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Les Misérables vocabulary
11 plants, trees, botany terms
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Narcissus
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tags: [botany] [mythology]
► definition
Definition:1. Defn: A genus of endogenous bulbous plants with handsome flowers, having a cup-shaped crown within the six-lobed perianth, and comprising the daffodils and jonquils of several kinds.2. (Classical Myth.) Defn: A beautiful youth fabled to have been enamored of his own image as seen in a fountain, and to have been changed into the flower called Narcissus.Noah Webster. Webster's Unabridged Dictionary (1913)
photo: by ajvocab.comimage: By Caravaggio, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25450745
► uses
Uses:
a flock of birds fluttered in the grey sky round the trefoil bell-turrets; the square, resounding with cries, was fragrant with the flowers that bordered its pavement, roses, jasmines, pinks, narcissi, and tube-roses, unevenly spaced out between moist grasses, catmint, and chickweed for the birds;
Gustave Flaubert. Madame Bovary
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I moved swiftly — so as to arrive, as soon as might be, at the table that was spread for me, with fruit and a flask of Chianti — across a Ponte Vecchio heaped with jonquils, narcissi and anemones.
Marcel Proust. In Search of Lost Time [volume 1]
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the anticipation of warmth (human) tempered with coolness (linen), obviating desire and rendering desirable: the statue of Narcissus, sound without echo, desired desire.
James Joyce. Ulysses
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Why, my dear Basil, he is a Narcissus, and you—well, of course you have an intellectual expression, and all that. But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins.
Oscar Wilde. The Picture of Dorian Gray
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