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Penelope   /pənˈɛləpi/   Listen
Penelope

noun
1.
(Greek mythology) the wife of Odysseus and a symbol of devotion and fidelity; for 10 years while Odysseus fought the Trojan War she resisted numerous suitors until Odysseus returned and killed them.
2.
A genus of guans (turkey-like arboreal birds valued as game and food birds).  Synonym: genus Penelope.



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"Penelope" Quotes from Famous Books



... the Princess Dowager, with their suite. Among those invited to meet their Serene Highnesses were the French and Spanish Ambassadors, the Duchesse de Vichy, Prince and Princess Bagnidilucca, Lady Penelope Pantiles—" Susy's eye flew impatiently on over the long list of titles—"and Mr. Nicholas Lansing of New York, who has been cruising with Mr. and Mrs. Hicks on the Ibis ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton

... some years Dr. E. Cobham Brewer, best known for his Dictionary of Phrase and Fable; whilst in a house that stood beside the stream lived William—afterwards Sir William—Boothby, the uncle of pretty Penelope, whose white marble tomb is one of the wonders of Ashbourne ...
— The Dukeries • R. Murray Gilchrist

... she will not ask philosophy to release her in order that when released she may deliver herself up again to the thraldom of pleasures and pains, doing a work only to be undone again, weaving instead of unweaving her Penelope's web. But she will calm passion, and follow reason, and dwell in the contemplation of her, beholding the true and divine (which is not matter of opinion), and thence deriving nourishment. Thus she seeks to live while she lives, and after death ...
— Phaedo - The Last Hours Of Socrates • Plato

... he had a job, my gentleman sat withinside tailor-wise and busily stitching. I say, when he had a job; but such customers as came were rather for Secundra, and the Master's sewing would be more in the manner of Penelope's. He could never have designed to gain even butter to his bread by such a means of livelihood: enough for him that there was the name of Durie dragged in the dirt on the placard, and the sometime heir of that proud family set up cross-legged in ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson

... twenty years' absence, in the later half of which an army of suitors pled for her hand, pleading that her husband would never return; but she put them all off by a promise of marriage as soon as she finished a web (called after Penelope's web) she was weaving, which she wove by day and undid at night, till their importunities took a violent form, when her ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... singular project, incited by the current stories of left-handed marriages and loving episodes, as in the case of the Prince of Capua and Miss Penelope Smith, was put into operation by one Sarah Seyton, widow of the Earl of M'Gregor. Her brother, the Honorable Tom Seyton, assisted her to the utmost, fully prepared to aid his sister in matrimonially entangling any crown-wearer whomsoever; ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue

... Vassall had married Penelope, sister of Isaac Royall, the proprietor of the beautiful place at Medford, but upon the beginning of hostilities, this sprightly widow abandoned her spacious home in such haste that she carried along with her, according to tradition, a young companion whom she had ...
— The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees • Mary Caroline Crawford

... Phaeacians are romantic in their tastes, but because it belongs to Odysseus, that the Phaeacian night's entertainment has its place in the Odyssey. The Odyssey is the story of his home-coming, his recovery of his own. The great action of the drama of Odysseus is in his dealings with Penelope, Eumaeus, Telemachus, the suitors. The Phaeacian story is indeed episodic; the interest of those adventures is different from that of the meeting with Penelope. Nevertheless it is all kept in harmony with the stronger part of the poem. It is not pure fantasy and ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker

... bright Osyth, divine strength Parnel, a little stone Patience, bearing up Patricia, noble Patty, becoming batter Paulina, little Paul Pauline, little Paul Paula, little Peace, peace Peggy, pearl Penelope, weaver Pernel, stone Petrina, stone Petronella, stone Phebe, light of life Phemie, fair fame Philadelphia, fraternal Philippa, lover of horses Phillis, a little leaf Phoebe, shining Piety, piety Polly, bitter Portia, of the pigs Priscilla, ancient ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole

... which form the subject of the Odyssey. After twenty years' absence he arrives at length in Ithaca, where he slays the numerous suitors who devoured his substance and contended for the hand of his wife Penelope. ...
— A Smaller History of Greece • William Smith

... "Thus Penelope spake. Then quickly Telemachus sneez'd loud, Sounding around all the building: his mother, with smiles at her son, said, Swiftly addressing her rapid and high-toned words to Eumaeus, {122} 'Go then directly, Eumaeus, and call to my presence ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 197, August 6, 1853 • Various

... from Circe, who had retained me more than a year there near to Gaeta, before Aeneas had so named it, neither fondness for my son, nor piety for my old father, nor the due love that should have made Penelope glad, could overcome within me the ardor that I had to gain experience of the world, and of the vices of men, and of their valor. But I put forth on the deep, open sea, with one vessel only, and with that little company by which I had not been deserted. One ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri

... Mrs. Penelope Carroll and her niece Debby Wilder were whizzing along on their way to a certain gay watering-place, both in the best of humors with each other and all the world beside. Aunt Pen was concocting sundry mild ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various

... about you," he said, "a sort of waiting. Whatever I see you doing, you're not really there: you are waiting—like Penelope when she did her weaving." He could not help a spurt of wickedness. "I'll call you Penelope," ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence

... with the magnificent Pagan, Penelope, who refused the hands of kings, was as true to her love as the star is to the pole, who, after years of waiting, clasped the old wanderer in rags to her heart, her husband, her long-lost Ulysses; yet this Pagan ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton

... alive in the human Hades of Homer, yet cannot well speak, prophecy, or know the living, except they drink blood, wherein is the life of man. And therefore the souls of Penelope's paramours, conducted by Mercury, chirped like bats, and those which followed Hercules, made a noise but like a ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne

... good-bye to his infant son, Telemachus, and to his young wife Penelope, and to his father, old Laertes. And he bade good-bye to his house and his lands and to the island of Ithaka where he was King. He summoned a council of the chief men of Ithaka and commended to their care his wife and his child and all ...
— The Adventures of Odysseus and The Tales of Troy • Padriac Colum

... his own, and thus exposed himself to the cannon-shot which slew him. (2) Being mortally wounded, and receiving a cup of water, he handed it (according to a tradition which is not unquestionable) to a dying soldier. (3) His series of sonnets record his love for Penelope Devereux, sister to the Earl of Essex, who married Lord Rich. She had at one time been promised to Sidney. He wrote the sonnets towards 1581: in 1583 he married another lady, daughter of Sir Francis Walsingham. It has been said that Shelley was wont to make some self-parade in connexion with Sir ...
— Adonais • Shelley

... or why she had thrust herself into their company she did not understand. She had herself but known of this trip on the day before, when Miss Penelope Rhinelander had been obliged to give it up, on account of the extreme illness of ...
— Dorothy's Travels • Evelyn Raymond

... thirteen years before in Livadia, and with whom he now conversed of those times, with a rapidity and freshness of recollection with which the memory of the old bishop could but ill keep pace. Neither did the traditional Baths of Penelope escape his research; and "however sceptical (says a lady, who, soon after, followed his footsteps,) he might have been as to these supposed localities, he never offended the natives by any objection ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore

... him get some horse news that is news. I wouldn't want to have you bounce a young man who's doing the best he can, but it doesn't do a newspaper any good to speak of Dan Patch as a trotting-horse or give the record of my two-year-old filly Penelope O as 2:09-1/4 when she made a clean 2:09. You've got to print facts in a newspaper if you want people to respect it. How about ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson

... standing like that, and I don't remember that we were very unhappy either. It was croquet in our time, and the ladies had not reefed in their skirts quite so taut. What year would it be? Just before the commission of the Penelope." ...
— Beyond the City • Arthur Conan Doyle

... Nature made her,—that Ruth and Naomi could not read, and Boaz probably would never have married into the family had they possessed that accomplishment,—that the Spartan women did not know the alphabet, nor the Amazons, nor Penelope, nor Andromache, nor Lucretia, nor Joan of Arc, nor Petrarch's Laura, nor the daughters of Charlemagne, nor the three hundred and sixty-five wives of Mohammed; but that Sappho and Madame de Maintenon ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson

... Iliad, which tells us of the siege of Troy, and Achilles's quarrel with the kings; and the Odyssey, which tells the wanderings of Odysseus, through many lands for many years; and how Alcinous sent him home at last, safe to Ithaca his beloved island, and to Penelope his faithful wife, and Telemachus his son, and Euphorbus the noble swineherd, and the old dog who licked ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various

... admiral, to repeat Ball's expression, that she arrived barely in time, only a few hours before the event, her absence from which might have resulted in the escape of the enemy, and a just censure upon Nelson. The French ship was sighted first by a frigate, the "Penelope," Captain Blackwood, which hung gallantly upon her quarters, as Nelson in former days had dogged the "Ca Ira" with the "Agamemnon," until the heavier ships could gather round the quarry. The "Guillaume Tell," necessarily intent only on escape from overpowering numbers, could not turn aside to ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. II. (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan

... arithmetic to Love, Hope, and Charity!—of imparting general knowledge to Experience! There were three of this last name, and it was only after a long experience of my own that I learned that the first was called "Pelly," the second, "Exy," and the third, "Sperrence." Penelope was rendered "Pep." ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various

... the nettles from other people's fingers,—and her hard work at her music, she was getting thin. We were all insisting that she must take a vacation this summer, both from teaching and learning; when, all at once, Miss Pennington made up her mind to go to West Point and Lake George, and to take Penelope with her; and she came over and asked Ruth to ...
— We Girls: A Home Story • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney

... to marry Puritan lovers, save the parson. Not till the beginning of the eighteenth century did the Puritan minister assume the function of solemnizing marriages. Gov. Bellingham married himself to Penelope Pelham when he was a short time a widower and forty-nine years old, and his bride but twenty-two. When he was "brought up" for this irregularity he arrogantly and monopolizingly persisted in remaining on the bench to try his own case. "Disorderly ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle

... is mostly war,—men acting hell on earth, as Goethe said. But in the Odyssey the goal of the hero is his home. The magnet is not Helen's beauty, but Penelope's faithfulness. Odysseus, mighty warrior, crafty leader,—who with his sword has smitten the Trojans, by his wiles destroyed their city,—Odysseus is driven for ten years through hostile seas and men and gods by the compelling ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam

... the long wished for lighthouse of Abaco (built by the English) showed her charitable and revolving radiance. But our ship, Penelope-like, undoes by night what she has performed by day, and her course is backward and crabbish. A delicious smell of violets is ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca

... exactly even distances from your horse's head, with the two reins firmly nipped by the thumbs resting on top of the fore-fingers. This is the way recommended in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, in Colonel Dodge's 'Patroclus and Penelope,' and you will see it in many ...
— In the Riding-School; Chats With Esmeralda • Theo. Stephenson Browne

... acrostic verse; and Orchestra, or a poem expressing the antiquity and excellency of dancing, in a dialogue between Penelope and one of her Woers, containing 131 stanzas unfinished. Mr. Wood mentions also epigrams, and a translation of several of King David's Psalms, written by Sir John Davies, ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume I. • Theophilus Cibber

... St. Ronan's Spa and the company at the table-d'hote, he is of course somewhere near the mark,—he was too able a man to fall far short of success in anything he really gave to the world; but it is not interesting. Miss Austen would have made Lady Penelope Penfeather a hundred times as amusing. We turn to Meg Dods and Touchwood, and Cargill, and Captain Jekyl, and Sir Bingo Binks, and to Clara Mowbray,—i. e. to the lives really moulded by large and specific causes, ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton

... India; there are 108 Upanishads (a certain class of mystical Brahmanical sacred literature); 108 rupees is frequently a sum devoted to alms; the rules of the Chinese Triad Society assign 108 blows as the punishment for certain offences;—108, according to Athenaeus, were the suitors of Penelope! I find a Tibetan tract quoted (by Koeppen, II. 284) as entitled, "The Entire Victor over all the 104 Devils," and this is the only example I have met with of 104 as a ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa

... Consuls of each nation drew lots for them. The shortest and weakest fell to the lot of England. The Giraffe destined for our Sovereign was conveyed to Malta, under the charge of two Arabs; and was from thence forwarded to London, in the Penelope merchant vessel, and arrived on the 11th of August. The animal was conveyed to Windsor two days after, in a spacious caravan. The following were its dimensions, as measured shortly after its arrival ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 395, Saturday, October 24, 1829. • Various

... and Irus. Laertes was king of Ithaca and father of Ulysses; Irus, or properly Arnaeus, a beggar who kept watch over Penelope's suitors. Their names are here introduced as typical of the rich and the ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various

... animal instincts attained gigantic proportions in the persons of splendid young athletic despots. Even the names of these Baglioni, Astorre, Lavinia, Zenobia, Atalanta, Troilo, Ercole, Annibale, Ascanio, Penelope, Orazio, and so forth, clash with the sweet mild forms of Perugino, whose very executioners are candidates for Paradise, and kill ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds

... is the tale of Morley Roberts' "Lady Penelope," L. C. Page & Co. The reader spends most of his time, as it were, in the wake of a gaseous motor car. Such audacious defiance of the conventionalities on the part of the heroine, such mystery and scandal as to her matrimonial ventures, such "racing and ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various

... into a dance of the fairies on the banks of the Gwyrfai, near Cwellyn Lake, one moonlit night, and carried off a maiden. She at first refused to wed him, but consented to remain his servant. One evening, however, he overheard two of her kindred speaking of her, and caught her name—Penelope. When she found that he had learnt her name she gave way to grief: evidently she now knew that her fate was sealed. On his importunity being renewed, she at length consented to marry him, but on the condition that ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland

... a man speak to-night in a man's voice. I mean to do that man the best service that I can. These two years at Mequinez cannot mate with these two years at Tangier. Knightley knows nothing now; he never shall know. He believes his wife a second Penelope; he shall keep that belief. There is a trench—you called it very properly a grave. In that trench Knightley will not hear though all Tangier scream its gossip in his ears. I mean to give him ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason

... be foot loose and heart loose themselves, but always after Ulysses is tired of world wandering, he wants to come back and open the barred doors of home with his own private latch-key, and find Penelope knitting stockings for him with her veil ...
— Samantha on the Woman Question • Marietta Holley

... roder about her mother's house, willing to be put on the ranks of suitors, though he knew he might be cast off the next week. If he were like Ulysses in his folly at least, she was in so far like Penelope, that she had a crowd of suitors, and undid day after day and night after night the handiwork of fascination and the web of coquetry with which she was wont to allure ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray

... she is not bought. In times of emergency, she steps to the front and legislates, judges, or fights. It is possible in the pages of the Old Testament to find women doing everything which men can do. Even where the power is not nominally in her own hands, she often, as in the cases of Penelope or Esther, rules by indirection. Her body and her offspring are protected; and the Hebrew woman of the Proverbs shows us a singularly free and secure industrial position.[16] Such was the condition in primitive Judea, in early Greece, in ...
— Woman in Modern Society • Earl Barnes

... need, when her ports were closed by England's orders, and her people were threatened with starvation, John Harvey and Joseph Hewes together caused the ship "Penelope" to be loaded with corn and meal, flour and pork, which they solicited from the generous people of Albemarle, and sent it with words of cheer and sympathy to their brethren in the New England town. In 1775 Harvey again braved the anger of the ...
— In Ancient Albemarle • Catherine Albertson

... regions in which merit holds the place it is entitled to or justice is done to the claims of virtue. What is the tenderness of Baucis, or the long fidelity of Penelope? Fiction only. And the resignation of the gentle Griseldis—what is it? An old tale of other days. In order to find the good woman we are looking for, this is the ivory portal at ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various

... Penelope!" said Richard, just wetting his mouth. The carriage was at the door: a couple of dire organs, each grinding the same tune, and a vulture-scented itinerant band (from which not the secretest veiled wedding can escape) worked harmoniously without in the production of discord, and the noise ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... eyes. A girl's sin—in his eyes. Love declared. The way of a maid. Beginning of the end. Penelope. ...
— New Poems • Francis Thompson

... original representative of no less than sixty-five characters. Pope disliked and satirised her severely; on the other hand, Cibber worshipped her. According to some, Farquhar fell violently in love with her, and she is the 'Penelope' of his letters; but although she often spoke of the happy hours she spent in his company, there appears to be no foundation for this surmise. Bowen, a low comedian of considerable talent, afterwards accidentally killed ...
— The Beaux-Stratagem • George Farquhar

... from our starvation cruise we remained but a day in harbour, and again sailed for Old Harbour with despatches for the Penelope. Having delivered them we were returning when we fell in with a small schooner. She made a signal to us to heave-to, and an officer came on board who brought us the news that war with Spain had broken out, and directed us to go in search of the Penelope and acquaint ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston

... did it himself, wagging his tail in the kitchen. Some Democrat has been bribing that dog with cold victuals.—PENELOPE PETTO." ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)

... tongue uttering sounds, Threw out its voice, and spake: "When I escap'd From Circe, who beyond a circling year Had held me near Caieta, by her charms, Ere thus Aeneas yet had nam'd the shore, Nor fondness for my son, nor reverence Of my old father, nor return of love, That should have crown'd Penelope with joy, Could overcome in me the zeal I had T' explore the world, and search the ways of life, Man's evil and his virtue. Forth I sail'd Into the deep illimitable main, With but one bark, and the small faithful band That yet cleav'd to me. As Iberia far, Far as ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri

... the Muses grant their beloved son a soul to celebrate so notable a festival in the strains which it deserves!" cried the poet, shaking all over with emotion, and his eyes dim with tears. "Achilles hath his Briseis; Odysseus his lost Penelope, and all four have to their hand an Orpheus (woe's me! without his Eurydice), to chant their fortunes. Oh! my noble son of a wolf, and thou, my Hollander, how I rejoice to see you, and to hand to your arms the nymphs of whom one day, perhaps, it shall be ...
— Sir Ludar - A Story of the Days of the Great Queen Bess • Talbot Baines Reed

... may not pass, secret treasures that he may not see, dreams that he may not guess. There are dark corners where there has been torture, of which he will never know. There are shadows and ghostly shapes which Penelope has hidden with the fairest fabrics of her loom. There are doors, tightly locked, which he has no key to open; rooms which have contained costly vessels, ...
— The Spinster Book • Myrtle Reed

... of my bags! (To the children): What? Must I wrap them up? (He takes a bag, and just as he is about to put in the pies, he reads): 'Ulysses thus, on leaving fair Penelope. . .' Not that one! (He puts it aside, and takes another, and as he is about to put in the pies, he reads): 'The gold-locked Phoebus. . .' Nay, ...
— Cyrano de Bergerac • Edmond Rostand

... Maioli et Amicorum;" Cristoforo Beneo of Milan ("Questo libro e de Christophore Beneo de Milano e soi Amize"); Antonio Maldonado, of whom a volume of Petrarch has on the upper cover the name of the poet, and on the reverse, "D. Antonio Maldonado," with a shield enclosing five fleurs-de-lis; and Penelope Coleona, with flowering vases heightened in silver, and her initials at the ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt

... in the background, as in later Hellenic society; on the contrary, she mixes freely with the other sex in private and in public, and is uniformly depicted as exercising a very strong, and generally beneficent, influence. The very names of Andromache, Penelope, Nausicaa, stand as types of all that is purest and sweetest in womanhood. The fact that a wife is purchased by bride-gifts does not militate against the respect in which she is held or the regard which is paid to her rights. The contrast between this state of affairs and that prevailing in later ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie

... know the words in which he would address us. We could meet Hector as a friend. If we could choose a companion to spend an evening with over a fireside, it would be the man of many counsels, the husband of Penelope. ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph

... that Penelope's love to her husband was always thus manifested. To this I answer, who but he that has habitually drunk Mandragora can prefer in a woman conjugal affection ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport

... breakfast?" she said, as they reached the end of the terrace. "Aunt Penelope is not coming down; her nerves are ...
— Adrien Leroy • Charles Garvice

... charming. However, there it was above the shoulders, high of course—swan-necked women are only found in England—above the shoulders of a Russian marchioness, princess, czarina, or what you will, who called for her cigarettes after dinner, was attended by a little soubrette, named Penelope, and looked for all the world as if she had just been whirled off the boards ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 435 - Volume 17, New Series, May 1, 1852 • Various

... book is dedicated to the renowned as well as evilly notorious Lady Penelope Rich, sister of the unfortunate Earl of Essex. She shone by her extraordinary beauty as well as by her intellectual gifts. Of her Sir Philip Sidney was madly enamoured, but she married a Croesus, Lord Rich. This union was a most unhappy one. Her husband, ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis

... elementary graphic art of women, in divers colours of needlework. There has been no nation of any art-energy, but has strenuously occupied and interested itself in this household picturing, from the web of Penelope to the tapestry of Queen Matilda, and the meshes of ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin

... boot-maker, hatter, tailor, and hair-cutter. I humanize myself from head to foot. Even Ulysses is obliged to have recourse to the arts of Minerva, and, to speak unmetaphorically, "smarten himself up," before the faithful Penelope condescends to ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... Mrs. Donaldson has a piece of fancy netting which she reserves for her evening work, because, she says, it does not make much demand upon her eyes. This the mischievous and privileged Annie calls "Penelope's Web," declaring, that whatever is done on it in the evening is undone the next morning. Around the table, on which the brightest lights were placed for the convenience of those who would read or sew, clustered the two married daughters of the house—who ...
— Evenings at Donaldson Manor - Or, The Christmas Guest • Maria J. McIntosh

... Harvard College, was learning about life in Rumford, as a surveyor of land, spending his evenings in the house of Joshua Walden, with Robert and Rachel to keep him company, especially Rachel. He found pleasure in telling her the story of Ulysses and Penelope. Most of the young men of Rumford who came to the Walden home could only talk about oxen, which pair of steers could pull the heaviest load, or whose horse could out-trot all others. When the surveying was done, Roger accepted the invitation of the committeemen ...
— Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times - 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance • Charles Carleton Coffin

... the Kabyles and Arabs is the making 'hykes,' as they call their blankets. The women alone are employed in this work; like Andromache and Penelope of old, they do not use the shuttle, but weave every thread of the woof with their fingers. The usual size of a hyke is six yards long and five or six feet broad, serving the Kabyle and Arab as a complete dress during the day, and as a covering for the bed at night. It is a loose but troublesome ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne

... which had been melted down. There was an evident profit, therefore, in melting down new-coined money; and it was done so instantaneously, that no precaution of government could prevent it. The operations of the mint were, upon this account, somewhat like the web of Penelope; the work that was done in the day was undone in the night. The mint was employed, not so much in making daily additions to the coin, as in replacing the very best part of it, ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith

... had recovered, she would have fared badly, even at that late period, had she been in Salem; but the death-penalty has never been hastily inflicted in Portsmouth. The first execution that ever took place there was that of Sarah Simpson and Penelope Kenny, for the murder of an infant in 1739. The sheriff was Thomas Packer, the same official who, twenty-nine years later, won unenviable notoriety at the hanging of Ruth Blay. The circumstances are ...
— An Old Town By The Sea • Thomas Bailey Aldrich

... a lesson that comes to happy fruition in maturer life, if there is need of it. I say happy, because we look back with joy to the hours spent in toughening the sinews of endurance. I remember that long and Penelope-like were my own Christmas preparations; but what they evolved is a matter as lost to thought as a breeze on the desert, in spite of the clearness with which I remember the gifts from my sister and our genteel Nurse, Fanny, who was with us ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop

... was changed within—that we were ready at last? One of those Spring days, in the midst of a forenoon's work, I stopped short with the will to go to the country to look for a place to rent. I left the garret, found Penelope, who was ready in fifteen minutes. We crossed the river first of all into Canada, because the American side within fifty miles in every direction had been sorted over again and again, by those who had followed just such an impulse. In the smaller city opposite, we learned that there were two suburban ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort

... and copses is the spindle tree (euonymus europeus), so named because of its compact, yet light, wood was made the spindle of the spinster. An old MS., kept by Sarah Cleveland, shows how not only the poor but ladies of all ranks, like the Homeric Penelope and her maidens, practised spinning; the younger with a view to providing a marriage portion for themselves; whence, until marriage, they were called "spinsters," a term still in use. [Berenden Letters of William Ward and his family, of Berenden, Kent, 1758-1821, edited by C. F. Hardy. ...
— A History of Horncastle - from the earliest period to the present time • James Conway Walter

... there to receive! A flock of guests was assembling,—peasant girls, Italian, German, and Norman; Turks, Greeks, Persians, fish-wives, brigands, chocolate-women, Lady Washington, Penelope, Red Riding-hood, Joan of Arc, nuns, Amy Robsart, Leicester, two or three Mary Stuarts, Neapolitan fisher-boys, pirates of Penzance and elsewhere,—all lingering, some on the stairs, some going ...
— The Last of the Peterkins - With Others of Their Kin • Lucretia P. Hale

... but surely she ought to have woven for him; on Helbig's showing Hector had two, Patroclus had only one; Patroclus is in the old epic, Hector and Laertes are in the Ionian epics; therefore, Laertes should have had two [Greek: charea] but we only hear of one. Penelope had to finish the [Greek: charos] and show it; [Footnote: Odyssey, XXIV. 147.] now if she wanted to delay her marriage, she should have begun the second [Greek: charos] just as necessary as the first, if Hector, ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang

... Both girls have homes of their own in other towns. My sister Anne stays with us, and with the help of Penelope and Pansy manages the house ...
— Heart of Gold • Ruth Alberta Brown

... name was Penelope Pepperall and Aunt Jamsiah had taken her out of the County Home after the fire episode, by way of saving her from the worse influence of a reformatory. She and Uncle Ebenezer had agreed to be responsible for the girl, and Pepsy had spent a year of joyous freedom at the farm ...
— Pee-wee Harris • Percy Keese Fitzhugh

... arranged all the various productions of national art. Nothing can be pictured more beautiful than the combination of rich and varied colors, or more curious than the forms which art and genius had given them: here were dyes which might have rivaled those of Tyre, and fabrics of finer texture than a Penelope could have woven. At one end, toward which Marguerite's eyes were most anxiously turned, the models of the clocks were arranged. Dumiger's was placed in the center, for it was at the same time the ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 2, July 8, 1850 • Various

... house-plants are green and flowering, and the ivy glistens in the firelight, and Polly sits with that contented, far-away look in her eyes that I like to see, her fingers busy upon one of those cruel mysteries which have delighted the sex since Penelope, and I read in one of my fascinating law-books, or perhaps regale ourselves with a taste of Montaigne,—if all this is true, there are times when the cottage seems small; though I can never find that Polly thinks so, except when she sometimes says that she does not know where she ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... saw fit to compare yourself, a few moments since, to certain celebrated absentees, I am constrained to tell you that I happen to be neither Penelope nor Gretchen, nor yet the illustrious dog ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson

... please to tell her that Captain Powell was oleways talking great deal about her, and was missing her very much. Oh, we shall never see nobody like him again. He went out in a small boat with two frinds to the steamer Penelope, Captain Parley, and coming back the boat was capsize and the three gentlemen was upset in the water. One was saved, but Captain Powell and Mr. Jones was drownded. Please to come and see about the funeral as ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine

... elderly matron, sitting in the Winslow arm-chair, with its mark, "Cheapside, 1614," [Footnote: This chair and the cape are now In Pilgrim Hall, Plymouth; here also are portraits of Edward Winslow and Josiah Winslow and the latter's wife, Penelope.] perhaps wearing the white silk shoulder-cape with its trimmings of embossed velvet which has been preserved, proud that she was privileged to be the mother of this son, the first child born of white parents in New England, proud that she had been the wife of a Governor and Commissioner ...
— The Women Who Came in the Mayflower • Annie Russell Marble

... side I have him just come home, and the old nurse washing his feet, and his queen fast asleep in her chair by a lamp, which I hope will not set her on fire, though it is, in spite of my best endeavours, so much out of the perpendicular that nothing but a miracle can keep it from falling on Penelope's crown. ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth

... rest and pine in the islet of Calypso, the kind sea-goddess; to meet with Nausicaa, loveliest of mortal maids; to reach his Ithaca, and do battle with the Wooers, and age in peace and honour by the side of the wise Penelope. The day is yet afar when, as he sailed out to the sunset ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley

... preserve fair order in houses, and prepare therein the shining raiment for worthy inmates, worthy guests. Only these "functions" must not be a drudgery, or enforced necessity, but a part of life. Let Ulysses drive the beeves home, while Penelope there piles up the fragrant loaves; they are both well employed if these be done in thought and love, willingly. But Penelope is no more meant for a baker or weaver solely, than Ulysses ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli

... instance. Indeed love in all its forms was familiar to the ancients. Where can we find a more beautiful expression of ardent passion than glows in Sappho's songs? or of patient faithful constancy than in Homer's Penelope? Could there be a more beautiful picture of the union of two loving hearts, even beyond the grave, than Xenophon has preserved for us in his account of Panthea and Abradatas? or the story of Sabinus the Gaul and ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... of the Chamaepetes unicolor (a large gallinaceous bird of America), the first primary wing-feather is arched towards the tip and is much more attenuated than in the female. In an allied bird, the Penelope nigra, Mr. Salvin observed a male, which, whilst it flew downwards "with outstretched wings, gave forth a kind of crashing rushing noise," like the falling of a tree. (54. Mr. Salvin, in 'Proceedings, Zoological Society,' 1867, p. 160. I am much indebted to this distinguished ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin

... in my arms now. But there came in through the hall a pattering of little feet, and by the time Jock and Hurry had burst into the room I was at a garden window looking out, and Lucy had caught up from her work bag that Penelope's web of a silk necktie upon which she so often worked, ...
— We Three • Gouverneur Morris

... late voyage performed by certain Hollanders to the islandes of Iaua, part of the East Indies) falling into my handes, and in my iudgement deserving no lesse commendation then those of our Countreymen, (as Captaine Raimonde in the Penelope, Maister Foxcroft in the Marchant Royall, and M. Iames Lancaster in the Edward Bonauenture, vnto the said East Indies, by the Cape de Bona Sperance, in Anno 1591, as also M. Iohn Newbery, and Raphael Fich ouer land through Siria from Aleppo vnto Ormus and Goa, and ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, - and Discoveries of The English Nation, Volume 10 - Asia, Part III • Richard Hakluyt

... Tasso, are no epic poets at all. They are mere light and amusing gossips, some of them absolute buffoons. Their adventures over hill and dale are mere riding parties; their fights mere festival tournaments, their enchantments mere pageant wonders. Events like the death of Hector, the slaughter of Penelope's suitors, the festive massacre of Chriemhilt, the horrible deceit of Alfonso the Chaste sending Bernardo del Carpio his father's corpse on horseback— things like these never enter their minds. When tragic events do by some accident come into ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee

... alluded to in the annals of Bohemia. These two emissaries of a detested party escaped, indeed, unhurt; for they fell upon a bed of manure, and were carried off, and nursed, and aided in their subsequent flight by the Princess Penelope of Lobkowitz. But throughout the Hussite troubles, and in times anterior to them, the right of putting to death by casting from towers and over windows, was claimed and exercised by those in power; nay, and more curious ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig

... be counted of this number—unless we think with Fox, in the preface to his History of Lord Holland, that it is only as to her wakefulness Penelope is compared to the night singing-bird; and so must Milton (for although Coleridge has satisfactorily dealt with the passage in Il Penseroso, the line of the Lady's song in Comus remains still); and Shakspeare himself, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 442 - Volume 17, New Series, June 19, 1852 • Various

... upholding his friends, purifying his house; and then, with the heat of righteous battle still upon him, with its gore, so to speak, still upon his hands, of turning his mind, without a pause and without hypocrisy, to things intimate and soft and pure—the domestic sweetness of Penelope, the young promise of Telemachus. The President stood, a rugged figure, amid the cosmopolitan crowd, breasting the modern world, like some ocean headland, yet not truly of it, one of the great fighters and workers of mankind, with a laugh that pealed above the noise, blue eyes that seemed to pursue ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... more bitter enmity between him and Lysimachus than with any of the others. Once, as a scoff at his passion for Lamia, Lysimachus said he had never before seen a courtesan act a queen's part; to which Demetrius rejoined that his mistress was quite as honest us Lysimachus's own Penelope. ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough

... graduates. She must look out for Kathryn Fleming, who had been singing in New York all season, but she couldn't miss her, she wasn't the sort who was easily overlooked; and Julia Weston, a judge of the Juvenile Court out West; and Penelope Adams, who had married a millionaire and was a great belle; and Martha Penrose, who was just "the sweetest little Virginian you ever saw"; and her chum, Winifred Freeman, who was matron of a big hospital; and Kitty Fisken, the artist; ...
— Judy of York Hill • Ethel Hume Patterson Bennett

... are of a truer fabric than Penelope's web, for she, I read, pulled in pieces at night what she had woven through the day," replied Lady de Tilly. "Give me ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby

... ceased not to warn every one night and day with tears, kneeled down and prayed, so that they all wept sore and fell on his neck: Romeo took a last embrace of Juliet in the vault, and sealed the doors of breath with a righteous kiss: Penelope embraced Ulysses, who was welcome to her as land is welcome to shipwrecked swimmers escaping from the grey seawater—there have, we say, been some remarkable embraces on this earth since time began, ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford

... that hopeless captivity; and we know that Ulysses felt so manifest an ennui under similar circumstances that Calypso herself furthered his departure. There is indeed a report that he afterward left Penelope; but since she was habitually absorbed in worsted work, and it was probably from her that Telemachus got his mean, pettifogging disposition, always anxious about the property and the daily consumption of meat, no inference can be drawn from this already dubious scandal as to the relation ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot

... seem to you that you do her whom you love harm by persisting in that very love which is—yes, Philip, I must say it—unlawful? See, now, I am struck with the change in her since I beheld her last. The modesty which charmed me in Penelope Devereux seems vanished. Even now I hear her laugh, hollow and unreal, as she coquettes and lays herself out for the admiring notice of the gentlemen who are watching her movements. Yes, Philip, nothing but harm can come of persisting in ...
— Penshurst Castle - In the Days of Sir Philip Sidney • Emma Marshall

... was alone in her room, knitting with the feverish tranquillity with which Penelope must have woven her famous web. Like Penelope, she was waiting for her husband's return. M. Arnaud used to spend whole days away from home. He had classes in the morning and evening. As a rule he came back to lunch. Although he was a slow walker and his ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland

... blushing, "as many as Penelope, not one of whom cares twopence about me any more than I care for them. The truth is, Mr. Quatermain, that nobody and nothing interest me, except a spot in the churchyard yonder and another ...
— The Ancient Allan • H. Rider Haggard

... life, but by the assistance of Mercury, who may be considered as the emblem of reason, he will at length be enabled to quit the magic embraces of Calypso, the Goddess of Imagination, and to return again into the arms of Penelope, or Philosophy, the long lost and proper object ...
— An Essay on the Beautiful - From the Greek of Plotinus • Plotinus

... The beautiful Penelope finding herself in this dilemma, blushed, and without making the least reply, drew her veil over her face, thereby intimating a denial to her father's request, and sunk into the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 385, Saturday, August 15, 1829. • Various

... appearance: his countenance seemed harsher, yet the lines of his face, his outer man, his whole personality, did not seem altered, but his soul had changed its nature, a different mind looked forth from those eyes. Bertrande knew him for her husband, and yet she hesitated. Even so Penelope, on the return of Ulysses, required a certain proof to confirm the evidence of her eyes, and her long absent husband had to remind her of secrets known ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - MARTIN GUERRE • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE

... In Grece and Troye, renoumyd of prudence, Wroot of queen Helene, and Penelope, Off Polyceene with hir chaast innocence: For wyves trewe calle Lucrece to presence, That they wer fayr, ther can no man sey nay; Kynde wrouht hem with so gret dilligence, Ther bewte ...
— A Chronicle of London from 1089 to 1483 • Anonymous

... times, was considered the most unpardonable of all crimes. Only one of the kings held back for awhile and needed much persuasion to join the league. This was Odysseus of Ithaca, who could well consider himself at the time the happiest of mortals, for he had lately married Penelope, one of the fairest and most virtuous maidens of Greece. He had an infant son of great beauty and promise, and he owned much land and countless herds of cattle, sheep, and swine. Added to that, all the petty nobles of the island acknowledged him ...
— Odysseus, the Hero of Ithaca - Adapted from the Third Book of the Primary Schools of Athens, Greece • Homer

... interrupted, "I must protest. Lucille and I were married by a most respectable Episcopalian clergyman. We have documentary evidence. Besides, if Lucille is Calypso, what about Penelope?" ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... No: the title of the great story is The Memoirs of David Balfour. Catriona has a prettier name than David, and may give it to the last book of her lover's adventures: but the Odyssey was not christened after Penelope. ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... undertaking on the part of the United Provinces never to send or maintain troops in the duchies. Tedious and futile correspondence followed between Brussels, the Hague, London, Paris. But the difficulties grew every moment. It was a Penelope's web of negotiation, said one of the envoys. Amid pertinacious and wire-drawn subtleties, every trace of practical business vanished. Neuburg departed to look after his patrimonial estates; leaving his interests in the duchies to be watched over by the Archduke. Even ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... flute. K 's for Kate, who is nursing her dolly; L is for Lawrence, feeding Poor Polly. M is for Maja, learning to draw; N is for Nicholas, with a jackdaw. O 's for Octavius, riding a goat; P 's for Penelope, sailing a boat. Q is for Quintus, armed with a lance; R is for Rachel, learning to dance. S 's for Sarah, talking to the cook; T is for Thomas, reading a book. U 's for Urban, rolling on the green; V 's named Victoria, after the Queen. W is for ...
— Aunt Kitty's Stories • Various

... ra- uishyng Lu- crecia, and all of his name banished.] commendacion be mencioned, and celebrated to al ages. Lu- cretia for her chastite, is perpetuallie to be aduanunced, wher- vpon the Romaines banished Tarquinius their kyng, his stocke and name from Rome. The rare chastite of Penelope, is remainyng as a example herein: So many snares laied to caste doune her vertuous loue towarde her housebande U- lisses. But Ulisses made hauocke by murder, on these gaie and gallante Ruffins, who in his absence sought ...
— A booke called the Foundacion of Rhetorike • Richard Rainolde

... hanging in a triangle on each side of the chair. And across the length of the table covered with brown oil-cloth Winnie, his wife, talked evenly at him the wifely talk, as artfully adapted, no doubt, to the circumstances of this return as the talk of Penelope to the return of the wandering Odysseus. Mrs Verloc, however, had done no weaving during her husband's absence. But she had had all the upstairs room cleaned thoroughly, had sold some wares, had seen Mr Michaelis several times. He had told her the ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad

... Philip Sydney; Mr. Secretary Walsingham, in his gown and wrought cap; Mary Countess of Pembrok, sister of Sir Philip Sydney; the last Lady Abbess of Wilton (Lady Anna Gawen), a pretty, beautiful, modest Penelope; with many others now forgotten ...
— The Natural History of Wiltshire • John Aubrey

... wealth, at present, of spare space, will be the ideal setting for my treasures. There be it that the public shall throng to steep itself in the splendour of possibilities, beholding, under glass, and perhaps in excellent preservation, Penelope's web and the original designs for the Tower of Babel, the draft made by Mr. Asquith for a reformed House of Lords and the notes jotted down by the sometime German Emperor for a proclamation from Versailles to the citizens ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm

... the fact that machinery brings to every thrifty cottage in New England comforts and adornments which, in the days of Queen Bess, were not known outside of the palace. Be mindful, then, that handicraft makes machines which are wonders of productive force—weaving tissues such as Penelope never saw, of woolen, cotton, linen, and silk, to carpet our floors, cover our tables, cushion our chairs, and clothe our bodies; machines of which Vulcan never dreamed, to point a needle, bore a rifle, cut a watch wheel, or rule a series of lines, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 497, July 11, 1885 • Various

... title of Domitor Equi, he being proud of the achievement of taming the horse, and then, so far as we can learn, gentler woman sat like Penelope handling the distaff. Subsequently there arose a race of Amazons, who, aspiring to the feats of man, lost the gentleness of woman; but in our happy land and day, rising above the one without running to the excess of the ...
— Speeches of the Honorable Jefferson Davis 1858 • Hon. Jefferson Davis

... leisurely, and fascinating narrative of travel. In addition to Montaigne, it enshrines a priceless collection of armour, of incunabula and Eastern MSS. Among the pictures are full lengths of Sir Philip Sidney and Lady Sidney, and that Penelope D'Arcy—one of Mr. Hardy's "Noble Dames"—who promised to marry three suitors in turn and did so. We see her again at ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas

... have discarded such and such an adorer, and the poor infatuated wretch would be sure to come and roder about her mother's house, willing to be put on the ranks of suitors, though he knew he might be cast off the next week. If he were like Ulysses in his folly, at least she was in so far like Penelope that she had a crowd of suitors, and undid day after day and night after night the handiwork of fascination and the web of coquetry with which she was wont to allure and ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray

... work! He has supplied his only foe with arms For his destruction. Old Penelope's tale Inverted; he has unravelled all by day, That he has done ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden

... ennobled, whose effigy—more majestic still, robed and coroneted, with his Viscountess by his side, and her dog (with his name, Jakke, engraven on his shoulder)—lies smiling, the slender hands crossed in prayer. But the house was not destined to survive. The Viscount's only daughter, the Lady Penelope, looks down from the wall, a fair and delicate lady, the last of her brief race, who, as the old inscription says with a tender simplicity, "dyed a mayd." I cannot help wondering, my pretty lady, what your story was; and it will do you no hurt if one, who looks ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson

... songs endure. Endures the Trojan fame, And how Penelope's wise nights were passed. So Nemesis and Delia have a name,— A poet's earliest passion and ...
— The Elegies of Tibullus • Tibullus

... introduced by Wyatt is frequent. First of the important English sequences is the 'Astrophel and Stella' of Sir Philip Sidney, written about 1580, published in 1591. 'Astrophel' is a fanciful half-Greek anagram for the poet's own name, and Stella (Star) designates Lady Penelope Devereux, who at about this time married Lord Rich. The sequence may very reasonably be interpreted as an expression of Platonic idealism, though it is sometimes taken in a sense less consistent with Sidney's high reputation. Of Spenser's ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher

... introduction of the name of Box to make the whole thing perfect and satisfactory. "It will be within the recollection of the Court," Sir HORACE might have continued, "that Cox was prevented from becoming the husband of PENELOPE ANNE, relict of WILLIAM WIGGINS, Proprietor of Bathing Machines at Margate and Ramsgate, by the sudden and totally unforeseen union of the lady in question with one KNOX, whose residence, as the Musical Revised Version has it, was usually 'in the Docks'; ...
— Punch, or, the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 8, 1890. • Various

... there are two such visions which turn out to be realities:—that of Nausicaa, Bk. vi. 20, etc., and that of Penelope, Bk. xix. 535, etc. In the former case we are told that the vision occurred just before dawn; I. 48-49, [Greek: autika d' Eos elthen], 'straightway came the Dawn,' etc. In the latter, there is no special mention of the hour. The vision, however, ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott

... one within another, the proportions ever dwindling with each successive inclosure, yet each a more minute duplicate of the external sphere. This might seem the least world of all,—the restricted limits of the quadrangle of this primitive stockade,—but Peninnah Penelope Anne Mivane had known no other than such as this. It was large enough for her, for a fairy-like face, very fair, with golden brown hair, that seemed to have entangled the sunshine, and lustrous brown eyes, looked out of an embrasure (locally called "port-hole") of the blockhouse, more formidable ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock

... you saw that, Rita!" she said. "It recalls a sad story, which might better be forgotten. However—well, that gown belonged to my poor Aunt Penelope. She was a beautiful girl, but headstrong, and she married, against her parents' wishes, a handsome, good-for-nothing man, who made her desperately unhappy, and finally left her. She lost her mind, poor soul, from sorrow ...
— Three Margarets • Laura E. Richards

... sunshine, at peace with himself and the pleasant solitudes, Sundown relaxed and fell to dreaming of Andalusian castles builded in far forests of the south, and of some Spanish Penelope—possibly not unlike the Senorita Loring—who waited his coming with patient tears and rare fidelity. "Them there true-be-doors," he muttered, "like Billy used to say, sure had the glad job—singin' and wrastlin' out po'try galore! A singin'-man sure gets the ladies. Now if I was to take ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs

... Harold sailed, and passed the barren spot Where sad Penelope o'erlooked the wave; And onward viewed the mount, not yet forgot, The lover's refuge, and the Lesbian's grave. Dark Sappho! could not verse immortal save That breast imbued with such immortal fire? Could she not live who life eternal gave? If life ...
— Childe Harold's Pilgrimage • Lord Byron

... Penelope Hawthorne sat in the school-room window-seat at Easney Vicarage, one afternoon, looking very gravely out at ...
— Penelope and the Others - Story of Five Country Children • Amy Walton

... progress ever to be made if races keep reversing, Penelope- like, in one generation all that they have been achieving in the preceding? And how, on Mr. Darwin's system, of which the accumulation of strokes of luck is the greatly preponderating feature, is a hoard ever to be got together and conserved, no matter how often luck ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler

... of the Egyptian, Indian and Greek mythologies, certain Bible characters, especially the Holy Mother; Cleopatra, Penelope; the portraits of Brunhelde and Chriemhilde in the Nibelungen; Oriana, Una, &c.; the modern Consuelo, Walter Scott's Jeanie and Effie Deans, &c., &c. (Yet woman portray'd or outlin'd at her best, or as perfect human mother, does ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman

... annoy." Well, they did, and they do, annoy—not because they were jokes, but because they were feeble jokes. "If it is thought desirable to have an article on the Odyssey, I have abundant, most aggravating and impudent matter about Penelope and King Menelaus"—so he wrote to Mr. H. Quilter, who naturally jumped at it. Here is another gem which Mr. Jones seems to admire: "There will be no comfortable and safe development of our social arrangements—I ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett

... vitreous pastes, upon both wood and ivory, dating from the 8th and 10th centuries before the Christian Era, or earlier. The Greeks and Romans also made use of it for costly furniture and ornamental sculpture; in Book 23 of the "Odyssey," Ulysses, describing to Penelope the bride-bed which he had made, says—"Beginning from this head-post, I wrought at the bedstead till I had finished it, and made it fair with inlaid work of gold, and of silver, and of ivory"; the ...
— Intarsia and Marquetry • F. Hamilton Jackson

... stands back from the road, and has an obsequious retinue of fringed elms and oaks and weeping willows. Sometimes in the morning, and oftener in the afternoon, when the sun has withdrawn from that part of the mansions, a young woman appears on the piazza with some mysterious Penelope web of embroidery in her hand, or a book. There is a hammock over there—of pineapple fibre, it looks from here. A hammock is very becoming when one is eighteen, and has golden hair, and dark eyes, and an emerald-colored illusion dress looped up after the ...
— Marjorie Daw • Thomas Bailey Aldrich

... mankind Unhappiest deem.—Thy question is resolved. Then answer thus Pallas blue-eyed return'd. From no ignoble race, in future days, The Gods shall prove thee sprung, whom so endow'd With ev'ry grace Penelope hath borne. 280 But tell me true. What festival is this? This throng—whence are they? wherefore hast thou need Of such a multitude? Behold I here A banquet, or a nuptial? for these Meet not by contribution[3] to regale, With such brutality ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer

... is Sybylla," Miss Beecham continued, "Sybylla Penelope. Your mother used to be very dear to me, but I don't know why she doesn't write to me now. I have never seen her since her marriage. It seems strange to think of her as the mother of eight-five boys and three girls, is ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin

... English stranger. Lower down stood immense clumsy joints of mutton and beef, which, but for the absence of pork, [Footnote: See Note 21.] abhorred in the Highlands, resembled the rude festivity of the banquet of Penelope's suitors. But the central dish was a yearling lamb, called 'a hog in har'st,' roasted whole. It was set upon its legs, with a bunch of parsley in its mouth, and was probably exhibited in that form to gratify the pride of the cook, who piqued himself more on the plenty than ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott

... Medea wise, I crave to see, nor win much lore, Nor list to Orpheus' minstrelsies; Nor Her'cles would I see, that o'er The wide world roamed from shore to shore; Nor, by St. James, Penelope, - Nor pure Lucrece, such wrong that bore: To ...
— Ballads in Blue China and Verses and Translations • Andrew Lang

... weaving the plaids was ever a domestick art in the Highlands, like spinning or knitting. They could not inform him here. But he conjectured probably, that where people lived so remote from each other, it was likely to be a domestick art; as we see it was among the ancients, from Penelope. I was sensible to-day, to an extraordinary degree, of Dr Johnson's excellent English pronunciation. I cannot account for its striking me more now than any other day: but it was as if new to me; and I ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell

... never have dreamed of meeting in the old days—people that she had grown used to the idea of never meeting, even now that Mr. Dickett was in the Firm. Eleanor's little girl went to school with all the little girls on the Hill and was asked to attend their parties. Her name was Penelope, after George's mother, who had never expected it—the name being so old-fashioned—and was correspondingly delighted and had given her much ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon

... ennuied spinsters; gushing buds; athletic collegians, cigarettes in mouths and hands in pockets; languid, drawling dudes; old bachelors, fluttering around the fair human flower like September butterflies; fancy work, fancy work, like Penelope's web, never finished; pug dogs of the aged and asthmatic variety. Everything there but MEN—they are wise enough to ...
— Adopting An Abandoned Farm • Kate Sanborn

... have strongly affected his imagination and to have inspired some of his earliest verses. In November 1594, in his twenty-first year, Barnfield published anonymously his first work, The Affectionate Shepherd, dedicated with familiar devotion to Penelope, Lady Rich. This was a sort of florid romance, in two books of six-line stanza, in the manner of Lodge and Shakespeare, dealing at large with "the complaint of Daphnis for the love of Ganymede." As the author expressly admitted later, it was an ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various

... until, you know, the last hem of the garment of summer is lost sight of, and then—and then—I must either follow to another climate, or be ill again—that I know, and am prepared for. It is but dreary work, this undoing of my Penelope web in the winter, after the doing of it through the summer, and the more progress one makes in one's web, the more dreary the prospect of the undoing of all these fine silken stitches. But ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon

... given in to the more vulgar accounts, by making the former so eminent, at the cost of the other heroes, in his Jerusalem Delivered. Thus Virgil transformed by his magical power the chaste Dido into a distracted lover; and Homer the meretricious Penelope into a moaning matron. It is not requisite for poets to be historians, but historians should not be so frequently poets. The same charge, I have been told, must be made against the Grecian historians. ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli

... interesting incident of ancient times is that of Penelope's patient weaving. It is related that, after one short year of wedded happiness, her husband Ulysses was called to take part in the Trojan War. Not a single message having been received from him by Penelope during his long absence, a doubt finally arose as to his being still alive. Numerous ...
— Quilts - Their Story and How to Make Them • Marie D. Webster

... up the coast to Trinidad once more, in through the Serpent's Mouth, and round Punto Gallo to the lake of pitch, where all recruit themselves with fish and armadillos, 'pheasant' (Penelope), 'palmitos' (Moriche palm fruit?), and guavas, and await the return of the expedition from the last day of December to the middle of February. They see something of the Spaniards meanwhile. Sir John Ferns is sent up to Port ...
— Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time from - "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley

... city. A panoramic view was before him and he saw the creations of human beings, obviously, but a culture far removed from his. A slight path of white began at his feet and expanded as it fell slightly, ramplike, over and into the city. The buildings were whiter than the gate of false dreams that Penelope sung of and the streets and avenues were blue, not gray. The people wore white and milled about in the streets below him. They shouted as one; their voices were not cries but songs ...
— Pleasant Journey • Richard F. Thieme

... February, beeing egge Satterday, it pleased some gentlemen schollers in the towne to make a dauncing night of it. They had provided many new and curious daunces for the maske of Penelope's Woers, but the yeare beeing far spent and Lent drawing on and many other thinges to bee performed, the Prince was not able to bestow that state upon them which their love & skill deserved. But their good will was very kindely received by the Prince in this night's ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson

... sigh o'er hopes deferred, may take up needle, and silk, and turn you, once again, to that embroidery which has engaged your dainty fingers this twelvemonth and more, yet which, like Penelope's web, would seem ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol

... me in a wistful, mothering way, showing me a fresh side of her nature. She is as domesticated as Penelope. ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke

... may be traced briefly. Richard Stout, who seems to have been first of his name in America, was the son of John Stout, of Nottinghamshire, England. When a young man he came to New Amsterdam (New York City), where he met Penelope Van Princess, a young woman from Holland. She, with her first husband, had been on a ship from Amsterdam, Holland, bound for New Amsterdam. The ship was wrecked in the lower bay and driven on the New Jersey coast below Staten Island. ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer

... Riggs) (1857- ), b. Philadelphia, Pa. Novelist and writer on kindergarten subjects. Author of The Bird's Christmas Carol, Timothy's Quest, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, Penelope's Progress, A Cathedral Courtship. Pathos, humor, and sympathy for the poor, the weak, and the helpless are characteristic qualities of her work. There are few better children's stories than ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck

... home the triumph of our Victory," Sings SPENSER. From wide wanderings you have come Victorious, yet, as all the world may see, Your sweetest, crowning triumph find—at home. Say, would ULYSSES care again to roam Wed with so winning a PENELOPE As STANLEY'S DOROTHY? Loyal like her of Ithaca, and dowered With charms that in the Greek less fully flowered, The charms of talent and of character, Which blend in her Who, won, long waited, and who, waiting, won The virile, valiant son Of our adventurous England. May the bays Blend well ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, July 12, 1890 • Various

... many-sided man, has a strong Phoenician tinge, though the dominant color continues to be Greek. And in his house we find exhibited one of the noblest among the characteristics of the poems in the sanctity and perpetuity of marriage. Indeed, the purity and loyalty of Penelope are, like the humility approaching to penitence of Helen, quite ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne

... on nose, thimble on twisted finger, ivory-egg in hand, in active preparation for that work, woman's par excellence, that alone rivals Penelope's. Surely that assortment of yellow, ill-mated, half-worn, and holey hose, was a treasure to her, that no gold could have replaced, in our dreary solitude (none the less dreary for being so luxurious). I envied her almost the power she seemed to have to merge her mind in ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield

... my father sent me to live with my aunts, Mrs. Grace and Mrs. Penelope, two old ladies, who, having never been married, had no families to take up their attention, and were so kind as to undertake to bring me up. These old ladies lived near the pleasant town of Reading. ...
— The Fairchild Family • Mary Martha Sherwood

... Champe's afraid of you. He calls you Penelope, you know, because of the 'wooers.' We counted six horses at the portico yesterday, and he made a bet with me that all of them belonged to the 'wooers'—and they really ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow

... they always were called by the Groby Park people, had been christened Diana, Creusa, and Penelope, their mother having a passion for classic literature, which she indulged by a use of Lempriere's dictionary. They were not especially pretty, nor were they especially plain. They were well grown and healthy, and quite capable of enjoying themselves in any of the amusements customary to young ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope

... devotions: She was remarkably prudent in her conversation: She had great skill in music; and was perfectly well versed in all the lesser arts that employ a lady's leisure. Her wit allowed her a fund of perpetual cheerfulness within proper limits. She exactly answered the description of Penelope in Homer. ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber

... Courtship' was first published in 1893, appearing in a volume with 'Penelope's English Experiences.' In course of time, the latter story, finding unexpected favour in the public eyes, left its modest companion, and was promoted to a separate existence, with pictures and covers of its own. Then ...
— A Cathedral Courtship • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... Oracle expounded in two Elegies. 1. Of Humane Knowledge. 2. Of the Soule of Man, and the immortalitie thereof. Hymnes of Astra in Acrosticke Verse. Orchestra, or, A Poeme of Dauncing. In a Dialogue betweene Penelope, and one of her Wooers. Not finished. London, Printed by Augustine Mathewes for Richard Hawkins, and are to be sold at his Shop in Chancery Lane, neere Serieants ...
— Catalogue of the Books Presented by Edward Capell to the Library of Trinity College in Cambridge • W. W. Greg

... the Arcadia, and is one of the very few books of criticism belonging to a creative and uncritical time. He was also the author of a series of love sonnets, Astrophel and Stella, in which he paid Platonic court to the Lady Penelope Rich (with whom he was not at all in love), according to the ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers

... her up in disgust. "The ungrateful, soft-spoken wretch!" cried the forsaken fair one; "the hypocritical young blue-grass Penelope Blue! she has been bluer than the blue clouds all the time she has been imposing on me as a pining, bread-and-butter, home-sick miss among us Titanesses and daughters of the gods. Here I am ready to collapse ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler

... unsubservience^; inadequacy &c (insufficiency) 640; inefficiency, &c (incompetence) 158; unskillfulness &c 699; disservice; unfruitfulness &c (unproductiveness).. 169; labor in vain, labor lost, labor of Sisyphus; lost trouble, lost labor; work of Penelope; sleeveless errand, wild goose chase, mere farce. tautology &c (repetition) 104; supererogation &c (redundancy) 641. vanitas vanitatum [Lat.], vanity, inanity, worthlessness, nugacity^; triviality &c (unimportance) 643. caput mortuum [Lat.], waste paper, dead letter; blunt tool. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... in the north of England; and in this way her course of life had been very much divided from that of our Miss Le Smyrger. But the Lord of the Government board had been blessed with various children, and perhaps it was now thought expedient to look after Aunt Penelope's Devonshire acres. Aunt Penelope was empowered to leave them to whom she pleased; and though it was thought in Eaton Square that she must, as a matter of course, leave them to one of the family, nevertheless ...
— Victorian Short Stories • Various

... cohibes adsensum. Hoc idem me in obscuris facere non sinis. Nihil igitur te contra soritas ars ista adiuvat, quae nec augentis nec minuentis quid aut primum sit aut postremum docet. 95. Quid? quod eadem illa ars, quasi Penelope telam retexens, tollit ad extremum superiora. Utrum ea vestra an nostra culpa est? Nempe fundamentum dialecticae est, quidquid enuntietur—id autem appellant [Greek: axioma], quod est quasi effatum—, ...
— Academica • Marcus Tullius Cicero



Words linked to "Penelope" :   bird genus, mythical being, family Cracidae, Greek mythology, Cracidae



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