"Sibyl" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... perhaps longer; but I have neither relatives nor friends. This child helps me at the hour of sacrifice. His mother was the great sibyl Diotima, who lived here, and it is said that he is the son of a ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various
... Of the "indescribable" nature of the "phenomenon" (for by that title is Miss Fay announced, a la Vincent Crummles) there may be two opinions, according as we regard the young lady as a kind of Delphic Priestess and Cumaean Sibyl rolled into one, or simply a clever conjuror—conjuress, if there be ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... first as saved through the influence of Virgil's poems and then is shown to be a Christian, having been led to embrace Christianity both from the heroic example of the martyrs and from his meditation on Virgil's prophecy of the Cumaean Sibyl interpreted in the Middle Ages to refer to Christ. In the Divina Commedia Statius pays a glowing tribute to the AEneid and its author, wholly ignorant that he is addressing Virgil himself. "Of the AEneid I speak which was a mother to me and was to me a nurse ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... old made use of caverns for places of worship: hence this at Athens had the name of Petra, or temple. [869]It is said of Ceres, that after she had wandered over the whole earth, she at last reposed herself upon a stone at Eleusis. They in like manner at Delphi shewed the petra, upon which the Sibyl Herophile at her first arrival sat [870]down. In short, there is in history of every oracular temple some legend about a stone; some reference to the word Petra. To clear this up, it is necessary to observe, that when the worship of the Sun was almost universal, this was one name ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume I. • Jacob Bryant
... reader merely groans when the heavy-handed Silius introduces his wondrously engraven shield,[610] his funeral games,[611] his Amazon,[612] his dismal catalogues,[613] his Nekuia.[614] In the latter episode, he even introduces the Vergilian Sibyl of Cumae; it is a redeeming feature that Scipio does not make a 'personally conducted tour' through the nether world; such a direct challenge to the Sixth Aeneid was perhaps impossible for so true a lover of Vergil as Silius. The Homeric method of necromancy is wisely preferred, ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... pauses," said Raleigh, "at the gate of the Chase, where a sibyl, one of the FATIDICAE, meets the Queen, to tell her fortune. I saw the verses; there is little savour in them, and her Grace has been already crammed full with such poetical compliments. She whispered to me, during the Recorder's speech yonder, at Ford-mill, as she entered the liberties ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... these, together with the Sibylline Books, were kept in the Temple of Capitoline Jupiter. Nothing seemed more natural than to suppose that Tarquin, who built that temple, purchased also the sacred books of the Sibyl.' —Ihne. ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... The Sibyl sank her head upon her breast so that her nose and chin quite disappeared, and she stood before them like some furry headless beast. There was a long pause. Alwin nervously followed the pairs of eyes, noiselessly appearing ...
— The Thrall of Leif the Lucky • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... Delphi, the miko was in ancient times also a divineress—a living oracle, uttering the secrets of the future when possessed by the god whom she served. At no temple does the miko now act as sibyl, oracular priestess, or divineress. But there still exists a class of divining-women, who claim to hold communication with the dead, and to foretell the future, and who call themselves miko—practising their profession secretly; for it has ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... is not miserable, or Horace had never called his poetical fury a beloved madness; nor Plato placed the raptures of poets, prophets, and lovers among the chiefest blessings of this life; nor that sibyl in Virgil called Aeneas' travels mad labors. But there are two sorts of madness, the one that which the revengeful Furies send privily from hell, as often as they let loose their snakes and put into men's breasts ...
— The Praise of Folly • Desiderius Erasmus
... Iowa. They pretend to be under direct inspiration, receiving from God the model and general orders for the direction of their community. The present head, both spiritual and temporal, is a woman, a sort of sibyl who negotiates the inspirations. Their business affairs are managed by thirteen trustees, chosen annually by the male members, who also choose the president. They are very religious, though having but little ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... Lady Sibyl, "the proud maiden of Bernshaw," was from her youth the creature of impulse and imagination—a child of nature and romance. She roved unchecked through the green valleys and among the glens and moorlands of her native hills; every nook and ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... of Timothy, together with the hump on one shoulder. A warm dispute ensued, and being maintained with much acrimonious altercation, might have dissolved the new-cemented friendship of those two originals, had it not been interrupted by the old sibyl, who, coming into the parlour, intimated that the doctor waited for them above. She likewise told them, that he never admitted more than one at a time. This hint occasioned a fresh contest. The captain insisted upon Crabshaw's making sail a-head, in order to look out afore; but Timothy ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... neglected. Commemoration was made of the stages of mortal life, of the bonds of love and kinship, of peace, of battle, and of mourning for the dead. By a very intelligible figure and analogy the winds became shepherds, the clouds flocks, the day a conqueror, the dawn a maid, the night a wise sibyl and mysterious consort of heaven. These personifications were tentative and vague, and the consequent mythology was a system of rhetoric rather than of theology. The various gods had interchangeable ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... get a leaf of brass, And with a gad of steel will write these words, And lay it by. The angry northern wind Will blow these sands, like Sibyl's leaves, abroad, And where's your ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... Sibyl—that is what you are, darling!" the Princess returned. "I wish I could ever know what has so utterly changed you from our convent days," and she sighed impatiently. "Then you were the merriest madcap, ready to tease any one and to have any lark, and for nearly ...
— The Man and the Moment • Elinor Glyn
... the world'; and, to convince his Spanish Eminence, he said that the book was a thousand years' old. 'Est-il possible?' replies the Cardinal, 'you don't say so. I can only say, my friend, I would rather have a book hot from the press than all the old parchments that the Sibyl ...
— The Great Book-Collectors • Charles Isaac Elton and Mary Augusta Elton
... once, and sat down to order her costume, while Sibyl, the niece, revelled silently in visions of a new bicycle which should presently revert to her. "For it's ridiculous, auntie's thinking of riding!" Miss Sibyl considered. "She would be a figure of fun on a wheel; besides, she can never learn in ...
— Different Girls • Various
... brotherhood, the harmony Of living in the healthful air, the swift Clean beauty of strong limbs when men are free And women chaste, these are the things which lift Our souls up more than even Agnolo's Gaunt blinded Sibyl poring o'er ...
— Poems • Oscar Wilde
... above-named Titian has done it. Corregio, moreover, and Giorgione and Leonardo, very nearly, trying hard. Holbein three or four times, in precious pieces, highest wrought. Raphael, it may be, in one or two crowns of Muse or Sibyl. If any one else in later times, we have to consider.' There is no endeavour to show how or why accurate drawing of the leaf leads to general accuracy in drawing; no analogy is attempted, for instance, between the human and vegetable ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... Bought him an office and a house. As she could then no longer bear it, Another tenanted the garret. To her came up the city crowd,— Wives, maidens, servants, gentry proud,— To ask their fortunes, as before; A Sibyl's cave was on her garret floor: Such custom had its former mistress drawn It lasted even when herself was gone. It sorely tax'd the present mistress' wits To satisfy the throngs of teasing cits. 'I tell your fortunes! ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... the professor, "Countess Sibyl is indubitably very beautiful, but the beauty-in-itself in my dream was simply ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... it at first took no official notice of the communication. But, like the Cumaean sibyl to Tarquin, the message came again. It was not received, but it made an unofficial impression. It was repeated. Who was this mysterious stranger? Whence came he, and ...
— True to His Home - A Tale of the Boyhood of Franklin • Hezekiah Butterworth
... borrowed some hints from Dandolo (Chron. Venet. p. 323—330) and Gunther, (Hist. C. P. c. 14—18,) who added the decorations of prophecy and vision. The former produces an oracle of the Erythraean sibyl, of a great armament on the Adriatic, under a blind chief, against Byzantium, &c. Curious enough, were the prediction ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... that held the great gold thread of her plan was thrown. She saw the pattern stretch firm and fair before her. Silently and sweetly, with the intentness of a sibyl who pours and holds forth a deep potion, she smiled at him across ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... is He whom seer and sibyl sang in ages long gone by; This is He of old revealed in the page of prophecy; Lo! He comes, the promised Saviour; let the world ...
— The Hymns of Prudentius • Aurelius Clemens Prudentius
... fables. But therein, as I found, dwelt now John Field, an Irishman, and his wife, and several children, from the broad-faced boy who assisted his father at his work, and now came running by his side from the bog to escape the rain, to the wrinkled, sibyl-like, cone-headed infant that sat upon its father's knee as in the palaces of nobles, and looked out from its home in the midst of wet and hunger inquisitively upon the stranger, with the privilege of infancy, not knowing but it was the last of a noble line, ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... some calmer, firmer, and more benignant Roman Empire manvantaras back, when the Mysteries were in their flower and Theosophy guided the relations of men and nations, some thin stream of that divine knowledge flowed down into the pralaya; that an echo lingered,—at Cumae, perhaps, where the Sibyl was,— or somewhere among the Oscan or Sabine mountains. Certainly nothing remained, regnant and recognised in the cities, to suggest a repugnance to the summer campaigns, or that other nations ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... court of joy and pleasures; where the sunny exposure of plenty, and the hot walls of profusion, produce those blissful fruits of luxury, exotics in this world, and natives of paradise!—Thou withered sibyl, my sage conductress, usher me into thy refulgent, adored presence!—The power, splendid and potent as he now is, was once the puling nursling of thy faithful care and tender arms! Call me thy son, thy cousin, ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... should. They will hear that "Miss 'Unter, is the missis, and lets every one know she is. Miss 'Ester keeps the maids on their legs all day long because she won't use hers. Miss H'Amabel does the sporting gent, and is never indoors except to meals; while Miss Sibyl—well, there, she is not much 'count in the fam'ly, for she can't say bo to a goose, and doesn't mind ...
— Bulbs and Blossoms • Amy Le Feuvre
... up, his ears tingling with shame, and hurried down the beach. Presently it occurred to him, however, that it was not quite chivalrous in him to leave little Elsie there alone with the dark-minded sibyl. Who knew but that she might need his help? He paused, and was about to retrace his steps, when he heard some one approaching, whom he instinctively knew to be Elsie. As she came nearer, the moon, which ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... such as the chairs on which they sit, and the pillars which form the frame work of the pieces, are designed and executed in a style of art worthy of the Florentine School of this period. Every Sibyl is succeeded by a scriptural subject. If the faces of these figures were a little more animated and intelligent, this book would be a charming specimen of art of the XVth century. The Erythraean Sibyl holds a white rose very prettily in her left ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... "a great event coming to pass in the birth of One who should prove to be the true 'King of Kings,' and Augustus Caesar therefore dedicated an altar in his palace to this unknown God." Eusebius and St. Augustine inform us that the first letter of each line of the verses from the Erythrean Sibyl containing this prophecy, formed the word [Greek: ICHTHYS] (a fish), and were taken as representing the sentence: [Greek: Iesous Christos Theou Huios Soter]("Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Saviour"). Based upon this discovery arose that extraordinary enthusiasm, ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... among the frail leaves bear, To catch them fluttering in the cave she never hath a care, 450 Nor will she set them back again nor make the song-words meet; So folk unanswered go their ways and loathe the Sibyl's seat. But thou, count not the cost of time that there thou hast to spend; Although thy fellows blame thee sore, and length of way to wend Call on thy sails, and thou may'st fill their folds with happy gale, Draw nigh the seer, and strive ...
— The AEneids of Virgil - Done into English Verse • Virgil
... prophet, prophesier, seer, soothsayer, augur, fortune teller, crystal gazer^, witch, geomancer^, aruspex^; aruspice^, haruspice^; haruspex; astrologer, star gazer^; Sibyl; Python, Pythoness^; Pythia; Pythian oracle, Delphian oracle; Monitor, Sphinx, Tiresias, Cassandra^, Sibylline leaves; Zadkiel, Old Moore; sorcerer &c 994; interpreter, &c 524. [person who predicts by non-mystical (natural) means] predictor, prognosticator, forecaster; weather forecaster, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... and hearts, and not to the meeting of a fortuitous concourse of male and female evening-dresses. I have now before me a very brilliant published account of a reception at George Eliot's house. Those assemblies were company, and company of the finest kind. The exaggerated fuss made by the sibyl's husband in order to secure silence while she was speaking sometimes became a little embarrassing when men of a humorous turn were there; but nevertheless the best in England met in that drawing-room, and all that was highest in literature, science, and art was talked ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... and Neap'olis, on the western coast of Italy, about the middle of the eleventh century. Cumae was built on a rocky hill washed by the sea; and the same name is still applied to the ruins that lie scattered around its base. Some of the most splendid fictions of Virgil's AEneid relate to the Cumaean Sibyl, whose supposed cave, hewn out of the solid rock, ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... [Footnote 444: Delphic Sibyl. In ancient mythology, the Sibyls were certain women who possessed the power of prophecy. One of these who made her abode at Delphi in Greece was called ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... having reason'd with consummate skill, In immortality he dips his quill: And, since blank paper is denied the press, He mingles the whole alphabet by guess: In various sets, which various words compose, Of which, he hopes, mankind the meaning knows. So sounds spontaneous from the sibyl broke, Dark to herself the wonders which she spoke; The priests found out the meaning, if they could; And nations star'd at what none understood. Clodio dress'd, danc'd, drank, visited, (the whole And great concern of an immortal soul!) Oft have I said, "Awake! exist! ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... right, of course. To continue would have been equally rude and foolish. I had perforce to bottle up my curiosity for the moment and wait till my sibyl was in the mood ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... sudden swell of the ocean. Here they were desolate and homesick. The strange people among whom they had fallen did not know they were the children of a king. No one was left to care for them but their old nurse, named Sibyl. ...
— Fairy Book • Sophie May
... show their purpose, and to illustrate their manner of how-not-to-do-it in grappling with the grand social questions of the age. In "Coningsby" they sing canticles and carry about the boar's head; in "Sibyl" they sing hymns to the Holy Virgin and the song of labor, and steal title-deeds, after setting houses on fire to distract attention from their immediate object; and in "Tancred" they go on pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... there he is,' cried Mab, as the bishop issued from the sibyl's tent. 'Oh, George, how ill ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... those singular columns! Shall I confess to what purpose? I read the long lists of uncontinental names over and over, but I lingered not at all upon those like "Muriel," "Hermione," "Violet," and "Sibyl," nor over "Balthurst," "Skeffington-Sligo," and "Covering-Legge"; no, my search was for the Sadies and Mamies, the Thompsons, Van Dusens, and Bradys. In that ...
— The Beautiful Lady • Booth Tarkington
... Egyptian than ever to-day. She always dressed for her parts; and as a believer in the Unseen, she felt it right, in honour of the sibyl, to wear her hair very low, with some green pins in it, long earrings, and a flowing gown, ...
— The Twelfth Hour • Ada Leverson
... the second quarter of this century has been felicitously characterised by an anonymous contemporary: Thalberg, he said, is a king, Liszt a prophet, Chopin a poet, Herz an advocate, Kalkbrenner a minstrel, Madame Pleyel a sibyl, ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... said the old mariner, in a subdued tone, and with a shrewd and suspicious glance of his eye after the old sibyl, "it's a word that may not very well be uttered, but there are many mistakes made in evening stories if old Moll Moray there, where she lives, knows not mickle more than she is willing to tell of the Haunted Ships and their unhallowed mariners. She lives cannilie and ...
— Little Classics, Volume 8 (of 18) - Mystery • Various
... and the nation comes to recount her poetic glories in the century which has just then ended, the first names with her will be these.' The prophecy is as little like to commend itself to the pious votary of Keats as to the ardent Shelleyite: there are familiars of the Tennysonian Muse, the Sibyl of Rizpah and Vastness and Lucretius and The Voyage, to whom it must seem impertinent beyond the prophet's wont; there are—(but they scarce count)—who grub (as for truffles) for meanings in Browning. But it was not uttered to please, and in truth it has ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... distinction in the fourteenth century, made a collection of treatises in one volume for his own amusement and behoof. It contains the Volosp, the most famous of all the Northern mythical poems, the Sibyl's song of the doom of the gods; it contains also the Landnmabk, the history of the colonisation of Iceland; Kristni Saga, the history of the conversion to Christianity; the history of Eric the Red, and Fstbrra Saga, the story ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... woman, in the name of all that is wonderful, was this? Let her appear, and speak for herself—the wild and weird grandmother of gentle little Mary; the Sibyl of modern times, known, far and wide, in our part of Suffolk, ...
— The Two Destinies • Wilkie Collins
... parted and red, her great rich eyes a goddess might have commanded through, with their eyebrows of raven-black, like entrances to the caves of the Cumaean sibyl, her small head borne as easily upon her neck as a dove upon a sprig—all flashed upon Milburn's thrilled yet flinching soul, as the revelation of ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... cousins, who took after their father and followed the imaginations of their own hearts. They were tall, dark, warmly flushed girls handsome rather than pretty. Gertrude, the eldest and tallest, had eyes that were almost black; Sibyl was of a stouter build, and her eyes, of which she was shamelessly proud, were dark blue. Sibyl's hair waved, and Gertrude's was severely straight. They treated me on my first visit with all the contempt of the adolescent girl for a boy a little younger and infinitely less expert ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... the soap and sugar of indiscriminate adulation had drawn to a head of conceit. This youth bestowed a great deal of attention on a certain young woman of a classical turn of mind, who once had a longing to attend a fancy-ball as a sibyl. About the same time Sophomore missed the first volume of his Potter's "Antiquities of Greece"; and, having searched for it in vain, made up his mind that I had presented it as a keepsake, together with a lock ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... passing in other parts of the castle, the Jewess Rebecca awaited her fate in a distant and sequestered turret. Hither she had been led by two of her disguised ravishers, and on being thrust into the little cell, she found herself in the presence of an old sibyl, who kept murmuring to herself a Saxon rhyme, as if to beat time to the revolving dance which her spindle was performing upon the floor. The hag raised her head as Rebecca entered, and scowled at the fair Jewess with the malignant envy ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... forfeit twenty-five myriads of denarii. Now it happened that the Ludi Apollinares fell on the same day, and they therefore voted that his natal feast should be held on the previous day,[28] because (they said) there was an oracle of the Sibyl forbidding a festival to be celebrated during that twenty-four hours to any god except Apollo. [-19-] Besides granting him these privileges they regarded the day on which he had been murdered (on which there was always a regular meeting ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol. III • Cassius Dio
... what do you think was the effect? Why, nearly half the sailors in the merchant ships wanted to join the "Raleigh." They could not be accommodated, but many were engaged and put on board the "Sibyl." ...
— Notes by the Way in A Sailor's Life • Arthur E. Knights
... to Tyrrel; "we know what we are, we know not what we may be.—And now, Mr. Tyrrel, I have been your sibyl to guide you through this Elysium of ours, I think, in reward, I deserve ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... the open light, even the moon, The Sibyl, clothed in white, appears, with glance Lyncean, piercing deep and bringing forth From the world's ends great hosts of monstrous things, The monsters born of shadows and ...
— Life Immovable - First Part • Kostes Palamas
... his mind because of the misfortune of his son, was wounded by some fugitive or other and fell. Thereupon the pursuit ended and the two armies separated. And at that time the Romans recalled the verse of the Sibyl, which had been pronounced in earlier times and seemed to them a portent. For the words of the saying were that when Africa should be held, the "world" would perish together with its offspring. This, however, was not the real meaning of ...
— Procopius - History of the Wars, Books V. and VI. • Procopius
... less familiar to us, is well calculated to arrest our attention after it has been paralysed by familiar repetitions. We cannot afford to lose these heathen testimonies to Christian truth; or to hush the glorious utterances of Muse and Sibyl which have justly outlived "the drums and tramplings of a hundred triumphs." We may make them infinitely profitable to us. If St. Paul quotes Aratus, and Menander, and Epimenides,[76] and perhaps more than one lyrical melody besides, ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... spring will peep amid anemones from rustling foliage strewn by winter's winds. The heights of Casentino, the Perugian highlands, Volterra, far withdrawn amid a wilderness of rolling hills, and solemn snow-touched ranges of the Spolentino, Sibyl-haunted fastnesses of Norcia, form the most distant horizon-lines of this unending panorama. And then there are the cities, placed each upon a point of vantage: Siena; olive-mantled Chiusi; Cortona, white upon her spreading throne; poetic Montalcino, lifted aloft against the vaporous sky; San ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... from which she could not turn her face. The curve of her upper lip, where it lay along its fellow and made a dimpled end, sharpened and grew bleak. Poring and smiling into the fire, she looked like a Sibyl envisaging the fate of men, not concerned in it, yet absorbed, interested in the play, not at all in the persons. This friend of Mrs. Benson, this midnight mate of young gardeners, disturber of high ladies' comfort, serene controller of Wanless, she was, it would seem, ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... in the afternoon all through the season. And round this structure were things desirable by all mankind, and supposed to be desired by possessors of one penny willing to part with it. For a penny-in-the-slot you could learn your fate from a Sibyl, and repent of having spent your penny on it. For another you could scent your pocket-handkerchief, and be sorry you hadn't kept your penny for chocolate. For another you could have the chocolate, and wish you had waited and taken a cigarette. And for another you could take the cigarette, ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... events recorded professes to be found in the cave of the Cumsean Sibyl, near Naples, where they had remained for centuries, outlasting the changes of nature and, when found, being still two hundred and fifty years in advance of the time foretold. The accounts are all written on the sibylline leaves; they are in all languages, ancient ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti
... walk, with one foot advanced, her head thrown up, her finger on her chin. She looked like a glorious young sibyl, reading a divine prophecy upon the clouds. After a moment, she waved her autumn banner over her head, with a gesture of triumph, and, turning on her heel, began to walk ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... readers, they certainly know the Rue St. Claude, which joins at one end the boulevard, and at the other the Rue St. Louis; this was an important street in the first part of our story, when it was inhabited by Joseph Balsamo, his sibyl, Lorenza, and his master, Althotas. It was still a respectable street, though badly lighted, and by no means clean, but little ...
— The Queen's Necklace • Alexandre Dumas pere
... new society of humane culture in the South of Europe, and to anticipate the advent of the spirit of modern tolerance. He, too, and all his race were exterminated by the papal jealousy. Truly we may say with Michelet that the sibyl of the Renaissance kept offering her books in vain to feudal Europe. In vain, because the time was not yet. The ideas projected thus early on the modern world were immature and abortive, like those headless ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... whose life paid the forfeiture of his folly, acknowledged, before he died, that his reasons for believing in a mine were extracted from the lips of a sibyl, who, by looking in a magic glass, was enabled to discover the hidden treasures of the earth. Such superstition was frequent in the new settlements; and, after the first surprise was over, the better part of the community forgot the subject. But, at the same time that ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... the east side of the lake are remains of baths, including a great octagonal hall known as the Temple of Apollo, built of brickwork, and belonging to the 1st century. The so-called Grotto of the Cumaean Sibyl, on the south side, is a rock-cut passage, ventilated by vertical apertures, possibly a part of the works connected with the naval harbour. To the south-east of the lake is the Monte Nuovo, a volcanic hill upheaved in 1538, with a deep extinct crater in the centre. To the south ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... the temple were those of the Sibyl's Temple at Tivoli, helped out by a dome, only the whole was a good deal smaller. Some ancient sepulchral reliefs were built into the wall, and about it all was a pleasant flavour of the grand tour. Cooper produced the key, and with some difficulty ...
— Ghost Stories of an Antiquary - Part 2: More Ghost Stories • Montague Rhodes James
... dashing and proud air of Adeline Imposed not upon her: she saw her blaze Much as she would have seen a glow-worm shine; Then turned unto the stars for loftier rays. Juan was something she could not divine, Being no sibyl in the new world's ways; Yet she was nothing dazzled by the meteor, Because she did not pin her ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... commission, and at first was proposed as a subject the Sibyl, for which the drawing in sepia, dated 1821, now hangs in the Count's Gallery in Berlin. The figure, pensive and poetic, resembles a mediaeval Saint rather than a Sibyl. The painter afterwards found a more congenial theme in The Marriage of the Virgin. The treatment is wholly traditional, the style austerely pre-Raphaelite; the only expletive in the way of an idea comes with attendant angels, lyres ...
— Overbeck • J. Beavington Atkinson
... trial, Lola left France, returning once more to Germany. Perhaps the Irish strain in her blood made her a little superstitious. At any rate, just before starting, she consulted a clairvoyante. She felt that she had her money's worth, for the Sibyl declared that she would "exercise much influence on a monarch and the destiny of a kingdom." A long shot, and, as it ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... recollect yourself; alas! How much distracted are your thoughts; and how Disjointed all your words! The sibyl's leaves more orderly were laid. Where is that harmony of mind, that prudence, Which guided all you did? that sense of glory, Which raised you high above the rest of kings, As kings are o'er ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. II • Edited by Walter Scott
... awe, what infantile impatience, We eyed the artifice when issued out, And racked our brains about the Regulations, And tried to think we had them free from doubt! As Rome's old Fathers, reverently leaning In secret cellars o'er the Sibyl's strain, Beyond the fact that several pars Had something vague to do with Mars, Failed, as a rule, to find the smallest meaning, But told the plebs ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 12, 1917 • Various
... haughty mind. Thus, at the length, your passage shall be free, And you shall safe descend on Italy. Arriv'd at Cumae, when you view the flood Of black Avernus, and the sounding wood, The mad prophetic Sibyl you shall find, Dark in a cave, and on a rock reclin'd. She sings the fates, and, in her frantic fits, The notes and names, inscrib'd, to leafs commits. What she commits to leafs, in order laid, Before ...
— The Aeneid • Virgil
... it lies, my sibyl sister, still! Your plummet hath not reached it. Yes, 't is love Flaunts his triumphant colors in my cheek, And quickens my lame speech—but not for him, Not for the Prince—so may I vaunt his ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... imperious sibyl, Sea, Thou mayest learn if thou wilt hearken well, When God's white star-fires beacon home the ships; The solemn secrets of infinity, Unto the inner sense translatable, Hang trembling ever on ...
— From The Lips of the Sea • Clinton Scollard
... landed at a place in Italy named Cumae. There dwelt one of the Sibyls. These were wondrous virgins whom Apollo had endowed with deep wisdom; and when AEneas went to consult the Cumaean Sibyl, she told him that he must visit the under-world of Pluto to learn his fate. First, however, he had to go into a forest, and find there and gather a golden bough, which he was to bear in his hand to keep him safe. Long he sought it, until two doves, his mother's birds, came flying before him to show ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... mind. Mrs. Byron had, it seems, in her first visit to this person, (who, if I mistake not, was the celebrated fortune-teller, Mrs. Williams,) endeavoured to pass herself off as a maiden lady. The sibyl, however, was not so easily deceived;—she pronounced her wise consulter to be not only a married woman, but the mother of a son who was lame, and to whom, among other events which she read in the stars, it was predestined that his life should ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... me that of all I had seen in the world, Tivoli was the most lovely. The old "temple of the Sibyl" on the hill stood on consecrated ground, and consecrated the whole neighbourhood. I loved those waterfalls, which impressed me much more than Trollhaettan [Footnote: Trollhaettan, a celebrated waterfall ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... under the stimulating influences of the great masterpieces of the past should linger on in the city whose very air became to them the breath of inspiring suggestion? Where but in Rome would have come to Crawford the vision of his "Orpheus" and of his noble Beethoven? or to Story his "Libyan Sibyl," and that exquisite group, "Into the Silent Land"? or to Vedder his marvellous creations of "The Fates Gathering in the Stars," the "Cumaean Sibyl," or the "Dance of the Pleiades"? to Simmons his ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... a great deal of interesting matter may be found on this subject. Another sacred college of somewhat later date is that of the men, at first three in number, afterwards fifteen, who acted as expounders of the sacred Sibylline books, which King Tarquin purchased from the old woman or Sibyl, of Cumae. ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... quarters now as it was at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Names are only air, and blow away with a change of wind; but beliefs are rooted in human wants and weakness, and die hard. The oaks of Dodona are prostrate, and the shrine of Delphi is desolate; but the Pythoness and the Sibyl may be consulted in Lowell Street for a very moderate compensation. Nostradamus and Lilly seem impossible in our time; but we have seen the advertisements of an astrologer in our Boston papers year after year, which seems to imply ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... of knowledge to that knowledge which is the knowledge of nothing else save the absolute Beauty itself, and knows it at length as in itself it really is. At this moment of life, dear Socrates! said the Mantinean Sibyl, if at any moment, man truly lives, beholding the absolute beauty—the which, so you have once seen it, will appear beyond the comparison of gold, or raiment, or those beautiful young persons, seeing whom now, like many another, you are so overcome that you are ready, beholding those beautiful ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... strange habit of emotion. The first person he met on his landing happened to be his aunt, whose appearance, as, bent to the earth with age and infirmities, she ascended a hill, supporting herself upon a long staff, Nicholas compares to that which we might conceive the Sibyl bore, when she presented herself to Tarquin. Yet, when she came up to Korro-korro, the chief, we are told, having fallen upon her neck, and applied his nose to hers, the two continued in this posture for some minutes, talking ...
— John Rutherford, the White Chief • George Lillie Craik
... Love's toys, kiss'd and flung by, Some his pale martyrs: thou art womanhood, Superbly symbol'd in rare flesh and blood. Eternal Beauty, she for whom we sigh, Dowers thee with her own eternity; Thou art Love's sibyl: in proud solitude O'er his old mysteries thy deep eyes brood, And at thy feet his rich dominions lie. Hast thou a heart? Let me desire it still. Torture my heart to life with thy disdain; Yet smile, give me immortal dreams, still be My Muse, my inspiration, vision, will! I ask ...
— The Black Cat - A Play in Three Acts • John Todhunter
... came to be born at all is what I cannot understand," said Sibyl, who is always like that ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 21st, 1920 • Various
... came back and asked still the same price for the three that were left. Then the king was struck by her pertinacity, and he consulted his augurs what this might be; and they bade him by all means buy the three, and said he had done wrong not to buy the nine, for these were the books of the Sibyl and contained great secrets. So the books were kept underground in the Capitol in a stone chest, and two men (duumviri) were appointed to take charge of them, and consult them when the state ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... to a luncheon at Lansdowne House, Lord Rosebery's residence, not far from our hotel. My companion tells a little incident which may please an American six-year-old: "The eldest of the four children, Sibyl, a pretty, bright child of six, told me that she wrote a letter to the Queen. I said, 'Did you begin, Dear Queen?' 'No,' she answered, 'I began, Your Majesty, and signed myself, Your little humble servant, Sibyl.'" A very cordial and homelike reception at this great house, where ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... beauty! — questing, unconfined, The mind conceived you, though the quenched mind Goes down in dark where you in dawn ascend. Our songs can but suspend The ultimate silence: yet could song aspire The realms of mortal music to extend And wake a Sibyl's voice or Seraph's lyre — How should it tell ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... beauty, then, no power? When united with virtue and intellect, we might almost answer,—All power. It is the embodied harmony of the true poet; his visible Muse; the guardian angel of his better nature; the inspiring sibyl of his best affections, drawing him to her with a purifying charm, from the selfishness of the world, from poverty and neglect, from the low and base, nay, from his own frailty or vices:—for he cannot approach her with unhallowed ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... the doctors. When they maintained that it was impossible for God to become man, and be acquainted with grief, Catherine showed how the birth and passion of Jesus Christ had been announced by the Gentiles themselves, and prophesied by Plato and the Sibyl. ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... bear her from earth, she never loses her close sympathy with the fortunes of mankind. Nay, from her lofty station she is the teacher of truth and love and justice, in splendid prophecy. It is with an impassioned exaltation, worthy of Sibyl and Pythoness in one, of divine wisdom both Roman and Greek, that she cries to the companions of her voyage words which embody her soul and the soul of all the wise and loving of the earth, when they act for men; bearing ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... simulated frame which surrounds the fresco, are hexagonal spaces containing half figures of prophets with labels, containing texts referring to the passion of Christ; and below them on the right, the Erythrean Sibyl. In the lower part of the frieze, are ten rounds, containing portraits of the most illustrious members of the Dominican Order. In the centre St. Dominic, on the left Pope Innocent V., Cardinal Ugone, Father Paulo the Florentine, ...
— Fra Angelico • J. B. Supino
... and a quick motion of the hand towards the folds of the 'faja,'[132] caused in me, at least, anything but a comfortable sensation; but their hostile intentions, if ever entertained, were immediately removed by a wave of the hand from our conductress, who, leading my companion towards the sibyl, whispered something in her ear. The old crone appeared incredulous. The 'Unknown' uttered one word; but that word had the effect of magic; she prostrated herself at his feet, and in an instant, from an object of suspicion he became one of worship to the whole family, to whom, on taking leave, ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... more intense style the stories of our loves. Music is the memory of love. What Prophet will enter the temple of the modern arts and drive away with his divine scourge the vile money-changers who fatten therein?" Her voice was shrill as she paced the room. A very sibyl this, her crest of hair agitated, her eyes sparkling with wrath. He ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... it is anatomically beautiful and desirable—he bethought him of a subject that would enable him to introduce his trouvaille. As but one attitude could display the special formation to advantage, the idea of a Sibyl, sitting brooding beside her oracular tripod, was soon evolved, but not so soon was its form determined and fixed. Like Mr. Watts, Sir Frederic Leighton thinks out the whole picture before he puts brush to canvas, or chalk to paper; but, unlike ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys
... guided by the same considerations. "Virgil ... is everywhere elegant, sweet, and flowing in his hexameters. His words are not only chosen, but the places in which he ranks them for the sound. He who removes them from the station wherein their master set them spoils the harmony. What he says of the Sibyl's prophecies may be as properly applied to every word of his: they must be read in order as they lie; the least breath discomposes them and somewhat of their divinity is lost. I cannot boast that I have been thus exact in my verses; but I have endeavored to follow the example of my master, ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... strangely, the cunctantem ramum, said of the Golden Bough, in the Sixth AEneid. The choice is odd, because the Sibyl has just told AEneas that, if he be destined to pluck the branch of gold, ipse volens facilisque sequetur, "it will come off of its own accord," like the sacred ti branches of the Fijians, which bend down to be plucked for the Fire rite. Yet, when the predestined AEneas tries to pluck ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... and best supply! That lends Corruption lighter wings to fly: Gold imp'd by thee, can compass hardest things, Can pocket States, can fetch or carry Kings; A single leaf shall waft an Army o'er, Or ship off Senates to a distant Shore; A leaf, like Sibyl's, scatter to and fro Our fates and fortunes, as the winds shall blow; Pregnant with thousands flits the Scrap unseen, And silent sells a King, or buys ...
— War-Time Financial Problems • Hartley Withers
... loved her. She dying gave it me, and bade me, if I ever married, to give it to my wife. I did so; take heed of it. Make it a darling as precious as your eye." "Is it possible?" said the frighted lady. "'Tis true:" continued Othello; "it is a magical handkerchief; a sibyl that had lived in the world two hundred years, in a fit of prophetic fury worked it; the silk-worms that furnished the silk were hallowed, and it was dyed in mummy of maidens' hearts conserved." Desdemona, ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... you can at the beginning, because there may be some loss of time later on," which was insult and ingratitude to those mountain sides and valleys of Subiaco and Tivoli, and to the ghosts of St. Benedict, of Nero, and of the delightful beribboned Sibyl, who beckoned us to rest in ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... it amounts to that," Dr. Renshaw returned reluctantly. His age, the kindness of his manner and tone, were disarming, and his listener entertained no more personal resentment toward him than if he were an ancient sibyl uttering of necessity the will ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... involved" in passing it without delay. In a meeting held in the common-hall of London, Colonel Torrens remarked:—"Let the peers refuse this bill if they dare; and if they do, dearly will they rue their obstinacy hereafter. You all remember the Sibyl's story. She presented her oracles to the court of Tarquin, and they were rejected. She burned a portion, and again offered them, but they were again rejected. After diminishing their number still further, she once more returned, and the remaining volumes ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... artist; here, where the very pavement bears the story of Odysseus, and each passage-way is a Via Sacra, and every stone is old with years whose tale is told by hundreds or by thousands, and the wounded Adonis can be adored beside the tempted Christ of Sistine, and the serious beauty of the Erythean Sibyl lives beside the laughing grace of ivy-crowned Thalia, and the Jupiter Maximus frowns on the mortals made of earth's dust, and the Jehovah who has called forth woman meets the first smile of Eve. A Divine City indeed, holding in its innumerable chambers and its courts of granite and of porphyry all ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... contain more urgent lessons or point a more precious moral; and I would have the head-master in the drawing-school take each ingenuous pupil by the hand and lead him up to the Triumph of David or the Chase of Diana or the red-nosed Persian Sibyl and make him some such little speech as the following: "This great picture, my son, was hung here to show you how you must never paint; to give you a perfect specimen of what in its boundless generosity the providence of nature created for our fuller knowledge—an ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... whole time had not taken his eyes from her, this ready obedience of Crispus produced a wonderful and pervading impression. It seemed to him that among the Christians Lygia was a kind of sibyl or priestess whom they surrounded with obedience and honor; and he yielded himself also to that honor. To the love which he felt was joined now a certain awe, in presence of which love itself became something almost insolent. He could not familiarize himself, however, with the thought that their ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... women, at all, merely because they do not use the elixir which would keep them always young. Under its influence, a gem brightens yearly which is only seen to more advantage through the fissures Time makes in the casket. [Footnote: Appendix F.] No one thinks of Michael Angelo's Persican Sibyl, or St. Theresa, or Tasso's Leonora, or the Greek Electra, as an old maid, more than of Michael Angelo or Canova as old bachelors, though all had reached the period in life's course appointed to take ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... I saw her with my own eyes at Cumae, hanging in a jar; and when the boys asked her, 'What would you, Sibyl?' she ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... descended from them into the Bath-room, where a pool of water and sundry other arrangements suggest to a lively imagination its designation. It certainly has the recommendation of being the most retired bath-room ever known. That of the Neapolitan sibyl is public in ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... "This shows that the Sibyl at the festival of Adonis was right when she sang in the Jalemus that the gods did half ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... education of the whole man, and for every man, than so exuberant and diversified and persistent a promulgation of all kinds of knowledge? Why, you will ask, need we go up to knowledge, when knowledge comes down to us? The Sibyl wrote her prophecies upon the leaves of the forest, and wasted them; but here such careless profusion might be prudently indulged, for it can be afforded without loss, in consequence of the almost fabulous fecundity of the instrument which these latter ages have invented. We have sermons in stones, ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various |
