"Proteus" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the D'Urbervilles" is as false as "Lorna Doone" or "Plain Tales from the Hills." Life, large, chaotic, inexpressible, not to be bound down by a formula, peeps at itself through the brain of each artist, but eludes photography. This is the true inwardness of the Proteus myth. The humourist alone, by presenting life in its own eternal contradictoriness, by not being tied down to one point of view, like his less gifted brother, comes nearest to expressing its elusive essence. The great novelists ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... into space, but our world is a halting place where this energy is conditioned. Here the Proteus works his spells; the selfsame essence takes a million shapes and hues, and finally dissolves into its primitive and almost formless form. The sun comes to us as heat; he quits us as heat; and between his entrance and departure the multiform powers of our ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... their conduct pays but a poor compliment to these gentlemen. They pretend that their doctrines are infinitely beneficial to mankind; but it seems they would keep them to themselves, if they were not greatly provoked. They are benevolent from spite. Their oracles are like those of Proteus, (whom some people think they resemble in many particulars,) who never would give his responses, unless you used him as ill as possible. These cats, it seems, would not give out their electrical light without having their backs well rubbed. But this is not to do them perfect justice. ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... ancient abode of Proteus, the old shepherd of Neptune's flocks, now the Island of Scarpanto, situated between Rhodes and Crete. I saw nothing but the granite base through the glass panels of ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea, Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn. 937 WORDSWORTH: Miscellaneous ...
— Handy Dictionary of Poetical Quotations • Various
... Huguenots out of the provinces, agreeably to the design for which the army was raised; that he had returned to the Court at Poitiers, where the King stayed during the siege of Brouage, to be near to M. de Mayenne, in order to afford him whatever succours he stood in need of; that, as the Court is a Proteus, forever putting on a new face, he had found it entirely changed, so that he had been no more considered than if he had done the King no service whatever; and that Bussi, who had been so graciously looked upon before and during this last war, had done ...
— Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois, Complete • Marguerite de Valois, Queen of Navarre
... their claim upon our notice,[329] and even those which are not in themselves exceptionable become so from the circumstances or manner in which they took place. Apollonius is said to have been an incarnation of the God Proteus; his birth was announced by the falling of a thunderbolt and a chorus of swans; his death signalized by a wonderful voice calling him up to Heaven; and after death he appeared to a youth to convince him of the immortality ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... bearded goat, thou mate of the white herd, and O ye blunt-faced kids, where are the manifold deeps of the forest, thither get ye to the water, for thereby is Milon; go, thou hornless goat, and say to him, 'Milon, Proteus was a herdsman, and that of seals, though he ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... Hero thorough Sestos, from her tower To Venus' temple, where unhappily, As after chanc'd, they did each other spy. So fair a church as this had Venus none: The walls were of discolour'd[9] jasper-stone, Wherein was Proteus carved; and over-head A lively vine of green sea-agate spread, Where by one hand light-headed Bacchus hung, And with the other wine from grapes out-wrung. 140 Of crystal shining fair the pavement ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... as ev'ry ship their sov'reign knows, His awful summons they so soon obey: So hear the scaly herds when Proteus blows, And so to pasture follow through ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... illustrious family. Of one whose intellect and character were infinitely subtle and complex, the blending of all opposites, it is possible to sustain the most conflicting opinions, and perhaps in the end no critic can seize this Proteus. Saint-Simon noticed how in his noble countenance every contrary quality was expressed, and how all were harmonised: "Il fallait faire effort pour cesser de le regarder." During the early years of his clerical career he acted as superior to female converts from Protestantism, ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... Greely according to the best guidance that the past could give them, their plans failed completely. The first relief ship did, indeed, land some stores—never, as the issue showed, to be reached by Greely—but the second expedition, composed of two ships, the "Proteus" and the "Yantic," accomplished nothing. The station was not reached, practically no supplies were landed, the "Proteus" was nipped by the ice and sunk, and the remnant of the expedition came supinely home, reporting utter failure. It is impossible to acquit the commanders of the two ships engaged ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... Macduff's grief is in harmony with the whole play! It rends, not dissolves, the heart. 'The tune of it goes manly.' Thus is Shakspeare always master of himself and of his subject,—a genuine Proteus:—we see all things in him, as images in a calm lake, most distinct, most accurate,—only more splendid, more glorified. This is correctness in the only philosophical sense. But he requires your ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... famed father's hand, Great Cibber's brazen brainless brothers stand, One cell there is, concealed from vulgar eye. The cave of Poverty and Poetry. Keen, hollow winds howl through the bleak recess, Emblem of music caused by emptiness. Hence bards, like Proteus long in vain tied down, Escape in monsters, and amaze the town. Hence Miscellanies spring, the weekly boast Of Curll's chaste press and Lintot's rubric post; Hence hymning Tyburn's elegiac lines; Hence Journals, Medleys, Mercuries, ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... which a traveller fond of natural history may find in this region, it has had a peculiar object of interest for me in the extraordinary animals which are found in the bottom of its subterraneous cavities: I allude to the Proteus anguinus, a far greater wonder of nature than any of those which the Baron Valvasa detailed to the Royal Society a century and half ago as belonging to Carniola, with far too romantic ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... CHARLES PROTEUS STEINMETZ Consulting Engineer, with the General Electric Co.; Professor of Electrical Engineering, Union College. Author of "The Theory and Calculation of Alternating-Current Phenomena," "Theoretical Elements of ...
— Cyclopedia of Telephony & Telegraphy Vol. 1 - A General Reference Work on Telephony, etc. etc. • Kempster Miller
... That stone, or like to that which here below 600 Philosophers in vain so long have sought, In vain, though by thir powerful Art they binde Volatil Hermes, and call up unbound In various shapes old Proteus from the Sea, Draind through a Limbec to his Native forme. What wonder then if fields and regions here Breathe forth Elixir pure, and Rivers run Potable Gold, when with one vertuous touch Th' Arch-chimic Sun so farr from us remote Produces with Terrestrial ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... allowed. They are included, as a bed of flowers, between the high walls of duty; love-flowers even grow there, to be plucked, under the blue sky. But take care not to be tempted by that wonderful female Proteus, Lady Meed, the great corruptress. She disappears and reappears, and she, too, assumes all shapes; she is everywhere at the same time: it seems as if the serpent of Eden had become the immense reptile ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... the cases of Manchester and ... Sheffield," cried James Otis. "If these places are not represented, they ought to be." This ought is the fundamental premise of the entire colonial argument. "Shall we Proteus-like perpetually change our ground, assume every moment some new strange shape, to defend, to evade?" asks a Virginian in 1774. This was precisely what could not be avoided. For the end determined the means. If, therefore, the distinction between ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... multiform, appearing in so many shapes and garbs, so variously apprehended of several eyes and judgments, that it seemeth no less hard to settle a clear and certain notion thereof than to make a portrait of Proteus, or to define the figure of the fleeting wind." Nor is it fitting to attempt exact distinctions between wit and humor, which are essentially two aspects of one thing. It is enough to realize that humor is the product of nature rather than of art, while ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... too, be a question whether the literary man and the artist are not immolating their genius to society when, in the shadowiness of assumed talents—that counterfeiting of all shapes—they lose their real form, with the mockery of Proteus. But nets of roses catch their feet, and a path, where all the senses are flattered, is now opened to win an Epictetus from his hut. The art of multiplying the enjoyments of society is discovered in the morning lounge, the evening dinner, ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... after Bourrienne left, says, "I shall always remember the astonishment of the Hamburgers when they were invaded by this cloud of French officials, who, under every form, made researches is their houses, and who came to apply the multiplied demands of the fiscal system. Like Proteus, the administration could take any shape. To only speak of my department, which certainly was not the least odious one, for it was opposed to the habits of the Hamburgers and annoyed all the industries, no idea can be formed of the despair of the inhabitants, subjected to perpetual visits, ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... from which my cares have been hitherto so forcibly diverted? The ear of Fancy, it is said, can discover the voice of sea-nymphs and tritons amid the bursting murmurs of the ocean; would that I could do so, and that some siren or Proteus would arise from these billows, to unriddle for me the strange maze of fate in which I am so deeply entangled!—Happy friend!" he said, looking at the bed where Dinmont had deposited his bulky person, "thy cares are confined to the narrow round of a healthy and thriving ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... of the birth of Apollonius to his mother by Proteus, and the incarnation of Proteus himself, the chorus of swans which sang for joy on the occasion, the casting out of devils, raising the dead, and healing the sick, the sudden appearances and disappearances ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... very elastic theory of development that the Modernists rely. 'The differences between the larval and final stages of many an insect are often far greater than those which separate kind from kind.' And so this Proteus of a Church, which has changed its form so completely since the Gospel was first preached in the subterranean galleries of Rome, may undergo another equally startling metamorphosis and come to believe in ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... the name of William Jasper—perhaps Sergeant Jasper is the better known. This brave man possessed remarkable talents for a scout. He could wear all disguises with admirable ease and dexterity. Garden styles him "a perfect Proteus".* He was equally remarkable for his strategy as for his bravery; and his nobleness and generosity were, quite as much as these, the distinguishing traits of his character. Such was the confidence in his fidelity and skill ...
— The Life of Francis Marion • William Gilmore Simms
... of the Augustan age Perused in Virgil's golden page, The story of the secret won From Proteus by Cyrene's son How the dank sea-god sowed the swain Means to restore his hives again More briefly, how a slaughtered bull ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling
... less than he does; he has learned to act a part, he pretends to love his pictures, or again he lets you know the price he himself gave for the things, he offers to let you see the memoranda of the sale. He is a Proteus; in one hour he can be Jocrisse, Janot, Queue-rouge, Mondor, ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... sonnetteering in his plays. 'Tush, none but minstrels like of sonnetting,' exclaims Biron in 'Love's Labour's Lost' (IV. iii. 158). In the 'Two Gentlemen of Verona' (III. ii. 68 seq.) there is a satiric touch in the recipe for the conventional love-sonnet which Proteus offers the amorous Duke: ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... satisfied with Anderson would hardly content him. He remained therefore quiet till he saw that Anderson had failed. The young man at once took to an altered mode of life which was sufficiently marked. He went, like Sir Proteus, ungartered. Everything about him had of late "demonstrated a careless desolation." All this M. Grascour observed, and when he saw it he felt that his ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... first the sensation of grease annoys, after a few days it is forgotten, and at last the "pat of butter" is expected as pleasantly as the pipe or the cup of coffee. It prevents the skin from chaps and sores, obviates the evil effects of heat, cold, and wet, and neutralises the Proteus-like malaria poison. The Somal never fail to anoint themselves when they can afford ghee, and the Bedouin is at the summit of his bliss, when sitting in the blazing sun, or,—heat acts upon these people ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... poetical faith. Look into the old Italian poets, whom we read continually with still increasing pleasure; does any one think of sitting down to disprove the existence of Ariodante, king of Scotland? or to prove that the mention of Proteus and Pluto, baptism and the Virgin Mary, in a breath, amounts to an anachronism? Shakspeare, by throwing his story far back into a remote and uncertain age, has blended, by his "own omnipotent will," the marvellous, ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... permitted me to see. "Anaerobic bacilli and spores," he replied, excitedly. "The things that produce the well-known 'gas gangrene' of the trenches, the gas phlegmon bacilli—all sorts, the bacillus aerogenes capsulatus, bacillus proteus, pyogenic cocci, and others, actively gas-forming microbes that can't live in air. The method I took to develop and discover them was that of Col. Sir Almroth Wright of the British army ...
— The Treasure-Train • Arthur B. Reeve
... {even} exceeded the material; for there Mulciber had carved the sea circling round the encompassed Earth; and the orb of the Earth, and the Heavens which hang over that orb. {There} the waves have {in them} the azure Deities, both Triton, sounding {with his shell}, and the changing Proteus, and AEgeon,[1] pressing the huge backs of whales with his arms; Doris,[2] too, and her daughters, part of whom appear to be swimming, part, sitting on the bank, to be drying their green hair; some {are seen} borne upon fishes. The features in all are not ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... alone, with no equal or second in his own class; to that power which seated him on one of the two glory-smitten summits of the poetic mountain, with Milton as his compeer not rival. While the former darts himself forth, and passes into all the forms of human character and passion, the one Proteus of the fire and the flood; the other attracts all forms and things to himself, into the unity of his own ideal. All things and modes of action shape themselves anew in the being of Milton; while Shakespeare becomes all things, yet for ever remaining ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... me Piecemeal! Enough to endure by myself in the light of the sunshine Guiltless, the death of a kid!' But the boy still lingered around her, Loth, like a boy, to forego her, and waken the cliffs with his laughter. 'Yon is the foe, then? A beast of the sea? I had deemed him immortal. Titan, or Proteus' self, or Nereus, foeman of sailors: Yet would I fight with them all, but Poseidon, shaker of mountains, Uncle of mine, whom I fear, as is fit; for he haunts on Olympus, Holding the third of the world; ...
— Andromeda and Other Poems • Charles Kingsley
... For this the Poet looks thy world around, Where form and life and reasoning man are found; He loves the mind, in all its modes, to trace, And all the manners of the changing race; Silent he walks the road of life along, And views the aims of its tumultuous throng: He finds what shapes the Proteus-passions take, And what strange waste of life and joy they make, And loves to show them in their varied ways, With honest blame or with unflattering praise: 'Tis good to know, 'tis pleasant to impart, These turns and movements of the human heart: The stronger ...
— The Borough • George Crabbe
... for I knew that she was no mortal woman. But her look was gracious, and her voice was sweet; so I took courage as she said: 'Who art thou, stranger, and why lingerest thou with thy company in this desert place? I am Eidothea, daughter of Proteus, the ancient one of the sea; and I am ready to help thee, if thou wilt tell me ...
— Stories from the Odyssey • H. L. Havell
... Proteus, the two gentlemen, are friends. Valentine is about to travel. Proteus, in love with Julia, will not go with him. Antonio, Proteus' father, sends Proteus after Valentine. Julia resolves to follow him in boy's ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... Teacher's trick of repetition, but then he is 'so rare a wondered teacher,' so rich in magical resources, that he does not often find it necessary to weary the sense with sameness. He is prodigal in variety. It is a Proteus repetition. But his charge to his Ariel in getting up his ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... as Proteus. There are sympathetic inks. A young celibate has told us in confidence that he has written a letter on the fly-leaf of a new book, which, when the husband asked for it of the bookseller, reached the hands of his mistress, who had been prepared ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... there still live the protopterus in Africa, the lepidosiren in the tributaries of the Amazon, and the ceratodus in the swamps of Southern {49} Australia. On the thirteenth stage, there are the gilled amphibians (sozobranchia), proteus and axolotl; on the fourteenth, the tailed amphibians (sozura), newt and salamander; on the fifteenth, the purely hypothetical primaeval amniota or protamnia (amnion is the name given to the chorion which surrounds the germ-water and embryo of ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... wreathed horn Cheerly, as is your wont, and let the blast Circle our island on the breezes borne; Blow, while the shining hours go swiftly past. Rise, Proteus, from the cool depths rise, and be A friend to them ...
— The Vagabond and Other Poems from Punch • R. C. Lehmann
... luxurious superfluity, now in starvation. Black, mutinous discontent devours them; simply the miserablest feeling that can inhabit the heart of man. English commerce, with its world-wide, convulsive fluctuations, with its immeasurable Proteus Steam demon, makes all paths uncertain for them, all life a bewilderment; society, steadfastness, peaceable continuance, the first blessings of man are not theirs.—This world is for them no home, but a dingy prison-house, of reckless unthrift, rebellion, rancour, indignation ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... muttered to himself, "Thou art a fool, stout earl, not to have welcomed the union between thy power and my wit. Thou goest to a court where without wit power is nought. Who may foresee the future? Marry, that was a wise ancient fable, that he who seized and bound Proteus could extract from the changeful god the prophecy of the days to come. Yea! the man who can seize Fate can hear its voice predict to him. And by my own heart and brain, which never yet relinquished what affection yearned for, or thought aspired to, I read, as in a book, Anne, that thou ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the first carp had eaten the bread my father threw to it, Mr. Caxton had mentally resolved that a race so confiding should never be sacrificed to Ceres and Primmins. But all the fishes on my uncle's property were under the special care of that Proteus Bolt; and Bolt was not a man likely to suffer the carps to earn their bread without contributing their full share to the wants of the community. But, like master, like man! Bolt was an aristocrat fit to be hung a la lanterne. He out-Rolanded Roland in the respect he entertained ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... supplies the toothless portresses, washerwomen, street-sweepers, beggars, occasionally insolent countesses, admired actresses, applauded singers; she has even given, in the olden time, two quasi-queens to the monarchy. Who can grasp such a Proteus? She is all woman, less than woman, more than woman. From this vast portrait the painter of manners and morals can take but a feature here and there; ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... from every thing like a mannerism derived from habit or personal peculiarities. Rather is he, such is the diversity of tone and colour, which varies according to the quality of his subjects he assumes, a very Proteus. Each of his compositions is like a world of its own, moving in its own sphere. They are works of art, finished in one pervading style, which revealed the freedom and judicious choice of their author. If the formation of a work throughout, ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... Jacob, the fourth in Thessaly in the time of Deucalion and Pyrrha, in the days of Moses according to Isidore, in 782 as given by Juan Annius. The fifth flood is mentioned by Xenophon as happening in Egypt in the time of Proteus. The sixth was this which destroyed so great a part of the Atlantic Island and sufficed so to separate the part that was left unsubmerged, that all mortals in Asia, Africa and Europe believed that all were drowned. Thus was lost the intercourse and commerce of the people of these parts with ...
— History of the Incas • Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa
... Age Perused in Virgil's golden page, The story of the secret won From Proteus by Cyrene's son— How the dank sea-god showed the swain Means to restore his hives again. More briefly, how a slaughtered bull Breeds honey by ...
— Songs from Books • Rudyard Kipling
... other families besides the Cuthites, who occupied the lower provinces towards the sea. The towers which were there raised served for lighthouses, and were, at the same time, temples, denominated from some title of the Deity, such as Canoph, Caneph, Cneph; also Perses, Proteus, Phanes, and Canobus. They were on both accounts much resorted to by mariners, and enriched with offerings. Here were deposited charts of the coast, and of the navigation of the Nile, which were engraved on pillars, and in aftertimes sketched out upon the ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume II. (of VI.) • Jacob Bryant
... as this had Venus none. The walls were of discoloured jasper stone Wherein was Proteus carved, and o'erhead A lively vine of green sea agate spread, Where by one hand lightheaded Bacchus hung, And, with the other, wine from grapes out wrung. Of crystal shining fair the pavement was. The town of Sestos called it Venus' ...
— Hero and Leander • Christopher Marlowe
... eggs upon the back of the male, who carries them about till they burst from their shells; the repulsive siren of Carolina, which Mr. J.E. Gray likens to an eel with fore-legs; and lastly, here is the blushing proteus, which in its native subterranean caverns is of a pale pink, but when brought to the light of day, deepens into a crimson blush; this is represented by a waxen model. It is strange that political and controversial literature, ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold
... the palace of Menelaus, from whom he receives some fresh information concerning the return of the Greecians, and is in particular told on the authority of Proteus, that his father is detained by Calypso. The suitors, plotting against the life of Telemachus, lie in wait to intercept him in his return to Ithaca. Penelope being informed of his departure, and of their designs ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer
... and hark that passion-warbled song— Still, Fancy! still that voice, those notes prolong. As sweet as when that voice with rapturous falls 55 Shall wake the soften'd echoes of Heaven's Halls! [52:1]O (have I sigh'd) were mine the wizard's rod, Or mine the power of Proteus, changeful God! A flower-entangled Arbour I would seem To shield my Love from Noontide's sultry beam: 60 Or bloom a Myrtle, from whose od'rous boughs My Love might weave gay garlands for her brows. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... completely, until revived again about the middle of the 19th century. During this century of wonder a sufficiency of exactness was, however, introduced into the study of microscopic organisms to call for the use of names, and we find Muller using the names of Monas, Proteus, Vibrio, Bacillus, and Spirillum, names which still continue in use, although commonly with a different significance from that given them by Muller. Muller did indeed make a study sufficient to recognise the several distinct types, and ...
— The Story Of Germ Life • H. W. Conn
... demons when separated from their earthly bodies;" and PLUTARCH, that "The demons of the Greeks were the ghosts and genii of departed men." "All Pagan antiquity affirms," says Dr. CAMPBELL, "that from Titan and Saturn, the poetic progeny of Coelus and Terra, down to AEsculapius, Proteus, and Minos, all their divinities were the ghosts of dead men; and were so regarded by the most ...
— A Brief Commentary on the Apocalypse • Sylvester Bliss
... dissipation, And, out of endeavor To change and to flow, The gas become solid, And phantoms and nothings Return to be things, And endless imbroglio Is law and the world,— Then first shalt thou know, That in the wild turmoil, Horsed on the Proteus, Thou ridest to power, And ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... arose the class of amphibia, having five toes (the pentadactyla). The gill amphibians are man's most ancient ancestors of the class amphibia. Besides possessing lungs as well as the mud-fish, they retain throughout life regular gills like the still-living proteus and axolotl. Most gilled batrachia live in North America. The paddle-fins of the dipneusta changed into five-toed legs, which were afterwards transmitted to the higher vertebrata up ...
— Was Man Created? • Henry A. Mott
... MALTA-JEW had being and was made; And he then by the best of actors [6] play'd: In HERO AND LEANDER [7] one did gain A lasting memory; in Tamburlaine, This Jew, with others many, th' other wan The attribute of peerless, being a man Whom we may rank with (doing no one wrong) Proteus for shapes, and Roscius for a tongue,— So could he speak, so vary; nor is't hate To merit in him [8] who doth personate Our Jew this day; nor is it his ambition To exceed or equal, being of condition More modest: this is all that he intends, (And that too at the urgence of some friends,) ...
— The Jew of Malta • Christopher Marlowe
... them to be rudimentary gills. Owen says that the thymus appears in vertebrates with the establishment of the lung as the main or exclusive respiratory organ. It is wanting in all fishes, also in the gill-bearing batrachians, siren and proteus. The thyroid appears in fishes, and Gegenbaur believes that it may have been a useful organ to the Tunicata in ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... however, on this occasion wide awake, when lo and behold! in accordance with the laws of the association of ideas the same Canon again flashed across me; so being now awake I held it as fast as Menelaus did Proteus, only permitting it to be changed into ...
— Beethoven's Letters 1790-1826 Vol. 2 • Lady Wallace
... warres, to try their fortune there; Some, to discover Islands farre away; Some, to the studious Universities; For any, or for all these exercises, He said, thou Proteus, your sonne was meet; And did request me, to importune you To let him spend his time no more at home; Which would be great impeachment to his age, In having knowne no travaile in his youth. (Antonio) Nor need'st thou much importune me to that Whereon, ...
— English Travellers of the Renaissance • Clare Howard
... possibility of this; but Lelex quotes, as an example, the case of Baucis and Philemon, who were changed into trees, while their house became a temple, and the neighbouring country a pool of water. Acheloues then tells the story of the transformations of Proteus and of Metra, and how Metra supported her father Erisicthon, while afflicted with ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... reign of this monarch, Paris the Trojan, returning home with Helen whom he had stolen, was driven by a storm into one of the mouths of the Nile, called Canopic; and from thence was conducted to Proteus at Memphis, who reproached him in the strongest terms for his base perfidy and guilt, in stealing the wife of his host, and with her all the effects in his house. He added, that the only reason why he did not punish him with death (as his crime deserved) was, because the Egyptians were careful ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... inversion of phrases that confuses the sense; faithful to rhyme, that enslaved queen, that supreme charm of our poetry, that creator of our metre; verse that is inexhaustible in the verity of its turns of thought, unfathomable in its secrets of composition and of grace; assuming, like Proteus, a thousand forms without changing its type and character; avoiding long speeches; taking delight in dialogue; always hiding behind the characters of the drama; intent, before everything, on being in its place, and when it falls to its lot to be beautiful, being ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... Americans. An "ugly disposition" manifested when the speaker is not understood. The Spaniards "ain't kinder like our folks," nor "folksy". Mistakes not all on one side. Spanish proverb regarding certain languages. Not complimentary to English. Stormy weather. Storm king a perfect Proteus. River on a rampage. Sawmill carried away. Pastimes of the miners during the storm. MS. account of storm sent in keg via river to Marysville newspaper. Silversmith makes gold rings during storm. Raffling and reraffling of same as pastime. Some ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... leaving many things unsaid on this topic, but not longer omit our homage to the Efficient Nature, natura naturans, the quick cause, before which all forms flee as the driven snows, itself secret, its works driven before it in flocks and multitudes, (as the ancient represented nature by Proteus,[500] a shepherd), and in undescribable variety. It publishes itself in creatures, reaching from particles and spicula, through transformation on transformation to the highest symmetries, arriving at consummate results without a shock or a leap. ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... 657. The story is mixed up with Greek fables, e.g. that of Proteus, as Wissowa has pointed out, ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... the stream, the daisy of the field, the conies of the rock, the hysop of the wall. Now, the vast and various frame of nature is adapted not to the lesser, but to the larger mind. It spreads on and around us in all its rich and magnificent variety, and finds the full portraiture of its Proteus-like beauty in the mirror of genius alone. Evident, however, as this may seem, we find a sort of levelling principle in the inferior order of minds, and which, in fact, constitutes one of their grand characteristics—a principle that would fain abridge the scale ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... are these? And what their sin?"—They fell by one disease! (Not by the Proteus maladies, that strike Man into nothingness—not twice alike;) By the blue pest, whose gripe no art can shun, No force unwrench—out-singled one by one; When like a timeless birth, the womb of Fate Bore a new death, of unrecorded date, And doubtful name. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19. No. 575 - 10 Nov 1832 • Various
... Cistercian abbeys, I should have been sure to get on crystals presently; and if I had begun upon crystals, I should soon have drifted into architecture." Those who conceive of Ruskin as being thus a kind of literary Proteus like to point to the year 1860, that of the publication of his tracts on economics, as witnessing the greatest and suddenest of his changes, that from reforming art to reforming society; and it is true that this year affords a simple dividing-line between Ruskin's earlier ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... a start. Like Proteus who changed his shape to save himself the trouble of prophesying, he swiftly changed the key to save himself providing accurate information ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... cramped stiffness draws in my limbs, now the virtue of my tall body unfolds them, and suffers them to touch the cloud-tops. Now I am short and straitened, now stretch out with loosened knee; and I have mutably changed myself like wax into strange aspects. He who knows of Proteus should not marvel at me. My shape never stays the same, and my aspect is twofold: at one time it contrasts its outstretched limbs, at another shoots them out when closed; now disentangling the members and now rolling them back into a coil. ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... days the intermittent clouds of vapour sent up from the crater assume the most fantastic shapes—trees, ships, men, birds, animals—ever changing like the forms of Proteus. It would seem as if the Spirit of the Mountain were idly amusing himself, like a child blowing bubbles, or a vendor at a fair-stall carving out little figures of gingerbread to tickle the fancy of country boys and girls. The ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... fleetfoot son, The warrior Maenalus, who left his home In far-renowned Abydos: down on him He hurled Atymnius, the goodly son Whom Pegasis the bright-haired Nymph had borne To strong Emathion by Granicus' stream. Dead by his side he laid Orestius' son, Proteus, who dwelt 'neath lofty Ida's folds. Ah, never did his mother welcome home That son from war, Panaceia beauty-famed! He fell by Odysseus' hands, who spilt the lives Of many more whom his death-hungering spear Reached in that fight around the mighty dead. Yet Alcon, son of Megacles ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... Humor. You find in Germany ardent admirers of Shakespeare, who tell you that what they think most admirable in him is his Wortspiel, his verbal quibbles; and one of these, a man of no slight culture and refinement, once cited to a friend of ours Proteus's joke in "The Two Gentlemen of Verona"—"Nod I? why that's Noddy," as a transcendant specimen of Shakespearian wit. German facetiousness is seldom comic to foreigners, and an Englishman with a swelled cheek might take up Kladderadatsch, ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... miracle; 'Tis thy great work: that hath, not now alone, But sundry times raised me, in several shapes, And, but this morning, like a mountebank; To see thee at thy window: ay, before I would have left my practice, for thy love, In varying figures, I would have contended With the blue Proteus, or the horned flood. ...
— Volpone; Or, The Fox • Ben Jonson
... late hour of the day, it is still conceivable that such of them as would verily prefer to see, suppose, instead of a tramp with a harmonium, Orpheus with his lute, or Arion on his dolphin, pleased Proteus rising beside him from the sea,—might, standing on the "pleasant lea" of Margate or Brighton, ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... never be till the millennium—but here and there twos and threes, and more men than that, who will throw their whole hearts into the work of such a class till they come out of the hall in experimental religion like Sir Proteus ...
— Bunyan Characters - First Series • Alexander Whyte
... horsey clothes, and talk about nothing but betting. She abandoned religion for mesmerism, mesmerism for politics, and politics for the melodramatic excitements of philanthropy. In fact, she was a kind of Proteus, and as much a failure in all her transformations as was that wondrous sea-god when Odysseus laid hold of him. One day a serial began in one of the French magazines. At that time I used to read serial stories, and I well remember the shock of surprise I felt when I came to the description of ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... them was really a gentleman, as you will discover later. Their names were Valentine and Proteus. They were friends, and lived at Verona, a town in northern Italy. Valentine was happy in his name because it was that of the patron saint of lovers; it is hard for a Valentine to be fickle or mean. Proteus was unhappy in his name, because it was ...
— Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare • E. Nesbit
... distant parts of the world there are some of the same genus, and yet the genus is not found out of the caves or living in the free world. I have little doubt that, like the fish Amblyopsis, and like Proteus in Europe, these insects are "wrecks of ancient life," or "living fossils," saved from competition and extermination. But that formerly SEEING insects of the same genus roamed over the whole area in ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... carnival societies, Comus, Momus, and Proteus, are understood to be connected with three of the city's four leading clubs, all of which stand within easy range of one another on the uptown side of Canal Street: the Boston Club (taking its name from an old card game); the Pickwick (named for Dickens' genial gentleman, a statue of whom ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... for you at a quarter before seven, if that will suit you. I return you Sir Proteus[37], and shall merely add in return, as Johnson said of, and to, somebody or other, 'Are we alive ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... of common sense will enable any one to comprehend what is meant by case. Its real character is extremely simple; but in the different grammars it assumes as many meanings as Proteus had shapes. The most that has been written on it, however, is mere verbiage. What, then, is meant by case? In speaking of a horse, for instance, we say he is in a good case, when he is fat, and in a bad case, when he is lean, and needs more oats; ...
— English Grammar in Familiar Lectures • Samuel Kirkham
... perception of divine and internal harmony, and its thoughts and acts accord with the symmetry of the law, innate in all things. Not, as drunk from the cups of Circe, does he go dashing and stumbling, now in this and then in that ditch, now against this or that rock, or like a shifting Proteus, changing now to this, now to the other aspect, never finding place, fashion, or ground to stay and settle in; but, without spoiling the harmony, conquers and overcomes the horrid monsters, and however much he may swerve, he easily returns ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... sheriff's officer in arranging for special bail. These very uncanonical services one might have fancied sufficient, with spinning and spelling, for filling up the temporal cares of any one man's time. But this restless Proteus masqueraded through a score of other characters—as seedsman, harvester, hedger and ditcher, etc. We have no doubt that he would have taken a job of paving; he would have contracted for darning old Christopher's silk stockings, or for ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... this stiff-necked and tyrannical, this lustful and bigoted, this vain and sensual man, whom the wrath of God has made King of England. You must, before all things, be perfect master of the difficult art of coquetry. You must become a female Proteus—today a Messalina, to-morrow a nun; to-day one of the literati, to-morrow a playful child; you must ever seek to surprise the king, to keep him on the stretch, to enliven him. You must never give way to the dangerous feeling of security, for in fact King Henry's ...
— Henry VIII And His Court • Louise Muhlbach
... cabinet of curiosities since I was nine years old (I am now fourteen), and I have stones and shells and pieces of wood from a great many of the States, from the arctic regions, from South America, Oceanica, and Europe—more than two hundred in all. Among the rest is a Proteus (Menobranchus maculatus) taken from the Winooski River by Thompson, once State Geologist of Vermont. I would like to know if any other of your correspondents has got a Proteus, and also if ...
— Harper's Young People, February 17, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... "Cytherea!" Lock hands and cry together: it may be That she will heed and hear And come from the waste places of the sea, Leaving old Proteus all discomforted, To cast down from his head Its crown of nameless jewels, to be hurled In ruins, with the ruined royalty Of an old world. The Nereids seek thee in the salt sea-reaches, Seek thee; and ...
— A Handbook for Latin Clubs • Various
... and then inflated into bombast. The characters do not, as it were, verify their human nature, by those thousand little touches and nameless turns, which distinguish the genius essentially dramatic from the genius merely poetical; the Proteus of the stage from the philosophic observer and trained imitator of life. We have not those careless felicities, those varyings from high to low, that air of living freedom which Shakspeare has accustomed ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... pain and punishment for ill deed unforgiven, Till Priam's self might pity us. Witness the star of bane Minerva sent; Euboea's cliffs, Caphereus' vengeful gain! 260 'Scaped from that war, and driven away to countries sundered wide, By Proteus' Pillars exiled now, must Menelaues bide; And those AEtnaean Cyclop-folk Ulysses look upon: Of Pyrrhus's land why tell, or of Idomeneus, that won To ruined house; of Locrian men cast on the Libyan shore? Mycenae's lord, the duke and king of all the Argive war, ...
— The AEneids of Virgil - Done into English Verse • Virgil
... Yet the mole, which habitually makes no use of the sense of sight, has eyes so small that they can hardly be seen; and the aspalax, whose habits-resemble a mole's, has totally lost its sight, and shows but vestiges of eyes. So also the proteus, which inhabits dark caves ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... friend! By Proteus, the old shepherd of the seals, you slumber uneasily. If I had not caught hold of you, you would have tumbled into the Eunostos. It is as true as that my mother sold salt fish, that ...
— Thais • Anatole France
... the camp and the Roman road which still exist in the mind's eye of the antiquaries, he might then go on to tell of holy St. Servan's feats in the way of detecting sheep-stealers by making them, like Speed under the influence of Proteus' reasoning, cry "Baa," or relate some such pretty human story as that of how he turned water into wine for the sake of a sick monk, or unfold the thrilling tale of how he fought the Dovan dragon, as Wyntoun ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... fire-escape become not clearly distinguishable; this barbarous logic prevails against the logic in Barbara, and the syllogism is in the predicament of Humpty Dumpty. In this predicament was the Poet Laureate. The miscreant Proteus (could not) escape these chains!" So the miscreant Proteus—no bad name for an old actor—took his little cocked hat and marched, a smaller, if not a wiser man. Some disjointed words fell from him: "Mimicry is not acting," etc.; and with one bitter, ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... not this coy secrecy prevent Th' admiring gaze and warm desires of one Tutored by Love, nor yet would Love consent To hide such lustrous beauty from the sun; Love! that through every change delight'st to run, The Proteus of the heart I who now dost blind, Now roll the Argus eyes that nought can shun! Thou through a thousand guards unseen dost wind, And to the chastest ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... congenial spirits among the sea-nymphs and sirens on the shores of the Aegean. He longs to gain freedom from his glass, in which he is still imprisoned. Nereus the sea-god is unable to help him, but sends him to his father Proteus, the great ocean prophet, who bears him out into the midst of the ocean. Here Galatea the sea-goddess (identical with Aphrodite, the sea-born symbol of the beauty of the natural-world) passes by in her chariot drawn by dolphins ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... Proteus informed Menelaus that he would be conveyed to the Islands of the Blessed, because he was the husband of Helen, and the son-in-law of Jupiter. No incentives to goodness from the consideration of a future state are held out by the older poets to the female sex, or to the ignoble or common people, ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 11, November, 1880 • Various
... eyes in masculine bewilderment. Then came the final change in this Proteus, and she put out both her hands for an instant and said in a low tone on which he ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... Scolion of Harmodius and Aristogiton. Sertorius heard of the islands at Cadiz from some sailors who had been there; and he had a wish to go and live in them and rest from his troubles (Plutarch, Sertorius, c. 8). In the Odyssey, Proteus told Menelaus that he should not die in Argos, but be removed to a place at the boundary of the earth where Rhadamanthus dwelt ...
— Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus • Marcus Aurelius Antoninus |
