"Stygian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... day of the gods!" he continued. "And may I from across this Stygian lake (there was a little water collected in the haw-haw here from the recent rains) introduce Miss Lutworth to you—and Miss Clinker and Lord Freynault? Miss ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn
... amazed at this scene, and asked the Sibyl to explain to him its meaning. "You see before you," she replied, "the deep pools of Cocytus, and the Stygian lake, by which the Gods are accustomed to swear when they take an oath which they dare not violate. All that crowd which Charon will not ferry across is composed of persons who after death received not the rites of burial; ...
— The Children's Hour, Volume 3 (of 10) • Various
... turned off the flashlamp, for its battery was giving out and he wished to conserve its remaining energy for eventualities. Thus they were in Stygian darkness for nearly a half-hour, though the green luminosity far beneath them grew stronger with each passing minute. It now revealed itself as a clearly defined disc of light that flickered and sputtered continually, frequently lighting the lower end of the shaft with an ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... spendthrifts; each succeeding circle embracing what the poet deems a deeper shade of guilt, and inflicting appropriate punishment. The Christian and heathen systems of theology are here freely interwoven. We have Minos visiting the Stygian Lake, where heretics are burning; we meet Cerberus and the harpies, and we accompany the poet across several of the fabulous rivers of Erebus. A fearful scene appears in the deepest circle of the infernal abodes. Here, among those who have betrayed their country, and are entombed ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... with mineral fury, aid the winds, And leave a singed bottom all involved With stench and smoke. Such resting found the sole Of unblest feet. Him followed his next mate; Both glorying to have scaped the Stygian flood As gods, and by their own recovered strength, Not by the sufferance of supernal Power. "Is this the region, this the soil, the clime," Said then the lost Archangel, "this the seat That we must change for Heaven?—this mournful ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... along the sidewalk to Pat, and reached the horse's head and bridle. Untying the reins from the post, he leaped into the saddle. Then he swung Pat around, put light spurs to him, and urged him rapidly across the avenue. Beyond the avenue toward the north lay Stygian darkness. In these black ...
— Bred of the Desert - A Horse and a Romance • Marcus Horton
... helmsman of the course he should steer, to avoid collision with the shores. Canopies of weaving branches met in various directions far above their heads, and through these the schooner glided with a silence that might have called up the idea of a Stygian freight. Meanwhile, the men stood anxiously to their guns, concealing the matches in their water-buckets as before; and, while they strained both ear and eye through the surrounding; gloom to discover the ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... enthralled. His shade from Hades upon that dread day Bursting to light in terrible array! What! could not Pluto spare the Chief once more, To scare a second robber from his prey? Idly he wandered on the Stygian shore, Nor now preserved the walls he ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... Cerberus in his den, and, like him, must be appeased by a sop before access can be gained to his master. Perhaps Jones might have seen him in that light, and have recollected the passage where the Sibyl, in order to procure an entrance for Aeneas, presents the keeper of the Stygian avenue with such a sop. Jones, in like manner, now began to offer a bribe to the human Cerberus, which a footman, overhearing, instantly advanced, and declared, "if Mr Jones would give him the sum proposed, he would conduct him ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... trade her cause divine, "And gamble for gold on Freedom's shrine!" Thus saying, the Ghost, as he took his flight, Gave a Parthian kick to the Benthamite, Which sent him, whimpering, off to Jerry— And vanisht away to the Stygian ferry! ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... likeness of my embossed Bombay cap and golden spectacles, she found the fault that it rendered my complexion of a too excessive murksomeness; not reflecting (with feminine imperceptivity) that, the material being black as a Stygian, this criticism applied to ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... a name to suit my fancy; and as flushing, fading, its glory changed, sometimes I rechristened it. Jupiter's Chariot, brazen wheeled, stood ready to roll into the clouds. Semiramis's Bed, all gold, shone from a tower of Babylon. Castor and Pollux clasped hands over a Stygian river. The Spur of Doom, a mountain shaft as red as hell, and inaccessible, insurmountable, lured with strange light. Dusk, a bold, black dome, was shrouded by the shadow of a giant mesa. The Star of Bethlehem glittered from the brow of Point Sublime. The Wraith, fleecy, feathered ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... upon a rock in the midst of the rapids, he is the incarnation of all that is untamed, a wild spirit of the mountain stream, as free as a raindrop or a sunbeam. How solitary he is, a lone little bird, flitting from rock to rock through the desolate gorge, like some spirit in a Stygian world. Yet he sings continually as he takes his solitary way along the stream, and bursts of melody, so eerie and sylvan as to fire the imagination, come to the ear, sounding above the roar of the torrent. Like Orpheus, he seeks in the ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... a small pause. The vessel seemed to have lost way altogether, to swim like a spirit ship that Stygian tide. The lieutenant moved forward, leaving Lanyard alone. The voice of the leadsman was stilled. By the wheel the captain stood absolutely motionless, his body vaguely silhouetted against the glow ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... that from him shall spring a pair Of brothers, leagued no less by love than blood; Who shall be all that Leda's children were; The just Alphonso, Hippolite the good. And as each twin resigned the vital air His fellow to redeem from Stygian flood, So each of these would gladly spend his breath, And for his ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... the Stygian pool, though long detained In that obscure sojourn; while, in his flight Through utter and through middle darkness borne, He sang of ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... inexhaustible reservoir of tar, with more and more picturesque results. The caldron had been elevated upon bricks and was not perfectly balanced; and under a heavy impact of the struggling group it lurched and went partly over, pouring forth a Stygian tide which formed a deep ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington
... he did say something of the kind," said Kenrick, laughing; "at least I know he called it Stygian and Tartarean. But, as I was saying, he set Penkridge (who happened to be going round with the lists) to examine the cupboards, and see if by chance some inopportune rat had died there; and Penkridge, opening one of them where the floor was very rotten, and poking about with his foot, ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... concerning him would pretty soon have died away; nor could any amount of unwise desire to satisfy that feeling in fellow-creatures less seriously disposed have sustained him alive, in those baleful Historic Acherons and Stygian Fens, where he has had to dig and to fish so long, far away from the upper light!—Let me request all readers to blow that sorry chaff entirely out of their minds; and to believe nothing on the subject except what they get ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. I. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Birth And Parentage.—1712. • Thomas Carlyle
... sunk in that putrefying well of abominations; they have oozed in upon London, from the universal Stygian quagmire of British industrial life; are accumulated in the well of the concern, to that extent. British charity is smitten to the heart, at the laying bare of such a scene; passionately undertakes, by enormous subscription of money, or by other enormous ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... which killed him, show their sepulchral grasp for many and many a year before their final victory; and the states of more or less dulled, distorted, and polluted imagination which culminate in Castle Dangerous, cast a Stygian hue over St. Ronan's Well, The Fair Maid of Perth, and Anne of Geierstein, which lowers them, the first altogether, the other two at frequent intervals, into fellowship with the normal disease which festers throughout the whole body of ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... the perfect man; a man to lead nations. But are great abilities, complete without a flaw, and polished without a blemish, the standard of human excellence? This is certainly the staunch opinion of men of the world; but I call on honour, virtue, and worth, to give the stygian doctrine a loud negative! However, this must be allowed, that, if you abstract from man the idea of an existence beyond the grave, then the true measure of human conduct is, proper and improper: virtue and vice, as dispositions of the heart, are, in that case, of scarcely the same ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... wall. The passage over the water is also a death symbol. We have not only the anxiety about death caused by the moral conflict, but we have also to remember that the passage into the uterus is a passage to the beyond. The water is the Water of Death (stygian waters) and of Life. In narrower sense it is also seminal fluid and the amniotic liquor. It is overdetermined as indeed all symbols are. The water bears the death color black. In the Flying Post dream a black road appears. ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... Regent Street, near Piccadilly Circus, was a haven of brightness in an otherwise Stygian London. It was one of those "old-fashioned" places—Restoration style of decoration, carried out in modern plastics. The oak panelling looked authentic enough, but it was just a little too glossy ...
— The Penal Cluster • Ivar Jorgensen (AKA Randall Garrett)
... from us, Virgil salutes him, and Theocritus; Catullus, mightiest-brained Lucretius, each Greets him, their brother, on the Stygian beach; Proudly a gaunt right hand doth Dante reach; Milton and Wordsworth bid him welcome home; Bright Keats to touch his raiment doth beseech; Coleridge, his locks aspersed with fairy foam, Calm Spenser, Chaucer suave, His equal friendship crave: And godlike spirits hail him ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... the end of a cedar penholder, he groped for expression: "Stygian ... sickening ... surfeiting ... ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... gloom his friend Achilles knew, As he speaks the tears dissolve in dew. 'Comest thou alive to view the Stygian bounds, Where the wan spectres walk eternal rounds; Nor fear'st the dark and dismal waste to tread, Thronged with pale ghosts familiar with the dead?' To whom with sighs, 'I pass these dreadful gates ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... nerves to be somewhat shaken. On the morrow I was to die some sort of nameless death for the diversion of a savage horde, but the morrow held fewer terrors for me than the present, and I submit to any fair-minded man if it is not a terrifying thing to lie bound hand and foot in the Stygian blackness of an immense cave peopled by unknown dangers in a land overrun by hideous beasts and reptiles of the greatest ferocity. At any moment, perhaps at this very moment, some silent-footed beast of prey might catch my scent where it laired in some contiguous ...
— The People that Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... god who, if he were living now, would deserve to be put in jail, does not launch the thunderbolt, but the thunderbolt falls when electricity wills it. There is no Parnassus; there is no Olympus; there is no Stygian lake; nor are there any other Elysian Fields than those of Paris. There is no other descent to hell than the descents of Geology, and this traveller, every time he returns from it, declares that there are no damned souls in the centre of the ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... simples Cocted in Stygian shades— Acids of wrinkles and pimples From faces of ancient maids— Acrid precipitates sunken From tempers of scolding wives Whose husbands, uncommonly drunken, Are commonly found in dives,— With this I baptize and appoint thee (to St. ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... friend and confidant of Four Dogs who have helped to humanize him for a quarter of a century and more, and who have souls to be saved, he is sure. And when he crosses the Stygian River he expects to find, on the other shore, a trio of dogs wagging their tails almost off, in their joy at his coming, and with honest tongues hanging out to lick his hands and his feet. And then he is going, with these faithful, devoted dogs at his ...
— A Boy I Knew and Four Dogs • Laurence Hutton
... were speaking near the curb-door. She turned her head involuntarily in this direction. There were no lights in the frontage before which stood her cab, which intervened between the Brocken haze in the street, throwing a square of Stygian shadow against the fog, with right and left angles of aureola. She could distinguish ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath
... a picture of such violence the tree's heavy canopy made that spot one of Stygian murk, and even the moon hid its face just then, so that the world went black, and the stars seemed more brilliant against their inky velvet. But the light had held until the grim preparations were finished, and then when Bas ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... dressed, he descended upon his guest, who sat in torment, on a hall-tree shelf, in Stygian darkness. ...
— Bambi • Marjorie Benton Cooke |
