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More "Charnel" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the Lord's Vicegerent at Canterbury, and many of the most learned divines of England; and from those ecclesiastical leeches there was a Shylock cry of incest, incest, incest! And those terrible words came greeting the ears of Charles Blount, making his home like a charnel-house, and they nearly sent his beautiful Eliza to a maniac's grave. Still she lingered on. Denied the power of a wife, she would not relinquish her duties as a mother to her sister's babes. There was a calm heroism here which few can imitate. The passions of Blount could not brook further ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... 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 death on the earth ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... he could not 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, ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... and agonies, in one intoxicating draught. What have they to do more upon 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 pain, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 563, August 25, 1832 • Various
... was the custom of a number of Indian tribes, when first encountered by the whites, and even down to a comparatively modern date, to remove the flesh before final burial by suspending on scaffolds, depositing in charnel-houses, by temporary burial, or otherwise, is well known to all students of Indian habits ...
— The Problem of Ohio Mounds • Cyrus Thomas
... to the hotel, and I got a doctor and a nurse, and for two days I had to watch the revolution alone, while dad had fits of remorse 'cause he brought me to such a charnel ...
— Peck's Bad Boy Abroad • George W. Peck
... by the feet in 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 Lady ...
— High History of the Holy Graal • Unknown
... 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 ...
— Intestinal Ills • Alcinous Burton Jamison
... be a charnel house when these bodies start to decompose." Baron hesitated. "Shouldn't we get out of town while there ...
— The End of Time • Wallace West
... pleasantries, Lord Pomfret muttered 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 they ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... 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 a period of 1,200 years, new ...
— The History of London • Walter Besant
... foolhardy youth to a condition of abject terror, he was then to proceed to the room occupied by the United States Minister and his wife, and there to place a clammy hand on Mrs. Otis's forehead, while he hissed into her trembling husband's ear the awful secrets of the charnel-house. With regard to little Virginia, he had not quite made up his mind. She had never insulted him in any way, and was pretty and gentle. A few hollow groans from the wardrobe, he thought, would be more than sufficient, ...
— Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories • Oscar Wilde
... 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 the passage of the column with the wounded, who must otherwise ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... 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 in a still profounder desolation, he built the Escorial out of sight ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... inconsiderable proportion of the entire mass. I found the deposit thickly inhabited by spatangi, razor-fish, gapers, and large, well-conditioned cockles, which seemed to have no idea whatever that they were living amid the debris of a charnel house. Such has been the origin here of a bed of shell-sand, consisting of many thousand tons, and of which at least eighty per cent. was once associated with animal life. And such, I doubt not, is the history ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... 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
... stood still. Her life sank down so low That but for wretchedness no life she knew. A charnel wind moaned out a moaning—No; From the devouring heart of earth it blew. Fair memories lost all their sunny glow: Out of the dark the forms of old friends grew But so transparent blanched with dole and smart She saw the pale worm lying ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... Sigmund Oroshaz, 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 ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... 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 ever ordered the same. Sable, however, proved ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... 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 ...
— The Flight of the Shadow • George MacDonald
... 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
... 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
... in 1694, records the tradition that the poet himself composed the lines in a style calculated to impress sextons and prevent them from digging up his bones and throwing them into the adjacent charnel house. However this may be, ...
— The Facts About Shakespeare • William Allan Nielson
... taught Margarita. The little lady learnt it, with many 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
... having 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, and his wife, with an inscription setting ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Hereford, A Description - Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • A. Hugh Fisher
... countermarches in preparation for a battle which would decide the destiny of France and Italy, the garrison of Genoa found itself reduced to its last extremity. The typhus epidemic was raging. The hospitals had become ghastly charnel houses; starvation was at its worst. Nearly all the horses had been eaten, and though for a long time the soldiers had had no more than half a pound of rotten food daily, the distribution for the following day was not assured. There was absolutely nothing left when, ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... distance, been 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 ...
— For the Temple - A Tale of the Fall of Jerusalem • G. A. Henty
... be called Phoenix, because, he explained, the Phoenix was a bird of beautiful plumage and exceptional voice, which lived for five hundred years and then, after chanting its death-song, prepared a charnel-house for itself and was cremated, after which a new and glorified bird arose from the ashes to live a magnificent existence forever. When Dupper finished his suggestion and explanation the meeting voted on the names and the Frenchman's choice was decided upon. ...
— Arizona's Yesterday - Being the Narrative of John H. Cady, Pioneer • John H. Cady
... we look steadily with the wise, searching eye of faith into the face of mother earth, we shall see how death is but the gate of life, and this narrow churchyard, with its corpses close-packed underneath the sod, would not seem to us a frightful charnel-house of corruption. No! it would seem like what it is—a blessed, quiet, seed-filled God's garden, in which our forefathers, after their long-life labour, lay sown by God's friendly hand, waiting peaceful, one and all, to spring up into leaf, and flower, and everlasting ...
— Twenty-Five Village Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... Games used by Boys and Girls, merrily sett 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
... 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 stone cottage at the west end. Seen from a distance the churchyard looks ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... Its noisome 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 downwards, some ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... 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 appeal for more was sent to Houston and other places. ...
— The True Story of Our National Calamity of Flood, Fire and Tornado • Logan Marshall
... sweet messenger 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! ...
— The Poetical Works of Mrs. Leprohon (Mrs. R.E. Mullins) • Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon
... and 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, America, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... visited Stratford in 1694, records the tradition that the poet himself composed the lines in a style calculated to impress sextons and prevent them from digging up his bones and throwing them into the adjacent charnel house. However this may be, the ...
— The Facts About Shakespeare • William Allan Nielson
... 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. No ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... 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
... bones were 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
... 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
... 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
... 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 ...
— Minnie's Sacrifice • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
... correspondent and appropriate 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 ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... part, I never entered the Abbey church at 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 ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... 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
... Torbay. He was buried in Mr. Strudwick's newly-purchased vault, in what Southey has termed the Campo Santo of Nonconformists, the burial-ground in Finsbury, taking its name of Bunhill or Bonehill Field, from a vast mass of human remains removed to it from the charnel house of St. Paul's Cathedral in 1549. At a later period it served as a place of interment for those who died in the Great Plague of 1665. The day after Bunyan's funeral, his powerful friend, Sir John Shorter, the Lord Mayor, had a fatal fall from his horse ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... study, 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 which my ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... the doctor; "but I needn't tell you that; the charnel-house smell is enough to convince you of the fact of ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... 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 ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... whether this doctrine or the other be 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 her sisters ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... 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 ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... 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 did, from my lacerated fingers the bloody fibres would stretch out all quivering ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume III (of 6) - Orators and Reformers • Various
... stood together on the deck, For a charnel-dungeon fitter: All fixed on me their stony eyes, That in ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... 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, ...
— A Middy in Command - A Tale of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... Spin round! I see 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 My flesh to a pollution, ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... writes:- "Creeping down the crypt steps, oppressed by growing horror and by terror of coming judgment, sickening under fears engendered by the darkness of night and the charnel-house air he breathed, Jasper opens the door of the tomb and holds up his lantern, shuddering at the thought of what it ...
— The Puzzle of Dickens's Last Plot • Andrew Lang
... 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? ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... 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 sweet sad rhyme." [Footnote: ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... the divers to rise again, I started from a seat on a coil of ropes which I had in my musings taken possession of—having been oblivious of the intervening half hour, during which I had been shadowing forth the secrets of the green charnel-house, with its surface lying smiling before me in the lurid glare ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... in to die—lazzaretto, charnel-house, morgue, living grave! Oh, go away, girl, go to the blarsted church if you want to, and ...
— Ridan The Devil And Other Stories - 1899 • Louis Becke
... 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 hearts ...
— The New Book Of Martyrs • Georges Duhamel
... 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
... 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 you save her. Do not, as you love your own ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman
... are being 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 of this land in the last twenty ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... him as a man of ready, 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 so bewailed ...
— Testimony of the Sonnets as to the Authorship of the Shakespearean Plays and Poems • Jesse Johnson
... who had fought their way five bloody miles since daybreak? I could not tell; it would be a death grapple worthy of the gods, and the Hardy house would be in the very vortex. Whether it was destined also to become a charnel house, a shambles, depended on the early coming of those other, unseen men toiling ...
— Love Under Fire • Randall Parrish
... "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 for ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... 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 ...
— The House of Life • Dante Gabriel Rossetti
... 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 ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... 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
... gentleman, of whose taste it may be held a satisfactory instance, that he deemed the tragedy of "Titus Andronicus" too mild for representation, and generously added a few more murders, rapes, and parricides, to that charnel-house of horrors[1]. His turn for comedy being at least equal to his success in the blood-stained buskin, Mr Ravenscroft translated and mangled several of the more farcical French comedies, which he decorated with the lustre of his own great ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... always must be, where power and wealth are masters of 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 not the ...
— Via Crucis • F. Marion Crawford
... 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 lights as 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 ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... 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
... 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 and desolation, almost fearful. ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... 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
... 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 ruins ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... ravings become clear and clearer, until at last she scents the "blood-dripping slaughter within;" a vapour rises to her nostrils as from a charnel house—her own fate, which she foresees at hand, begins to overpower her—her mood softens, and she enters the palace, about to become her tomb, with thoughts in which frantic terror has yielded to solemn ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... 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 ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... it is a mistake to be for ever looking back to the past for precedents," she said. "The past has its charm, of course, but it is the charm of the charnel house—it is the dead past, and what was good for one ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... 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 ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... 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
... 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 succeed to the blooming ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... 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 this charnel-house were great numbers of pikes ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr
... condition of abject terror, he was then to proceed to the room occupied by the United States Minister and his wife, and there to place a clammy hand on Mrs. Otis's forehead, while he hissed into her trembling husband's ear the awful secrets of the charnel-house. With regard to little Virginia, he had not quite made up his mind. She had never insulted him in any way, and was pretty and gentle. A few hollow groans from the wardrobe, he thought, would be more ...
— Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories • Oscar Wilde
... most terrible wrongs, where had been stifled the higher aspirations of manhood, where genius had been crushed, nay, more, where attempts had been made to annihilate even all human instincts,—from this accursing region, this charnel-house of human woe, came the latter-day children ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... its discovery was due to the Rev. Canon Jones, Vicar of Bradford. At the Reformation 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 ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield
... 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; while all the rational objects and interests to which it refers have ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... and endearing ties; and there lies our friend, the sprightly, vigorous youth, whose death is the occasion of this funeral solemnity. This earth is overspread with the ruins of the human frame: it is a huge carnage, a vast charnel-house, undermined and hollowed with the graves, ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... nod, speak too! if our graves And charnel houses give those we bury back, Our monuments shall ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... he would never be able to free his mind from the memory of those dreadful moments. The gloom which surrounded that horrible charnel pit, which seemed to go down to the very bowels of the earth, conveyed from far down the sights and sounds of the nethermost hell. The ghastly fate of the African as he sank down to his terrible doom, his black ...
— The Lair of the White Worm • Bram Stoker
... 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 ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... 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 dead companions, ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... corps at Port Royal 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 of ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... afterwards proved." A different visitor to Stratford next year recorded in an extant letter to a friend yet more scraps of oral tradition. These were to the effect that "the great Shakespear" dreaded the removal of his bones to the charnel-house attached to the church; that he caused his grave to be dug seventeen feet deep; and that he wrote the rude warning against disturbing his bones, which was inscribed on his gravestone, in order to meet the capacity ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... 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 in yonder hall ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... some sleepy mountain's top, Where rearing bears and savage lions roam; Or shut me nightly in a charnel house] [Or walk in thievish ways, or bid me lurk Where serpents are; chain me with rearing bears, Or hide me ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Flight of the Shadow • George MacDonald
... 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 ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... 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) ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... 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 ...
— Intestinal Ills • Alcinous Burton Jamison
... 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, ...
— Paris War Days - Diary of an American • Charles Inman Barnard
... rails laid over the steps, and listening to the rasping noise which the casters of these osier waggons made in their descent. Down below there was a scene of exquisite horror. They entered into a charnel-house atmosphere, and walked along through murky puddles, amidst which every now and then purple eyes seem to be glistening. At times the soles of their boots stuck to the ground, at others they splashed through the horrible ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... much—than the level on which we 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 the remains of a departed race I cannot ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... Emperour," Gefrei 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 then upon your ...
— The Song of Roland • Anonymous
... 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 ...
— Winning His Way • Charles Carleton Coffin
... more horrid could be conceived than the spectacle presented in this asylum for the afflicted. It was rather a charnel-house than an hospital; and the name of the Creator, over the gate, which recalled to mind the principle of all existence, served only to decorate the entrance of the tomb ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... 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 in most ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... 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 us ...
— Dreams and Dust • Don Marquis
... stemmed by Castelnau to the battles won by Nivelle and Mangin; Verdun, with her mud-stained poilu, standing firm in the tempest, who said: "They shall not pass!" (passeront pas!), and they have not passed; Verdun, for the Germans a charnel-house, for us a sanctuary, was something greater ...
— Fields of Victory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... 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 ...
— Historic Tales, Volume 11 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... 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 ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... the wide grey sky, Nor light on any field, and 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 sung? Life, hopes, and human things ...
— Alcyone • Archibald Lampman
... 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 not see her, for our eyes have been blinded with blood, for ever ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... your 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 beauty; yet my ...
— The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems • Aldous Huxley
... blameworthy hankering after the picturesque, I have grossly misused a foreign word. Those cats in Trajan's Forum at Rome are nowise a "macabre exhibition"; they are not macabre in the least; they are sad, or saddening. The charnel-house flavour is absent. ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... The old 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. ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... senses report 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
... the heart of every man and boy we pass upon the street, how few—how very few—there are that would not reveal sickening pictures of lust, disease, melancholy and insanity. Charnel-houses of sin and lust—sloughs of despond and regret—excess of passion offset by lack of power—dread, despair, hopelessness, shame and desperation, making a picture of misery scarcely to be conceived by any but those unfortunate beings who in the thoughtless, careless heyday ...
— Manhood Perfectly Restored • Unknown
... 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
... 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 History of London • Walter Besant
... ached till the throbs 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... little 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 wait. ...
— Rhymes of a Rolling Stone • Robert W. Service
... proficient in the art, and had taught Margarita. The little lady learnt it, with many 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; ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... fiery star struggled through the drifting vapor, furnishing a lurid gleam of brightness to the dull aspect of the heavens. Within the bosom of the encircling hills, an impenetrable darkness had already settled; and the plain lay like a vast and deserted charnel-house, without omen or whisper to disturb the slumbers of ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper
... 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 Party Will show ...
— Punch, or, the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 8, 1890. • Various
... passing, explains 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 consigned to ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... 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, have made me tremble; And I will do it without fear ...
— Romeo and Juliet • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... but the opposite wall had in it the narrow door aforesaid, and a wide grated window, the bars of which were rusty, though strong. The atmosphere of the place was cold and musty and suggestive of a charnel house. Certainly a strange place in which to transact business, but everything about ...
— The Opal Serpent • Fergus Hume
... from yon black 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 scythe and darts supply, How great ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... toy with clay, And in the ghastly gleam Of charnel gloom didst kiss decay; And many full moons waned away, And left thee in ...
— My Beautiful Lady. Nelly Dale • Thomas Woolner
... place was a charnel-house. The bones of men and animals mingled in weird confusion. Most were mere skeletons. A few bodies—nine the sailor counted—yet preserved some resemblance of humanity. These latter were scattered among the older relics. They wore the clothes of Dyaks. Characteristic ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... 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 before he died. He soon overtook the poor little Frenchman, ...
— Allan Quatermain • by H. Rider Haggard
... while they became aware that the ground they were standing on was like an unroofed charnel-house, littered over with the bodies of their unburied dead. So they set themselves to cover up their comrades in the earth, never asking which was British and which German, but laying them all together in the everlasting ...
— The Drama Of Three Hundred & Sixty-Five Days - Scenes In The Great War - 1915 • Hall Caine
... abandon, emphasizes their hideousness and renders it more repulsive. Most of them have passed through the successive grades of immorality. Some of them have been the queenly mistress of the spendthrift, and have descended, step by step, to the foul, degraded beings of those human charnel-houses. In some instances fresh-looking girls will be seen, and careful inquiry will discover the fact that they were either emigrant or innocent country girls, who have been inveigled into these dens by the arts of procuresses or brought ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... a 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 ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... 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 ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... 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
... of Don Juan: how each footfall of the statue smote upon my heart, as I heard it approach, step by step, through the echoing corridor, and beheld it enter, and advance, a moving figure of stone, to the supper table! But then the convivial scene in the charnel-house, where Don Juan returned the visit of the statue; was offered a banquet of skulls and bones, and on refusing to partake, was hurled into a yawning gulf, under a tremendous shower of fire! These were accumulated horrors enough to shake the nerves of the most pantomime-loving schoolboy. ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... is a charnel-house, dull Dudley, but this picture of its furniture shall not suffice for me. The man who is to be my husband must have a feeling for ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... 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 ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... mist, and he quickly grappled her and sent his men to see what manner of ship she was. Ten or twelve Spaniards lying about the deck with their throats cut proved that some other buccaneer had been before him. As the men were about to leave their floating charnel-house to hold her way whither the gales might send her, a furious swearing in Spanish caused them to shiver and look back. Were the dead speaking? Had some crazed sailor escaped, and was he gibbering from the roundtop? No: it was a parrot in the ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... read, 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 of ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... have been interred obscurely to prevent any popular sensation; and it is recorded by an ancient and faithful chronicler of the time that the body of the old monarch was deposited by two Christian captives in his osario or charnel-house.* Such was the end of the turbulent Muley Abul Hassan, who, after passing his life in constant contests for empire, could scarce gain quiet admission into the ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... to sleep, last night, there were—corpses all round me. I thought I was in a charnel ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... foolish and blind) 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
... followed. The wall was broken down in many places, and the path all overgrown and weedy, and as he came to the courtyard before the house, he saw the fishponds choked with weeds and the horseblock green with moss, and in the great doorway grew charnel and hellebore, and the spiked hemlock waved and spilt its seed in the wind. The windows hung by their hinges, and the green moss crept down the wide wet cracks in ...
— King Arthur's Knights - The Tales Re-told for Boys & Girls • Henry Gilbert
... taken from the charnel, and placed there by the demon," replied the monk. "Of my long wanderings in other lands and beneath brighter skies I need not tell you; but neither absence nor lapse of years cooled my desire of vengeance, ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... the dreary old King of Death Inclined for some sport with the carnal, So he tied a pack of darts on his back, And quietly stole from his charnel. ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... 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 Lady had ...
— High History of the Holy Graal • Unknown
... her for a moment, uttered a little shriek, and covered 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
... 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 ...
— Phaedo - The Last Hours Of Socrates • Plato
... ready for the insect-pin and the cabinet on the window-sill beneath the web, which affords at all times its liberal entomological assortment—Coleoptera, Hymenoptera, Diptera, and Lepidoptera. Many are the rare specimens which I have picked from these charnel remnants ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... together by nightly meetings and solemn feasts and inhuman meats—not by any sacred rites, but by such as require expiation. It is a people skulking and shunning the light; in public silent, but in corners loquacious. They despise the temples as charnel-houses; they reject the gods; they deride sacred things. While they are wretched themselves, if allowed they pity the priests; while they are half naked themselves, they despise honors and purple robes. O wonderful folly and incredible ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... you 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 a dirge ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... 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, who never ...
— 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
... 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
... secrets, nor will the crumbling pediments of naos and cenotaph, the obliterated tombstones, or the worm-eaten parchments, tell us their story. To-night, however, we are privileged; for Professor Blank will open the doors for us that we may gaze for a moment upon that solemn charnel-house of the Past in which he has sat for so many long hours ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... the 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 ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... fringes of the circle. There were some millions of survivors. But there was no longer a nation to be called the Union of Communist Republics. There were only frightened, starving people trudging blindly away from cities that were charnel-houses and machines that would not run and trees and crops and grasses that were stark dead where they stood. It would be a long time before anybody would want to cross those lifeless plains and enter the places which once had been swarming ...
— The Machine That Saved The World • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... 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 as a very ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... sacrifice, And pile the earth with slain, Kind Mother Nature ever tries To cover up the stain. 'Mid charnel of the tiger's den May pure white lilies blow, And on the graves of warlike men The ...
— War Rhymes • Abner Cosens
... of distant years, That flashed unnoticed, save by wrinkled eld, Musing, at midnight, upon prophecies, Who at her only lattice, saw the gleam Point to the mist-poised shroud, then quietly Closed her pale lips, and locked the secret up, Safe in the charnel's treasure. ...
— A Book For The Young • Sarah French
... Gefrei 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 then ...
— The Song of Roland • Anonymous
... are thine, and we, who still are dead, Do yearn — nay, not to kill thee back again Into this charnel life, this lowlihead, Not to the dark of sense, the blinking brain, The hugged delusion drear, the hunger fed On husks of guess, ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... 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
... to be iron, or some other metal, in huge plates, whose sutures or joints occasioned the depression. The entire surface of this metallic enclosure was rudely daubed in all the hideous and repulsive devices to which the charnel superstition of the monks has given rise. The figures of fiends in aspects of menace, with skeleton forms, and other more really fearful images, overspread and disfigured the walls. I observed that the outlines of these monstrosities ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... 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
... That 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 human gore his ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... 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 ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... 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; ...
— The Flight of the Shadow • George MacDonald
... once a member of the Middle Temple,—an ingenious gentleman, of whose taste it may be held a satisfactory instance, that he deemed the tragedy of "Titus Andronicus" too mild for representation, and generously added a few more murders, rapes, and parricides, to that charnel-house of horrors[1]. His turn for comedy being at least equal to his success in the blood-stained buskin, Mr Ravenscroft translated and mangled several of the more farcical French comedies, which he decorated with the lustre of his own great ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... culmination of fear. 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, threatening. She seemed ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... the parapet of the Latomia, where the breath of the sirocco, the gnawing tooth of time, and the slow ravelling of rain had serrated the ledge, stood Leo, gazing into the dizzying depths of the charnel house that swarmed with the ghosts of nine thousand men, who once were ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... gale which seemed ready to catch him up and whirl him with other inconsequent things into the void of nothingness. Then darkness settled again and I was left alone with Murder;—all the innocence of my youth gone, and my soul a very charnel house. ...
— Dark Hollow • Anna Katharine Green
... little shriek, and covered 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 join ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... the chef 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, it was ultimately arranged that ...
— With Airship and Submarine - A Tale of Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... whole external world shrunk into a little child's garden. It was, "Simply to sink down into this little garden; and there to nestle yourself so snugly, so homewise, in some furrow, that in looking out from your warm lark-nest, you likewise can discern no wolf-dens, charnel-houses, or thunder-rods, but only blades and ears, every one of which, for the nest-bird, is a tree, and a sun-screen, and rain-screen." There is a similar way of being good, with a goodness which, though ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... party at the Browns—to which I duly went, although in sore disgrace—that my charnel poets played me a mean trick. It was proposed that 'our young friends' should give their elders the treat of repeating any pretty pieces that they knew by heart. Accordingly a little girl recited 'Casabianca', and another little girl 'We are Seven', and various children were induced ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... the horror of the faithful, and all obits and chantreys were confiscated, 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 ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... 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 ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... 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
... which had been so successfully ushered in on that ill-starred Sunday of August, was maintained on the succeeding days with little abatement of its frenzied excitement. Paris soon resembled a vast charnel-house. The dead or dying lay in the open streets and squares, they blocked the doors and carriage-ways, they were heaped in the courtyards. When the utmost that impotent passion could do to these lifeless remains was accomplished, the Seine became the receptacle. Besides ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... 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 trillium ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... ghastly hand protruding from the upper berth. I was scarcely sure this last was not a vision of my half-mad brain, but a fourth match revealed it all—above the murdered Coombs, hidden beneath blankets, was the body of the strange man shot in the upper room. My God! the place was a charnel house! a spot accursed! I crept back from that ghastly scene of death as though invisible hands gripped my throat. I fairly choked with the unutterable horror which overcame me. And yet I knew I must act, must go on to the end. Even as I crouched ...
— Gordon Craig - Soldier of Fortune • Randall Parrish
... saddle, and from saddle to bottle, my Lord. We must have our pleasure ashore, and sleep at sea," and the captain tipped his flask with a leer. He turned his eye uncertainly first on me, then on my Lord. "We are lately from Boston, gentlemen, that charnel-house of treason, and before we leave, my Lord, I must tell them how Mr. Robinson of the customs served that dog Otis, in the British Coffee House. God's word, 'twas ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... a cold wind, a blast from the charnel-house, had swept through the car. Amid the sudden silence that descended on them Loubet's ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... of life. 'Tis we who, lost in stormy visions, keep With phantoms an unprofitable strife, And in mad trance strike with our spirit's knife Invulnerable nothings. WE decay Like corpses in a charnel; fear and grief Convulse us and consume us day by day, And cold hopes swarm like worms within ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... cannot stifle the smell of the charnel house. Here, too, men must hold their handkerchiefs to their mouths as they do before the corpses of ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... mandrake's dreadful groans; {108b} By the lubrican's sad moans; {108c} By the noise of dead men's bones In charnel-houses rattling; By the hissing of the snake, The rustling of the fire-drake, {108d} I charge thee thou this place forsake, Nor of Queen Mab ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... back to their lodgings he had the sensation of entering the atmosphere of a charnel house. Cleo had not come home yet, and he had leisure to ponder on Helen's attitude towards him and her bearing when she had learned all. Of course, he told himself, he must not take any notice of her wild ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... 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
... you 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 ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... loathsome experience. The dead detective had altered his position as Silas Blackburn had done, and this time someone had been in the room and suffered the appalling change. Bobby's fingers still responded to the charnel feeling of cold, inactive flesh suddenly become alive and potent beneath his touch. And a reason for the apparent miracle offered itself. Between the extinction of his candle and the commencement of that movement!—only a ...
— The Abandoned Room • Wadsworth Camp
... monument say "Here rest these bones till the last day," When Time, swift both of foot and feather, May bear them the sexton kens not whither? What care I, then, though my last sleep Be in the desert or the deep, No lamp nor taper, day and night, To give my charnel chargeable light? I have there like quantity of ground, And at the last day I ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... truth, and truth is not always beautiful. In a happier day 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 admit that ugliness ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... working-class, and I was now, 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
... doom, 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
... delay in the 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 in a still profounder desolation, ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... faced the scowling night once more, and with bare necks and hopeless hearts went—whither? Where do they all go when the gin-hells close their yawning jaws? Where do they lie down at night? They vanish like unlawfully risen corpses in the graves of cellars and garrets, in the charnel-vaults of pestiferously-crowded lodging-houses, in the prisons of police-stations, under dry arches, within hoardings; or they make vain attempts to rest the night out upon door-steps or curbstones. All their life ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... overgrown with 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 ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... 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 ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... either, plump upon noses—or collaterally touching them;—such for instance as Prignitz, now lying upon the table before me, who with infinite learning, and from the most candid and scholar-like examination of above four thousand different skulls, in upwards of twenty charnel-houses in Silesia, which he had rummaged—has informed us, that the mensuration and configuration of the osseous or bony parts of human noses, in any given tract of country, except Crim Tartary, where they are all crush'd down by the thumb, so that no judgment can be formed upon them—are ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... the deck, For a charnel-dungeon fitter: All fixed on me their stony eyes, That in the moon ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... their hideousness and renders it more repulsive. Most of them have passed through the successive grades of immorality. Some of them have been the queenly mistress of the spendthrift, and have descended, step by step, to the foul, degraded beings of those human charnel-houses. In some instances fresh-looking girls will be seen, and careful inquiry will discover the fact that they were either emigrant or innocent country girls, who have been inveigled into these dens by the arts of procuresses or ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... delicate skin of a fine lady; it could not be confined in graceful folds by clasps of jet, and pearl, and ornaments in black and gold. "Sackcloth? Faugh!—away with it. It smells of the knotted scourge and the charnel-house." We, too, say, "Away with it!" True grief has no need of such miserable provocatives ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... 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 ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... 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
... my 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
... pointed out 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
... three had 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
... Strutt's Auntient Customs in Games used by Boys and Girls, merrily sett 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, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 348, December 27, 1828 • Various
... 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 ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... vicissitudes, its partings and its meetings, its inquietudes and its persecutions!—that mistaken zeal should follow them down to the very tomb—as if earthly passion could glimmer, like a funeral lamp, amid the damps of the charnel-house, and "even in their ashes bum their ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... 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 ...
— Minnie's Sacrifice • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
... 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 must ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... 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 in the ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... held 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
... 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 sickness ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... 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
... lady learnt it, with many 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
... which is crooked may be made somewhat straight, till their whole soul was distempered, all but degraded, by the continual sight of sin, till their eyes seemed full of nothing but the dance of death, and their ears of the gibbering of madmen, and their nostrils with the odours of the charnel house, and they longed for one breath of pure air, one gleam of pure light, one strain of pure music, to wash their spirits clean from those foul elements into which their duty had thrust ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... against the breasts of women, of children, of old men, and the earth all smoking with the blood of victims immolated to false gods or to the Supreme Being, and presenting one vast, sickening, horrible charnel-house of intolerance. Now what virtuous man, what Christian, if his tender soul is filled with the divine unction that exhales from the maxims of the Gospel, if he is sensible of the cries of the unhappy and the outcast, and has sometimes wiped away their tears—what man could ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... just crawled up, he is far liker Death than He. O the Parish, the Parish, the hospital, the infirmary, the charnel house, these are places meet for such guests, not our quiet mansion where nothing but affluent plenty and literary ease should abound.—Howard's House, Howard's House, or where the Parylitic descended thro' the sky-light (what a God's Gift) to get ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... disposes of lives, proscribes and executes: it is 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 honest bourgeoisie, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... 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
... 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 ...
— Athelstane Ford • Allen Upward
... the 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 dead companions, and streamed upwards to the heterogeneous objects ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... 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, but I cannot strip the features of those I have known of their fleshy covering, ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... Rogue!" she croaked. "Behold thy grave! 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 ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... 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
... 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
... Speeches and women and guests and hosts, Weddings and morning calls and toasts, In every bad variety: Ghosts who hover about the grave Of all that's manly, free, and brave: You'll find their names on the architrave Of that charnel-house, Society. ...
— The Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... the child of a beggar-nay, of a felon—now if he could but recall her to life, how small and mean would all that dreaded world appear to him! Too late, too late! The dews were glistening in the sun, the birds were singing overhead, life wakening all around him—and his own heart felt like a charnel-house. Nothing but death and the dead there,—nothing! He arrived at the door: it was open: he called; no one answered: he walked up the narrow stairs, undisturbed, unseen; he came into the chamber of death. At the opposite side of the bed was seated John Avenel; but he seemed in a heavy sleep. ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... 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. ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... 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 ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... fellow practitioner, even if he is in a side line. Some folks think your way of business is a little shady, but Lord, if they knew the secrets of our charnel-house! ...
— The Faith Healer - A Play in Three Acts • William Vaughn Moody
... the army came 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 this charnel-house were great numbers of ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr
... walls Spin round! I see 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
... 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 ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... might 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; ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... 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'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, have made me tremble; And I will do it without ...
— Romeo and Juliet • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... say true, 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. He ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... as from the charnel-house seems to breathe upon us while reading the lines; the coldness, the darkness, and the horror of death have never been painted for us with more terrible power than in the 'Wiertz ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... 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. ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... they put people in to die—lazzaretto, charnel-house, morgue, living grave! Oh, go away, girl, go to the blarsted church if you want to, and ...
— Ridan The Devil And Other Stories - 1899 • Louis Becke
... few seconds after I had found myself standing upon the ensanguined deck planks of that floating charnel house I had no eyes for anything, save the spectacle of her slaughtered crew, lying there at my feet in every conceivable attitude indicative of the unspeakable agony and terror that had distracted ...
— Overdue - The Story of a Missing Ship • Harry Collingwood
... 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 certainty of being blest. 800 ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats
... 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 the responsible ...
— Intestinal Ills • Alcinous Burton Jamison
... them lay huge tusks in quantities, tusks the like of which I had never seen, except in pictures of the giant mammoth of prehistoric ages, tusks the girth of a man in size. Piled in all directions they lay, the whole vast floor was indeed a stupendous charnel house. And among the white sand and bones diamonds lay thick as ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... 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
... appearance, amidst the peaceful solemnity of the surrounding objects. This exhibition is not yet completed, but, in its present condition, is very interesting. Some hints, not altogether useless, may be collected from it. In England, our churches are charnel houses. The pews of the congregation are raised upon foundations of putrefaction. For six days and nights the temple of devotion is filled with the pestilent vapours of the dead, and on the seventh they are absorbed by the living. Surely it is high time to subdue prejudices, which endanger ...
— The Stranger in France • John Carr
... mortality. An inscription Viro Immortali was in a style of flattery too refined for the simplicity of those ages. If divine honours were conferred, they were the effects of time, and paid at some distance; not upon the spot, at the vestibule of the charnel-house. Besides, it is evident, that most of the deified personages never existed: but were mere titles of the Deity, the Sun; as has been, in great measure, proved by Macrobius. Nor was there ever any ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume II. (of VI.) • Jacob Bryant
... would give all the books in his study (which are rarities all), for one of the old Roman binding, or six-lines of Tully in his own hand. His chamber is hung commonly with strange beasts' skins, and is a kind of charnel-house of bones extraordinary; and his discourse upon them, if you will hear him, shall last longer. His very attire is that which is the eldest out of fashion, [[17] and you may pick a criticism out of his breeches.] He never looks upon himself till he is grey-haired, and then he is pleased with ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... Adrian's almost lifeless 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"
... 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 ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... 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 from ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... 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 out ...
— A Middy in Command - A Tale of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... 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 ...
— The Cross and the Shamrock • Hugh Quigley
... 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
... 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, ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... 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
... the depths of the cellar, watching them glide down the rails laid over the steps, and listening to the rasping noise which the casters of these osier waggons made in their descent. Down below there was a scene of exquisite horror. They entered into a charnel-house atmosphere, and walked along through murky puddles, amidst which every now and then purple eyes seem to be glistening. At times the soles of their boots stuck to the ground, at others they splashed through the horrible mire, anxious and yet delighted. The gas jets burned low, like blinking, ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... 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 of ...
— Dick in the Everglades • A. W. Dimock
... public 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. ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... 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 ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... 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 ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... said Hugh, glancing back at it from the other side of the deserted square, "but oh, I pray heaven that we may never see that charnel-house again!" ...
— Red Eve • H. Rider Haggard
... custom of a number of Indian tribes, when first encountered by the whites, and even down to a comparatively modern date, to remove the flesh before final burial by suspending on scaffolds, depositing in charnel-houses, by temporary burial, or otherwise, is well known to all students of ...
— The Problem of Ohio Mounds • Cyrus Thomas
... atrociously bad. Scurvy and other malignant diseases soon broke out among the soldiers. The Senecas prowled about the place, and no man dared venture out for hunting, fishing, or firewood. [Footnote: Denonville, Memoire du 10 Aoust, 1688.] The fort was first a prison, then a hospital, then a charnel-house, till before spring the garrison of a hundred men was reduced to ten or twelve. In this condition, they were found towards the end of April by a large war-party of friendly Miamis, who entered the place and held it till a French detachment at length arrived for its relief. ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman
... 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 custom obtains ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... of those who were lying in front of us; we thought every moment that the network of projectiles would be drawn more tightly round us, and that one would fall into our holes, transforming them into a ghastly charnel-house. ...
— In the Field (1914-1915) - The Impressions of an Officer of Light Cavalry • Marcel Dupont
... 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
... born from the dusty and dreadful whiteness of the charnel house, but softened in their forms by the holiest of human affections, went forth the troop of wild and wonderful images, seen through tears, that had the mastery over our Northern hearts for so many ages. The powers of sudden ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... that is 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. The whole place is ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... Johannes. But he," and there was a note in her voice that recalled the night he had listened to it over the telephone, "he was different. There is no more dreadful thing in the play, to me, than the character of Rosmer. To think of him sitting quietly in that charnel house, prospering in soul, growing sleek in thought, becoming stored with high ideas. Perfect peace came to him in spite of the stern-faced portraits which shrieked murder from the walls. He dreamed of freeing and ennobling mankind, ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Investigator • John T. McIntyre
... older group, many more from the younger, and ordained to survive and shed their undying beams for posterity. From these judicial pronouncements there was no appeal, and the pleasant spaces of the Sign of the Indian Chief, so innocuous to the uninitiated eye, was a veritable charnel house that stank in the nostrils of the rejected; but, inconsistent even as life itself, those melancholy graves were danced over by the sprightly young feet of the elect. Sometimes there was a terrifying upheaval in one of those graves. A dismal figure fought his way out, tore off his cerements, ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... 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 ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... George! where art thou going? Who has made known to thee this secret passage into endless vaults covered with eternal darkness? to this black charnel house, where moulder the bones of earlier ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... But instances need not be given when it is known that above seven hundred thousand Cuban non-combatants have been killed or have died of starvation in the past two or three years, many of them not buried, but their bones picked by the buzzards. The island is a charnel-house of dead. Every graveyard has piles of exposed human bones, and the earth has been strewn with them outside of cities and towns. There were many killed who were not actual insurgents, but Cubans, women and children included. ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... three miles! You must not take shelter in that charnel-house," he muttered; and moved along in his seat as if to show me ...
— The Forsaken Inn - A Novel • Anna Katharine Green
... 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 ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: Southwark Cathedral • George Worley
... 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 appeal for more was sent to Houston ...
— The True Story of Our National Calamity of Flood, Fire and Tornado • Logan Marshall
... accelerated; or, it may be, he is buried in Christ, and there in that mysterious depth grows on to the spirit of a just man made perfect! Could I for a moment doubt this, the grass would become black beneath my feet, and this earthly frame a charnel-house. I never knew any man so illustrate the difference between ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... speaking! I have been fighting—fighting hard—for half an hour. The place smells like a charnel-house and the—shapes are taking definite, horrible form! They have ... eyes!" His voice sounded harsh. "Quite black the eyes are, and they shine like beads! It's gradually wearing me down, although I have myself in hand, so far. I mean I might crack up—at ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... 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 ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... 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 couple? If so, thought he, they had arrived ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... out of the sunshine, how dark a place it seems, full of a mysterious melancholy too, a sort of remembrance of change and death, as though some treachery asleep in our hearts had awakened on the threshold and accused us. The crypt has long been used as a charnel house, the guide-book tells you, but maybe it is not any memory of the unremembered and countless dead that has stirred in your heart, but some stranger impulse urging you to a dislike of the darkness, that dim mysterious ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... they spoke about. Not that 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 bandits of the Mark, and never punished ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... Against the wall, which was below the street, were three green painted safes fast locked: but the opposite wall had in it the narrow door aforesaid, and a wide grated window, the bars of which were rusty, though strong. The atmosphere of the place was cold and musty and suggestive of a charnel house. Certainly a strange place in which to transact business, but everything about Aaron Norman ...
— The Opal Serpent • Fergus Hume
... inscriptions run from about 1283 to 1462, or later.[1] "In 1464," writes the Rev. J. K. Floyer, in his article entitled A Thousard Years of a Cathedral Library, "we first hear of a regular endowment for the acquisition of books. Bishop Carpenter made a library in the charnel house chantry, and endowed it with L 10 for a librarian. The charnel house was near the north porch of the Cathedral, and stood on or near the site of the present Precentor's house. It was a separate institution from the monastery, and had its own endowments and priests. ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... some other metal, in huge plates, whose sutures or joints occasioned the depression. The entire surface of this metallic enclosure was rudely daubed in all the hideous and repulsive devices to which the charnel superstition of the monks has given rise. The figures of fiends in aspects of menace, with skeleton forms, and other more really fearful images, overspread and disfigured the walls. I observed that the outlines of these monstrosities were sufficiently ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... 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 in chunks ...
— Dick in the Everglades • A. W. Dimock
... suddenly, extending both arms, 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
... colored soldiers of the Revolution, no attempt has, to our knowledge, been made to preserve a record. Their history is not written; it lies upon the soil watered with their blood; who shall gather it? It rests with their bones in the charnel house; who shall exhume it?" Upon reading these lines, it occurred to me that somewhere among the archives of that period there must exist at least a clue to the record of the negro patriots of that war. If I cannot exclaim Eureka, after years of diligent search, I take pride in presenting what ...
— The Black Phalanx - African American soldiers in the War of Independence, the - War of 1812, and the Civil War • Joseph T. Wilson
... 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; death, not once inflicted on the ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... was coming, had come, then. It was as if the old, good-easy, meek-eyed man of science, dying, had left his effectual curse on all the world, and had thereby converted civilisation into one omnivorous grave, one universal charnel-house. I spent several days in reading out to Zaleski accounts of particular deaths as they had occurred. He seemed never to tire of listening, lying back for the most part on the silver-cushioned couch, and wearing ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... social ghosts, - Speeches and women and guests and hosts, Weddings and morning calls and toasts, In every bad variety: Ghosts who hover about the grave Of all that's manly, free, and brave: You'll find their names on the architrave Of that charnel-house, Society. ...
— Fifty Bab Ballads • William S. Gilbert
... swinging saddle-bags, and a great mastiff running on either side. Many a disappointed wayfarer was turned away from the lonely tower. At last Busbec the great traveller, because he was an ambassador from the Emperor, was allowed to enter a kind of charnel-house, and to see what had been the lovely gaily-painted vellums lying squalidly piled in heaps. To see them was a high favour; the visitor was not permitted to touch the remains; and it was not until 1686 that about forty of ...
— The Great Book-Collectors • Charles Isaac Elton and Mary Augusta Elton
... 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. ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... 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 ray of ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... with the greater story he put as their contrast and foil; the solemn gloom, the deep chiaroscuro of this framing, painted like a miniature; the artful way in which he prepares for his lieta brigata the way out of the charnel-house: these are the real 'Decameron.' The author presents it in a prelude which has for its scope only to give the air of reality to the whole, as if not only the plague, but the 'Decameron,' had been history; and the proof of his perfect ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... tangled limbs appear pulseless and dead. The youth started up with a little cry when his eyes first swept over this motionless mass of men, thick-spread upon the ground, pallid, and in strange postures. His disordered mind interpreted the hall of the forest as a charnel place. He believed for an instant that he was in the house of the dead, and he did not dare to move lest these corpses start up, squalling and squawking. In a second, however, he achieved his proper mind. He swore a complicated oath at himself. ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... 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, and his wife, with an inscription ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Hereford, A Description - Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • A. Hugh Fisher
... devils, prompting and suggesting us unto mischief, blood, and villany; instilling and 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
... impious invitation of Don Juan: how each footfall of the statue smote upon my heart, as I heard it approach, step by step, through the echoing corridor, and beheld it enter, and advance, a moving figure of stone, to the supper table! But then the convivial scene in the charnel-house, where Don Juan returned the visit of the statue; was offered a banquet of skulls and bones, and on refusing to partake, was hurled into a yawning gulf, under a tremendous shower of fire! These were accumulated horrors enough to shake the nerves of the most pantomime-loving schoolboy. ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... there, a red and fiery star struggled through the drifting vapor, furnishing a lurid gleam of brightness to the dull aspect of the heavens. Within the bosom of the encircling hills, an impenetrable darkness had already settled; and the plain lay like a vast and deserted charnel-house, without omen or whisper to disturb the slumbers of its numerous ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper
... 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 in most rapid proportion within its precincts, and it was continually found necessary ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... God; who nevertheless is Lord 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 in the same way ...
— The Hymns of Martin Luther • Martin Luther
... reeked with horrible putrescence. Its noisome 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 downwards, some in a cruciform ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... 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
... 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 ...
— Intestinal Ills • Alcinous Burton Jamison
... him. How could she have done so? He was in bliss; and had only preceded her to that heaven for which she was day by day preparing. Nor was it a time for the idle indulgence of sorrow. Want and sickness were turning Rome into a charnel-house. Wild voices were screaming for bread on every side. The streets were encumbered by the victims of contagious disease; their frantic cries and piteous moanings re-echoed in each piazza and under every portico. Old men were dying surrounded by the corpses of their children; mothers ...
— The Life of St. Frances of Rome, and Others • Georgiana Fullerton
... the 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 are so much wrapped up ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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, Joan Wolfe, only survived him a few months, her will, which is also preserved in the Prerogative ...
— A Short History of English Printing, 1476-1898 • Henry R. Plomer
... country became a charnel-house; the deathbell tolled hourly in every village; not a family but was called to mourn for its dearest relatives, while the survivors stalked listlessly about, the ghosts of their former selves, among the wrecks of their former homes. The spirit ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... and 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. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... consider these women, let us take a peep at the lower depths. Come, then! Now we are in a charnel house, for we are down among the drunken women, the dissolute women that stew and writhe in the underworld, for whom there is no balm in Gilead and no physician. Now we realise what moral ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... sure it is a mistake to be for ever looking back to the past for precedents," she said. "The past has its charm, of course, but it is the charm of the charnel house—it is the dead past, and what was good for one age is bad ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... engaged in marches and countermarches in preparation for a battle which would decide the destiny of France and Italy, the garrison of Genoa found itself reduced to its last extremity. The typhus epidemic was raging. The hospitals had become ghastly charnel houses; starvation was at its worst. Nearly all the horses had been eaten, and though for a long time the soldiers had had no more than half a pound of rotten food daily, the distribution for the following day was not assured. There was absolutely nothing left when, on the 15th Prairial ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... was distempered, all but degraded, by the continual sight of sin, till their eyes seemed full of nothing but the dance of death, and their ears of the gibbering of madmen, and their nostrils with the odours of the charnel house, and they longed for one breath of pure air, one gleam of pure light, one strain of pure music, to wash their spirits clean from those foul elements into which their duty had thrust them ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... to saddle, and from saddle to bottle, my Lord. We must have our pleasure ashore, and sleep at sea," and the captain tipped his flask with a leer. He turned his eye uncertainly first on me, then on my Lord. "We are lately from Boston, gentlemen, that charnel-house of treason, and before we leave, my Lord, I must tell them how Mr. Robinson of the customs served that dog Otis, in the British Coffee House. God's word, 'twas as ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... kind that always does live!" cried Delafield, with angry emphasis. "And as for Lady Henry, her imagination is a perfect charnel-house. She likes to think that everybody's dead or dying but herself. The fact is that Mervyn is a good deal stronger this year than he was last. Really, Lady Henry—" The tone lost itself in a growl ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... 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
... two stopped 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
... 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 ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... 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 ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... 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. Stark ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... 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, but I cannot strip the ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... old 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 ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... ordained to survive and shed their undying beams for posterity. From these judicial pronouncements there was no appeal, and the pleasant spaces of the Sign of the Indian Chief, so innocuous to the uninitiated eye, was a veritable charnel house that stank in the nostrils of the rejected; but, inconsistent even as life itself, those melancholy graves were danced over by the sprightly young feet of the elect. Sometimes there was a terrifying upheaval in one of those graves. A dismal figure fought his way out, tore ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... of Bradford. At the Reformation 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 ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield
... 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
... feel those wounds.... But why is she fighting? For what mad love of glory? Is she not intoxicated with successes and conquests? Remember our journey through Europe.... Wherever we went, we found traces of her passage: cemeteries and charnel-houses to bear witness that she was the great victress. Isn't that enough of ...
— The Frontier • Maurice LeBlanc
... began 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, ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... 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, and where, perhaps, many a deed that shunned the day had been ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... corner, the very corner where Sir Adrian's almost lifeless 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, ...
— The Haunted Chamber - A Novel • "The Duchess"
... 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 is not the hell it used to be. Death and the world are ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... 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 ...
— The Poetical Works of Mrs. Leprohon (Mrs. R.E. Mullins) • Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... the capacity of bestowing animation, yet to prepare a frame for the reception of it remained a work of inconceivable difficulty and labour. I collected bones from charnel houses, and the dissecting room and the slaughter house furnished many of my materials. Often my nature turned with loathing from my occupation, but the thought that if I could bestow animation upon lifeless matter I might in process of time renew life where ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... the Servians gave them 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
... 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
... the last no solemn stole Shall on thy breast be laid; No mumbling priest shall speed thy soul, No charnel vault thee shade. But by the shadowed hazel copse, Aneath the greenwood tree, Where airs are soft and waters sing, Thou'lt ever sleep by me, My love, ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... 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 ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... of the little iron 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; ...
— The Flight of the Shadow • George MacDonald
... Karl, and I marvelled what they spoke about. Not that 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 bandits of the Mark, and never punished ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... leads, of the bestial 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 ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... 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 Party ...
— Punch, or, the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 8, 1890. • Various
... Droulde try to persuade, to entreat, to bribe. The sullen guardians of these twelve charnel-houses knew nothing of ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... might almost say that he was a fine old English gentleman 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 very construction of his kingship was built upon the destruction of his manhood. He ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... south wall 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 ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Winchester - A Description of Its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See • Philip Walsingham Sergeant
... to drink of our cup and sit in the lap, to follow the young fere to the battle, and weave the blithe dance in the fair,' I would depart from my sisters, and have a hut of my own, and a black cat without a white hair, and steal herbs by the new moon, and bones from the charnel, and curse those whom I hate, and cleave the misty air on a besom, like Mother Halkin of Edmonton. Ha, ha! Master, thou shalt present me then to the Sabbat. Graul has the mettle ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... croaked. "Behold thy grave! 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 ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... it was as it always is and always must be, where power and wealth are masters of 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 not ...
— Via Crucis • F. Marion Crawford
... except the smith, who skulked off in the opposite direction, he passed through the low doorway on the right of the choir, and descended to Saint Faith's. The subterranean church was buried in profound darkness, and apparently wholly untenanted. On reaching the charnel, they crossed it, and tried the door of the vault formerly occupied by the sexton. It was fastened, but Leonard knocking violently against it, it was soon opened by Judith Malmayns, who appeared much surprised, and not a little alarmed, at the sight of so many persons. She was not alone, and ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... truth" their life's work have shown every whit as much ardour and passion as those who have given their life to religion. The picture of man sacrificing himself in the cause of religion is easily matched by a Vesalius haunting the charnel houses of Europe, and risking the most loathsome diseases in the interests of scientific research. The abiding passion for truth in a character such as that of Roger Bacon or Bruno easily matches the enthusiasm of the missionary monk. The passion ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... strolled 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 to reabsorb, and renew by her marvellous ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... learnt it, with many 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, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... 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 good ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... last day," When Time, swift both of foot and feather, May bear them the sexton kens not whither? What care I, then, though my last sleep Be in the desert or the deep, No lamp nor taper, day and night, To give my charnel chargeable light? I have there like quantity of ground, And at the last day I ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... "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 ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... humanity to death with 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 ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... rusted, the skins of wild 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 ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... face they covered had a 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
... 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 ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... who were prisoners when the massacre began. The bodies were interred in heaps, in immense trenches, prepared beforehand by order of the community of Paris; but their bones have since been transferred to the subterranean catacombs, which form the general charnel-house of the city. In those melancholy regions, while other relics of mortality lie exposed all around, the remains of those who perished in the massacres of September, are alone secluded from the eye. The vault in which they ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... 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
... 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
... 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 him ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... 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 ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... one to tell him who it is that has preserved his life; nor has Irene, it seems, left any trace of her presence. He sallies forth again into the city of the plague to seek her, and she is destined to return to the empty chamber! Taken to a hideous sort of charnel-house, Adrian is shown the body of a female clad in a mantle that had once been Irene's, and concludes that it is the corpse of her who, for the last three days and nights, has been tending on him. I recollect that, when I came to this part of the novel, I threw the book down, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... at the Browns—to which I duly went, although in sore disgrace—that my charnel poets played me a mean trick. It was proposed that 'our young friends' should give their elders the treat of repeating any pretty pieces that they knew by heart. Accordingly a little girl recited 'Casabianca', and another little ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... 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 ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 357 - Vol. XIII, No. 357., Saturday, February 21, 1829 • Various
... and gagged, lay at full length on the floor. Round him, their backs against the walls, crouched the other men. Moylin's lantern cast a feeble, smoky light. The air was heavy and close. It was the air of a charnel house. ...
— The Northern Iron - 1907 • George A. Birmingham
... 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
... "Despair flap o'er my hopes with raven wings; "Because thy love is giv'n to other love. "And did I love—unless I gain'd thy love, "I would disdain the golden hair, sweet lips, "Air-blown form and true violet eyes; "Nor crave the beauteous lamp without the flame; "Which in itself would light a charnel house. "Unlov'd and loving, I would find the cure "Of Love's despair in nursing Love's disdain— "Disdain of lesser treasure than the whole. "One cares not much to place against the wheel "A diamond lacking flame—nor loves to pluck "A rose with all its perfume cast abroad ...
— Old Spookses' Pass • Isabella Valancy Crawford
... clear and clearer, until at last she scents the "blood-dripping slaughter within;" a vapour rises to her nostrils as from a charnel house—her own fate, which she foresees at hand, begins to overpower her—her mood softens, and she enters the palace, about to become her tomb, with thoughts in which frantic terror has yielded to solemn and ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... benches. Others, huddled together, sleep off the fumes of their wine, removed on one side. The exhalation from the carnage is so strong that the president of the civil committee faints in his chair,[31115] the fumes of the tavern blending with those from the charnel-house. A heavy, dull state of torpor gradually overcomes their clouded brains, the last glimmerings of reason dying out one by one, like the smoky lights on the already cold breasts of the corpses ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... 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
... connections. The grave, the wreck of the brig, and the rusty shoe-buckle were surely plain advertisements. A child might have read their dismal story, and yet it was not until I touched that actual piece of mankind that the full horror of the charnel ocean burst upon my spirit. I laid the bone beside the buckle, picked up my clothes, and ran as I was along the rocks towards the human shore. I could not be far enough from the spot; no fortune was vast enough to tempt me back again. The bones of the drowned dead should henceforth ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 couple? If so, thought ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... 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 author ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... 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
... imagery of death serves for delicate ornament, and they weave into the airy nothingness of their verses their trite reflections on the vanity [170] of life. Just so the grotesque details of the charnel-house nest themselves, together with birds and flowers and the fancies of the pagan mythology, in the traceries of the architecture of that time, which wantons in its graceful arabesques with the images of old age ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... light, my body might have ached till the throbs 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... a question [the doubled triplet figure A, B flat, d flat, in the first bar], taught Chopin, and for him it was never question enough, never piano enough, never vaulted (tombe) enough, as he said, never important enough. It must be a charnel-house, he said on one occasion." (W. von Lenz, in Vol. ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... might have been taken for that of a sun-dried corpse had it not been for a pair of large black eyes, still full of fire and intelligence, which gleamed and played under the snow-white eyebrows, and the projecting parchment-coloured skull, like jewels in a charnel-house. As for the head itself, it was perfectly bare, and yellow in hue, while its wrinkled scalp moved and contracted like the ...
— King Solomon's Mines • H. Rider Haggard
... (price) kosto. Chariot cxaro. Charitable bonfarada. Charity bonfarado. Charity (alms) almozo. Charlatan cxarlatano. Charm cxarmi. Charm cxarmo. Charm talismano. Charming cxarma. Charnel house karnejo. Chart (geog.) karto geografia. Chase cxasi. Chase cxaso. Chaste cxasta. Chasten korekti. Chastise puni. Chastisement puno. Chastity cxasteco. Chasuble mesvesto. Chat interparoleti. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... know your 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 you save her. Do not, ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman
... 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
... watching them glide down the rails laid over the steps, and listening to the rasping noise which the casters of these osier waggons made in their descent. Down below there was a scene of exquisite horror. They entered into a charnel-house atmosphere, and walked along through murky puddles, amidst which every now and then purple eyes seem to be glistening. At times the soles of their boots stuck to the ground, at others they splashed ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... itself; for, on ascending its stone staircase, and wandering for a brief period among its bottles and cases, its wax models and human preserves, we find them of so unsightly and disgusting a character that we are happy to regain the echoing corridor which had led us into this huge, systematised charnel-house. ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... Having brought a basket of provisions and a few bottles of wine with them, they determined to pass the night in revelry; and, accordingly, having lighted a fire with the fragments of old coffins brought from the charnel, they sat down to their meal. Having done full justice to it, and disposed of the first flask, they were about to abandon themselves to unrestrained enjoyment, when their glee was all at once interrupted by a strange and unaccountable ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... not 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 is ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 330, September 6, 1828 • Various
... God had to tell us—as it is all the prophets of Infidelity can prophecy—we had 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
... 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
... beautiful and wicked—but since the Balzac and Dumas days the story-tellers and stage-mongers have made exceeding free with the type, and we have between Herman Merivale's Stephanie de Mohrivart and Victorien Sardou's Zica a very theater—or shall we say a charnel house—of the woman with the past; usually portrayed as the victim of circumstance; unprincipled through cruel experience; insensible through lack of conscience; sexless in soul, but a siren in seductive arts; cold as ice; hard ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... 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)
... 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 than ...
— HE • Andrew Lang
... 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 ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... into Canaan, if it ever got there; that he would never have to resort to the subways that he was figuring on to steal the ore out of the Canaan Tigmores; that all this ceaseless, merciless calculation was but the reaction of a conscience, stalking, gaunt and lunatic, through the charnel-house of its own experience. But for all that he had to go on crossing bridges that he was never to reach, covering black tracks that he was never to make. Often at his desk there, his mind became strangely obtunded and he babbled vapidly; his big face ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... Oroshaz, 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 ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... other be 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 her ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... 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
... 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 into the Ashpit, ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... 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? ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
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