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Sarcophagus   /sɑrkˈɑfəgəs/   Listen
Sarcophagus

noun
(pl. L. sarcophagi, E. sarcophaguses)
1.
A stone coffin (usually bearing sculpture or inscriptions).






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Sarcophagus" Quotes from Famous Books



... white boughs of twisted fig-trees depressed her. Besides, these hills were steep, and Herminia felt the climbing. Nothing in city or suburbs attracted her soul. Etruscan Volumnii, each lolling in white travertine on the sculptured lid of his own sarcophagus urn, and all duly ranged in the twilight of their tomb at their spectral banquet, stirred her heart but feebly. St. Francis, Santa Chiara, fell flat on her English fancy. But as for Alan, he revelled all day long in his native element. He sketched every morning, among the huddled, strangled ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen

... became complicated in design; enrichment was considered before elegance. The old simple form of finger-ring varied much. Fig. 104 is given by Montfaucon. Fig. 105 is in the Londesborough collection, and was found upon the hand of a lady's skeleton, buried with her child in a sarcophagus discovered in 1846, in a field near Amiens, called "Le Camp de Caesar;" on two of her fingers were rings, one of which was set with ten round pearls, the other (here engraved) is of gold, in which is set ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt

... "When you grow up, you shall see the inside of it," Aunt Mary Ann used to say to me; and so I wondered, and wished, but all in vain. I must have the virtue of years before I could view the treasures of past magnificence so long entombed in that wooden sarcophagus. Once I saw the faded sisters bending over the trunk together, and, as I thought, embalming something in camphor. Curiosity impelled me to linger, but, under some pretext, I was ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various

... a side-door to the left, we found, opposite to the Jama, an old Egyptian sarcophagus of black granite, now used as a water trough, covered within and without with very ...
— The Caravan Route between Egypt and Syria • Ludwig Salvator

... rattled over the stones and was more or less of a sarcophagus, without its repose, we mounted the interminable Jacob's Ladder, and glanced in at our Antiquarian's. He was absent this morning; had gone a little way into the country, where he had heard of some Louis XIV. furniture ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 5, May, 1891 • Various

... outside, two small flights of steps, forming a semicircle, lead up to the top. The doors were not opened for us, and we were obliged to content ourselves with the assurance that, with the exception of a small, plain sarcophagus there was nothing inside. ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer

... Praxiteles; the "Dying Medusa;" the "Ludovisi Juno," which Winckelmann declares to be the finest head of Juno extant, a Greek work of the fourth century; a "Cupid and Psyche;" the two "Muses of Astronomy" and of "Epic Poetry," "Urania and Calliope;" "an Antoninus;" the largest sarcophagus known; a "Tragic Mask" (colossal) in rosso antico; a bust of "Marcus Aurelius" in bronze, and many ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting

... Dynasties. As regards the domestic architecture of the ancient kingdom, the evidences are few and obscure. Nevertheless, the stelae, tombs, and coffins of that period often furnish designs which show us the style of the doorways (fig. 24), and one Fourth Dynasty sarcophagus, that of Khufu Poskhu, is carved in the likeness of a house ...
— Manual Of Egyptian Archaeology And Guide To The Study Of Antiquities In Egypt • Gaston Camille Charles Maspero

... small; most of them are Jacobean in date. Very frequently they were made to contain the store of house-linen which a bride took to her husband upon her marriage. In the 17th century Boulle and his imitators glorified the marriage-coffer until it became a gorgeous casket, almost indeed a sarcophagus, inlaid with ivory and ebony and precious woods, and enriched with ormolu, supported upon a stand of equal magnificence. The Italian marriage-chests (cassone) were also of a richness which was never attempted in England. The main characteristics ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various

... take it away!" she cried, to Madame de Tourzel. "It is a dreadful reminder of the past, a terrible prophecy of the future. The stones of the Bastile, which the people destroyed, lie in this box! And the box itself, does it not look like a sarcophagus? And this sarcophagus bears the face of the king! Oh, the sorrow and woe to us unfortunate ones, who can not even receive gifts of love without seeing them obscured by recollections of hate, and who have no joys that have not bitter drops ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach

... embalming, and of presenting, at intervals, offerings of food and drink to the departed. The tomb contains a room for sacred services to the dead. The most ancient structures are sepulchers. They were the germ of the pyramid, in which rested the sarcophagus ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher

... syntax, excusable in a person of his circumstances. Now, suppose they—or he—the man whose brains are out—goes about with his coffin under his arm, like my worthy uncle? and suppose he blandly, politely, relentlessly insists upon reading to you, out of that octavo sarcophagus, passages which in his opinion prove that he is not only not dead, but immortal? If such a man be a stranger, snub him; if a casual acquaintance, met in an evil hour, there is still hope,—doors have locks, and there are two sides to ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various

... his passionate energy. He liked the governorship. He thought there were many things which he could do in another term, and he believed and so stated that the vice-presidency was a tomb. He thought that nobody could be resurrected when once buried in that sarcophagus. ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew

... felt only her presence. I fell on my knees. I flung my arms across the beautiful form—no colder to my embrace than had been the living woman! As I recoiled from the death-like touch, my eyes fell on the words carved on the face of the sarcophagus, and once more, it was like the voice that was hushed ...
— Told in a French Garden - August, 1914 • Mildred Aldrich

... bedraped columns. The bent gilt legs and backs of the furniture shone in indistinct curves. The tall marble fireplace had a cold and monumental whiteness. A grand piano stood massively in a corner, with dark gleams on the flat surfaces like a somber and polished sarcophagus. A ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad

... yet supposing they did not—and one couldn't have everything—was it not better to feel young somewhere rather than old everywhere? Time enough to be old everywhere again, inside as well as out, when she got back to her sarcophagus ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim

... over the Tomb of San Satiro, where it lay under an arcade to the right of the Altar. This tomb, in shape resembling the great vats used at vintage time, was more ancient than the Church and in all respects similar to a Pagan sarcophagus, except that the sign of the Cross was to be seen traced in three different places ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France

... the body of Lorenz as it lay in the sarcophagus of the royal palace, where it had been borne at the command of the Princess Yetive, he demanded audience with his son's betrothed, and it was with fear that she prepared for the trying ordeal, an interview with the grief-crazed old man. The castle was in a furore; its halls ...
— Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon

... later date his father died, like a good and dutiful son he caused to be erected for him a tomb of very honourable kind for those days, being a great sarcophagus cut from the solid stone, which to this day may be seen under the portico before the Church of S. Lorenzo in this city, on the right hand as you enter, with an inscription denoting it to be the tomb of Messer Nicolo Polo of the contrada of S. Gio. Chrisostomo. The ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa

... market; a circumstance which made that most conservative of chancellors, Lord Eldon, swear with bitter oaths that, if he were to begin life over again, he would begin it as an agitator. Tom Moore tells a pleasant story (one of the many pleasant stories embalmed in his vast sarcophagus of a diary) about a street orator whom he heard address a crowd in Dublin. The man's eloquence was so stirring that Moore was ravished by it, and he expressed to Sheil his admiration for the speaker. "Ah," said Sheil ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier

... Professor Cumont, its historical character, which had been doubted or denied, has received strong confirmation from an interesting discovery. In the crypt of the cathedral which crowns the promontory of Ancona there is preserved, among other remarkable antiquities, a white marble sarcophagus bearing a Greek inscription, in characters of the age of Justinian, to the following effect: "Here lies the holy martyr Dasius, brought from Durostorum." The sarcophagus was transferred to the crypt of the cathedral in 1848 from the church of San ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer

... not dangerous, and if he was alive the four of them could whip him, if he undertook to run things. What they were in duty bound to do was to let him out. No man could enjoy life screwed down in a sarcophagus like that. ...
— Peck's Sunshine - Being a Collection of Articles Written for Peck's Sun, - Milwaukee, Wis. - 1882 • George W. Peck

... Down in the south, where the heated sands of Egypt never cool, there in the rock-hewn tombs lie the mummies wrapped and lapped and wound about with a hundred yards of linen, in the hope, it may be, that spices and balm might retain within the sarcophagus some small fragment of human organism through endless ages, till at last the gift of life revisited it. Like a grain of wheat the mummy is folded in its cloth. And I do not know really whether I ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies

... exception of the skull, were reduced to a soft paste, or even entirely gone. At Adakh a fancy prompted me to dig into a small knoll near the ancient shell-heap; and here we found, in a precisely similar sarcophagus, the remains of a skeleton, of which also only the cranium retained sufficient consistency to admit of preservation. This inclosure, however, was filled with a dense peaty mass not reduced to mold, the result ...
— An introduction to the mortuary customs of the North American Indians • H. C. Yarrow

... Florence. Silvio executed a tomb for the Minerbetti in their chapel in the tramezzo[1] of the Church of S. Maria Novella, as well as any man could, since, in addition to the beautiful shape of the sarcophagus, there are carved upon it various shields, helmet-crests, and other fanciful things, and all with as much design as could be desired in such a work. Being at Pisa in the year 1528, Silvio made there an Angel that was wanting over a column ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 05 ( of 10) Andrea da Fiesole to Lorenzo Lotto • Giorgio Vasari

... feet wide, having at the end two iron steps ascending to an iron door, and this leads into a semicircular gallery; at its furthest extremity is a second iron door, which completes the gallery, and ten feet further an immense massive door enclosing the dungeon. In the midst of this sarcophagus is a well, the mouth of which is level with the ground, and half closed by two flag-stones; to this is given the name of the well of blood, because the heads of those who are executed in the dungeon are thrown into it. In the same tower with this dungeon is a ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 10, Issue 285, December 1, 1827 • Various

... mummy, with its stand and its two coffins, into a great stone box called a sarcophagus, and this was fastened and plastered up so as to seem like one ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton

... he is in his grave," were the words of Solon. Here was a strong fresh proof of their truth. Every corpse is a sphinx of immortality. The sphinx in this sarcophagus might unveil its own mystery in the words which the living had himself ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen

... Phlegethon; while the distant occasional growl had grown into a frequent thunderous muttering that deepened with every repetition, and already began to shake the windows in its reverberations. Two ladies in deep mourning, who had been hovering like black spectres around a granite sarcophagus, where they deposited and arranged the customary Sabbath arkja of white flowers, concluded their loving tribute to the sleeper, and left the churchyard; and save the continual challenge of the thunder drawing nearer, the perfect stillness ominous and dread, ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson

... buried it out of sight. It was accidentally discovered in 1780, in consequence of a peasant digging in the vineyard to make a cellar, and breaking through a part of the vaulted roof of the tomb. Then was brought suddenly to light the celebrated sarcophagus of plain peperino stone, which contained the remains of the Roman consul, Lucius Scipio Barbatus, after having been undisturbed for nearly twenty-two centuries. Several other sarcophagi belonging to members of the family ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan

... conducted to the crypt of the Pantheon, he is first taken to the tomb of Victor Hugo. The sarcophagus on each side is draped with the red, white and blue of France and the stars and stripes of America. With uncovered heads, we behold the mass of flowers and wreaths, and our minds go back to Eighteen Hundred Eighty-five, when the body of the chief citizen of Paris lay in state at the Pantheon ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard

... there could be no postal communication for many days. The laird judged it better, therefore, as soon as the shell arrived, to place the body in a death-chapel prepared for it by nature herself. With their spades he and Cosmo fashioned the mound, already hollowed in sport, into the shape of a hugh sarcophagus, then opened wide the side of it, to receive the coffin as into a sepulchre in a rock. The men brought it, laid it in, and closed the entrance again with snow. Where Cosmo's hollow man of light had shone, lay the body of the wicked ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald

... at the gate of the small garden that enclosed the place of burial, only the immediate relatives follow-ing the bearers into the tomb. A slender wax candle, such as is used in Catholic churches, burnt at the foot of the uncovered sarcophagus, casting a dim glow oyer the centre of the apartment, and deepening the shadows which seemed to huddle together in the corners. By this flickering light the coffin was placed in its granite shell, the heavy slab laid over it reverently, and the oaken ...
— A Struggle For Life • Thomas Bailey Aldrich

... Sinope had received a Roman colony, and the colonists had part of the city and of the territory. The word Colonia in Greek ([Greek: koloneia]) appears on a sarcophagus which was seen by Hamilton in ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long

... me. It recalled to my mind a phrase I had once read in the translation of an inscription found in an Egyptian sarcophagus—"The peace of the morning befriend thee, and the light of the sunset and the happiness of the sky." The words rang in my ears with an odd familiarity, like the verse of some poem loved and learned by ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli

... with Donatello! Bacchus, too, a rosy flush diffusing itself over his time-stained surface, could come down from his pedestal, and offer a cluster of purple grapes to Donatello's lips; because the god recognizes him as the woodland elf who so often shared his revels. And here, in this sarcophagus, the exquisitely carved figures might assume life, and chase one another round its verge with that wild merriment which is so strangely represented on those old burial coffers: though still with some subtile allusion to death, carefully ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... and wreaths of red roses. All round, innumerable lights gleamed out of the heavy shadow, in which the smoke of Arabian gums seemed like the folds of angels' robes, and the paintings on the walls visions of Paradise. Priests, clad in white, were prostrate at the foot of the sarcophagus. The hymns they sang with the people expressed the delight of suffering, and mingled, in a triumphal mourning, so much joy with so much grief, that Thais, in listening to them, felt the pleasures of life and the terrors of death flowing, at the same ...
— Thais • Anatole France

... admiration. It was with a peculiar feeling that I trod the old bridge, from which St. John of Nepomuk was cast into the Moldau for refusing to publish the confession of King Wenceslaus' consort. {7} On the opposite bank I mounted the Hradschin, and paid a visit to the cathedral, in which a large sarcophagus, surrounded and borne by angels, and surmounted by a canopy of crimson damask, is dedicated to the memory of the saint. The monument is of silver, and the worth of the metal alone is estimated at 80,000 florins. The church itself is not spacious, but is ...
— Visit to Iceland - and the Scandinavian North • Ida Pfeiffer

... and passing through a small gate on the top of the bank, you at once enter the domain of Stoke Park, and are admitted to a full view of the church, which stands at a short distance, but almost immediately within the gate, are particularly struck by the appearance of a grand sarcophagus, erected by Mr. Penn to the memory of Gray, in the year 1779. It is a lofty structure, in the purest style of architecture; and a tolerable idea of it, and the surrounding scenery, may be obtained from the cut at the head of this article, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various

... in the confusion of impressions, not new mainly, but oddly revived (the same things transposed by time into new keys), my most vivid impression should be of something so impersonal, so unimportant, as an antique sarcophagus serving as base to a mediaeval tomb. Impressions? Scarcely. My mind seems like an old blotting-book, full of fragments of sentences, of words suggesting something, which refuses to absorb any ...
— The Spirit of Rome • Vernon Lee

... Charles IV.,—the lady who so gallantly bestrides her war-horse, in the uniform of a colonel, in Goya's picture,—coming down those slippery steps with the sure footing of feverish insanity, during a severe illness, scratched Luisa with the point of her scissors and marked the sarcophagus for her own. All there was good of her is interred with her bones. Her frailties live ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay

... discoveries and information. Notice, it will be found, has been taken even of the stela of Meneptah, recently disinterred by Professor Petrie, on which the name of the Israelites is engraved. At Elephantine, I found, a short time since, on a granite boulder, an inscription of Khufuankh—whose sarcophagus of red granite is one of the most beautiful objects in the Gizeh Museum—which carries back the history of the island to the age of the pyramid-builders of the fourth dynasty. The boulder was subsequently concealed under the southern side of the city-wall, and as ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... of all was now Anne's bed. Sir Julius, son to Sir Ferdinando, had had it made in Venice against his wife's first lying-in. Early seicento Venice had expended all its extravagant art in the making of it. The body of the bed was like a great square sarcophagus. Clustering roses were carved in high relief on its wooden panels, and luscious putti wallowed among the roses. On the black ground-work of the panels the carved reliefs were gilded and burnished. The golden roses twined in spirals up the four pillar-like ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley

... add that it does not appear to have been uncommon amongst the antients to put allegorical figures on funeral vases. In the Pamphili palace at Rome there is an elaborate representation of Life and of Death, on an antient sarcophagus. In the first Prometheus is represented making man, and Minerva is placing a butterfly, or the soul, upon his head. In the other compartment Love extinguishes his torch in the bosom of the dying figure, ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin

... lungs, and they kept to work at him till they drove him into a mountain fever, and finally into a metallic sarcophagus. ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye

... thick gold leaf and the eyes made of enamel. This again was placed in other cases, sometimes three or four in number, all similarly ornamented with painting and gilding, and the whole inclosed in a sarcophagus or coffin of wood or stone, profusely decorated with painting and sculpture. It was then handed over to the family of the deceased, and afterward taken in solemn procession across the sacred lake, followed by the mourning relatives throwing dust ...
— The Cat of Bubastes - A Tale of Ancient Egypt • G. A. Henty

... by Arabs who had plundered the Persian remains—but between and after those findings the oblivious sands had swept over it, blotting it from the world, choking the entrance hall and the shafts, seeping through half-sealed entrances and packing its dry drift over the rifled sarcophagus of the king and over the withered mummy of the young girl in the ante-room. The tombs had been cleared now, down almost to the stone floors, and Ryder was busy with the drifts that had lodged in the crevices about the entrance ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley

... of their apostasy they had already begun to indulge in hopes that the maidens would be late at the fountain and leave them some time to loiter by the old aqueduct that brought the water in a tiny stream to fall into a marble trough: an erstwhile sarcophagus, maybe, Azariah said, as he gathered some water out of it with his hands and drank, telling Joseph ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore

... indicate that travelling and the power of transfer were practised, and the skeleton within would indicate the physical formation of the men of that day. We have selected here a case of an ordinary grave, but how much stronger would the case be were we to take a sarcophagus of Egypt, enclosing a mummy? The inscription, the fabric of the cere-cloth, the chemical substances with which it is impregnated, as well as those by which the body is preserved, and the relics commonly deposited ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various

... had seen him amid the brilliant society of Naples, or amid the awful judicial ordeal to which he had just been subjected, and which he had undergone with such coolness and audacity, would not have recognized the humble and trembling man, who knelt before a sarcophagus of black marble surmounted with the coronet and arms of the Monte-Leoni. The Count knelt at the tomb of his father—his father, who was his religion and his faith. He would have thought himself unworthy of his protection had he not gone immediately on his release to worship ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various

... within the great marble dome a hanging lamp as a memorial to his own wife. It seemed like a shocking piece of presumption—much as if the president of France should hang a memorial to one of his own family over the sarcophagus of Napoleon, or a president of the United States should do the same at Washington's tomb at Mount Vernon. It seemed like an inexpensive way of diverting the most beautiful structure of the world to ...
— In Africa - Hunting Adventures in the Big Game Country • John T. McCutcheon

... anything slowly painted on the once mystic and now commonplace papyri of ancient, ancient Egypt, held on the mummy's withered breast? In that elaborate ritual, in the procession of the symbols, in the winged circle, in the laborious sarcophagus? Nothing; absolutely nothing! Before the fierce heat of the human furnace, the papyri smoulder away as paper smoulders under a lens in the sun. Remember Nineveh and the cult of the fir-cone, the turbaned and bearded ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies

... is of white marble, a solid mass large enough to support a coffin; upon that a sarcophagus rests. The remains are not enclosed within. As I stepped aside I found I had been standing upon a slab marked 'Isaac Newton,' beneath which the great man's ...
— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell

... found, with ruined baths, and mosaics and frescoes, with various pieces of sculpture, some perfect and of most excellent style. There is also a sarcophagus with bas-relief of a Bacchic procession, remarkably fine. The government has bought all for the Museum, and intends spending a large sum in building a basilica over the remains of the old one, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various

... towed them to shore. There was not a sound from the reef, not a sound from the land. The slender lacing mangroves in the swamp looked like upright serpents, black and petrified, and the Fort on the high bluff might have been a sarcophagus full of dead men but for the challenge ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton

... An ancient Sarcophagus of a young child serves for the fountain to this convent. The beautiful Palm-tree of which Rome boasts, is the only tree of any sort in the garden of these monks; but they pay no attention to external objects. Their discipline is too rigorous to allow any kind of latitude to the mind. Their looks ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael

... second-century temple, and its tall battlemented tower harks back to a tenth-century chateau fort. The interior is striking: double aisles, simple nave with tiers of arches of the tenth century, a choir with richly carved oak stalls, a fourth-century sarcophagus for altar, and a font and lectern of the ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons

... myself who I am. I take my way feebly up the stone steps to the grated door of the tomb. I look through. There lies the sarcophagus which contains the bones of Stephen A. Douglas. There was no truer, braver man in his time, ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters

... of their two daughters: the baby Sophia only lived three days, but her sister Mary had reached the fascinating age of two years when a slow fever carried her off. Between the two little sisters, his own aunts, Charles II. placed a heavy stone sarcophagus, containing some bones found in the Tower, near the room where the boy princes, Edward V. and Richard of York, are said to have been smothered, and which are most probably their remains. Edward was born in the precincts, where his mother took sanctuary from her husband's Lancastrian ...
— Westminster Abbey • Mrs. A. Murray Smith

... gallant soldier who so long ago perished there in battle. In Cathedral and Parthenon, under the dome of the Invalides, in the sequestered parish church or the rural cemetery, what image so accords with the sad reality and the serene hope of humanity, as the adequate marble personification on sarcophagus and beneath shrine, in mausoleum ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various

... imprisoned in a huge platter, of no ordinary dimensions you may be assured, since I could lie at length in it, and when I was entombed, as it were, in walls of standing crust, and a huge cover of pastry, the whole constituting a sort of sarcophagus, of size enough to have recorded the epitaph of a general officer or an archbishop on the lid. Sir, notwithstanding the conveniences which were made to give me air, it was more like being buried alive than aught else which I could ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott

... the sight, soon arrested her majesty's attention. She singled out from their number an old salt, whose bare arms and feet, and exposed breast, were covered with as many inscriptions in India ink as the lid of an Egyptian sarcophagus. Notwithstanding all the sly hints and remonstrances of the French officers, she immediately approached the man, and pulling further open the bosom of his duck frock, and rolling up the leg of his wide trousers, she gazed with admiration at the bright ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville

... to the dead lion by ordering the papers not to comment on his death. The church laid an interdict on his burial in consecrated ground,—an hour or two too late, as it proved. His body, minus the heart, was transferred in 1791 to the Pantheon, and when, in 1864, the sarcophagus was opened with the purpose of restoring the heart to the other remains, it was found to be empty. In the stirring days of France the body had by some one, in some way, ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris

... once ornamented this portion of the great city; and to the right of this are the remains of some mighty structure of stone and brick. In some places, where the paving blocks have been taken up, a water course beneath is disclosed. While walking around in the ruins, I saw a fine marble sarcophagus, or coffin, ornamented with carvings of bulls' heads and heavy festoons of ...
— A Trip Abroad • Don Carlos Janes

... in his will that the Hofkirche should be built, and in the centre of the nave he is represented kneeling by a sumptuous bronze statue, surrounded by the statues I had come to see. Jimmie declared that the marble sarcophagus upon which the statue of Maximilian is placed was "worth the price of admission," but Jimmie's opinion is of no value except when he is accidentally right, as in this instance. He studied this and the monument of Andreas ...
— Abroad with the Jimmies • Lilian Bell

... On the 15th (or 16th) of February I had an attack of apoplexy, or epilepsy,—the physicians have not exactly decided which, but the alternative is agreeable. My constitution, therefore, remains between the two opinions, like Mahomet's sarcophagus between the magnets. All that I can say is, that they nearly bled me to death, by placing the leeches too near the temporal artery, so that the blood could with difficulty be stopped, even with caustic, I am supposed ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore

... "was found about the middle of the sixteenth century enclosed in a marble sarcophagus in an underground chamber which was located two and a half miles out of Rome. It was taken to the Barbarini Palace, but later the princess of that noble family, wishing to raise money, sold it to Sir William Hamilton, who chanced to be at that time the English ambassador to Naples. From him it ...
— The Story of Glass • Sara Ware Bassett

... acrimonious conversation with Mrs. Lawrence on the subject of twopennyworth of coal. At the same time I haven't the remotest intention of paying twopence extra for those two lumps of excess luggage, so to speak. So you can just trot that sarcophagus away, like the darling you are, and bring me back my ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler

... start of surprise, as she rose from prayer, that she saw the cavalier sitting on one end of the marble sarcophagus, with an air so composed and melancholy that he might have been taken for one of the marble knights that sometimes ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various

... dried up mummy of an ancient king, Tabnith, who lived four centuries before the time of Christ. An inscription on this in Egyptian hieroglyphics pronounced a curse upon the man who should despoil the tomb, but the dreadful warning was not deciphered until the casket reached the Museum. Another sarcophagus, called the Satrap's, cut out of Parian marble, somewhat resembles a Grecian temple in form. On the sides are depicted, in marble carvings, a funeral banquet, a governor on his throne, a hunting scene with a lion at bay, a frightened ...
— A Trip to the Orient - The Story of a Mediterranean Cruise • Robert Urie Jacob

... contrast between the Greek and the Christian idea of death. It is strikingly presented in a visible form on a fine antique sarcophagus in the gallery of Florence, which exhibits, in relief, the whole series of ceremonies attending a wedding in ancient times, from the formal offer to the evening when Hymen's torch lights the happy couple home. ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Studies in Pessimism • Arthur Schopenhauer

... neglected them. There was another Roman settlement, namely, at Westminster, where the abbey stands on the site of some older buildings. Roman concrete forms the foundation of the older part of the church and the dark cloisters. The pavement of a dwelling was found under the nave, and a sarcophagus, bearing a rudely carved cross, showed that the town was not walled. The Romans possibly built here on account of the ford, and we may be sure that at times, when the only bridge was under repair or unfinished, the crossing here for the ancient road, which the Saxons named the ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various

... A GUS, (SARCO, flesh; and PHAGUS, that which eats or devours,) is made up of two Greek words, signifying together flesh-eating, and was applied by the ancients to a species of stone, used for making coffins. Hence, sarcophagus came to signify a stone-coffin. The form of the plural in Latin, ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders

... been misread. Moin-ud-din gives as the words at the north side of the tomb, script characters 'the unbelieving nations', whereas Muh. Latif (Agra, p. 111) says that the words 'on the head of the sarcophagus' are script characters 'He is the everlasting. He is sufficient.' It will be observed that the characters in the ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman

... of the great father of our nation, after a slumber of thirty-eight years, were again exposed by the circumstance of placing his body once and forever within the marble sarcophagus made by Mr. Struthers, of Philadelphia. The body, as Mr. Struthers related, was still in a wonderful state of preservation, the high pale brow wore a calm and serene expression, and the lips, pressed together, had ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing

... and imperial portraits. It was also rich in relics, some of them brought by Gennadius from the church of the Holy Apostles and from other sanctuaries lost to the Greeks. Among the interesting objects shown to visitors was a small rude sarcophagus inscribed with the imperial eagle and the name of the Emperor Alexius Comnenus.[239] It was so plain and rough that Schweigger speaks of it as too mean to contain the dust of a German peasant.[240] But that any sarcophagus professing to hold the remains ...
— Byzantine Churches in Constantinople - Their History and Architecture • Alexander Van Millingen

... occupying the centre of the chapel, but it just misses a more interesting, if much less beautiful, tomb, that of Stephen Langton, the courageous Archbishop who took such a leading part in forcing John to sign Magna Charta. The plain sarcophagus is partly within and partly outside the chapel, for when it was rebuilt in the fourteenth century it was extended so much to the east that it became necessary either to move Langton's tomb or else to make an arch in the wall, and the latter course was taken, with the curious ...
— Beautiful Britain • Gordon Home

... wooden door, and on knocking were admitted to the garden of an old suppressed convent. Crossing the grounds, we reached the building itself, where, next to the outer wall, we were shown a large open sarcophagus of reddish stone, the sides about four or five inches thick, and partly broken. The inside was strewn with visiting-cards—travellers from all parts of the world paying this tribute of respect to the memory of the unfortunate girl-bride. There were ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux

... he could see that the church itself was a quaint and wonderful preservation of the past. For four centuries it had been sacred to the tombs of the Dorntons and their effigies in brass and marble, yet, as Randolph glanced at the stately sarcophagus of the unknown ticket of leave man, its complacent absurdity, combined with his nervousness, made him almost hysterical. Yet again, it seemed to him that something of the mystery and inviolability of the past now invested that degraded dust, and it would be an equal impiety ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte

... the old General," said the aged negro, as he touched lightly the sarcophagus with his cane; "that, yonder, is his wife," pointing to a similar one at ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams

... of the demi-monde alike became scholars. There is a story told by Infessura which illustrates the temper of the times with singular felicity. On April 18, 1485, a report circulated in Rome that some Lombard workmen had discovered a Roman sarcophagus while digging on the Appian Way. It was a marble tomb, engraved with the inscription "Julia, Daughter of Claudius," and inside the coffer lay the body of a most beautiful girl of fifteen years, preserved by precious unguents from corruption ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various

... a decrepit woman naming herself wife when she is only a limpet of vitality, with drugs for blood, hanging-on to blast the healthy and vigorous! I remember old Colney's once, in old days, calling that kind of marriage a sarcophagus. It was to me. There I lay—see myself lying! wasting! Think what you can good of her, by all means! From her bed! despatches that Jarniman to me from her bedside, with the word, that she cannot in her conscience allow—what imposition was ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... beautiful and secured by green velvet binding, with embossed clasps and corners of solid silver, washed with gold. Each volume is preserved in a silken cover—and the whole is kept inviolate from the impurities of bibliomaniacal miasmata, in a sarcophagus-shaped piece of furniture of cedar and mahogany. What is the pleasure experienced by the most resolute antiquary, when he has obtained a peep at the inmost sarcophagus of the largest pyramid of Egypt, compared with that which a tasteful bibliomaniac enjoys upon ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin

... the reader that in Egypt men should die. And there they lay, the brown sons and daughters of Mizraim, side by side with their gods, wrapt with them in the same stoney, dreamless slumber. One mummy struck me much. It lay in a stone sarcophagus, the same in which the hands of wife or child mayhap had placed it; and there it had slept on undisturbed through all the changes and hubbub of four thousand years. Over the face was drawn a thin cloth, through which the ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie

... fortunate for us that the French use the basements of their churches for burying purposes, for by crawling behind a marble sarcophagus we found a sort of cave made by the debris. Owing to that protection the grenades the enemy threw into the cellar did no harm whatever, save to waken Tish from a ...
— More Tish • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... Englishman, known as Captain Dick, who, after having completed a cottage to live in, carried out the serious idea of erecting a morgue, or a mausoleum, as a means of final earthly deposit upon dissolution. This queer-looking dog-house might have become a sarcophagus had it not been for one thing, viz., Captain Dick, one dark and stormy night, having visited one of the neighboring resorts where he had pressed his cordial intemperately, determined to return to his solitary home. In vain the danger was urged upon ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James

... saved the solitary tree, Piang could not imagine, until he discovered a small diamond-shaped cut in the bark. He drew back with a shudder. Two crossed arrows were carved within the diamond. This was another Dyak custom so hateful to the Mohammedan; the tree was the sarcophagus of some Borneo chief. A century must have passed since the burial, for the incision was almost obliterated, but Piang knew that the mummy of his enemy reposed in savage dignity within the heart of the tree, and that the Dyak belief ...
— The Adventures of Piang the Moro Jungle Boy - A Book for Young and Old • Florence Partello Stuart

... said that Nicola Pisano revived Art through study of the antique; his models, even, are pointed out, particularly a sarcophagus, said to have been brought to Pisa in the eleventh century from Greece. But this sarcophagus, wherever it came from, is not Greek, but late Roman work; and we find in Nicola no mark of direct Greek influence, but only of the late Roman and early Christian sarcophagus-sculptures. In the reliefs ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various

... pyramid ended in a funeral urn surmounted by a crown of fire. On the front of the pyramid were placed the arms of the duke, and medallions commemorating the most remarkable events of his life borne by genii. Under the obelisk was placed the sarcophagus containing the remains of the marshal, at the corners of which were trophies composed of banners taken from his enemies, and innumerable silver candelabra were placed on the steps by which the platform was reached. The oaken altar, ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant

... better than dining at the "Sarcophagus,"' thinks I to myself, at which Club Wagley and I had intended to take our meal; and so we accepted the kindly invitation, whence ...
— The Book of Snobs • William Makepeace Thackeray

... herself was brought in a coffin more enormous than that which inclosed the gigantic frame of her husband, Prince George, to the vault of her sister Mary. George II. and Queen Caroline repose in a black marble sarcophagus in the centre of the Chapel of Henry VII. And now Westminster Abbey ceased to be a burial-place of English kings and queens. George III. constructed a vault at Windsor for himself and his numerous family, and there his descendants have ...
— Little Folks (Septemeber 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various

... indicative of a cemetery. Hewn stones were frequent, and mixed with them were occasional entablatures and vases from which the ages had not yet entirely worn the fine chiselling. At length an immense uncovered sarcophagus barred the way. The master stopped by it to study the heavens; when he found the north star, he gave the signal to his followers, and moved under the trail of ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace

... circular pit twenty feet deep and forty feet wide, enclosed by a balustrade of Italian marble, you see the sarcophagus, in which is inclosed all that was mortal of the great Napoleon. The mosaic pavement at the bottom of the pit represents a wreath of laurels; on it rests the sarcophagus, consisting of a single block, highly polished, of reddish brown granite, fourteen feet high, thirteen ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs

... same thought is found in George Whetstone's epitaph on the good lord Dyer, 1582: Et semper bonus ille bonis fuit, ergo bonorum Sunt illi demum pectora sarcophagus. J.B.] ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson

... tumbling upon each other; but the lead, of which the lower half of the fountain is composed—as the reservoir of the water—might have been advantageously exchanged for marble. The lion at each corner of the pedestal, squirting water into a sarcophagus-shaped reservoir, has a very absurd appearance. Upon the whole, this fountain is well deserving of particular attention. The inscription upon it is FONTIVM NYMPHIS; but perhaps, critically speaking, it ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin

... high relief being still clearly outlined. Here had once been entombed the ashes of Caius Longinis, a centurion of the third legion. Sit sibi terra levis! One of the door-posts had in ancient times served as a milestone, and the broad bench before the house was made from the lid of a sarcophagus, bearing an inscription which informed the archaeologist what saffron-haired Roman beauty had, centuries before, been laid ...
— Manasseh - A Romance of Transylvania • Maurus Jokai

... her tea, managed to eat a little of the dry but wholesome food, and found herself capable of getting up. It was the strangest bedroom! she thought. Everything was cut out of the live rock. The dressing-table might have been a sarcophagus! She kneeled by the bedside, and tried to thank God. Then she opened the door. The chief rose at ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald

... of Alexander was removed from Babylon to Alexandria by Ptolemy Soter, one of his generals, subsequently King of Egypt, and was interred in a golden coffin. The sarcophagus in which the coffin was enclosed has been in the British Museum since 1802—a circumstance to which BYRON makes a happy allusion in the closing lines of ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson

... infinite skill with lacelike tracery. But their bodies are actually buried in the basement, and, the guides assert, in coffins of solid gold. She for whom this tomb was built occupies the center. Her lord and lover, because he was a man and an emperor, was entitled to a larger sarcophagus, a span loftier and a span longer. Both of the cenotaphs are embellished with inlaid and carved Arabic inscriptions. Upon his, in Persian characters, are written ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis

... Columns, arches, pyramids, what are they but heaps of sand; and their epitaphs, but characters written in the dust? What is the security of a tomb, or the perpetuity of an embalmment? The remains of Alexander the Great have been scattered to the wind, and his empty sarcophagus is now the mere curiosity of a museum. "The Egyptian mummies, which Cambyses or time hath spared, avarice now consumeth; Mizraim cures wounds, and Pharaoh is sold for balsams." [Footnote: ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various

... nature, however, retirement was as essential as routine. He was one of those outwardly calm and inwardly excitable and nervous people we sometimes encounter without detecting the fire beneath the marble, the ever-burning lamp in the sarcophagus, unless we lift the lid of rock to find it—an effort scarcely worth the making in any case, for at best it lights only ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield

... but they seemed to have lost their value; and it was not till the thirteenth century that any attempt to imitate these remains of antiquity was made. Nicola Pisano, about the year 1231, taking for his model an ancient sarcophagus at Pisa, which contained the remains of Beatrice, mother of the Countess Matilda, sculptured an urn—a feat in those days so extraordinary, as to have conferred upon him the title of Nicolas of the Urn. This artist, in the words of Lanzi, "was the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various

... imitation porphyry, takes the form of a sarcophagus, beneath an arch the soffit of which is adorned with red and white roses. Corinthian pillars of black marble support ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: A Short Account of Romsey Abbey • Thomas Perkins

... famous monuments of Semitic art date from the Persian and Hellenistic periods, and if we glance at them in this connexion it is in order to illustrate during its most obvious phase a tendency of which the earlier effects are less pronounced. In the sarcophagus of the Sidonian king Eshmu-'azar II, which is preserved in the Louvre,(1) we have indeed a monument to which no Semitic sculptor can lay claim. Workmanship and material are Egyptian, and there is no doubt that it was sculptured in Egypt and transported ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King

... the inscription written on the sarcophagus (Plate V.), at the extremity of which this angel is sculptured. It stands in an open recess in the rude brick wall of the west front of the church of St. John and Paul at Venice, being the tomb of the two doges, father and son, Jacopo and Lorenzo Tiepolo. This ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin

... This monument was dedicated June 14th, 1888, nearly a century after the death of the one it is intended to commemorate, and is in the shape of a beautiful bronze statue, representing Putnam on his war-horse, beneath the pedestal supporting which, embedded in the foundation, is a sarcophagus containing his ashes. It stands near the old church which Putnam helped to build, and not far distant from the field in which he was plowing when the call came from Lexington and Concord. Dr. Dwight's original epitaph is inscribed ...
— "Old Put" The Patriot • Frederick A. Ober

... were growing in the basin of a fountain which had been filled up; while among the mass of weeds, some orange-trees with golden, ripening fruit alone indicated the tracery of the paths which they had once bordered. Between two huge laurel-bushes, against the right-hand wall, there was a sarcophagus of the second century—with fauns offering violence to nymphs, one of those wild baccanali, those scenes of eager passion which Rome in its decline was wont to depict on the tombs of its dead; and this marble ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola

... the minds of men as to be vividly present in imagination to be affixed as typical stamps on their theories concerning the judgments of God and the future world. This process is perhaps nowhere more distinctly shown than in the belief of the ancient Egyptians. Before the sarcophagus containing the mummy was ferried over the holy lake to be deposited in the tomb, the friends and relatives of the departed, and his enemies and accusers, if he had any, together with forty two assessors, each of whom had the oversight of a particular sin, assembled ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger

... Paris to young Foch, in all the depression he found there, was undoubtedly the great Dome des Invalides, where, bathed in an unearthly radiance and surrounded by faded battle flags, lies the great porphyry sarcophagus ...
— Foch the Man - A Life of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Armies • Clara E. Laughlin

... have poured forth on this subject, it is dangerous even to mention the tomb. A modern traveller, in twelve lines, burdens the poor little island with the following titles, — it is a grave, tomb, pyramid, cemetery, sepulchre, catacomb, sarcophagus, ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin

... sarcophagus fit for an emperor, that he might be buried like a simple citizen, in the ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed

... to attend upon this burial were not yet at an end; for at the time when they were laying the corpse in the sarcophagus, and were bending it with some force, which they were compelled to do, in consequence of the coffin having been made too short, the body, which was extremely corpulent, burst, and so intolerable a stench issued from the grave, that ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XX. No. 556., Saturday, July 7, 1832 • Various

... pattern as all other Portuguese churches, a long, whitewashed, barn-shaped building. The object of my devotion, the tomb, is contained in a recess on a side of the altar dedicated to Xavier, and consists of a magnificently carved silver sarcophagus, enriched with alto relievi, representing different acts of the Saint's life. Inside is a gold box containing the remains of the Saint, shown to people with a great feast once ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins

... Mexican blanket—whose pattern of Aztec design bears striking resemblance to the hieroglyphs of Egypt—this closed and corded round her figure, she might easily be mistaken for a mummy, one of Pharaoh's daughters taken out of the sarcophagus in which for centuries she has slept. Alone, the face with its soft white skin, negatives the comparison: though it appears bloodless, too. The eyes tell nought; their lids are closed, the long dark lashes alone showing ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid

... of the windows tonight. From roof to basement not a light twinkled in any part of the great building. Its huge mass loomed up dark and sullen amid the trees which surrounded it, looking more like some giant sarcophagus than a ...
— The Mystery of Cloomber • Arthur Conan Doyle

... exquisitely carved, lay about, and some of the tall windows of marble lace were punctured, as if the fist of some angry god had beaten through. Under the decayed portico stood an iron brazier. Near this reposed a cracked stone sarcophagus: an unusual sight in this part of the world. It was without its lid. But one god now brooded hereabouts—Silence. Not a sound anywhere, not even from the near-by trees. She saw a noiseless lizard slide jerkily across a patch of moonshine and ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath

... suddenly pass into a large hall, with magnificent columns, and rich festoons of stalactite, in various forms of beautiful combination. In the centre of this chamber, between columns of stalactite, stands a mass of stalagmite, shaped like a sarcophagus, in which is an opening like a grave. A Roman Catholic priest first discovered this, about a year ago, and with fervent enthusiasm exclaimed, "The Holy Sepulchre!" a name ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various

... have followed this funeral be kind to the stranger that is within our gates? The quiet old gentleman standing so gravely over the fosse commune might have attracted more regard from the angels than that Iron Duke who once looked down upon the sarcophagus of his enemy ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend

... walls were covered with sculptures and hieroglyphical paintings. A deep fosse and a wall barred the further end of the cave; but he broke a passage through, and found a second vault, in which stood an alabaster sarcophagus, covered with hieroglyphics. He took possession of this and sent it safely to Europe. His own account of ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various

... secret joy) that he was afraid he couldn't help. But he believed that there were two world-famous Italian doctors named Tracchi and Tomy. 'Esophagus' was, he also remarked, no doubt meant for 'sarcophagus'—the Latin name for the gullet. And he suggested to his enemy that it would be well to rush the cable through as quickly as possible. The business manager said he should—he merely felt a little doubt about the proper spelling of the ...
— Ridan The Devil And Other Stories - 1899 • Louis Becke

... opposite side, over the doorway that leads to the dome, is a large sarcophagus of white marble, looking down, if marble can be supposed to look, upon the monument of the last of the Stuarts: dead Pope and dead King almost face to face; crown and tiara mouldering within a few paces of each other; for in that sarcophagus Pope after Pope has silently taken his place, ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... the weather), are not unfrequently found. We propose to name in the following pages a few of the more important specimens of antique glass-fabrication. One of the first amongst these is the vessel known as the Barberini or Portland Vase, which was found in the sixteenth century in the sarcophagus of the so-called tomb of Severus Alexander and of his mother Julia Mammaea. It was kept in the Barberini Palace for several centuries, till it was purchased by the Duke of Portland, after whose death it was ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy

... piers, with rows of Doric columns between, supported the roof and the obtuse cone of the cupola, which rested upon a great circle of Ionic pillars. The interior was cruciform. In the centre was the crypt, where, upon a square platform, rested the red porphyry sarcophagus. From the mausoleum summit, 150 feet above, the eye swept the Hudson for ...
— History of the United States, Volume 5 • E. Benjamin Andrews

... The former reminds us of Donatello's S. George; the latter is twisted into a strained attitude, full of character, but lacking grace. What the effect of these emblematic figures would have been when harmonised by the architectural proportions of the sepulchre, the repose of Aragazzi on his sarcophagus, the suavity of the two square panels and the rhythmic beauty of the frieze, it is not easy to conjecture. But rudely severed from their surroundings, and exposed in isolation, one at each side of the altar, they leave an impression of awkward discomfort on the memory. A ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds

... Museum I visited, containing the sarcophagus described by Dr. Waagen, Hogarth's pictures, a fine Canaletto, and a manuscript of Tasso. It fills the house once the residence of his body, still of his mind. It is not a mind with which I have sympathy; I found there no law of harmony, and it annoyed me ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli

... the Louvre for the royal sepulchre at St. Denis. It was a gloomy winter's night. Many torches illumined the path of the procession, exhibiting to the thousands of spectators the solemn pageant of the burial. The ecclesiastics and the monks, in their gorgeous or picturesque robes, the royal sarcophagus, the sombre light of the torches, the royal coaches in funereal drapery, and the wailing requiems, now swelling upon the breeze, and now dying away, blending with the voices of tolling bells, presented one of the most mournful and instructive of ...
— Louis XIV., Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott

... were the acts of worship in connection with the Minoan Religion? Sacrifice was certainly prominent, and the bull was probably the chief victim offered to the goddess. In one of the scenes on the Hagia Triada sarcophagus, a bull is being sacrificed, and his blood is dripping into a vessel placed beneath his head. Behind is the figure of a woman, whose hands are stretched out, presumably to hold the cords with which the victim ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie

... records that have reached us from this period none is more venerable, and none at the same time more characteristic, than the epitaph of Lucius Cornelius Scipio, who was consul in 456, and three years afterwards took part in the decisive battle of Sentinum.(49) On the beautiful sarcophagus, in noble Doric style, which eighty years ago still enclosed the dust of the conqueror of the Samnites, the following sentence ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen

... body of the Prince was dragged from the river. The Poles expressed a wish to. erect a monument to the memory of their countryman in the garden of M. Reichenbach, but that gentleman declared he would do it at his own expense, which he did. The monument consists of a beautiful sarcophagus, surrounded by weeping willows. The body of the Prince, after bring embalmed, was sent in the following year to Warsaw, and in 1816 it was deposited in the cathedral, among the remains of the Kings and great men of ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne

... of immersing the remains of the deceased in a jar of methylated spirit was obviously impracticable. However, I bethought me that we had in our collection a porphyry sarcophagus, the cavity of which had been shaped to receive a small mummy in its case. I tried the deceased in the sarcophagus and found that he just fitted the cavity loosely. I obtained a few gallons of methylated spirit which ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman

... many cases were accorded a more elaborate grave. They were laid in a sarcophagus in an arcossolium, and on the covering slab the Holy Mysteries were celebrated on the anniversary of their martyrdom. But sometimes a wealthy family had its own chamber, cubiculum, ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould

... response to an urgent invitation, despatched by mail. Louise Latimer's great bare room was incapable of transmutation into a cosy nest of a boudoir. There was too much of its heavy raw silk furniture—too much of its vast, sarcophagus-like bed—too much of its upholsterer's elegance, regardless of cost—and taste. An enlargement from an ambrotype of the original Latimer, as he arrived in New York from New Hampshire, and a photograph of a "child subject" by Millais, were all her works of art. It was ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various

... me the height of the chamber by burning magnesian wire for the price of one piastre (five cents) per second. After I had a good flash-light view of the inside of this room, and marvelled sufficiently at the enormous size of the blocks of marble in the walls and out of which the sarcophagus was made, the old son of a thief told me it would be at the same rate that he would light my way to the outside air again. I only had stockinged feet, and made the foolish mistake of striking out in the dark. The old boy howled, but I verily believe ...
— "Over There" with the Australians • R. Hugh Knyvett

... one of his letters from Verona, "are tenacious to a degree of the truth of Juliet's story, insisting on the fact, giving the date 1303, and showing a tomb. It is a plain, open, and partly decayed sarcophagus, with withered leaves in it, in a wild and desolate conventual garden—once a cemetery, now ruined, to the very graves! The situation struck me as very appropriate to the legend, being blighted as their love." He might have added, that when Verona itself, with its amphitheatre and its Palladian ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 563, August 25, 1832 • Various

... gentlemen," he began solemnly, "once having had occasion to visit the great pyramid of Khufu, a Pharaoh of the fourth dynasty, I chanced upon a sarcophagus of red granite in a forgotten chamber. My joy was great, for I thought that I had found a royal mummy, but what was my disappointment on opening the coffin, at the cost of infinite labor, to find nothing more than this box, ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal

... any account,' replies Durdles, adjusting it. 'Durdles was making his reflections here when you come up, sir, surrounded by his works, like a poplar Author.—Your own brother-in-law;' introducing a sarcophagus within the railing, white and cold in the moonlight. 'Mrs. Sapsea;' introducing the monument of that devoted wife. 'Late Incumbent;' introducing the Reverend Gentleman's broken column. 'Departed Assessed Taxes;' introducing a vase and towel, standing on what might represent ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens

... this grass is the best covering for the tomb of the poor in spirit, the humble, the transitory Jahanara, the disciple of the holy men of Christ, the daughter of the Emperor Shah Jehan." Travelers who visit the magnificent Taj linger long by the grass-green sarcophagus in Delhi, but give only passing notice to the beautiful Jamma Masjid, a mausoleum afterwards erected ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden

... in quantities hitherto unknown from the vast pitchblend deposits of Ho-Nan—which industry we control. He visited China arrayed in his shroud, and he travelled in a handsome Egyptian sarcophagus purchased at Sotherby's on behalf of a ...
— The Golden Scorpion • Sax Rohmer

... and simultaneously satisfied. The President is not yet in his sarcophagus, but all the conspirators against his life, with a minor exception or two, are in their prison cells waiting ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend

... be seen, under the second window from the east, the marble or slate painted sarcophagus known as the Etricke tomb. Anthony Etricke of Holt Lodge, Recorder of Poole, was the magistrate who committed for trial the ill-fated Duke of Monmouth, who, after his flight from Sedgemoor, was captured in the north of Dorset near Critchell. ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: Wimborne Minster and Christchurch Priory • Thomas Perkins

... the visible embodiment of a hope which smiled at death and counted centuries as nothing. At last the day came which vindicated the long-deferred confidence; and, as the fugitives in their haste shouldered the heavy sarcophagus, and set out with it for the Land of Promise, surely some thrill of trust would pass through their ranks, and in some hearts would sound the exhortation, 'If the vision tarry, wait for it; because it will surely come, it will ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren

... the mighty steam fleets which his genius has called forth. A plain obelisk at the extreme southern end of the church yard marks the grave of Alexander Hamilton; and James Lawrence, the heroic commander of the Chesapeake, sleeps by the south door, his sarcophagus being the most prominent object in that ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin

... them, the Marble Canon, is of itself more than three thousand feet deep and sixty-six miles long. In every direction I beheld below me a tangled skein of mountain ranges, thousands of feet in height, which the Grand Canon's walls enclosed, as if it were a huge sarcophagus, holding the skeleton of an infant world. It is evident, therefore, that all the other canons of our globe are, in comparison with this, what pygmies are to a giant, and that the name Grand Canon, ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard

... inscription, graven on an ancient sarcophagus preserved in the cathedral of Amalfi. A fool, probably, that excellent Rufus—he said to himself,—but what a happy fool! Unborn as yet, or to him unknown, the faith that would have bidden him write himself a miserable ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing

... possibility of a doubt. It was known that the body of the murdered Alexander was placed in the tomb of his putative father, Lorenzo. If, therefore, the body of Alexander should be found in this sepulchre, the tomb is proved to have been that of Lorenzo. When the lid of the sarcophagus was raised, there accordingly were the two bodies visible—one dressed in white, the other in black. It has been assumed—and I think the assumption is abundantly justified, as will presently be seen—that ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various

... an art partly shaped by Maeterlinck, in which all is atmosphere, and a home for sensations which never become vital passions. The roses in the sarcophagus are part of the action in "Francesca," and in "The Dead City" the whole action arises out of the glorious mischief hidden like a deadly fume in the grave of Agamemnon. Speech and drama are there, clothing but not ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons

... with the floor of rock. We crossed and gained another passage which, descending gently for a length of fourteen paces, led us into a great chamber, paved with black marble, more than nine cubits high, by nine cubits broad, and thirty cubits long. In this marble floor was sunk a great sarcophagus of granite, and on its lid were graved the name and titles of the Queen of Menkau-ra. In this chamber, too, the air was purer, though I know not by ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard

... The sarcophagus of pure white marble stands in the midst of a tiny garden, exquisitely kept and railed in, with gate well- locked. The well-known inscription inscribed by Stuart Mill to the memory of his wife cannot be deciphered from outside the enclosure, and no one, under any circumstances whatever, ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards

... impetuous soul soared straight up to paradise with the first heavenly strains, and remained there far above the rigid, breathless little body, bolt upright in its golden sarcophagus of the grand tier. ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers

... hour, even for the old dust of Egypt, which fills the air eternally, without detracting at all from its wonderful clearness. It savours of spices, of the Bedouin, of the bitumen of the sarcophagus. And here now it is playing the role of those powders of different shades of gold which the Japanese use for the backgrounds of their lacquered landscapes. It reveals itself everywhere, close to and on the ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti

... this tale there is no doubt. They were embellished afterwards, as usual, by many fanciful traditions; as, for instance, that, when the sarcophagus was discovered, St. Mark extended his hand out of it, with a gold ring on one of the fingers, which he permitted a noble of the Dolfin family to remove; and a quaint and delightful story was further invented of this ring, which I shall ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin

... pedestal for the equestrian statue—is repeatedly sketched on a magnificent plan. In the sketch just mentioned it has the character of a shrine or aedicula to contain a sarcophagus. Captives in chains are here represented on the entablature with their backs turned to that portion of the monument which ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci

... caress of the sunlight pervading that atmosphere of love. He seated himself against the right-hand wall on a fragment of a fallen column over which a huge laurel cast a deep-black shadow, fresh and aromatic. In the antique greenish sarcophagus beside him, on which fauns offered violence to nymphs, the streamlet of water trickling from the mask incrusted in the wall, set the unchanging music of its crystal note, whilst he read the newspapers and the letters which he received, ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola

... But at last, in the days of Honorius, disestablisher of heathen worship, the body was brought back for the last time, with great concourse and ceremony, and laid where it or its dust still lies, in a brazen sarcophagus. ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford

... flask of oil in one hand, and a frying-pan and small lantern in the other, closely enveloped in his dusky capote, proceeded smiling to his task. The tomb of the Turk consisted of a marble cover taken from some ancient sarcophagus, and sustained at the corners by four small pillars of masonry—the top was not higher than an ordinary table, and below the marble slab there was an empty space between the columns. It has long since disappeared; but that is not wonderful, since King Otho and his subjects have contrived ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various

... great dais of the crystal sarcophagus, and I followed just in time to see her disappear behind a hanging curtain of leather. I hastened after, my hand on my gun, for I had no wish to be left alone where I had seen my three companions stricken down ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell

... commotions, from Clovis to Robespierre, from Noah to the Final Fire. The spirit that can contemplate, that lives only in the intellect, can ascend to its star, even from the midst of the burial-ground called Earth, and while the sarcophagus called Life immures ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... mausoleum is the vault containing the bones, and over it a sarcophagus on a pedestal, upon which are inscribed the names of the victims. On the sarcophagus are busts of Sombreuil and the other chiefs of the expedition; and a profile of Monseigneur d'Herce, Bishop of Dol, one of the victims. Of the bas-reliefs on the mausoleum, ...
— Brittany & Its Byways • Fanny Bury Palliser

... ottomans and golden candelabra, of Eastern figure, were in various stations about—and there was the couch, too—bridal couch—of an Indian model, and low, and sculptured of solid ebony, with a pall-like canopy above. In each of the angles of the chamber stood on end a gigantic sarcophagus of black granite, from the tombs of the kings over against Luxor, with their aged lids full of immemorial sculpture. But in the draping of the apartment lay, alas! the chief phantasy of all. The lofty walls, gigantic in height—even ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... considerable city, of which nothing remained but the outlying streets, some doorways, and many tombs, open every one of them, as if the dead had already been resurrected. Before him lay the broken lid of a sarcophagus and the sarcophagus empty, a little sand from the desert replacing the ashes of the dead man. Owen's horse approached it, mistaking it for a drinking trough; "and it will serve for one," he said, "in a little while after the next rainfall. Some broken capitals, fragments ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore

... plethora of good things I had almost forgotten to mention the Tomb of Columbus, a finely carved sarcophagus in solid bronze. Heroic, allegorical figures support it and it is an ...
— A Fantasy of Mediterranean Travel • S. G. Bayne

... cathedral-close rises a column adorned with bronze reliefs from the Life of Christ, authoritatively declared to be the work of his own hands—let us say they came out of his own workshops, in the year 1022, nearly a thousand years ago. St. Bernward was canonised by Celestine III. in 1194. His sarcophagus is in the crypt of the Basilica of St. Michael at Hildesheim. Of Tuotilo, the pupil of Moengall (or Marcellus), it is said that he was physically almost a giant; just the man, says his biographer, that you would choose for a wrestler. ...
— Illuminated Manuscripts • John W. Bradley

... used the principle of a diving-bell or air-chamber for reaching parts under water. Certainly the device of raising things by dropping down sand to be put under them is still practised. An immense sarcophagus at Gizeh was raised from a deep well by natives who thrust sand under it rammed tight by a stick, and by this simple kind of hydraulic press raised it a hundred feet to the surface. In this way the magic men of Na.nefer.ka.ptah ...
— Egyptian Tales, Second Series - Translated from the Papyri • W. M. Flinders Petrie

... possibly have been the Sarcophagus brought lately from Alexandria, and deposited in the British museum, under the strange idea of having been the tomb of Alexander. Benjamin seems to have known nothing about the hieroglyphics, with which his ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr

... have prayed long beside the tomb And touched the grave-cloths With living fingers. I have lain my breasts Against the granite Of the sarcophagus Where he was. Prayers for the dead I ...
— Spectra - A Book of Poetic Experiments • Arthur Ficke



Words linked to "Sarcophagus" :   casket, coffin



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