"Olympian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... celebrate great events—the Trojan war, the founding of Rome, the loss of Paradise—and bring before us a large number of heroes, divinities, and angels. The "Iliad" is made up chiefly of battle scenes, in which mighty heroes and Olympian deities take part. AEneas is the hero of the "AEneid"; but back of the tribulations through which he passes, we recognize the agency of contending divinities. And in "Paradise Lost" Milton introduces the mighty beings of heaven and hell. The ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... reply gives the least hint that condescension had been displayed. He is wholly unruffled, distant, objective. There is also a quiet tone of finality, almost the tone one might use in gently but firmly correcting a child. The Olympian impertinence of the Thoughts had struck out of Lincoln the first flash of that approaching masterfulness by means of which he was to ride out successfully such furious storms. Seward was too much the man of the ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... monsieur," said Mousqueton, smiling. "Thursday, Olympian pleasures. Ah, monsieur, that is superb! We get together all monseigneur's young vassals, and we make them throw the disc, wrestle, and run races. Monseigneur can't run now, no more can I; but monseigneur throws the ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... might fail and call down upon them the implacable and destructive forces that could ruin them body and soul forever. For this, plainly expressed, was the form in which his terror attacked him when he thought about it. Skale was tempting the Olympian powers to crush him. ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood
... Charge past them like lightning. The Irish mare gave a rush and got alongside of him; the King would have done the same, but Cecil checked him and kept him in that cool, swinging canter which covered the grassland so lightly; Bay Regent's vast thundering stride was Olympian, but Jimmy Delmar saw his worst foe in the "Guards' Crack," and waited on ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... its "machines," its catalogue of the forces, its funeral games, has contributed more than the Odyssey to the common pattern of manufactured epics. But the essence of the poem is not to be found among the Olympians. Achilles refusing the embassy or yielding to Priam has no need of the Olympian background. The poem is in a great degree independent of "machines"; its life is in the drama of the characters. The source of all its variety is the imagination by which the characters are distinguished; the liveliness and variety of the characters bring with ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... forgotten to despatch Concho on his usual fool's errand, or he is himself lying helpless in some ditch. Was there ever a girl so persecuted? With a father wrapped in mystery, a lover nameless and shrouded in the obscurity of some Olympian height, and her only confidant and messenger a Bacchus instead of a Mercury! Heigh ho! And in another hour Don Juan—he told me I might call him John—will be waiting for me outside the convent wall! What if Diego fails me? To go there alone would be madness! Who else would ...
— Two Men of Sandy Bar - A Drama • Bret Harte
... passage above cited, by assigning the different incidents, which have doubtless caused an intelligent woman to falter in her judgment, to their proper place in the order of time. For as, during the Olympian contests, swift-footed Spartan boys, to typify the transmission of Truth, ran with a lighted torch, and, as each fell breathless, another took up the flambeau and bore it on, bright and rapid, to the goal, so should the light of History be passed steadily and ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... Olympian god, more familiar even than the thunderbolt, is the eagle. AEschylus calls this bird "the winged hound of Zeus." This conception of the poet ruled in art as well as in literature. It was the popular ...
— The New England Magazine Volume 1, No. 6, June, 1886, Bay State Monthly Volume 4, No. 6, June, 1886 • Various
... religious practice, the Parthians were, naturally, tolerant of a variety of creeds among their subjects. Fire altars were maintained, and Zoroastrian zeal was allowed to nourish in the dependent kingdom of Persia. In the Greek cities the Olympian gods were permitted to receive the veneration of thousands, while in Babylon, Nearda, and Nisibis the Jews enjoyed the free exercise of their comparatively pure and elevated religion. No restrictions seem to have been placed on proselytism, and Judaism certainly ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 6. (of 7): Parthia • George Rawlinson
... apart, aloof from his comrades on the beach of the grey sea, gazing across the boundless main; he stretched forth his hands and prayed instantly to his dear mother: "Mother, seeing thou didst of a truth bear me to so brief span of life, honour at the least ought the Olympian to have granted me, even Zeus that thundereth on high; but now doth he not honour me, no, not one whit. Verily Atreus' son, wide-ruling Agamemnon, hath done me dishonour; for he hath taken away my meed of honour and keepeth her ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer (Lang, Leaf, Myers trans.)
... I returned to the station and saw how very lovely the country was, how fertile—the rounded mountains, when cleared of their royal forests, arable to their very summits, the air like Olympian nectar, the sunshine a divine balm, the whole scene a Sabbath-land of peace and of boundless plenty, awaiting only the cohorts of the North and of the white-cliffed isle—I would fain have cried, "Come, ye moderately ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... Asinus scenting the joke, and determined to revenge himself, does the same joyfully. Jacques sighs, Sir Asinus laughs. Jacques directs an Olympian frown at his opponent, but Sir ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous
... come only once in a lifetime. There were pipes and there were kilts! (I didn't suppose they ever really wore them outside of the theatre!) When you have seen the kilts swinging, Salemina, you will never be the same woman afterwards! You never expected to see the Olympian gods walking, did you? Perhaps you thought they always sat on practicable rocks and made stiff gestures, from the elbow, as they do in the Wagner operas? Well, these gods walked, if you can call the inspired gait a walk! If there is a ...
— Penelope's Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... life here above all things. Four months have slipped away in this Olympian calm, between the sea and the sky, and I fancy that the New Forest is the Highlands; but it is time to be up and doing, and next week I return to London, with a large stock of health and ...
— Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, C.B., D.C.L. - In Two Volumes. VOL. II. • John Knox Laughton
... "Sestiad." From the Platonists and Epicureans of Renaissance Italy our greatest dramatists learned that cheerful and serious love of life, that solemn and manly facing of death, that sense of the finiteness of man, the inexhaustibleness of nature, which shines out in such grand, paganism, with such Olympian serenity, as of the bent brows and smiling lips of an antique Zeus, in Shakespeare, in Marlowe, in Beaumont and Fletcher, even in the sad and savage Webster. But with the abstract, with the imbibed modes of thought and feeling, with the imitated forms, the Elizabethans brought back from Italy ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... When the Olympian Games were held in Sweden, and all the champion athletes of the world took part, it was the ambition of each to win one event, or even to run one-two-three in it. There were five events in the Pentathlon and ten in the Decathlon. Jim ...
— Injun and Whitey to the Rescue • William S. Hart
... him that order always existed in his class-room. I do not remember that he ever addressed me in language; at the least sign of unrest his eye would fall on me and I was quelled. Such a feat is comparatively easy in a small class; but I have misbehaved in smaller classes and under eyes more Olympian than Fleeming Jenkin's. He was simply a man from whose reproof one shrank; in manner the least buckramed of mankind, he had, in serious moments, an extreme dignity of goodness. So it was that he obtained a power over the most insubordinate of students, but a power of which ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... had descended upon him this afternoon that especial ecstasy that is surrendered once and again by the gods to men to lead them, maybe, into some especial blunder or to sharpen, for Olympian humour, the contrast ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... inroads upon the vitality of the race from two directions. We preserve the feeble and extirpate the strong. He who, in view of this amazing folly can believe in a constant, even slow, progress of the human race toward perfection ought to be happy. He has a mind whose Olympian heights are inaccessible—the Titans of fact can never scale them to ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... end of the school-room. I rose and threaded my way through two lines of boys, who put out their legs to trip me up in my passage through their ranks; and surmounting all difficulties, found myself within three feet of the master's high desk, or pulpit, from which he looked down upon me like the Olympian Jupiter ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... or fertility. This explains many things in the Priest's first speech, in the attitude of the Chorus, and in Oedipus' own language after the discovery. It partly explains the hostility of Apollo, who is not a mere motiveless Destroyer but a true Olympian crushing his Earth-born rival. And in the same way the peculiar royalty of Jocasta, which makes Oedipus at times seem not the King but the Consort of the Queen, brings her near to that class of consecrated ...
— Oedipus King of Thebes - Translated into English Rhyming Verse with Explanatory Notes • Sophocles
... generalship of Napoleon, and put her into a room in which every arrangement is conducive to physical discomfort, and even such a paragon will fail of attaining that ideal of happy order which she aims to realize in her children's reading room. The temper even of an Olympian is not proof ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... unable to lift this proud capital out of the mud and mire of mediaeval ignorance and superstition. The established religion is the narrowest and most intolerant form of Romanism. Mountains usually have a more elevating, religious influence than monotonous plains. The Olympian mythology of the Greek was far superior to the beastly worship on the banks of the Nile. And yet at the very feet of glorious Chimborazo and Pichincha we see a nation bowing down to little images of the rudest ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... TEMPEST and TWELFTH NIGHT follow. These are what I mean by poetry and nature. I make an effort of my mind to be quite one with Moliere, except upon the stage, where his inimitable JEUX DE SCENE beggar belief; but you will observe they are stage-plays - things AD HOC; not great Olympian debauches of the heart and fancy; hence more perfect, and not so great. Then I come, after great wanderings, to Carmosine and to Fantasio; to one part of La Derniere Aldini (which, by the by, we might dramatise in a week), to the notes that Meredith has found, Evan and the ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... "discovered playing chess with Ferdinand" in Prospero's cell, (an early instance of "discovered mate,") the numberless Mirandas of Romance have played for and been played for mates. Chess has even its Mythology,—Caissa being now, we believe, generally received at the Olympian Feasts. True, some one has been wicked enough to observe that all chess-stories are divisible into two classes,—in one a man plays for his own soul with the Devil, in the other the hero plays and wins a wife,—and to beg for a chess-story minus wives and devils; but such grumblers ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... heaven! I was thrown into great trepidation by the stupendous event, and eagerly inquired if Madam herself was in her carriage, and was immensely relieved to learn she was not; for, unspeakably gratifying as such condescension, such an Olympian compliment, would have been under other circumstances, I should have felt it more than offset by the mortification of knowing that she knew, that her own eyes had beheld, the very humble quarter in which a lack of means had compelled me ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... like a festal bower or arch, to entertain him a single day. Happier, if he know the solemnity of that relation and honor its law! He who offers himself a candidate for that covenant comes up, like an Olympian, to the great games where the first-born of the world are the competitors. He proposes himself for contests where Time, Want, Danger, are in the lists, and he alone is victor who has truth enough in his constitution to preserve the delicacy of his beauty from the wear and tear of all these. ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... let vs altogether to our Troopes, And giue them leaue to flye, that will not stay: And call them Pillars that will stand to vs: And if we thriue, promise them such rewards As Victors weare at the Olympian Games. This may plant courage in their quailing breasts, For yet is hope of Life and Victory: Foreslow no longer, make we ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... occasion ladies will go for the sake of seeing the king," said Lucian. "The Olympian gymnastic society, which has undertaken the direction of the part of the assault that is to show off the prowess of our civilians, expects what they call a ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... about, living in great comfort at the expense of the Christians, until at last they quarrelled in consequence, Lucian thinks, of his eating some forbidden food. Finally, Peregrinus ended his career by throwing himself into the flames of a funeral pile during the Olympian games. An earthquake is said to have taken place at the time; a vulture flew out from the pile crying out with a human voice; and, shortly after, Peregrinus rose again and appeared clothed in white raiment, unhurt ...
— A Reply to Dr. Lightfoot's Essays • Walter R. Cassels
... and this was odd, A sort of new Olympian god; And when the wise, who watched his whim, Sighed, "Have the gods demented him? Quem deus vult, et cetera" he Was just as mad as mad could be; And, just like other angry boys, Kicked over tables, smashed his toys, And ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, March 26, 1892 • Various
... various sectarian houses, the mood of which is doubtless reverent—though all the while the rippling water beckons to the high and dry canoes, and a gathering of many-tinted clouds is summoned in the windy west to tingle with Olympian laughter and Universal song. How much more wisely (if I may talk in Greek terms for the moment) the gods take Sunday, than their followers on this ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... Shelley's mind to the end, and made him rebellious against everything bearing the paternal name. He assailed the Father of the Hebrew theocracy with amazing bitterness, and joined Prometheus in cursing and dethroning Zeus, the Olympian usurper. With him, tyrant and father were synonymous, and he has drawn the old Cenci, in the play of that name, with the same fierce, unfilial pencil, dipped in blood and wormwood. Shelley was by nature, self-instruction, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... asked a very great lady, whose gracious manner was never disturbed, who floated through the endless complications of her life with smiling serenity, how she achieved this Olympian calm. She was good enough to explain. "I make a list of what I want to do each day. Then, as I find my day passing, or I get behind, or tired, I throw over every other engagement. I could have done them all with hurry and fatigue. I prefer to do one-half and enjoy what I do. If I go to a house, ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... with all her appearance and manner. Lothair thought he had never seen any one or any thing so serene; the serenity, however, not of humbleness, nor of merely conscious innocence; it was not devoid of a degree of majesty; what one pictures of Olympian repose. And the countenance was Olympian: a Phidian face, with large gray eyes and dark lashes; wonderful hair, abounding without art, and ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... pleasure bland Spreading o'er the Thunderer's face, When the sound climbs near his seat, The Olympian council sees; As he lets his lax right hand, Which the lightnings doth embrace, Sink upon his mighty knees. And the eagle, at the beck Of the appeasing, gracious harmony, Droops all his sheeny, brown, deep-feather'd neck, Nestling nearer to Jove's ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... but occasionally turned her head to see if she could get a glimpse of the Olympian creature who as the coachman had truly observed, hardly ever descended from her clouds into the Tempe of the parishioners. But she could discern nothing of the lady. She also looked for Miss Melbury and Winterborne. The nose of their horse sometimes came quite near the back of Mrs. ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... of the sun the need of sleep began to afflict him. He had thought he never would need sleep again. His paddle became leaden in his hands, and Olympian yawns prostrated him. ...
— The Fur Bringers - A Story of the Canadian Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... may likeliest find Truce to his restless thoughts, and entertain The irksome hours, till his great Chief return. Part on the Plain, or in the Air sublime Upon the wing, or in swift race contend, As at th' Olympian Games or Pythian fields; 530 Part curb thir fierie Steeds, or shun the Goal With rapid wheels, or fronted Brigads form. As when to warn proud Cities warr appears Wag'd in the troubl'd Skie, and Armies rush To Battel in the Clouds, before each Van Pric forth the Aerie Knights, and couch thir ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... Styx Coffee and Repartee Mollie and the Unwiseman Worsted Man; A Musical Play for Amateurs The Enchanted Typewriter Ghosts I Have Met Mrs. Raffles Olympian Nights R. Holmes & Co. And Many ...
— Alice in Blunderland - An Iridescent Dream • John Kendrick Bangs
... Constantinople, to the Revival of Learning, ere we can find a fitting parallel to match the importance of this recent find. Not since the spade of the excavator uncovered from its shroud of earth the flawless beauty of the Olympian Hermes has such a delightful acquisition been made to our knowledge of Greek literature. The name of Professor Lachsyrma has long been one to conjure with, and all of us should experience pleasure (where surprise in his case is out of ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... that, when, in 1830, Klenze was called upon to prepare plans for the grand Walhalla of Bavaria, he had remembered his sublime theory and worked up to its spirit, instead of recalling the Parthenon in his exterior and the Olympian temple of Agrigentum in his interior. The last effort of this distinguished artist was the building of three superb palaces for the museum of the Emperor at St. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... worshipped, their share in the bargain with humanity, a bargain to be kept on their side if they expected tribute of lambs and piglings, of hallowed cakes and vervain wreaths. Very little of what we call devotion seasons them. In two Odes (I, ii, xii), from a mere litany of Olympian names he passes to a much more earnest deification of Augustus. Another (III, xix) is a grace to Bacchus after a wine-bout. Or Faunus is bidden to leave pursuing the nymphs (we think of Elijah's sneer at Baal) and to attend to his duties on the Sabine farm, of blessing the soil and protecting ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... remember in studying any of the myths of Greece is, that we have here a composite and not a simple system of thought and imagination. There are always at least two layers: the primitive, and the Olympian which came later. The primitive conceptions were those afforded by the worship of ghosts, of dead persons, and of animals. Miss Jane Harrison has pointed out in great detail the primitive elements which lingered on through the Olympian worship. Perhaps the most striking ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... seemed more Olympian than the psalm in spiritual strains of the Hebrew bard. So I send my answer in a commonplace letter. Poor return, is ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... his talents and his drachmas at the game of Palamedes, or else it may be that he is disappointed at not having won the prize at the Olympian games. He had great faith in ...
— King Candaules • Theophile Gautier
... their interest and millennial habit to secure control of every important religious movement and to incorporate rather than suppress. And this incorporation is more than mere recognition: the parvenu god borrows something from the manners and attributes of the olympian society to which he is introduced. The greater he grows, the more considerable is the process of fusion and borrowing. Hindu philosophy ever seeks for the one amongst the many and popular thought, in a more confused way, pursues the same goal. It combines and identifies its ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... misguided counthry, I wint out to give a few raw rahs f'r me fellow colleejens, who was attimptin' to dimonsthrate their supeeryority over th' effete scholars iv England at what I see be th' pa-apers is called th' Olympian games. Ye get to th' Olympian games be suffocation in a tunnel. Whin ye come to, ye pay four shillin's or a dollar in our degraded currency, an' stand in th' sun an' look at th' Prince iv Wales. Th' Prince iv Wales looks at ye, too, but he don't ...
— Mr. Dooley's Philosophy • Finley Peter Dunne
... all their national poets. The wild enthusiasm that greeted his verse has never passed away, and he has generally been regarded in Russia as one of the great poets of the world. Yet Matthew Arnold announced in his Olympian manner, "The Russians have not yet had a great poet."* It is always difficult fully to appreciate poetry in a foreign language, especially when the language is so strange as Russian. It is certain that no modern European tongue ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... to De Launay or mademoiselle, the high gods must have laughed in irony as old Jim Banker raved and flung his hands toward their Olympian fastness. ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... the dread decree of Jove Your child is doomed to be eternal Queen [24] Of Tartarus,—nor may she dare ascend The sunbright regions of Olympian Jove, Or tread the green Earth 'mid attendant nymphs. Proserpine, call to mind your walk last eve, When as you wandered in Elysian groves, Through bowers for ever green, and mossy walks, Where flowers never die, nor wind disturbs The sacred calm, whose silence soothes the dead, Nor interposing ...
— Proserpine and Midas • Mary Shelley
... present day, how much more must it have been so before the invention of printing, at a time when it was more usual to listen to books read aloud than to read them oneself? Plutarch journeyed to Rome just as Herodotus went to Athens, or as he is said to have gone to the Olympian festival, in search of an intelligent audience of educated men. Whether his object was merely praise, or whether he was influenced by ideas of gain, we cannot say. No doubt his lectures were not delivered gratis, and that they were well attended seems evident ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... own love in excelsis, to imagine what aspect it might have worn, if it had been its destiny to deny itself at some heroic call, and to confront with nobleness an extreme emergency, and to be victor (as Plato has it) in an Olympian contest of the soul. For, indeed, the "fervent, not ungovernable, love," which is the ideal that Protesilaus is sent to teach, is on a great scale the same affection which we have been considering ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... deliver urbi et orbi, "Here I reign more tranquilly than at Lahore"? Perhaps but for this immortal analytical study, archaeologists might begin to puzzle their heads about him five hundred years hence, and set about writing quartos with plates (like M. Quatremere's work on Olympian Jove) to prove that Napoleon was something of a Sofi in the East before he became "Emperor of the French." Well, the wealthy shop laid siege to the poor little entresol; and after a bombardment with banknotes, entered and took possession. The Human Comedy gave way before the comedy ...
— Gaudissart II • Honore de Balzac
... happened in 425, while he himself preferred to connect it with an event of 453. The inscription on the pedestal is indecisive on this point. It runs in these terms: "The Messenians and Naupactians dedicated [this statue] to the Olympian Zeus, as a tithe [of the spoils] from their enemies. Paeonius of Mende made it; and he was victorious [over his competitors] in making the acroteria for the temple." The later of the two dates mentioned ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... of James Otis' and Sam Adams' influence," as Governor Hutchinson wrote to Lord Dartmouth, "was the town meeting, that Olympian ...
— James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist • John Clark Ridpath
... that earlier half-hour in the garden now breathed a portentous air. He was with the Gods ... there on the Olympian heights he drank with them, he sang songs with them, with mighty voices they applauded "Reuben Hallard." He drank in his excitement many whiskies and sodas and soon the white room with its books was like the inside of a golden shell. The old man opposite him grew in size—his face was ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... impostors—disgusting frauds. A feature like that would be a doubtful thing to try in any cultured atmosphere. The thought of associating, ever so remotely, those three old bummers which he had conjured up with the venerable and venerated Emerson, Longfellow, and Holmes, the Olympian trinity, seems ghastly enough to-day, and must have seemed even more so then. But Clemens, dazzled by the rainbow splendor of his conception, saw in it only a rare colossal humor, which would fairly lift ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... road, the solitary journey by land and sea, the doubtful welcome at home. And here by her side stood the wealthy lover, the very embodiment of protecting power—is not every girl's first lover in her eyes as Olympian Jove?—eager to take upon himself the burden of her life, to ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... fame of the Olympian Jupiter has reached, Phidias[98] is looked upon, beyond all doubt, as the most famous of artists; but to let those who have never seen his works know how deservedly he is esteemed, we will take this opportunity of adducing a few slight proofs of the genius which ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume II (of X) - Rome • Various
... condolence, his congratulation;—hopes withal that his sons and he will be continued in their old posts, and that he, the Old Dessauer, "will have the same authority as in the late reign." Friedrich's eyes, at this last clause, flash out tearless, strangely Olympian. "In your posts I have no thought of making change: in your posts, yes;—and as to authority, I know of none there can be but what resides in the King that is sovereign!" Which, as it were, struck the breath out of the Old ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. X. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—At Reinsberg—1736-1740 • Thomas Carlyle
... the last, splendescent as god of Olympus. When for ten minutes already the fourwheel had stood at the gateway; He, like a god, came leaving his ample Olympian chamber."—pp. 5, 6. ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... Then, with baskets, we sally out; I taking the middle rank, and the children the outer spray of boughs. Even now we gather those only which drop at the touch; these, in a brimming saucer, with golden Alderney cream and a soupcon of powdered sugar, are Olympian nectar; they melt before the tongue can measure their full soundness, and seem to be mere bloated bubbles ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... School children in Ceylon are compelled to study a long and unfamiliar list of errors in English speech current only in the London streets, in order to identify and correct them on the Oxford papers, distributed with Olympian impartiality to all parts of the Empire. Such insularity of mind seems to justify Bernard Shaw's description of Britain as an island whose natives regard its manners and customs as laws of nature. Yet ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... foreknowledge, it misses the specifically dramatic effect of the scenes. The author invites it to play at blind-man's-buff with the characters, instead of unsealing its eyes and enabling it to watch the game from its Olympian coign of vantage. ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... with the most urban-like courtesy and affability. From noon till dark, the time is spent in conversation, continued, various, and eloquent. What a presence is there in this humble, unpretending cottage! And as the stream of Olympian sweetness moves on, now in laughing ripples, and again in a solemn majestic flood, what a past do we bring before ourselves! what a present! For this is he that talked with Coleridge, that was the friend of Wilson,—and—what furnishes ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Majesty moves, for a mean and a measure Of motion, — not faster than dateless Olympian leisure Might pace with unblown ample garments from pleasure to pleasure, — The wave-serrate sea-rim sinks unjarring, unreeling, Forever revealing, revealing, revealing, Edgewise, bladewise, halfwise, wholewise, — 'tis done! Good-morrow, lord Sun! With several ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... His coat of glossy velvet was lined with gold lace. His flowing sleeves and ruffled cuffs gave grace to all the movements of his arms and hands. Immense wigs adorned his brow with almost the dignity of Olympian Jove. A glittering rapier, with its embossed and jewelled scabbard, ...
— Peter Stuyvesant, the Last Dutch Governor of New Amsterdam • John S. C. Abbott
... Garrulity," "On Love," and thank anew the art of printing, and the cheerful domain of ancient thinking. Plutarch charms by the facility of his associations; so that it signifies little where you open his book, you find yourself at the Olympian tables. His memory is like the Isthmian Games, where all that was excellent in Greece was assembled, and you are stimulated and recruited by lyric verses, by philosophic sentiments, by the forms and behavior of heroes, by the worship ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... as emporia at the mouths of the Tiber and Po. The cities we have just named are those which appear as holding primitive religious intercourse with Greece. The first of all barbarians to present gifts to the Olympian Zeus was the Tuscan king Arimnus, perhaps a ruler of Ariminum. Spina and Caere had their special treasuries in the temple of the Delphic Apollo, like other communities that had regular dealings with the shrine; and the sanctuary at Delphi, as well as the Cumaean oracle, is interwoven ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... adversaries, among which was a force in the valley of Big Sandy, supposed to be advancing on Paris, Kentucky. General Nelson at Maysville was instructed to collect all the men he could, and Colonel Gill's regiment of Ohio Volunteers. Colonel Harris was already in position at Olympian Springs, and a regiment lay at Lexington, which I ordered to his support. This leaves the line of Thomas's operations exposed, but I cannot help it. I explained so fully to yourself and the Secretary of War the condition of things, that I can add ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... the government should consider themselves as runners in the Olympian games, and never seek to trip, jostle, harass or annoy a rival, but run the race squarely and fairly, satisfied to be beaten if the other is the stronger and better man. An unfair victory gains only ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... so. They had their revenge, however, for weary of plaguing puny mortals, who whimpered and cried when they saw they could not escape, the inevitable Nemesis turned her attention from actors to spectators, and made a clean sweep of the whole Olympian hierarchy. She smashed their altars, pulled down their statues, and after she had completed her malicious work, found that she had, vulgarly speaking, been cutting off her nose to spite her face, for she, too, became an object of derision and of disbelief, ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... song! And nobler bays, In old Olympian golden days Of clamor thro' the clear-eyed morn, No bowed triumphant head hath borne, Victorious ...
— In Divers Tones • Charles G. D. Roberts
... at Olympian Springs, Bath County, Kentucky, flakes of a substance that looked like beef fell from the sky—"from a clear sky." We'd like to emphasize that it was said that nothing but this falling substance was visible in the sky. It fell in flakes of various sizes; ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... two centuries of canonization of the Condes, it has now become the fashion to denigrate them to an equal excess. The traditional figure of the Grand Conde, Olympian and sublime, has been exposed by pitiless documentary evidence. La Bruyere's latest and most learned editor, M. Emile Magne, gives a terrible picture of the Prince's meanness and dirtiness; Harpagon in an ostler's jacket, he calls him, en souquenille. But to dwell on all this is to forget ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... that composure is perhaps the most remarkable of his many qualities. In the midst of a Cabinet crisis he would hand you a postage-stamp as though it were the sole matter that concerned him. But it is also said by his intimates that he has possibilities of Olympian wrath which almost frighten people. He was certainly roused to a passion by Lord Randolph—very much to the advantage and delight of the House of Commons; for during the earlier portion of the evening, and especially ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... in those days to reckon by Olympiads, which were periods of four years, the series commencing with a great victory at a foot-race in Greece, won by a man named Coroebus, from which event originated the Olympian games, which were afterward celebrated every four years, and which in subsequent ages became so renowned. The time when Coroebus ran his race, and thus furnished an era for all the subsequent chronologists and historians ...
— Romulus, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... triumphant from the receiving-vault of the Vice-Presidency, where his enemies supposed they had laid him away for good. In ancient days, his midnight dash from Mount Marcy, and his flight by train across New York State to Buffalo, would have become a myth symbolizing the response of a hero to an Olympian summons. If we ponder it well, was it ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... he possesses is not only the most stupendous eloquence ever owned by man. It is profound knowledge of humanity, gathered by a keen and open-eyed Olympian contemplation of all sorts and conditions of men, from the egregious Bottom, and Dogberry the muddled, up to Hamlet and Imogen; it is the broad myriad-minded understanding which feels with every class, and, withal, suffers even fools gladly. His prime value is that he saw—saw life steadily ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... voluntary martyrdom. Meanwhile he despatched letters to many famous cities, containing laws and ordinances; and appointed certain of his companions— under the name of death-messengers—to scatter abroad these missives. Finally, at the close of the Olympian games he erected a funeral pile; and when it was all ablaze, he threw himself into it, and perished in the flames. "There is very strong reason for believing" says Dr. Lightfoot, "that Lucian has drawn ...
— The Ignatian Epistles Entirely Spurious • W. D. (William Dool) Killen
... that no one but he can hear. Mr. George Moore collects every fragment of Irish paganism that the forgetfulness of the Catholic Church has left or possibly her wisdom preserved. There are innumerable persons with eye-glasses and green garments who pray for the return of the maypole or the Olympian games. But there is about these people a haunting and alarming something which suggests that it is just possible that they do not keep Christmas. It is painful to regard human nature in such a light, but it seems ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... will never sit calmly on Olympian heights, as we have become accustomed to represent them to ourselves. The thinker or the artist should suffer in company with the people, in order that he may find salvation or consolation. Besides this, he will suffer because he is always and ...
— What To Do? - thoughts evoked by the census of Moscow • Count Lyof N. Tolstoi
... her Lord's Olympian smile His lotus-loving Memphian lies,— The musky daughter of the Nile With plaited hair ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... speculative powers of man,—the fulfilment of which mission justly entitled him to all the privileges incident to the vantage-ground thus gained,—privileges widely significant in a survey of that field where chiefly these practical powers hold their Olympian supremacy, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... use of the term "barbarism" is not merely rhetorical nor cheap invective. It is exact. One of the Olympian jests of this world tragedy has been the passionate verbal battles over the claims of respective "Kulturs" to the favor of survival. Why deny that the barbarian can have a very superior form of "Kultur" and yet remain a barbarian in soul? These pages on the German lesson are a tribute to Germany's ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... purer realms above: Their father is the Olympian Jove. Ne'er shall oblivion veil their front sublime, Th' indwelling god is great, nor ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... said the Stranger, and he laughed a little too, even if he was a philosopher, "boys will be boys, and those seem two fine strong little fellows of yours. One of these days they'll be competing in the Olympian games, I suppose, and how proud you will be if they should bring home the wreath ...
— The Spartan Twins • Lucy (Fitch) Perkins
... drifted from one to the other is also still to be evaluated. Did it show a certain slackness, a certain aimlessness, at the bottom of his nature? Had it, in a way, some sort of analogy—to compare homespun with things Olympian—to the vein of frivolity in the great Caesar? One is tempted to think so. Surely, here was one of those natures which need circumstance to compel them to greatness and which are not foredoomed, Napoleon-like, to seize greatness. Without encroaching upon the biographical ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... Clarice felt this way about Hartman's coming; she has not waked up so, or come down from her Olympian clouds of indifference, in a long time. But still I thought it best to go around and make some more preparations. When I have a secret to carry, it oppresses my frank and open nature more than you would think; and I find that I can ...
— A Pessimist - In Theory and Practice • Robert Timsol
... feeblest plot, in fact a mere apology for a story, and contains more passages which seem unfinished, and what on a second reading would scarce have satisfied their own writer. 'Guy Livingstone,' though not faultless, is a work of power, talent, and brilliancy. Guy himself is an Olympian character, sketched upon the scale and model of a Torso, a giant in his virtues and his vices and his frame—but exaggerated with such tact and ability that even the impossible hugeness charms and fascinates. The feats of the hero in the dance and carpeted salon, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... I knew at Oxford as an undergraduate, and whom I watched and admired to the end of his life, was Matthew Arnold. He was beautiful as a young man, strong and manly, yet full of dreams and schemes. His Olympian manners began even at Oxford; there was no harm in them, they were natural, not put on. The very sound of his voice and the wave of his hand were Jovelike.... Sometimes at public dinners, when he saw himself surrounded by his contemporaries, most of them judges, bishops, and ministers, ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... with some difficulty, the manner which would be correct in their relative positions; accepted the curtsey before stretching out a hand, guaranteed Olympian, to the plains below. "My dear Mrs. Thrale," said she, choking back excitement to chat-point, "I really am more grateful to you than I can say for taking charge of this dear old lady. I was quite at my wits' end what to ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... supreme value of humanity, by ascribing, even to the humblest, the dignity of a child of God. They were accustomed to pray to immortal beings who lived in privileged supremacy and wild revelry at the golden tables of the Olympian banquet; and now they were told that the church of the Christians meant the communion of the faithful with their fatherly God, and with His Son who had mingled with other mortals in the form of man and who ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Nor roam the park, nor tramp the pool Of lucid waters pebble cool, Nor list the satyr's far halloo. Noon, and the glowing hours, seem Mutations of a laboring dream. Yet subject, still, to Jove's decree, That governs, from the Olympian doors, The populous and lonely shores, We do a work of destiny; When any mortal, sorely spent, Girt with the thorns of discontent, Or care, or hapless love, invades, This ancient neighborhood of shades, Our gracious leave is to dispense, Of woods, the slumbrous influence; The ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... Thetis divine, and Peleides the swift-footed answer'd: "So let it be: let a ransom be brought, and the body surrender'd, Since the Olympian minds it in earnest, ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... though offering in its appearance no explanation of its toothsome name—perhaps it was regarded as the drinking cup of the Olympian gods—is one of the most singular of the dark lunar plains in its outlines. At the south it ends in a vast semicircular bay, sixty miles across, which is evidently a half-submerged mountain ring. But submerged by what? Not water, but ...
— Pleasures of the telescope • Garrett Serviss
... Homeric men and the Homeric religion. It starts, after the introductory chapter, with a discussion of the several races then existing in Hellas, including the influence of the Phoenicians and Egyptians. It contains chapters on the Olympian system, with its several deities; on the Ethics and the Polity of the Heroic age; on the geography of Homer; on the characters of the Poems; presenting, in fine, a view of primitive life and primitive society as found in the poems ...
— MacMillan & Co.'s General Catalogue of Works in the Departments of History, Biography, Travels, and Belles Lettres, December, 1869 • Unknown
... therefore, regard the sun as a star, like any other star; and worship should be given, not to those rolling spheres moving across the sky in prescribed paths, but to Him who created them and guides them by fixed laws. I really pity your Apollo and the whole host of the Olympian gods, since the world has become possessed by the mad idea that the gods and daimons may be moved, or even compelled, by forms of prayer and sacrifices and magic arts, to grant to each worshiper the particular thing on which he may have set his ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers |
