"Corpse" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... should take, though she lived but a street or two away; and Miss Bart and Gerty found themselves almost alone in the purple drawing-room, which more than ever, in its stuffy dimness, resembled a well-kept family vault, in which the last corpse had just ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... from Lord Arran to the Duke's late chaplain, dated April 17th, 1687, says, "I have ordered the corpse to be embalmed and carried to Helmsley Castle and there to remain till my Lady Duchess her pleasure shall be known. There must be speedy care taken; for there is nothing here but confusion, not to be expressed. Though his stewards have received vast sums, ...
— The Evolution Of An English Town • Gordon Home
... uncertain life so wrought in her profession as to attain an average professional income, and win the undivided respect and esteem of her professional associates. And when from a far country, whither she had gone in hope to escape a fell disease, her lifeless corpse was brought back for sepulture, many of the foremost lawyers of Chicago gathered about her bier and bore emphatic testimony to her virtues as a woman and her attainments as a lawyer. To me no greater work has been done by any American woman. When Alta Hulett unobtrusively, silently but indomitably ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... know not. That sunset was a grave between us; and had the corpse risen and stared him in the face, I think he had run mad. In my solitary hours, I would imagine I spoke. Sometimes I would kneel before him entreating, and he would raise me up, as a certain king did another Esther. Sometimes ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington
... was that the culprit should only be delivered to the flames after having been previously strangled. In this case, the dead corpse was then immediately placed where the victim would otherwise have been placed alive, and the punishment lost much of its horror. It often happened that the executioner, in order to shorten the sufferings of ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... Independence, all generosity, forgiveness and benevolence. He was riding alone when shot from an ambush. His orderly, who was at some distance behind him, rushed to the scene only to find that Sucre was dead. His corpse remained there that afternoon and all night. On the following day the soldier buried ...
— Simon Bolivar, the Liberator • Guillermo A. Sherwell
... looked not but at the dead carrion," answered Varney; "an ugly spectacle—he was swollen like a corpse three days exposed on the wheel. Pah! give me ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... to be a derivative from quimiloa, to wrap up, especially, to shroud the dead, to wrap the corpse in its winding sheets, as was the custom of the ancient Mexicans. The word, however, seems an archaic form, as it does not ...
— Ancient Nahuatl Poetry - Brinton's Library of Aboriginal American Literature Number VII. • Daniel G. Brinton
... have hanged, for parties that knew her said that before she would have seen him hanged she would have shot him herself. I was standing in the hotel where the body lay when she came in. She stood silently looking at the corpse for a few minutes, and then turning to the crowd that was standing around, said: "Will some one tell me who did this?" No one answering her, she repeated the question, and finally the third time she repeated the question at the top of her voice. At this I ...
— Thirty-One Years on the Plains and In the Mountains • William F. Drannan
... service degree—because he had spent too much time in riding and boxing and fencing. An uncle in official life early took charge of him; and when this relative died the young man displayed filial piety in accompanying the corpse back to the family graves and in otherwise manifesting grief. Through official connections a place was subsequently found for him in that public department under the Manchus which may be called the military intendancy, and it was through this branch of the civil service ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... longer of any use in this world. I have no longer any vocation, any duties to perform. I only lived for him." Then she was so kind to me, kinder than she has ever been yet, and said I was like her own child and a comfort to her. I saw the corpse again this morning; he is unaltered, only changed in colour, and the ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume III (of 3), 1854-1861 • Queen of Great Britain Victoria
... Taylor, 'O friend, I have harm enough—what needed that?'" One more act of brutality brought his sufferings to an end. "So stood he still without either crying or moving, with his hands folded together, till Soyce with a halberd struck him on the head that the brains fell out, and the dead corpse fell down ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green
... the morrow's funeral pyre, will be thrown on the waters of the Ganges. "Rama, nama, satya hai" (The name of Rama is true): so I heard the weird chant as four men bore past me the rigid red-clad figure of a corpse for the burning. No coffins are used. The body is wrapped in white if a man's, in red if a woman's, strapped on light bamboo poles, and before {204} breakfast-time the burning wood above and beneath the body ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... that," put in Lambert; "they have it now in the wharves that the corpse of the hare took the shape and hands of a woman when in ...
— Grisly Grisell • Charlotte M. Yonge
... connected, as it appeared to be, with a supernatural summons similar to that which he imagined he had himself received, that he was incapable of stirring from the spot, or removing his gaze from the rigid features of the corpse, which, even in death, wore the strong impress of horror and despair. Through life he knew that Agnes, his own nurse, had been his mother's constant and faithful attendant; the unhesitating agent of her schemes, and it was to be feared, ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... not a flower sweet, On my black coffin let there be strown; Not a friend, not a friend greet My poor corpse, where my bones shall be thrown. A thousand thousand sighs to save, Lay me, O, where Sad true lover never find my grave, To weep ...
— Twelfth Night; or, What You Will • William Shakespeare [Hudson edition]
... to her end the same way," said Mrs. Smith, "only with her it was the Bible reader as didn't shut the door through being so set on shewing off her reading. And my granny, a clot of blood went to her brain, and her brain went to her head and she was a corpse ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... filled with nameless foreboding shapes from an under-world; and the thought that the sound she had heard had been caused by her clothes slipping from a chair failed to reassure her. She was as cold as a corpse in a grave. She felt that it was her duty to explore the dark, but to get out of bed to stand in that grey room and look into the passage was more than she dared; she could only lie still and endure the sensation of hands at her throat ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... the eyes of his mind, that the vision had returned. He knew it was standing against the night-sky as a ghastly headstone to the grave. But when he raised his eyes what he saw was more terrible. The face was before him, but it was a dead face now. He saw his own corpse stretched ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... dust, only, being a far superior artist, he produces a work of art which is better constructed and capable of far more wonderful movements. The cause of death is the destruction of some important part of the machine, which prevents it from running longer; a corpse is a broken clock, and the departure of the soul comes only as a result of death. The common opinion that the soul generates life in the body is erroneous. It is rather true that life must be present before the soul enters into union with the body, as it is ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... hour, and amused yourself by prolonging my agony! Oh! I ought to have known it; I have found my master. Never mind, you shall learn nothing from my face, nor yet from the decaying body you will find; worms and poison can only have left an unrecognisable corpse." ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - DERUES • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... of "Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser," the finest of all national anthems, and a sudden hush fell on the crowd. A silence absolute and unbroken that continued till the unhappy man, who sat motionless and erect, his face as blanched as a corpse, drove out of the further gate of the town. Then the crowd burst into one huge laugh. So complete was the demonstration that it ...
— Twenty Years Of Balkan Tangle • Durham M. Edith
... in the experience of death, and the toppled corpse of the slain cavalry-man on the scout, somehow haunted me. I heard his hoof-falls chiming with my own, and imagined, with a cold thrill, that his steed was still following me; then, his white rigid face and uplifted arms menaced my way; and, at last, the ruffianly ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... shall be accomplished, and the Tatii shall replace the Comneni upon the Imperial throne of Constantinople. Go, my trusty Hereward. Thou wilt not forget that the signal word of the insurrection is Ursel, who lives in the affections of the people, although his body, it is said, has long lain a corpse in the ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... her head. "When I was a little girl, Katherine, I read in a book about the old Romans, how a wicked daughter over the bleeding corpse of her father drove her chariot. She wanted his crown for her own husband; and over the warm, quivering body of her father she drove. When I read that story, Katherine, my eyes I covered with my hands. I thought such a wicked woman ...
— The Bow of Orange Ribbon - A Romance of New York • Amelia E. Barr
... again interrupted his lamentations with arguments for flight; and Halbert recollecting the oratory in which Wallace had ordered the body of Lord Mar to be deposited, named it for that of his dear lady. Grimsby, immediately wrapping the beauteous corpse in the white garments which hung about it, raised it in his arms, and was conducted by Halbert to a little chapel in the heart of a ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... was altering the harness, and went like the wind before we could clamber on to the box, seize the reins, and stop them. The unfortunate yemstchik[8] was dragged with them, and I expected to find the poor fellow a mangled corpse, but we pulled him out from under his team badly cut and bruised, but otherwise little the worse for the accident. He had clung like grim death to the pole, or the heavy sleigh ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... corpse knelt the nurse, who had loved so well that erring man. On the other stood the Queen-mother, trembling in spite of her cold and dauntless nature. At the bed's head sat the hideous ape, grinning a fearful grin, as it were the evil spirit that had arisen to claim the lost soul of him ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... my time was well employed, and not a little of it passed in this occupation, nor did I quit my first essay till unable to persist in it, for on leaving my apartment I had the appearance of a corpse, and had I continued this course much longer I should certainly have ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... time the priests were entirely apathetic on the subject, but latterly they are bestirring themselves, and are doing their best to put down wakes, which simply mean one or more nights of disgusting intemperance in the immediate vicinity of the corpse. ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... alone, although his aloneness was modified to a certain extent by the corpse at his feet. The dead weight he lifted with some difficulty to the railing, pushed hard, and heard the muffled splash. Quickly he got into his uniform, slipped his naked feet into looped sandals, ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... swathed the dead girl in a blanket and had bent the tops of a couple of small spruce, growing close together, almost to the ground, holding them in position with a sled thong. To the trees he had lashed the corpse, and he was standing by with a knife ...
— A Mating in the Wilds • Ottwell Binns
... must not present themselves before the hour appointed, when the corpse is generally exposed for the last gaze of the friends. It is customary for the family to pay their last visit to the coffin just before that hour, and all intrusion is against the ...
— Frost's Laws and By-Laws of American Society • Sarah Annie Frost
... trucks the men were drunk and singing, waving their bidons in the air, shouting at people along the road, crying out all sorts of things: "Get to the front!" "Into the trenches with them!" "Down with the war!" In others they sat quiet, faces corpse-like with dust. Through the gap in the trellis Martin stared at them, noting intelligent faces, beautiful faces, faces brutally gay, miserable faces like those ...
— One Man's Initiation—1917 • John Dos Passos
... in the neighbor-woman's house, and her eldest daughter had been the corpse-watcher the first night. In the morning they found that the girl's hand had been withered. The woman's second daughter was the corpse-watcher the second night and her right hand had been left trembling. This was the third and last night that the Hunter-King would be waked, ...
— The King of Ireland's Son • Padraic Colum
... candle hardly lighted up the splendid furniture of the salon, and the magnificent paintings by Porbus and Holbein which were hanging on the walls. The marble bust showed faintly in the obscurity, like the spectre of a dying man. A corpse-like odour filled ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... exceptional, however. In the majority of executions the body was taken down when life was considered to be extinct, and carried away to Surgeon's Hall for dissection. Sometimes the relatives used their influence to have the corpse handed over to them (often not even in a coffin) and they then carried it away in a coach for decent burial, or to try resuscitation. Occasionally, indeed, hanged men came to life again. In 1740 one Duel, or Dewell, was hanged for ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... brief pause of extraordinary deep quiet, a sudden cessation of all perceptible sounds and movements. Dale was confused, dazed, breathing hard. That was a dead man sprawling there—what you call a corpse, a bleeding carcass. Dale looked at him. Beneath his last kick, the skull had cracked ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... sadly. Flavia's mother had been removed from this world at the early age of twenty-four by that insidious malady, consumption, which defies modern medical science, and in a brief space changes a beautiful girl into a livid corpse, and the father viewed her excited manner, flushed cheeks, and sparkling eyes with tears ...
— Caught In The Net • Emile Gaboriau
... despised; when suddenly out of the gloom with a guttural roar sprang a great black wolf. The prairie wolves scattered like chaff except the bold one, which, seized by the black new-corner, was in a few moments a draggled corpse, and then, oh horrors! this mighty brute bounded at me and—Bingo—noble Bingo, rubbed his shaggy, panting sides against me ...
— Wild Animals I Have Known • Ernest Thompson Seton
... reflectively, "is that one is not able to have any personal concern in the most interesting event in one's career. If you could even follow your own funeral and have a chance of weeping for yourself! You are never so important as when you are a corpse—and you miss it all. I have a good mind not to die. It is either the silliest or the wisest action of one's ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... and the Son of Man assumes more and more the whole burden of Sin and Death,—it is inevitable that the life-size painting of Christ in the Grave, also in the Basel Museum (Plate 10), should seem just a ghastly and "unpardonable" piece of realism. Realism of the most ghastly truthfulness, as to a corpse in the grave, it certainly is. But although it may be questioned whether such a picture should ever be painted, no one who looks through the form to the thought that shapes it would pronounce ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... this monologue is especially noticeable. There is a march in it, exhibiting the spirit with which the bearers of the corpse are conveying it ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... wore, the corpse was that of a Salvation Army captain. Some shocking accident seemed to have struck him down, and the head was crushed and battered out of all human semblance. Probably, I thought, a motor-car fatality; and then, with a sudden overmastering insistence, came another thought, that ...
— Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches • Saki (H.H. Munro)
... convulsively as the finishing touches were given to this sad bridal toilette. Angela remained firm and collected, but she, too, was pale; her cherished companion was gone from her forever—gone in such misery, too, that she almost prayed to see her the corpse ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various
... chimney. His blows were answered by a sound from within the chimney. It seemed at first like the sobbing of a child and then swelled into an indescribable scream, howl, or shriek. The wall was broken down, revealing the bloody corpse of Mrs. Edwards. It stood erect. On its ...
— Practical English Composition: Book II. - For the Second Year of the High School • Edwin L. Miller
... was dead. When Ferguson glibly replied that he had been dead three thousand years, he was dumbfounded at the fury of the "doctor" for being imposed upon with vile second-hand carcases. The poor Frenchman was warned that if he didn't bring out a nice, fresh corpse at once, they would brain him! No wonder that, later, when he was asked for a description of the party, Ferguson laconically remarked that they ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... corpse began to decay, and John felt that it was necessary to get rid of it, but he dared not venture to throw it into the sea. It was well known that Dorkin had been a quarrelsome man, and he feared that if he could not produce the body when the relief came, he might be deemed ...
— The Story of the Rock • R.M. Ballantyne
... had given him a refuge. The fiery Humanist wrote to Aleander himself, saying that he would leave no stone unturned "till thou who earnest hither full of wrath, madness, crime, and treachery shalt be carried hence a lifeless corpse." Aleander naturally felt exceedingly uncomfortable, and other supporters of the Papal party were not less disturbed at the threats which seemed in a fair way of being carried out. The Emperor himself was without adequate ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax
... had disappeared, "Who is that officer?" asked Michael Strogoff. And while putting the question his face was pale as that of a corpse. ...
— Michael Strogoff - or, The Courier of the Czar • Jules Verne
... undermined Murger's constitution. His rustic life repaired some of the damage wrought, and would probably have entirely retrieved it, had his life then been freer from care, less visited by privation. Had the money the Government and his friends lavished on his corpse been bestowed on him living, he had probably still been numbered among the writers militant of France. Some obscure parasite got the pension. He continued to work on still hounded by debt. "Five times a week," he wrote in 1858, "I dine at twelve or one o'clock at night. One thing is certain: ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... atmosphere, but was occasioned by the malevolence of witches. Forthwith they seize a little old woman suspected of sorcery; and after examining her with the strictest scrutiny, guilty or not guilty, they slay her, suspected of this very heinous sin. The corpse, and whatever belonged to her, they cast into the sea. But the winds did not thus remit their violence, or the ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... ordinary airlanes and has absolutely novel concept by the tail, he is suddenly pulled up by the discovery that what is entertaining him is simply the ghost of some ancient idea that his school-master forced into him in 1887, or the mouldering corpse of a doctrine that was made official in his country during the late war, or a sort of fermentation-product, to mix the figure, of a banal heresy launched upon him recently by his wife. This is the penalty that the man of intellectual curiosity and vanity pays for his violation of the divine edict ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... There, along with his survey of the heavens, the shepherd who kept watch upon the stars applied also his shameful nostrums, made his essays upon the bodies of animals. The Witch would bring out a corpse stolen from the neighbouring cemetery; and, for the first time, at risk of being burned, you might gaze upon that heavenly wonder, "which men"—as M. Serres has well said—"are foolish enough to bury, instead ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... human spirit, sobbing and sighing, gurgling and rattling in the throat. No help! No help! He—he himself—his body to which he had yielded was dying. Into the grave with it. Nail it down into a wooden box, the corpse. Carry it out of the house on the shoulders of hirelings. Thrust it out of men's sight into a long hole in the ground, into the grave, to rot, to feed the mass of its creeping worms and to be devoured ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... heard of his fate, all the Mice were seized with fierce anger, and bade their heralds summon the people to assemble towards dawn at the house of Bread-nibbler, the father of hapless Crumb-snatcher who lay outstretched on the water face up, a lifeless corpse, and no longer near the bank, poor wretch, but floating in the midst of the deep. And when the Mice came in haste at dawn, Bread-nibbler stood up first, enraged at his son's death, ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... a little while to wait, and then they would bring their beloved chief back to France and to his own again. Had he not written: "Come for me, mon brave. They say they have orders to shoot me. Come; better carry my corpse away than that I should rot here for years to come." They would come. But this year went by and another; one by one the Old Guard died off, smaller and smaller had drawn the circle. The vile rock called St. Helena ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... think it is his plot to make the King thus, to shew his power in the making him change his mind. But Pierce did tell me that the King did certainly say, that he that took one stone from the Church, did take two from his Crown. By and by the corpse come out; and I, with Sir Richard Browne and Mr. Evelyn, in their coach to the church, where Mr. Plume preached. But I, in the midst of the sermon, did go out, and walked all alone, round to Deptford, thinking para have seen the wife of Bagwell, which I did at her door, but I could not ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... long a sot endur'd, Who all his time in taverns spent, While his affairs in ruin went. Once as insensible he lay, She dress'd him in a corpse's array, And with the undertaker's aid, Into a burying vault convey'd. The fumes dispersed, the man awakes; All for reality he takes. When by the glimmering of a lamp He saw his mansion drear and damp, Reflecting how ...
— Aesop, in Rhyme - Old Friends in a New Dress • Marmaduke Park
... of moonlight, fifty feet or so in from the road, lay Sir John de Bury, his eyes closed, his face upturned, motionless—to all appearances a corpse. De Lacy sprang down ...
— Beatrix of Clare • John Reed Scott
... Cemetery, where several thousand bodies are buried in the great circular wall which surrounds the church. These niches in the wall are rented for a certain yearly sum, and in the old Spanish days, when this rental was not promptly paid by relatives, the corpse was removed and thrown with others into a great pit. Recently this ghastly practice has been ...
— The Critic in the Orient • George Hamlin Fitch
... later they caught a glimpse of a strangled moon overhead—a livid corpse of a moon, tarnished and battered almost out ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers
... began to beat with the steady throb of a swollen artery inside some brain-fevered skull. Spurstow turned on his side and swore gently. There was no movement on Hummil's part. The man had composed himself as rigidly as a corpse, his hands clinched at his sides. The respiration was too hurried for any suspicion of sleep. Spurstow looked at the set face. The jaws were clinched, and there was a ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... drifted in the benumbing water so long that had they been delayed for another hour they would have found nothing more than a corpse awaiting them. ...
— Curlie Carson Listens In • Roy J. Snell
... a wonder, exaggerated little. There were, in fact, in this case as in thousands, the well-worn incidents, old as the hills, which, with individual variations, made a mourner of Ariadne, a by-word of Vashti, and a corpse of the Countess Amy. There were rencounters accidental and contrived, stealthy correspondence, sudden misgivings on one side, sudden self-reproaches on the other. The inner state of the twain was one as of confused ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... Incredible as it may seem he spoke the truth. He did not want a war in which he would be tripped on the Marne, blocked on the Yser and foiled at Verdun. He wanted a war in which France would be felled, Russia rolled back, a war in which, over Serbia's ravaged corpse, his legions could pour down across the Turkish carpet into the realm where Sardanapalus throned, beyond to that of Haroun-al-Raschid, on from thence to Ormus and the Ind, and, with the resulting thralls and treasure, overwhelm England, gut the United States, destroy ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... he began, nodding feebly at the corpse—"O'Brien were his name—a rank Irelander—this man and me got the canvas on her, meaning for to sail her back. Well, he's dead now, he is—as dead as bilge; and who's to sail this ship I don't see. Without I gives you a hint, you ain't that ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... they took the body of Brynhild in the raiment that she wore, And out through the gate of the Niblungs the holy corpse they bore, And thence forth to the mead of the people, and the high-built shielded bale; Then afresh in the open meadows breaks forth the women's wail When they see the bed of Sigurd and the glittering of his gear; And fresh ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs • William Morris
... The flames were burnt down now; and we and they approached the charred ruins. Everything was in ashes. But"—he lowered his voice—"we found what seemed to be the body of Boris the hound; in another room was a charred corpse, whose hunting-horn, melted to a molten mass, told us that it had been Herbert the forester. And there was another corpse, almost shapeless, utterly unrecognizable. We saw it; the charcoal-burners saw it. Then more peasants came round, drawn by ...
— Rupert of Hentzau - From The Memoirs of Fritz Von Tarlenheim: The Sequel to - The Prisoner of Zenda • Anthony Hope
... howled a human being, whose voice was so like a wolf's that the words at first had no meaning. He peered over the parapet, a hundred feet above, with his head so swathed in dirty linen that he looked like a bandaged corpse. ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... occasional human sounds. One of these was an intermittent howling and wailing from the placita. This he knew was the work of two old Mexican women who made their livings by acting as professional mourners. They did not wait for an invitation but hung about like buzzards wherever there was a Mexican corpse. Seated on the ground with their black shawls pulled over their heads, they wailed with astonishing endurance until the coffin was carried from the house, when they were sure of receiving a substantial gift from the grateful relatives. ...
— The Blood of the Conquerors • Harvey Fergusson
... high land their conjectures were strengthened. Long Ash Lane cut athwart them, right and left; and they saw that at the junction of the four ways, under the hand-post, a grave was dug, into which, as the choir drew nigh, a corpse had just been thrown by the four Sidlinch men employed for the purpose. The cart and horse which had brought the body ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... maintain my constrained attitude of prayer. The air of the alcove intoxicated me, that febrile perfume of half-faded roses penetrated my very brain, and I commenced to pace restlessly up and down the chamber, pausing at each turn before the bier to contemplate the graceful corpse lying beneath the transparency of its shroud. Wild fancies came thronging to my brain. I thought to myself that she might not, perhaps, be really dead; that she might only have feigned death for the purpose of bringing me to her castle, and then declaring her love. At ...
— Clarimonde • Theophile Gautier
... doubt in the Roman mind as to the claim of the dead to a proper burial and a worthy monument. It had once on a time been a matter of universal belief that the spirit which had departed from an unburied corpse could find no admittance to the company in the realms of Hades. It could not join "the majority" below. Originally no doubt the notion was simply that, as the body had not been consigned to the earth, the spirit ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... fund. These ranged from stirring personal experiences with lions in the East African jungles to a pathetic incident connected with the death of his family's favourite cat. As a mark of affection, the corpse of this cat was buried in the garden at the foot of an old grape vine. In the first subsequent crop of fruit—so the Captain related—each grape appeared with ...
— The 28th: A Record of War Service in the Australian Imperial Force, 1915-19, Vol. I • Herbert Brayley Collett
... seriously prepared himself to fight. He was a very expert swordsman, nevertheless in a few minutes I ran him through the body, and he instantly fell and expired. At this juncture Don Carlos stepped up, and when we removed the mask from the face of the corpse, I found to my consternation that I had killed the Count ——, an aid-de-camp of the captain-general, and a son of one of the most powerful noblemen in the mother country. Horror-struck, we fled. The next day the whole city resounded with the fame of the so-called assassination. ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... dead soldier lit her heart with a faint ray of hope, for how did he come to be dead if Nahoon had no hand in his death? She could not bear to leave him lying so near her hiding-place, however; therefore, with no small toil, she rolled the corpse back into the water, which carried it swiftly away. Then she returned to the tree, having first replenished the fire, and awaited ...
— Black Heart and White Heart • H. Rider Haggard
... recurred to his mind that court of honor, his fellow-officers, and the unfortunate young man who had destroyed himself. He had been obliged to view the body; he knew how one looks who has died thus; he knew too, now, how a man comes to die. Once he had shuddered at the image of the corpse, now he shuddered at it no longer. His lips moved, and as in a dream he said to himself, "That is the last resource." The door was now torn open, a hideous head appeared, and a wild cry was heard, "Come up, Hirsch Ehrenthal; your son is dying." Then the apparition ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... I, sternly, as I glared on him out of my intensity of anguish—"she is not dead: and if you try to send her to death again you must first send me. She shall not pass to the grave except over my corpse, and over the corpse of the first murderer that dares ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... prearranged programme is not scrupulously carried out, we feel that we have been defrauded. It was the regret of Aunt Sophronia Hallett's life that, on her Washington excursion, she had not seen the "Diplomatic Corpse." She saw the President and the Monument and Congress and "the relics in the Smithsonian Institute," but the "Corpse" was not on view; Aunt Sophronia never quite ...
— Cy Whittaker's Place • Joseph C. Lincoln
... pitch was streaming from her sides; her bulwarks were rotting to decay. And what was that line of dark objects dangling along the mainyard?—A line of hanged men! And, horror of horrors, from the yard-arm close above him, John Oxenham's corpse looked down with grave-light eyes, and beckoned and pointed, as if to show him his way, and strove to speak, and could not, and pointed still, not forward, but back along their course. And when Amyas ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... not contain so much as an inch of iron, for which reason the natives use (bits of) conch-shell (ch'oe-k'ue) with ground edges instead of knives. On this island is a sacred relic, (the so-called) 'Corpse on a bed of rolling ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... looking snug but cheerful, and its occupant's sweet countenance expressive of care, not altogether free from curiosity. The last time I had been in that room, it was to look on the pallid features of my mother's corpse, previously to closing the coffin. All the recollections of that scene rushed upon our minds at the same instant; and taking a place by the side of Grace, I put an arm around her waist, drew her to me, and, receiving her ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... course have done its work, but still there must be a something to show that a corpse has so undergone the process common to all nature. Double the lapse of time surely could not obliterate all traces of ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... done the same in your place. The only disadvantage about shying at disagreeable things like tutors is that one hardly ever gets rid of them after all. I'm becoming convinced that the only way to get round a difficulty is to hit it in the head and walk over its flattened corpse." ...
— The Spanish Chest • Edna A. Brown
... high with hope, until the appalling intelligence was flashed across the wires that they were defeated. It was a cruel blow. Strong men looked at one another in mute agony, or spoke as if there was a corpse in the next room. The Press sent up a wail that resounded through the land. An eminent divine pronounced it a "National misfortune," and the pictorials containing wood-cuts of the lamented heroes were put away, ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 35, November 26, 1870 • Various
... closer around the yawning grave, and some began to lift the corpse. As for me, I withdrew as noiselessly as an Indian from my lair of grass, and, hidden by the heaped-up sand, made off across the point and down the beach to where a light curl of smoke showed that some one was mending ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... for dead; that the Eastern mail happening to come along shortly after, found the body and placed it upon the boot of the coach; that before arriving at Fort Larned they found that instead of carrying a corpse, as it was at first supposed, they carried a living man. This man was taken to a hospital and got well. He raised a family of children and his sons, some of them live in or around Independence, Missouri. This man, Mr. McGee, is said to be the only scalped man in the United States ...
— The Second William Penn - A true account of incidents that happened along the - old Santa Fe Trail • William H. Ryus
... who have children and are denied them the right of Christian burial. The usual ceremonies on such occasions were however performed, and an appropriate prayer was delivered by the Rev. John Simpkins, and the funeral procession formed and proceeded with the corpse about one and a half mile, and very near to the spot of the grave, when the said Sheriff arrested the coffin, without any service on the body, and it was set down in the middle of the highway nearly abreast of said Bangs' dwelling house, and forbid proceeding ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 5: Some Strange and Curious Punishments • Henry M. Brooks
... possession of it; the atmosphere of dry rot was in the beams and rafters. To his excited fancy the few disordered blankets and articles of clothing seemed dropping to pieces; in one of the bunks there was a hideous resemblance in the longitudinal heap of clothing to a withered and mummied corpse. So it might look in after-years when some passing stranger—but he stopped. A dread of the place was beginning to creep over him; a dread of the days to come, when the monotonous sunshine should lay bare the loneliness ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... himself so feeble that he might not sit upon his horse. And then Sir Launcelot cried unto Sir Bors: Ah, Sir Bors and Sir Lavaine, help, for I am come to mine end. And therewith he fell down on the one side to the earth like a dead corpse. And then Sir Bors and Sir Lavaine came to him with sorrow-making out of measure. And so by fortune the maiden Elaine heard their mourning, and then she came thither; and when she found Sir Launcelot there armed in that place she cried and wept as she had been wood; and then she kissed ...
— Le Morte D'Arthur, Volume II (of II) - King Arthur and of his Noble Knights of the Round Table • Thomas Malory
... morose glances. They were not happy. Sometimes, as now, they concluded an evening visit by sitting in Clancey's or Warwick's car parked outside the Douglas fence, holding an impromptu post-mortem on an intellectual corpse that had come to life in complete defiance of all the rules. They didn't notice the stealthy movement of one of the fence-boards, nor the small form that snaked through the shadows of concealing shrubbery until it was near the ...
— The Short Life • Francis Donovan
... no terror holds, Yet one fear presses on my mind, That death should on me helpless play A satire of the bitter kind. For much I fear that o'er my corpse The scalding tears of friends shall flow, And that, too late, they should with zeal Fresh flowers upon my body throw. That fate sardonic should recall The ones I loved to my cold side, And make me lying in the ground, The object of love once denied. ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... increasing, though slowly, he seemed at last to lose his senses, and happily expired on the feast of Holy Innocents, the 28th of December, at eight o'clock at night, in the year 1622, the fifty-sixth of his age, and the twentieth of his episcopacy. His corpse was embalmed, and carried with the greatest pomp to Annecy, where he had directed by will it should be interred. It was laid in a magnificent tomb near the high altar in the church of the first monastery ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... the nomarch increased when they told him in the evening that two physicians of the temple of Hator, when looking at the corpse of the infant, had expressed the opinion that only a man could have committed the murder. Some man, said they, seized with his right hand the feet of the little boy, and broke his skull against the wall of the building. Sarah's hand could not clasp both legs, on which, moreover, ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... seemed to be troubled all the time by mosquitoes. He slapped his face and his ears and the back of his neck. He succeeded in killing one insect upon the bridge of his nose, and left it there by mistake, a strangely ignoble corpse. Sarah Brown suspected Richard of some ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson
... escape. If a hundredth part of the providential deliverances told in Ladysmith were true, it was a miracle that anybody in the place was alive after the first quarter of an hour. A day of this and you are a nerveless semi-corpse, twitching at a fly-buzz, a misery to yourself and ...
— From Capetown to Ladysmith - An Unfinished Record of the South African War • G. W. Steevens
... conglomeration of rust that looked as if it might have been a heap of tools or weapons. We set the antiquaries to work, and they pronounced it to be what is called a Roman Ustrinum—that is to say, a public crematorium, where people who could not afford a separate funeral might bring a corpse to be burnt. If they had no place to deposit the urn, in which the bones were enclosed, they were allowed, it seems, to bury the urn there, until such time as they cared to remove it. There was a big Roman ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... jewel and pocket-book on board (the property of one of the dead), I turned the same over to Mr. Bigelow, to take them to Stonington for the purpose of identifying corpse marked No. 4. ...
— The Medallic History of the United States of America 1776-1876 • J. F. Loubat
... of Nera (q. v.), the corpse of the criminal is the cause of Nera's being lured into the cave. So the dead have the same power as fairies, and live in the same place. On May Eve and November Eve the dead and the fairies hold ...
— The Book of Hallowe'en • Ruth Edna Kelley
... said, "that when a man dies, the visible part of him, the body, which is exposed to sight, and which we call a corpse, to which it appertains to be dissolved, to fall asunder and be dispersed, does not immediately undergo any of these affections, but remains for a considerable time, and especially so if any one should die with his body in full vigor, and at a corresponding age;[31] for when the body ...
— Apology, Crito, and Phaedo of Socrates • Plato
... nor are those of better Blood more secure, for all their Bolts and Barricadoes. This felonious Commodity, I am told, is sold by Weight, and that the Purchasers generally consider and weigh well what they are about, before they strike a Bargain. The Corpse of a plain Milk-Maid is said to fetch at least 7d. in the Pound more than that of a Countess; and, notwithstanding the highest feeding and fattening, a common Joiner's has had vastly the preference of a Major General's ...
— The Tricks of the Town: or, Ways and Means of getting Money • John Thomson
... Mr Hodgkins, who could not, however, as he afterwards declar'd upon his Oath, before the Coroner's quest, discover that any matter of a venomous kind was present in it. For, as was natural, in the great Swelling and Blackness of the Corpse, there was talk made among the Neighbours of Poyson. The Body was very much Disorder'd as it laid in the Bed, being twisted after so extream a sort as gave too probable Conjecture that my worthy Friend and Patron had expir'd in great Pain and Agony. And what is ...
— Ghost Stories of an Antiquary • Montague Rhodes James
... I used too sentimental a phrase. I should have said, acting out a murder. You can't very well murder a dead man. The fellow he was killing already was a corpse. ...
— The White Desert • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... haven't the slightest desire to loaf, but a consuming desire to work, ever since I got back my swing. And you see this book is either going to be compared with the Innocents Abroad, or contrasted with it, to my disadvantage. I think I can make a book that will be no dead corpse of a thing and I mean to do my ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... seconds I endured it, my hair lifting: then, with one sharp scream I dashed back into the room and across the corpse; struggled for a moment with the window-sash; and flinging it up, dropped out ...
— The Adventures of Harry Revel • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Vou was a comedian. The season had ended, crowned with success—perhaps out of proportion to the gold pieces he had amassed—he wished to return to his country otherwise than as a corpse, for Chinamen always like to get buried at home and there are special steamers who carry dead Celestials and nothing else. At all risks, therefore, he had secretly slipped on board ...
— Godfrey Morgan - A Californian Mystery • Jules Verne
... the bear had bounded forward upon the prostrate body; and, no doubt, in the twinkling of a bedpost would have made a corpse of it—either squeezing the breath out of it by one of his formidable "hugs," or tearing it to pieces with his trenchant teeth. In another moment the hope of Russia would have been extinguished; but, just at this crisis, a third figure appeared upon the ...
— Bruin - The Grand Bear Hunt • Mayne Reid
... the feeling is, how evanescent it becomes, when once familiarised! It has no longer power over the senses, and the soldier and sailor pillow themselves on the corpse with perfect indifference, if not with a jest. So it is with those who are accustomed to post-mortem arrangements, who wash and lay out ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... whimpering fondling down my capatious maw.' So saying, he turned his ghastly visage on the trembling Amata who, being now no longer able to support herself under his cruel threats, fainted away, and remained in his hand but as a lifeless corpse. When lifting up his eyes towards the hill on the opposite side, he beheld Benefico coming hastily towards him. This good giant having been that morning informed that Barbarico was roaming in the mountains after prey, left his peaceful castle, in hopes of giving protection ...
— The Governess - The Little Female Academy • Sarah Fielding
... the woman fertile, because similar prayers are made to the River Nerbudda, a goddess. But perhaps he, being the god of strength, lends virile power to her husband. Another prescription is to go to the burying-ground, and, after worshipping it, to take some of the bone-ash of a burnt corpse and wear this wrapped up in an amulet on the body. Occasionally, if a woman can get no children she will go to the father of a large family and let him beget a child upon her, with or without the connivance of her husband. But only the more immodest women do this. Or she cuts a piece off ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... mother's corpse," answered the sexton, coldly; "I brought you hither to behold it. But ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... centuries; on its bosom many a body had been borne towards the sea. It recalled those mysterious waters of the Eastern tales which brought to the marble steps of palaces great chests in which lay a fair youth's headless corpse or ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... of God! Or let me die, Or grant what shall seem heaven almost. Let me not know that all is lost, Though lost it be—leave me not tied To this despair—this corpse-like bride! Let that old life seem mine—no more— With limitation as before, With darkness, hunger, toil, distress: Be all the earth a wilderness! Only let me go on, go on, Still hoping ever and anon To reach ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... whenever a peasant died to carry the corpse to the cemetery in a coffin hired at transient rates, and then, having dumped the deceased into a shallow grave, to return what is facetiously known as the "wooden overcoat" to its original owner, for further service. This was bad enough, considering the danger of infection thus engendered; ...
— From Yauco to Las Marias • Karl Stephen Herrman
... the world and bearing the secret burden of his dishonored life. He went to the window, swept back the curtains which he had drawn over it, and looked at himself in the glass. If he had wished to know how his corpse would look after the ravages of time and disease, he could have learned ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... of one departed; into the Exchange, and he sees another standing against his peculiar pillar; into a haunt of infamy, where wretches are dividing the spoils and hoardings of the dead; into a wretched room, where a corpse lies shrouded, whose face Scrooge dares not uncover; into dwellings made miserable by the grasping avarice of those who had wealth they could not use; into his nephew's house, shorn of its comforts, where the inmates, care-worn and weary, are wringing their hands with distress; into ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... count's face had become absolutely frightful. It indicated utter discouragement, the most bitter suffering, the most horrible despair. His soul was writhing in a body from which life had fled. Intelligence, mind, and will were fast bound in a corpse which they could not electrify. The consciousness of his own powerlessness caused him a paroxysm of frantic rage; his hands clinched, the veins in his throat swelled, his eyes almost started from their sockets, and in a harsh, shrill voice that had nothing human in it, he exclaimed: "Marguerite!—despoiled!—take ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... The slight expression of tired attention with which he had been listening, had faded from his face. In the late sunshine which still filled the room, there was something almost corpse-like in the pallor of his cheeks, his unnatural silence. When he spoke, ...
— The Lighted Way • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... out of water. When, therefore, I asked this family-drilling, house-managing, mountain-living woman whether she could make omelettes, she shook her head at me slowly, keeping her eyes fixed on mine, and said in what was the corpse of French with a German ghost in it, ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... following peculiar way: "Having died toward evening, he would not, on any account, have himself buried the same evening, and the bearers, in spite of all their shouting of la ilah ill Alllah (sic), could not bring the corpse to the graveyard. It remained therefore, all night in the house (though the people do not like to keep a corpse at night), watched by a multitude of people praying. Next morning also it could not be buried ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 3, 1918 • Various
... happened. There was blood upon his hands and wrist-bands! Oh, more—far more! There was the unmistakable mark of Cain upon his writhen brow! Before now she had seen him look pale and wild and haggard, and had known neither fear nor pity for him. But now! An exhumed corpse galvanized into a horrid semblance of life might look as he did—with just such sunken cheeks and ashen lips and frozen eyes; with just such a collapsed and shuddering form; yet, withal, could not have shown that terrific look of utter, incurable despair! His fingers, ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... and tears the bandages from his wound. "Ha! my blood! flow merrily now! She who opened the wound is here to heal it!" Life endures but for one embrace, one glance, one word: "Isolde!" While Isolde lies mortally stricken upon Tristan's corpse, Marke and his train arrive upon a second ship. Brangane has told the secret of the love-draught, and the king has come to unite the lovers. But his purpose is not known, and faithful Kurwenal receives his ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... moment Rogojin appeared, elbowing through the crowd; he took Nastasia's hand, drew it through his arm, and quickly led her away. He appeared to be terribly excited; he was trembling all over, and was as pale as a corpse. As he carried Nastasia off, he turned and grinned horribly in the officer's face, ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... dead on the doorstep,—'e probably shot 'imself about midnight,—and Llewellyn comes rollin' in a couple o' hours later, an' stumbles over 'is bloody corpse. 'E's tired, but 'e gets a lantern, an' sees the kid there, like a bleedin' wreck on the reef. It fair knocks 'im out, an' 'e sits down on the same step, an' when the kanaka comes in the mornin' to sweep up, 'e fin's ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... to realize the truth, but it was some time before she would acknowledge it, even to herself. At last, however, she had to face the fact that Esteban's months of prison fare, the abuse, the neglect he had suffered in Spanish hands, had left him little more than a living corpse. It seemed as if fever had burned him out, or else some dregs of disease still lingered in his system and had all but quenched that elusive spark which for want of a ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... even agree whether creation was in time or eternity. But all agree in this, that the invisible is rapidly absorbing all the force at least of the visible universe, and that when force is gone the corpse will not remain unburied. Indeed, when the range of seeing puts the size of an atom at less than one two-hundred-and-twenty-four-thousandth of an inch, and when the range of thinking puts it at less than one six-millionth of an inch, many prefer to consider an atom as a center of force ...
— Among the Forces • Henry White Warren
... swarm of sharks crowding round the boat, Sir Edgar?" said I. "Take my word for it, there is a corpse—perhaps several—in her, and I am glad that the ladies are not on deck. Lay aft here, lads, to the main-braces, and back the mainyard. Ease your helm down, and steer up alongside her,"—to the man at the wheel. "Stand by, ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... into utter decay. Maine himself cannot at that time have had any profound knowledge of the Civil Law—if, indeed, he ever acquired such knowledge. But his genius enabled him to revive the study in England—although no genius could galvanise the corpse of legal studies at the Cambridge of those days into activity. Maine, as Fitzjames says, 'made in the most beautiful manner applications of history and philosophy to Roman law, and transfigured one of the driest of subjects into all sorts of ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... Crossing to them, we dismounted and looked into the first. It was empty, had a little straw, and was intended for a refuge, in the event of storms. Thrusting my head into the other, after the eye had got a little accustomed to the light, I saw a grinning corpse seated against the remotest side. The body looked like a mummy, but the clothes were still on it, and various shreds of garments lay about the place. The remains of other bodies, that had gradually shrunk into shapeless masses, ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... carrion, and sure that this must be a fresh corpse, the bird swooped down upon the boy. But he was awake now, and perceiving the eagle, he determined by its help ...
— The Junior Classics, Volume 1 • Willam Patten
... speechless,—stupefied by its suddenness and awful rapidity. Then with one accord they hurried down to the level shore of the torrent, moved by the unanimous idea that they might possibly succeed in rescuing Sigurd's frail corpse from the sharp teeth of the jagged rocks, that, piercing upwards through the foam of the roaring rapids, were certain to bruise, tear, and disfigure it beyond all recognition. But even this small satisfaction was denied them. There was no sign of a floating or struggling body anywhere visible. ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli |
