"Hydra" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was at that time the eccentric and elegant lion of society in Baltimore. "Jack Randolph" had recently sat to him for his portrait. "By the bye [the letter continues] that little 'hydra and chimera dire,' Jarvis, is in prodigious circulation at Baltimore. The gentlemen have all voted him a rare wag and most brilliant wit; and the ladies pronounce him one of the queerest, ugliest, most agreeable little creatures ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... such as Fielding's The Author's Farce—the play appears to be writing itself on the stage. He displays all the tricks of satire—exaggeratedly ironic praise, allegorical names (Miss Giggle, Miss Brilliant, Miss Bashfull), stock characters of satire (Pasquin, Marforio, Hydra, Drawcansir), lists of offenses, parodies of polite conversation reminiscent of Swift, and constant topical references: to the Robin Hood Society to which little Bob Smart belongs; to Mother Midnight; to playwrights ...
— The Covent Garden Theatre, or Pasquin Turn'd Drawcansir • Charles Macklin
... civilization on a level with that of the most polished nation of the Old World. But even now, when we are struggling for our very existence, when every energy and every material resource is being exerted to stem the tide of internal dissensions and crush out the hydra of internal treason; at a time when the mother country has gone to every length short of open war to aid and assist those who are striving for our downfall, and her press is exhausting every epithet of vituperation ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... connection with the royal blood was nearest and most recent, the pedigrees of families pointed out others, and others still, whose relationship grew into nearness by the removal of such as had stood before them, and presented to the affrighted eyes of their persecutor, a hydra with ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... the money Ernest gives me will not hold out. He knows absolutely nothing about that hydra-headed monster, a household. I, have had to go back to sewing as furiously as ever. And with the sewing the old pain in the side has come back, and the sharp, quick speech that I hate, and, that Ernest hates, and that everybody hates. I ...
— Stepping Heavenward • Mrs. E. Prentiss
... irresistible fatality, fall again into intolerable disgrace. For twenty-four centuries these are the scenes which recur again and again; the same changes, the same misfortune, but also the same courage, the same resolution, the same boldness.... If she trembled for an instant before the feudal hydra, it was only long enough to recognize and destroy it. If, led by a natural feeling, she kissed, like a slave, the chains of Rome, she was not long in breaking them. If, finally, she bowed her head before ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... While every fibre, from the lowest root To the last leaf upon the topmost twig, Was held by common sympathy, diffusing Through all the complex frame unconscious life. Such was the locust with its hydra boughs, A hundred heads on one stupendous trunk; And such the mangrove, which, at full-moon flood, Appear'd itself a wood upon the waters, But when the tide left bare its upright roots, A wood on piles suspended in the air; Such too the Indian fig, that built itself Into a sylvan temple, arch'd aloof ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 286, December 8, 1827 • Various
... with six persons, one has reason to dread the presence of one spy), proclaims at once the morality of the governors and that of the governed: were the former just, and the latter good, this mass of vileness would never be employed; or, if employed, wickedness would expire for want of fuel, and the hydra of tyranny perish by its own ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... fortunately for his own happiness, was of, that peculiar temperament that nothing could completely rouse his anger: he was absent to an excess; and if any language or behaviour on the part of his wife induced his choler to rise, other ideas would efface the cause from his memory; and this hydra of the human bosom, missing the object of its intended attack, again ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... the imagination, picture as now present before him any particular object or event, real or imaginary, such as King Arthur's round table; the death scene of Sir Isaac Brock or Captain Scott; the sinking of the Titanic; the Heroine of Vercheres; or the many-headed Hydra. ...
— Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education • Ontario Ministry of Education
... "ascertained as proved"—that these minute creatures are one-celled, and that in the case of these infusoria one single cell is capable of all the various vital functions—including soul-functions—which in the zoophytes (plant-animals), as the hydra and the sponges, are distributed among the cells of the two germ-layers, and in all the higher animals among the different tissues, organs, and apparatus of a highly developed and constructed organism. The psychic functions of sensation and ...
— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel
... melodramatic lawlessness, exercised what now seems such an amazing fascination over the least revolutionary of European nations. Unfitted for scientific work and full of ardour, Mr. Carlyle found his mission in rushing with all his might to the annihilation of this terrible poet, who, like some gorgon, hydra, or chimera dire planted at the gate, carried off a yearly tale of youths and virgins from the city. In literature, only a revolutionist can thoroughly overpower a revolutionist. Mr. Carlyle had fully as much daring as Byron; his writing at its best, if without the many-eyed ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... PEOPLES (published in 1908). There it is written of the "Borneans" that "No girl will look at a wooer before he has laid a head or two at her feet." To us it seems obvious that this state of affairs could only obtain among a hydra-headed race. The statement is not true of any one tribe, and as regards most of the "Borneans" has no foundation in fact. Applied to the Sea Dayaks alone has the statement an element of truth. ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... certain specialized cells which, in their developed form, we know as seeds or eggs. Yet, even among animals, at a low stage of development, this original power of reproducing the whole from a single part remains inherent in the organism; for you may chop up a fresh-water hydra into a hundred little bits, and every bit will be capable of growing ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... seduced them by her soft and bewitching speeches, viz.: That "they must render to the Eternal Creator of all things an adoration with more testimony, and more extensive, than they had hitherto done," etc. This Hydra with a hundred heads, at that time misled, and continues to this day to mislead men who are so weak as to submit to her empire; and it will subsist, until the moment that the true elected shall appear and ...
— The Mysteries of Free Masonry - Containing All the Degrees of the Order Conferred in a Master's Lodge • William Morgan
... padding, for as I have already explained, if he wrote about anything that really interested him, his mother always wanted to know more and more about it—every fresh answer being as the lopping off of a hydra's head and giving birth to half a dozen or more new questions—but in the end it came invariably to the same result, namely, that he ought to have done something else, or ought not to go on doing as he proposed. Now, however, there was a new departure, and for the thousandth ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... printed documents joined to the dossier, and, among others, by a "Requete a Desmoulins, procureur-general de la Lanterne." It relates to a "patriotic inkstand," recently made out of the stones of the demolished citadel, representing a hydra with four heads, symbolizing the nobility, the clergy, the ministry and the judges. "It is from the four patriotic skulls of the hydra that the ink of proscription will be taken for the enemies of the Constitution. This inkstand, cut out of the first stone that fell in the ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... said, as we sat comfortably together, "the great principle of Irish life is quieta non movere. Because, when you lay a finger on the most harmless and impotent things, they spring at once into hissing and spitting things, like the Lernaean hydra; and then, like that famous monster, you must cauterize the wound to heal, or prevent new hideous developments. You have, as yet, no idea of how many ways, all different and mutually antagonistic, there are, of looking at things ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... a sincere friend; and of this let me assure you, that your drink, if everything goes right with us, won't cost you much—much! not a penny; if you had two throats instead of one—as many necks as Hydra, we should ...
— The Emigrants Of Ahadarra - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... charmed life; We come not scathless from the strife! The Python's coil about us clings, The trampled Hydra ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... see that you never know where ignorance lurks. The hydra-headed upas tree and bete noir of self-acting progress, is such ignorance as that, lurking in the very shadow of magnificent educational institutions and hard words of great cast. Nothing can be more disagreeable to the scientist ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... appears, there is a tap root from which it all comes, like a close-clinging mass of ivy which is choking the life out of an elm-tree. If that root were grubbed up, all would fall. It is like some huge sea monster 'floating many a rood,' but there is only one life in it. The hydra has a hundred heads, but one heart. And the place in the prayer in which this clause comes suggests ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... vengeance. We in Italy are all of us afraid of socialism, we who have anything to lose; and yet we let the syndics, and their secretaries, conciliators, and chancellors sow it broadcast in dragon's teeth of petty injustices and petty cruelties, that soon or late will spring up armed men, hydra-headed ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... inner cells now do the work of digestion alone; the outer cells effect locomotion, by means of lashes like oars, and are sensitive. This is, in the main, the structure of the next great group of animals, the hydra, coral, meduca, and anemone. They have remained at this level, though they have developed, special organs for stinging their prey and bringing ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... party in the same conventional dress. Huxley examined a large number of these, and picked out from them two great families of polyps, the Hydroid and Sertularian polyps, which each consist of colonies of creatures very much like the little fresh-water hydra. He shewed that the tubular body of these and the ring of tentacles surrounding the mouth were composed of the same two foundation-membranes of which all the organs of Medusae are composed. He found in them the poisoned arrows or ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... he raised his deep voice to ask whether Ledscha, if the venture in which he would willingly risk his life were successful, would accompany him on board the Hydra, the good ship whose command his father intrusted to him. The firm "Yes" with which she answered, and her indignant exclamation as she repulsed Hanno's premature attempt at tenderness, might have been heard by the hawk even ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... in English, a sermon with a name, a sermon without, a sermon, a sermon, &c. But I have been ever as desirous to suppress my labours in this kind, as others have been to press and publish theirs. To have written in controversy had been to cut off an hydra's head, [157]Lis litem generat, one begets another, so many duplications, triplications, and swarms of questions. In sacro bello hoc quod stili mucrone agitur, that having once begun, I should never make an end. One had much better, as [158]Alexander, the sixth pope, long ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... after the date of Peyssonel's suppressed paper, the Abbe Trembley [118] published his wonderful researches upon the fresh-water Hydra. Bernard de Jussieu [119] and Guettard [120] followed them up by like inquiries upon the marine sea-anemones and corallines; Reaumur, convinced against his will of the entire justice of Peyssonel's views, adopted them, and made him ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... from that scene of oriental learning, simplicity, and kindliness, we walked into our western life once more, and resumed our citizenship and burden in the Venetian world—out of the waters of which, like a hydra or other water beast, a bathing boy instantly issued and begged ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... political hydra of Huguenots in France; from that time the Reformers had lived in modest retirement. "I have no complaint to make of the little flock," Mazarin would say; "if they eat bad grass, at any rate they do not stray." During the troubles ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... just received. "Now, this man owed everything to the kindness of Charles X., yet for the sake of office he has cast himself at the foot of a new master. Here is one who, on the 28th of July, applauded the ordinances, and swore that the hydra of liberalism should he destroyed: and said that he would pour out the last drop of his blood in defense of legitimacy. He is now a partisan of the revolution. We live in a scandalous age. All principles of honor and religion are forgotten. ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... days;[14.B.] But Cadiz, rising on the distant coast,[82] Calls forth a sweeter, though ignoble praise. Ah, Vice! how soft are thy voluptuous ways! While boyish blood is mantling, who can 'scape[cx] The fascination of thy magic gaze? A Cherub-Hydra round us dost thou gape, And mould to every taste thy dear ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... Lerna.—Ver. 597. This was a swampy spot on the Argive territory, where the poets say that the dragon with seven heads, called Hydra, which was slain by Hercules, had made his haunt. It is not improbable that the pestilential vapors of this spot were got rid of by means of its being drained under the superintendence of Hercules, on which fact the story was founded. ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... hydra of three hideous heads the German army had pushed its course over the Saar, over the Rhine, over the Lauter; it sniffed at the frontier line; licked Wissembourg and the Spicheren with flaming tongues, shuddered, coiled, and glided over the boundary into the fair land of ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers
... Hydra was a monster with one hundred heads. If one was cut off two grew in its place unless the wound was stopped ...
— The Original Fables of La Fontaine - Rendered into English Prose by Fredk. Colin Tilney • Jean de la Fontaine
... enthroned in space—judges, and spectators, cold and pitiless as it seemed to me, in the strangeness and forlornness of my condition—Arcturus, and the Ursas, great and little, and Lyra, and the Corona Borealis, Berenice, and Hydra, and Cassiopea's chair; these and many more. I marked them all with a calm scrutiny that belongs to terror in some phases. The stars seemed mocking eyes that night—smiling and safe in heaven—the moon, a cold and cruel enemy with her vapory train, so ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... resemble plants in many respects. Thus any new or peculiar character presented by a compound animal is propagated by budding, as occurs with differently coloured Hydras, and as Mr. Gosse has shown to be the case with a singular variety of a true coral. Varieties of the Hydra have also been grafted on other varieties, ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... floor—and the dance went on. Still the pursuit of gold went on, more frenzied than ever, and still the greater and richer claims were struck. The price of gold soared and the commodities of life were almost beyond the dreams of avarice. It was a tune in which the worst of men's natures stalked forth, hydra-headed and deaf, roaring for gold, spitting fire, and shedding blood. It was a time when gold and fire and blood were one. It was a tune when a horde of men from every class and nation, of all ages and characters, met on a field were motives and ambitions and faiths and traits merged into one ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... cause, the sole reward of which would have been the discovery of a river's source and termination, but now there was combined with that end, the cheering hope of extending civilization, of strangling the hydra, slavery, in its cradle, and of diffusing comfort and happiness over a wide quarter of the globe. Assuredly it is a glorious thing to be signally and prosperously engaged in laying the foundation for a consummation so devoutly ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... we have the soul "in a necklace, in a box, in the heart of a boal fish, in a tank"; in Albania "it is in a pigeon, in a hare, in the silver tusk of a wild boar"; in Rome it is "in a stone, in the head of a bird, in the head of a leveret, in the middle head of a seven-headed hydra"; in Russia "it is in an egg, in a duck, in a hare, in a casket, in an oak"; in Servia it is "in a board, in the heart of a fox, in a mountain"; in Transylvania "it is in a light, in an egg, in a duck, in a pond, in a mountain;" ...
— Indian Fairy Tales • Collected by Joseph Jacobs
... dip with the bottle in this pond. I will try and catch a few Hydrae. Strange animals, indeed, they are, and strange is their history; but let us catch a few first. Nothing yet in my bottle like a hydra. Ah! now we have one or two. You see a small creature sticking to the stem of a bit of duckweed; around its mouth are five or six little projections. At present they are contracted; but the hydra is able to lengthen them ...
— Country Walks of a Naturalist with His Children • W. Houghton
... no battle lightning flickered along the Southern horizon to sober folk with premonition; but the nightly illumination of the metropolis was becoming tinged with a more sinister reflection where licence had already begun to lift a dozen hydra-heads from certain lurid resorts hitherto limited ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... burnings, will touch a deep-lying political sore, any more than a deep bodily one; but only right and utter change of constitution: and that "they do but lose their labour who think that by any tricks of law they can get the better of these mischiefs of commerce, and see not that they hew at a Hydra." ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... scepticism begins to raise its hydra head, and to grin at the dogmatist's discomfiture. For in point of fact the history of thought reveals, not a steady accumulation of indubitable truth, but a continuous strife of opinions, in which the most widely accepted beliefs daily succumb to ...
— Pragmatism • D.L. Murray
... crocodile's tail. According to Biot the Egyptian Lion has nothing in common with the Greek constellation of that name, nor yet with our own, but was composed of smaller stars, belonging to the Greek constellation of the Cup or to the continuation of the Hydra, so that its head, its body, and its tail would follow the [ ] of the Hydra, between the [ ] and [ ] of that constellation, or the ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... cutting off three of his heads. [181] The fortune of Sidonius far exceeded the customary wealth of a poet; but if he had pursued the allusion, he might have painted many of the Gallic nobles with the hundred heads of the deadly Hydra, spreading over the face of the country, and devouring the substance of a hundred families. II. The difficulty of allowing an annual sum of about nine pounds sterling, even for the average of the capitation of Gaul, may be rendered more evident by the comparison ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... of the Hydra of Corruption now grovelling in the dust beneath the lance of Reason, and spouting up to the universal arch above us, its sanguinary gore,' said Mr Brick, putting on a little blue cloth cap with a glazed front, ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... all Europe quake for fear. I have of Turks, Arabians, Moors, and Jews, Enough to cover all Bithynia: Let thousands die; their slaughter'd carcasses Shall serve for walls and bulwarks to the rest; And as the heads of Hydra, so my power, Subdu'd, shall stand as mighty as before: If they should yield their necks unto the sword, Thy soldiers' arms could not endure to strike So many blows as I have heads for them. [174] Thou know'st not, foolish-hardy Tamburlaine, ...
— Tamburlaine the Great, Part I. • Christopher Marlowe
... for the first time in New York early in the morning. Before night he had explored the city, written a scathing philippic on it and sold it to a leading newspaper. New York had not daunted him. It had only annoyed him. He was quite impervious to its hydra-headed appeal. But you don't get the answer to that imperviousness until you visit the California which has produced the ...
— The Native Son • Inez Haynes Irwin
... bombardment of Algiers had shown what could be done against stone walls. A new power was now introduced into naval warfare—a considerable number of steam-ships being among the fleet. They were the Gorgon, Cyclops, Vesuvius, Hydra, Phoenix, and Confiance. At that time little confidence was placed in them as vessels of war, though it was acknowledged that they might prove useful in towing line-of-battle ships into action, or in acting as despatch-boats, or as transports for ...
— How Britannia Came to Rule the Waves - Updated to 1900 • W.H.G. Kingston
... scavenging the water—till a tadpole comes by and scavenges it. How many millions of living creatures are there on that one sprig? Look here!—a brown polype, with long waving arms—a gigantic monster, actually a full half-inch long. He is Hydra fusca, most famous, and earliest described (I think by Trembley). Ere we go home I may show you perhaps Hydra viridis, with long pea-green arms; and rosea, most beautiful in form and colour of all the strange family. You see that lump, just where his stalk joins his ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... was wrought the Hydra many-necked Flickering its dread tongues. Of its fearful heads Some severed lay on earth, but many more Were budding from its necks, while Hercules And Iolaus, dauntless-hearted twain, Toiled hard; the one with lightning sickle-sweeps Lopped the ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... was prepared—the fire, the sword, the men To wield them in their terrible array,— The army, like a lion from his den, Marched forth with nerve and sinews bent to slay,— A human Hydra, issuing from its fen To breathe destruction on its winding way, Whose heads were heroes, which cut off in vain Immediately in others ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... greenery, have been replaced by mills which now, dragon-like, everywhere rear their hissing heads, belching forth black smoke. In the midday glare of modern life even our hours of mental siesta have been narrowed down to the lowest limit, and hydra-headed unrest has invaded every department of life. Maybe, this is for the better, but I, for one, cannot account it ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... few, the blood of Hydra—Herne's bane, The juice of Hebron, and Cocytus' breath, And all the poisons ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... a peculiar state of feeling which a man sometimes experiences when he has bravely resisted some hydra-headed temptation to do anything "pleasant but wrong," yet which circumstances appear determined to force upon him: he struggles against it boldly at first; but, as each victory serves only to lessen his ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... last man, I believe, in England, who laid down his arms—Here is his son, of whom I have the highest accounts, as a gallant of spirit, accomplishments, and courage—Here is the unfortunate House of Derby—for pity's sake, interfere in behalf of these victims, whom the folds of this hydra-plot have entangled, in order to crush them to death—rebuke the fiends that are seeking to devour their lives, and disappoint the harpies that are gaping for their property. This very day seven-night the ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... committed suicide. Aurelian was of the same harsh and forbidding character as the Emperor Severus: he had, however, the qualities demanded by the times; energetic and not amiable princes were required by the exigences of the state. The hydra-headed Goths were again in the field on the Illyrian quarter: Italy itself was invaded by the Alemanni; and Tetricus, the rebel, still survived as a monument of the weakness of Gallienus. All these enemies were speedily repressed, or vanquished, by Aurelian. But it marks the real declension of ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... chronic affections, to discover this great truth, which remained concealed from all my predecessors and contemporaries, to establish the basis of its demonstration, and find out, at the same time, the curative medicines that were fit to combat this hydra ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... the black-and-steel lady, "and assist in crushing the hydra-headed demon rum." And she got into the victoria and ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... Hydra, growing on the duckweed usually multiplies by budding. It forms daughter-buds, living images of itself; a check comes to nutrition and these daughter-buds go free. A big sea-anemone may divide in two or more parts, which become separate animals. This is asexual reproduction, ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... books that blaspheme the gods and perplex the natural sense of right and wrong? I believe if Eurystheus was to set me to work again he would find me a worse task than any he imposed; he would make me read through a great library; and I would serve it as I did the hydra, I would burn as I went on, that one chimera might not rise from another to plague mankind. I should have valued myself more on clearing the library than on cleansing the ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... bought Hydra House we all hoped that beyond papering and painting, dabbing on a bit of plaster where it was needed, and grubbing the groundsel in the drive, he would allow it to remain in the state of old-world picturesqueness in which he had found it. We would not have objected even if he had ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 3, 1914 • Various
... of discord was abroad; one of the most favoured and interesting of our colonies was in revolt. The noble Duke saw this, and seemed at once to decide that it would require all the energies of the mother country to crush the Hydra at its birth. Accordingly, when any measure was brought forward tending to support the dignity, to uphold the honour, and to secure the integrity of the empire, the noble Duke invariably came forward and nobly ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... conception and manifestation of that being, or his attributes, in the form of idols. Next, the representation of all that belongs to spirits, good and bad. And finally, the deification of every imagination of the heart of man,—a written and accredited system of polytheism, and a monstrous and hydra-headed idolatry." ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... I think, considering our present circumstances at this time, the Almighty God has reserved this great work for us. We may bruise this Hydra of division, and crush this Cockatrice's egg. Our neighbors in England are not yet fitted for any such thing; they are not under the afflicting hand of Providence, as we are; their circumstances are great and glorious; their treaties are prudently managed, both at home ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... ugly creatures labouring at our embellishment, monstrous chrysalids trying to become butterflies. Our ideal is no longer the tranquil beauty of the soul, it is the anguish of Laocoon fighting with the hydra of evil. No longer are there happy and accomplished men; we are candidates, indeed, for heaven, but on earth galley-slaves, and we row away our life in the expectation of harbour. It seems possible that this perfecting of which we are so proud is ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... learned that the French fleet had returned to Toulon; wanting, however, at that time, three sail of the line and a frigate. On the 28th, while employed in watering the fleet, at Palla, in Sardinia, a letter arrived from Captain Munday of the Hydra, dated February 17th, who had reconnoitred the French fleet in Toulon on the 12th, when it consisted ...
— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. II (of 2) • James Harrison
... thousand avenues. The brothel, the flat, the assignation house, the tenement, saloons, dance halls, steamers, ice-cream parlors, Turkish baths, massage parlors, street-walking—the thing has woven itself into the texture of city life. Like the hydra, it grows new heads, everywhere. It draws into its service the pleasures of the city. Entangled with the love of gaiety, organized as commerce, it is literally impossible to follow the myriad ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... of Hercules and the Hydra, then, was to the general Greek mind, in its best days, a tale about a real hero and a real monster. Not one in a thousand knew anything of the way in which the story had arisen, any more than the English peasant generally is aware of the plebeian original of St. George; or supposes ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... these beds of seaweed. Almost all the leaves, excepting those that float on the surface, are so thickly incrusted with corallines as to be of a white colour. We find exquisitely delicate structures, some inhabited by simple hydra-like polypi, others by more organised kinds, and beautiful compound Ascidiae. On the leaves, also, various patelliform shells, Trochi, uncovered molluscs, and some bivalves are attached. Innumerable crustacea frequent every part of the plant. On shaking the great entangled roots, a pile of small ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... the horrors of the Roman crucifixion the twin thieves, superstition and scepticism, while the angel of "Goodwill'' will go free to solace the world with the fruit and fragrance of enduring power and promise{.} The steel chains that fasten these hydra-headed crocodiles of sensuous poison around love and destiny can only be severed by the diamond of wisdom ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... that it now threatened to disintegrate the whole nation, and unless it were firmly dealt with would probably split up the Makolo into a number of petty tribes, at enmity with each other, and an easy prey to those other nations who surrounded them. Would the king have the courage boldly to seize the hydra-headed menace and choke the life out of it, or would he resort to a policy of temporising and concession? Everybody present awaited the king's action in breathless suspense, while some were already ...
— The Adventures of Dick Maitland - A Tale of Unknown Africa • Harry Collingwood
... my place again; he shall tell me I am a drunkard. Had I as many mouths as Hydra, such an answer would stop them all. To be now a sensible man, by-and-bye a fool, and presently a beast" ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... view) the talk is far more difficult. The unruly and turbulent desires of the heart are not so obedient; one passion will start up before another is suppressed. The subduing Hercules cannot cut off the heads so often as the prolific Hydra can produce them, nor fell the stubborn Antaeus so fast as he can recruit his strength, and rise in ...
— Essays on Various Subjects - Principally Designed for Young Ladies • Hannah More
... task of Hercules was to destroy a hydra or water snake which dwelt in the marsh of Lerna, a small lake near Mycenae. The body of this snake was large and from its body sprang nine heads. Eight of these heads were mortal, but the ...
— Heroes Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... dying by the arrow of Heracles, which had been dipped in the venom of the Hydra, persuaded the bride Deanira, whose beauty was the cause of his death, to keep some of the blood from the wound as a love-charm for her husband. Many years afterwards, when Heracles was returning from his last exploit ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... too seriously, considering the circumstances. I've told you my plans for the Emperor's future. Princesses are women, and gossip is hydra-headed. When the lady hears—she who has been allowed to understand that the Emperor of Rhaetia only waits for a suitable opportunity of formally asking for her hand—for she will surely hear, that he has seized this very moment for his first liason, I tell you neither she nor her people are ...
— The Princess Virginia • C. N. Williamson
... is Hercules with the Augean stable to cleanse, of which every city is a stall, heaped with the dung of a century; with the Hydra to slay, whose hundred writhing heads of false belief, from old truth rotted into lies, spring inexhaustibly fecund in creeds, interests, institutions. Of which the chief is Property, most cruel and blind of all, who devours us, ere we know it, in the guise of Security and Peace, killing ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson
... by and for the good of each being' that it spares, and causing 'all corporal and mental endowments to tend towards perfection'? or who need mind suspecting himself to be descended, through an ape, from a triton or a hydra, if he may compensate himself by hoping to have a distant posterity of angels? How well, moreover, would it, if permitted, chime in with any rational religion, besides being, as already hinted, absolutely essential to that part of the Mosaic creed which represents all the variously coloured ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... good-humouredly, "be not always a boder of ill. Thou deemest a Goth worse than a gorgon or hydra, whereas, I assure you, they are very good fellows after all, if you stand up to them like a man, and trust their word. Old Meinhard ...
— More Bywords • Charlotte M. Yonge
... is that champion's glorious career!" cried the Secretary. "Let the hydra alone. Like the antique god of mythology, it eats up its own children as soon as they get large enough to be eaten. It is a fickle beast, and the idol of to-day it ...
— Edmond Dantes • Edmund Flagg
... Scarr'd and hard and forlorn. And as that foul monster of Lerna Whom Heracles slew in his might, But this one slaying, not slain, From the marshes, poisonous, white, Crawl'd out a plague-mist and sheeted the plain, A hydra of hell and of night. —Whence upon men has that horror past? From Cathaya westward it stole to Byzance,— The City of Flowers,—the vineyards of France;— O'er the salt-sea ramparts of England, last, Reeking and rank, a serpent's breath:— What ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... seventies Bakounin and his friends found opening before them a field of practical activity. On the whole, the sixties were spent in theorizing, in organizing, and in planning, but with the seventies the moment arrived "to unchain the hydra of revolution." On the 4th of September, 1870, the Third Republic was proclaimed in Paris, and a few days afterward there were many uprisings in the other cities of France. It was, however, only in Lyons that the Bakouninists played an important part. Bakounin had a ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... the law which he was fighting against, in doing all he could to effect the return of certain members to Parliament; these certain members being pledged to effect a reform in the law, according to Mr Hickson. And, as he once observed confidentially, "If you had to destroy a hydra-headed monster, would you measure swords with the demon as if he were a gentleman? Would you not rather seize the first weapon that came to hand? And so do I. My great object in life, sir, is to reform the law of England, sir. Once get a majority of Liberal members into the ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... Universe, but on the compact of men. It is the abnegation of God in the universe and of conscience in man. Its form will be despotism,—the government of all, by a part, for the sake of a part. It may be a single-headed despotism, or a despotism of many heads; but whether a Cyclops or a Hydra, it is alike "the abomination which maketh desolate." Its ultimate consequence is plain to foresee—poverty ...
— The Trial of Theodore Parker • Theodore Parker
... as by the old Hebrews; thus, also, it became the presiding genius of the malaria and fever which arose from the fens haunted by it—a superstition which gave rise to the theory that the tales of Hercules and the Hydra, Apollo and the mud-Python, St. George and the Dragon, were sanitary-reform allegories, and the monsters whose poisonous breath destroyed cattle and young maidens only typhus and consumption. We see no reason why early Christian heroes should not have ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... when I spoke, was in a hurry, "going to his ledger," Had I had as many months as hydra, that would have stopped ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... hyena, with a variety of household idols, on a small scale, calculated for family worship. Eighteen months credit will be given, or a discount of fifteen per cent. for prompt payment, on the sum affixed to each article. Direct, Canton-street, Canton, under the marble Rhinoceros and gilt Hydra." ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... the bidding of Minerva—a creation destined to restore order among the industrious classes, and to confirm to Great Britain the empire of art. The news of this Herculean prodigy spread dismay through the Union, and even long before it left its cradle, so to speak, it strangled the Hydra of misrule." {223b} ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... property, and independence of the people, they were obliged to seek it around the standards of lawless freebooters; and upon the ruins of these independent kingdoms and their disbanded armies rose the Maratha power, the hydra-headed monster which Aurangzeb thus created by his ambition, and spent the last twenty years of his life in vain attempts to crush.[15] The monster has been since crushed by being deprived of its Peshwa, the head which alone could infuse into all the members of the confederacy ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... of France, Hear me! Beneath the vengeance of the law Traitors have perish'd countless; more survive: The hydra-headed faction lifts anew Her daring front, and fruitful from her wounds, 85 Cautious from past defects, contrives new wiles Against ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... head. All night, jolting along a rough track cut through the forest, he thought of Pippin. The other miseries of this calamity at present left him cold; he barely thought of the smothered men; but Pippin's struggle, his lonely struggle with this hydra-headed monster, touched him very nearly. He fell asleep and dreamed of watching Pippin slowly strangled by a snake; the agonised, kindly, ironic face peeping out between two gleaming coils was so horribly real, that he awoke. It was the moment before dawn: pitch-black branches barred the sky; with ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... as a young palm sways before a breeze, and he caught her in his strenuous, young embrace, and held her firmly against him. Her old terrors wakened, and dreadful, unforgettable things stirred in the darkness, where they had lain hidden, and lifted hydra-heads. She cried out wildly, and strove to thrust him from her, but he held her close. There was a shaking among the tangled growths of bush and cactus high up on the opposite bank, and Lynette realised that Beauvayse's arms no longer held ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... the valuable contributions to geographical knowledge resulting from your explorations among the headwaters of the Mississippi River, and your discovery of the remotest lake that contributes to the perennial birth of this hydra-headed "Father of Waters," whose Genesis near the Arctic regions gives it a length of more than three thousand miles to the tropical gulf, to which it bears upon its ample bosom in safety the freightage of ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... horrid hinges grate The doors accursed. See'st thou what sentinel Sits in the porch? What presence guards the gate? Know, that within, still fiercer and more fell, Wide-yawning with her fifty throats, doth dwell A Hydra. Tartarus itself, hard by, Abrupt and sheer, beneath the ghosts in Hell, Gapes twice as deep, as o'er the earth on high Towers up the Olympian steep, ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... seeking a bubble in the mouth of a cannon. The Morning Post, in the year 1812, congratulated its readers upon having stripped off Cobbett's mask and discovered his cloven foot; adding, that it was high time to give the hydra-head of Faction a rap on ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... expense.' The Turk, a man of sense, Rejoin'd, 'I am aware What power your emperor's servants share. It brings to mind a tale both strange and true, A thing which once, myself, I chanced to view. I saw come darting through a hedge, Which fortified a rocky ledge, A hydra's hundred heads; and in a trice My blood was turning into ice. But less the harm than terror,— The body came no nearer; Nor could, unless it had been sunder'd, To parts at least a hundred. While musing deeply on this sight, ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... 20 And thou, my sire, not destined by thy birth To turn to dust, and mix with common earth, How wilt thou toss, and rave, and long to die, And quit thy claim to immortality; When thou shalt feel, enraged with inward pains, The Hydra's venom rankling in thy veins'? The gods, in pity, shall contract thy date, And give thee over to the power of Fate.' Thus, entering into destiny, the maid The secrets of offended Jove betrayed; 30 More had she still to say; but now appears ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... despoil a virgin's chastity Must likewise suffer death by law's decree, And that decree is irrevocable. Then, as I am God's vicegerent here on earth, By God's appointment here to reign and rule, So must I seek to cut abuses down, that, like To Hydra's heads, daily grows up, one in another's Place, and therein makes the land infectious. Which if with good regard we look not to, We shall, like Sodom, feel that fiery doom That God in justice ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VI • Robert Dodsley
... been of no use to hold up a candle to the hydra-headed devil,' said one landlord to me about his tenants, 'for affability is more expensive than absenteeism. If I say, "Good morning, Tom," the fellow expects twenty per cent. off the rent, and "How's your family?" is considered to imply forty per cent, abatement'—and that ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... thing would be fatal to him, and you will guard him against it." The princess gets from the magician the fatal secret. "One must go into a far distant forest," he says "Where there is a beast called the hydra, and cut off his seven heads. If the middle head is split open a leveret will jump out and run off. If the leveret is split open, a bird will fly out. If the bird is caught and opened, in its body is a precious stone, and should ...
— A History of Pantomime • R. J. Broadbent
... evil—in a form so degrading to all womanhood that no man, though he were the prince of profligates, would submit to its regulations for a day; then we cried out so that the world heard us. We know the plague is only stayed for a brief while. The hydra-headed monster every now and then lifts a new front, and must be smitten again. Four times in four successive years a little company of women of the District have appeared before committees and compelled the discussion and defeat of bills designed to fasten these measures upon the ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... political animosities arising from a free and enlightened people governing themselves, have principally engendered and fostered this vice, is most certain; and it would be some satisfaction, if, after the hostile feelings had subsided, the hydra also sank ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... overthrown; but he is one of three, Harmachis. Now that Cassius hath gone where all fools go, Rome has thrown out a hydra head. Crush one, and another hisses in thy face. There's Lepidus, and with him, that young Octavianus, whose cold eyes may yet with a smile of triumph look on the murdered forms of empty, worthless Lepidus, ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... grow like Hydra's heads: I am the Dowglas, fatall to all those That weare those colours on them. What art thou That counterfeit'st the person of a King? King. The King himselfe: who Dowglas grieues at hart So many of his shadowes thou hast met, And not the very ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... who best understand the nature of gossip and slander, if the victims of both, will take no notice of the former, but will allow no slander of themselves to go unrefuted during their lifetime, to spring up in a hydra-headed attack upon their children. No woman can be too sensitive as to any charges affecting her moral character, whether in the influence of her companionship, or in the influence ...
— Our Deportment - Or the Manners, Conduct and Dress of the Most Refined Society • John H. Young
... failed to station soldiers near those obvious points of danger, Marston Moor and Salisbury Plain.[36] 'Oliver, Protector,' evidently 'understood his Protectorship moderately well, and what Plots and Hydra-Coils were ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... of Heracles (Hercules) have a prominent place in the legends. This hero of Argos submitted to serve a cruel tyrant, but, by prodigious labors (twelve in number), delivered men from dangerous beasts,—the Lernaean hydra, the Nemean lion, etc.,—and performed other miraculous services. Theseus, the national hero of Attica, cleared the roads of savage robbers, and delivered his country from bondage. Minos, the mythical legislator of Crete, cleared the sea of pirates, and founded ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... helmets, of cries, of sabres, a stormy heaving of the cruppers of horses amid the cannons and the flourish of trumpets, a terrible and disciplined tumult; over all, the cuirasses like the scales on the hydra. ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... Tory member, Lord Lyndhurst of Lyndhurst, at whom the Radical party, with the publican of the Green Drake at their head, had shied rotten eggs, would Lady Redmond assure him that the Grange was not infested with serpents. The old hydra-headed reptile had lived there in his father's time, and there was a young brood left, he heard, that were nourished on Margaret's roses. No, he repeated, if there were serpents at the Grange they would not drive there, for he was afraid of Raby, ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... become the possessors of "Attic salt." Another diversion is to compare every guest present to some mythical monster, a process which infallibly ends by getting the "Parasite" likened to Cerberus, the Hydra, or some such dragon, amid the laughter of all the rest. At some point in the amusement the company is sure to get to singing songs:—"Scolia"—drinking songs indeed, but often of a serious moral or poetic ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... object. But now comes the question, "What will he do with it?" Question with as many heads as the Hydra; and no sooner does an author dispose of one ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... His opinions of poetry were, she thought, “so absurd and inconsistent with each other, that, though almost any of his dogmas may be clearly and easily confronted, yet the attempt is but combating an hydra-headed monster . . . Johnson’s ‘Lives of the Poets,’ and all the records of his own life and conversation, prove that envy did deeply stain his spirit. To your question, ‘Whom could Johnson envy’? I answer, all his superiors ...
— Anna Seward - and Classic Lichfield • Stapleton Martin
... Mancha's knight, who launce in hand, Mounted his steed to free th' enchanted land, Our Quixote bard sets forth a monster-taming, Arm'd at all points, to fight that hydra—GAMING. Aloft on Pegasus he waves his pen, And hurls defiance at the caitiff's den. The First on fancy'd giants spent his rage, But This has more than windmills to engage: He combats passion, rooted ...
— The Gamester (1753) • Edward Moore
... said, admiring the ease with which he sprang about in full armour; "I would laugh at Medusa or the Hydra of Lerna ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... hydra-head Theology appears To shatter dreams and chill her heart with nameless fears, For Sage and Seer spare not in sharp dissection, 'Till poor Puff, alas! no longer ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... be led to seek earnestly for help from above to overcome the hydra of selfishness, and may you be encouraged, by that freely offered help, to exert your own energies ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... Weepest thou for him to my face? He that hath robbed me of my peace, my energy, the whole love of my life? Could I call the fabled Hydra, I would have him live and perish, survive and die, until the sun itself would grow dim with age. I would make him have the thirst of a Tantalus, and roll the wheel of an Ixion, until the stars of heaven should ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... second, a monster not to be overcome and that may not be described, Cerberus who eats raw flesh, the brazen-voiced hound of Hades, fifty-headed, relentless and strong. And again she bore a third, the evil-minded Hydra of Lerna, whom the goddess, white-armed Hera nourished, being angry beyond measure with the mighty Heracles. And her Heracles, the son of Zeus, of the house of Amphitryon, together with warlike Iolaus, ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... statements. They were left in railway coaches and sent to newspaper offices with strong appeals for the publishing of the letters from time to time, but Kansas men had fought too many battles with the saloon power not to recognize its hydra head. Toward the last came one clothed in the official garb of the exalted Methodist Church, but warning had been sent by the women of Oregon, where he had united his efforts with the worst elements to defeat the suffrage amendment in two campaigns. The Men's League, the ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume VI • Various
... slave has scarcely been heard and hushed, when from another direction there comes another sharp cry of oppression. Another form of inhumanity [15] lifts its hydra head to forge anew the old fetters; to shackle conscience, stop free speech, slander, vilify; to invite its prey, then turn and refuse the victim a solitary vindication in this most ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... re-election was hydra-headed, and no less than seven candidates were in the field against him. The contest of 1824 had been called "the scrub-race for the Presidency," and to that of 1872 was given the name of "Go as ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... slave of the Romans is not adapted to the descendants of Scoevola. The general prosperity which is certain to proceed from individual happiness will spread to the farthest regions of the universe and everywhere the dreaded hydra of ultramontane superstition, chased by the combined lights of reason and virtue, no longer finding a refuge in the hateful haunts of a dying aristocracy, will perish at her side in despair at finally beholding on this ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... was gone the old trembling came again to Democrates. He had Bias light all the lamps. The room seemed full of lurking goblins,—harpies, gorgons, the Hydra, the Minotaur, every other foul and noxious shape was waiting to spring forth. And, most maddening of all, the chorus of AEschylus, that Song of the Furies Democrates had heard recited at the Isthmus, rang in ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... they looked at every phenomenon—even the most trivial incident of common life—from the philosophical point of view, talked day and night about principles, ideas, subjectivity, Weltauffassung, and similar abstract entities, and habitually attacked the "hydra of unphilosophy" by analysing the phenomena presented and relegating the ingredient elements to the recognised categories. In ordinary life they were men of quiet, grave, contemplative demeanour, but their faces could flush and their blood boil when they discussed the all-important question, ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... from the Iland of Madera forward on their voiage, began this worthy captaine Pinteados sorow, as a man tormented with the company of a terrible Hydra, who hitherto flattred with him, and made him a faire countenance and shew of loue. Then did he take vpon him to command all alone, setting nought both by captain Pinteado, and the rest of the marchants factors, sometimes with opprobrious ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of - The English Nation, Vol. 11 • Richard Hakluyt
... with the next place, not envying thy reputation with thy patron;" and he thinks that Horace and himself "would soon lift out of favour Virgil, Varius, and the best of them, and enjoy them wholly to ourselves." The restlessness of Horace to extricate himself from this "Hydra of Discourse," the passing friends whom he calls on to assist him, and the glue-like pertinacity of ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... The interests of both nations, of religion, and of humanity, made it imperative upon them to put an end to this unnatural war, in order that the two monarchs might unite hand and heart for the extirpation of heresy. That hydra-headed monster had already extended its coils through France, while its pestilential breath was now wafted into Flanders from the German as well as the French border. Philip placed full reliance upon the wisdom ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... might have an officer of the adjutant-general's department, whom I knew, in my own office, to keep me informed of what I was to do, and, if possible, what orders I might actually receive from the Secretary himself, and what from the several other heads of that hydra ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield
... Full in the midst of this infernal road, An elm displays her dusky arms abroad: The God of Sleep there hides his heavy head, And empty dreams on ev'ry leaf are spread. Of various forms unnumber'd specters more, Centaurs, and double shapes, besiege the door. Before the passage, horrid Hydra stands, And Briareus with all his hundred hands; Gorgons, Geryon with his triple frame; And vain Chimaera vomits empty flame. The chief unsheath'd his shining steel, prepar'd, Tho' seiz'd with sudden fear, to force the guard, Off'ring his brandish'd ...
— The Aeneid • Virgil
... heroic virtue, it is easy to assign the proper employment of a true, ancient, genuine critic: which is, to travel through this vast world of writings; to peruse and hunt those monstrous faults bred within them; to drag out the lurking errors, like Cacus from his den; to multiply them like Hydra's heads; and rake them together like Augeas's dung; or else to drive away a sort of dangerous fowl who have a perverse inclination to plunder the best branches of the tree of knowledge, like those Stymphalian birds that ate ...
— A Tale of a Tub • Jonathan Swift
... filled with outposts and spies of the "pagan army." There was nothing for the King to do but gather his men and dash into the fray to "let the hard steel ring upon the high helmet." Time after time the Danes are overthrown, but, like the heads of the fabled Hydra, they grow and flourish after each attack. They have one advantage: they know how to command the sea, and numerous as the waves that their vessels ride so proudly and well, the invaders arrive and quickly land to ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... recently, after his arduous labors as Head of the State, been seeking relaxation in distant Africa, where his onslaughts on the wild beasts of the desert have been not less fierce nor less successful than over the many-headed hydra of corruption in ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt
... unsystematised present obtrudes its fresh discontents, and the unknown future is pregnant with possibilities of good and the alternative of unimaginable evil. All perceive that something must be done to direct the plunging course of this hydra-headed democracy which, as its onrush is in any case irresistible, may at any moment deviate from the path and fling itself headlong to perdition. When the guns are firing and the battle is joined and the cries of the wounded fill the air, there are not ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... calls the chief of them Upis; and styles her, and her associates, [Greek: Koras] [384][Greek: Huperboreous], Hyperborean young women. The Hyperboreans, Alazonians, Arimaspians, were Scythic nations of the same family. All the stories about Prometheus, Chimaera, Medusa, Pegasus, Hydra, as well as of the Grupes, or Gryphons, arose, in great measure, from the sacred devices upon the entablatures ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume II. (of VI.) • Jacob Bryant
... refrained from battle before Ilerda and honourably spared the defenceless at Pharsalus. The habit of civil war and the rancour left behind by the mutiny asserted their power in a terrible manner on the battlefield of Thapsus. If the hydra with which they fought always put forth new energies, if the army was hurried from Italy to Spain, from Spain to Macedonia, from Macedonia to Africa, and if the repose ever more eagerly longed for never came, the soldier sought, and not wholly without cause, the reason of this state ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... piece of weed (fig. 2). At the top end of the stalk is the mouth, and if you watch carefully you may be fortunate enough to see the long arms catch a water-flea, and carry it towards the mouth. This creature is known as the hydra. In some cases you will see two or even three of these creatures all attached to the same stalk, and if you watch every day, you will at last find that sooner or later this partnership is dissolved, so that the branched hydra has split up into a ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... Actaeon, when he contemplated Diana simplicem munditiis, paid a severe penalty in the transformation of his own head; and so, perhaps, we may incur—but never mind; the task, worthy of a Hercules, (for the hydra of female fashion is more than hundred-headed,) must be gone through with, and the scrivano umillimo must push his pen even under the pole of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... terrified him. To be only a wretched king, only a remote descendant of a hero who had become a god by mighty labours, only a common man formed of flesh and bone, and without having in aught rendered himself worthy of it—without having even, like his ancestor, strangled some hydra, or torn some lion asunder—to enjoy a happiness whereof Zeus of the ambrosial hair would scarce be worthy, though lord of all Olympus! He felt, as it were, a shame to thus hoard up for himself alone so rich a treasure, ...
— King Candaules • Theophile Gautier
... "nothing could be better. Already have Harkaway and his hard-knuckled companion, Girdwood, been seen in Lenoir's society. But before the day is over they will be seen in the Caveaux themselves, where proofs of their guilt will spring up hydra-headed from the very ground." ...
— Jack Harkaway's Boy Tinker Among The Turks - Book Number Fifteen in the Jack Harkaway Series • Bracebridge Hemyng
... of the hydra, of Bodley the numerous-headed, Clean as the chin of a boy, bare as a babe in a bath; Year that—I see in the vista the principal verb of the sentence Loom as a deeply-desired bride that is late at the post— Year that has painfully tickled ...
— The Battle of the Bays • Owen Seaman
... bond, and leave the subject free; The government's ungirt when justice dies, And constitutions are nonentities. The nation's all a mob, there's no such thing, As lords, or commons, parliament, or king; A great promiscuous crowd the Hydra lies, Till laws revive and mutual contract ties; A chaos free to choose for their own share, What case of government they please to wear; If to a king they do the reins commit, All men are bound in conscience to submit; But then the king must by his oath assent, To Postulata's of ...
— The True-Born Englishman - A Satire • Daniel Defoe
... they had neither peers in one house, nor representatives in the other. He was of opinion, that this country was strong enough to enforce obedience. "When an Englishman," he says, "is told that the Americans shoot up like the hydra, he naturally considers how the hydra was destroyed." The event has shown how much he and the minister of that day ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... laughed mockingly, and cried out: "Ah, Achelous! While yet in my cradle I strangled two serpents! And what art thou compared to the Hydra whose hundred heads I cut off? Every time I cut of I one head two others grew in its place. Yet did I conquer that horror, in spite of its branching serpents that darted from every wound! Thinkest thou, then, that I fear thee, thou mimic snake?" And even as he spake ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... these things, for this miracle troubleth me above all others." Then she smiling a little said: "Thou invitest me to a matter which is most hardly found out, and can scarcely be sufficiently declared; for it is such that, one doubt being taken away, innumerable others, like the heads of Hydra, succeed, neither will they have any end unless a man repress them with the most lively fire of his mind. For in this matter are wont to be handled these questions: of the simplicity of Providence; of the course of Fate; of sudden chances; of God's knowledge ...
— The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy • Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius
... edifice of the Paris of its time. To no little extent was this imposing outline due to its great central tower, the maitresse, which was surrounded by twenty-three dames d'honneur, without counting numberless tourelles. This hydra-towered giant palace was the real guardian of the Paris of mediaevalism, as its successor is indeed the real centre of ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield
... recognizes his high vocation and will be true to it. That is the one thing I have faith in! Our good and wonderful sovereign has to perform the noblest role on earth, and he is so virtuous and noble that God will not forsake him. He will fulfill his vocation and crush the hydra of revolution, which has become more terrible than ever in the person of this murderer and villain! We alone must avenge the blood of the just one.... Whom, I ask you, can we rely on?... England with her commercial spirit will not and cannot understand the Emperor Alexander's ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... raised such sharp outcries for freedom, of all men were the most intolerant: hardly had they tasted of the Circean cup of dominion, ere they were transformed into the most hideous or the most grotesque monsters of political power. To their eyes toleration was an hydra, and the dethroned bishops had never so vehemently declaimed against what, in ludicrous rage, one of the high-flying presbyterians called "a cursed intolerable toleration!" They advocated the rights of persecution; and ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... however, the Doctor is intent on a new book nowise to his mind. It is the "Redemption Redeemed" of John Goodwin. Its hydra-headed errors have already drawn from the scabbard the sword of many an orthodox Hercules on either side of the Tweed; and now, after a conference with the other Goodwin, the Dean takes up a ream of manuscript, and adds a finishing touch ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... and that perhaps death would overtake him before he should begin to be a king in earnest; and that in case Herod should die, which yet nobody knew when it would be, the enjoyment of the succession could certainly be but for a little time; for that these heads of Hydra, the sons of Alexander and Aristobulus, were growing up: that he was deprived by his father of the hopes of being succeeded by his children, for that his successor after his death was not to be ...
— The Wars of the Jews or History of the Destruction of Jerusalem • Flavius Josephus
... those which my neighbors have undertaken; for they were only twelve, and had an end; but I could never see that these men slew or captured any monster or finished any labor. They have no friend Iolaus to burn with a hot iron the root of the hydra's head, but as soon as one head is ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau |
