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More "Sphinx" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... shelving ledges made of stone, with a sheet of water gliding down over them; here a long path, stretching down slopes and flights of steps, and arched over all the way with trellises and creepers; here a huge boulder, hewn, just as it lay, into the shape of a gigantic head and face, with mild, sphinx-like eyes, as if some buried Titan were struggling to free himself; here a fountain, so artfully formed of pipes set in circles, each set shooting the water higher than those outside, as to form a solid pyramid ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... said the General, somewhat drawling on the words, 'you exchanged cards and confidences?' Polson stretched out his hands again in appeal, and the General, looking at him with a countenance impassive as the Sphinx, felt a pang of pity in his heart, for the lad was a good lad, and the old warrior knew it, and he had been near to loving him, this past half-dozen years. And the boy was not merely pale with the suffering of his mind, but his very eyes had lost their colour, as a man's eyes do when he has ...
— VC — A Chronicle of Castle Barfield and of the Crimea • David Christie Murray
... nothing but the piles of coin, the spinning needle, and the flashing hands of the woman that turned it. She all the while sat passionless and cold, looking on the scene as might some glittering and bejewelled sphinx. ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Tristan might expect to recover fully in a matter of weeks. Mentally—the doctor was not so sure. The boy had gone through a terrible experience, and one which was still continuing—might continue no one knew how long. We were, said the doctor, up against a trick played by the great Sphinx, Nature, and one which, so far as he knew, had never before taken place in ...
— Disowned • Victor Endersby
... of a world trying to tell its secret to the darkness. What depths, what subtleties, what unfailing revelations of beauty, and surely, too, of love, there were in Nature! And yet in Nature what terrible indifference there was: a powerful, an almost terrific inattention, like that of the sphinx that gazes at what men cannot see. Hermione moved away from the house. She walked to the brow of the island and sat down on the seat that Vere was fond of. Presently she would go to the bridge and look over into the Pool and listen for ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... in the Pentateuch, nothing of the transmigration of souls, nothing of the worship of animals; nothing of the future life and judgment to come; nothing of the embalming of bodies and ornamenting of tombs. The cherubim among the Jews may resemble the Egyptian Sphinx; the priests' dress in both are of white linen; the Urim and Thummim, symbolic jewels of the priests, are in both; a quasi-hereditary priesthood is in each; and both have a temple worship. But here the parallels cease. Moses left behind ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... of this isle, Which way they lead the clueless wanderer To fields suburban, and the towers of men, I would confront the strangest things that haunt In horrid shades of brooding desolation: Griffin, or satyr, sphinx, or sybil ape, Or lop-eared demon from the dens of night, Let loose to caper out of Acheron. Ah me, my Theseus, wherefore art thou gone! Who left that crock of water at my side? Who stole my dog that loved no one ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... your gaze to the bottom of an immensely deep well. What is it that moves there? you ask yourself. Is it a blind monster or only a lost gleam from the universe? It occurred to me—don't laugh—that all things being dissimilar, she was more inscrutable in her childish ignorance than the Sphinx propounding childish riddles to wayfarers. She had been carried off to Patusan before her eyes were open. She had grown up there; she had seen nothing, she had known nothing, she had no conception of anything. I ask myself whether ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... starting up, 'Speak swiftly, ere too late, where dwelleth he?' 'Ah, that I know not,' spake the little voice, 'Yet keep thy courage, seek thou out the stork, The ancient stork that saw from earliest days, Sitting in primal contemplation lost, Sphinx-like, seraphic, and oracular, Watching the strange ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... those days; she loved. She moved as one who is moved; she was drawn as by the cords of the sun. The Ancient One, the Sphinx, had her fast. The reflection of a greater thing claimed her and taught her, held her like a bayadere in a ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... us! 'tis indeed serious. I supposed the boat which passed contained all the Dons on the upper river, but if this be true we may have to desert the stream, and take to the eastern trail on foot. Sacre! I like it not! What say you, you sphinx of an English borderman? Knew you ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... pyramid towered up from the desert with its apex toward the moon which hung in the sky. For centuries it had stood thus, disdaining the aid of gods or man, being, as the Sphinx herself observed, able to stand up for itself. And this was no small praise from that sublime yet mysterious female who had seen the ages come and go, empires rise and fall, novelist succeed novelist, and who, for eons and cycles the cynosure and centre of admiration and ...
— New Burlesques • Bret Harte
... ("Fertilisation of Orchids," Edition II., page 163), is adapted to the visits of a moth with a proboscis of corresponding length. He points out that there is no difficulty in believing in the existence of such a moth as F. Muller has described ("Nature," 1873, page 223)—a Brazilian sphinx-moth with a trunk of 10 to 11 inches in length. Moreover, Forbes has given evidence to show that such an insect does exist in Madagascar ("Nature," VIII., 1873, page 121). The case of Angraecum was put forward by the Duke of Argyll ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... always as expressionless as a graven image. While contemplating the most cruel murder they never show the least change in expression, nor do their eyes show the faintest shadow of an emotion. They are stolid, surly and Sphinx-like always. Wolf's partner was like his race, and not even by the droop of an eyelid did he betray the slowly gathering storm of hate and rage within. He brooded over the hurt he felt when Wolf had wanted to buy his sloop, and believing the Jew meant to rob ...
— Pocket Island - A Story of Country Life in New England • Charles Clark Munn
... Orchis, whose shorter spur holds out a certain prospect of reward; for, in these two cases, as in so many others, the flower's welcome for an insect is in exact proportion to the length of its visitor's tongue. Doubtless it is one of the smaller sphinx moths, such as we see at dusk working about the evening primrose and other flowers deep of chalice, and heavily perfumed to guide visitors to their feast, that is the great Purple-fringed Orchid's benefactor, since the length of its tongue ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... quarrel arises over the question of passing,—a quarrel as to the merit of which the legend is silent. Oedipus kills his antagonist, and that antagonist is his father. Then he delivers Thebes from the scourge of the Sphinx and receives the hand of Queen Jocasta as his due reward. He has forgotten the oracle, or imagines that he has eluded his foreordained fate by leaving Corinth; but the oracle has fulfilled itself, ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... perpetual adoration, and as it were weariness of continual triumph, had forever frozen this face, implacably gentle and of granite serenity. Osiris judging the souls could not have had a more majestic and calm expression. A large tame lion, lying by his side, stretched out its enormous paws like a sphinx on its pedestal, and ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... phytophagic—that is, due to the direct action of the differently coloured leaves on which the insect fed. Mr. Poulton's experiments have thrown much light on this question, since he has conclusively proved that, in the case of the sphinx caterpillar of Smerinthus ocellatus, the change of colour is not due to the food but to the coloured ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... Woe to him who is inexperienced on the ocean! One ought to be familiar with the Channel—the Channel is the Sphinx. Look ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... looking long at you, The woman almost fades from view. A cipher of man's changeless sum Of lust, past, present, and to come, Is left. A riddle that one shrinks To challenge from the scornful sphinx. ...
— Traffic in Souls - A Novel of Crime and Its Cure • Eustace Hale Ball
... and wistfully. "I wonder what they are doing?... I think they will miss us. It is extraordinary how Zimbabwe gets into one's heart. I have never seen anything anywhere that appealed to me quite like those old walls, with their untold story and their patience of the ages. The Sphinx in Egypt may be older, but we know how it came to be there and who built it. One of Zimbabwe's fascinations seems to be the absence of all knowledge about it, of all why and wherefore." She broke off as a Cape cart drove up to the door. ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... (Lord Lyons) is the most sphinx; he is taciturn, reserved, listens more than he speaks; the others are ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... scratched the reindeer-bone, Someone made the sketch his own, Filched it from the artist—then, Even in those early days, Won a simple Viceroy's praise Through the toil of other men. Ere they hewed the Sphinx's visage, Favoritism governed kissage, Even as it ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... had better take back your God—if you needs must have something to kow-tow to! You're a fine atheist, with all that superstition about woman still in you! You're a fine free-thinker, who dare not think freely about the dear ladies! Do you know what that incomprehensible, sphinx-like, profound something in your wife really is? It is sheer stupidity!—Look here: she cannot even distinguish between th and t. And that, you know, means there is something wrong with the mechanism. When you look at the case, it looks like a chronometer, but the ...
— Plays by August Strindberg, Second series • August Strindberg
... whatever. Among these is a large brown chrysalis with a long tongue case bent over so as to resemble the handle of a jug. Every farm boy has ploughed or spaded it up in the spring, and is it but the pupa of a large sphinx moth, Protoparce celeus Hub., the larva of which is the great green worm, with a "horn on its tail," so common on tomato ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... vainly doth the earnest voice of man Call for the thing that is his pure desire! Fame is the birthright of the living lyre! To noble impulse Nature puts no ban. Nor vainly to the Sphinx thy voice was raised! Tho' all thy great emotions like a sea, Against her stony immortality, Shatter themselves unheeded and amazed. Time moves behind her in a blind eclipse: Yet if in her cold eyes ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... coast. It is indeed difficult to see how tourists could pass their time here without this topic of conversation, so infinite is its variety and so debatable are many of the conclusions drawn from it. It is the Sphinx of California; differing, however, from the Sphinx of Egypt in that it offers a new problem every day. The literature that treats of the Pacific coast fairly bristles with statistics on this subject, and many writers have found it impossible to resist the temptation of adorning their pages with ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... well known for her pictures of cats. She illustrated the "Fireside Sphinx," by Agnes Repplier. Her picture of "Hot Milk" is in the Pennsylvania Academy; her "Suspense," in a private ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... so steady that the fear of forced idleness will almost be banished from it. The promise is false. Protection by itself has in no country annulled or seriously qualified unemployment. But the need to which it appeals is absolutely real; for the modern State it is a problem of the Sphinx, neither to be shirked nor wrongly answered. And the alternative remedy offered in these pages has already, as their author abundantly shows, succeeded even in the very partial forms in which it has been applied. The labour market can be steadied ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... moments he questioned the seemingly blind destiny by which he felt himself impelled. A thousand miles he had ridden in search of the realization of his dreams, but had not found it. That which at first had lured him on, now seemed to mock him. The vision that beckoned to him still maintained a sphinx-like attitude toward ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... highest ecstacies could not bear down and silence the weight of my ridicule, which, in its turn, was powerless to prevent me from running into other and more gorgeous absurdities. I was double, not "swan and shadow," but rather, Sphinx-like, human and beast. A true Sphinx, I was a riddle ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... Hammurabi (British Museum, London). Khufu (Cheops), Builder of the Great Pyramid. Menephtah, the supposed Pharaoh of the Exodus. Head of Mummy of Rameses II (Museum of Gizeh). The Great Pyramid. The Great Sphinx. A Phoenician War Galley. An Assyrian. An Assyrian Relief (British Museum, London). The Ishtar Gate, Babylon. The Tomb of Cyrus the Great. Darius with his Attendants. Rock Sepulchers of the Persian ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... useless as to try to solve the enigma of the Sphinx. The dog's lips were sealed as tightly as the stone lips; the barrier between his brain and Donaldson's brain was as high as that between the man-chiseled image and the man who chiseled. He was only wasting his time on such a task, time that he should ...
— The Seventh Noon • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... with no visible sensation. His sphinx-like reticence vexed Bird more and more, and intolerably deepened the mystification of his failure to do any of the things with his capital which Bird had promised himself and his fellow-citizens. He no longer talked of going to Chicoutimi, that was true, and there was not the danger of his putting ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... returned to his quarters. He wondered just how much MacGregor knew, and he sat down to bring up before him for the thousandth time a vision of the two faces that had played their part in his life—the face of the girl at home, as beautiful as a Diane de Poitiers, as soulless as a sphinx, who had offered herself to him in return for his name and millions, and of that other which he had met away up in the frozen barrens of Lac Bain. Beauty-proof! He laughed and loaded his pipe. MacGregor had made a good guess, even though ...
— Philip Steele of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • James Oliver Curwood
... man who had been waiting for his sentence there was something terrible in the grim impassivity of Prince Falkenberg's features. His face was set and white and sphinx-like. Only his eyes shone with a ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... what I meant. I referred to Madge's health and appearance and accomplishments and all that. She has not changed in heart and feeling any more than I have, and I'm sure I'm not a sphinx." ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... dull to read the riddle of the sphinx, and your words are as enigmatical. I have not begun to find their clew," replied Madeleine, pausing in the garland she was forming, and letting the ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... rush. They were as picturesque and malignantly savage as those with which he had cursed the tules; and suddenly they stopped, checked by the Chinaman's expression. It was neither angry or alarmed, but intently observant, the eyes unblinking—an imperturbable, sphinx-like face against which the flood of ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... the while, With a sphinx-like shadowy smile, Poet Florio sat, but now Spake in deep-voiced accents slow, More as one who probes his mind, Than for us—"Who seeks, shall find— Widening knowledge surely brings Vaster themes to him who sings. ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... confronts like a sphinx the foreigners. In the same way you will find that the Russian homes are full of contrasting colors, bright red and yellow, white and blue. The Russian music is the most dramatic phonetic art ever created; it reaches the deepest sorrow and the gayest hilarity and joy. Dreamy, romantic, ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... Ezbekieh, he was soon passing down the narrow lane between throngs of garlic-scented humanity. At the great iron gates of the Boulak Station, the car with the trooper, solitary and dignified within, entered the avenue of Sphinx-like dragoons, well polished and groomed. This led to a square lined with infantry. In the centre on one side was the Royal door thrown wide, towards which stretched a broad ribbon of crimson carpet. The car came ...
— The Tale of a Trooper • Clutha N. Mackenzie
... stopped at the door of the office, and bent upon Cornelia a look at once prehistoric and fin de siecle, which lighted up with astonishment, interest and sympathy, successively; then she went trailing herself on up stairs with her strange Sphinx-face over her shoulder, and turned upon Cornelia as long as ...
— The Coast of Bohemia • William Dean Howells
... world had outlived its faculties, and its creative power had failed, it sank into the ocean of the past—a sphinx, with her riddle guessed,—and mediaeval civilization arose, founded upon Christianity and Germanism. There are times in the world's history when change seems to be abrupt, the old to be swept away and all things made new at a stroke, as if by the world-consuming fire of the old Saga. But, ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... bound to look fierce sometimes. At least, my father does, though he is celebrated for his unchanging aspect, no matter what happens. Perhaps he may look like a Sphinx when he is carrying through what he calls 'a deal,' but I remember very well seeing lightning in his eye when an Italian prince was rude to me one day. We were at Pompeii, and this Prince Monte-something induced me to look at a horrid fresco under the pretense that it was very ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... "An Englishwoman is our Waterloo. There are women who slip through our fingers like eels; we catch them on the staircase. There are lorettes who chaff us, we join in the laugh, we have a hold on them because we give credit. There are sphinx-like foreign ladies; we take a quantity of shawls to their houses, and arrive at an understanding by flattery; but an Englishwoman!—you might as well attack the bronze statue of Louis Quatorze! ...
— Gaudissart II • Honore de Balzac
... toss him in a blanket," stormed Beef McNaughton, in ludicrous rage. "Ever since he mystified Bannister by going out and corralling a Hercules who is an entire eleven in himself, Hicks has maintained that sphinx-like silence as to how he achieved the feat, and he swaggers around, enshrouded in mystery! All we know is that 'Thor' is John Thorwald, of Norwegian descent. If we ask him for information, that wretch Hicks has him trained to say, 'Ask ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... observer, continuing his study, would have forgotten the parcel, the white slaves, the gigantic negro, the self-willed hair and beard of pride—the face alone would have held him. The countenance of the Sphinx has no beauty now; and standing before it, we feel no stir of the admiration always a certificate that what we are beholding is charming out of the common lines; yet we are drawn to it irresistibly, and by a wish ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... (Trochilus gigas) is a very large bird for the delicate family to which it belongs: when on the wing its appearance is singular. Like others of the genus, it moves from place to place with a rapidity which may be compared to that of Syrphus amongst flies, and Sphinx among moths; but whilst hovering over a flower, it flaps its wings with a very slow and powerful movement, totally different from that vibratory one common to most of the species, which produces the humming noise. I never saw any other bird where the force of its wings ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... a sensitive creature, and Raggles soon shrivelled in the bleak embrace of the undecipherable. The chill, sphinx-like, ironical, illegible, unnatural, ruthless expression of the city left him downcast and bewildered. Had it no heart? Better the woodpile, the scolding of vinegar-faced housewives at back doors, the kindly spleen of bartenders behind provincial ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... perhaps just because ideas I did not understand were surging up in me, that I used to drink and fight and rage. It was to stifle them in myself, to still them, to smother them. Ivan is not Rakitin, there is an idea in him. Ivan is a sphinx and is silent; he is always silent. It's God that's worrying me. That's the only thing that's worrying me. What if He doesn't exist? What if Rakitin's right—that it's an idea made up by men? Then if He doesn't exist, ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... dark-browed girl with a ragged red shawl on her head. The uncouth men stood shoulder to shoulder, staring with unwinking eyes. A tall, pale shepherd youth was erect and motionless in a tattered hat and a brown cloak, overtopping the others by his head and thin throat, and there was something Sphinx-like in the expression of ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... past that the Gods, being angry with the inhabitants of Thebes, sent into their land a very noisome beast which men called the Sphinx. Now this beast had the face and breast of a very fair woman, but the feet and claws of a lion; and it was wont to ask a riddle of such as encountered it; and such as answered not aright it would tear and devour. Now ...
— Stories from the Greek Tragedians • Alfred Church
... like some historical personage, probably the Sphinx, and repeated a guttural kind of incantation while George stretched his ears until they stood out more than usual in a struggle ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 29, 1919 • Various
... Sphinx. Perhaps he was biassed by the opinion the fair Maria had expressed. Jack did not altogether like to hear her talked about, especially by the master and purser, or the lieutenant of marines, who called her a monstrously fine woman. The colonel was fair game. No one could make out who he was, what ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... overcome by the "Madam." For a moment, she quailed. She couldn't ask that masculine sphinx questions! Then the thought of her mother's pale, careworn face flashed across her mind, and all her courage came back with an inspiriting rush. She bent forward to look eagerly into Mr. Reefer's carved, granite face, and ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1907 to 1908 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... still moaned and howled; every now and then, between lulls, screeching gusts of sleet beat upon the windows. The parrot, clinging upside down to the roof of its cage, winked rapidly with Sphinx-like eyes and inclined its head sideways in ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... you wish to know old age? He who is never an old man, does not know the whole of human life; for old age is one of the divisions of it.' JOHNSON. 'Nay, Sir, what talk is this?' BOSWELL. 'I mean, Sir, the Sphinx's description of it;—morning, noon, and night. I would know night, as well as morning and noon.' JOHNSON. 'What, Sir, would you know what it is to feel the evils of old age? Would you have the gout? Would you have decrepitude?'—Seeing him heated, I would not argue ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... should think so, you sphinx of plagues, I declare I am dripping, and you know I have a ...
— Yr Ynys Unyg - The Lonely Island • Julia de Winton
... tell? They are co-ordinate, rather, and to adapt ourselves to them singly, to 'square' the dangerous powers and keep the others friendly, regardless of consistency or unity, is the chief problem. The symbol of nature at this stage, as Paulsen well says, is the sphinx, under whose nourishing breasts ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... marry him? Not the sea, nor the sky, nor the great mysterious midnight, when he opens his casement and gazes into starry space will give him answer; riddle that no Oedipus will ever come to unravel; this sphinx will never throw herself from the rock into the clangour of the seagulls and waves; she will never divulge her secret; and if she is the woman and not a woman of thirty, she ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... "Behold! The Sphinx is Africa. The bond Of Silence is upon her. Old And white with tombs, and rent and shorn; With raiment wet with tears and torn, And trampled on, ...
— The Negro • W.E.B. Du Bois
... a moment, thinking, and gazing at the splendid Sphinx-browed creature before him with a mixture of hatred and respect. Then he ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... full blast. The proprietor, his elegant diamonds flashing in the light, was seated on a raised platform from whence he could survey the entire company—his face, impassive as marble and unreadable as the sphinx, was turned toward the faro lay-out, which this evening appeared to be ...
— Jim Cummings • Frank Pinkerton
... what was said back and forth, and to answer, when it was necessary, with a tongue prone to looseness of speech that required a constant curb. And to add confusion to confusion, there was the servant, an unceasing menace, that appeared noiselessly at his shoulder, a dire Sphinx that propounded puzzles and conundrums demanding instantaneous solution. He was oppressed throughout the meal by the thought of finger-bowls. Irrelevantly, insistently, scores of times, he wondered when they would come on and what they looked like. He had heard of such things, and ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... Hill-top, on Sunday and Monday, sees all this of Ziethen, and much more. Sees the vanguard of Daun himself approaching Dippoldiswalde, cannonading his meal-carts as they issue there; on all sides his enemies encompassing him like bees;—and has a sphinx-riddle on his mind, such as soldier seldom had. Shall he manoeuvre himself out, and march away, bread-carts, baggages and all entire? There is still time, and perfect possibility, by Dippoldiswalde there, or ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... endless lorries and Red Cross waggons and troops and dug-out camps. As we get closer the signs of shelling get worse, and children are seen no longer. Old men, though, occasionally observed working in a field quite unperturbed. Rarely a French soldier or an interpreter with his sphinx badges. All this quite lost on Hunt, who has "quite got used to abroad, thank you, sir." He is eating chocolate or something, half a horse-length (the ...
— Letters to Helen - Impressions of an Artist on the Western Front • Keith Henderson
... effectually placed me hors de combat, Lawless took possession of my poor writing-desk, and commenced tracing on the top thereof, with the red-hot poker, what he was pleased to term a "design from the antique," which consisted of a spirited outline of that riddle-loving female the Sphinx, as she appeared when dressed in top-boots and a wide-awake, and regaling herself with a choice cigar! He was giving the finishing touch to a large pair of moustaches, with which he had embellished her ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... arches, and painted ceilings and shining Doric columns, leads directly to the gallery; but it is thought too fine for working days, and is only opened for the public entrance on Sabbath. A little back stair (leading from a court, in which stand numerous bas-reliefs, and a solemn sphinx, of polished granite,) is the common entry for students and others, who, during the week, ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the declivity of the hay, disappeared from sight, leaving his companion crouched like a sphinx, with his eyes fixed on Roland ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... miracles. In London he resumed his favorite diversion, and a Christmas gift of Mrs. Beckett to him, "The Life and Adventures of Valentine Vox the Ventriloquist," indicated the interest his friends took in this amusement. One of his own purchases was "Modern Magic," the frontispiece of which is the sphinx that figures in the story of ...
— Lineage, Life, and Labors of Jose Rizal, Philippine Patriot • Austin Craig
... the heroes of old, but every one of us has to fight his own Marathon and Thermopylae; every one meets the Sphinx sitting by the road he has to pass; to each of us, as to Hercules, is offered the choice of Vice or Virtue; we may, like Paris, give the apple of life to Venus, ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... our heroines be not what men and women are, but what they should be. Let Angelina be always spotless and Edwin always true. Let virtue ever triumph over villainy in the last chapter; and let us assume that the marriage service answers all the questions of the Sphinx. ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... race pictured on his furrowed face, a face like an ancient weather-worn statue on whose countenance grief has petrified—has summed up the character of Disraeli as no other man ever has or can. I will not rob the reader by quoting from "The Primrose Sphinx"—that gem of letters must ever stand together without subtraction of a word. It belongs to the realm of the lapidary, and its facets can not be transferred. Yet when Mr. Zangwill refers to the Mephistophelian curl of Lord Beaconsfield's lip, the word is used advisedly. No character in history ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... the Mother of Darkness, lends you her cloak! Out!" Kenkenes cried, striking at his pet. The wary animal eluded the blow and for a moment revolved about another sphinx, pursued by his master, and then fled like a phantom out of the court by the path he came. By this time the priest had emerged from his refuge and was attempting to prevent the young man's interference with the will of ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... The Sphinx is a fair example of an Emerson poem. The opening verses are musical, though they are handicapped by a reminiscence of the German way of writing. In the succeeding verses we are lapped into a charming reverie, and then at the end suddenly jolted by the question, "What is it all ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... the air, raised, with one voice, a psalm of triumph and thanksgiving, and waved their colours, colours which were on that day unfurled for the first time in the face of an enemy, but which have since been proudly borne in every quarter of the world, and which are now embellished with the Sphinx and the Dragon, emblems of brave actions achieved in Egypt and ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... It is impossible for us to appreciate the sentiment of religious awe with which the Mediterranean people looked upon the enchanted, the hoary, the civilized monarchy on the banks of the Nile. As Bunsen says, "Egypt was to the Greeks a sphinx with ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... intelligence of this woman. To this end, he asked Gilder and the District Attorney to withdraw, while he should have a private conversation with the prisoner. As she listened to his request, Mary smiled again in sphinx-like fashion, and there was still on her lips an expression that caused the official a pang of doubt, when, at last, the two were left alone together, and he darted a surreptitious glance toward her. Nevertheless, he pressed on ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... is that modern sphinx whose thundering interrogative society will be called upon to answer. You and I know too well that society hitherto has answered only with belching cannon and vain vapourings of law, religion, and duty. But the toiling sphinx, who has time only to ask terrible questions, will some day formulate ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... Eteocles and Polynices, the two sons of oedipus, at the period of the "Seven against Thebes," which seven were contemporary with the fathers of the heroes engaged in the Trojan war, it becomes necessary to add sixty or seventy years to the Trojan date, in order to obtain that of oedipus and the Sphinx. Out of the Hebrew Scriptures, there is nothing purely historic so old as this.] story in the Pagan records, older by two generations than the story of Troy, is that of oedipus and his mysterious fate, which wrapt in ruin both himself and all his kindred. No story whatever continued ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... memories that echo within us when we see the hieroglyphics of Osiris, and Isis. Egypt was our long brooding youth. We built the mysteriousness of the Universe into the Pyramids, carved it into every line of the Sphinx. We thought always ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... proved to be a negro. He tied his boat and deliberately unloaded his supply of vegetables. His stolid, sphinx-like face showed neither ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... wondrous and more awful than all else in the land of Egypt, there sits the lonely Sphinx. Comely the creature is, but the comeliness is not of this world; the once worshiped beast is a deformity and a monster to this generation, and yet you can see that those lips, so thick and heavy, were fashioned according to some ancient mold of beauty—some mold of beauty now forgotten—forgotten ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... hero sits, serene and solemn, upon a sepulchre. Beneath him recline two vast mourning figures, one of each sex. One longs to challenge converse with the male figure, with the unfinished Sphinx-like face, who is stretched there at his harmonious length, like an ancient river-god without his urn. There is nothing appalling or chilling in his expression, nor does he seem to mourn without hope. 'Tis a stately recumbent ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... stroke when Burke, whose whole soul was bound up in order, peace, and gently enlarged precedent, found himself face to face with the portentous man-devouring Sphinx. He who could not endure that a few clergymen should be allowed to subscribe to the Bible instead of to the Articles, saw the ancient Church of Christendom prostrated, its possessions confiscated, its priests proscribed, and Christianity ...
— Burke • John Morley
... lines. That was precisely the way that the Germans had just forbidden me to go. But this accomplice (if such she was) got no rise out of me. To all intents I was stone-deaf. Compared to me, she would have found the Sphinx garrulous indeed. She may have been as harmless as a dove but, after my escapade, I wouldn't have talked to my own mother without a written permit from the military governor. The Kaiser himself would have found it hard work breaking through my cast-iron spy-proof ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... if you only knew, but I can't tell you what it is. You see, I promised not to divulge where the money came from, and when I give my word I'm a regular Sphinx. But it's funny." After an instant he said, in all seriousness: "If Hilliard holds the combination to this thing, why don't you ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... Savile's Crime The Canterville Ghost The Sphinx Without a Secret The Model Millionaire The Portrait ...
— Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories • Oscar Wilde
... Verres having a son who had fallen into disgraceful courses. Hortensius the orator, not daring directly to undertake the defense of Verres, was yet persuaded to appear for him at the laying on of the fine, and received an ivory sphinx for his reward; and when Cicero, in some passage of his speech, obliquely reflected on him, and Hortensius told him he was not skillful in solving riddles, "No," said Cicero, "and yet you have the Sphinx ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... miniature. In another was Napoleon, flag in hand, leading the charge across the bridge of Lodi. In still another was Napoleon in Egypt, before the Pyramids, seated, impassive, on his horse, gazing at the Sphinx, as if about to utter his immortal words to his soldiers: "Here, forty centuries look down upon us." These object lessons of the past are all gone now and the land used for ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... of the artists of the early Renaissance; and while they studied, copied, and calculated, another thought began to haunt them, another eager desire began to pursue them: by the side of Nature, the manifold, the baffling, the bewildering, there rose up before them another divinity, another sphinx, mysterious in its ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... a statement. But then it was necessary to have a word to rhyme with "view," and what could be easier than to make a white egg "blue"? Again, one of our later poets has evidently confounded the hummingbird with that curious parody upon it, the hawk or sphinx moth, as in his poem upon the subject he has hit off exactly the habits of the moth, or, rather, his creature seems a cross between the moth and the bird, as it has the habits of the one and the plumage of the ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... regarding it with the same eyes,—the painter catching inspiration from the poet's themes, and the poet in turn getting new insight into the mystery of the outer world through the painter's eyes. Bryant's face has been a Sphinx's riddle to our best painters; none have succeeded in rendering its severe simplicity, and clear, self-disciplined expression, until Durand tried it with a success which renders the picture interesting evermore as a tribute of friendship as well as a solution of a difficult problem. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... hideous scene in the hall of Fotheringay, or the last agonies of a disembowelled Papist. Lord Acton was, or seemed to be, a man of the world first and foremost; a politician and a lover of society; a gossip, and, as his "Letters" show, not always a friendly gossip.[52] His demeanour was profoundly sphinx-like, and he seemed to enjoy the sense that his hearers were anxious to learn what he was able but unwilling to impart. His knowledge and accomplishments it would, at this time of day, be ridiculous to question; and on the main ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... wilt see how indifferent thy mind is to all except Lygia; how exclusively it is occupied with her, how it returns to her always, and circles above her, as a falcon above chosen prey. By Pollux! find her quickly, or that of thee which fire has not turned into ashes will become an Egyptian sphinx, which, enamored, as 'tis said, of pale Isis, grew deaf and indifferent to all things, waiting only for night, so as to gaze with stony eyes ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... him to the face. But he did not flinch from making an energetic assault upon atheism and the excesses of its partisans. His admirers usually count his speech of the Twenty-first of November one of the most admirable of his oratorical successes. The Sphinx still sits inexorable at our gates, and his words have lost none of their interest. 'Every philosopher and every individual,' he said, 'may adopt whatever opinion he pleases about atheism. Any one who wishes to make such an opinion into a crime is an insensate; but the public man or ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... sphinx, the girl walked to the steps, not even looking around to see if he was coming after her. Perhaps she knew the power of curiosity. Without hesitance she mounted the steps; he followed, a step behind. At the door, however, she paused. He could hear her breath coming in quick gasps. Oddly enough, ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... meddled in any way," proudly, "it has been because I love you, and I see you unhappy. You have nearly killed me with your sphinx-like actions. You have never asked me the result of my spying for you that night. Spying is not one of my usual vocations, but I did it gladly ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... no matter why, No matter how, in one who ought to dwell Fixed to the solid upper sphere, my friends, Would never be forgiven." Dancey stared In mute amazement, but that mask of gold Outstared him, sphinx-like, and inscrutable. ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes
... could daunt the sleepless ken Of roseate Sphinx, and god of marble green, Which stood as guardians o'er the sacred ground. For a great port steered vessels huge and fleet, A giant city bathed her marble feet In ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... visible world on a march one needs to go to a really large desert. The Pyramids and the Sphinx have been partly buried, and parts of the valley of the Nile threatened, by hordes of sand hills marching in from the desert; cities have been buried and harbors filled up. Many of the harbors of the ancient civilizations are mere miasmatic marshes now. This is partly in consequence ...
— Among the Forces • Henry White Warren
... marry him? Not the sea, nor the sky, nor the great mysterious midnight, when he opens his casement and gazes into starry space will give him answer; no Œdipus will ever come to unravel this riddle; this sphinx will never throw herself from the rock into the clangour of the sea-gulls and waves; she will never divulge her secret; and if she is the woman and not a woman of thirty, she ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... woman in a steel-built city who had all that money could buy, she had gold and dividends and trains and houses, and she had pets to play with, but she had no sphinx. ...
— Fifty-One Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... teach us that the sum of our sorrows is not greater than that of our joys. The more the black period may be prolonged the more quickly will approach the dawn of proud aspirations at length realised. And the granite Sphinx which near at hand dreams on the desert sands, the Sphinx which saw the passage of Bonaparte, which saw Lesseps and his work, has not yet uttered its last word, has not murmured the supreme sentence. The more fiercely evil fortune may pursue us ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh
... consciousness which he looks upon as open to the influx of the divine essence from which it came, and towards which all its upward tendencies lead, always aspiring, never resting; as he sings in "The Sphinx ":— ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... disreputable conduct followed, but no corroborating word from her could be adduced. She attended to her business, accepted orders with thanks and smiles, talked about the weather and the accident to the coach, was punctual in her attendance at church, calm and inscrutable as the Sphinx. The attendance at church was, of course, set down to "business considerations," and was held to be quite consistent with the scepticism and loose morality deducible from the French book and the ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... comment, but sat in front of him, unresponsive as the sphinx. The rigor of her flat back told him that, though she might have to keep his shameful secret for the sake of her own, he could not presume upon it the least ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... pretty, but methinks, The weighty and phlegmatic Sphinx Could trip as lightly— And yet she is a regular, Serene and well established star ...
— The Broadway Anthology • Edward L. Bernays, Samuel Hoffenstein, Walter J. Kingsley, Murdock Pemberton
... interesting old buildings are presented with extraordinary fidelity. They were taken on the spot. They are three in number, you will observe. I presume you cannot tell me what this is? We paid for it as the Sphinx, and it is pronounced by competent judges an exceedingly flattering portrait. The Pyramids are centuries old. It is understood that Miss Sphinx, out of respect to her sex, is about ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II. No. 38, Saturday, December 17, 1870. • Various
... also, are Hector and Achilles of Troy. These songs mark the greatness and the waning of the heroic world In the Nibelungen-lied the final event is a great calamity that is akin to a half historical event of the North. Odin descends to the nether world to consult Hela; but she, like the sphinx of Thebes, will not reply save in an enigma, which enigma is to entail terrible tragedies, and lead to destruction the young hero who is ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... I interrupted. "It isn't fair. I tell you I won't take it. I'll go two days earlier to prevent you. Unless you promise me—— Of course I see how things are with her. She's not a sphinx. But it isn't fair. It isn't. Not to her, or to him—or myself. He's got some claims. He's got more right to her ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... rescripts, or epistles, he at first used the figure of a sphinx, afterwards the head of Alexander (111) the Great, and at last his own, engraved by the hand of Dioscorides; which practice was retained by the succeeding emperors. He was extremely precise in dating his letters, putting down exactly ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... expression than that of the Sphinx, though inwardly he was consumed with laughter; he himself was chief of the Bureau, and Clancy was his most trusted assistant! Certainly, the gods were contriving a spicy dish for the news-loving ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... movement a peculiar dismal spirit breathes upon us, who keeps down with a strong hand that which would revolt, so that we obey, as if we were charmed, without murmuring, but also without praising, for that is no music. Thus the sonata concludes, as it began, enigmatically, like a sphinx with ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... virgin goddess, the work of Phidias, stood in the eastern chamber of the cella, and was composed of ivory and gold. It had but one rival in the world, the Jupiter Olympus of the same famous artist. On the summit or apex of the helmet was placed a sphinx, with griffins on either side. The figure of the goddess was represented in an erect martial attitude, and clothed in a robe reaching to the feet. On the breast was a head of Medusa, wrought in ivory, and a figure of Victory about ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... on the servant, and walked towards the light, while he tore open the envelope. It had the most minute sphinx in the corner, and the paper was un-English, ...
— Three Weeks • Elinor Glyn
... that he declared, "If such great moths were to become extinct in Madagascar, assuredly this Angraecum would become extinct." I am not aware that Darwin's fine argument has yet been clinched by the discovery of that insect. But cavil has ceased. Long before his death a sphinx moth arrived from South Brazil which shows a proboscis between ten and eleven inches long—very nearly equal, therefore, to the task of probing the nectary of Angraecum sesquipidale. And we know enough of orchids at this time to be absolutely certain that the Madagascar ...
— About Orchids - A Chat • Frederick Boyle
... and it is on these occasions that they burst into human speech, call each other names, cry, scold, and sometimes tear off horns and skin, declaring fiercely that they "won't play." The few privileged persons who have studied them are inclined to think them a remarkable mixture of the monkey, the sphinx, the roc, and the queer creatures seen ...
— Little Men - Life at Plumfield With Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... head and seated herself, darting a glance at Don Carlos. His face was pale and his expression was as impassive and inscrutable as a Sphinx. ...
— Bandit Love • Juanita Savage
... Mrs. McGillicuddy's iron rule, did not approve of Kettle's breach of discipline and hatched a scheme to catch him. With a countenance as inscrutable as the Sphinx, he stepped to the telephone booth, shut the door carefully, and held a short conversation over the wire with Mrs. McGillicuddy. When the Sergeant came out of the telephone booth his face was not inscrutable but expressed pure human ...
— Betty at Fort Blizzard • Molly Elliot Seawell
... left her. She leaned back in her seat and assumed an air of indifference far removed from her real state of mind. Then she calmly refolded the letter and placed it in its envelope with the impassivity of a young sphinx. ...
— Marjorie Dean High School Freshman • Pauline Lester
... all promising youths who have died a premature death, and whose memory is melodiously prolonged to the latest morning; the beautiful stories of Phaeton, and of the Sirens whose isle shone afar off white with the bones of unburied men; and the pregnant ones of Pan, Prometheus, and the Sphinx; and that long list of names which have already become part of the universal language of civilized men, and from proper are becoming common names or nouns,—the Sibyls, the Eumenides, the Parcae, the Graces, the Muses, ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... just left met my scrutiny with a cold, impassive stare of its own—its look might have been the stare of the sphinx or of a good poker player. It gave no sign. My eyes traveled up to the roof, then back again to the ground, and only when my glance dropped did I see for the second time the lurking ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... I think the Sphinx and the Pyramid could hardly have impressed me more than their dark faces, that seemed to look vaguely on our modern world from the remote twilights of old, and in their very infancy to be reverend through the antiquity of their ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... by his horse looking after her straight, slender figure as she walked toward the gate. His face was still sphinx-like but there was a speculative look in his shrewd eyes. Bruce's success "meant so much to her," did it? That, then, was why she had come. The distance she had travelled for the purpose of seeing him had not impressed him ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... darting this way and that, studying each minutest detail of the disturbed ground. Following closely, Endicott hung on each word and grunt and fragmentary observation of the old Indian. In vain he plied Bat with eager questions but he might as well have sought information from the sphinx. The old man paid him not the slightest attention but proceeded on down the coulee pausing and staring at the sign for a full minute at a time, again almost running with his eyes fixed on the ground until brought up again, frowning and muttering by some new baffling combination ...
— Prairie Flowers • James B. Hendryx
... his tongue, he must be up to some dam' good thing," opined another; while a man with hooked features and of German extraction who was supposed to be agent for a Dutch crockery house—the famous "Sphinx" mark—broke ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... animal heads and claws, and animals never seen by man, and horns of plenty, were used to support tables and chairs and sofas. Everywhere one turned the feeling of martial grandeur was in the air. Ormolu mounts of bay wreaths, torches, eagles, military emblems and trophies, winged figures, the sphinx, the bee, and the initial N, were used on furniture; and these same motives were used in wall decoration. The furniture was left the natural color of the wood, and mahogany, rosewood, and ebony, were used. Veneer was also extensively ...
— Furnishing the Home of Good Taste • Lucy Abbot Throop
... picturesque ceremony of its annual "rope-in" of new members, who are surrounded on a certain day in spring with a howling band of painted braves. Similar societies in other departments and classes soon followed, and we now have the "Griffins," another all-campus society; "Druids," senior literary; "Sphinx," junior literary; "Vulcans," senior engineering; "Triangle," junior engineering; "Archons," junior laws; "Galens," medical; "Alchemists," chemical students; "Craftsmen," Masonic students; "Quarterdeck," marine engineering; as well as several similar societies among ...
— The University of Michigan • Wilfred Shaw
... Silencieux, Antony found himself suddenly inspired once more to sing of his wife. It was the best poem he had written for a long time, and when it was finished, he came down the wood impatient to read it to Beatrice. This was the poem, which he called "The Northern Sphinx":— ...
— The Worshipper of the Image • Richard Le Gallienne
... atop a disorderly camel named Mark Twain nosing about the Sphinx when my companion remarked that that stony-faced lady looked a good deal like Temanu of Lovaina's. Then I had to have the whole story of Lovaina and her household. I have heard it away from Tahiti a dozen times and ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... of June Glowing like thought upon the living tree Without a pity that they die so soon, Die into petals, like those roses old, Those women, who were summer in men's hearts Before the smile upon the Sphinx was cold Or sand had hid the Syrian and his arts. O myriad dust of beauty that lies thick Under our feet that not a single grain But stirred and moved in beauty and was quick For one brief moon and died nor lived again; But when the moon rose lay upon the grass ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 - Edited by Sir Edward Howard Marsh • Various
... the quiet greenness of an English lane, or the inaccessible ice and glory of a far-off mountain summit; in place of the burnt waste of fields covered with ashes and coal-dust, the burning stretch of the desert with the Sphinx looking out over it century after century; in place of the shower coming down through the dirty air to wash the dirty roofs, a storm breaking over the sea-shore rocks, or beating down on the broken wreck; instead of the drabbled calico of the factory ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... spinney. Rookery full. Usual butterflies in unusual numbers. Toward twilight several sphinx moths visited the privet. No net at hand so did not identify any. Pheasants in bad shape. Nobody to keep them down. Must arrange drives while ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers
... Count was speaking the young man watched him closely, hoping to read something of his purpose in his face, but his countenance was inscrutable especially when, as in the present case, it was veiled in a sphinx-like smile. "But tell me now, count," exclaimed Albert, delighted at the idea of having to chaperon so distinguished a person as Monte Cristo; "tell me truly whether you are in earnest, or if this project of visiting Paris is merely one of the chimerical and uncertain air castles of which we make ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... talking. He saw the watch below of stokers and trimmers bobbing out of the forecastle doors like rabbits from a warren and making their way aft over the rusty deck to the mustering of the port doctor. They were Chinese, with expressionless, Sphinx-like faces, and they walked in peculiar shambling fashion, dragging their feet as if the clumsy brogans were too heavy ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London
... different from each other than George Sand and Gustave Flaubert. He was an artist, and she in many respects was bourgeoise. He saw all things at their worst; she saw them better than they were. Flaubert wrote to her in surprise as follows: "In spite of your large sphinx eyes, you have seen the world ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic
... up suddenly, and, as suddenly, leaning forward, he touched Benson's shoulder. They were just approaching a restaurant and music hall known as "The Sphinx," that was popular for the moment with the slumming ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... with a gold mesh-bag suspended by a chain about her neck, and her face was sphinx-like as she waited ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... last impression of the evening. The lighted office buildings, the murk of rain, the haze of light in the heavens, and raised against it the pile of the Board of Trade Building, black, grave, monolithic, crouching on its foundations, like a monstrous sphinx with blind eyes, silent, grave,—crouching there without a sound, without sign of life under the night and the drifting veil ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... was right. There were two of Rhodopis. Everybody knows that. The Third Pyramid was built for the tomb of the first one, not for King Mycineris, I believe. Why shouldn't a woman have a Pyramid to herself? The Sphinx is a woman, as I will insist to my dying day, if it were my last word! I hope Lord Ernest won't ram down our throats any nonsense about that noble and graceful tribute to the Mystery of Womanhood being a stupid King Harmachis, or Horemkhu. I wouldn't believe ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... said Cardinal Bernis, laughing; "some divinity may have taken a seat there, or perhaps it is a sphinx which will from thence give us the solution of her enigma. But let us see what belated guests are now ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... went on through Boeotia. On the top of a hill near Thebes sat a monster called the Sphinx, with a women's head, a lion's body, and an eagle's wings. She had been taught riddles by the Muses, and whoever failed to answer them she devoured upon the spot. Whoever could answer her was to marry the king's ...
— Aunt Charlotte's Stories of Greek History • Charlotte M. Yonge
... If such a mistake had been made by an Irishman, it would surely have been called a bull: it has, at least, as good pretensions to the title as many mistakes made by ignorant Hibernians; for instance, the well-known blunder relative to the sphinx:—An uninformed Irishman, hearing the sphinx alluded to in company whispered to a friend, "The sphinx! who is ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... pressed till the iron railings cut her shoulders. She stretched the forefinger of her extended arm; at great peril of slipping forward and rasping her nose along the rails effected to scratch the top of the sphinx's head. ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... unique thing that represented my first attempt at a journal. It looked like a sibyl's conjuring book, or an Assyrian manuscript; a seeming endless strip of paper was rolled upon a reed; at the head of this there were two varieties of the Egyptian sphinx and a cabalistic star drawn in red ink,—and under these mysterious signs I wrote down, upon the full length of the paper and in a cipher of my own invention, daily events and reflections. A year later, however, because of the ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... Eastern edge of the Desert of Sahara there stands the world-famous Sphinx with its inscrutable face turned toward the East, ever greeting the sun as its rising rays herald the newborn day. It was said in the Greek myth that it was the wont of this monster to ask a riddle of each traveler. She devoured those who could ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... The "every married man of us" tickled him. "Yes," said he; "they are all daughters of the Sphinx, and past finding out. Is Miss Denham an invalid?" he asked, after ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... But the face! it was that which inspired my awe and my terror. It was the face of man, but yet of a type of man distinct from our known extant races. The nearest approach to it in outline and expression is the face of the sculptured sphinx—so regular in its calm, intellectual, mysterious beauty. Its colour was peculiar, more like that of the red man than any other variety of our species, and yet different from it—a richer and a softer hue, with large black eyes, deep and brilliant, ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... "the precipitous sides of that high rock! Shall I ever forget it, beginning like the tail of a lion and rising up to the sky, towering above the level landscape like a sphinx." ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... Lieder at the poem in his preface—the song of the sphinx in the enchanted wood ... and how it clutched the seeker, the poet, to its monstrous but voluptuous woman's breasts as it ravished his soul with kisses. And the ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... unnatural proportions or parts, usually regarded with terror, as possessing immense strength and ferocity, which they employed for the injury and annoyance of men. Some of them were supposed to combine the members of different animals; such were the Sphinx and Chimaera; and to these all the terrible qualities of wild beasts were attributed, together with human sagacity and faculties. Others, as the giants, differed from men chiefly in their size; and in this particular we must recognize a wide distinction among them. The human giants, if so they may ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... kinds of attitudes and positions he could study up, but standing on his head and working his legs the way a frog does was the best. The further we got away, the littler Jim got, and the grander the Sphinx got, till at last it was only a clothespin on a dome, as you might say. That's the way perspective brings out the correct proportions, Tom said; he said Julus Cesar's niggers didn't know how big he was, they was ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... headlong cataracts the impetuous tide; Or lead o'er wastes of Abyssinian sands The bright expanse to EGYPT'S shower-less lands. —Her long canals the sacred waters fill, 140 And edge with silver every peopled hill; Gigantic SPHINX in circling waves admire; And MEMNON bending o'er his broken lyre; O'er furrow'd glebes and green savannas sweep, And towns and temples ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... by, discretion having had her perfect work, they metaphorically came out of their shells and permitted an inspection. Above the railway I saw one of the few birds of my entire Rocky Mountain outing that I was unable to identify. That little feathered Sphinx—what could he have been? To quote from my note-book, "His song, as he sits quietly on a twig in a pine tree, is a rich gurgling trill, slightly like that of a house-wren, but fuller and more melodious, with an air about it that makes me feel almost like ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... possibly, under the influence of some sweeping passion, all the doors are flung wide and the one beloved woman may enter in. Yet she is wise, with the wisdom of the Sphinx, if she refuses to go. Let her say to him: "Close all these doors, except that which bears my name. In that chamber and in that alone, we shall dwell together." For, with these words, the memories housed in the other chambers crumble ...
— Old Rose and Silver • Myrtle Reed
... persons of the most elegant position or the most protected privacy. Specially visiting the Coliseum by moonlight always struck me as being as vulgar as visiting it by limelight. One millionaire standing on the top of Mont Blanc, one millionaire standing in the desert by the Sphinx, one millionaire standing in the middle of Stonehenge, is just as comic as one millionaire is anywhere else; and that is saying a good deal. On the other hand, if the billycock had come privately and naturally into Ely Cathedral, no enthusiast for Gothic harmony would ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... him? Not the sea, nor the sky, nor the great mysterious midnight, when he opens his casement and gazes into starry space will give him answer; riddle that no Oedipus will ever come to unravel; this sphinx will never throw herself from the rock into the clangour of the seagulls and waves; she will never divulge her secret; and if she is the woman and not a woman of thirty, ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... gown was of blue faded to green, her feet were bare. If a gipsy, she was to be trusted to take care of herself; if but a sunburnt vagrant she could be let to shift; and yet he watched her curiously, while she sat as impassive as a young Sphinx, and wondered to himself ...
— The Spanish Jade • Maurice Hewlett
... the pen of that accomplished scholar, and well-known enthusiast in bee-culture, Henry K. Oliver, Esq. "We add a few words respecting the enemies of bees. The mouse, the toad, the ant, the stouter spiders, the wasp, the death-head moth, (Sphinx atropos,) and all the varieties of gallinaceous birds, have, each and all, "a sweet tooth," and like, very well, a dinner of raw bee. But the ravages of all these are but a baby bite to the destruction caused by the bee-moth, (Tinea mellonella.) These nimble-footed little ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... on the Egyptian sands," reflected Miss Clarkson once, as she glanced at him. "He'd make a dear little brother to the Sphinx." She stopped a train-boy passing through the car and bought him a small box of chocolates, which he ate uninterruptedly, somewhat as the tiny hand of a clock marks the seconds. Later she presented him with a copy of a picture-paper. He surveyed its illustrations with studious intentness for ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... declivity of the hay, disappeared from sight, leaving his companion crouched like a sphinx, with his eyes fixed on ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... who told the tales did us a good turn after all," laughed Grace. "The girls were ever so much more anxious to attend the bazaar after they heard of the circus. Every girl loves 'Alice in Wonderland,' I think. And then the Sphinx is a ...
— Grace Harlowe's Third Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... all you can read into it, and nothing more. It gives you what you bring, and nothing else. It is as silent as the lips of Memnon, as voiceless as the Sphinx. It suggests to you every joy that you have ever felt, every sorrow you have ever known, every triumph you ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... Herzliebchen, carissima; and bien, bien-aimee, I'll not run out of salutations for you this side of heaven—no—nor t'other. I adore the serene grace with which you ignore the ravishing Liane. Haven't you any curiosity at all, my Sphinx? No? Well, then, just to punish you, I'll tell you all about it. She's married to the best fellow in the world—a liaison officer working with our squadron—and she worships the ground that he walks on and the air that he occasionally flies ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... of the Man-Horse Distressing Tale of Thangobrind The Jeweller The House of the Sphinx Probable Adventure of the Three Literary Men The Injudicious Prayers of Pombo the Idolater The Loot of Bombasharna Miss Cubbidge and the Dragon Of Romance The Quest of the Queen's Tears The Hoard of the Gibbelins How ...
— The Book of Wonder • Edward J. M. D. Plunkett, Lord Dunsany
... him who is inexperienced on the ocean! One ought to be familiar with the Channel—the Channel is the Sphinx. Look out ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... great building in which England's foreign policy is shaped and formulated." But the Foreign Office at Swiss Cottage, or Wandsworth—I could not write of it. And there will be the India Office at Tooting, or Ponder's End, or at—But how can your "dusky Sphinx-like faces, wrapt in the mystery of the East, be seen passing the purlieus ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, February 18th, 1920 • Various
... Mountains especially produce silver, and some gold, with lead and copper ores. The silver mines of this region were worked at a very early period, as is proved by the discovery of an excavation a thousand feet in length, from which a stone sphinx was dug up, corroborating a statement of Herodotus that the Scythians possessed mines of gold and silver, which, according to his account, were guarded by monsters and griffins. Baron Humboldt supposes that he referred to the bones of elephants, and other gigantic animals, ...
— The Mines and its Wonders • W.H.G. Kingston
... spurred forward, the beldame's glittering eye held his horse motionless. 'Good woman,' cried Hind, flinging her a crown, 'I am in haste; pray let me pass.' 'Sir,' answered the witch, 'three days I have awaited your coming. Would you have me lose my labour now?' And with Hind's assent the sphinx delivered her message: 'Captain Hind,' said she, 'your life is beset with constant danger, and since from your birth I have wished you well, my poor skill has devised a perfect safeguard.' With this she gave him a small box containing what might have been a sundial ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... entrance to the Egyptian temple. It was square and heavy-browed, flanked by short thick columns rising from a base of sculptured papyrus-leaves, and flowering in lotus capitals. Three marble steps led to the threshold, while on either side reclined a sphinx in polished granite, softened, however, by a delicate flowering vine, which had been trained to cling round their necks. On the deep panels of the door were mystic emblems carved in relief. A line of hieroglyphics inscribed the ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... beetle which he calls a 'sphinx,' And O what questions asked in club-foot rhyme Of Earth the tongueless, and the deaf-mute Time! Here babbling 'Insight' shouts in Nature's ears His last conundrum on the orbs and spheres; There Self-inspection ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... ELLIPSIS} But the myth is yet in too early a state to allow of the definite designations which are brought before us in the conflicts of Zeus with Typhon and his monstrous progeny, of Apollon with the Python, of Bellerophon with Chimaira of Oidipous with the Sphinx, of Hercules with Cacus, of Sigurd with the dragon Fafnir; and thus not only is Vritra known by many names, but he is opposed sometimes by Indra, sometimes by Agni the fire-god, sometimes by Trita, Brihaspati, ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... question, "What will you do with us, we hundreds of millions, who cannot keep pace with you?" If the New Republic emerges at all it will emerge by grappling with this riddle; it must come into existence by the passes this Sphinx will guard. Moreover, the necessary results of the reaction of irresponsible wealth upon that infirm and dangerous thing the human will, the spreading moral rot of gambling which is associated with irresponsible wealth, will have ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... purple-fringed orchis, whose shorter spur holds out a certain prospect of reward; for, in these two cases, as in so many others, the flower's welcome for an insect is in exact proportion to the length of its visitor's tongue. Doubtless it is one of the smaller sphinx moths, such as we see at dusk working about the evening primrose and other flowers deep of chalice, and heavily perfumed to guide visitors to their feast, that is the great purple-fringed orchid's benefactor, since the length of its tongue is perfectly adapted to its needs. Attracted by the ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... attack him, nor did Robespierre dare to withstand him to the face. But he did not flinch from making an energetic assault upon atheism and the excesses of its partisans. His admirers usually count his speech of the Twenty-first of November one of the most admirable of his oratorical successes. The Sphinx still sits inexorable at our gates, and his words have lost none of their interest. 'Every philosopher and every individual,' he said, 'may adopt whatever opinion he pleases about atheism. Any one who wishes ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... daunt the sleepless ken Of roseate Sphinx, and god of marble green, Which stood as guardians o'er the sacred ground. For a great port steered vessels huge and fleet, A giant city bathed her marble feet ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... charm and suavity, a finesse of expression never reached before and hardly ever equalled since. Contrast the head of the Christ at Milan, Leonardo's conception of divinity expressed in perfect humanity, with the subtle and sphinx-like smile ...
— Leonardo da Vinci • Maurice W. Brockwell
... forthcoming. After ten minutes I heard a commotion in the poultry yard, and found her at the back among her chickens. Her hair was piled up into an amazing structure: it looked as if some one had placed the great pyramid on top of the sphinx. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... some Giver hath: Let be! let be! what canst thou know? A myriad races came and went; this Sphinx hath seen them ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... be purely ornamental, it may not weaken or obscure the general design; and finally, whether, if we decide to use it, we should do so grossly and notably, or in some conventional disguise: are questions of plastic style continually rearising. And the sphinx that patrols the highways of executive art has no more unanswerable ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... implacably gentle and of granite serenity. Osiris judging the souls could not have had a more majestic and calm expression. A large tame lion, lying by his side, stretched out its enormous paws like a sphinx on its pedestal, and ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... type of the race it would be difficult for a sculptor to imagine. Six feet tall,—strength and grace united throughout her whole figure from neck to heel; with that clear black skin which is beautiful to any but ignorant or prejudiced eyes; and the smooth, pleasing, solemn features of a sphinx,—she looked to me, as she towered there in the gold light, a symbolic statue of Africa. Seeing me smoking one of those long thin Martinique cigars called bouts, she begged one; and, not happening to have another, I gave her the price of a bunch of twenty,—ten sous. She took ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... discipline is of the severest. They are therefore among the most fearless fighters in the world, and always put in a tight place on the French front. There is one man at the enlisting depot[9] who is a wonderful being, and can size up a new recruit at a glance. He is known as "Le Sphinx." You must give him your real name and reason for joining the Legion, and in exchange he gives you a number by which henceforth you are known. He knows the secrets of all the Legion, and they are never divulged to a living soul; he never ...
— Fanny Goes to War • Pat Beauchamp
... added to his dignity, and his figure inspired Lucien with a prodigious awe. It is the wont of imaginative natures to magnify everything, or to find a soul to inhabit every shape; and Lucien took this gentleman, not for a granite guard-post, but for a formidable sphinx, and thought ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... suddenly. "I've been cultivating Cloran myself for the last two weeks. We're quite pals! I'm for playing the luck every time! When the jewels showed up to-day, I figured that to-night's the night—see? Cloran and I are going to supper together at the Silver Sphinx at about eleven o'clock—and this is where you shed the Gypsy Nan stuff, and show up as your own sweet self. Cloran'll be ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... heard the news, Armitage? The Austrian sphinx is here—in this very house!" whispered ...
— The Port of Missing Men • Meredith Nicholson
... mark the greatness and the waning of the heroic world In the Nibelungen-lied the final event is a great calamity that is akin to a half historical event of the North. Odin descends to the nether world to consult Hela; but she, like the sphinx of Thebes, will not reply save in an enigma, which enigma is to entail terrible tragedies, and lead to destruction the young hero who is the prey of ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... babel of cries weird beyond description—so fierce and screeching as to be almost blood-curdling. It seems to come from all directions and distance out of measure! Vibrating over the sands and through the rocks, filling the immense void, crying out as it were for the sphinx, a veritable de profundis of the wastes. The vultures, who hold the fort during the day have given way to the night shift, the jackals. These come from all directions; from the caves in the earth, from among the rocks, ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... at the foot of the pyramids, which lifted their sharp points into the intense saffron glow of the sunset sky, changeless monuments of the perishable glory and the imperishable hope of man. He looked up into the face of the crouching Sphinx and vainly tried to read the meaning of the calm eyes and smiling mouth. Was it, indeed, the mockery of all effort and all aspiration, as Tigranes had said—the cruel jest of a riddle that has no answer, a search that never can succeed? Or was there a touch of pity and encouragement in that ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke
... yet potent manner, a sense of the soul being near the surface of life. There is the same love of mystery and of symbolism; and in both may be observed the tendency to create strange composite figures to typify transcendental ideas, the sphinx seeming a blood-brother to the gargoyle. The conditions under which each architecture flourished were not dissimilar, for each was formulated and controlled by small well-organized bodies of sincerely religious ...
— The Beautiful Necessity • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... One could easily discern that there was no heart in the delegates for the job on hand. To them, the active forces in the Convention, the Princeton president was, indeed, a man of mystery. Who could solve the riddle of this political Sphinx? Who was this man Wilson? What were his purposes? What his ideals? These questions were troubling and perplexing the delegates. Colonel Harvey, the commander-in-chief of the Wilson forces, when interrogated by us, refused to answer. How masterfully the ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... are still exposed to view. Here, after a lapse of 1,500 years, the visitor may tread the streets and pavements, handle the implements which the old Romans used, admire their well-turned arches, and see the paint and plaster upon the walls of their apartments. The "Old Wall," so long a sphinx by the roadside, suggesting enigmas to passers-by, has found an interpreter in revelations which the spade and pickaxe have made within its shadow. From the time when its walls first fell down, it has furnished plunder to the country round. ...
— Handbook to the Severn Valley Railway - Illustrative and Descriptive of Places along the Line from - Worcester to Shrewsbury • J. Randall
... Certainly the sphinx could have propounded no more puzzling riddles than those which Elizabeth thus suggested to Buckhurst. To make war without an army, to support an army without pay, to frame the hearts of a whole people to peace who were unanimous for war, and this without saying a word either in private ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... you to tell us that, Sir Evelyn, for though he is supposed to be a Roman, he seems to have lived most of his life in your country. As silent as an owl and as inscrutable as a sphinx. Nobody in Rome knows certainly who his father was, nobody knows certainly who his mother was. Some say his father was an Englishman, some say a Jew, and some say his mother was a gipsy. A self-centred man, who never talks about himself, and cannot be got to lift ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... When you tell me how much of you was eighteen last birthday and how much is as old as the Sphinx and twice as mysterious, perhaps I'll attend to you. Lend me that banjo. The spirit moveth me to yowl at ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... purely ornamental; whether, if it be purely ornamental, it may not weaken or obscure the general design; and finally, whether, if we decide to use it, we should do so grossly and notably, or in some conventional disguise: are questions of plastic style continually re-arising. And the sphinx that patrols the highways of executive art has no more unanswerable ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... who amuse themselves" don't come now. It's not "the thing." Why, therefore, should this couple choose Ennis's for supper? They haven't been out of England for fifteen years, like me. If Mrs. Senter occasionally spends Saturday to Monday in India, or visits the Sphinx when the Sphinx is in season, she always returns to London when "everybody is in town," and there does ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... cautiously regarded him munching a sandwich and keeping his own eyes rather away from than on her own, she asked herself whether she had undertaken too much, and whether this sphinx-like face might hide danger for her. She at least knew it was far from being possible to tell by looking at the outside of a man's head what might be going on inside. Only the plight of her father's affairs had seemed to justify her; even this did not seem ...
— Laramie Holds the Range • Frank H. Spearman
... Moggridge, you won't stay? You must be off? Are you driving through Eastbourne this afternoon in one of those little carriages? Are you the man who's walled up in green cardboard boxes, and sometimes has the blinds down, and sometimes sits so solemn staring like a sphinx, and always there's a look of the sepulchral, something of the undertaker, the coffin, and the dusk about horse and driver? Do tell me—but the doors slammed. We shall ...
— Monday or Tuesday • Virginia Woolf
... A sphinx unguessed, enthroned in azure skies, White as the swan, my heart is cold as snow; No hated motion breaks my lines' pure flow, Nor tears nor ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... the same lips. A pretty girl—or rather "an exquisite creature!" met at the house of some relation in Scotland, met again at the "Boats" at Oxford, and yet again at Commemoration balls, Nuneham picnics, and the rest; adored and adorable; yet, of course, a sphinx born for the torment of men, taking her haughty way over a prostrate sex, kind to-day, cruel to-morrow; not to be won by money, yet, naturally, not to be won without it; possessed like Rose Aylmer of "every virtue, every grace," whether of form or family; yet making ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Amphitrite, the Marvellous Floatin' Goddess. Just about to commence! This way for the Mystic Gallery—three Illusions for threepence! Atalanta, the Silver Queen of the Moon; the Oriental Beauty in the Table of the Sphinx, and the Wonderful Galatea, or Pygmalion's Dream. Only threepence! This way for the Mystic Marvel o' She! ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., October 25, 1890 • Various
... fire are they, and of enormous size. The chaplet had twelve great carbuncles in the centre, and went off by gradations into smaller garnets by the thousand. They flashed their blood-red flames in the African sun, and the head of Ucatella, grand before, became the head of the Sphinx, encircled with a coronet of fire. She bestowed a look of rapturous gratitude on Staines, and then glided away, like the stately Juno, to admire herself in the nearest glass like any other coquette, black, brown, yellow, ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... temple which they call the Parthenon, as you enter it everything portrayed on the gables relates to the birth of Athene, and behind is depicted the contest between Poseidon and Athene for the soil of Attica. And this work of art is in ivory and gold. In the middle of her helmet is an image of the Sphinx—about whom I shall give an account when I come to Boeotia—and on each side of the helmet are griffins worked. These griffins, says Aristus the Proconnesian, in his poems, fought with the Arimaspians beyond the Issedones for the gold of the soil which the griffins ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... practice in humorous drawing, having drawn three years before for the "Will-o'-the-Wisp" and "The Sphinx." But his Punch work was merely occasional; his more serious labours were for the "Graphic," "The Pictorial World," and most notably, on Mr. Edmund Evans's suggestion, for the immortal children's books which the engraver might print ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... General Jackson, but found that his commander was yet inactive. He was still waiting and watching with a patience that seemed equal to that of the Sphinx. Noon came, food was served, and the hours ...
— The Star of Gettysburg - A Story of Southern High Tide • Joseph A. Altsheler
... had a fine view of a glorious plain, out of which rose several insulated headlands. One of these was the height on which stands Stirling Castle, and which reclines on the plain like a hound or a lion or a sphinx, holding the castle on the highest part, where its head should be. A mile or two distant from this picturesque hill rises another, still more striking, called the Abbey Craig, on which is a ruin, and where is to be built the monument to William Wallace. I cannot conceive a nobler ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... being made the means of expression of a particular tendency. Instead of taking a passion for Rene, indeed, future generations will scorn and wonder at him; instead of a hero they will see in him a pathological case; but the work itself, like the Sphinx, will endure. A work of art will bear all kinds of interpretations; each in turn finds a basis in it, while the work itself, because it represents an idea, and therefore partakes of the richness and complexity which belong to ideas, suffices for all and survives all. A portrait proves ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... which we found in great poverty because of the oppression of the tax-gatherers. Also, as we went, I saw for the first time the great pyramids that are beyond the image of the God Horemkhu, that Sphinx whom the Greeks name Harmachis, and the Temples of the Divine Mother Isis, Queen of the Memnonia, and the God Osiris, Lord of Rosatou, of which temples, together with the Temple of the worship of the Divine Menkau-ra, I, Harmachis, am by right Divine ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... the Pyramids or the Sphinx. Perhaps when she was staying with the Iretons, they would take her to see them. She had certainly no desire to make the ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... we find an important element in the explanation of the sand drifts, which have half buried the Sphinx and so many other ancient monuments in that part of Egypt. These drifts, as I have said, are not wholly from the desert, but in largo proportion from the sea; and, as might be supposed from the distance they have travelled, they have been long in gathering. ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... were to make their own arrangements, subject to the approval of Kennedy, who was left in charge. I thus had an opportunity not only to visit Cairo, but also to take a run out to the Pyramids and the Sphinx. As a matter of fact we remained at Suez nearly a fortnight, awaiting our skipper's return, when we hove up our anchor and proceeded down the Gulf of Suez into the Red Sea, duly noting Mount Sinai on our port hand as we ...
— The First Mate - The Story of a Strange Cruise • Harry Collingwood
... under the famous word of the realists 'vitality.' It is even possible that being is only possessed completely by the dead, and that it is some knowledge of this that makes us gaze with so much emotion upon the face of the Sphinx or Buddha. Who can forget the face of Chaliapine as the Mogul King in Prince Igor, when a mask covering its upper portion made him seem like a Phoenix at the end of its thousand wise years, awaiting in condescension the burning nest and what did it not gain from that immobility in dignity ...
— Certain Noble Plays of Japan • Ezra Pound
... edge of the Desert of Sahara there stands the world-famous Sphinx with its inscrutable face turned toward the East, ever greeting the sun as its rising rays herald the newborn day. It was said in the Greek myth that it was the wont of this monster to ask a riddle of each traveler. She devoured those who could not ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... to as a great power and known as the "Sphinx of the Philippines," was reticent at first, but later he talked freely about the marvelous resources of the Islands and stated that he, too, believed ...
— The Log of the Empire State • Geneve L.A. Shaffer
... "they are bringing Mademoiselle de Tonnay-Charente and her sphinx butterfly in grand ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... a charming little Branch of Civilisation at the gate of the desert, stands, like man himself, in the shadow of two terrible immensities, the Sphinx and the Pyramid, the Origin and the End. And in the grill-room, over a glass of whiskey and soda, we presume to solve in few words the eternal mystery. But that is not what we came for. And to avoid the bewildering depths into which we were led, we suggested a stroll on the sands. ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... amiable willingness that she should take her leave without shaking more dust from her feet upon an already burdened household, had become impatient desire by the time I counted out her wages. Yet, here she stands, grim as the sphinx, fixed as Fate, with the inexorable requisition, "Me ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... in those days; she loved. She moved as one who is moved; she was drawn as by the cords of the sun. The Ancient One, the Sphinx, had her fast. The reflection of a greater thing claimed her and taught her, held her like a bayadere in a ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... activities from Gawain. We were content to visit him now and then, to arouse him, and then leave him to disincarnate his vertebral outward phase into chlorophyll or lifeless stone. To muse upon his courtship or emotions was impossible. His life had a feeling of sphinx-like duration—Gawain as a tadpole was unthinkable. He seemed ageless, unreal, wonderfully ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... the Sphinx and does not harm her. They say that he does not dare to harm the Sphinx. She has borne him many gods whom ...
— Plays of Gods and Men • Lord Dunsany
... me and commenced asking questions about the S. A. S. I tried not to tell, but you know the way the Dowager looks when she's angry. Even a sphinx would break down and tell everything it knew, and I never did pretend to ...
— Just Patty • Jean Webster
... latter's countenance could assume. It had seemed interesting and even admirable to him then—but then he had not foreseen the possibility that he himself might some day confront its adamantine barrier with a sinking heart. All at once he could bear this implacable sphinx-gaze no longer. ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... comprised in self-trust." We have to remember that the self he means is the highest self, that consciousness which he looks upon as open to the influx of the divine essence from which it came, and towards which all its upward tendencies lead, always aspiring, never resting; as he sings in "The Sphinx ":— ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... puzzles is not known, nor is it at all probable that the mystery surrounding their inception will ever be cleared away. The fabled founder is the Sphinx of Egypt, who, the mythologists inform us, propounded the first enigma. 2. It is an invariable custom to notify our readers of the appearance of new serial stories, and therefore you will receive due ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls - Volume VIII, No 25: May 21, 1887 • Various
... a long and pliant proboscis for the purpose of acquiring this grateful food, as a variety of bees, moths, and butterflies: but the Sphinx Convolvuli, or unicorn moth, is furnished with the most remarkable proboscis in this climate. It carries it rolled up in concentric circles under its chin, and occasionally extends it to above three inches in length. ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... across the swelling domes and heat-stricken valleys of foliage, the pale green of the feather-palms, the sombre green of the n'sambyas, to the haze that veiled all things beyond, on a day like this, silence gazed at one Sphinx-like, and from the distance of a million years. Silence that had brooded upon Africa before Africa had a name, before Pharaoh was born, ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... number of the houses. The modern parts of the town are handsome, and there is a pleasant intermixture of trees and grass plats in some of these more recent portions. There are some pleasing public walks, after the English fashion; and a public garden, where a colossal sphinx, erected by the late philosopher Gleichen, has a very imposing appearance. Here is also an obelisk erected to the memory of Gleichen himself, the founder of these gardens; and a monument to the memory of Kepler, the astronomer; which latter was luckily spared in the assault ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various
... Nineveh, found 'in the rubbish near the bottom of a chamber, several ivory ornaments upon which were traces of gilding: among them was the figure of a man in long robes, carrying in one hand the Egyptian crux ansata—part of a crouching sphinx—and flowers designed with great ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal, No. 421, New Series, Jan. 24, 1852 • Various
... encased in an abnormally curled wig, with pendent ringlets, and the whole clasped by a massive head-dress, following the contour of head and having as part of it, a curtain or veil, reaching down behind, across shoulders and approaching waist line. The Sphinx wears a characteristic ...
— Woman as Decoration • Emily Burbank
... satisfaction, but seemed rather cast into some horrible trance in which they saw nothing but the piles of coin, the spinning needle, and the flashing hands of the woman that turned it. She all the while sat passionless and cold, looking on the scene as might some glittering and bejewelled sphinx. ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... by a reference to Fitz James Stephen; let me end by a quotation from him. "What do you think {31} of yourself? What do you think of the world?... These are questions with which all must deal as it seems good to them. They are riddles of the Sphinx, and in some way or other we must deal with them.... In all important transactions of life we have to take a leap in the dark.... If we decide to leave the riddles unanswered, that is a choice; if we waver in our answer, that, too, is a choice: but whatever choice we make, ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... suddenly, and, as suddenly, leaning forward, he touched Benson's shoulder. They were just approaching a restaurant and music hall known as "The Sphinx," that was popular for the moment with ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... not kiss her any more. And then, perhaps, at last he prays, "Deliver me from this bondage!" And he thinks that he knows his mistress. But, happy or sad, does he ever quite know her? Is she not always a mystery, this life, a sphinx who ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... heart can understand it, Though her tongue can ne'er explain: Let yon granite Sphinx demand it— Riddle, ...
— Fringilla: Some Tales In Verse • Richard Doddridge Blackmore
... d'hote, and mingled with them as freely as possible, for they interested me greatly, and I used try and classify them much as an entomologist would classify his beetles and insects. One lady of forbidding appearance was known as "the Sphinx." When on an expedition, it was the custom to call the "Cookii" at 5 a.m., and strike the tents at six. It appears that her bower falling at the stroke of six disclosed the poor thing in a light toilet, whence issued a serious quarrel. She wore an enormous, brown, ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... breathless moment we paused. In front of us reared a monster—a colossal, headless Sphinx. Like forelegs and paws, a ridge of pointed cubes, and globes thrust against each side of the canyon walls. Between them for two hundred feet on ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... carry an interlinear translation of your temperament on your face. So long as he kept in his own yard and quarreled with his own dog for not feeding on Freshmen more enthusiastically, we got along as nicely as the Egyptian Sphinx and John L. Sullivan. Even when he was elected police magistrate we didn't object. In fact, we didn't bumpity-bump to the situation until we went up against him ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... who tested his chest and felt his pulse. Ass's milk was prescribed, and the poor little creature drank it willingly enough out of his tiny china saucer. He would remain for hours at a time stretched out on my knee like the shadow of a sphinx; I could feel his vertebrae like the grains of a chaplet, and he would try to acknowledge my caresses with a feeble purr that sounded like a death-rattle. On the day he died, he lay on his side gasping, but got himself up by a supreme effort, came to me, and opening wide his ...
— My Private Menagerie - from The Works of Theophile Gautier Volume 19 • Theophile Gautier
... and on Abelard he pours out the vials of his wrath. He has a quick eye for all humbugs and a scorching scorn for them; but there is no attempt at being funny in the manner of the cockney comedians when he stands in the awful presence of the Sphinx. He is not taken in by the glamor of Palestine; he does not lose his head there; he keeps his feet; but he knows that he is standing on holy ground; and there is never a hint of ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... inspired once more to sing of his wife. It was the best poem he had written for a long time, and when it was finished, he came down the wood impatient to read it to Beatrice. This was the poem, which he called "The Northern Sphinx":— ...
— The Worshipper of the Image • Richard Le Gallienne
... would have the best of him in this engagement. All the bright things to say would come to him after he had gone home. It was far easier to write letters. That mask! One might as well converse with the Sphinx. His face was hers to study; her emotions would be wholly ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... healed. Clive was a Theosophist: all men were her brothers, and all women her sisters; but those especially among art-workers who fell by the wayside might share her bread and blanket. They called her Old Mother Sphinx, because of her inscrutable eyes, and the tenderness ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... nice story. "Many centuries ago, there reigned over Thebes, Laius and Iocasta. Laius was one day killed on the road as he was airing himself in his chariot. Shortly after, a terrible plague broke out in Thebes, and the Sphinx ravaged all the neighborhood. The Sphinx gave out that the plague would cease and his ravages be ended, when this riddle was solved:—'What animal walks on four feet in the morning, two at noon day, and three ...
— The Girl's Cabinet of Instructive and Moral Stories • Uncle Philip
... glad indeed to hear from you and to know that you are in sympathy with my "eloquent" address at the University of Virginia. You give me hope that I am on the right track. As for Harmon and representative government, you won't get either. ... Please see Mr. R. W. Emerson's Sphinx, ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... those others—the male minority—well, Mrs. Bethune could sometimes prove unkind, and there are men who do not readily forgive. Her mouth is curious, large and full, but not easily to be understood. Her eyes may speak, but her mouth is a sphinx. Yet it is a lovely mouth, and the little teeth behind it shine like pearls. For the rest, she is a widow. She married very badly; went abroad with her husband; buried him in Montreal; and came home again. Her purse is as slender as her ...
— The Hoyden • Mrs. Hungerford
... handed Miss Milroy out of the boat. The major followed. Mrs. Pentecost sat immovable as the Egyptian Sphinx, with her bag on her knees, mounting guard ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... banks of the Nile. On the walls and lotus-shaped columns were processions of dark figures at the loom, at the work of irrigation, marching as soldiers, or mourners at funerals,—exact copies of the original delineations. There were sphinx and obelisk, coffins of kings, mummies of priest and chieftain, the fabrics they wore, the gems they cut, the scrolls they engrossed, the tomb in which they were buried. Stepping into another section, you were in Assyria, with the alabaster ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... reconciled to him, she bestows on him a dog and a dart, which Diana had once given her. The dog is turned into stone, while hunting a wild beast, which Themis has sent to ravage the territories of Thebes, after the interpretation of the riddle of the Sphinx, by Oedipus. ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... one is a Pandorus Sphinx!" he said in great excitement to Kathleen, who had lifted the big glass jar into the lantern light and was trying to get a glimpse of the exquisite moth, whose wings of olive green, rose, and bronze velvet were already beating a hazy death tattoo ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... protested, glancing at Miss Lyberg. I could have sworn that I detected a gleam in the woman's eyes and that the sphinx-like attitude of dull incomprehensibility suggested a strenuous effort. "She doesn't understand anything. She doesn't want ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... or at least could when he left college a few months back, but now his life, the life of his crew, the salving of the dock, and the winning of a possible fortune, depended upon his answering the riddle of this Twentieth Century Sphinx. It was like attempting to understand all mathematics, from addition to celestial mechanics, at ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... 'the Sphinx' right, some of your English guessers in the 'Times' and elsewhere fail also, as events prove. The clever 'Prince-Napoleon-for-Central-Italy' guess,[67] for instance, has just fallen through, by declaration of the ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... a well-cooked lunch at perhaps the best restaurant in any town of Europe. I have lost my little pile. The eight five-franc pieces which I annually devote out of my scanty store to the tutelary god of roulette have been snapped up, one after another, in breathless haste, by the sphinx-like croupiers, impassive priests of that rapacious deity, and now I am sitting, cleaned out, by the edge of the terrace, on a brilliant, cloudless, February afternoon, looking across the zoned and belted bay towards the beautiful grey hills of Rocca-bruna and the gleaming ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... have not! You can still give yourself a counsel.' And Sugarman looked a conscious sphinx. 'You may yet get back ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... the torrents of his speech. The girl regarded him with the face of a Sphinx. Only in her eyes there seemed to be some apprehension of the fact that the young man's clothes and manners were ...
— Anna the Adventuress • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... you do care for him—despite your life-long reserve and apparent indifference? I have suspected as much, several times, but that imperturbable sphinx-face of yours always baffled me. My child, you need not droop your head; he is worthy of your love; he is the only man I know whom I would gladly see you marry. Irene, look up—tell me—did Leonard know this? Conscious of your affection for Aubrey, ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... and solemn, upon a sepulchre. Beneath him recline two vast mourning figures, one of each sex. One longs to challenge converse with the male figure, with the unfinished Sphinx-like face, who is stretched there at his harmonious length, like an ancient river-god without his urn. There is nothing appalling or chilling in his expression, nor does he seem to mourn without hope. 'Tis a stately recumbent figure, of wonderful anatomy, without any exaggeration ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... representative of all promising youths who have died a premature death, and whose memory is melodiously prolonged to the latest morning; the beautiful stories of Phaeton, and of the Sirens whose isle shone afar off white with the bones of unburied men; and the pregnant ones of Pan, Prometheus, and the Sphinx; and that long list of names which have already become part of the universal language of civilized men, and from proper are becoming common names or nouns,—the Sibyls, the Eumenides, the Parcae, the ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... face of a sphinx. He made no protestations. He denied nothing. He waited simply to see where ...
— The Lost Ambassador - The Search For The Missing Delora • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Deities who perform special service to the greater gods,—Iris, Hebe, the Horae;, etc. 4. Deities whose personality is less distinct,—Ate, Eris, Thanatos, Hypnos, etc. 5. Monsters, progeny of the gods,—the Harpies, the Gorgons, Pegasus, Chimaera, Cerberus, Scylla and Charybdis, the Centaurs, the Sphinx. Below the gods are the demigods ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... not a crank. He knew that so far from being a mere animal, the Indian is of a subtlety more ancient than the Sphinx. In his primal brain—nearer nature than our own—the directness of a child mingles with the profoundest cunning. He believes easily in powers of light and darkness, yet is a sceptic all the while. Stirling knew this; but he could not know just when, if ever, the young ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... wonderful of these temples is called 'Kailus,' and is dedicated to Siva the Destroyer. It has a great court, in which are ponds, obelisks, figures of the Sphinx, and other ornaments, whilst in the middle stands an immense group of elephants. Above these huge creatures, rows of stately columns, in four tiers, one above the other, support the actual temple, and the effect is so light that the building ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... been carved out of granite, eyes that bored through an opposing brain, and a constant expression of absolute, yet watchful immobility, he was a trying person to tackle, and most men, when they did tackle him, felt as if they might be talking to the Sphinx and wondered if the tightly-locked lips were ever going to open. But all men who ever had anything to do with Markledew were well aware that, difficult as he was of access, you had only got to approach him with something good to be rewarded for your ...
— The Herapath Property • J. S. Fletcher
... problem with which it occupies itself is not the question as to the difference between the sexes, but the riddle: from where do children come? In a distorted form, which can easily be unraveled, this is the same riddle which was given by the Theban Sphinx. The fact of the two sexes is usually first accepted by the child without struggle and hesitation. It is quite natural for the male child to presuppose in all persons it knows a genital like his own, and to find it impossible to harmonize the lack of ...
— Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex • Sigmund Freud
... great box canon, and scaled its upper end, following near the voices of a cascade. Cliffs thousands of feet high hemmed us in. At the very top of them strange crags leaned out looking down on us in the abyss. From a projection a colossal sphinx gazed solemnly across at a dome as smooth and symmetrical as, but vastly larger than, ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... social value of that companion of a lady stopped in chat by that other lady, who was always hopping up and stopping people of her acquaintance. The companion was not of her acquaintance, nor was she now made of it; she stood statue-still and sphinx-patient in the walk, and only an eye ever avid of story could be aware of the impassioned tapping of the little foot whose mute drama faintly agitated the hem of her drapery. Was she poor and proud, or was she rich and ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... of the riddle for the folk mind is well known, and before the spread of cards appears to have been one of the chief forms of gambling in which even life was staked, as in the case of Samson or the Sphinx. In the Folk-Tale it often occurs in the form of the Riddle-Bride-Wager, in which a princess is married to him that can guess some elaborate conundrum. The first two of Child's Ballads deal with similar riddles, and his notes are a mine of erudition on the subject: on the Clever Lass herself ...
— Europa's Fairy Book • Joseph Jacobs
... the trial she sat in utter immobility, sphinx-like, unapproachable, yet listening with tense attention to all that passed. Field's handling of the case was a marvel of legal ingenuity. There were many who were attracted to the trial by that alone. He had made his mark, and whatever ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... in front of her, pouting, wistful, immobile, as if she yielded herself to her fate because it was too strong for her. She could not help herself; she was in the grip of something bigger than herself. A kind of eternal look about her, as if she were a wistful sphinx, made it necessary for him to kiss her. He dropped his programme, and crouched down on the floor to get it, so that he could kiss her hand and wrist. Her beauty was a torture to him. She sat immobile. Only, when the lights went down, she sank a little against him, and he caressed ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... get a fresh currency, until some new circumstance gave rise to a new hypothesis. Unconscious of all these inquiries and fictions, Maurice Kirkwood lived on in his inoffensive and unexplained solitude, and seemed likely to remain an unsolved enigma. The "Sachem" of the boating girls became the "Sphinx" of the village ramblers, and it was agreed on all hands that Egypt did not hold any hieroglyphics harder to make out than the meaning of this young ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
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