Legend of The Perpetual Lamp
In the fifteenth century, a tomb was found in Rome which was identified as Tullia’s burial place. Among other things found in the tomb was a perpetual lamp which was supposedly still burning after more than 15 centuries. The 17th-century English poet and preacher John Donne alludes to this legend in the eleventh stanza ("The Good-Night") of his "Eclogue, 1613. Decemb. 26" for the marriage of the Earl of Somerset to Frances Howard:
- Now, as in Tullias tombe, one lamp burnt cleare,
- Unchang'd for fifteene hundred yeare,
- May these love-lamps we here enshrine,
- In warmth, light, lasting, equall the divine. . . .
Read more about this topic: Tullia Ciceronis
Famous quotes containing the words legend of, legend, perpetual and/or lamp:
“The Legend of Love no Couple can find
So easie to part, or so equally join’d.”
—John Dryden (1631–1700)
“Newspaperman: That was a magnificent work. There were these mass columns of Apaches in their war paint and feather bonnets. And here was Thursday leading his men in that heroic charge.
Capt. York: Correct in every detail.
Newspaperman: He’s become almost a legend already. He’s the hero of every schoolboy in America.”
—Frank S. Nugent (1908–1965)
“There is no such thing as perpetual tranquillity of mind while we live here; because life itself is but motion, and can never be without desire, nor without fear, no more than without sense.”
—Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679)
“Writing is to descend like a miner to the depths of the mine with a lamp on your forehead, a light whose dubious brightness falsifies everything, whose wick is in permanent danger of explosion, whose blinking illumination in the coal dust exhausts and corrodes your eyes.”
—Blaise Cendrars (1887–1961)