"Prometheus" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... generally, old maids don't keep houses, and widows marry again. No doubt it was an unconscious appreciation of this feeling which brought about the burning of Indian widows. There is an unfitness in women for solitude. A female Prometheus, even without a vulture, would indicate cruelty worse even than Jove's. A woman should marry,—once, ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... create combinations more beautiful than ever existed in Nature, are derived from chemistry; in short, in every branch of the common and fine arts, in every department of human industry, the influence of this science is felt, and we may find in the fable of Prometheus taking the flame from heaven to animate his man of clay an emblem of the effects of fire in its application to chemical purposes in creating the activity and almost ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... were Thessalian princes, others that they were Jewish patriarchs; while not a few are of opinion that they were kings of the several countries where they were worshipped. It has been supposed that Saturn represented Adam; Rhea, Eve; Jupiter, Cain; Prometheus, Abel; Apollo, Lamech; Mercury, Jabal; Bacchus, Noah; and Phaeton, Elias. Others imagine that Saturn came in place of Noah; Pluto, of Sem; Neptune, of Japheth; Bacchus, of Nimrod; and Apollo, of Phut. A third class of thinkers maintain ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... single life. Each tragedy or trilogy resembles the fragment of a sublime Epic poem. Mighty issues revolve about the scene, whether this is laid on Earth or amongst the Gods, issues far transcending the fate of Orestes or even of Prometheus. In the perspective painting of Sophocles, these vast surroundings fall into the background, and the feelings of the spectator are absorbed in sympathy with the chief figure on the stage, round whom the other characters—the members of the ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... a clear exposition of the principles of accentuation, drawing accurately the distinction between accent and quantity, and between the accents of common talk and the musical accents that occur in poetry. It is the best monograph on the subject, of which we know. Another article, "On Prometheus," clears AEschylus from the charge of impiety, because he appears to make Zeus act tyrannically towards Prometheus in the "Prometheus Vinctus." He also gave the results of some of his classical studies, in lectures in Edinburgh and Glasgow on Roman history and Greek ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... the philosophy of outsides. Few dive deeper into the human breast than the bosom of the shirt. Who could doubt the heart that beats beneath a cambric front? or who imagine that hand accustomed to dirty work which is enveloped in white kid? What Prometheus was to the physical, Stultz is to the moral man—the one made human beings out of clay, the other cuts characters out of broad-cloth. Gentility is, with us, a thing of the goose and shears; and nobility an attribute—not of the mind, but (supreme ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... human heart that can love and suffer. It aided him in this respect however, that his inherent modesty caused him to look up to Helen as to a suffering goddess, noble, grand, lovely, only ignorant of the one secret, of which he, haunting the steps of the Unbound Prometheus, had learned a few syllables, broken yet potent, which he would fain, could he find how, communicate in their potency to her. And besides, to help her now looking upon him from the distant height ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... addressed by Prometheus to Zeus, under whose sentence he was groaning, has never before been put into such plain English.[7] Mr Mill's declaration reminds us also of Hippolytus, the chaste and pure youth, whose tragic fate is so beautifully described by Euripides. Hippolytus ...
— Review of the Work of Mr John Stuart Mill Entitled, 'Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy.' • George Grote
... do because his wrists were bound behind, leaving the space of a foot or two between his waist and the wall; and when he leant back he had the tragic outline of a modern Prometheus bound; when he strained forward, that of one of Muller's pupils undergoing treatment for the development of ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... with each succeeding cycle of its history. So luminous was his mind, so profound and far-reaching his sympathy, that he understood the obscure workings of the mediæval mind as clearly as he appreciated Mirabeau’s transcendent genius. He believed that humanity, like Prometheus, was self-made; that nations modelled their own destiny during the actions and reactions of history, as each one of us acquires a personality through the struggles and temptations of existence, by the evolving power every soul ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... by an author is hardly ever the lesson the world chooses to learn from his book. What attracts and impresses us in El Burlador de Sevilla is not the immediate urgency of repentance, but the heroism of daring to be the enemy of God. From Prometheus to my own Devil's Disciple, such enemies have always been popular. Don Juan became such a pet that the world could not bear his damnation. It reconciled him sentimentally to God in a second version, and clamored for his canonization ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... in producing odes and epistles, a little better than Cibber's, and a little worse than Hayley's. Here and there a manly sentiment which deserves to be in prose makes its appearance in company with Prometheus and Orpheus, Elysium and Acheron, the Plaintive Philomel, the poppies of Morpheus, and all the other frippery which, like a robe tossed by a proud beauty to her waiting woman, has long been contemptuously abandoned by genius to mediocrity. We hardly know any instance of the strength ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... too, in his darkest hour, it was Greek that surged in him—iambics of thunderous wrath such as those which are volleyed by Prometheus. But as he sat down to his writing-table, and unlocked the dear old album, and dipped his pen in the ink, a great calm fell on him. The iambics in him began to breathe such sweetness as is on the lips of Alcestis going to her doom. But, just as he set ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... us see what AEschylus says, who was not only a poet, but a Pythagorean philosopher, also, for that is the account which you have received of him; how doth he make Prometheus bear the pain he suffered for the Lemnian theft, when he clandestinely stole away the celestial fire, and bestowed it on men, and was severely punished by Jupiter for the theft. Fastened to mount Caucasus, ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... ancient dwellers on earth get command and possession of fire? The Vedic poets tell us that fire first came to them from the sky, in the form of lightning, but that it disappeared again, and that then Matarisvan, a being to a certain extent like Prometheus, brought it back and confided it to the safe keeping of the ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... her hideous idea of Frankenstein. We are told in this allegory that, after fashioning some thousands of men after the most approved model, endowing them with all that is noble, generous, admirable, and loveable in man or woman, the eastern Prometheus grew weary in his work, stretched his hand for the beer-can, and draining it too deeply, lapsed presently into a state of what Germans call 'other-man-ness.'—There is a simpler Anglo-Saxon term ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... before the days of Smith and Rigdon, advanced the theory that the Urim and Thummim were clear crystals intended for "gazing" purposes. One writer remarks of the practice, "Aeschylus refers it to Prometheus, Cicero to the Assyrians and Etruscans, Zoroaster to Ahriman, Varro to the Persian Magi, and a very large class of authors, from the Christian Fathers and Schoolmen downward, to the devil."* An act of James I (1736), against witchcraft in England, made it a crime to pretend to ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... irrepressible grief she gave vent to her apprehensions and sorrow. She described in vivid terms the ceaseless care that with still renewing hunger ate into her soul; she compared this gnawing of sleepless expectation of evil, to the vulture that fed on the heart of Prometheus; under the influence of this eternal excitement, and of the interminable struggles she endured to combat and conceal it, she felt, she said, as if all the wheels and springs of the animal machine worked at double rate, and were fast consuming ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... originated either by Nimrod, who is related to have forced men to worship fire, or by Ninus, who caused the statue of his father Bel to be worshiped. Among the Greeks, as related by Isidore (Etym. viii, 11), Prometheus was the first to set up statues of men: and the Jews say that Ismael was the first to make idols of clay. Moreover, idolatry ceased to a great extent in the sixth age. Therefore idolatry had no cause on ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... morning the steamship Prometheus came in and tied up near us, and soon word was brought that she would take the New Orleans passengers on board and sail immediately for that port. It now occurred to me that I could get nearer home by going ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... delights and humiliates me: it is so full of sympathy for all sorts and conditions of men, and so appreciative of what is and what is not. It is so very human and humane. There is in it a sort of quite gentle and dignified Prometheus Vinctus attitude towards the Powers That Be; and Zeus, with his thunderbolts and chains, looks very much ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... which I took care to explain were on the look-out for my guest; and he seemed by this time pretty well convinced that an attempt to elude our cruisers would have been fruitless. On the latter day, the Prometheus showed her number, while we were at dinner: when Buonaparte expressed a wish to know whether the ships at Brest had hoisted the white flag or not. I sent for the officer of the watch, and desired him to ask the question by telegraph. In a few minutes he returned, ...
— The Surrender of Napoleon • Sir Frederick Lewis Maitland
... unite the chain in a circle. In Alfieri art once more achieved the faultless purity of its proper character; Greek tragedy reached the same height in the Italian's Saul that it touched in the Greek's Prometheus, two dramas which are perhaps the most gigantic creations of any literature." Emiliani-Giudici thinks that the literary ineducation of Alfieri was the principal exterior cause of this prodigious development, that a more regular course of study would have restrained ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... the principal thing. You cannot believe how delighted I was to hear some particulars of your music to "Prometheus." Our friend Uhlig, to whom I attribute excellent judgment, sends me word that he values this single overture more than the whole of Mendelssohn. My desire to make its acquaintance is raised to the highest pitch. Dearest friend, will you be kind enough to let me have a copy ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... His favourite gods are those of the elder generation, the sons of heaven and earth, compared with whom Jupiter himself was a stripling and an upstart, the gigantic Titans, and the inexorable Furies. Foremost among his creations of this class stands Prometheus, half fiend, half redeemer, the friend of man, the sullen and implacable enemy of Heaven. Prometheus bears undoubtedly a considerable resemblance to the Satan of Milton. In both we find the same impatience of control, the same ferocity, the same unconquerable pride. In both characters ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... a little outward resemblance, the name, the death he suffered. But for the rest it seemed to me that they might as well have named any other hero of tragedy - Prometheus for example - as the mighty and loving being that, even now, directed all their steps and ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... Adams, John, the Southwell carrier Lord Byron's epitaph on Addison, Joseph, his character as a poet His conversation His 'Drummer' 'Adolphe,' Benjamin Constant's Adversity 'AEneid, the,' written for political purposes AEschylus His 'Prometheus' His 'Seven before Thebes' 'Agathon,' Wieland's history of Aglietti, Dr., MS. letters in his profession offered to Mr. Murray Albania Albanians, their character and manners Alberoni, Cardinal Albrizzi, Countess, some ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... Napoleon had broken forth from Elba, and everything was in confusion. Vast military preparations were again made, our own corps was levied anew, and my brother became an officer in it; but the danger was soon over, Napoleon was once more quelled, and chained for ever, like Prometheus, to his rock. As the corps, however, though so recently levied, had already become a very fine one, thanks to my father's energetic drilling, the Government very properly determined to turn it to some account, and, as disturbances were apprehended ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... thy fate, thou wandering Sphinx! Pale Science, searching by the midnight lamp Through the vexed mazes of the human brain, Still fails to read the secret of its soul As the superb enigma flashes by, A loosed Prometheus ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster
... mouth of AEsop an explanation of that love which would certainly not have been relished by the Greeks. He says that while Prometheus was occupied with modelling his man and woman, he was invited to a feast given by Jupiter, to the Gods; he came back intoxicated and, by mistake, applied the sexual parts of one to ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... the form of an apologue, in which, after Prometheus had given men the arts, Zeus is represented as sending Hermes to them, bearing with him Justice and Reverence. These are not, like the arts, to be imparted to a few only, but all men are to be partakers of them. Therefore the Athenian people are right in distinguishing between the ...
— Protagoras • Plato
... midst of all his busy, useful, aspiring life he was conscious, deep in his heart, of a gnawing anguish, whose name was Claudia Merlin. To-night this deep-seated anguish tortured him like the vulture of Prometheus. One vivid picture was always before his mind's eye—the sofa, with the beautiful figure of Claudia reclining upon it, and the stately form of the viscount, leaning with deferential admiration over her. The viscount's admiration of the beauty was patent; he did not attempt to conceal ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... and his rage against mankind. I have always thought of him and of Marlborough as the two greatest men of that age. I have read his books (who doth not know them?) here in our calm woods, and imagine a giant to myself as I think of him, a lonely fallen Prometheus, groaning as the vulture tears him. Prometheus I saw, but when first I ever had any words with him, the giant stepped out of a sedan-chair in the Poultry, whither he had come with a tipsy Irish servant parading before him, who announced him, bawling out his ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... New-England clergy was this Dr. Burge. He held the old creed-formulas through which Wilson and Mather declared their faith, yet warmed them into ruddy life by whatever fire the last transcendental Prometheus or Comte-devoted scientist filched from aerial or material heaven. A good diner-out, a good visitor among the poor. His parishioners supplied him with a wood-fire, a saddle-horse, and, it was maliciously said, a boxing-master; and he, on his part,—so ran the idle ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... dark, as a clear midnight sky is dark, her beautiful lips compressed, but with concentration of purpose, not with weakness of sorrow. The force of her motherhood had awakened in Katherine a latent, titanic element. Like "Prometheus Bound," chained to the rock, torn, her spirit remained unquelled. For good or evil—as the event should prove—she ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... stealing living beauty's fire Into my verse that it may always live, And change his forms to shapes of my desire, Thou beauty's queen, self sentence like dost give. Bound to thy feet in chains of life I lie; For to thine eyes I never dare aspire; And in thy beauty's brightness do I fry, As poor Prometheus in the scalding fire; Which tears maintain as oil the lamp revives; Only my ...
— Elizabethan Sonnet-Cycles - Delia - Diana • Samuel Daniel and Henry Constable
... gentleman at Ranelagh, and his personal courage, rather than his stoicism, was suspected, he published a story of his having once caned a person whom he called Mario; on which a wag, considering Hill as a Prometheus, wrote— ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... mortal and in the other the mortal approaches the Goddess; hence, too, the severer punishment in the latter case. The second legend ought to be completed here by a fact derived from the story of Prometheus: the liver grows as fast as the vultures rend or consume it; thus again rises the idea of infinite repetition, now of suffering, not of action, for Orion ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... over-material-production of every sort and degree, as on all hands is now acknowledged. The foundations of Manchester tremble under the ponderous piles of Cobden's calicoes, in Cobden's warerooms, ever, like the liver of Prometheus, undiminished, though daily devoured by the vulture of consumption. The sight of the Pelion upon Ossa, accumulated masses of pig upon bar iron, immovable as the cloud-capped Waen and Dowlais of Merthyr Tydvil themselves, should almost generate burning ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... too shalt know; the place Is all to great Poseidon consecrate. Hard by, the Titan, he who bears the torch, Prometheus, has his worship; but the spot Thou treadest, the Brass-footed Threshold named, Is Athens' bastion, and the neighboring lands Claim as their chief and patron yonder knight Colonus, and in common bear his name. ...
— The Oedipus Trilogy • Sophocles
... terror. Even those who expected much found their expectations surpassed. It was as though on the mountain reserved for the gods, during the banquet on a serene evening, the whole of the all-powerful body being gathered together, the face of Prometheus, mangled by the vulture's beak, should have suddenly appeared before them, like a blood-coloured moon on the horizon. Olympus looking on Caucasus! What a vision! Old and young, open-mouthed with surprise, fixed their ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... the 'far off times;' and not to the 'near,' it was to the advanced ages of the Advancement of Learning, that this Play was dedicated by its Author. For it was the spirit of the modern ages that inspired it. It was the new Prometheus who planned it; the more aspiring Titan, who would bring down in his New Organum a new and more radiant gift; it was the Benefactor and Foreseer, who would advance the rude kind to new and more enviable approximations to the celestial summits. He knew there would come a time, in the inevitable ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... every time, till Hercules found out that he grew in force whenever he touched his mother earth, and therefore, lifting him up in those mightiest of arms, the hero squeezed the breath out of him. By and by he came to Mount Caucasus, where he found the chained Prometheus, and, aiming an arrow at the eagle, killed the tormentor, and set the Titan free. Atlas undertook to go to his daughters, and get the apples, if Hercules would hold up the skies for him in the meantime. Hercules agreed, and Atlas shifted the heavens to his shoulders, went, and presently ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... of each constituent; but they never could put them together again, or, by any similar compound produce the primordial egg or organic germ, from which a living being would arise. A connecting link—a vital spark, or animating soul—is always wanting to complete the existence of the Prometheus of the laboratory. Mark, too, the "if," and the "might," in this most lame and impotent hypothesis:—"If, therefore, these globules be identical with the cells which are held to be reproductive, it might be said," &c. Globules can be easily produced; the passage ...
— An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" • Anonymous
... invention prove to mankind a blessing or a curse?—like the fire which Prometheus stole from heaven to vivify his statue, may it not be followed by the ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... in colors too deep and strong. Prometheus bound to the rock, with the beak of the vulture in his bleeding breast, suffering daily renewing pangs, his wounds healed only to be torn open afresh, is an emblem of the victim of that vulture passion, which the word of God declares to be cruel and ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... of modern Prometheus, capable of creating and of vivifying with the electric spark of mind; but, whether he would steal the fire from Heaven, or a less elevated region, I am not prepared to say. He has called into life a body—and a vast one—by his vigorous writings, and has infused into it a spirit that will not be ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... expiating by suffering the sins of an upper world. Virgil gave a glimpse, as it were, into that scene of retribution; Minos and Rhadamanthus passing judgment on the successive spirits brought before them; the flames of Tartarus, the rock of Sisyphus, the wheel of Ixion, the vulture gnawing Prometheus. But with Homer and Virgil, the descent into the infernal regions was a brief episode; with Dante it was the whole poem. Immense was the effort of imagination requisite to give variety to such a subject, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... painstaking effort, the labour, is quickly forgotten; the blunders, the false quantities in our lives, are treasured up to be flung against our names. We play, but we do not know our parts; we are Oedipus, who has committed unwitting sin, and yet must reap his reward; we are Prometheus who is to be chained to the rock forever, for offending the gods; we are Orestes whom the Eumenides pursue, chasing him down for his guilt. And all the time we vainly imagine that we are some victorious ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... womanly but not effeminate; the very books on the table, that had been made familiar by dear associations. Yes, there the Tasso, in which we had read together the episode of Clorinda; there the Aeschylus in which I translated to her the 'Prometheus.' Pedantries these might seem to some, pedantries, perhaps, they were; but they were proofs of that congeniality which had knit the man of books to the daughter of the world. That room, it was the home ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... thought be Apollo's, 'tis finely express'd; So a thief steals my horse, and has him well dress'd. Now whereas the said criminal seems past repentance, We Phoebus think fit to proceed to his sentence. Since Delany hath dared, like Prometheus his sire, To climb to our region, and thence to steal fire; We order a vulture in shape of the Spleen, To prey on his liver, but not to be seen. And we order our subjects of every degree To believe all his verses were written by me: And ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... spiritual and bodily, ethereal and corporeal, ideal and actual, be accepted as exact, there are all the possibilities and capabilities of corporeal transference, guided always by an unimprisonable will or intelligence." As he paused I murmured the lines from Shelley's "Prometheus Unbound": ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker
... the mountain-side. He has remarkable presence of body. In any emergency he is usually the best man on the spot. He is at once seer, creator, accomplisher, and present help in time of trouble. But his everyday occupation is that of entertainer. He is the joy-bringer—the Prometheus of pleasure. In his vicinity there is no such thing as ennui ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... near at hand, the Greeks modelled their first images out of clay; hence they naturally imagined that Prometheus had made man out of that substance when called upon to fashion a creature inferior to the gods only. As the Northern statues were hewn out of wood, the Northern races inferred, as a matter of course, that Odin, Vili, and Ve (who here correspond ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... Prometheus underwent various changes in successive periods of Greek thought. In its main outline the story is the same: that Prometheus, whose name signifies Forethought, stole fire from Zeus, or Jupiter, or Jove, and gave it as a gift to man. For this, the angry ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... Vols.: Vol. I. Introduction; Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson; Shelley's Correspondence with Stockdale; Wandering Jew; Queen Mab; Alastor; Rosalind and Helen; Prometheus Unbound; Adonais. ...
— Chatto & Windus Alphabetical Catalogue of Books in Fiction and General Literature, Sept. 1905 • Various
... were a god,' Mirabeau answered. 'Yes, it is true and it is right. Has he not, like Jove, hurled the lightning of heaven in his right hand? Is he not an unpunished Prometheus? Is he not breaking the scepter of ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... Jupiter, Prometheus set about the creation of Man and the other animals. Jupiter, seeing that Mankind, the only rational creatures, were far outnumbered by the irrational beasts, bade him redress the balance by turning ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... women as Aeschylus unfolds in the few places where he condescends to notice such inferior beings. The only kind of sexual love of which he shows any knowledge is that referred to in the remarks of Prometheus and Io regarding the designs of Zeus on ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... Indra who, by killing the Dasyus, protected the colour of the Aryans; and again, Indra "unveiled the light for the Aryas and the Dasyus was left on the left hand" (ii. III 18). Let the student of Occultism bear in mind that the Greek Noah, Deukalion, the husband of Pyrrha, was the reputed son of Prometheus who robbed Heaven of its fire (i.e., of secret Wisdom "of the right hand," or occult knowledge); that Prometheus is the brother of Atlas; that he is also the son of Asia and of the Titan Iapetus—the antetype from which the Jews ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... is said by some authors to be the daughter[FN262] of Hermes, [FN263] and by others of Prometheus, both of them famous for their philosophic turn of mind. The latter is supposed to have first taught mankind wisdom and foresight, as the former is reputed to have ...
— Legends Of The Gods - The Egyptian Texts, edited with Translations • E. A. Wallis Budge
... imagine that there the souls of Keats and Shelley uttered their enfranchised music, not in rivalry but in welcome. We can realise, perhaps, something of the startled delight, of the sudden electric tremors, of the young poet when, with eager eyes, he turned over the pages of "Epipsychidion" or "Prometheus Unbound," "Alastor" or "Endymion," or the Odes to a Nightingale, on Melancholy, on a ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... underwent various changes in successive periods of Greek thought. In its main outline the story is the same: that Prometheus, whose name signifies Forethought, stole fire from Zeus, or Jupiter, or Jove, and gave it as a gift to man. For this, the angry god bound him upon Mount Caucasus, and decreed that a vulture should prey upon his liver, destroying every ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... but it is so, because his will must of necessity be in accordance with the fitting and right. Could we conceive of Omnipotence commanding what is intrinsically unfit and wrong, the virtuous man would not be the God-server, but the Prometheus suffering the implacable vengeance of an unrighteous Deity. 3. Though everlasting happiness be the result of virtue, it is not the ground or the reason for it. Were our being earth-limited, virtue would lose none of its obligation. ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... Rome, jocund in spirit (wohlgemuth), spend much of his time in fiddling? Foolish Word-monger and Motive-grinder, who in thy Logic-mill hast an earthly mechanism for the Godlike itself, and wouldst fain grind me out Virtue from the husks of Pleasure,—I tell thee, Nay! To the unregenerate Prometheus Vinctus of a man, it is ever the bitterest aggravation of his wretchedness that he is conscious of Virtue, that he feels himself the victim not of suffering only, but of injustice. What then? Is the ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... Sheking Kalidasa's Sakuntala or The Lost Ring Aeschylus' Prometheus Trilogy of Orestes Sophocles' OEdipus Euripides' Medea Aristophanes' The Knights ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... consciousness in the present! Here at least is a vision, a theory, [149] theoria, which reposes on no basis of unverified hypothesis, which makes no call upon a future after all somewhat problematic; as it would be unaffected by any discovery of an Empedocles (improving on the old story of Prometheus) as to what had really been the origin, and course of development, of man's actually attained faculties and that seemingly divine particle of reason or spirit in him. Such a doctrine, at more leisurable moments, would of course have its precepts to deliver on the embellishment, generally, ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... a tendency,—to the service of the senses: and he flung into literature, in his Mephistopheles, the first organic figure that has been added for some ages, and which will remain as long as the Prometheus. I have no design to enter into any analysis of his numerous works. They consist of translations, criticisms, dramas, lyric and every other description of poems, literary journals, and portraits of distinguished men. Yet I cannot omit ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... governments, and a higher law above all human laws, from whence all their powers are derived. That higher law is the Law of God, that supreme authority is the God of Justice. To this eternally just God, innocence, under oppression and wrong, has made its proud appeal, like that of Prometheus to the elements, to the witnessing clouds, to coming ages, and has been sustained and comforted. And to that higher law the weak have confidently appealed against the unrighteous enactments of the strong, ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... Commonwealth,—the idea of a common good surpassing a personal good; then in the conception of the Epic, which assumes a political as well as a physical Kosmos, or order; then in the grand moral ideas lying at the basis of the Mythology,—the myths, for instance, of Prometheus, and the picture of Nemesis and the Fates. Next, the deep sense of God speaks out in Grecian Tragedy and the great works of Grecian Art; and in the highest degree, in the Philosophy which culminated ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... neighbor eight miles away. It was an impossible undertaking to keep a coal alive on a walk of eight miles. Wrapping a piece of cotton cloth tightly about a small stick he ignited one end at his neighbor's hearth, and like an humble Prometheus carried the smouldering gift to his little world and its ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee
... continuous action on the aerial ocean, depending upon the influence of light — the primary condition of all organic vitality — on the solid and liquid surface of our planet. It might be said, in accordance with a beautiful expression of Lavoisier, that the ancient marvel of the myth of Prometheus was incessantly renewed ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... of the high hils, which I specially recited in my former booke, by his entrailes (like Prometheus) feedeth the Tynners pecking, or picking bils, with a long liued profit, albeit, their scarcle Eagle eyes sometimes mistake the shadow for the substance, and so offer vp degenerate teares, as a ...
— The Survey of Cornwall • Richard Carew
... learning to do. It seems to me almost that I need no one else! I sit here in my room, out there in the woods, and I am content. I read a great deal; I have just re-read the "Volsunga Saga," and have begun Tolstoi's "Cossacks." I am trying, too, to continue my mother's translation of "Prometheus," but the difference between my work and hers is so great that I sometimes lose heart. However, I shall try to finish it. Her beautiful face and yours look down at me from the shelf above my writing-table, ...
— The Wings of Icarus - Being the Life of one Emilia Fletcher • Laurence Alma Tadema
... with dread, horror, or the most painful pity,—sympathies and antipathies which we seem to be feeling not only for them but for the whole race. This world, we are told, is called Britain; but we should no more look for it in an atlas than for the place, called Caucasus, where Prometheus was chained by Strength and Force and comforted by the daughters of Ocean, or the place where Farinata stands erect in his glowing tomb, 'Come avesse ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... extremity of his alarm. His struggles kept the bird at a distance, but it continued to survey him with such a longing, liquorish eye, that the poor culprit felt himself already writhing, like another Prometheus, under the beak of his destroyer. His terror increased. It might be some demon sent to torment him; and this conviction strengthened when he saw the dismal and hideous things that surrounded him. Just as his agony was wrought to the highest pitch he heard footsteps. Even the sound ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... water, or wind, or light, in the [33] moulding of eye and brow; to arrest it, or rather, perhaps, to set it free, there, as human expression. The body of man, indeed, was for the Greeks, still the genuine work of Prometheus; its connexion with earth and air asserted in many a legend, not shaded down, as with us, through innumerable stages of descent, but direct and immediate; in precise contrast to our physical theory of our life, which never seems to fade, dream over it ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... by, the smoked glass is apt to be missing just at the moment it is most wanted. I daresay, now, even a man fortified with a knowledge of the classics might be lured into an imprudent marriage, in spite of the warning given him by the chorus in the Prometheus." ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... reader will find the figure of the Prometheus-artist clamped, so to speak, with bands of steel to the huge granitic cliff of English puritanism. No account was taken of his manifold virtues and graces: no credit given him for his extraordinary achievements: he was hounded out of life because ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... was the romantic and splendid ambition after knowledge, for the conquest of nature and for the service of man; gathering up in himself the spirit and longings and efforts of all discoverers and inventors of the arts, as they are symbolised in the mythical Prometheus. He rose to the highest place and honour; and yet that place and honour were but the fringe and adornment of all that made him great. It is difficult to imagine a grander and more magnificent career; ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... like better the tradition of the Grecians, and ascribe the first inventions to men, yet you will rather believe that Prometheus first stroke the flints, and marvelled at the spark, than that when he first stroke the flints he expected the spark; and therefore we see the West Indian Prometheus had no intelligence with the European, because of the rareness with them of flint, that ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... proportions of his own intellectual stature. Hamilton, too, must have had many a pang. The wretched nervousness of character which at once stimulated him to pine for distinction, and disqualified him from obtaining it, must have made his life miserable. If the magnificent conception of the poet's Prometheus could be lowered to any thing so trivial as a disappointed politician of the eighteenth century, its burlesque might be amply shown in a mind helplessly struggling against a sense of its own inferiority, gnawed by envy at the success ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... the dead, and the living claim our thoughts," sighed the king. "What an absurd thing is the human heart! It will never grow cold or old; always pretending to a spark of the fire which that shameful fellow Prometheus stole from the gods. What an absurdity! What have I, an old fellow, to do with the fire of Prometheus, when the fire of war will soon rage around me," At this instant the door gently opened. "What do you want, ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... be held to be no more real a personage than Prometheus, and if the story of the Fall is merely an instructive "type," comparable to the profound Promethean mythus, ...
— The Lights of the Church and the Light of Science - Essay #6 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... PROMETHEUS. H'sh, h'sh! Don't call me by my name; you will be my ruin, if Zeus should see me here. But, if you want me to tell you how things are going in heaven, take this umbrella and shield me, so that the ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... Prometheus bitter-wroth The Sea-maids were, remembering how that Zeus, Moved by his prophecies, unto Peleus gave Thetis to wife, a most unwilling bride. Then cried in wrath to these Cymothoe: "O that the pestilent prophet had endured All pangs ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... she will'd, Stole some from Hebe (Hebe Jove's cup fill'd), And gave it to his simple rustic love: Which being known,—as what is hid from Jove?— He inly storm'd, and wax'd more furious Than for the fire filch'd by Prometheus; And thrusts him down from heaven. He, wandering here, In mournful terms, with sad and heavy cheer, 440 Complain'd to Cupid: Cupid, for his sake, To be reveng'd on Jove did undertake; And those on whom heaven, earth, and hell relies, I mean the adamantine Destinies, ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... there were a great number of stout fellows before Agamemnon, may not unreasonably induce us to conclude that similar heroes were to succeed him. Shakspeare made a better man when his imagination moulded the mighty figure of Macbeth. And if you will measure Satan by Prometheus, the blind old Puritan's work by that of the fiery Grecian poet, does not Milton's angel surpass AEschylus's—surpass him ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... at a certain feast held in honour of Minerva, who gave them oil; of Vulcan, who was the inventor of lamps; and of Prometheus, who had rendered them service by the fire which he had stolen from heaven. Another feast to Bacchus was celebrated by a grand nocturnal illumination, in which wine was poured forth profusely to all passengers. A feast in memory ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... the subject matter of my poetry. I believed that if Morris had set his stories amid the scenery of his own Wales (for I knew him to be of Welsh extraction and supposed wrongly that he had spent his childhood there) that if Shelley had nailed his Prometheus or some equal symbol upon some Welsh or Scottish rock, their art had entered more intimately, more microscopically, as it were, into our thought, and had given perhaps to modern poetry a breadth and stability like that ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... spark of Prometheus is burnt out, and now they substitute for it the flash of lycopodium,* a stage-fire which will not so much as light a pipe. The present generation may be compared to rats crawling ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... free life, put on ugly garments, and work for a living. These animals, for which we have such contempt, are freer than men; they are the Supermen of Nietzsche—Nietzsche whose brain mirrored both a Prometheus and a Napoleon." Quell listened to this speech ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... or reasoning which never grows old in us. At first we have but a confused conception of them, analogous to the eyes blinking at the light in the Republic. To this Plato opposes the revelation from Heaven of the real relations of them, which some Prometheus, who gave the true fire from heaven, is supposed to have imparted to us. Plato is speaking of two things—(1) the crude notion of the one and many, which powerfully affects the ordinary mind when first beginning ...
— Philebus • Plato
... this afternoon, as viewed from Sidi Mansur. They are fine, these moments of conflagration, of mineral incandescence, when the sober limestone rocks take on the tints of molten copper, their convulsed strata standing out like the ribs of some agonized Prometheus, while the plain, where every little stone casts an inordinate shadow behind it, clothes itself in demure shades of pearl. Fine, and all too brief. For even before the descending sun has touched the rim of the world the colours fade away; ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... bluish-gray stream along the verge of our orchard like a snake half torpid with the cold,—it is sad to turn from an outward scene of so little comfort and find the same sullen influences brooding within the precincts of my study. Where is that brilliant guest, that quick and subtle spirit, whom Prometheus lured from heaven to civilize mankind and cheer them in their wintry desolation; that comfortable inmate, whose smile, during eight months of the year, was our sufficient consolation for summer's lingering advance and early flight? Alas! blindly inhospitable, grudging the food that kept him cheery ...
— Fire Worship (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... accursed race Dare look divine Astrea in the face; Chaos return and with confusion Involve the world with strange disunion; For Pluto sits in that adored chair Which doth belong unto Minerva's heir. O hecatombs! O catastrophe! From Midas' pomp to Trus' beggary! Prometheus, who celestial fire Did steal from heaven, therewith to inspire Our earthly bodies with a sense-ful mind, Whereby we might the depth of nature find, Is ding'd to hell, and vulture eats his heart Which did such deep philosophy impart To ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... are at once his exemplars, his audience, and his worshippers; and he is their mirror in which they behold themselves as they are: he breathes them vitally as an atmosphere, and they breathe him. Zeus, Athene, Heracles, Prometheus, Agamemnon, Orestes, the House of Oedipus, Clytemnestra, Iphigenia, and Antigone, spoke something to the Hellenic nations; woke their piety, pity, or horror,—thrilled, soothed, or delighted them; but they have no charm for our ears; for us, they are literally disembodied ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... career as a midshipman, he suffered a mortifying interruption of the active life which had long since become essential to his comfort. He had contrived to get appointed on board a fire ship, the Prometheus, (chiefly with a wish to enlarge his experience by this variety of naval warfare,) at the time of the last Copenhagen expedition, and he obtained his wish; for the Prometheus had a very distinguished station assigned her ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... had, occasion, in one of my visits to the depot, to repair to the tent of one of the embalmers. He was a sedate, grave person, and when I saw him, standing over the nude, hard corpse, he reminded me of the implacable vulture, looking into the eyes of Prometheus. His battery and tube were pulsing, like one's heart and lungs, and the subject was being drained at the neck. I compared the discolored body with the figure of Ianthe, as revealed in Queen Mab, but failed to see the ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... to lofty verse Who sweep the earth with lowly wing, Like sand before the blast disperse— A Nose! a mighty Nose I sing! As erst Prometheus stole from heaven the fire 5 To animate the wonder of his hand; Thus with unhallow'd hands, O Muse, aspire, And from my subject snatch a burning brand! So like the Nose I sing—my verse shall glow— Like Phlegethon my verse in waves of fire ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... books, his is the one I wish to bear. He took the light of the gods and [-he-] brought it to men, and he taught men to be gods. And he suffered for his deed as all bearers of light must suffer. His name was Prometheus." ...
— Anthem • Ayn Rand
... animals. Sea-water also is undrinkable and brackish, but it feeds fish, and is a sort of vehicle to convey and transport travellers anywhere. The Satyr, when he saw fire for the first time, wished to kiss it and embrace it, but Prometheus warned him, ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... wife, Tethys, and his three hundred daughters, the Oceanides. No Argonaut had ever dared to come in contact with these mysterious divinities. Only the grave Aeschylus had dared to portray the Oceanides—virgins fresh and demure, weeping around the rock to which Prometheus was bound. ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... Nothing can be more impressive than the picture of Saturn in his palsy of affliction, and of the mighty goddess his grand-daughter, or than the secret signs of coming woe in the palace of Hyperion. These things grew from darker creeds than Greece had ever known since the elder traditions of Prometheus—creeds that sent down their sounding plummets into far deeper wells within the human spirit. What had been meant, by the question proposed to Shelley, was no doubt— How so young a man as Keats, not having had the advantage ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... know the story of Prometheus, friend Jonathan? It is, of course, a myth, but it serves as an illustration of my present point. Prometheus, for ridiculing the gods, was bound to a rock upon Mount Caucasus, by order of Jupiter, where daily for thirty years a vulture came and tore at his liver, feeding upon it. Then ...
— The Common Sense of Socialism - A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg • John Spargo
... at and reflect upon men—the great men, the men who have moulded the world, who have made the massive contributions to humanity, who have dealt the Titan strokes that have redeemed the race from its servitudes and bestialities, who, like Atlas, have upheld and lifted up the world; who, like Prometheus, have brought to man precious gifts from Zeus, and so delivered him from the tyranny and dominion of his ignorance, superstitions, fears and passions—you will always find that they are men who have lived upon the lofty summits of the Spirit, ...
— The Jericho Road • W. Bion Adkins
... in silence as he stood before him, his looks bent upon the ground, his arms folded on his bosom, with the appearance of a black marble statue of the most exquisite workmanship, waiting life from the touch of a Prometheus. The King of England, who, as it was emphatically said of his successor Henry the Eighth, loved to look upon A MAN, was well pleased with the thews, sinews, and symmetry of him whom he now surveyed, and questioned him in the lingua franca, "Art thou ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... mingled beauty and wildness of a scene, so consonant with my ideas of the romantic and the picturesque. Let me rather recur to her (although my heart be lacerated once more in the recollection) who was the presiding deity of the whole,—the being after whom, had I had the fabled power of Prometheus, I should have formed and animated the sharer of that sweet wild solitude, nor once felt that fancy, to whom I was so largely a debtor, had in aught been cheated of what she had, for a series ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... until it is unendurable. Hence I am silent so long as it does not speak for itself, which extremity might be prevented were circumstances other than they are. Since they are not, let it be borne with, say strength and resignation united with hope. 'Tis this that is fabled in Prometheus and Laocooen—and ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... account of the plays will not be expected in the Preface to a series of extracts; it will be found in such literary histories as that of Professor Mahaffy. Nor can it be necessary to dilate on the merit of the pieces selected. The sublime agony of Prometheus Bound, the majesty of wickedness in Clytaemnestra, the martial grandeur of the siege of Thebes, or of the battle of Salamis, in Aeschylus; the awful doom of Oedipus, his mysterious end, the heroic despair of Ajax, the martyrdom of ...
— Specimens of Greek Tragedy - Aeschylus and Sophocles • Goldwin Smith
... of Tantalus, of Prometheus, or of Sisyphus are but the types of what his shall be. Let him try to hang, drown, stab ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... case of men was very helpless and pitiable; for they were alone among the wild beasts, and had to carry on the struggle for existence without arts or knowledge, and had no food, and did not know how to get any. That was the time when Prometheus brought them fire, Hephaestus and Athene taught them arts, and other gods gave them seeds and plants. Out of these human life was framed; for mankind were left to themselves, and ordered their own ways, living, like the universe, in one cycle ...
— Statesman • Plato
... relate the story of my miserable Fall:—most miserable, yet surely most undeserved! For why should the thirst for knowledge be aroused, only to be disappointed and punished? My volition shrinks from the painful task of recalling my humiliation; yet, like a second Prometheus, I will endure this and worse, if by any means I may arouse in the interiors of Plane and Solid Humanity a spirit of rebellion against the Conceit which would limit our Dimensions to Two or Three or any number short of Infinity. Away then with all personal considerations! ...
— Flatland • Edwin A. Abbott
... tale which he who thinks he can entertain the company is at liberty to relate, or gathering at once instruction and delight, as Longinus, either from his memory or a volume, imparts to us choice selections of the literature of Athens or Rome. So have I heard the Oedipus Tyrannus, and the Prometheus, as I ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... our ancestors, think you, obtain fire in those early times? I suggested a burning mountain as a source of fire. You remember, too, perhaps reading about Prometheus, who stole fire from heaven, bringing it to earth in a copper rod, which combined act of theft and scientific experiment made the gods very angry, because they were afraid mortals might learn as many wonderful ...
— The Story of a Tinder-box • Charles Meymott Tidy
... whose lips had still the power to formulate it by an entreaty for death. Consciously or unconsciously, this writhing fragment of humanity, this type and example of acute sensation, this handiwork of man and beast, this humble, unheroic Prometheus, was imploring everything, all, the whole non-ego, for the boon of oblivion. To the earth and the sky alike, to the trees, to the man, to whatever took form in sense or consciousness, this incarnate suffering addressed ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... constructed, and the daring plan to secure the sovereignty is in a fair way to succeed. Meantime various quacks and charlatans, each with a special scheme for improving things, arrive from earth, and are one after the other exposed and dismissed. Presently arrives Prometheus, who informs Epops of the desperate straits to which the gods are by this time reduced, and advises him to push his claims and demand the hand of Basileia (Dominion), the handmaid of Zeus. Next an embassy from the Olympians appears on the scene, consisting ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... the most gifted of men can create that is not mixed up with earth, and Milton, too, works it up with his gold. The weakness of the Paradise Lost is not, as Johnson affirms, its lack of human interest, for the Prometheus Bound has just as little, nor is Johnson's objection worth anything that the angels are sometimes corporeal and at other times independent of material laws. Spirits could not be represented to a human mind unless they were in a measure subject to the conditions of time and space. The ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... age which pressed around them, I wondered that they, knowing what they did, could have lived—ay, lived and sung and given a soul to art. And, understanding them in spirit and in truth, every Ivy-leaf carved by them seemed the whole Prometheus bound and unbound—yes, all poems of truth, all myths, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... said the attendant. "He was taken out last year and killed. Got too proud to live. He put in a complaint about his food. Said Prometheus was a very interesting man, but as a diet he was monotonous and demanded a more diversified menu. Said he'd like to try Apollo and a Muse or two, for a little while, and preferred Cupids on toast for ...
— Olympian Nights • John Kendrick Bangs
... point in Ben's history was that he fell in love. Just as you did,—with the difference, of course: though the hot sun, or the perpetual foot upon his breast, does not make our black Prometheus less fierce in his agony of hope or jealousy than you, I am afraid. It was Nan, a pale mulatto house-servant, that the field-hand took into his dull, lonesome heart to make life of, with true-love defiance of caste. I think Nan liked him very truly. She was lame and sickly, and if Ben ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... safer to keep their eyes on the ground. And there is a chance that this guide could not always retrace his steps if he tried—and why should he!—he is on the road, conscious only that, though his star may not lie within walking distance, he must reach it before his wagon can be hitched to it—a Prometheus illuminating a privilege of the Gods—lighting a fuse that is laid towards men. Emerson reveals the less not by an analysis of itself, but by bringing men towards the greater. He does not try to reveal, personally, but leads, rather, to a field where revelation is a harvest-part, ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... Thus, when enwrapt, Prometheus strove to trace Inspir'd perceptions of celestial grace, Th' ideal spirit, fugitive as wind, Art's forceful spells in adamant confin'd; Curv'd with nice chisel, floats the obsequious line, From stone unconscious, beauty beams ...
— Poetic Sketches • Thomas Gent
... 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... from the first, to have been affected towards Pompey, much in the same manner as Prometheus, in Aeschylus, was towards Hercules, when after that hero had delivered him from his chains, ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... in me only the parent of remorse., . . I know it too well not to hate and fear it. Why do you reproach me, if I try to abjure it, and cast away the burden which I am too weak to bear? I am weak—Would you have me say that I am strong? Would you have me try to be a Prometheus, while I am longing to be once more an infant on a mother's breast? Let me alone . . . I am a weary child, who knows nothing, can do nothing, except lose its way in arguings and reasonings, and "find no end, ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... only electricity, weren't they?" she assented. "So you're right, in a way—their god and their power were electricity! Perhaps it was electricity Prometheus stole!" ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... edifying. The pleasure we get from the rhetoric of the book of Job and its tragic picture of a bewildered soul cannot disguise the ignoble irrelevance of the retort of God with which it closes, or supply the need of such modern revelations as Shelley's Prometheus or The Niblung's Ring of Richard Wagner. There is nothing in the Bible greater in inspiration than Beethoven's ninth symphony; and the power of modern music to convey that inspiration to a modern man is far greater than that of Elizabethan English, ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... benevolent attention to my request last Wednesday night. Although I am convinced your ideas and mine thoroughly coincide as to the real cause of man's bitter degradation, yet I fear human means to redeem him are now fruitless. The Fire must burn, and Prometheus endure his agony. The Pestilence of Asia must come again, ere the savage will be taught humanity. May you escape! God bless ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... from the unbearable sufferings of the body!" comes in a sigh through time, and strikes upon our ear. What a picture! Griffenfeldt, a Danish Prometheus, bound to the ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... bear, and really fling himself down and deluge the stage with blood. When the heroism of Mucius Scaevola was represented, a real criminal must thrust his hand without a groan into the flame and stand motionless while it is being burned. Prometheus must be really chained to his rock, and Dirce in very fact be tossed and gored by the wild bull; and Orpheus be torn to pieces by a real bear; and Icarus must really fly, even though he fall and be dashed to death; and Hercules must ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... altogether incapable. For many years he continued to discharge splenetic remarks about his music, and he was always annoyed at being called his pupil. "I never learned anything from Haydn," he would say; "he never would correct my mistakes." When, the day after the production of his ballet music to Prometheus, he met Haydn in the street, the old man observed to him: "I heard your music last night; I liked it very well." To which Beethoven, alluding to Haydn's oratorio, replied: "Oh! dear master, it is far from being a CREATION." The doubtful ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden
... of the jungle are still under the thick shade of cerebral inertia. They have not yet seen the swift, bright light of a first doubt flash across the darkness of their brain giving to it a shock of unsuspected vibrations. As yet no glorious Prometheus has arisen amongst those primitive creatures far whom the discouraging counsel of the Italian poet might seem to ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... of Egypt are peculiar and its own. Mr. Pococke will have it that Greece was a migrated India: it was, of course, a migration from some place that first planted the Hellenic stock in Europe; but if the man who carved the Zeus, and built the Parthenon, and wrote the "Prometheus" and the "Phaedrus," were a copy, where shall we find the original? Indeed, there has never been a great migration that did not result in a new form of national genius. And it is the thoroughness of the transformations thus induced which ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... that you would not lose yourself amid temptation, or, if like Tobias, you had an angel to guide you in the stormy voyage you undertake. Into what derangement of pride has not man fallen, from the fabulous Prometheus, who sought to snatch fire from heaven, to the Philosophers of the eighteenth century, who extinguished fire in the lights of their reason. Prove to me that what you call human reason has in any manner ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... Pope Planer, Wilhelmine or Minna Plater, Countess Plato Playford, John Poe, Edgar Allen Pohl, Louis Pohl, Richard Poliziano, Angelo Polko, Elise Polovna, Marie, Grand Duchess of Weimar Polzelli, Anton Polzelli, Luigia Potocka, Countess Praeger, Fd. C. Wm. Prometheus Prudent, Emile Psyche Purcell, Edw. Purcell, Frances Purcell, Henry Purcell, ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... earthly life, die to their own names even, that they may know nothing but their holy duties,—while men are torturing and denouncing their fellows, and while we can hear day and night the clinking of the hammers that are trying, like the brute forces in the "Prometheus," to rivet their adamantine wedges right through the breast of human nature,—I have been ready to believe that we have even now a new revelation, and the name of its ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Then he finish'd MAN! Or by the world's creator, power supreme, Form'd from an heavenly seed; or new-shap'd earth Late from celestial ether torn, and still Congenial warmth retaining, moisten'd felt, Prometheus' fire, and moulded took the form Of him all-potent. Others earth behold Pronely;—to man a face erect was given. The heavens he bade him view, and raise his eyes High to the stars. Thus earth of late so rude, So shapeless, man, ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... conceive how Harris or Elliston should be so insane as to think of acting Marino Faliero; they might as well act the Prometheus of Aeschylus. I speak of course humbly, and with the greatest sense of the distance of time and merit between the two performances; but merely to show the absurdity ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... in this way, is the legend of Prometheus. He and his brother Epimetheus are sons of the Titan Iapetus. The Titans are the offspring of the oldest generation of gods, Uranus (Heaven) and Gaea (Earth). Kronos, the youngest of the Titans, dethroned his ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner
... a cause of the slightest anxiety. The means by which they might have placed themselves within the reach of that danger had been removed; and, like Prometheus, they ...
— The Giraffe Hunters • Mayne Reid
... another, with eyes glaring through the gloaming, and gave and took manfully, fighting out anew the old battles of the Bourbon vs. China, of King James vs. Virginia, of Graham vs. Greece! I could tell you of the siesta of the new Prometheus, when, perched on the Mount Caucasus of a bleak chain-cable, he gave himself postprandially, in full livery of seisin, to the vulturous sun. Wasted, yet daily renewed, enduring, yet murmuring not, he hurled defiance at Fat, scoffed at the vain rage ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... darkness, a whirlwind, a tempest, an ague not appearing, heating worse than any fire, and a battle that hath no end. It crucifies worse than any tyrant; no torture, no strappado, no bodily punishment is like unto it." 'Tis the eagle without question which the poets feigned to gnaw [1642]Prometheus' heart, and "no heaviness is like unto the heaviness of the heart," Eccles. xxv. 15, 16. [1643]"Every perturbation is a misery, but grief a cruel torment," a domineering passion: as in old Rome, when the Dictator was created, all inferior magistracies ceased; ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... human efficiency requires the acquaintance thereof, 'tis because the knowledge of their violence and of their wiles is needed for our own protection and the helping of other folk. Evil comes from the gods, no doubt; but so do all things; and to extract good from it—the great Prometheus-feat of man—is not to evil's credit, but to the credit of good. The contrary doctrine is a poison to the spirit, though a poison of medicinal use in moments of anguish, a bromide or ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... reading Schubert's Der Ewige Jude, they began a narrative poem dealing with the legend of the Wandering Jew,[91] who lingered in Shelley's imagination in after years, and whom he introduced into Queen Mab, Prometheus Unbound, and Hellas. The grim and ghastly legends included in "Monk" Lewis's Tales of Terror (1799) and Tales of Wonder (1801) fascinated Shelley;[92] and the suggestive titles Revenge;[93] Ghasta, or the Avenging Demon;[94] St. Edmund's Eve;[95] The ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... startling, when we consider that so modern and historical a personage as Queen Elizabeth was reigning at the time of the death of Dr. John Faustus, out of whose story the Teutonic imagination built up a mythus that may be set beside that of Prometheus. ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... hospitality, dear lady," said the Reverend Prometheus, "and I trust I may have the pleasure ...
— Men of Affairs • Roland Pertwee
... geographical frontier. Driving out the tyrant or driving out the English, in both cases, regaining possession of one's own territory. There comes an hour when protestation no longer suffices; after philosophy, action is required; live force finishes what the idea has sketched out; Prometheus chained begins, Arostogeiton ends; the encyclopedia enlightens souls, the 10th of August electrifies them. After AEschylus, Thrasybulus; after Diderot, Danton. Multitudes have a tendency to accept ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... first spread along a city, mapping it forth about evenfall for the eye of observant birds, a new age had begun for sociality and corporate pleasure-seeking, and begun with proper circumstance, becoming its own birthright. The work of Prometheus had advanced by another stride. Mankind and its supper-parties were no longer at the mercy of a few miles of sea-fog; sundown no longer emptied the promenade; and the day was lengthened out to every man's fancy. The city-folk had stars of their ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Man} Then am I Prometheus, your brother. I stole the fire from heaven and hid it in the heart of ...
— The Acorn-Planter - A California Forest Play (1916) • Jack London |
