"Proteus" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... ball to the players as usual, he omitted to do so to the king, and when Alexander asked why he did not give him the ball, answered "You do not ask me for it." At this, Alexander laughed and gave him many presents. Once he appeared to be seriously angry with one Proteus, a professed jester. The man's friends interceded for him, and he himself begged for pardon with tears in his eyes, until Alexander said that he forgave him. "My king," said he "will you not give me something by way of earnest, to assure ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... seemed gradually to subside, and a calm to succeed. His look and bearing changed; something of depression seemed to steal over him; his voice became deep and melancholy, and the first syllables which he uttered showed this Proteus recalled to himself, and tamed by two words. "Hapless existence!" he exclaimed; then pausing, seemed to muse, and after a while continued, "'tis but too true; comedian or tragedian, all for me is an affair of acting and costume; so it has been hitherto, and such it is likely to continue. ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... windless days the intermittent clouds of vapour sent up from the crater assume the most fantastic shapes—trees, ships, men, birds, animals—ever changing like the forms of Proteus. It would seem as if the Spirit of the Mountain were idly amusing himself, like a child blowing bubbles, or a vendor at a fair-stall carving out little figures of gingerbread to tickle the fancy of country boys and girls. The clouds so formed sometimes cause amusement by ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... city of Verona two young gentlemen, whose names were Valentine and Proteus, between whom a firm and uninterrupted friendship had long subsisted. They pursued their studies together, and their hours of leisure were always passed in each other's company, except when Proteus visited a lady he was in love with; and these visits to his mistress, and this passion of ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... Peregrinus, to which he refers, seems to me even more unfortunate than that of Paul. Of Peregrinus himself, historically, we really know little or nothing, for the account of Lucian is scarcely received as serious by anyone. [102:1] Lucian narrates that this Peregrinus Proteus, a cynic philosopher, having been guilty of parricide and other crimes, found it convenient to leave his own country. In the course of his travels he fell in with Christians and learnt their doctrines, and, ...
— A Reply to Dr. Lightfoot's Essays • Walter R. Cassels
... mobile boy, a born poseur, who passes his life in cloud-castles where he always dramatizes himself as the hero, who has no continuity of purpose, and no capacity of self-sacrifice except in spasms of impulse, and in emotional feeling which is real to itself; a spiritual Proteus who deceives even himself, and only now and then recognizes his own moral illusiveness, like Hawthorne's scarecrow-gentleman before the mirror: but with the irresistible instincts also of the born literary creator and constructor. The other ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... we met yesterday is that he seems the same. There are obvious resemblances that strike us at once. He looks the same, he acts the same, he has the same mannerisms, the same kind of voice, and he answers to the same name. If Proteus, with the best intention in the world, but with an unlimited variety of self-manifestations, were to call every day, we should greet him always as a stranger. We should never feel at home with so versatile a person. A character must have a certain degree of monotony about it before we can trust ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... These are the very words of Jamblicus de Symbolis Aegyptiorum, c. 2, sect. 7. The sun was the grand Proteus, the ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... principle, so that when hard pressed by the authorities he could in a minute or two transmute himself into the appearance of a nun very different from the individual described to them. Indeed he was such a perfect Proteus that no vigilance of the Executive was ever a match for his versatility of appearance, swiftness of foot, and caution. These frequent defeats of the authorities of that day made him extremely popular with the people, who were ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... of pure cultivations of the organism into some selected situation, together with the subcutaneous, intraperitoneal, or intravenous injection of a toxin—e. g., one of those elaborated by the proteus group—either simultaneously with, before, or immediately after, the injection of the feeble virus. By this means the natural resistance of the animal is lowered, and the organism inoculated is enabled to multiply and produce its ...
— The Elements of Bacteriological Technique • John William Henry Eyre
... carnival societies, Comus, Momus, and Proteus, are understood to be connected with three of the city's four leading clubs, all of which stand within easy range of one another on the uptown side of Canal Street: the Boston Club (taking its name from an old card game); the Pickwick (named ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... Proteus in my gripe? How fix him down in one enduring type? Turn to the poor: their megrims are as strange; Bath, cockloft, barber, eating-house, they change; They hire a boat; your born aristocrat Is not more squeamish, tossing ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... the Times printing-office now stands, to diffuse its ceaseless floods of knowledge, to spread its resistless aegis over the poor and the oppressed, and ever to use its vast power to extend liberty and crush injustice, whatever shape the Proteus assumes, whether it sits upon a throne or lurks ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... no doubt that the dodo was one of those instances, well known to naturalists, of a species, or part of a species, remaining permanently in an undeveloped state. As the Greenland whale never acquires teeth, but remains a suckling all its life; as the proteus of the Carniolian caverns, and the axolotl of the Mexican lakes, never attain a higher form than that of the tadpole; so the dodo may be described as a permanent nestling covered with down, and possessing ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 440 - Volume 17, New Series, June 5, 1852 • Various
... they were in the wooden horse, when one false sound would have betrayed them. On the next morning Telemachus told the story of the ruin of his home; Menelaus prophesied the end of the suitors, then preceded to recount how in Egypt he waylaid and captured Proteus, the changing god of the sea, whom he compelled to relate the fate of the Greek leaders and to prophesy his own return; from him he heard that Odysseus was with Calypso who kept him by force. On learning this important piece of news Telemachus ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... argued from them as from facts. Therefore let us have no traditional theories, and make none for ourselves but such as are revealed in the form of laws to the patient investigator, who has "straightened and held fast Proteus, that he might be compelled to change his shapes," and so reveal his nature. Hence one of the aspects in which Lord Bacon was compelled to appear was that of a destroyer of what preceded. In this he resembled Cardan and Paracelsus who went before him, and who like him pulled down, but could not, ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... needs. Sometimes I cast my nets in our wake, and I pull them up ready to burst. Sometimes I go hunting right in the midst of this element that has long seemed so far out of man's reach, and I corner the game that dwells in my underwater forests. Like the flocks of old Proteus, King Neptune's shepherd, my herds graze without fear on the ocean's immense prairies. There I own vast properties that I harvest myself, and which are forever sown by the hand of the ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... looked up with a start. Like Proteus who changed his shape to save himself the trouble of prophesying, he swiftly changed the key to save himself providing accurate information that ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... pagan suckled in a creed outworn; So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea, Or hear old Triton blow his ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... a thing severe and unapproachable, never to be won by a languid lover. You must lie in wait for her coming and take her unawares, press her hard and clasp her in a tight embrace, and force her to yield. Form is a Proteus more intangible and more manifold than the Proteus of the legend; compelled, only after long wrestling, to stand forth manifest in his true aspect. Some of you are satisfied with the first shape, or at ...
— The Unknown Masterpiece - 1845 • Honore De Balzac
... Protean disguises of truth, each "one grade above its last presentment,"[138] until, at the rare moment, by the excepted eye, the naked truth was grasped. But Browning became steadily more reluctant to admit that these fortunate moments ever occurred, that the Proteus was ever caught. Things would be known to the soul as they were known to God only when it was emancipated by death. Infinity receded into an ever more inaccessible remoteness from the finite. For the speaker in Christmas-Eve ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... the inundation of the urinal deluge, could not tell what to say nor what to think. Some said that it was the end of the world and the final judgment, which ought to be by fire. Others again thought that the sea-gods, Neptune, Proteus, Triton, and the rest of them, did persecute them, for that indeed they found it to be like sea-water ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... obloquy and ridicule, in despair he left Edinburgh for London, still encountering the same hostility; that all this was the work of the same hand perhaps was never even known to its victim. The multiplied forms of this Proteus of the Malevoli were still but one devil; fire or water, or a bull or a lion; still it was the same ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... Aarons Brest-plate, and a stone besides Imagind rather oft then elsewhere seen, That stone, or like to that which here below 600 Philosophers in vain so long have sought, In vain, though by thir powerful Art they binde Volatil Hermes, and call up unbound In various shapes old Proteus from the Sea, Draind through a Limbec to his Native forme. What wonder then if fields and regions here Breathe forth Elixir pure, and Rivers run Potable Gold, when with one vertuous touch Th' Arch-chimic ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... and are shown to the Hall. Rossetti and Morris, however, make a fuss because the paper is not to their taste. Walt Whitman, already a great favourite of mine, "though spurning a jingle," is hailed as "the singer of songs for all time." Proteus (Wilfrid Blount) is mentioned, for my cult for him was already growing. Among other poets who appear, but who have since died to fame, are Lord Lytton, Lord Southesk, Lord Lome, Mrs. Singleton, and Martin ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... woman; glowing imagination with wondrous stores of erudition; fancy with exactness; the most loving heart with the keenest insight into the foibles of his fellows; the wit of a Swift with the romance of a Rousseau—but why attempt to describe the indescribable, to give portraits of the Proteus who changes as ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... at times an excessive flow of spirits, and had it now, was, in his days of absconding, known by the name of M'Cruslick, which it seems was the designation of a kind of wild man in the Highlands, something between Proteus and Don Quixotte; and so he was called here. He made much jovial noise. Dr Johnson was so delighted with this scene, that he said, 'I know not how we shall get away.' It entertained me to observe him sitting by, while we danced, ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... assumed in different ages; but it is humiliating to human nature to reflect, that the conquests obtained by philosophy over her great adversary, are in reality very small. Superstition, like the fabled Proteus, appears under an endless variety of forms; but she is also, like the god, still one ...
— Architectural Antiquities of Normandy • John Sell Cotman
... had been playing off all her graces, while Sir James admired her in every Proteus form of affectation, Mr. Barclay, as she thought, evidently pained by her coquetry, retired from the sofa, where she sat, and went to Mrs. Hungerford's table, where he took up a book and began to read. Lady Angelica ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... admirers of Shakespeare, who tell you that what they think most admirable in him is his Wortspiel, his verbal quibbles; and one of these, a man of no slight culture and refinement, once cited to a friend of ours Proteus's joke in "The Two Gentlemen of Verona"—"Nod I? why that's Noddy," as a transcendant specimen of Shakespearian wit. German facetiousness is seldom comic to foreigners, and an Englishman with a swelled ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... serving-man. Two or three days later Humfrey had told him of Langston's interview with Walsingham, which he had at the time laughed to scorn, thinking himself able to penetrate any disguise of that Proteus, and likewise believing ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... every shape thou well canst run, Proteus, 'twixt rise and set of sun, Well pleased with logger-camps in Maine As where Milan's pale Duomo lies A stranded glacier on the plain, Its peaks and pinnacles of ice Melted in many a quaint device, And sees, across ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... own fashion and popularity. I was sent for to all parties of pleasure, both of men or women; where, in some measure, I gave the 'ton'. This gave me the reputation of having had some women of condition; and that reputation, whether true or false, really got me others. With the men I was a Proteus, and assumed every shape, in order to please them all: among the gay, I was the gayest; among the grave, the gravest; and I never omitted the least attentions of good-breeding, or the least offices of friendship, that ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... not as plain, the edge is not as sharp as we suppose when we look back on the result. The question to be fought out between king and parliament was not monarchy or republic, democracy or aristocracy, freedom or the proteus that resists or betrays freedom. At many points the Stuart cause resembles that of constitutional monarchy on the Continent, as it was in France under Lewis XVIII, and in Prussia under the Emperor William. If Bismarck had been there he would have ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... a church as this had Venus none. The walls were of discoloured jasper stone Wherein was Proteus carved, and o'erhead A lively vine of green sea agate spread, Where by one hand lightheaded Bacchus hung, And, with the other, wine from grapes out wrung. Of crystal shining fair the pavement was. The town of ...
— Hero and Leander • Christopher Marlowe
... effects, the other revolutionised the whole style of writing for the pianoforte. Thalberg was perfect in his genre, but he cannot be compared to an artist of the breadth, universality, and, above all, intellectual and emotional power of Liszt. It is possible to describe the former, but the latter, Proteus-like, is apt to elude the grasp of him who endeavours to catch hold of him. The Thalberg controversy did not end with Fetis's article. Liszt wrote a rejoinder in which he failed to justify himself, but succeeded in giving the poor savant some hard hits. ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... as ev'ry ship their sov'reign knows, His awful summons they so soon obey: So hear the scaly herds when Proteus blows, And so to pasture follow ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... perplexity, those arts of peace from which my cares have been hitherto so forcibly diverted? The ear of Fancy, it is said, can discover the voice of sea-nymphs and tritons amid the bursting murmurs of the ocean; would that I could do so, and that some siren or Proteus would arise from these billows to unriddle for me the strange maze of fate in which I am so deeply entangled! Happy friend!' he said, looking at the bed where Dinmont had deposited his bulky person, 'thy cares are confined to the narrow round of a healthy and thriving ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... ship, if the wind bloweth fair in her wake. Here did the gods keep me twenty days, nor did the sea winds ever blow. Then all my corn would have been spent, and the lives also of my men lost, if the daughter of Proteus [Footnote: Pro'-teus.]had not taken pity on me. Her heart was moved to see me when I wandered alone, apart from my company, for they all roamed about the island, fishing with hooks because hunger gnawed them. So she stood by me and spake, saying: 'Art thou foolish, stranger, and ...
— The Story Of The Odyssey • The Rev. Alfred J. Church
... threatens to overturn long established customs and transform the baby and the toy into an intellectual being, desiring equal rights with themselves and asserting her claim to all the immunities they enjoy. Woman must be willing to see herself as she is, the slave of fashion, assuming all the Proteus forms she invents, without reference to health or convenience. She must remember how few of us give evidence of sufficient development to warrant our claims; and whilst we feel a divine impulse to proceed in achieving the enlargement of woman, whilst we hear a voice ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... Proteus informed Menelaus that he would be conveyed to the Islands of the Blessed, because he was the husband of Helen, and the son-in-law of Jupiter. No incentives to goodness from the consideration of a future state are held out by the older poets to the female sex, or to the ignoble or common people, ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 11, November, 1880 • Various
... Proteus, the old shepherd of the seals, you slumber uneasily. If I had not caught hold of you, you would have tumbled into the Eunostos. It is as true as that my mother sold salt fish, that ...
— Thais • Anatole France
... with handling it before a full success can be secured. It is owing to this difficulty that the terrible fate intended for London Bridge and its neighborhood was turned aside by the instantaneous killing instead of the two Fenian criminals. The size and appearance of that machine changes, Proteus-like, according to the necessity of smuggling it in, in one or another way, unperceived by the victims. It may be concealed in bread, in a basket of oranges, in a liquid, and so on. The Commission of Experts is said to have declared that its explosive power is such as to ...
— Studies in Occultism; A Series of Reprints from the Writings of H. P. Blavatsky • H. P. Blavatsky
... the former observing, "There can be no deception here," when the applicant was suddenly pounced upon by an officer, as one of the greatest impostors in the Metropolis, who, with the eyes of Argus, could transform themselves into a greater variety of shapes than Proteus, and that he had been only fifty times, if not more, confined in different houses of correction as an incorrigible rogue and vagabond, from one of which he had recently contrived to effect his escape. The officer ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... is poured freely into space, but our world is a halting place where this energy is conditioned. Here the Proteus works his spells; the selfsame essence takes a million shapes and hues, and finally dissolves into its primitive and almost formless form. The sun comes to us as heat; he quits us as heat; and between his entrance and departure the multiform powers ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... Pisistratus, arrives at the palace of Menelaus, from whom he receives some fresh information concerning the return of the Greecians, and is in particular told on the authority of Proteus, that his father is detained by Calypso. The suitors, plotting against the life of Telemachus, lie in wait to intercept him in his return to Ithaca. Penelope being informed of his departure, and of their designs to slay him, becomes inconsolable, but ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer
... rock, the hysop of the wall. Now, the vast and various frame of nature is adapted not to the lesser, but to the larger mind. It spreads on and around us in all its rich and magnificent variety, and finds the full portraiture of its Proteus-like beauty in the mirror of genius alone. Evident, however, as this may seem, we find a sort of levelling principle in the inferior order of minds, and which, in fact, constitutes one of their grand characteristics—a principle that would fain abridge the scale to their own narrow capabilities—that ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... he is, he has a keen eye to profits, he talks roughly to those who know less than he does; he has learned to act a part, he pretends to love his pictures, or again he lets you know the price he himself gave for the things, he offers to let you see the memoranda of the sale. He is a Proteus; in one hour he can be Jocrisse, Janot, ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... with squibs in their mouths, breathing fire, and others with crackers in their tails: some sending out sky-rockets, others rising into pyramids of party-coloured fire, and others bursting like a mine with violent explosions. But the most ingenious are those that, Proteus-like, change their shape from time to time, and under every form exhibit a different display ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... a judge—my kindling breast Burns for that chair which Roscius once possess'd. Here give your votes, your interest here exert, And let success for once attend desert. With sleek appearance, and with ambling pace, And, type of vacant head, with vacant face, The Proteus Hill[17] put in his modest plea,— Let Favour speak for others, Worth for me.— For who, like him, his various powers could call Into so many shapes, and shine in all? 110 Who could so nobly grace the motley list, Actor, Inspector, ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... Eratosthenes, after pondering over high matters; nor did Cyrene where thou sawest the light receive thee within the tomb of thy fathers, O son of Aglaus; yet dear even in a foreign land art thou buried here, by the edge of the beach of Proteus. ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... who intends to make his fortune in this ancient capital of the world must be a chameleon susceptible of reflecting all the colours of the atmosphere that surrounds him—a Proteus apt to assume every form, every shape. He must be supple, flexible, insinuating; close, inscrutable, often base, sometimes sincere, some times perfidious, always concealing a part of his knowledge, indulging in one tone of voice, patient, a perfect master ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... variable as Proteus. There are sympathetic inks. A young celibate has told us in confidence that he has written a letter on the fly-leaf of a new book, which, when the husband asked for it of the bookseller, reached the hands of his mistress, ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac
... him often became upon the instant a little acted drama. His mimetic powers were in many respects marvellous. In voice, in countenance, in carriage, almost, it might be said, at moments, in stature, he seemed to be a Proteus. ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... Palace Hotel: who has had the genius to devise and to accomplish such terrible crimes in incredible circumstances, and to combine audacity with skill, and a conception of evil with a pretence of respectability; who has been able to play the Proteus eluding all the efforts of the police;—this man, I say, ought not to be called Gurn! He is, and can be, no other ...
— Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... experiences of several mysteries shall fall under the consideration of one man's mind; but further, it will give a more true and real illumination concerning causes and axioms than is hitherto attained. For like as a man's disposition is never well known till he be crossed, nor Proteus ever changed shapes till he was straitened and held fast; so the passages and variations of nature cannot appear so fully in the liberty of nature as in the trials ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... Have wrought out pain and punishment for ill deed unforgiven, Till Priam's self might pity us. Witness the star of bane Minerva sent; Euboea's cliffs, Caphereus' vengeful gain! 260 'Scaped from that war, and driven away to countries sundered wide, By Proteus' Pillars exiled now, must Menelaues bide; And those AEtnaean Cyclop-folk Ulysses look upon: Of Pyrrhus's land why tell, or of Idomeneus, that won To ruined house; of Locrian men cast on the Libyan shore? Mycenae's lord, the duke and king of all the Argive war, ...
— The AEneids of Virgil - Done into English Verse • Virgil
... beauties found in Illyria, and the various sources of amusement which a traveller fond of natural history may find in this region, it has had a peculiar object of interest for me in the extraordinary animals which are found in the bottom of its subterraneous cavities: I allude to the Proteus anguinus, a far greater wonder of nature than any of those which the Baron Valvasa detailed to the Royal Society a century and half ago as belonging to Carniola, with far too romantic ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... they now learned that the hated "spy" who had prowled round their folds and fields so long, would resign to Mistress Bevan the house in which they sat, and that atonement made, vanish into thin air—a vox et preterea nihil! being in reality the Proteus-like, mysterious, handsome, though sallow stranger, and no stranger, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... declared concerning wit: "It is, indeed, a thing so versatile, multiform, appearing in so many shapes and garbs, so variously apprehended of several eyes and judgments, that it seemeth no less hard to settle a clear and certain notion thereof than to make a portrait of Proteus, or to define the figure of the fleeting wind." Nor is it fitting to attempt exact distinctions between wit and humor, which are essentially two aspects of one thing. It is enough to realize that humor is the product of nature rather than of art, while wit is the expression of an intellectual ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... savage kind, By you were brighten'd and refined, Descendants to the barbarous Huns, With limbs robust, and voice that stuns: But you have moulded them afresh, Removed the tough superfluous flesh, Taught them to modulate their tongues, And speak without the help of lungs. Proteus on you bestow'd the boon To change your visage like the moon; You sometimes half a face produce, Keep t'other half for private use. How famed thy conduct in the fight With Hermes, son of Pleias bright! Outnumber'd, half encompass'd round, You strove for every inch of ground; Then, by a soldierly ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... devisde himselfe how to disguise; For by his mightie science he could take As many formes and shapes in seeming wise, As ever Proteus[*] to himselfe could make: 85 Sometime a fowle, sometime a fish in lake, Now like a foxe, now like a dragon fell, That of himselfe he ofte for feare would quake, And oft would flie away. O who can tell The hidden power of ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... painters are no musicians, else had they furnished their angels not with harps—beautiful and sparkling as the sea-foam, as are their most graceful chords—but with this, of all instruments the most musical, whose tones admit of more variety than any, (the Proteus organ alone excepted,) and whose delicious long-drawn notes must entrance every one not absolutely soulless. Oh, they are excruciatingly delightful! And yet you shall hear this identical violin, in the hands of an everyday performer, emit such squeals and screams as shall set your teeth on ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... late hour of the day, it is still conceivable that such of them as would verily prefer to see, suppose, instead of a tramp with a harmonium, Orpheus with his lute, or Arion on his dolphin, pleased Proteus rising beside him from the sea,—might, standing on the "pleasant lea" of Margate or Brighton, have ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... and rolled his eyes in masculine bewilderment. Then came the final change in this Proteus, and she put out both her hands for an instant and said in a low tone on which he lived ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... this coy secrecy prevent Th' admiring gaze and warm desires of one Tutored by Love, nor yet would Love consent To hide such lustrous beauty from the sun; Love! that through every change delight'st to run, The Proteus of the heart I who now dost blind, Now roll the Argus eyes that nought can shun! Thou through a thousand guards unseen dost wind, And to the ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... the scrivener, and sometimes, we fear, of the sheriff's officer in arranging for special bail. These very uncanonical services one might have fancied sufficient, with spinning and spelling, for filling up the temporal cares of any one man's time. But this restless Proteus masqueraded through a score of other characters—as seedsman, harvester, hedger and ditcher, etc. We have no doubt that he would have taken a job of paving; he would have contracted for darning old Christopher's silk stockings, or for a mile ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... Sherwood, or any of the art publishers of the day, to undertake its publication. But Egan's hands were full, and he declined the offer. Two years later on, author and artist again met, and the result was that "The Life of an Actor, Peregrine Proteus," made its appearance, "illustrated by twenty-seven coloured scenes and nine woodcuts, representing the vicissitudes of the stage". The publisher was Arnold, of Tavistock Street, Covent Garden, who paid the young artist ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... or Eidothea, is the daughter of Proteus—the old man of the sea. A legend concerning her is found in the ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... light reflected from the water dances. Huge caverns open in the limestone; on their edges hang stalactites like beards, and the sea within sleeps dark as night. For some of these caves the maidenhair fern makes a shadowy curtain; and all of them might be the home of Proteus, or of Calypso, by whose side her mortal lover passed ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... for a well-known and necessary reason, made a causeway seven furlongs in extent, admirable for its size and for the almost incredible rapidity with which it was made. The island of Pharos, where Homer in sublime language relates that Proteus used to amuse himself with his herds of seals, is almost a thousand yards from the shore on which the city stands, and was liable to pay ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... circulation, Behold the shimmer, The wild dissipation, And, out of endeavor To change and to flow, The gas become solid, And phantoms and nothings Return to be things, And endless imbroglio Is law and the world,— Then first shalt thou know, That in the wild turmoil, Horsed on the Proteus, Thou ridest to power, ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... lustful and bigoted, this vain and sensual man, whom the wrath of God has made King of England. You must, before all things, be perfect master of the difficult art of coquetry. You must become a female Proteus—today a Messalina, to-morrow a nun; to-day one of the literati, to-morrow a playful child; you must ever seek to surprise the king, to keep him on the stretch, to enliven him. You must never give way to the dangerous feeling ...
— Henry VIII And His Court • Louise Muhlbach
... are an essential part of the organisation of vertebrates. Yet the mole, which habitually makes no use of the sense of sight, has eyes so small that they can hardly be seen; and the aspalax, whose habits-resemble a mole's, has totally lost its sight, and shows but vestiges of eyes. So also the proteus, which inhabits dark ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... Proteus, the two gentlemen, are friends. Valentine is about to travel. Proteus, in love with Julia, will not go with him. Antonio, Proteus' father, sends Proteus after Valentine. Julia resolves to follow him in boy's clothes. Valentine at Milan falls in love with the Duke's daughter, Silvia, ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... perfectly lonely. Not a sound was to be heard but the regular dip of the oars, the cry of a startled bird, and the splash of a flock of seals, which had been sunning themselves on the shore, and which floundered into the sea like Proteus' flock of yore before Ulysses. Would that Proteus himself had still been there to be captured and interrogated! For the place was so entirely deserted that, saving for the remains of the wreck, he must have believed himself mistaken in the locality, and the lieutenant began to question ...
— A Modern Telemachus • Charlotte M. Yonge
... "The deponent verbs, in Latin, require also an auxiliary to conjugate several of their tenses."—Ib., p. 100. "I have no doubt he made as wise and true proverbs, as any body has done since."—Ib., p. 145. "A uniform variety assumes as many set forms as Proteus had shapes."—Kirkham's Elocution, p. 72. "When words in apposition follow each other in quick succession."—Nixon's Parser, p. 57. "Where such sentences frequently succeed each other."—L. Murray's Gram., p. 349. "Wisdom leads ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... seems as every ship their sovereign knows, His awful summons they so soon obey; So hear the scaly herd when Proteus blows, And so to pasture follow ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... Guiltless, the death of a kid!' But the boy still lingered around her, Loth, like a boy, to forego her, and waken the cliffs with his laughter. 'Yon is the foe, then? A beast of the sea? I had deemed him immortal. Titan, or Proteus' self, or Nereus, foeman of sailors: Yet would I fight with them all, but Poseidon, shaker of mountains, Uncle of mine, whom I fear, as is fit; for he haunts on Olympus, Holding the third of the world; and the gods all rise at his coming. Unto ...
— Andromeda and Other Poems • Charles Kingsley
... and that Lord Bolingbroke was to have replaced him, had the King lived to come back. But my presumption to the contrary is more strongly corroborated by what had recently passed: the Duchess had actually prevailed on the King to see Bolingbroke secretly in his closet. That intriguing Proteus, aware that he might not obtain an audience long enough to efface former prejudices, and make sufficient impression on the King against Sir Robert, and in his own favour, went provided with a memorial, which he left in the closet. and begged his Majesty to peruse coolly ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... secluded abodes. Far from feeling surprise that some of the cave-animals should be very anomalous, as Agassiz has remarked in regard to the blind fish, the Amblyopsis, and as is the case with the blind Proteus, with reference to the reptiles of Europe, I am only surprised that more wrecks of ancient life have not been preserved, owing to the less severe competition to which the scanty inhabitants of these dark abodes will ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... pagan, suckled in a creed outworn; So might I standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn— Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea, Or hear old Triton blow his ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... calling them by the name of a Latin god. The following are their true names: Zeus (Jupiter), Hera (Juno), Athena (Minerva), Apollo, Artemis (Diana), Hermes (Mercury), Hephaistos (Vulcan), Hestia (Vesta), Ares (Mars), Aphrodite (Venus), Poseidon (Neptune), Amphitrite, Proteus, Kronos (Saturn), Rhea (Cybele), Demeter (Ceres), Persephone (Proserpina), Hades (Pluto), Dionysos (Bacchus). It is this little group of gods that men worshipped in all the temples, that men ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... again, and found he was mistaken. He wrote, "I am in receipt of your last, which is very encouraging. You were quite right to do as you did. Give Rudd & Carleton no loop-hole. They will soon owe us a good round sum, and will writhe like Proteus to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... The Proteus of Odyssean story or the King's daughter and the Efreet in the "Second Royal Mendicant's Adventure," could not more easily transform themselves than the French peasant. Husbandman to-day, mechanic on the morrow, at one season he plies the pruning-hook, at another he turns the ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... and amphibia. Out of the dipneusta arose the class of amphibia, having five toes (the pentadactyla). The gill amphibians are man's most ancient ancestors of the class amphibia. Besides possessing lungs as well as the mud-fish, they retain throughout life regular gills like the still-living proteus and axolotl. Most gilled batrachia live in North America. The paddle-fins of the dipneusta changed into five-toed legs, which were afterwards transmitted to the ...
— Was Man Created? • Henry A. Mott
... bearded goat, thou mate of the white herd, and O ye blunt-faced kids, where are the manifold deeps of the forest, thither get ye to the water, for thereby is Milon; go, thou hornless goat, and say to him, 'Milon, Proteus was a herdsman, and that of seals, though he ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... the kind of man whom you would call unsophisticated and youthful. It was probably the state of suppressed excitement in which he was, the unreality of his position, that helped him to that sense of elation as much as anything else; for emotion is a Proteus ready to take any form, and pain itself sometimes finds vent in the quick blazing up of fictitious delight, as much as in the moanings that seem more accordant with its own nature. He put his hand ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... flow of spirits, and had it now, was, in his days of absconding, known by the name of M'Cruslick[499], which it seems was the designation of a kind of wild man in the Highlands, something between Proteus and Don Quixote; and so he was called here. He made much jovial noise. Dr. Johnson was so delighted with this scene, that he said, 'I know not how we shall get away.' It entertained me to observe ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... mill. The scene afterwards changes to the temple of Dagon, where a magnificent festival is in progress. Samson is summoned to make sport for the Philistine lords, and the act ends with the destruction of the temple, and the massacre of the Philistines. Saint Saens is the Proteus of modern music, and his scores generally reveal the traces of many opposing influences. The earlier scenes of 'Samson et Dalila' are conceived in the spirit of oratorio, and the choral writing, which is unusually solid and dignified, often recalls the massive style of Handel. ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... to escape the solicitations of Peleus, assumed in turn the form of a bird, of a tree, and finally of a tigress; but Peleus learnt of Proteus the way of compelling Thetis to yield to his wishes. The gods were present at his nuptials and made the pair ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... Where form and life and reasoning man are found; He loves the mind, in all its modes, to trace, And all the manners of the changing race; Silent he walks the road of life along, And views the aims of its tumultuous throng: He finds what shapes the Proteus-passions take, And what strange waste of life and joy they make, And loves to show them in their varied ways, With honest blame or with unflattering praise: 'Tis good to know, 'tis pleasant to impart, ...
— The Borough • George Crabbe
... of men, who had been gazing at the dead as at the chief actor in a drama, began to look, instead, at Fairfax Cary, and to look the more steadily for their first glance. They saw a curious thing; they witnessed a transformation. Had he, like Proteus, slipped before their eyes into another shape, the vital change had hardly been more marked. He had been, even this morning, a young man, handsome and gallant, with a bright eye, a most happy manner, a charm and spirit wholly admirable. All Albemarle knew and liked ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... son of Memphis, and according to Herodotus, must have succeeded the first—since Proteus lived at the time of the siege of Troy, which, according to Usher, was taken ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... prodigies is in most cases a refutation of their claim upon our notice,[329] and even those which are not in themselves exceptionable become so from the circumstances or manner in which they took place. Apollonius is said to have been an incarnation of the God Proteus; his birth was announced by the falling of a thunderbolt and a chorus of swans; his death signalized by a wonderful voice calling him up to Heaven; and after death he appeared to a youth to convince him of the immortality of the soul.[330] He is reported to have known the language of birds; ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... eo, quod attulit ex suo naturali Adamo.'" "We say, Only the regenerate will cooperates; if you [Strigel] say the same, the controversy is at an end." Strigel, however, who, to use a phrase of Luther (St. L. 18, 1673), was just as hard to catch as Proteus of old, did not reply with a definite yes or no, but repeated that it was only a weak assent (qualiscumque assensio languida trepida et imbecilla) which man was able to render when his will was incited and supported by the prevenient ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... and minor seas are to the great deep; but, as the cloud-firmament detaches itself more from the air, and has a wider range of ministry than the minor streams and seas, the highest cloud deity, Hermes, has a rank more equal with Athena than Nereus or Proteus with Neptune; and there is greater difficulty in tracing his character, because his physical dominion over the clouds can, of course, be asserted only where clouds are; and, therefore, scarcely at all in Egypt;* so that the changes which Hermes undergoes in becoming ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... sombre character. But now, after these long preparations, the drama opens, the scenes become rapid and lifelike; events, long impeded, accumulate and pass quickly before us, the action is connected and hastens to an end. We shall see Derues like an unwearied Proteus, changing names, costumes, language, multiplying himself in many forms, scattering deceptions and lies from one end of France to the other; and finally, after so many efforts, such prodigies of calculation and activity, end by wrecking himself ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - DERUES • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... You'll mark in plenty, la Proteus: A bear become a little horse— Presumably from too much throat-use! A thousandfold must go untold; But, should you miss your farm-yard sunny, And miss your ducks and drakes, behold We'll make ...
— In Divers Tones • Charles G. D. Roberts
... FARMER of the Augustan age Perused in Virgil's golden page, The story of the secret won From Proteus by Cyrene's son How the dank sea-god sowed the swain Means to restore his hives again More briefly, how a slaughtered bull Breeds ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling
... mystery in what is said of Belphoebe, that her hair was sprinkled with flowers and blossoms which had been entangled in it as she fled through the woods? Or is it necessary to have a more distinct idea of Proteus, than that which is given of him in his boat, with the frighted Florimel at ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... vast mechanism for guiding and governing the minds of men, this mighty enginery for subduing the earth to the dominion of an idea, this harmony of contradictions, this moral Proteus, the faintest sketch must now suffice. A disquisition on the Society of Jesus would be without end. No religious order has ever united in itself so much to be admired and so much to be detested. Unmixed praise has been poured on its Canadian members. ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... Those few then existing in England and the rest of Europe, were as the eyes and ears of the great king of the universe, seeing and hearing all things; seraphically illuminated; companions of the holy company of unbodied souls and immortal angels; turning themselves, Proteus-like, into any shape, and having the power of working miracles. The most pious and abstracted brethren could slack the plague in cities, silence the violent winds and tempests, calm the rage of the sea and rivers, walk in the ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... him, they said, there succeeded to the throne a man of Memphis, whose name in the tongue of the Hellenes was Proteus; for whom there is now a sacred enclosure at Memphis, very fair and well ordered, lying on that side of the temple of Hephaistos which faces the North Wind. Round about this enclosure dwell Phenicians of Tyre, and this ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 1(of 2) • Herodotus
... once appointed a general?' Ion replies that he is a foreigner, and the Athenians and Spartans will not appoint a foreigner to be their general. 'No, that is not the real reason; there are many examples to the contrary. But Ion has long been playing tricks with the argument; like Proteus, he transforms himself into a variety of shapes, and is at last about to run away in the disguise of a general. Would he rather be regarded as inspired or dishonest?' Ion, who has no suspicion of the irony of Socrates, eagerly ...
— Ion • Plato
... that war, to distant shores we stray. To Proteus' Pillars, far remote from men An exile, Menelaus wends his way; Ulysses shudders at the Cyclops' den; Why speak of Pyrrhus, by Orestes slain? Or poor Idomeneus, expelled his state? Of Locrians, cast upon the Libyan plain? Of Agamemnon, greatest of the great, Mycenae's valiant lord, slain ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... is contradistinguished from the rest of the globe. It is an island-land, the civilized land, the land of the Tritons or water-deities, of Proteus, geon, Doris, and Atlas. It is, in ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... astonishment of the Hamburgers when they were invaded by this cloud of French officials, who, under every form, made researches is their houses, and who came to apply the multiplied demands of the fiscal system. Like Proteus, the administration could take any shape. To only speak of my department, which certainly was not the least odious one, for it was opposed to the habits of the Hamburgers and annoyed all the industries, no idea can be formed of the despair of the ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... eye presumes to scan The wily Proteus-heart of man?— What potent hand will e'er unroll The mantled treachery of his soul!— O where is he who hath surveyed The horrors of our own ...
— Clotel; or, The President's Daughter • William Wells Brown
... northeast Trades shortly after turning Cape Palmas, and kept them till close upon Grand Canary. They were a complete contrast with the Harmatan, the firmament looking exceptionally high, and the sun shining hot, while a crisp, steady gale made the 'herds of Proteus' gambol and disport themselves over the long ridges thrown up by the cool plain of bright cerulean. The horizon, when clear, had a pinkish hue, and near coast and islands puffy folds of dazzling white, nearly 5,000 feet high, were based upon dark-grey streaks of ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... passing waves? Who has not found pleasure on the seashore in viewing the distant rock whitened by the billows? How much are the ancients to be pitied, who discovered in the ocean naught but the palace of Neptune and the cavern of Proteus; it was hard that they should perceive only the adventures of the Tritons and the Nereids in the immensity of the seas, which seems to give an indistinct measure of the greatness of our souls, and which excites a vague desire to quit this life, that we may embrace ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... there are many reasons for believing them to be rudimentary gills. Owen says that the thymus appears in vertebrates with the establishment of the lung as the main or exclusive respiratory organ. It is wanting in all fishes, also in the gill-bearing batrachians, siren and proteus. The thyroid appears in fishes, and Gegenbaur believes that it may have been a useful organ to the Tunicata in their former ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... special organ, and what will be the organ that nature will form before any others, and which in the simplest animal is the only one constantly found; this is the alimentary canal, the principal organ of digestion common to all except colpodes, vibrios, proteus (amoeba), volvoces, monads, etc. ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... Cuthites, who occupied the lower provinces towards the sea. The towers which were there raised served for lighthouses, and were, at the same time, temples, denominated from some title of the Deity, such as Canoph, Caneph, Cneph; also Perses, Proteus, Phanes, and Canobus. They were on both accounts much resorted to by mariners, and enriched with offerings. Here were deposited charts of the coast, and of the navigation of the Nile, which were engraved on pillars, and in aftertimes ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume II. (of VI.) • Jacob Bryant
... design for which the army was raised; that he had returned to the Court at Poitiers, where the King stayed during the siege of Brouage, to be near to M. de Mayenne, in order to afford him whatever succours he stood in need of; that, as the Court is a Proteus, forever putting on a new face, he had found it entirely changed, so that he had been no more considered than if he had done the King no service whatever; and that Bussi, who had been so graciously looked upon before ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... bit of navigation along there. The Proteus was nipped and crushed to kindling in about that same latitude ... h'm" ... Bennett tugged at his mustache. Then, suddenly, as if coming to himself: "Well—these temperatures now. Where were we? 'Eight hundred and seventy-four fathoms, ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... "If Proteus like your journey, when you come, No matter who's displeas'd when you are gone; I fear me he will ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume II • Susan Warner
... in Perigord (1651), of an ancient and illustrious family. Of one whose intellect and character were infinitely subtle and complex, the blending of all opposites, it is possible to sustain the most conflicting opinions, and perhaps in the end no critic can seize this Proteus. Saint-Simon noticed how in his noble countenance every contrary quality was expressed, and how all were harmonised: "Il fallait faire effort pour cesser de le regarder." During the early years of his clerical career he acted as superior to female converts from Protestantism, and ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... head. He is represented with black hair and blue eyes, arrayed in a mantle of azure, holding a trident in his right hand, and embracing his queen with his left arm. He stands upright in his chariot, drawn by sea horses, and is attended by nymphs. Proteus is the son of Neptune, but some say he is the offspring of Oceanus and Tethys. His business is to tend the sea-calves. He can turn himself into any shape. Triton, the son and trumpeter of Neptune, is a man to the middle and a dolphin below; he has two fore feet, like ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... his own class; to that power which seated him on one of the two glory-smitten summits of the poetic mountain, with Milton as his compeer not rival. While the former darts himself forth, and passes into all the forms of human character and passion, the one Proteus of the fire and the flood; the other attracts all forms and things to himself, into the unity of his own ideal. All things and modes of action shape themselves anew in the being of Milton; while Shakespeare becomes all things, yet for ever remaining himself. O what great men hast thou not produced, ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... carved the sea circling round the encompassed Earth; and the orb of the Earth, and the Heavens which hang over that orb. {There} the waves have {in them} the azure Deities, both Triton, sounding {with his shell}, and the changing Proteus, and AEgeon,[1] pressing the huge backs of whales with his arms; Doris,[2] too, and her daughters, part of whom appear to be swimming, part, sitting on the bank, to be drying their green hair; some {are seen} borne upon fishes. The features in all are not the same, nor, however, ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... could take As many forms and shapes in seeming wise As ever Proteus to himself could make: Sometimes a fowl, sometimes a fish in lake, Now like a fox, now like ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... science admits, through her most learned professors, that "energy has as much claim to be regarded as an objective reality as matter itself"** and as life, according to the occult doctrine, is the one energy acting, Proteus-like, under the most varied forms, the occultists have a certain right to use such phraseology. Life is ever present in the atom or matter, whether organic or inorganic—a difference that the occultists do not accept. ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... poor Austrian musician,) I resumed my dream-journey, being, however, on this occasion wide awake, when lo and behold! in accordance with the laws of the association of ideas the same Canon again flashed across me; so being now awake I held it as fast as Menelaus did Proteus, only permitting it to be ...
— Beethoven's Letters 1790-1826 Vol. 2 • Lady Wallace
... heads in the play of Macbeth! But I was to tell you how to sit—that is the way, get into a coma—that will be the painter's best chance of having you; or, when he has been working for hours, he may find you a Proteus, and that you have slipped through his fingers after all his toil to catch you. I will tell you what happened to a painter of my acquaintance. A dentist sat to him two days—the third the painter worked away very hard—looked at the picture, then at his sitter. "Why, sir," said he; "I find ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... "homely" the entire event of the tragedy turning on betrayal of home duty. Hermione ([Greek: erma]), "pillar-like," ([Greek: he eidos eche chryses 'Aphrodites]). Titania ([Greek: titene]), "the queen;" Benedict and Beatrice, "blessed and blessing;" Valentine and Proteus, enduring (or strong), (valens), and changeful. Iago and Iachimo have evidently the same root—probably the Spanish Iago, Jacob, "the supplanter," Leonatus, and other such names, are interpreted, or played with, ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... to be drawn between Cant and Slang it is somewhat difficult to speak. Cant we know; its limits and place in the world of philology are well defined. In Slang, however, we have a veritable Proteus, ever shifting, and for the most part defying exact definition and orderly derivation. Few, save scholars and such-like folk, even distinguish between the two, though the line of demarcation ...
— Musa Pedestris - Three Centuries of Canting Songs - and Slang Rhymes [1536 - 1896] • John S. Farmer
... And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers; For this, for every thing, we are out of tune; It moves us not—Great God! I'd rather be A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn; So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus coming from the sea; Or hear old Triton blow his ...
— Poems In Two Volumes, Vol. 1 • William Wordsworth
... Augustan Age Perused in Virgil's golden page, The story of the secret won From Proteus by Cyrene's son— How the dank sea-god showed the swain Means to restore his hives again. More briefly, how a slaughtered bull Breeds honey by ...
— Songs from Books • Rudyard Kipling
... silent. Mr. Mivart, on the contrary, is perfectly explicit, and the whole tenor of his remarks leaves no doubt that by "religion" he means theology; and by theology, that particular variety of the great Proteus, which is expounded by the doctors of the Roman Catholic Church, and held by the members of that religious community to be the sole form of absolute ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... speaker is not understood. The Spaniards "ain't kinder like our folks," nor "folksy". Mistakes not all on one side. Spanish proverb regarding certain languages. Not complimentary to English. Stormy weather. Storm king a perfect Proteus. River on a rampage. Sawmill carried away. Pastimes of the miners during the storm. MS. account of storm sent in keg via river to Marysville newspaper. Silversmith makes gold rings during storm. Raffling and reraffling of same as pastime. Some natural gold rings. Nugget ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... their brother pamphlets wage! Tracts battle tracts, self-contradictions glare; Say, is this lunacy?—I wish it were. If such our writers, startled at the sight, Felons may bless their stars they cannot write! How justly Proteus' transmigrations fit The monstrous changes of a modern wit! Now, such a gentle stream of eloquence As seldom rises to the verge of sense; Now, by mad rage, transform'd into a flame, Which yet fit engines, well applied, can tame; Now, on immodest trash, the swine obscene, Invites the town to sup at ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... bush remained untouched, but the universal eucalyptus, which I had expected to find grey and monotonous, was a Proteus it shape and colour, now branching like an oak or a cork tree, now feathered like a birch, or glowing like an arbutus with an endless variety of hue—green, orange, ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... work with the categories Organism—Function—Environment, and theories of evolution may be classified in relation to these. To some it has always seemed that the fundamental fact is the living organism,—a creative agent, a striving will, a changeful Proteus, selecting its environment, adjusting itself to it, self-differentiating and self-adaptive. The necessity of recognising the importance of the organism is admitted by all Darwinians who start with inborn variations, but it is open to question whether the whole truth of what we might call ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... Jacob, the fourth in Thessaly in the time of Deucalion and Pyrrha, in the days of Moses according to Isidore, in 782 as given by Juan Annius. The fifth flood is mentioned by Xenophon as happening in Egypt in the time of Proteus. The sixth was this which destroyed so great a part of the Atlantic Island and sufficed so to separate the part that was left unsubmerged, that all mortals in Asia, Africa and Europe believed that all were drowned. Thus was lost the intercourse and commerce of the people of these parts with ...
— History of the Incas • Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa
... from their earthly bodies;" and PLUTARCH, that "The demons of the Greeks were the ghosts and genii of departed men." "All Pagan antiquity affirms," says Dr. CAMPBELL, "that from Titan and Saturn, the poetic progeny of Coelus and Terra, down to AEsculapius, Proteus, and Minos, all their divinities were the ghosts of dead men; and were so regarded by the most erudite of ...
— A Brief Commentary on the Apocalypse • Sylvester Bliss
... boulders, straying all over it. Some far up, and frightful to look at, others huddled down in the river, immane pecus, and one huge unloosened fellow, as big as a manse, up aloft watching them, like old Proteus with his calves, as if they had fled from the sea by stress of weather, and had been led by their ancient herd altos visere montes—a wilder, more "unreconciled" place I know not; and now that the darkness was being poured into it, those big fellows ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... NATURAL HISTORY.—I took out of the bed of the river, in the descent below Red Cedar Lake, a greenish substance attached to stone, having an animal organization resembling the sponge. In our descent, the men caught, and killed with their poles, a proteus. The wild rice, which fills this part of the river, is monoecious. The river abounds in muscles, among which the species of unios is common, but not of large size, so far as we observed. The forest growth improves about this point, ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... if the truth gives you pain, pray remember it gives me agony. However, I must tell you the man was not what he looked, a mere blacksmith; he is a sort of Proteus, who can take all manner of shapes: at the time I'm speaking of, he was a maker of carving tools. Well, sir, you could hardly believe the effect of this accidental interview with that man: the next day, when I renewed my addresses, Miss Carden evaded ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... scenes in this play, though not so highly wrought as in some others, have often much sweetness of sentiment and expression. There is something pretty and playful in the conversation of Julia with her maid, when she shows such a disposition to coquetry about receiving the letter from Proteus; and her behaviour afterwards and her disappointment, when she finds him faithless to his vows, remind us at a distance of Imogen's tender constancy. Her answer to Lucetta, who advises her against following her lover in disguise, is a beautiful piece ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... Mr. Fett, with a quick warning wink and a wave of his hand to introduce us. "I pescatori da maremma. . . . To them enter Proteus with his attendant nymphs. . . . They rush on him and bind him with strings of sausages (will the Donna Julia oblige by tucking up her sleeves and fetching the sausages from the back kitchen, with a brazier?) The music, slow at first, becomes agitated ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... the protopterus in Africa, the lepidosiren in the tributaries of the Amazon, and the ceratodus in the swamps of Southern {49} Australia. On the thirteenth stage, there are the gilled amphibians (sozobranchia), proteus and axolotl; on the fourteenth, the tailed amphibians (sozura), newt and salamander; on the fifteenth, the purely hypothetical primaeval amniota or protamnia (amnion is the name given to the chorion which surrounds the germ-water and embryo of the three higher ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... Trees were still erect, clasped by the salt waves, but quite dead; and all around their base were hung fringes of marine growth, touched with prismatic tints when seen through the glittering water, but brown and hideous when gathered, as the trophy remaining in the hand which has dared to seize old Proteus by the locks. All around this avenue, into which the sea sometimes rushed like an invading host of armed men, the laurels and the delicate trees that love to bend over the sources of the forest-streams hung half-uprooted ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... of any length. Defoe's incomparable clearness of statement would alone betray him; that was a gift of nature which no art could successfully imitate. Contemporaries also were quick at recognising their Proteus in his many shapes, and their gossip gives a strong support to internal evidence, resting as it probably did on evidences which were not altogether internal. Though Mr. Lee may have been rash sometimes in quoting ...
— Daniel Defoe • William Minto
... the same.—Mr. Lovelace a perfect Proteus. He now applauds her for that treatment of him which before he had resented; and communicates to her two letters, one from Lady Betty Lawrance, the other from Miss Montague. She wonders he did not produce those letters ...
— Clarissa, Volume 3 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... 13. c. 18. de theolog. Platonica. Imaginatio est tanquam Proteus vel Chamaeleon, corpus proprium ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... one living principle? Does organized existence, and perhaps all material existence, consist of one Proteus principle of life capable of gradual circumstance-suited modifications and aggregations without bound, under the solvent or motion-giving principle of heat or light? There is more beauty and unity of design in this continual balancing of life to circumstance, ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... most ancient Greek physician with whom we are acquainted, is reputed to have cured one of the Argonauts of barrenness, by exhibiting the rust of iron dissolved in wine, for the space of ten days. The same physician used hellebore as a purgative on the daughters of King Proteus, who were labouring under hypochondriasis or melancholy. Bleeding was also a remedy of very early origin, and said to have been first suggested by the hypopotamus or sea horse, which at a certain time of the year was observed to cast itself on the sea shore, ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... all retire to rest, and when morning dawns Telemachus inquires whether Menelaus knows aught of his father. All the information Menelaus vouchsafes is that when he surprised Proteus, counting sea-calves on the island of Pharos, he was told he would reach home only after making due sacrifices in Egypt to appease the gods, that his brother had been murdered on arriving at Mycenae, and that Ulysses—sole ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... murmur to a noise, from a noise to a tumult, from a tumult to a tempest. He was himself, any, every one else. Alone, and polyglot. As there are optical illusions, there are also auricular illusions. That which Proteus did to sight Ursus did to hearing. Nothing could be more marvellous than his facsimile of multitude. From time to time he opened the door of the women's apartment and looked at Dea. Dea was listening. On his part the boy exerted himself ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... which promises the remission of crimes, if it restrains any, it encourages the great number to commit evil. Notwithstanding His immutability, God is, in all the religions of this world, a veritable Proteus. His priests show Him now armed with severity, and then full of clemency and gentleness; now cruel and pitiless, and then easily reconciled by the repentance and the tears of the sinners. Consequently, men face the Deity in the manner which conforms the most to their present interests. ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... sorts of judgments becomes more evident still, if we take an example where the moral sense and the aesthetic sense pronounce a different verdict. Suppose we take the act of Perigrinus Proteus burning himself at Olympia. Judging this act morally, I cannot give it my approbation, inasmuch as I see it determined by impure motives, to which Proteus sacrifices the duty of respecting his own existence. But in the aesthetic judgment this same act delights me; it delights me precisely ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... diabolical purpose, the form of a woman is not always the best disguise. There are men quite insusceptible to feminine witchcraft. But the fox is never at a loss for a disguise; he can assume more forms than Proteus. Furthermore, he can make you see or hear or imagine whatever he wishes you to see, hear, or imagine. He can make you see out of Time and Space; he can recall the past and reveal the future. His power has not been destroyed by the ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... you at a quarter before seven, if that will suit you. I return you Sir Proteus[37], and shall merely add in return, as Johnson said of, and to, somebody or other, 'Are we alive ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... pushed aside or thrown overboard—philosophy, for instance, by those who profess it. People are often reproached for wishing for money above all things, and for loving it more than anything else; but it is natural and even inevitable for people to love that which, like an unwearied Proteus, is always ready to turn itself into whatever object their wandering wishes or manifold desires may for the moment fix upon. Everything else can satisfy only one wish, one need: food is good only if you are ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer: The Wisdom of Life • Arthur Schopenhauer
... attempt to include all its species and their unknown varieties in narrow classes? Why say that there are only two modes of life, instinct on the one hand and intelligence on the other, "when we know how subtle and illusive is this Proteus, and that there are not two things only, but a thousand dissimilar things" (8/20.): or rather is it not always the same thing, everywhere present and acting in living matter, and susceptible of infinite degrees, under ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... the sense; faithful to rhyme, that enslaved queen, that supreme charm of our poetry, that creator of our metre; verse that is inexhaustible in the verity of its turns of thought, unfathomable in its secrets of composition and of grace; assuming, like Proteus, a thousand forms without changing its type and character; avoiding long speeches; taking delight in dialogue; always hiding behind the characters of the drama; intent, before everything, on being ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... abbeys, I should have been sure to get on crystals presently; and if I had begun upon crystals, I should soon have drifted into architecture." Those who conceive of Ruskin as being thus a kind of literary Proteus like to point to the year 1860, that of the publication of his tracts on economics, as witnessing the greatest and suddenest of his changes, that from reforming art to reforming society; and it is true that this year affords a simple dividing-line between Ruskin's earlier ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... covering wrought: The matter vied not with the sculptor's thought, For in the portal was displayed on high (The work of Vulcan) a fictitious sky; A waving sea the inferior earth embraced, And gods and goddesses the waters graced. 10 AEgeon here a mighty whale bestrode; Triton, and Proteus, (the deceiving god,) With Doris here were carved, and all her train, Some loosely swimming in the figured main, While some on rocks their dropping hair divide, And some on fishes through the waters glide: Though various features did the sisters grace, A sister's likeness was in every face. On earth ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... Proteus, coming from Brundisium, entered the harbor of Eunostus only yesterday," he replied; "and an hour ago a mounted messenger brought the letter. Nor was it an ordinary letter but a despatch from the Senate—I know ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... analogy between these, varieties in the type of the Achelous and those under which the metamorphoses of the marine goddess Thetis are represented, see Gerhard, Auserl. Vasenb. ii. pp. 106-113. It is probable that, in the type of Thetis, of Proteus, and also of the Achelous, the singular combinations and transformations are intended to express the changeful ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... it is for that Proteus, self-love, to elude the presence of mind, the inexorable eye, the fast ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... The Christians, that is the Christian preachers, were most in agreement with the Cynics (see Lucian's Peregrinus Proteus), both on the negative and on the positive side; but for that very reason they were hard on one another (Justin and Tatian against Crescens)—not only because the Christians gave a different basis for the right mode of life from the Cynics, but above all, because they did not approve of the self-conscious, ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... colour, and his flowing hair that covers his shoulders and his back, and how a wreathed fish closes the extremity of his groin. {This} he perceives; and leaning upon a rock that stands hard by, he says, "Maiden, I am no monster, no savage beast; I am a God of the waters: nor have Proteus, and Triton, and Palaemon, the son of Athamas, a more uncontrolled reign over the deep. Yet formerly I was a mortal; but, still, devoted to the deep sea, even then was I employed in it. For, at one time, I used to drag the nets that swept up the fish; at another time, seated ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... Proteus was transformed. Doffing his habit, Sir John Finett stood confessed before them. He knelt penitently before the king, humbly assuring his Majesty that he had been preparing this device, and many others, to please and surprise ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... particular persons—men of sharp wit, close countenances, pliant tempers, and deep dissimulation—and send them forth among the sectaries, so called, with instructions to thrust themselves into all societies, conform to all or any sort of religious profession, Proteus-like change their shapes, and transform themselves from one religious appearance to another as occasion should require. In a word, to be all things to all—not that they might win some, but that they might, if possible, ruin all; at ...
— The History of Thomas Ellwood Written by Himself • Thomas Ellwood
... hand, when a limb is not used, as by Eastern fanatics, or when the nerve supplying it with nervous power is effectually destroyed, the muscles wither. So again, when the eye is destroyed the optic nerve becomes atrophied, sometimes even in the course of a few months.[734] The Proteus is furnished with branchiae as well as with lungs: and Schreibers[735] found that when the animal was compelled to live in deep water the branchiae were developed to thrice their ordinary size, and the lungs were partially atrophied. When, on the other hand, ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin |
