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More "Charnel" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a process of mummifying, the remains being afterwards placed in the earth, caves, mounds, boxes on scaffolds, or in charnel-houses. ...
— A Further Contribution to the Study of the Mortuary Customs of the North American Indians • H.C. Yarrow
... this earth? Young, innocent, loving, and beloved, they descend together into the tomb: but Shakspeare has made that tomb a shrine of martyred and sainted affection consecrated for the worship of all hearts,—not a dark charnel vault, haunted by spectres of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 563, August 25, 1832 • Various
... anything else in such a room,' said Ida, to whom the spacious chamber looked as gloomy as a charnel-house. 'I beg your pardon. I ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... on young Fulton. The men, who believed implicitly every word that he had said, regarded him almost with superstition. He alone of the defenders had come alive out of that terrible charnel house, ...
— The Texan Scouts - A Story of the Alamo and Goliad • Joseph A. Altsheler
... the joint characteristic of all these men who had turned France into a vast butchery and charnel-house, that they all feared and hated one another, even more whole-heartedly than they hated the aristocrats and so-called traitors whom they sent to the guillotine. Citizen Lebon is said to have dipped his sword into the blood which flowed from the guillotine, whilst ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... hospital; and highest (1,700 feet) the box which lodges their commandant. Even the seldom-seen 'Sugarloaf' was fairly outlined against the mild blue vault. Although the withering hand of summer was on the scene, the old charnel-house looked lovely; even the low lines of the Bullom shore borrowed a kind of beauty from the air. The hues were those of Heligoland set in frames of lapis lazuli above and of sapphire below; golden sand, green strand of silky Bermuda-grass, ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... the hands of strangers—no slight reproach to the cruel insensibility of those who, wallowing in wealth, and fluttering from year to year through the round of fashion, suffered their former associate, nay their envied example, to perish in his living charnel. He was buried in the Protestant cemetery of Caen, under a stone ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... the reign of sailors, porters, and the dregs of the populace.—At Avignon,[3374] it is that of simple brigands, incendiaries and assassins, who, six months previously, converted the Glaciere[3375] into a charnel-house. They return in triumph and state that "this time the Glaciere will be full." Five hundred families had already sought asylum in France before the first massacre; now, the entire remainder of ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... present age. In at this gulf all offerings pass And lie an undistinguish'd mass. Deucalion,[1] to restore mankind, Was bid to throw the stones behind; So those who here their gifts convey Are forced to look another way; For few, a chosen few, must know The mysteries that lie below. Sad charnel-house! a dismal dome, For which all mortals leave their home! The young, the beautiful, and brave, Here buried in one common grave! Where each supply of dead renews Unwholesome damps, offensive dews: And lo! the ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... young girls; all these are but subtile deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains white or colorless in itself, and if .. operating without medium upon matter, ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... bier, hearse, catafalque, cinerary urn^. grave, pit, sepulcher, tomb, vault, crypt, catacomb, mausoleum, Golgotha, house of death, narrow house; cemetery, necropolis; burial place, burial ground; grave yard, church yard; God's acre; tope, cromlech, barrow, tumulus, cairn; ossuary; bone house, charnel house, dead house; morgue; lich gate^; burning ghat^; crematorium, crematory; dokhma^, mastaba^, potter's field, stupa^, Tower of Silence. sexton, gravedigger. monument, cenotaph, shrine; grave stone, head stone, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... the age of eighteen, beneath the point at which I had started. I was down in the cellar of society, down in the subterranean depths of misery about which it is neither nice nor proper to speak. I was in the pit, the abyss, the human cesspool, the shambles and the charnel-house of our civilization. This is the part of the edifice of society that society chooses to ignore. Lack of space compels me here to ignore it, and I shall say only that the things I there saw gave me a ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... all-atoning tenderness of the divine heart, the degraded, disfigured, defiled, distorted thing, whose angel is too blind ever to see the face of its Father? Through all the hideous filth of the charnel-house, which the passions had heaped upon her, did the Word recognise the bound, wing-lamed, feather-draggled Psyche, panting in horriblest torture? Did he have a desire to the work of his hands, the child of his father's heart, and therefore, strong ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... rehearsed by Sir Edwin Arnold. There all beings met—gods, devas, men, beasts of the field, and fowls of the air—to make common cause against the relentless fate that rules the world, and to bewail the sufferings and death which fill the great charnel-house of existence, while Buddha voiced their common complaint and stood before them as the only pitying friend that the universe had found. It was the first great Communist meeting of which we have any record.[88] ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... to the homes of men, and pass by the grog-shops that are constantly grinding out their fearful grist of poverty, ruin and death, I long for the hour when woman's vote will be levelled against these charnel houses; and have, I hope, the power to close them throughout the length and breadth ...
— Minnie's Sacrifice • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
... once occupied by glittering chandeliers were now shrouded with immense spider webs, in which a whole colony of spiders lived subsisting on the noisome vapors of this gloomy charnel like abode. ...
— The Home in the Valley • Emilie F. Carlen
... prolonged debate; the warriors' detail of their long secret marches, continued hunger, and anxious ambush, until the moment arrived of the Pale-face's security, and the Indian war-whoop, surprise, and triumph. The continued massacre is next detailed; ending with the settlement being left a reeking charnel-house, and its best champion led captive to crown the triumph with his death, the last and proudest ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... Perhaps he did. Perhaps he saw the Simiacine Plateau, and knew that, after all, he had won the last throw; for up there, far above the table-lands of Central Africa, there lay beneath high Heaven a charnel-house. Hounded down the slope by his tormentors, he had left a memento behind him surer than their torturing knives, keener than their sharpest steel—he had left the sleeping sickness ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... Charlotte Bronte, who feels the pressure of every-day life to be as hard as a giant's grasp upon her throat! Charlotte Bronte cannot tell why she is so unhappy, why she feels like a prisoner in the world,—why earth, our beautiful earth, is like a charnel house to her. And yet we think that the most ordinary passerby could see very satisfactory reasons why Charlotte Bronte was what she was, and felt what she felt. Hollow cheek and faded eye, teach their wisdom to their possessor ...
— A Lecture on Physical Development, and its Relations to Mental and Spiritual Development, delivered before the American Institute of Instruction, at their Twenty-Ninth Annual Meeting, in Norwich, Conn • S.R. Calthrop
... of God, Poised lightly 'bove the charnel sod, With upturned brow and radiant eyes, Pointing unto the distant skies, Whispers: "Oh, weary child of care, Look up! thy heavenly home ...
— The Poetical Works of Mrs. Leprohon (Mrs. R.E. Mullins) • Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon
... the Prince himself may one day look upon the vile secrets of this charnel house! I would that he and his royal father might know what deeds of darkness are even now committed in lands that own their sway! Would that I had that wicked wretch here in my power at this moment! Well does he deserve ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green
... lifted its head high, and looked straight toward the boats, and at the same moment a whiff of air came toward us heavily charged with a most disgusting and nauseating odour, about equally suggestive of musk and the charnel-house. Its eyes, distinctly luminous, and apparently about two feet apart, were directed straight toward the longboat, and the next instant it began to move toward us, again stretching ...
— A Middy in Command - A Tale of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... face to scorn and derision. They made him look at his statues, which were being tumbled to the ground. They pointed out to him the place where Galba had perished. They pricked his body with their weapons. With endless contumely they brought him to the public charnel, where the body of Sabinus had been thrown among those ...
— Historic Tales, Volume 11 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... charnel-worm, rioting in all the horror of decay, there could be nothing but a blind joy in the conditions which Hugh hardly even dared to imagine. To indulge such thoughts was morbid, perhaps. But here they ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... and now and then uttered deep groans. The atmosphere was prescient with horror. He struggled to his feet and paced gloomily back and forth along the brow of the hill. The second church stood near, deserted, gloomy, no longer a temple of God, but a charnel house of fear and black superstition. In the distance the ghostly white walls of the Rincon church glowed faintly in the feeble light that dripped from the yellow stars. There was now no thought of God—no thought of divine aid. Jose was riding again the mountainous billows of fear and unbelief; ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... help England! I, that am to die, What I must see! 'tis here—all here! My God, Let me but gasp out, in one word of fire, How thou wilt plague him, satiating hell! What? England that you help, become through you A green and putrefying charnel, left Our children ... some of us have children, Pym— Some who, without that, still must ever wear A darkened brow, an over-serious look, And never properly be young! No word? What if I curse you? Send a strong curse forth Clothed from my heart, lapped round with horror till She's ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... district, is plain but interesting and in parts is quite old. Near it is a little mortuary chapel. In most parts of Switzerland, it is the custom, after the bodies of the dead have been buried a certain length of time, to remove the remains to the "charnel house," allowing the graves to be used again and thus not encroaching upon the space reserved and consecrated in the churchyard, but we do not think this ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... accuser, all appointed by the Convention, was proposed and decreed on the same evening. It possessed unlimited powers to confiscate property and take life. The Girondists dared not vote against this tribunal. The public voice would pronounce them the worst of traitors. France was now a charnel-house. Blood flowed in streams which were never dry. Innocence had no protection. Virtue was suspicion, suspicion a crime, the guillotine the penalty, and the confiscated estate the bribe to accusation. Thus there was erected, in the name of liberty and popular ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... dinner-table, looked at me out of his one eye, in which all the desolation of two was concentrated, and miaowed heart-rendingly in my face. Something is wrong with the house, with my pens which will not write, with my books which have the air of dry bones in a charnel-house, with the MS. of my History of Renaissance Morals, which stands on the writing-table like a dusty monument to the futility of human endeavour. Something is ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... It had never seemed so near, so strong. It was stronger than her will to put it from her and in it, with inherent superstition, she saw a premonition. The little peaceful church became all at once a place of terror, a grisly charnel house of vanished hopes and lives. The spirits of countless Cravens seemed all about her, hostile, malign, triumphing in her weakness, rejoicing in her fear—spectral figures of the dead crowding, hurrying, ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... left to God, The only speakers of essential truth, Opposed to relative, comparative, And temporal truths; the only holders by His sun-skirts, through conventional gray glooms; The only teachers who instruct mankind, From just a shadow on a charnel-wall, To find man's veritable stature out, Erect, sublime—the measure of ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... had not the life-warmth of Faith been withdrawn.' But this once lost, how recoverable? how, rather, ever acquirable? 'First must the dead Letter of Religion own itself dead, and drop piecemeal into dust, if the living Spirit of Religion, freed from this, its charnel house, is to arise on us, new born of Heaven, and with new healing under ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... strode forward, with the air of one to whom fear had no meaning; but even he closed his eyes for a moment in horror. The poor creatures behind mumbled and crossed themselves and clung to each other. The plain was a vast charnel-house. The sun, looking over the brow of an eastern hill, threw its pale rays upon thousands of crumbling skeletons, bleached by unnumbered suns, picked bare by dead and gone generations of carrion, white, rigid, sinister. Detached skulls lay in ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... broken salient. The Yankees fought with obstinacy and furious pluck. Charge after charge was broken and hurled back. On they came again—ever to the shambles! Night fell on a field piled thick with bodies of the attacking force; in front of the broken salient was a perfect charnel-house! ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... host and hostess both well disposed to fall in with their guests' wishes. There is a schloss hard by, inhabited by certain officials, who, however, exercise no jurisdiction over the town; and a church, not remarkable for anything, except the good order of its charnel-house. This, a small building separated by the breadth of the churchyard from the main edifice, seems to be a place of deposit for all the skulls and other bones which may be thrown up in digging the graves; and they are arranged ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig
... with himself, and his reasoning, instead of troubling his faith, caused him to cling the more to the only One, the sole hope and saviour of the hearts of his men and women, without whom the whole universe were but a charnel house in which the ghosts of the dead went about crying, not over the life that was gone from them, ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... churchyard ornament, to braid The charnel of putridity, and part The spot where what was mortal had been laid, With all thy native coldness in his heart? Thou sure wert not the stone—let critics cavil!— Of quack M.D. who lectur'd ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 357 - Vol. XIII, No. 357., Saturday, February 21, 1829 • Various
... a way out of this accursed charnel-house before long, I think that we shall add to its company," I said, ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... anchor. Soon the soft slap of the water around the bow and the regular heaving motion told that the Bozra was under way. The sea-mouse creaked and groaned through all her timbers and her lading. The foul bilge-water made the hold stifling as a charnel-house. Lampaxo, Hib being absent, began to ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... Nature seized the rod and wielded it with relentless hand, smiting Jew and gentile, the pious and the ungodly, with equal severity. The cholera had broken out in Central Russia and its devastations were terrible beyond description. The country from Kief to Odessa was as one vast charnel-house. As has always been the case during epidemics, the Jews suffered less from the ravages of the disease than did their gentile neighbors. The strict dietary laws which excluded everything not absolutely fresh and ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith
... my dear," replied the confidant,—"it is a shame to him to be out of Saint Pancras's charnel-house, for I know no other place he is fit for, the foul-mouthed old railer. ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... little, without perceiving it, thinking only of stammering forth acts of gratitude, he disappeared from the chapel, his soul borne up by the souls of others, away, away from the world, far from his charnel-house, far ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... it that, in this story, Hamlet, the moody moraliser upon charnel-houses and mouldy bones, is identified with the jolly companion of the Mermaid, the wine-bibbing joker of the Falcon, and the Apollo saloon? It is because Hamlet is the most elaborately-painted character in literature. It is because the springs of his ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... her face with her hands. To face these objects was painful enough, but to have them grinning on her, as in mockery, behind her back, was more than she could stand. So seizing old Moodie by the arm, he being beside her, she rushed out of this charnel house, and impatiently called to the others to ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... time we first got on board we had heard moans, cries, and rumblings coming from below, and as soon as the captain and crew were removed, the hatches had been taken off, when there arose a hot blast as from a charnel house, sickening and overpowering. In the hold were three or four hundred human beings, gasping, struggling for breath, dying; their bodies, limbs, faces, all expressing terrible suffering. In their agonizing fight for life, some had torn or wounded themselves ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... song-birds singing at her heart, but there A thousand gnashing furies made their lair, And urged her on; her nearest pathway lay Over a little hill, and on its brow A group of trees, whereof each blackened bough Bore up to heaven as if in protest mute Its clustering load of ghastly charnel fruit,[12] The swaddled forms of all the village dead— Maid, lusty warrior, and toothless hag, The infant and the conjurer with his bag, Peacefully rotting in their airy bed. As on a battle plain she saw ...
— Indian Legends of Minnesota • Various
... may be divided into two conflicts of equal intensity which raged along the ridge of the heights of Tser. Each of the two slopes, descending one to the Save and the town of Shabatz and the other to the Drina, is now nothing but a charnel house. ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various
... fight of nations—bear witness field and storm To our desert hereafter? Now we are but braggarts warm— But by our honest cause, we swear, ere they our land retake, Each town shall he a charnel tomb—each field ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 476, Saturday, February 12, 1831 • Various
... On leaving this charnel-house of mortality, we drove to the Abattoir de Popincourt, which is the largest in the city, and occupies six hundred and forty-five feet by fire hundred and seventy. On entering, we found four slaughter-houses, each standing ...
— Young Americans Abroad - Vacation in Europe: Travels in England, France, Holland, - Belgium, Prussia and Switzerland • Various
... Of course, these charnel prophets are not the only phantasms that "possess" furniture. For example, I once heard of a case of "possession" by a non-prophetic phantasm in connection with a chest—an antique oak chest which, I believe, claimed to be a native of Limerick. After experiencing many ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... a man," said he, "to treat a poor Emir like me in the manner you have done, as if my house was a charnel-house? I suppose you will ask me the ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... headstone bare, And signs it with a paraph wild, And hangs a wreath of bones to glare Upon the charnel death-defiled. ...
— Enamels and Cameos and other Poems • Theophile Gautier
... ravens, vampires and the like, make their nests, and cry unceasingly for flesh, although the whole place is but one vast, putrid shamble. The pillars of the hall were made of thighbones, and those of the parlour of shinbones, while the floors were formed of layer upon layer of all manner of charnel. ...
— The Visions of the Sleeping Bard • Ellis Wynne
... and death, Of beauty singing in a charnel house, Like the lost soul of a poor moon-mad maid, With too much loving of some lord of hell; Doomed and disastrous spirit, to what shore Of what dark gulf infernal art thou strayed, Or to what spectral star of topless ...
— The Lonely Dancer and Other Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... the familiar chill of uneasiness that inevitably preceded this moment of decision. He was not lacking in courage, else the circumstances under which he had worked for the past ten years—the sometimes perilous, sometimes downright charnel conditions left by the fleeing Hymenop conquerors—would have broken him long ago. But that same hard experience had honed rather than blunted the edge of his imagination, and the prospect of a close-quarters stalking ...
— Control Group • Roger Dee
... Republicans, Calvinists, merchants, bankers, Hating me, yet fearing my arm. With wife and children heavy to carry— Yet fruits of my very zest of life. Stealing odd pleasures that cost me prestige, And reaping evils I had not sown; Foe of the church with its charnel dankness, Friend of the human touch of the tavern; Tangled with fates all alien to me, Deserted by hands I called my own. Then just as I felt my giant strength Short of breath, behold my children Had wound their lives in stranger gardens— And I stood alone, as I started alone My valiant ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... the chapel L. of the high altar, but the four angels in silver that sustained the hearts of Louis XIII. and XIV., and the noble bronze statues from the mausoleum of the Princes of Conde, admired by Bernini, are only a memory. At No. 65, a malodorous court leads to the old vaulted entrance to the charnel-houses of St. Paul, where Rabelais and the Man with the Iron Mask were buried;[227] and to the R. of this vault a narrow street leads to the Marche Ste. Catherine on the site of the canons' houses of the monastery of Ste. Catherine du Val des Ecoliers ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... the body of some poor victim is taken from the debris, and the town, or rather the remnants of it, is one vast charnel house. The scenes at the extemporized morgue are beyond powers of description in their ghastliness, while the moans and groans of the suffering survivors, tossing in agony, with bruised and mangled bodies, or screaming in a delirium of ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... taste of death long before they have died, and have placed before their eyes all the furniture of mortality. The horrors of a charnel-house is the scene of their pleasure. The "Midnight Meditations" of Quarles preceded Young's "Night Thoughts" by a century, and both ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... tangled ivy. At one wild bound the hunted slave leaped over it, into the trackless gloom. At one wild bound the fierce pursuer followed him. Scarcely a yard asunder they alighted on the rank grass of that charnel grove; and not three paces did they take more, ere Cataline had hurled his victim to the earth, and cast himself upon him; choking his cries for help by the compression of his sinewy fingers, which grasped with a tenacity little inferior ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... feudal war. This heaving, moaning city, blessedly quiet tonight, would learn its lesson of futility. His eyes that had been long searching the dark were opened now, and he could bide his few years of life in peace. He had labored too long in the charnel house. ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... paint, and under a goodly light. Wide enough the light was, and clear; no more Salvator's lurid chasm on jagged horizon, nor Duerer's spotted rest of sunny gleam on hedgerow and field; but light over all the world. Full shone now its awful globe, one pallid charnel-house,—a ball strewn bright with human ashes, glaring in poised sway beneath the sun, all blinding-white with death from pole to pole,—death, not of myriads of poor bodies only, but of will, and mercy, and conscience; ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... reason why, to the eyes of astonished servants, from that day forth the Crown Prince of Livonia apparently devoured his chop, bone and all. And why Nikky resembled, at times, a well-setup, trig, and soldierly appearing charnel-house. "If I am ever arrested," he once demurred, "and searched, Highness, I shall be consigned ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Mr Aiken has taken quite another province for his own; he is an introspective psychologist. But like Mr Kipling he prefers big business. His inward eye roves over immensities at least as vast as Mr Kipling's outward. In 'The Charnel Rose and Other Poems' this appetite for the illimitable inane of introspection seems to have gained upon him. There is ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... gratified, if decay had spared the more durable portions of his material structure. It was probably not against such a transfer that the lines were written,—whoever was their author,—but in the fear that they would be carried to the charnel-house. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... international marriage ceremony, his handsome face and melodious voice and aristocratic bearing doing full justice to the grandeur of the occasion—it is a contrast in which there is a bitter humor, a farce in which there is something horrible, a comedy that smells of the charnel house. ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... the dull, misty daybreak, it was yet the most welcome of all the objects surrounding the starving soldier on which he could fix his languid gaze. To look back on the city behind him was to look back on the dreary charnel-house of famine and death; to look down on the waste ground without the walls was to look down on the dead body of the comrade of his watch, who, maddened by the pangs of hunger which he had suffered during the night, had cast himself from the rampart to meet a welcome death on the earth beneath. ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... gradually diminished in force and frequency. Jees Uck hung over him remembering his injunction and not daring to touch him. Once Amos grew restless and made as though to go into the kitchen; but a quick blaze from her eyes quelled him, and after that, save for his laboured breathing and charnel cough, he ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... I had long to wonder, for through the open door of the chapel there streamed a dismal host of invaders from the Wolfmark—black Hussars of Death, in dark armor, with white skeletons painted over them, all charnel-house ribs and bones in hideous and ridiculous array—which was one of Duke Casimir's devices to frighten children, and no doubt these scarecrows frightened many of these. Specially when these villanous companies were recruited from all the wild ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... so long as he was young. Even Nero was loved in his first days: and there must have been some cause to make that Christian maiden cast flowers on his dishonourable grave. But the spirit of the great Hohenzollern smelt from the first of the charnel. He came out to his first victory like one broken by defeats; his strength was stripped to the bone and fearful as a fleshless resurrection; for the worst of what could come had already befallen him. The ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... across which our path lay was white with fresh hoar-frost, and the thicket away to the south was a haunt for crows such as I never have seen again since; the black birds flew round and about it in dark clouds with loud shrieks, as though in its midst stood a charnel and gallows, and from the brushwood likewise, by the pool's edge, came other cries of birds, all as full of complaining as though they were bewailing the griefs ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... being principally "mere Irish," and the cost of their support derived chiefly from the land, the landlords consider their health, comfort, or life of only secondary importance. Hence we find the number of deaths in these charnel houses averaging that of years of plague; and each pauper is allowed far less weekly for his support than the lord of the soil allows the meanest dog in his kennel. Add to these the separation of man and wife, the isolation of members of the same family, the dangers of perversion and proselytism ...
— The Cross and the Shamrock • Hugh Quigley
... found that the trenches dug by the Germans were filled with human corpses in thick, serried masses. Quicklime and straw had been thrown over them by the ton. Piles of bodies of men and of horses had been partially cremated in the most rudimentary fashion. The country seemed to be one endless charnel-house. The stench of the dead was appalling. Of the fifty odd houses that form the village of Etrepilly, not one remained intact. Some of them had been hit by a shell that penetrated through the roof, falling into the cellar, and by its explosion bringing down ...
— Paris War Days - Diary of an American • Charles Inman Barnard
... by. Dim ghosts of men and women, most of them, who loitered at this hour in these streets. Old men, with the souls long years dead within them, and the corruption reeking up with every breath to poison every word, or lurking like charnel lights in the eyes to blink contagion in every glance. Young girls hopping like birds beside them, the spectres of roses in their cheeks, but the real thorns at their hearts. There had been no way for them ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... things the ruin is not altogether to be regretted. It has softened certain loathsome details of the charnel facts portrayed, and in other pictures the torment and anguish of the lost souls are no longer so painful as the old painters ascertained them. Hell in the Campo Santo is not now the hell of other days, just as the hell of Christian doctrine ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... a churchyard ornament, to braid The charnel of putridity, and part The spot where what was mortal had been laid, With all thy native coldness in his heart? Thou sure wert not the stone—let critics cavil!— Of quack M.D. who lectur'd on ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 357 - Vol. XIII, No. 357., Saturday, February 21, 1829 • Various
... the deck, For a charnel-dungeon fitter: All fixed on me their stony eyes, That in the Moon ...
— English Songs and Ballads • Various
... and strode forward, with the air of one to whom fear had no meaning; but even he closed his eyes for a moment in horror. The poor creatures behind mumbled and crossed themselves and clung to each other. The plain was a vast charnel-house. The sun, looking over the brow of an eastern hill, threw its pale rays upon thousands of crumbling skeletons, bleached by unnumbered suns, picked bare by dead and gone generations of carrion, white, rigid, sinister. Detached skulls lay in heaps, grinning derisively. ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... what society you enjoyed in the Parc de Charrebourg, madame," he began, in an obvious vein of sarcasm. And as he did so, he thought he observed her eyes averted, and her color brighten for a moment. He did not suffer this observation to interrupt him, but he laid it up in the charnel of his evil remembrances, and continued: "I don't know, I say, what society you there enjoyed. It may have been very considerable, or it may have been very limited: it was possibly very dull, or possibly very delightful, madame. But if ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... other gruesome matters, in the Palatine of Bohemia's family. She usually talked of the spectres of Hollenbogenblitz Castle in the passing of the threads. Those were dismal spectres in Bohemia, smelling of murder and the charnel-breath of midnight. They uttered noises that wintered the blood, and revealed sights that stiffened hair three feet long; ay, and ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... that by my bed dost beckoning glide, 8 Spectre of Death, to the damp charnel hie! Thy dim pale hand, thy festering visage hide; Thou com'st to say, I with thy worms ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... declared that the reigning dynasty could only be saved by granting to Hungary a responsible Ministry drawn from the Diet itself, and by establishing constitutional government throughout the Austrian dominions. "From the charnel-house of the Viennese system," he cried, "a poison-laden atmosphere steals over us, which paralyses our nerves and bows us when we would soar. The future of Hungary can never be secure while in the other provinces there exists a system of government ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... of the cathedral, close to the west front, there is a doorway which is reported to have led to the chapel and charnel-house mentioned by Leland. "S. Swithin, now called Trinity," he says, "stands on the south side of the town, and there is a chapelle with a carnarie at the west end of it." S. Swithin is, of course, the cathedral itself. Leland's other carnary, which must not be confused with this, ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Winchester - A Description of Its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See • Philip Walsingham Sergeant
... saint in the Valais and Rhone district, is plain but interesting and in parts is quite old. Near it is a little mortuary chapel. In most parts of Switzerland, it is the custom, after the bodies of the dead have been buried a certain length of time, to remove the remains to the "charnel house," allowing the graves to be used again and thus not encroaching upon the space reserved and consecrated in the churchyard, but we do not think ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... was lamenting and adding another chapter to the horrors of the mountain, hoping for fresh ossuary relics for his charnel glass-case, the Swedish youth and his guides, who had returned from their expedition, set off in search of the hapless Tartarin with ropes, ladders, in short a whole life-saving outfit, alas! unavailing... Bompard, rendered half idiotic, ...
— Tartarin On The Alps • Alphonse Daudet
... year (1548) the chapel of St. Paul's charnel house was pulled down and the bones removed into the country and reburied. From a sanitary point of view their removal is to be commended. There is no such excuse, however, for the destruction of the cloister in Pardon churchyard (April, 1549), with its ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume I • Reginald R. Sharpe
... black with many a crack, All black and bare, I ween; Jet-black and bare, save where with rust Of mouldy damps and charnel crust They were patch'd with ...
— Lyrical Ballads, With Other Poems, 1800, Vol. I. • William Wordsworth
... by a divine being. Even the sickening tales of Krishna and his amours are less shocking than this. When we turn from such representations of divinity to "the Word made flesh" we seem to have escaped from the pestilential air of a charnel-house to the sweet, pure ...
— Two Old Faiths - Essays on the Religions of the Hindus and the Mohammedans • J. Murray Mitchell and William Muir
... winding road to the place of graves, the great charnel house where so many, who were formerly actors on life's busy stage, have laid them down in the sleep of death. Many are the changes that meet the eye as we pass along, but there are many traces left that awaken memories of past friends and past years. ...
— Withered Leaves from Memory's Garland • Abigail Stanley Hanna
... nation, valorous and free, Thou shalt o'erlive the terror and the pain; Call back thy scattered children unto thee, Strong with the memory of their brothers slain, And rise from out thy charnel-house, to be Thine own immortal, ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times
... doubt, wonderful that the human mind can retain such a mass of recollections; yet we seem to be, in general, little aware that for one solitary incident in our lives, preserved by memory, hundreds have been buried in the silent charnel-house of oblivion. We peruse the past, like a map of pleasing or melancholy recollections, and observe lines crossing and re-crossing each other in a thousand directions; some spots are almost blank; others faintly traced; and ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - tailor in Dalkeith • D. M. Moir
... girders and panels were of the blackest oak; and the general effect of all this, augmented, if anything, by the windows, which were too high and narrow to admit of much light, was much the same as that produced by the interior of a subterranean chapel or charnel house. ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtile deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains white or colorless in itself, and if .. operating without medium upon matter, would touch all ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... and colour death and the taint of death are ever present, for every church is little better than a charnel-house, and in the crowded city nearly eighty cemeteries are packed with dead. Magnificent processions of princes and of great prelates march through the town by day; they are followed by the riot of the Mascarade ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... belonging to a copper-haired girl named Rhoda Kane. Rhoda's legs were far more alluring. Her chest had added equipment that was a haven of rest under trying circumstances, and Corson yearned for midnight when he would quit this charnel house and climb into Rhoda's convertible and—perhaps later—do a little chest analysis without benefit ...
— Ten From Infinity • Paul W. Fairman
... said Maskull. "At this moment the world with its sweetness seems to me a sort of charnel house. I feel a loathing for everything in it, including myself. I know ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... children; but weeks had now passed since they were slain, and their bones alone remained. The beasts and even the birds of prey had been there, or it would have been impossible to enter into that charnel-house. ...
— Manco, the Peruvian Chief - An Englishman's Adventures in the Country of the Incas • W.H.G. Kingston
... the wind grieves, And talks of death. Where cold grey waters lie Round greyer stones, and the new-fallen leaves Heap the chill hollows of the naked woods, A lisping moan, an inarticulate cry, Creeps far among the charnel solitudes, Numbing the waste with mindless misery. In these bare paths, these melancholy lands, What dream, or flesh, could ever have been young? What lovers have gone forth with linked hands? What flowers could ever have bloomed, what birds have ...
— Alcyone • Archibald Lampman
... was he who, lashed to his own mast, There where the sea-flowers screen the charnel-caves, Beside the sirens' singing island pass'd, Till sweetness failed along the inveterate waves... Say, soul,—are songs of Death no heaven to thee, Nor shames her lip the cheek ...
— The House of Life • Dante Gabriel Rossetti
... well disposed to fall in with their guests' wishes. There is a schloss hard by, inhabited by certain officials, who, however, exercise no jurisdiction over the town; and a church, not remarkable for anything, except the good order of its charnel-house. This, a small building separated by the breadth of the churchyard from the main edifice, seems to be a place of deposit for all the skulls and other bones which may be thrown up in digging the graves; and they are arranged ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig
... storm the weather turned milder. By Monday the city reeked with the smell of a charnel house and pestilence was in the air. The bodies of dead animals lay in the streets; the waters of the bay and gulf were thick with the dead. All the disinfectants in the city were quickly consumed. An earnest ...
— The True Story of Our National Calamity of Flood, Fire and Tornado • Logan Marshall
... was wrecked from end to end, was no more than a charnel house, a smashed and battered sepulchre. There was not one building that was whole, not one roof that had more than a few tiles clinging to shattered rafters, hardly a wall that was not cracked and bulged ...
— Between the Lines • Boyd Cable
... Mrs. Calvert, "whom I thought so like a fiend. If a demon could inherit flesh and blood, that youth is precisely such a being as I could conceive that demon to be. The depth and the malignity of his eye is hideous. His breath is like the airs from a charnel house, and his flesh seems fading from his bones, as if the worm that never dies were gnawing it ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... to digression," let us see what the ancient cemetery of the Innocents was like. Round an irregular four-sided space, about five hundred feet by two, ran a low cloister-like building, called Les Charniers, or the Charnel Houses. It had originally been a cloister surrounding the churchyard; but, so convenient had this place of sepulture been found, from its situation in the heart of Paris, that the remains of mortality increased ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... then uttered deep groans. The atmosphere was prescient with horror. He struggled to his feet and paced gloomily back and forth along the brow of the hill. The second church stood near, deserted, gloomy, no longer a temple of God, but a charnel house of fear and black superstition. In the distance the ghostly white walls of the Rincon church glowed faintly in the feeble light that dripped from the yellow stars. There was now no thought of God—no thought ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... panorama is wholly different. Carnivorous violence prevents more pain than it inflicts; the wedded laws of life and death wear the solemn beauty and wield the merciful functions of God; all is balanced and ameliorating; above the slaughterous struggle safely soar the dove and the rainbow; out of the charnel blooms the rose to which the nightingale sings love; nor is there poison which helps not health, nor destruction which supplies not creation with nutriment for greater ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... large heaps of organic matter, brought either from the Equator by the Gulf Stream, or from the North Pole by the counter-current of cold water which skirts the American coast. There also are heaped up those erratic blocks which are carried along by the broken ice; and close by, a vast charnel-house of molluscs, which perish here by millions. The depth of the sea is not great at Newfoundland—not more than some hundreds of fathoms; but towards the south is a depression of 1,500 fathoms. There the Gulf Stream widens. It loses some of its speed and some ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... vividly painted with weird figures depicting Chinese forms of torture, a veritable charnel-house of what in Europe would be called the Dark Ages. There were plenty of evidences that at no very distant date this chamber had been in use to punish horribly those who had offended against the fire god or the ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey
... about a voice? Surely you forget it, or Wilfully conceal that I have no competitor! I do not know the play, or even what the title is, But safe to make success a charnel-house recital is! So please to bear in mind, if I am not to fail in it, That Hamlet's father's ghost must rob the Lyons Mail in it! No! that's not correct! But you may spare your charity— A good sepulchral groan's ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... great cry, sometimes with a curse on my lips. Nor were they the most horrible of those dreams in which she would help him to mock me. Once, and only once, I found myself dreaming the dream of that night, and I knew that I had dreamed it before. Through palace and chapel and charnel-house, I followed her, ever with a dim sense of awful result; and when at the last she lifted the shining veil, instead of the face of Athanasia, the bare teeth of a skull grinned at me from under a spotted shroud, through which the sunlight ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... that the true and the beautiful were bound together in angelic wedlock and that all art found its highest mission in giving them expression. But the drama has been led through devious paths into the charnel house, and in "Salome" we must needs listen to the echoes of its dazed and drunken footfalls. The maxim "Truth before convention" asserts its validity and demands recognition under the guise of "characteristic beauty." We may refuse to admit that ugliness is entitled to be raised to a valid ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... "It is a charnel-house if you like, under those trees there, but a very beautiful one as is evident. We ought to keep alive the memories that make the place romantic. It would be a pity if utilitarian axe and fire were to spoil ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... the tumult died away in low gaspings and moanings. The day broke. The Nabob had slept off his debauch, and permitted the door to be opened. Twenty-three ghastly figures staggered out of the charnel-house, one hundred and twenty-three bodies were hastily thrown into a pit and covered up, and the Black Hole of Calcutta has gone into history as a synonym for all that is dreadful and all that is possible in ...
— Ten Great Events in History • James Johonnot
... were talking at the gate, one of them carrying a spade in hands still crusted with the soil of graves. Their very aspect was delightful to me; and I crept nearer to them, thinking to pick up some snatch of sexton gossip, some "talk fit for a charnel,"[35] something, in fine, worthy of that fastidious logician, that adept in coroner's law, who has come down to us as the patron of Yaughan's liquor, and the very prince of gravediggers. Scots people in general are so much wrapped up in their profession ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... obeyed and blew his horn; The French dismount, such was the king's command, And all their friends found slain upon the field Together in one charnel wide inter: A crowd of bishops, abbots, canons, monks And tonsured priests there gathered, in the name Of God assoil and bless; incense and myrrh Are burned in reverence and love before The dead who, buried there with honors great, Are left alone—what ...
— La Chanson de Roland • Lon Gautier
... the man lay prone and still, as still as those poor dead whose broken bodies rested all about him, where they had fallen, months or days, hours or weeks ago, in those grim contests which the quick were wont insensately to wage for a few charnel yards ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... to prevail. Then it was learned that the ship's doctor had run out of medicines. The passengers became demoralized. They believed their vessel was to become a charnel ship. Strict sanitary orders were issued, and a hospital ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... cried Almamen, in such a voice as might have come from the charnel, so ghostly and deathly sounded its hollow tone; then, recoiling some steps, he placed both his hands upon his temples, and muttered, "Mad, mad! yes, yes, this is but a delirium, and I am tempted with a devil! Oh, my child!" he resumed, in a voice that became, ...
— Leila or, The Siege of Granada, Book IV. • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... endeavour to do so; and to live like those many worthy men, of which you made mention in the former part of your discourse. This is my firm resolution. And as a pious man advised his friend, that, to beget mortification, he should frequent churches, and view monuments, and charnel-houses, and then and there consider how many dead bodies time had piled up at the gates of death, so when I would beget content, and increase confidence in the power, and wisdom, and providence of Almighty ...
— The Complete Angler • Izaak Walton
... in the wrong, who, when the great Alexander, finding him in the charnel-house, asked him what he was seeking for, answered, "I am seeking for your father's bones, and those of my slave; but I cannot find them, because there ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 330, September 6, 1828 • Various
... steal- ing into our hearts that the blessed spirits are not at rest in their graves, but wander, solicitous of the affairs of the world. But that those phantasms appear often, and do frequent cemeteries, charnel-houses, and churches, it is because those are the dormitories of the dead, where the devil, like an insolent champion, beholds with pride the spoils and trophies of his victory ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne
... that. And I didn't know but that even a pa'son might backslide to such things in these gory times—I won't say on a Zunday, but on a week-night like this—when we think what a blasphemious rascal he is, and that there's not a more charnel-minded villain towards womenfolk ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... me were so faint that it was impossible to tell in which direction they were. I had lost all trace of Holman. With extreme caution I crawled toward what I thought to be the spot where I had left him, but my groping fingers found only the fragments of bone that covered the dusty floor of the charnel house. ...
— The White Waterfall • James Francis Dwyer
... animals instead of clothes hanging loosely about their limbs, their long and matted locks streaming wildly down their shoulders, their faces burned and blackened by the tropical sun, their bodies wasted by famine and sorely disfigured by scars,—it seemed as if the charnel-house had given up its dead, as, with uncertain step, they glided slowly onwards like a troop of dismal spectres! More than half of the four thousand Indians who had accompanied the expedition had perished, and of the Spaniards ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... agents of progressive auto-infection: the streptococcus lanceolatus, the bacterium pyogenes, the bacillus subtilis, the staphylococci, the bacterium coli commune? They all play a part in the game, reducing the body in time to a charnel-house. Or are such substances as putrescein, cadaverin, skatol or indol—which are derived through chemical change in the putrescent mass—contributors to the spread of the poisonous taint throughout the system? ...
— Intestinal Ills • Alcinous Burton Jamison
... all appointed by the Convention, was proposed and decreed on the same evening. It possessed unlimited powers to confiscate property and take life. The Girondists dared not vote against this tribunal. The public voice would pronounce them the worst of traitors. France was now a charnel-house. Blood flowed in streams which were never dry. Innocence had no protection. Virtue was suspicion, suspicion a crime, the guillotine the penalty, and the confiscated estate the bribe to accusation. Thus there was erected, in the name of liberty and popular rights, over the ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... accomplishment of his vow. Charles V. had charged him in his will to build a mausoleum for the kings of the Austrian race. He bound the two obligations in one, and added a third destination to the enormous pile he contemplated. It should be a palace as well as a monastery and a royal charnel-house. He chose the most appropriate spot in Spain for the erection of the most cheerless monument in existence. He had fixed his capital at Madrid because it was the dreariest town in Spain, and to envelop himself ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... cumbersome weapons, and that we should give ourselves up with clean hearts and empty hands to battle against the fiery nightmare. He who fights and defends himself needs a pure heart: so does he who wanders among charnel houses, gives drink to parched lips, washes fevered faces and bathes wounds. We thought there would be a great forgetfulness of self and of former hopes, and of the whole world. O Union of pure hearts to ...
— The New Book Of Martyrs • Georges Duhamel
... Capitol? Buried under the mountain of potsherds! O Dian, how can a man who loses a father, a beloved, in Rome shed a single tear or look round him with consternation, when he comes out here before this battle-field of time and looks into the charnel-house of the nations? Dian, one would wish here an iron heart, for ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... this master-singer of the world, who, in De Quincey's phrase, was "a little lower than the angels," died and was buried in the parish church at Stratford. Shakespeare knew that in the course of time graves were often opened and the bones thrown into the charnel house. The world is thankful that he deliberately planned to have his resting place remain unmolested. His grave was dug seventeen feet deep and over it was placed the following inscription, intended to frighten those who might think of ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... d'Anjou implored, "Let not your grief to such excess be wrought; Bid that our men through all this field be sought, Whom those of Spain have in the battle caught; In a charnel command that they be borne." Answered the King: "Sound ...
— The Song of Roland • Anonymous
... death. A fortnight ago, Danton, the incomparable fiend, let loose his assassins upon the priests of God. Now Paris is made a theatre where the people whom Louis and his nobles would have died to save have turned every street into a stable of carnage, every prison and hospital into a vast charnel-house. One last revolting thing alone remains to be done—the murder of the King; then this France that we have loved will have no name and no place in our generation. She will rise again, but we shall ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... foundations. When the news of the February Revolution in Paris reached Austria the Magyar Diet was in session in Hungary. The success of the revolutionists in France inflamed the Liberal leaders in Hungary. Casting aside all reserve, Kossuth declared in the Diet: "From the charnel house of the Viennese system a poison-laden atmosphere steals over us. It would paralyze our nerves and pin us down when we might soar. The future of Hungary can never be secured while Austria maintains a system of government in direct antagonism ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... chronicle of his adopted country, which he amused himself with in his spare time. But he did not live to print it, his death taking place late in the year 1573. His will was short, and mentioned none of his children by name. His property in St. Paul's Churchyard, which included the Chapel or Charnel House on the north side, which he had purchased of King Henry VIII., he left to his wife, and the witnesses to his will were George Bishop, Raphael Holinshed, John Hunn, and John Shepparde.[6] His wife, ...
— A Short History of English Printing, 1476-1898 • Henry R. Plomer
... edifice in advance, like a castle of Anne Radcliffe, with donjon, turrets, underground chambers, secret passages, corkscrew stairs, vaulted halls, mysterious closets, hiding places in the thickness of the walls, oubliettes, charnel-houses, crypts where his heroes and heroines were to meet later on, to love, hate, fight, set ambushes, assassinate, or marry. . . . He cut masked doors in the walls for his expected personage to appear through, ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... them at sight of their king so strangely and appallingly stricken, but evidently they were entirely and happily unconscious of the THING that sat there in their midst, touching them, consorting its charnel horrors with their warm-blooded humanity,—so near, so close to them, that he fancied the smell of that trickling gore, that dank grave-soil, must necessarily enter in at their nostrils, and he sickened at the thought ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... and fragments formerly constituted part of the Harleian manuscripts in the British Museum, but has been chiefly transferred to the printed book department of recent years. It resembles a Typographical Cemetery, a charnel-house of books crowded together without respect to their subject-matter or their literary rank: the leaf of a Caxton, another of a valueless legal treatise, the title-page of Romeus and Julietta, on which Shakespeare founded, as the phrase goes, his ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... life. Is it not a visible absurdity to suppose that being is crowded upon every leaf, and yet absent from the immensities of space? The law of the Great System forbids the waste even of an atom; it knows no spot where something of life does not breathe. In the very charnel-house is the nursery of production and animation. Is that true? Well, then, can you conceive that space, which is the Infinite itself, is alone a waste, is alone lifeless, is less useful to the one design of universal being than the dead carcass of a dog, than the peopled leaf, than the swarming ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... man, who pursued his art in the solitude of his cell, but made it a source of penance to him. His employment was to portray, either on canvas or in waxen models, the human face and human form, in the agonies of death and in all the stages of dissolution and decay. The fearful mysteries of the charnel house were unfolded in his labors—the loathsome banquet of the beetle and the worm.—I turn with shuddering even from the recollection of his works. Yet, at that time, my strong, but ill-directed imagination seized with ardor upon his ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... left England. So terribly was the "first seven divisions" of glorious memory decimated in this first battle of Ypres, that at a critical time, the bakers, cobblers and grooms were put into the trenches to fill the gaps made by the slain soldiers in that great charnel house. The "thin red line" held back—not for days, but for weeks,—an immensely superior force, and the soldiers of England unflinchingly bared their breasts to the most destructive artillery-fire that the world at that time had ever known. They held their ground and saved ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... could flow in and cover its barren nakedness, as we now know they might if a few sandy barriers were swept away, it would be indeed, a blessing, for in it there is naught of good, comfort or satisfaction, but ever in the minds of those who braved its heat and sands, a thought of a horrid Charnel house, a corner of the earth so dreary that it requires an exercise of strongest faith to believe that the great Creator ever smiled upon it as a portion of his work and pronounced it "Very good." We had crossed the great North American Continent, ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... a sight which wrung tears from the eyes of those who did not often weep. The ship was a charnel-house. Death in its most horrible forms was there,—from starvation, from corruption, scurvy, lock-jaw, gangrene, consumption, and fever. How ghastly the scene! Men, once robust and strong, weak and helpless as babes, ...
— Winning His Way • Charles Carleton Coffin
... the work of the week. The sponge of commerce, the one you buy at the drug store, is the skeleton of the creature; the thing taken from the water is its corpse. Not until this body has rotted away is it pleasant to live with. Day by day the stench, like that of a charnel house, became more unbearable to Dick. The crew seemed never to notice it, which caused the boy much wonderment that noses had ever been given them. He was glad when a strong wind came and swept some of the smell away instead ...
— Dick in the Everglades • A. W. Dimock
... midst of it lay her face, a radiant isle in a dark sea. I stood and gazed. Fascinated by her beauty? God forbid! I was fascinated by the awful incongruity between that face, pure as the moonlight, and the charnel-house that lay unseen behind it. She was to me, henceforth, not a woman, but a live Death. I had no sense of sacredness, such as always in the chamber even of a little girl. How should I? It was no ...
— The Flight of the Shadow • George MacDonald
... He had a silk skirt on, and torn lace upon his wrists, and he came mincingly up, holding the parasol above his head, and imitating the walk of an affected lady, to the vociferous delight of his comrades. And all this, and much more, in that fearful charnel city, with death and suffering on ...
— Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands • Mary Seacole
... awful stench of these frightful charnel isles haggard maniacs screamed and gibbered and fought among the torn remnants of their grisly feasts; while on those which contained but clean-picked bones they battled with one another, the weaker furnishing sustenance ...
— Warlord of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... wont to let his imagination dwell on these details of the charnel-house. In a letter to Dallas, August 12, 1811, he writes, "I am already too familiar with the dead. It is strange that I look on the skulls which stand beside me (I have always had four in my study) without emotion, ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... man." With all this, our new-made divine is an unmistakable poet. To a clay compounded chiefly of the worldling and the rhetorician, there is added a real spark of Promethean fire. He will one day clothe his apostrophes and objurgations, his astronomical religion and his charnel-house morality, in lasting verse, which will stand, like a Juggernaut made of gold and jewels, at once magnificent and repulsive; for this divine is Edward Young, the future ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... quicken'd hairs begin to rise: Ghastly and strong his features grow; The cold dew trickles from his brow; Whilst grinning beat his clatt'ring teeth, And loosen'd knock his joints beneath. As to the charnel he draws nigh The whiten'd tomb-stone strikes his eye: He starts, he stops, his eye-balls glare, And settle in a death-like stare: Deep hollow sounds ring in his ear; Such sounds as dying wretches hear When the ...
— Poems, &c. (1790) • Joanna Baillie
... and funeral yew That bathes the charnel house with dew Methinks I hear a voice begin: (Ye ravens, cease your croaking din; Ye tolling clocks, no time resound O'er the long lake and midnight ground) It sends a peal of hollow groans Thus speaking from among the bones: 'When men my ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... On the 23rd of April 1616, England's greatest dramatist died in the prime of life—he was just fifty-two years of age. Two days later he was buried in Stratford Church, near the north wall of the chancel. Fearful lest his bones should be added to the grisly burden of the charnel-house close by, he penned a curse upon those who should ...
— William Shakespeare - His Homes and Haunts • Samuel Levy Bensusan
... speak too! if our graves And charnel houses give those we bury back, Our monuments shall be the ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... thereof." As I looked more attentively, I saw that this figure was of a Spectral appearance, and Bony withal; albeit, its contours were to some extent hidden by its clinging cerement-like garments, and the equally clinging and charnel-like shades ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, August 1, 1891 • Various
... life, played wildly with them. The smoking-room then, with its occupants so greedy for the things that money connotes—the furs, champagne, cigars, and heavy possessions that were symbols of the personal aggrandizement they sought and valued—seemed to the Irishman like a charnel-house where those about to die sat making inventories in blind pride of the things they ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... rather than marry Paris, From off the battlements of yonder tower; Or walk in thievish ways; or bid me lurk Where serpents are; chain me with roaring bears; Or shut me nightly in a charnel-house, O'er-cover'd quite with dead men's rattling bones, With reeky shanks and yellow chapless skulls; Or bid me go into a new-made grave, And hide me with a dead man in his shroud; Things that, to hear them told, ...
— Romeo and Juliet • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... of our observation turned upon the fact of death, the world would appear to us like a huge charnel- house; but in the world of life the thought of death has, we find, the least possible hold upon our minds. Not because it is the least apparent, but because it is the negative aspect of life; just as, in spite of the fact that we shut our eyelids every second, it is the openings of the eye that ...
— Sadhana - The Realisation of Life • Rabindranath Tagore
... the heaps of corpses on which the burning climate had already begun to do its loathsome work. When at length a passage was made, twenty-three ghastly figures, such as their own mothers would not have known, staggered one by one out of the charnel-house. A pit was instantly dug. The dead bodies, a hundred and twenty-three in number, were flung into it promiscuously and ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... in the ears of the British soldier. It was France that had prostituted liberty to lust. It was France that had dragged public opinion to the scaffold and the guillotine. It was France that held the axe uplifted over all that was good and holy. It was France that was making all Europe a charnel-house. It was General Buonaparte of France, who only sought to subdue England, the more easily to conquer the world. Many an English hearth had cursed his name. Many a widow had he made desolate, and many an orphan fatherless. ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... the chapel dedicated to St. John the Evangelist, converted by Edward VI. into, and now used as, a grammar school; below it was a charnel-house. ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Norwich - A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief History of the Episcopal See • C. H. B. Quennell
... if it is three miles! You must not take shelter in that charnel-house," he muttered; and moved along in his seat as if to show me there was ...
— The Forsaken Inn - A Novel • Anna Katharine Green
... this part of the country—and perhaps extensively in the interior of New England—to bury the dead first in a charnel-house, or common tomb, where they remain till decay has so far progressed as to secure them from the resurrectionists. They are then reburied, with certain ceremonies, in their own ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... was to me merely the receptacle of bodies deprived of life, which, from being the seat of beauty and strength, had become food for the worm. Now I was led to examine the cause and progress of this decay and forced to spend days and nights in vaults and charnel-houses. My attention was fixed upon every object the most insupportable to the delicacy of the human feelings. I saw how the fine form of man was degraded and wasted; I beheld the corruption of death ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... and adaptations from the German. He revelled in the horrific school of melodrama. He delighted in the kind of German romance parodied by Meredith in Farina, where Aunt Lisbeth tells Margarita of spectres, smelling of murder and the charnel-breath of midnight, who "uttered noises that wintered the blood and revealed sights that stiffened hair three feet long; ay, and kept it stiff." The Bravo of Venice (1805) is a translation of Zschokke's Abellino, der Grosse Bandit, but Lewis invented a superfluous ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... house early on Third day morning, with a letter from Thomas Garrett, giving me a description of the whole transaction. My joy on this occasion was great! and I returned thanks to God for this wonderful escape of so many human beings from the charnel-house of Slavery. ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... the few survivors of General Leclerc's expedition to St. Domingo, had, on leaving that charnel-house, become aide-de-camp to Marshal Ney. He it was who, during the famous retreat from Russia, was sent to ask the general who was blowing up the Beresina bridges to suspend the work of destruction, so as to allow ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... Bath but once, and the moment I stept over the threshold, I found myself chilled to the very marrow of my bones. When we consider, that in our churches, in general, we breathe a gross stagnated air, surcharged with damps from vaults, tombs, and charnel-houses, may we not term them so many magazines of rheums, created for the benefit of the medical faculty? and safely aver, that more bodies are lost, than souls saved, by going to church, in the winter especially, which may be said to engross eight months in the year. ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... there, And standing calm and motionless, whilst I Slide giddily as the world reels—My God! The beautiful blue heaven is flecked with blood! The sunshine on the floor is black! The air Is changed to vapours such as the dead breathe In charnel pits! Pah! I am choaked! There creeps A clinging, black, contaminating mist About me—'tis substantial, heavy, thick, I cannot pluck it from me, for it glues My fingers and my limbs to one another, And eats into my sinews, and dissolves My flesh ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... in. There was a great rattling of milk-cans on the gloomy platform, and various slouching shapes entered third-class carriages. The wanderers had the only first-class compartment to themselves. It struck cold and noisome, like a peculiarly unaired charnel-house. A feeble lamp, whose effect was dimmed by the swishing dirty oil in the bottom of the globe, gave a pretense at illumination. The guard passing by the window turned his lantern on them and paused for a wondering moment. Were they a runaway ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... head high, and looked straight toward the boats, and at the same moment a whiff of air came toward us heavily charged with a most disgusting and nauseating odour, about equally suggestive of musk and the charnel-house. Its eyes, distinctly luminous, and apparently about two feet apart, were directed straight toward the longboat, and the next instant it began to move toward us, again ...
— A Middy in Command - A Tale of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... cables weighing anchor. Soon the soft slap of the water around the bow and the regular heaving motion told that the Bozra was under way. The sea-mouse creaked and groaned through all her timbers and her lading. The foul bilge-water made the hold stifling as a charnel-house. Lampaxo, Hib being absent, began to howl ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... offerings pass And lie an undistinguish'd mass. Deucalion,[1] to restore mankind, Was bid to throw the stones behind; So those who here their gifts convey Are forced to look another way; For few, a chosen few, must know The mysteries that lie below. Sad charnel-house! a dismal dome, For which all mortals leave their home! The young, the beautiful, and brave, Here buried in one common grave! Where each supply of dead renews Unwholesome damps, offensive dews: And lo! the writing ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... an odour arose, and came, and struck upon my brain, most detestable, most execrable; and while one might count ten, I was aware of her near-sounding engines, and that cursed charnel went tearing past me on her maenad way, not fifteen yards from my eyes and nostrils. She was a thing, my God, from which the vulture and the jackal, prowling for offal, would fly with shrieks of loathing. I had a glimpse of decks piled thick ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... give life to the dead. He will make the deaf ear to hear, the blind eye to see, the pulseless heart to beat, and the damp walls of your spiritual charnel-house will crash into ruin at His cry: "Come forth!" I verily believe there are souls in this house who are now dead in sin, who in half an hour will be alive forever. There was a thrilling dream, a glorious dream—you may have heard of it. Ezekiel closed his eyes, and he saw two ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... break down her proud spirit. The first is an exhibition of wax figures, representing her husband and children as they appeared in death. Then comes a dance of madmen, with dismal howls and songs and speeches. Then a tomb-maker whose talk is of the charnel-house, and who taunts her with her mortality. She interrupts his insulting homily with the exclamation, "Am I not thy Duchess?" "Thou art," he scornfully replies, "some great woman sure, for riot begins to sit on thy forehead (clad in gray hairs) twenty years sooner than on a merry milkmaid's. Thou ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... false words. I denounce you openly as a false follower, for if I read rightly the language of Holy Writ, it was He whom you so delight to term Master who gave his life freely for His friends. But you—you are all words, a charnel-house of ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... persecution, when Nature seized the rod and wielded it with relentless hand, smiting Jew and gentile, the pious and the ungodly, with equal severity. The cholera had broken out in Central Russia and its devastations were terrible beyond description. The country from Kief to Odessa was as one vast charnel-house. As has always been the case during epidemics, the Jews suffered less from the ravages of the disease than did their gentile neighbors. The strict dietary laws which excluded everything not absolutely fresh and clean, the frequent ablutions which the religious rites demanded ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith
... and the steam the electric lights would shine like far-off twinkling stars—red and blue-green and purple stars, according to the color of the mist and the brew from which it came. For the odors of these ghastly charnel houses there may be words in Lithuanian, but there are none in English. The person entering would have to summon his courage as for a cold-water plunge. He would go in like a man swimming under water; he would put his ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... creep 150 Through thousand lazy channels in our veins, Dammed like the dull canal with locks and chains, And moving, as a sick man in his sleep, Three paces, and then faltering:—better be Where the extinguished Spartans still are free, In their proud charnel of Thermopylae, Than stagnate in our marsh,—or o'er the deep Fly, and one current to the ocean add, One spirit to the souls our fathers had, One freeman more, America, to ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... runes are as blanks, and the wave sleeps unstirred on the fountain. Go where the Fylgia [96], whom Alfader gives to each at his birth, leads thee. Thou didst desire love that seemed shut from thee, and I predicted that thy love should awake from the charnel in which the creed that succeeds to the faith of our sires inters life in its bloom. And thou didst covet the fame of the Jarl and the Viking, and I blessed thine axe to thy hand, and wove the sail for thy masts. So long as man ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... heresy or truth;—drenching the world with blood, depopulating realms, and turning fertile lands into deserts; until, for religious war, persecution, and bloodshed, the Earth for many a century has rolled round the Sun, a charnel-house, steaming and reeking with human gore, the blood of brother slain by brother for opinion's sake, that has soaked into and polluted all her veins, and made her a horror to ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... hole, and they have found things like flowerpots upside down, Mis'ess Yeobright; and inside these be real charnel bones. They have carried 'em off to men's houses; but I shouldn't like to sleep where they will bide. Dead folks have been known to come and claim their own. Mr. Yeobright had got one pot of the bones, and was going to bring 'em home—real skellington bones—but 'twas ordered ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... the scene, and there is no acting room for misery or sorrow or such poor strolling players as sickness and death. The things which please not the eye are quick to offend souls nursed in a faultless taste, and the charnel-house of failure receives whatsoever things have ...
— Via Crucis • F. Marion Crawford
... a very modest extension of my open air establishments, has become something of a charnel house. The grey fly pays me a visit. If I lay a piece of butcher's meat on the windowsill, she hastens up, works her will on it and retires. No hiding place escapes her notice among the jars, cups, glasses and receptacles of every kind with ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... believe the discovery; but next instant—as at the temple pond, though now without need of placard or interpreter—he understood. This bowl, a tiny crater among the weeds, showed like some paltry valley of Ezekiel, a charnel place of Herod's innocents, the battlefield of some babes' crusade. A chill struck him, not from the water or the early mists. In stupor, he viewed that ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... despite the active measures of sanitation lately taken, the Department of Public Health, the ordinances of the Colonial Government in 1879, and the excellent water with which the station is now provided. On a clear sunny day the charnel-house, I repeat, is lovely, mais c'est la mort; it is the terrible beauty of death. Mrs. Melville says, with full truth, 'I felt amidst all the glory of tropic sunlight and everlasting verdure a sort of ineffable dread connected with the climate.' ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... death-spasms, and yet the suffering had been nought, compared with that loathing and disgust in my soul. It had seemed that I was alone, I said. Alone as the corpse in unshrouded grave! I was in a charnel-house. Men who were sinless as you hung dead upon the wall, hung dying there. Darkness covered all things at a distance, sighs crept up from far corners, chains clanked, or imprecations or prayer uttered themselves,—bodiless ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... merged into the heavy sky; Around, the huddled stones of grave and tomb: Some old God's-acre now corruption's sty: 10 He murmured to himself with dull despair, Here Faith died, poisoned by this charnel air. ...
— The City of Dreadful Night • James Thomson
... the whole place is but one vast, putrid shamble. The pillars of the hall were made of thighbones, and those of the parlour of shinbones, while the floors were formed of layer upon layer of all manner of charnel. ...
— The Visions of the Sleeping Bard • Ellis Wynne
... vegetable death. It is familiar, and the impression passes away. It is the naked skeleton bleaching in the winds, the gigantic bones of the forest still erect, the speaking records of former life, and of strength still unsubdued, vigorous even in death, which renders Glenmore one enormous charnel-house." ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... whose sad and pensive face of a soldier who has seen too much slaughter and too many charnel houses, was marked by a large scar, raised his head and said in a grave, ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... aside all reserve, the Magyar leader had declared that the reigning dynasty could only be saved by granting to Hungary a responsible Ministry drawn from the Diet itself, and by establishing constitutional government throughout the Austrian dominions. "From the charnel-house of the Viennese system," he cried, "a poison-laden atmosphere steals over us, which paralyses our nerves and bows us when we would soar. The future of Hungary can never be secure while in the other provinces there exists a system of government in direct antagonism to every constitutional ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... have been gratified, if decay had spared the more durable portions of his material structure. It was probably not against such a transfer that the lines were written,—whoever was their author,—but in the fear that they would be carried to the charnel-house. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... opinion of my daughter's condition. You have inspired us with a degree of hope that we have not known for a long time. Indeed, Hope spread her wings and left this castle long since, and it has been little better than a charnel-house until your appearance. Now I ask you to tell me candidly whether you entertain any hope of my Feodora's ultimate recovery. You may lay your heart open to me, for I should receive her as one raised from the dead if ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman
... part of the congregation. Behind and around us were the vaults I have already described; before us the devout audience, dimly shown by the light which streamed on their faces through one or two low Gothic windows, such as give air and light to charnel-houses. By this were seen the usual variety of countenances which are generally turned towards a Scotch pastor on such occasions, almost all composed to attention, unless where a father or mother here and there recalls the wandering eyes ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... though peering about in search of something. Suddenly it paused, lifted its head high, and looked straight toward the boats, and at the same moment a whiff of air came toward us heavily charged with a most disgusting and nauseating odour, about equally suggestive of musk and the charnel-house. Its eyes, distinctly luminous, and apparently about two feet apart, were directed straight toward the longboat, and the next instant it began to move toward us, again ...
— A Middy in Command - A Tale of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... speaking of death and of the skulls and bones of dead men and women, how there is no difference; that nobody could tell that of the great Marius or Alexander from a pyoneer; nor, for all the pains the ladies take with their faces, he that should look in a charnel-house could not distinguish which was Cleopatra's, or fair Rosamond's, ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... commerce, the one you buy at the drug store, is the skeleton of the creature; the thing taken from the water is its corpse. Not until this body has rotted away is it pleasant to live with. Day by day the stench, like that of a charnel house, became more unbearable to Dick. The crew seemed never to notice it, which caused the boy much wonderment that noses had ever been given them. He was glad when a strong wind came and swept some of the smell away instead of leaving it to settle ...
— Dick in the Everglades • A. W. Dimock
... who, lashed to his own mast, There where the sea-flowers screen the charnel-caves, Beside the sirens' singing island pass'd, Till sweetness failed along the inveterate waves... Say, soul,—are songs of Death no heaven to thee, Nor shames her lip ...
— The House of Life • Dante Gabriel Rossetti
... (1548) the chapel of St. Paul's charnel house was pulled down and the bones removed into the country and reburied. From a sanitary point of view their removal is to be commended. There is no such excuse, however, for the destruction of the cloister in Pardon churchyard (April, 1549), with its famous picture ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume I • Reginald R. Sharpe
... in no common degree, was left to die in the hands of strangers—no slight reproach to the cruel insensibility of those who, wallowing in wealth, and fluttering from year to year through the round of fashion, suffered their former associate, nay their envied example, to perish in his living charnel. He was buried in the Protestant cemetery of Caen, under ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... doors, and one might not know how the coroner would interpret it. His power to commit a suspect added to his terrors, and gave to the capable, astute official a mundane formidableness that overtopped the charnel-house flavor of his more habitual duties. He was visible through the unchinked logs of the little room where the inquest was in progress, barely spacious enough to contain the bier, the jury, and the witness under examination; and yet ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... been used as a charnel-house is called the "Golgotha." In the centre is an altar tomb, upon which is a large and elaborately decorated alabaster slab, in a fair state of preservation. It bears an incised representation of Andrew Jones, a Hereford merchant, ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Hereford, A Description - Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • A. Hugh Fisher
... it be falsehood. God is Truth; God-taught, true hearts discern that Truth, and guard: Whom God forsakes forsake it. O thou North, That beat'st thy brand so loud against thy shield, Hearing nought else, what Truth one day was thine! Behold within corruption's charnel vaults It sleeps this day. What God shall lift its head? We came from regions of the rising sun: Scorning the temples built by mortal hand, We worshipp'd God—one God—the Immense, All-Just: That worship was the worship of great hearts: Duty was worship then: that ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere
... time. But he did not live to print it, his death taking place late in the year 1573. His will was short, and mentioned none of his children by name. His property in St. Paul's Churchyard, which included the Chapel or Charnel House on the north side, which he had purchased of King Henry VIII., he left to his wife, and the witnesses to his will were George Bishop, Raphael Holinshed, John Hunn, and John Shepparde.[6] His wife, ...
— A Short History of English Printing, 1476-1898 • Henry R. Plomer
... The nymph arose: he left them to their joy, And onward went upon his high employ, Showering those powerful fragments on the dead. And, as he pass'd, each lifted up its head, 790 As doth a flower at Apollo's touch. Death felt it to his inwards: 'twas too much: Death fell a weeping in his charnel-house. The Latmian persever'd along, and thus All were re-animated. There arose A noise of harmony, pulses and throes Of gladness in the air—while many, who Had died in mutual arms devout and true, Sprang to each other madly; and the rest Felt a high ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats
... to wonder, for through the open door of the chapel there streamed a dismal host of invaders from the Wolfmark—black Hussars of Death, in dark armor, with white skeletons painted over them, all charnel-house ribs and bones in hideous and ridiculous array—which was one of Duke Casimir's devices to frighten children, and no doubt these scarecrows frightened many of these. Specially when these villanous companies ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... the best in the Armada, and they made a magnificent and desperate struggle. Raked with broadside after broadside they fought on, drifting into ever more dangerous proximity to the shoals, their hulls riddled, their decks charnel-houses; resolved to sink rather than strike; while the English poured in a ceaseless storm of shot at close range but always evaded the one danger, of being grappled and boarded, the sole condition ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... British in the naval engagement, but the greater sacrifice, the supreme charnel house of the war, the British race reserved for itself. There, the yeomanry of England, the unsung county regiments whose sacrifices and achievements have been neglected in England's generous desire to honor the men from ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... than this it was believed that the true and the beautiful were bound together in angelic wedlock and that all art found its highest mission in giving them expression. But the drama has been led through devious paths into the charnel house, and in "Salome" we must needs listen to the echoes of its dazed and drunken footfalls. The maxim "Truth before convention" asserts its validity and demands recognition under the guise of "characteristic beauty." We may refuse to ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... of him, despite myself, was an unkind remembrance—his breath had been charnel-foul, and always, when discussing anything, he insisted on taking the lapel of his listener's coat and ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... to make room for other corpses. Who has said: "Life is a hostelry, and the grave is our home?" But these corpses do not remain in their graves, for they are only tenants and are ejected at the expiration of the lease. Around this charnel-house, where the heaps of bones resemble a mass of fagots, is arranged, breast-high, a series of little black boxes, six inches square, surmounted by a cross and cut out in the shape of a heart in front, so that one can see the skulls inside. ...
— Over Strand and Field • Gustave Flaubert
... ruin is not altogether to be regretted. It has softened certain loathsome details of the charnel facts portrayed, and in other pictures the torment and anguish of the lost souls are no longer so painful as the old painters ascertained them. Hell in the Campo Santo is not now the hell of other days, just as the hell of Christian ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... also, of the College of the Holy Trinity, endowed as a "carnarie," or charnel-house, of the city. The chief duties of the priests belonging to the chantry attached thereto were to bury the dead, and keep up perpetual Masses for the souls ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... being—skull-headed, skeleton-boned, scythe in hand—Death himself; and ever and anon, when the dance was swiftest, would he dart into the midst, pounce on one or other, holding an hour-glass to the face, unheeding rank, sex, or age, and bear his victim to the charnel-house beside the church. It was a sight as though some terrible sermon had taken life, as though the unseen had become visible, the veil were taken away; and the implicit unresisting obedience of the victims added to the sense of awful reality ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... into the darkness of a vast pile, evidently once a convent, and where the chill of the massive walls struck to the marrow. I felt as if walking through a charnel-house. We hurried on; a trembling light, towards the end of an immense and lofty aisle, was our guide; and the crowd, long familiar with the way, rushed through the intricacies where so many feet of monks had trod before them, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... when they heard the rattling of the cables weighing anchor. Soon the soft slap of the water around the bow and the regular heaving motion told that the Bozra was under way. The sea-mouse creaked and groaned through all her timbers and her lading. The foul bilge-water made the hold stifling as a charnel-house. Lampaxo, Hib being absent, began to ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... sustained is Webster's symphony of sombre tints, that we do not feel this sepulchral language, this 'talk fit for a charnel' (to use one of his own phrases), to be out of keeping. It sounds like a presentiment of coming woes, which, as the drama grows to its conclusion, gather and darken on the wretched ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... squabbles I know preserve one's name, when one's work will not; but I despise the fame that depends on scolding till one is remembered, and remembered by whom? The scavengers of literature! Reviewers are like sextons, who in a charnel-house can tell you to what John Thompson or to what Tom-Matthews such a skull or such belonged—but who wishes to know? The fame that is only to be found in such vaults, is like the fires that burn unknown in tombs, and go out as fast as they are discovered. Lord Hardwicke is welcome to live ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... on the gloomy platform, and various slouching shapes entered third-class carriages. The wanderers had the only first-class compartment to themselves. It struck cold and noisome, like a peculiarly unaired charnel-house. A feeble lamp, whose effect was dimmed by the swishing dirty oil in the bottom of the globe, gave a pretense at illumination. The guard passing by the window turned his lantern on them and paused for a wondering moment. Were they a runaway ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... chill of uneasiness that inevitably preceded this moment of decision. He was not lacking in courage, else the circumstances under which he had worked for the past ten years—the sometimes perilous, sometimes downright charnel conditions left by the fleeing Hymenop conquerors—would have broken him long ago. But that same hard experience had honed rather than blunted the edge of his imagination, and the prospect of a close-quarters stalking of an unknown and patently ...
— Control Group • Roger Dee
... clock, my life away! Even a second seems a day. Even a minute seems a year, Peopled with ghosts, that press and peer Into my face so charnel white, Lit by the devilish, dancing light. Tick, little clock! mete out my fate: Tortured and tense I wait, I ...
— Rhymes of a Rolling Stone • Robert W. Service
... strange mystic grin, as if he saw something that they could not perceive. Perhaps he did. Perhaps he saw the Simiacine Plateau, and knew that, after all, he had won the last throw; for up there, far above the table-lands of Central Africa, there lay beneath high Heaven a charnel-house. Hounded down the slope by his tormentors, he had left a memento behind him surer than their torturing knives, keener than their sharpest steel—he had left the sleeping ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... man-made moral standards. They are beyond all that goes by the name of good and evil, in that the two are used indifferently for the furtherance of a purely aesthetic end. The Beyond-man discovers beauty in the abyss, and ugliness in mere worldly rectitude. Leonardo painted the Medusa head, with its charnel pallor and its crown of writhing snakes, no less lovingly than the sweet-tender face of the Christ of the Cenacolo, and the beauty is not less, though of an opposite sort. Shakespeare's most profound sayings and most magical poetry are as often as not put in the mouths ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... Walled about by its basement stones, Lie the marvellous preacher's bones. No saintly honors to them are shown, No sign nor miracle have they known; But he who passes the ancient church Stops in the shade of its belfry-porch, And ponders the wonderful life of him Who lies at rest in that charnel dim. Long shall the traveller strain his eye From the railroad car, as it plunges by, And the vanishing town behind him search For the slender spire of the Whitefield Church; And feel for one moment the ghosts of trade, And fashion, and folly, and pleasure laid, By the thought of ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... that he "planned his singular edifice in advance, like a castle of Anne Radcliffe, with donjon, turrets, underground chambers, secret passages, corkscrew stairs, vaulted halls, mysterious closets, hiding places in the thickness of the walls, oubliettes, charnel-houses, crypts where his heroes and heroines were to meet later on, to love, hate, fight, set ambushes, assassinate, or marry. . . . He cut masked doors in the walls for his expected personage to appear through, and trap doors in the floor ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... blithe and light-hearted, though he thought me insane; he returned with the air of a serving-man who, expecting to find a well-equipped pantry, had wandered into a charnel house. ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... an exhalation; Pass'd! pass'd! for us, forever pass'd, that once so mighty world, now void, inanimate, phantom world, Embroider'd, dazzling, foreign world, with all its gorgeous legends, myths, Its kings and castles proud, its priests and warlike lords and courtly dames, Pass'd to its charnel vault, coffin'd with crown and armor on, Blazon'd with Shakspere's purple page, And dirged by Tennyson's ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... apparently to warn them from a nearer approach. Her skinny lips, rapidly moving to and fro, and her dark withered, bony, and cadaverous features, gave her more the appearance of a living mummy or a resurrection from the charnel-house than aught instinct with the common ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... stripped of their timber for the purposes of the siege. In another hour's walking they reached the forest, and pressed on until the afternoon. Not that there was any need for speed, now, but John felt a longing to place as wide a gap as possible between himself and the great charnel ground which, alone, marked the spot ...
— For the Temple - A Tale of the Fall of Jerusalem • G. A. Henty
... men, of which you made mention in the former part of your discourse. This is my firm resolution. And as a pious man advised his friend, that, to beget mortification, he should frequent churches, and view monuments, and charnel-houses, and then and there consider how many dead bodies time had piled up at the gates of death, so when I would beget content, and increase confidence in the power, and wisdom, and providence of Almighty God, I will walk the meadows, by some gliding stream, and ...
— The Complete Angler • Izaak Walton
... twilight fails; beneath, the blind snakes creep; Beside us glides the charnel shark, our pilot through the deep; And, lurking where low headlands shield from cruising scout and spy, We bide the signal through the gloom that bids ...
— Dreams and Dust • Don Marquis
... it." Lady Agatha's face flushed and lit up. "I've made it healthy for them. Highercombe is a painted lie—a pest-house, a charnel-house, full of unwholesome miasmas from its pretty green, its pond covered with water-lilies. Death lurks in that pond. There is bad drainage and bad water; the damp oozes through the old brick floors of the houses. ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... unerringly, like flights of homing doves, their myriad prayers, their passionate loving thoughts and wistful thirsty longing for one word, one kiss, one touch of the hand.... Surely such thoughts and prayers sanctified this charnel-house. ...
— The End of Her Honeymoon • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... standing calm and motionless, whilst I Slide giddily as the world reels—My God! The beautiful blue heaven is flecked with blood! The sunshine on the floor is black! The air Is changed to vapours such as the dead breathe In charnel pits! Pah! I am choaked! There creeps A clinging, black, contaminating mist About me—'tis substantial, heavy, thick, I cannot pluck it from me, for it glues My fingers and my limbs to one another, And eats into my sinews, and dissolves My flesh ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... the ideal world as a ruin stands in a blooming landscape. The thought of death sheds a pathetic charm over everything then. The young man cools himself with a thought of the winding-sheet and the charnel, as the heated dancer cools himself on the balcony with the night-air. The young imagination plays with the idea of death, makes a toy of it, just as a child plays with edge-tools till once it cuts its fingers. The most lugubrious poetry is written by very young and tolerably ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... Wanderer fell to the earth before the shadow of Beatrice, Keyork Arabian sat alone in his charnel-house. The brilliant light of two powerful lamps illuminated everything in the place, for Keyork loved light, like all those who are intensely attached to life for its own sake. The yellow rays flooded the life-like faces of his ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... would not have dared to repeat those names in the charnel hut, lest those whom he invoked should spring upon him and tear him to pieces. No more potent or more perilous charm was known to ...
— The Bridge of the Gods - A Romance of Indian Oregon. 19th Edition. • Frederic Homer Balch
... revolt and bitterness in which her thoughts on human life would move when she had no labour for her hands. He was another of those who suffered so uselessly, a mere half animal who had to do the rough work of the world, and then was dropped into the great charnel house of unmeaning death. As soon as the man began to show signs, faint signs of perception, she left the priest by his bedside and went back into the inner room to put on the cloak she had left there. And then ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward
... condition was mainly owing to the presence of various fakirs, who, though still alive, were in advanced stages of putrefaction. Most people are supposed to go easily and pleasantly to the devil, but these elected to do so by way of a charnel-house asceticism, and an elaborate system of self-torture. Some were suspended from the ceiling by a rope tied to their arms, some embedded in plaster, some stiffened in a circle, some permanently distorted into the shape of the letter S; some were head ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... the forms of human beings. Their dresses showed that they were those of men, women, and children; but weeks had now passed since they were slain, and their bones alone remained. The beasts and even the birds of prey had been there, or it would have been impossible to enter into that charnel-house. ...
— Manco, the Peruvian Chief - An Englishman's Adventures in the Country of the Incas • W.H.G. Kingston
... Situated high above sea level, with a climate so bracing and life-giving that the phthisis bacillus can hardly live in it, it seemed to our soldiers, after their long march across the veldt, a veritable City of Refuge. Alas! how soon it was to be turned into a charnel house! ...
— From Aldershot to Pretoria - A Story of Christian Work among Our Troops in South Africa • W. E. Sellers
... drunken soldier. He had a silk skirt on, and torn lace upon his wrists, and he came mincingly up, holding the parasol above his head, and imitating the walk of an affected lady, to the vociferous delight of his comrades. And all this, and much more, in that fearful charnel city, with death ...
— Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands • Mary Seacole
... ransom courteously when they were all cured, for there was none that was not grievously wounded, French as well as English. I saw afterwards, sitting at the table of King Charles of France, a Breton knight who had been in it, Sir Yvon Charnel , and he had a face so carved and cut that he showed full well how good a fight had been fought. The matter was talked of in many places, and some set it down as a very poor, and others ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... articles arrived; but how great was their surprise and dismay, when in a short time every order came, directed properly to the person who had given it! Coffins and coffin-plates, silk shrouds and velvet palls, and all the expensive paraphernalia of the charnel-house were to be seen carried about from the waggon-office in Bolton, to be delivered at the residences of the principal inhabitants. Many refused to receive these mementoes of their terrestrial life, and others denied having ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... below—to serious risks of infection upon so remote a probability, as that there might possibly be a survivor of the tragedy still existing. Yet, the idea having been mooted, he could not bring himself to say the word that would leave the floating charnel-house unexplored. He therefore appealed to von Schalckenberg to say whether there were any means, either by the use of disinfectants or otherwise, whereby an examination of the ship might be rendered possible; and upon the latter answering in the affirmative, ...
— With Airship and Submarine - A Tale of Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... divided into two conflicts of equal intensity which raged along the ridge of the heights of Tser. Each of the two slopes, descending one to the Save and the town of Shabatz and the other to the Drina, is now nothing but a charnel house. ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various
... ornament, to braid The charnel of putridity, and part The spot where what was mortal had been laid, With all thy native coldness in his heart? Thou sure wert not the stone—let critics cavil!— Of quack M.D. who ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 357 - Vol. XIII, No. 357., Saturday, February 21, 1829 • Various
... Governor. Being requested to go down below and see the patients, the sight of so many poor fellows in the last stage of that horrid disease—their teeth fallen out, gums ulcerated, bodies full of tumours and sores—was quite sufficient, and, hurrying up from the lower deck, as he would have done from a charnel-house, the officer hastened on shore and made ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... advancing dawn. Desolate as was the appearance of the dull, misty daybreak, it was yet the most welcome of all the objects surrounding the starving soldier on which he could fix his languid gaze. To look back on the city behind him was to look back on the dreary charnel-house of famine and death; to look down on the waste ground without the walls was to look down on the dead body of the comrade of his watch, who, maddened by the pangs of hunger which he had suffered during the night, had cast himself from the rampart to meet a welcome ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... near, so strong. It was stronger than her will to put it from her and in it, with inherent superstition, she saw a premonition. The little peaceful church became all at once a place of terror, a grisly charnel house of vanished hopes and lives. The spirits of countless Cravens seemed all about her, hostile, malign, triumphing in her weakness, rejoicing in her fear—spectral figures of the dead crowding, hurrying, threatening. She seemed to see them, ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... horrible! O charnel gulf I 2 Of death on death, not to be done away, Why harrowest thou my soul? Ill boding harbinger of woe, what word Have thy lips uttered? Oh, thou hast killed me again, Before undone! What say'st? What were thy ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... any one merit whatever in point of art. The illustrations to the 'Contes Drolatiques' are full of power and invention; but those to 'Elaine' are merely and simply stupid; theatrical betises, with the taint of the charnel-house on them besides. ...
— Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne - Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work • John Ruskin
... little by little, without perceiving it, thinking only of stammering forth acts of gratitude, he disappeared from the chapel, his soul borne up by the souls of others, away, away from the world, far from his charnel-house, far ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... electric lights would shine like far-off twinkling stars—red and blue-green and purple stars, according to the color of the mist and the brew from which it came. For the odors of these ghastly charnel houses there may be words in Lithuanian, but there are none in English. The person entering would have to summon his courage as for a cold-water plunge. He would go in like a man swimming under water; he would put his handkerchief ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... died in the prime of life—he was just fifty-two years of age. Two days later he was buried in Stratford Church, near the north wall of the chancel. Fearful lest his bones should be added to the grisly burden of the charnel-house close by, he penned a curse upon those who should disturb ...
— William Shakespeare - His Homes and Haunts • Samuel Levy Bensusan
... for an instant and sniffed, as a peculiar odor came to their nostrils. It was a vague but fearsome odor, indescribable, making their skin crawl. A smell of decay—of death—and yet somehow of rank and fetid life. A combination of charnel-house and ...
— The Raid on the Termites • Paul Ernst
... and blew his horn; The French dismount, such was the king's command, And all their friends found slain upon the field Together in one charnel wide inter: A crowd of bishops, abbots, canons, monks And tonsured priests there gathered, in the name Of God assoil and bless; incense and myrrh Are burned in reverence and love before The dead who, buried there with honors great, Are left alone—what ...
— La Chanson de Roland • Lon Gautier
... own I should pluck her out of that particular fire. I'd get down on my knees and beg her pardon for having thrown her into it. It burns up their youth, their bloom, their originality, their modesty. It thrusts the girls into a charnel house of sin, sickness, and death. It shatters the nervous system of nine out of ten, or it leaves them calm, steady, burnt-out women, who have been behind the scenes of life and are disillusioned. When that little pink and white thing sat there and told me of some of ...
— The Making of Mary • Jean Forsyth
... And swiftly to his finger's call The box wide open flew. O heaven! O hell! What Pandemonium In the pouncet dwells! How it quakes, and how it quivers; How it seethes and swells! Misty steams from it upwreathing, Wave on wave is spread! Like a charnel-vault, 'tis breathing Vapors of the dead! Fumes on fumes as from a throat Of sooty Vulcan rise, Clouds of red and blue and yellow Blotting the fair skies! And the air, with noisome stenches, As from things that rot, Chokes the breather—exhalation From the infernal pot. And ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... overflow, than creep 150 Through thousand lazy channels in our veins, Dammed like the dull canal with locks and chains, And moving, as a sick man in his sleep, Three paces, and then faltering:—better be Where the extinguished Spartans still are free, In their proud charnel of Thermopylae, Than stagnate in our marsh,—or o'er the deep Fly, and one current to the ocean add, One spirit to the souls our fathers had, One freeman more, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... wholly different. Carnivorous violence prevents more pain than it inflicts; the wedded laws of life and death wear the solemn beauty and wield the merciful functions of God; all is balanced and ameliorating; above the slaughterous struggle safely soar the dove and the rainbow; out of the charnel blooms the rose to which the nightingale sings love; nor is there poison which helps not health, nor destruction which supplies not creation with nutriment ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... entrance, but by climbing upon the ruins of an old house near, I could look over the wall. A cold shudder crept over me, to think that warm, joyous Life, as I then felt it, should grow chill and pass back to clay in such a foul charnel-house. Large mounds of earth, covered with black, decaying grave-stones, which were almost hidden under the weeds and rank grass, filled the inclosure. A few dark, crooked alder-trees grew among the crumbling tombs, and gave the scene an air of gloom ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... as little need for the one as for the other. Earthquake and hurricane, volcano and valley flood, autumn frosts and winter blasts, fever, consumption, war, and pestilence, the grave-yard and the charnel-house, the Parthenon and the Pyramids, the silent cities of Colorado, and the buried palaces of Assyria, unite to ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... one of the few survivors of General Leclerc's expedition to St. Domingo, had, on leaving that charnel-house, become aide-de-camp to Marshal Ney. He it was who, during the famous retreat from Russia, was sent to ask the general who was blowing up the Beresina bridges to suspend the work of destruction, so as to allow of ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... On Thursday, April 25 (O.S.), the poet was buried inside Stratford Church, near the northern wall of the chancel, in which, as part-owner of the tithes, and consequently one of the lay-rectors, he had a right of interment. Hard by was the charnel-house, where bones dug up from the churchyard were deposited. Over the poet's grave were inscribed ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... on which she was seated was rotting away; a huge fleshy fungus had formed on it, and the decaying timber emitted a charnel-house smell. ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... Father? Did the perfect will embrace in the all-atoning tenderness of the divine heart, the degraded, disfigured, defiled, distorted thing, whose angel is too blind ever to see the face of its Father? Through all the hideous filth of the charnel-house, which the passions had heaped upon her, did the Word recognise the bound, wing-lamed, feather-draggled Psyche, panting in horriblest torture? Did he have a desire to the work of his hands, the child of his father's heart, and therefore, strong in compassion, speed to the painful ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... an old iron grating, which was out of order, into which were cast not only the human remains, which were taken from the chains of Montfaucon, but also the bodies of all the unfortunates executed on the other permanent gibbets of Paris. To that deep charnel-house, where so many human remains and so many crimes have rotted in company, many great ones of this world, many innocent people, have contributed their bones, from Enguerrand de Marigni, the first victim, and a just ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... MORLEY, my boy, and brave PARNELL, I'll lay it; just follow my hand. That plain will soon look like a charnel, With all that remains of their band; The "fragments of him called McCARTY" (Referred to, I think, in the song) Were huge chunks to the scraps that their ...
— Punch, or, the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 8, 1890. • Various
... venerable mayor, a man of extreme firmness of character. A French force under Brune had already overrun Vaud, which, under pretext of being delivered from oppression, was laid under a heavy contribution; the ancient charnel-house at Murten was also destroyed, because the French had formerly been beaten on this spot by the Germans. But few of the Swiss marched to the aid of Berne; two hundred of the people of Uri, arrayed in the armor of their ancestors, some of the peasantry ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... little consequence, following in the wake of the mighty vengeance of nature, even of God, that Macbeth cannot say Amen; that Macbeth can sleep no more; that Macbeth is "cabined cribbed, confined, bound in to saucy doubts and fears;" that his very brain is a charnel-house, whence arise the ghosts of his own murders, till he envies the very dead the rest to which his hand has sent them. That immediate and eternal vengeance upon crime, and that inner reward of well-doing, never fail ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... than living men. Their skins were yellow, and their hands were roped and warpt with veins and sinews in a manner very awful to see. Their eyes were vivid with a strange distemperature, and there was a charnel-house anatomy in the melancholy with which they welcomed a new brother in affliction, that made me feel, when I entered among them, as if I had come into the dark abode of spectres, and ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... children to pass through the fire." On the mountain opposite, Solomon, with the thousand women of his harem, worshipped the gods of all their nations, "Ashtoreth," and "Milcom, and Molech, the abomination of the Ammonites." An enormous charnel-house stands on the hill where the bodies of dead pilgrims used to be thrown; and common belief has fixed upon this spot as the Aceldama, which Judas purchased with the price of his treason. Thus you go on from one gloomy place to another, each ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... society you enjoyed in the Parc de Charrebourg, madame," he began, in an obvious vein of sarcasm. And as he did so, he thought he observed her eyes averted, and her color brighten for a moment. He did not suffer this observation to interrupt him, but he laid it up in the charnel of his evil remembrances, and continued: "I don't know, I say, what society you there enjoyed. It may have been very considerable, or it may have been very limited: it was possibly very dull, or possibly ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... which had haunted Jenny. That cleansing fire cleansed his fancies too. However morbid his fancies might become, desiderium could never take any but beautiful forms. Jenny could never come to him in any fearful images of corruption, nor could he picture her in any mouldering shape of catacomb or charnel. ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... of the nave, was erected. Where the ruined steeple stood is not clear, but most probably over the crossing, and as towers were unimportant features in the churches of the Austin Canons, it is likely that it rose but little above the roofs. Another and remarkable erection of this period was the charnel-house at the east end, known as "Purgatory," which was constructed with some attempt to give it a Gothic appearance, and was attached to the reredos wall. This is shown in fig. 7, which illustrates the eastern ambulatory, as it ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various
... loiter with the "Butternuts." No one, whom I saw, exhibited any emotion at the strewn spectacles on every side, and the stories I had read of the stony-heartedness during the plague, were more than rivalled by these charnel realities. Already corruption was violating the "temples of the living God." The heat of the day and the general demoralizing influences of the climate, were making havoc with the shapely men of yesterday, and nature seemed hastening ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... were pleasant with you To fly from this tussle of foes, The shambles, the charnel, the wrinkle! To dwell in yon dribble of dew On the cheek of your sovereign rose, And live the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... character, come to that. And I didn't know but that even a pa'son might backslide to such things in these gory times—I won't say on a Zunday, but on a week-night like this—when we think what a blasphemious rascal he is, and that there's not a more charnel-minded villain towards ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... black bloated insects crawled over my face, and myriads of burning, concentric rings were revolving incessantly. At one moment the chamber appeared as red as blood, and in a twinkling it was dark as the charnel house. I seemed to have a knife with hundreds of blades in my hand, every blade driven through the flesh, and all so inextricably bent and tangled together that I could not withdraw them for some time; and when I did, from my lacerated ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume III (of 6) - Orators and Reformers • Various
... stiffened into death-spasms, and yet the suffering had been nought, compared with that loathing and disgust in my soul. It had seemed that I was alone, I said. Alone as the corpse in unshrouded grave! I was in a charnel-house. Men who were sinless as you hung dead upon the wall, hung dying there. Darkness covered all things at a distance, sighs crept up from far corners, chains clanked, or imprecations or prayer uttered themselves,—bodiless voices in the night. I did not know what untold ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... Isle and Libby Prison, and subsequently those from Andersonville, Florence, Salisbury and Wilmington, began to come into this Hospital, and it was Miss Hall's painful privilege to be permitted to minister to these poor victims of Rebel cruelty and hate, who amid the horrors of the charnel houses, had not only lost their health, but almost their semblance to humanity, and reduced by starvation and suffering to a condition of fatuity, often could not remember their own names. In these scenes of horror, with the patience and tenderness born only of ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... in to die—lazzaretto, charnel-house, morgue, living grave! Oh, go away, girl, go to the blarsted church if you want to, ...
— Ridan The Devil And Other Stories - 1899 • Louis Becke
... degree, from the highest to the lowest. There were formerly many examples of such dances. Next to the cloister was the library, the catalogue of which still exists to show what a scholar's collection of books then meant. Next to the library stood the College of the Minor Canons: then came Charnel Chapel, beneath which was a crypt filled with human bones taken from the churchyard. Remember that this has been a burial place ever since the year 610, when a church was first built here. From the year 610 till the year 1840, or for ...
— The History of London • Walter Besant
... stept over the threshold, I found myself chilled to the very marrow of my bones. When we consider, that in our churches, in general, we breathe a gross stagnated air, surcharged with damps from vaults, tombs, and charnel-houses, may we not term them so many magazines of rheums, created for the benefit of the medical faculty? and safely aver, that more bodies are lost, than souls saved, by going to church, in the winter especially, which may be said ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... appetites it fosters, of all the unnameable impurities that revel in its abodes; think of the hearth-stones desolated, of the mothers and daughters whose earthly hopes and joys have been destroyed by that charnel-house, the tavern. The incendiary who applies the midnight torch to peaceful dwellings, the robber who commits murder to secure his prey, is not an enemy to society half so dangerous, as he who inflames all evil passions and scatters wretchedness through a community, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... that the tendency of all endowed forces is to find their equilibrium and be at rest—that is, dead. He draws a dismal picture of the time when the sun shall be burned out, and the world float like a charnel ship through the dark, cold voids of space—the sun a burned-out char, a dead cinder, and the world one dismal silence, cold beyond measure, and dead beyond consciousness. The philosopher has wailed ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... Go down!" So shiv'ring Robin, in most woeful plight, Crept into gloom and vanished from their sight. "O, Robin, Robin!" the old Witch softly cried, "Alack, I'm here!" faint voice, below, replied. "Thou dead," croaked she, "thou ghostly shade forlorn, From charnel-vault sound now thy spectral horn, Sound now thy rallying-note, then silent be Till from thy mouldering tomb I ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... America is dead; America is money mad; America is a charnel house of greed. Millions and millions of men from all over the earth came to her shores. And the world said: They have brought only their greed with them. And still the struggle went on. The continent was taken; man abolished the wilderness. A new civilization rose. And because ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... digression," let us see what the ancient cemetery of the Innocents was like. Round an irregular four-sided space, about five hundred feet by two, ran a low cloister-like building, called Les Charniers, or the Charnel Houses. It had originally been a cloister surrounding the churchyard; but, so convenient had this place of sepulture been found, from its situation in the heart of Paris, that the remains of mortality increased in most rapid proportion within its precincts, and it was continually found ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... denounce you openly as a false follower, for if I read rightly the language of Holy Writ, it was He whom you so delight to term Master who gave his life freely for His friends. But you—you are all words, a charnel-house of ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... argue as yet," said Maskull. "At this moment the world with its sweetness seems to me a sort of charnel house. I feel a loathing for everything in it, including myself. I ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... as 1815! Mr. Holyoake himself remarks that, in his youth, he never heard one word which indicated a kindly or respectful feeling between employers and employed; and he speaks of the workshops and factories of those days as "charnel-houses of industry." If there has been great improvement, it is due to these causes: The resistance of the operative class; their growth in self-respect, intelligence, and sobriety; and the humanity and wisdom of some ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton
... had resisted the earthquake and was standing intact. Port Royal, notwithstanding its situation at the end of a peninsula, had in old days a terrible reputation for unhealthiness, only surpassed by that of Fort Augusta across the bay, the latter a veritable charnel-house. The neighbourhood of the poisonous swamps of the Rio Cobre was in both cases responsible for the loss of tens of thousands of British soldiers' lives in these two ill-fated spots. They were both hot-beds ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... from dungeon foul, Where, maimed and torn, they die, From gory trench and charnel-house, Where, heap on heap, ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... dementia, and death, Of beauty singing in a charnel house, Like the lost soul of a poor moon-mad maid, With too much loving of some lord of hell; Doomed and disastrous spirit, to what shore Of what dark gulf infernal art thou strayed, Or to what spectral star of topless heaven Art lifted ...
— The Lonely Dancer and Other Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... In every charnel breast Dead conscience rises slow: They, dumb before that awful guest, Turn, one ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... desperate along the broken salient. The Yankees fought with obstinacy and furious pluck. Charge after charge was broken and hurled back. On they came again—ever to the shambles! Night fell on a field piled thick with bodies of the attacking force; in front of the broken salient was a perfect charnel-house! ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... this story, Hamlet, the moody moraliser upon charnel-houses and mouldy bones, is identified with the jolly companion of the Mermaid, the wine-bibbing joker of the Falcon, and the Apollo saloon? It is because Hamlet is the most elaborately-painted character in literature. It is because the springs of his actions are so profoundly touched, the ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... men, he could so hunt the rebel, that ere May was passed, he should not show his face in Ulster. But the 'Black Death' returned after a brief respite; and, says Mr. Froude, in the reeking vapour of the charnel-house, it was indifferent whether its victims returned in triumph from a stricken field, or were cooped within their walls by hordes of savage enemies. By the middle of March there were left out of ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... here trying to conjure up a picture of all I saw that day, trying to find words in order to give some general impression of what took place; but I simply can't. As I look back now, it only seems a combination of a vast mad-house and a vast charnel-house. I have confused memories of bodies of men creeping up behind deadly barrages; I can see shells tearing up great holes in the earth, and scattering mud and stones around them. I can see, too, where trenches were levelled, just as I have seen pits which children make on the seashore ...
— "The Pomp of Yesterday" • Joseph Hocking
... blend them; finding it convenient to make external show pass for sterling worth—to let whitewashed walls vouch for clean shrines. It may hate him who dares to scrutinize and expose—to raze the gilding, and show base metal under it—to penetrate the sepulcher, and reveal charnel relics: but hate as it will, it is ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... James H. Tuke, "the roads in many places became as charnel-houses, and several car and coach drivers have assured me that they rarely drove anywhere without seeing dead bodies strewn along the road side, and that, in the dark, they had even gone over them. A gentleman ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... which the writer of our text lays his finger upon is that at the same time the two opposite processes of death and renewal are going on, so that if you look at the facts from the one side it seems nothing but a charnel-house and a Golgotha that we live in, while, seen from the other side, it is a scene of rejoicing, budding ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... Charrebourg, madame," he began, in an obvious vein of sarcasm. And as he did so, he thought he observed her eyes averted, and her color brighten for a moment. He did not suffer this observation to interrupt him, but he laid it up in the charnel of his evil remembrances, and continued: "I don't know, I say, what society you there enjoyed. It may have been very considerable, or it may have been very limited: it was possibly very dull, or possibly ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... talking at the gate, one of them carrying a spade in hands still crusted with the soil of graves. Their very aspect was delightful to me; and I crept nearer to them, thinking to pick up some snatch of sexton gossip, some 'talk fit for a charnel,' {9b} something, in fine, worthy of that fastidious logician, that adept in coroner's law, who has come down to us as the patron of Yaughan's liquor, and the very prince of gravediggers. Scots people in general are so much wrapped up in their profession that I had a good chance ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... mouth, white and milk-warm sphinx, I taste a strange apocalypse: Your subtle taper finger-tips Weave me new heavens, yet, methinks, I know the wiles and each iynx That brought me passionate to your lips: I know you bare as laughter strips Your charnel ...
— The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems • Aldous Huxley
... death that had met this casual wayfarer at their very doors, and one might not know how the coroner would interpret it. His power to commit a suspect added to his terrors, and gave to the capable, astute official a mundane formidableness that overtopped the charnel-house flavor of his more habitual duties. He was visible through the unchinked logs of the little room where the inquest was in progress, barely spacious enough to contain the bier, the jury, and the witness ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... glorious strength and pitiable weakness! Charlotte Bronte, who feels the pressure of every-day life to be as hard as a giant's grasp upon her throat! Charlotte Bronte cannot tell why she is so unhappy, why she feels like a prisoner in the world,—why earth, our beautiful earth, is like a charnel house to her. And yet we think that the most ordinary passerby could see very satisfactory reasons why Charlotte Bronte was what she was, and felt what she felt. Hollow cheek and faded eye, teach their wisdom to their possessor last of all. The pale-eyed school-girl, ...
— A Lecture on Physical Development, and its Relations to Mental and Spiritual Development, delivered before the American Institute of Instruction, at their Twenty-Ninth Annual Meeting, in Norwich, Conn • S.R. Calthrop
... that they were those of men, women, and children; but weeks had now passed since they were slain, and their bones alone remained. The beasts and even the birds of prey had been there, or it would have been impossible to enter into that charnel-house. ...
— Manco, the Peruvian Chief - An Englishman's Adventures in the Country of the Incas • W.H.G. Kingston
... to another town called Tolomeco, in a temple or charnel-house more properly of which place, opposite the residence of the chief, they found strings of large pearls hanging on the walls, and others in chests, with many fine garments like those formerly mentioned; and in rooms over ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr
... Irish," and the cost of their support derived chiefly from the land, the landlords consider their health, comfort, or life of only secondary importance. Hence we find the number of deaths in these charnel houses averaging that of years of plague; and each pauper is allowed far less weekly for his support than the lord of the soil allows the meanest dog in his kennel. Add to these the separation of man and wife, ...
— The Cross and the Shamrock • Hugh Quigley
... be told except in the words of the Author himself. Worthy of Poe is the scene of the vast charnel-house.... On the other hand, the pages of "Vathek" could hardly show finer imagery ...
— HE • Andrew Lang
... Suttanta, 7, runs as follows: "And, moreover, bhikkhu, a brother, just as if he had been a body abandoned in the charnel-field, dead for one, two, or three days, swollen, turning black and blue, and decomposed, apply that perception to this very body (of his own), reflecting: 'This body, too, is even so constituted, is of such a nature, has not ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... Burroughs, "that there is a species of smilax with an unsavory name, that the bee does not visit, herbacea. The production of this plant is a curious freak of nature.... It would be a cruel joke to offer it to any person not acquainted with it, to smell. It is like the vent of a charnel-house." (Thoreau compared its odor to that of a dead rat in a wall!) "It is first cousin to the trilliums, among the prettiest of our native wild flowers," continues Burroughs, "and the same bad blood crops out in the purple ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... 25 (O.S.), the poet was buried inside Stratford Church, near the northern wall of the chancel, in which, as part-owner of the tithes, and consequently one of the lay-rectors, he had a right of interment. Hard by was the charnel-house, where bones dug up from the churchyard were deposited. Over the poet's grave ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... a field of rubble, with bits of windowless walls leading up to a crazy tangle of twisted girders. Only memory could locate where the major streets had been. Over everything lay the green wash of incandite, and the wind carried the smell of a charnel house. There was no sign of the apartment where he and Ronda ...
— Victory • Lester del Rey
... upon every leaf, and yet absent from the immensities of space? The law of the Great System forbids the waste even of an atom; it knows no spot where something of life does not breathe. In the very charnel-house is the nursery of production and animation. Is that true? Well, then, can you conceive that space, which is the Infinite itself, is alone a waste, is alone lifeless, is less useful to the one design of universal being than the dead carcass of a dog, than the peopled leaf, than the swarming ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... having nothing noble in her own nature she is constantly picking flaws in the character of others. Madam Snob will entertain you with a long account of her family connections. Poor soul she is constantly resurrecting the remains of dead and gone ancestors; her life is spent in the charnel house, being very careful however, to let the remains of a certain few rest in peace, while she rattles the dry bones of her favored ones in our face, until we are tempted to cry "peace." At last our curiosity ...
— Bohemian Society • Lydia Leavitt
... Quicklime and straw had been thrown over them by the ton. Piles of bodies of men and of horses had been partially cremated in the most rudimentary fashion. The country seemed to be one endless charnel-house. The stench of the dead was appalling. Of the fifty odd houses that form the village of Etrepilly, not one remained intact. Some of them had been hit by a shell that penetrated through the roof, falling into the cellar, and by its explosion bringing ...
— Paris War Days - Diary of an American • Charles Inman Barnard
... document from a small, flat cardboard box which he carried in the breast pocket of his coat. But first he withdrew from the box a little object, and placed it on the table. It was an ivory skull, and the very presence of such a sinister token brought some hint of the charnel-house into the cozy ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... hut-man was lamenting and adding another chapter to the horrors of the mountain, hoping for fresh ossuary relics for his charnel glass-case, the Swedish youth and his guides, who had returned from their expedition, set off in search of the hapless Tartarin with ropes, ladders, in short a whole life-saving outfit, alas! unavailing... Bompard, rendered half idiotic, could give ...
— Tartarin On The Alps • Alphonse Daudet
... the vat, so that his head were in the blood as far as the shoulders, and so maketh him be held there until that he was drowned and quenched. After that, he made carry his body and the bodies of the other knights and their heads, and made them be cast into an ancient charnel that was beside an old chapel in the forest, and the vat together with the blood made he be cast into the river, so that the water thereof was all bloody. The tidings came to the castles that the son of the Widow ...
— High History of the Holy Graal • Unknown
... men were talking at the gate, one of them carrying a spade in hands still crusted with the soil of graves. Their very aspect was delightful to me; and I crept nearer to them, thinking to pick up some snatch of sexton gossip, some "talk fit for a charnel,"[35] something, in fine, worthy of that fastidious logician, that adept in coroner's law, who has come down to us as the patron of Yaughan's liquor, and the very prince of gravediggers. Scots people in general ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to the shipwrecked in Nova Zembla; ah! like the mother's voice to her little child that strays bewildered, weeping, in unknown tumults; like soft streamings of celestial music to my too exasperated heart, came that Evangel. The Universe is not dead and demoniacal, a charnel-house with spectres; but godlike, ...
— Daily Strength for Daily Needs • Mary W. Tileston
... and gentile, the pious and the ungodly, with equal severity. The cholera had broken out in Central Russia and its devastations were terrible beyond description. The country from Kief to Odessa was as one vast charnel-house. As has always been the case during epidemics, the Jews suffered less from the ravages of the disease than did their gentile neighbors. The strict dietary laws which excluded everything not ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith
... lost, how recoverable? how, rather, ever acquirable? 'First must the dead Letter of Religion own itself dead, and drop piecemeal into dust, if the living Spirit of Religion, freed from this, its charnel house, is to arise on us, new born of Heaven, and with new ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... and handsome—truss-beams, corbels, girders and panels were of the blackest oak; and the general effect of all this, augmented, if anything, by the windows, which were too high and narrow to admit of much light, was much the same as that produced by the interior of a subterranean chapel or charnel house. ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... well as shadows to the picture. Out of that grim den of death, out of that floating lazar house, there came a few blooming maidens and stalwart youths, like fair flowers springing from the rankness of a charnel. Their sorrows were but for the misfortunes of others; and even these were a while forgotten in the joy of meeting near and dear relatives, and old friends upon the shore of the promised land. They went their way rejoicing, and with them passed the solitary ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... they thought to live; in black draped they their corpses; even in their talk do I still feel the evil flavour of charnel-houses. ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... bed, streamed out on each side over the pillow, and in the midst of it lay her face, a radiant isle in a dark sea. I stood and gazed. Fascinated by her beauty? God forbid! I was fascinated by the awful incongruity between that face, pure as the moonlight, and the charnel-house that lay unseen behind it. She was to me, henceforth, not a woman, but a live Death. I had no sense of sacredness, such as always in the chamber even of a little girl. How should I? It was no chamber; it was a den. She was no woman, but a female monster. ...
— The Flight of the Shadow • George MacDonald
... to me. Literary squabbles I know preserve one's name, when one's work will not; but I despise the fame that depends on scolding till one is remembered, and remembered by whom? The scavengers of literature! Reviewers are like sextons, who in a charnel-house can tell you to what John Thompson or to what Tom-Matthews such a skull or such belonged—but who wishes to know? The fame that is only to be found in such vaults, is like the fires that burn unknown in tombs, and go out as fast as they are discovered. ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... of fishing for barbel, I was unable to rise from my bed; and for fifteen nights I never closed my eyes without seeing in my dreams ghosts, and all the horrid details of the churchyard and the charnel-house. ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... sacrificed to idols under the green trees there, and "caused their children to pass through the fire." On the mountain opposite, Solomon, with the thousand women of his harem, worshipped the gods of all their nations, "Ashtoreth," and "Milcom, and Molech, the abomination of the Ammonites." An enormous charnel-house stands on the hill where the bodies of dead pilgrims used to be thrown; and common belief has fixed upon this spot as the Aceldama, which Judas purchased with the price of his treason. Thus you go on from one gloomy place ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... plague. I myself had escaped the sickness, perhaps because of the strength and natural healthiness of my body, which has always saved me from fevers and diseases, fortified as it was by the good food that I had obtained. But now I knew that I could not live long, indeed chained in this dreadful charnel-house I prayed for death to release me from the horrors of such existence. The day passed as before in sweltering heat, unbroken by any air or motion, and night came at last, made hideous by the barbarous ravings of the dying. But even there and then I slept and dreamed ...
— Montezuma's Daughter • H. Rider Haggard
... broader humanity. When I see intemperance send its floods of ruin and shame to the homes of men, and pass by the grog-shops that are constantly grinding out their fearful grist of poverty, ruin and death, I long for the hour when woman's vote will be levelled against these charnel houses; and have, I hope, the power to close them throughout the length and breadth of ...
— Minnie's Sacrifice • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
... enclosed the flat expanse of charnel, over which the scattered houses of the barriers looked widowed through their mournful windows; and now and then a crippled crone, or a bereaved old pauper, hobbled to the roadway and shook her white hairs ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... stood, and was edged in with a low wall of rock. So far as I could judge, this pit was about the size of the space beneath the dome of St. Paul's in London, and when the lamps were held up I saw that it was nothing but one vast charnel-house, being literally full of thousands of human skeletons, which lay piled up in an enormous gleaming pyramid, formed by the slipping down of the bodies at the apex as fresh ones were dropped in from above. Anything more appalling than this jumbled mass of ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... whereas the interior of the house is exquisitely clean, the outside is covered with dirt, bits of earth, chips of rotten wood, little pieces of gravel. Often there are worse things still: the exterior of the tent becomes a charnel-house. Here, hung up or embedded, are the dry carcasses of Opatra, Asidae and other Tenebrionidae {39} that favour underrock shelters; segments of Iuli, {40} bleached by the sun; shells of Pupae, {41} common among the stones; and, lastly, Snail-shells, selected ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... skeleton bleaching in the winds, the gigantic bones of the forest still erect, the speaking records of former life, and of strength still unsubdued, vigorous even in death, which renders Glenmore one enormous charnel-house." ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... greatest dramatist died in the prime of life—he was just fifty-two years of age. Two days later he was buried in Stratford Church, near the north wall of the chancel. Fearful lest his bones should be added to the grisly burden of the charnel-house close by, he penned a curse upon those ...
— William Shakespeare - His Homes and Haunts • Samuel Levy Bensusan
... it was a very much larger place than he had at first imagined it to be; for, looking inward, he was able to follow the rough walls for a few yards, as they receded inward, when he lost sight of them in the gloom. Also he became aware of a curious charnel-house kind of stench that now and then issued from the cavern. It was just the kind of odour that one would expect to meet with in the den of a carnivorous beast, and Phil peered keenly into the darkness, more than half-expecting to see the shining eyes ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... in and cover its barren nakedness, as we now know they might if a few sandy barriers were swept away, it would be indeed, a blessing, for in it there is naught of good, comfort or satisfaction, but ever in the minds of those who braved its heat and sands, a thought of a horrid Charnel house, a corner of the earth so dreary that it requires an exercise of strongest faith to believe that the great Creator ever smiled upon it as a portion of his work and pronounced it "Very good." We had ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... same was he who, lashed to his own mast, There where the sea-flowers screen the charnel-caves, Beside the sirens' singing island pass'd, Till sweetness failed along the inveterate waves... Say, soul,—are songs of Death no heaven to thee, Nor shames her lip the cheek ...
— The House of Life • Dante Gabriel Rossetti
... hither came winging unerringly, like flights of homing doves, their myriad prayers, their passionate loving thoughts and wistful thirsty longing for one word, one kiss, one touch of the hand.... Surely such thoughts and prayers sanctified this charnel-house. ...
— The End of Her Honeymoon • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... ever changing, and displaying new and still more horrible features; black bloated insects crawled over my face, and myriads of burning, concentric rings were revolving incessantly. At one moment the chamber appeared as red as blood, and in a twinkling it was dark as the charnel house. I seemed to have a knife with hundreds of blades in my hand, every blade driven through the flesh, and all so inextricably bent and tangled together that I could not withdraw them for some time; and when I ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume III (of 6) - Orators and Reformers • Various
... incessantly for more than a week may be divided into two conflicts of equal intensity which raged along the ridge of the heights of Tser. Each of the two slopes, descending one to the Save and the town of Shabatz and the other to the Drina, is now nothing but a charnel house. ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various
... the reason why, to the eyes of astonished servants, from that day forth the Crown Prince of Livonia apparently devoured his chop, bone and all. And why Nikky resembled, at times, a well-setup, trig, and soldierly appearing charnel-house. "If I am ever arrested," he once demurred, "and searched, Highness, I shall be ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... in irons for having a bad sore leg, and in which I have been grossly insulted for daring to go to see my poor people—that house is shut up! Delightful, I assure you, are my feelings, whenever I go by that place, attached to which, too, was the old-time prison, a perfect charnel-house. ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... her life sunk down so low, That, but for wretchedness, no life she knew. A charnel wind sung on a moaning—No; Earth's centre was the grave from which it blew; Earth's loves and beauties all passed sighing slow, Roses and lilies, children, friends, the few; But so transparent blanched in every part, She saw the pale ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... good and evil, in that the two are used indifferently for the furtherance of a purely aesthetic end. The Beyond-man discovers beauty in the abyss, and ugliness in mere worldly rectitude. Leonardo painted the Medusa head, with its charnel pallor and its crown of writhing snakes, no less lovingly than the sweet-tender face of the Christ of the Cenacolo, and the beauty is not less, though of an opposite sort. Shakespeare's most profound sayings and most magical poetry are as often as not put in the mouths ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... I dare to think I do, then let him say, and not till then, whether it be a good world or not. That in the midst of the splendour of the sunny day, in the midst of olives and oranges, grapes and figs, ripening swiftly by the fervour of the circumambient air, should lie that charnel-church, is a terrible fact, neither to be ignored, nor to be explained by the paltry theory of the greatest good to the greatest number; but the end of the maker's dream is ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... cannot stand any more of your 'Chronicles of the Charnel-house' this morning; 311 you have horrified Miss Fairlegh already to such a degree that she is going to run away. If I should stroll down here again in the afternoon, Fanny, will you take compassion on me so far as to indulge me with a game ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... auto-infection. Which of the following microbes are the most active agents of progressive auto-infection: the streptococcus lanceolatus, the bacterium pyogenes, the bacillus subtilis, the staphylococci, the bacterium coli commune? They all play a part in the game, reducing the body in time to a charnel-house. Or are such substances as putrescein, cadaverin, skatol or indol—which are derived through chemical change in the putrescent mass—contributors to the spread of the poisonous taint throughout the system? Any single one or a group of the fifty or more bacterial poisons may be ...
— Intestinal Ills • Alcinous Burton Jamison
... torpid Wasp; but the bee is incapable of enduring even a moderate degree of cold: a temperature as low as 50 deg. speedily chills it, and it would be quite as easy to recall to life the stiffened corpses in the charnel house of the Convent of the Great St. Bernard, as to restore to animation, a frozen bee. In cool weather, they must therefore associate in large numbers, in order to maintain the animal heat which is ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... Percy, casting his eyes down the poorly lighted and narrow street through which he had come; "so is a charnel-house, ...
— The Fifth of November - A Romance of the Stuarts • Charles S. Bentley
... to taste of death long before they have died, and have placed before their eyes all the furniture of mortality. The horrors of a charnel-house is the scene of their pleasure. The "Midnight Meditations" of Quarles preceded Young's "Night Thoughts" by a century, and both these poets loved ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... is," said the doctor; "but I needn't tell you that; the charnel-house smell is enough to convince you of the fact of where ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... pit dug under the staircase. Derues tried to drag the chest towards the hole, but all his strength was insufficient to move it. He uttered terrible imprecations when he recognised his own weakness, and saw that he would be obliged to bring another stranger, an informer perhaps, into this charnel-house, where; as yet, nothing betrayed his crimes. No sooner escaped from one peril than he encountered another, and already he had to struggle against his own deeds. He measured the length of the trench, it was too short. ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - DERUES • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... imposing dimensions quoted above, and the visitor will have to depend on sentiment and the imagination rather than on actual sightseeing. The excavators in 1845 had a gruesome experience, for they discovered a charnel pit containing thirteen cart loads of bones of the fallen warriors at the battle of Lewes. Although nearly six centuries had ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... out in verse; but we leave such relics for the present, and seek consolation in the thousand wagon-loads of poultry and game, and the many million turkeys that make all the coach—offices of the metropolis like so many charnel-houses. We would rather illustrate our joy like the Hindoos do their geography, with rivers and seas of liquid amber, clarified butter, milk, curds, and intoxicating liquors. No arch in antiquity, not even that of Constantine, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 348, December 27, 1828 • Various
... wide, The charnel-house of ages! gathered lie Nations and empires, flung by destiny Beneath thy flowing tide: There rest alike the monarch and the slave; There is no galling chain, ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... CR. O horrible! O charnel gulf I 2 Of death on death, not to be done away, Why harrowest thou my soul? Ill boding harbinger of woe, what word Have thy lips uttered? Oh, thou hast killed me again, Before undone! What say'st? What were thy tidings? Woe is me! Saidst thou a slaughtered queen ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... written by the leader himself and in every instance expressed the deepest sympathy for the plague-ridden chateau. It was evident that Rasula believed that the occupants were slowly but surely dying, and that it was but a question of a few days until the place would become a charnel-house. With atavic cunning he sat upon the outside and waited for the ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... in the naval engagement, but the greater sacrifice, the supreme charnel house of the war, the British race reserved for itself. There, the yeomanry of England, the unsung county regiments whose sacrifices and achievements have been neglected in England's generous desire to honor the men ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... lost souls. Rosendo tossed fitfully, and now and then uttered deep groans. The atmosphere was prescient with horror. He struggled to his feet and paced gloomily back and forth along the brow of the hill. The second church stood near, deserted, gloomy, no longer a temple of God, but a charnel house of fear and black superstition. In the distance the ghostly white walls of the Rincon church glowed faintly in the feeble light that dripped from the yellow stars. There was now no thought of God—no thought of divine aid. Jose was riding again the mountainous billows of ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... in this story, Hamlet, the moody moraliser upon charnel-houses and mouldy bones, is identified with the jolly companion of the Mermaid, the wine-bibbing joker of the Falcon, and the Apollo saloon? It is because Hamlet is the most elaborately-painted character in literature. It is because the springs of his actions ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... loose gestures, and foul talk, But most by lewd and lavish act of sin, Lets in defilement to the inward parts, The soul grows clotted by contagion, Imbodies, and imbrutes, till she quite lose, The divine property of her first being. Such are those thick and gloomy shadows damp Oft seen in charnel vaults and sepulchres, Lingering, and sitting by a new made grave, As loath to leave the body that it lov'd, And linked itself by carnal sensuality To a degenerate ...
— Phaedo - The Last Hours Of Socrates • Plato
... understanding. The period of actual death and race-extermination is not far off. We could have produced the same barrenness and frenzy of nothingness in people, perhaps, by dinning it into them that every man is just a charnel-house skeleton of unclean bones. Our "understanding," our science and idealism have produced in people the same strange frenzy of self-repulsion as if they saw their own skulls each time they looked in the mirror. A man is a thing of scientific cause-and-effect and biological process, ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... of the few survivors of General Leclerc's expedition to St. Domingo, had, on leaving that charnel-house, become aide-de-camp to Marshal Ney. He it was who, during the famous retreat from Russia, was sent to ask the general who was blowing up the Beresina bridges to suspend the work of destruction, so as to allow of the passage of the column with the wounded, who must ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... way out of this accursed charnel-house before long, I think that we shall add to its company," ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... baffled twilight fails; beneath, the blind snakes creep; Beside us glides the charnel shark, our pilot through the deep; And, lurking where low headlands shield from cruising scout and spy, We bide the signal through the gloom that ...
— Dreams and Dust • Don Marquis
... steps.— Despair I take with me. Alas, my people! E'en to the second Deluge now the plague May rage at will, may pile mount Oeta high With corpses upon corpses, and may turn All Greece into one mighty charnel-house, Ere Semele can bend the angry gods. I, thou, and Greece, and all, ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... the voice of the orators, the procession to the Capitol? Buried under the mountain of potsherds! O Dian, how can a man who loses a father, a beloved, in Rome shed a single tear or look round him with consternation, when he comes out here before this battle-field of time and looks into the charnel-house of the nations? Dian, one would wish here an iron heart, for fate has an ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... a charnel-house if you like, under those trees there, but a very beautiful one as is evident. We ought to keep alive the memories that make the place romantic. It would be a pity if utilitarian axe and fire were to spoil the beauty of Te Puke Tapu. There is plenty of other good land to be had. ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... his heart, for he had imbibed from the mild and sage Buddha a befitting contempt for these grotesque and cadaverous fanatics. The emergency, however, left him no resource, and he followed his guide to a charnel house, which the latter had selected as his domicile. There, with many lamentations over the smoothness of his hair and the brevity of his nails, the Jogi besprinkled and besmeared Ananda agreeably to his own pattern, and scored ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... Him is the way by which you and I get it, then there is no escape from the solemn conclusion that to be out of Christ, and not to be exercising faith in Him, is to be infected with death, and to be shut up in a charnel-house. I dare not suppress the plain teaching of Jesus Christ Himself: 'He that hath the Son hath life; he that hath not the Son hath not life.' The issues that depend upon the answer to this question of my text may be summed up, if I may venture to say so, by taking the words ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... lingering slumbers on the sedge-wove bog, With webbed feet o'er midnight meadows creeps, Or flings his hairy limbs on stagnant deeps. YOU meet CONTAGION issuing from afar, And dash the baleful conqueror from his car; 85 When, Guest of DEATH! from charnel vaults he steals, And bathes in ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... went on without a word. She led the way back to the low and dismal sheds which lay there like a vast charnel-house, and thence to a low hut some distance away from all, where she opened a door. She spoke a few words to a man, who finally withdrew. A light was burning. A rude cot was there. Here I laid the one ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... with fresh hoar-frost, and the thicket away to the south was a haunt for crows such as I never have seen again since; the black birds flew round and about it in dark clouds with loud shrieks, as though in its midst stood a charnel and gallows, and from the brushwood likewise, by the pool's edge, came other cries of birds, all as full of complaining as though they were bewailing the griefs ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... the cables weighing anchor. Soon the soft slap of the water around the bow and the regular heaving motion told that the Bozra was under way. The sea-mouse creaked and groaned through all her timbers and her lading. The foul bilge-water made the hold stifling as a charnel-house. Lampaxo, Hib being absent, began to ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... objects was painful enough, but to have them grinning on her, as in mockery, behind her back, was more than she could stand. So seizing old Moodie by the arm, he being beside her, she rushed out of this charnel house, and impatiently called to the others to join her ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... hypocrisy, wreathing the artificial flowers of sentiment over unutterable pollution and unimaginable wrong. It is white-washing the sepulchre to make us forget its horrible deposit. It is scattering flowers around the charnel-house and over the yet festering grave to turn away our thoughts "from the dead men's bones and all uncleanness," the ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... those thick and gloomy shadows damp, Oft seen in charnel-vaults and sepulchres, Lingering, and sitting, ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... grinning Lions. I passed cautiously through the 'Valley of the Shadow'—wild scenery, sir! I visited that prince of bubbles also, Giant Despair, in his draughty castle. And—though boasting be far from me!—fetched Liveloose's half-brother out of a certain charnel-house near by. ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... achieves at the best moment of his life is indeed something ideal and significant; it justifies and consecrates all his coherent actions and preferences. But the man's life, the circle drawn by biographers around the career of a particular body, from the womb to the charnel-house, and around the mental flux that accompanies that career, is no significant unity. All the substances and efficient processes that figure within it come from elsewhere and continue beyond; ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... fleshless fingers of the seals, so like to those of the human hand, rendered the illusion singularly striking and filled one with a kind of terror. I quitted the charnel-house, and directing my steps very cautiously over the slippery soil, penetrated inland. I found myself very speedily in the middle of a cemetery; but this time, the remains lying on the frozen snow were human. Several coffins, half open and empty, had formerly been occupied by human bodies, ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... raise his head and expose his bloated face to scorn and derision. They made him look at his statues, which were being tumbled to the ground. They pointed out to him the place where Galba had perished. They pricked his body with their weapons. With endless contumely they brought him to the public charnel, where the body of Sabinus had been thrown among those ...
— Historic Tales, Volume 11 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... vous di sanz faille que, quand Messires Marcs Pols sceust ces choses, moult en ot pitie de cestui pueple, et il li vint a remembrance ce que avenu estoit, ou tens Monseignour Nicolas et Monseignour Mafe, a l'ore quand Alau, frere charnel dou Grant Sire Cublay, ala en ost seur Baudas, et print le Calife et sa maistre cite, atout son vaste tresor d'or et d'argent, et l'amere parolle que dist ledit Alau au Calife, com l'a escripte li Maistres Rusticiens ou chief ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... opposition in his own profession, and popular fury, he studied his science by the only method that could give useful results. No peril daunted him. To secure material for his investigations, he haunted gibbets and charnel-houses, braving the fires of the Inquisition and the virus of the plague. First of all men he began to place the science of human anatomy on its solid modern foundations—on careful examination and observation of the human body: this ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... tossed over into a lost eternity, an avalanche of horror and despair. The London plague was nothing to it. That counted its victims by thousands; but this modern pest has already shoveled its millions into the charnel-house of the morally dead. The longest rail train that ever ran over the Erie or the Hudson tracks was not long enough or large enough to carry the beastliness and the putrefaction which have gathered up in the bad books and newspapers ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... at the age of eighteen, beneath the point at which I had started. I was down in the cellar of society, down in the subterranean depths of misery about which it is neither nice nor proper to speak. I was in the pit, the abyss, the human cesspool, the shambles and the charnel-house of our civilization. This is the part of the edifice of society that society chooses to ignore. Lack of space compels me here to ignore it, and I shall say only that the things I there saw gave ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... something that they could not perceive. Perhaps he did. Perhaps he saw the Simiacine Plateau, and knew that, after all, he had won the last throw; for up there, far above the table-lands of Central Africa, there lay beneath high Heaven a charnel-house. Hounded down the slope by his tormentors, he had left a memento behind him surer than their torturing knives, keener than their sharpest steel—he had left the ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... most woeful plight, Crept into gloom and vanished from their sight. "O, Robin, Robin!" the old Witch softly cried, "Alack, I'm here!" faint voice, below, replied. "Thou dead," croaked she, "thou ghostly shade forlorn, From charnel-vault sound now thy spectral horn, Sound now thy rallying-note, then silent be Till from thy mouldering tomb ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... of Holman. With extreme caution I crawled toward what I thought to be the spot where I had left him, but my groping fingers found only the fragments of bone that covered the dusty floor of the charnel house. ...
— The White Waterfall • James Francis Dwyer
... mausoleum for the kings of the Austrian race. He bound the two obligations in one, and added a third destination to the enormous pile he contemplated. It should be a palace as well as a monastery and a royal charnel-house. He chose the most appropriate spot in Spain for the erection of the most cheerless monument in existence. He had fixed his capital at Madrid because it was the dreariest town in Spain, and to envelop himself in a still profounder desolation, ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... them 700 horses and 1,000 cattle. He assured Sidney, that with 300 additional men, he could so hunt the rebel, that ere May was passed, he should not show his face in Ulster. But the 'Black Death' returned after a brief respite; and, says Mr. Froude, in the reeking vapour of the charnel-house, it was indifferent whether its victims returned in triumph from a stricken field, or were cooped within their walls by hordes of savage enemies. By the middle of March there were left out of ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... surely take warning: but they do not, and their bones will soon bleach on the mound whereon those of all other wasters of days have been thrown. When I think of the lost days and the lost lives of which I have cognizance, then it seems as though I were gazing on some vast charnel-house, some ghoul-haunted place of skulls. Memories of those who trifled with life come to me, and their very faces flash past with looks of tragic significance. By their own fault they were ruined; they were shut out of the ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... you here, as to visit the Catacombs, or subterranean burying grounds of the early inhabitants. These are not much compared with those at Naples, or Palermo, for instance, but to those who have seen neither the one nor the other, they will present all the charm of novelty. Though only a charnel house it is laid out with great care, in street, square, and alley, just like the abodes of men above. The bodies are mostly in a fine state of preservation, reposing in niches cut out of the dry earth, some of the tombs being double, others, again, having an additional crib for a child. ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... across the boundary, to chaff and loiter with the "Butternuts." No one, whom I saw, exhibited any emotion at the strewn spectacles on every side, and the stories I had read of the stony-heartedness during the plague, were more than rivalled by these charnel realities. Already corruption was violating the "temples of the living God." The heat of the day and the general demoralizing influences of the climate, were making havoc with the shapely men of yesterday, and nature seemed hastening ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... Heaven!—have thatched myself over with the dead fleeces of sheep, the bark of vegetables, the entrails of worms, the hides of oxen or seals, the felt of furred beasts; and walk abroad a moving Rag-screen, overheaped with shreds and tatters raked from the Charnel-house of Nature, where they would have rotted, to rot on me more slowly! Day after day, I must thatch myself anew; day after day, this despicable thatch must lose some film of its thickness; some film of it, frayed away by tear and wear, must be brushed off ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... Ruined tombstones, and broken slabs which appear to cover family vaults, trip you up at every step. Every yard of progress is made with difficulty, and you move nervously among the tall rank nettles in momentary fear of dislocating your ankle, or of being suddenly precipitated into the reeking charnel house of some defunct Mayo family. The Connaught dead seem to be very exclusive. Most of the ground is enclosed in small squares, each having a low stone wall, half-a-yard thick, with what looks like the gable-end of a ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... and stuffed it back, wondering how so small a space ever held so much, the still harder task confronted you of putting the drawer in its grooves again. Sometimes you succeeded; more often you left it "for mother to do"—that depended on your temper and the time of your train. The drawer was a charnel-house of gloves and mittens and veils. When you cut your finger you were sent to it to get a "cot", and it had a peculiar smell of its own, the smell of the hat-tree drawer. A whiff of old gloves still brings that odor back to me, out of childhood, stirring memories of little garments ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... something about "hearing his mother calling" and fled with precipitate irrelevance in the direction of the back stairs, leaving Mrs. Wrangle speechless with indignation and bitterly repenting her recent indecision. She swept past Anthony as if she were leaving a charnel-house. Her daughters, who took after their father, walked as though ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... and scum it very clean, boil away one third part, then put it in a vessel, put to it some charnel, stop the vessel close, and in a short time it will ...
— The accomplisht cook - or, The art & mystery of cookery • Robert May
... applied— The nymph arose: he left them to their joy, And onward went upon his high employ, Showering those powerful fragments on the dead. And, as he pass'd, each lifted up its head, 790 As doth a flower at Apollo's touch. Death felt it to his inwards: 'twas too much: Death fell a weeping in his charnel-house. The Latmian persever'd along, and thus All were re-animated. There arose A noise of harmony, pulses and throes Of gladness in the air—while many, who Had died in mutual arms devout and true, Sprang ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats
... carcasses. I followed, holding my nose against their nauseating, charnel-house odor. We scrambled ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... together on the deck, For a charnel-dungeon fitter: All fixed on me their stony eyes, That ...
— English Songs and Ballads • Various
... the unglazed earthen pipkin, fashioned by the hand without the assistance of the potter's wheel, is held to belong to the "bronze and stone periods" of the antiquary; and yet my friend of the Doocot Cave, when minister of Small Isles, found the remains of one of these pipkins in the famous charnel cave of Eigg, which belonged to an age not earlier than that of Mary, and more probably pertained to that of her son James; and I have since learned, that in the southern portions of the Long Island, this same hand-moulded pottery of the bronze period has been fashioned ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... and God over all the earth, and should have of everything the fairest, best and noblest. Likewise have they costly shrines of gold and silver, and images set with gems and jewels; but within are dead men's bones, as foul and corrupt as in any charnel-house. So also have they costly vestments, chasubles, palliums, copes, hoods, mitres, but what are they that be clothed therewithal? slow- bellies, evil wolves, godless swine, persecuting and dishonoring the word of God.Just ...
— The Hymns of Martin Luther • Martin Luther
... were walking down together to join the others, who were gathered in a group by the wide entrance to the kraal, which now resembled a veritable charnel-house, a Masai, who had escaped so far and been hiding under a bush, suddenly sprang up and charged furiously at us. Off went Alphonse with a howl of terror, and after him flew the Masai, bent upon doing some execution ...
— Allan Quatermain • by H. Rider Haggard
... would fill several waggons. It was with no regret that I went out into the hot and brilliant air, and left for ever these gloomy vaults, with their dismal human relics and that penetrating odour of the earth that once moved and spoke, which dwells in every ancient charnel-house. ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... "a truce to digression," let us see what the ancient cemetery of the Innocents was like. Round an irregular four-sided space, about five hundred feet by two, ran a low cloister-like building, called Les Charniers, or the Charnel Houses. It had originally been a cloister surrounding the churchyard; but, so convenient had this place of sepulture been found, from its situation in the heart of Paris, that the remains of mortality increased ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... desire of rule, and the hope of victory; to high vaulting ambition, to the appetite for praise, and the craving for the suffrage of their fellows! The nations are no longer! No senate sits in council for the dead; no scion of a time honoured dynasty pants to rule over the inhabitants of a charnel house; the general's hand is cold, and the soldier has his untimely grave dug in his native fields, unhonoured, though in youth. The market-place is empty, the candidate for popular favour finds none whom he can represent. To chambers ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... always treading the bones and images of humans and gods that constituted the floor of this ancient charnel-house of sacrifice, he came upon the device by which the Red One was made to send his call singing thunderingly across the jungle-belts and grass-lands to the far beach of Ringmanu. Simple and primitive ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... "Come out of this charnel-house into the pure air once more. Do not shrink back—trust yourself with me this once at least." The brick walls of the factory rose a hundred yards off, in full view of the Row, and leading her along the river bank he placed her on one of the massive stone ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... struggled through many difficulties only to lie down here silently, uncomplainingly, and give up their lives, all stirred Dermot strangely. And when the thought of the incalculable wealth that lay in the vast quantity of ivory stored in this great charnel-house flashed through his mind, he felt that it would be a shameful desecration, inviting the wrath of the gods, to remove even one tusk ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... gruesome matters, in the Palatine of Bohemia's family. She usually talked of the spectres of Hollenbogenblitz Castle in the passing of the threads. Those were dismal spectres in Bohemia, smelling of murder and the charnel-breath of midnight. They uttered noises that wintered the blood, and revealed sights that stiffened hair three feet long; ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... present you to the Smithsonian Institution as the last embodiment of effete theories. Who exhumed you, patron saint of archaism, from the charnel-house of centuries?" He looked down at her with an expression of intolerable bitterness and scorn. Her habitually pale face flushed to crimson, as she ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... floor by the eastern wall lies one of those charnel house memorials, in the shape of a ghastly and desiccated human figure, of the kind not uncommon in tombs of the sixteenth century. To whose tomb this figure belonged there is no ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: Southwark Cathedral • George Worley
... and the vestments and altar cloths were sold. The early reformers were backed by greedy partisans. The Protector Somerset, who was desirous of building rapidly a sumptuous palace in the Strand, pulled down the chapel and charnel-house in the Pardon churchyard, and carted off the stones of St. Paul's cloister. When the good Ridley was installed Bishop of London, he would not enter the choir until the lights on the altar were extinguished. Very soon a table was substituted for the altar, and ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... of the College of the Holy Trinity, endowed as a "carnarie," or charnel-house, of the city. The chief duties of the priests belonging to the chantry attached thereto were to bury the dead, and keep up perpetual Masses for ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... a woman weeping there, And standing calm and motionless, whilst I Slide giddily as the world reels—My God! The beautiful blue heaven is flecked with blood! The sunshine on the floor is black! The air Is changed to vapours such as the dead breathe In charnel pits! Pah! I am choaked! There creeps A clinging, black, contaminating mist About me—'tis substantial, heavy, thick, I cannot pluck it from me, for it glues My fingers and my limbs to one another, And eats into my sinews, and dissolves ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... paused: a black mass in the gloom, A tower that merged into the heavy sky; Around, the huddled stones of grave and tomb: Some old God's-acre now corruption's sty: 10 He murmured to himself with dull despair, Here Faith died, poisoned by this charnel air. ...
— The City of Dreadful Night • James Thomson
... the appearance of the dull, misty daybreak, it was yet the most welcome of all the objects surrounding the starving soldier on which he could fix his languid gaze. To look back on the city behind him was to look back on the dreary charnel-house of famine and death; to look down on the waste ground without the walls was to look down on the dead body of the comrade of his watch, who, maddened by the pangs of hunger which he had suffered during the night, had cast himself from the rampart ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... recently as 1815! Mr. Holyoake himself remarks that, in his youth, he never heard one word which indicated a kindly or respectful feeling between employers and employed; and he speaks of the workshops and factories of those days as "charnel-houses of industry." If there has been great improvement, it is due to these causes: The resistance of the operative class; their growth in self-respect, intelligence, and sobriety; and the humanity and wisdom of ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton
... with the dissolution of the abbey at Shaftesbury it had passed into lay hands. The chancel was used as a cottage. Round its walls other cottages arose. Perhaps part of the building was at one time used as a charnel-house, as in an old deed it is called the Skull House. In 1715 the nave and porch were given to the vicar to be used as a school. But no one suspected the presence of this exquisite gem of Anglo-Saxon architecture, until Canon Jones when surveying the town from the height of a neighbouring hill recognized ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield
... aggressive and caustic wit, and rebellious and bitter against opposition.[19] The lines on the slab over his grave are less supplicatory than mandatory against the removal of his bones to the adjacent charnel-house.[20] His name, often written with a hyphen, indicates that he came of English fighting stock. When the Sonnets were written he was in the full tide of success. It is not credible that such a man at thirty or thirty-five, of buoyant and abounding life, could have ...
— Testimony of the Sonnets as to the Authorship of the Shakespearean Plays and Poems • Jesse Johnson
... clearer. "Death destroys a man: the idea of Death saves him." Behind the coffins and the skeletons that stay the vulgar mind lies something so immense that all that is great in us responds to it. Men of the world may recoil from the charnel-house that they will one day enter, but Love knows better. Death is his foe, but his peer, and in their age-long struggle the thews of Love have been strengthened, and his vision cleared, until there is no one who can ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... body had been found? Is this a trick, a delusion of the brain? What is this thing huddled together, lying in a heap—a ghastly, ragged, filthy heap, before their terrified eyes? And why does this charnel-house smell infect their nostrils? They stagger. Even the strong men grow pale and faint, for there, before them, gaunt, awful, unmistakable, ...
— The Haunted Chamber - A Novel • "The Duchess"
... vanished into the shadow of the sphinx, and we could see nothing of them. The great round moon rose higher and higher, flooding the rest of the charnel-house with light, and, save for an occasional roar or whimper from the lions beyond the wall, the silence was intense. Now I could make out the metal gates in this wall, and even dark and stealthy forms which passed and repassed beyond their bars. ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... side, Into a passage whose stifling breath Reeked with the pestilence of death. Down through a subterranean vault, Over broken steps with never a halt, Till we stood in the midst of a spacious room, A charnel-house in its shroud of gloom. Only a window, narrow and small, Left in the build of the heavy wall, Through which the flickering sunbeams died, Showed passway to the world outside. Slowly my eyes to the darkness grew, And I saw in the ...
— Debris - Selections from Poems • Madge Morris
... shoulder of mutton with onion sauce,' said Mrs Crummles, in the same charnel-house voice; 'but such as our dinner is, we beg you to partake ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... beneath whose ermined pride Stalks the corruption of a charnel-house, Where fest'ring flesh lies in its cloth of gold, E'en yet the wonder of the gaping crowd. Upon his brow the jewelled circlet rests, His only title to nobility; But that, unto the vulgar, symbols still The orbit of the everlasting sun, That fills ...
— Eidolon - The Course of a Soul and Other Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... gross, didst toy with clay, And in the ghastly gleam Of charnel gloom didst kiss decay; And many full moons waned away, And ...
— My Beautiful Lady. Nelly Dale • Thomas Woolner
... rather narrow and pointed chin, suggested to him unhealthiness, a human being perhaps stricken by some obscure disease which had drained her body of all fresh color, and robbed it of flesh, had caused to come upon her something strange, not easily to be defined, which almost suggested the charnel-house. ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... thought that all passions would be laid aside, like cumbersome weapons, and that we should give ourselves up with clean hearts and empty hands to battle against the fiery nightmare. He who fights and defends himself needs a pure heart: so does he who wanders among charnel houses, gives drink to parched lips, washes fevered faces and bathes wounds. We thought there would be a great forgetfulness of self and of former hopes, and of the whole world. O Union of pure ...
— The New Book Of Martyrs • Georges Duhamel
... bid me leap, rather than marry Paris, From off the battlements of yonder tower, Or walk in thievish ways; or bid me lurk Where serpents are—chain me with roaring bears, Or shut me nightly in a charnel-house O'ercovered quite with dead men's rattling bones; Or bid me go into a new made grave; Or hide me with a dead man in his shroud;— Things that to hear them ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... some that see him sit In the charnel house alone, Counting what seems to him shining gold, Heap upon heap, a sum ne'er told: Alas, the dead, how they lack of wit! They are not even bits ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... but grim and hollow head. O, woeful pride! dark root of all distress! With contrite heart, our fleshless scalps behold! O wretched man, to God, meek prayers address. Thy lusty strength, thy wit, thy daring bold, All shall lie low with us in charnel cold: Proud king, 'tis thus thy pamper'd corpse shall rot; Thus, in the dust thy purple pomp be roll'd, Mark then, in peeled ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 554, Saturday, June 30, 1832 • Various
... where I would, Marian was not there, and my heart misgave me that that beautiful form was lying in the loathsome charnel-house whence I had so hardly come out. A man near me, who appeared to have preserved his strength better than most of us, presently observing my trouble, and guessing its cause, undertook to ...
— Athelstane Ford • Allen Upward
... shaken to its foundations. When the news of the February Revolution in Paris reached Austria the Magyar Diet was in session in Hungary. The success of the revolutionists in France inflamed the Liberal leaders in Hungary. Casting aside all reserve, Kossuth declared in the Diet: "From the charnel house of the Viennese system a poison-laden atmosphere steals over us. It would paralyze our nerves and pin us down when we might soar. The future of Hungary can never be secured while Austria maintains a system of government in direct antagonism ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... give way, as had the barbarians of feudal war. This heaving, moaning city, blessedly quiet tonight, would learn its lesson of futility. His eyes that had been long searching the dark were opened now, and he could bide his few years of life in peace. He had labored too long in the charnel house. ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... slave of old Marster John Durham, on a plantation 'bout five miles east of Blackstock, S.C. My mistress name Margaret. Deir chillun was Miss Cynthia, Marse Johnnie, Marse Willie and Marse Charnel. I forgits de others. Then, when young Marse Johnnie marry Miss Minnie Mobley, my mammy, Kizzie, my daddy, Eph, and me was give to them. Daddy and mammy had four other chillun. They was Eph, Reuben, Winnie and Jordan. Us live in rows of log houses, a path 'twixt de ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves • Works Projects Administration
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