"Sackcloth" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... difficulties they have involved us in with their accursed astronomy. Boccaccio and the Troubadours should have been burned instead, and if this had been done all the abominable modern literature which would persuade the faithful that this world is not all sackcloth and ashes would never have been written. Away with him who says that the earth is as beautiful as heaven," and Gautier's phrase, "Moi, je trouve la terre aussi belle que le ciel, et je pense que la correction de la forme est la ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... no patience with such stuff As by Renan is writ, and when you read (Why do you read?) have hardly strength enough To hold your hand from flinging the vile screed Into the fire. That were a wasteful deed Which you'd repent in sackcloth extra rough; For books cost money, and I'm told you care To lay up treasures Here ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... would be very hard to answer, were there not other questions that I could ask. Of course I was wrong to marry him. I know that now, and I repent my sin in sackcloth and ashes. But I did not leave him after I married him till he had brought against me horrid accusations,—accusations which a woman could not bear, which, if he believed them himself, must have made it impossible for ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... the rest, in the floating of the mine. And forthwith Elsie fell from the clouds, and was brought back, shuddering, to cold reason again. She was sick at heart; she hated herself for her self-abasement. She must gird her with sackcloth and mourn; and the fight must be fought now, without parley or hesitation, unless the sweetness were to go forth from life for ever, and all things should turn to ashes ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... has been made on American soil for liberty, one of these descendants of the youth who landed on American soil with Columbus, in 1492, has been found. They disliked Andros, and the members of this now extensive and widely scattered family were in sackcloth and ashes, so to speak, when King James, in 1688, gave Andros a vice-regal commission to rule New York and all ...
— The Witch of Salem - or Credulity Run Mad • John R. Musick
... forgotten music, that had been dear to me. They are vain, I know; how very vain in their attempt to soothe or comfort me. Dearest Lionel, you cannot guess what I have suffered during these long months. I have read of mourners in ancient days, who clothed themselves in sackcloth, scattered dust upon their heads, ate their bread mingled with ashes, and took up their abode on the bleak mountain tops, reproaching heaven and earth aloud with their misfortunes. Why this is the very luxury of sorrow! ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... came to my superior end. So, these my kinsmen came, these of my family, to be with me at my going, to call my spirit back from the roof-top with face turned to the north, to leap before my death-mat, to wail and bare the shoulders and bind the sackcloth ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Ash Wednesday got wedged in (as was concerted) betwixt Christmas and Lord Mayor's Days. Lord! how he laid about him! Nothing but barons of beef and turkeys would go down with him—to the great greasing and detriment of his new sackcloth bib and tucker. And still Christmas Day was at his elbow, plying him the wassail-bowl, till he roared, and hiccup'd, and protested there was no faith in dried ling, but commended it to the devil for a sour, windy, acrimonious, censorious, hy-po-crit-crit-cri-tical mess, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... her a hardened little sinner! I abused her like a pickpocket, and called her an ungrateful serpent! Bring some sackcloth and ashes, somebody, quickly! I shall go in mourning for ...
— Pixie O'Shaughnessy • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... wherein the people repented not: "Woe unto thee, Chorazin! woe unto thee, Bethsaida! for if the mighty works, which were done in you, had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes. But I say unto you, It shall be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon at the day of judgment, than for you. And thou, Capernaum, which art exalted unto heaven, shalt be brought down to hell: for if the mighty works, which have been done in thee, had been done in Sodom, it would have remained ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... the wonderful doorway: beggars crouch under the wall of the terrace; the sellers of cakes, of syrups and lemon-water, and of the big and luscious watermelons that are so popular in Cairo, display their wares beneath awnings of orange-colored sackcloth, or in the full glare of the sun, and, their prayers comfortably completed or perhaps not yet begun, the worshippers stand to gossip, or sit to smoke their pipes, before going on their way into the city or ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... day's work, but how much of her time had been occupied in doing the tasks of others? He knew well that she disliked the Carrolls. She would speak of her own dislike of them as of her great sin, of which it was necessary that she should repent in sackcloth and ashes. ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... meet for repentance, I would be among the first to hail his reformation with heartfelt satisfaction; but when I hear that while he no longer sells liquor, that he constantly offers it to his guests, I feel that he should rather sit down in sackcloth and ashes than fireside at sumptuous feasts, obtained by liquor selling. When crime is sanctioned by law, and upheld by custom and fashion, it assumes its most dangerous phase; and there is often a fearful fascination in the sin ...
— Sowing and Reaping • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
... unto the children of my people, though your sins should reach from earth to heaven; and though they shall be redder than scarlet, and blacker than sackcloth yet if ye shall turn to me with all your heart, and shall call me father, I will hearken to you, ...
— The Forbidden Gospels and Epistles, Complete • Archbishop Wake
... lives of the saints. His enthusiastic mind was affected, and he resolved to pass from worldly to spiritual knighthood. He became a saint, after the notions of the age; that is, he fasted, wore sackcloth, lived on roots and herbs, practised austerities, retired to lonely places, and spent his time in contemplation and prayer. The people were attracted by his sanctity, and followed him in crowds. His heart burned ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... you, said my master, what sort of an answer you'd have from Pamela. The younger miss said, She never heard of such grave folks in her life, on such an occasion: Why, sir, said she, I hope you'll sing psalms all day, and miss will fast and pray! Such sackcloth and ashes doings, for a wedding, did I never hear of!—She spoke a little spitefully, I thought; and I returned no answer. I shall have enough to do, I reckon, in a while, if I am to answer every ...
— Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded • Samuel Richardson
... conscious that just ahead of him there was a great and ever increasing gathering of people—a mighty throng, in fact. Arriving at the fringe of the crowd which grew closer and closer, as well as greater, every moment, he was amazed to see two very striking looking Easterns, clothed in sackcloth, and standing high upon a mound of stone. The appearance of the two men was extraordinary. The face of the elder of the two was cast in a ...
— The Mark of the Beast • Sidney Watson
... of the great city of Nineveh, and after the lapse of many centuries, when Jonah came to Nineveh, and prophesied the overthrow of the city on account of the evil done by the people, it was Pharaoh who, seized by fear and terror, covered himself with sackcloth, and sat in ashes, and with his own mouth made proclamation and published this decree through Nineveh: "Let neither man nor beast, herd nor flock, taste anything; let them not feed nor drink water; for I know there is no god beside Him in all the world, all His words are truth, and all His ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME III BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... against all these offences; and the persecution of the Quakers was again renewed. A Quaker woman had recently frightened the Old South congregation in Boston by entering that meeting-house clothed in sackcloth, with ashes on her head, her feet bare, and her face blackened, intending to personify the small-pox, with which she threatened the colony, in punishment for ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... When at peace with the Lord, they are fighting with their neighbors; when at peace with them, worshiping their gods and giving them their daughters in marriage, then the Lord is angry, and vents His wrath on them. Thus, they are continually between two fires; now repenting in sackcloth and ashes, and now, with the help of ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... thoughtfully. "Oh, you mean sackcloth and ashes. That's in a different department—Con Grazia, also a different priced goods. But I don't believe we need worry about the laundry work. Mother thought we were perfectly heroic to undertake the task, and she was pleased to death to see the lines of sparkling linens waving ...
— The Girl Scouts at Sea Crest - The Wig Wag Rescue • Lillian Garis
... when they were sick, I put on sackcloth, and humbled my soul with fasting: and my prayer shall turn into ...
— The Book of Common Prayer - and The Scottish Liturgy • Church of England
... command from it one of the most notable scenes in this wide world of ours. Far as the eye can reach, a waste of wild sea moor, of a lurid ashen gray; not like our northern moors with their jet-black pools and purple heath, but lifeless, the color of sackcloth, with the corrupted sea-water soaking through the roots of its acrid weeds, and gleaming hither and thither through its snaky channels. No gathering of fantastic mists, nor coursing of clouds across it; but melancholy clearness of space in the warm ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... conceived the idea of establishing a school for his people; but the scheme resulted in a farce which left him in sackcloth and ashes. In the same way he found that, when it came to a question of dispensing justice and of adjusting disputes, the host of juridical subtleties with which the professors had provided him ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... neither suspected nor dreaded. But, on the Missouri question, there was a fair trial of strength between the friends of Slavery and the friends of the Constitution. The former triumphed, and by the prime agency of one whose raiment, the remainder of his days, ought to be sackcloth and ashes,—because of the disgrace he has continued on the name of his country, and the consequent injury that he has inflicted on the cause of Freedom throughout the world. Although all the different Administrations, ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... Helen Maurice's Aunt Felix, Rosamond's mother, Rebecca, the Lady Rowena (my father began Ivanhoe in January), Mrs. Fairchild, Deborah, Mrs. Murray of Anna Ross, Naomi, and Ophelia. Once, I "did" Job by wrapping a meal-sack—for sackcloth—about me, and, sitting upon the ground, throwing ashes over my head and into the air, the while four colored boys, previously instructed, burst in one by one, with news of the mischief wrought by Sabean, lightning, Chaldean, and cyclone. A dramatization of Queen Esther, upon ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... himself, aided by that experienced nurse, Mrs. Gamp, in somewhat dilapidated attire, followed. The babies, from a span long to an indefinite length, of all shapes and sizes, black, white, and snuff-colored, twins, triplets, quartettes, and quincunxes, in calico and sackcloth, and in a state of nature, filled the vehicle, and were hung about it by the leg or neck or middle. A half-starved quadruped of osseous and slightly equine appearance drew the concern, and the shrieking axles drowned the cries of ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... eternal glory! Heaven, forgive My feebleness of arm that reached him not, And take thy servant to thy mercy. 'Tis A glorious triumph still; proud Babylon's No more; the Harlot of the Seven Hills Hath changed her scarlet raiment for sackcloth And ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... of life to the deuce and go out on a bat like a man, but console yourself with this: you'd be a long sight worse off when you got through than when you started, and you'd either go to smash altogether or spend the rest of your life trying to get back where you were before; and sackcloth hurts. There isn't one bit of joy to be got out of it. If you can't get the very best in this world, take nothing. That's the only religion for a woman to cling to, and if she does cling to it she ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... sometimes eat rice and other food of the richest kind. Sometimes I sleep on an elevated bedstead of the best kind. Sometimes I sleep on the bare ground. Sometimes my bed is made within a fine palace or mansion. I am sometimes clad in rags, sometimes in sackcloth, sometimes in raiments of fine texture, sometimes in deer-skins, sometimes in robes of the costliest kind. I never reject such enjoyments as are consistent with virtue and as are obtained by me without ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... couldn't get away from seeing Lady Joan; Jem Temple Barholm didn't go off with another woman, but what Torfreda went through, this one has gone through, and she's going through it yet. She can't dress herself in sackcloth, and cut off her hair, and hide herself away with a bunch of nuns, as the other one did. She has to stay and stick it out, however bad it is. That's a darned sight worse. The day after I'd finished ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... go throughout all generations to the children of the nation. Then Judith went to the House of the Lord and fell upon her face and called upon the Lord who breakest the battles to bless her purpose. She went thereafter to her house, put off the garments of widowhood and of sackcloth, and bathed, and anointed herself with precious ointment, and put on the garments of gladness, with bracelets and chains and rings and ornaments to lure the eyes of all the men that should see her. Then she went forth ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... came flocking out at the town gate, for they wanted to see the witch burned. The old horse drew the cart on which she sat. They had put upon her a garment of coarse sackcloth. Her lovely hair hung loose about her beautiful head; her cheeks were as pale as death; and her lips moved silently, while her fingers were engaged with the green flax. Even on the way to death she did not interrupt the work she had begun; the ten shirts ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... St. James's Street, and Piccadilly, whose glories her sister's pen had depicted with such fond enthusiasm, was now deserted by the rabble of quality who had peopled its palaces, while the old London of the East, the historic city, was sitting in sackcloth and ashes, a place of lamentations, a city where men and women rose up in the morning hale and healthy, and at night-fall were carried away in the dead-cart, to be flung into the pit where the ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... mark their mirth—ere Lenten days begin, That penance which their holy rites prepare To shrive from Man his weight of mortal sin, By daily abstinence and nightly prayer; But ere his sackcloth garb Repentance wear, Some days of joyaunce are decreed to all, To take of pleasaunce each his secret share, In motley robe to dance at masking ball, And join the ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... of my childhood, one by one Did leave me dark before the natural sun, And I astonied fell, and could not pray, A thought within me to myself did say, "Is God less God that thou art left undone? Rise, worship, bless Him! in this sackcloth spun, As in that purple!"—But I answer, Nay! What child his filial heart in words can loose, If he behold his tender father raise The hand that chastens sorely? Can he choose But sob in silence with an upward gaze? And my great Father, thinking fit to bruise, Discerns ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... is in the glow of a summer sunset: and we call him unsympathetic and unfeeling. If we let him know the state of our world, we should see the rosehues fade from his, and our friend put off his singing robes, and sit down with us in sackcloth and ashes, to ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 3 • George MacDonald
... blinding beam of tone, higher and more undulating. His heart harshly ticking like a clock, he viewed, as in a vision, the march of the nations, the crash of falling theocracies, of dying dynasties. On a stony platform, vast and crowded, he knelt in sackcloth and ashes; the heavens thundered over the weeping millions of Nineveh; and the Lord of Hosts would not be appeased. Stretching to the clouds were black, basaltic battlements, and above them reared white terraced palaces, as swans that strain their throats to the sky. The day of wrath ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... consigned to infamy by posterity. As he approached the spirit land he was tortured with the dread of the scenes which he might encounter there. His crimes had condemned thousands to death and other thousands to live-long woe. He sought by priestcraft, and penances, and monastic vows, and garments of sackcloth, to efface the stains of a soul crimsoned with crime. He died, and his guilty spirit passed away ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... Let me, like him, first cracks of thunder hear, Then let the harps enchantments stroke mine ear: Here give me thorns, there, in Thy kingdom, set Upon my head the golden coronet; There give me day; but here my dreadful night: My sackcloth here; but there my stole ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... mourned, and sang his great deeds. And in the lower chamber of the tower the women sat upon the floor, with Nehushta in their midst, and sorrowed greatly, fasting and mourning in raiment of sackcloth, and strewing ashes upon the floor and upon themselves. Nehushta's face grew thin and very pale and her lips white in that time, and she let her heavy hair hang neglected about her. Many of the men shaved their heads and went barefooted, and the fortress and the palaces were filled with ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... upon a shop where were no jewels, nor gold, nor costly silks, nor pearls of great price; but all that was in it was coarse sackcloth, and rough and hairy garments, and heaps of ashes, and here and there a loaf of bitter bread, and bitter herbs, and bottles wherein tears were stored. As he gazed on this shop something seemed to whisper to his heart, "Go and buy." So he went with his sorrowful heart, ...
— The Rocky Island - and Other Similitudes • Samuel Wilberforce
... way to their grief, the mourners filed into the room. Some had cymbals, some flutes, some pieces of sackcloth which they put over their heads before turning their faces to the wall. "Alas the lion—alas the hero—alas for him!" wailed the mourners. "Woe! Woe! Death hath entered into the place of the living and hath taken the ...
— The Coming of the King • Bernie Babcock
... ghostly and abominable smells into our streets; and if that were to haunt us by day and night, a phantom from which there was no escape, to remain till the sins of Europe were expiated, we should soon forget politics and arguments, and be in sackcloth and ashes, positive no longer, but down on our knees before Heaven in awe at this revelation of social guilt, asking simply what we must ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... between those whom God had bound together was shocking and wicked. Lady Susanna was louder and less just. She did not believe that Mary had done anything to merit expulsion from the family; but she did think that her return to it should be accompanied by sackcloth and ashes. Mary had been pert to her, and she was not prone to forgive. Lady Alice had no opinion,—could say nothing about it; but would be happy if, by her ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... you would. Beggars mustn't be choosers; but if they might, I should say it was the very thing. Sackcloth, you know; and then, perhaps, the ashes might be excused. I'm in solemn earnest, though. I'm reformed. You've done it; and you," she added, turning round short on Leslie Goldthwaite,—"you've been at it a long time, ...
— A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's Life. • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... a persistency in sectional strife and domination, foreseen and foretold by me in the "Southern Monitor," published in Philadelphia; no one regarded the warning. Now hundreds of thousands are weeping in sackcloth and ashes over the untimely end of hundreds of thousands slain in battle! And thousands yet must fall, before the ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... pray, but she was light-minded and full of vanity when Philip married her, and it might ha' been a lift towards her salvation in one way; but it pleased the Lord to work in a different way, and she mun wear her sackcloth and ashes in patience. So I'll say naught more about her. But for him as is absent, as thee hast spoken on so lightly and reproachfully, I'd have thee to know he were one of a different kind to any thee ever knew, I reckon. If he were led away ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. III • Elizabeth Gaskell
... thousand marks, let him lend me the money, and have at him! For the box of the ear that the prince gave you, he gave it like a rude prince, and you took it like a sensible lord. I have checked him for it, and the young lion repents; marry, not in ashes and sackcloth, but in new silk ...
— King Henry IV, Second Part • William Shakespeare [Chiswick edition]
... the confidential clerk of a firm in this city. I have reason to believe that if I had continued as I began, I should have been in the firm now. But one night in a saloon under the influence of drink I committed a crime, and I was sent to the penitentiary, where I repented in sackcloth and ashes. To-day I came back for the first time, and went to the old house, and they ordered me out. I went to other business-houses I was acquainted with, and received the same treatment. I met men on the street whom I once knew, who had held inferior places to me, ...
— Sowing and Reaping • Dwight Moody
... that firmly was settling The crown on her head, Sits, like Rizpah, in sackcloth and ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... into her flesh, a little above the ankle-bones—of discomfort, rather, in comparison with the anguish throbbing and biting across her shoulder-blades. Some one—it may have been in unthinking mercy—had drawn down the sackcloth over her stripes, and the coarse stuff, irritating the raw, was as a ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... hitherto been so soft to her! She was there told that she was unfeminine, unladylike! And then, he that was sitting by her was so smooth, so sympathizing, so anxious to please her! In her anger and her sympathy she had shown it; and from that day to this she had repented in the roughness of sackcloth and the bitterness of ashes. It was possible that Caroline Waddington should so sin against a woman's sense of propriety; that, alas! had been proved; but it was impossible that she should so sin and not know that she had sinned, not ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... so eagerly, and relish it so thoroughly, when they find it! I don't know; for my own part, gaudeamus. I have always thought that the text, 'Blessed are they that mourn,' referred to the inner private life, not to a perpetual display of sackcloth and ashes; but I know not. I can understand the weeping-willow taste among people, who have too little wit or too little Christianity to be cheerful, but it is a wonder to find the luxury of gloom united to the keenest ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... letters all winter had been so kind of jokey and frivolous, all about the good times she was having, and the parties she went to, and the new dresses she got. New dresses! When I read that letter of Anne's, I knew that all the purple and fine linen in the world was just like so much sackcloth and ashes to her as long as Gilbert was sulking out on a ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... daughter of Aiah, took sackcloth, and spread it for her upon the rock, from the beginning of harvest until the water dropped upon them out of heaven, and suffered neither the birds of the air to rest upon them by day, nor the beasts of the field ...
— Poems • William Cullen Bryant
... supply of flowers and confetti on hand, which they were anxious to dispose of suddenly—since in ten minutes the horses would run, and then the carriages must leave the Corso. It was the last day of Carnival, and to-morrow—sackcloth and ashes. How the masks crowd around them; how the beautiful faces, unmasked, are smiling! Look at them well, stamp them on your heart, for many and many one shall we see never again. Another Carnival will bring them again, like song birds in summer; but a long, long winter ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... he leaves for ever Of his ancestors; Shield or sword sets eyes on never, Or his faithful horse. Down from Toggenburg he fareth, None to see or care; On his noble limbs he weareth Sackcloth ...
— Rampolli • George MacDonald
... court of the women's house, to know how Esther did and what should become of her." And when she had been made queen, "she did still the commandment of Mordecai, like as when she was brought up with him." In the threatened calamity of the Jews, Mordecai rent his clothes, and put on sackcloth with ashes, and wept. Esther's maids told her of it. "Then was the queen exceedingly grieved; and she sent raiment to clothe Mordecai." In all the sequel of the well-known tale, it is easy to see that the niece's friendship for her uncle was at least as important a sentiment ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... possessions in all zones; and we, wretched imbeciles, cannot do the function of administering them? And because the accounts do not stand well in the ledger, our remedy is, not to take shame to ourselves, and repent in sackcloth and ashes, and amend our beggarly imbecilities and insincerities in that as in other departments of our business, but to fling the business overboard, and declare the business itself to be bad? We are a hopeful set of heirs to a big fortune! It does not suit our ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... Lily Dallam in her usual staccato, following Honora's gaze, "at the piano, in ashes of roses. She's stopped mourning for her husband. Trixy told her to-night she'd discarded the sackcloth and kept the ashes. He's awfully clever. I don't wonder that she's crazy about him, do ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... too, in her sackcloth and sashes. She was moved by the enthusiastic explosions of Miranda Brown to reveal some details of the great novel which was then ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... I dream, But that is a pullet and clouted cream; Myself by denial I mortify— With a dainty bit of a warden-pie; I'm clothed in sackcloth for my sin— With old sack wine I'm lined within; A chirping cup is my matin song, And the vesper's bell is my bowl, ding-dong. What baron or squire, Or knight of the shire, Lives half so well as a ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... with your lot, while crime, cowardice, cupidity or low cunning have handed you down from the high tower of a statesman to the black hole of a gambler . . . . Crape the heavens with weeds of woe; gird the earth with sackcloth, and let hell mutter one melody in commemoration of fallen splendor! For the glory of America has departed, and God will set a flaming sword to guard the tree of liberty, while such mint-tithing Herods as Van Buren, ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... very kind of you," said Lady Tatham as she shook hands first with the mother, and then with the silent daughter. "Oh, I'm a dreadful neighbour. I confess it in sackcloth and ashes. I ought to have called upon you long ago. I don't know what to say. I'm incorrigible! Please will you sit down, and will you have some tea? My son will ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the sackcloth of regret, she said, She long had wept the past; but for my sake She now would cast it off, and ...
— Stories in Verse • Henry Abbey
... of the Bible needs any description of Oriental mourning for the dead. The rent garments and sackcloth (2 Sam. iii. 31), loud weeping and wailing (ver. 32), protracted lamentation as for Jacob (Gen. 1.10 and 11), and for Moses (Deut. xxxiv. 8), and the hired mourning women (Jer. ix. 17, and Matt. ix. 23), were to be found nowhere in greater perfection than ...
— Woman And Her Saviour In Persia • A Returned Missionary
... Women, like Miriam, Deborah, Hannah, Huldah, and Noadiah; inexperienced youths, like Jeremiah; men of high standing in society, like Isaiah and Daniel; humble men, like the ploughman Elisha and the herdsman Amos; men married and unmarried, are numbered among the Prophets. Living poorly, wearing sackcloth, feeding on vegetables, imprisoned or assassinated by kings, stoned by the people, the most unpopular of men, sometimes so possessed by the spirit as to rave like madmen, obliged to denounce judgments ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... followed? A. They then deprived me of my outward apparel, sash and sword, and having confined my hands and feet in chains, the links thereof were of a triangular form, they put sackcloth and ashes on ...
— The Mysteries of Free Masonry - Containing All the Degrees of the Order Conferred in a Master's Lodge • William Morgan
... the dress, except her wearing of it. There is a grace of carriage that will make purple of sackcloth. Still, the gown was well cut of fawn-coloured stuff, which her stockings and shoes matched. Her face was generous—proud, too, yet tender and very beautiful. The soft rose of her cheeks, the misty blue of her eyes stood there for gentleness, the curve of the ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... She came herself to the camp, just as the brave men of Calais had been starved out; and Edward had said he would only consent not to burn the town down, if six of the chief townsmen would bring him the keys of the gates, kneeling, with sackcloth on, and halters round their necks, ready to be hung. Queen Philippa wept when she saw them, and begged that they might be spared; and when the king granted them to her she had them led away, and gave each a good dinner and a fresh suit of clothes. The king, however, ...
— Young Folks' History of England • Charlotte M. Yonge
... which were such braised and bleeding hearts. These demonstrations of a noble hypocrisy, if such it were, excited the wrath, not the compassion, of the Stadholder, who thought that the aged matron and her sons and daughters, who dwelt in that house of mourning, should rather have sat in sackcloth with ashes on their heads than indulge in these insolent marks of hope ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... the holy ring. Here he was received by the high-priest, and with their hands mutually interfolded, one upon the other, he vowed to renounce, then and there, the world with all its cares and temptations, and to observe with obedience the doctrines of Buddha. This done, he was clad afresh in sackcloth, and led from the temple to the royal monastery, Watt Brahmanee Waid; with bare feet and eyes downcast he went, ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... (God asked the Jews of old) the fast which I have chosen? Is it a day for a man to afflict his soul, and bow down his head like a bulrush, and to spread sackcloth and ashes under him (playing at being sad, while God has not made him sad)? Wilt thou call this a fast, and an acceptable ...
— Town and Country Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... instructions which had been received, that Nelson exclaimed, "Do his majesty's ministers know their own minds? They at home," said he, "do not know what this fleet is capable of performing—anything and everything. Much as I shall rejoice to see England, I lament our present orders in sackcloth and ashes, so dishonourable to the dignity of England, whose fleets are equal to meet the world in arms; and of all the fleets I ever saw, I never beheld one, in point of officers and men, equal to Sir John Jervis's, who is a commander-in-chief able to lead them to glory." Sir Gilbert ...
— The Life of Horatio Lord Nelson • Robert Southey
... Charles Swinburne has more fire in him, and more wealth of expression, but he does not prophesy; he has a clever way of combining Biblical similes with Provengal passion—et voila tout! The prophets are always poor—the sackcloth and ashes of the world are their portion; and their bodies moulder a hundred years or more in the grave before the world finds out what they meant by their ravings. But apropos of these lines of Shelley. He speaks of the duality of existence. 'Nothing in the world is ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... employment. A part of his entertainment was a trio of kittens which he had rented for the summer—rented because then they would not lose ownership and would find home and protection in the fall. He named the kittens Sackcloth and Ashes—Sackcloth being a black-and-white kit, and Ashes a joint name owned by the two others, who were gray and exactly alike. All summer long these merry little creatures played up and down the wide veranda, or chased butterflies and grasshoppers down the clover slope, offering Mark ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine
... about to go forth from your dwelling. If you have not been the seducer of my child, I crave your pardon in deep humility, and will do penance in sackcloth and ashes for having wrongfully accused you; but," he added, bitterly, "if you have wronged me, and devoted her soul to destruction, may the curse of the old Jew enter into your veins, and curdle the red blood to a hot and destroying poison!—may the flowers of the spring ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... appearance of any plague, famine, war, &c.; and though they sadly neglected the commands of God in other particulars, yet they obeyed this command with great devotedness. The abstinence of the ancient Jews generally lasted from twenty-six to twenty-seven hours. On these days they wore sackcloth, laid themselves in ashes, and sprinkled them on their heads, in token of their great grief and penitence. Some spent the whole night in the synagogue; occasionally using with great effect a scourge as a penance for their sins, or as a stimulant to devout behaviour. We think it is not ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 20. No. 568 - 29 Sept 1832 • Various
... Goodwood—and to Goodwood Elinor was going with a party, Lady Mariamne and a number of the "set." She told her mother, to amuse her, of the new dresses she had got for this important occasion. "Phil says one may go in sackcloth and ashes the remainder of the year, but we must be fine for Goodwood," she said. "I wanted him to believe that I had too many clothes already, but he was inexorable. It is not often, is it, that one's husband is more anxious than one's self about ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... was last night damned. They may bring it on again, and probably will; but damned it was,—not a word of the last act audible. I went (malgre that I ought to have stayed at home in sackcloth for unc., but I could not resist the first night of any thing) to a private and quiet nook of my private box, and witnessed the whole process. The first three acts, with transient gushes of applause, oozed patiently but heavily on. I must say it was badly acted, particularly by * *, who was groaned ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... shall or shall not correspond, now that she is no longer a child. Doubtless you remember that I warned you against her from the first day I ever set my eyes upon her, and predicted that you would repent in sackcloth and ashes your charitable credulity? I swore then she would prove a thief; you vowed she was a saint! But, nevertheless, I have no intention of turning spy at this late day, and assisting you in the ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... organized—for example, there was no reason why the sitting-room should be made uninhabitable between breakfast and dinner once a week—but it could never be other than odious. The kitchen floor must inevitably be washed every day by a girl on her knees in sackcloth with terrible hands. She was witnessing now the first stage in the progress of a victim of the business of domesticity. To-day Florrie was a charming young creature, full of slender grace. Soon she would be a dehumanized drudge. And Hilda could not stop it! All ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... and schism is at work horribly, and the people are running away from the old guides, and there is no end to them. Actually in the year of grace 1257,' he says, 'a new order of these fellows turned up in London. Friars of the sack, forsooth, because they were clothed in sackcloth! Of course they came armed with a papal licence as usual. What did these fellows come for? Was it to make confusion worse confounded? Alas! Alas! If we had only been as we were in the golden age, these friars would never have had a chance—not they! We too are not ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... his son whose love had been her misfortune and was now her only crime, to spare a mother whose conduct had been otherwise irreproachable. But her tears and pleadings produced no effect on Ali, who ordered her to be taken, loaded with fetters and covered with a piece of sackcloth, to the prison of ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Covered with sackcloth vile they seemed to me, And one sustained the other with his shoulder, And all of them were by the ...
— Dante's Purgatory • Dante
... to pass, when the king heard the words of the woman, that he rent his clothes; and he passed by upon the wall, and the people looked, and, behold, he had sackcloth within upon ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... was now drawing near its end; and the city had been promised that before the time of cakes and ale should be over, and that of sackcloth and ashes should begin, the divine prima donna should appear in one more new part. And, after much deliberation and debate, it had been decided that this should be Bellini's masterpiece, La Sonnambula. She was to sing it on one night only— the last Sunday of the ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... is my punishment. I violated it to my papa, and now my papa is the medium of that punishment. Well, then, there's a Providence proved. But, in the mean time, mamma, what has become of my beauty? It is gone—it is gone—and now for humility and repentance—now for sackcloth and ashes. I am now no longer beautiful!—so off, off go the ...
— Jane Sinclair; Or, The Fawn Of Springvale - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... your mother's touching dream of becoming a boor, and repenting your sins in sackcloth and ashes! That maternal idyl still troubles your poor, shallow brain, does it? For my part, I think no spectacle on earth is so ridiculous as that of the repentant sinner. It is the most humiliating character in which a man can appear before ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... depopulate the guilty capital and to imitate, perhaps to surpass, the example of Justinian II. who had chastised a former rebellion by the choice and execution of fifty of the principal inhabitants. The women and clergy in sackcloth and ashes lay prostrate in prayer; the men were in arms for the defence of their country; the common danger had united the factions, and the event of a battle was preferred to the slow miseries of a siege. In a hard-fought ...
— Ravenna, A Study • Edward Hutton
... the world, if you don't wish to get chafed at every turn, fold up your pride carefully, put it under lock and key, and only let it out to air upon grand occasions. Pride is a garment all stiff brocade outside, all grating sackcloth on the side next to ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various
... we see silhouetted against an angry sky three crosses at the top of a sad little hill. It is a crucifixion infinitely more real, more intense than Dore's. Another scene—also engraved by Le Keux: On a stony platform, vast and crowded, the people kneel in sackcloth and ashes; the heavens thunder over the weeping millions of Nineveh, and the Lord of Hosts will not be appeased. Stretching to the clouds are black basaltic battlements, and above rear white-terraced ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... Camden before Ethelyn's introduction to it, were the highest kind of church-women, and while neglecting the weightier matters of the law were strict to bring their tithes of mint, and anise, and cummin. They were going to wear sackcloth and ashes for forty days and stay at home, unless, as Mrs. Miller said to Ethelyn, they met occasionally in each other's house for a quiet game of whist or euchre. There could be no harm in that, particularly if they abstained on Fridays, as of course they should. Mr. Bartow himself could not ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes
... to her, that is mama. I shall not introduce you. Should you speak she could not reply; she belongs to a religious sect which forbids unnecessary conversation. It is the very latest thing in sects. Its adherents wear sackcloth and eat out of wooden basins. Mama greatly enjoys these little observances. But you can imagine that I did not ask you here to talk to you about mama. I will put on my Egyptian costume. I shan't be long. In the meantime you might look at ...
— Balthasar - And Other Works - 1909 • Anatole France
... the King ordered, but as soon as he was made Archbishop he became the servant of the Church. Again, on his assumption of this sacred office Becket underwent a remarkable charge of character. He had been a man of the world, fond of pomp and pleasure. He now gave up all luxury and show. He put on sackcloth, lived on bread and water, and spent his nights in prayer, tearing ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... of religious enthusiasm, here was a nature that, awaking from sin, could not have been contented with the sober duties of mediocre goodness; that would have plunged into the fiery depths of monkish fanaticism, wrestled with the fiend in the hermitage, or marched barefoot on the infidel with a sackcloth for armor,—the cross for a sword. Now, the impatient desire for redemption took a more mundane direction, but with something that seemed almost spiritual in its fervor. And this enthusiasm flowed through strata of such profound melancholy! Deny it a vent, and it might sicken into lethargy ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... seven shirts, and some other linen, of as fine cloth as could be got, which indeed was coarser than sackcloth; and these she constantly washed for me with her own hands. She was likewise my school-mistress, to teach me the language. When I pointed to anything, she told me the name of it in her own tongue, so that in a few days I was able to call for whatever I had ...
— Gulliver's Travels - Into Several Remote Regions of the World • Jonathan Swift
... education, but you diffuse the taste for rubbish and something worse, in the shape of books. No good thing but has its shadow of evil attendant upon it. And if we had only to estimate by visible or human forces, we might well sit down and wrap ourselves in the sackcloth of pessimism. 'We see not yet all things put under Him'; but 'we see Jesus crowned with glory and honour,' and the vision that cheered the first martyr—of Christ 'standing at the right hand of God'—is the rebuke of every fear and every gloomy anticipation ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... and widows may weep, but the world must not pause in its regular routine of business and of pleasure. This is natural and right. It was not intended that men should walk perpetually in sackcloth and ashes because of the sorrows that surround them. But equally true is it that they were never meant to shut their eyes and ears to those woes, and dance and sing through life heedlessly, as far too many do until some thunderbolt falls on their own ...
— The Lifeboat • R.M. Ballantyne
... with scissors. No Turk could have more indignantly resented the process than did that small quadruped,—his Celtic feelings being so severely wounded by it, in fact, that he abstained from sustenance for three days, putting himself into moral sackcloth and ashes for that period by retiring into his penitential cell ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... she is so kind. Now do write directly, and let me hear of you [in d]etail. And tell Mr. Martin to make a point of coming home to us, with no grievances but political ones. The Bazaar is to be something sublime in its degree, and I shall have a sackcloth feeling all next week. All the rail carriages will be wound up to radiate into it, I hear, and the whole country is to be shot into the heart ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... attendants alone his ancient pomp and lustre, which was useful to strike the vulgar: in his own person he affected the greatest austerity and most rigid mortification, which, he was sensible, would have an equal or a greater tendency to the same end. He wore sackcloth next his skin, which, by his affected care to conceal it, was necessarily the more remarked by all the world: he changed it so seldom, that it was filled with dirt and vermin: his usual diet was bread; his drink water, which he even rendered farther unpalatable ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... of Don Quixote, who grasped her tightly by the wrist, and drawing her towards him, while she dared not utter a word, made her sit down on the bed. He then felt her smock, and although it was of sackcloth it appeared to him to be of the finest and softest silk: on her wrists she wore some glass beads, but to him they had the sheen of precious Orient pearls: her hair, which in some measure resembled a horse's mane, he rated as threads of the brightest gold of Araby, ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... character with it; for Barney is by no means either stupid or weak. He is recklessly untidy as to his person; but the worst effects of his neglect are mitigated by a powdering of flour and mill dust; and his unbrushed clothes, made of a fashionable tailor's sackcloth, were evidently chosen regardless of expense for ...
— John Bull's Other Island • George Bernard Shaw
... ASHTON,—We, the undersigned, do regret in sackcloth and ashes our serious misconduct in going away at an improper time, and in an improper manner, on a sleigh-ride, without your consent ...
— Miss Ashton's New Pupil - A School Girl's Story • Mrs. S. S. Robbins
... Sackcloth, The Transfigured. By William L. Watkinson Saints Converse with God, The. By Francis Fenelon Salvation, Making Light of Christ and. By Richard Baxter Satan, The Fall of. By George C. Lorimer Saurin, Jacques, Paul Before Felix and Drusilla Savonarola, Girolamo, The Ascension ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... countries. Soon after his baptism, he visited Syria, to retrace the scenes of the life of Christ. He then retired to a desert, where he passed four years in penance and fasting, living in the companionship of wild beasts. Clothed in sackcloth, he spent his days in torture, struggling with temptation, and haunted ...
— Correggio - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Painter With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... prevailed among the ancient Jewish maidens; for Isaiah, in calling upon the women to put away their personal adornments, says: "Instead of a girdle there shall be a rent, and instead of a stomacher (corset) a girdle of sackcloth." ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... I'M in sackcloth and ashes. My dream castles have tumbled down upon my head and left me bruised and sorrowful. I'm awake at last! I'd like to bury my face in my old red and green patchwork quilt and ask forgiveness for being a fool. But I must compose myself and write this last ...
— Patchwork - A Story of 'The Plain People' • Anna Balmer Myers
... were allowed to unite in prayers offered in their own behalf. Here they were called genuflectentes. In the fourth degree they were allowed to approach the altar and were called consistentes. In the taking of these degrees the penitents were compelled to appear in sackcloth and ashes, and in some places the men were obliged to shave their heads and the women to wear veils. The duration of their penitence was regulated by the bishop. He could make the time of taking these degrees short, or ...
— The Gospel Day • Charles Ebert Orr
... things, she would therefore now propose to spend her allotted six weeks with her guardian. We might certainly expect her on the twentieth of September, and she would take the greatest care to fit herself for our society by arriving in the lowest possible spirits, and bringing her own sackcloth and ...
— The Queen of Hearts • Wilkie Collins
... degrees his sight became more able to penetrate the obscurity within, he began plainly to perceive the form of the miserable woman, crouched on her knees upon the damp slimy pavement of the wretched hole. She was already dressed in the sackcloth robe of the penitents condemned to the stake, and her poor grey hairs were without covering. So motionless was her form that for a moment the witchfinder thought she was dead, and had fallen together in the position in which she had knelt down; and the thought was like a ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... Marina was really dead, and so she put up a monument to her memory, and showed it to King Pericles, when after long years of absence he came to see his much-loved child. When he heard that she was dead, his grief was terrible to see. He set sail once more, and putting on sackcloth, vowed never to wash his face or cut his hair again. There was a pavilion erected on deck, and there he lay alone, and for three months he spoke word ...
— Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare • E. Nesbit
... rejoiced when the matin chimes of Lent announced that the gay season was ended, but although gayety arrayed itself in sackcloth and sprinkled ashes broadcast, the sackcloth moved in the waltz as its wearer tripped over the ashes. There were successions of informal dancing parties, lunch parties, and card parties during the penitential forty days, and then came ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... they fasted that day, and put on sackcloth, and cast ashes upon their heads, and ...
— Deuteronomical Books of the Bible - Apocrypha • Anonymous
... make bonfires for a defeat, and put on sackcloth and ashes after a victory?" asks George. "I protest I don't want to thank Heaven for helping us to burn ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... O'Murphy. Two years ago we were camped at one end of a certain damp dark gully up north. Thither came a party of big marines and a small Irish terrier, bringing with them a long naval gun, which they covered with a camouflage of sackcloth and ashes and let off at intervals. Whenever the long gun was about to fire the small dog went mad, bounced about behind the gun-trail like an indiarubber ball, in an ecstasy of expectation. When the great gun boomed he shrieked with joy and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 6, 1917 • Various
... very commonly indicate the meaning of the symbols which they employ. Thus the prophet Isaiah is directed to loose the sackcloth from his loins, and put off his shoe from his foot, walking naked and barefoot. Chap. 20:2. Then follows the explanation of this symbolical transaction: "Like as my servant Isaiah hath walked naked and barefoot three ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... their arms which with them are often bare: it appears from a passage of Jeremiah that the ancients wounded themselves in the same part, 'Every head shall be bald, and every beard clipt; upon all hands shall be cuttings and upon the loins sackcloth.' Chapter 48:37." Harmer volume 4 ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 2 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... had been in a mistake; and lamenting that he had not been aware of it before, from that instant his conscientious spirit sunk into despair. In the open court he stretched out his arm, offering it as the offending instrument to be first cut off; he requested the king's leave to wear sackcloth about his loins, to sprinkle ashes on his head, to carry a halter about his neck, in testimony of repentance; and that he might sink to the lowest point of contrition, he insisted on asking pardon not ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... weeds, willow, cypress, crape, deep mourning; sackcloth and ashes; lachrymatory[obs3]; knell &c. 363; deep death song, dirge, coronach[obs3], nenia[obs3], requiem, elegy, epicedium[obs3]; threne[obs3]; monody, threnody; jeremiad, jeremiade|!; ullalulla[obs3]. mourner; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... He had opened the sixth seal, and, lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood; and the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty ...
— Our Day - In the Light of Prophecy • W. A. Spicer
... filth, which ye had never thrown had ye known me in this strange guise. But lo, this poor old man pleadeth more eloquently than I. His dead lips shake your souls. Go home, go home from this Pagan mirth, and sit on the ground in sackcloth and ashes, and pray God He make ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... worn when last I saw him, but so tattered and dirty and threadbare that it was a marvel to me it did not fall to pieces before my eyes. The great ruff drooped brown and dank upon his shoulders. The gay shirt and doublet hung like grey sackcloth on his limbs. His shoes flapped in fragments about his feet, and the empty scabbard at his belt swung like the shreds of a worn rope between ...
— Sir Ludar - A Story of the Days of the Great Queen Bess • Talbot Baines Reed
... give you—grief and dreadful laughter. Sackcloth for banner, ashes in your wine. Go forth, go forth, nor ask me what comes after. The fifth stone shall not fail you, son ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson
... got fairly into the wine. The cura had thrown aside his sanctity and become human like the rest; the padres had forgotten their sackcloth and bead-roll, and the senior of them, Padre Joaquin, entertained the table with spicy adventures which had occurred to him before he became a monk. Echevarria related anecdotes of Paris, with many adventures he had encountered ...
— The White Chief - A Legend of Northern Mexico • Mayne Reid
... alone; Put a shirt of sackcloth on: Never keep a fast, or pray For good luck in love ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... said the man, with a leer, "sitting in sackcloth and ashes, more ashes than sackcloth. Have you got some clothes ...
— Many Cargoes • W.W. Jacobs
... Galileo's abjuration was one of exciting interest, and of awful formality. Clothed in the sackcloth of a repentant criminal, the venerable sage fell upon his knees before the assembled Cardinals; and laying his hands upon the Holy Evangelists, he invoked the Divine aid in abjuring and detesting, and vowing never again to teach, the doctrine of the earth's ...
— The Martyrs of Science, or, The lives of Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler • David Brewster
... they unblest, Who underneath the world's bright vest With sackcloth tame their aching breast, The ...
— Richard Vandermarck • Miriam Coles Harris
... by the time he reached the 77th verse, a strange divine entered the church, by the western door, and advanced solemnly up to the pulpit. The eyes of all the congregation were riveted on the sublime stranger, who was clothed in a robe of black sackcloth, that flowed all around him, and trailed far behind, and they weened him an angel, come to exhort them, in disguise. He read out his text from the Prophecies of Ezekiel, which consisted of these singular words: "I will overturn, overturn, overturn it; and it ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... whom chant "They have no wine!" while the others respond "Love ye those who have wrong'd you." These are those who, having sinned through envy, can be freed only by the exercise of charity. Then, bidding Dante gaze fixedly, Virgil points out this shadowy host, clothed in sackcloth, sitting back against the rocks, and Dante takes particular note of two figures supporting each other. He next discovers that one and all of these victims have their eyelids sewn so tightly together with wire that passage is left only for streams of ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... his whole name—Vivian only, this and nothing more; he, a British officer, in a mad impulse (I am like him) marries my mother, nobody's daughter, and a ballet dancer, during a run he made to New York city just thirty-five years ago; my sire repents in sackcloth and ashes, dragging us with him; sells out; living by his wits anyhow and anywhere, chiefly at gaming places abroad. At a German suburb once he had left us, my late husband came to our cottage to enquire his road; as he was an American, my mother ...
— A Heart-Song of To-day • Annie Gregg Savigny
... much more vigorously enforced in olden time than it is now. A certain couple having been guilty of illicit intercourse, and also within the forbidden degrees of consanguinity, appeared before the Presbytery of Lanark, and made confession in sackcloth. They were ordered to return to their own session, and to stand at the kirk-door, barefoot and barelegged, from the second bell to the last, and thereafter in the public place of repentance; and, at direction of the session, thereafter to go through the whole ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... demand for iron and steel goods. Even were this decline permanent, it would not be the fault of our manufacturers, nor—except as a device for reducing their personal expenditure—is there any reason why these gentlemen should sit in sackcloth and ashes. ...
— Are we Ruined by the Germans? • Harold Cox
... and sipping the claret he always produced for a guest. The penitential husks which her sisters would have thought proper in the circumstances were not for Lois. He could not imagine her, no matter how grievously she might sin, as meekly repenting in sackcloth and ashes. He wondered just what she meant to do now that she had come back; he wondered what her sisters and the rest of Montgomery would do! The situation interested him impersonally. It sufficed for the ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... means necessary to provide her with food. In HERON'S collection of God's judgments on wicked acts, it is related of an unnatural son, who fed his aged father upon orts and offal, lodged him in a filthy and crazy garret, and clothed him in sackcloth, while he and his wife and children lived in luxury; that, having bought sackcloth enough for two dresses for his father, the children took away the part not made up, and hid it, and that, upon asking them what they could do this ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... had obscured art for centuries. Human beauty terrified the great artists, who painted with a cross on their breasts and a rosary on their sword-hilts. Bodies were hidden under the stiff, heavy folds of sackcloth or the grotesque, courtly crinoline, and the painter never ventured to guess what was beneath them, looking at the model, as the devout worshiper contemplates the hollow mantle of the Virgin, not knowing whether it ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... still till the last echo died; then, throwing off the sackcloth from his brow, and laying back the pall from the still features of his child, he bowed his head upon him, and broke forth in the resistless ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... to hear it," said Maggie judicially. "And I hope now that she'll spend the rest of her days in sackcloth—with a scourge," she added. "Oh, did I tell ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... sword we quiet men spurn away, you shrewd knaves pick up and commit murders with; what opportunities 105 the virtuous forego, the villainous seize. Because, to pleasure myself, apart from other considerations, my food would be millet-cake, my dress sackcloth, and my couch straw—am I therefore to let you, the offscouring of the earth, seduce the poor and ignorant by appropriating 110 a pomp these will be sure to think lessens the abominations so unaccountably and exclusively associated with it? Must I let villas and poderi go to you, a murderer ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... becomes of your eyes, keep your two ears for my sake; and for your sake too! You don't know what exquisite ears you've got. You are like me—you and I are made of silk, Barty—as other men are made of sackcloth; and their love, of ashes; and their joys, ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... body, and then back again. At last, with a start, he did as he was bidden. He had almost expected the sight that met his eyes, and yet the shock was cruel. To see, fixed in the rigidity of death and naked on that coarse layer of sackcloth, the man whom he had left well clad and full of meat and sin upon the threshold of a tavern, awoke, even in the thoughtless Fettes, some of the terrors of the conscience. It was a CRAS TIBI which re-echoed in his soul, that two whom he had known should have come to lie ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and with many of God's best beloved, one tear is scarce dried when another is ready to flow! Mourners! rejoice! When the reaping time comes, the weeping time ends! When the white robe and the golden harp are bestowed, every remnant of the sackcloth attire is removed. The moment the pilgrim, whose forehead is here furrowed with woe, bathes it in the crystal river of life,—that moment the pangs of a lifetime of sorrow are eternally forgotten! Reader! if thou art one of these ...
— The Faithful Promiser • John Ross Macduff
... would drop hers—that Lady Maria felt her first pang of remorse that she had told a fib, or rather, that she was found out in telling a fib, which is a far more cogent reason for repentance. Heaven help us! if some people were to do penance for telling lies, would they ever be out of sackcloth and ashes? ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... offend you, Lance; but you are really too young to think of marriage. Your tastes are not formed yet; that which pleases you now you will dislike in six or ten years' time. I assure you that if you marry this farmer's niece now, in ten years' time you will repent it in sackcloth and ashes. She is not fit, either by manner, education, or anything else, to be your mother's daughter, and you know it; you know that when the glamour of her beauty is over you will wonder at your own madness and folly. ...
— A Mad Love • Bertha M. Clay
... Berkeley, contemptously. "She don't know what she wants, or what is good for her. Women rarely do. They make their matrimonial selections like the blindest of bats, the most egregious of fools, and then, when the mischief is done, go in for unending sackcloth, or a divorce court. Pocahontas will get hold of a fellow some day who will wring her heart—with her rubbishing longing after novelty and intellect, and fine scorn of homespun truth and loyalty. Were I a woman, I should esteem the ...
— Princess • Mary Greenway McClelland |
