"Pleiades" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of that," continued the first; "I am troubled about our course. If we could leave the Pleiades a little more to the right, striking a middle course between Booetes and the ecliptic, we should find it all plain sailing as far as the solstitial colure. But once we get into the Zodiac upon our present bearing, we are certain to meet ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... which lies Between the four walls of this garden fair,— Whose constellations are the fireflies That wheel their instant courses everywhere,— Mid faery firmaments wherein one sees Mimic Booetes and the Pleiades, Thou steerest like some faery ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... of spirits thither through the air. After a great battle they are thus warned of the event long before the news can arrive by natural means.2 It is a common superstition with them that the left eye of every chief, after his death, becomes a star. The Pleiades are seven New Zealand chiefs, brothers, who were slain together in battle and are now fixed in the sky, one eye of each, in the shape of a star, being the only part of them that is visible. It has been observed that the ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... in captive flight all day, but with no such vanishings as these. The dimmer constellations of the soft night are reserved by the skies. Hardly is a secondary star seen by the large and vague eyes of the stream. They are blind to the Pleiades. ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... about a prodigious star in the centre of the galaxy. About this star, or at all events about a centre of gravity common to all the globes of the Milky Way and supposed to be near Alcyone in the Pleiades, every one of these globes was declared to be revolving, our own performing the circuit in a period of 117,000,000 of years! We, with our present lights, our vast telescopic improvements, and so forth, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... life. All life is not under our control, to be freely mastered by our thought and toil. There are areas where scientific knowledge gives us power to do amazing things, but all around them are other areas which our hands cannot regulate. Orion and the Pleiades were not made for our fingers to swing, and our engineering does not change sunrise or sunset nor make the planets one whit less or more. So, in the experiences of our inward life, around the realm which we can control is that other realm where move the mysterious providences ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... with silver altars and adoration the moon, which they call the consort of the sun, and certain stars, which they term the handmaids of the moon: but their most singular idea is that the Pleiades represent their grandfather; and "as that constellation disappears at certain periods from the sky of South America, upon such occasions they suppose that their grandfather is sick, and are under a yearly apprehension that he is going to die; ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... uncorked, and scatters the worlds with the foam of what ambrosial liquor may have been within. Beyond, a Spanish goddess, some minor deity in the Dionysian theogony, dances continually, rapt and mysterious, to the music of the spheres, her head in Cassiopeia and her twinkling feet among the Pleiades. And near her, Orion, archer no longer, releases himself from his strained posture to drive a sidereal golf-ball out of sight through the meadows of Paradise; then poses, addresses, ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... 19, 1880.—Just before 10 P.M. cold and entirely clear again, the show overhead, bearing southwest, of wonderful and crowded magnificence. The moon in her third quarter —the clusters of the Hyades and Pleiades, with the planet Mars between—in full crossing sprawl in the sky the great Egyptian X, (Sirius, Procyon, and the main stars in the constellations of the Ship, the Dove, and of Orion;) just north of ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... them, but they listened not. Then they heard the voices of their five sisters, who from the sky stretched forth their hands and drew the two others in to live with them in the sky, and there you may see the seven sisters together. We know them as the Pleiades, but the black fellows call them ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... him declare that he has been turned into a golden nightingale, and that there must be no noise or romping in the garden for three days, as not till then will he have arrived safely at the Appleiades. That is the name they give to the Pleiades—the seven golden islands whither pass the souls of dead mice and birds and dolls and where Scarlatti lives and where you, too, may expect to go if you please them. Even the black cat will probably go there—one's own black cat. But not the neighbour's ...
— The Pleasures of Ignorance • Robert Lynd
... in the following language: 'I therefore pronounce the Pleiades to be the central group of that mass of fixed stars limited by the stratum composing the Milky Way and Alcyene as the individual star of this group, which, among all others, combines the greatest probability of being ...
— Scientific American magazine Vol 2. No. 3 Oct 10 1846 • Various
... has to be won tonight. I've already issued a check for this twenty-seven million, it will bounce as high as the Pleiades unless we deposit the money in the morning, so that's our ...
— Deathworld • Harry Harrison
... now. He was beset with invitations, but he declined most of them. He told the dog story one night to the Pleiades Club, assembled at the Brevoort; but that was only a step away, and we went in after the dining was ended and came away before the exercises ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... all, is not this singular person anxious to have me informed that he has received a fresh supply of Dimitry Bruisgins? But to none of us does the Present (even if for a moment discerned as such) continue miraculous. We glance carelessly at the sunrise, and get used to Orion and the Pleiades. The wonder wears off, and to-morrow this sheet, in which a vision was let down to me from Heaven, shall be the wrappage to a bar of soap or the platter for a beggar's broken ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... known as the chain of Taygetus. Now, the nymph from whom that mountain ridge is named was the mother of Lacedaemon; therefore the mythic ancestress of the Spartan race. She is the nymph Taygeta, and one of the seven stars of spring; one of those Pleiades of whom is the question to Job,—"Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion?" "The sweet influences of Pleiades," of the stars of spring,—nowhere sweeter than among the pine-clad slopes of the hills of Sparta and ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... right wing of darkness. And there is Mercury, like a lighted cresset shaken by the winds, flapping his violet wings above the Northeastern horizon; and Mars, like a piece of gold held out by the trembling hand of a miser, is sinking in the blue of the sea with Neptune; the Pleiades are stepping on the trail of the blushing moon; the Balance lingers behind to weigh the destinies of the heroes who are to contend with the dawn; while Venus, peeping from her tower over Mt. Sanneen, is sending love vibrations to all. I would tell thee more ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... the laurel-leaves to crown The star-discoverer's name with high, renown; Accept the flower of love we lay with these For influence sweeter than the Pleiades! ...
— The White Bees • Henry Van Dyke
... of mindful hearts and gratitude: For by our hands the meshes of revenge Closed on the prey, and for one woman's sake Troy trodden by the Argive monster lies— The foal, the shielded band that leapt the wall, What time with autumn sank the Pleiades. Yea, o'er the fencing wall a lion sprang Ravening, and lapped his fill of blood ...
— The House of Atreus • AEschylus
... noticeable when we try to count the seven stars of the Pleiades. It is easy enough to fix upon six, but if we gaze too intently, the seventh modestly withdraws ...
— The Great Cattle Trail • Edward S. Ellis
... and his sleep appears serene, Whatever dreams it has brought him— [Looks at the plans.] If he knows what those hieroglyphics mean, He's wiser than one who taught him. Why does he number the Pole-star thus? Or the Pleiades why combine? And what is he doing with Sirius, In the devil's name or in mine? Man thinks, discarding the beaten track, That the sins of his youth are slain, When he seeks fresh sins, but he soon comes back To his old pet ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... glanced up at the stars again and saw the tight cluster of the Pleiades. Across the world, the constellation was just coming into view of anyone standing on top of the mountain known as ...
— The Egyptian Cat Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin
... "the act of the 2nd of December,"—to execute it, and to complete it, he needed these men, and he had them. Now he is surrounded by them; these men form his retinue, his court, mingling their radiance with his. At certain epochs of history, there are pleiades of great men; at other epochs, there ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... of Paraguay, called the Pleiades their "Grandfather" and "Creator." When the constellation was invisible, they said: "Our Grandfather, Keebet, is ill" (509. ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... their serene spaces; like Eyes glistening with heavenly tears over the little lot of man! Thousands of human generations, all as noisy as our own, have been swallowed up of Time, and there remains no wreck of them any more; and Arcturus and Orion and Sirius and the Pleiades are still shining in their courses, clear and young, as when the Shepherd first noted them in the plain of Shinar. Pshaw! what is this paltry little Dog-cage of an Earth; what art thou that sittest whining there? Thou art still Nothing, Nobody: true; but who, then, is Something, ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... those magnificent moments in the war which filled the soul with a strange and wild delight. For months we had been preparing for this event, and now it was upon us. The sky was growing lighter, and the constellation of the Pleiades was beginning to fade in the sky above the outline of the distant trees. I looked at my watch. Nearer and nearer the hands crept to zero hour, but they move slowly at such times. Then at 4.20 the long barrage ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... of an electric bulb. What do they mean? It cannot have the faintest glimmer of the real power of my candle. It would be as right to express, in the same inverted and foolish comparison, the worth of "those delicate sisters, the Pleiades." That pinch of star dust, the Pleiades, exquisitely remote in deepest night, in the profound where light all but fails, has not the power of a sulphur match; yet, still apprehensive to the mind though tremulous on the limit of vision, and sometimes even vanishing, it brings into distinction ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... recited was more singularly applicable to their case than that which they paid heed to. "The great stars that globed themselves in Heaven," were shining clear and bright in the vast arch above. Resplendent amidst the throng rose the Pleiades, the mythological seven hailed by the Greeks as an augury of safe navigation. And the Dyaks—one of the few remaining savage races of the world—share the superstition of the people who fashioned all the arts ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... resemblance to any French poetry preceding his work. For example, where can we find anything resembling 'Moise, Eloa, Doloeida'? Where did he find his inspiration for style and composition in these poems? If the poets of the Pleiades of the Restoration seem to have found their inspiration within themselves, showing no trace of connection with the literature of the past, thus throwing into confusion old habits of taste and of routine, certain it is that among them Alfred ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... the middle of the sixteenth century, banded themselves together in France, with the express aim of supplying influential example to improve the French language for literary purposes. Their peculiar appellation, "The Pleiades," was copied from that of a somewhat similar group of Greek writers, that existed in the time of Ptolemy Philadelphus. Of course, the implied allusion in it is to the constellation of the Pleiades. The individual name by which the Pleiades of the sixteenth century may best ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... roundup [U.S.]; array, bevy, galaxy; corps, company, troop, troupe, task force; army, regiment &c. (combatants) 726; host &c. (multitude) 102; populousness. clan, brotherhood, fraternity, sorority, association &c. (party) 712. volley, shower, storm, cloud. group, cluster, Pleiades, clump, pencil; set, batch, lot, pack; budget, assortment, bunch; parcel; packet, package; bundle, fascine[obs3], fasces[obs3], bale; seron[obs3], seroon[obs3]; fagot, wisp, truss, tuft; shock, rick, fardel[obs3], stack, sheaf, haycock[obs3]; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... peculiar, though from human sight So farr remote, with diminution seen. First in his East the glorious Lamp was seen, 370 Regent of Day, and all th' Horizon round Invested with bright Rayes, jocond to run His Longitude through Heav'ns high rode: the gray Dawn, and the Pleiades before him danc'd Shedding sweet influence: less bright the Moon, But opposite in leveld West was set His mirror, with full face borrowing her Light From him, for other light she needed none In that aspect, and still that distance keepes Till night, then in the East her turn she shines, 380 ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... the Pleiades of distinguished names are thrown in the text just above is apt to convey an incorrect impression, and the impression is not materially corrected in the subsequent references to them. Neither Bachofen, nor yet Tylor, McLennan or Lubbock contributed to the principles ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... the glorious Lamp was seen, Regent of Day; and all th' Horizon round Invested with bright Rays, jocund to round His Longitude through Heavns high Road: the gray Dawn, and the Pleiades before him danced, Shedding sweet Influence. Less bright the Moon, But opposite in level'd West was set, His Mirror, with full face borrowing her Light From him, for other Lights she needed none ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... touching sense of human sympathy, to find that we may look at Orion and the Pleiades through the grave eyes of a Puritan divine. "The Seven Stars are the Summer Constellation: they bring on the spring and summer; and Orion is a Winter Constellation, which is attended with snow and cold, as at this Day.... Moreover, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... gaslight boundaries of existence! Pah! it is a courtyard, bounded by four square walls, a path or two to walk in, and the eyes of busybodies to order our doings and sneer us out of our souls. How they deny us that the centre of the systems is immeasurably off there in Pleiades! What fools we are. We follow trifles we value at the valuation of idiots; we cherish mean ideas; we believe contracted doctrines; we do things we are ashamed of; dropping at last like the animals, with alarm ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair
... what our Egyptians called the Khamsin, and the Arabs El- Dufn (Bedawin, Dafn) generically; and specifically Dufn el-Suryy ("of the Pleiades""). Sky dark without clouds. At night, yellow clouds over moon. Gusts alternately hot and cold. Highly electrical; few could sleep at night. Tents left open. It was followed by damp and gloomy weather, which the Arabs attribute ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 2 • Richard Burton
... Friend, our Saviour, by the surrender of the heart to God, and every father and mother who is yet unprepared to join the growing circle of the family in heaven,—('how grows in Paradise their store!')—may, as we reach the last page, find that with cords of a man, with bands of love, He who made Pleiades, and Arcturus and his sons, has united them in eternal fellowship with their departed loved ones, through faith in Christ. This, while it hallows the remainder of life with the rich, mellowed beauty of the changing leaf, and ripening grain, and shortening days, ...
— Catharine • Nehemiah Adams
... tail of the Bear, three hunters who are in pursuit of it. The second of these stars has a very small one very close to it. This, they say, is the kettle of the second hunter, who is the bearer of the baggage and the provision belonging to all three.[239] The savages also call the Pleiades 'the Dancers,' and Hygin tells us that they were thus called by the ancients, because they seem, from the arrangement of their stars, to be engaged in a circular dance."—Lafitau, vol. ii., p. 236. Hygin., ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... Pimentola. Et'e-le'tar. A daugter of the South-wind. Fire-Child. A synonym of Panu. Frost. The English for Pakkanen. Hal'lap-yo'ra. A lake in Finland. Hal'ti-a (plural Haltiat). The Genius of Finnish mythology. Het'e-wa'ne. The Finnish name of the Pleiades. Hi'si (original Hiisi). The Evil Principle; also called Jutas, Lempo, and Piru. Mon'ja-tar. The daughter of the Pine-tree. Hor'na. A sacred rock in Finland. I'ku-Tur'so. An evil giant of the sea. Il'ma-ri'nem. The worker of the metals; a brother of Wainamoinen. ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... ingratitude to us. Ought we to require of those whom we have served, that they should be always confessing their obligations to us? Why should we care about neglect? 'Seek Him that maketh the Pleiades and Orion, and turneth the shadow of death into morning, and maketh the day dark with night; that calleth for the waters of the sea, and poureth them out upon the face of the earth: The Lord is ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... Political interests, social obligations, financial concerns, choke the spiracles of our inner being, and we lose all concern about what is supersensible, and hold no communication with it. There are stars and planets overhead, Orion with his spangled belt, Cassiopeia in her glittering chair, and Pleiades in their web of silver, but we cannot see them because of the fog ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... surprising. He enjoyed, in common with Moestlin, Kepler's professor, the rare faculty of distinguishing the satellites of Jupiter with the naked eye, and of counting fourteen of the stars in the group of Pleiades, the remotest of them being only of the ninth magnitude. He presumed none the more for that; on the contrary, he made his bow to you, at a distance, and when occasion arose he bravely knew ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... and disturbance. I discovered that my house actually had its site in such a withdrawn, but forever new and unprofaned, part of the universe. If it were worth the while to settle in those parts near to the Pleiades or the Hyades, to Aldebaran or Altair, then I was really there, or at an equal remoteness from the life which I had left behind, dwindled and twinkling with as fine a ray to my nearest neighbor, and to be seen ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... young people stood at the western edge of the little pool, studying astronomy in the reflected firmament. The Pleiades were trembling in the wave before them, and the three great stars of Orion,—for these constellations were both glittering ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... appear. But, on the other hand, if his natural relation to the white man be that of slave to master, our Southern brethren have wasted a great deal of time in prohibitory and obscurantist legislation; they might as well have been passing acts to prevent the moon from running away, or to make the Pleiades ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... winds were whist. The moon, then in the last quarter, had just risen, and the stars shone with a spectral luster but little affected by her presence; Jupiter, two hours high, was the herald of the day; the Pleiades, just above the horizon, shed their sweet influence in the east; Lyra sparkled near the zenith; Andromeda veiled her newly discovered glories from the naked eye in the south; the steady Pointers, far beneath the pole, looked meekly up from the ...
— The Uses of Astronomy - An Oration Delivered at Albany on the 28th of July, 1856 • Edward Everett
... away, and all these sounds are still. See, now, how much of your perplexity came from a deceit of eye-sight—see how the light of this world blinded you to the immensity and the meaning of existence! See! over your head spreads the great firmament. There are Sirius, and Orion, and the glittering Pleiades. How harmoniously they are related; how calmly they roll! And now, O man! fresh from the reeking dust, and the cry of pained hearts, and the shadows of the grave, do not the scales of unbelief drop from your eyes, when you see the width of God's universe, and ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... Freemasonry finds its prototype in the temple worship of ancient Egypt, we have but to study the Masonic arms, as illustrated in Fellows' chart, in which are pictured, as its objects of adoration, the sun and moon, the seven stars, known as Pleiades in the sign of Taurus; the blazing star Sirius, or Dog-star, worshipped by the Egyptians under the name of Anubis, and whose rising forewarned those people of the rising of the Nile River; the seven signs of the Zodiac from Aries to Libra, inclusive, ...
— Astral Worship • J. H. Hill
... arrows; a snake severed into sections; a Seneca tied to a post and a broken wampum belt at his feet. And on every tree they had also painted the symbol of their own clans and nation—pointed stones and the stars of the Pleiades; a witch-wolf and an enchanted bear; a yellow moth alighted on a white cross; a night-hawk, perfectly recognizable, soaring high above a sun, setting, bisecting the line of ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... the wizard Makalii in rat form and kills him by carrying him up in the air and letting him drop. Makalii means "little eyes" and refers to a certain mesh of fish net. One form of cat's cradle has this name. It also names the six summer months, the Pleiades, and the trees of plenty planted in Paliuli. "Plenty of fish" seems to be the root idea of ...
— The Hawaiian Romance Of Laieikawai • Anonymous
... Pleiades: a group of stars in the constellation Taurus; only six stars of the group are readily visible, but legend tells of a seventh, lost. Read the account of the ancient myth in Gayley's ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... being with one pair of arms, but I can't string space with arrows like that. You forest nymphs," he added with mild resentment, "with woodland eyes and ears and skill put me to shame. You and I, Diane, quarreled once, I think, about the number of Pleiades—" ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... whom stories are told to you when more favored beings dwell here among you? While you are making sacrifices on the altar of Latona, why does my divine name remain unknown? My father Tantalus is the only mortal who has ever sat at the table of the gods, and my mother Dione is the sister of the Pleiades, who as bright stars shine nightly in the heavens. One of my uncles is the giant Atlas, who on his neck supports the vaulted heavens; my grandfather is Jupiter, the father of the gods. The people of Phrygia obey me, and to me and my husband belongs the city of Cadmus, the walls of which were put ...
— Famous Tales of Fact and Fancy - Myths and Legends of the Nations of the World Retold for Boys and Girls • Various
... mirror, the poignancy of what we behold is strangely softened. After all, it is something, whatever becomes of us, to have been conscious of all this. It is something to have outwatched Arcturus, and felt "the sweet influences" of the Pleiades. Congruous with such a mood is the manner in which, while Mr. Hardy opposes himself to Christianity, he cannot forget it. He cannot "cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that perilous stuff which weighs upon the heart." It troubles and vexes him. ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... with the glowing clouds of sun-set and the soft light of the first star coming through the violet sky. At night with the stars, according to the season : now with the Pleiades, now with the Swan or burning Sirius, and broad Orion's whole constellation, red Aldebaran, Arcturus, and the Northern Crown; with the morning star, the lightbringer, once now and then when I saw it, a white-gold ball in the violet-purple sky, or framed about ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... Clemens was the guest of honor at a dinner given by the Pleiades Club at the Hotel Brevoort, December 22, 1907. The toastmaster introduced the guest of the evening with a high tribute to his place in American literature, saying that he was dear to the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... *what may be seen in the distance, experiment again, is the best judge. The human eye is so very different in each man that even the acute examination into what is known of the visual image of the Pleiades shows that the *average visual capacity of classic periods is no different from our own, but still that there was great variety in visual capacity. What enormous visual power is attributed to half-civilized and barbarous peoples, ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... traversed the deep" when sailing from the pillars of Hercules (Gibraltar) to Corfu. Yet such a course taken now would land the traveller in Africa. Odysseus is said in his voyage in springtime to have seen the Pleiades and Arcturus setting late, which seemed to early commentators a proof of Homer's inaccuracy. Likewise Homer, both in the Odyssey [2] (v. 272-5) and in the Iliad (xviii. 489), asserts that the Great Bear never set in those latitudes. Now it has been found that the precession of the ...
— History of Astronomy • George Forbes
... body and soul, and soul and body; When you came to the Simorg, Three therein appeared to you, And, had fifty of you come, So had you seen yourselves as many. Him has none of us yet seen. Ants see not the Pleiades. Can the gnat grasp with his teeth The body of the elephant? What you see is He not; What you hear is He not. The valleys which you traverse, The actions which you perform, They lie under our treatment And among our properties You as three birds are amazed, Impatient, heartless, confused: ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and Salaman and Absal • Omar Khayyam and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... how worthy of admiration in the field of battle, [to see] with what destruction he oppressed the brave, hearts devoted to voluntary death: just as the south wind harasses the untameable waves, when the dance of the Pleiades cleaves the clouds; [so is he] strenuous to annoy the troops of the enemy, and to drive his eager steed through the midst of flames. Thus the bull-formed Aufidus, who washes the dominions of the Apulian Daunus, rolls along, when he ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... must have seven, A cluster like the Pleiades, And lo! it happens, as with these, That one is missing from our heaven. Where is the Landlord? Bring him here; Let ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... and evinces by his conduct that he believes there is no God. And let him who denies what he cannot comprehend, be addressed in the impressive language of holy writ, "Canst thou bind the sweet influences of the Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion? Canst thou bring forth Mazzaroth in his season? or canst thou guide Arcturus with his Sons?" ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 10, Issue 285, December 1, 1827 • Various
... gave me one of the plates to hold, and with his disengaged hand pointed successively to the constellation of Orion, to the stars Castor, Pollux, Aldebaran, Rigel, the Pleiades, Sirius and others which with my very limited knowledge I could not recognise offhand. Then on the plate which I held, he showed us those same stars and constellations, checking them one ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... ice as it melted put out the fire. The two ice-maidens were miserable on earth with him, and eventually escaped by the aid of one of their 'multiplex totems,' the pine-tree. Wurrunnah had told them to get him pine bark. Now the Meamei—Pleiades—belong to the Beewee totem, so does the pine-tree. They chopped the pine bark, and as they did so the tree telescoped itself to the sky where the five other Meamei were, whom they now joined, and with whom ...
— The Euahlayi Tribe - A Study of Aboriginal Life in Australia • K. Langloh Parker
... atmosphere, they are not free from its desolating melancholy! Perhaps those who are transported there may adore the shining of new suns—but there are others not less dear whose light they must see extinguished! Will not the most glorious among the beloved constellation of the Pleiades there disappear? Like drops of luminous dew the stars fall one by one into the nothingness of a yawning abyss, whose bottomless depths no plummet has ever sounded, while the soul, contemplating these fields of ether, this ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... in aether I met a battered, prowling spirit, that had belonged to a man whom drugs had killed a hundred years ago; and he led me to regions that I had never imagined; and we parted in anger beyond the Pleiades, and I could not imagine my way back. And I met a huge grey shape that was the Spirit of some great people, perhaps of a whole star, and I besought It to show me my way home, and It halted beside me like a sudden wind and pointed, and, speaking quite ...
— A Dreamer's Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... hot upon us, showing Mayyum and Zubah, the giant staples of the "Gate under the Pleiades." [15] Shortly afterwards, we came in sight of the Barr el Ajam (barbarian land), as the Somal call their country [16], a low glaring flat of yellow sand, desert and heat-reeking, tenanted by the Eesa, and a meet habitat for savages. Such to us, at least, appeared the land of Adel. [17] At midday ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... alternated. When I have made giggle with Clara under the influence of the starry sky, did you suppose me giggling with Lyra or the Pleiades! I should dread to see the statue descend; it seemed irreverence even to gaze. The lofty serenity keeps me aloof. I like to believe in a creature too bright and good for human nature's daily food. Our profane squinting through telescopes ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... are like old neighbours for whom we never look in vain, intimate though eternal, friendly and companionable though far off. There is Orion coming over the hill, and there the many-jewelled Pleiades, and across the great central dome of the sky the vast triangle formed by the Pole Star, golden Arcturus (not now visible), and ice-blue Vega. But these are not names for me. Better are those homely sounds that link the pageant of night with the immemorial life of the fields. Arcturus ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... serve only as a saddle. Between Andromeda and her father, Cepheus, we find her mother, Cassiopeia, or rather Cassiopeia's Chair. (Of course b, a, and g mark the chair's back.) Perseus, the Rescuer, lies below; b is the famous variable Algol. Below him lies the Bull (Taurus), with the Pleiades and the bright Aldebaran. Low down to the left of the Bull, we find the Charioteer (Auriga), with the bright Capella. And lastly, anyone who likes may admire the Camelopard (Camelopardalis), between the Great Bear, ...
— Half-Hours with the Stars - A Plain and Easy Guide to the Knowledge of the Constellations • Richard A. Proctor
... plains and peaks as Bible pictures of the Holy Land have made familiar, and at night, as October's hunters' moon glorifies all the landscape, a faint light gleaming here and there from an opening in the rock huts, and with Arcturus and the Pleiades of Job in the sky, it has seemed almost sacrilege to mar the ancient environment by such an anachronism as a modern railway locomotive. Rather, in looking out over the picturesque mountains and valleys and sniffing the cool, dry air, ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... cold, out into the little back yard of his cell and look at the sky, where, when the nights were clear, the stars were to be seen. He had never taken any interest in astronomy as a scientific study, but now the Pleiades, the belt of Orion, the Big Dipper and the North Star, to which one of its lines pointed, caught his attention, almost his fancy. He wondered why the stars of the belt of Orion came to assume the peculiar mathematical relation to ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... Children" Jim Bridger meant the Pleiades. These stars, forming a cluster or nebula, sink below the western horizon in the spring and do not appear in the sky again until autumn; and the following is the reason why. They were once six children in a Blackfeet camp. The Blackfeet hunters had killed many buffalo, and among ...
— Pluck on the Long Trail - Boy Scouts in the Rockies • Edwin L. Sabin
... the son of Zeus and Maia, the eldest and most beautiful of the seven Pleiades (daughters of Atlas), and was born in a cave of Mount Cyllene in Arcadia. As a mere babe, he exhibited an extraordinary faculty for cunning and dissimulation; in fact, he was a thief from his cradle, for, not many hours after his birth, we find him creeping stealthily out of the ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... history which is especially visited upon us in our school-days, in expiation of the sins of our forefathers, there nourished seven poets at the court of Ptolemy Philadelphus. Royal favor and amiable dispositions united them in a club: public applause and self-appreciation led them to call it The Pleiades. In the middle of the sixteenth century, Pierre Ronsard, emulous of Greek fame, took to him six other poets more wretched than himself, and made up a second Pleiades for France. The third rising of this rhythmical constellation ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... skyey influences, it is thou, breath as thou art, that dost hourly afflict thy body with the results of sin." But even if this be not the meaning, is Mr. White correct in saying that influence had no plural at that time?[I] Had he forgotten "the sweet influences of Pleiades"? The word occurs in this form not only in our version of the Bible, but in that of Cranmer, and in the "Breeches" Bible. So in Chapman's "Byron's Conspiracy," (Ed. ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... "The Pleiades," I murmured to Morhange, showing him the seven pale stars, while Eg-Anteouen took up his mournful song in ...
— Atlantida • Pierre Benoit
... have the sight. It is admirable, this potent patience of these wee things that are born in bogs yet in their own world grow stars the memory of which lasts as long in the consciousness of man as does that of the Pleiades. If you pluck them you will see by turning them over that these constellations are as whitely bright to small eyes that look from below, from the ooze of the bog or the roots of marsh grass, as they are to our great ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... Pleiades (Ply-a-des) can be seen in winter as a cluster of small stars between Aldebaran and Algol, or, a line drawn from the back bottom, through the front rim of the Dipper, about two Dipper lengths, touches this little group. They are not ...
— Boy Scouts Handbook - The First Edition, 1911 • Boy Scouts of America
... a night I saw the Pleiades, rising through the mellow shade, Glitter like a swarm of fireflies tangled in a silver braid. Love took up the harp of Life, and smote on all the chords with might; Smote the chord of Self, that, trembling, pass'd in music out ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... spectacle as I entered the train. As we proceeded, the timid approach of twilight became more perceptible; the intense blue of the sky began to soften; the smaller stars, like little children, went first to rest; the sister-beams of the Pleiades soon melted together; but the bright constellations of the west and north remained unchanged. Steadily the wondrous transfiguration went on. Hands of angels, hidden from mortal eyes, shifted the scenery of the ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... central axis and concentrating. Further, we find in some of the gaseous nebulae (Orion) comparatively void spaces occupied by stars, which seem to have absorbed the nebulous matter in their formation. On the other hand, we find (in the Pleiades) wisps and streamers of nebulous matter clinging about great clusters of stars, suggesting that they are material left over when these clustered worlds crystallised out of some vast nebula; and enormous stretches of nebulous material covering regions (as ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... because they commonly sought after such things quae nec percipi a nobis neque comprehendi posset, or put case they did understand, yet they were altogether unprofitable. For what matter is it for us to know how high the Pleiades are, how far distant Perseus and Cassiopeia from us, how deep the sea, &c., we are neither wiser, as he follows it, nor modester, nor better, nor richer, nor stronger for the knowledge of it. Quod supra nos nihil ad, nos, I may say the same of those genethliacal studies, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... girds him with a flame; And, king-like, from the eastward seas, Comes Aldebaran, with his train Of Hyades and Pleiades. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... discovery! No longer lord of a little, bounded world, man crept as a parasite on a grain of dust spinning eternally through endless space. And with the humiliation came a great exaltation. For this tiny creature could now seal the stars and bind the Pleiades and sound each deep abyss that held a sun. What new sublimity of thought, what greatness of soul was not his! To Copernicus belongs properly the praise lavished by Lucretius on Epicurus, of having burst the flaming bounds of the world and of having made man equal to ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... island to island coasted the Asiatic shores, trusting, when for a short time out of sight of land, not to the compass, though they were acquainted with it, but to known rocks, glimpses of headlands, the direction of the wind, and their observation of the Pleiades. ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... the scheme of things From earth to star; Thy cycle holds whatever is fate, and Over the border the bar. Though rank and fierce the mariner Sailing the seven seas, He prays, as he holds his glass to his eyes, Coaxing the Pleiades. ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... God's Word clothed in Syllables of Unsurpassable Sweetness—He that holdeth the Pleiades in His Right Hand—Blissful Forecasts—Shall God weigh out Arcturus to Stop the Unreasoning Clamor of the Fool who Hath Said in His Heart there Is ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... The sun is female; and Mr. Yule* [I am indebted to Mr. Inglis for most of this information relating to the Khasias, which I have since found, with much more that is curious and interesting, in a paper by Lieut. Yule in Bengal Asiat. Soc. Journal.] (who is my authority) says that the Pleiades are called "the Hen-man" (as in Italy "the chickens"); also that they have names for the twelve months; they do not divide their time by weeks, but hold a market every four days. These people are industrious, and good cultivators of rice, millet, ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... whose disciples worshipped the host of Heaven. In the serenity of such an hour, with the white tents reposing in the distance, and the "soul-like sound" of the rustling forest alone breaking the stillness, it would not be strange, as they gazed on flaming Orion and the Pleiades, if they had bowed with ...
— Half Hours in Bible Lands, Volume 2 - Patriarchs, Kings, and Kingdoms • Rev. P. C. Headley
... of Attalus, founder and king of Fiesole, was of very brilliant origin, being no less than one of the Pleiades, and the only one of the sisters who seems to have married into a patriarchal family. "The reason why the seven stars are seven is a pretty reason"; but it is not "because they are not eight," as Lear suggests, but, as we now discover by patient investigation, because one of them had married and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... passions and sensualities, or from the as malarious though loftier grounds of my own self-regard, be I student or thinker, or moral man, there rise up these light mists, they will fill the sky and hide the sun. On a winter's night you will see the Pleiades, or other bright constellations, varying in brilliancy from moment to moment as some invisible cloud-wrack floats across the heavens. So, brother, every evil thing that we do rises up and gets diffused through our atmosphere, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... Epicurus too was sure a cook, And knew the sovereign good. Nature his study, While practice perfected his theory. Divine philosophy alone can teach The difference which the fish Glociscus[124] shows In winter and in summer: how to learn Which fish to choose, when set the Pleiades, And at the solstice. 'Tis change of seasons Which threats mankind, and shakes their changeful frame. This dost thou comprehend? Know, what we use In season, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... signs his name: Captain Sir Henry Quill, Bart. And since he's the toughest old martinet this side of the Pleiades, the 'Black' part just comes naturally. I served under him seven years ago. Put ...
— Unwise Child • Gordon Randall Garrett
... Thjasse, he appeared in the heavens as Sirius. In India the ghosts of the "seven Rishis", who were semi-divine Patriarchs, formed the constellation of the Great Bear, which in Vedic times was called the "seven bears". The wives of the seven Rishis were the stars of the Pleiades. In Greece the Pleiades were the ghosts of the seven daughters of Atlas and Pleione, and in Australia they were and are a queen and six handmaidens. In these countries, as elsewhere, stories were told to account for the "lost Pleiad", a fact which suggests that primitive men were more ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... an Alpine grandeur of mind that towered far above the sordid lowlands of selfish ambitions to those sublime heights of whole-souled devotion to public duty and incorruptible integrity, where the great soul of the man shone forth like the lovely Pleiades on a winter night. In this "Cincinnatus of the West" resided a liberal mind, broad as his sunny acres that led far back from the river; his clearness of thought was like that of his native springs which gush in crystal clearness, leaving a path of verdure along ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... quick succession, probably not more than two minutes apart. The third appeared about eight minutes after these, and exceeded in brilliancy any of the surrounding stars. It took a direction from near β Tauri, and passing slowly towards the Pleiades, left behind it sparks like the tail of a rocket, these being visible for a few seconds after the meteor appeared to break, which it did close to the Pleiades. The fourth meteor made its appearance very near the same place as the last, and about five minutes after it. Taking the course of ...
— Journal of the Third Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage • William Edward Parry
... of their travels they arrived in a little State, which may have been Rhode Island, or may have been Connecticut, or may have been one of the Pleiades, but which at all events had two capitals. Without regard to Morse's Gazetteer, or to whatever other Gazetteer may now be in currency, we shall affirm that one of these capitals was called Slowburg and the other Fastburg. For some hundreds ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... The Pleiades and the twenty millions of suns that form our own galaxy and the Milky Way, with all their varied colours, tints, and hues of white, golden, orange, ruby, red and blue, green and grey, silver, purple and yellow, buff ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... the reredos in St. John's Church, Notting Hill, London; a terra-cotta relief called "Earthward Board" (?) is in St. Bartholomew's Hospital, London; a relief, the "Pleiades," was purchased by the Corporation of Glasgow for the Permanent Exhibition; her restoration of the "Hermes" was placed in the British Museum beside the ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... gazelle, more vigilant than the dog, and thriftier than the ant. The cup-boy is a sun rising from the dark underworld symbolised by his collar; his cheek-mole is a crumb of ambergris, his nose is a scymitar grided at the curve; his lower lip is a jujube; his teeth are the Pleiades or hailstones; his browlocks are scorpions; his young hair on the upper lip is an emerald; his side beard is a swarm of ants or a Lam ( -letter) enclosing the roses or anemones of his cheek. The cup-girl is a moon who rivals ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... military or civic honours; Rigel, on Orion's left foot, denoted honours; Sirius and Procyon, the greater and lesser Dog Stars, both implied wealth and renown. Star clusters seem to have portended loss of sight; at least we learn that the Pleiades were 'eminent stars,' but denoting accidents to the sight or blindness, while the cluster Praesepe or the Beehive in like manner threatened blindness. The cluster in Perseus does not seem to have been noticed by astrologers. The variable star ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... affection lasted for twenty years without a collision or disappointment. Death alone could thin the numbers of the noble Pleiades, taking first Louis Lambert, later Meyraux ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... baby sleep! The Pleiades bright their watches keep. The Libra shines so fair and clear, The stars are shining, ...
— The Women of the Arabs • Henry Harris Jessup
... her highest noon, The enamored moon Blushes with love, While, to listen, the red levin (With the rapid Pleiades, even, Which ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... the appearance of the egg, as seen under the microscope, and the firmament with the celestial bodies. The little clusters or constellations are unequally divided: here and there they are two and two like double stars, or sometimes in threes or fives, or in sevens, recalling the Pleiades, and the clear albuminous tracks between are like the empty ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... woman spat out as she journeyed on. At the edge of the earth he caught the tapir and killed him; yet the creature's shadow arose from the body and kept on its flight with the wife. Straightforth she leaped into the blue vast, and there she hangs, only we call her the Pleiades. The brute is the Hyades. He glares and winks with his red eye: Aldebaran. The husband is Orion, who follows the others ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... unforgiving verdict upon one of the two unfortunates than I have the heart to render. The marriage had been the wedding of a near-sighted woman and a man who could see hardly anything nearer than the Pleiades. Neither was more to blame than the other for the fault of eyesight. It was simply a ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... Dawnchild all the gods made Themselves stars for torches, and far away through all the sky followed the tracks of Night as far as he prowled abroad. And at one time Slid, with the Pleiades in his hand, came nigh to the golden ball, and at another Yoharneth-Lahai, holding Orion for a torch, but lastly Limpang Tung, bearing the morning star, found the golden ball far away under the world near to ...
— Time and the Gods • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... line, or in an enormous orbit around some centre. The idea has been put forward that it may be moving around the centre of gravity of the whole visible stellar universe. Maedler, indeed, propounded the notion that Alcyone—the chief star in the group known as the Pleiades—occupied this centre, and that everything revolved around it. He went even further to proclaim that here was the Place of the Almighty, the Mansion of the Eternal! But Maedler's ideas upon this point have ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... personality or historic event mooted in our little human world was at the same time in the planetary confidences, and that when you shook his hand at parting, he would turn to interpreting the sweet influences of the Pleiades and the mysteries of the bands that hold Orion. Coming home from an interview with Simon Newcomb, late at night I paused on the terrace at the west front of the Capitol and looked back upon the heavens widely stretching above the city. The stars glittered cold, far, and silent, but I had been with ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... singularity, and counted the number—four on the table and three others on the mantel, seven in all, the number freighted with so many religious associations. She wondered whether there were some astronomical association also. Were there seven stars in the Pleiades? ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... and the seraphim! Slave of the wheel of labor, what to him Are Plato and the swing of Pleiades? What the long reaches of the peaks of song, The rift of dawn, the reddening of the rose? Through this dread shape the suffering ages look; Time's tragedy is in that aching stoop; Through this dread shape humanity betrayed, Plundered, profaned and disinherited, Cries protest ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For • Various
... may have existed in Mexico and elsewhere, but in general, as is remarked above, the astronomical feature at solar epochs yielded to other associations. Occasional festivals occur in connection with the worship of stars (especially the morning star);[410] the Pleiades are objects of observation among some low tribes, and in some cases (Society Islands, Tahiti, Hawaii, New Zealand) the year began with the rising of these stars, but apparently no festivals are dedicated ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... built the Milky Way as a bridge so they could communicate with each other. Nyoda had taught the girls the three ways the Indians had of testing eyesight, namely, by reproducing the spots on the rabbit, counting the Pleiades, and spying out the little companion star to the one in the handle of the Big Dipper, the pair which the Arabs call the Horse and Rider, and the girls would not rest until they, too, had caught sight of the tiny point of light. And in learning to know the ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Maine Woods - Or, The Winnebagos Go Camping • Hildegard G. Frey
... ought to be about four hours right ascension, and something like plus twenty degrees declination. My figures aren't accurate, though, since I'm working purely from memory, so we'd better cover everything from Aldebaran to the Pleiades." ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... Arundhati was the wife of the great sage Vasishtha, and regarded as the pattern of conjugal excellence. She was raised to the heavens as one of the Pleiades. ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI |
