Nemesis

“ So come they at last, the Murderer and his Nemesis, to a leafy grove that all day long has rung with the joyous carolling of birds, but now, hushed and silent, is a place of gloom meet for dark and stealthy deeds. Within this place of shadow Murder creeps, seeking a place where, unseen, he may destroy, but always unconscious of the lurking shape of the Nemesis that flits ever behind him; suddenly he starts and crouches, to peer along the glimmering road, for upon the silence is the sound of a man’s light tread coming at slow, unhurried pace—the footsteps of a man who dreams.... ”

“ Yet in the very ecstasy of those sensations, his countenance became ghastly, his lips writhed, his eyes beheld with unutterable dismay the omen of his dissolution—the visible phantom of an avenging Nemesis. [14] He staggered from his throne, crying aloud in the extremity of his anguish; a sudden corruption had seized upon his body—he was being devoured by worms. ”

“ Explanation.—The fable receives this explanation. The word Nemesis manifestly signifies revenge, or retribution; for the office of this goddess consisted in interposing, like the Roman tribunes, with an “I forbid it,” in all courses of constant and perpetual felicity, so as not only to chastise haughtiness, but also to repay even innocent and moderate happiness with adversity; as if it were decreed, that none of human race should be admitted to the banquet of the gods, but for sport. ”

“ Nemesis is written in letters of flame across the starry heavens, as an atonement for the blood of nations and the degeneracy and diabolism of an ambitious, cruel, relentless, and unrestrained priesthood. ”

“ I have bought at a terrible price my conviction of the melancholy truth, that he who touches the weapons of Nemesis effectually slaughters his own peace of mind, and challenges her maledictions, from which there is no escape. ”

“ Sometimes they are joined by Nemesis, goddess of revenge, who hurries the doomed spirit over the fiery waters of the Phlegethon with her merciless whip, and sees that it follows no path but the one leading to the brazen gates of Tartarus. ”

“ I am the watchful proxy—the rightful Nemesis, of the living and the Dead! I put forth books to the world. This demon in saint's garb, and his minions, howled them down as blood-hounds do the panting slave. More bread lost to my hungry ones, more stern calling for reprisals. All men have foes. ”

“ Nemesis, the daughter of Nyx, represents that power which adjusts the balance of human affairs, by awarding to each individual the fate which his actions deserve. She rewards, humble, unacknowledged merit, punishes crime, deprives the worthless of undeserved good fortune, humiliates the proud and overbearing, and visits all evil on the wrong-doer; thus maintaining that proper balance of things, which the Greeks recognized as a necessary condition of all civilized life. ”

“ Retribution.—Nemesis is lame, but she is of colossal stature, like the gods; and sometimes, while her sword is not yet unsheathed, she stretches out her huge left arm and grasps her victim. The mighty hand is invisible, but the victim totters under the dire clutch.—George Eliot. ”

“ And though her fingers shook, she pursued and performed her task.
When she rose he thanked her; and then the devil in the man, or the Nemesis he had provoked when he took her by force from another--the Nemesis of jealousy, drove him to spoil all. "And for whose sake, madame?" he added with a jeer--"mine or M. de Tignonville's?" And with a glance between jest and earnest, he tried to read her thoughts.
She winced as if he had indeed struck her, and the hot colour fled her cheeks. "For his sake!" she said, with a shiver of pain. "That his life may be spared!" ”

“ And pointing to the lurid heaven afar,
Whence all could see, through the south windows slanting,
Crimson as blood, the beams of that Lone Star!
The Fates are just; they give us but our own;
Nemesis ripens what our hands have sown. ”

“ I will remind you that there is another Nemesis besides the just being who drives from his stolen ease the unworthy mortal who suns himself in good fortune. The Nemesis whom I will recall to-day, while angry Zeus is hurling his thunderbolts, is the other, who chastises sacrilege—Ate, the swiftest and most terrible of the Erinyes. I will invoke her wrath upon you in this hour if you do not confess the truth to me fully and entirely. ”

“ NEMESIS. But, in spite of all these joyful tidings, it must, alas! be remembered that Pœna, that just but Rhadamanthine goddess, whom we moderns ordinarily call Punishment, or Nemesis when we wish to speak of her goddess-ship, very seldom fails to catch a wicked man, though she have sometimes a lame foot of her own, and though the wicked man may possibly get a start of her. ”

“ In a year or two Nemesis brings the fool back to face the consequences of his folly—suffering from conscience and prison terror. But let a fugitive be a real wise one, with a sense of humor, and Nemesis after a blink or two of surprise at the novelty, hands him one in kind.
Copron Colphete entered Pittsburgh and emerged on the far side, a little sooty, but jaunty and smiling. ”

“ The blazing, burning light filled all the room with a glare more terrible than the lightning. He recovered his sight, and saw Nemesis standing above him, revolver in hand, and with a torch of magnesium wire blazing in horrid flames above his head. ”

“ Within the brief space of one generation, within the limit of one man's memory, vengeance has revolved full circle; and while the sleepless Nemesis points with unresting finger to the barren rock and the insulted captive, she turns with meaning smile to the borders of the Seine, where mausoleum and palace stand in significant proximity,—the one covering the dust of the first empire, the other the home of the triumphant grandson of Josephine. ”

“ XXII.—NEMESIS, OR THE VICISSITUDE OF THINGS.
EXPLAINED OF THE REVERSES OF FORTUNE.
Nemesis is represented as a goddess venerated by all, but feared by the powerful and the fortunate. She is said to be the daughter of Nox and Oceanus. ”

“ And if no one had told him the contrary, he could have persuaded himself so much better. Nemesis can seldom forge a sword for herself out of our consciences—out of the suffering we feel in the suffering we may have caused: there is rarely metal enough there to make an effective weapon. ”

“ The little weazened body with its scrawny neck rising out of the gaping rubber collar, the shiny bald head with its fringe of graying hair about the edge, the white shirt sleeves with the frayed cuffs and the skinny brown hands—a most incongruous disguise for Nemesis to take in passing a pronunciamento. ”

“ And his imagination, finding no nutriment in any creation, avenged itself by celebrating the majestic beauty of the laws of decay. The necessities of mental structure force all minds into a few categories, and where impatience of the tricks of men makes Nemesis amiable, and builds altars to the negative Deity, the inevitable recoil is to heroism or the gallantry of the private heart, which decks its immolation with glory, in the unequal combat of will against fate. ”

“ Bradley paused and followed them with his eyes until they had disappeared. Then suddenly, as he glanced round the congregation and resumed his discourse, he looked full into the eyes of the goddess Nemesis, who was regarding him quietly from a seat in the centre of the church.
Nemesis in widow’s weeds, exquisitely cut by a Parisian modiste, and with a charming black bonnet set upon her classic head. Nemesis with bold black eyes, jet black hair, and a smiling mouth. In other words, Mrs. Montmorency, seated by the side of George Craik and his father the baronet. ”

“ Happily, Nemesis does not sleep this time in the face of such provocation as is given her by these atrociously inhuman human beings. It is a satisfaction to record that something more than a half dozen of them have been dealt with as promptly and as mercilessly as they deserve. ”

“ After all those brave victories of man over the first chaos, organic and inorganic, whose effect upon his phantasms has been indicated; after fire had slain its thousands, and iron its tens of thousands of his demons, and the rough artisan become a Nemesis with his rudder and wheel pursuing the hosts of darkness back into Night and Invisibility; still stood the grim fact of manyformed pain and evil in the world, still defying the ascending purposes of mankind. ”

“ The devil always has an imp or two in every house, and my imps are getting lively. The good lady, the dear, kind lady, the sweet, excellent lady, Nemesis, whom alone I adore, has fixed her wooden eye upon me. I fall prone; spare me, Mother Nemesis! But catch her!
I must now go to bed; for I have had a whoreson influenza cold, and have to lie down all day, and get up only to meals and the delights, June delights, of business correspondence. ”

“ Oh, I shall go wild, I shall go wild," persisted the woman, half frantic at the intimation which came to her that a corpse was not only in her place, but in the very room where she slept, and that this fiend who was pursuing her—this Nemesis, who struck her pride, her ambition, her desires, her very life, at every move she made, had actually sent an undertaker there to measure the dead body. ”

“ For the terrors of the foe,
And it seems to them the shadow of a pall.
A Nemesis concealed
In the shades of wold and field,
Breathes of vengeance to the foemen as they run;
[Pg 106] They are rushing in despair,
But there’s carnage everywhere,
And they know not what to welcome or to shun.
Ten thousand of their slain
Strew the plain;
The shrieks from ten thousand more arise;
And the ghosts
From their hosts
Wail despairingly and vain,
In their pain,
For a welcome to the skies.
At morning, in their pride,
Side by side,
They went forth in their might
To the fight ”

“ In the tragedians Nemesis appears chiefly as the avenger of crime and the punisher of arrogance, and as such is akin to Ate and the Erinyes. She was sometimes called Adrasteia, probably meaning “one from whom there is no escape” ”

“ But though Nemesis, in her original character, was the distributor of rewards as well as punishments, the world was so full of sin, that she found but little occupation in her first capacity, and hence became finally regarded as the avenging goddess only. ”

“ My wardmate had a double grip upon the attendant's throat. Thus was formed a chain with a weak, if not a missing, link in the middle. Picture, if you will, an insane man being choked by a supposedly sane one, and he in turn being choked by a temporarily sane insane friend of the assaulted one, and you will have Nemesis as nearly in a nutshell as any mere rhetorician has yet been able to put her. ”

“ It was farther below the earth than the earth is below the sky, and was surrounded by three brazen walls, and by Phlegethon, the river of Fire. The only entrance was through a high tower, with gates which not even the gods could open, and guarded by the three-headed dog Cerberus, which never slept; and the air was three times darker than the darkest midnight, lighted only by the terrible flames of Phlegethon. The jailers were Nemesis and the Furies. Nemesis is the great stern power who never allows the guilty to escape from their just punishment, nor the good to lose their just reward. ”

“ No one spoke. Each gazed at the others, avoiding his proximity as they might have avoided contact with a man stricken with pestilence. He thought he heard a whispered word—"Nemesis!"—but it came from as remote distance as might have come a dream voice.
Once more he made his request, but now it was in the manner of one who demands. A student pointed wordlessly, and he gathered from the gesture that the way was open to him. As he grasped the knob, the students with one accord melted away from that spot, unhallowed by its associations with robbery of the grave. ”

“ We all remember the king who threw his signet-ring into the sea, that he might in his too happy fortunes avert this suspected presence; we remember, too, the apprehension of the Chorus in the "Seven against Thebes," looking forward from the noontide prosperity of the Theban king to some coming catastrophe.
But it is not without us that this Nemesis waits; she is but another name for the fearful possibility which lurks in every human will, of treachery to itself. ”

“ Let them be taught those dogmas which inform us that the souls of effeminate and pusillanimous men transmigrate into female bodies; those of murderers into bodies of wild beasts; those of licentious men into bodies of wild boars and hogs; those of fickle and inconstant men into bodies of birds; those of idle, ignorant and silly men into bodies of fishes. The just Nemesis regulates those pains in the future life conjointly with the gods of the earth, avengers of the crimes they have witnessed. ”

“ NEMESIS, the personification of divine justice. This is the only sense in which the word is used in Homer, while Hesiod (Theog. 223) makes Nemesis a goddess, the daughter of Night (some, however, regard the passage as an interpolation) ; she appears in a still more concrete form in a fragment of the Cypria. The word Nemesis originally meant the distributor (Gr. νέμειν) of fortune, whether good or bad, in due proportion to each man according to his deserts ”

“ Fortunately for our tale and its readers, Nemesis, in dealing out death and meting vengeance, has necessarily allied herself with Justice. The fallen deserved their fate—all, save the teamsters of the caravan, and those Texans who on Pecan Creek succumbed to the Comanche spears. ”

“ All this is191 the work of Nemesis, the punisher of those who have lifted up their hearts in insufferable pride and arrogance.
It is not alone in the dramatized history of Herodotus that we are able to trace the moral effects of the Persian wars in bringing into the foreground of the Greek consciousness the conception of Nemesis as the vindicator of the moral government of the world. ”

“ Nemesis is one of the grim realities not sufficiently taken into account in the great game of life. Leaden-footed she may be, and often is, but that is only her merciful way of giving the sinner time to repent. ”

“ Viewed as a study in character the play leaves in us only an intense craving for Nemesis: when we turn to consider the plot, this presents to us the world of history transformed into an intricate design of which the recurrent pattern is Nemesis. ”