"Stygian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 110 There rouse Oblivion from her sable cave, Where dull she sits by Lethe's sluggish wave; Command her to secure the sacred bound. Where lives Content retired, and all around Diffuse the deepest glooms of Stygian night, And screen the virgin from the tyrant's sight; That the vain purpose of his life may try Still to explore, what still eludes his eye.' He spoke; loud praises shake the bright abode, And all applaud the ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... embraced Christianity. Other causes also contributed to the migration of these remains: they were often summoned in order to dignify acts of peculiar solemnity, or to be the witnesses to the oaths of princes, like the Stygian marsh ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... lands wherefrom the water had corroded all color and form, whose contours crumbled on all sides under the assault of the liquid putrescence that flowed across the broken bones of stakes and wire and framing; nor, rising above those things amid the sullen Stygian immensity, can I ever forget the vision of the thrill of reason, logic and simplicity that suddenly shook these men like ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... star-eyed Egyptian! Glorious sorceress of the Nile, Light the path to Stygian horrors With the splendors of thy smile. Give the Caesar crowns and arches, Let his brow the laurel twine; I can scorn the Senate's triumphs, Triumphing in love ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... mare's unoffending sides. Cardoness did not read Dante, else he would have said to himself that his anger often filled his heart with hell's dunnest gloom. The old Castle was never well lighted; but, with a father and a son in it like Cardoness and his heir, it was sometimes like the Stygian pool itself. Rutherford had need to write to her ladyship to have a soft answer always ready between such a father and such a son. If you have the Inferno at hand, and will read what it says about the Fifth Circle, you will see what went on sometimes in that debt-drained and ...
— Samuel Rutherford - and some of his correspondents • Alexander Whyte
... includes gluttons; the fourth misers and spendthrifts; each succeeding circle embracing what the poet deems a deeper shade of guilt, and inflicting appropriate punishment. The Christian and heathen systems of theology are here freely interwoven. We have Minos visiting the Stygian Lake, where heretics are burning; we meet Cerberus and the harpies, and we accompany the poet across several of the fabulous rivers of Erebus. A fearful scene appears in the deepest circle of the infernal abodes. Here, among those who have betrayed ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... Peleus' son? whom Hell in vain enthralled. His shade from Hades upon that dread day Bursting to light in terrible array! What! could not Pluto spare the Chief once more, To scare a second robber from his prey? Idly he wandered on the Stygian shore, Nor now preserved the walls he ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... wait for evolution, let it right these monstrous wrongs, While the helpless, young, and tender writhe and groan 'neath social thongs? Nay, 'tis better all should perish in a battle for the right, Than let philosophic cowards keep us in this stygian night. ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... of the head is broken by two black pigment specks, conspicuous indeed as the only bits of color on the whole blanched body; and these, even to the casual observer, certainly represent well-defined organs of vision. But what do they with eyes in these Stygian waters? There reigns an everlasting night. Is the law for once at fault? A swift incision with the scalpel, a glance with a lens, and their secret is betrayed. The eyes are a mockery. Externally they are organs of vision—the front of the eye is perfect; behind, ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... bridge. The gaunt trestle ran out past midstream, then stopped, all the portion toward the northern shore burned away. It stood against the intensely lit sky and stream like the skeleton of some antediluvian monster, then vanished into Stygian darkness. The thunder crashed at once, an ear-splitting clap followed by long reverberations. As these died, in the span of silence before should come the next flash and crash, Steve became conscious of another sound, dull and distant at first, then nearer and ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... of promise doth redden The rim of our Stygian night; Our bondage is breaking—O blessed awaking To melody merry and bright! My heart, long o'erloaded and leaden, Now bounds to the blue like a bird; The shadow has shifted; with paean uplifted I ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 5, 1916 • Various
... friend and confidant of Four Dogs who have helped to humanize him for a quarter of a century and more, and who have souls to be saved, he is sure. And when he crosses the Stygian River he expects to find, on the other shore, a trio of dogs wagging their tails almost off, in their joy at his coming, and with honest tongues hanging out to lick his hands and his feet. And then he is going, with these ...
— A Boy I Knew and Four Dogs • Laurence Hutton
... my embossed Bombay cap and golden spectacles, she found the fault that it rendered my complexion of a too excessive murksomeness; not reflecting (with feminine imperceptivity) that, the material being black as a Stygian, this criticism applied to the portraitures of ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... beacons seem, that men to arms assemble, His feltered locks, that on his bosom fell, On rugged mountains briars and thorns resemble, His yawning mouth, that foamed clotted blood, Gaped like a whirlpool wide in Stygian flood. ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... Cocted in Stygian shades— Acids of wrinkles and pimples From faces of ancient maids— Acrid precipitates sunken From tempers of scolding wives Whose husbands, uncommonly drunken, Are commonly found in dives,— With this I baptize and appoint thee (to St. John.) To marshal the vinophobe ranks. In the name ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... in the rear seat. Two small lamps served to light the way through the Stygian labyrinth of trees and rocks. O'Dowd had an electric pocket torch with which to pick his way ...
— Green Fancy • George Barr McCutcheon
... the domain of the myths and immaterials, there is the home of the law and the force, there dwell the Odyles, the electricities, the magnetisms, and affinities, and there the speculative AEneas pursues shadows more fleeting than the Stygian ghosts, and the grasp of the metaphysician closes on shapes whose embrace is vacancy. The bark that ploughs within this mystic expanse, sheds from its cleaving keel but coruscations of phosphorescent sparkles, which glimmer and quench in a gloom that Egyptian seers never penetrated, ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... giant god was Carthoris of Helium, yet in the clutches of these unseen creatures of the pit's Stygian night he was ...
— Thuvia, Maid of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... pray who had not prayed for years. The pious and the educated (and there were plenty of both in Barbados) were not proof against the infection. Old letters describe the scene in the churches that morning as hideous—prayers, sobs, and cries, in Stygian darkness, from trembling crowds. And still the darkness ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... Inn, on Regent Street, near Piccadilly Circus, was a haven of brightness in an otherwise Stygian London. It was one of those "old-fashioned" places—Restoration style of decoration, carried out in modern plastics. The oak panelling looked authentic enough, but it was just a little ...
— The Penal Cluster • Ivar Jorgensen (AKA Randall Garrett)
... ideal Margrave with his ever-renewing youth, and care little for the soul as the price paid for it. Not a few, mistaking "Witch-of-Endorism" pure and simple, for Occultism—"through the yawning Earth from Stygian gloom, call up the meager ghost to walks of light," and want, on the strength of this feat, to be regarded as full blown Adepts. "Ceremonial Magic" according to the rules mockingly laid down by Eliphas Levi, is another imagined ...
— Studies in Occultism; A Series of Reprints from the Writings of H. P. Blavatsky • H. P. Blavatsky
... shaken. On the morrow I was to die some sort of nameless death for the diversion of a savage horde, but the morrow held fewer terrors for me than the present, and I submit to any fair-minded man if it is not a terrifying thing to lie bound hand and foot in the Stygian blackness of an immense cave peopled by unknown dangers in a land overrun by hideous beasts and reptiles of the greatest ferocity. At any moment, perhaps at this very moment, some silent-footed beast of prey might catch my scent where it laired in some contiguous passage, and might creep stealthily ...
— The People that Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... mortal prayers are heard in hell, Hear, Goddess dread, invisible! Monarch of the regions drear, Aidoneus, hear, O hear! By a gentle, tearless doom Speed this stranger to the gloom, Let him enter without pain The all-shrouding Stygian plain. Wrongfully in life oppressed, Be he now by ...
— The Oedipus Trilogy • Sophocles
... All the ruins, said to be of Caesar's and Marius's Villas, Agrippina's Tomb, Caligula's Bridge, &c., may be anything; they are nothing but shapeless fragments, only on a rock I saw a bit of marble or stucco in what they call Caesar's Villa. The Stygian Lake presented no horrors, nor the Elysian Fields any delights; the former is a great round piece of water, and the latter are very common-looking vineyards. When well wooded, which in the time of the Romans it was, this ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... the golden bowl! the spirit flown forever! Let the bell toll!—a saintly soul floats on the Stygian river; And, Guy De Vere, hast thou no tear?—weep now or never more! See! on yon drear and rigid bier low lies thy love, Lenore! Come! let the burial rite be read—the funeral song be sung!— An anthem for the queenliest dead that ever died so young— A dirge ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... man to obtain a guide. About two in the afternoon he returned, accompanied by an extraordinary creature. I can scarce believe that any practical description of a fury could come up to the idea which this Lapland fair one excited. It might well be imagined she was really of Stygian origin. Her stature was very diminutive; her face of the darkest brown, from the effects of smoke; her eyes dark and sparkling; her eyebrows black. Her pitchy-coloured hair hung loose about her head, and she wore a ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... abrupt turn—and it was here that the newer tunnel had broken through into the older gallery of the Wiley claim—Manuel caught swiftly at Talbot's arm. "What is that?" To straining ears came the unmistakable throb of machinery. They snapped off their torches and crouched in Stygian darkness. Not a ray of light was to be seen. Talbot knew that in following the ore stratum, the Wiley gallery took several twists. Laboriously he and Manuel advanced with the gas tube. It was stiflingly close. He counted the turns, one, two, three. Now the roar of machinery was a steady reverberation ...
— The Seed of the Toc-Toc Birds • Francis Flagg
... entirely. I believe that at the root of a general discontent there is in all countries a general grievance and general suffering. The surface of society is not incessantly disturbed without a cause. I recollect in the poem of the greatest of Italian poets, he tells us that as he saw in vision the Stygian lake, and stood upon its banks, he observed the constant commotion upon the surface of the pool, and his good instructor and guide explained to him the cause ...
— Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Volume 1 • John Bright
... the brain. But after that—what? He laughed again at Carmen's pertinent question about the mind climbing up into the brain to see the vibrating nerve. But was it so silly a presumption, after all? Is the mind within the brain, awaiting in Stygian darkness the advent of the vibrations which shall give it pictures of the outside world? Or is the mind outside of the brain, but still slavishly forced to look at these vibrations of the optic nerve and then ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... well. The new tree was not of so much worth {as to be a recompense for the crime to which it owed its origin}. Cupid himself denies, Myrrha, that it was his arrows that injured thee; and he defends his torches from that imputation; one of the three Sisters kindled {this flame} within thee, with a Stygian firebrand and with swelling vipers. It is a crime to hate a parent; {but} this love is a greater degree of wickedness than hatred. On every side worthy nobles are desiring thee {in marriage}, and throughout the whole East the youths come to the contest for thy bed. Choose out of all these ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... balcony; and, at Ascot, she was hissed by the Duchess of Montrose and Lady Sarah Ingestre as she passed. Lady Flora died. The whole scandal burst out again with redoubled vehemence; while, in the Palace, the two parties were henceforth divided by an impassable, a Stygian, gulf. ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... from their sockets. His face turned an ashy blue. Presently he relaxed once more—this time in the final dissolution from which there is no quickening. Korak propped the dead body against the door frame. There it sat, lifelike in the gloom. Then the ape-man turned and glided into the Stygian ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... loathsome to my vexed thoughts [278] Than noisome parbreak [279] of the Stygian snakes, Which fills the nooks of hell with standing air, Infecting all the ghosts with cureless griefs! O dreary engines of my loathed sight, That see my crown, my honour, and my name Thrust under yoke and thraldom of a thief, Why feed ye still on day's accursed beams, And ...
— Tamburlaine the Great, Part I. • Christopher Marlowe
... in that putrefying well of abominations; they have oozed in upon London, from the universal Stygian quagmire of British industrial life; are accumulated in the well of the concern, to that extent. British charity is smitten to the heart, at the laying bare of such a scene; passionately undertakes, by enormous subscription of money, or by other enormous effort, ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... the farther wall. An archway gaped there. I walked across the room, passed under the archway. Instantly I was in complete, stygian darkness. But I was ...
— Where the World is Quiet • Henry Kuttner
... sense of foreignness in the Greek ceremonies gradually introduced into the cult. It fed on the more sensational aspects of certain of the gods brought in: on the enthusiastic rites of Bacchus, on the miracle-working of Aesculapius, on the Stygian mystery of Dis and Proserpina. But its fulfilment was to come from the East, that inexhaustible fountain of religious energy. In the Magna Mater it recognised its own. This was the first undiluted Orientalism which came to Rome. But the state itself had received it, and had managed in ...
— The Religion of Numa - And Other Essays on the Religion of Ancient Rome • Jesse Benedict Carter
... All was foul, sullen, weird as witches' dream. If Amyas had seen a crew of skeletons glide down the stream behind him, with Satan standing at the helm, he would scarcely have been surprised. What fitter craft could haunt that Stygian flood? ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... the kind of men that figure prominently in the school geographies. It was a chapter from "Swiss Family Robinson,"—the white surf lashing the long yellow beach; the rakish palm-trees bristling in the wind; a Stygian volcano rising above a slope of tropic foliage; the natives gathering around, all open-mouthed with curiosity. At Camaguin, where the boat stopped at the sultry little city of Mambajo, an accident ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... it was a change, a relief inexpressibly delightful, to emerge from the Stygian regions of the copper-works, where for the last five or six days we had wandered like an 'unshriven spirit,' and to find ourselves in contemplation of the happy faces of the scholars, and to hear the hopeful, encouraging tones of their intelligent teachers. The popular song ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 458 - Volume 18, New Series, October 9, 1852 • Various
... of real proof as to what lies beyond the gates of death, still he hoped for the brighter and better life, and when that beautiful smile overspread his face when he died, those who beheld it felt that he had realized his hopes, and in the shadowy realm that bounds the Stygian river had met his little girl Inez, whose untimely death at the age of barely 12 years, had worked such havoc in his heart. Mr. Brann loved nature, not only when the gorgeous god of day threw over earth and sky the flashing strands of his golden ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... in regal mantle dight, Maidens immers'd in thoughts profound, Spectres, that haunt the shades of night, And spread a waste of ruin round. These form thy never-varying theme, While, buried in thy Stygian stream, Religion mourns her wasted fires And Hymen's sacred torch low ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... fail to improve the conditions of mortals, morally, spiritually, or physically. Such miscalled metaphysical systems are reeds shaken by the wind. Compared with the inspired wisdom and infinite meaning of the Word of Truth, they are as moonbeams to the sun, or as Stygian night to the ...
— No and Yes • Mary Baker Eddy
... between him and his fellow- men might remain buried in that tomb to which he had been consigned. Jack Savage then sang a song (to the tune of "Benny Havens, O!"), describing a forced visit of "the fine Arkansas gentleman" to the Stygian shore, where he craved permission of Pluto to return to earth for ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... Elysian Fields? And is there life beyond the grave? Or are the years that Nature yields Confined this side the Stygian wave? For those who more existence crave Is there a Power to ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... Stygian pug I' th' garb and habit of a dog, That was his tutor; and the cur Read to th' ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... usurper of his father's seat, Might presently be banish'd into hell, And aged Saturn in Olympus dwell. They granted what he crav'd; and once again Saturn and Ops began their golden reign: Murder, rape, war, and[24] lust, and treachery, Were with Jove clos'd in Stygian empery. But long this blessed time continu'd not: As soon as he his wished purpose got, 460 He, reckless of his promise, did despise The love of th' everlasting Destinies. They, seeing it, both Love and him abhorr'd, And Jupiter ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... machine has got them, not I," was the response. "I'm not the machine. I'm the man that's using it—Jim—Jim Boswell. What good would a bell do me? I'm not a cow or a bicycle. I'm the editor of the Stygian Gazette, and I've come here to copy off my notes of what I see and hear, and besides all this I do type-writing for various people in Hades, and as this machine of yours seemed to be of no use to you I thought I'd try it. But if you ...
— The Enchanted Typewriter • John Kendrick Bangs
... lays. Let silence hide the good your hand has wrought. Farewell, reward! Had blank oblivion's power Dimm'd the bright deeds of Romulus, at this hour, Despite his sire and mother, he were nought. Thus Aeacus has 'scaped the Stygian wave, By grace of poets and their silver tongue, Henceforth to live the happy isles among. No, trust the Muse: she opes the good man's grave, And lifts him to the gods. So Hercules, His labours o'er, sits at the board of Jove: So Tyndareus' ...
— Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace • Horace
... day of the gods!" he continued. "And may I from across this Stygian lake (there was a little water collected in the haw-haw here from the recent rains) introduce Miss Lutworth to you—and Miss Clinker and Lord Freynault? Miss ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn
... Splutter. I'll win sometime," said Pennoyer. "Me too," cried Grief. "Good night, old girl!" said Wrinkles. They crowded in the doorway. "Hold on to Billie. Remember the two steps going up," Pennoyer called intelligently into the Stygian blackness. "Can ...
— The Third Violet • Stephen Crane
... failed for an instant of proper service. Candles, kerosene lamps and old gas fixtures, the rusty cocks of which had not been turned in a decade, were put hastily in use, while the streets were black with a blackness particularly Stygian, contrasted with the brilliantly illuminated squares supplied by the Consolidated Company. All night long the mechanical force, attended by the worried but painfully helpless Bobby, pounded and tapped and worked in the grime, but ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... when they do not lean over extremely to the Stygian shore, with the complexions of the drugs which expedited the defunct to the ferry, provoke the manly arm within reach of them to pluck their pathetic blooming persons clean away from it. What of the widow who visibly likes ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... forlorn hope against Rosecrans, where he had no success; for success was impossible. Yet his lofty character was respected of all and compelled public confidence. Indeed, his character seemed perfect, his bath in Stygian waters complete; not a vulnerable spot remained: totus teres atque rotundus. His soldiers reverenced him and had unbounded confidence in him, for he shared all their privations, and they saw him ever unshaken of fortune. Tender ...
— Destruction and Reconstruction: - Personal Experiences of the Late War • Richard Taylor
... the light of truth, as I have been in this blessed sunshine! But in vain I seek to comprehend the mystery of my being. All my thoughts on this subject are dim and shadowy, as the ghosts seen by Odysseus on the Stygian shore." ...
— Philothea - A Grecian Romance • Lydia Maria Child
... tremulous and weak, And mustering his dissipated strength, A sitting posture he assumed at length,— "Whate'er thou art, thou harbinger of gloom, Thou fiend or ghoul, fresh from the new made tomb, Thou vampire, diabolical and fell, Thou stygian shade or denizen of hell, I charge thee, thing of evil, to confess Why thou hast thus disturbed my sore distress. Why hast thou burst my chamber's bolted door Where guest unbidden never trod before? Break this suspense, so horrible and still! ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... the world became darker. His brain working feverishly, Mal Shaff waited for the darkness. Adroitly he worked the battle nearer and nearer to the Stygian darkness that lay at the foot of the mighty crags. In the darkness he might escape. He could no longer continue this unequal ...
— Hellhounds of the Cosmos • Clifford Donald Simak
... rose, and truth and light Burst on the nations that reposed in night, And chased the Stygian shades with rosy smile That spread from Error's home, the land of Nile. No more with harp and sistrum Music calls To wanton rites within Astarte's halls, The priests forget to mourn their Apis slain, And bear Osiris' ark with pompous train; Gone ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... supplied by the rapids of "Platanal" is carried on high-tension wires to several cities far distant, including Guanajuato, a hundred miles away. Let the dynamo here break down and the cage of "Pingueico" mine hangs suspended in its shaft and Stygian darkness falls in the labyrinth below. In the rainy season lightning causes much trouble, and immense flocks of birds migrating south or north, according to the period of year, keep the repair gangs busy ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... spoke—His son obey'd:—and to his feet Bound the light wings of gold—wings ever fleet, Which over earth and sea, through yielding air, Swift as the wind the rapid herald bear; 305 And took the rod that calls the trembling ghost To light, or binds it to the Stygian coast, Gives balmy slumber, breaks the sweet repose, Weighs down the lid of dying eyes that close. Thro' storms and dripping clouds with this he glides; Now o'er the summit and the hoary sides 310 Of Atlas hangs, pois'd on whose ...
— The Fourth Book of Virgil's Aeneid and the Ninth Book of Voltaire's Henriad • Virgil and Voltaire
... does it occur to them how much better it would be for the departed one if the fare were not forthcoming,—because then the ferryman would decline to take him, and he would be sent back into the living world. Lest the Stygian Lake should prove inadequate to the requirements of ghostly toilets, the corpse is next washed, anointed with the choicest unguents to arrest the progress of decay, crowned with fresh flowers, and laid out in sumptuous ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... cavern, now reached by descending about a hundred steps to a canal below, on which was a boat for conveying passengers to the other end of the canal, with only a small light or torch at the bow to relieve the stygian darkness. Visitors were landed on a platform to listen to a tremendous sound of rushing water being precipitated somewhere in the fearful and impenetrable darkness, whose obscurity and overpowering gloom could almost be felt. On the slope of the Eldon Hill there was also a ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... and stir But greater coyness breed in her; Yet thou mayst find, ere Age's frost, Thy long apprenticeship not lost, Learning at last that Stygian Fate Unbends to him that knows to wait. 130 The Muse is womanish, nor deigns Her love to him that pules and plains; With proud, averted face she stands To him that wooes with empty hands. Make thyself free of Manhood's guild; Pull down thy barns and greater build; The wood, the mountain, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... blood of Hydra, Lerna's bane, The juice of Hebon, and Cocytus breath, And all the poison of the Stygian pool." ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... came, the boat now drawing very near. And as the craft loomed up through the vapors that rose incessantly from that Stygian sea, he made a mighty effort, raised himself a little and suddenly beheld her—dim, vague, uncertain in the shuddering bluish glare, yet ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... found the hidden catch that held the cunningly devised door in place. An instant later the panel swung inward before his touch, and standing to one side, the old fellow bowed low as he ushered Barney into the Stygian darkness of ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... hundred yards when he felt the earth give way beneath him. He clutched frantically about for support, but there was none, and with a sickening lunge he plunged downward into Stygian darkness. ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... the formation in all directions are numberless curiosities, such as the Devil's Kitchen, Cupid's Cave, and the Stygian Cave. In many of these caves there is an accumulation of carbonic-acid gas sufficient to destroy animal life. This is especially true of the ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... Verdi; Vulcan is Krupp; Apollo is any poet. Do you wish more? Well, then, Jupiter, a god who, if he were living now, would deserve to be put in jail, does not launch the thunderbolt, but the thunderbolt falls when electricity wills it. There is no Parnassus; there is no Olympus; there is no Stygian lake; nor are there any other Elysian Fields than those of Paris. There is no other descent to hell than the descents of Geology, and this traveller, every time he returns from it, declares that there are no damned ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... pony stood still, with a slight neigh and ears erect. They were at that moment winding around the face of a precipice, with the wall on the left rising to a height of a hundred feet or more, and sloping downward on the right into a gorge of Stygian blackness. The path was a yard or over in width, so there was plenty of foothold, and the halt could not be due to any ...
— Up the Forked River - Or, Adventures in South America • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... sound of the second mate's voice I turned, and saw, dead astern, a thin streak of ghostly white, drawn horizontally across the curtain of Stygian darkness in that quarter. The line lengthened and broadened with amazing rapidity; and presently a ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... Father, offended that any mortal should rise to the light of life from the infernal shades, struck the son of Phoebus with his forked lightning to the Stygian lake." —AEneid, ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... solitude, in which there was not a sound of moving leaf or singing bird, seemed to be peopled by the ghosts of men who were waiting and weeping out their hundred years on the Stygian shore. ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... in the center of the cavity when the soft ground beneath him gave way suddenly and he catapulted below into the darkness. Through the Stygian gloom he fell in what seemed to be an endless drop. He finally crashed upon something hard. The thin crust of the volcano's mouth had broken through, precipitating him into ...
— The Jameson Satellite • Neil Ronald Jones
... eyes of one of the things of the woods to which a huntsman has given a mortal wound. Mortally wounded he truly was, slain, like many another since his day, by a hopeless love for what was in truth but an image, and that an image of his own creation. Even when his shade passed across the dark Stygian river, it stooped over the side of the boat that it might try to catch a glimpse of the beloved one in ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... arriving at a well, That boiling pours itself down to a foss Sluic'd from its source. Far murkier was the wave Than sablest grain: and we in company Of the' inky waters, journeying by their side, Enter'd, though by a different track, beneath. Into a lake, the Stygian nam'd, expands The dismal stream, when it hath reach'd the foot Of the grey wither'd cliffs. Intent I stood To gaze, and in the marish sunk descried A miry tribe, all naked, and with looks Betok'ning rage. ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... brain-toil, which killed him, show their sepulchral grasp for many and many a year before their final victory; and the states of more or less dulled, distorted, and polluted imagination which culminate in Castle Dangerous, cast a Stygian hue over St. Ronan's Well, The Fair Maid of Perth, and Anne of Geierstein, which lowers them, the first altogether, the other two at frequent intervals, into fellowship with the normal disease which festers throughout the whole body of our lower ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... the great hole in the plaster close by the bed, his eyes fell on a piece of rich old tapestry! Curtains of silk damask, all bespotted with quaintest flowers, each like a page of Chaucer's poetry, hung round his bed, quite other than fit sails for the Stygian boat. They had made the bed as different as the vine in summer from the vine in winter. A quilt of red satin lay in the place of the patchwork coverlid. Everything had been changed. He thought the mattress felt soft under him—but that was only a fancy, for he saw before the fire the feather-bed ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... childhood once again. Her memory Is like an ant-hill which a twig disturbs, But twig stilled never. And to see her face, Broad with sleek homely beams; her babied hands, Ever like 'lighting doves, and her small eyes— Blue wells a-twinkle, arch and lewd and pious— To darken all sudden into Stygian gloom, And paint disaster with uplifted whites, Is life's epitome. She prates and prates— A waterbrook of words o'er twelve small pebbles. And when she dies—some grey, long, summer evening, When ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume I. • Walter de la Mare
... stalk about her door Like a strange soul upon the Stygian banks Staying for waftage. O, be thou my Charon, And give me swift transportance to these fields Where I may wallow in the lily beds Propos'd for the deserver! O gentle Pandar, from Cupid's shoulder pluck his painted wings, and ...
— The History of Troilus and Cressida • William Shakespeare [Craig edition]
... such a rain of bombshells being palpably too hot for him: got out, but cannot get across the muddy intricacies of the Weichsel; lies painfully squatted up and down, in obscure alehouses, in that Stygian Mud-Delta,—a matter of life and death to get across, and not a boat to be had, such the vigilance of the Russian. Dantzig is capitulating, dreadful penalties exacted, all the heavier as no Stanislaus is to be found in it; and search all the keener rises in the Delta ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... heat and stir The greater coyness breed in her: Yet thou may'st find, ere Age's frost, Thy long apprenticeship not lost, Learning at last that Stygian Fate Supples for him that knows to wait. The Muse is womanish, nor deigns Her love to him who pules and plains; With proud, averted face she stands To him who wooes with empty hands. Make thyself free of manhood's guild; Pull down thy barns and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... involved in wild disputes, Roaring till their lungs were spent, 'Privilege of Parliament.' Now a new misfortune feels, Dreading to be laid by the heels. Never durst the muse before Enter that infernal door; Clio, stifled with the smell, Into spleen and vapours fell, By the Stygian steams that flew From the dire infectious crew. Not the stench of Lake Avernus Could have more offended her nose; Had she flown but o'er the top, She had felt her pinions drop, And by exhalations dire, Though a goddess, must expire. In a fright she ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... a door opening off the rear of the room. Burton glided to it and carefully pushed it ajar. Stygian darkness reigned beyond. ...
— Owen Clancy's Happy Trail - or, The Motor Wizard in California • Burt L. Standish
... millions waited and longed for the hour of sunrise, hoping that then the stygian darkness would be dissipated, so that people might, at least, see where to go and what to do. Many, oppressed by the almost unbreathable air, gave up in despair, and no longer even hoped for ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... given. The little craft was to be at a certain place at a certain hour,—and she was there! The men who jumped knew that she would be there. A black, tiny speck on the broad expanse of water, sheltered by a night of almost stygian darkness, she lay outside the narrow radius to which visual observation was confined, patiently waiting for the Doraine to pass a designated point. There was to be no miscalculation on the part of either the boat or the men ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... that illumined her figure emanated from, it did not perceptibly dispel the Stygian gloom all about her. She was bathed in dazzling light, but framed ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... Stygian gloom a torrent of sheet-lightning rolled down across the heavens, bringing in its wake a moment of terrible light. It was in one of these brief moments of illumination that the wan watchers at Hall's ...
— Great Pirate Stories • Various
... proceeding. He held the statuette out stiffly, it seemed fairly to leap in his hands, as if tugging with an ecstatic longing to reach the dark place ahead. The rocks closed completely overhead; the dimness changed to stygian darkness. I got out my flashlight, sent the beam ahead. But Jake was pressing on through the darkness, directly in the center of ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... never knew: One rapps an Oath, another deals a Curse, He never better bowl'd, this never worse; One rubs his itchless Elbow, shrugs and laughs, The t'other bends his Beetle-brows, and chafes; Sometimes they whoop, sometimes the Stygian cryes, Send their black Santo's to the blushing Skies: Thus mingling Humours in a mad Confusion They make bad premisses ...
— The School of Recreation (1696 edition) • Robert Howlett
... before they could drink. The bed was covered to the depth of nearly a yard with black sticky mud, and my horse, plunging forward to get at the water, stepped into a steep hole where the mud was of Stygian blackness and incomparable stickiness, and we investigated these qualities together. As I was leading another horse as well, my position was exceedingly uncomfortable, for in the confusion a trace ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett
... again to their places, play the crier of the court with an audible voice, and take state of a president upon you at wrestlings, pleadings, negociations, etc. Here's the catalogue of your employments, now! O, no, I err; you have the marshalling of all the ghosts too that pass the Stygian ferry, and I suspect you for a share with the old sculler there, if the truth were known; but let that scape. One other peculiar virtue you possess, in lifting, or leiger-du-main, which few of the house of heaven have else besides, I must confess. But, methinks, ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... water is also a death symbol. We have not only the anxiety about death caused by the moral conflict, but we have also to remember that the passage into the uterus is a passage to the beyond. The water is the Water of Death (stygian waters) and of Life. In narrower sense it is also seminal fluid and the amniotic liquor. It is overdetermined as indeed all symbols are. The water bears the death color black. In the Flying Post dream a black road appears. The dreamer has conflicts like those ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... sons, as many blooming maids, In one sad day beheld the Stygian shades; These by Apollo's silver bow were slain, Those Cynthia's arrows stretched upon the plain." ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... men were speaking near the curb-door. She turned her head involuntarily in this direction. There were no lights in the frontage before which stood her cab, which intervened between the Brocken haze in the street, throwing a square of Stygian shadow against the fog, with right and left angles of aureola. She could ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath
... tongue, and why smeared with honey? For no reason, except that the Greeks (not the Romans till very late in their history) always placed an obolos, or penny, beneath the tongue of the dead to pay his passage across the Stygian river of ghosts; for no reason, except that to these same Greeks honey was a sacred fluid, intimately associated in their minds with the mournful subject of Death; a fluid with which the bodies of the deceased were anointed, and sometimes—especially in Sparta ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... places, at last reaches the Acherusian lake,—this is the river at which the souls of the dead await their return to earth. Pyriphlegethon is a stream of fire, which coils round the earth and flows into the depths of Tartarus. The fourth river, Cocytus, is that which is called by the poets the Stygian river, and passes into and forms the lake Styx, from the waters of which it gains new and strange powers. This river, too, falls ...
— Phaedo - The Last Hours Of Socrates • Plato
... almost over, when, between us and the border of the basin, arose a long neck, on the top of which, like the blossom of some Stygian lily, sat what seemed the head of a corpse, its mouth half open, and full of canine teeth. I went on; it retreated, then drew aside. The lady stepped on the firm land, but the leopardess between us, roused once more, turned, and flew at the throat of the terror. I remained ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... alone, methinks, to me Belongs the office; Lady, when my tongue Is cold in death, believe me, unto thee My voice shall raise its tributary song. My soul, from this strait prison-house set free, As o'er the Stygian lake it floats along, Thy praises singing still shall hold its way, And make ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... any other at night—the baying of dogs, and sometimes again the lowing of some disconsolate cow in a distant barn-yard. In the mean-while all the shore rang with the trump of bullfrogs, the sturdy spirits of ancient wine-bibbers and wassailers, still unrepentant, trying to sing a catch in their Stygian lake—if the Walden nymphs will pardon the comparison, for though there are almost no weeds, there are frogs there—who would fain keep up the hilarious rules of their old festal tables, though their voices have waxed hoarse and solemnly grave, mocking at mirth, and the wine has ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... never allows a roof to cover her horrid head, or confesses the influence of the Houshold Gods. She inhabits the deserted tomb, and dwells in a grave from which the ghost of the dead has been previously expelled. She knows the Stygian abodes, and the counsels of the infernals. Her countenance is lean; and her complexion overspread with deadly paleness. Her hair is neglected and matted. But when clouds and tempests obscure the stars, then she comes forth, and defies the midnight lightning. Wherever she treads, the fruits of ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... me on to deliverance! Oh, silence, vast, immense, infuse into your soul some sound other than the heavy throbbing of this fast disintegrating heart! Oh, pitiless stone arches, let fall your crushing weight upon this Stygian monster! ...
— Violets and Other Tales • Alice Ruth Moore
... was the first (here) Coffee made, And ever since the rest drive on the trade; Me no good Engalash! and sure enough, He plaid the Quack to salve his Stygian stuff; Ver boon for de stomach, de Cough, de Ptisick And I believe him, for it looks like Physick. Coffee a crust is charkt into a coal, The smell and taste of the Mock China bowl; Where huff and puff, they labour out their lungs, Lest Dives-like they should ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... especially the public of Fraser's Magazine (which I believe I have now done with), exceed all speech; require not even contempt, only oblivion. Poor Teufelsdrockh!—Creature of mischance, miscalculation, and thousand-fold obstruction! Here nevertheless he is, as you see; has struggled across the Stygian marshes, and now, as a stitched pamphlet "for Friends," cannot be burnt or lost before his time. I send you one copy for your own behoof; three others you yourself can perhaps find fit readers for: as you spoke in the plural number, I thought there might be three; more would rather ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... ballads; we'll go now,' said Fenellan. 'It 's true it's like sitting on the banks of the Stygian waters.' ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... machine which had been used to operate the crane. Beyond it was stygian darkness. ...
— The Whispering Spheres • Russell Robert Winterbotham
... hope, That he might yet be lifted by a rope. Behold the awful bench, on which he sat! He was as hard and ponderous wood as that: Yet when his sand was out, we find at last, That death has overset him with a blast. Our Boat is now sail'd to the Stygian ferry, There to supply old Charon's leaky wherry; Charon in him will ferry souls to Hell; A trade our Boat[5] has practised here so well: And Cerberus has ready in his paws Both pitch and brimstone, to fill up his flaws. ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... danced away to join the others. Then, out of the black depth of my misery a feeble gleam illuminated the Stygian obscurity. There was one way left to stay my approaching downfall—only one. Professor Bottomly meant to get rid of me, "for the good of the Bronx," but there remained a way to ward off impending disaster. And though I had ...
— Police!!! • Robert W. Chambers
... in vain. Some monk would surely see him in a vision, as St. Eucherius, Bishop of Orleans, saw Charles Martel (according to the Council of Kiersy), 'with Cain, Judas, and Caiaphas, thrust into the Stygian whirlpools and Acherontic combustion of ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... devotedly attached to him; they admire him "that for the general safety he despised his own"; and the only scene of rejoicing recorded in the annals of Hell, before the Fall of Man, is at the dissolution of the Stygian Council, when the devils come forth ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... house at night are often the signal of birth or death, sometimes of both. The old red house threw its beacon from almost every window that night, and seemed mutely to defy the onslaught of enveloping darkness, whether Plutonic or Stygian. Time was when Parson Thayer's library lamp burned nightly into the little hours, and through the uncurtained windows the churchyard ghosts, had they wandered that way, could have seen his long thin form, wrapped in a paisley cloth dressing-gown, sitting in the glow. He would ...
— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger
... waves, mingle with the roar of the thunder. The swelling sea seems lifted up to the heavens, to scatter its foam among the clouds; then sinking away to the bottom assumes the color of the shoal—a Stygian blackness. ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch |
