"Medea" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... no soldier, but a soldier's lover, In the style of my namesake and kinsman do hereby discover, That I have written the twenty-four letters twenty-four million times over; And to every true-born Scott I do wish as many golden pieces As ever were hairs in Jason's and Medea's golden fleeces." ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... The Philosopher Chrisippus was wont to foist-in amongst his bookes, not only whole sentences and other long-long discourses, but whole bookes of other Authors, as in one, he brought in Euripides his Medea. And Apollodorus was wont to say of him, that if one should draw from out his bookes what he had stolne from others, his paper would remaine blanke. Whereas Epicurus cleane contrarie to him in three hundred volumes he left behind him, had not made use of one allegation. [Footnote: ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... Lemnos, after the undaunted women pitiless had given all their males to death. There with tokens and with ornate words he deceived Hypsipyle, the maiden, who first had deceived all the rest. There he left her pregnant, and alone; such sin condemns him to such torment; and also for Medea is vengeance done. With him goes whoso in such wise deceives. And let this suffice to know of the first valley, and of those that it holds ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri
... say, 'He faltered!' I will not endanger the noble barons who have devoted themselves to my advancement. If I have sinned in alluring them thus far, I will not deepen my guilt by betraying them. Though I knew that the crown which I am about to assume were like the gift of Medea, I would still set it on my temples: better pay the penalty of ambition by advancing than by timidly retreating, when boldness may remedy, and retreat is ...
— The Truce of God - A Tale of the Eleventh Century • George Henry Miles
... ship which, to the destruction of Greeks and Barbarians, first laid open the bays of the inhospitable Euxine. For both had the house of the proud Aeetes to lament it, and the realms of Pelias[15] fell by the guilt of Medea, who, after concealing by various methods the cruelty of her disposition, there effected her escape, by means of the limbs[16] of her brother, {and} here embrued the hands of the daughters of Pelias in ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus
... Meissner notes that Latin has no verb with the sense 'to see again', which a modern would use here. — CONSCRIPSI: in the Origines. — QUO: ad quos; see n. on 12 fore unde. — PELIAN: a mistake of Cicero's. It was not Pelias but his half-brother Aeson, father of Iason, whom Medea made young again by cutting him to pieces and boiling him in her enchanted cauldron. She, however, induced the daughters of Pelias to try the same experiment with their father; the issue, of course, was very different. Plautus, Pseud. 3, 2, 80 seems to make the ...
— Cato Maior de Senectute • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... supernatural arts, and through the favor of Me-de'a, daughter of the King of Colchis, he succeeded in capturing the fleece. After four months of continued danger and innumerable hardships, Jason returned to Iolcus with the prize, accompanied by Medea, whom he afterward deserted, and whose subsequent history is told by the poet Euripides in his ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... mention of a few more curiosities must suffice. The immense skull of Polyphemus was recognizable by the cavernous hollow in the centre of the forehead where once had blazed the giant's single eye. The tub of Diogenes, Medea's caldron, and Psyche's vase of beauty were placed one within another. Pandora's box, without the lid, stood next, containing nothing but the girdle of Venus, which had been carelessly flung into it. A bundle of birch-rods which had been used by Shenstone's ...
— A Virtuoso's Collection (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... adventure by the addition of an erotic element which often took the form of two separated lovers. Some use is made of this element, for instance, in the relations of Odysseus and Penelope, perhaps in the episode of AEneas and Dido, and in the story of Jason and Medea. The intrusion of the love motif into the stories told of demigods and heroes, so that the whole narrative turns upon it, is illustrated by such tales in the Metamorphoses of Ovid as those of Pyramus and Thisbe, Pluto and Proserpina, or Meleager and Atalanta. The love element, ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... Alas! they abound. Think of the cavalier fashion in which Ulysses treated Calypso, Diomedes Callirhoe. What should I say of Theseus and Ariadne? Jason treated Medea with inconceivable lightness. The Romans continued the tradition with still greater brutality. Aenaeus, who has many characteristics in common with the Reverend Spardek, treated Dido in a most undeserved fashion. Caesar was a laurel-crowned blackguard in his ...
— Atlantida • Pierre Benoit
... school "of Storm and Pressure"—(Stuerm und Draeng—as the Germans have expressively described it.) If the reader will compare Schiller's poem of the 'Infanticide,' with the passages which represent a similar crime in the Medea, (and the author of 'Wallenstein' deserves comparison even with Euripides,) he will see the distinction between the art that seeks an elevated emotion, and the art which is satisfied with creating an intense ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... before Christ King Ahasuerus (Xerxes) reigned over Persia. In the third year of his reign he gave a royal feast to all the princes and nobles of Persia and Medea, in Shushan, the royal city. It lasted one hundred and eighty days, and was very costly, for the king wished to show the great men from all his provinces the riches and glory of his kingdom and ...
— Child's Story of the Bible • Mary A. Lathbury
... captain would have been a marquis," he exclaimed to himself, "the Marquis de Medea, and owner of those magnificent estates. Well, truly he had something to live for, and yet he was cut off—while I who have not a peco beyond my pay, and little enough of that, have been allowed to remain in existence. I cannot understand these matters—it is very strange; ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston
... made it look like some sort of sepulchral altar. The Hague was a Court town. I was richly dressed; my elaborate attire made the saddest possible contrast with the gloom of my surroundings. Therese, dressed in black and seated between her children at that black table, reminded me of Medea. To see these two fair young creatures vowed to a lot of misery and disgrace was a sad and touching sight. I took the boy between my arms, and pressing him to my breast called him my son. His mother told him to look upon me as his father from henceforth. The ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... passes, Europe, it seemed, was going to end her journey by plunging down a precipice. Perhaps it would have been as well; but it was not to be. The headlong rush was to be checked. The descent was to be eased by a strange detour, by a fantastic adventure, a revival that was no re-birth, a Medea's cauldron rather, an extravagant disease full of lust and laughter; the life of the old world was to be prolonged by four hundred years or so, by the galvanising power of the ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... my dreadful mouth with a masterly exactness. No—my dear Monsieur Gouache—it is a compliment I pay you. I am in earnest. I do not want a portrait of the Venus of Milo with red hair, nor of the Minerva Medica with yellow eyes, nor of an imaginary Medea in a fur cloak. I want myself, just as I am. That is exactly what you are doing for me. Myself and I have lived so long together that I desire a little memento ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford
... sides, where twilight reigns perpetually, and where sweet soft gases are generated by innumerable plants, and distilled from the warm moist soil. How grateful and revivifying! Among the half-lit crowded groves might not another Medea gather enchanted herbs such as "did ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... sea that mattered, more important than all the oceans; the oceans might dry up to-morrow for all he cared so long as this sea remained; and with the story of Theseus and "lonely Ariadne on the wharf at Naxos" ringing in his ears he looked to the north-east, whither lay the Cyclades and Propontis. Medea, too, had been deserted—"Medea deadlier than the sea." Helen! All the stories of the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" had been lived about these seas, from the coasts of Sicily to those of Asia Minor, whence AEneas had made his way to Carthage. Dido, she, too, had been deserted. All the ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... Euripides Romantic Love, Greek Style Platonic Love of Women Spartan Opportunities for Love Amazonian Ideal of Greek Womanhood Athenian Orientalism Literature and Life Greek Love in Africa Alexandrian Chivalry The New Comedy Theocritus and Callimachus Medea and Jason Poets and Hetairai Short Stories Greek Romances Daphnis and Chloe Hero ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... Friedrich's hands;—and under what imminency of peril, too; victorious deliverance, or ruin and annihilation, wavering fearfully in the balance for him, more than once, or rather all along. But it is certain the deeper one goes into that hideous Medea's Caldron of stupidities, once so flamy, now fallen extinct, the more is one sensible of Friedrich's difficulties; and of the talent for all kinds of Captaincy,—by no means in the Field only, or perhaps ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... "the goblet that is set apart for kings to drink out of. And fill it with the same delicious wine which my royal brother, King AEetes, praised so highly, when he visited me with my fair daughter Medea. That good and amiable child! Were she now here, it would delight her to see me offering this ...
— The Children's Hour, Volume 3 (of 10) • Various
... his reach, till Medea, the wicked witch, daughter of AEetes, promised to help him, on condition that he would marry her, and take her to Greece. When Jason had sworn to do so, Medea gave him an ointment with which to rub himself, also his shield and spear. For a whole day afterwards neither sword nor ...
— Aunt Charlotte's Stories of Greek History • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of Medea and Jason. It's a very fine thing, certainly; but one has seen it so often. ...
— Tales And Novels, Volume 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... vessel, itself sentient and intelligent, having its prophet as well as pilot on board, darting through rocks which move and join together, like huge pincers, to crush the passing ship; think of the wondrous Medea who conducted the homeward voyage, and reflect upon the sort of people who created and credited all these marvels. Then turn to the semi-critical version of Strabo, where the whole expedition resolves itself into an invasion of some unknown king, of some unknown country, whose wealth stands ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... at least three of us to deal with that one woman. When I saw her in Paris she was still young and handsome, with superb eyes and a kind of eastern tread. You could imagine her, when she did not speak, as Semiramis, Medea, Clytemnestra! Except that when you saw a little more of her, you felt that she was only a heroine of a cheap theater. Wharton could not have been fascinated by her, if, at that time of his life, he had ever known a refined woman ...
— Esther • Henry Adams
... of which Washington Irving wrote "the predictions of the ancient oracles were rarely so unequivocal," is part of the "chorus" at the end of the second act of Seneca's "Medea," written near the date of St. Paul's first Epistle ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... but not so selfish, as that of Macbeth, to call up the apparitions of future kings from the strange ingredients of the witch's caldron. Thus I will not grieve that all the noble trees are gone already from this island to feed this caldron, but believe it will have Medea's virtue, and reproduce them in the form of new intellectual growths, since centuries cannot again adorn the land with such as ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... perpetuated, if not in England herself, yet among her great children beyond the sea. France was to go her way through Bartholomew massacres and the dragonnades to a polished Louis the Magnificent, and thence to the bloody Medea's cauldron of Revolution, out of which she was to rise as now we know her. No common road could have been found for such destinies as these; and the French prince followed the direction of his wiser instincts when he preferred a quiet arrangement with the pope, ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... attempts to influence the course of nature by conjectural means, the choice of which was not directed by previous observation and experiment. The guess almost always fixed upon some means which possessed features of real or apparent resemblance to the end in view. If a charm was wanted, as by Ovid's Medea, to prolong life, all long-lived animals, or what were esteemed such, were collected and brewed into ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... Medea, having conquered the bulls that breathe forth flames, having sowed the teeth of a serpent, from which armed men are produced, and having lulled the dragon to sleep, recovers the Golden Fleece. Medea, accompanying Jason to Greece, restores AEson to youth by the ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... themselves the two were modern of the moderns, ranked in the forefront of the present; courtier, statesman, and poet of the day, exquisite maid of honor whose every hour convention governed,—yet the face upon which in one revealing moment he had gazed seemed not less old than the face of Helen—of Medea—of Ariadne; not less old and not less imperishably beautiful. Neither spoke of her idyll turned to a crowder's song. Knowing that there were no words which she could bear, he waited, his mind filled ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... models are first consulted,—Oenone, Evadne, Medea,—these characters being followed through the delineation of modern dramatists. We know of no more exquisite criticism than the pages devoted to Griseldis. Analyzing the accounts of Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Perault, our author concludes with the play of "Munck Bellinghausen." ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... that when the word Dancing occurs in an old author, that it should always be translated by "gesticulation," "declamation," or "Pantomime." When we read that an actress "danced" her part well in the tragedy of Medea, that a carver cut up food dancing, that Heligobalus and Caligula "danced" a discourse for an audience of state, we are to understand that they—actress, carver, and emperor—declaimed, gesticulated, made themselves understood in a language without words. ...
— A History of Pantomime • R. J. Broadbent
... difficulty, but with a sunny smile and a charming manner bade me welcome. My father had been an old friend of hers, and she spoke of my home and belongings as only a woman can speak of such things, then we plunged into medea res, into men and books. She seemed to me to have known everybody worth knowing from the Duke of Wellington to the last new verse-maker. And she talked like an angel, but her views upon poetry as a calling in life, shocked me not a little. She said she preferred a mariage de convenance ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... Medea With all her hearbs, charmes, thunders, lightning, 40 Made not her presence and blacke hants ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman
... glad that my letter, with Dr. Shaw's opinion, has lessened your bathing; for since I was born, I never heard of bathing four hours a-day; which would surely be too much, even in Medea's kettle, if you wanted (as you do ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... whither he had gone in the disguise of an artist, to contend in the Nemean, Isthinian, and Floral games, celebrated there; and whence he returned conqueror in the Palaestra, the chariot race, and the song; bearing with him, like Jason of old, a second Medea, divine in form and feature as the first, and who like her had left father, friends, and country, to follow ...
— Mazelli, and Other Poems • George W. Sands
... "Look here," he said presently; "why shouldn't we get hold of Farmer Larkin's boat, and go right away up the river in a real Argo, and look for Medea, and the Golden Fleece, and everything? And I'll tell you what, I don't mind your being Jason, as you thought of ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... and suffices to overthrow it: that fact is—myself!" And since, to have the better of materialism, it is sufficient to understand well what is one thought of the mind, one throb of the spiritual heart, one utterance of the conscience,—add boldly with Corneille's Medea: ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... Love," painted during these years for the Borghese, there are summed up all those artistic aims towards which the Venetian painters had been tending. The picture is still Giorgionesque in mood. It may represent, as Dr. Wickhoff suggests, Venus exhorting Medea to listen to the love-suit of Jason; but the subject is not forced upon us, and we are more occupied with the contrast between the two beautiful personalities, so harmoniously related to each other, yet so opposed in type. The gracious, self-absorbed ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... wits! But murder first, and mince them all to bits; 120 As erst Medea (cruel, so to save!) A new edition of old Aeson gave; Let standard authors, thus, like trophies borne, Appear more glorious as more hack'd and torn. And you, my critics! in the chequer'd shade, Admire new ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... if, in fact, this be veritably nightfall, he will not wish greatly for the continuance of a twilight that only strains and disappoints the eyes, but steadfastly await the perfect darkness. He will pray for Medea: when she comes, let her ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... otherwise have stiffened into caricature. Like Michelangelo, these sculptors fill their works with intense and individualised expression. Their noblest works are the careful sepulchral portraits of particular persons—the monument of Conte Ugo in the Badia of Florence, of the youthful Medea Colleoni, with the wonderful, long throat, in the chapel on the cool north side of the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore at Bergamo— monuments such as abound in the churches of Rome, inexhaustible in suggestions of repose, of a subdued Sabbatic joy, a kind of sacred ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... In my fancy the pagan gods and goddesses still walked on earth and talked face to face with men, and in my heart I secretly built shrines to those I loved best. I knew and loved the whole tribe of nymphs and heroes and demigods—no, not quite all, for the cruelty and greed of Medea and Jason were too monstrous to be forgiven, and I used to wonder why the gods permitted them to do wrong and then punished them for their wickedness. And the mystery is still ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... ac dirum nefas A me quoque absit. Quod scelus miseri luent? Scelus est Iason genitor, et maius scelus Medea mater. Occidant: non sunt mei. Pereant? mei sunt. Crimine et culpa carent. Sunt innocentes, fateor: et frater fuit. Quid, anime, titubas? ora quid lacrimae rigant? Variamque nunc huc ira nunc illuc amor ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... Bourdeaux.——There he taught three years in the schools, which were erected at the public cost. In that time he composed four tragedies, which were afterwards occasionally published. But that which he wrote first, called The Baptist, was printed last, and next the Medea of Euripides. He wrote them in compliance with the custom of the school, which was to have a play written once a-year, that the acting of them might wean the French youth from allegories, to which they had taken a false taste, and bring them back, as much as possible, to a ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... anwenden will, dich zu vergessen. Und das erste, was ich in dieser Absicht tun werde, soll dieses sein— Du wirst mich verstehen! Zittre fr deine Bella! Ihr Leben soll das Andenken meiner verachteten Liebe auf die Nachwelt nicht bringen; meine Grausamkeit soll es tun. Sieh in mir eine neue Medea! ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... to paint her already. Her coloring and style are unique and she suggests tragedy—with those marvelous pale eyes in that dark face—those heavy dark brows and heavy masses of hair. I have suggested that Folkes—your greatest portrait painter, you know,—paint her as Medea, or as the Genius of the Revolution, How proud you must be ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... they imitate the gods. Let the evil examples be blamed. In the Andromache horror is expressed of the folkways of the barbarians, in which incest is not prevented. In the Medea Jason, who is a scoundrel and a cur, prates to Medea about her gain in coming to Greece: "Thou hast learned what justice means, and how to live by law, not by the dictates of brute force." She had not learned it at all—quite the contrary. In the Hekuba it is said to be a disgrace to murder guests in Greece, and in Iphigenia ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... Spain; and in this manner is this sublime tragedy composed! When he first sent it anonymously to the French Academy it was reprobated. He then tore it in a rage, and scattered it about his study. Towards evening, like another Medea lamenting over the members of her own children, he and his secretary passed the night in uniting the scattered limbs. He then ventured to avow himself; and having pretended to correct this incorrigible tragedy, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... ABSYRTUS, brother of Medea and companion of her flight from Colchis. To elude or delay her pursuers, she cut him into pieces and strewed the fragments in the road, that her father might be detained by gathering up the ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... cure of gout, of quinsy, and of asthma; I know so much about the water and so much about the pulse that evil would be the hour in which you would take another leech. And I know, if I dared say it, of enchantments and of charms, well proven and true, more than ever Medea knew. Never spake I a word of it to you; and yet I have brought you up till now; but never reproach yourself at all for it, for never would I have said aught to you if I had not seen for a surety that such a malady has attacked ...
— Cliges: A Romance • Chretien de Troyes
... Medias teichous].] As many of the best manuscripts have [Greek: Medeias], in this passage as well as in ii. 4. 12, ii. 4. 27, and vii. 8. 25, Kuehner adopts that reading, under the notion that the wall was named from Medea, the wife of the last king of the Medes, whom the Persians conquered and despoiled of his dominions. "Those who defend the reading [Greek: Medias]," continues Kuehner, "suppose the name to be derived from ...
— The First Four Books of Xenophon's Anabasis • Xenophon
... no woman's character in the range of Greek tragedy so profoundly studied. Not Aeschylus' Clytemnestra, not Phaedra nor Medea. One's thoughts can only wander towards two great heroines of "lost" plays, Althaea in the Meleager, and ...
— The Electra of Euripides • Euripides
... Now we 'll turn to Juan. Poor little fellow! he had no idea Of his own case, and never hit the true one; In feelings quick as Ovid's Miss Medea, He puzzled over what he found a new one, But not as yet imagined it could be Thing quite in course, and not at all alarming, Which, with a little patience, ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... to Germany a note of protest on the sinking in March of the Dutch steamship Medea by ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... stateliness aside, brings heroic characters down to a common level, and introduces characters which are unheroic. He gives the people plenty of passion, especially of feminine passion, without being nice as to its sources, or rejecting such stories as those of Phaedra and Medea, which would have been alien to the taste, not only of Aeschylus, but of Sophocles. He gives them plenty of politics, plenty of rhetoric, plenty of discussion, political and moral, plenty of speculation, which in those ...
— Specimens of Greek Tragedy - Aeschylus and Sophocles • Goldwin Smith
... reading him with a mind accustomed to historical researches, and to political affairs; and I am astonished at my own former blindness, and at his greatness. I could not bear Euripides at college. I now read my recantation. He has faults undoubtedly. But what a poet! The Medea, the Alcestis, the Troades, the Bacchae, are alone sufficient to place him in the very first rank. Instead of depreciating him, as I have done, I may, for aught I know, ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... Ariadne, Phaon and Sappho. . . . We are back in the world's first best age; when a man, if he wanted a woman to wife, sailed in a ship and abducted her, as did the Tyrian sea-captain with Io daughter of Inachus, Jason with Medea, Paris with Helen of Greece; and again, when he tired of her, left her on an island and sailed away. There was Sappho, now; she ran and cast herself off a rock. And Medea, she murdered her children in revenge. But we are over hasty, to talk ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... there's danger in a fool. Let them, tho' modest, Gray more modest woo; Let them with Mason bleat, and bray, and coo; Let them with Franklin, proud of some small Greek, Make Sophocles disguis'd, in English speak; Let them with Glover o'er Medea doze; Let them with Dodsley wail Cleone's woes, Whilst he, fine feeling creature, all in tears, Melts, as they melt, and weeps with weeping peers; Let them with simple Whitehead, taught to creep Silent and soft, lay Fontenelle asleep;[214] Let them with Browne contrive, to ...
— English Satires • Various
... heart by as simple an argument, and was, as the socialist D... said to me one night walking home after some lecture, 'an anarchist without knowing it.' Certainly I and all about me, including D... himself, were for chopping up the old king for Medea's pot. Morris had told us to have nothing to do with the parliamentary socialists, represented for men in general by the Fabian Society and Hyndman's Socialist Democratic Federation and for us in particular by D... During the period of transition mistakes must be made, ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... the surface of the planet. These same marks are accounted for in the Eskimo legend already mentioned as the impressions of the woman's sooty fingers on the face of her pursuer. By some mythologists the moon is thought to be Medea, but it is more common to interpret Medea as the daughter of the ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor
... beautiful, and of a sweetness most alluring and fatal! Had Medea worn such a look, sure Jason had quite forgot the fleece, and with those eyes Circe had needed no other charm to make men what she would. Her voice, when she spoke, was no longer imperious; it was low pleading music. And she ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... characters, adhere to fame, Or study keeping in the type you frame: If great Achilles figure in the scene, Make him impatient, fiery, ruthless, keen; All laws, all covenants let him still disown, And test his quarrel by the sword alone. Still be Medea all revenge and scorn, Ino still sad, Ixion still forsworn, Io a ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... primeval and of chaos old! Before her Fancy's gilded clouds decay, And all its varying rainbows die away. Wit shoots in vain its momentary fires, The meteor drops, and in a flash expires, As one by one, at dread Medea's strain, The sickening stars fade off the ethereal plain; As Argus' eyes by Hermes' wand oppress'd Closed one by one to everlasting rest; Thus at her felt approach, and secret might, Art after art goes out, and ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... fire; and his body was so burned all over that he was not cured of it a good while after. And thus it was not without some plausibility that they endeavor to reconcile the fable to truth, who say this was the drug in the tragedies with which Medea anointed the crown and veils which she gave to ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 497, July 11, 1885 • Various
... Canidia of Horace,' Gibbon pronounces, 'is a vulgar witch. The Erichtho of Lucan is tedious, disgusting, but sometimes sublime.' The love-charms of Canidia and Medea are chiefly indebted ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... etc., direct to the place appointed,—the said carriage, moreover, serving to bring the ladies to town, should the evening prove cold; that, for the water-music, the following programme be adopted: 1. On reaching Vauxhall Bridge, the concert to commence with Madame Pasta's grand scena in "Medea," previous to the murder of the children, by Miss Corinna Grouts. 2. Nicholson's grand flute concerto in five sharps, by Mr. Frederick Snodgrass. 3. Grand aria, with variations, guitar, by Miss Euphemia Grouts. 4. Sweet Bird; accompaniment, flute obligato, Miss C. G. and Mr. F. S.—and 5. The Dettingen ...
— Stories of Comedy • Various
... and arrived at the river Phasis, south of the Caucasian mountains, where dwelt AEetes, whom they sought. But he refused to surrender the golden fleece except on conditions which were almost impossible. Medea, however, his daughter, fell in love with Jason, and by her means, assisted by Hecate, he succeeded in yoking the ferocious bulls and plowing the field, and sowing it with dragons' teeth. Still AEetes refused the reward, and meditated the murder of the ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... the pieces of Euripides like flowers in a pleasure-garden; hence above all the psychology of Euripides, which rests by no means on direct reproduction of human experience, but on rational reflection. His Medea is certainly in so far painted from life, that she is before departure properly provided with money for her voyage; but of the struggle in the soul between maternal love and jealousy the unbiassed reader will not find much in Euripides. But, above all, poetic effect is replaced in the ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... incidents; that, as the world grew civilised, other alterations were made, and that, at last, Homer composed the 'Odyssey,' and somebody else composed the Story of Jason and the Fleece of Gold, and the enchantress Medea, out of a set of wandering popular tales, which are still told among Samoyeds and ...
— The Crimson Fairy Book • Various
... persistence of the Comedie Francais in exhibiting that to us as "a masterpiece" had so exasperated me that, having gone home in order to get rid of the taste of this milk-food, I read before going to bed the Medea of Euripides, as I had no other classic handy, and Aurora surprised ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... Luctata diu, postquam ratione furorem, Vincere non poterat. Frustra, Medea, repugnas. —— Excute virgineo conceptas pectore flammas, Si potes, infelix. Si possem sanior essem: Sed ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 65, January 25, 1851 • Various
... were styled Ethia and Athia. The sons of Chus founded a colony in Colchis; and we find a king of that country named Ait; or, as the Greeks expressed it, [Greek: Aietes]: and the land was also distinguished by that characteristic. Hence Arete in the Orphic Argonautics, speaking of Medea's returning to Colchis, expresses this place by the ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume I. • Jacob Bryant
... too, you know, would be a mother!... And yet, can you fancy me torn in two between you and the infant? To begin with, if I saw any creature—were it even my own son—taking my place in your heart, I couldn't answer for the consequences. Medea may have been right after all. The Greeks had ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... the poor girl away from her solitary broodings and plunge her into the whirl of the world of Roman fashion. Claudia had become an intimate of Clodia, the widow of Quintus Metellus, a woman of remarkable gifts and a notoriously profligate character. "The Medea of the Palatine Hill," Cicero had bitingly styled her. Nearly all the youth of parts and social distinction enjoyed the wild pleasures of Clodia's garden by the Tiber. Catullus the poet, Caelius the brilliant young politician, and many another had ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... led to, to the rape of Helen; "The Fate of the Children of Lir," a story that has as its base the folk-tale that underlies "Lohengrin," but which takes us back farther into the past in its kinship to "Medea"; and "The Sons of Tuireann," which has been called the Irish Odyssey. Of these the first is incomparably the finest story, and Lady Gregory has told it nobly in "Cuchulain of Muirthemne," but it alone of all the stories in ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... the knowledge of Medea, and of Circe, and of Calypso, and of Helen, and of Rebekah, and of the Queen of Sheba. It means the knowledge of all herbs, and fruits, and balms, and spices; and of all that is healing and sweet in fields and groves, and savory in meats, it means carefulness, and inventiveness, and watchfulness, ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin
... battle of, and legends connected with. Mardo'nius, Persian general. First invasion of Greece; his second Invasion and defeat at Marathon; defeated at Plataea, and is slain. Mars. Mavrocordae'to, Alexander. Mede'a. Medea, the. Meg'ara. Me'llan nymphs. They watched over gardens and flocks of sheep. Me'los, island of. Melpom'e-ne, inventress of tragedy. Memno'nian Palace. So called because said to have been founded by the ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... the Goddess of Good; the celebrated Mithras with a serpent coiled round him, between the folds of which are sculptured the signs of the zodiac; Medea and her children; a mile-stone, bearing the names of the Emperors Theodosius and Valentinian; a basso-relievo of the Muses; several sarcophagi, votive altars, cornices, pillars, mutilated statues, and inscriptions, are here carefully ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... neighbourhood, my friends the Hollanders: mine I may well call them, for they stick so close and lovingly to me, that they are styled fools to a proverb, and yet scorn to be ashamed of their name. Well, let fond mortals go now in a needless quest of some Medea, Circe, Venus, or some enchanted fountain, for a restorative of age, whereas the accurate performance of this feat lies only within the ability of my ...
— In Praise of Folly - Illustrated with Many Curious Cuts • Desiderius Erasmus
... of the Latines, Candela Regia and Candelaria." The modern Romans style it the "Plant of the Lord," Other popular English names of the plant are "Adam's flannel," "Blanket," "Shepherd's club," "Aaron's rod," "Cuddie's lungs"; and in Anglo-Saxon, "Feldwode." Gower says of Medea:— ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... their bread with tongue and pen, by retailing to 'silly women,' 'ever learning and never coming to the knowledge of the truth,' second-hand German eclecticisms, now exploded even in the country where they arose, and the very froth and scum of the Medea's caldron, in which the disjecta membra of old ...
— Phaethon • Charles Kingsley
... winding gravel-walks from the esculents more dear to Ceres than to Flora. The vicar is seated in his little parlour, from which a glazed door admits into the garden. The door is now open, and the good man has paused from his work (he had just discovered a new emendation in the first chorus of the "Medea") to look out at the rosy faces that gleam to and fro across the scene. His wife, with a basket in her hand, is standing without the door, but a little aside, not to ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... then to me, and how far from me? Far verily was I straying from Thee, barred from the very husks of the swine, whom with husks I fed. For how much better are the fables of poets and grammarians than these snares? For verses, and poems, and "Medea flying," are more profitable truly than these men's five elements, variously disguised, answering to five dens of darkness, which have no being, yet slay the believer. For verses and poems I can turn to true food, and "Medea ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... express it to the life, is commanded; and on the contrary, if the imitation make a foul thing to appear fair, it is dispraised because it observes not decency and likeness. Now some painters there are that paint uncomely actions; as Timotheus drew Medea killing her children; Theon, Orestes murdering his mother; and Parrhasius, Ulysses counterfeiting madness; yea, Chaerephanes expressed in picture the unchaste converse of women with men. Now in such cases a young man ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... Original, may have been inwardly a saint and a sage, but it is impossible that his familiar society could have been desirable, even to fools or sinners. Rather recall, from your early explorations in Lempriere's Dictionary, how Medea renewed the youth of Pelias by simply cutting him to pieces and boiling him; whereon my Lord Bacon justly remarks, that "there may be some boiling required in the matter, but the cutting to pieces is not needful." If you ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... shepherd's flock as charmed by the evil eye.] There was as much difference as between a Roman Proconsul, surrounded with eagle-bearers, and a commercial Consul's clerk with a pen behind his ear. Apparently she was not so much a Medea as an Erichtho. (See the Pharsalia.) She was an Evocatrix, or female necromancer, evoking phantoms that stood in some unknown relation to dead men; and then by some artifice (it has been supposed) of ventriloquism,[Footnote: ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... the power to scatter tempests rude, And snows in summer at her whisper fall; The horrid simples by Medea brewed Are hers; she holds the hounds of ...
— The Elegies of Tibullus • Tibullus
... without my own will or deed; but considering that gold, like feathers, is equally useful to those who have and those who have not, why, it is worth while for the goose to remember that he may possibly one day be plucked. And what remains? "Io," as Medea says. . . . But Argemone?' . . . And Lancelot felt, for the moment, as conservative as the tutelary genius of ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... placed on the last word startled me. I looked at her and wondered if Medea wore such a countenance when she stabbed her children to the heart. But it flashed and was gone, and the next moment she had moved away from my side and I had stepped to the door. As I opened it to pass out I caught one glimpse of the bride as she came ...
— The Mill Mystery • Anna Katharine Green
... ploughs his field at home: If Colchian, or Assyrian, fill the scene, Theban, or Argian, note the shades between! Aut famam sequere, aut sibi convenientia finge, Scriptor. Honoratum si forte reponis Achillem, Impiger, iracundus, inexorabilis, acer, Jura neget sibi nata, nihil non arroget armis. Sit Medea ferox invictaque, flebilis Ino, Perfidus Ixion, ...
— The Art Of Poetry An Epistle To The Pisos - Q. Horatii Flacci Epistola Ad Pisones, De Arte Poetica. • Horace
... races, nations and peoples, for several thousand years. Egypt, the home of the Pyramids and the Sphinx, was the birthplace of the Hidden Wisdom and Mystic Teachings. From her Secret Doctrine all nations have borrowed. India, Persia, Chaldea, Medea, China, Japan, Assyria, ancient Greece and Rome, and other ancient countries partook liberally at the feast of knowledge which the Hierophants and Masters of the Land of Isis so freely provided for those who came prepared to partake of the great store of Mystic ...
— The Kybalion - A Study of The Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece • Three Initiates
... historic page, and still their battle continues year after year. All readers know the sleepy voice and horrid sigh of Mrs. Pritchard in Lady Macbeth's awful scene of haunted somnambulism; the unexampled and unexcelled grandeur of Mrs. Yates in Medea; the infinite pathos of Mrs. Dancer (she that became in succession Mrs. Spranger Barry and Mrs. Crawford) and her memorable scream, as Lady Randolph, at "Was he alive?"; the comparative discomfiture of both those ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... us now-a-days a childish pedantry; which was then—when Latin was the vernacular tongue of all scholars—a serious, if not altogether a useful, pursuit. Of his tragedies, so famous in their day—the 'Baptist,' the 'Medea,' the 'Jephtha,' and the 'Alcestis'—there is neither space nor need to speak here, save to notice the bold declamations in the 'Baptist' against tyranny and priestcraft; and to notice also that these tragedies gained for the poor Scotsman, in the eyes of ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... strives to eternise thee, Age rules my lines with wrinkles in my face, Where in the map of all my misery Is modelled out the world of my disgrace; Whilst in despite of tyrannising times, Medea-like, I make thee young again, Proudly thou scorn'st my world-outwearing rhymes, And murther'st virtue with thy coy disdain; And though in youth my youth untimely perish, To keep thee from oblivion and the grave, Ensuing ages yet my rhymes shall cherish, Where ...
— Elizabethan Sonnet Cycles - Idea, by Michael Drayton; Fidessa, by Bartholomew Griffin; Chloris, by William Smith • Michael Drayton, Bartholomew Griffin, and William Smith
... hampers us in life as the failure to accept our fate with courage," my guardian said to me once. "Be as brave as you can. Do you remember what Medea says in reply to that cruel reminder of her losses?—'Husband, countrymen, riches, all gone from you: what remains?' She answers, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... 23] And hence generally arose for Shakspeare the wider field, and the more astonishing by its perfect novelty, when he first introduced female characters, not as mere varieties or echoes of masculine characters, a Medea or Clytemnestra, or a vindictive Hecuba, the mere tigress of the tragic tiger, but female characters that had the appropriate beauty of female nature; woman no longer grand, terrific, and repulsive, but woman "after her kind"—the other hemisphere of the dramatic ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... question, 'What does cookery mean?' Mr. Ruskin says: 'It means the knowledge of Circe and Medea, and of Calypso and of Helen, and of Rebekah and of all the Queens of Sheba. It means knowledge of all fruits and balms and spices, and of all that is healing and sweet in fields and groves, and savory to meals; it means carefulness and inventiveness, and readiness of appliances; ...
— Carving and Serving • Mrs. D. A. Lincoln
... of Arragon, belongs, by internal marks, to about the same period as the preceding, but is not known to have been printed till 1597. Each Act opens with a chorus by Venus. Medea, also, is employed to work enchantments, and raises Homer's Calchas, who comes forth "clad in a white surplice and a cardinal's mitre." This play, too, is crammed from first to last brimful of tumult and battle; the scene changing between Italy and Turkey with admirable lawlessness; and Christians ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... when they should be married;—but how if, even now, there should be no marriage for her? Camilla French had never heard of Creusa and of Jason, but as she paced her mother's drawing-room that morning she was a Medea in spirit. If any plot of that kind should be in the wind, she would do such things that all Devonshire should hear of her wrongs ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... of the Saracen lady, who sought and found her lover, Gilbert Becket, father of Thomas a Becket, in London (see preface to Life of Becket, or Beket), Percy Society, 1845. The date may be circ. 1300. The kind of story, the loving daughter of the cruel captor, is as old as Medea and Jason, and her search for her lover comes in such Marchen as "The Black Bull o' Norraway." No story is more widely diffused (see A Far Travelled Tale, in the Editor's Custom and Myth). The appearance ...
— A Collection of Ballads • Andrew Lang
... noteworthy than Colleoni's own monument is that of his daughter Medea. She died young in 1470, and her father caused her tomb, carved of Carrara marble, to be placed in the Dominican Church of Basella, which he had previously founded. It was not until 1842 that this most precious masterpiece of Antonio Amadeo's skill was transferred ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... say that Thetis snatched his body from the pyre and conveyed it to the island of Leuke, at the mouth of the Danube, where he ruled with Iphigeneia as his wife; or that he was carried to the Elysian fields, where his wife was Medea or Helen. He was worshipped in many places: at Leuke, where he was honoured with offerings and games; in Sparta, Elis, and especially Sigeum on the Hellespont, where his famous ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... long after, Violenta toke one of the great knifes, and lifting her selfe vp softlye, she proued with her hand, to seke a place most meete for her to stabbe a hole into her enemies fleshe. And inchaunted with wrath, rage and furie, like another Medea, thrust the poincte of the knife with suche force into his throte as shee perced it through, and the poore vnhappie man thinking to resiste the same, by geuing some repulse against that aduerse and heauie fortune, was appalled, ...
— The Palace of Pleasure, Volume 1 • William Painter
... Paris have been at all times extravagance and credulity itself. They looked upon this young villain as a martyr, and at once dedicated an elegy to him, in which I was compared with Medea, Circe, and Fredegonde. ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... like a symbolic figure of evening, or the genius of the place. Her hair shone duskily as she bent beside the candle, and with steady fingers tilted a vial, from which amber drops fell slowly into a glass. With dark eyes watching closely, she had the air of a young, beneficent Medea, intent ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... was beginning to be restless with fears not intelligible to myself. Once again the nurse, but now dilated to colossal proportions, stood as upon some Grecian stage with her uplifted hand, and, like the superb Medea towering amongst her children in the nursery at Corinth, smote me senseless to the ground. Again I am in the chamber with my sister's corpse, again the pomps of life rise up in silence, the glory of summer, the Syrian sunlights, the frost of death. ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... with Mie Mie to the Opera in Lady Townshend's box, to see this famous dance of Medea and Jason. The girl had not in her head to go this year any more to the Opera, but Lady Townshend made this party. It will be etouffante; Vestris, it is said, dances for the ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue
... Homer (Callimachus and he had a violent quarrel on the subject), Apollonius of Rhodes in his Argonautics narrated the expedition of Jason. It was a fine epic poem and especially an astonishing psychological poem. The study of passion and of the progress and catastrophe of the infatuation of Medea form a masterpiece. Assuredly Virgil in his Dido, and perhaps Racine in ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... like her to have, if possible, good verse drawn up in order of battle; but, like Napoleon, she must face the fire herself, and, like Alexander, march in the front ranks of the phalanx. She is so powerful that in some cases she would conquer unaided; for she has the right to say with Medea: 'I, ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... many people coming to harm through her arts; and the very next day had been fixed upon to wreak a fearful vengeance on her, by stoning her to death. She frustrated the design by her enchantments. You remember how Medea, having got Creon to allow her just one day before her departure, burned his whole palace, with himself and his daughter in it, by means of flames issuing from a garland? Well, this sorceress, having performed ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... allowed to undertake the job. With the characteristic stupidity of his tribe the giant fell into the trap, and having had one finger polished was so pleased with the result that he agreed to be polished all over. For this purpose, like Aetes in the Greek legend of Medea, he had to be melted down, and the goldsmith, who was to get the body as his perquisite, giving the head only to Devi, took care not to put him together again. The goldsmith, however, overreached ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... the times went then) Appear'd Apollo's may'r and aldermen, On whom three hundred gold-capt youths await, To lug the pond'rous volume off in state. "When Dulness, smiling—'Thus revive the wits! But murder first, and mince them all to bits! As erst Medea (cruel, so to save!) A new edition of old AEson gave; Let standard authors thus, like trophies borne, Appear more glorious as more hack'd and torn. And you my Critics! in the chequer'd shade, Admire new light through holes yourselves have made. "'Leave not a foot of verse, a foot ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... not easy to determine. Mimnermus, a contemporary of Solon, makes the home of AEetes lie 'on the brink of ocean,' a very vague description. {95} Pindar, on the other hand, in the splendid Fourth Pythian Ode, already knows Colchis as the scene of the loves and flight of Jason and Medea. ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... the situation of a young man in the hands of a cruel captor (often a god, a giant, a witch, a fiend), but here—a Turk. The youth is loved and released (commonly through magic spells) by the daughter of the gaoler, god, giant, witch, Turk, or what not. In Greece, Jason is the Lord Bateman, Medea is the Sophia, of the tale, which was known to Homer and Hesiod, and was fully narrated by Pindar. THE OTHER YOUNG PERSON, the second bride, however, comes in differently, in the Greek. In far-off Samoa, a god is the captor.* The gaoler is a ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... "lie at his feet and eat out of his hand," as Morena had once described the plight of Zona, he would see at a glance that she was no longer so easily mastered. In fact, sitting there, she looked as proud and perilous as a young Medea, black-haired with long throat and cold, malevolent lips. It was only in the eyes—those gray, unhappy, haunted eyes—that Joan gave away her eternal simplicity of heart. They were unalterably tender and lonely and hurt. It was the look in them that had prompted Shorty's ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... compass of dramatic poetry, there is but one female character which can be placed near that of Lady Macbeth; the MEDEA. Not the vulgar, voluble fury of the Latin tragedy,[121] nor the Medea in a hoop petticoat of Corneille, but the genuine Greek ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... is worthy of him, and she is almost more original as an individual. It is true that she is not the first heroine, as he is, if not altogether, almost the first hero. Helen was that, though very imperfectly revealed and gingerly handled. Calypso (hardly Circe) might have been. Medea is perhaps nearer still, especially in Apollonius. But the Greek romancers were the first who had really busied themselves with the heroine: they took her up seriously and gave her a considerable position. But ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... and yet all this is artificial. As for the Euxine, I stood upon the Symplegades—I stood by the broken altar still exposed to the winds upon one of them—I felt all the "poetry" of the situation, as I repeated the first lines of Medea; but would not that "poetry" have been heightened by the Argo? It was so even by the appearance of any merchant vessel arriving from Odessa. But Mr. Bowles says, "Why bring your ship off the stocks?" for no reason that I know, except that ships are built to be ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... incessantly poured on the heads of the assailants; but they were most dangerously annoyed by a fiery composition of sulphur and bitumen, which in Colchos might with some propriety be named the oil of Medea. Of six thousand Romans who mounted the scaling-ladders, their general Bessas was the first, a gallant veteran of seventy years of age: the courage of their leader, his fall, and extreme danger, animated ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... a mistake! Is he blind? The mansion, which was a moment before ablaze, is now all dark! But the bride still stands under the lamp on the portico, statuesque as Zenobia or Medea. The statue grasps a paper. ...
— David Lockwin—The People's Idol • John McGovern
... belongs to his own locality, and not to that of the heroes whose adventures he purports to relate. In his work the old classical heroes are transformed into typical mediaeval knights, and heroines such as Helen and Medea, for instance, are portrayed as damsels ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber
... enthusiasts, had discovered that all the wit and wisdom of the world were concentrated in some fifty antique volumes, and he treated the unlucky moderns with the most sublime spirit of hauteur imaginable. A chorus in the Medea, that painted the radiant sky of Attica, disgusted him with the foggy atmosphere of Great Britain; and while Mrs. Grey was meditating a visit to Brighton, her son was dreaming of the gulf of Salamis. ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... produced tragic poets. In the first flourished Livius Andronicus, Naevius, and Ennius; in the second, Pacuvius and Attius; in the third, Asinius Pollio wrote tragedies, the plots of which seem to have been taken from Roman history. Ovid attempted a "Medea," and even the Emperor Augustus, with other men of genius, tried his ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... for her—!" But he could think of no classical parallel for Agnes. She slipped between examples. A kindly Medea, a Cleopatra with a sense of duty—these suggested her a little. She was not born in Greece, but came overseas to it—a dark, intelligent princess. With all her splendour, there were hints of splendour still hidden—hints of an older, richer, and more mysterious ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... Glastonbury by the tomb of Arthur. The nymph in furred raiment who seduces Hylas is conceived frankly in the spirit of Teutonic romance; her song is of a garden [226] enclosed, such as that with which the old church glass-stainer surrounds the mystic bride of the song of songs. Medea herself has a hundred touches of the medieval sorceress, the sorceress of the Streckelberg or the Blocksberg: her mystic changes are Christabel's. It is precisely this effect, this grace of Hellenism relieved against ...
— Aesthetic Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... we were ready for sea, and on the 2nd of December we hoisted Admiral Arbuthnot's flag, and, proceeding to Statten Island, we were joined by HMS Thames, Charlestown, Medea, Amphitrite, Fowey, Hope, Bonetta, Swift, and ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... dissolved. And they that go about by disobedience, to doe no more than reforme the Common-wealth, shall find they do thereby destroy it; like the foolish daughters of Peleus (in the fable;) which desiring to renew the youth of their decrepit Father, did by the Counsell of Medea, cut him in pieces, and boyle him, together with strange herbs, but made not of him a new man. This desire of change, is like the breach of the first of Gods Commandements: For there God says, Non Habebis Deos Alienos; Thou shalt not ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... death up to Socrates inciting his friends to good courage as he drinks the hemlock. It takes cognizance of the slave in his cabin no less than of Lincoln in his act of setting the slaves free. It touches the extremes in Mrs. Grundy and Clara Barton. It concerns itself with Medea scattering the limbs of her murdered brother along the way to delay her pursuers and with Antigone performing the rites of burial over the body of her brother that his soul might live forever. It has to do with Circe, ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... to Domini as she watched. Now she saw Jael and the tent, and the nails driven into the temples of the sleeping warrior. Now she saw Medea in the moment before she tore to pieces her brother and threw the bloody fragments in Aetes's path; Clytemnestra's face while Agamemnon was passing to the bath, Delilah's when Samson lay sleeping on her knee. But all these imagined faces of named women fled like sand grains ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... Alciphron; for we find earlier instances in the imaginary love-letters composed in verse by the Roman poet, Ovid, under the names of famous women of early legend, such as those of Oenone to Paris (which suggested a beautiful poem of Tennyson's), Medea to Jason, and many others. In these one finds keen insight into character, especially feminine character, together with much that is exquisite in fancy and tender in expression. But it is to Alciphron that we owe the adaptation ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... also; and suddenly, when conversation flagged or suggested it, she could throw herself into the part of Medea or Antigone, with a force and truth which far surpassed the effect produced by the male and masked representations of those characters at the theatre. Brother and sister were OEdipus and Antigone, Electra and Orestes, Cassandra ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... Medea in the tragedy recommends caution and submission; and enumerating all the distresses of that unfortunate heroine, asks her, what she has to support her against her numerous and implacable enemies. MYSELF, ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals • David Hume
... Perse, and the sister of Pasiphae, the wife of Minos. Homer makes her the sister of AEetes, the king of Colchis, while other authors represent her as the daughter of that monarch, and the sister of Medea. Being acquainted with the properties of simples, and having used her art in mixing poisonous draughts, she was generally looked upon as a sorceress. Apollonius Rhodius says that she poisoned her husband, the king of the Sarmatians, and ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... them often. Like good performers, she flung herself heart and soul into the business of the stage, and was what she acted. She was Phedre, and if in the first part of the play she was uncommonly tender to Hippolyte, in the second she hated him furiously. She was Medea, and if Jason was volage, woe to Creusa! Perhaps our poor Lord Kew had taken the first character in a performance with Madame d'Ivry; for his behaviour in which part it was difficult enough to forgive him; but ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... facetiae, ubi nimis ex vero traxere, acrem sui memoriam relinquunt, a bitter jest leaves a sting behind it: and as an honourable man observes, [813]"They fear a satirist's wit, he their memories." I may justly suspect the worst; and though I hope I have wronged no man, yet in Medea's ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior |
