The snow-white bird which the monk Felix listened to, sang so enchantingly that he was spell-bound for a hundred years, listening to it.—Longfellow, Golden Legend.
Rhodalind, daughter of Aribert, king of Lombardy, in love with Duke Gondibert; but Gondibert preferred Birtha, a country girl, daughter of the sage, Astrăgon. While the duke is whispering sweet love-notes to Birtha, a page comes post-haste to announce to him that the king has proclaimed him his heir, and is about to give him his daughter in marriage. The duke gives Birtha an emerald ring, and says if he is false to her, the emerald will lose its lustre; then hastens to court, in obedience to the king’s summons. Here the tale breaks off, and was never finished.—Sir Wm. Davenant, Gondibert (1605-1668).
Rhodian Venus (The). This was the “Venus” of Protog´enês mentioned by Pliny, Natural History, xxxv. 10.
When first the Rhodian’s mimic art arrayed
The Queen of Beauty in her Cyprian shade,
The happy master mingled in his piece
Each look that charmed him in the fair of Greece.
Campbell, Pleasures of Hope, ii. (1799).
Prior (1664-1721) refers to the same painting in his fable of Protogênes and Appellês:
I hope, sir, you intend to stay
To see our Venus; ’tis the piece
The most renowned throughout all Greece.
Rhod´ope (3 syl.), or Rhod´opis, a celebrated Greek courtezan, who afterwards married Psammetichus, king of Egypt. It is said she built the third pyramid.—Pliny, Nat. Hist., xxxvi. 12.
A statelier pyramis to her I’ll rear,
Than Rhodope’s.
Shakespeare, Henry VI. act i. sc. 6 (1589).
Rhombus, a schoolmaster who speaks “a leash of languages at once,” puzzling himself and his hearers with a jargon like that of “Holofernês” in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labor’s Lost (1594).—Sir Philip Sidney, Pastoral Entertainment (1587).
Rhombus, a spinning-wheel or rolling instrument used by the Roman witches for fetching the moon out of heaven.