"Bacchanal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... spectacle which met the eye, there were sounds of revelry which fell almost appallingly upon the ear. The wide expanse reverberated with bacchanal songs, and drunken shouts, and frenzied war-whoops. These were all blended in an inextricable clamor. With the unrefined eminently, and in a considerable degree with the most refined, noise is one of the essential elements ...
— David Crockett: His Life and Adventures • John S. C. Abbott
... new fierce, now faint, But ever fever-sick, shook not his lyre With epileptic fervours. Sensual taint Of satyr heat, or bacchanal desire, Polluted not the passion of his song; No corybantic clangor clamoured through Its manly harmonies, as sane as strong; So that the captious few Found sickliness in pure Elysian balm, And coldness ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 15, 1892 • Various
... the reading of essays added to the entertainment of these gatherings. Stories were told, and bacchanal songs sung. No man could tell a better story, and few men could sing a better song than Benjamin Franklin. No one was deemed a suitable member of the club, who would not contribute his full quota to the entertainment or instruction. The questions proposed ...
— Benjamin Franklin, A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago - American Pioneers and Patriots Series • John S. C. Abbott
... [U.S.], peg, rum, rye, schnapps [U.S.], sherry, sling [U.S.], uisquebaugh [Ire.], usquebaugh [Scot.], whisky, xeres^. drunkard, sot, toper, tippler, bibber^, wine-bibber, lush; hard drinker, gin drinker, dram drinker; soaker [Slang], sponge, tun; love pot, toss pot; thirsty soul, reveler, carouser, Bacchanal, Bacchanalian; Bacchal^, Bacchante^; devotee to Bacchus^; bum [U.S.], guzzler, tavern haunter. V. get drunk, be drunk &c adj.; see double; take a drop too much, take a glass too much; drink; tipple, tope, booze, bouse ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... world's history men did believe that the stars were dancing to the tune of their temples, and they danced as men have never danced since. With this old pagan eudaemonism the sage of the Rubaiyat has quite as little to do as he has with any Christian variety. He is no more a Bacchanal than he is a saint. Dionysus and his church was grounded on a serious joie-de-vivre like that of Walt Whitman. Dionysus made wine, not a medicine, but a sacrament. Jesus Christ also made wine, not a medicine, but a sacrament. But Omar makes ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... kindly consented to take just a "sip of red port wine" with the performer upon catgut cables; and everything was progressing allegro, when Cupid wickedly stimulated the double-bass to chuck Susan's double chin, and then, with the frenzy of a Bacchanal, to attempt the impossibility of encircling the ample waist of his Dulcinea. This was carrying the joke a leetle too far, and Susan, equally alarmed for her reputation and her habit-shirt, struggled to free herself from the embrace of the votary of Apollo; but the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... in revelling roundelays, Belched out with hickups at bacchanal Go, Bellowed, till heaven's high concave rebound the lays, Are all for college carousals too low. Of dullness quite tired, with merriment fired, And fully inspired with amity's glow, With hate-drowning wine, boys, and punch all divine, boys, The Juniors combine, boys, in friendly HIGH-GO. ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... bacchanal songs that resound When they're making a night of it half the year round, And carousing for months till the morning is pale, Go home with the milk ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... of Maia; And honour with three, the band zone-free, The band of the bright Aglaia. But since every bud in the wreath of pleasure Ye owe to the sister Hours, No stinted cups, in a formal measure, The Bromian law makes ours. He honors us most who gives us most, And boasts, with a Bacchanal's honest boast, He never will count the treasure. Fastly we fleet, then seize our wings, And plunge us deep in the sparkling springs; And aye, as we rise with a dripping plume, We'll scatter the spray round the garland's bloom; ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... the sacrifice, the chant, and the dance, as in most of the preceding exhibitions, each of which, like this of Bacchus, had contained allusions to the peculiar habits and attributes of the different deities. The bacchanal that closed the scene was performed in character; the trumpets flourished, and the procession departed in the order in which it ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... the Tartarean abyss. The rest of the Caesars successively advanced to their seats; and as they passed, the vices, the defects, the blemishes of their respective characters, were maliciously noticed by old Silenus, a laughing moralist, who disguised the wisdom of a philosopher under the mask of a Bacchanal. As soon as the feast was ended, the voice of Mercury proclaimed the will of Jupiter, that a celestial crown should be the reward of superior merit. Julius Caesar, Augustus, Trajan, and Marcus Antoninus, were selected as the most illustrious candidates; ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... Bacchanal of Blood, the colonies tore out of the map every shred of German colonial territory there was, and poured into Europe their flood of black, white, and yellow men. Little Denmark, catching the festive spirit, reached out for Schleswig-Holstein; ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... distraught hand, and as she sank the mist closed down again as it were a merciful curtain drawn to hide a horror. An enemy Cruiser dropped down the engaged side of the line like an exhausted participator in a Bacchanal of Furies. Her sides were riven and gaping, with a red glare showing through the rents. Her decks were a ruined shambles of blackened, twisted metal, but she still spat defiance from a solitary gun, and sank firing as the ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... obscenities of black, white, and yellow bodied women. Thus, the mania for the rouge of life, for the grimace that lies beyond satiety, passes in him from bestiality to asceticism and esthetics. Yesterday a bacchanal of flesh, to-day a bacchanal of words ... the posturings of courtezans and the posturings of ornate phrases become the same." He heard Crowley repeating, "Damned idiot, Egan! No sense of human values. Crowded the best story of the day off page one." ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... slight scar on his brow—so completely is his apparent personal identity lost, that it would be impossible for him to establish an alibi. He sees a figure in the mirror above the chimney-piece, but has not the slightest suspicion that the rosy-faced Bacchanal is himself, the water-drinker; but then he takes care to imitate the manual exercise of the phantom—lifting his glass to his lips at the very same moment, as if they were both moved ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... chastity. The wretched Astraea, who is the perfection of beauty and innocence, has long been thus condemned for life. The romantic tales of virgins devoted to the jaws of monsters, have nothing in them so terrible as the gift of Astraea to that Bacchanal. ...
— Isaac Bickerstaff • Richard Steele
... air of the "Collier's dochter," Burns bids Thomson add the following old Bacchanal: it is slightly altered from a rather ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... restless with long inactivity in a pension, seized on the bright pans of Marie's kitchen and the promise of the brick-and-sheetiron stove. She disapproved of Stewart, having heard strange stories of him, but there was nothing bacchanal or suspicious about this orderly establishment. Mrs. Boyer was a placid, motherly looking woman, torn from her church and her card club, her grown children, her household gods of thirty years' accumulation, that "Frank" might catch up ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... despatches of the ambassadors—regarding all this Burchard is silent. Even Vannozza he names but once, and then incorrectly. There are two passages in particular in his diary which have given the greatest offense: the report of the bacchanal of fifty harlots in the Vatican, and the attack made on the Borgias in the anonymous letter to Silvio Savelli. These passages are found in all the manuscripts and doubtless also in the original of the diary. That the letter ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... the tables be loaded with feasts till they groan! Till they groan like thy people, through ages of woe! Let the wine flow around the old Bacchanal's throne, Like their blood which has flowed, and which yet has ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... good William hushed with the embarrassments of love, but looking out warily with the white of his eye for Mr. Martin, and determined not to sit within a hundred yards of him; here rolled in the orbit of habit the bacchanal, Mr. Wilkerson, who politely answered in kind all the uncouth roarings and guttural ejaculations of jungle and fen that came from the animal tent; in brief, here came with lightest hearts the population of Carlow ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... be parodied, even parody. The Saturnalia, that grimace of antique beauty, ends, through exaggeration after exaggeration, in Shrove Tuesday; and the Bacchanal, formerly crowned with sprays of vine leaves and grapes, inundated with sunshine, displaying her marble breast in a divine semi-nudity, having at the present day lost her shape under the soaked rags of the North, has finally come to be ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... past the grape arbor whose fruit ripened for us only in a single bunch, though he had so confidently prophesied our daily pleasure in it. He seemed at first to be the landlord, and without reference to higher authority he gave us beautiful rooms overlooking the bacchanal vine which would have been filled with sunshine if the weather had permitted. When he lapsed into the concierge, he got us, for five pesetas, so deep and wide a wood-box, covered with crimson cloth, that he was borne ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... but not play the fool! It's the same insane orgy every year, the same waste of money when there's so much need and so much suffering! But I see! It's the orgy, the bacchanal, that is to still the lamentations ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... a gilded wreath of olive leaves, and incised on an architrave fronting the vestibule, the golden "Salve" greeted visitors; just beneath it, on an antique shaped table of topaz-veined onyx, stood a Vulci black bowl or vase, decorated in vermilion with Bacchanal figures; and this Leo filled in summer with creamy roses, in winter, with camellias. Where the shrines and Lares stood in ancient houses, a square, burnished copper pedestal fashioned like an altar had been placed, and upon it rose from a bed of carved lilies, a copy in white marble ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... its subject—be it drink or war or money—possesses the reader as a nightmare possesses the dreamer. For the time this place of wide prospect, the world, puts up its shutters; and life becomes all drink, all war, all money, while M. Zola (adaptable Bacchanal!) surrenders his brain to the intoxication of his latest theme. He will drench himself with ecclesiology, or veterinary surgery, or railway technicalities—everything by turns and everything long; but, like the gentleman in the comic opera, ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... during the morning; at noon all lights are turned off. Many of the workers went out for lunch, the rest got around in dismal corners, most of them singly, and ate by their machines, on the same hard seats they have been on since a quarter to 8. What a bacchanal festival of color and beauty now appeared the candy-factory whitewashed lunch room with the marble-topped tables! The airy sociability of it! I wandered about with my lunch in my hand, to see what I could see. Up amid the belts and power machines sat ...
— Working With the Working Woman • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... he could swallow no more of anything, unless it were punch. The materials were forthwith produced; the bowl was planted before the poet, and as he proceeded in his concoction, Hook, unbidden, took his place at the piano. He burst into a bacchanal of egregious luxury, every line of which had reference to the author of the Lay Sermons and the Aids to Reflection. The room was becoming excessively hot: the first specimen of the new compound was handed to Hook, who paused to quaff it, and then, exclaiming that he was stifled, flung his glass ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... in some foreign countries to improve the color of the wine; so that the poetaster maybe celebrating the virtues of the Poke without knowing it. Here are berries enough to paint afresh the western sky, and play the bacchanal with, if you will. And what flutes its ensanguined stems would make, to be used in such a dance! It is truly a royal plant. I could spend the evening of the year musing amid the Poke-stems. And perchance ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... strike other chords; Fill high the cup with Samian wine! Leave battles to the Turkish hordes, And shed the blood of Scio's vine! Hark! rising to the ignoble call— How answers each bold Bacchanal! ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... most jocund bacchanal of all; the operator boxed over his instrument against harm and slipped out; and Shelby was left solitary with the litter and the lees. One by one he extinguished the lights, and in darkness, at length, ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... it as by the roar of a great waterfall. You see a wave of unusual magnitude rolling in from far beyond the wild revelry of waters on 'The Rips.' It leaps into the arena as if fresh and eager for the fray, clutches another Bacchanal like itself, and the two towering floods rush swiftly toward the shore. Instinctively you run backward to escape what seems an impending destruction. Very likely a sheet of foam is dashed all around you, shoe-deep, but you are safe—only the foam hisses away in impotent ...
— Elsie at Nantucket • Martha Finley
... who has stepped unconscious and lifeless out of a Praxitelian bas-relief. And there are stranger works than even the Judith; strange statuesque fancies, like the fight of Marine Monsters and the Bacchanal among Mantegna's engravings. The group of three wondrous creatures, at once men, fish, and gods, is as grand and even more fantastic than Leonardo's Battle of the Standard: a Triton, sturdy and muscular, with sea-weed beard and hair, wheels round his finned horse, preparing ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... when all title-deeds are gone, Still, still will satyr, nymph, and faun Through brake and covert pipe and call In dances bold and bacchanal— For them, for me, you hold ...
— Dreams and Dust • Don Marquis
... wrought, with a lamp hanging from one hand, and an instrument for trimming it from the other, the lamp itself representing a theatrical mask. Beside him is a twisted column, surmounted by the head of a Faun, or Bacchanal, which has a lid in its crown, and seems intended as a reservoir of oil. The boy and pillar are both placed on a square plateau, raised upon lions' claws. But, beautiful as those lamps are, the light which they gave must have been weak and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 581, Saturday, December 15, 1832 • Various
... impregnated with Russian tobacco and the bluish vapor which filled the room, revealed in what manner the betrayed lover had diverted his impatience, and in the centre of the writing-table a cup with a bacchanal painted in red on a black ground, of which Julien was very proud, contained the remains of about thirty cigarettes, thrown aside almost as soon as lighted. Their paper ends had been gnawed with a nervousness which betrayed the young man's condition, while he repeated, in a ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... maddening glamour, With the wild White Maids, to the hills, to the hills! Oh, then, like a colt as he runs by a river, A colt by his dam, when the heart of him sings, With the keen limbs drawn and the fleet foot a-quiver, Away the Bacchanal springs! ...
— Hippolytus/The Bacchae • Euripides
... century, "the evening of the vigil is scarcely dark when numbers of men, women, and boys are seen traversing the streets with torches, and many of them supplied with tambourines, which they strike loudly as they move along in a kind of Bacchanal procession. There is a tradition here that the shepherds who visited Bethlehem on the day of the Nativity had instruments of this sort upon which they expressed the sentiment of joy that animated them when they received ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... narrative everything is plausible, nay, of the stuff of life. As realists the Russians easily lead all other nations in fiction. There are descriptions of woodlands that recall a little scene from Turgenieff's Sportsman's Sketches; there are episodes, such as the bacchanal in the monastery, a moonlit ride in the canoe with a realistic seduction episode, and the several quarrels that would have pleased both Tolstoy and Dostoievsky; there is an old mujik who seems to have stepped out of Dostoievsky, yet is evidently a portrait taken from ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker |
