"Charon" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to wait a pilot, being strangers to the waters," surmised Clowes, wheeling and looking up the river townwards. "Ay, there goes some signal from the 'Charon's' truck," he went on, as the British frigate anchored off the town displayed ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... the current, with a rising gale, Still set them onwards to the welcome shore, Like Charon's bark of spectres, dull and pale: Their living freight was now reduced to four, And three dead, whom their strength could not avail To heave into the deep with those before, Though the two sharks still followed them, and dashed The spray into ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... Uncle Tom, descended, as we were told that the boat could not carry a larger fare. After looking down for a few seconds, we distinguished a light; and going down the ladder, we stepped into a boat, in which a man, whom we of course denominated Charon, was seated. Instead of oars, he used a long pole to urge on the boat. We noticed the dark appearance of the water as we made our way through the vaulted chambers. We now found ourselves floating on a lake, the water black as ink, but perfectly smooth. Above our heads was a lofty ...
— A Yacht Voyage Round England • W.H.G. Kingston
... is scarcely a doorway thou canst pass through; and if one of Hell's gate-posts be not put back a foot or two, thou wilt be left, at thy latter end, like a huge undelivered parcel in the lumber-room of Charon. ...
— Cromwell • Alfred B. Richards
... blossomes of my blisse, Forcing diuorce betwixt my loue and me; For in the late conflict with Portingale My valour drew me into dangers mouth Till life to death made passage through my wounds. When I was slaine, my soule descended straight To passe the flowing streame of Archeron; But churlish Charon, only boatman there, Said that, my rites of buriall not performde, I might not sit amongst his passengers. Ere Sol had slept three nights in Thetis lap, And slakte his smoaking charriot in her floud, By Don Horatio, our knight-marshals sonne, ...
— The Spanish Tragedie • Thomas Kyd
... being already full; there was incessant lamentation, and all the passengers had wounds upon them; mangled legs, mangled heads, mangled everything; no doubt there was a war going on. Nevertheless, when good Charon saw the lion's skin, taking me for Heracles, he made room, was delighted to give me a passage, and showed us our direction when we ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume I (of X) - Greece • Various
... his knell This god on earth turns devil in hell; And lo! his ministers of state, Transformed to imps, his levee wait, Where, in the scenes of endless woe, They ply their former arts below; And as they sail in Charon's boat, Contrive to bribe the judge's vote; To Cerberus they give a sop, His triple-barking mouth to stop; Or in the ivory gate of dreams Project Excise and South-Sea schemes, Or hire their party pamphleteers To set ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... advantage find, Ships fraught with fire among the heap they throw, And up the so-entangled Belgians blow. The flame invades the powder-rooms, and then, Their guns shoot bullets, and their vessels men. The scorch'd Batavians on the billows float, Sent from their own, to pass in Charon's boat. ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham
... "Charon keeps the ferry across the Styx to the Elysian Fields, past the sunless marsh of Acheron. Yes—I've met him more than once. I met him only last month, and he was very proud of his new electric ...
— Tales of Fantasy and Fact • Brander Matthews
... of Michelangelo's poems, speaks of it as "a most sublime sonnet, full of that antique purity and Dantesque gravity." Dante's influence over the great artist's pictorial imagination is strongly marked in the fresco of the Last Judgment, where Charon's boat, and Minos with his twisted tail, are borrowed direct from the Inferno. Condivi, moreover, informs us that the statues of the Lives Contemplative and Active upon the tomb of Julius were suggested by the Rachel and ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... of motion in the Divina Commedia, I do not think there is another quite so fine as that in which Dante has glorified the old fable of Charon by giving a boat also to the bright sea which surrounds the mountain of Purgatory, bearing the redeemed souls to their place of trial; only an angel is now the pilot, and there is no stroke of laboring oar, for ...
— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin
... is but a foretaste of Charon's boat!" said Mary, who was one of those people whose spirit of enterprise rises with the occasion, and she murmured to Mary Seaton the ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... steadily wrong side up, perhaps because we had lashed all our loads in place and they acted as ballast. Will took the pole and acted the part of Charon, our proper pilot contenting himself with perching on the rear end lamenting the ill-fortune noisily until Kazimoto struck him and threatened to throw him back ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... from common life could hardly be greater if one were suddenly swept away to some far star, blazing in the firmament; or if Charon had rowed him over the mystic river and he had entered the abodes of life on the plane beyond. Even the hotel becomes an enchanted palace whose salons, luxuriously decorated, open by long windows on marble balconies overhanging the Grand Canal. Dainty little tables ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... constantly to observation and experiment; not only is it said that the thing is so, but we can be made to see that it is so. Not only does a man tell us that when a taper burns the wax is converted into carbonic acid and water, as a man may tell us, if he likes, that Charon is punting his ferry-boat on the river Styx, or that Victor Hugo is a sublime poet, or Mr. Gladstone the most admirable of statesmen; but we are made to see that the conversion into carbonic acid and water does ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... any man may gainsay, the ketch Arangi, trader and blackbirder in the Solomon Islands, may have signified in Jerry's mind as much the mysterious boat that traffics between the two worlds, as, at one time, the boat that Charon sculled across the Styx signified to the human mind. Out of the nothingness men came. Into the nothingness they went. And they came and went ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... Charon, the Ferryman of renown, was cruising slowly along the Styx one pleasant Friday morning not long ago, and as he paddled idly on he chuckled mildly to himself as he thought of the monopoly in ferriage which in the course of years he ...
— A House-Boat on the Styx • John Kendrick Bangs
... are still placed in the graves by the North American Indians. The Laplanders lay beside the corpse flint, steel, and tinder, to supply light for the dark journey. A coin was placed in the mouth of the dead by the Greeks to pay Charon, the ferryman of the Styx, and for a similar purpose in the hand of a deceased Irishman. The Greenlanders bury with a child a dog, for they say a dog will find his way anywhere. In the grave of the Viking warrior were buried his horn ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... thou, who rowest the boat of the dead in the water of this reedy lake, for Hades, stretch out thy hand, dark Charon, to the son of Kinyras, as he mounts the ladder by the gang-way, and receive him. For his sandals will cause the lad to slip, and he fears to set his feet naked on the sand of ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... Bourbon, where a noble gallery accommodated the audience, and left full space beneath for the actors. Down the centre of the stage flowed a stream, broad enough to contain a boat, which was plied by the Abbe de Mericour—transformed by a gray beard and hair and dismal mask into Charon. ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... please, your will is mine; Enjoy it without fear, And your grave will be this glass of wine, Your epitaph—a tear— Go, take your seat in Charon's boat; We'll tell ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... now?" she asked, with the smile of curiosity which she always had ready for his plans. Would he pursue the Professor beyond Charon's stream? ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... said the Devil, "I understand all this; You turned to half a courtier[536] ere you died, And seem to think it would not be amiss To grow a whole one on the other side Of Charon's ferry; you forget that his Reign is concluded; whatsoe'er betide, He won't be sovereign more: you've lost your labour, For at the best he will but ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... battle, and do all in their power to avoid the punishment which awaits the coward. The Kayan Hades is believed to be under ground, and like the Hades of the ancient Greeks there is a guide to the entrance who corresponds to a certain extent to Charon. But their river Styx is not a stream, but a deep and wide ditch, through which flow ooze and slime swarming with worms and maggots; the souls of the departed must cross over this ditch not by a ferry, but by means of a fallen tree-trunk, guarded by the great demon Maligang, who challenges ...
— Folk-lore in Borneo - A Sketch • William Henry Furness
... your letter, and the instalment of Forester which accompanied it, and which I read with amusement and pleasure. I fear Somerset's letter must wait; for my dear boy, I have been very nearly on a longer voyage than usual; I am fresh from giving Charon a quid instead of an obolus: but he, having accepted the payment, scorned me, and I had to make the best of my way backward through the mallow-wood, with nothing to show for this displacement but the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... orient. A sonnet is a coin: its face reveals The soul,—its converse, to what Power 'tis due:— Whether for tribute to the august appeals Of Life, or dower in Love's high retinue, It serve; or, 'mid the dark wharf's cavernous breath, In Charon's palm it pay the toll to Death. DANTE ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... from hence the road doth go, That mire-bemingled, whirling wild, rolls on his desert flow, And all amid Cocytus' flood casteth his world of sand. This flood and river's ferrying doth Charon take in hand, Dread in his squalor: on his chin untrimmed the hoar hair lies Most plenteous; and unchanging flame bides in his staring eyes: 300 Down from his shoulders hangs his gear in filthy knot upknit; And he himself poles on his ...
— The AEneids of Virgil - Done into English Verse • Virgil
... useless to press her further. She is right! I am not the man for her. I am too old, and too poor; and I must put up as well as I can with her loss—drown her image in old Falernian till I embark in Charon's boat for good!—Really, if I had the industry I could write some good Horatian verses on my inauspicious situation!... Ah, well;—in this way I affect levity over my troubles; but in plain truth my life will not be the ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... truth whose significance Dale was far from realising. Of what value, indeed, is money to me? There is none to whom I can usefully bequeath my little fortune, my sisters having each married rich men. I shall not need even Charon's obolus when I am dead, for we have ceased to believe in him—which is a pity, as the trip across the Styx must have been picturesque. Why, then, should I not deal myself a happy lot and portion by squandering my ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... said the friar, "or it will give us no peace. I would all my customers were of this world. I begin to think that I am Charon, and that this ...
— Maid Marian • Thomas Love Peacock
... loved ones who have gone before, I do not know but that I should look forward with pleasure to the "passing across." Not having this belief, I am quite content to stay where I am as long as I can; and finally, when old Charon appears to row me over the river Styx, I shall be ...
— Fifty Years of Public Service • Shelby M. Cullom
... gunboats which held one division of the expedition were merely old sugar-barges, roofed over with boards, and looking like coffins. They were pleasantly named the "Charon" and the "Cerberus," but Stedman thought that the "Sudden Death" and the "Wilful Murder" would have been titles more appropriate. The chief duty of the troops consisted in lying at anchor at the intersections ...
— Black Rebellion - Five Slave Revolts • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... Crossman's Isle lies Hood's Isle, or McCain's Beclouded Isle; and upon its south side is a vitreous cove with a wide strand of dark pounded black lava, called Black Beach, or Oberlus's Landing. It might fitly have been styled Charon's. ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... covering from the open air, since you are the victim of merciless Pluto. We are all driven toward the same quarter: the lot of all is shaken in the urn; destined sooner or later to come forth, and embark us in [Charon's] boat for eternal exile. ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... songs, is dead; flee, O you under earth! Eutychides is coming with his odes; he left instructions to burn along with him twelve lyres and twenty-five boxes of airs. Now Charon has come upon you; whither may one retreat in future, ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... was a unanimous and simultaneous movement upon the part of all present to get up closer, so as the more readily to hear what he said, as a result of which poor old Boswell was pushed overboard, and fell with a loud splash into the Styx. Fortunately, however, one of Charon's pleasure-boats was close at hand, and in a short while the dripping, sputtering spirit was drawn into it, wrung out, and sent home to dry. The excitement attending this diversion having subsided, ...
— The Pursuit of the House-Boat • John Kendrick Bangs
... same purpose, or want of purpose, with myself. See this great fleet of scattered leaf-boats which we paddle amid, in this smooth river-bay, each one curled up on every side by the sun's skill, each nerve a stiff spruce-knee,—like boats of hide, and of all patterns, Charon's boat probably among the rest, and some with lofty prows and poops, like the stately vessels of the ancients, scarcely moving in the sluggish current,—like the great fleets, the dense Chinese cities of boats, with which you mingle on entering ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... making a council of gods, whom Jupiter consulted in important cases. Vertumnus was an Etruscan; so, according to Ottfried Mueller, was the Genius. So are the Lares, or household protectors, and Charun, or Charon, a power of the under-world. The minute system of worship was derived by Rome from Etruria. The whole system of omens, especially by lightning, ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... We all know Ricketts. Never mind, he shall not come here. I shall give special orders to Charon. Come on to the trap and we can start for ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... This time the ill-looking Charon made no venture for my purse. Little enough he would have found in it, had he got it. He demanded his fare as if he had never before seen me; nor was it till I demanded if his rascally mate, whom I pitched into the river, had ever reached the shore, that he condescended to recall ...
— Sir Ludar - A Story of the Days of the Great Queen Bess • Talbot Baines Reed
... not be as great as the reward of those who make charitable contribution while yet they have power to keep their money. Charity, in last will and testament, seems sometimes to be only an attempt to bribe Charon, the ferryman, to land the boat in celestial rather than infernal regions. Mean as sin when they disembark from the banks of this world, they hope to be greeted as benefactors when they come up ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... permitted to enter Charon's boat, or to cross the Stygian river without the passport of the golden bough. This could be obtained only by special favor of some powerful god, and few had been so favored. Even the dead, if their bodies had not ...
— Story of Aeneas • Michael Clarke
... stay! why bid the dead arise? Why call them back from Charon's wherry? Come, Yankee Mark, with twinkling eyes, Confuse these ghouls with something merry! Come, Kipling, with thy soldiers three, Thy barrack-ladies frail and fervent, Forsake thy themes of butchery And be ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III., July 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... his black stringy hair and his dirty and tattered clothes, such a singularly wild and infernal look, that he actually struck me as a real Charon. His voice, and the questions he asked me, were not of a kind to remove this notion, so that, far from its requiring any effort of imagination, I found it not easy to avoid believing that, at length, I had actually reached Avernus, was about to cross Acheron, and ...
— Travels in England in 1782 • Charles P. Moritz
... registers in 1678. The law required (for purposes of protecting trade) that all the dead should be buried in woollen winding-sheets. The price of the wool was the obolus paid to the Charon of the Revenue. After March 25, 1667, no person was to be "buried in any shirt, shift, or sheet other that should be made of woole only." Thus when the children in a little Oxfordshire village lately beheld a ghost, "dressed in a long ...
— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang
... Celia was ready to jump into his delivery wagon and ride with him clear to the end of the pier and on to the ferry-boat of the Charon line. ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... think you, do the physicians lie, when they aver things good for sicknesses, which afterwards send Charon a great number of souls drowned in a potion before they come to his ferry? And no less of the rest, which take upon them to affirm. Now, for the poet, he nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth. For, as I take it, to lie is to affirm that to be true which is false. So as ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... ghost of the whale's tooth which was placed in his hand at time of burial. If he succeeds in hitting the Pandanus, he may then wait until the spirit of his strangled wife comes to join him, after which he boards the canoe of the Fijian Charon and proceeds to Nambanggatai, where until 1847 there dwelt the god Samu, and after his death Samuyalo "the ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... sight, growing slate-colour in the earliest dawn. He could see the boat nuzzling up against the pier, and snoring in its sleep. He said to himself that this was Styx and the fare an obolus. As he jumped on board, with hot face and hotter heart, Charon clicked his signal to the engines; the boat slowly snuffled itself half awake, and shoved ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... over into Fowey by the ferry here instead of by that from Polruan. If we had already come from Fowey to Bodinnick we should find that the ferryman would carry us back without further payment; the outward fee included a return—not like the ferry of Charon which had no return for passengers. The oars dip peacefully into the water, breaking its surface of glistening light; a delicious coolness, that phantom fragrance of water to which we can give no name, steals ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... royal predecessors were sleeping, and by the side of the eternal Sphynx, whose riddle he could not read in life. Perhaps death unsealed the mystery of those stony lips to him. The token was placed in the mummy case upon the Egyptian's lips, perhaps as Charon's toll. But, in that event, evidently our friend the Egyptian never crossed over the black river of Death, but is still wandering—a miserable shade—along its banks, seeking rest, and finding none. Token and Egyptian remained in their tomb while Thebes flourished and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Pandarus. I stalk about her door Like a strange soul upon the Stygian banks Staying for waftage. O, be thou my Charon, And give me swift transportance to these fields Where I may wallow in the lily beds Propos'd for the deserver! O gentle Pandar, from Cupid's shoulder pluck his painted wings, and ...
— The History of Troilus and Cressida • William Shakespeare [Craig edition]
... ferried us in a boat, landing us in a cave called the Hall of Pluto, the Being who ruled over the Greek Hades, or Home of Departed Spirits, guarded by a savage three-headed dog named Cerberus. The only way of reaching the "Home," our guide told us, was by means of the ferry on the River Styx, of which Charon had charge, and to ensure the spirit having a safe passage to the Elysian Fields it was necessary that his toll should be paid with a coin placed beforehand in the mouth or hand of the departed. We did not, however, take the hint ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... such a faith has existed in every age and among almost every people. Charon and his boat might be the means of conveyance. Or the believer, dying in battle for the creed of the Faithful, might expect to wake up in a celestial harem peopled with Houris. Or the belief might embody the matchless horrors painted by Dante; his dolorous ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... different from my idea of that sort of thing. I thought that people always kissed at such affairs, and there was general jollification and cake, but this seemed more like a newfangled funeral, with the dear departed acting as his own Charon and steering himself across ...
— The Adventures of Captain Horn • Frank Richard Stockton
... walls, that seemed to grow out of the gray light of a wet morning as the natural deposit from such a solution. Two slender poles, meant to support curtains, but without a rag of drapery upon them, rose at his feet, like the masts of a Charon's boat. Was he indeed in the workhouse he had pre—ferred to Cairncarque? It could hardly be, for there was the plaster fallen in great patches from the walls as well as the ceiling, and surely no workhouse would be allowed to get into such a disrepair! He tried again, and this time ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... all appeared united in one skillful composition, arranged in groups. The other picture, the descent of Ulysses into Hades to interrogate Teiresias, might be called a pictorial epic of Hades. On one side was the entrance, indicated by Charon's boat crossing: the Acheron, and the evocation of Teiresias by Ulysses, besides the punishment of Tityos and other wicked men; on the other side were Tantalos and Sisyphos. Between these scenes, on the flanks, were various groups of heroes and heroines from the Trojan and other legends. From ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 365, December 30, 1882 • Various
... and myth.[849] Early in the second century B.C. Plautus in the Captivi alluded to these paintings as familiar;[850] and we must not forget that the Etruscans habitually chose the most gruesome and cruel of the Greek fables for illustration, and especially delighted in that of Charon, one likely enough to strike the popular imagination. The play-writers themselves were responsible for inculcating the belief, as Boissier remarked in his work on the Roman religion of the early empire.[851] In the theatre, with women and children present, Cicero says in the first book of ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... organisation, had been murdered by a girl's hand; but Charon, Manuel, Osselin had gone the usual way, denounced by their colleagues, Rabaut, Custine, Bison, who in their turn were sent to the guillotine by those more powerful, perhaps more ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... thou overtake a lame ass laden with wood, and a lame driver, who will pray thee reach him certain cords to fasten the burden which is falling from the ass: but be thou cautious to pass on in silence. And soon as thou comest to the river of the dead, Charon, in that crazy bark he hath, will put thee over upon the further side. There is greed even among the dead: and thou shalt deliver to him, for the ferrying, one of those two pieces of money, in such wise that he take [88] it with his ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... Laborious Writers On a Club of Sots Holland Women Epigrams of Edmund Waller On a Painted Lady On the Marriage of the Dwarfs Epigrams of Matthew Prior A Simile The Flies Phillis's Age To the Duke de Noailles On Bishop Atterbury Forma Bonum Fragile Earning a Dinner Bibo and Charon The Pedant Epigrams of Joseph Addison The Countess of Manchester To an Ill-favored Lady To a Capricious Friend To a Rogue Epigrams of Alexander Pope On Mrs. Tofts To a Blockhead The Fool and the Poet Epigrams of Dean Swift ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... on the fountain of forgetfulness. In Scotland the channering worm doth chide even the souls that come from where, "beside the gate of Paradise, the birk grows fair enough." The Romaic idea of the place of the dead, the garden of Charon, whence "neither in spring or summer, nor when grapes are gleaned in autumn, can warrior or maiden escape," is likewise pre-Christian. In Provencal and Danish folk-song, the cries of children ill-treated by a cruel step-mother awaken the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... forward after King the hairless mullah gave a signal and the great stone door slid slowly into place. It was like a tombstone. It was as if the world that mortals know were a thing of the forgotten past and the underworld lay ahead. "Lead along, Charon!" King grinned. He needed some sort of pleasantry to steady his nerves. But even so he wondered what the nerves of India would be like if her ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... determined to have the wedding take place the next Wednesday. She said she once knew a lady who was separated from her lover, and yielded to her parents' choice, who lived in perpetual torment, surrounded by a profusion of wealth. In a few years she pined away, and died broken-hearted, entered Charon's boat with her first love, and sailed over the River of Death together, to join their friends on the Elysian Fields of Paradise, and left her parents and the man of their choice digging in the mud ...
— The Forest King - Wild Hunter of the Adaca • Hervey Keyes
... Ate, Pluto, Rhadamanthus, and Minos, the Fates and the Furies, together with Charon, Calumnia, Bellona, and all such objectionable divinities, were requested to disappear for ever from the Low Countries; while in their stead were confidently invoked Jupiter, Apollo, Triptolemus, and last, though ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... write to you some little account of his manners and conversation, which you know very well, or you would not have sent him to me. I only now hope I shall not see him to-morrow; and should I learn that he shall have departed in one of those Plutonian engines to the keeping of Charon himself, I should only regret that I had not put an obol into his hand, lest he should be presented with a return-ticket. What did he say, and what did he not say? He called my daughter "Miss," and said he should like music very well but for the noise of it; and as to his ideas of poetry, that you ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... the passengers sitting there, so hushed and motionless, look like shadows. The scene is so strangely funereal and spectral, that it seems as if the Greeks must have witnessed it, before they imagined Charon conveying ghosts to the dim regions of Pluto. Your companions, thus seen, ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... bestowed indiscriminately upon every person who died, however exalted his position. Characters were given by judges, after inquiry into the life and conduct of the deceased. The judges sat on the opposite side of a lake; and while they crossed the lake, he who sat at the helm was called Charon, which gave rise to the fable among the Greeks, that Charon conducted the souls of deceased persons into the ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... was told chiefly to introduce Rostopchin's witty remark on that occasion. The foreigners were deported to Nizhni by boat, and Rostopchin had said to them in French: "Rentrez en vousmemes; entrez dans la barque, et n'en faites pas une barque de Charon." * There was talk of all the government offices having been already removed from Moscow, and to this Shinshin's witticism was added—that for that alone Moscow ought to be grateful to Napoleon. It was said that Mamonov's regiment would cost him eight hundred thousand rubles, and that Bezukhov had ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... we were descending the great flight of steps from the house to go and sup in the grotto on the banks of Helicon: we were so cloaked up, for the evening was very cold, and so many of us were limping and hobbling, that Charon would have easily believed we were going to ferry over in earnest. It is with much more comfort that I am writing to your lordship in the great bow-window of my new round room, which collects all the rays of the southwest sun, and composes a sort of ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... bombs rose in vast curves overhead, with trails of light, and, seeming to hesitate in mid-air, exploded, or fell on town or ship or in the stream between. As we looked, awe-struck, hot shot set fire to the "Charon," a forty-four-gun ship, nigh to Gloucester, and soon a red rush of fire twining about mast and spar rose in air, lighting the sublime spectacle, amid the crash of guns, the rattle of musketry, and multitudinous inexplicable noises, through ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... Furies, after barely sketching in the main outlines. It blocked up half the studio with its half-finished, threatening shapes, greater than life-size, and its vast brood of green snakes, each darting forth two sharp, forked tongues. In the foreground, to the left, could be discerned Charon in his boat, a haggard, wild-looking figure,—a powerful and well conceived design, but of the schools, schooly. There was far more of genius and less of artificiality in a canvas of smaller dimensions, ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France
... loneliness of the spot, the acting of ferryman over this river was not an agreeable post, and Count Stolberg, a German dilettante who has left some memories of his Italian wanderings, relates how a feeble dismal soured old man, a veritable Charon of the upper air, had great difficulty in conveying himself, his horse and his servant across the swollen stream. The old man's age and misery aroused the Count's compassion, so that he asked him why he continued thus ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... Charon's Westerne barge Running a tilt at the Subjunctive mood, Beckoned to Bednal Green, and gave him charge To ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... since the journey was long, they put boots into the coffin, (for it was made on foot,) and coins to pay the ferrying across a wide sea, even as the Greeks expected to be carried over the Styx by Charon. This abode of the dead, at the end of this long pathway, was an island, a warm, fertile land, ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... the opinion the crew formed of him, which was a very just one. Neither he nor I had much doubt that the ships in sight were British. We hoisted British colours, so did they; and in a short time we were all paying compliments to each other, they being his Majesty's ships Charon, Lowestoffe, and Pomona, under the command of the Honourable Captain Luttrell. He confirmed the account we had received of the attack of the Spaniards on the British territories, and informed us also that he had been in quest of two Spanish galleons ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... ferried over the Styx by the grim, unshaven old boatman Charon, who, however, only took those whose bodies had received funereal rites on earth, and who had brought with them his indispensable toll, which was a small coin or obolus, usually placed under the {133} tongue of a dead person for this purpose. If these conditions had not been fulfilled, ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... of that excellent housewife Mrs. Joan. Some of the lighter papers, such as the one upon the "Art of Puffing," are amusing enough; and of the visions, that which is based upon Lucian, and represents Charon as stripping his freight of all their superfluous incumbrances in order to lighten his boat, has a double interest, since it contains references not only to Cibber, but also (though this appears to have been hitherto ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... as he wrote to Professor Bartholomew Price on May 20, in answer to the invitation,] "It will be a sort of apotheosis coincident with my official death, which is imminent. In fact, I am dead already, only the Treasury Charon has not yet settled the conditions upon which I am to be ferried ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... meant to represent by this figure the Renascence of Italy, still struggling with darkness. The whole work brings the times before us. There is the Christian Heaven above, and the heathen Styx below. Charon ferries the souls across the dark stream; they are first judged by Minos, and Minos is a portrait of a cardinal who had ventured to judge the rest of the picture before it was finished. There is in the picture all the whirling confusion of ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... Pelopidas, a rich and patriotic Theban, who was yet to prove himself one of the great men of Greece. Entering the gates, they proceeded quietly through the streets, and soon found an abiding-place in the house of Charon, an earnest patriot. This ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... voice, and the doctor looked nothing at all like Charon, but still Lancaster wondered if he weren't being ferried over the river of death. There was a thrumming all about him, and he heard a low keening of wind. "Where are ...
— Security • Poul William Anderson
... The banquet of my arms, my arbour queen, Seated upon an uptorn forest root; And all around her shapes, wizard and brute, Laughing, and wailing, groveling, serpenting, Shewing tooth, tusk, and venom-bag, and sting! O such deformities! Old Charon's self, Should he give up awhile his penny pelf, And take a dream 'mong rushes Stygian, It could not be so phantasied. Fierce, wan, And tyrannizing was the lady's look, 510 As over them a gnarled staff she shook. Oft-times upon the sudden she laugh'd out, And from ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats
... we glided, I thought of the Styx, and of Charon rowing some solitary soul to the Land of Shades. Amidst the strange scene, with a chilly wind blowing in my face and midnight clouds dropping rain above my head; with two rude rowers for companions, whose insane oaths still tortured my ear, I asked myself if I was wretched ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... Strabo. For all that, we hear in the Annals of troops "along their march capturing the City of Nineveh, that most ancient capital of Assyria": "Capta in transitu urbis Ninos vetustissima sedes Assyriae" (An. XII. 13). In Lucian's amusing Dialogue, entitled "Charon," when Mercury points out the tomb of Achilles on Cape Sigaeum and that of Ajax on the Rhoetaean promontory, Charon wants to see Nineveh, with Troy, Babylon, Mycenae, and Cleone, the following being the conversation; "I want to point out to you," says Mercury, "the tomb of Achilles: you see it on ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... interests and cares. Necessity and the waiter drive them all to a sepulchral syssition, whereof the cook too frequently deserves that old Greek comic epithet—hadou mageiros—cook of the Inferno. And just as we are told that in Charon's boat we shall not be allowed to pick our society, so here we must accept what fellowship the fates provide. An English spinster retailing paradoxes culled to-day from Ruskin's handbooks; an American citizen describing his jaunt in a gondola from the railway station; a German shopkeeper ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... the protection of Apollo, when they are drawing near their latter end do ordinarily become prophets, and by the inspiration of that god sing sweetly in vaticinating things which are to come. It hath been likewise told me frequently, that old decrepit men upon the brinks of Charon's banks do usher their decease with a disclosure all at ease, to those that are desirous of such informations, of the determinate and assured truth of future accidents and contingencies. I remember also that Aristophanes, in a certain comedy of his, calleth ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... Hades may possibly be a distorted survival of this ancient symbolism of the three-fold dog-skin as the graphic sign for the act of emergence from the portal of birth. Elsewhere (p. 223) in this lecture I have referred to Charon's obolus as a surrogate of the life-giving pearl or cowry placed in the mouth of the dead to provide "vital substance". Rohde[284] regards Charon as the second Cerberus, corresponding to the Egyptian dog-faced god Anubis: just as Charon received his ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... of the place, cannot be denied; it is an established principle, that all ornaments owe their beauty to their propriety. The same glitter of dress, that adds graces to gaiety and youth, would make age and dignity contemptible. Charon with his boat is far from heightening the awful grandeur of the universal judgment, though drawn by Angelo himself; nor is it easy to imagine a greater absurdity than that of gracing the walls of a Christian temple, with the figure of Mars leading a hero to battle, or Cupids sporting round a virgin. ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... twenty-six, Shelley at thirty-three, Byron at thirty-six, Poe at forty, and Burns at thirty-seven, are the rule. When drafts made by the men mentioned became due, there was no balance to their credit and Charon beckoned. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... standeth horribly and gnasheth," condemning the miserable souls before him each to his different circle, his tail wound twice about his middle. Farther back, the Pistoiese, Vanno Fucci, with blasphemous gesture, yells out his challenge to God; Charon plies his boat; and in the background despairing souls follow a mocking demon who runs before them ...
— Luca Signorelli • Maud Cruttwell
... when the hour was now come when she must die, she cried to her husband (for he held her in his arms, as if he would have stayed her that she should not depart), "I see the boat of the dead, and Charon standing with his hand upon the pole, who calleth me, saying, 'Hasten; thou delayest us;' and then again, 'A winged messenger of the dead looketh at me from under his dark eyebrows, and would lead me away. Dost thou not see him?'" Then after this she ...
— Stories from the Greek Tragedians • Alfred Church
... city. Philidas, secretary of the polemarchs, entered into the conspiracy, and, being sent in an embassy to Athens, concocted the way for Pelopidas and his friends to return to Thebes and effect a revolution. Charon, an eminent patriot, agreed to shelter the conspirators in his house until they struck the blow. Epaminondas, then living at Thebes, dissuaded the enterprise as too hazardous, although all his ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... him; however, the Tyndals swept all of us, except Mrs. Norton, away to Delabole to see the slate quarries, and to have the adventure of sliding down a fearfully steep incline in a tiny trolley-car—if that's the right word for it. I half expected Charon to meet me with his ferry-boat at the bottom. It wouldn't have seemed much stranger than other things ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... l. 244, O Sun.]—Alcestis has come out to see the Sun and Sky for the last time and say good-bye to them. It is a rite or practice often mentioned in Greek poetry. Her beautiful wandering lines about Charon and his boat are the more natural because she is not dying from any disease but is being mysteriously drawn away by the ...
— Alcestis • Euripides
... the brisker inhabitants of Ashbridge, who do not understand its spirit, to substitute for this aged and ineffectual Charon someone who is occasionally awake, but nothing ever results from these revolutionary moves, and the requests addressed to the town council on the subject are never heard of again. "Old George" was ferryman there before any members of ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... CHARON, ferryman. Never had a childhood. Devoted life to his business. Has navigated more people than all the Atlantic liners combined. Ambition: A launch. Recreation: ...
— Who Was Who: 5000 B. C. to Date - Biographical Dictionary of the Famous and Those Who Wanted to Be • Anonymous
... tender sides of both, their legs and wings close pinioned to their ribs, so was this pair of friends transfixed, till down they fell joined in their lives, joined in their deaths; so closely joined, that Charon would mistake them both for one, and waft them over Styx for half his fare.' The humour of the piece is delightful, and it matters not a whit for the enjoyment of it, that the ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... peremptory, becomes almost suppliant. The reason for this is indeed somewhat obscure: one does not at once see why the formula "So it is willed there, where will is power," should not be as good for the Furies or for Malacoda as it has proved for Charon and Minos. Perhaps the clue is to be found in the fact that the sins punished inside the walls of the city (sins which, it will be seen, are not represented in Purgatory at all) are to be regarded as the result of a will obstinately set against the will of ...
— Dante: His Times and His Work • Arthur John Butler
... bolt upright save when he stooped a trifle to reach forward with his paddle, was Sorez, who might have passed for Charon. His thin frame, his hollow cheeks, the intense look of his burning eyes gave him a ghostly air. The raft moved without a sound, scarcely rippling the waters before it, scarcely disturbing in its wake the gaunt shadow cast by Sorez, which followed ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... return to Wainamoinen, who, like all epic heroes, visits the place of the dead, Tuonela. The maidens who play the part of Charon are with difficulty induced to ferry over a man bearing no mark of death by fire or sword or water. Once among the dead, Wainamoinen refuses—being wiser than Psyche or Persephone—to taste of drink. This 'taboo' is found in Japanese, Melanesian, ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... not one less than twenty-two inches, with bellies as yellow as marigold and as white as a lily in parts. That I account quite excellent taking for these times, when this stream hath been so roiled and troubled by the passage of Master Charon's barges, he having been so pressed with traffic that he hath discarded his ancient vessel as incommodious and hasteneth to and fro with ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... monument to after-times— "Here Cassy lies, by Celia slain, And dying, never told his pain." Vain empty world, farewell. But hark, The loud Cerberian triple bark; And there—behold Alecto stand, A whip of scorpions in her hand: Lo, Charon from his leaky wherry Beckoning to waft me o'er the ferry: I come! I come! Medusa see, Her serpents hiss direct at me. Begone; unhand me, hellish fry: "Avaunt—ye cannot say 'twas I."[1] Dear Cassy, thou must purge ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... is suggestively brought before us in an account of his crossing the Styx of the Peak cavern, alone with the lady and the Charon of the boat. In the same passage he informs us that he had never told his love; but that she had discovered—it is obvious that she never returned—it. We have another vivid picture of his irritation ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... stormy night when the good Antony arrived at the creek (sagely denominated Haerlem river) which separates the island of Manna-hata from the mainland. The wind was high, the elements were in an uproar, and no Charon could be found to ferry the adventurous sounder of brass across the water. For a short time he vapored like an impatient ghost upon the brink, and then, bethinking himself of the urgency of his errand, took a hearty embrace of his stone ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... pleasure, and the day grows old. Rice. As good be gone, as stay and be benighted. K. Edw. A litter hast thou? lay me in a hearse, And to the gates of hell convey me hence; Let Pluto's bells ring out my fatal knell, And hags howl for my death at Charon's shore; For friends hath Edward none but these, And these must die under a tyrant's sword. Rice. My lord, be going: care not for these; For we shall see them shorter by the heads. K. Edw. Well, that shall ...
— Edward II. - Marlowe's Plays • Christopher Marlowe
... observer, not imbued with the knowledge of our intentions, would indicate us to be a combination of perturbed spirits, rowed by Charon ...
— Stories of Comedy • Various
... to the Governor. About a mile and a half from our location, the Fremantle and Perth road crosses the river (which is there about four hundred yards wide) by a ferry. John-of-the-Ferry, the lessee of the tolls, the Charon of the passage, is a Pole by birth, who escaped with difficulty out of the hands of the Russians; and having the fortune to find an English master, after a series of adventures entered into the employment of an emigrant, and settled in Western Australia. He had now become not only the ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... became the symbol of initiation; and hence among the Greeks the same word signified to die, and to be initiated. In the British Mysteries, says Davies (Mythol. of the British Druids), the novitiate passed the river of death in the boat of Garanhir, the Charon of the Greeks; and before he could be admitted to this privilege, it was requisite that he should have been mystically buried, as well ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... enjoyed their humour, and hence arose a familiarity of intercourse which called forth many amusing scenes and quaint rejoinders. A celebrated character of this description bore the soubriquet of "Boaty," of whom I have already spoken. He had acted as Charon of the Dee at Banchory, and passed the boat over the river before there was a bridge. Boaty had many curious sayings recorded of him. When speaking of the gentry around, he characterised them according to their occupations and activity ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... voyage, I had time not only to coax into quietness my restive horse, but also to conclude that it would never do to dismiss our Charon on the other bank, as half an hour might put on our track a squad of cavalry, who, in our ignorance of the roads and country, would soon return us to Rebeldom and a rope. A man who would take twenty dollars for twenty minutes' work, after swearing that his conscience would ...
— Thirteen Months in the Rebel Army • William G. Stevenson
... offer either prayers or sacrifice. In that land of forgetfulness and shadows there is the unnavigable lake Avernus, Acheron, Styx, the groaning Cocytus, and Phlegethon, with its waves of fire. There are all kinds of monsters and forms of fearful import: Cerberus, with his triple head; Charon, freighting his boat with the shades of the dead; the Fates, in their garments of ermine bordered with purple; the avenging Erinnys; Rhadamanthus, before whom every Asiatic must render his account; Aeacus, ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper |
