"Gorgon" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... she's the wickedest of creatures; Oh, gaze not on the Syren's fatal features, More baneful than the Gorgon head, Medusa. ...
— Turandot: The Chinese Sphinx • Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller
... with a strong sense of their wickedness. Then comes Law, with its whips and bonds, to chastise and tie up "the offending Adam"—that is, the Adam without a pocket,—and then the gentle violence of kindly Mother Church leads the poor man far from the fatal presence of his Gorgon wants, to consort him with meek-eyed Charity,—to give him glimpses of the Land of Promise,—to make him hear the rippling waters of Eternal Truth,—to feast his senses with the odours of Eternal sweets. Happy English poor! Ye are not scurfed with the vanities of the flesh! Under ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 9, 1841 • Various
... solid tufa stone. A low stone seat against the wall on each hand and a small hanging lamp were all the furniture of this apartment, awful in its emptiness and mystery. On every side there were dark openings into cells whence came gleams of white, indefinite forms: a great Gorgon's head gazed at us from the ceiling, and from the walls in every direction started the crested heads and necks of sculptured serpents. We entered one by one the nine small grotto-like compartments which surround the central cavern: the white shapes ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... for the field of wo complete. She charged her shoulder with the dreadful shield The shaggy AEgis,[20] border'd thick around With terror; there was Discord, Prowess there, There hot Pursuit, and there the feature grim 875 Of Gorgon, dire Deformity, a sign Oft borne portentous on the arm of Jove. Her golden helm, whose concave had sufficed The legions of an hundred cities, rough With warlike ornament superb, she fix'd 880 On her immortal head. Thus arm'd, she rose Into the flaming chariot, ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... farewell,—a sad, a sweet farewell; And, if I never must behold you more, In other worlds I will not cease to tell The rosary I here have numbered o'er; And bright-haired Hope will lend a gladdened ear, And Love will free him from the grasp of Fear, And Gorgon critics, while the tale they hear, Shall dew their stony glances with a tear, If I but catch one echo from your spell:— And so ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... Hellenism. Yet Cyprian artists probably executed the work. There are little departures from Greek models, which indicate the "barbarian" workman, as the introduction of trees in the backgrounds, the shape of the furniture, the recurved wings of the Gorgon, and the idea of hunting the wild bull. But the figures, the proportions, the draperies, the attitudes, the chariot, the horse, are almost pure Greek. There is a grace and ease in the modelling, an elegance, a variety, to which Asiatic art, left to itself, never attained. ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... crossed the web Just as the red moon bloomed upon the hills And silvered all the Panticapean vale. The funnel of the web was in the mouth Of a vast tomb, whose outside, hewn on rock, Outlined a Gorgon's face with jaws agape— Some stern Medusa, Stheno, or Euryale, Changed to the stone that in the elder days She changed the sons of men who looked on her. We passed the funnel, entering the tomb. About my arms the spider threw his cords, ...
— Stories in Verse • Henry Abbey
... requires the fabulous Jack to overcome the hoary giants of prejudice and custom, or the irrepressible energy of the Gorgon. It has been helpful to remember away "down North" the stand which Archbishop Ireland took for public schools. When the Episcopal clergyman for Labrador, whom we had been influential in bringing out from England, ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... said that it was a mighty giant, the brother of the Evening Star, who held up the sky upon his shoulders, in the midst of the Fortunate Islands, the gardens of the daughter of the Evening Star, full of strange golden fruits; and that Perseus had turned him into stone, when he passed him with the Gorgon's Head. ...
— Madam How and Lady Why - or, First Lessons in Earth Lore for Children • Charles Kingsley
... of staircase meeting in a stone terrace before the principal door. A stony business altogether, with heavy stone balustrades, and stone urns, and stone flowers, and stone faces of men, and stone heads of lions, in all directions. As if the Gorgon's head had surveyed it when it was finished two ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... and bombast epithets," to smother him with fumes and eulogies, whom they know to be a dizzard, a fool, a covetous wretch, a beast, &c. "because he is rich?" To see sub exuviis leonis onagrum, a filthy loathsome carcass, a Gorgon's head puffed up by parasites, assume this unto himself, glorious titles, in worth an infant, a Cuman ass, a painted sepulchre, an Egyptian temple? To see a withered face, a diseased, deformed, cankered complexion, a rotten carcass, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... very dense. Suddenly a trumpet blared. At the gate was Pontius Pilate. On his head was a high and dazzling helmet. His tunic was short, open at the neck. His legs were bare. He was shod with shoes that left the toes exposed. From his cuirass a gorgon's head had, in deference to local prejudice, been effaced; in its stead were scrolls and thunderbolts. From the belt rows of straps, embroidered and fringed, fell nearly to the knee. He held his head in the ...
— Mary Magdalen • Edgar Saltus
... be Queen Mab, papa, but Armine wants to be Perseus with the Gorgon's head, and Jock is the dragon; but the dragon will come before we've put ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... other way to get in, but by faining to be a post; but when I got in once, I proved none, but rather the contrary, turn'd him into a post, or a stone, or what is stiffer, with thundering into him the incommodities of a wife, and the miseries of marriage. If ever Gorgon were seen in the shape of a woman, he hath seen her in my description: I have put him off o' that scent for ever.—Why do you not applaud and adore me, sirs? why stand you mute? are you stupid? You are not ...
— Epicoene - Or, The Silent Woman • Ben Jonson
... am something revived at this testimony of your obedience; but I cannot admit that traitor,—I fear I cannot fortify myself to support his appearance. He is as terrible to me as a Gorgon: if I see him I swear I shall turn to stone, ...
— The Way of the World • William Congreve
... have no reference to my situation. Yet, unreasonable as it may appear, I confess that my feelings were not altogether so ecstatic as when I first called Mrs. Bullfrog mine. True, she was a sweet woman and an angel of a wife; but what if a Gorgon should return, amid the transports of our connubial bliss, and take the angel's place. I recollected the tale of a fairy, who half the time was a beautiful woman and half the time a hideous monster. Had I taken that very fairy to be the wife of my bosom? While such ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... welcome leave at the door; up I go, mutton on table, hungry as hunter, hope to forget my cares, and bury them in the agreeable abstraction of mastication; knock at the door, in comes Mr. ——, or Mr. ——, or Demi-gorgon, or my brother, or somebody, to prevent my eating alone—a process absolutely necessary to my poor wretched digestion. O, the pleasure of eating alone!—eating my dinner alone! let me think of it. But in they come, and make it absolutely necessary that I should open a ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... Mrs. Watson was in a critical condition. I understood also that legal steps were being taken to terminate my lease at Sunnyside. Louise was out of danger, but very ill, and a trained nurse guarded her like a gorgon. There was a rumor in the village, brought up by Liddy from the butcher's, that a wedding had already taken place between Louise and Doctor Walkers and this roused me for the first time ...
— The Circular Staircase • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... severed head of Medusa, whose horrid aspect of snaky hair and scaly body turned to stone every beholder, rescues the maiden from chains, and leads her away by the bands of love. Nothing could be more poetical than the life of Perseus. When he went to destroy the dreadful Gorgon, Medusa, Pluto lent him his helmet, which would make him invisible at will; Minerva loaned her buckler, impenetrable, and polished like a mirror; Mercury gave him a dagger of diamonds, and his winged sandals, which would ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... seemed rather out of spirits. Mr F.'s Aunt was so stiffened that she had the appearance of being past bending by any means short of powerful mechanical pressure. Her bonnet was cocked up behind in a terrific manner; and her stony reticule was as rigid as if it had been petrified by the Gorgon's head, and had got it at that moment inside. With these imposing attributes, Mr F.'s Aunt, publicly seated on the steps of the Marshal's official residence, had been for the two or three hours in question a ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... father's legacy; but it was not likely he would ever want that trifle; and even if he did—why, it was a compensation to think that in being for ever divided from his family he was divided from Jacob, more terrible than Gorgon or Demogorgon to David's timid green eyes. Thank heaven, he should never ...
— Brother Jacob • George Eliot
... was that snaky-headed Gorgon shield That wise Minerva wore, unconquered virgin, Wherewith she freezed her foes to congealed stone, But rigid looks of chaste austerity, And noble grace that dashed brute violence With ...
— Teachers' Outlines for Studies in English - Based on the Requirements for Admission to College • Gilbert Sykes Blakely
... this cry of battle? where must I bring my aid? where must I sow dread? who wants me to uncase my dreadful Gorgon's head?[217] ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... lever engine (fig. 26), and the oscillating engine (fig. 27), besides numerous other forms of engine which are less known or employed, such as the trunk (fig. 22), double cylinder (fig. 23), annular, Gorgon (fig. 24), steeple (fig. 25), and many others. The side lever engine, however, and the oscillating engine, are the only kinds of paddle engines which have been received with wide ...
— A Catechism of the Steam Engine • John Bourne
... figures of gold tissue, the battle of the Centaurs with the Lapithae, flowed loose over his panoply, and was fastened in front with a clasp, representing Pallas sculptured in amber, and holding before her the Gorgon's head on her shield. The breeze, which blew back his locks from his forehead, gave his features more fully to view; and even the horse which bore him seemed to move with a statelier gait, arching his neck and proudly caracoling, as if conscious of the noble presence of his ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... elegant span of its arches to the dead masonry of the palace; a figure supremely shapely and graceful; gentle, almost, in spite of his holding out with his light nervous arm the snaky head of the slaughtered Gorgon. His name is Perseus, and you may read his story, not in the Greek mythology, but in the memoirs of Benvenuto Cellini. Glancing from one of these fine fellows to the other, I probably uttered some irrepressible ...
— The Madonna of the Future • Henry James
... emperor learnt this, at first by report, but subsequently by certain intelligence, and while all were in suspense from dread of the impending danger, the dependents of the court, hammering on the same anvil day and night (as the saying is), at the prompting of the eunuchs, held up Ursicinus as a Gorgon's head before the suspicious and timid emperor, continually repeating that, because on the death of Silvanus, in a dearth of better men, he had been sent to defend the eastern districts, he had become ambitious ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... hair the flower as she wept, in exchange for another which—which the Squire had sent her. And she whispered a word of sorrow, and he another of comfort, and came away. And the Gorgons suspected nothing; except perhaps the littlest Gorgon, and she looked the ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon
... And guardian terrors, whose out-flashing swords Beleaguer Paradise and the holy Tree Sciential. Step by step the way is fought That leads from Darkness, through her miscreant hordes, Back to the heavens of wise, and true, and free: Minerva's Gorgon, Ammon's cyclic Asp, And the fierce flame-sword of the Cherubim, That flashed like hate across the pallid gasp Of exiled Eve and Adam, flare, and glare, And hiss venenate, round the steps of him Who thirsts for heavenly Wisdom, if he dare Climb to her bosom, or with artless grasp ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... wanted to marry you. But you fly off without a word and bury yourself in this benighted place with a gorgon who ...
— Death At The Excelsior • P. G. Wodehouse
... reason it out in his heart. It was not that she was physically attractive to him. Mrs. Noble was that. It was not that fascination which Bella aroused, the adventuress, the siren, the gorgon. In Constance there was something different. She was a woman of the world, a man's woman. Then, too, she was so brutally frank ...
— Constance Dunlap • Arthur B. Reeve
... his cup— It is enough, for any retribution, That guilt retain remembrance of itself. Guilt is a thing, however bolstered up, That the great scale-adjusting Nemesis, And Furies iron-eyed, will not let sleep. Sail on unscarred—thou canst not sail so far, But that the gorgon lash of vipers fanged Shall scourge this howler home to thee again. Yes, yes, rash man, Jove and myself do know That from this wrong shall rouse an Anteros, Fierce as an Ate, with a hot right hand, That shall afflict thee with the ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... you are afraid of Athene and the Gorgon; at least so you say, though you do not mind Zeus's thunderbolt a bit. But why do you let the Muses go scot free? do they toss their plumes and ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... deigning to translate; and finding her own reply. "Ah, yes, the Medusa!" then, as more than one exclaimed in indignant dismay, she said, "No, not the Gorgon, but the beautiful winged head, with only two serpents on the brow and one coiled round the neck, and the pensive ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... stone!" he exclaimed. "She is a regular Gorgon, with those heavy eyes of hers. I never saw such eyes. I believe she would petrify me if I had to bear them. Don't you give Medusa one of those sweet almonds, Daisy—not ...
— Daisy • Elizabeth Wetherell
... at the same time, is more book-learned than Don Sebastian. She plays an Hydra upon the Emperor, that is full as good as the Gorgon: ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... fail, 'tis want of parts. Bless us! Morgan,[20] art thou there, man? Bless mine eyes! art thou the chairman? Chairman to yon damn'd committee! Yet I look on thee with pity. Dreadful sight! what, learned Morgan Metamorphosed to a Gorgon![21] For thy horrid looks, I own, Half convert me to a stone. Hast thou been so long at school, Now to turn a factious tool? Alma Mater was thy mother, Every young divine thy brother. Thou, a disobedient varlet, Treat thy mother like a harlot! Thou ungrateful to thy teachers, Who are all grown ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... had suddenly become agitated, and Buck was left wondering the more. She was stirred with strange feelings which embodied a dozen different emotions, and it was the sight of that great black crown, like the head of a Gorgon, which had inspired them. Its fascination was one of cruel attraction. Its familiarity suggested association with some part of her life. It seemed as if she belonged to it, or that it belonged to her—that in some curious way it was actually a part of her life. And all the time her detestation, ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... And gorgon shield,—or, power to fright Man's folly, dreadful shone, And many a blockhead (easy change!) Turn'd, ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... a beam in the eye, or diminutive mote, But vortex-like that tube of tin Suck'd the censorious particle in; And, truth to tell, for as willing an organ As ever listen'd to serpent's hiss, Nor took the viperous sound amiss, On the snaky head of an ancient Gorgon! ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... a million wrinkles were carved upon the deep-seamed brow and corrugated cheeks. Over that hideous face the gray hair wandered. Bob's blood seemed to freeze within his veins. The old fable tells of the Gorgon, whose face inspired such horror that the beholder stiffened into stone. So here. Bob beheld a Gorgon face. He felt ...
— Among the Brigands • James de Mille
... with in the darkness. The fight with Grendel's mother touches on other motives; the terror is further away from human habitations, and it is accompanied with a charm and a beauty, the beauty of the Gorgon, such as is absent from the first adventure. It would have loosened the tension and broken the unity of the scene, if any such irrelevances had been admitted into the story of the fight with Grendel. The fight with Grendel's mother is fought ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... Catharine, darling!—but there it is). And he can't make up his mind to leave Upcote for twenty-four hours till this girl is safely off the scene! He means to take her to Paris himself on Monday. I only hope he has found a proper sort of Gorgon to ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... vanquished and humiliated emperor, I should stab myself with my own sword rather than submit to such a disgrace. It seems I have not yet engraved my name deeply enough into the marble tablets of history, and I shall prove to these overbearing princes, who believe their legitimacy to be the Gorgon's head they only need show in order to crush me—I shall prove to them WHO I AM, AND TO WHOM the future belongs, whether to THEM or to ME! However, it is unnecessary to say so much about things ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... her open palm, and as Beryl saw the button, a gasping, gurgling sound broke from her. She snatched it, stared at it. Then the Gorgon head slipped through her fingers, she threw herself against the window, shook the iron bar frantically; and one desperate cry seemed to tear its way through her clinched teeth, ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... to fight a gorgon fight! A cruel monster hell-born, Whose hungry maw, ignoring law, Mocks misery's tears to scorn. She may not slay the beast, but aye Her blows will badly scratch it; All praise is due the woman true, ...
— The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation • Carry A. Nation
... in my bosom burneth, My hand is ready for sword or lance, For unto me the Gorgon turneth My foeman's hateful countenance. Scarce I master the rage that assails me. Shall I salute him with fair speech? Better, perchance, my ire avails me? Only the Fury me affrighteth, Protectress of all within her reach, And God's truce which ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume II • Gerhart Hauptmann
... official will erect a perpendicular with you; but for that touck of Mathematics you must go to the hangman, at whose hands you will have to receive the rites of your church, you monstrous bog-trotting Gorgon. Mine a trade! Shades of Academus, am I ...
— The Emigrants Of Ahadarra - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... troop {46} Of women strange to look at sleepeth there Before this wanderer, seated on their stools; Not women they, but Gorgons I must call them; Nor yet can I to Gorgon forms compare them; I have seen painted shapes that bear away The feast of Phineus. Wingless, though, are these, And swarth, and every way abominable. They snort with breath that none may dare approach, And from their eyes a loathsome humour pours, And such their garb as neither ...
— Story of Orestes - A Condensation of the Trilogy • Richard G. Moulton
... he asked me to come to the wedding feast. I said I would come. And then, because I was young and full of the boast of youth, and because the king was now ceasing to be a terror to me, I said that I would bring to his wedding feast the head of the Gorgon. ...
— The Golden Fleece and the Heroes who Lived Before Achilles • Padraic Colum
... named Polydectes wanted Danae to be his wife, and, as she would not consent, he shut her up in prison, saying that she should never come out till her son Perseus had brought him the head of the Gorgon Medusa, thinking he must be lost by the way. For the Gorgons were three terrible sisters, who lived in the far west beyond the setting sun. Two of them were immortal, and had dragon's wings and brazen claws ...
— Aunt Charlotte's Stories of Greek History • Charlotte M. Yonge
... I a Gorgon that she doth me fly, Or was I hatched in the river Nile? Or doth my Chloris stand in doubt that I With syren songs do seek her to beguile? If any one of these she can object 'Gainst me, which chaste affected love protest, Then might my fortunes by her frowns be checked, And blameless ...
— Elizabethan Sonnet Cycles - Idea, by Michael Drayton; Fidessa, by Bartholomew Griffin; Chloris, by William Smith • Michael Drayton, Bartholomew Griffin, and William Smith
... learned discussions upon the meaning of evolution and the Gospel according to Darwin. This cheese-epic is a rather unsavoury production and the style is at times so monstrous and so realistic that the author should be called the Gorgon-Zola ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... "Dr. Grey is no Gorgon, having power to petrify my tongue. I am not afraid of him; and my respect for your feelings is much stronger than my dread ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... Aristotle tells us that the Senate of the Areopagus, by supplying each fighting man with eight drachmas, did good service in manning the fleet; and Kleidemus tells us that this money was obtained by an artifice of Themistokles. When the Athenians were going down to the Peiraeus, he gave out that the Gorgon's head had been lost from the statue of the goddess. Themistokles, under pretext of seeking for it, searched every man, and found great stores of money hidden in their luggage, which he confiscated, and thus was able to supply the crews of the ships with abundance of necessaries. When the whole ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... that Stevenson at least found a final philosophy of some sort to live by, while Mr. Moore is always walking the world looking for a new one. Stevenson had found that the secret of life lies in laughter and humility. Self is the gorgon. Vanity sees it in the mirror of other men and lives. Pride studies it for itself and is turned ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... the crimson field, And blue-eyed Pallas shook her Gorgon shield; O'er the hushed waves their mightier monarch drove, And Ida trembled to ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... his senses, and to come back from the place where he had been struck by the hammer of treachery. He seemed to realize again that he was still a part of the common world, not a human being swung through the universe on his heart-strings by a Gorgon. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... madden him with the terror of his piping in desolate places; at another it was the sun-god Apollo, who threatened him with fiery arrows in the parching heat of noon; or it was Pallas Athene, who appeared to him in visions, and shook in his face the Gorgon's head, which turns to stone all living creatures who look on it. But the holy Bishop made the sign of the cross of the Lord, and the right arm of their power was broken, and their malice could ...
— A Child's Book of Saints • William Canton
... mouse in a cat's ear. Through all the other islands a stream of native visitors comes and goes, travelling by families, spending years on the grand tour. Apemama alone is left upon one side, the tourist dreading to risk himself within the clutch of Tembinok'. And fear of the same Gorgon follows and troubles them at home. Maiana once paid him tribute; he once fell upon and seized Nonuti: first steps to the empire of the archipelago. A British warship coming on the scene, the conqueror ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and once more she turned her eyes to Richard. It was a true and tender glance, one would have said, and accompanied by an attempt at a smile of encouragement. But if it had been a glance of a gorgon, it could not have had a more appalling effect; it literally seemed to turn him ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... which the human soul had debased itself to objects beneath the dignity of its own nature, and thus prepared itself for all moral corruption; and the massive sepulchral monuments in which the hopeless despair of heathenism had, as it were, become petrified by the Gorgon gaze of death. That Appian Way should be to us the most interesting of all the roads of the world; for by it came to us our civilisation and Christianity—the divine principles and hopes that redeem the soul, retrieve the vanity of existence, open up the path of life through the dark ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... the Gorgon's head before Polydectes's guests and turning them to stone wrought hardly more of a miracle than this calm announcement of Themistocles. Men stared at him vacantly, stunned by the tidings, then Adeimantus's frightened ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... the shield of Zeus, made of the hide of the goat AMALTHEA (q. v.), representing originally the storm-cloud in which the god invested himself when he was angry; it was also the attribute of Athena, bearing in her case the Gorgon's head. ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... the chamber, and destroy your sight With a new Gorgon:—do not bid me speak; See, and then ...
— Macbeth • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... which Emily instantly forbade me to look. It is true that they were objects not often seen by bachelor man, except in shop windows and on the advertising pages of women's magazines; but silk petticoats and cobwebby lace frills have no Gorgon qualities, and I was not turned to stone by the sight of them. I even found courage to ask of the company at large if they were the sort of thing that young ladies ought to have in their wardrobes. The answer was emphatically in ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... but will not refuse your offer. If I have not a gorgon-face this morning, it must surely be a proof of my utter insensibility, or easy belief of ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico
... wavering torch His aspect glares within the porch; 890 There will he pause till all is done— And hear the prayer, but utter none. See—by the half-illumined wall[dw] His hood fly back, his dark hair fall, That pale brow wildly wreathing round, As if the Gorgon there had bound The sablest of the serpent-braid That o'er her fearful forehead strayed: For he declines the convent oath, And leaves those locks unhallowed growth, 900 But wears our garb in all beside; And, not from piety but pride, Gives wealth to walls that never heard Of his one ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... so did the famous Lame One fashion him of gold with his hands. On his feet he had winged sandals, and his black-sheathed sword was slung across his shoulders by a cross-belt of bronze. He was flying swift as thought. The head of a dreadful monster, the Gorgon, covered the broad of his back, and a bag of silver—a marvel to see—contained it: and from the bag bright tassels of gold hung down. Upon the head of the hero lay the dread cap [1804] of Hades which had the awful gloom of night. Perseus himself, the son of Danae, was at full stretch, like one ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... push and swagger"; {kai ama edun te kai gorgon idein}, "a la fois doux et terrible a voir," see Victor Cherbuliez, "Un Cheval de ...
— On Horsemanship • Xenophon
... after another, day by day, they came rushing up out of the northern offing, each like a huge hundred-footed dragon, panting and quivering, as if with terror, at every loud pulse of its oars, hurling the wild water right and left with the mighty share of its beak, while from the bows some gorgon or chimaera, elephant or boar, stared out with brazen eyes toward the coast of Africa, as if it, too, like the human beings which it carried, was dead to every care but that of dastard flight. Past they rushed, one after another; and off the poop some shouting voice chilled all hearts ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... confirming a young and candid mind in prudent and excellent dispositions. After humbling herself in vain before a mother, this poor young lady was now to withstand a father's reproaches; and, after the inexorable Miss Strictland, she was to encounter the exasperated Miss Bateman. Whether the Gorgon terrors of one governess, or the fury passions of the other, were most formidable, it was difficult to decide. Miss Bateman had written an epilogue for Lady Julia to recite in the character of Calista; and, with the combined irritability of authoress ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth
... it!" said the youth, brushing himself, and assuming all the dignity of which he was master. "Wonder who that is? Housekeeper, perhaps? Quite the Gorgon, whoever it is. Wish I ...
— Margaret Montfort • Laura E. Richards
... came here to buy up all your stock, but that gorgon, Lady de Courcy, captured me, and my ransom has sent me here free, but a beggar. I do not know a more ill-fated fellow than myself. Now, if you had only condescended to take me prisoner, I might have saved my money; for I should have kissed ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... hell, and rear'd Those artificial boundaries that divide Man from his species. State of blessedness! Till that ill-omen'd hour when Cain's stern son Delved in the bowels of the earth for gold, Accursed bane of virtue! of such force As poets feign dwelt in the Gorgon's locks, Which whoso saw, felt instant the life-blood Cold curdle in his veins, the creeping flesh Grew stiff with horror, and the heart forgot To beat. Accursed hour! for man no more To JUSTICE paid his homage, but forsook Her altars, and bow'd down before the shrine ...
— Poems, 1799 • Robert Southey
... the great dreary house, and day succeeded day, and still she lived alone; and the blank walls looked down upon her with a vacant stare, as if they had a Gorgon-like mind to stare her youth and beauty ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... of iron, And gnash, beside the streams of fire and wail, 345 Your foodless teeth. Geryon, arise! and Gorgon, Chimaera, and thou Sphinx, subtlest of fiends Who ministered to Thebes Heaven's poisoned wine, Unnatural love, and more unnatural hate: These shall ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... me! far otherwise: The naked horror numbs me to the bone; In stupor calm its cold blank eyes Set hard at mine. I do not fall or groan, Our island Gorgon's face had changed ...
— My Beautiful Lady. Nelly Dale • Thomas Woolner
... my manner altered with my feelings, and became so cold and shy that she could not fail to notice it. She soon did notice it, and HER manner altered too: the familiar nod was changed to a stiff bow, the gracious smile gave place to a glare of Gorgon ferocity; her vivacious loquacity was entirely transferred from me to 'the darling boy and girls,' whom she flattered and indulged more absurdly than ever their ...
— Agnes Grey • Anne Bronte
... may recognize true education from false. False education is a delightful thing, and warms you, and makes you every day think more of yourself. And true education is a deadly cold thing with a Gorgon's head on her shield, and makes you every ...
— Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne - Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work • John Ruskin
... step in, sir?" the elderly Gorgon had returned to ask. She led Mr. Ware along the hall-way to a door near the end, and opened it for him ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... storm-footed Son of Zeus, Slaying huge Argus nigh to Inachus' streams, Argus, whose sentinel eyes in turn took sleep. And there was Phaethon from the Sun-car hurled Into Eridanus. Earth verily seemed Ablaze, and black smoke hovered on the air. There Perseus slew Medusa gorgon-eyed By the stars' baths and utmost bounds of earth And fountains of deep-flowing Ocean, where Night in the far west meets the setting sun. There was the Titan Iapetus' great son Hung from the beetling crag of Caucasus In bonds of adamant, and the eagle tare His liver ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... this fresh calamity, retires from Thebes, and flies to Illyria, together with his wife, where they are both transformed into serpents. Of those who despise Bacchus, Acrisius alone remains, the grandfather of Perseus, who, having cut off the head of the Gorgon Medusa, serpents are produced by her blood. Perseus turns Atlas into a mountain, and having liberated Andromeda, he changes sea-weed into coral, and afterwards ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... thick swarming now With complicated monsters head and tail, Scorpion, and Asp, and Amphisbaena dire, Cerastes horned, Hydrus, and Elops drear, And Dipsas; (not so thick swarmed once the soil Bedropt with blood of Gorgon, or the isle Ophiusa,) but still greatest he the midst, Now Dragon grown, larger than whom the sun Ingendered in the Pythian vale or slime, Huge Python, and his power no less he seemed Above the rest still to retain; they all Him followed, issuing ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... his wife engaged in even innocent conversation with her lover, his face still calm, should produce the effect mythologically attributed to the celebrated Gorgon. ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac
... the foremost in the fight, Fierce Juno stands, the Scaean gates before, And, mad with fury and malignant spite, Calls up her federate forces from the shore. See, on the citadel, all grim with gore, Red-robed, and with the Gorgon shield aglow, Tritonian Pallas bids the conflict roar. E'en Jove with strength reanimates the foe, And stirs the powers of heaven to work ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... rais'd, That to the bard I clung, suspicion-bound. "Hasten Medusa: so to adamant Him shall we change;" all looking down exclaim'd. "E'en when by Theseus' might assail'd, we took No ill revenge." "Turn thyself round, and keep Thy count'nance hid; for if the Gorgon dire Be shown, and thou shouldst view it, thy return Upwards would be for ever lost." This said, Himself my gentle master turn'd me round, Nor trusted he my hands, but with his own He also hid me. Ye of intellect Sound and entire, mark well the lore conceal'd Under close texture of the mystic ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... being in readiness for the second attempt at laying the cable, the "Niagara" sailed from New York in March, 1858, to take on her portion of the cable at Plymouth. The "Agamemnon" was again ordered to assist in the undertaking, and the "Gorgon" was made her consort Mr. Field had hoped that the "Susquehanna" would again be the consort of the "Niagara," but a few days before the sailing of the fleet he was officially informed that he could not have the ship, as she was then in the West Indies, ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... quaver of consternation on finding himself so near one whose character he supposed to be little less suspicious than that of the hero of his madrigal, and he remained silent, with a mouth gaping as if I had brought the Gorgon's head in my hand. ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... stream?—A traitor, bringing war and pestilence into the heart of that country! No wonder that he paused! No wonder if, in his imagination, wrought upon by his conscience, he had beheld blood instead of water; and heard groans instead of murmurs. No wonder if some Gorgon horror had turned him into stone upon the spot.—But, no!—he cried, "The die is cast!" He plunged!—He crossed!—and Rome was free no ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... be nursed by you!" he cried. "I won't have you near me, glaring at me with your Gorgon stare. Send another nurse to me—send the doctor. Get out of my sight, Gorgon! Don't ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... on thy suppliant's head, Dread goddess, lay thy chastening hand! Not in thy Gorgon terrors clad, 35 Not circled with the vengeful band (As by the impious thou art seen), With thundering voice and threatening mien, With screaming Horror's funeral cry, Despair, and fell ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray
... apples which Gaia gave to the lady Here, dwelt the maiden Medusa, with her sisters Stheino and Euryale, in their lonely and dismal home. Between them and the land of living men flowed the gentle stream of ocean, so that only the name of the Gorgon sisters was known to the sons of men, and the heart of Medusa yearned in vain to see some face which might look on her with love and pity, for on her lay the doom of death, but her sisters could neither grow old ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... I heard an old Gorgon ask one of Mrs. Lollipop's clientele the other day whether he would like to be Mrs. Lollipop's husband. "No," he said, "not her husband; I am not ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... flashing through the midnight of their mind, The sable bands combined, Where Fear's black banner bloats the troubled sky, Appalled retire. Suspicion hides her head, Nor dares th' obliquely gleaming eye-ball raise; Despair, with gorgon-figured veil o'erspread, Speeds to dark Phlegethon's detested maze. Lo, startled at the heavenly ray, With speed unwonted Indolence upsprings, And, heaving, lifts her leaden wings, ...
— The Minstrel; or the Progress of Genius - with some other poems • James Beattie
... being, to have been. 290 When Hopkins dies, a thousand lights attend The wretch who, living, saved a candle's end: Shouldering God's altar a vile image stands, Belies his features, nay, extends his hands; That live-long wig which Gorgon's self might own, Eternal buckle takes in Parian stone.[40] Behold what blessings wealth to life can lend! And see what comfort it affords ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... does the Odyssey afford, that Homer sold his Trojan war-ballads at three yards an obolus? "3. Show the strong presumption there is, that Nox was the god of battles. "4. State reasons for presuming that the practice of lithography may be traced back to the time of Perseus and the Gorgon's head. "5. In what way were the shades on the banks of the Styx supplied with spirits? "6. Show the probability of the College Hornpipe having been used by the students of the Academia; and give passages from Thucydides and Tennyson ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... the Pompeian Fawn, half life-size. But far beyond all else in artistic importance are the metopes from Selinuntium, which, though much damaged, show marks of high excellence. They are of clearly different dates, though all very archaic. The oldest represent Perseus cutting off the Gorgon's head, and Hercules killing two thieves. Perseus has the calm, sleepy look of a Hindoo god,—while Gorgon's head, with goggle eyes and protruding tongue, resembles a Mexican idol. Hercules and the thieves have more of an Egyptian character. The material of these bas-reliefs is coarse limestone; ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... they flew, and over the yellow sand of the Libyan desert, and as Perseus flew before them, some blood-drops fell from the severed head of Medusa, and from them bred the vipers that are found in the desert to this day. But bravely did the winged shoes of Hermes bear Perseus on, and by nightfall the Gorgon sisters had passed from sight, and Perseus found himself once more in the garden of the Hesperides. Ere he sought the nymphs, he knelt by the sea to cleanse from his hands Medusa's blood, and still does ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... delicately and so aristocratically entempled in that graceful, slender, ultra-feminine body of Margaret Severence's, as she descended the stairs, putting fresh gloves upon her beautiful, idle hands, he would have borrowed wings of the wind and would have fled as from a gorgon. ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... "Gorgon" arrived, towing the brig which brought out Mrs Livingstone and some ladies about to join the University mission, as well as the sections of a new iron steamer intended for the navigation of Lake Nyassa. The name of the "Lady Nyassa" was given ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... which mr. Pitt concluded the debate t'other day on the treaties. His antagonists endeavour to disarm him, but as fast as they deprive him of one weapon, he finds a better; I never suspected him of such an universal armoury-I knew he had a Gorgon's head, composed of bayonets and pistols, but little thought that he could tickle to death with a feather. On the first debate on these famous treaties, last Wednesday, Hume Campbell, whom the Duke of ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... old legends, unsurpassed for beauty in the literature of any race, in which the hero stands out as the deliverer, the destroyer of evil? Theseus ridding the land of robbers, and delivering it from the yearly tribute of boys and maidens to be devoured by the Minotaur; Perseus slaying the Gorgon, and rescuing Andromeda from the sea-beast; Heracles with his twelve famous labours against giants and monsters; and ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... friends there were none. Oh, if he could cry to the Church for help in this hour of his need! but it was slowly dawning on him that not from the Church would help come to his cause; for a grievous thing had happened to the Church. The slave gorgon sat staring from the pews, and turning the pulpits to stone, turning also to stone the hearts of ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... measure of ignorance of ourselves is wise, because consciousness of a weakness may lead us to give it rein. Perfect strength can coexist only with perfect knowledge, but neither is attainable by man. Man should pay to be screened from himself, lest his sword fail,—lest the Gorgon's head on his ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... scarcely imagine the strange horror of its appearance. The peculiar V-shaped mouth with its pointed upper lip, the absence of brow ridges, the absence of a chin beneath the wedgelike lower lip, the incessant quivering of this mouth, the Gorgon groups of tentacles, the tumultuous breathing of the lungs in a strange atmosphere, the evident heaviness and painfulness of movement due to the greater gravitational energy of the earth—above all, the extraordinary intensity ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... or technical industries, however brilliant, no school regulations, no political education of the masses, however widespread and complete, can protect us from the curse of ridiculous and barbaric offences against good taste, or from annihilation by the Gorgon head of the classicist. ...
— Homer and Classical Philology • Friedrich Nietzsche
... the shield or buckler of Zeus, fashioned for him by Hephaestus, furnished with tassels and bearing the Gorgon's head in the centre. Originally symbolical of the storm-cloud, it is probably derived from aisso, signifying rapid, violent motion. When the god shakes it, Mount Ida is wrapped in clouds, the thunder rolls and men are smitten with fear. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... (Let none them read) thereof did verses frame, With which and other spelles like terrible, He bad awake blacke Plutoes griesly Dame,[*] And cursed heaven and spake reprochfull shame Of highest God, the Lord of life and light; 330 A bold bad man, that dar'd to call by name Great Gorgon,[*] Prince of darknesse and dead night, At which Cocytus[*] quakes, and Styx is put ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... I walk the horses! I scorn't, faith: [89] I have other matters in hand: let the horses walk themselves, an they will.— [Reads.] A per se, a; t, h, e, the; o per se, o; Demy orgon gorgon.— Keep further from me, O thou illiterate and ...
— Dr. Faustus • Christopher Marlowe
... damsel, does it not? Well, when I looked along the row of young heads, my eye generally stopped at this of Adele's; her gaze was ever waiting for mine, and it frequently succeeded in arresting it. She was an unnatural-looking being—so young, fresh, blooming, yet so Gorgon-like. Suspicion, sullen ill-temper were on her forehead, vicious propensities in her eye, envy and panther-like deceit about her mouth. In general she sat very still; her massive shape looked as if it could not bend much, nor did her large head—so broad at ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... the flame. O let the pure, the gentle breath of love, Low murmuring, cool thy bosom's fiery glow. Orestes, fondly lov'd,—canst thou not hear me? Hath the terrific Furies' grisly band Dried up the blood of life within thy veins? Creeps there, as from the Gorgon's direful head, A petrifying charm through all thy limbs? With hollow accents from a mother's blood, If voices call thee to the shades below, May not a sister's word with blessing rife Call from Olympus' height ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... to me it shows that the poet did not so absolutely crawl in the dust before her, as did almost all the so called men of her court; though he did certainly flatter her after a fashion in which few queens can be flattered. His description of the belligerent old Gorgon as the "Fair Vestal throned by the West" seems like the poetry and fancy of the beautiful Fairy Queen wasted upon the ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... eye-witness and ear-witness of that which he relates. He is the very man who has heard the tormented spirits crying out for the second death, who has read the dusky characters on the portal within which there is no hope, who has hidden his face from the terrors of the Gorgon, who has fled from the hooks and the seething pitch of Barbariccia and Draghignazzo. His own hands have grasped the shaggy sides of Lucifer. His own feet have climbed the mountain of expiation. His own brow ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... suppose these gnats were intended to be shrined in amber? these mere minnows to be treated with the high consideration due only to potted char and white bait? these fleeting thoughts fixed in stone before that Gorgon-head, the public? these ephemeral fancies dropped into the true elixir of immortality, printer's-ink? these——" I stopped him, for this other mighty mouthful of images betrayed the hypocrite—"Yes, I did." An involuntary smile assured me he did too, and the cause proceeded thus: first, ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... the Stranger, "if your Mother will let me, I will tell you the story of Perseus and how the great Goddess Athena helped him to cut off the Gorgon's head with its writhing snaky locks! There's a story for you! And if you don't believe it is true, some day, when you go to Athens with your Father, you can see the Gorgon's head, snakes and all, on the breastplate ...
— The Spartan Twins • Lucy (Fitch) Perkins
... there, man! Bless mine eyes! art thou the chairman! Chairman to yon damned committee! Yet I look on thee with pity. Dreadful sight! what! learned Morgan Metamorphosed to a Gorgon? For thy horrid looks I own, Half convert me to a stone, Hast thou been so long at school, Now to turn a factious tool? Alma Mater was thy mother, Every young divine thy brother. Thou a disobedient varlet, Treat thy ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... and, if it did not succeed, then to vote for peace." As if war was a matter of experiment! As if you could take it up or lay it down as an idle frolic! As if the dire goddess that presides over it, with her murderous spear in her hand and her Gorgon at her breast, was a coquette to be flirted with! We ought with reverence to approach that tremendous divinity, that loves courage, but commands counsel. War never leaves where it found a nation. It is never to be entered into without a mature deliberation,—not a deliberation ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... not all of the body are the pangs of that severance. With that terrible sword of impersonal Pain the God of Peace makes sorrowful war that Peace may come again. With its flame He ringed the bastions of Heaven when Satan made assault. Only on the Gorgon-image of that Pain in the shield may weak man look; and its blaze and ire had permeated with deadly nearness the ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... wondered that she wore no parki—this lady who had claimed sole right to all the finest sables found in her new American dominions. On the other side of the medal, Minerva, with a Gorgon-furnished shield and a beautiful bone-tipped harpoon, as it looked, with a throwing-stick and all complete. But she, too, would strike the Yukon eye as lamentably chilly about the legs. How had these ladies ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... another figure beside her, which, although vague and indistinct, I yet recognised but too well. It was the Ash-tree. My beauty was the Maid of the Alder! and she was giving me, spoiled of my only availing defence, into the hands of bent his Gorgon-head, and entered the cave. I could not stir. He drew near me. His ghoul-eyes and his ghastly face fascinated me. He came stooping, with the hideous hand outstretched, like a beast of prey. I had given myself up to a death of unfathomable ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... departure, as somebody called them. And they were built for kings and persons of spacious lives, but they have been sublet to smaller folk. Or does no one live inside? You never see a curtain stir. There is never a face at a window. Everything is stone and dead. One might think that a Gorgon had gone riding on a 'bus top, and had thrown his cold eye upon the house fronts." Flint paused. "How can one live obscurely, as these folk do, in the twilight, in so beautiful a shell? Even a crustacean sometimes shows his nose at his door. And yet what a ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... agony and dread, the women were caught in the wild clutches of hysteria, and Courtney himself was as if possessed with a frenzy: his features were rigid, his eyes dilated, and his hair rose and clung in wavy locks, so that he seemed a very Gorgon's head. The only person apparently unmoved was old Dr Rippon, whose pale, gaunt form rose in the background, sinister and calm ...
— Master of His Fate • J. Mclaren Cobban
... the shepherd kings, who introduced not only the arts, but the religious rites of that ancient country. Among the regal descendants of Lynceus was Danae, whose son Perseus performed marvelous deeds, by the special favor of Athene, among which he brought from Libya the terrific head of the Gorgon Medusa, which had the marvelous property of turning every one to stone who looked at her. Stung with remorse for the accidental murder of his grandfather, the king, he retired from Argos, and founded the city of Mycenae, the ruins of whose massive walls are still to be seen—Cyclopean works, which ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... ornaments in stucco, on the front of the main building, consisting of the lotus, the sistrum, representations of gods, Harpocrates, Anubis, and other objects of Egyptian worship. The figures on one side of this temple are Perseus with the Gorgon's head; on the other side, Mars and Venus, with Cupids bearing the arms of Mars. We next observe three altars of different sizes. On one of them is said to have been found the bones of a victim unconsumed, the last sacrifice having probably been stopped by the dreadful calamity ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... asked a very skilful Hand, to have depicted to the Life the Faces of those Three Persons, at Don Mario's Appearance. He that has seen some admirable Piece of Transmutation by a Gorgon's Head, may form to himself the most probable Idea of the Prototype. The Old Gentleman was himself in a sort of a Wood, to find his Daughter with a Young Fellow and a Priest, but as yet he did not know the Worst, ...
— Incognita - or, Love & Duty Reconcil'd. A Novel • William Congreve
... walls were the three Furies of the Greek legends. When they beheld Dante they howled for the Gorgon, Medusa, with the snaky locks to come quickly and turn him into stone—a fate that must befall all men that gazed upon her face. But Vergil bade Dante hide his eyes, and to be sure that he might be saved he covered them ...
— A Treasury of Heroes and Heroines - A Record of High Endeavour and Strange Adventure from 500 B.C. to 1920 A.D. • Clayton Edwards
... unknown, for Nature has made that an instinct; but the will to overcome conquers even this last of fears and steels a man's nerves to face anything. The heroes of antiquity set their lances against dragons and creatures that belched forth flame and smoke—brave Perseus slew the Gorgon, and Jason the brass-hooved bulls, and St. George and many another slew his "worm." But the dragons are all dead or driven to the depths of the sea, whence they rise up to chill men's blood; and those who conquer now fight only their memory, ...
— Wunpost • Dane Coolidge
... off, to fall back senseless and exhausted; his strained and bloodshot eyes starting from their sockets, the slaver gathering round his lips, his raven hair standing on end, his delicate and symmetrical features distorted into a hideous and Gorgon aspect. It was, indeed, an appalling and sublime spectacle, full of an awful moral, the meeting of the foes! Here stood Maltravers, strong beyond the common strength of men, in health, power, conscious superiority, premeditated vengeance—wise, gifted; all his faculties ripe, developed, ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... by John Graham, Head of the House of Graham & Company, Pork-Packers in Chicago, familiarly known on 'Change as "Old Gorgon Graham," to his Son, Pierrepont, facetiously known to ...
— Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer
... entertaining nor ornamental," against which we have already heard the painter inveigh. Upon the ceiling, with a nice sense of decorative fitness, is Pharaoh in the Red Sea. From a sconce at the side, a Gorgon surveys the proceedings with astonishment. Hogarth has used a similar idea in the Strolling Actresses, where the same mask seems horrified at the airy freedom of the lightly-clad lady who there enacts the ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... he, "is this you that I hear? Why you are warmer in your denunciation of this little wisp of a woman than you ever were of fat old Madame Gorgon, with her prodigious paste diamonds. Really, you take it too hard. And you, too, who used to skate so nimbly over the glib surface of society, and cut such coquettish figures of eight upon the characters of your friends. You must excuse me, but it seems to me odd that Miss Minerva ...
— The Potiphar Papers • George William Curtis
... you say, the Life? Lenox. Meane you his Maiestie? Macd. Approch the Chamber, and destroy your sight With a new Gorgon. Doe not bid me speake: See, and then speake your selues: ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... said her husband 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
... complications. He has risked enough for it, to be trusted a little I think—his life and dynasty certainly. At this moment I hear from Rome of a great dinner given by Lamoriciere to his staff, or by his staff to him (I don't know which), only that the health of Henri Cinq was suggested and drunk at it. Gorgon telegraphed the news to Paris. What then? English newspapers (even such papers as the 'Daily News') have stated that Lamoriciere was doing Napoleonic business at Rome. Perhaps this is ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... is like a broken loom, and the piece which Rebellion put in, and was weaving, has been cut, and every thread broken. You must put in new warp and new woof, and weaving anew, as the fabric slowly unwinds we shall see in it no Gorgon figures, no hideous grotesques of the old barbarism, but the figures of liberty, vines, and golden grains, framing in the heads of justice, love, and liberty. The august convention of 1787 formed the Constitution with this memorable preamble: "We, the people of the United States, in ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... watch'd; And bending cock, he levell'd full Against th' outside of TALGOL'S skull; Vowing that he shou'd ne'er stir further, 780 Nor henceforth cow nor bullock murther. But PALLAS came in shape of rust, And 'twixt the spring and hammerthrust Her Gorgon shield, which made the cock Stand stiff, as t'were transform'd to stock. 785 Mean while fierce TALGOL, gath'ring might, With rugged truncheon charg'd the Knight; But he with petronel upheav'd, Instead of shield, the blow receiv'd. The gun ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... whole course of this irruption, he ceased nor to cry, with great vociferation, "Drive, coachman, drive, in the name of God!" and the carriage had proceeded the length of a whole street before he manifested the least sign of reflection, but stared like the Gorgon's head, with his mouth wide open, and each particular hair crawling and twining like an animated serpent. At length, however, he began to recover the use of his senses, and asked if Peregrine thought ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... "Gorgon—Gorgon of Poitou," he returned with enthusiasm. "They are getting as rare now as this," he declared, nodding to the cobwebbed bottle, as he rose, drew the ...
— A Village of Vagabonds • F. Berkeley Smith
... to them [the aborigines of Port Jackson] for any animal, until we introduced it. When I showed Colbee [an aboriginal] the cows brought out in the Gorgon he asked me ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... terror, horror, dismay, consternation, panic, scare, stampede [of horses]. intimidation, terrorism, reign of terror. [Object of fear] bug bear, bugaboo; scarecrow; hobgoblin &c. (demon) 980; nightmare, Gorgon, mormo[obs3], ogre, Hurlothrumbo[obs3], raw head and bloody bones, fee-faw-fum, bete noire[Fr], enfant terrible[Fr]. alarmist &c. (coward) 862. V. fear, stand in awe of; be afraid &c. adj.; have ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... smiled again, and said: "Not yet; you are too young, and too unskilled; for this is Medusa the Gorgon, the mother of a ...
— Heroes Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... assertion of his rights, is far more compact and powerful than in Russia, or even in Germany. Even where it does not employ the arm of the law, society knows how to use that quieter, but more crushing pressure, that calm, Gorgon-like look which only the bravest and stoutest hearts ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller
... my boy. Someone here is composing, with much citation of texts, a dissertation on the Gorgon Islands: de Gorgonum insulis. Medusa, according to him, was a Libyan savage who lived near Lake Triton, our present Chott Melhrir, and it is ...
— Atlantida • Pierre Benoit
... with them and ends by borrowing the form of one of them (she becoming for the time absorbed into her two sisters)—for as medieval devil he has no right of entree into that classical scene in which he and Faust are now to play their parts. It is therefore in the form of a Phorkyad or Gorgon that Mephisto will appear ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... if Lady Auriol had been a Gorgon or a basilisk or a cockatrice, then had I been a slain ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... laughed Connie. "Well, what about their cousin, that Mr. Ruthven Smith who used to stay at your 'gorgon's' till our friends the burglar-band called on him? There are things in Valley House which would interest an expert in jewels. And you've never asked ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... way, he sees the separate acts of which he had been guilty—lust, fraud, treachery, murder: looked at in another, he sees them all knotted together, in one inextricable tangle of forked, hissing tongues, like the serpent locks that coil and twist round a Gorgon head. No sin dwells alone; the separate acts have a common root, and the whole is matted together like the green growth on a stagnant pond, so that, by whatever filament it is grasped, the whole mass is drawn towards you. And a profound insight into the essence and character of ...
— The Life of David - As Reflected in His Psalms • Alexander Maclaren
... And stood accoutred for the bloody fray. Her tasselled aegis round her shoulders next She threw, with terror circled all around, And on its face were figured deeds of arms And Strife and Courage high, and panic Rout. There too a Gorgon's head of monstrous size Frown'd terrible, portent of angry Jove. . . . . . . . In her hand A spear she bore, long, weighty, tough, wherewith The mighty daughter of a mighty sire Sweeps down the ranks of ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... as brave a youth as I believe you to be," replied King Polydectes, with the utmost graciousness of manner. "The bridal gift which I have set my heart on presenting to the beautiful Hippodamia is the head of the Gorgon Medusa with the snaky locks; and I depend on you, my dear Perseus, to bring it to me. So, as I am anxious to settle affairs with the princess, the sooner you go in quest of the Gorgon, the better I ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... age she loses her brilliant complexion. Yet, for reasons best known to herself, her colour continues to be bright, though her spirits and her temper seem to suffer in the effort to keep it so. As old age advances, she is as likely as not to become a gorgon of immaculate propriety, and will be heard lamenting over the laxity of manners which permits girls to do what was never dreamt of when she was ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, March 15, 1890 • Various
... I have no doubt that the statue is as like Mr. Wilberforce as one pea to another, and you might fancy, that, at some ordinary moment, when he least expected it, and before he had time to smooth away his knowing complication of wrinkles, he had seen the Gorgon's head, and whitened into marble,—not only his personal self, but his coat and small-clothes, down to a button and the minutest crease of the cloth. The ludicrous result marks the impropriety of bestowing the age-long duration of marble upon small, ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... why did heaven impart, To please your eyes, but not to move your heart! I'll shroud this gorgon from all human view, And own no beauty, since it charms not you! Reverse your orders, and your sentence give; My soldiers shall not ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... looked forward to, as pleasures are, the wide world over; and all classes, from highest to lowest, have their modes of enjoyment marked out. Preparation follows preparation in festal succession. Sorrow hides her Gorgon head, care may betake itself to any dreary recesses, for Christmas ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... began again, "we have lives of our own.... There's no use attempting the impossible. You're so unprejudiced about some things, so used, as you say, to looking at the Gorgon, that I don't know why you're afraid to face our case, and see it as it really is—unless you think the sacrifice ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... women, from the thoughtless gaiety of youth, or the impulse of inexperienced enthusiasm, may have given some slight cause for censure, I would not have virtue put on all her gorgon terrors, nor appear circled by the vengeful band of prudes; her chastening hand will be more beneficially felt if she wear her more benign form. To place the imprudent in the same class with the vicious, ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth |
