Asleep in lap of legends old.
The Tree of Life, according to some of the old rabbinical legends, lifted its branches, by an indwelling motion, high above impure hands that were stretched to touch them; and until our hands are cleansed through faith in Jesus Christ, its richest fruit hangs unreachable, golden above our heads. The fullness of the life of heaven is only granted to those who, drawing near Jesus Christ by faith on earth, have thereby cleansed themselves from all filthiness of the flesh and spirit.--_Alex. McLaren._
In order to bear our afflictions with patience, it is very useful to read the lives and legends of the saints who endured great torments for Jesus Christ.--ST. TERESA.
I had rather believe all the fables in the legends and the Talmud and the Alcoran, than that this universal frame is without a mind.
I had rather believe all the fables in the legends, the Talmud, and the Koran, than that this universal frame is without a mind.
Right as a trivet.
I hope the time will come when the subterranean area of human religion will be rendered more and more accessible, ... and that the Science of Religion, which at present is but a desire and a seed, will in time become a fulfilment, a plenteous harvest. When that time of harvest has come, when the deepest foundations of all the religions of the world have been laid free and restored, who knows but that those very foundations may serve once more, like the catacombs, or like the crypts beneath our old cathedrals, as a place of refuge for those who, to whatever creed they may belong, long for something better, purer, older, and truer than what they can find in the statutable sacrifices, services, and sermons of the days in which their lot on earth has been cast; some who have learnt to put away childish things, call them genealogies, legends, miracles, or oracles, but who cannot part with the childlike faith of their heart. Each believer may bring down with him into that quiet crypt what he values most, his own pearl of great price--the Hindu, his innate disbelief in this world, his unhesitating belief in another world; the Buddhist, his perception of an eternal law, his submission to it, his gentleness, his pity; the Mohammedan, if nothing else, his sobriety; the Jew, his clinging through good and evil days to the one God, who loveth righteousness and whose name is 'I am'; the Christian, that which is better than all, if those who doubt it would only try it--our love of God, call Him what you like, the infinite, the invisible, the immortal, the father, the highest Self, above all, and through all, and in all, manifested in our love of man, our love of the living, our love of the dead, our living and undying love.
Most legends have their basis in facts. -- Kirk, "And The Children Shall Lead", stardate 5029.5
Once there lived a village of creatures along the bottom of a great crystal river. Each creature in its own manner clung tightly to the twigs and rocks of the river bottom, for clinging was their way of life, and resisting the current what each had learned from birth. But one creature said at last, "I trust that the current knows where it is going. I shall let go, and let it take me where it will. Clinging, I shall die of boredom." The other creatures laughed and said, "Fool! Let go, and that current you worship will throw you tumbled and smashed across the rocks, and you will die quicker than boredom!" But the one heeded them not, and taking a breath did let go, and at once was tumbled and smashed by the current across the rocks. Yet, in time, as the creature refused to cling again, the current lifted him free from the bottom, and he was bruised and hurt no more. And the creatures downstream, to whom he was a stranger, cried, "See a miracle! A creature like ourselves, yet he flies! See the Messiah, come to save us all!" And the one carried in the current said, "I am no more Messiah than you. The river delight to lift us free, if only we dare let go. Our true work is this voyage, this adventure. But they cried the more, "Saviour!" all the while clinging to the rocks, making legends of a Saviour. -- Richard Bach
We are stronger than our skin of flesh and metal, for we carry and share a spectrum of suns and lands that lends us legends as we craft our immortality and interweave our destinies of water and air, leaving shadows that gather color of their own, until they outshine the substance that cast them.
We might say that, for ten centuries, the cess-pool has been the disease of Paris. The sewer is the blemish which Paris has in her blood. The popular instinct has never been deceived in it. The occupation of sewermen was formerly almost as perilous, and almost as repugnant to the people, as the occupation of knacker, which was so long held in horror and handed over to the executioner. High wages were necessary to induce a mason to disappear in that fetid mine; the ladder of the cess-pool cleaner hesitated to plunge into it; it was said, in proverbial form: "to descend into the sewer is to enter the grave;" and all sorts of hideous legends, as we have said, covered this colossal sink with terror; a dread sink-hole which bears the traces of the revolutions of the globe as of the revolutions of man, and where are to be found vestiges of all cataclysms from the shells of the Deluge to the rag of Marat.
Some persons, however, were still curious, surmising that in all this there was probably no fabulous treasure of the legends, but some fine windfall of a more serious and palpable sort than the devil's bank-bills, and that the road-mender had half discovered the secret. The most "puzzled" were the school-master and Thenardier, the proprietor of the tavern, who was everybody's friend, and had not disdained to ally himself with Boulatruelle.
On another occasion, the centenarian was telling stories. She said that in her youth the Bernardine monks were every whit as good as the mousquetaires. It was a century which spoke through her, but it was the eighteenth century. She told about the custom of the four wines, which existed before the Revolution in Champagne and Bourgogne. When a great personage, a marshal of France, a prince, a duke, and a peer, traversed a town in Burgundy or Champagne, the city fathers came out to harangue him and presented him with four silver gondolas into which they had poured four different sorts of wine. On the first goblet this inscription could be read, monkey wine; on the second, lion wine; on the third, sheep wine; on the fourth, hog wine. These four legends express the four stages descended by the drunkard; the first, intoxication, which enlivens; the second, that which irritates; the third, that which dulls; and the fourth, that which brutalizes.
"Look round you then." Dantes rose and looked forward, when he saw rise within a hundred yards of him the black and frowning rock on which stands the Chateau d'If. This gloomy fortress, which has for more than three hundred years furnished food for so many wild legends, seemed to Dantes like a scaffold to a malefactor.
Him, then, Eurymachus thus answer'd rough The son of Polybus. Hence to thy house, Thou hoary dotard! there, prophetic, teach Thy children to escape woes else to come. Birds num'rous flutter in the beams of day, Not all predictive. Death, far hence remote Hath found Ulysses, and I would to heav'n That, where he died, thyself had perish'd too. Thou hadst not then run o'er with prophecy As now, nor provocation to the wrath Giv'n of Telemachus, in hope to win, Perchance, for thine some favour at his hands. But I to _thee_ foretell, skilled as thou art In legends old, (nor shall my threat be vain) That if by artifice thou move to wrath A younger than thyself, no matter whom, Woe first the heavier on himself shall fall, Nor shalt thou profit him by thy attempt, And we will charge thee also with a mulct, Which thou shalt pay with difficulty, and bear The burthen of it with an aching heart.
Despite this destitution, the soldiers and officers went on living just as usual. Despite their pale swollen faces and tattered uniforms, the hussars formed line for roll call, kept things in order, groomed their horses, polished their arms, brought in straw from the thatched roofs in place of fodder, and sat down to dine round the caldrons from which they rose up hungry, joking about their nasty food and their hunger. As usual, in their spare time, they lit bonfires, steamed themselves before them naked; smoked, picked out and baked sprouting rotten potatoes, told and listened to stories of Potemkin's and Suvorov's campaigns, or to legends of Alesha the Sly, or the priest's laborer Mikolka.
The gallant Perseus, a son of Jupiter, was the first whaleman; and to the eternal honour of our calling be it said, that the first whale attacked by our brotherhood was not killed with any sordid intent. Those were the knightly days of our profession, when we only bore arms to succor the distressed, and not to fill men's lamp-feeders. Every one knows the fine story of Perseus and Andromeda; how the lovely Andromeda, the daughter of a king, was tied to a rock on the sea-coast, and as Leviathan was in the very act of carrying her off, Perseus, the prince of whalemen, intrepidly advancing, harpooned the monster, and delivered and married the maid. It was an admirable artistic exploit, rarely achieved by the best harpooneers of the present day; inasmuch as this Leviathan was slain at the very first dart. And let no man doubt this Arkite story; for in the ancient Joppa, now Jaffa, on the Syrian coast, in one of the Pagan temples, there stood for many ages the vast skeleton of a whale, which the city's legends and all the inhabitants asserted to be the identical bones of the monster that Perseus slew. When the Romans took Joppa, the same skeleton was carried to Italy in triumph. What seems most singular and suggestively important in this story, is this: it was from Joppa that Jonah set sail.
Towards midnight, a man was prowling about, or rather, climbing in the direction of the hollow road of Ohain. To all appearance he was one of those whom we have just described,--neither English nor French, neither peasant nor soldier, less a man than a ghoul attracted by the scent of the dead bodies having theft for his victory, and come to rifle Waterloo. He was clad in a blouse that was something like a great coat; he was uneasy and audacious; he walked forwards and gazed behind him. Who was this man? The night probably knew more of him than the day. He had no sack, but evidently he had large pockets under his coat. From time to time he halted, scrutinized the plain around him as though to see whether he were observed, bent over abruptly, disturbed something silent and motionless on the ground, then rose and fled. His sliding motion, his attitudes, his mysterious and rapid gestures, caused him to resemble those twilight larvae which haunt ruins, and which ancient Norman legends call the Alleurs.
It is not necessary to dwell at any length on the monkish legends and the hymns to the Virgin Mary which were abundantly produced during the 13th century, and which, though destitute of all literary merit, were of use as exercises in the infancy of the language. The first lyrical writer of Holland was John I., duke of Brabant, who practised the _minnelied_ with success, but whose songs are only known to us through a Swabian version of a few of them. In 1544 the earliest collection of Dutch folk-songs saw the light, and in this volume one or two romances of the 14th century are preserved, of which _Het Daghet in den Oosten_ is the best known. Almost the earliest fragment of Dutch popular poetry, but of later time, is an historical ballad describing the murder of Count Floris V. in 1296. A very curious collection of mystical medieval hymns by Sister Hadewych, a nun of Brabant, was first printed in 1875 by Heremans and Ledeganck. Entry: DUTCH
ELLA (d. 867), king of the Northumbrians, became king about 862 on the deposition of Osbert, although he was not of royal birth. Afterwards he became reconciled with Osbert, and together they attacked the Danes, who had invaded Northumbria, and drove them into York. Rallying, however, the Danes defeated the Northumbrians, and in the encounter both Ella and Osbert were slain. In certain legends Ella is represented as having brought about the Danish invasion of Northumbria by cruel and unjust actions. Entry: ELLA
CALLISTHENES (_c._ 360-328 B.C.), of Olynthus, Greek historian, a relative and pupil of Aristotle, through whose recommendation he was appointed to attend Alexander the Great in his Asiatic expedition. He censured Alexander's adoption of oriental customs, inveighing especially against the servile ceremony of adoration. Having thereby greatly offended the king, he was accused of being privy to a treasonable conspiracy and thrown into prison, where he died from torture or disease. His melancholy end was commemorated in a special treatise ([Greek: Kallisthenaes ae peri penthous]) by his friend Theophrastus, whose acquaintance he made during a visit to Athens. Callisthenes wrote an account of Alexander's expedition, a history of Greece from the peace of Antalcidas (387) to the Phocian war (357), a history of the Phocian war and other works, all of which have perished. The romantic life of Alexander, the basis of all the Alexander legends of the middle ages, originated during the time of the Ptolemies, but in its present form belongs to the 3rd century A.D. Its author is usually known as pseudo-Callisthenes, although, in the Latin translation by Julius Valerius Alexander Polemius (beginning of the 4th century) it is ascribed to a certain Aesopus; Aristotle, Antisthenes, Onesicritus and Arrian have also been credited with the authorship. There are also Syrian, Armenian and Slavonic versions, in addition to four Greek versions (two in prose and two in verse) in the middle ages (see Krumbacher, _Geschichte der byzantinischen Litteratur_, 1897, p. 849). Valerius's translation was completely superseded by that of Leo, arch-priest of Naples in the 10th century, the so-called _Historia de Preliis_. Entry: CALLISTHENES
The legends agree in locating the rise of the worship of the Great Mother in Asia Minor, in the region of loosely defined geographical limits which comprised the Phrygian empire of prehistoric times, and was more extensive than the Roman province of Phrygia (Diod. Sic. iii. 58; Paus. vii. 17; Arnob. v. 5; Firm. Mat. _De error._, 3; Ovid, _Fasti_, iv. 223 ff.; Sallust. Phil. _De diis et mundo_, 4; Jul. _Or._ v. 165 ff.). Her best-known early seats of worship were Mt. Ida, Mt. Sipylus, Cyzicus, Sardis and Pessinus, the last-named city, in Galatia near the borders of Roman Phrygia, finally becoming the strongest centre of the cult. She was known to the Romans and Greeks as essentially Phrygian, and all Phrygia was spoken of as sacred to her (Schol. Apollon. Rhod. _Argonautica_, i. 1126). It is probable, however, that the Phrygian race, which invaded Asia Minor from the north in the 9th century B.C., found a great nature goddess already universally worshipped there, and blended her with a deity of their own. The Asiatic-Phrygian worship thus evolved was further modified by contact with the Syrians and Phoenicians, so that it acquired strong Semitic characteristics. The Great Mother known to the Greeks and Romans was thus merely the Phrygian form of the nature deity of all Asia Minor. Entry: GREAT
The flourishing period of English miracle-plays begins with the practice of their performance by trading-companies in the towns, though these bodies were by no means possessed of any special privileges for the purpose. Of this practice Chester is said to have set the example (1268-1276); it was followed in the course of the 13th and 14th centuries by many other towns, while in yet others traces of such performances are not to be found till the 15th, or even the 16th. These towns with their neighbourhoods include, starting from East Anglia, where the religious drama was particularly at home, Wymondham, Norwich, Sleaford, Lincoln, Leeds, Wakefield, Beverley, York, Newcastle-on-Tyne, with a deviation across the border to Edinburgh and Aberdeen. In the north-west they are found at Kendal, Lancaster, Preston, Chester; whence they may be supposed to have migrated to Dublin. In the west they are noticeable at Shrewsbury, Worcester and Tewkesbury; in the Midlands at Coventry and Leicester; in the east at Cambridge and Bassingbourne, Heybridge and Manningtree; to which places have to be added Reading, Winchester, Canterbury, Bethesda and London, in which last the performers were the parish-clerks. Four collections, in addition to some single examples of such plays, have come down to us, the _York_ plays, the so-called _Towneley_ plays, which were probably acted at the fairs of Widkirk, near Wakefield, and those bearing the names of _Chester_ and of _Coventry_. Their dates, in the forms in which they have come down to us, are more or less uncertain; that of the _York_ may on the whole be concluded to be earlier than that of the _Towneley_, which were probably put together about the middle of the 14th century; the _Chester_ may be ascribed to the close of the 14th or the earlier part of the 15th; the body of the _Coventry_ probably belongs to the 15th or 16th. Many of the individual plays in these collections were doubtless founded on French originals; others are taken direct from Scripture, from the apocryphal gospels, or from the legends of the saints. Their characteristic feature is the combination of a whole series of plays into one _collective_ whole, exhibiting the entire course of Bible history from the creation to the day of judgment. For this combination it is unnecessary to suppose that they were generally indebted to foreign examples, though there are several remarkable coincidences between the Chester plays and the French _Mystère du vieil testament_. Indeed, the oldest of the series--the _York_ plays--exhibits a fairly close parallel to the scheme of the _Cursor mundi_, an epic poem of Northumbrian origin, which early in the 14th century had set an example of treatment that unmistakably influenced the collective mysteries as a whole. Among the isolated plays of the same type which have come down to us may be mentioned _The Harrowing of Hell_ (the Saviour's descent into hell), an East-Midland production which professes to tell of "a strif of Jesu and of Satan" and is probably the earliest dramatic, or all but dramatic, work in English that has been preserved; and several belonging to a series known as the _Digby Mysteries_, including _Parfre's Candlemas Day_ (the massacre of the Innocents), and the very interesting miracle of _Mary Magdalene_. Of the so-called "Paternoster" and "Creed" plays (which exhibit the miraculous powers of portions of the Church service) no example remains, though of some we have an account; the Croxton _Play of the Sacrament_, the MS. of which is preserved at Dublin, and which seems to date from the latter half of the 15th century, exhibits the triumph of the holy wafer over wicked Jewish wiles. Entry: 10
13. The _Phoenissae_ was brought out, with the _Oenomaus_ and the _Chrysippus_, in 411 B.C., the year in which the recall of Alcibiades was decreed by the army at Samos, and, after the fall of the Four Hundred, ratified by the Assembly at Athens (Thuc. viii. 81, 97). The dialogue between Iocaste and Polynices on the griefs of banishment ([Greek: ti to steresthai patridos], v. 388 f.) has a certain emphasis which certainly looks like an allusion to the pardon of the famous exile. The subject of the play is the same as that of the Aeschylean _Seven against Thebes_--the war of succession in which Argos supported Polynices against his brother Eteocles. The Phoenician maidens who form the chorus are imagined to have been on their way from Tyre to Delphi, where they were destined for service in the temple, when they were detained at Thebes by the outbreak of the war--a device which affords a contrast to the Aeschylean chorus of Theban elders, and which has also a certain fitness in view of the legends connecting Thebes with Phoenicia. But Euripides has hardly been successful in the rivalry--which he has even pointed by direct allusions--with Aeschylus. The _Phoenissae_ is full of brilliant passages, but it is rather a series of effective scenes than an impressive drama. Entry: 13
Isaac is by general consent of the Christian church taken as a representative of the unobtrusive, restful, piously contemplative type of human character. By later Judaism, which fixed its attention chiefly on the altar scene, he was regarded as the pattern and prototype of all martyrs. The Mahommedan legends regarding him are curious, but trifling. Entry: ISAAC
HARZ MOUNTAINS (also spelt HARTZ, Ger. _Harzgebirge_, anc. _Silva Hercynia_), the most northerly mountain-system of Germany, situated between the rivers Weser and Elbe, occupy an area of 784 sq. m., of which 455 belong to Prussia, 286 to Brunswick and 43 to Anhalt. Their greatest length extends in a S.E. and N.W. direction for 57 m., and their maximum breadth is about 20 m. The group is made up of an irregular series of terraced plateaus, rising here and there into rounded summits, and intersected in various directions by narrow, deep valleys. The north-western and higher part of the mass is called the Ober or Upper Harz; the south-eastern and more extensive part, the Unter or Lower Harz; while the N.W. and S.W. slopes of the Upper Harz form the Vorharz. The Brocken group, which divides the Upper and Lower Harz, is generally regarded as belonging to the first. The highest summits of the Upper Harz are the Brocken (3747 ft.), the Heinrichshöhe (3425 ft.), the Königsberg (3376 ft.) and the Wurmberg (3176 ft.); of the Lower Harz, the Josephshöhe in the Auerberg group and the Viktorhöhe in the Ramberg, each 1887 ft. Of these the Brocken (q.v.) is celebrated for the legends connected with it, immortalized in Goethe's _Faust_. Streams are numerous, but all small. While rendered extensively useful, by various skilful artifices, in working the numerous mines of the district, at other parts of their course they present the most picturesque scenery in the Harz. Perhaps the finest valley is the rocky Bodethal, with the Rosstrappe, the Hexentanzplatz, the Baumannshöhle and the Bielshöhle. Entry: HARZ
Besides the scholastic efforts of the monks, which in course of time so greatly changed these old legends, there was another class of men who had no little influence on the form and matter of Welsh, and consequently of European, romance. These were the Welsh jongleurs--the professional story-tellers, against whom the bards proper nursed a deadly hatred because, presumably, their tales drew larger audiences and won greater rewards than the _awdlau_ of the poets. There is little doubt that this order existed in Wales at a very early period, being quite a natural evolution of the older poet who sang in comparatively free metres of the deeds of the great dead. It is these men who invented the term _Mabinogi_, which is supposed to mean a "tale for young people"; but whatever the word may mean, the fact that they were the stock-in-trade of the professional story-teller will explain a good many of their structural peculiarities. Entry: 3
When true heraldry begins in Western Europe nothing is more remarkable than the suddenness of its development, once the idea of hereditary armorial symbols was taken by the nobles and knights. Its earliest examples are probably still to be discovered by research, but certain notes may be made which narrow the dates between which we must seek its origin. The older writers on heraldry, lacking exact archaeology, were wont to carry back the beginnings to the dark ages, even if they lacked the assurance of those who distributed blazons among the angelic host before the Creation. Even in our own times old misconceptions give ground slowly. Georg Ruexner's _Thurnier Buch_ of 1522 is still cited for its evidence of the tournament laws of Henry the Fowler, by which those who would contend in tournaments were forced to show four generations of arms-bearing ancestors. Yet modern criticism has shattered the elaborated fiction of Ruexner. In England many legends survive of arms borne by the Conqueror and his companions. But nothing is more certain than that neither armorial banners nor shields of arms were borne on either side at Hastings. The famous record of the Bayeux tapestry shows shields which in some cases suggest rudely devised armorial bearings, but in no case can a shield be identified as one which is recognized in the generations after the Conquest. So far is the idea of personal arms from the artist, that the same warrior, seen in different parts of the tapestry's history, has his shield with differing devices. A generation later, Anna Comnena, the daughter of the Byzantine emperor, describing the shields of the French knights who came to Constantinople, tells us that their polished faces were plain. Entry: HERALDRY