Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 25, 2025
Conspicuous above all were the Tahitian and part-Tahitian girls. In their long, graceful, waistless tunics of brilliant hues, their woven bamboo or pandanus hats, decorated with fresh flowers, their feet bare or thrust into French slippers, their brown eyes shining with yearning, they were so many Circes to us from the sea.
The poets of old must have been thinking of a woman like Lady Amelie when they wrote of circes and sirens, and women whose beauty has proved fatal to men. It is perhaps quite as well that they are very rare the power of a beautiful woman is great. If she be good, and use it for a good purpose; the world is the better for it.
The fascinations of the Circes of the High Street, and the potations of strength with which they had been drenched over night, had probably detained these heroes within the walls of Edinburgh somewhat later than was consistent with their morning duty.
A voyage of this kind is by no means an easy undertaking, when there are Circes and Calypsos assailing one on every side; and when one has reached the conclusion, one cannot perhaps distinguish the object of one's search at a coup d'oeil. It would be in every point of view more appropriate if the lady were to stand directly opposite to the door of the back parlour.
The Circes deserted under a baleful moon, ere the brutalizing change had come! I returned to Paris, a man with soul so dead that his country was not dear to him I felt guilty of an unknown crime, but reflection reduced the enormity of the offence. Long voyages impart to us a nameless virtue or vice, made up of tolerance, stoicism and disdain.
Sometimes it is Ulysses painfully toiling his way home across the unknown ocean; sometimes it is we that are Ulysses, and that unknown ocean is the life across which we are wandering, with too many Circes, and Sirens, and 'Isles of Error' in our path. In the same spirit death is no longer the end; and on every side long vistas seem to stretch away into the infinite, peopled with shadowy forms.
"But I am afraid," says Ascham, "that over many of our travellers unto Italy do not eschew the way to Circe's Court: but go and ryde and runne and flie thether, they make great hast to cum to her; they make great sute to serve her: yea, I could point out some with my finger that never had gone out of England, but onlie to serve Circes in Italie.
For, as Greene says, "as our wits be as ripe as any, so our willes are more ready than they all, to put into effect any of their licentious abuses." Thus arose the famous proverb, "An Englishman Italianate is a devil incarnate." Hence the warnings against Circes by even those authors most loud in praise of travel.
In each gambling house was a band of music, and a skillful player received some $30 per night for his services. Painted women were the presiding geniuses at the wheels of fortune and these modern Circes or Sirens played the piano and the harp with all the passion of their art to drown men's cares and make them forget duty and principle and honour.
The fascinations of the Circes of the High Street, and the potations of strength with which they had been drenched over night, had probably detained these heroes within the walls of Edinburgh somewhat later than was consistent with their morning duty.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking