"Myth" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Ruthven of his dagger, a very improbable tale, told falsely at first, no doubt, as Robertson the notary at first invented his fable about meeting with Henderson, coming out of the dark staircase. This myth Robertson narrated when examined in September, but omitted it in the trial in November. Henderson now explained about his first opening the wrong window, but he sticks to it that he took the garter from Ruthven, of which James says nothing. He vows that he turned the key of the door ...
— James VI and the Gowrie Mystery • Andrew Lang
... took everythink, or practically everythink worth takin'. They stormed Lala Baba and captured Chocolate 'ill—in fac' they made the landin'; and the Xth and XIth Divisions are simply a myth accordin' to the papers!" ...
— At Suvla Bay • John Hargrave
... There is a myth abroad that college towns are intellectual centers; but the number of people in a college town (or any other) who really think, ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... but now, with the aid of the compass, it was not difficult to determine the relative position of one point to another, while all the windings of a road could be fixed down on paper without much difficulty. Consequently, while the learned monks were content with the mixture of myth and fable which we have seen to have formed the basis of their maps of the world, the seamen of the Mediterranean were gradually building up charts of that sea and the neighbouring lands which varied but little from the true ...
— The Story of Geographical Discovery - How the World Became Known • Joseph Jacobs
... merely a plant. You can imagine what discussions such an assertion as that raised. The public had come to like the notion of the Tartary lamb and did not wish to give it up; besides, if the story were all a myth, it put the travelers who had told it in a very bad light, and shook the confidence of readers in some of the other tales they had published. Science always upsets us. None of us like to be jolted out of the beliefs we have been brought up with and exchange them for others, ...
— Carl and the Cotton Gin • Sara Ware Bassett
... given? None that we know of which would satisfy the reason. And what, then? This—viz., that in the light of the drama of the fall, the doctrine of universal foreordination must be given up as a myth which ignores philosophy, and reflects injuriously upon ...
— The Doctrines of Predestination, Reprobation, and Election • Robert Wallace
... representative of a mammoth house of trade. The reason of this is obvious: hundreds and thousands have dealt year after year in that marble palace without ever beholding its proprietor. To such persons the name 'Stewart' has become merely a symbol, or, at most, a term of locality. To them he is a myth, with no personal entity. To their minds the term sets forth, instead of so many feet stature encased in broadcloth, with countenance, character, and voice like other men, merely a train of ideas, a marble front, plate glass, gorgeous ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... of the rise of the myth of Tammuz is uncertain, but as the name of this god is found on tablets of the time of Lugal-anda and Uru-ka-gina (about 3500 B.C.), it can hardly be of later date than 4000 B.C., and may be much earlier. As he is repeatedly called "the shepherd," and ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Theophilus G. Pinches
... absolute certainty from having been up the coast of Labrador in a most inclement season, that Bourdon could not possibly have gone to and back from the inner waters of Hudson Bay between May 2 and August 11. J. Edmond Roy and Mr. Sulte both pronounce Bourdon a myth, and ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut
... through to them. The reviver of the simple drama, the discoverer of the position due to art in true human society, the poetic interpreter of bygone views of life, the philosopher, the historian, the aesthete and the critic, the master of languages, the mythologist and the myth poet, who was the first to include all these wonderful and beautiful products of primitive times in a single Ring, upon which he engraved the runic characters of his thoughts— what a wealth of knowledge ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... on them. But the melancholy Jacques of our ordinary experience either uses some narcotic or stimulant to excess, or else has trouble with his liver or kidneys. "Liver complaint," says Zangwill, "is the Prometheus myth done into modern English." Already historical criticism has shown that the Bloody Assizes had its origin in disease of the bladder, and most forms of vice and cruelty resolve themselves into decay of the ...
— The Philosophy of Despair • David Starr Jordan
... had become a household word in the Bradley family, and in other families. Nobody ever expected to pocket the handsome commission that the owner and the firm between them had placed upon the deal, and to Nancy the thing was only a myth until a certain autumn Sunday, when she and Bert and the children were roaming about the Jersey hills, and stumbled upon ...
— Undertow • Kathleen Norris
... litters, Ch. Goodwood Lo and Goodwood Put-Sing. To these three sires, some of the bluest Pekinese blood is traceable, vide Ch. Goodwood Chum, Ch. Chu-Erh of Alderbourne, Ch. Gia-Gia, Manchu Tao-Tai, Goodwood Ming, Marland Myth, ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... which he is known, he wrote some narrative and lyric verse. Marpessa (1890), a blank verse poem, is a beautiful treatment of the old Greek myth, in which Apollo, the god, and Idas, the mortal, woo Marpessa. Marlowe might have written the lines in which Apollo promises to take her to a home above the world, where movement is ecstasy and repose is thrilling. ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... experience, for thought there is myth and drama and dancing and singing. Everything is of the blood, of the senses. There is no mind. The mind is a suffusion of physical heat, it is not separated, it is ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... useful, but add so much to the beauty of our homes. Our early ancestors may at times have made their homes in the trees, as some of the wild people do now. They certainly lived among the trees, for the myth stories that they have given us speak of the deep, dark forests and of the mysterious people ...
— Conservation Reader • Harold W. Fairbanks
... Antiquaries. Then Mr. Collier presented the treasure to the Duke of Devonshire, who again lent it for examination to the British Museum. Mr. Hamilton published in the Times (July, 1859) the results of his examination of the old corrector. It turned out that the old corrector was a modern myth. He had first made his corrections in pencil and in a modern hand, and then he had copied them over in ink, and in a forged ancient hand. The same word sometimes recurred in both handwritings. The ink, which looked ...
— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang
... no Cavaliers in my country. We are all Covenanter and Huguenot folks. The idea that Southern boys are lazy loafing dreamers is a myth. I was ...
— The Clansman - An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan • Thomas Dixon
... understand that as the wife of a man in Mr. Palmer's position, nothing that has ever been connected with my previous history will be liable to touch me. Mrs. Richmond Montague," with a sneering laugh, "will have vanished, or become a myth, and Mrs. Palmer will be unassailable by any enemies ...
— True Love's Reward • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... the story of Leicester's marriage with Amy Robsart is something more than a myth, based upon an obscure legend and an ancient ballad. The earl had had such a wife, and there were sinister stories about the manner of her death. But it is Scott who invents the villainous Varney and the bulldog Anthony Foster; just as he brought the whole episode into the foreground and made ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... already surrounded with myth and mystery, Hereward flashed into the fens and out again, like the lightning brand, destroying as he passed. And the hearts of all the French were turned to water; and the land had peace from its tyrants for ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... I for all his vaunted width Know the giant Space is but a myth; Over miles and miles of pure deceit You and I have ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... traced the origin of their laws to individual lawgivers. These were real persons, though we are uncertain how far they originated or only modified the institutions which are ascribed to them. But the lawgiver, though not a myth, was a fixed idea in the mind of the Greek,—as fixed as the Trojan war or the earth-born Cadmus. 'This was what Solon meant or said'—was the form in which the Athenian expressed his own conception of right and justice, ...
— Laws • Plato
... opposition, all those who possessed but a feeble individual power of resistance to the specific poison, while it spared those who possessed this power of resistance in an extraordinary degree. The first were, according to the Grecian myth, the human victims destined to appease the monster or demon who opposed the violation of the territory over which he had up to that time exercised an absolute sovereignty. The second became the founders of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 458, October 11, 1884 • Various
... in strict accordance with, the teachings of myth, folk-lore and tradition, I have used the linguistic argument as briefest and most convincing in indicating the probable sequence of architectural types in the evolution of the Pueblo; from the ...
— A Study of Pueblo Pottery as Illustrative of Zuni Culture Growth. • Frank Hamilton Cushing
... which you pride yourself, for immunity from insult while I am under your roof. Since I stood no taller than your knee, my mother has striven to inculcate a belief in the nobility, refinement, and chivalric deference to womanhood, inherent in southern gentlemen; and if it be not all a myth, I invoke its protection against abuse of my father. A stranger, but a lady, every inch, I demand the ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... through paper hoops? No, it was not altogether possible, there must have been some exaggeration. Still, I would be content with very little, I would take a low percentage—a very small proportion of the circus myth would more than satisfy me. But again, even supposing that history were, once in a way, no liar, could it be that I myself was really fated to look upon this thing in the flesh and to live through it, to survive ...
— Dream Days • Kenneth Grahame
... a replica of the Theban Amon on a smaller scale, and was associated with the same companions as his prototype, Maut, his consort, and Khonsu, his son. He owed his origin to the same religious concepts, and was the central figure of a similar myth, the only difference being that he was represented in composite shape, with a ram's head; perhaps a survival from some earlier indigenous deity, such as Didun, for instance, who had been previously worshipped in ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 7 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... likewise she treasured up the memory of the dream—words he had uttered, words it would seem begotten of the longings of her starved and empty heart, words of a kind not calculated to bring peace to the soul of a nun professed. She was enamoured, deeply, fervently, and passionately enamoured of a myth, a mental image of a man who had been dust these fifteen years. She mourned him with a fond widow's mourning; prayed daily and nightly for the repose of his soul, and in her exaltation waited now almost impatiently ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... to have been that, starting with a simple Egyptian tale, the resemblance to the shepherd of the Asiatic myth, led to a Ramesside author improving the story by tacking on the branches of the myth one after another, and borrowing the name. If this be granted, we have here in Bata the earliest indications of the elements of the ...
— Egyptian Tales, Second Series - Translated from the Papyri • W. M. Flinders Petrie
... you have one?" Bertram demanded one day. "Really, Will, I'm beginning to think she's a myth. Long years ago, from the first of April till June we did have two frolicsome sprites here that announced themselves as 'Billy' and 'Spunk,' I'll own. And a year later, by ways devious and secret, we three managed to see the one called 'Billy' off on a great steamship. ...
— Miss Billy • Eleanor H. Porter
... Washington and a description of a battle; and who did not end his hour-long prayer until he had anathematized the enemy, and circled the globe for recent examples of divine wrath and benevolence. Such a clergyman is by no means a myth. Each pastor made his own contribution, inconspicuous or notable as it might be, to the broadening of thought, and contributed his part to the development among his people of ideas of personal liberty, even as the colonial wars were developing confidence ...
— The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut • M. Louise Greene, Ph. D.
... boast of bringing the hart to bay and no woman of owning his antlers, we will acknowledge ourselves outwitted; and so go back to Adur. And it may prove that we have been brought to Arun by an idle tale, to hunt a myth; but be that as it may, see to your bowstrings, for to-morrow we ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon
... Warnham Pond; and any unwonted noise was accounted for by the presence of this great beast, which was made into the fanciful proportions most adapted to excite awe and wonder." To his friend Hogg, in after-years, Shelley often spoke about another reptile, no mere creature of myth or fable, the "Old Snake," who had inhabited the gardens of Field Place for several generations. This venerable serpent was accidentally killed by the gardener's scythe; but he lived long in the ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... faith. Grace and symmetry of form were theirs, and they satiated the eye with outward loveliness; but to the deep fountains of feeling and sentiment, such as a higher faith has unsealed in the heart, they never penetrated. What a poor, narrow little world was that myth-haunted one of the Grecian poet and sculptor, and even philosopher, compared with the actual world which modern science is revealing from year to year! What a puny affair was that Grecian sun, with its coachman's apparatus of reins, fire-breathing nags, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... saying with derision: "Thou pig-faced person, thou hast not the property thou namest, and even wert thou the Lord of the earth, yet still would I take thy head!" To which the fallen warrior made answer: "I am Tangaloa, the high-chief of Leatatafili, in Savai'i, and the property I speak of is no myth, and all of it thine if thou wilt spare me." To which O'olo replied: "And when I should claim it, verily thou wouldst forget thy covenant, and order thy young men to chastise me forth, they laughing at the cheat, and I with neither head nor property, ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... fitted! I cannot look on marriage as on the other experiments of life: it is the one grand type that should be kept forever sacred. There are two kinds of love experienced by high and rich souls. The first seeks, according to Plato's myth, another half, as being not entire in itself, but needing a kindred nature to unlock its secret chambers of emotion, and to act with quickening influence on all its powers, by full harmony of senses, affections, intellect, will; the second is purely ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... conception divine in size as in simplicity, and that the Gods and mythological figures had been projections of her consciousness—this thought ran with a magnificent new thunder about his mind. It was overwhelming, beautiful as Heaven and as gracious. He saw the ancient shapes of myth and legend still alive in some gorgeous garden of the primal world, a corner too remote for humanity to have yet stained it with their trail of uglier life. He understood in quite a new way, at last, those deep primitive longings that hitherto had vainly craved their full acknowledgment. ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... outrage has been recently committed on his memory, than were his dust, like Wickliffe's, tossed out of his tomb into the Avon—his plays have been, with as much stupidity as malice, attributed to Lord Bacon! Homer, too, has been found out to be a myth; and we know not if even Dante's originality has altogether passed unquestioned in this age of disbelief and downpulling; although what brow, save that thunder-scathed pile, could wear those scorched laurels, ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham
... above arguments will do away with the plea of mesmeric power being accountable for this myth. The plea is to my mind too absurd for words, yet it is wonderful that many people put it ...
— Indian Conjuring • L. H. Branson
... have read, "The Wall of Death" is the only one I dislike; and the worst of it is that it was written by Victor Rousseau, who is one of my favorite authors. The story is horribly reminiscent of the old Greek myth of the Minotaur, which it resembles in many phases. Still, this is an exception that proves Victor Rousseau's stories to be of high average value. And I shall expect to ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... usually a good authority on Praeneste, thinks that all the opus quadratum walls were built as surrounding walls for the great sanctuary of Fortuna. But the facts will not bear out his theory. Ovid, Fasti VI, 61-62, III, 92; Preller, Roem. Myth., 2, 191, ...
— A Study Of The Topography And Municipal History Of Praeneste • Ralph Van Deman Magoffin
... your case," said Major Williams, "what romance in history will be left us? William Tell is now a myth, and Washington's little hatchet story is ...
— The Harris-Ingram Experiment • Charles E. Bolton
... is not a myth, not a creation of literature, not a tradition, but not unlike the Grecian hero in that he sprung from the union of a god and a mortal. My hero is not reckoned among the high and mighty nor will his name ever be carved on stone or raised ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... nose, in allusion to the fate which here overtook the demon Shurpanakhi. It is altogether too savage an appellation for a city whose purity was established in the "Krita Yuga," and whose fame is coeval with that of the great protagonists of Hindu myth and epic. The great city of religion in the West stood upon seven hills, the holy city of the East stood upon nine; and the famous rivers which flow past them whisper in each case of a heritage ...
— By-Ways of Bombay • S. M. Edwardes, C.V.O.
... is the last thing she thinks of, and the least of the dangers besetting her. Love in a cottage, that seductive dream which used to vex the heart and disturb the calculations of prudent mothers, is now a myth of past ages. The legal barter of herself for so much money, representing so much dash, so much luxury and pleasure; that is her idea of marriage; ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... feel tempted to believe this that in 1817 a learned librarian of Agen, Jean-Baptiste Peres, demonstrated, in a highly plausible manner, that Napoleon had never existed, and that the story of this supposed great captain was nothing but a solar myth. Despite the most ingenious diversions of the wits, we cannot possibly doubt that Bluebeard and ...
— The Seven Wives Of Bluebeard - 1920 • Anatole France
... hidden from the sun (27) Its chill recesses; matted boughs entwined Prisoned the air within. No sylvan nymphs Here found a home, nor Pan, but savage rites And barbarous worship, altars horrible On massive stones upreared; sacred with blood Of men was every tree. If faith be given To ancient myth, no fowl has ever dared To rest upon those branches, and no beast Has made his lair beneath: no tempest falls, Nor lightnings flash upon it from the cloud. Stagnant the air, unmoving, yet the leaves Filled with mysterious trembling; dripped ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... {47} The myth above alluded to exists in Erewhon with changed names and considerable modifications. I have taken the liberty of referring to the ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... had almost given up the animals as a myth, feeling inclined to believe that the old "billy" they had seen the evening before was the creature of their imagination, they suddenly came upon the flock. The goats were secreted in a thicket of buckthorn trees ...
— Fritz and Eric - The Brother Crusoes • John Conroy Hutcheson
... France at midsummer 1791, which may be termed the central event of the French Revolution, at least in its first phases. The aim of joining the armed bands of emigres and the forces held in readiness by Austria was so obvious as to dispel the myth of "a patriot King" misled for a time by evil counsellors. True, the moderates, from sheer alarm, still sought to save the monarchy, and for a time with surprising success. But bolder men, possessed both of insight and humour, perceived the futility ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... says that: "The biggest myth ever on earth was Shakespeare, and that if Francis Bacon had said to the people, I, Francis Bacon, a gentleman of gentlemen, have been taking in secret my share of the coppers and shillings taken at the door of those ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... in 1899, was one of the first to discover "the new Washington." "The real man," he wrote, "has been so overlaid with myths and traditions, and so distorted by misleading criticisms, that ... he has been wellnigh lost. We have the religious and statuesque myth, we have the Weems myth (which turns Washington into a faultless prig), and the ludicrous myth of the writer of paragraphs. We have the stately hero of Sparks, and Everett, and Marshall, and Irving, with all his great deeds as general and President duly recorded and set down in polished and ...
— Washington's Birthday • Various
... a hard time convincing her that Nyoda was not a myth, although they began to wonder if she had not turned into one. Gradually Pearl began to thaw out under their persistent cordiality and was really not such a bad companion after all. She still furtively watched the road behind them as if she feared pursuit, but some of the scared ...
— The Campfire Girls Go Motoring • Hildegard G. Frey
... pirates began to lose themselves in the background of my mind. There was a dance at the hotel that evening. Before I had waltzed twice with Evelyn her buccaneer cousin had dissolved into a myth. ...
— The Pirate of Panama - A Tale of the Fight for Buried Treasure • William MacLeod Raine
... is the scale ordinarily employed by both vocalists and players on stringed instruments, and that the ideal of and agitation for a pure (i.e., untempered) scale in vocal and in string music is somewhat of a myth.] ...
— Music Notation and Terminology • Karl W. Gehrkens
... of you have looked at the explanation I have given of the myth of Athena in my 'Queen of the Air,' you cannot but have been surprised that I took scarcely any note of the story of her birth. I did not, because that story is connected intimately with the Apolline myths; and is told of Athena, not ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... assert my strong belief that in the religious conception of a people we find the true thoughts and the customs of the period in which they originated. A patriarchal people could not have given expression to a creation myth in which the female idea prevailed, and the mother, and not the father, was dominant. For men have ever fashioned the gods in their own human image, endowing them with their thoughts and actions. The sharp change in the view of woman's part in the relationship of the sexes is clearly symbolised ...
— The Position of Woman in Primitive Society - A Study of the Matriarchy • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... an Aphrodite, originally placed in the Temple of Asclepius on the island of Cos. The goddess was represented, according to the Greek myth of her birth, as rising from the sea, the upper part of her person being alone distinctly visible. The picture, from all that we can learn of it, seems to have been imbued with the same spirit of refinement and grace as Praxiteles's statue of Aphrodite ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... anonymous Observations upon Sanderson's History of Queen Mary and King James, issued in 1656, 'upon the word of a Christian received from Sir Edward Coke's own mouth,' will appear to any reader of the trial a manifest fable. Not the less does it, like the myth of the fraud by which Cobham's accusing Winchester deposition is alleged to have been procured, testify to the difficulty the public experienced in digesting the judicial outrage upon reason. Similarly must be explained the anecdote, though told by Ralegh himself to the Privy Council after his ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... bewildering fullness. He had gathered the results of his slowly-formulating consciousness, his tragic memory, to a final resolve in the return of the options to a county enhanced by the coming of a railroad whose benefits he would distribute to all. And now the railroad was no more than a myth, it had vanished into thin, false air, carrying ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... nevertheless a case of deliberate murder he was as firmly convinced as ever. Of the identity of the murderer, of his motive, he had not the haziest idea, but that the cloud which he had pictured as overhanging the life of the late Sir Charles was a reality and not a myth of the imagination he became more completely convinced with each new failure to pick up ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer
... of faith and hope. Such imagery, it may be said, is hackneyed now, and trite even to impertinence. It might be so at home; but here, in presence of the magnificent pageant of tropic sunlight, it is natural, almost inevitable; and the old myth of the daily birth and death of Helios, and the bridal joys and widowed tears of Eos, re-invents itself in the human mind, as soon as it asserts its power—it may be, its sacred right—to translate nature into the language ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... Egyptian god of Agriculture (here, perhaps by confusion with Apis, figured as a Bull), was torn to pieces by Typho and embalmed after death in a sacred chest. This myth, reproduced in Syria and Greece in the legends of Thammuz, Adonis, and perhaps Absyrtus, represents the annual death of the Sun or the Year under the influences of the winter darkness. Horus, the son of Osiris, as the New Year, in his turn overcomes ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... study of facts show this creature to be little else than a myth. The miseries of the sweating den are no exaggeration, they are attested by a thousand reliable witnesses; but this monster human spider is not found there. Though opinions differ considerably as to the precise status ...
— Problems of Poverty • John A. Hobson
... dressed, Sir Magnus. He finds himself a little better now, and means to have something up-stairs." Then there came an awful silence, during which the dinner was eaten. Sir Magnus knew nothing of the truth, simply suspecting the headache to be a myth. Lady Mountjoy, with a woman's quickness, thought that there had been some words between Florence and her late lover, and, as she disliked Florence, was inclined to throw all the blame upon her. A word had been ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... language may in many cases first be ascribed to a distinguished writer. Shakespeare is full of expressions which have since, and because of his use of them, become literally household words. Many words that have now a general application arose out of a peculiar local situation, myth, or name. "Boycott" which has become a reasonably intelligible and universal word, only less than fifty years ago referred particularly and exclusively to Boycott, a certain unpopular Irish landowner who was subjected to the ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... creatures. I only wish to show that these favourites of God were not admirable characters, and that therefore the Bible cannot be a divine revelation. As for animus: I do not believe any of these men ever existed. I regard them as myths. Should one be angry with a myth? I should as soon think of being angry with Bluebeard, or the ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... this series—an essay to which I cannot help taking this opportunity of offering a tribute of sincere admiration. It may not be an undesigned coincidence that the inconsolable widower of the "Daphnaida" is named Alcyon, while Chaucer's poem begins with a reference to the myth of Ceyx and Alcyone. Sir Arthur Gorges re-appears in Alcyon in "Colin Clout's come home again."); but it is the first passage in Chaucer's writings revealing, one would have thought unmistakeably, the dramatic power which was among his most characteristic gifts. ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... the pages of any review printed in England, or, indeed, elsewhere.—So here are two facts, one literary and the other physiological, for which any candid critic was bound to thank the author, even as in the Romany Rye there is a fact connected with Iro Norman Myth, for the disclosing of which any person who pretends to have a regard for literature is bound to thank him, namely, that the mysterious Finn or Fingal of "Ossian's Poems" is one and the same person as the Sigurd Fofnisbane of the Edda and the Wilkina, ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... of town so long that he had begun to believe her a myth, when one day the word passed down the line that she was coming home ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... reign of Elizabeth thus saw Jonson recognised as a dramatist second only to Shakespeare, and not second even to him as a dramatic satirist. But Jonson now turned his talents to new fields. Plays on subjects derived from classical story and myth had held the stage from the beginning of the drama, so that Shakespeare was making no new departure when he wrote his "Julius Caesar" about 1600. Therefore when Jonson staged "Sejanus," three years later ...
— The Poetaster - Or, His Arraignment • Ben Jonson
... half-lighted conservatory. Tropical flowers bloomed around them, scenting the warm air; delicious music floated entrancingly in. The cold white wintry moon flooded the outer world with its frosty glory, and Rose felt as if fairyland were no myth, and fairy tales no delusion. They were alone in the conservatory; how they got there she never knew; how she came to be clinging to his arm, forgetful of past, present, and future, ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... priest and must have an excuse to rediscuss theology, although the story of the book suggests this explanation. Higgs, the mysterious stranger of "Erewhon," who escaped by a balloon, has become a subject for myth. In Erewhon he is declared the child of the sun. Miracles gather about the supreme miracle of his air-born departure. His "Sayings," a mixture of Biblical quotation and homely philosophy, strained through Erewhonian intellects, become a new ethics ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... a science, not a myth. It is a very real fact, a very real power which can be developed only by careful research. To most people it is merely a curiosity. They sit, for instance, in a crowded room at some uninteresting lecture, and stare continually at the back of some unsuspecting companion until that companion, ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... course, knows whose birthday we celebrate on the twenty-fifth of December. If we imagine that such a man never really existed, that he was simply an ideal character, and nothing more,—if we were to take Christmas Day as the festival of a noble myth,—the ideal which it represents is so clear, so true, so absolutely practical in the way it is recorded in the book of his life, that it would be a most helpful joy to reflect upon it, and to try and apply its ...
— The Freedom of Life • Annie Payson Call
... the nature of historical evidence, and the loss thereby sustained of many a popular tale, is—need we insist upon it?—mere childishness. It is never found that we lose any thing by truth, and certainly not here. The popular tale, legend, or myth, may be displaced entirely from the records of the past, (for what it contains, or may be supposed to contain, of fact or event;) but it remains with us in its true character of fable, as the offspring of the teeming invention ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... There was a chapter on water clocks, to begin with: "Known to the Egyptians and the Holy Land." Barrant turned the leaves. "The Ancient Chinese used a smouldering wick as timekeeper." Barrant shook his head impatiently. "King Alfred's supposed device of measuring Time by Candles—a Myth." Would to heaven his invention of juries was a myth, too. Scotland Yard would get on much better without them. "A Lamp-clock was another Simple and Ingenious Design." How intolerably long-winded the writer was. What had he to say about hood clocks? "Very few ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... identification depends ultimately on another, namely, that of Mita, King of the Mushki, against whom Ashurbanipal would fight more than a century later, with Midas, last King of Phrygia, who is mentioned by Herodotus and celebrated in Greek myth. To assume this identity is very attractive. Mita of Mushki and Midas of Phrygia coincide well enough in date; both ruled in Asia Minor; both were apparently leading powers there; both fought with the Gimirrai or Cimmerians. But there are also certain difficulties of which too little ...
— The Ancient East • D. G. Hogarth
... the myth. "It is like a passionate word," he said; "the exaggeration is a flash of fervor. It is an extreme image of what is happening every day-the ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... the dishes and the food might stay up on the table until the next meal. There was nearly always a piled-up mass of dishes and skillets and sauce-pans in the house—to Thyrsis these soiled dishes were the original source of the myth of ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... contentious literature has already gathered round his name during his lifetime. He has been so written about, so talked about, so riddled with praise or blame, that, to those who have never seen him in the flesh, he has become almost a tradition, a myth—and one runs the risk of losing all ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... buried; his bones were thrown into a box which was bandied about the world till it came to a button-manufacturer; and now Paine is travelling round the world in the form of buttons!" This variant of the Wandering Jew myth may now be regarded as unconscious homage to the author whose metaphorical bones may be recognized in buttons now fashionable, and some even found useful ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... she laid her right hand on Sappho's head and her left on Bartja's, and said: "There is a myth which tells of a blue lake in the land of roses; its waves are sometimes calm and gentle, but at others they rise into a stormy flood; the taste of its waters is partly sweet as honey, partly bitter as gall. Ye will learn the meaning of this ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... report had been allowed to pass and remain uncontradicted so long could not be fathomed. Those were very black days for the army in the field and many a man died with despair in his heart, convinced that what had been the greatest fact in his whole life—the invincibility of the British Fleet—was a myth. The British nation will take a long time to forgive the ...
— On the Fringe of the Great Fight • George G. Nasmith
... hands. Gwen Hesketh, a member of the Sixth, in a marvelously contrived Chinese costume, was first favorite; little Cyntha West, as a delightful goblin, secured second prize, while the kangaroo, to the satisfaction of the Transition, was awarded the third. The gold wristlet watch was of course a myth, and the rewards were mere trifles, but the principals had risen to the occasion sufficiently to contribute to the entertainment by providing lemonade between the dances, which in the opinion of the girls was a great addition to the festivities, and made ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... the first Adam. It was given right into the very conditions that illustrated its need. It would have meant nothing, given into a society of angels. Yet because men were not angels, but very mortal and sinful men, we of to-day must fling contempt upon the Myth of the Salvation of God! It will stand, for all that,—that history of God's intimacy with men. It was lived, not told as a vision, that it might stand! It was lived, to show how near, in spite of sin, God came, and stayed. The second ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... been—cruel, tyrannous, vindictive—his buildings always have reference to religion. They bespeak a vivid sense of the Unseen and his awareness of his relation to it. Of a truth, the story of the Tower of Babel is more than a myth. Man has ever been trying to build to heaven, embodying his prayer and his dream ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... inspiring moment, attempt what they missed, merely because they lacked direct inspiration? Those who once lived in Egypt saw the sumptuous southern jewel, and it may again glitter vainly for the bewilderment of the Sphinx if the lazy world lurches through space long enough. Yes, let me invent a myth—and not tell it, but rather think of the origin of the Milky Way and so convince myself of the ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... enemy. Just as we find a personification of death in the manuscripts of the Mayas, we also find it in the picture-writings of the ancient Mexicans, often surprisingly like the pictures of the Maya codices. The Aztec death-god and his myth are known through the accounts of Spanish writers; regarding the death-god of the Mayas we have less accurate information. Some mention occurs in Landa's Relacion de las cosas de Yucatan, Sec. XXIII, but unfortunately nothing is said of the manner of representing the death-god. He seems ...
— Representation of Deities of the Maya Manuscripts • Paul Schellhas
... traditional Communist exhortation: "Workers of the world, unite." According to Marxian orthodoxy, they were misled by cunning capitalists, who made their profit out of the slaughter. But to any one capable of observing psychological facts, it is obvious that this is largely a myth. Immense numbers of capitalists were ruined by the war; those who were young were just as liable to be killed as the proletarians were. No doubt commercial rivalry between England and Germany had a great deal to do with causing the war; but rivalry is a different thing ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell
... the Phoenician trader from the Baltic would meet the Hindu wandering to Intra, from Extra, Gangem; and the Hyperborean would step on shore side by side with the Nubian and the Aethiop. Here was produced and published for the use of the then civilized world, the genuine Oriental apologue, myth and tale combined, which, by amusing narrative and romantic adventure, insinuates a lesson in morals or in humanity, of which we often in our days must fail to perceive the drift. The book of Apuleius, before quoted, is subject to as many discoveries of recondite meaning as is Rabelais. As regards ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... particular, the religious mind of the Hindu." In the course of his enquiries Lyall incidentally performed the useful historical service of showing that Euhemerism is, or very recently was, a living force in India,[49] and that the solar myth theory supported by Max Mueller and others had, to say the least, been pushed ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... Gnostics were a sect that arose in the early times of Christianity. They pretended to a special insight into the divine nature, and combined Platonic and oriental theories with Christian dogmas. They tried to convert the story of the Redemption into a cosmological myth, and regarded the human person of Christ as a kind of phantom—a magic apparition. Some of these Gnostics seem to have accepted Simon Magus as the 'Power of God'—as the Logos, or divine Reason, by which the world was created (or reduced from chaos to an ordered Cosmos). ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... Myths were created in the early days of the race to account for sunrise and sunset, storm-winds and thunder, the origin of the earth and of mankind. The tales men told in the face of these mysteries were naturally inspired by awe and fear. The universal myth of a great flood is perhaps the earliest tale of terror. During the excavation of Nineveh in 1872, a Babylonian version of the story, which forms part of the Gilgamesh epic, was discovered in the library of King Ashurbanipal (668-626 B.C.); and there are ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... the myth of the source of his power, in the story that he gets it from all the stars of ...
— Invaders from the Infinite • John Wood Campbell
... altogether characteristic of Mr. Churton Collins that he, nevertheless, adopts this exploded myth. "That Shakespeare was in early life employed as a clerk in an attorney's office may be correct. At Stratford there was by royal charter a Court of Record sitting every fortnight, with six attorneys, besides the town clerk, belonging to it, and it is certainly not straining probability ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... and his family is only a myth, but it is a very celebrated one. The Greeks wrote stories, poems, and plays about it, and it is on that account that it should be known by every one who wishes to study the history ...
— The Story of the Greeks • H. A. Guerber
... has already been given. The generation that invented those numerous Homeric fables, that poetised the myth of the contest between Homer and Hesiod, and looked upon all the poems of the epic cycle as Homeric, did not feel an aesthetic but a material singularity when it pronounced the name "Homer." This period regards Homer as belonging ...
— Homer and Classical Philology • Friedrich Nietzsche
... and quivering. This story of Salvat's arrest, which none of the morning papers had reported; the present which Monferrand seemed to be making them of that terrible Anarchist whom many had already begun to regard as a myth; the whole mise-en-scene of the Minister's speech transported the deputies as if they were suddenly witnessing the finish of a long-interrupted drama. Stirred and flattered, they prolonged their applause, while ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... history I have told you little; nor have you seen the book! Yet you must see it, for it alone remains to us of that other, better time. And though my folk mock at it as imposture and myth and fraud, you shall judge if it be true; you shall see what has kept the English speech alive in me, kept memories of the upper world alive. ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... an action which may take its place by the side of the myth of Mucius Scaevola, or the real exploit of that brother of the poet AEschylus, who, when the Persians were flying from Marathon, clung to a ship till both his hands were hewn away, and then seized it with his teeth, leaving ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... to know Lincoln as he really was must read the biography of him written by his friend and law-partner, W.H. Herndon. This book was imperatively needed to brush aside the rank growth of myth and legend which was threatening to hide the real lineaments of Lincoln from the eyes of posterity. On one pretext or another, but usually upon the plea that he was the central figure of a great historical picture, most of his self-appointed biographers have, by suppressing a ...
— General Scott • General Marcus J. Wright
... monument, by the way, the statues at either side stand on two circular tablets, which are not unlike the yellow cheeses of Alkmaar. It was possibly this circumstance that led to the myth that the Jefferays, too proud to walk on the ground, had on Sundays a series of cheeses ranged between their house and the church, on which to step. Their house was Chiddingly Place, built by Sir John Jefferay, who died in 1577. Remains of this great mansion are ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... William Tell! William Tell a myth! And it was a painter charged with the duty of decorating the Tellsplatte who said that calmly. He hated him as if for a sacrilege; he hated those learned men, and this denying, demolishing impious age, which respects nothing, neither ...
— Tartarin On The Alps • Alphonse Daudet
... record of outward fact, but as a mirror of the evolving heart, mind, and soul of man. They are true because they have been developed in accordance with the laws governing the evolution of truth in human history, and because in poem, chronicle, code, legend, myth, apologue, or parable they reflect this development of what is best in the onward march of humanity. To say that they are not true is as if one should say that a flower or a tree or a planet is not true; to scoff at them is to scoff at the law of the universe. In welding together into ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... the waters and cows to mean rain and daylight. Since most of us are agreed that stories such as that of Indra defeating Sambara for the benefit of Divodasa refer to real events, it seems unnatural to suppose that the Vritra-legend is a purely imaginary myth. We can thus explain why the ideas of Indra setting free the rain and the light fit in so awkwardly with the heroic element in the legend: for they are merely secondary attributes, borrowed from the myths of other gods and mechanically ...
— Hindu Gods And Heroes - Studies in the History of the Religion of India • Lionel D. Barnett
... State cares not for belief, but for bullying. If there be in Europe any people or principality which respects neither republics nor religions, to which the political ideal of Paris is as much a myth as the mystical ideal of Moscow, then blame that: and do more than blame. In the healthy and highly theological words of Robert Blatchford, drive it back to the Hell from which ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... stones scattered along the new road, now in the course of construction, we came to a dead lock in an excavation; and one of the horses, though mettlesome enough, hung in the collar, refusing to draw. It was said to be an Irish horse, but how or when it got to Sardinia was as much a myth as the immigration of some of the various races by which the island is said to have been peopled in ancient times. However, Miss Edgeworth's Irish postilion and “Knockecroghery,” could scarcely have afforded us more amusement than our Sarde driver and ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... Greeks they could not have ignored the Iliad and the Odyssey: indeed we know by tradition that they had translations, now apparently lost. I cannot however, accept Lane's conjecture that "the story of Ulysses and Polyphemus may have been of Eastern origin." Possibly the myth came from Egypt, for I have shown that the opening of the Iliad bears a suspicious likeness to the proem ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... rather evident that any single life is empty and shallow. Nature had made no mistake in decreeing that humans should live in pairs. Dave had never thought much on that point before, but now it struck him as so obvious that none could fail to see its logic. The charm of bachelorhood was a myth which only needed contact with the gentle atmosphere of feminine affection to ...
— The Cow Puncher • Robert J. C. Stead
... an eager listener to their folk lore and fireside stories. When later, during a residence of nearly four years among the people, my eyes were opened to behold the wondrous fertility of invention, the wealth of literary, historic and classic allusion, of pun, myth and riddle, of heroic, wonder, and legendary lore in Japanese art, I at once set myself to find the source of the ideas expressed in bronze and porcelain, on lacquered cabinets, fans, and even crape paper napkins and tidies. Sometimes I discovered the originals ...
— Japanese Fairy World - Stories from the Wonder-Lore of Japan • William Elliot Griffis
... and with respect. Indian commentators and comparative mythologists agree that he is a solar deity. His chief exploit is that he took (or perhaps in the earlier version habitually takes) three strides. This was originally a description of the sun's progress across the firmament but grew into a myth which relates that when the earth was conquered by demons, Vishnu became incarnate as a dwarf and induced the demon king to promise him as much space as he could measure in three steps. Then, appearing in his true form, he strode across earth and heaven and recovered ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... the other hand, it be admitted that the legend of the third degree is a fiction,—that the whole masonic and extra-scriptural account of Hiram Abif is simply a myth,—it could not, in the slightest degree, affect the theory which it is my object to establish. For since, in a mythic relation, as the learned Mueller[34] has observed, fact and imagination, the real and the ideal, are very closely united, and since the myth itself always ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... dogmatic and sceptical spirits. We may disagree with much else in the Kantian system. Even here we may say that we have not two reasons, but only two functionings of one. We have not two worlds. The philosophical myth of two worlds has no better standing than the religious myth of two worlds. We have two characteristic aspects of one and the same world. These perfectly interpenetrate the one the other, if we ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... village story. It grew as such a dark myth would grow in the superstitious times in which it started. Goethe created the character of Marguerite and added it to the fable. The transformation of Faust from extreme old age to youth was also ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth
... always thought," she said, "that Penelope was a myth. In your case I should say that Penelope represents a return to sanity—to the ordinary ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... disuse, though their memory is still reverently cherished in all the text-books of the science. The "Challenger" Expedition dissipated most of the myths that had long been taught regarding the deep waters of the ocean; and Professor Suess has disposed of the closely related myth about the coasts of the continents being constantly on the seesaw up and down. These two discoveries, with others that might be mentioned, dispose of Lyell's theory of uniformity. Lord Kelvin and the other physicists ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price
... "A mysterious chain links together the celestial and terrestrial forces. According to the ancient signification of the Titanic myth, the powers of organic life, that is to say, the great order of nature, depend upon the combined action of heaven ...
— New and Original Theories of the Great Physical Forces • Henry Raymond Rogers
... does not begin for a thousand years after the accession of Jimmu Tenno; and the chronicles of those thousand years must be regarded as little better than fairy-tales. They contain records of fact; but fact and myth are so interwoven that it is difficult to distinguish the one from the other. We have legends, for example, of an alleged conquest of Korea in the year 202 A.D., by the Empress Jingo; and it has been tolerably well proved ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... glimpse of brown eyes, raven hair, and olive-tinted cheeks, displayed with all the coquetry of a Manila belle. A Filipino family in a rickety cart, tilted at an impossible angle, are drawn by a moth-eaten pony, mostly bones. Public conveyances—if these are not indeed a myth—are most exasperating. You can never find one when you want it, even at the "Public Carriage Station." If by chance you come across one in the street, the driver will ignore your signal and drive on. Evidently he selects this walk in life merely to discharge the obligations ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... child, with the promise of a robust manhood. The mythopoeic faculty is strong in all of us, and in Wadham has grown up a tradition that Dorothy was a strong-minded woman, and her husband a submissive man without character and will. The myth rests only on the science of physiognomy working on portraits,—a most insecure foundation. The Founders' portraits depict him as a gentle, placid person with melancholy eyes; her as a hard-featured ...
— The Life and Times of John Wilkins • Patrick A. Wright-Henderson
... suddenly so that his whole form seemed to sag and grow weak, "that's all I wanted to tell you. It's all I can tell—all I know. I wanted to show you that this man with the gold tooth and the brown beard is no myth, as ...
— The Winning Clue • James Hay, Jr.
... of people this expression 'the Soul' has become overfamiliar by constant repetition, and conveys little more than the suggestion of a myth, or the hint of an Imaginary Existence. Now there is nothing in the whole Universe so REAL as the Vital Germ of the actual Form and Being of the living, radiant, active Creature within each one of ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... one question, and exerting all his skill and pertinacity, Saunders succeeded in convincing the court that the Hard Cash was a myth: a pure chimera. The defendant's case looked up; for there are many intelligent ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... vine-leaves, sometimes muffled in skins against the cold, sometimes in the dress of a monk, but always with a strong impress of real character and incident from the veritable streets' of the town itself. From this strange design Mr. Pater has fashioned a curious mediaeval myth of the return of Dionysus among men, a myth steeped in colour and passion and old romance, full of wonder and full of worship, Denys himself being half animal and half god, making the world mad with a new ecstasy of living, stirring the artists simply by his visible presence, drawing the marvel ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... probably Italy, and India almost for a certainty, draws the superfluous imagination. One's aunts have been to Rome; and every one has an uncle who was last heard of—poor man—in Rangoon. He will never come back any more. But it is the governesses who start the Greek myth. Look at that for a head (they say)—nose, you see, straight as a dart, curls, eyebrows—everything appropriate to manly beauty; while his legs and arms have lines on them which indicate a perfect degree of development— the Greeks ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... popular legend which tells how a lover, when trying to gather some of these blossoms for his sweetheart, fell into a deep pool, and threw a bunch on the bank, calling out, as he sank forever from her sight, "Forget me not." Another dismal myth sends its hero forth seeking hidden treasure caves in a mountain, under the guidance of a fairy. He fills his pockets with gold, but not heeding the fairy's warning to "forget not the best"—i.e., the myosotis—he is crushed by the closing together of the mountain. Happiest of all is the folk-tale ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... surcingle—one of the long thick straps that keep all firm on a pack-horse—was buckled through the pulley, and the Maluka crossed first, just to test its safety. It was safe enough; but as he was dragged through the water most of the way, the pleasantness of "getting across" on the wire proved a myth. ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... 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 of the "True Love," just at her lover's wedding, is common in the Marchen of the world, and occurs in a Romaic ballad, as well as in many from Northern Europe. The "local colour"—the Moor or Saracen—is derived from Crusading times, perhaps. Motherwell ...
— A Collection of Ballads • Andrew Lang
... apportioned them among certain families—in short, he gave these oases their present shape, and did his work so well that up to this day no one has been able to suggest any improvements or to quarrel with his arrangement. The story interested me; it may be a variant of the old Hercules myth—it shows how much the Arabs, with their veneration for past heroes and prophets, and their sterile distrust in the possibility of any kind of progress, ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... of the library. He may, for example, be profoundly convinced of the truth of the Christian religion; and he is called on, we will suppose, for books attacking Christianity, like Thomas Paine's "Age of Reason," or Robert G. Ingersoll's lectures on "Myth and Miracle." It is his simple duty to supply the writers asked for, without comment, for in a public library, Christian and Jew, Mahometan and Agnostic, stand on the same level of absolute equality. The library has the Koran, and the Book of Mormon, as well ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... said, glancing up at the young man who was watching me as I read. "But you say this cell has never been found. I should say its existence was a myth, and, of course, the curse on the soul of the first-born to keep the door shut as warder is absurd. Matter ...
— A Master of Mysteries • L. T. Meade
... and LXXX; also page 363 for the reasons operating against emigration. Mr. J. Russell Kennedy, of Kokusai-Reuter, declared (1921) that it was "a myth that Japan must find an outlet for surplus population; Japan has plenty of room within her own border," that is, including Korea and Formosa as well as Hokkaido in Japan. Mr. S. Yoshida, Secretary of the Japanese Embassy in London, in an address also delivered in 1921, ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... incrustations, which had at first the appearance of the effigies of lizards crawling along the main figure. It was supposed that these reptiles were intended to embody the idea of malevolent spirits, and that the piece of sculpture might have been designed to represent a myth, probably in reference to the machinations of the infernal world. But, upon a closer inspection, it was found that these tiny figures represented pigmy knights in armor, scrambling, as it were, up the massive figure. One appears ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, Jan-Mar, 1890 • Various
... Testament: and, as if that were not enough, proceeded to bury them in the huge absurdities of the Rabbinical traditions; the Christians, in like manner, corrupted the yet purer truths, which these writers affirm Christianity teaches, with what they also affirm to be the load of myth, fiction, false history, and monstrous doctrine, which make up nine tenths of the New Testament: and, as if that were not enough, proceeded, just as did the Jews, to "expand" the New Testament itself into the worse than Rabbinical traditions of the Papacy! From approximate ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... later writers. Although some of the Greek writers made Busiris an Egyptian king and a successor of Menes, about the sixtieth of the series, and the builder of Thebes, those better informed by the Egyptians rejected him altogether. Various esoterical explanations were given of the myth, and the name not found as a king was recognized as that of the tomb of Osiris. Busiris is here probably an earlier and less accurate Graecism than Osiris for the name of the Egyptian god Usiri, like Bubastis, Buto, for the goddesses Ubasti and Uto. Busiris, Bubastis, Buto, more strictly represent ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... the sense of the universal in the whole.... And as it laid great stress upon the letter in the book of nature, it fell into polytheism. The particular symbol of the divine, or of the Godhead, became a myth of some special deity."—Lange's "Bible-work," Genesis, ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... surprising skill which Jonson, author of such plays, showed in devising the court masks, daintily unsubstantial creations of moral allegory, classical myth, and Teutonic folklore, is rendered less surprising, perhaps, by the lack in the masks of any very great lyric quality. There is no lyric quality at all in the greater part of his non-dramatic verse, though there is an occasional ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... chief, a sulky good-for-nothing; would not have him again at any price; besides the usual wages, tobacco, food, etc., he demanded extra to support his wife during his absence. The wife, I found, was a myth. ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton
... traditions point to the distant land of their appearance in this world as being in the far northwest; from, there they were accompanied by [A]h-ai-[u]-ta and M[a]-[a]-s[e]-we. These little gods occupy important positions in Zuni myth and legend. After long journeying, it was decided that the Priest Doctor (K[a] wi-m[o] sa) should send his son and his daughter in advance to discover some favorable spot upon which to build a village. The youth and the maiden finally ascended ...
— The Religious Life of the Zuni Child - Bureau of American Ethnology • (Mrs.) Tilly E. (Matilda Coxe Evans) Stevenson
... Myth and legend invest every turn and footfall of the Eternal City, and there are few that are not founded on what the church has always called supernatural manifestations, but which the new age is learning to recognize as occurrences ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... summer lighting, illumines, but does not destroy. She knows and implies that he is not only this. But she greets the light, no matter to what darkness it be allied. She reverences the god who forms one half of him, so long as the monster which constitutes the other, remains out of sight; a poetic myth is made to illustrate this feeling. The gravity, however, is short-lived. The lower self in Aristophanes springs up again, and ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... pilgrim, as given by Sir Walter from Mr. Train's memoranda, needs no addition. About Old Mortality's son, John, who went to America in 1776 (? 1774), and settled in Baltimore, a curious romantic myth has gathered. Mr. Train told Scott more, as his manuscript at Abbotsford shows, than Scott printed. According to Mr. Train, John Paterson, of Baltimore, had a son Robert and a daughter Elizabeth. Robert married an American ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... Stream, once a myth, still a mystery, the strange current of human existence bears each and all of us with a strong, steady sweep from the tropic lands of sunny childhood, enameled with verdure and gaudy with bloom, through the temperate regions of manhood and womanhood, fruitful ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... rear rank was closed up, and joined in the fusilade. One effect was to paralyse the deer and birds within range. I noticed that the tip-filed bullets did not usually spread, and that their man-stopping quality was something of a myth. Even the dum-dum does not invariably "set up" on striking an object. For the Omdurman Campaign a new hollow-nosed bullet was issued for the Lee-Metfords. So far as I was able to judge, it generally spread on hitting, and made a deadly wound, tearing away bone and flesh ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh
... existed. And this is a disputed point; for while there are those, like Father Colgan, whose clear faith accepts Saint Patrick just as he stands in history and tradition, yet, on the other hand, there are sceptics, like Ledwick, who contend that the saint is nothing but a prehistoric myth, floating about in the ...
— Saint Patrick - 1887 • Heman White Chaplin |
