Online dictionaryOnline dictionary
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Hesperides   Listen
Hesperides

noun
1.
(Greek mythology) group of 3 to 7 nymphs who guarded the golden apples that Gaea gave as a wedding gift to Hera.  Synonym: Atlantides.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |
Add this dictionary
to your browser search bar





"Hesperides" Quotes from Famous Books



... golden fruit that hung from these celestial branches. Out of this as the race grew came also many another romantic symbolism of cherished belief. Among the glowing sunset clouds was hung the golden fleece of the Cholchis. The golden apples of the Hesperides grew there. The very lightning flash was but a celestial mistletoe growing mysteriously upon the limbs of this flame tree as it grows on the oaks in the forests beneath which they hunted. Secure in our better beliefs, we call their worship superstition, ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard

... joy. Treason was in her thought, And cunningly to yield herself she sought. Seeming not won, yet won she was at length: In such wars women use but half their strength. Leander now, like Theban Hercules, Enter'd the orchard of th' Hesperides; Whose fruit none rightly can describe, but he That pulls or shakes it from the golden tree. 290 Wherein Leander, on her quivering breast, Breathless spoke something, and sigh'd out the rest; Which so prevail'd, ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe

... feeling is more soft and sensible, Then are the tender hornes of Cockle Snayles. Loues tongue proues dainty, Bachus grosse in taste, For Valour, is not Loue a Hercules? Still climing trees in the Hesperides. Subtill as Sphinx, as sweet and musicall, As bright Apollo's Lute, strung with his haire. And when Loue speakes, the voyce of all the Gods, Make heauen drowsie with the harmonie. Neuer durst Poet touch a pen to write, Vntill his Inke were tempred with Loues sighes: O then his ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare

... frowns. Sir William would perpetually quote Latin and the ancient classics apropos of his gardens and his Dutch statues and plates-bandes, and talk about Epicurus and Diogenes Laertius, Julius Caesar, Semiramis, and the gardens of the Hesperides, Maecenas, Strabo describing Jericho, and the Assyrian kings. Apropos of beans, he would mention Pythagoras's precept to abstain from beans, and that this precept probably meant that wise men should abstain from public affairs. He is ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various

... nothing long inviolate. Earth's buried seed springs up—slowly, or fast: The ring came home, that one in ages past Flung to the keeping of unfathomed seas: And golden apples on the mystic trees Were sought and found, and borne away at last, Though watched of the divine Hesperides. ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Jean Ingelow

... was written. I have not space to tell of the wonders that served to decorate the geography of those times. On the north there was the delicious country of the Hyperboreans, beyond the reach of winter; in the west the garden of the Hesperides, in which grew apples of gold; in the east the groves and dancing-ground of the sun; in the south the country of the blameless Ethiopians, whither the gods were wont to resort. In the Mediterranean itself the ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper

... d'Or, with garden off the main road; the H.Continental, on an eminence above the Iles d'Or. These three are first-class houses, and charge per day from 15 to 20 frs., including bedroom, service, wine, candles, and three meals with coffee or tea in the morning. Next the Iles d'Or is the Hesperides, 8 to 12 frs. Off the main street are the Ambassadeurs and the Europe, both from 10 to 12 frs., frequented chiefly by those who come only for a few days. At the east end of Boulevard des Palmiers the H. du Parc, 12 to 15 frs. On opposite side, and well situated for the ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black

... has been steeped in rancid lamp-oil; one plays daintily with mullet and lamprey, while the other has his stomach turned by an eel as long as a snake, and bloated in the foul torrent of the sewers; Virro has apples that might have come from the gardens of the Hesperides, while Trebius gnaws such musty things as are tossed to a performing monkey on the town wall. But the distance is immeasurable between Juvenal's scorching truculence and Diderot's half-ironical, half-serious sufferance. Juvenal knows that Trebius is a base ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley

... of women. Thus we stoop To pick up hectic apples from the ground, Pierc'd by the canker or the unseen worm, And tasting deem none other grow but they, Whilst on the topmost branches of life's tree Hangs fruitage worthy of the virgin choir Of bright Hesperides. Soft! Who comes here? Surely my rascal is not yet return'd— The times are full of ...
— Cromwell • Alfred B. Richards

... Hesperides, whose dragons lay on guard in the remote west; the divine cities of Meru, whose encircling towers pierced the eastern sky; the Banquet Halls of Ethiopia, gleaming through the fiery desert; the fragrant Islands ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger

... better than to get away as fast as possible; they contrived to transport over one canoe, on which they all embarked, abandoning the other and the goods, to the natives. While the barbarians were plundering these effects, more precious in their estimation than the apples of gold in the garden of the Hesperides, our party retired and got out of sight. The retreat was, notwithstanding, so precipitate, that they left behind an Indian from the Lake of the Two Mountains, who was in the service of the Company as a hunter. This Indian had persisted ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to the Northwest Coast of America in the years 1811, 1812, 1813, and 1814 or the First American Settlement on the Pacific • Gabriel Franchere

... Sydney will give you tales of seamen who slipped ashore in Samoa or Tahiti or the Marquesas for a month's holiday, five, ten, or twenty years ago. Their wives and families await them yet. They are compound, these islands, of all legendary heavens. They are Calypso's and Prospero's isle, and the Hesperides, and Paradise, and every timeless and untroubled spot. Such tales have been made of them by men who have been there, and gone away, and have been haunted by the smell of the bush and the lagoons, and ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke

... detachments of a peninsula running out in the same direction with Keweenaw, which is known as La Point. The group consist of three islands, which rise like gems from the water. There is a dreamy summer about them which make them enticing as the Hesperides of the ancients. ...
— Old Mackinaw - The Fortress of the Lakes and its Surroundings • W. P. Strickland

... Hills. Convent and villa, cottage and farmhouse, peep out of embowering verdure, whilst our road is shaded in many places by the overhanging boughs of blossoming almond and loquat trees. The whole region is in truth a veritable garden of the Hesperides, where in the mild equable climate fruit and flowers ripen and bloom without a break throughout the ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan

... The three-fold Geryon... The sojourners in the Stymphalian fens So dreadfully offend us, or the Steeds Of Thracian Diomedes breathing fire From out their nostrils off along the zones Bistonian and Ismarian? And the Snake, The dread fierce gazer, guardian of the golden And gleaming apples of the Hesperides, Coiled round the tree-trunk with tremendous bulk, O what, again, could he inflict on us Along the Atlantic shore and wastes of sea?— Where neither one of us approacheth nigh Nor no barbarian ventures. And the rest Of all those monsters slain, even if alive, Unconquered still, what ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius

... and gifted with a kind of second sight, can see into the mysteries of nature, hidden from the eyes of ordinary mortals. To this gifted race it has ever been a region of fancy and romance, teeming with all kinds of wonders. Here once bloomed, and perhaps still blooms, the famous garden of the Hesperides, with its golden fruit. Here, too, was the enchanted garden of Armida, in which that sorceress held the Christian paladin, Rinaldo, in delicious but inglorious thraldom; as is set forth in the immortal lay of Tasso. It was on this island, also, that Sycorax, the witch, held sway, when ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving

... all the choir is a-cry together, but not of much use under other circumstances. In this way then I made acquaintance with a number of songs—such as Mr. Wise's "It is not that I love you less" and his duet "Go, perjured man!" of which the words are taken from Herrick's "Hesperides," and of which the music was made by Mr. Wise (who was a gentleman of the Chapel Royal) at ...
— Oddsfish! • Robert Hugh Benson

... of knowledge. The celestial fruits, the golden apples of the Hesperides, are ever guarded by a hundred-headed dragon which never sleeps, so that it is an ...
— Wild Apples • Henry David Thoreau

... bare hateful Doom and black Fate and Death, and she bare Sleep and the tribe of Dreams. And again the goddess murky Night, though she lay with none, bare Blame and painful Woe, and the Hesperides who guard the rich, golden apples and the trees bearing fruit beyond glorious Ocean. Also she bare the Destinies and ruthless avenging Fates, Clotho and Lachesis and Atropos [1610], who give men at their birth both evil and good to have, and they pursue the transgressions of men and of gods: ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod

... the waysides as if to invite to destruction the weary traveller who may be unaware of their poisonous properties. One in particular with a smooth shining skin of a golden orange colour rivals in appearance the golden apples of the Hesperides, and has great attractions for many birds, from the white cockatoos to the little yellow Zosterops, who feast on the crimson seeds which are displayed when the fruit bursts open. The great palm called "Gubbong" by the natives, a species of Corypha, is the most striking feature ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace

... the world, when human thought began to brood over the mysteries of life and time. There are the Broad Path of Wickedness and the Narrow Way of Right, and between them that 'bonnie road' of Fantasy, winding and fern-sown, that leads to 'fair Elfland.' There is a glimpse of the Garden of the Hesperides and its fruits; and a ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie

... aforesaid species of tree first degenerated into a shrub, then absconded underground, and finally, in our iron age, vanished altogether. In favorable exposures it may be conjectured that a specimen or two survived to a great age, as in the garden of the Hesperides; and, indeed, what else could that tree in the Sixth AEneid have been with a branch whereof the Trojan hero procured admission to a territory, for the entering of which money is a surer passport than to a certain other more profitable ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell

... road there may be seen the film of a blue hill in the gleam of sky at the horizon, the landscape, however beautiful, produces in me even a kind of sickness and pain; and the whole view from Richmond Hill or Windsor Terrace,—nay, the gardens of Alcinous, with their perpetual summer,—or of the Hesperides (if they were flat, and not close to Atlas), golden apples and all,—I would give away in an instant, for one mossy granite stone a foot broad, and ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin

... heard; And every wood-note bids me burst asunder The bonds that hold me from the leaf-hid bird. I quaff thee, O Nepenthe! Ah, the wonder Grows, that there be who buy their wealth, their ease By damning serfs to cities, hot and blurred, Far from thy golden quest, Hesperides!... ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England



Words linked to "Hesperides" :   Atlantides, Greek mythology, nymph



Copyright © 2024 Dictionary One.com