"Mermaid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the institutions which have made Pall Mall and its neighbourhood a conglomerate of palaces, or on such lighter affairs as "the Four-in-Hand," which the railways have left behind, or the "Alpine," whose members they carry to the field of their enjoyment: there was the Mermaid, counting among its members Shakespeare, Raleigh, Beaumont, Fletcher, and Jonson; then came the King's Head; the October; the Kit-Cat; the Beef-Steak; the Terrible Calves Head; Johnson's club, where he had Bozzy, Goldie, Burke, and Reynolds; the ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... for white men; This sailor knows of wondrous lands afar, More rich than Spain, when the Phoenicians shipped Silver for common ballast, and they saw Horses at silver mangers eating grain; This man has seen the wind blow up a mermaid's hair Which, like a golden serpent, reared and stretched To feel the air away beyond her head. He begged my pennies, which I gave with joy— He will most certainly return some time A self-made king of some new land, and rich. Alas that he, the hero of my dreams, Should be his people's scorn; for ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... pride Once so faithful and so true, On the deck of fame that died, With the gallant good Riou: Soft sigh the winds of heaven o'er their grave; While the billow mournful rolls, And the mermaid's song condoles, Singing glory to the souls ...
— English Songs and Ballads • Various
... veteran dictator, his reminiscences, opinions, affections, and enmities. And we hear, too, of valorous potations; but in the words of Herrick addressed to his master, Jonson, at the Devil Tavern, as at the Dog, the Triple Tun, and at the Mermaid, ...
— Every Man In His Humour • Ben Jonson
... a pair of camels went the rounds—"19 hands high, with 4 joints in their hind legs." A mermaid also was exhibited—defunct, I presume—and a living cassowary five feet high, that swallowed stones as large as an egg. A white sea bear appeared in the port of Pollard's Tavern and could be seen for half a pistareen. A forlorn moose was held in bondage ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... travelling wax-works; the menagerie with a very mangy lion in an appallingly rickety cage; the fat Scotchman, a monster made more horrible to view by a dress of royal Stuart tartan; the penny theatre, and a mermaid ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... the month we spoke his Majesty's ship Mermaid, with a convoy from England to New York. On the 15th the Orpheus took a schooner from Martinique, with a cargo of claret, so that with another sloop she had taken she had now five prizes. It was not, however, till the 26th ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... that the law oft obeys; K is a Key, that no secret betrays. L is a Lamb, often freaks o'er the lea; M is a Mermaid, that sings in ...
— Banbury Chap Books - And Nursery Toy Book Literature • Edwin Pearson
... for this reluctant drudgery. And there, grasping the unhappy violin with ferocious fingers, he would pour forth, often till the morning rose, strange, wild measures that would startle the early fisherman on the shore below with a superstitious awe, and make him cross himself as if mermaid or sprite had wailed no earthly music in ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... executive management, and also I put in a very large amount of my own money. My work was to be that of business director, for I did not know an iron or a coal mine from an alabaster ledge in the lunar spheres, and not half as much about an iron smelter as I did about converting whiskers into mermaid's tresses. However, one of the greatest iron men in New England, Aretas Blood, president of the Manchester Locomotive Works, and of the Nashua Steel and Iron Company, was at the head of the enterprise, which ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... of amusement flitted through the mind of Caius at the thought of the sidelight this threw on Jim's character. For Jim was not incapable of casting stones at even so rare a curiosity as a mermaid. ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... indeed! Yes, you are dripping like a mermaid; pull my cloak round you: but I think you are feverish, Jane: both your cheek and hand are burning hot. I ask again, is there anything ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... you hear a mermaid sing so sweet, That the rude sea grows civil at her song, Wont at this hour her music to repeat, (With that she showed the monster huge and long — I said it seemed an island — as her seat) Pass ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... older and feebler. And did he communicate his views of Mackarel Lane? I saw him regarding, me as a species of mermaid or syren, evidently thinking it a great shame that I have not a burnt face. If he had only ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... cry to think how short life is, and how little of it I can spare. 'Cling fast to me and hold me,' my heart is always saying, but meantime London is calling to me, calling to me, like the sea, and I feel as if I were a wandering mermaid and she ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... be read in conjunction with Rosmer, printed in The Mermaid's Prophecy, and other Songs relating to Queen Dagmar, 1913, ...
— Young Swaigder, or The Force of Runes - and Other Ballads • Anonymous
... considerable variants, as Dr. Todd in his book on St. Patrick, Apostle of Ireland, page 460, cites from 'An Irish Life of St. Brendan,' but which must evidently be the fabulous voyage, four incidents, of which one is about the finding of a dead mermaid, another about one of the voyagers being devoured alive by sea-cats, and the third about an huge sea-cat as large as an ox which swam after them to destroy them, until another sea-monster rose up and fought with the cat, ...
— Brendan's Fabulous Voyage • John Patrick Crichton Stuart Bute
... cold, and lifeless at her feet, Pale as the foam that frothed on his dead brow, Which she essayed in vain to clear, (how sweet Were once her cares, how idle seemed they now!) Lay Juan, nor could aught renew the beat Of his quenched heart: and the sea dirges low Rang in her sad ears like a Mermaid's song, And that brief dream appeared ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... shall have one hand in heaven, To write my happiness in leaves of stars, A wife would pluck me by the other down. This bark has thus long sailed about the world, My soul the pilot, and yet never listened To such a mermaid's song. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... social game—they had to invite Sylvia and her sister to their card-parties, and Sylvia and her sister had to go. They had to go and be the most striking figures there: Celeste, slim and pale from sorrow, virginal, in clinging white chiffon; and Sylvia, regal and splendid, shimmering like a mermaid in a ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... difficulty ceases when we consider, that it is as easy to form an idea of feminine features with male organs of reproduction, or of male features with female ones, as the contrary; as we conceive the idea of a sphinx or mermaid as easily and as distinctly as of a woman. Add to this, that at the time of procreation the idea of the male organs, and of the female features, are often both excited at the same time, by ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... the best remark in the course of the evening." Lamb was undoubtedly "matchless as a fireside companion," inimitable as a table-talker, "great at the midnight hour." The "wit-combats" at his Wednesday-evening parties were waged with scarcely inferior skill and ability to those fought at the old Mermaid tavern between Shakspeare and Ben Jonson. Hazlitt, in his delightful essay intituled "Persons One would Wish to have Seen," gives a masterly report of the sayings and doings at one of these parties. It is to be regretted that he did not report ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... much ballast aboard, and Miss Wilder ran up false colors just in time to save her ship. What was the wager?" asked the lively Joseph, complacently surveying his marine millinery, which would have scandalized a fashionable mermaid. ...
— A Modern Cinderella - or The Little Old Show and Other Stories • Louisa May Alcott
... with the ridiculously ornamental. Here were the beautiful banks of a lake and Nature's embellishment of reeds and water plants, which, for a wonder, were left to grow in their native luxuriance, and in the midst a huge pasteboard or wooden swan, and a wooden mermaid of tasteless proportions blowing from a conchshell. In another part was a cottage with puppets the size of life moving by clock-work; a peasant smoking and turning a reel to wind off the thread which his 'goed vrow' is spinning upon a wheel, while ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... Thus a Mermaid, or a Whale, may be made to float on the Water, but then the Figure must be fixed on a convenient piece of Board, with two fire Wheels fixed on an Axle, run through the poised part of the Body, by the force of which it moves in a swift Line in the Water; the Wheels must have ...
— The School of Recreation (1696 edition) • Robert Howlett
... to think! (Looking down.) No! I say, do just look down here! There's the "Mermaid" walking along and chatting with him. Not with father. I wonder if those two aren't making eyes ...
— The Lady From The Sea • Henrik Ibsen
... birth and state.' The third (idem) I have ventured to shorten by three stanzas: a proceeding which, however culpable it seem, at least gets rid of the chief who gave a country's wounds relief by stopping a battle, eliminates the mermaid and her song (the song that 'condoles'), and ends the lyric on as sonorous and romantic a word as even Shakespeare ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... was Tricked The Goblin and the Grocer The House in the Wood Uraschimataro and the Turtle The Slaying of the Tanuki The Flying Trunk The Snow Man. The Shirt-Collar The Princess in the Chest The Three Brothers The Snow-queen The Fir-Tree Hans, the Mermaid's Son Peter Bull The Bird 'Grip' Snowflake I know what I have learned The Cunning Shoemaker The King who would have a Beautiful Wife Catherine and her Destiny How the Hermit helped to win the King's Daughter The Water of Life The ...
— The Pink Fairy Book • Various
... aquiline—the large, dark, and beautiful eye which stood the sternest human gaze, gave to the expression of her countenance such dignity and variety that we all agreed that it really was super-animal. The Scandinavian Scald, with such a mermaid before him, would find in her eye a metaphor so emphatic that he would have no reason to borrow the favourite oriental image of the ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... upon Fu-hi as their first historical emperor; and they place his lifetime in the years 2852-2738 B.C. Some accounts represent him as a supernatural being; and we see him depicted as a human figure with a fish tail something like a mermaid. He is credited with having established social order among his people, who, before him, had lived like animals in the wilds. The social chaos out of which Chinese society arose is described as being characterized by the absence of family life; for "children knew only their mothers and not their fathers." ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... spacious days of Queen Elizabeth, tea, coffee, and chocolate were unknown save to travellers and savants, and the handmaidens of the good queen drank beer with their breakfast. When Shakespeare and Ben Jonson forgathered at the Mermaid Tavern, their winged words passed over tankards of ale, but later other drinks became the usual accompaniment of news, story, and discussion. In the sixteen-sixties there were no strident newspapers to destroy ...
— Cocoa and Chocolate - Their History from Plantation to Consumer • Arthur W. Knapp
... supporting her chin and her knees supporting her elbows, her eyes fixed on the horizon-line. Her hair dried, too, but she did not touch it. It flowed down her back and spread into a pool of gold on the sand. She might have been a mermaid cast up by that sea on which she gazed with such a tragic wistfulness—and forever cut off ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... infants, fearing that they will suck the child's breath; who believe that certain snakes milk cows, and that mermen are possible. I stood in a tent last summer at Atlantic City—a large seaside resort—and watched a line of middle-class people passing to see a "Chinese mermaid," of the kind the Japanese manufacture so cleverly. It was to be seen on the water. All, so far as I could judge, accepted it as real. So much for the influence of the American public school, where ...
— As A Chinaman Saw Us - Passages from his Letters to a Friend at Home • Anonymous
... forget that man, in his search for God, is, after all, but man, and weak! So from "Tales of a Mermaid Tavern": ...
— Giant Hours With Poet Preachers • William L. Stidger
... but he came the other way, from Salem. Do you remember Swampscott was where he found pink and white Susan, who gave him the sugar heart? That was pink, too, with a touch of white perhaps. She sounds so delightful as the "Mermaid!" I'm glad Hawthorne kept the heart for years, and then instead of throwing it away ate it—gave it honourable burial, so to speak—which shows that you can have your heart and eat it, too! (I must, by the by, make a parable of this for Pat, who ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... were pressed and dried, still kept their wonderful colors. Among these valuable water plants, I noted various seaweed: some Cladostephus verticillatus, peacock's tails, fig-leafed caulerpa, grain-bearing beauty bushes, delicate rosetangle tinted scarlet, sea colander arranged into fan shapes, mermaid's cups that looked like the caps of squat mushrooms and for years had been classified among the zoophytes; in short, ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... likely be a mermaid playing reels on her silver comb, and yourself craving after the world you ...
— Three Wonder Plays • Lady I. A. Gregory
... death, the ideas of reality and deception were strongly contending in Lord Glenvarloch's imagination, and it required him to rouse himself from his reverie, so strange did the proposal at first sound when his companion declared King Richard should sup with them at the Mermaid. ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... for it has,' replied Louie, triumphantly. 'It's t' Mermaid Pool. Theer wor a Manchester mon at Wigsons' last week, telling aw maks o' tales. Theer's a mermaid lives in 't—a woman, I tell tha, wi' a fish's tail—it's in a book, an he read it out, soa theer—an on Easter Eve neet she cooms out, and walks about t' Scout, combin her hair—an if onybody sees her an wishes for soomthin, they get ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... there was a youngster in Zennor who was all'ys geekin'[B] into matters that warn't no use in the world. Some do say 'a was cliver, too, weth it all, an' cut out that there mermaid in the church[C] what the folks do come from miles round to see. Anyway, 'a warn't like 'es brawthers an' sesters, an' 'es folks dedn' knaw what ...
— Drolls From Shadowland • J. H. Pearce
... Shropshire; Griffin dwells in Coventry (where he died, three years later). These are the men injured; and if they cannot, or will not, move in the business, Shakespeare (whose case at law would be more difficult) can hardly be expected to. So he contents himself with strong expressions at The Mermaid. But in 1612 Jaggard repeats his offence, and is indiscreet enough to add Heywood to the list of the spoiled. Heywood lives in London, on the spot; and Shakespeare, now retired to Stratford, is of more importance than ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... '49 and the strenuous work of the Young Ireland Party which gathered about the Nation in 1848, to displace this traditional figure in favour of a more earnest and tragical national type. But a single quotation will illustrate the natural magic of which Arnold speaks: "The Merrow (mermaid) put the comb in her pocket, and then bent down her head and whispered some words to the water that was close to the foot of the rock. Dick saw the murmur of the words upon the top of the sea, going out towards the wide ocean, just like a breath of wind rippling along, and, says he, in the greatest ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... thus they reached the mermaid's cave. Who, with a heart-felt joy, To her bright home beneath the ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, May, 1878, No. 7. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... old servant of the Macleans, who had transferred his services without afterthought on the occasion of the marriage. There was some tale of an unlucky creature, a sea-kelpie, that dwelt and did business in some fearful manner of his own among the boiling breakers of the Roost. A mermaid had once met a piper on Sandag beach, and there sang to him a long, bright midsummer's night, so that in the morning he was found stricken crazy, and from thenceforward, till the day he died, said only one ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Since once I sat upon a promontory, And heard a mermaid on a dolphin's back, Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath, That the rude sea grew civil at her song? And certain stars shot madly from their spheres, ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... its onward course as the great tides rise and fall? The great tides rise and fall, and the cave sucks in the breath Of the wave when it runs with tossing spray, and the ground-sea rattles of Death; "I rise in the shallows," 'a saith, "Where the mermaid's kettle sings, And the black shag flaps his wings!" Ay, the green sea-mountain leaping may lead horror in its rear, When thy drenched sail leans to its yawning trough, Pentruan ...
— The Haunted Hour - An Anthology • Various
... our pirate cave away up among the rocks, where we kept an old pistol with the lock broken, a rusty cutlass, a pair of knee boots, and Claude's jute beard and wig. Down on the shore, around one of the horns of the Half Moon, was the Mermaid's Pool, where we sailed our toy boats and watched for sea kelpies. We never saw any. Dick says there is no such thing as a kelpy. But then Dick has no imagination. It is no argument against a thing that you've never seen it. I have never seen the pyramids, either, ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... of these lovers gave occasion to various fictions and conjectures. Some are of opinion, that they were changed into stars; others imagine, that Anningait was seized in his passage by the genius of the rocks, and that Ajut was transformed into a mermaid, and still continues to seek her lover in the deserts of the sea. But the general persuasion is, that they are both in that part of the land of souls where the sun never sets, where oil is always fresh, and provisions ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... When seeking to solve that curious problem which is discussed in one of Hazlitt's best essays—what characters one would most like to have met?—and running over the various claims of a meeting at the Mermaid with Shakespeare and Jonson, a 'neat repast of Attic taste' with Milton, a gossip at Button's with Addison and Steele, a club-dinner with Johnson and Burke, a supper with Lamb, or (certainly the least attractive) an evening ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... a run and a leap, and for fifteen minutes or more she was over and under and up and down on the waves like a snowy mermaid. ...
— Judy • Temple Bailey
... fell asleep working on it at three o'clock, or thereabouts, this morning, and some tests with Carson seem to indicate that it is a success. I should have called you to-morrow, for further test. Nearly five years of damned hard work to a successful conclusion, Taylor, and then this mermaid comes along and makes my experiment appear about as important as one of those ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... them, I suspect," said Glynn. "It's rather too deep a pool to play in unless you were a mermaid." ...
— The Red Eric • R.M. Ballantyne
... the basest and most cowardly among the forest tribes; nor has the sublime courage of the English bull-dog ever been so memorably exhibited as in his hopeless fight at Warwick with the cowardly and cruel lion called Wallace. Another of the traditional creatures, still doubtful, is the mermaid, upon which Southey once remarked to me, that, if it had been differently named (as, suppose, a mer-ape,) nobody would have questioned its existence any more than that of sea-cows, sea-lions, &c. The ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... was compelled to leave her home. She regularly returned, however, before the death of any of the lords of her family, and by her wailings foretold that event. Her history is closely interwoven with the legends of the Banshee and Mermaid.] ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... authorities at Halifax were informed of Allan's expedition and of what was going on at the River St. John they sent the warship "Mermaid" and the sloops "Vulture" and "Hope" with a detachment of troops under Major Studholme to put a stop to the proceedings. Allan's force at the mouth of the river consisted of about sixty men under command of Captains West and Dyer. The "Vulture" arrived on ...
— Glimpses of the Past - History of the River St. John, A.D. 1604-1784 • W. O. Raymond
... changes little Mary Louise into a mermaid. The Polar Bear Porter on the iceberg Express invites her to take a trip with him and away they go on a little journey ...
— Little Jack Rabbit and the Squirrel Brothers • David Cory
... than the church are the by-streets of Rye, so old and simple and quiet and right; particularly perhaps Mermaid Street, with its beautiful hospital. In the High Street, which is busier, is the George Inn, the rare possessor of a large assembly room with a musicians' gallery. One only of Rye's gates is standing—the Landgate; but on the south rampart of the town is the ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... moan, now cooing and crooning, now bold and confident, and again irresolute and unschooled. Not too sure of instrumentalism, oft the note was hesitating, soliciting a compliant ear as became a modest wooer of the muses, polishing his unceremonious serenade to some, shy mermaid, or hooting ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... have a light, mother? I never know what to do When the Three Bears ride on the White Bell-horse, And the Mermaid gallops to Banbury Cross, And the ...
— The Bay and Padie Book - Kiddie Songs • Furnley Maurice
... half-caste, half-blood, half-breed; metis[Lat], crossbreed, hybrid, mule, hinny, mulatto; tertium quid[Lat], hermaphrodite. [mythical animal] phoenix, chimera, hydra, sphinx, minotaur; griffin, griffon; centaur; saggittary[obs3]; kraken, cockatrice, wyvern, roc, dragon, sea serpent; mermaid, merman, merfolk[obs3]; unicorn; Cyclops, "men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders" [Othello]; teratology. [unconformable to the surroundings] fish out of water; neither one thing nor another, neither fish nor fowl, neither fish flesh nor fowl nor good red ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... not altogether a luxurious position to find yourself in. You cannot sit still and hold your hands. All manner of hard and unpleasant things are expected of you, which you neglect at your peril. It is like the old fable of the mermaid. She loved a mortal youth, and, in order that she might win his affection, she prayed that she might have the limbs and feet of a human maiden. Her prayer was answered, and she met her prince; but every step she ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... tall, but not too tall, lithe and slim and sinuous as a mermaid, yet well enough rounded to make each delicate curve a charm, not merely of promise but of fulfilment. She wore a flowing morning-gown that made negligee seem to the suddenly intoxicated secretary the glorified costume ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... the locks combed down, like a mermaid's on a sign-post. Well, you think now your father may live in the same house with you till doomsday, and never find you; or, when he has found you, he will be kind enough not to consider what a property you have made of him. My employment is ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... beautiful green plants that spread their flat fingers over the silver-white sands; and huge rolls of purple and sombre brown; and long strings that came up to the surface—the traceries and decorations of these haunts of the mermaid. ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... of evidence contrary to the traditions he holds to, seriously maintaining that this skeleton never belonged to a living creature, but was created with just these appearances; a make-believe, a sham, a Barnum's-mermaid contrivance to amuse its Creator and impose upon his intelligent children! And now people talk about geological epochs and hundreds of millions of years in the planet's history as calmly as if they were discussing the age of their deceased great-grandmothers. Ten or a dozen years ago people ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... sea moss, which swings back and forth to the action of the waves, as if moved by some invisible hand. We get a glimpse, in passing, of the interior view with its white, pebbly floor, in which the basket starfish have possession—a fitting reception room for sea nymph or mermaid. Pillars of stone incrusted with barnacles and periwinkles rise all around, while long tendrils of sea ferns wave like banners around ...
— Byways Around San Francisco Bay • William E. Hutchinson
... Moryson is often dull, Coryat seldom. Moryson was a student, Coryat a cockscomb. Moryson was a plain man, Coryat a euphuist of the first water. I haven't the least doubt but that Shakespeare met him at the Mermaid—he called himself a friend of Ben Jonson's—and took the best of him. You will find him in Love's Labour's Lost as well as in All's Well. For a foretaste of his quality take a small portion of his first sentence, the whole of which ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... and with Mead extracting fearful groans and growls out of the harmonium, he started off on the first verse of "The Mermaid," a song which he was destined in after years to sing under strangely ...
— Soldiers of the Queen • Harold Avery
... plunge into the waves to get to the mermaids. But the mermaids haven't any hearts, Trot, no more'n a fish has; so they laughs when the poor people drown an' don't care a fig. That's why I says, an' I says it true, that nobody never sawr a mermaid an' lived ...
— The Sea Fairies • L. Frank Baum
... so nearly sealed the Mermaid's fate with Captain King, we found to lie half a mile north-west from the north-east end of ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes
... awa, ye ill woman! "Ye're no come here for good! "Ye're but some witch, or wil warlock, "Or mermaid o' the flood." ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott
... left hand on the wrist that hung over the edge of the sofa. 'Ay, I hope that wicked little siren has done no great damage. Pulled you below, true mermaid fashion—eh?' ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... attempt, when she lifted her voice and began to sing. She sang as she did in the meeting-house at South Bradfield, and her voice seemed to fill all the hollow height and distance; it rang far off like a mermaid's singing, on high like an angel's; it called with the same deep appeal to sense and soul alike. The sailors stood rapt; Dunham kept up a show of singing for the church's sake. The others made no pretense of looking at the words; they looked ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... longer than we had laid out to, for our sweet Dorothy liked it there. And if she had took it into her head to set down on a lonesome rock in mid ocean, like a mermaid, for a week, there would the rest on us be sot round her till her mind changed. For the head of our party would have managed it some way so she could had her way. Not that she would do anything aginst the wishes of the rest of us, but ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... twentieth-century writer, to build yourself a Tudor House would be as absurd as for Ben Jonson to have planned himself a Norman Castle with a torture-chamber underneath the wine-cellar, and the fireplace in the middle of the dining-hall. His fellow cronies of the Mermaid would have thought him ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... use of the trumpet, how many advertising tailors and pill-makers could testify to the soundness of Ellesmere's principle? And beyond the Atlantic it finds special favor. When Barnum exhibited his mermaid, and stuck up outside his show-room a picture of three beautiful mermaids, of human size, with flowing hair, basking upon a summer sea, while inside the show-room he had the hideous little contorted figure made of a monkey with a fish's tail attached to it, probably the proportion ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... among Mr Wells' romances. The realistic method remains, but the conception is touched with a poetic fancy of a kind that I have not found elsewhere in these books. The Venus Annodomini who came out of the sea at Folkestone in the form of an authentic mermaid was something more than a mere critic of our civilised conventions. She was that, too; she asked why people walked on the Leas "with little to talk about and nothing to look at, and bound not to do all sorts of natural things, and bound to do all sorts of preposterous things." ...
— H. G. Wells • J. D. Beresford
... suburbs:—1st, by way of Pershore Street, Moat Row, Bradford Street, and Moseley Road, to Moseley; 2nd, by way of Deritend, Bordesley, Camp Hill, along Stratford Road, to Sparkhill; 3rd, leaving Stratford Road (at the Mermaid) and along Warwick Road, to Acock's Green; 4th, striking off at Bordesley, along the Coventry Road to the far side of Small Heath Park; 5th, from Moat Row, by way of Smithfield Street to Park Street, Duddeston Row, Curzon ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... no birthmarks," ses the woman, speaking very slow—and I could see she was afraid of making a mistake and losing me—"but he's got tattoo marks. He's got a mermaid ...
— Deep Waters, The Entire Collection • W.W. Jacobs
... the luck of picking up a mermaid," she declared. "I may find Father Neptune, or the Sirens, if I go a little farther; or perhaps I might drag back the sea serpent, as a neat little specimen for the school museum. If the trippers are ...
— The New Girl at St. Chad's - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... these replies are worded! See now, dear Manuel, how divertingly you have described King Helmas' hideous nose in your letter to King Helmas, and how trenchant is that paragraph about the scales of his mermaid wife—" ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell
... lady followed the mermaid through a winding gallery, which led from the chief hall far into the marble hill. All was dark, and they had neither lamp nor torch, but at the end of the gallery they came to a great stone gate, which creaked like thunder ...
— Granny's Wonderful Chair • Frances Browne
... would serve a sophomore, that Shakespeare must through conversation have possessed himself of whatever principles of art Ben Jonson and the other university men had been able to deduce from their study of the classics. That they should not have discussed these matters over their sack at the Mermaid is incredible; that Shakespeare, who left not a drop in any orange he squeezed, could not also have got all the juice out of this one, is even ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... Mermaid were celebrated taverns, which the poets, wits, and gallants were accustomed to visit. Mr. Thorpe, the enterprising bookseller of Bedford Street, is in possession of a manuscript full of songs and poems, in the handwriting of a person of the name of Richard Jackson, all copied prior to ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 183, April 30, 1853 • Various
... as at Porto cla Lenha, and we found the people catching it in large spoon-shaped basins: I enquired about the Peixe mulher (woman- fish), the French sirene, which old missioners describe as an African mermaid, not exactly as she appeared to the "lovely lord of Colonsay," and which Barbot figures with "two strutting breasts." He makes the flesh taste like pork, and tells us that the small bones of the hand were good for gravel, whilst bracelets made of the left rib were ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... comb in its hand, for one thing; and besides, my dear, I hope I know a mermaid when ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... granted it to his college at Glassiney near Penryn, and the living seems to have been starved. Zennor, indeed, was formerly known as the place "where the cow ate the bell-rope," a sportive neighbourly reference to its poverty and infertility. But the most famous feature of the church is its carved mermaid. There are two good old bench-ends, now forming the sides of sedilia, and of these the mermaid is one, represented with comb, mirror, and fishy tail. The story tells that the men of Zennor were very fine singers in the old days, and one, a squire's ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... just as I am going to tell Michael. But I did remember one dream just before Michael went down to Newcastle to join you ... was it about mermaids? No. It was about you—wasn't that funny? And you seemed to be dressed as a mermaid—no, I suppose it must have been a merman—and you were trying to follow Michael up the rocks by walking on your tail; and it seemed to hurt you awfully. Of course I know what it all came from. Michael had wanted me to read Hans Andersen's fairy stories—don't you ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... would not laugh, if Lawrence, hired to grace His costly canvass with each flatter'd face, Abused his art, till Nature, with a blush, Saw cits grow centaurs underneath his brush? Or should some limner join, for show or sale, A maid of honour to a mermaid's tail? Or low Dubost (as once the world has seen) Degrade God's creatures in his graphic spleen? Not all that forced politeness, which defends Fools in their faults, could gag his grinning friends. ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... their satirical whips, how they brawled in taverns, how pinched they were at times, how, when they possessed money, they flung it from them as if it were poison, with what fierce speed they wrote, how they shook the stage. Then we think of the "Mermaid" in session, with Shakspeare's bland, oval face, the light of a smile spread over it, and Ben Jonson's truculent visage, and Beaumont and Fletcher sitting together in their beautiful friendship, and fancy as best we can the drollery, the repartee, the sage sentences, the lightning ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... patron of literature, and had to devote evenings to the wits. To him has been ascribed the institution, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, of the Mermaid Tavern meetings in Bread Street, Shakespeare's, Jonson's, Beaumont's, Fletcher's, Selden's, Cotton's, Camden's, and Donne's club. It is very likely; so likely that the intrinsic probability of the ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... in my memory still, a blistered dirty ship with patched sails and a battered mermaid to present Maud Mary, sounding and taking thought between high ranks of forest whose trees come out knee-deep at last in the water. There we go with a little breeze on our quarter, Mordet Island rounded and the quap, it might be within a ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... night shed pale its light, The billows are gently swelling; See a mermaid merge from the briny surge, To Sir Sinclair ...
— Targum • George Borrow
... pictures behind a piece o' calico, Paul Pry with his umbrella, Daniel i' th' lions' den, ducks swimming across a river, a giantess who was a man shaved and dressed in women's clothes, a dog wi' five legs, and a stuffed mermaid—just what little lads would like. There was a man, besides, who played on a flute, and another singing funny songs. When I went outside into the street there was little Billy Yates, as used to play ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... St. Paul's Churchyard. Williarn Bonham, the stationer with whom Rastell was afterwards associated, had some premises there, and as late as the seventeenth century there was a house in Sermon Lane, known as the Mermaid, and it may be that in one or other of these Rastell printed the undated edition of Linacre's Grammar, which bears the address, 'ye sowth side of paulys.' But in 1520 he moved to 'the Mermayd at Powlys ...
— A Short History of English Printing, 1476-1898 • Henry R. Plomer
... now,—the earnings of some half-dozen "evenings." The sea-green silk would not do forever, in place after place; they would call her the mermaid. She must have a quiet, elegant black one, and one the color of her hair, like that she had seen the pretty actress, Alice Craike, so bewitching in. She could deepen it with chestnut trimmings, all toning up together ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... formidable; it amounted to little more, indeed, than a turn for humorous paradox. Our discussion reminded me of Fuller's description of the wit-combats between Ben Jonson and Shakespeare at the "Mermaid." I was the Spanish galleon, my Fascinating Friend was the English man-of-war, ready "to take advantage of all winds by the quickness of his wit and invention." An hour sped away delightfully, the only thing I did not greatly enjoy being the cigarette, which ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... mermaid aboard, sir," said the sailing-master. "Nothing else, they say, sings after that fashion, and the men are on ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... black limber bone of the Greenland or Right whale was largely used in ladies' bodices. But this same bone is not in the tail; it is in the head, which is a sad mistake for a sagacious lawyer like Prynne. But is the Queen a mermaid, to be presented with a tail? An allegorical meaning may lurk here. There are two royal fish so styled by the English law writers — the whale and the sturgeon; both royal property under certain limitations, and nominally supplying the tenth ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... old dishes vanished to? Who has ever known "A smoothening Quiddany of Quinces?" Who can tell the composition of a Tansy? These are tame days when we have forgotten how to make Cock-Ale. They drank 'Sack with Clove-gilly-flowers' at the "Mermaid," I am sure. What is Bragot? What is Stepony? And what Slipp-coat Cheese? Ask the baker for a Manchet. The old names call for a Ballade. Ou sont les mets d'antan? And, cooks, with all your exactness about pounds and ounces and minutes of the clock, can ...
— The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Knight Opened • Kenelm Digby
... sly little Goblin, "I was about to go to the Fairy Queen and tell her one of her fairies was being carried off, but of course I shall not do so now. I see whom she is with. I thought it was old Neptune himself and he might change her into a mermaid." ...
— Sandman's Goodnight Stories • Abbie Phillips Walker
... still it is like a foreigner who speaks your language to perfection in all but accent, and whom you long to hear in his own tongue. Put her back in her Welsh castle, and the scales would fall from her as from a mermaid who loves. If she returns to her father at the end of the season, I think I will call upon her six months later. She should go now, though; scales are apt to corrode. But what is the mystery about the mother? Did she elope with the coachman? But, no; that is strictly a modern freak of fashion. ...
— What Dreams May Come • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... in a society of actors and dramatists and amateurs who must have been incessantly talking about plays and play-writing, and some of whom were ardent champions of the rules and full of contempt for the lawlessness of the popular drama? Who can doubt that at the Mermaid Shakespeare heard from Jonson's lips much more censure of his offences against 'art' than Jonson ever confided to Drummond or to paper? And is it not most probable that those battles between the two which Fuller imagines, were waged ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... Henry Flower bought. Are you not happy in your home? Flower to console me and a pin cuts lo. Means something, language of flow. Was it a daisy? Innocence that is. Respectable girl meet after mass. Thanks awfully muchly. Wise Bloom eyed on the door a poster, a swaying mermaid smoking mid nice waves. Smoke mermaids, coolest whiff of all. Hair streaming: lovelorn. For some man. For Raoul. He eyed and saw afar on Essex bridge a gay hat riding on a jaunting car. It is. Again. Third ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... love with the portrait of Scotland's Queen, Mary Stuart; paying court to her and expecting to see the ship, with her, glide over the sea towards Vadstene. And she came—he thought she came—in the form of a mermaid, raising herself aloft on the water: she nodded and called to him, and the unfortunate Duke sprang out of the window down to her. We gazed out of this window, and below it we saw the deep ...
— Pictures of Sweden • Hans Christian Andersen
... nature's a glass of champagne with the foam on't, As tender as Fletcher, as witty as Beaumont; So his best things are done in the heat of the moment. * * * * * He'd have been just the fellow to sup at the 'Mermaid,' Cracking jokes at rare Ben, with an eye to the barmaid, His wit running up as Canary ran down,— The topmost bright bubble on the wave of ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... remarked David Duffy, who was no respecter of names or persons, "it ain't a wreck, it's a mermaid. I've bin told they weigh over six ton when young. Look out when she ...
— The Lively Poll - A Tale of the North Sea • R.M. Ballantyne
... Kahn Court of Flowers, Detail—Pacific Photo and Art Co. "The End of the Trail"—J. L. Padilla "The Pioneer" The Court of Palms. Portal between the Courts of Palms and Seasons—Pacific Photo and Art Co. Fountain of Summer—J. L. Padilla The Mermaid Fountain Fountain of "Beauty and the Beast" The Palace of Machinery Palace of Machinery, Interior Vestibule, Palace of Machinery—Gabriel Moulin Palace of Fine Arts Open Corridor, Palace of Fine Arts Detail of Rotunda, Palace of Fine Arts Colonnade, Fine Arts, and Half-Dome, ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... the Three Cranes in the Vintry among his houses of call. Of two of his allusions to the house one is derogatory of the wit of its patrons, the other laudatory of the readiness of its service. "A pox o' these pretenders to wit!" runs the first passage. "Your Three Cranes, Mitre, and Mermaid men! Not a corn of true salt, not a grain of right mustard amongst them all." And here is the other side of the shield, credited to Iniquity in "The Devil is ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... imprisoned, and his goods confiscated; in prison he turned Catholic, but twelve years later reverted to Protestantism; the opening of the century brought an unpleasant difference with Dekker and Marston, and saw the famous Mermaid Club at its zenith; for nine years after Shakespeare's death he produced no dramas; in 1619 he received a degree, M.A., from Oxford, the laureateship, and a small pension from the king; now a widower, he founded with Herrick, Suckling, Carew, and others the Apollo Club at the Devil Tavern; ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... There is a tradition in the Isle of Man, that a mermaid becoming enamoured of a young man of extraordinary beauty took an opportunity of meeting him one day as he walked on the shore, and opened her passion to him, but was received with a coldness, occasioned by his horror and surprise at her appearance. This, however, ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... since he boarded the sailboat, he looked into the face of the young lady. Her clothing was thoroughly drenched by the spray, and her face was moist as though she were a mermaid just emerged from the depths of the ocean. But even in her present plight Shuffles saw that she was a very pretty girl. She was shivering with cold, and it was necessary to do ...
— Down the Rhine - Young America in Germany • Oliver Optic
... gentleman rabbit, and before he could turn the spyglass the other way a lovely mermaid swam up and handed him her card, and on it was written in lovely ...
— Billy Bunny and Uncle Bull Frog • David Magie Cory
... Philip ran upstairs three at a time. He went first to the attics, and made a systematic search of every hall, room, and closet. He even peeped into the great tank, as if Patty might have been transformed into a mermaid. Then followed a thorough search of the second story, with all its rambling ells and side corridors; he tiptoed through the nursery, smiling at the sleeping baby and casting a casual glance at the still figure on the couch with the ...
— Patty's Social Season • Carolyn Wells
... what they say of women ye may hear. These be the cocke's wordes, and not mine; I can no harm of no woman divine.* *conjecture, imagine Fair in the sand, to bathe* her merrily, *bask Lies Partelote, and all her sisters by, Against the sun, and Chanticleer so free Sang merrier than the mermaid in the sea; For Physiologus saith sickerly,* *certainly How that they singe well and merrily. And so befell that, as he cast his eye Among the wortes,* on a butterfly, *cabbages He was ware of this fox ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... waves watered every day: she had a palace of pretty shells, where she kept all sorts of little water-creatures as fairy tenants; she had friends and playmates among the gulls and peeps, and learned curious things by watching crabs, horse-shoes, and jelly-fishes; and every day she looked for a mermaid. ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... of the South Gardens is all on the three fountains. The immense central group, the Fountain of Energy, already has been described. In the other two basins the Mermaid Fountain is repeated. This is an attractively ornate bit of decorative design, surmounted by the figure of a mermaid with a dolphin. The figure was modeled from designs by Arthur Putnam. It is typical of the fine strength of his work, and at the same time appealing ...
— An Art-Lovers guide to the Exposition • Shelden Cheney
... love in the rest of the play, appears to contain a reference to Elizabeth as "a fair vestal throned by the west" and "the imperial votaress." So much may be reasonably granted; but Warburton in his edition proceeded to identify "the mermaid on a dolphin's back" with Mary Queen of Scots, the dolphin of course being the Dauphin, and so forth. This interpretation of the alleged secret allegory was displaced in 1843 by one rather more plausible—though still ...
— The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer-night's Dream' • Compiled by Frank Sidgwick
... loving hand and her irritation vanished like magic. Water was Sahwah's element, and as she propelled herself gracefully across the sparkling lake, feeling the absolute mastery of her muscles, changing regularly from left to right in her side stroke, she might have been taken for a mermaid by some Neckan of the deep. She reached Blueberry Island in good time and, climbing up on the rocky shore, sat down in ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Maine Woods - Or, The Winnebagos Go Camping • Hildegard G. Frey
... fishwife would have, so she feared, made her look "too natural." Having, therefore, discarded these notions, her fancy roved in the realms of the beautiful and fantastic, until it settled down upon a costume which, bespangled and with its garland of rushes, she declared to be that of a "mermaid of middle age." Nobody was in a condition to contradict her, inasmuch as nobody recollected ever having seen a "middle-aged" mermaid before. She floated, as a matter of fact, in a cloud of pink and ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg
... next turned to two important sets of pictures, "The Briar Rose" and "The Story of Perseus," though these were not completed for some years to come. In 1886, having been elected A.R.A. the previous year, he exhibited (for the only time) at the Royal Academy "The Depths of the Sea," a mermaid carrying down with her a youth whom she has unconsciously drowned in the impetuosity of her love. This picture adds to the habitual haunting charm a tragic irony of conception and a felicity of execution which ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... Poets dead and gone, What Elysium have ye known, Happy field or mossy cavern, Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern? KEATS, Lines on ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... nine men's morris, old Hiems, etc. 5. Account of theories as to meaning of references to the imperiall votresse, a little westerne flower, a mearemaide on a dolphins backe, etc. Warburton says the mermaid was meant for Mary Queen of Scots. N.H. Halpin thinks that by Cynthia is meant Queen Elizabeth; by Tellus, Lady Douglas; by the little 'western flower,' Lettice, wife of Walter, Earl of Essex, while Cupid is Leicester. (See "First ...
— Shakespeare Study Programs; The Comedies • Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke
... roared with pain in the ears of Mr. Toobad. Mr. Toobad's alarm so bewildered his senses that missing the door he threw up one of the windows, jumped out in his panic, and plunged over head and ears in the moat. Mr. Asterias and his son, who were on the watch for their mermaid, were attracted by the splashing, threw a net over him, and dragged ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... of the verb ( allure, entice); as in C. of E. iii. 2. 45: "O, train me not, sweet mermaid, with thy note;" Scott's Lay, iii. 146: "He thought to train him to the wood," etc. James was much given to gallantry, and many of his travels in disguise were on adventures of this kind. See on i. 409 above ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... and the tavern in Eastcheap came in to fill out his picture; although Mrs. Quickly and Falstaff, and Poins and Bardolph were more likely to have been fallen in with by Shakespeare himself at the Mermaid, than to have been comrades of the true Prince Henry. It was enough for Shakespeare to draw real men, and the situation, whatever it might be, would sit easy on them. In this sense only it is that Poetry is truer than History, that it can ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... gently inclining toward Wallace, "might the beautiful mermaid of Corie Vrekin keep her court! Observe how magnificently those arching cliffs overhang the hollows, and how richly they are ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... Surgeon. Corporal R. Auger, Corporal John Coles, and Private Mustard of the Corps of Sappers and Miners. J.C. Cox, a Stock-Keeper. Thomas Ruston, a Sailor who had been on the coast of Australia in the Mermaid with Captain King. Evan Edwards, a Sailor. Henry Williams and R. ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 1 (of 2) • George Grey
... merchant took the pearl, gave him what he considered its value—at all events enough to make Sulu ring with his generosity—and sent the pearl to China; but what became of it afterwards I could never distinctly trace; but I learned that a pearl in Bengal called 'The Mermaid' originally came from China, and as the one found in Sulu was said to be shaped like a woman's bust, it is ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... was. It lay in the Mermaid's hand, all glowing with its magic blue, pale and dark by turns, its wonderful veins panting as if it were a living thing, its threads of gold moving and twining underneath, round the red heart burning deep in the ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... Shakespeare say, in the Monologue entitled 'At the Mermaid', he could say, with perhaps greater truth, in his own person, than Shakespeare could have ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... Who are your solicitors? And may I take it that they will accept service?" (Here I rolled over and leaned on my elbow.) "You do look fit. Just move your heel out of that pool—there's an anemone going to mistake it for a piece of alabaster. That's right! Oh, but, Mermaid, do tell me how you keep your hair so nice ...
— The Brother of Daphne • Dornford Yates
... know so little. For the story of his youth we have only one or two trifling legends, and these almost certainly false. Not a single letter or characteristic saying, not one of the jests "spoken at the Mermaid," hardly a single anecdote, remain to illustrate his busy life in London. His look and figure in later age have been preserved by the bust over his tomb at Stratford, and a hundred years after his death he ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green
... ye ill woman, Ye're no come here for gude; Ye're but some witch or wil' warlock, Or mermaid o' the flood.' ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... and separation, the intellect is at once infected, so that the man ceases to see God whole in each object, but is able to see the sensual allurement of an object and not see the sensual hurt; he sees the mermaid's head but not the dragon's tail, and thinks he can cut off that which he would have from that which he would not have. "How secret art thou who dwellest in the highest heavens in silence, O thou only great God, sprinkling with an unwearied ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... hunted by the great marine lizards and flying dragons of the Jurassic Epoch. Such a picture is really just as absurd, or, to speak more correctly, a thousand times absurder, than if one were to speak of those grand old times when Homer and Virgil smoked their pipes together in the Mermaid Tavern, while Shakespeare and Moliere, crowned with summer roses, sipped their Falernian at their ease beneath the whispering palmwoods of the Nevsky Prospect, and discussed the details of the ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... glory of Elizabeth's reign was to be the work of playwrights; yet before she died the genius of Marlowe had blazed and been quenched, Hamlet had appeared on the boards, Jonson's "learned sock" had achieved fame; the men whose names we are wont to associate with the "Mermaid" had most of them already begun their career, even if they had not yet passed the stage of merely adapting, doctoring, and "writing up" for managers the stock-plays in their repertory. The Drama, proving itself the form of literary ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes |
