of Hercules seem to be approximated according to many of ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott
... Chester, "there are no such men as you. You would be a veritable Hercules, a man among men. Brave men there are there in plenty, ...
— The Boy Allies with the Cossacks - Or, A Wild Dash over the Carpathians • Clair W. Hayes
... in early days stood for what was ugly and terrible and a hater of good. The Greeks believed there were dragons, and they had many tales of how Hercules or this or that hero slew a dragon. To the Christian of the Middle Ages the dragon stood at one end of the scale, an archangel at the other; for as the dragon was all darkness and hideousness, the archangel was all light and beauty and gloriousness. It thrilled every one to think of the ...
— Raphael - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Painter With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... to distinction disappears, with all claim to praise, from written matter, however good it be. He worked, he read, he studied, he wrote late, and rose early to observe. But his natural gift was to be a mountebank, a clown, a circus Hercules. By stiffening one of his senseless arms he could bring down roars of applause. By years of bitter labour with his pen he earned the barest living. The muscles that a porter might have, offered him opulence, because it was ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... a terrible blow—a very coup de Jarnac. He spoke at him; he ran forward to the nurse, and said very loud: "Let me see the little darling. He does you credit. What fat cheeks!—what arms!—an infant hercules! There, take him up the mound. Now lift him in your arms, and let him see his inheritance. Higher, nurse, higher. Ay, crow away, youngster; all that is yours—house and land and all. They may steal the trees; they can't make away with the broad acres. Ha! I believe he understands every word, ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... with stunted cork-trees and evergreen oaks; here and there was the golden gleam of broom; yonder over a spur of whitish rock sprawled the green and living scarlet of a cactus. Below him about the caves of Hercules was a space of sea whose clear depths shifted with its slow movement from the deep green of emerald to all the colours of the opal. A little farther off behind a projecting screen of rock that formed a little haven two enormous masted galleys, ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... Prodicus, in the book he has written of the life of Hercules, where Virtue and Pleasure make their court to that hero under the appearance of two beautiful women. His words, as near as I can remember, are ...
— The Memorable Thoughts of Socrates • Xenophon
... predecessors in office, and most notably by the malignant star which lately ruled over the foreign destinies of England, the task has necessarily been, yet is, and will be, Herculean; but the force of Hercules is there also, as may be hoped, to wrestle with and overthrow the hydra—the AEolus to recall and encage the tempestuous elements of strife. A host in himself, hosts also the premier has with him in his cabinet; ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... observe his inward character: he is a melancholy churchman. The spring in his face is nothing but the engend'ring of toads; where he is jealous of any man, he lays worse plots for them than ever was impos'd on Hercules, for he strews in his way flatterers, panders, intelligencers, atheists, and a thousand such political monsters. He should have been Pope; but instead of coming to it by the primitive decency of the ...
— The Duchess of Malfi • John Webster
... been afraid of the task before him, and doubtful of success. Mansfield was neither; at any rate, as far as any one else could see. He set himself up neither for a Hercules nor a Galahad. It never occurred to him what he was. But it did occur to him that Templeton wanted reform, and that the Captain of Templeton ought to reform it. And with that one clear purpose before him, Mansfield was the sort of fellow to go straight ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed
... Came to Parnassus The Hunt in the Wood of Calydon The Choice of Hercules Alpheus and Arethusa The Golden Apple Paris and Oenone Hesione Paris and Helen Iphigenia The Hoard of the Elves The Forging of Balmung Idun and Her Apples The Doom of the Mischief-maker The Hunt in the Wood of Puelle Ogier the Dane and the Fairies How Charlemagne ...
— Hero Tales • James Baldwin
... auspices of Sir Gregory Hardlines, were destined to revivify, clarify, and render perfect the Civil Service of the country. It was a great triumph to Sir Gregory to see the darling object of his heart thus commencing its existence in the very cradle in which he, as an infant Hercules, had made his first exertions in the cause. It was to be his future fortune to superintend these intellectual contests, in a stately office of his own, duly set apart and appointed for the purpose. But the throne on which he was to sit had ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... except one Nubian, who bravely endeavoured to defend himself against the whole eleven. Botello closed with him, and finding him hard to overcome while he touched the ground with his feet, raised him in his arms as Hercules did Anteus, and carried him to the fort by main strength. The assaults were frequently renewed, and the besieged were worn out with fatigue and reduced to the last extremity by famine, being forced to feed even upon naseous vermin. A crow or a vulture taken while ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VI - Early English Voyages Of Discovery To America • Robert Kerr
... be a pimp and not a man of parts. That is without being politic, diligent, secret, wary, and so forth—and to all this valiant as Hercules—that is, passively valiant and actively obedient. Ah, Setter, what a treasure is here lost ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... three years since these her second nuptials. The testimonials which Mr. Shirley had received in print from that living academy of love-lore, my Lady Vane, added to this excessive tenderness of one, little less a novice, convinced every body that he was a perfect hero. You will pity poor Hercules! Omphale, by a most unsentimental precaution, has so secured to her own disposal her whole estate and jointure, that he cannot command so much as a distaff; and as she is not inclined to pay much for nothing, her offers on the article of separation are exceedingly moderate. ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... succeeding generations. You can look at them where they quietly rest upon the waters of the great northwest. In such as these one hundred and twenty men sailed on an unknown ocean, they knew not where. They lived where for two thousand years the pillars of Hercules had marked the end of the world. They had been taught to believe in the four corners of the earth, and that all beyond was a boundless waste of waters, into which no one had ventured beyond the Canary Islands and the coast ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... world, or defend it; but its adorning should be left to others. Their hands are rude, and they but spoil what they touch. Since the days of Cicero, and the death of the Republic, what has Rome done to advance any cause, save that of slavery and licentiousness? A moral Hercules is needed to sweep it clean of corruptions, which it is amazing have not ere this drawn down the thunder of the gods. Julia would say that Christ is that ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... it. While they were all busily occupied, the fire in the furnace—by burning up faster than was expected—suddenly imparted to the engine the breath of life; and no sooner had the minimum of steam necessary to move it been thus created, than this infant Hercules not only walked off, but without the smallest embarrassment walked through the 14-inch brick wall of the great building which contained it, to the terror of the superintendent and workmen, who expected every instant that the roof above their heads would fall ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... "And I," said Hercules with the lion's-skin, "will teach him how to overcome Vice and quell evil passions, those poisonous monsters which like Hydras[15] are ever reborn in the heart. A foe to effeminate pleasures, he shall learn from me those too seldom trodden ...
— The Original Fables of La Fontaine - Rendered into English Prose by Fredk. Colin Tilney • Jean de la Fontaine
... golden-hilted sword, and had gained the renown of being one of the bravest young men of the day. His fame traveled faster than he did, and reached Athens before him. As he entered the city, he heard the inhabitants talking at the street corners, and saying that Hercules was brave, and Jason too, and Castor and Pollux likewise, but that Theseus, the son of their own king, would turn out as great a hero as the best of them. Theseus took longer strides on hearing this, and fancied himself sure of a magnificent reception at his father's court, since he came thither ...
— Tanglewood Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... learnt by heart, without telling us much of those who wore them. Many things for which thousands of human beings were willing to lay down their lives, and actually did lay them down, are to us mere words and dreams, myths, fables, and legends. If ever there was a doer, it was Hercules, and now we are told that he was a ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller
... with the strength of Hercules, and having still the heart of a lion—kind and patient, because he was courageous and strong—Dagobert, notwithstanding his rough exterior, evinced for his orphan charges an exquisite solicitude, a watchful kindness, and a tenderness almost maternal. ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... minute I seen you sneaking off like shadows toward the trail. I hurried to my cabin, got a lot of cold meat and bread together and then hunted up Hercules, my boss mule. He isn't very handsome, but he has a fine voice and has been through these mountains so many times that he knows the right road as well as me. I knowed you would travel fast and didn't expect to overhaul you afore morning, but you went past the right turn and that give me a ...
— A Waif of the Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... reinforced with all the supplies necessary to a conqueror: Corbleu! Spain will surrender, for they are all poltroons. You will pass the Straits of Seville,[94] and will there erect two columns more magnificent than those of Hercules for the perpetual memory of your name. And that Strait shall thenceforward be named the ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... Babington, of Dacre's House, was on the horns of a dilemma. Circumstances over which he had had no control had brought him, like another Hercules, to the cross-roads, and had put before him the choice between pleasure and duty, or, rather, between pleasure and what those in authority called duty. Being human, he would have had little difficulty in making his decision, had not the path of pleasure been so hedged about by danger ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... been conquered by these unarmed foes: the flowery setters are fastened, before they are felt. The blandishments of Circe were more fatal to the mariners of Ulysses, than the strength of Polypheme, or the brutality of the Laestrigons. Hercules, after he had cleansed the Augean stable, and performed all the other labours enjoined him by Euristheus, found himself a slave to the softnesses of the heart; and he, who wore a club and a lion's skin in the cause of virtue, condescended to the most effeminate employments to gratify ...
— Essays on Various Subjects - Principally Designed for Young Ladies • Hannah More
... palmy days Denzil had been an editor, but he no more thought of turning his scissors against himself than of swallowing his paste. The efficacy of hair has changed since the days of Samson, otherwise Denzil would have been a Hercules instead of a long, thin, nervous man, looking too brittle and delicate to be used even for a pipe-cleaner. The narrow oval of his face sloped to a pointed, untrimmed beard. His linen was reproachable, his dingy boots were down at heel, and his cocked hat was drab with dust. Such are the effects ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... which he was not willing himself to share. He took the head of the column in the storming of Eryx, and was the first to mount the ladders. Previous, however, to advancing for the attack, he performed a grand religious ceremony, in which he implored the assistance of the god Hercules in the encounter which was about to take place; and made a solemn vow that if Hercules would assist him in the conflict, so as to enable him to display before the Sicilians such strength and valor, and to perform such ...
— Pyrrhus - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... Vito Viti, it is even so," interrupted the deputy, with a wave of the hand that was as authoritative as the concession was liberal, and indicative of a spirit enlightened by study; "the fact must be conceded. There is the fable of Hercules and the wagoner to confirm it. Did our men first strive, and then pray, more would be done than by first praying and then striving; and now, Signor Capitano, a word on your language, of which I have some small knowledge, ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... bands of red (top), yellow (double width), and red with the national coat of arms on the hoist side of the yellow band; the coat of arms includes the royal seal framed by the Pillars of Hercules, which are the two promontories (Gibraltar and Ceuta) on either side of the eastern end of the Strait ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... were as terrible as terminations, there were no liuing neere her, she would infect to the north starre: I would not marry her, though she were indowed with all that Adam had left him before he transgrest, she would haue made Hercules haue turnd spit, yea, and haue cleft his club to make the fire too: come, talke not of her, you shall finde her the infernall Ate in good apparell. I would to God some scholler would coniure her, for certainely while she is heere, a man may ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... now he was in an optimistic mood—perhaps a reaction from his recent tremors. "Yet, by the Host!" he pursued, bethinking him of the amazing boldness Francesco had shown in the courtyard, "he has the strength of Hercules, and a way with him that makes him feared and obeyed. Pish!" he laughed again, as, turning, he unhooked his lute from where it hung upon the wall. "The by-blow of some condottiero, who blends with his father's bullying arrogance the peasant soul of his careless mother. And I fear that such ...
— Love-at-Arms • Raphael Sabatini
... their way down. Iris was despatched to procure a fresh supply of nectar, which Bacchus declared would nearly exhaust his stock. At last the table was spread in the most delightful part of Tempe, and the top of Ossa was occupied by Hercules with his club to see that no mortal intruded on the revels of the gods, when Jupiter discovered something at a distance running at full speed towards them. "Heyday! what have we here?" he exclaimed; "as I live, my old friend Cerberus, with a note in his jaws; why what can Pluto have got to say? ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XX. No. 556., Saturday, July 7, 1832 • Various
... even afraid of the big black hole under the barn in the daytime: "I was tortured with the thought of what might lurk there in that great black abyss, and would hustle through my work of cleaning the stable, working like Hercules, and often sending in 'Cuff,' the dog, to scare ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... touching; Sheridan, Grey, and a long list of practised and indefatigable talent, were in perpetual debate; but Pitt, "with huge two-handed sway", finally crushed them all. The classic illustration of Hercules destroying the Hydra, was frequently used to express the solitary prowess of this extraordinary man in resisting the multiplied, wily, and envenomed attacks of his opponents; and he realized the fable to the full—he not merely crushed the heads, but he ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... still love to relate to their peaceable and admiring pupils how that pocket Hercules, the Honourable S—- C—-, now a pious clergyman, had a single combat with a saucy six foot bargee, "all alone by they two selves," bunged up both his eyes, and left him all but dead to time, ignorant then, and for months after, of ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... carved upon his Pisan pulpit, Madonna assumes the haughty pose of Theseus' wife; while the high priest, in the "Circumcision," displays the majesty of Dionysus leaning on the neck of Ampelus. Nor again is the naked vigour of Hippolytus without its echo in the figure of the young man—Hercules or Fortitude—upon a bracket of the same pulpit. These sculptures of Pisano are thus for us a symbol of what happened in the age of the Revival. The old world and the new shook hands; Christianity and Hellenism kissed each other. And ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... market-place of Lemnos, was a guiding point for mariners in the whole northern Aegean.[425] For the ancient Greeks Cape Malia was long the boundary stone to the unknown wastes of the western Mediterranean, just as later the Pillars of Hercules marked the portals to the mare tenebrosum of the stormy Atlantic. So the Sacred Promontory (Cape St. Vincent) of the Iberian Peninsula defined for Greeks and Romans the southwestern limit of the habitable world.[426] Centuries later the Portuguese marked their advance down the west coast ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... then a great hero, Hercules, came to the Caucasus Mountains. He climbed the rugged peak, slew the fierce eagle, and with mighty blows broke the chains that bound the ...
— Myths and Legends of All Nations • Various
... of autumn, they landed in Lybia, and planted some corn in the place, where they happened to find themselves; when this was ripe, and they had cut it down, they again departed. Having thus consumed two years, they in the third passed the columns of Hercules, and returned to Egypt. Their relation may obtain attention from others, but to me it seems incredible, for they affirmed that having sailed round Africa, they had the sun ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... of the "Evening News" is 60,000 daily. That of "The Age", as I learnt on arrival at Melbourne, has now advanced in its inspiring career to 76,000. These are the papers of greatest circulation in the Southern Hemisphere. Such is already the Press of the infant Hercules of Australasia. ...
— Personal Recollections of Early Melbourne & Victoria • William Westgarth
... up at the white form with the arrow in its hands. "Self-containment.... What, goddess, you would call chastity all around?... All the spilled self somehow centered. But just that is difficult—difficult—more difficult than anything Hercules attempted. Oh me!" He sat down beneath the cypress that stood behind the statue and rested his head within his hands. From Rome, on all sides, broke into the still light trumpets and bell-ringing, pipes and drums, shout and singing. It sounded like a ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... women—oh, the women!" he wailed, and interrupted himself to describe a heavy-footed German Princess who had marched past his treasures as if she were inspecting a cavalry regiment, applying an unmodulated Mugneeficent to everything from the engraved gems to the Hercules torso. ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... mind's eye a tree; a tree which moreover was closely connected in meaning with the forbidden tree of the Garden of Eden, an allegorical figure of undoubtedly phallic signification which had its counterpart in the Tree of the Hesperides, from which the Sun-God Hercules after killing the Serpent was fabled to have picked the Golden Apples of Love, one of which became the symbol of Venus, the Goddess of Love. Nor was this the only such counterpart, for almost every ...
— The Non-Christian Cross - An Enquiry Into the Origin and History of the Symbol Eventually Adopted as That of Our Religion • John Denham Parsons
... looking for them. Personally, if I get the chance, I shall immediately go about purloining other people's physical perfections, so that, when at last I am ready for the next move onward, I shall consist of one part Hercules and three-parts Owen Nares! I shall indeed look lovely, shan't I? In the meanwhile, I realise that, physically speaking, I am far better imagined than understood. Not that I am very much worse than the average? on the other ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... the work and the difficulties of its conductors recommended to them.[118] As the structure progresses, his enthusiasm waxes warmer. Diderot and his colleague are cutting their wings for a flight to posterity. They are Atlas and Hercules bearing a world upon their shoulders. It is the greatest work in the world; it is a superb pyramid; its printing-office is the office for the instruction of the human race; and so forth, in every phrase of stimulating sympathy and energetic interest. Nor does his sympathy blind him to faults of ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... earnestly,—will you share my narrow means, my almost poverty? Will you be my wife? We might have been exiles, so to speak, for we should perhaps have been cast off by our own kindred, and might never have returned to our native land; but your presence would have made this new country,—this young Hercules of lands,—this land full of sinews, bones and muscle, not yet clothed with rounded symmetry of outward form, but fresh and strong and teeming with promise, a true home to us. Its vast, ever-growing mind would have given new expansion to our own mental ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... after the similitude of Caliban's Setebos. They are grotesque, carnal, devilish. Paganism was but an installment of Caliban's theory. God was a bigger man or woman, with aggravated human characteristics, as witness Jove and Venus and Hercules and Mars. Greek mythology is a commentary on Caliban's monologue. For man to evolve a god who shall be non-human, actually divine in character and conduct, is historically impossible. No man could create Christ. The attempt to account for religion by evolution is a piece of ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... a youthful Hercules returning, box in hand, quite proud of his expedition. The box is placed on the table and opened with great ceremony. I can hear the bursts of laughter and the shouts of the merry party when, instead of the looked-for sweets, he finds, neatly arranged on moss or cotton-wool, a beetle, a snail, ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... followers, they forthwith made a rhyme about his father and his ancestors, numbering how many heads they had cut off, how many towns they had burned, how many virgins they had deflowered, how many notable murders they had done, comparing them to Hannibal, or Scipio, or Hercules, or some other famous person—'wherewithal the poor fool runs mad, and thinks indeed it is so.' Then he will gather a lot of rascals about him, and get a fortune-teller to prophesy how he is to speed. After ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... clown. To argue against the war spirit were like whistling in the teeth of a north wind. You cannot alter a psychological condition with a made-to-order editorial. It is urged that we should sing small, as we are "not prepared for war." We are always prepared. Hercules did not need a Krupp cannon—he was capable of doing terrible execution with a club. Samson did not wait to forge a Toledo blade—he waltzed into his enemies with an old bone and scattered their shields of iron and helmets of brass ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... now doth lodge a noble peer, Great England's glory and the world's wide wonder, Whose dreadful name late thro' all Spain did thunder, And Hercules' two pillars standing near Did make to quake and fear: Fair branch of honour, flower of chivalry! That fillest England with thy triumphs' fame Joy have thou of thy noble victory, And endless happiness of thine ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... then declared he HAD BEEN a policeman, and insisted on taking him into custody and to the 'Tronk' (prison) on his own authority, but was in turn sent flying by a gigantic Irishman, who 'wouldn't see the poor baste abused'. The Irishman was a farmer; I never saw such a Hercules—and beaming with fun and good nature. He was very civil, and answered my questions, and talked like an intelligent man; but when Captain D- asked him with an air of some anxiety, if he was coming to the hotel, he replied, 'No, sir, no; I wouldn't be guilty of such a misdemeanour. I am ...
— Letters from the Cape • Lady Duff Gordon
... world-justice with its universal judgment, hitherto only implied, now becomes explicit in Hades and organizes itself, showing (1) the judge, Minos, (2) the culprits in four condemned ones, (3) the saved one, Hercules, who rises out of Hades through the deed. By implication so does the living Ulysses—hence the journey is at an ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... Newton is allowed every advantage, whilst Descartes is not indulged a single one. According to some, it is to the former that we owe the discovery of a vacuum, that the air is a heavy body, and the invention of telescopes. In a word, Sir Isaac Newton is here as the Hercules of fabulous story, to whom the ignorant ascribed all the feats of ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire
... ancient city. It was founded by the Phoenicians, hundreds of years before the building of Rome. Upon the coat-of-arms of the city is the figure of Hercules, by whom the inhabitants say it was built. Then came the dominion of the Moors, and afterwards the Spaniards. When America was discovered, a golden prosperity beamed upon Cadiz, which was lost as soon as the Spanish Possessions in the New World proclaimed ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... appointed by her Majesty's Government consisted of Sir Hercules Robinson, who replaced Sir Bartle Frere at the Cape; Sir Henry de Villiers, now Chief-Justice of Cape Colony; and Sir Evelyn Wood; President Brand was present in a neutral capacity. Though nominally under the control of ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 1 (of 6) - From the Foundation of Cape Colony to the Boer Ultimatum - of 9th Oct. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... scanty grounds on the sea-level, where commerce noisily encompassed it with trains and tracks and lines of freight-cars. But there had remained up to my last visit that grot on the gardened hill-slope whence a colossal marble Hercules helplessly overlooked the offence offered by the railroad; and now suddenly here was the lofty wall of some new edifice stretching across in front of the Hercules and wholly shutting him from view; for all I know it may have made him part ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... the dramatist worked upon. And an important clue to the spirit in which he handled it is the identification, here first made, of part of Bussy's dying speech with lines put by Seneca into the mouth of Hercules in his last agony on Mount Oeta. The exploits of D'Ambois were in Chapman's imaginative vision those of a semi-mythical hero rather than of a Frenchman whose life ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman
... for it; he therefore attributed it to his household gods, to whom he made an immediate supplication for assistance, or rather for forbearance of further affliction: this disposition in man has been finely pourtrayed by Aesop in his fable of "the Waggoner and Hercules." The motion which in despight of himself was excited in his machine, his diseases, his troubles, his passions, his inquietude, the painful alterations his frame underwent, without his being able to fathom the true causes; at length death, of ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... the customs of later centuries; they created in fact a new Arthur and a new Charlemagne, adapted to the new times. They brought to light the almost forgotten characters of antiquity. They represented Jason and Alexander invested with chivalric attributes and affected by mediaeval superstitions. Hercules, according to them, performed his labors, not because of the wrath of Juno or the command of Jove, but, like a true knight-errant, to gain the favor of a Boeotian princess. Virgil the poet was transformed ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... from Dante or, still better, from Chaucer. Chaucer's Monk's Tale is a series of what he calls 'tragedies'; and this means in fact a series of tales de Casibus Illustrium Virorum,—stories of the Falls of Illustrious Men, such as Lucifer, Adam, Hercules and Nebuchadnezzar. And the Monk ends ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... gods have become nice homey things," retorted Dick. "Even in the West we couldn't keep house without Dionysius assisted by Hebe to superintend our afternoon teas, and Hercules as ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... ceremony, went into a learned discussion with my lord of Montacute and Master Sandy as to the origin of the snapdragon, which he, with his customary assumption of deep learning, declared was "but a modern paraphrase, my lord, of the fable which telleth how Dan Hercules did kill the flaming dragon of Hesperia and did then, with the apple of that famous orchard, make a fiery dish of burning apple brandy which he did ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... trod on the threshold of Proserpine." 38 Orpheus, to whom the introduction of the Mysteries into Greece from the East was ascribed, wrote a poem, now lost, called the "Descent into Hades." Such a descent was attributed to Hercules, Theseus, Rhampsinitus, and many others.39 It is painted in detail by Homer in the adventure of his hero Ulysses, also by Virgil much more minutely through the journey of Aneas. Warburton labors with great learning and plausibility, and, as it seems to us, with irresistible cogency, to show that ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... elegant in their deportment, the grass green and as short as a fast horse's winter coat. I could not learn whether it was kept so by clipping or singeing. I was delighted with my new property,—but it cost me four dollars to get there, so far was it beyond the Pillars of Hercules of the fashionable quarter. What it will be by and by depends on circumstances; but at present it is as much central to New York as Brookline ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... substitute. But none was found willing to be the victim, not even his aged parents: at last Alcestis his wife, young and bright as himself, gave herself for her husband and died. Then another Guest-Friend of Admetus came to the rescue, Jupiter's own son Hercules, and by main force wrested Alcestis from the grasp of Death, and restored ...
— Story of Orestes - A Condensation of the Trilogy • Richard G. Moulton
... harp-controling hymns! (or) ye hymns the sovereigns of harps! What God? what Hero? What Man shall we celebrate? Truly Pisa indeed is of Jove, But the Olympiad (or the Olympic games) did Hercules establish, The first-fruits of the spoils of war. But Theron for the four-horsed car, That bore victory to him, It behoves us now to voice aloud: The Just, the Hospitable, The Bulwark of Agrigentum, Of renowned fathers The Flower, ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... threatened to reduce duties twice, five times, ten times as high as ours!" England alone clung to Free Trade, and why? Because she had grown so strong under the old system of Protection that she could now as a Hercules step down into the arena and challenge everyone to come into the lists. In the arena of commerce England was the strongest. This was why she advocated Free Trade, for Free Trade was really the right of the most powerful. English interests were furthered ...
— Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire • James Wycliffe Headlam
... years old, and almost six feet high, strongly built in proportion, and even a little stouter than exactly corresponded to her majestic figure. She looked like a gigantic Niobe, though she never had any children; she seemed like a female Hercules, or like a Roman matron, the sort of whom there are still copies to be seen in the Rioni Trastevere. But the most striking feature was her mobility, her agility, her animation, and the grace of her rather ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... escutcheon, scutcheon; shield, supporters; livery, uniform; cockade, epaulet, chevron; garland, love knot, favor. [Of locality] beacon, cairn, post, staff, flagstaff, hand, pointer, vane, cock, weathercock; guidepost, handpost[obs3], fingerpost[obs3], directing post, signpost; pillars of Hercules, pharos; bale-fire, beacon- fire; l'etoile du Nord[Fr]; landmark, seamark; lighthouse, balize[obs3]; polestar, loadstar[obs3], lodestar; cynosure, guide; address, direction, name; sign, signboard. [Of the future] warning &c. 668; omen &c. 512; prefigurement ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... wealth and learned ease. But think you that I am the dupe of the art wherewith I dupe others? Or, that once I have my foot on firm ground I will stoop again to the things of matter and sense? No, by Hercules!" the big man continued, his eye kindling, his form dilating. "This scheme once successful, this feat that should supply me for life, once performed, Caesar Basterga of Padua will know how to add, to those laurels which ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... as fine and clear as could be desired; and the moon shone with an intensity of light. On arriving at the Temple of Hercules, nothing met our eyes but one solitary column rising from a mass of prostrate ruins, and over-topping the cluster of Indian fig-trees that grew around it. Pointing towards the heavens, it seemed to whisper,—"Mortals, there ...
— Journal of a Visit to Constantinople and Some of the Greek Islands in the Spring and Summer of 1833 • John Auldjo
... larger medical clinics of the world for inspection. According to a recent number of the London Graphic, there is in Berlin a Singhalese who baffles all investigations by physicians by the impenetrability of his skin. The bronzed Easterner, a Hercules in shape, claims to have found an elixir which will render the human skin impervious to any metal point or sharpened edge of a knife or dagger, and calls himself the "Man with Iron Skin." He is now exhibiting himself, and his ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... been scourged by him with lighter rods than those used elsewhere in Sicily. But this man Heius had a chapel, very sacred, in which were preserved four specially beautiful images. There was a Cupid by Praxiteles, and a bronze Hercules by Myro, and two Can[oe]phrae by Polycletus. These were treasures which all the world came to see, and which were open to be seen by all the world. These Verres took away, and caused accounts to be forged in which it was made to appear that ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... many a reader of the most familiar histories of England, in saying, "Hengist and Horsa, Vortigern and Rowena, Arthur and Mordred, are mythical persons, whose very existence may be questioned, and whose adventures must be classed with those of Hercules and Romulus." It is difficult to write of a period of which the same writer has said, "an age of fable completely separates two ages of truth." Yet no one knew better than this accomplished historian himself that ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... observe that there are so many nascent and even flourishing churches around the vast continent of Africa, from Senegambia and Sierra Leone, by the Cape of Good Hope, the islands on the south-east coast, AEthiopia and AEgypt, to the gates of Hercules. They stand there as sentinels, ready to intimate the moment when the army of the Cross may penetrate to the central continent, and conquer new kingdoms to the cause of Christ. This is surely not too much ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... until they were stopped by the sea. This was that fruitful region formerly called Paracheloitis, which, according to classic allegory, was drained or torn from the river Achelous, by the perseverance of Hercules and presented by him for a nuptial present ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... "meet the great Hercules, who threw men about. I always knew that Morey was a brainless brute, but I never realized the marvelous divining powers of those Greeks so perfectly—now, the Incarnation of Dumb Power!" Dramatically Wade pointed to Morey, unable even now ...
— Invaders from the Infinite • John Wood Campbell
... the Prince of Espinoy and a large deputation of the states-general, had been for some days waiting to welcome him. The man whom the Netherlands had chosen for their new master stood on the shores of Zealand. Francis Hercules, Son of France, Duke of Alencon and Anjou, was at that time just twenty-eight years of age; yet not even his flatterers, or his "minions," of whom he had as regular a train as his royal brother, could claim for him the external ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... quickly for any eye but Dick's to see how it was done, he had Bob Woodfall by the nape of the neck and the band of his trousers and lifted the long body high above the crowd at full-length of his terrible arms, brandishing it helpless, like some Mongolian Hercules a Norse Antaeus; took three steps to the stone wall of the stable-yard, and would have flung the village hero over it to break upon the cobble-stones, but for a gloved hand laid upon his shoulder, and a soft, high-pitched ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming
... more proper for the ornaments of wit and learning in the story of Deucalion than in that of Noah? Why will not the actions of Samson afford as plentiful matter as the Labours of Hercules? (Perhaps from this Milton took the hint of writing his "Samson Agonistes.") Why is not Jephtha's daughter as good a woman as Iphigenia? and the friendship of David and Jonathan more worthy celebration than that of Theseus and Pirithous? Does not the passage of Moses ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham
... are sacrifice to thee, Kind Hermes, inexpensive deity. But Hercules demands a lamb each day, For keeping, so he says, the wolves away. Imports it much, meek browsers of the sod, Whether a wolf devour you, ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... we, you see, who should be taught politeness, and the task would be such a difficult one that Hercules himself would not be equal to it. You speak to me about Etretat and about the people who indulged in "tittle-tattle" along the beach of that delightful watering-place. It is a spot now lost to me, a thing of the ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... desires are well regulated, they will not cause you any torments; and if they are not so, you will be punished by swoonings similar to those of Celadon, and the shepherdess Galatea, whom the inconstant Hercules abandoned in the mountains of Auvergne, and who gave her name to the tender country of the Gauls; or you will be stoned by the shepherdesses of Lignon, as was the ferocious Amidor. The great nymph of this cave ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... lest I should do the very thing which I am blaming, I will pass over all these matters, which are so far from the subject that they are not even connected with it. Only do you protect me, if any one attacks me for putting down Chrysippus, who, by Hercules, was a great man, but yet a Greek, whose intellect, too sharply pointed, is often bent and turned back upon itself; even when it seems to be in earnest it only pricks, but does not pierce. Here, however, what occasion is there for subtlety? ...
— L. Annaeus Seneca On Benefits • Seneca
... small faithful band That yet cleav'd to me. As Iberia far, Far as Morocco either shore I saw, And the Sardinian and each isle beside Which round that ocean bathes. Tardy with age Were I and my companions, when we came To the strait pass, where Hercules ordain'd The bound'ries not to be o'erstepp'd by man. The walls of Seville to my right I left, On the' other hand already Ceuta past. "O brothers!" I began, "who to the west Through perils without number now have reach'd, To this the ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... a man. He could not see his comrades left to die before his very eyes, those men who came right from his own mountain town, his own boy friends, the ones who had enlisted under him, marched and drilled with him. Rather would he perish in the swamp with them. He worked like a Hercules, encouraging, helping, carrying some of the more exhausted. A wet, straggling remnant reached Newberne. Even then, when Captain Conwell found that two of his own company were missing, he plunged back into the swamp to rescue them. Hours passed, and just as a relief expedition ...
— Russell H. Conwell • Agnes Rush Burr
... dignified reserve into its new Life; and then how is this new Life spent? As you glance at it, it seems almost ascetic, and reminds you of the rigid fatalism of Egypt. Its grace is almost strangled, as those other serpents were in the grasp of the child Hercules. But if you watch it attentively, you will find it ever changing, though with subtilest refinement, ever human, and true to the great laws of emotion. There is no straight line here,—no Death in Life,—but the severity and composure of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... a half ago, in the mid spring-time of 1492, we are sure that the angel of the dawn, as he travelled with broad slow wing from the Levant to the Pillars of Hercules, and from the summits of the Caucasus across all the snowy Alpine ridges to the dark nakedness of the Western isles, saw nearly the same outline of firm land and unstable sea—saw the same great mountain shadows on the same valleys as ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... had just come in, but she did not go to the nursery. She took care not to expose herself to that. She was willing to allow that she did not understand babies; and then to see such a pale little thing the heir of the Randolphs worried her. He ought to have been a little Hercules; it wounded her that he was so puny and pale. She went through the great drawing-room, and looked at all the additions to the furniture and decorations that Tom and Lucy had made. They had kept a number of the old things; but naturally ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... attained a rebirth in the hereafter. In ancient Persia corpses were thrown out for the dogs to devour. There was also the custom of leading a dog to the bed of a dying man who presented him with food, just as Cerberus was given honey-cakes by Hercules in his journey to hell. But I have not been able to obtain any corroboration of this supposition. It is a remarkable coincidence that the Great Mother has been identified with the necrophilic vulture as Mut; and it has been claimed by some writers[285] that, just as the jackal ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... unable to decipher. In the apparent dimensions of the fixed stars, in their distance, in their relative position with regard to each other, he could observe no change. Although it is established that our sun is approaching the constellation of Hercules at the rate of more than 126,000,000 miles a year, and although Arcturus is traveling through space at the rate of fifty-four miles a second—three times faster than the earth goes round the sun,—yet such is the remoteness of those stars ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne
... moral sense, but which have also some relation to an event really historical: for instance, what is said of the Golden Fleece carried away by Jason; of the Wooden Horse, made use of to surprise the city of Troy; the Twelve Labors of Hercules; the metamorphoses related by Ovid. All fabulous as those things appear in the poets, they have, nevertheless, their historical truth. And thus the pagan poets and historians have travestied and disguised the stories of the Old Testament, and have attributed to Bacchus, Jupiter, Saturn, Apollo, ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... neighboured. He was a grand fragment; as good as an Elgin marble. The nature, which should have recruited his reft legs and thighs, was not lost, but only retired into his upper parts, and he was half a Hercules. I heard a tremendous voice thundering and growling, as before an earthquake, and, casting down my eyes, it was this mandrake reviling a steed that had started at his portentous appearance. He seemed to want but his just stature to have rent the offending quadruped ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... length of breath and sustaining power. And so on with several other forms of aria. The part of hero, whether male or female, was assigned to a man, an artificial soprano, although it might be a hero—like Hercules, for example. The subject had to be classical, and the denouement happy. There were invariably six principal characters, three men and three women. The first woman was always a high soprano; the second or third a contralto; the first man, always the hero of the piece, an artificial soprano. ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... instead of a child; the delineation of childhood was one of the latest triumphs of art." Even in the time of those latest triumphs, however, the same fault was committed in another way; and a boy of eight or ten was commonly represented—even by Raffaelle himself—as a dwarf Hercules, with all the gladiatorial muscles already visible in stunted rotundity. Giotto probably felt he had not power enough to give dignity to a child of three years old, and intended the womanly form to be rather typical of ...
— Giotto and his works in Padua • John Ruskin
... feel as if I lay in a ground-swell on the Bay of Biscay. I am not unacquainted with that fusiform, spiral-wound bundle of chopped stems and miscellaneous incombustibles, the CIGAR, so called, of the shops,—which to "draw" asks the suction-power of a nursling infant Hercules, and to relish, the leathery palate of an old Silenus. I do not advise you, young man, even if my illustration strike your fancy, to consecrate the flower of your life to painting the bowl of a pipe, for, let me assure ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... was still unfit for an offensive campaign against a regular army. To the practised eye of an able and experienced soldier who accompanied McClellan, the Federal host was an army only in name. He likened it to a giant lying prone upon the earth, in appearance a Hercules, but wanting the bone, the muscle, and the nervous organisation necessary to set the great frame in motion. Even when the army was landed in the Peninsula, although the process of training and organisation had been going on for over six months, it was still a most unwieldy force. ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... nobly conceived, but expressed somewhat obscurely. As Hercules contended in vain against Antaeus, the Son of Earth,—so long as the Earth gave her giant offspring new strength in every fall,—so the soul contends in vain with evil—the natural earth-born enemy, while the very contact of the earth invigorates the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... pygmy race in India, a statement which our present knowledge confirms. It is a curious fact that Swift's Lilliputians are thus traceable to the Central African dwarf race, for Greek legend related that Hercules visited the country of the pygmies, where on waking from sleep he found one division of the army guarding his right leg, another his left, and others his arms. Hercules got up, swept them all into the lion's skin which he used as a cloak, and went on his way, shaking ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... pillars of Hercules to Europe; and having taken a survey of its northern and southern countries, I passed by the north of Asia, on the polar glaciers, to Greenland and America, visiting both parts of this continent; and the winter, which was already ...
— Peter Schlemihl etc. • Chamisso et. al.
... reckless swing of their shoulders. For they were palpably masters in their environment. They strove with woodsy giants and laid them low. Amid constant dangers they sweated at a task that shamed the seven labors of Hercules. Gladiators they were in a contest from which they did ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... introduce it into an old society, hic labor, hoc opus est! The Augean stable might have been kept clean by ordinary labour, if from the first the filth had been removed every day; when it had accumulated for years, it became a task for Hercules to cleanse it. Alas, the age of heroes ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... by Hercules the raven Was flayed at her (his) return from Lybia haven. Why am not I, said Minos, there invited? Unless it be myself, not one's omitted: And then it is their mind, I do no more Of frogs and oysters send them any store: In case they spare my life and prove but civil, I give their ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... Hercules and Cleopatra, and the theatre proved to be that of the long-lost city of Herculaneum. The site of Pompeii was not discovered until forty years afterward, but work there proved far easier than at Herculaneum, and more progress ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... of the Japanese Hercules destroying the demons and other mythical heroes was a large alcove, or tokonoma, decorated with peacock, stork, and crane panels. Carvings and lacquer added to the beauty of it. A miniature chrysanthemum garden heightened the illusion. Carved hinoki wood ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... receives many assurances of trust and regard—sometimes by express in a letter—sometimes face to face, with persons of great consequence falling on his neck. It is not wonderful if his head is turned for a time. But once he is dead, were he as brave as Hercules or as wise as Solomon, he is soon forgotten. It is not ten years since my father fell, with many other knights around him, in a very fierce encounter, and I do not think that any one of them, nor so much as the name of the fight, is now remembered. ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... wrought Such a reformation so soon; That House which of late Was the jakes of our state Will ere long be a house of renown. How good wits did jump In abusing the Rump, Whilst the House was prest by the rabble; But our Hercules, Monk, Though it grievously stunk, Now hath cleansed that Augean stable, And drive the cold ...
— Cavalier Songs and Ballads of England from 1642 to 1684 • Charles Mackay
... towards making the King into Hercules," said Stephen, "though verily the tailor hath more part therein than we have; but he must needs have a breastplate of scales of gold, and that by to-morrow's morn. As Ambrose would say, 'if he will be a pagan god, he should have what's-his-name, ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... fellow was driving his cart along a deep miry lane, the wheels stuck so fast in the clay, that the horses could not draw them out. Upon this he fell a-bawling and praying to Hercules to ...
— Favourite Fables in Prose and Verse • Various
... danger threatened to his empire by the consummation of his marriage with Thetis. Thetis, according to this view of the subject, was given in marriage to Peleus, and Prometheus, by the permission of Jupiter, delivered from his captivity by Hercules. Had I framed my story on this model, I should have done no more than have attempted to restore the lost drama of Aeschylus; an ambition which, if my preference to this mode of treating the subject had incited me to cherish, the recollection of the high comparison ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... be a columnar tree straight and true as the supports of a Greek facade. The least deviation from the perpendicular of such a mass would cause it to fall. The limbs are sturdy like the arms of Hercules, and grow out from the main trunk direct instead of dividing and leading that main trunk to themselves, as is the case with other trees. The column rises with a true taper to its full height; then is finished with ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... often really helpful. They enlarge our experience and incite us to do our best. "The head of Hercules," says Ruskin, "was always represented as covered with a lion's skin, with the claws joining under the chin, to show that when we had conquered our misfortunes they ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... lived two thousand years before us, they conclude that we must have made great progress since. In this way poor Aeschylus especially is got rid of. But in sober truth, if this was the infancy of dramatic art, it was the infancy of a Hercules, who strangled ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... was in ancient times held sacred to the deified hero Hercules, and the town of Herculaneum, built at its base, was named after him. So also, it is said, was the mountain itself, though in a more round-about way. Hercules, as you will doubtless learn, was feigned to have been the son of the heathen god Zeus and Alcmena, a Theban lady. Now one of the appellations ...
— Wonders of Creation • Anonymous
... a drop of water, to be sure; but then a drop of water to a man raging in torment. I loved the ground he trod upon, blessed the hand that took mine, and had felt her pulse. I had a ring with a pretty cameo head of a Hercules on it. 'Twas too small for his finger, nor did the good old man wear such ornaments. I made him hang it to his watch-chain, in hopes that she might see it, and recognise that the token came from me. How I fastened upon Spencer at this time (my friend of the Temple ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of muscle was matched by his skill in the lists of love. No Louis of France could boast such an array of conquests as this Saxon Hercules, who changed his mistresses as easily as he changed his coats; the fairest women in Europe, from Turkey to Poland, succeeded each other in bewildering succession as the slaves of his pleasure, and before he died he counted his children ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... in all ambitions and attempts, howsoever grounded otherwise, there is this strict question on the threshold: "Are you of weight for the adventure; are not you far too light for it?" Ambitious persons often slur this question; and get squelched to pieces, by bringing the Twelve Labors of Hercules on Unherculean backs! Not every one is so lucky as our Friedrich in that particular,—whose back, though with difficulty, held out. Which poor Karl Albert's never had much likelihood to do. Few mortals ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle |
