"Bacchanal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... dances and suppers at the houses of college acquaintances. Sometimes she one-stepped demurely; sometimes, in dread of life's slipping past, she turned into a bacchanal, her tender eyes excited, her throat tense, as she slid down ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... could translate to its proper coin Gratitude for her grace. And I paid nothing then, As I pay nothing now with the dipping of my pen For her brother's music when he drummed the tambourine And stamped his feet, which made the workmen passing grin, While his mouth-organ changed to a rascally Bacchanal dance "Over the hills and far away." This and his glance Outlasted all the fair, farmer and auctioneer, Cheap-jack, balloon-man, drover with crooked stick, and steer, Pig, turkey, goose, and duck, Christmas Corpses ...
— Last Poems • Edward Thomas
... the vintage, when the showering grapes In Bacchanal profusion reel to earth, Purple and gushing: sweet are our escapes From civic revelry to rural mirth; Sweet to the miser are his glittering heaps, Sweet to the father is his first-born's birth, Sweet is revenge—especially ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... a Bacchanal of Blood, the colonies tore out of the map every shred of German colonial territory there was, and poured into Europe their flood of black, white, and yellow men. Little Denmark, catching the festive spirit, reached out for Schleswig-Holstein; and the rest, coveting the Kiel Canal, lent a willing ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... believe that the stars were dancing to the tune of their temples, and they danced as men have never danced since. With this old pagan eudaemonism the sage of the Rubaiyat has quite as little to do as he has with any Christian variety. He is no more a Bacchanal than he is a saint. Dionysus and his church was grounded on a serious joie-de-vivre like that of Walt Whitman. Dionysus made wine, not a medicine, but a sacrament. Jesus Christ also made wine, not a medicine, but a sacrament. But ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... early nineteenth century, "the evening of the vigil is scarcely dark when numbers of men, women, and boys are seen traversing the streets with torches, and many of them supplied with tambourines, which they strike loudly as they move along in a kind of Bacchanal procession. There is a tradition here that the shepherds who visited Bethlehem on the day of the Nativity had instruments of this sort upon which they expressed the sentiment of joy that animated them when they received the intelligence that a Saviour was born." ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... less strongly marked, on account of the different appearance which ridicule and pleasantry take from the different manners of every age. They will not pass for sisters, but for very distant relations. The Muse of Aristophanes and Plautus, to speak of her with justice, is a bacchanal at least, whose malignant tongue is dipped in gall, or in poison dangerous as that of the aspick or viper; but whose bursts of malice, and sallies of wit, often give a blow where it is not expected. The Muse of Terence, and, consequently, of Menander, is an artless and unpainted ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... "before Mulhausen, a large place, or square, where, during the fair, assemble a prodigious number of people, of both sexes, and of all ages; there one may see wives supporting their husbands, daughters their fathers, tottering upon their horses or asses, a true image of a Bacchanal. The public-houses are full of drinkers, where the young women who wait, pour wine into goblets out of a large bottle with a long neck, without spilling one drop. They press you to drink with pleasantries the most agreeable in the world. People drink here ...
— Ebrietatis Encomium - or, the Praise of Drunkenness • Boniface Oinophilus
... Media is in a very merry mood to-day," whispered Mohi, "but his counterfeit was not well done. No, no, a bacchanal is not used to be so ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... which lay immovable off the southern face of the island, gathered the new comers, whose Bacchanal approach has of late been chronicled. Had they had any outfit of decoys, and known how to use them, they could not but have had good sport; and even as it was, so many birds passed and repassed them, that a good shot ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... lights are turned off. Many of the workers went out for lunch, the rest got around in dismal corners, most of them singly, and ate by their machines, on the same hard seats they have been on since a quarter to 8. What a bacchanal festival of color and beauty now appeared the candy-factory whitewashed lunch room with the marble-topped tables! The airy sociability of it! I wandered about with my lunch in my hand, to see what I could see. Up amid the belts and power machines sat one of the girls who began that morning—not ...
— Working With the Working Woman • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... we met Guy Elersley to-morrow morning, the fetters of society would force us to feign an utter ignorance of such a mode of living among our gentlemen friends. We must take it for granted that from sunset till sunrise, Guy was not "sleeping the sleep of the Bacchanal," and we need not fear that he will ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... fortnight of this life Quadratilla broke like a thunder-squall. Whatever feelings had prompted her to leave her fashionable resort, her mood after she arrived was characteristically Bacchanal. She had a genius for making the tenderest feeling or the deepest conviction seem absurd. Rufus did not know whether to be more angry at her open hint to Pliny that his childlessness was like that of so many millionaires of the day, a voluntary lure for the attention ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson
... of nonsense," kindly consented to take just a "sip of red port wine" with the performer upon catgut cables; and everything was progressing allegro, when Cupid wickedly stimulated the double-bass to chuck Susan's double chin, and then, with the frenzy of a Bacchanal, to attempt the impossibility of encircling the ample waist of his Dulcinea. This was carrying the joke a leetle too far, and Susan, equally alarmed for her reputation and her habit-shirt, struggled to free herself from the embrace of the votary of Apollo; but the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... Mr. Emerson we have a poet and a profoundly religious man, who is really and entirely undaunted by the discoveries of science, past, present or prospective. In his case, poetry, with the joy of a Bacchanal, takes her graver brother, science, by the hand, and cheers him with immortal laughter. By Emerson scientific conceptions are continually transmuted into the finer forms and warmer lines of an ideal ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... to Mannering to accompany him. In less than two minutes he washed his face and hands, settled his wig in the glass, and, to Mannering's great surprise, looked quite a different man from the childish Bacchanal he had seen a ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... altogether insensible. The atmosphere, impregnated with Russian tobacco and the bluish vapor which filled the room, revealed in what manner the betrayed lover had diverted his impatience, and in the centre of the writing-table a cup with a bacchanal painted in red on a black ground, of which Julien was very proud, contained the remains of about thirty cigarettes, thrown aside almost as soon as lighted. Their paper ends had been gnawed with a nervousness which betrayed the young man's condition, while he repeated, in a tone so sad that it ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... them. Oft was she dressed before mine eyes, yet never, Snatching the comb to beat the wench, outdrive her. Oft in the morn, her hairs not yet digested, Half-sleeping on a purple bed she rested; 20 Yet seemly like a Thracian Bacchanal, That tired doth rashly[213] on the green grass fall. When they were slender and like downy moss, Thy[214] troubled hairs, alas, endured great loss. How patiently hot irons they did take, In crooked trannels[215] crispy ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... dance undreamed of mortal To the Bacchanal of Spring,— Where in mystic joy united ...
— King Midas • Upton Sinclair
... foolscap volumes, delightfully hot-pressed, and exquisitely embellished; the contents of which will neither fatigue by the quantity, nor require the laborious effort of thought to comprehend. The jolly bon-vivant and Bacchanal will find abundance of the latest songs, toasts, and sentiments; and the Would-be-Wit will meet with Joe Miller in such an endless variety of new dresses, shapes, and sizes, that he may fancy he possesses all the collected wit of ages brought down to the present moment. The ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... of thee, Anadyomene! What vine-outquickening life all creatures sup, Feel, for the air within its sapphire cup How it does leap, and twinkle headily! Feel, for Earth's bosom pants, and heaves her scarfing sea; And round and round in bacchanal rout reel the swift ...
— New Poems • Francis Thompson
... oh, it was joy to loiter thus, At peace in the heart of the city's stir, Entombed, while life hurried over us, In our lazy bacchanal sepulchre. ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various
... them out of doors, when they are gathered into the sections of a county fair-house; piles of melons fail of their poetry on a wooden floor, and heaps of grapes cannot assert themselves in a very bacchanal profusion against the ignominy of being spread upon long tables and ticketed with the names of their ...
— The Coast of Bohemia • William Dean Howells
... its order. Her housewifely mind, restless with long inactivity in a pension, seized on the bright pans of Marie's kitchen and the promise of the brick-and-sheetiron stove. She disapproved of Stewart, having heard strange stories of him, but there was nothing bacchanal or suspicious about this orderly establishment. Mrs. Boyer was a placid, motherly looking woman, torn from her church and her card club, her grown children, her household gods of thirty years' accumulation, that "Frank" might ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... be parodied, even parody. The Saturnalia, that grimace of antique beauty, ends, through exaggeration after exaggeration, in Shrove Tuesday; and the Bacchanal, formerly crowned with sprays of vine leaves and grapes, inundated with sunshine, displaying her marble breast in a divine semi-nudity, having at the present day lost her shape under the soaked rags of the North, has finally come to be called ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... abyss. The rest of the Caesars successively advanced to their seats; and as they passed, the vices, the defects, the blemishes of their respective characters, were maliciously noticed by old Silenus, a laughing moralist, who disguised the wisdom of a philosopher under the mask of a Bacchanal. As soon as the feast was ended, the voice of Mercury proclaimed the will of Jupiter, that a celestial crown should be the reward of superior merit. Julius Caesar, Augustus, Trajan, and Marcus Antoninus, were selected as the most illustrious candidates; the effeminate Constantine was not ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... pathetically lovely Eurydice, who has stepped unconscious and lifeless out of a Praxitelian bas-relief. And there are stranger works than even the Judith; strange statuesque fancies, like the fight of Marine Monsters and the Bacchanal among Mantegna's engravings. The group of three wondrous creatures, at once men, fish, and gods, is as grand and even more fantastic than Leonardo's Battle of the Standard: a Triton, sturdy and muscular, with sea-weed beard and hair, wheels round his finned horse, preparing to strike ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... Tahitians are charitable in their regard of very open peccadilloes, especially those animated by passion or a desire for amusement, thinking probably that were stones to be thrown only by the guiltless, there would be none to lift one; certainly no white in Tahiti. The dithyramb of a bacchanal sounded, and the outlaw dentist was reminded of his former intimate friend, King Pomare ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien |
