Venus (mythology)

“ Ans. She was educated and adorned by the Horæ or Hours, who carried her to heaven as soon she became of age. All the gods were astonished at the beauty of Venus, and many demanded her in marriage; but Jupiter betrothed her to Vulcan, an ugly and deformed divinity.
Ques. How is Venus represented?
Ans. Sometimes as a young virgin rising from the sea, or riding on the waves in a shell, while Cupids, Nereids and Dolphins are sporting around her—again, she is pictured as traversing the heavens in an ivory chariot drawn by doves. ”

“ It were endless to enumerate the variety of attitudes in which Venus is represented on antique gems and medals; sometimes she is clothed in purple, glittering with diamonds, her head crowned with myrtle intermixed with roses, and drawn in her car of ivory by swans, doves, or sparrows: at other times she is represented standing with the Graces attending her, and in all positions Cupid is her companion. In general she has one of the prettiest, as Minerva has sometimes one of the handsomest faces that can be conceived. ”

“ She was soon after carried to heaven, where all the gods admired her beauty, and all the goddesses became jealous of her personal charms. Jupiter even attempted to gain her affections, but Venus refused, and the god, to fulfil her destiny, gave her in marriage to Vulcan, the most ugly and deformed of the Gods. ”

“ She thereupon gave way to a long wail of lamentation and set off a-wandering over the wide world in search of her lost love, till she came to the palace of Venus, her arch-enemy, who seized on her person and made her her slave, subjecting her to a series of services, all of which she accomplished to the letter, so that Venus was obliged to relent and consent that, in the presence of all the gods of Olympus, Cupid and she should be united in immortal wedlock. It is the story of the trials of the soul to achieve immortality. See “Stories from the Greek Mythology,” by the Editor. ”

“ Jupiter referred them to Paris, who then led a shepherd's life on Mount Ida. Before him the goddesses appeared. Juno offered him [81] empire or power, Minerva wisdom, and Venus promised him the possession of the most beautiful woman in the world. Fatally for himself and family, the shepherd, more susceptible of love than of ambition or virtue, decided the contest in favor of Venus.
The sacrifices usually offered to Venus, were white goats and swine, with libations of wine, milk and honey. The victims were crowned with flowers, or wreaths of myrtle, the rose and myrtle being sacred to Venus. ”

“ In Rome it had a more familiar, wicked, and dry appearance; it was not suited to the severe and exact apprehensions of the Romans, and their strict morals were violated by it, and sustained a deep injury, little analagous to its effect upon the Greeks, who turned all things—superstition, prejudice, murder, madness—to beauty."
Shelley.
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V E N U S. ———
Venus, one of the most celebrated deities of the ancients, was the goddess of beauty, the mother of love, the queen of laughter, the mistress of the graces, and the patroness of pleasure. Some mythologists speak of more than one. ”

“ Even the light of the full moon silvering the tree tops does not exercise greater enchantment over the mind of the contemplative observer. In either of her rôles, as morning or as evening star, Venus has no rival. No fixed star can for an instant bear comparison with her. What she lacks in vivacity of light—none of the planets twinkles, as do all of the true stars—is more than compensated by the imposing size of [Pg 49] her gleaming disk and the striking beauty of her clear lamplike rays. ”

“ As I am about to turn aside into one of the green walks I see Venus sitting before me on a stone bench, not the beautiful woman of marble, but the goddess of love herself with warm blood and throbbing pulses. She has actually come to life for me, like the statue that began to breathe for her creator. Indeed, the miracle is only half completed. Her white hair seems still to be of stone, and her white gown shimmers like moonlight, or is it satin? ”

“ Now I could appreciate the worth of a broad, poetical, powerful interpretation, or rather it was to this that those epithets were conventionally applied, but only as we give the names of Mars, Venus, Saturn to planets which have no place in classical mythology. We feel in one world, we think, we give names to things in another; between the two we can establish a certain correspondence, but not bridge the interval. ”

“ We do not say that there is any caprice in the movements of Venus, as known to those who diligently consult their almanacs. The movements of the lovely planet are there prescribed with a prosaic detail hardly in harmony with the character usually ascribed to the Goddess of Love. But to those who do not devote particular attention to the stars, the very unexpectedness of its appearance is one of its greatest charms. Venus has not been noticed, not been thought of, for many months. ”

“ We spent an hour there, but, except that her divine beauty filled and satisfied my eye, as nothing else ever did, and that the statue is as unlike a thing to the casts one sees of it as one thing could well be unlike another, I made no criticism. There is an atmosphere of fame and circumstantial interest about the Venus, which bewilders the fancy almost as much as her loveliness does the eye. She has been gazed upon and admired by troops of pilgrims, each of whom it were worth half a life to have met at her pedestal. ”

“ Venus is so brilliant that perhaps you will hardly credit me when I tell you that she has no more light of her own than has a stone or a handful of earth, or a button. Is it possible that this is the case, you will say, for as we see the planet so exquisitely beautiful, how can she be merely a huge stone high up in the heavens? The fact is that Venus shines by light not her own, but by light which falls upon her from the sun. She is lighted up just as the moon, or just as our own earth is lighted. ”

“ And as Venus glowed with increasing splendor in the serene evenings of June, she continued to be mistaken for some petty artificial light instead of the magnificent world that she was, sparkling out there in the sunshine like a globe of burnished silver. Yet Venus as an evening star is not so rare a phenomenon that people of intelligence should be surprised at it. ”

“ Venus. I am Venus! I have many names in the outer world! It is I who rule the God of Love, I sway the hearts of all true lovers; in your world I have caused you poor mortals to burn for me—aye, and with an unconsuming, unquenchable fire! ”

“ While these clouds render the planet surprisingly lustrous to our eyes, they must, of course, keep the globe beneath them most of the time in shadow. It is a source of keen regret that the surface of Venus can not be seen as clearly as that of Mars, for, a priori, there is rather more reason to regard Venus as possibly an inhabited world than any other of the Earth's sister planets, not excepting Mars. ”

“ Venus. Hot ’un! You speak in enigmas? You are fully aware why I come hither?
Alph. I don’t. You are the statue out of them gardens, ain’t you?
Venus. I am no statue—I am Venus, I tell you! I have lain in a long, long trance, how long I know not, in my own palace in the Isle of Cyprus. How long I should have lain in that trance I know not had it not been for thou, most lovely mortal!
Alph. (Aside.) She knows me.
Venus. Yes; it was the touch of your kind mortal hand that has given me power to animate this marble shell!
Alph. (Aside.) She says she’s a shell. ”

“ Such, in those clear skies, is their glittering effulgence, that the visiter from other latitudes would scarce suppose them to be the same luminaries that sparkle in their own heavens. Venus—the bright and beautiful divinity of love—appears of far greater magnitude than here,—shining with a much greater intensity of brightness—so strong indeed as to cast a shadow from the trees. ”

“ Not Mars, for that planet was far in the heavens. But Venus!—misnamed for the Goddess of Love. It was Venus, and she alone, who by any stretch of the imagination could be threatening Earth. [189]
What did it mean? They had no answer. The ship was the only answer to that. Would there be more?—could we meet them?—defeat them? And again the wise men of the world refused to hazard a guess.
But they told what they knew; that Venus was past her eastern elongation, was approaching the earth. ”

“ I think it to be in the highest degree unlikely that the atmosphere of Venus should chance to suit us in the requisite particulars, and therefore I think there is not much likelihood that Venus is inhabited by any men, women, or children resembling those on this earth. ”

“ Of all the planets lovely Venus is the one that is best known and most admired. It far exceeds all the other planets in brilliancy and beauty when as an evening star it hangs in gracious silvery softness above the sun, which has just passed below the horizon; and it is not less surpassing in loveliness when as a morning star it comes into view shortly before the sun rises, its glowing face still silvery and bright, but yet tinged with the rosy flush of the eastern morning sky. ”

“ I saw an amphitheatre, with a wide sweep of marble seat around it, enclosing a grassy space, where, doubtless, the Medici may have witnessed splendid spectacles.
June 11th.—I paid another visit to the Uffizi gallery this morning, and found that the Venus is one of the things the charm of which does not diminish on better acquaintance. The world has not grown weary of her in all these ages; and mortal man may look on her with new delight from infancy to old age, and keep the memory of her, I should imagine, as one of the treasures of spiritual existence hereafter. ”

“ Venus comes forth from the sea to visit the world—as befits a divinity who loves men—alone and naked.—She prefers the earth to Olympus, and has more men than gods for lovers; she does not envelop herself in the languorous veils of mysticism; she stands, her dauphin behind her, her foot upon her shell of mother-of-pearl; the sun strikes upon her gleaming breast, and with her white hand, she holds in the air the wavy masses of her lovely hair, in which old father Ocean has scattered his most perfect pearls.—You can see her ”

“ Venus's boy heard these words, and rejoined, ":Your arrows may strike all things else, Apollo, but mine shall strike you.:" So saying, he took his stand on a rock of Parnassus, and drew from his quiver two arrows of different workmanship, one to excite love, the other to repel it. ”

“ I have told how at last a new Venus was born in my imagination out of gas lamps and the twilight, a Venus with a cockney accent and dark eyes shining out of the dusk, a Venus who was a warm, passion-stirring atmosphere rather than incarnate in a body. ”

“ Venus, a dozen foreign departments of the Centennial, ancient garrets and modern household art stores, all tumbled together in hopeless confusion, and over all an emerald, golden halo that grew more and more concentrated till it burst into gloom as one gigantic sunflower, which, suddenly changing into the full moon just rising above the top of a neighboring roof, put an end to his chaotic dreams. ”

“ The beauty of the Venus is only in the limbs and body. It is a faultless, and withal, modest representation of the flesh and blood beauty of a woman. The Apollo is all this, and has a soul. I have seen women that approached the Venus in form, and had finer faces—I never saw a man that was a shadow of the Apollo in either. ”

“ Venus, the Roman goddess of love, of wedded love, and of beauty (originally of the spring) , and at length identified with the Greek Aphrodité (q. v.) ; she was regarded as the tutelary goddess of Rome, and had a temple to her honour in the Forum.
Venus, an interior planet of the solar system, revolving in an orbit outside that of Mercury and within that of the earth, nearly as large as the latter; is 67 millions of miles from the sun, round which it revolves in 224 days, while it takes 231⁄4 hours to rotate on its own axis ”

“ Venus is the goddess of beauty, born of the ocean spray. When the tritons and nymphs who live in the sea beheld her, they loved her for her beauty, and the waves and gentle breezes bore her to Olympus.
Venus is attended by three maidens called the Graces, who give to the beauty of the goddess a charm which makes her lovely to all.
When she came to Olympus, all the gods loved her, but she proudly rejected the eager suitors. ”

“ Again she wandered on and on, helpless and despairing, till one of the servants of Venus met her and knew her. Seizing Psyche by the hair, she dragged her into the presence of the terribly beautiful goddess, who broke into a laugh of cruel triumph when she found her rival in her power. Venus delivered her over to her torturers, Anguish and Sorrow. They, having scourged and tormented her, brought her again before Venus, who flew at her like a fury, as if she would tear her limb from limb.
“You ugly slave!” said Venus, as soon as she recovered breath; “you want a lover, do you? ”

“ Neptune prefigures this island, the confessed ruler of the waves and the precise spot of the globe vindicated, as we have seen, by two great poets from the reign of Dulness. Venus is here understood in her noblest character, as the Alma Venus of Lucretius's invocation, as the Power of Love and the Beautiful in the Universe. The Goddess of Wisdom speaks for herself. Against them a heterogeneous rabble of monsters direct their artillery, under a dog-headed barking protagonist, (what a chosen symbol of an impudent, wide-mouthed, yelping Bayes!) ”