Goddess

“ And now before the goddess,
The maids lay flowers rare,
And she has ceased to care
For bay that I might bear.
To heal my heart's distress,
My feet must wander where
There waits some lonelier goddess. ”

“ I cannot think where I saw the eyes like those of the goddess, but perhaps it was in that part of my life which is forgotten and ruled off with a line. It gave one the greatest and most majestic feelings to stand there with the gods, and to know that one was a god one's self, and that lightning did not hurt one, and that one would live for ever. ”

“ And thus did the Ephesians play the 'March of the Goddess Hecate,' and the sound of the queenly tread of the Infernal Goddess seemed to follow the ranks of her devotees, ranks of priests and priestesses dressed in black raiment bestud with stars of gold, a crescent moon on every brow. They held their hands towards the earth. ”

“ And all the other faces have gone, and all the glory has passed. And, like so many of the living, the goddess has paid for her splendors. The pendulum swung, and where men adored, men hated her—her the goddess of love and loveliness. ”

“ In a recess apart we see a god and goddess, with arms close together, the hands broken, but showing that they were joined. The goddess stands at his right hand (in ancient days, the position in marriage) , and on both faces there is such a happy expression, the face of the god in particular beaming with a smile, that it leads one to believe they were in the act of being united. ”

“ Men say my flesh is smooth as marble, soft as velvet, and bright as gold, even as the forms of our priests and priestesses are sculptured and colored by the thoughts of love.
"Only a goddess knows such thoughts as hers that burn in the soul like fluid gold. Imagination fills me at times with vast and phantasmal splendors. Adoration glorifies me like light raining on the palms and palaces. ”

“ We have never seen anything to come up to our newly discovered goddess before, but she is what we have been all our lives looking for. The idol we fall down and worship is an image familiar to our minds. ”

“ A goddess she was made, Immortal, fair, unfit to suffer change. So now she lives, and never more shall fade. In earth, a goddess. What can be more strange? Then will I hope! A goddess, and so near; She cannot choose, my sighs and prayers but hear.
[Pg 437]
SONNET XXV.
SEven are the Lights that wander in the skies: And at these seven, I wonder in my Love. To see the Moon how pale she doth arise; Standing amazed, as though she durst not move: So is my Sweet, much paler than the snow; Constant her looks, those looks that cannot change. Mercury the next, a god sweet-tongued we know ”

“ So there in the half darkness we chanted the mystic ritual, hand in hand before the goddess we chanted it, bowing and swaying, weeping and praying, demanding that a sign be given to us who were prepared to die that her splendour might shine forth as a star. ”

“ This Earth Goddess was Goddess both of the Air and of the Underworld: when she appears as the Goddess of the Air, she has doves as her symbol; when she appears as the Goddess of the Underworld, she has snakes. ”

“ Just as the ancient Greeks embodied their ideals of virtue in the forms of gods, we can give our ideals of reason the forms of goddesses. The Goddess of Truth dwells in the temple of nature, in the green forests, upon the blue seas, on the snow-covered mountain-peaks. ”

“ That most ennobling, and most unostentatious quality, which dear and great Goddess—in lovingly tempering a soul that from its first inhalation of terrestrial air to the breath in which it escapes home, she intends to follow with her love—commingles in precious and perilous atoms that, in consecrating, destine to sorrow. ”

“ O King of Heav'n, O Father of the Skies,
The weeping Goddess passionately cries,
Tho' I the meanest of Immortals am,
And fewest Temples celebrate my Fame,
Yet still a Goddess, I presume to come,
Within the Verge of your Etherial Dome:
Yet still may plead some Merit, if my Light
With Purple Dawn controuls the Pow'rs of Night;
If from a Female Hand that Virtue springs,
Which to the Gods, and Men such Pleasure brings. ”

“ The following stanzas are from the hymn addressed to Night (x. 127) :—
Night coming on, the goddess shines In many places with her eyes: All-glorious she has decked herself. Immortal goddess, far and wide She fills the valleys and the heights: Darkness with light she overcomes. And now the goddess coming on Has driven away her sister Dawn: Far off the darkness hastes away. Thus, goddess, come to us to-day, At whose approach we seek our homes, As birds upon the tree their nest. The villagers have gone to rest, Beasts, too, with feet and birds with wings: The hungry hawk himself is still. ”

“ That goddess is all in all, she is changed through every thing in world, and is the cosmos itself and the power of the intellect also; she fills the whole concavity of the sky with her form of pure vacuity. ”

“ Women who are warriors! A queen who is not a queen! Magicians that hypnotize a kingdom but sleep for sixty days! A goddess in the shape of a cat that lopes about for her dinner in the moonlight and becomes stone in the sunlight! By the Seven, Thwaine, if you must rant and rave, at least have the courtesy to do it more quietly so I can get some rest. ”

“ There is a goddess, who, aloft in the empty air, advances girdled about with a cloud, but with a shining white cloak and a glory in her hair, and makes a rushing with her wings. She it is who crushes extravagant hopes, who threatens the proud, to whom is given to beat down the haughty spirit and the haughty step, and to confound over-great possessions. ”

“ Of course you don’t know in the least; you’ve never held a goddess’s hand. When the lights went up again I reluctantly dropped her hand, not liking the thought of the profane crowd seeing us, and for want of anything better to say, I asked her if she actually was a goddess. ”

“ Can the falling stone turn upwards to the sky, or when Nature draws it, can the tide cease to flow? A goddess whom I have offended, that goddess whose strength causes the whole world to be, has laid her curse upon me and because I have bent before the storm, as bend I must, or break, another goddess whom I serve, thou thyself, O Mother Isis, hast added to the curse. ”

“ Hecate, which was one of the names of Diana, was distinguished as the Goddess of magic and enchantments. Venus was the Goddess of love, the most irresistible and omnipotent impulse of which the heart of man is susceptible. ”

“ All this order and arrangement the goddess first imparted to you when establishing your city; and she chose the spot of earth in which you were born, because she saw that the happy temperament of the seasons in that land would produce the wisest of men. Wherefore the goddess, who was a lover both of war and of wisdom, selected, and first of all settled that spot which was the most likely to produce men likest herself. And there you dwelt, having such laws as these and still better ones, and excelled all mankind in all virtue, as became the children and disciples of the gods. ”

“ Well, let goddesses—if such indeed there be—take their way and work their will upon the helpless, and I, a mortal, will take mine until the clutch of doom closes round my throat and chokes out life and memory, and I too am a goddess—or a clod. ”

“ Taste this, and be henceforth among the Gods Thyself a Goddess, not to earth confined, But sometimes in the air, as we, sometimes Ascend to Heaven, by merit thine, and see What life the Gods live there, and such live thou!" ”

“ May it please thee, O goddess, that his heart and his life be purified, that he may dwell in this world in peace and wisdom. May this water take away all ills, for which this babe is put into thy hands, thou who art mother and sister of the gods, and who alone art worthy to possess it and to give it, to wash from him the evils which he beareth from before the beginning of the world. ”

“ He paints the story of the goddess of pleasure in other episodes besides that of her birth from the sea, but never without some shadow of death in the grey flesh and wan flowers. He paints Madonnas, but they shrink from the pressure of the divine child, and plead in unmistakable undertones for a warmer, lower humanity. ”

“ Depress the chin a little; the eyes level and strong; but—no—I’ll tell you the story. The woman in the goddess betrays her because her lover leaves her. She’s frightened, for her own power means nothing to her beside him. He has conquered her, for all she’s a goddess. The heavenly thing obeys the earthly, but with majesty. ”

“ The benign influence of the great goddess seemed to act upon them, for daily their love grew stronger, working at them, as it were, with pliant hands, until it smoothed out their every thought and rounded their every action. ”

“ But, when the goddess' work is done, The woman's still remains. ”

“ And the goddess answered: "There is just one remedy, my son, and it is in your hands." And Hero said: "Goddess, tell me quickly, that I may adopt it at once. What good would life be to us otherwise?"
Then the goddess said: "My son, there is no other man devoted to his master as you are: so you may learn how to save him. There is a temple to the Dreadful Goddess built by that king near his palace. If you sacrifice your son to her at once, then the king will not die. He will live another hundred years. ”

“ The Goddess wastes away the life of mortals, like a skilled hunter cutting birds in pieces. 11. She hath appeared discovering heaven's borders: to the far distance she drives off her Sister. Diminishing the days of human creatures, the Lady shines with all her lover's splendour. ”

“ I replied, "and your thought savors of sacrilege. The goddess belongs to her faith, her country. To prefer an individual soul is to dethrone herself as goddess and meet a painful death."
"In any case, whatever happens, you can rely on the fidelity of your followers," said the naturalist. ”

“ If there is a miscreant who believes not in the miracles of God, let him look upon her. Many believe that she is rather a goddess of heaven than a princess of earth, and yet perhaps no goddess was ever so lovely. ”

“ But if Faith is a goddess, I wonder why these keen lovers of a multitude of gods have wronged so many other goddesses, by passing them by, when they could have dedicated temples and altars to them likewise. Why has temperance not deserved to be a goddess, when some Roman princes have obtained no small glory on account of her? Why, in fine, is fortitude not a goddess, who aided Mucius when he thrust his right hand into the flames ”

“ Truly it may be said of the Virgin Goddess that, like the golden dawn, which she is thought to impersonate, she brightens more and more, still heralding by her effulgent but imperfect light the advent of the perfect day. ”

“ In the old heroic days of the loves of the gods and goddesses desire followed upon sight. Think you that the goddess of Love considered long in the grove of Ida that day Anchises found favour in her eyes? ”

“ Goddess amidst mystic scenes and circumstances which cannot be defined—priestess of the wand of divination, which she bears to awaken fairies and satyrs to the resolves of her soul, to listen to Pan's arcadian notes in eve tide hour—to waken Echo from her retreat—she who leads the loves of angels, and presides at the festivities of spirits requires different materials to define those orbs which evince ceaseless inspiration. That soul may often be seen looking through the brilliant transparencies: observe her at her toilet, preparing for the presence of her loved one ”

“ But the three gods did not stand by themselves. The mythical personification of nature, of which all three were in at least one aspect the products, required that each of them should be coupled with a goddess, and in each case it appears that originally the goddess was a more powerful and important personage than the god. ”

“ By times, to any lover worthy of the name, the chosen woman figures as a goddess, a tutelary divinity postulating for a mere earthly man all that is high and holy and inerrant; an impeccable standard by which he can measure his own baser desires and ambitions and be shrived of them. ”

“ Wherefore the Goddess, in the wisdom of her Divinity, hath been accustomed to select as persons to whom the secrets of her religion can with propriety be entrusted, those who, standing as it were on the utmost limit of the course of life they have completed, may through her Providence be in a manner born again, and commence the career of a new existence". ”

“ Her emblem as the goddess of vegetation and of the sus{98}tenance of life was the apple or pomegranate. As the goddess of the human soul she is represented as a bird like the Egyptian representation of the soul, a human-headed hawk; or as a dove, the symbol which later on represents the gnostic Sophia, the mother of the child-god, and in Christian dogmatology, the Holy Ghost. ”

“ G. Goddess.-As the Romans would rather recognize their monarchs as gods than as masters, so do men like to call the directress of their heart goddess rather than mistress,—because it is easier to adore than to obey. ”