"Olympian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... victory. Votaries of each of the great religions claimed that this storm was caused by the object of their own adoration. The pagans insisted that Jupiter had sent the storm in obedience to their prayers, and on the Antonine Column at Rome we may still see the figure of Olympian Jove casting his thunderbolts and pouring a storm of rain from the open heavens against the Quadi. On the other hand, the Christians insisted that the storm had been sent by Jehovah in obedience to THEIR prayers; ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... rising of the sun the need of sleep began to afflict him. He had thought he never would need sleep again. His paddle became leaden in his hands, and Olympian yawns prostrated him. ...
— The Fur Bringers - A Story of the Canadian Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... at every opening in the woods. Their curls float about their god-like heads, their slender hands hold aloft wreaths and cymbals, and laughter, sparkling, Olympian laughter, comes leaping, ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... heroic. They celebrate great events—the Trojan war, the founding of Rome, the loss of Paradise—and bring before us a large number of heroes, divinities, and angels. The "Iliad" is made up chiefly of battle scenes, in which mighty heroes and Olympian deities take part. AEneas is the hero of the "AEneid"; but back of the tribulations through which he passes, we recognize the agency of contending divinities. And in "Paradise Lost" Milton introduces the mighty beings of heaven and hell. The epic is thus the stateliest and grandest ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... the man who from an Olympian elevation surveys the political strivings of past and present alike, and analyses, catalogues, and defines, creating all the while an impression of luminous impartiality, may, of course, do much good work. The present writer would be the last man ...
— The School and the World • Victor Gollancz and David Somervell
... the reconstruction of the Capitolium, for which purpose he caused some columns of the temple of the Olympian Jupiter to be removed from Athens to Rome. Sulla's work was continued by Lutatius Catulus, and finished by Julius Caesar in 46 B. C. A second restoration took place in the year 9 B. C. under Augustus, a third A. D. 74 under Vespasian, ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani
... learned that cheerful and serious love of life, that solemn and manly facing of death, that sense of the finiteness of man, the inexhaustibleness of nature, which shines out in such grand, paganism, with such Olympian serenity, as of the bent brows and smiling lips of an antique Zeus, in Shakespeare, in Marlowe, in Beaumont and Fletcher, even in the sad and savage Webster. But with the abstract, with the imbibed modes of thought and feeling, with the imitated forms, the ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... waste invention to indite, Ovidian fictions, or Olympian games? My misty Muse enlightened with more light, To a more noble pitch her aim she frames. I must relate to my great Master JAMES, The Caledonian annual peaceful war; How noble minds do eternize their fames, By martial meeting in ...
— The Pennyles Pilgrimage - Or The Money-lesse Perambulation of John Taylor • John Taylor
... to Maison's, near Alfort. You come home by the left bank of the Seine, in the midst of a cloud of very black Olympian dust. The horse drags your family wearily along. But alas! your pride has fled, and you look without emotion upon his sunken flanks, and upon two bones which stick out on each side of his belly. His coat is roughened by the sweat which has repeatedly come out and dried upon him, and ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... indescribable as human features, with a certain boyish awkwardness of manner, but with the most urban-like courtesy and affability. From noon till dark, the time is spent in conversation, continued, various, and eloquent. What a presence is there in this humble, unpretending cottage! And as the stream of Olympian sweetness moves on, now in laughing ripples, and again in a solemn majestic flood, what a past do we bring before ourselves! what a present! For this is he that talked with Coleridge, that was the friend of Wilson,—and—what furnishes a more sublime suggestion—this ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... of the Tyrian Baal, who is also called Melkart (king of the city), and is often identified with the Greek Heracles, but sometimes with the Olympian Zeus, we have many accounts in ancient writers, from Herodotus downwards. He had a magnificent temple in insular Tyre, founded by Hiram, to which gifts streamed from all countries, especially at the great feasts. The solar character ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... grubbing imitators of detail so justly denounced and ridiculed by Mr. Whistler. He has the generalizing faculty in very distinguished degree, and in very large measure. Every trait of his talent, indeed, is large, manly; but for a certain qualification—which must be made—one might add, Olympian. This qualification perhaps may be not unfairly described as earthiness—never an agreeable trait, and one to which probably is due the depreciation of Courbet that is so popular even among appreciative critics. It is easy to characterize Courbet ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... king Was there, amidst his gardens with fresh streams Irriguous walking, and the tender boughs Of myrtles, for a wreath to bind his head, He cropt; he saw us, he address'd us thus Aloud: "Hail, strangers; who are ye, and whence Come, from what country?" Then Orestes said, "Thessalians; victims to Olympian Jove We at the stream of Alpheus go to slay." The King replied, "Be now my guests, and share The feast with me; a bullock to the Nymphs I sacrifice; at morn's first dawn arise, Then shall you go; but enter now my house." Thus as he spoke, he took us by the hand And led us, nothing loth: ...
— Story of Orestes - A Condensation of the Trilogy • Richard G. Moulton
... I returned to the station and saw how very lovely the country was, how fertile—the rounded mountains, when cleared of their royal forests, arable to their very summits, the air like Olympian nectar, the sunshine a divine balm, the whole scene a Sabbath-land of peace and of boundless plenty, awaiting only the cohorts of the North and of the white-cliffed isle—I would fain have cried, "Come, ye moderately pecunious Bulls, and you, ye hyperborean Vandals from the far Lake of Winnipiseogee ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... Sir, so nuttily complacent, So airy-poised upon thy rubbered feet, The cynosure, no doubt, of all adjacent Regard along that hit of Regent Street, My thanks. In rather less than half a twinkling Thy lofty air and high Olympian gaze Have taught me that of which I had no inkling Throughout my ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 16, 1919 • Various
... out of the ruin it made were shaped marvels of form; Olympian castles and giant statues, images of such savage creatures as roamed devastating the earth in days when man was in ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... the scented and crested note of introduction which was to open to him all doors and all ears? Was it not in her marvellous marble music-room—one of the boasts of Chicago—that he had mentally seen himself enthroned as the lord of the feast? And instead of these Olympian visions, lo! a typewritten note to clench his fist over—a note from a secretary regretting that the state of Mrs. Wilhammer's health forbade the pleasure of receiving a maestro ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... form very remarkable for its dignity. Had Creation resolved itself into its original elements, had Chaos come again, or even old Coelus, the indignity might have been endured; but to be baffled by an Olympian juste milieu, and to find, after all the clamour, that nothing has been changed save the places, is, you will ...
— The Infernal Marriage • Benjamin Disraeli
... are all wroth with the abominable behaviour of Achilles to dead Hector (XXIV. 134). They console and protect Priam. As for the Odyssey, Mr. Monro finds that in this late Epic the gods are just what Mr. Leaf proclaims them to have been in his old original kernel. "There is now an Olympian concert that carries on something like a moral government of the world. It is very different in the Iliad...." ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... himself on the ground at her feet. She was very happy to have him there, so dearly near, but she was just a little shy. She looked upon him as an all-powerful being, extraordinary, raising him, in her simplicity, to the greatness of an Olympian commanding the thunder and lightning. She spoke to him, asking about his friends, his business, but not daring to put the question she had asked de Gery: "Why haven't my grandchildren come?" But he spoke of them himself. "They are at school, mother. Whenever the holidays begin they shall ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... hesitated: before her lay the dry, dusty road, the solitary journey by land and sea, the doubtful welcome at home. And here by her side stood the wealthy lover, the very embodiment of protecting power—is not every girl's first lover in her eyes as Olympian Jove?—eager to take upon himself the burden of her life, to make ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... Aristotle, and Epicurus, was a more accomplished classical scholar than the most learned pundit of modern times, and was a model of manly beauty, yet he would have died to win the wreath of parsley at the Olympian games, which all esteemed an immortal prize. While, in our time, to be the winning crew on the Isis, the Cam, the English or American Thames, is equal in honor and influence to the position of senior wrangler, valedictorian, or Deforest ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... directly with the artists of literature, by what chasms of space are they removed from Milton, Shakspeare, and even from Homer, who, although he was a realist, yet had eagles' wings, and was at home on the earth and in the clouds, amongst heroes, amongst the light-footed nymphs, and amongst the Olympian gods! In these latter the movement of imagination is centrifugal, it sustains itself in the loftiest altitudes, and in the most evanescent and fleecy shapes of thought it finds the materials from which it wreathes ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... around it, and the burned-out case, falling back to earth, lies useless and uncared for, slowly smoldering into ashes. Once, breaking loose from our prison bonds, we dare, as mighty old Prometheus dared, to scale the Olympian mount and snatch from Phoebus' chariot the fire of the gods. Happy those who, hastening down again ere it dies out, can kindle their earthly altars at its flame. Love is too pure a light to burn long among the noisome gases that we breathe, but before ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... when the fond wretch wakes to weep, And Day peers forth with her blank eyes; So fleet, so faint, so fair, The Powers of earth and air 230 Fled from the folding-star of Bethlehem: Apollo, Pan, and Love, And even Olympian Jove Grew weak, for killing Truth had glared on them; Our hills and seas and streams, 235 Dispeopled of their dreams, Their waters turned to blood, their dew to tears, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... she breathed; "yes, why not? Man-making is almost equal to man-bearing. I have no son to spur up the Olympian heights; but what might I not do for Alymer, if... if ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... attained its height in the following century in Marino's epic of Adone. We find it infusing the scene of Mirtillo's first meeting with Amarilli, which may be said to set the tone of the rest of the poem. Happening to see the nymph at the Olympian games, Mirtillo at once fell in love and contrived to introduce himself in female attire into the company of maidens to which she belonged. Here, the proposal being made to hold a kissing match among themselves, Amarilli was unanimously chosen judge, and, the contest over, she ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... was at its head. His pupil, Aristides, painted pathetic scenes, and was perhaps as remarkable for teaching art to the celebrated Euphranor (fl. 360 B.C.) as for his own productions. Euphranor had great versatility in the arts, and in painting was renowned for his pictures of the Olympian gods at Athens. His successor, Nikias (fl. 340-300 B.C.), was a contemporary of Praxiteles, the sculptor, and was possibly influenced by him in the painting of female figures. He was a technician of ability in composition, light-and-shade, and relief, and was praised for the roundness of his figures. ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Painting • John C. Van Dyke
... matter. Every part of the city was filled with lights and noises of various kinds. Assemblies of armed men were formed in the open spaces. Those who had no arms tore down from the temple of the Olympian Jupiter the spoils of the Gauls and Illyrians, which had been presented to Hiero by the Roman people, and hung up there by him; at the same time offering up prayers to Jupiter, that he would willingly, and without feeling offence, lend those consecrated weapons to those who were ...
— The History of Rome; Books Nine to Twenty-Six • Titus Livius
... in the understanding, if it had been the True Divinity that men beheld in their contemplations of a superior existence. But when the gods of their heaven were little better than their own evil qualities, exalted to the sky to be thence reflected back upon them invested with Olympian charms and splendors, their ideas of deity would evidently combine with the causes which made it impossible for them to conceive a perfect model for human excellence. See the mighty labor of human depravity to confirm its dominion! It would translate itself ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... between Bulgars and Greeks, may be considered the father of that hideous birth. But it was he who suckled and nourished it, it was from his brain that it emerged, full-grown and in panoply of armour, as from the brain of Olympian Zeus came Pallas Athene. This new policy was in flat contradiction of all the previous policy, as he had received it from his predecessors, of strengthening Turkey by tributes of man-power from his subject tribes, ...
— Crescent and Iron Cross • E. F. Benson
... sentries paced along the wall, wrapped in their dark cloaks; and over all the scene, one snowtopped peak rose white on the horizon, like some classic virgin assisting at an Olympian solemnity. ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... enabled to depict his own love in excelsis, to imagine what aspect it might have worn, if it had been its destiny to deny itself at some heroic call, and to confront with nobleness an extreme emergency, and to be victor (as Plato has it) in an Olympian contest of the soul. For, indeed, the "fervent, not ungovernable, love," which is the ideal that Protesilaus is sent to teach, is on a great scale the same affection which we have been considering in domesticity and peace; it is love considered ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... the eternal pines, saving only occasional sunny patches of open greensward, very pretty and picturesque, but the hills not lofty enough to be very striking. The entire island, property speaking, is a forest. On the right we have a long massive chain of lofty mountains covered with snow, called the Olympian range—very grand, quite Alpine in aspect. This is the peninsula, composed of a series of mountains running for many miles in one unbroken line, which divides the Straits of Fuca from Puget Sound. It belongs to America, in the territory of Washington, is uninhabited, ...
— Handbook to the new Gold-fields • R. M. Ballantyne
... the old man seems to have clung to Shelley's mind to the end, and made him rebellious against everything bearing the paternal name. He assailed the Father of the Hebrew theocracy with amazing bitterness, and joined Prometheus in cursing and dethroning Zeus, the Olympian usurper. With him, tyrant and father were synonymous, and he has drawn the old Cenci, in the play of that name, with the same fierce, unfilial pencil, dipped in blood and wormwood. Shelley was by nature, self-instruction, and inexperience of life, impatient and full of impulse; ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... often the caprices of a moment, make Winckelmann's letters, with their troubled colouring, an instructive but bizarre addition to the History of Art, that shrine of grave and mellow light around the mute Olympian family. The impression which Winckelmann's literary life conveyed to those about him was that of excitement, intuition, inspiration, rather than the contemplative evolution of general principles. The quick, ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... are gone by when a SWINBURNE or BYRON Were loved for their love-locks and famed for their frizziness, When Olympian craniums, worthy of MYRON Or ANGELO, bowed to the hair-dresser's business, When Macassar's luxuriant essences fed At once metrical foot ...
— Punch, Or the London Charivari, Volume 101, November 21, 1891 • Various
... reflected—no doubt on his ample patrician years, on the fine great houses that had been his setting, the teeming race-courses that had roared his name, the enthusiastic meetings he had fed with fine hopes, the futile Olympian beginnings. . . . "I have been a fool," he said compactly. They heard him in a sympathetic ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... I've never confessed to you. Yes. It is true that I was cruel to you—deliberately. I did want to hurt you. And do you know why? I wanted to shatter that Olympian serenity of yours. You were too strong, too self-confident. You had the air of a being that nothing could hurt. You ...
— King Arthur's Socks and Other Village Plays • Floyd Dell
... addressed herself to the firm which had published her grandfather's works. Its founder, a personal friend of the philosopher's, had survived the Olympian group of which he had been a subordinate member, long enough to bestow his octogenarian approval on Paulina's pious undertaking. But he had died soon afterward; and Miss Anson found herself confronted by his grandson, a person with a brisk commercial view ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... existed in his class-room. I do not remember that he ever addressed me in language; at the least sign of unrest his eye would fall on me and I was quelled. Such a feat is comparatively easy in a small class; but I have misbehaved in smaller classes and under eyes more Olympian than Fleeming Jenkin's. He was simply a man from whose reproof one shrank; in manner the least buckramed of mankind, he had, in serious moments, an extreme dignity of goodness. So it was that he obtained a power over the most insubordinate of students, but a power of which ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... after fierce struggles within and without naturally deflected historical scholarship from the path marked out by Ranke, who had grown to manhood in the era of political stagnation following the downfall of Napoleon. The master's Olympian serenity was deplored by the group of hot-blooded scholars who are collectively known as the Prussian School, and who were firmly convinced that the principal duty of historians was to supply guidance and encouragement to their fellow-countrymen ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... hills and by Mount Cronion, was erected the ancient Stadion, and in its vicinity stood a great gymnasium, a palaestra (for wrestling and boxing exercises), a hippodrome (for the later chariot races), a council hall, and several temples, notably that of the Olympian Zeus, where the victors received the olive wreaths which were the highly valued prizes for ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... games, bridge games, and other forms of seaside sports, all of which contributed to the gaiety of life in the Indian Ocean. In the evening one might have imagined oneself at a London music-hall, in the daytime at the Olympian games, and in the early morning out on the farm. There were a number of chickens on board and each rooster seemed obliged to salute the dawn with a fanfare of crowing. They belonged to the governor ...
— In Africa - Hunting Adventures in the Big Game Country • John T. McCutcheon
... upon the vitality of the race from two directions. We preserve the feeble and extirpate the strong. He who, in view of this amazing folly can believe in a constant, even slow, progress of the human race toward perfection ought to be happy. He has a mind whose Olympian heights are inaccessible—the Titans of fact can never scale them to ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... over his shoulders, and the two travellers became the best of friends as they journeyed together along the road which lies between the wooded heights where the satyrs dance, to the hill where the Olympian palace hides half its rosy towers among ...
— Harper's Young People, April 20, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... marked thee, prince, with curious eye, Foreboding of some mystery deep enshrined Within thy laboring breast. This day, impatient, Thy lips have burst the seal; and unconstrained Confess a lover's joy;—the gladdening chase, The Olympian coursers, and the falcon's flight Can charm no more:—soon as the sun declines Beneath the ruddy west, thou hiest thee quick To some sequestered path, of mortal eye Unseen—not one of all our faithful train Companion of thy solitary way. Say, why so long concealed ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... would reform the race. The tailor, when a man came to be measured, would say, "Yes, but are you worth measuring?" and if he was out of drawing would refuse to dress him, thus extruding deformity from the world and restoring the Olympian gods. The charwoman, inspired by George Herbert, would not only "sweep a room as by God's laws," but would inquire whether it was worth sweeping; the wine merchant would refuse wine to rich customers who did not deserve ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... about six hundred years before the Christian era; and it was much admired for its singular beauty. It was not, however, till the days of Phidias that it attained to its full splendour. Two of the masterpieces of this sculptor—the colossal statues of Minerva in the Parthenon at Athens and the Olympian Jove in his temple—were formed of gold and ivory. The Minerva was forty feet high, and the Olympian Jupiter was one of the wonders of the world. In the latter of these, the exposed parts of the figure were of ivory, and the drapery of gold. It was seated on a throne elaborately formed ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal, No. 421, New Series, Jan. 24, 1852 • Various
... I knew at Oxford as an undergraduate, and whom I watched and admired to the end of his life, was Matthew Arnold. He was beautiful as a young man, strong and manly, yet full of dreams and schemes. His Olympian manners began even at Oxford; there was no harm in them, they were natural, not put on. The very sound of his voice and the wave of his hand were Jovelike.... Sometimes at public dinners, when he saw himself ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... warm, and fresh, and blue, by the young and the old, the weak and the strong, who came to sun themselves in the god's presence, as procession and hymn rolled on, in the fragrant and tranquil courts of the great Olympian temple; while all the time those people consciously apprehended in the carved image of Zeus none but the ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... prompt wooer, if thou wouldst be wise: "Time is in flight, and never backward flies. "How swiftly fades the bloom, the vernal green! "How swift yon poplar dims its silver sheen! "Spurning the goal th' Olympian courser flies, "Then yields to Time his strength, his victories; "And oft I see sad, fading youth deplore "Each hour it lost, each pleasure it forbore. "Serpents each spring look young once more; harsh Heaven "To beauteous youth ...
— The Elegies of Tibullus • Tibullus
... the arrival of the Chosen, Anna woke up in the true Olympian temper. She had been brought back to the happy world of realities from the happy world of dreams by the sun of an unusually lovely April shining on her face. She had only to open her window to be convinced that all which she beheld ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... wrestling when a boy, and as a man his fame as a wrestler was coincident with the Tennessee Valley. It was a manly sport which gave him great pleasure, just as would the physical development of one of his race horses. Had he lived in the early days of Greece, he would have won in the Olympian ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... floor at her feet, with cajoling words and gestures really touching to behold. She was very happy too to have him by her side, but she was a little embarrassed none the less, looking upon him as an all-powerful, strange being, exalting him in her artless innocence to the level of an Olympian encompassed by thunder-bolts and lightning-flashes, possessing the gift of omnipotence. She talked to him, inquired if he was still satisfied with his friends, with the condition of his affairs, but did not dare to ask the question she had asked de Gery: ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... destined brother friend, O whither fleets to-day thy wayward flight? Hast thou forgotten that I here attend, From the full noon until this sad twilight? A hundred times, at least, from the clear spring, Since the full noon o'er hill and valley glowed, I've filled the vase which our Olympian king Upon my care for thy sole use bestowed; That at the moment when thou should'st descend, A pure refreshment ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller
... Monarch drops his vengeful ire; Perch'd on the sceptre of the Olympian King, The thrilling darts of harmony he feels, And indolently hangs his rapid wing, While gentle sleep his closing eye-lids seals; And o'er his heaving limbs, in loose array To every balmy gale the ...
— An Essay on the Lyric Poetry of the Ancients • John Ogilvie
... rank, and the children the outer spray of boughs. Even now we gather those only which drop at the touch; these, in a brimming saucer, with golden Alderney cream and a soupcon of powdered sugar, are Olympian nectar; they melt before the tongue can measure their full soundness, and seem to be mere bloated bubbles of ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... and impressed attention. But it was in harmony with all her appearance and manner. Lothair thought he had never seen any one or any thing so serene; the serenity, however, not of humbleness, nor of merely conscious innocence; it was not devoid of a degree of majesty; what one pictures of Olympian repose. And the countenance was Olympian: a Phidian face, with large gray eyes and dark lashes; wonderful hair, abounding without art, and gathered together ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... direction much had already been done before the war began. The dfferent nations had already met in peaceful emulation and were to meet again at Berlin for the Olympian games. It is only necessary to recall the aeronautic races, the boat races, the horse races, and the beneficial international influence of the arts and sciences, and the great super-national Nobel Prizes. The barbarian Germany has, as is well known, led the way among the other nations ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... Kelly fresh from Spain; ask W.B. Blakie preoccupied with the modern development of the printed book, or Wells adrift in a world of his own invention; ask Kipling steeped in the real, or Barrie lost in the Kail-Yard; ask Kenneth Grahame on his Olympian heights or George S. Street deep in his study of the prig—ask any one of these men and a score besides what Henley's sympathy, Henley's outstretched hand, meant to him, and some idea of the breadth of his judgment ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... our attention on that which is really interesting and venerable in these churches, while we admire their long colonnades, their skilful use of ancient columns—some of which may probably have adorned the temples of Olympian deities in the days of the Emperors,—and the exceedingly rich and beautiful new forms of capitals, of a design quite unknown to Vitruvius, which the genius of Romanesque artists has invented, we find that our chief interest is derived from the mosaics with ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... base-ball than to any other topic that interests the American mind, and the most skillful player, the pitcher, often college bred, whose entire prowess is devoted to not doing what he seems to be doing, and who has become the hero of the American girl as the Olympian wrestler was of the Greek maiden and as the matador is of the Spanish senorita, receives a larger salary for a few hours' exertion each week than any college president is paid for a year's intellectual toil. Such has been the progress in the interest in education ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... hope deferred. When I was—what I was, I still believed that this dingy carcass swaddled a Roman spirit. In the pomp of my pallet I dreamed Olympian dreams. And the ...
— If I Were King • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... Undergraduate, generally known to his intimates as "Side of Bacon." I shudder to recollect how that amazing creature discoursed to me about his popularity, his influence, his surprising deeds both of valour and of discretion. With one nod—and, as he spoke, he gave me an illustration of his Olympian method—he had awed his Head-master—a present ornament of the Bench of Bishops—into a terrified silence, from which he recovered only to bless the name of JOSKINS, and hold him up as a pattern to his schoolfellows. At a single phrase of scorn ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 17, 1892 • Various
... English heroes astonish their allies by exhibiting splendid games, similar to those which draw the flower of the British aristocracy to Newmarket and Moulsey Hurst, and which will be considered by our descendants with as much veneration as the Olympian and Isthmian contests by classical students of the present time. In the combat of the cestus, Shaw, the lifeguardsman, vanquishes the Prince of Orange, and obtains a bull as a prize. In the horse-race, the Duke of Wellington and Lord Uxbridge ride against each other; the Duke is victorious, ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Academy, disturbed by a "flight of Corinthian leading articles, and an irruption of Mr. G.A. Sala;" his comparison of Miss Cobbe's new religion to the British College of Health; his parallel between Phidias' statue of the Olympian Zeus and Coles' truss-manufactory; Sir William Harcourt's attempt to "develop a system of unsectarian religion from the Life of Mr. Pickwick;" the "portly jeweller from Cheapside," with his "passionate, absorbing, almost blood-thirsty clinging to life;" the grandiose war-correspondence of the Times, ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... such representations of the human form are unnatural and monstrous, and it is true that they are able to point out some "terrible examples" of modern failures, such, for instance, as the "Bavaria" statue at Munich. But these writers appear to forget that the "Minerva" of the Parthenon and the Olympian Jupiter were the works of the greatest sculptor of ancient times, and that no less a man than Michael Angelo was the author of the "David" and "Moses." It is therefore apparent that those who deny the legitimacy of colossal sculptures in toto go too far; but it is quite true that ...
— The Bay State Monthly - Volume 2, Issue 3, December, 1884 • Various
... answer seemed less severe than the first: "Minerva is unable to appease the Olympian Jupiter. Again, therefore, I speak, and my words are as adamant. All else within the bounds of Cecropia and the bosom of the divine Cithaeron shall fall and fail you. The wooden wall alone Jupiter grants to Pallas, a refuge to your children and yourselves. ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... rather more powerfully built, awaited developments with apparent unconcern. Mr. Handyside, in fact, was in the august company of the Commissioner of Police, and the latter, though eminently agreeable, nevertheless observed an Olympian attitude. Thus might Jove watch a gathering in ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... was discovered in which many eminent Romans were engaged. The poet Lucan, Seneca, the philosopher and defender of matricide, together with many others, were put to death. In A.D. 67 Nero traveled to Greece, and performed on the cithara at the Olympian and Isthmian games. He also contended for the prize in singing, and put to death a singer whose voice was louder than his own. Stained with every crime of which human nature is capable, haunted by the shade of the mother he had murdered, ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... (older than Jerusalem itself) be literally true—that the Almighty was the immediate father of Mary's child: Is not the birth of each and all of us as much a mystery, as great a "miracle," as though we sprang full-grown from the brow of Olympian Jove? Is it necessary that the Creator should violate his own laws to convince us that he does exist? Is it more wonderful that the sun should stand still upon Gibeon and the moon in the Valley of Ajalon than that the great world ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... occasioned the ruin of the ancient system, we must bring to ourselves the ideas of the Greek of the eighth century before Christ, who thought that the blue sky is the floor of heaven, the habitation of the Olympian gods; that the earth, man's proper abode, is flat and circularly extended like a plate beneath the starry canopy. On its rim is the circumfluous ocean, the source of the rivers, which all flow to the Mediterranean, appropriately in after ages so called, since it is ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... gold—yes, enormous quantities of gold in all directions. There was land of the finest quality to be had for next to nothing; work for all who were blessed with good bone and muscle; a constant demand for labour—skilled or unskilled—at high wages; a climate such as the Olympian gods might revel in, and—in short, if all England had heard the oration delivered by that man, and had believed it, the country would, in less than a month, have been depopulated of its younger men and women, and left to the tender mercies of the ...
— The Coxswain's Bride - also, Jack Frost and Sons; and, A Double Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... that Miranda is "discovered playing chess with Ferdinand" in Prospero's cell, (an early instance of "discovered mate,") the numberless Mirandas of Romance have played for and been played for mates. Chess has even its Mythology,—Caissa being now, we believe, generally received at the Olympian Feasts. True, some one has been wicked enough to observe that all chess-stories are divisible into two classes,—in one a man plays for his own soul with the Devil, in the other the hero plays and wins a wife,—and to beg for a chess-story minus wives and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... under-bailiff, the head-bailiff, the chief-clerk in the office, the sub-agent, the head-agent. All these must be submissively approached and anxiously propitiated before the petitioner's prayers can reach the ears of Jove himself, seated aloft on his remote Olympian throne. He may be, and for the most part really is—if he belongs to the old stock of aristocratic divinities—generous and gracious, incapable of meanness, baseness, or cruelty. But the tenant has to do, not with the absentee divinity, but with his priest—not ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... inward, and thinking that she had made no mistake in her memory of this man. Certainly his features were altogether too regular, his head and body too perfectly moulded into that dark and graceful symmetry which she had hitherto vaguely associated with things purely and mythologically Olympian. ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... with Epicrates, here at the house of Morychus; that house which is near the temple of Olympian Zeus. ...
— Phaedrus • Plato
... Byzantium. We shall have to go back to the fifteenth century, to the Fall of Constantinople, to the Revival of Learning, ere we can find a fitting parallel to match the importance of this recent find. Not since the spade of the excavator uncovered from its shroud of earth the flawless beauty of the Olympian Hermes has such a delightful acquisition been made to our knowledge of Greek literature. The name of Professor Lachsyrma has long been one to conjure with, and all of us should experience pleasure (where surprise in his case is out of the question) on learning that his recent ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... pestilence or fertility. This explains many things in the Priest's first speech, in the attitude of the Chorus, and in Oedipus' own language after the discovery. It partly explains the hostility of Apollo, who is not a mere motiveless Destroyer but a true Olympian crushing his Earth-born rival. And in the same way the peculiar royalty of Jocasta, which makes Oedipus at times seem not the King but the Consort of the Queen, brings her near to that class of consecrated queens ...
— Oedipus King of Thebes - Translated into English Rhyming Verse with Explanatory Notes • Sophocles
... quality—that studied sequence of effects ranging from the translucent outline of Capri and the fantastically blue mountains of the coast, to Vesuvius lifting its torch above the plain—this prodigal response to fancy's claims suggested the boundless invention of some great scenic artist, some Olympian Veronese with sea and sky for a palette. And then the city itself, huddled between bay and mountains, and seething and bubbling like a Titan's cauldron! Here was life at its source, not checked, directed, utilised, ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... contrivance to be always with her: he would be her "comic." It was a new system which had come into fashion: the most plastic performances spoiled by the juxtaposition of their caricatures; acrobats, Olympian gods, parodied by a merry-andrew in a ridiculous coat: just as though Nunkie Fuchs, for instance, had taken it into his head to appear with his Three Graces and mimic their tricks, kicking about at the end of a wire with his fat, fatherly paunch and ...
— The Bill-Toppers • Andre Castaigne
... measure Man? How should I guess his mortal will outran Defeat so far that danger could allure For its own sake? — that he would all endure, All sacrifice, all suffer, rather than Forego the daring dreams Olympian That prophesy ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... Farewell, volcanic din, Olympian brattle, The bursting bomb, the thousand-throated cheer Tartarean roar, the volleyed rifle rattle, The rocket's lightning line of fire and fear. I sought my fate 'mid foes in brilliant battle, Gorging with souls the hungry atmosphere; I find my fate from one cold coward's ...
— Soldier Songs and Love Songs • A.H. Laidlaw
... served in the Russian army, to march into the provinces on the Danube; but they were not helped by the Russians, and were defeated by the Turks. Ipsilanti fled into Austria; but another leader, called George the Olympian, lived a wild, outlaw life for some years longer, but as he had no rank the Greeks were too proud to join him. At last he shut himself up in the old convent of Secka, and held it out against the Turks for thirty-six hours, until, finding that he could ...
— Aunt Charlotte's Stories of Greek History • Charlotte M. Yonge
... bear yourself like a goddess, and disdain me from Olympian heights," he said. "I had the wit to guess ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... there, the sorrowing Chief detains, 70 And ever with smooth speech insidious seeks To wean his heart from Ithaca; meantime Ulysses, happy might he but behold The smoke ascending from his native land, Death covets. Canst thou not, Olympian Jove! At last relent? Hath not Ulysses oft With victims slain amid Achaia's fleet Thee gratified, while yet at Troy he fought? How hath he then so deep incensed thee, Jove? To whom, the cloud-assembler God replied. 80 What ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer
... respond, Mr. Carmichael entered the parlour. He was a man of striking and venerable presence. His long white locks, his bulging brow, pregnant with brain, his bushy eyebrows and deep blue-grey eyes, his aquiline nose and flowing beard, gave an Olympian cast to his noble head. Withal, I could not help noticing that his countenance was lined with care, his black coat seamed and threadbare, his hands rough and horny, like those of a workman. If he appeared a god, it was a god in exile or disgrace; a ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... Gods was, then, a series of eight small hangings, four typifying the seasons and four the elements, with an appropriate Olympian forming the central point of interest and the excuse for an entourage of thrilling and graceful versatility. This set has been copied so many times that even the most expert must fail in trying to identify the date of reproduction. Two ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... table, took a sheet of paper, traced a few lines on it, and at once blotted them out.... He recalled Gemma's wonderful figure in the dark window, in the starlight, set all a-fluttering by the warm hurricane; he remembered her marble arms, like the arms of the Olympian goddesses, felt their living weight on his shoulders.... Then he took the rose she had thrown him, and it seemed to him that its half-withered petals exhaled a fragrance of her, more delicate than the ordinary scent ...
— The Torrents of Spring • Ivan Turgenev
... wife Gaia (Earth); Uranus reigns till he is dethroned by his son Cronos with the help of Gaia; then Cronos and Rhea (Earth) reign till Cronos is dethroned by his son Zeus, with the help of Rhea; then Zeus reigns till . . . but here the series stops, since, according to the orthodox Olympian system, Zeus is the eternal King. But there was another system, underlying the Olympian, and it is to that other system that the Year-Kings belong. The Olympians are definite persons. They are immortal; they do not die ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... edging the walk a man stepped. It was Adam Holcomb. He stood directly in front of Pasquale and his bride, blocking the way. There was a strange light in his eyes. It was as if he looked from the present far into the future, as if somehow he were a god, an Olympian who held in his hand ...
— Steve Yeager • William MacLeod Raine
... Olympian more heroic than he, and certainly none with so compelling a vitality. "Such a warm, kind light in them!" she thought of the eyes others had found ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... the idea of a circle, and a non-existent all-perfect Being is as inconceivable as a quadrilateral triangle. It is sometimes answered that in this way we may prove the existence of anything, —Titans, Chimaeras, or the Olympian Gods; we have but to define them as existing, and the proof is complete. But in this objection there is really nothing of weight; none of these beings are by hypothesis absolutely perfect, and, therefore, of their existence we can conclude nothing. With greater ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... appears to have made of the year of his age in which he wrote, bordering closely on the appointed term of man's life; and we may applaud as the curtain falls on his grand comparison of himself to a victorious racer laden with Olympian honours, and now at ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... de la creme of the diocese'—were brilliantly illuminated by electric lamps and furnished magnificently throughout, in keeping with their palatial appearance. The ceilings were painted in the Italian style, with decently-clothed Olympian deities; the floors were of parquetry, polished so highly, and reflecting so truthfully, that the guests seemed to be walking, in some magical way, upon still water. Noble windows, extending from floor to roof, were ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... Lebrun's epigram struck home. Sieyes' acceptance of Crosne was, in fact, his acceptance of notice to quit public affairs, in which he had always moved with philosophic disdain. He lived on to the year 1836 in dignified ease, surveying with Olympian calm the storms of French and ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... let vs altogether to our Troopes, And giue them leaue to flye, that will not stay: And call them Pillars that will stand to vs: And if we thriue, promise them such rewards As Victors weare at the Olympian Games. This may plant courage in their quailing breasts, For yet is hope of Life and Victory: Foreslow no longer, make ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... Olympian Games were held in Sweden, and all the champion athletes of the world took part, it was the ambition of each to win one event, or even to run one-two-three in it. There were five events in the Pentathlon and ten in the Decathlon. ...
— Injun and Whitey to the Rescue • William S. Hart
... that earlier half-hour in the garden now breathed a portentous air. He was with the Gods ... there on the Olympian heights he drank with them, he sang songs with them, with mighty voices they applauded "Reuben Hallard." He drank in his excitement many whiskies and sodas and soon the white room with its books was like the ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... graceful a manner as to divert my attention from the mere descriptions Pausanias gives us of the works of Grecian artists, and I would at any time fall asleep in a Flemish cathedral, for a vision of the temple of Olympian Jupiter. But I think I hear, at this moment, some grave and respectable personage chiding me for such levities, and saying, "Really, Sir, you had better stay at home, and dream in your great chair, than give yourself the trouble of going post through Europe, in search of inspiring places to fall ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... chalk, and wherever the soil was poor it emerged. The grassy track, so gay with scabious and bedstraw, was snow-white at the bottom of its ruts. A dazzling amphitheatre gleamed in the flank of a distant hill, cut for some Olympian audience. And here and there, whatever the surface crop, the earth broke into little embankments, little ditches, little mounds: there had been no lack of ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... amount of glory and reputation. Shrinking from the fatigue involved in the labour of visiting successively one after another the chief cities of the Athenians, the Corinthians, and the Lacedaemonians, he ingeniously hit upon the notion of appearing in person at the Olympian Games, and of there addressing himself simultaneously to the very pick and flower of the whole Greek population. Providing himself beforehand with the choicest portions or select passages from his great narrative, ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... student will recognize in this a parallel to the Greek myth in which the Olympian divinities refer their debate in the matter of the apple of discord to the judgment of Paris. May there not in both fables lie a dim forefeeling of the time when Justice shall transfer her seat from ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various |
