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Crypt   /krɪpt/   Listen
Crypt

noun
1.
A cellar or vault or underground burial chamber (especially beneath a church).






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Crypt" Quotes from Famous Books



... door behind them and hastily looked around, discovering that they stood in a crypt, the central part of which was occupied by a burial vault. In the crypt chapels were a number of statues, in marble and bronze, most of them rude, antique, yet not of indifferent workmanship, especially one before which the jestress, ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham

... on in the choir when we arrived, had now ceased; but from the crypt below arose a chant so harsh, vibratory, and void of solemnity, that we were irresistibly reminded of the subterranean chorus of demons in "Robert le Diable." Two of us ventured below and discovered ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various

... a sight of the hold. I never saw men more amazed. They filled the vessel with their exclamations. They never offered to touch anything, being too much awed, but stepped about with their heads uncovered, as quietly as they could, as though they had been in a crypt, and the influence of strange and terrifying memorials was upon them. I also showed them the clothes I had come away from the Laughing Mary in; and, that I might submit such an aspect to them as should touch their sympathies, I whipped off the ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell

... the other, all of them arranged around the tomb of St. Francis. Over this venerated body, which the people regard as ever living and absorbed in prayer at the bottom of an inaccessible cave, the edifice has arisen and gloriously flowered like an architectural shrine. The lowest is a crypt, dark as a sepulcher, into which the visitors descend with torches; pilgrims keep close to the dripping walls and grope along in order to ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various

... Jasper, from the pages of "Edwin Drood," also, one can descend into the crypt of the earlier Norman church, the same they visited by moonlight, when Durdles kept tapping the wall "just where he expected to disinter a whole ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun

... country are noteworthy remains of different epochs, Celtic, Roman, Merovingian, mediaeval; none, perhaps, of paramount importance, but all interesting to the archaeologist and the artist. Such remains as those of the Merovingian crypt at Jouarre, and the various monuments of Provins, well repay the traveller who visits these places on purpose, whilst, as he zig-zags here and there, he will find many a village church of quaint exterior and rich Gothic decoration within. Fontainebleau, being generally included ...
— Holidays in Eastern France • Matilda Betham-Edwards

... he was, and what it all meant. The little door to the left, behind him, that he had noticed as he came in, was the door of which he had heard other Catholics speak, that led down to the great crypt, where so many before him had screamed and fainted and called on God, from the rack that stood at the foot of the stairs, or from the pillar with the fixed ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson

... Alexis, red with anger, stepped forward to confront the man, his frail hands fiercely clenched. The officer in command struck him brutally across the breast with the flat of his sword, shoved him aside, strode toward the low door of the chapel crypt and ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers

... sweet-breads and the mutton kidneys, while Mr. Rodd, the Baptist minister, had requested that, so far as was compatible with the fair accommodation of other customers, the sheep's trotters might be reserved for him. And it was likely to be a growing place, for the trustees of Mr. Zephaniah Crypt's Charity, under the stimulus of a late visitation by commissioners, were beginning to apply long-accumulating funds to the rebuilding of the Yellow Coat School, which was henceforth to be carried forward on a greatly-extended ...
— Brother Jacob • George Eliot

... breathe, he squirmed, he crawled, and suddenly he saw. He was looking down into an underground crypt flooded with brilliant light. That crypt had been altered out of all recognition, its greater expanse of roof supported with massive pillars, the light screened away from the shaft. But it was not all this ...
— The Seed of the Toc-Toc Birds • Francis Flagg

... of this charitable criticism was a little crooked gentleman, at whose side I had dined—a man of sharpness and wit, for which his hunch gave him the authority. As we penetrated finally into the immense crypt, long like a street, provided with iron railways for handling the stores, and threaded now and then by heavy wagons and Normandy horses, my interest in the surrounding wonders was distracted by apprehensions of the fate awaiting the unfortunate ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various

... Htel Laspard. Seen from the station, the most prominent object is the Cathedral, to the right is St. Germain, to the left St. Pierre, and, above St. Pierre, the Tour Guillarde or Clock Tower, at the market-place. The Cathedral, St. Etienne, was rebuilt in the 13th cent., over a crypt of the 11th. The tower over the western entrance is 230 feet high. The north and south portals are crowded with statues. The entire length of the church is 332 feet, and of the transepts 128 feet. 110 feet intervene between the floor and the vaulted roof of the nave ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black

... passed after his fall into the hands of the Duke of Buckingham, who has left his mark in the Water Gate which is now seen, far from the river, in the garden of the Thames Embankment. His father was Sir Nicholas Bacon, Elizabeth's first Lord Keeper, the fragment of whose effigy in the Crypt of St. Paul's is one of the few relics of the old Cathedral before the fire. His uncle by marriage was that William Cecil who was to be Lord Burghley. His mother, the sister of Lady Cecil, was one of the daughters of Sir Antony Cook, a person deep in the confidence of the reforming ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church

... educated and with more practical minds than the rest, had always resisted this temptation. They in no degree believed in the intervention of spirits, elves, or goblins. These two were Simon Ford and his son. And they proved it by continuing to inhabit the dismal crypt, after the desertion of the Dochart pit. Perhaps good Madge, like every Highland woman, had some leaning towards the supernatural. But she had to repeat all these stories to herself, and so she did, most conscientiously, so as not to let the ...
— The Underground City • Jules Verne

... are often coeval with the upper parts of the building, and although not so elaborate in ornamentation as the fabric they support, they are almost without exception well constructed and well finished pieces of building. In some cases the crypt is of much older date than any portion of the superstructure, as is the case at York, Worcester and Rochester cathedrals. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the roofs were often richly groined, and upheld by cylindrical columns or clustered piers, and furnished with handsome bases and ...
— Our Homeland Churches and How to Study Them • Sidney Heath

... In the crypt there is a sumptuous shrine containing the statue of the Madonna, said to have been made by St. Luke. This was erected in 1854, but on the night between the 4th and 5th of October in the same year the crown was stolen from the Virgin's head, and in the following ...
— Ex Voto • Samuel Butler

... In the Crypt of St. Paul's, Mausoleum of England's greatest soldier and sailor heroes, their ashes rest who once fought and conquered. If it is given to those who have gone before to hear our human appeal, perhaps the immortal spirits ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy

... was buried in the crypt of St. Paul's Cathedral, near the tomb of Sir Christopher ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay

... of the church is the Crypt, where, at the eastern extremity, are gathered nearly all the remains of the tombs which were saved from the old St. Paul's. Here repose the head and half the body of Sir Nicholas Bacon (1579), Lord Keeper of the Great Seal in the reign of Elizabeth, and father of Francis, ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various

... ostentatious grief, each sufficient to discharge the whole. The mourning was still observed as rigidly as ever, the house was still closed and silent as a cave. But in the place of the living statue weeping and praying in the furthest recesses of the crypt was now a pretty young woman whose hair was growing again, instinct with life in every curl and wave of its soft luxuriance. The reappearance of this fair hair gave a touch of lightness, almost of brightness, to the widow's mourning, which seemed now no more than a caprice of ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet

... built a temple, how my eye Had hungering fed thereon, from low-browed crypt Up to the soaring pinnacles that, tipt With stars, gave signal when the sun drew nigh! Dark caverns in and under; vivid sky Its home and aim! Say, from the glory slipt, And down into the shadows dropt and dipt, Or reared from darkness ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald

... Gregorian notes of the choirs moved all to pray for the soul of one whose life had been given to the service of God. The Archbishop of Baltimore, the Most Rev. James Gibbons, pronounced the funeral discourse, and then the body was laid beside those of his predecessors in the crypt beneath. ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 1, January 1886 • Various

... living gauze no more unfurl; Wrecked is the ship of pearl! And every clambered cell, Where its dim dreaming life was wont to dwell, As the frail tenant shaped his growing shell, Before thee lies revealed, - Its irised ceiling rent, its sunless crypt unsealed! ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes

... massive and magnificent tombs in which India abounds, the tombs and pyramids that make marvellous the land of the Nile, the tombs that stood thick upon the Appian Way, and that rose superb upon the Tiber's shore, the modern use to which the Pantheon is put, the Pantheon at Paris and the Crypt of the Invalides, the Abbey of Westminster, matchless in memorials, the sepulchres within the hills that gird Jerusalem, and the sepulchre in which the Nazarene was gently laid ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, No. 733, January 11, 1890 • Various

... yet all the roads that traditionally lead to Rome do not converge to the palace on the Palatine. Modern Rome is only mildly archaeological, and while it takes occasional recognition of the ancient monuments, and drives to the crypt of old St. Agnes, to the tomb of Cecilia Metella, and may manage a descent into the catacomb of St. Calixtus, it is far more actively interested in its dancing and dining and driving. As a scenic background for festivities Rome is a success, and as one comes into social touch with the titled ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting

... and La Corne St. Luc have been with the King's warrant and searched the chateau from crypt to attic, without finding ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby

... down in his soul's crypt unriven The last black crooked sympathy and shame, And hailed him with that ringing rainbow name Erased upon the ...
— The Wild Knight and Other Poems • Gilbert Chesterton

... with foliations, over effigies between them, a door leading, down to a crypt. The effigies are too much decayed to enable a decided opinion to be formed as to sex or station. In the north wall of north transept. Date ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 64, January 18, 1851 • Various

... name for any navigable river, that if it be a fact that the river Severn did formerly run near the parish in question, it appears to me not difficult to give a satisfactory explanation of the term by which such parish is distinguished from St. Mary de Crypt and ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 184, May 7, 1853 • Various

... where a relic alleged to be a piece of a bone of the mother of the Virgin was exposed, a newspaper of that city, on July 24th, 1901, said: "There were five hundred persons, by actual count, in and around the crypt chapel of St. Anne when afternoon service stopped the rush of the sick and crippled at 4.30 o'clock yesterday. There were many more at the 8 o'clock evening Mass. What did these people seek at the shrine? Only ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn

... church where the funeral services would be held. It is small and old and severely plain, plastered outside and whitewashed or painted, and with no ornament but a statue of a monk in a niche over the door, and above that a small black flag. But in its crypt lie several of the great dead of the House of Habsburg, among them Maria Theresa and Napoleon's son, the Duke of Reichstadt. Hereabouts was a Roman camp, once, and in it the Emperor Marcus Aurelius died a thousand years before the first Habsburg ruled in Vienna, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... her soul, and her commander would not change her for battle-cruisers. Therefore, that he may remember he is the Service and not a branch of it, he is after certain seasons shifted to a battle-cruiser, where he lives in a blaze of admirals and aiguillettes, responsible for vast decks and crypt-like flats, a student of extended above-water tactics, thinking in tens of thousands of yards instead of his modest but deadly three to ...
— Sea Warfare • Rudyard Kipling

... a caravan, longer than his pilgrimage to China! But suddenly, inexplicably, there came a silence as of cemeteries; the living ocean seemed to have ebbed away from about him, to have been engulfed within abysses of subterranean architecture! He found himself alone in some strange crypt before a basin, shell-shaped and shallow, bearing in its centre a rounded column of less than human height, whose smooth and spherical summit was wreathed with flowers. Lamps similarly formed, and fed with oil of palm, hung above it. There ...
— Some Chinese Ghosts • Lafcadio Hearn

... Music and wine are one,— That I, drinking this, Shall hear far Chaos talk with me; Kings unborn shall walk with me; And the poor grass shall plot and plan What it will do when it is man. Quicken'd so, will I unlock Every crypt of every rock. ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy

... street had business of its own to think of, and was brave perhaps with fine men and maids at the time of the Spanish Armada. Its only bravery now was the good old church, and some queer gables, and a crypt (which was true to itself by being buried up to the spandrels), and one or two corners where saints used to stand, until they were pelted out of them, and where fisher-like men, in the lodging season, ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore

... withdrawal of the fog, as of a veil lifted from the face of a sleeper. All his boyish dreams of the mother country came back to him in the books he had read, and re-peopled the vast silence. Even the rotting leaves that lay thick in the crypt-like woods seemed to him the dead laurels of its past heroes and sages. Quaint old-time villages, thatched roofs, the ever-recurring square towers of church or hall, the trim, ordered parks, tiny streams crossed ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte

... Guibert was sound asleep, thought so too, and accompanied by Humfrey, they descended into the passage. The light, of course, was no longer visible, but the form of the crypt, through which they now passed, was less antique than that under the keep, and it was plain they were beneath a later portion of the Castle. The gallery concluded in a wall, with a small barred, unglazed window, perfectly dark, so that Berenger, ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge

... to know it, and after some trouble I obtained my father's permission to impart this calligraphic crypt to Barty, on condition he should swear on his honor never to reveal it: and ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier

... north side of the altar, over the grated window that lights the crypt, is an ancient pew, or gallery, to which there is an ascent by a flight of narrow stairs, of solid blocks of oak. The exterior of this gallery is very neat, and it is certainly older ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13, No. 355., Saturday, February 7, 1829 • Various

... all he wants out of this world and let the next go rip. Man cannot live by bread alone, the churches tell him; but he says, "I am living on bread alone, and doing well on it." But I tell you, Hapgood, that plumb down in the crypt and abyss of every man's soul is a hunger, a craving for other food than this earthy stuff. And the churches know it; and instead of reaching down to him what he wants—light, light—instead of that, they ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson

... passed on, stumbling over the ruined marbles. For a moment we had thought him ghost—one of the many. But he was not, since his hoofs sounded. The scrambling clatter of them had died out into silence before we came to that dark, crypt-like chamber whose marble columns were ringed in iron, veritable pillars of foundation. And then we saw that our old guide's hands were full of newspapers. She struck a match; they caught fire and blazed. Holding high that torch, she said: "See! Up there's his name, above where ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... It is furnished with four keyboards and 124 stops, with twenty-four combination stops that admit of more than a million combinations of sound. On either side of the choir is another organ, with a fourth of great power in the crypt, a fifth in the tower, and an echo organ built under the vaulting of the roof. This produces a soft and weird music. All the organs are operated from the keyboard of the great apse organ, which also plays the chimes of thirteen bells in ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various

... Worcester and the neighbourhood, among them a recital by Mr. Brandram of A Midsummer-Night's Dream, when she undertook the soprano solos occurring in the play, at the Worcester Guildhall. Lady Alwyne Compton was very musical, and rehearsals were held in the stone-vaulted crypt beneath the Deanery, a place of splendid acoustic properties, which intensified the sound without coarsening it, and brought the voice back to the singer in a way unknown on the usual platform, decorated with screens, curtains, and flags, ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory

... ween; but not so merry were the ones left behind. My lord Bishop of Hereford was stuck up in the organ-loft and left, gownless and fuming. The ten liveried archers were variously disposed about the church to keep him company; two of them being locked in a tiny crypt, three in the belfry, "to ring us a wedding peal," as Robin said; and the others under quire seats or in the vestry. The bride's brother at her entreaty was released, but bidden not to return to the church that day or interfere with his sister again on pain of death. ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden

... "To the skies, thou immortal spirit!" And then one divine hand was put against the back of Moses, and the other hand against the pulseless breast and God laid him softly down on Mount Nebo, and then the lawgiver lifted in the Almighty's arms, was carried to the opening of a cave and placed in crypt, and one stroke of the divine hand smoothed the features into an everlasting calm, and a rock was rolled to the door, and the only obsequies at which God did all the offices of priest, and undertaker, and grave-digger, ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage

... our professor of architecture, and carried out as a labor of love by Richardson, were all that I could desire. The trustees, entering heartily into the plan, authorized me to make an arrangement with Story, the American sculptor at Rome, to execute a reclining statue of Mr. Cornell above the crypt where rest his remains; and citizens of Ithaca also authorized me to secure in London the memorial window beneath which the statue is placed. Other memorials followed, in the shape of statues, busts, and tablets, as others who had been ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White

... is drawn above. My knees are bowed in crypt and shrine I never felt the kiss of love, ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith

... Madonna who is good-natured at Lourdes and cross-grained at La Salette; who likes "pretty speeches and little coaxing ways" in "paying court" to her, and who at the end is apostrophised as "our Lady of the Pillar," "our Lady of the Crypt." It may perhaps be excusable to resort to such expedients as these in the conversion of savages; but there is something singularly repulsive in the picture (drawn apparently from life) of a profligate man of letters seeking salvation in a Christianity which has lowered itself far ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge

... witnessed the abdication of the uxorious bigot Philip V. in 1724, and his resumption of the crown the next year at the instance of his proud and turbulent Parmesan wife. His bones rest in the church here, as he hated the Austrian line too intensely to share with them the gorgeous crypt of the Escorial. His wife, Elizabeth Farnese, lies under the same gravestone with him, as if unwilling to forego even in death that tremendous influence which her vigorous vitality had always exercised over ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay

... Patrick's performed his family devotions every morning regularly, but with such secrecy that the guests in his house were never in the least aware of the ceremony. There was no need surely why a church dignitary should assemble his family privily in a crypt, and as if he was afraid of heathen persecution. But I think the world was right, and the bishops who advised Queen Anne, when they counselled her not to appoint the author of the "Tale of a Tub" to ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various

... English cathedral. They are supposed to contain the bones of Kings Eadulph, Kinegils, Kenulf, Egbert, Canute, Rufus, Edmund, Edred, Queen Emma, and Bishops Wina and Alwyn. They no doubt got much mixed up when removed from the crypt by Henry de Blois, and again when the chests were broken open by the Parliamentarians, so that a detailed identification has been made impossible. It is now generally acknowledged that the bones ...
— Winchester • Sidney Heath

... are some subterranean vaults, not easily accessible, the presumed remains of Bishop Wilfrid's work, at Ripon and Hexham, of the latter part of the seventh century; but the crypt beneath the chancel of Repton Church, Derbyshire, the walls of which are constructed of hewn stone, is perhaps the most perfect specimen existing of a crypt in the Anglo-Saxon style, and of a stone vaulted roof sustained by piers, which are of singular character; the vaulting is without diagonal ...
— The Principles of Gothic Ecclesiastical Architecture, Elucidated by Question and Answer, 4th ed. • Matthew Holbeche Bloxam

... groined his arches and matched his beams: Slender and clear were his crystal spars 185 As the lashes of light that trim the stars; He sculptured every summer delight In his halls and chambers out of sight; Sometimes his tinkling waters slipt Down through a frost-leaved forest-crypt, 190 Long, sparkling aisles of steel-stemmed trees Bending to counterfeit a breeze; Sometimes the roof no fretwork knew But silvery mosses that downward grew; Sometimes it was carved in sharp relief 195 With quaint arabesques ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell

... Saxon church contains many relics of antiquity; as painted glass, ancient inscriptions, &c.; but the most remarkable feature of is interior is the celebrated crypt, or vault, formerly used as a depository for the venerated relics of canonized prelates. At the east end of this subterraneous retreat, from the window through which the light faintly gleams, the scene is interesting to astonishment. Here you ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 574 - Vol. XX, No. 574. Saturday, November 3, 1832 • Various

... friendship," as Stevenson puts it, is among the most beautiful things to contemplate in literary history. Before the theatre in Weimar, Germany, where the two men lived, stands a remarkable statue of the pair: and their coffins lie side by side in a crypt ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson

... Daisy'd prefer it underground. And your kids wouldn't have to explain why their father lives like a Red Indian. Not to mention the safety factor and insurance savings and a crypt church within easy slidewalk distance. Incidentally, we see the stars all the time, better ...
— The Creature from Cleveland Depths • Fritz Reuter Leiber

... where fraud, falsehood, and hate slink away— From the crypt in which error lies buried in chains— This foul apparition stalks forth to the day, And would ravage the land which ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various

... issue from them be included in the underlying idea. No, not even in the most Christian countries of to-day is such faith extinct. One has but to remember the famous well at Auray, or the sacred fountain in the crypt of the church at St. Melars, to which whole crowds of pilgrims still resort, to realise how far this is from being the case. Scotland herself, for all her centuries of Puritanism, has not wiped her slate quite clean; still less the countries ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer

... Christopher Wren, who did much to popularize the Renaissance style of building. [31] A great fire which destroyed most of old London during the reign of Charles II gave Wren an opportunity to rebuild about fifty parish churches, as well as St. Paul's Cathedral. His tomb in the crypt of the cathedral bears the famous inscription: Si monumentum requieris, circumspice: "If you seek ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER

... — N. receptacle; inclosure &c 232; recipient, receiver, reservatory. compartment; cell, cellule; follicle; hole, corner, niche, recess, nook; crypt, stall, pigeonhole, cove, oriel; cave &c (concavity) 252. capsule, vesicle, cyst, pod, calyx, cancelli, utricle, bladder; pericarp, udder. stomach, paunch, venter, ventricle, crop, craw, maw, gizzard, breadbasket; mouth. pocket, pouch, fob, sheath, scabbard, socket, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... without a check, for these paths are to the natives as marked as the king's highway is to us; insomuch that, in the days of the man-hunt, it was their labour rather to block and deface than to improve them. In the crypt of the wood the air was clammy and hot and cold; overhead, upon the leaves, the tropical rain uproariously poured, but only here and there, as through holes in a leaky roof, a single drop would fall, and make a spot upon my mackintosh. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... Landshut—and then diverge down, to the right, upon Salzburg—situated 'midst snow-clad mountains, and containing a LIBRARY within the oldest monastery in Austria. I am to be prepared to be equally struck with astonishment at the crypt of Freysing, and at the tower of Landshut—and after having "revelled and rioted" in the gloomy cloisters and sombre apartments of St. Peter's monastery, at Salzburg, I am instructed to take the Lake of Gmunden in my way to the Monastery of ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin

... tried to make the position of his only daughter, Maria Theresa, secure through a solemn treaty, written black on white, upon a large piece of parchment. But no sooner had the old emperor been deposited in the ancestral crypt of the Habsburg family, than the armies of Frederick were marching towards the Austrian frontier to occupy that part of Silesia for which (together with almost everything else in central Europe) Prussia clamored, on account of some ancient ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon

... of religion were not forgotten; and according to the custom of the times, and the doctrines of the Roman church, she endeavoured to propitiate the favour of Heaven by vows as well as prayers. In a small crypt, or oratory, adjoining to the chapel, was hung over an altar-piece, on which a lamp constantly burned, a small picture of the Virgin Mary, revered as a household and peculiar deity by the family of Berenger, one of whose ancestors had ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott

... hurrying, running here and there, Within the dark and stifling walls, dissent From every sound, and shoulder empty hods: 'The god's great altar should stand in the crypt Among our earth's foundations'—'The god's great altar Must be the last far coping of our work'— It should inaugurate the broad main stair'— 'Or end it'—'It must stand toward the East!' But here a grave contemptuous youth cries out 'Womanish babblers, how can we build ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various

... the other end of the town to that which I was stationed," Lionel said; "and I was just in time. You have a grand hiding place here. It looks like the crypt of a church." ...
— By England's Aid or The Freeing of the Netherlands (1585-1604) • G.A. Henty

... so that we presently discovered it to be a mummy; which naturally suggests that this portion of the cave, being dry and opening out of the great temple-like Auditorium as an alcove, could be converted into an imposing crypt. ...
— Cave Regions of the Ozarks and Black Hills • Luella Agnes Owen

... Mr. Spilsbury quotes one of the Harleian manuscripts, written in or about 1700, in which Inigo is named as the architect, and Vertue's engraving of 1751 also mentions him. The chapel is elevated on an open crypt, which was intended for a cloister. Butler's "Hudibras" speaks of the lawyers as waiting for customers between "the pillar-rows of Lincoln's Inn." There were three bays, divided by buttresses, each of which was surmounted by a stone vase, a picturesque ...
— Holborn and Bloomsbury - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant

... and when they had bad colds, they either got well, or died, according to their several destinies. Sor Tommaso might have saved some of them; but on the other hand, he might have helped some others rather precipitately from their cells to that deep crypt, closed, in the middle of the little church, by a single square flag of marble, having two brass studs in it, and bearing the simple inscription: 'Here lie the bones of the Reverend Sisters of the order of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Mount Carmel.' On the whole, it is doubtful whether the ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford

... of the family and servants of the house kept away from the gloomy spot, where the bones of the descendant of an ancient line of knights and gentlemen lay, awaiting their final consignment to the family crypt. No regrets attended them, save those of the poor woman who had hoped to be Sir Pitt's wife and widow and who had fled in disgrace from the Hall over which she had so nearly been a ruler. Beyond her and a favourite old ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray

... him forth," he says, "a herculean man, but our mad Babylon wore him and wasted him with all her engines, and it took her 12 years"; he died in Glasgow, aged 42, "hoary as with extreme age," and lies buried in a crypt of the cathedral ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... exuberant foliage. This passage brought us to a turfy knoll, upon which opened a deep recess in the mountain rock; a picturesque cavern, carpeted with moss, and showing, from some ancient, half obliterated carvings which here and there adorned its walls, that it had once served as a crypt or chapel, possibly in some time of ecclesiastical persecution. At the mouth of this cave, with startled eyes and pallid parted lips, stood a fair-haired lad, wrapped in the mantle described by the elder Raoul. One instant only he stood there; ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford

... prostrations, and pealing anthems, and rising incense, and all the surrounding magnificence of the scene, shall I tell you what was my thought? One sigh of contrition, one tear of repentance, one humble prayer to God, though breathed in a crypt of the darkest catacomb, is worth all the splendors of this gorgeous ceremonial and this ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various

... always a question of how far one may pardonably err on the side of indiscretion; and if I remember here a dinner in the basement of the House of Commons—in a small room of the architectural effect of a chapel in a cathedral crypt—it is with the sufficiently meek hope of keeping well within bounds which only the ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells

... 57), and by Mr. R.W. Billings more especially, who tacks to his account of this building an "Essay on the symbolical Evidences of the Temple Church, where the Templars are proved Gnostic Idolators, as alleged by Edward Clarkson, Esq." Had the learnedly hypothetic Austrian seen the engravings of the Crypt at Canterbury Cathedral (Archaeologia, viii. p. 74.), and Ledwick's remarks on it in conjunction with the carvings at Glendalloch (History of Ireland, p. 174.), or those of Grymbald's Crypt at Oxford, he might have been expected to have attributed their monstrosities ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 9, Saturday, December 29, 1849 • Various

... ivory roods Within the burning Castles of thy pain!— Thy mystic will no motion ever knew Outwith the splendid danger of extremes; Thy sorrowful refusals pass thee through The great concentrics of star-builded dreams, Unto the crypt of absolute ecstasy, To God or Nothing—where thine ...
— The Hours of Fiammetta - A Sonnet Sequence • Rachel Annand Taylor

... imagination seems to spire up like a Gothic cathedral over a prodigiously solid crypt of common sense, so that its lightness stands secure on the consciousness of ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis

... vain for Dr. Clarke's pagan remains, descended towards the Cave of the Prophets. We saw the well where Nehemiah found the fire of the altar, and then went up the Valley of Hinnom; first to the tomb called the Crypt of the Apostles, close to the Aceldama, or Field of Blood. We saw many other grottoes; one had [Greek: taes hagias Sion] inscribed upon it, as had another much farther up. Near this last was that ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell

... tribune, decorated with splendid mosaics of the sixth century,—biblical subjects, in all the stiff faithfulness of the holy old times. The marble floor is green and damp and slippery. Under the tribune is the crypt, where the body of St. Apollinaris used to lie (it is now under the high altar above); and as I desired to see where he used to rest, I walked in. I also walked into about six inches of water, in the dim, irreligious ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... and a century and a half later that sturdy Protestant, Henry, abjured the faith to which he had hitherto so tenaciously clung. In this church, too, the great Napoleon married Marie Louise in 1810; and his later namesake, some fifty years after, erected a mausoleum in the crypt, known as the Caveau Imperial, the burial vault of his dynasty, which, however, has never been ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun

... the intention of the original architect, that a portion of work should intervene between the summit of the capitals and this member. A capital to the north is remarkable for the eagles carved upon it, as if with some allusion to Roman power. But the most singular part of this church is the crypt under the apsis, a room about thirty feet long by fourteen wide, and sixteen high, of extreme simplicity, and remote antiquity. Round it runs a plain stone bench; and it is divided into two unequal parts by a circular arch, devoid of ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner

... Comte. Go to the mayor's office at Varengeville, where they have collected all the papers that used to be in the old parish of Ambrumesy, and you will learn from those papers, which belong to the eighteenth century, that there is a crypt below the chapel. This crypt doubtless dates back to the Roman chapel, upon the site of which the present ...
— The Hollow Needle • Maurice Leblanc

... a speaking-pipe, a post-box, and a mouldy smell from some forgotten crypt—an extra mouldy smell, mouldier than of yore. Lillie sniffs, projects one eye into nineteen hundred and ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 2 (of 3), 1857-1870 • Charles Dickens

... vision of Bishop Magnus, S. John appearing to him and commanding it to be built in honour of his father. The first structure probably dates from the seventh century; the present is fifteenth century, and beneath it is the ancient crypt adjoining the chapel of S. Tarasio, where in the twelfth century a hundred nuns seeking refuge from a fire were suffocated. In the chapel are ecclesiastical paintings, but no proper provision is made for seeing them. Eight Doges lie in ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas

... calm, but naturally indignant over such methods of warfare. The damage done is ridiculously small; the percentage of deaths and injuries insignificant. There exists, in every large city, a riffraff to get panicky: these are mostly foreigners; they seek the Tubes, and some the crypt of St. Paul's, for it is wise to get under shelter during the brief period of the raids, and most citizens obey the warnings of the police. It is odd, indeed, that more people are not hurt by shrapnel. The Friday ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... before the Pharaoh, may he live in health and strength [All kneel and remain with their faces on the ground during what follows, save an old man whom the High Priest calls to his side by a sign; and to whom he says in low tones] Let the man Satni be taken from the crypt where he is imprisoned [The old man bows] When I give the signal let them bring him here. While the Pharaoh goes in procession through the town let them do what I have told you [The old man bows] [To the others] Rise! [To the Pharaoh] Son of Ammon-Ra, bow down before him who represents ...
— Woman on Her Own, False Gods & The Red Robe - Three Plays By Brieux • Eugene Brieux

... Memory takes me back to the twilight of a spring Sunday several years ago, when in the wake of a cluster of market folks we wandered into the old Cathedral of St. Denis. Deep in the sombre shadows of the crypt a light gleamed faintly through a narrow slit in the stone wall. Approaching, we looked into a gloomy vault wherein, just visible by the ray of a solitary candle, ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd

... asleep. In the crypt beneath a ruined castle, in the midst of a dense forest, he is seated before a table round which his beard has twisted seven times. He will awake to drive away the crows which croak around ...
— The Story Of The Duchess Of Cicogne And Of Monsieur De Boulingrin - 1920 • Anatole France

... the cathedral and the church of Saint-Laurent had been closed, and in the crypt of the latter were found a great number of human bones; some of these were arranged so as to constitute the skeletons of fourteen women which, it was asserted, had been sequestered by the priests of the church, outraged, and murdered. Great was the virtuous ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton

... exquisite reliefs meet the eye, spoils evidently filched from the abandoned city of Paestum across the Salernian Bay and presented to the church by the Norman conquerors of Amalfi. After inspecting the classical bas-reliefs, we descend into the ancient crypt, which well-meaning artists have completely encased with a covering of precious marbles and garish frescoes of the Neapolitan school. It is a place of more than local sanctity, this modernized crypt, for the possession of the relics ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan

... four men; they were a sort of mysterious robber with four heads, operating on a grand scale on Paris; they were that monstrous polyp of evil, which inhabits the crypt of society. ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo

... find his last resting-place in this upper level of the interior of the pyramid: a narrow passage, hidden behind the slabbing of the second chamber, descended into a secret crypt, lined with granite and covered with a barrel-vaulted roof. The sarcophagus was a single block of blue-black basalt, polished, and carved into the form of a house, with a facade having three doors and three openings in the form of windows, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... crypt of St. Peter's, with only nineteen centuries bearing down on the groining, and the tombs of early popes and kings all about, is more impressive than the Valley of the Kings because it explains how and out of what an existing creed grew. But the Valley of the Kings ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling

... ghost. I must say he succeeded. He intended then to rent the house again, as before; and would then, of course have plenty of time to get whatever he had hidden. The house suited him admirably; for there was a passage—as he showed me afterward—connecting the dummy well with the crypt of the church beyond the garden wall; and these, in turn, were connected with certain caves in the cliffs, which went down to the beach beyond ...
— Carnacki, The Ghost Finder • William Hope Hodgson

... the flattened dome of the Rosary Church, of which the doors are beneath the terrace, placed upon broad flights of steps. Immediately above the dome is the entrance to the crypt of the basilica; and, above that again, reached by further flights of steps, are the doors of the basilica; and, above it, the roof of the church itself, with its soaring white ...
— Lourdes • Robert Hugh Benson

... freedom, and peace; and yet another teacher, graver than these. Sound preaching at last here, in Kirkstall crypt, concerning fate and life. Here, where the dark pool reflects the chancel pillars, and the cattle lie in unhindered rest, the soft sunshine on their dappled bodies, instead of priests' vestments; their white furry hair ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin

... spent at the house of his uncle, and among the Huguenot colony. Here also were many boys of his own age. These went to a school of their own, taught by the pastor of their own church, who held weekly services in the crypt of the cathedral, which had been granted to them for that purpose by the dean. While, with his English schoolfellows, he joined in sports and games; among these French lads the talk was sober and quiet. Scarce a week passed but some fugitive, going through ...
— Saint Bartholomew's Eve - A Tale of the Huguenot WarS • G. A. Henty

... the same above as below, except that the upper story has the dome c d; and the [Footnote: The church of San Sepolcro at Milan, founded in 1030 and repeatedly rebuilt after the middle of the XVIth century, still stands over the crypt of the original structure.] lower has the dome a b, and when you enter into the crypt, you descend 10 steps, and when you mount into the upper you ascend 20 steps, which, with 1/3 braccio for each, make 10 braccia, and this is ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci

... that she needn't suppose St. Damian's was a patch on the real Catholic churches, because it wasn't. She—Louie—had been at the Midnight Mass in Toulouse Cathedral on Christmas Eve. That was something like. And down in the crypt they had a 'Bethlehem'—the sweetest thing you ever saw. There were the shepherds, and the wise men, and the angels—dolls, of course, but their dresses were splendid, and the little Jesus was dressed in white satin, embroidered with ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... famous spires of Coventry, you behold a mediaeval edifice, in the basement of which is such a venerable and now deserted kitchen as I have above alluded to, and, on the same level, a cellar, with low stone pillars and intersecting arches, like the crypt of a cathedral. Passing up a well-worn staircase, the oaken balustrade of which is as black as ebony, you enter the fine old hall, some sixty feet in length, and broad and lofty in proportion. It is lighted by six windows of modern stained glass, on one side, and by the immense ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... where the thoughts are not yet shaped, are yet in the breast of the mother emotions. Louise de Seilles had prepared her to be strangely and deeply moved. The girl had a heart of many strings, of high pitch, open to be musical to simplest wandering airs or to the gales. This crypt of the recumbent sculptured figures and the coloured series of acts in the passage of the crowned Saint thrilled her as with sight of flame on an altar-piece of History. But this King in the lines of the Crucifixion ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... the machiavelian President's intrigues, was one of the curious figures which lie buried away in the provinces like old coins in a crypt. He was at that time a man of sixty-seven or thereabouts, but he carried his years well; he was very tall, and in build reminded you of the canons of the good old times. The smallpox had riddled his face with numberless dints, and spoilt ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac

... afore; and therfor he salued hem honurably, and askid of hem what feir lady that was, that come with hem? Anon as his lady herd his voys, and perceyved a certeyn signe in his frount,[FN570] she knew fully therby that it was her husbond; and therfore she ran to him, and crypt him and kyst him, and for joy fille doun to the erth, as she had be deaf. So aftir this passion, she was reised up; and then the maister seid to her, "Telle me, feir woman, whi thou clippest me, and kyssist me so?" She seid, "I am thi wif, that thou leftist with the maister of the ship; and ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton

... too! I had no chance to dream how we showed them the Church and the crypt, for I woke up. Ah, but 'tis long ago now!—sixty-two—sixty-three years! I wonder, is the stack of bones in the crypt now that was then? There was a big skull that ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan

... custom; so quiet, yet so thundering with echoes when a distant voice was raised or a door was shut,—echoes, not confined to the many low passages and empty rooms, but rumbling and grumbling till they were stifled in the heavy air of the forgotten Crypt where the Norman arches ...
— The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargin • Charles Dickens

... lingering about him of the antique organisation of Rome? For whatever cause, the mind of the people had been impressed; and yet, after all, the impression was more acute than lasting. The Cardinal's memory is a dim thing to-day. And he who descends into the crypt of that Cathedral which Manning never lived to see, will observe, in the quiet niche with the sepulchral monument, that the dust lies thick on the strange, the incongruous, the almost impossible object which, with its elaborations of dependent tassels, hangs down from the dim vault like some ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse

... this is doubtless an exaggerated story framed to tickle a stranger's ear, since if over a certain moderate percentage of silver is employed in the casting, the true melody of the bell is destroyed. A queer object is shown the visitor for a trifling fee, in the crypt of the church of San Diego, being the remains of a mummified or desiccated monk, sitting among a mass of skulls, rib and thigh bones, once belonging to human beings. The moral of this exhibition seemed a little too far-fetched to be interesting, and our small party ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou

... the sweaters, the chums leisurely retraced their way to the ruins. For half an hour or more they wandered around the remains, descending into the dark crypt, and running considerable risk in climbing to the summit of the tower. Since the spiral stone steps had vanished long ago, the only means of getting to the top was by climbing the gnarled stem of the ivy which ...
— The Submarine Hunters - A Story of the Naval Patrol Work in the Great War • Percy F. Westerman



Words linked to "Crypt" :   sepulture, church service, burial chamber, church, sepulchre, sepulcher



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