"Niobe" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... is the sea, and over it the wistfulness and pomp and pageantry of the setting sun, and the gentleness of heaven at evening;—there is the whole drama of Day with its tremendous glories; and the huge mystery of Night-time: Niobe Night, silent ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... gone, when the door had closed to behind him, the figure of the strange youth lost its soldierly bearing, and his limbs with a painful spasm subsided into that picturesque pose in which artists generally represent Niobe, or the Daughters of Sion mourning by the willows of Babylon. Every trace of energy and vigour vanished from his face, his eyelids closed over his tearful eyes, and his lips parted with an expression of the deepest emotion. Once more he raised his languishing head to show his strength ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... Niobe, regina Thebanorum, erat pulchra femina sed superba. Erat superba non solum forma[1] sua maritique potentia[1] sed etiam magno liberorum numero.[1] Nam habebat[2] septem filios et septem filias. Sed ea superbia erat ...
— Latin for Beginners • Benjamin Leonard D'Ooge
... earth! Must I remember? Why, she would hang on him As if increase of appetite had grown By what it fed on: and yet, within a month,— Let me not think on't,—Frailty, thy name is woman!— A little month; or ere those shoes were old With which she followed my poor father's body Like Niobe, all tears;—why she, even she,— O God! a beast that wants discourse of reason, Would have mourn'd longer,—married with mine uncle, My father's brother; but no more like my father Than I to Hercules: within a month; Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears Had left the flushing in her ...
— Hamlet, Prince of Denmark • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... those beautiful eyes no more, that all the intimacy of her person is now but a memory never to be renewed by actual presence—in these moments of passionate memory one experiences real grief, a pang that never has found expression perchance except in Niobe; even that concentration of features is more an expression of despair than grief. And it was the grief that this girl inspired that prevented me from mourning my mother as I should like to have mourned her, as she was worthy of being mourned, ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... rapid, imperious, with eyes and arrows that dart and kill. Harry watched and wondered at this young creature, and likened her in his mind to Artemis with the ringing bow and shafts flashing death upon the children of Niobe; at another time she was coy and melting as Luna shining tenderly upon Endymion. This fair creature, this lustrous Phoebe, was only young as yet, nor had nearly reached her full splendour: but crescent and brilliant, our young gentleman ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... is that grief should be so unbecoming!" says Cecil, laughing. "I always think what a guy Niobe must have been if she was ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... to shake the human bundle, calling the man again by name; when, after a little while, he disinterred his terrified face from amidst the folds of his coverings, looking as pale as a Niobe ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson
... bowed painter (who names some of his fellow-sufferers), Dante's attention is directed by Virgil to the pavement beneath his feet, where he sees carved Briareus, Nimrod, Niobe, Arachne, Saul, etc.,—in short, all those who dared measure themselves with the gods or who cherished overweening opinions of their attainments. So absorbed is Dante in contemplation of these subjects that he starts when told an angel is coming to meet them, who, ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... the Annuals, comes to woo us with the kindred charms of poetry and playful humour—romance and real life—full of kindly feelings, sighs and tears, such as Niobe shed, and smiles that with their witchery light up the finest affections to cherish drooping nature, and guide our footsteps along this world of weal and woe. To be more explicit, the character of the present volume is well told by Mr. Haynes Bayly ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 573, October 27, 1832 • Various
... sorrows have ye sung, And tragic stories, chronicled in stone,— Sad Philomel restored her ravish'd tongue, And transform'd Niobe in dumbness shown; Sweet Sappho on her love forever calls, And Hero on ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... and impressive. Thus, in the burlesque contest between Aeschylus and Euripides, in the comedy of "The Frogs," the former is censured, not for too rude a neglect, but for too elaborate a cultivation, of theatrical craft—such as introducing his principal characters, his Niobe and Achilles [30], with their faces hid, and preserving long and obstinate silence, in order by that suspense to sharpen the expectation of the audience. Aeschylus, in fact, contrary to the general criticism, was as earnest and thoughtful an artist as Sophocles himself. ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... husband was abroad; the sun shone, though it was not yet May—and then we breakfasted; and John Gilpin made a very funny speech, though with tears in his voice; and as for poor Maman-belle-mere, as Barty called her, she was a very Niobe. ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... little gauzy wings, and wands tipped with magic stars; one large, full-faced likeness of a pet actress, taken in just the right attitude to show the rounding shoulders, the lightly poised head, and the heavy hair, to the best advantage; some charming French prints, among them "Niobe and her Daughters" and "Di Vernon;" and a half dozen pictures of the fine old English stage-coach days. Over the fireplace were suspended several pairs of boxing gloves, garnishing the picture of a tall fellow in fighting attitude, whose prodigious muscles ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... capable of accommodating a ballet of two hundred cooks. The elegantly proportioned drawing-room (to which a fourth wall has been since added) was the subject of special mention in several leading newspapers after the production of Epigrams at the Niobe Theatre; while each of the twelve bedrooms represents some recent triumph in the Problematical Drama. An attractive feature is the fitting of an artificial sunlight attachment to the outside of each window; while every room is provided with ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156., March 5, 1919 • Various
... sir," replied Dr. Rolleston, "she asserts nothing. She sits there like Niobe changed to stone, staring straight before her. She seems to be unaware of the presence of everyone except Miss Beverley. The only words she has spoken since recovering consciousness ...
— Bat Wing • Sax Rohmer
... didst make thy vengeful might To Niobe and Tityos known, And Peleus' son, when Troy's tall height Was nigh his own, Victorious else, for thee no peer, Though, strong in his sea-parent's power, He shook with that tremendous spear The Dardan ...
— Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace • Horace
... and shining eyes she was a different child from the weeping Niobe who had sat and ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... wept like Niobe, Beheld her children springing round her feet, Raising young voices in the early day, That never to her ear had seem'd so sweet; And the soft murmur of a thousand rills Proclaim'd how Spring had ...
— Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... more he sees the affluence Which makes the heart of Nature glad; For he has lost the fine, first sense Of Beauty that he had. The old delight God's happy breeze Was wont to give, to Grief has grown; And therefore, Niobe of trees, His song ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... listened, with stony face and fixed eyes, to the consolation offered by knights and senators. It was evident that, even if he suffered, he was thinking of this: What impression would his suffering make upon others? He was posing as a Niobe, and giving an exhibition of parental sorrow, as an actor would give it on the stage. He had not the power even then to endure in his silent and as it were petrified sorrow, for at moments he made a gesture as if to cast ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... of thy sprinkling," replied De Bracy; "but this damsel hath wept enough to extinguish a beacon-light. Never was such wringing of hands and such overflowing of eyes, since the days of St Niobe, of whom Prior Aymer told us. [30] A water-fiend ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... all belonged long ago on the slopes of Mount Sipylos, between the valley of the Hermos and the Gulf of Smyrna. The traditional capital of this kingdom was Magnesia, the most ancient of cities, the residence of Tantalus, the father of Niobe and the Pelopidae. The Leleges rise up before us from many points at the same time, but always connected with the most ancient memories of Greece and Asia. The majority of the strongholds on the Trojan coast belonged to them—such as Antandros and Gargara—and Pedasos on the ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 5 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... inspector came to-day. I was at the blackboard in the Maths lesson, when there was a knock at the door and the head came in with the Herr Insp. For a moment I thought he had come about that matter, and I went as white as a sheet (at least the girls say I did; Hella says I looked like Niobe mourning for her children). Thank goodness, the sum was an easy one, and besides I can always do sums; in Maths and French I am the best in the class. But the Herr Insp. saw that I had tears in my eyes and said something to the head; then ...
— A Young Girl's Diary • An Anonymous Young Girl
... And thus Niobe is feigned to have been turned into stone, from her never speaking, I suppose, in her grief. But they imagine Hecuba to have been converted into a bitch, from her rage and bitterness of mind. There are others who love to converse with solitude itself, ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... of such minor attractions as those of Niobe and her daughters, at once to achieve the Tribune, feeling, as poppa said, that it would be most unfortunate to have our admiration all used up before we reached it. The guide led the way, and it was beguiled with the fascinating experience of the Miss Binghams, who had met Queen ...
— A Voyage of Consolation - (being in the nature of a sequel to the experiences of 'An - American girl in London') • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... woman started to her feet, and pressed her children to her arms with an expression as terrified and full of agony as that of the noble and touching statue of the Greek Niobe. ...
— Frederick the Great and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... of a series of letters containing shameless realistic caricatures was handed to him the afternoon following. They came fast and thick. Not a day's interval of grace was allowed. Niobe under the shafts of Diana was hardly less violently and mortally assailed. The deadliness of the attack lay in the ridicule of the daily habits of one of the most sensitive of men, as to his personal appearance, and the opinion of the world. He might have concealed the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Annabel Lee." And the sense of loss goes through and through one like a flight of arrows. Another noble picture, more realistic, more sculpturesque, is of Annabel mourning on her knees in her room. Her bended head makes her akin to "Niobe, ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... moodily. It was about a week after his disturbing adventures in J. B. Wheeler's studio, and life had ceased for the moment to be a thing of careless enjoyment. Mr. Wheeler, mourning over his lost home-brew and refusing, like Niobe, to be comforted, has suspended the sittings for the magazine cover, thus robbing Archie of his life-work. Mr. Brewster had not been in genial mood of late. And, in addition to all this, Lucille was away on ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... unfinished;" so he shapes his thoughts into his scenery. Shall man be satisfied in art with the crystallised joy of Apollo, or the petrified grief of Niobe, when there are a million more expressions of joy and grief to render? In that way felt Giotto and his crew. "We will paint the whole of man," they cried, "paint his new hopes and joys and pains, and never pause, because we shall never quite succeed. We will paint the soul in all its infinite ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... mermaids and sea-serpents, when a red-faced, bottle-nosed Frenchman clapped himself right before me, and, placing his spectacles very deliberately astride his proboscis, echoed out, 'Sacre, mille tonnerres! this is the damned pirate who boarded the "Niobe"!'" ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... Pallas and Arachne. Transformation of Arachne to a spider. Pride of Niobe. Her children slain by Apollo and Diana. Her change to marble. The Lycian peasants changed to frogs. Fate of Marsyas. Pelops. Story of Tereus, Procne, and Philomela. Their change to birds. Boreas and Orithyia. Birth of Zethes ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... doubt the inhabitants of the seaside resorts are duly grateful as they turn their faces to the trippers and the sun. Like Niobe, they are ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, June 2, 1920 • Various
... comes in in her automobile rig and talks about her 'bubble.' Mercury has a bicycle; he's a trick rider, and does all sorts of stunts. And Venus is a summer girl, dressed up in a stunning gown and a Paris hat. And Hercules has a punching-bag—to make himself stronger, you know. And Niobe has quantities of handkerchiefs, dozens and dozens of them; ...
— Patty at Home • Carolyn Wells
... crosses the waste. Far as the eye can see there is nothing but a melancholy plain, studded here and there with a ruin, and populous only with the visionary forms of the past; and its tragic beauty prepares your mind for passing into the solemn shadow of the great Niobe of cities. But it was not thus in the brilliant days of the Empire. For fifteen miles beyond the walls the Appian Way stretched to the beautiful blue Alban hills, through a continuous suburb of the city, adorned with all the charms ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... the Parthenon, and was perfectly conscious of the difference between Phidias and his pupils. Even now, if one takes the pains to think of it, the difference between such works as the so-called "Genius" of the Vatican and the Athenian marbles, or between the Niobe group at Florence and the Venus torso at Naples, for example, seems markedly individual enough, though the element of style is still to our eyes the most prominent quality in each. Indeed, if one really reflects upon the subject, it will not seem exaggeration to say that to anyone ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... Lady Barbara did not say one single word; but that need not have been surprising—only how very straight her back was, how fixed her marble mouth and chin! It was more like Diana's head than ever—Diana when she was shooting all Niobe's daughters, thought Kate, in her dreamy, vague alarm. Then she looked at Josephine on the back seat, to see what she thought of it; but the brown sallow face in the little bonnet was quite still and like itself—beyond Kate's power ...
— Countess Kate • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of the Muses, Pallas determines on the destruction of Arachne. She enters with her into a contest for the superiority in the art of weaving. Each represents various transformations on her web, and then Arachne is changed into a spider. Niobe, however, is not deterred thereby from preferring her own lot to that of Latona; on account of which, all her children are slain by Apollo and Diana, and she is changed into a rock. On learning this, while one person relates the transformation by Latona of the Lycian rustics into frogs, another ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... wreathed, Yon stone was mournful Niobe's mute cell, Low through yon sedges pastoral Syrinx breathed, And through those groves wailed the sweet Philomel, The tears of Ceres swelled in yonder rill— Tears shed for Proserpine to Hades borne; And, for her lost Adonis, yonder hill ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... with some aid from Ovid's Fasti, II. 721 ff. Among other Ovidian allusions are those to the story of Philomela, so pervasive in Titus Andronicus; to the Medea myth in four or five passages; to Narcissus and Echo, Phaeton, Niobe, Hercules, and a score more of the familiar names of classical mythology. Pyramus and Thisbe Shakespeare may have read about in Chaucer as well as in Ovid, but Bottom's treatment of this story in A Midsummer-Night's Dream gives but a slight ...
— The Facts About Shakespeare • William Allan Nielson
... gloomy cares portentous of her fate;— Yet on her brow still soft Affection beams, Tho' Desperation prompts her sombre dreams. Parental feelings thrill her tortur'd breast, And all the frantic mother stands confest— A very Niobe—sad, hapless name! In figure, features, and in all the same: The same in all as Vengeance fierce pursued Far to a wild and cheerless solitude. For Salmo's bard has sung (by Heaven's decrees) In awful pomp she mounted on the breeze— Borne by the buoyant wind—a ghostly form— ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 477, Saturday, February 19, 1831 • Various
... improvement. Nothing is wanting but riches, Aby, to proceed to much greater lengths than any we have yet thought of. What richness of imagination is there in Ovid! What statues might we form, from the wonderful tales which he relates! Niobe at the head of the canal, changing into stone! To be sure we should want a rock there. Then on one side Narcissus, gazing at himself in the clear pool, with poor Echo withering away in the grove behind! King Cygnus, in the very act of being metamorphosed ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... Eriphyle, Polyxena and Hermione, Deidamia and Deianira, Leda and Omphale, Atalanta and Cydippe, Laodamia, with her arm round the neck of a fond youth whom she still seems afraid of losing, and, apart, the daughters of Niobe clinging to their parent? ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... two hours in the gallery, and for the first time saw the Niobe. This statue has been for a long time a favourite of my imagination, and I approached it, treading softly and slowly, and with a feeling of reverence; for I had an impression that the original Niobe would, like the original Venus, surpass all the casts and copies I had ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... seemed to be nearly the sole covering to her delicate form; but the mid-summer and midnight air was hot, sullen, and still, and no motion in the statue-like form itself, stirred even the folds of that raiment of very vapor which hung around it as the heavy marble hangs around the Niobe. Yet—strange to say!—her large lustrous eyes were not turned downwards upon that grave wherein her brightest hope lay buried—but riveted in a widely different direction! The prison of the Old Republic is, I think, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... would fain be kinglier, say, than I am? Even so, you will not sit like Theseus. You would prove a model? The Son of Priam Has yet the advantage in arms' and knees' use. You're wroth—can you slay your snake like Apollo? You're grieved—still Niobe's the grander! You live—there's the Racers' frieze to follow: You die—there's the ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... pillar of rock, extending his graceful hand in triumph over the terrible snake. Oh, he was simply beautiful! Venus entranced me. She looked as if she had just risen from the foam of the sea, and her loveliness was like a strain of heavenly music. I also saw poor Niobe with her youngest child clinging close to her while she implored the cruel goddess not to kill her last darling. I almost cried, it was all so real and tragic. General Loring kindly showed me a copy of one of the wonderful bronze doors of the Baptistry of Florence, ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... herself. Had Silas Marner really existed (nay! even had George Eliot created him in her maturity) neither would he have felt recompensed. Far likelier, he would have been turned to stone, in the first instance, as was poor Niobe when the divine arrows destroyed that unique collection on which she had lavished so many years. Or, may be, had he been a very strong man, he would have found a bitter joy in saving up for a new hoard. Like Carlyle, when the MS. of his masterpiece was burned by ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... on their little tour, and she had to leave Mrs. Wilson and Eve for a whole week, the tears would not be denied; and, to show how perilous a road matrimony is, these two risked a misunderstanding on their wedding-day, thus: Lucy, all alone in the post-chaise with David, dissolved—a perfect Niobe—gushing at short intervals. Sometimes a faint explanation gurgled out with the tears: "Poor Eve! her dear little face was working so not to cry. Oh! oh! I should not have minded so much if she had cried ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... why the Prince's chauffeur had acquired the countenance of a male Niobe. Wormlike resignation to utter misery was, we had judged, his prevailing characteristic; but hard work, ingratitude, and goodness knows how much abuse, caused the worm to turn ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... nearly wrecked through the skipper's intemperance, and had finally been put ashore at Malta. He had also been Byron-smitten, and had followed in the wake of the author of "Childe Harold" to the Levant; had contemplated "the Niobe of nations" among the ruins of Rome; had witnessed the dance of the dervishes amid the fallen temples of Athens; and had "felt his patriotism gain force upon the plain of Marathon."[202] He had twice visited South America as the agent of a company ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... the purpose of their being. There were gaudy china vases by the dozen and simpering china shepherdesses by the score. There were plaster casts of the whole of Signora Anina's family of nine children, from the elder fiery Achilles to the younger hysterical Niobe. There were perfume-bottles enough to start a coiffeur in business, and woolly lambs enough for a dozen pastoral poems or as many bucolic butchers. But the piano was piled high with Beethoven's sonatas and Chopin's delicious dream-music, while a deluge of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... fifteen years of age outnumbered the men nearly four to one. Loose polygamy was the inevitable consequence, and women became the breadwinners. Even today in this country the excess of females over males is very great. All in all, it is not strange that Paraguay should be called the "Niobe ...
— The Hispanic Nations of the New World - Volume 50 in The Chronicles Of America Series • William R. Shepherd
... however, that she could by no possibility fill the important post of Family Ghost, but was real flesh and blood. Yet even thus she was scarcely less impressive. Most of all was he moved by the sorrow of her face. She might serve for Niobe with her children dead; she might serve for Hecuba over the bodies of Polyxena and Polydore. The sorrows of woman have ever been greater than those of man. The widow suffers more than the widower; the bereaved mother than the bereaved father. The ideals of grief ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... yet a third time. The crazy "murderess" had veered her course, but what was that other object nearby? A Niobe weeping for her own and the world's sorrows! Or this one over here—a shrieking maniac calling on all Hell's legions for vengeance on fancied enemies! Beyond, gibbering victims of paresis, white-haired idiots, wasted ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon
... Orion with one of her arrows, for daring to make love to her. (2) She changed Actaeon into a stag and set her own dogs on him to worry him to death, because he chanced to look upon her while bathing. (3) She shot with her arrows the six sons and six daughters of Niobe, because the fond mother said she was happier than Latona, who had ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... Magter," a volume of poetry, and two collections of shorter stories, "Otte Fortoellinger" and "Trold." He has recently completed another novel, which will shortly appear, and is, it is believed, to be entitled "Niobe." Jonas Lie completed his sixtieth year on the 6th of November last, and this interesting occasion has been celebrated by a festival given in his honour by the students of his old University at Christiania. A special number of Samtiden, a Norwegian magazine, ...
— The Visionary - Pictures From Nordland • Jonas Lie
... horseman and bounding avenging angels of Raphael's Heliodorus, to the St. Sebastian of Sodoma, with exquisite limbs and head, rich with tendril-like locks, delicate against the brown Umbrian sunset; from the Madonna of Andrea del Sarto seated, with the head and drapery of a Niobe, by the sack of flour in the Annunziata cloister, to the voluptuous goddess, with purple mantle half concealing her body of golden white, who leans against the sculptured fountain in Titian's Sacred and Profane Love, with the greenish blue sky and hazy light of evening behind her; from ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... Therein a flash of arrows feathered weel. In her left hand her bow was bended strong, Therein a shaft headed with mortal steel, So fit to shoot she singled forth among Her foes who first her quarries' strength should feel, So fit to shoot Latona's daughter stood When Niobe she killed ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... rural scenes to those we had recently encountered in poor down-trodden Ireland, the Niobe of nations, besprinkled with the tears of centuries for the loss of ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... Juan every hilltop is crowned with these monuments of antiquity. It is like the castled Rhine. Ruins looking in the faces of ruins. It is a tragedy in stone. It is like Niobe and her daughters. Moreover, if we take this route we shall pass the Moquis. The independent Moquis are a fragment of the ancient ruling race of New Mexico. They live in stone-built cities on lofty eminences. They weave blankets of exquisite patterns and colors, ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... looked some like her sirname with the last letter changed to n. But to resoom: The galleries of Florence contains priceless pictures and statuary, so many of 'em that to enjoy them as you should, and want to, would take years. Why, in the hall of Niobe I wanted to stay for days to cry and weep and enjoy myself. I took my linen handkerchief out of my pocket to have it ready, for I laid out to weep some, and did, the mother's agony wuz so real, holdin' ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... Ascoli blames me for deriving Niobe with other names for snow from the root snu, instead of from the root snigh, this can only be due to an oversight. I am responsible for the derivation of Niobe, and for the admission of a secondary root snyu or nyu, and so far I may be either right or wrong. But Signer Ascoli ought to have known that the derivation of Gothic snaiv-s, Old High-German sneo, or sne, ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller
... Niobe, Queen of Thebes, was proud of many things. Amphion, her husband, had received from the Muses a wonderful lyre, to the music of which the stones of the royal palace had of themselves assumed place. Her father was Tantalus, who had ...
— Myths and Legends of All Nations • Various
... hang on him, As if Increase of Appetite had grown By what it fed on; yet within a Month! Let me not think. Frailty! Thy Name is Woman. A little Month; e'er yet those Shoes were old, With which she follow'd my poor Father's Body, Like Niobe, all Tears; Why she, even she, (Oh Heav'n, a Beast that wants Discourse of Reason, Would have mourn'd longer) married with mine Uncle, My Father's Brother; but no more like my Father, Than I to Hercules. Within a Month, E'er yet the ...
— Some Remarks on the Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Written by Mr. William Shakespeare (1736) • Anonymous
... apt to continue for some little time, if a man gets thoroughly interested in his subject and thinks he is talking rather well, before he discovers that his petite blonde divinity is either a frozen statue, or a veritable Niobe as to tears. And not one man in three hundred and nineteen ever suspects what ...
— The Spinster Book • Myrtle Reed
... left this life at last, content, descending To realms of dark Persephone, the all-ending, Without such grievous sorrow in my heart, Of which earth holdeth not the counterpart. I marvel not that Niobe, alone Amid her dear, dead ...
— Laments • Jan Kochanowski
... Greenough, Crawford, or Powers, and the two latter upon Washington Allston. There was a small vase of oracular gas from Delphos, which I trust will be submitted to the scientific analysis of Professor Silliman. I was deeply moved on beholding a vial of the tears into which Niobe was dissolved; nor less so on learning that a shapeless fragment of salt was a relic of that victim of despondency and sinful regrets,— Lot's wife. My companion appeared to set great value upon some Egyptian darkness in a blacking-jug. Several of the shelves were ...
— A Virtuoso's Collection (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... record in his life. Just before we ascend, we glance up at those beautiful Caryatides, who give their name to one of the principal saloons, and, loitering for a few moments on the stair before a charming little group of Niobe and her children, are presently in the gallery above. There—omitting all minor objects of interest chronicled in the guide books, (which we have now no time to re-examine,)—we devote ourselves chiefly to the reconsidering two or three favourite marbles and bronzes. First among ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... Indian shawl. I have not seen her yet, so am no judge; but people are mad about her wonderful expression, which I do not conceive; so few antique statues having any expression at all, nor being designed to have it. The Apollo has the symptoms of dignified anger:(818) the Laocoon and his sons, and Niobe and her family,(819) are all expression;' and a few more: but what do the Venuses, Floras, Hercules, and a thousand others tell, but the magic art of the sculptor, and their own graces ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... Helvetius; or he may never think about the matter at all. His creed on such subjects will no more influence his poetry, properly so called, than the notions which a painter may have conceived respecting the lacrymal glands, or the circulation of the blood will affect the tears of his Niobe, or the blushes of his Aurora. If Shakespeare had written a book on the motives of human actions, it is by no means certain that it would have been a good one. It is extremely improbable that it would have contained half so much able ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... nearly the size of the common wood owl. Its cry once heard will never be forgotten. It seems like one in deep distress. "A stranger," says Waterton, "would never believe the sound to be the voice of a bird. He would say it was the last groan of a midnight murdered victim, or the cry of Niobe for her children before she was turned into stone. Suppose a person in great sorrow, who begins with a loud note, Ha, ha, ha, ha! and so on, each note lower and lower, till the last is scarcely heard, pausing a moment or two between every note, and some idea may ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... I'll try To show how this portentous quack beguiled the silly fools Whose tastes were nurtured, ere he came, in Phrynichus's schools. He'd bring some single mourner on, seated and veiled, 'twould be Achilles, say, or Niobe—the face you could not see— An empty show of tragic woe, who uttered not ...
— The Frogs • Aristophanes
... finished with the usher, than Mrs Root, "like Niobe, all in tears," appeared; with outstretched arms, in the gallery. Her outstretched arms, her pathetic appeals, her sugared promises, had no avail: the simple lady wanted us to go to bed, and Mr Root, ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... bay. His smile makes every barren hill-side blush In rose and purple for the glories fled, As early watchers note th' encroaching flush From proud Ravello to Atrani spread, And curse the cruel arm that once did crush This sea-sprung Niobe, ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... still, as though her breast had received the shot. With tragic eyes she gazed out above Karen's head; then: "It is true," she said in a low voice, as though communing with herself; "I am indeed alone." She rose. With the slow step of a Niobe she moved down the ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... You are happy, and I—shall try to be. Who knows what time may do—that and Texas? Now, my little Niobe, dry up your tears. Mine are all gone, and I feel in first rate spirits. I ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... now opened the door of an apartment, which appeared to have been more lately tenanted than the rest, yet which exhibited signs of the general desertion; a marble table, covered with a decaying drapery, a Carrara alabaster of Niobe and her children on the mantelpiece, a huge mirror, and a tapestry of one of the hunts of Henri Quatre, showed that Time had been there, and that the Prussians had not; but the indistinct light of the single chandelier ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... grief has kept me dumb: Sure there's a lethargy in mighty woe, Tears stand congeal'd, and cannot flow; And the sad soul retires into her inmost room: Tears, for a stroke foreseen, afford relief; But, unprovided for a sudden blow, Like Niobe we marble ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... more, having to slip away at that moment and hide behind one of the statues in the passage during the exit of his step-mother with the weeping Niobe; but when the sound of their footsteps had died away in the distance, he rushed into the oak parlour, and seizing Winnie round the waist, treated her to several convulsive hugs and various exclamations of ...
— Aunt Judith - The Story of a Loving Life • Grace Beaumont
... hang on him, As if encrease of Appetite had growne By what is fed on; and yet within a month? Let me not thinke on't: Frailty, thy name is woman. A little Month, or ere those shooes were old, With which she followed my poore Fathers body Like Niobe, all teares. Why she, euen she. (O Heauen! A beast that wants discourse of Reason Would haue mourn'd longer) married with mine Vnkle, My Fathers Brother: but no more like my Father, Then I to Hercules. Within a Moneth? Ere yet the salt ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... fancifully indicated in the matter of another; as in phantoms and cloud shapes, the use of which, in mighty hands, is often most impressive, as in the cloudy charioted Apollo of Nicolo Poussin in our own gallery, which the reader may oppose to the substantial Apollo, in Wilson's Niobe, and again the phantom vignette of Turner already noticed; only such operations of the imagination are to be held of lower kind and dangerous consequence, if frequently trusted in, for those painters only have the right imaginative power who can set the supernatural ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... flower or leaf,— If first to no man else, thou'rt first to me. New loves may come with duties, but the first Is deepest yet,—the mother's breath and smiles; Like that kind face and breast where I was nursed Is my poor land, the Niobe of isles. ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various
... Rachel, with the strange narrow jealousy of her nature, trembled for her laurels. Myrrha was followed by Marie Stuart, and Marie Stuart by Medea. In the latter part Madame Ristori excited the greatest enthusiasm. Ary Scheffer designed her costumes for her; and the Niobe that stands in the Uffizzi Gallery at Florence, suggested to Madame Ristori her famous pose in the scene with the children. She would not consent, however, to remain in France, and we find her subsequently playing ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... evidence of Popol Vuh, the Quichua sacred book, is to be accepted) changed into stone the lion, serpent and tiger gods. The Standing Rock on the Upper Missouri is adored by the Indians, and decorated with coloured ribbons and skins of animals. This stone was a woman, who, like Niobe, became literally petrified with grief when her husband took a second wife. Another stone-woman in a cave on the banks of the Kickapoo was wont to kill people who came near her, and is even now approached with great respect. The Oneidas and Dacotahs claim descent from stones to which ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... bear him no ill will. Although I grow slightly envious of his madness. Yet his madness is a terrific flattery. It is involved and piquant and one of the things that remain for me to study cautiously. The madness of Goliath and, of course, this gentleman Niobe. ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... haughty Niobe, with joy and pride, Saw all her shining offspring grace her side; She view'd their charms, exulting at each line, And then oppos'd 'em to the race divine! Enrag'd Latona urg'd the silver bow: Immortal vengeance laid their beauties ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. IV • Theophilus Cibber
... his body 'like Niobe, all tears.' And then within a month—'O God! a beast would have mourned longer'—she married again, and married Hamlet's uncle, a man utterly contemptible and loathsome in his eyes; married him in what to Hamlet was incestuous wedlock;[43] married him not for any reason ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... dialogue and movement, but dramatic monologue and episode. For illustration, we might refer to Hagar in the wilderness. Her tragic loneliness and shuddering despair alight upon the page of Scripture with the interest that attends the introduction of the veiled Niobe with her ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... unfavourable weather, this proved a most tediously vexatious voyage. Unable, after all, to fetch Ireland, on account of the northerly winds, his lordship, in the afternoon of August 12, was informed by the Niobe, Captain Scott, three weeks from the channel fleet, that there had not, at that time, been the smallest intelligence of the enemy's arrival in any of the ports. He also learned, that they had not been heard of on the Irish coast. Having ...
— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. II (of 2) • James Harrison
... the Soul that the creator of the Niobe has presented to us. All the means by which Art tempers even the Terrible, are here made use of. Mightiness of form, sensuous Grace, nay, even the nature of the subject-matter itself, soften the expression, through this, that Pain, transcending all expression, annihilates itself, ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... and kept their eyes fixed on the life-like sculptures on the floor of those who had suffered before them for the sins of pride: Lucifer, falling from Heaven; Briareus and Nimrod overcome by the bolts of Jove; Niobe, weeping among her dead children; Cyrus's head taunted by Tomyris; Troy ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... to the desire of explaining unusual natural appearances, coupled with the idea that sin must be followed by retribution, we also owe the well-known Niobe myth. Having incurred the divine wrath, Niobe saw those dearest to her destroyed by missiles from heaven, and was finally transformed into a rock on Mount Sipylos which bore some vague resemblance to the human form, and ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... did not like the easel-paintings of Raphael on account of their hard outlines; those in the Vatican did him better justice. This idea he may have derived from William Morris Hunt, the Boston portrait-painter. He considered the action of the Niobe group too strenuous to be ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... uttered these words in a tone of indescribable sadness, a faint smile played around the corners of her mouth—such a marble smile as might have appeared upon the face of Niobe. In an instant more it had composed itself into its former sadness, as a sheet of pure water resumes its calmness, after having been lightly stirred ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... the contemporary of Praxiteles, and was the author of the celebrated group of Niobe, which is one of the chief ornaments of the gallery of sculpture at Florence. He flourished about three hundred and fifty years before Christ, and wrought chiefly in marble. He was employed in decorating the Mausoleum ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... fat and crying like Niobe or Niagara, Mrs. Peters threw her arms around her lord and dissolved upon him. Mr. Peters would have striven to extricate the dollar bill from its deposit vault, but his arms were ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... Oblivion and sorrow share our being, as Darkness and Light divide the course of time. It is not in human nature to endure extremities, and sorrows soon destroy either us or themselves. Perhaps the fate of Niobe is no fable, but a type of the callousness of our nature. There is a time in human suffering when succeeding sorrows are but like snow falling on an iceberg. It is indeed horrible to think that our peace of mind should arise, not from a retrospection ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... enjoyment, while it is passing, but afterwards. I made a good suggestion to Miss Hosmer for the design of a fountain,—a lady bursting into tears, water gushing from a thousand pores, in literal translation of the phrase; and to call the statue "Niobe, all Tears." I doubt whether she adopts the idea; but Bernini would have been delighted with it. I should think the gush of water might be so arranged as to form a beautiful drapery about the figure, swaying and fluttering with every breath ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... had stood two nymphs, now almost classic with decay. One of them, toppling helplessly, quenched her bronze torch in weeds. Her sister stood erect in grief like a daughter of Niobe wept into stone. ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... I thought she had something to do with sitting on a hill and her children turning to stone one after the other, but Jerry said that was Niobe and that it was she who turned to stone, not the children. He has a fearfully long memory. So we put on the light again and looked it up in "The Reader's Handbook," because we didn't want to bother the grown-ups, ...
— Us and the Bottleman • Edith Ballinger Price
... to the 'Niobe' frigate out in the West Indies. We had been cruising for some weeks without taking a prize, when we captured a Spanish merchant schooner, after a long chase. From some of her crew our captain learnt that a Spanish corvette, ...
— Dick Cheveley - His Adventures and Misadventures • W. H. G. Kingston
... who, during his interminable task of sculpture, held fast the model's fleeting outline—so fleeting, at that particular age of life, that every month, and every week, brings about new conditions of surface and texture. A child of Niobe? Very likely. There is suffering also here, a suffering different from theirs; struck by the Sun-God's arrow, he is in the act of sinking to earth. Over this tension broods a divine calm. Here is the antidote ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... O Niobe! in what a trance of woe Thee I beheld, upon that highway drawn, Sev'n sons on either side thee slain! Saul! How ghastly didst thou look! on thine own sword Expiring in Gilboa, from that hour Ne'er visited with rain ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... ascribed to them scandalous adventures or dishonest acts. Hermes was notorious for his thieving, Aphrodite for her coquetry, Ares for his ferocity. All were so vain as to persecute those who neglected to offer sacrifices to them. Niobe had seen all her children pierced with arrows by Apollo because she herself had boasted of her numerous family. The gods were so jealous that they could not endure seeing a man thoroughly happy; prosperity for the Greeks was the greatest of dangers, for it never ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... to bear Alice Ferris away to her home by the lakes, and some subtle influence seemed to have transformed the golden-haired girl into a stern, stately Niobe. ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... night in Hyde Park he had slid and sneaked from tree to tree, from seat to seat, hunting blindly, ridiculously, in burning jealousy for her and young Bosinney. The path bent sharply, and, hurrying, he came on her sitting in front of a small fountain—a little green-bronze Niobe veiled in hair to her slender hips, gazing at the pool she had wept: He came on her so suddenly that he was past before he could turn and take off his hat. She did not start up. She had always had great self-command—it was one of ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... hear the doctor in the hall below. For goodness' sake, do try and look a little less like a modern Niobe when he comes up. Here, take baby," and she hugged the little fellow close and imprinted a kiss upon his dimpled cheek. "I must run down and detain him a moment until you can get ...
— 'Laramie;' - or, The Queen of Bedlam. • Charles King
... up as gallantly as he, resolved that his last impression of her should be a cheerful one. But when it was all over, and nothing remained but the trampled street, the hurrying crowd, the bleak November sky, when Mrs. Wilkins sat sobbing on the steps like Niobe with her children scattered about her, then Christie's heart gave way, and she hid her face on Mr. Power's shoulder for a moment, all her ardor quenched in tears as she ...
— Work: A Story of Experience • Louisa May Alcott
... keep these forms of gods and heroes ever present to our fancy. The assertion may appear somewhat strange at present, but I hope in the sequel to demonstrate its justice: it is only before the groups of Niobe or Laocon that we first enter into the spirit ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... who profoundly impressed her age was Giuditta Pasta, born near Milan in 1798, of Hebrew parentage. For her Bellini wrote "La Sonnambula" and "Norma," Donizetti his "Anna Bolena," Pacini his "Niobe," and she was the star of Rossini's leading operas of the time. Her voice, a mezzo-soprano, at first unequal, weak, of slender range and lacking flexibility, acquired, through her wonderful genius and industry a range of two octaves and ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore
... Perhaps you would like me to resemble Widow Anne, who is always funereal. Here she is, looking like Niobe." ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume
... commissionaire flings wide the doors for us and, passing reverently inside, we are confronted by the magnificent equestrian statue of Mr. Bookham Pryce, the founder of the firm. This masterpiece of the Post-Cubist School was originally entitled, "Niobe Weeping for her Children," but the gifted artist, in recognition of Mr. Pryce's princely offer of one thousand guineas for the group, waived his right ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 7th, 1920 • Various
... boulevard, the idlers of the quarter dubbed them "the pair of nutcrackers," a nickname which makes any portrait of Schmucke quite superfluous, for he was to Pons as the famous statue of the Nurse of Niobe in the Vatican is to the ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... men God sends, When to chastise some house his wrath intends; (From the "Niobe" of ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... blood, you grumble at a scar! What! would they spread their earthquake even o'er cash? And when land crumbles, bid firm paper crash?[335] So rent may rise, bid Bank and Nation fall, 640 And found on 'Change a Fundling Hospital? Lo, Mother Church, while all religion writhes, Like Niobe, weeps o'er her offspring—Tithes;[336] The Prelates go to—where the Saints have gone, And proud pluralities subside to one; Church, state, and faction wrestle in the dark, Tossed by the deluge in their common ark. Shorn ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... Madge, you look like some one in a dream. I really might imagine you a piece of rare statuary—one of the Niobe group strayed from the Florentine gallery to meet the wistful gaze of ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... nectar and ambrosia from the table of the gods, and revealed their secrets, for which he was punished in the under world by perpetual hunger and thirst, yet placed with fruit and water near him, which eluded his grasp when he attempted to touch them. He had two children, Pelops and Niobe. The latter was blessed with seven sons and seven daughters, which so inflamed her with pride that she claimed equality with the goddesses Latona and Diana, who favored her by their friendship. This presumption so incensed the goddesses, ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... that the chief pleasure he had in visiting Rome was to find the Greek gods and the heroes and heroines of Greek story throned in the Vatican. He preferred Niobe to the Mater Dolorosa and Helen to both; the worship of sorrow must give place, he declared, to ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... from her eyes like rain-drops from the azure chalice of a lotus-flower after some storm, and rolling down her pale cheeks fell upon her fair forlorn hands, languishingly open, like roses whose leaves are half-shed, for no order came from the brain to give them activity. The attitude of Niobe, beholding her fourteenth child succumb beneath the arrows of Apollo and Diana, was not more sadly despairing, but soon starting from this state of prostration, she rolled herself upon the floor, rent her garments, covered her beautiful dishevelled ...
— King Candaules • Theophile Gautier
... and heaped despair Of men and women writhing under blow, Harrowed and hideous in a filthy lair, Some personating Image wherein woe Was wrapt in beauty from offending much, They called it Cybele, or Niobe, Or laid it corpse-like on a bier for such, Where all the world might drop for Italy Those cadenced tears which burn not where they touch,— "Juliet of nations, canst thou die as we? And was the violet crown that crowned thy head So over-large, though new ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... Jupiter, who, if the queen brings no children, has a barren Juno. The queen is compounded of Juno, Venus, and Minerva. His poem on the dutchess of Grafton's lawsuit, after having rattled awhile with Juno and Pallas, Mars and Alcides, Cassiope, Niobe, and the Propetides, Hercules, Minos, and Rhadamanthus, at last concludes its ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... the artist's soul and crystallised in marble. It has been said that architecture is petrified music. In the Sacristy of S. Lorenzo we feel impelled to remember phrases of Beethoven. Each of these statues becomes for us a passion, fit for musical expression, but turned like Niobe to stone. They have the intellectual vagueness, the emotional certainty, that belong to the motives of a symphony. In their allegories, left without a key, sculpture has passed beyond her old domain of placid concrete form. ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... came to that of her father, he drew him with a veil over his face, meaning thereby that no kind of countenance was capable of expressing such a degree of sorrow. Which is also the reason why the poets feign the miserable mother, Niobe, having first lost seven sons, and then afterwards as many daughters (overwhelmed with her losses), to have been at last transformed ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... because his mother had died. You know I am a good fellow, so I cried, too. I always cry some time during a bat, and there was an opening for your life. I cried so hard that the bartender had to ask me to stop three different times. I made Niobe look like a two spot. Between sobs I asked him about the sad affair, and found that his mother had died when he was born. I guess it had just struck him. Then there ...
— Billy Baxter's Letters • William J. Kountz, Jr.
... then belonging to the State, including those in the gallery of the hospital of S. Maria Nuova, which owned, among others, the famous Hugo van der Goes. It was he also who brought together from Rome the Niobe statues and constructed a room for them. Leopold II ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... at each foot of the throne, and two also at the instep of each foot; and at each of the front feet are Theban boys carried off by Sphinxes, and below the Sphinxes, Apollo and Artemis shooting down the children of Niobe. And between the feet of the throne are four divisions formed by straight lines drawn from each ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... a fearful zigzag before it reached the upper regions of the roof, was the necessary and infallible ornament of the room. A shelf ran round the walls, on which were models in plaster, heterogeneously placed, most of them covered with gray dust. Here and there, above this shelf, a head of Niobe, hanging to a nail, presented her pose of woe; a Venus smiled; a hand thrust itself forward like that of a pauper asking alms; a few "ecorches," yellowed by smoke, looked like limbs snatched over-night from a graveyard; besides these objects, pictures, drawings, lay figures, frames ...
— Vendetta • Honore de Balzac
... and the sun, a coy disdainful guest, flung a glittering mist over what Nature had intended to be one of the most enchanting spots on earth, until, in a fit of ill-temper—with one of the gods, no doubt—she gave it to Niobe as a permanent outlet for her discontent. When it does not rain at Sitka it pours, and when once in a way she draws a deep breath of respite and lifts her grand and glorious face to the sun, in pathetic gratitude for dear infrequent favor, comes a wild flurry ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... came back into the conservatory and wanted to be comforted. And we did comfort her as best we could. All the winter through she was in and out from the conservatory to the dining-room, becoming very friendly and answering to her name instantly: papa had named her Niobe. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... whether antique or medieval, were unknown or unappreciated. The reigning models of taste in ancient sculpture were copies of fourth-century originals, Hellenistic or later productions. Hence Smollett's ecstasies over the Laocoon, the Niobe, and the Dying Gladiator. Greek art of the best period was hardly known in authentic examples; antiques so fine as the Torso of Hercules were rare. But while his failures show the danger of dogmatism in art criticism, Smollett is careful ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... queen of Thebes, Niobe, fortunate above all women, and yet arrogant in the face of the gods. Very beautiful she was, and nobly born, but above all things she boasted of her children, for she had ...
— Old Greek Folk Stories Told Anew • Josephine Preston Peabody
... Greek sculpture begin in the legends of the family of Tantalus. The main one is the making of the ivory shoulder of Pelops after Demeter has eaten the shoulder of flesh. With that you have Broteas, the brother of Pelops, carving the first statue of the mother of the gods; and you have his sister, Niobe, weeping herself to stone under the anger of the deities of light. Then Pelops himself, the dark-faced, gives name to the Peloponnesus, which you may therefore read as the "isle of darkness;" but its central city, Sparta, the "sown city," is ...
— Lectures on Art - Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... should say not—I wanted it to be known to Butch, and Coach Corridan, but I got all shivery when I tried to confess, and I—couldn't! Nay, Theophilus, you faithful friend, I'm so glad, old man, that beside yours truly, the celebrated Pollyanna resembles Niobe, weeping ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... there, pale and motionless, compelled to watch the horrid scene, like Niobe when chained to Sipylus. His servile spirit bowed before the ruler's power, instead of arming his right hand with the dagger of revenge, and when the frantic king asked him the same question a second time, he actually answered, pressing ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... no man raise, To her name, for after daies, Some kind woman, born as she, Reading this like Niobe, Shall turn marble, and become, Both her ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 75, April 5, 1851 • Various
... groans and prayers can raise thy sire from the doomed pool of Hades? you go from woes bearable to woes beyond bearing.—Elec. It is weak to forget parents so lost; rather for me the nightingale that ever wails 'Itys,' or Niobe weeping in stone.—Cho. Thou art not the only one who feels sorrow: there are thy sisters, and another now mourning in a youth obscure, but who will one day return to save.—Elec. Ah! him I yearn for, but he mocks ...
— Story of Orestes - A Condensation of the Trilogy • Richard G. Moulton
... accosted the reverend Priam:— "Now has thy son, old man, been restor'd to thee as thou requiredst. He on his bier has been laid, and thyself shall behold and remove him Soon as the dawning appears: but of food meanwhile be we mindful. For not unmindful of food in her sorrow was Niobe, fair-hair'd, Albeit she in her dwelling lamented for twelve of her offspring. Six were the daughters, and six were the sons in the flower of their manhood. These unto death went down by the silvern bow of Apollo, Wrathful to Niobe—those smote Artemis arrow-delighting; ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... characteristic by which to distinguish her. We recognize her no longer. Her position is that of an agonized mother; and we can no more fancy her under a different aspect, than we can imagine the statue of Niobe in ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... him that is allone, For, and he falle, he hath noon help to ryse;" 695 And sith thou hast a felawe, tel thy mone; For this nis not, certeyn, the nexte wyse To winnen love, as techen us the wyse, To walwe and wepe as Niobe the quene, Whos teres yet in ...
— Troilus and Criseyde • Geoffrey Chaucer
... youth binding a fillet about his hair, but no work whose theme is suffering or death is definitely ascribed to him. It is strange therefore to find Pliny saying that it was a matter of doubt in his time whether a group of the dying children of Niobe which stood in a temple of Apollo in Rome was by Scopas or Praxiteles. It is commonly supposed, though without decisive proof, that certain statues of Niobe and her children which exist in Florence and elsewhere are copied from the group of which Pliny speaks. The story was that Niobe vaunted ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... dealt with criminally, free speech, free action, the noble inheritance of our ancestors, were gone, and the liberties of the country no more. Collecting himself for a last effort, he represented the Goddess of Liberty, like Niobe, all tears, weeping over the fate of her children, should the iniquity, contemplated by ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... and angles about the mouth, but as she marked the chilling repose of the countenance, so indicative of conscious power and well-regulated strength, why did memory travel swiftly back among the "Stones of Venice," repeating the description of the hawthorn on Bourges Cathedral? "A perfect Niobe of May." Had this man petrified in his youth before the steady stylus of time left on his features that subtle tracery which passing years engrave on human faces? The motto of his magazine, Veritas sine clementia, ruled his life, and, putting aside ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... singer and musician, Zethus a hunter and herdsman (Apollodorus iii. 5). After punishing Lycus and Dirce for cruel treatment of Antiope (q.v.), they built and fortified Thebes, huge blocks of stone forming themselves into walls at the sound of Amphion's lyre (Horace, Odes, iii. 11). Amphion married Niobe, and killed himself after the loss of his wife and children (Ovid, Metam. vi. 270). The brothers were buried in one grave and worshipped as the Dioscuri "with white horses'' (Eurip. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... my grief has kept me drunk: Sure there 's a lethargy in mighty woe; Tears stand congealed, and cannot flow. ........ Tears for a stroke foreseen, afford relief; But unprovided for a sudden blow, Like Niobe, we marble ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... (the Aurore de Provence), Polyommatus Ballus, and Rhodocera Cleopatra may be taken in April. A little later there is an abundance of the Podalirius (scarce Swallow Tail), the Machaon, the Thecla Betul, the Argynnis Pandora, the A.Niobe, the A.Dia, the A. Aglaia, the A.Valenzina, the Arge Psyche, the Satyrus Circe, the S. Briseis, the S.Hermione, the S. Fidia, the S.Phdra, the S. Cordula, the S.Acto, the S.Semele, and the S. Bathseba, all common more or less throughout ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... There is the eye gate, and through it pass friends, a multitude of strangers, the forests, the fields, the marching clouds. There is the ear gate, and therein go trooping all sweet songs, all conversation and eloquence, all laughter with Niobe's woe and grief. There is conversation, and thereby we cross the threshold of another's mind, and wander through the halls of memory and the chambers of imagination. But these faculties are limited. The ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... next, by the unquenchable worm—as he'll find out when he tries his 'down, dog' tricks; his 'drop that, will you?' None of that down there in the fire. What says the Book? My dear, my dear," and she took the girl in her arms with a fine look about her of Niobe amid arrows, "I've a bosom for your head and a roof to shelter us both, and we'll see what we shall see. There's castles and towers for the great oneyers and their minions; but mine is in the Fulham Road, my dear; my own property out of a building society that does business for the widow and ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... There's a Niobe—weeping not for her children, she never had any, but for her youth. She is the religion of half Mayfair, though I don't know whether she's got a religion. Men who wouldn't look at her when she was sixteen, twenty-six, thirty-six, worship her now she's ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... answer remained,—unwittingly the athlete had offended some god, forgotten some vow, or by sheer good fortune had awakened divine jealousy. Poseidon had been implacable toward Odysseus, Athena toward Hector, Artemis toward Niobe,—Glaucon could only pray that his present welcome amongst the Persians might not draw down another outburst ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... and wept in the land of the stranger. The salix babylonica, or the weeping willow, in its geographical range, sweeps through the plains of Judea, and by the ruins of Babylon, from the verge of the Mediterranean to the frontiers of Japan—a lovely line of beauty—the Niobe of vegetation! Sad memorial of the mournful march of the captive Hebrews. It is, we think, a very striking circumstance, that these countries should even now retain such unchanged lineaments of their ancient history. Time seems to linger, or move slowly ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 553, June 23, 1832 • Various
... and poplars by the roadside, which, like mourners by an open grave, had been bowing their heads to the earth, and brandishing their long arms, with their silver tresses spread out on the winds, now stood as if dead, with an expression of dumb grief like the statue of Niobe on Sipylos. Only the trembling ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... disclosure was received with another burst of woe, except from the unfortunate Marie, who stood like a pale and rigid Niobe—her grief too deep ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... should be a climax, of course, to all this, and it came. It was not the odor of the steaks and onions that, wafted across intervening gardens from Father Letheby's kitchen, precipitated the crisis; nor the tears of Lizzie, who appeared from time to time, a weeping Niobe, and whose distress would have touched the heart of a less susceptible Irishman than Jem Deady; nor yet the taunts of the women of the village, who stung him with such sarcasms as these: "Yes; Faynians ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... the "delicate distress" of heroines, like Niobe, all tears, palls at last, and Belinda, having wept her fill, craves now ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... desperate pack, With each a sickly brother at his back:[332] Sons of a day! just buoyant on the flood, Then number'd with the puppies in the mud. Ask ye their names? I could as soon disclose The names of these blind puppies as of those. 310 Fast by, like Niobe (her children gone) Sits Mother Osborne,[333] stupified to stone! And monumental brass this record bears, 'These are,—ah no! these were, ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... man raise To her name for after-dayes; Some kind woman, borne as she, Reading this, like Niobe, Shall turne marble, and become Both her mourner ...
— The Natural History of Wiltshire • John Aubrey
... one have imagined that the masculine traits in her were getting the upper hand! She grew more feminine every hour. There was an increasing rhythm in her movements—a certain rich solemnity like that of Niobe or Hermione. Her red-brown hair tumbled about her face and festooned her statuesque shoulders. The severity of her usual attire gave place to a negligence which enhanced her picturesqueness, and the heaving of her troubled bosom, the lifting of her wistful eyes gave her a tenderer ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie |
