FREE TRANSLATOR.ORG • More 'Tumulus' Quotes from Famous Books

... value of the bardic literature I fear to write at all, lest I should not know how to make an end. Rude indeed it is, but great. Like the central chamber of that huge tumulus [Note: New Grange anciently Cnobgha, and now also Knowth.] on the Boyne, overarched with massive unhewn rocks, its very ruggedness strikes an awe which the orderly arrangement of smaller and more reasonable thoughts, ...

— Early Bardic Literature, Ireland • Standish O'Grady

... to project from the wall. Nor is it entirely circular. I cannot be sure, but it seems to cast a perceptible shadow, suggesting that if I ran my finger down that strip of the wall it would, at a certain point, mount and descend a small tumulus, a smooth tumulus like those barrows on the South Downs which are, they say, either tombs or camps. Of the two I should prefer them to be tombs, desiring melancholy like most English people, and finding ...

— Monday or Tuesday • Virginia Woolf

... of continuity in the flow of the stream of life, and of the abidingness of its existence through all vicissitudes has been strikingly expressed by Jefferies. He is sitting on the grass-grown tumulus where some old warrior was buried two thousand years ago, and his thought slips back over the interval. "Two thousand years being a second to the soul could not cause its extinction. . . . Resting by the tumulus, the spirit ...

— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer

... the abodes of their ancestors, when by chance they have been traveling in the vicinity, have been known to turn aside from the highway, and guided by wonderfully accurate tradition have crossed the country for miles to some tumulus, buried perhaps in woods, where the bones of their tribe were anciently deposited, and there have passed hours in silent meditation. Influenced by this sublime and holy feeling, the sachem whose mother's ...

— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes

... carved pillars intertwine, The green gauze now is also pasted on the straw windows! What about the cosmetic fresh concocted or the powder just scented; Why has the hair too on each temple become white like hoarfrost! Yesterday the tumulus of yellow earth buried the bleached bones, To-night under the red silk curtain reclines the couple! Gold fills the coffers, silver fills the boxes, But in a twinkle, the beggars will all abuse you! While you deplore that the life of others is not long, You forget that you yourself are approaching ...

— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin

... his warlike companions to their wives, children, and possessions in Britain, he conferred upon them numerous districts from the lake on the summit of Mons Jovis, to the city called Cant Guic, and to the western Tumulus, that is, to Cruc Occident.* These are the Armoric Britons, and they remain there to the present day. In consequence of their absence, Britain being overcome by foreign nations, the lawful heirs were cast out, ...

— History Of The Britons (Historia Brittonum) • Nennius

... the theory. Among the aboriginal Britons the custom of simple inhumation was probably prevalent, but there are not wanting evidences in support of the belief that cremation also was sometimes practised in prehistoric times. An instance of early interment was discovered in a tumulus at Gusthorp, near Scarborough, in 1834. In a rude coffin scooped out of the trunk of an oak-tree lay a human skeleton, which had been wrapped or clothed in the skin of some wild animal, fastened at the breast with a pin or skewer of wood. In the coffin were also a bronze spearhead and several ...

— In Search Of Gravestones Old And Curious • W.T. (William Thomas) Vincent

... the world's history was once an enormous lake. A river ran east and west across this plain and into it fell tributaries. Far beyond this river the contours of the country rose again till, many, many miles away, there appeared a solitary hill, tumulus-shaped, which seemed to be covered ...

— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard

... of Iona; the sons of the wave, and the chiefs of the dark-brown shield! The tear of the sympathising stranger is scattered by the wind over the hoary stones as she meditates sorrowfully on the times of old! Such could I say, sitting upon some druidical heap or tumulus. The fact is this, there is a right and wrong handle to everything, and there is more pleasure in thinking with pure nobility of heart than with the illiberal enmities and ...

— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe

... tumulus was raised over the bodies of the slain Plataeans, and another over the light-armed slaves who had taken part and had fallen in the battle.[49] There was also a separate funeral monument to the general to whose genius the victory was mainly due. Miltiades did not live long after ...

— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various

... hill—a curious little hill—not very much higher than his own head, green with grass and smooth. This curious little hill greatly pleased him; he would have liked to have had it carried down into his garden at home; he ran up on the top of it, and shouted at the sun, and danced round on the tumulus. A third grasshopper called in the grass, and Bevis ran down after him, but he, too, was too cunning; then a glossy ball of thistledown came up so silently, Bevis did not see it till it touched him, and lingered ...

— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies

... that marks the open water of last year is about a mile and a half distant. There is a solitary dry spot near this, the heart of desolation—a tumulus of about half an acre, like the back of a huge tortoise, is raised about five feet above the highest water level. Upon this crocodiles love to bask in ...

— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker

... see what Miss Susan can possibly do with all this trumpery in the hereafter, but, if I survive her, I shall certainly insist upon a compliance with her wishes, even though it involve the erection of a tumulus as prodigious as the ...

— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field

... Amawombe were to keep out of the fray if that were possible, we had taken up a position about a mile to the right of what proved to be the actual battlefield, choosing as our camping ground a rising knoll that looked like a huge tumulus, and was fronted at a distance of about five hundred yards by another smaller knoll. Behind us stretched bushland, or rather broken land, where mimosa thorns grew in scattered groups, sloping down to the banks of the ...

— Child of Storm • H. Rider Haggard

... the remains of towers here and there, which give to it, when first beheld, its civic character; and it was, I believe, made use of, so recently as 1683, as a line of defence against the Turks. Moreover Deutsch Altenburg has its objects of interest also;—a tumulus, or mound, sixty feet in altitude, but of a date to which tradition goes not back; while the church of St. John, which crowns an eminence near, is accounted one of the most perfect Gothic edifices in the Austrian dominions. And, last of all, there is Hainburg, with its old castle, ...

— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig

... whole of this part of Thrace had been so long a scene of contest, that it had remained uncultivated, and presented a dreary, barren appearance. The order I had received, was to make an observation of the direction which a detachment of the enemy might have taken, from a northern tumulus; the whole Turkish army, followed by the Greek, had poured eastward; none but the dead remained in the direction of my side. From the top of the mound, I looked far round—all ...

— The Last Man • Mary Shelley

... description, written by Withers in 1831, still holds good in the main. The mound, which proves to have been a burial tumulus, is now surrounded by the little city of Moundsville, W. Va., and is kept inclosed by the owner as one of the sights of the place. The writer visited it ...

— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers

... of the 12th dynasty at Beni-Hasan in Egypt), while his kilted followers with helmets on their heads and lances in their hands march behind him. In another a flock of vultures is feeding on the bodies of the fallen enemy; in a third a tumulus is being heaped up over those who had been slain on the side of Lagash. Elsewhere we see the victorious prince beating down a vanquished enemy, and superintending the execution of other prisoners who are being sacrificed to the gods, while in one curious scene ...

— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various

... engraved, sometimes on rocks outside an old aboriginal village or camp, as at Rowtin Lynn and Old Bewick; sometimes on the walls of underground chambers, as in the Holm of Papa Westray, and in the island of Eday; sometimes on the walls of a chambered tumulus, as at Pickaquoy in Orkney; or on the interior of the lid of a kistvaen, as at Craigie Hall, near Edinburgh, and probably also at Coilsfield and Auchinlary; or on a so-called Druidical stone, as ...

— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson

... the practice in that contentious atmosphere with which Mr. Gladstone expresses and laments his familiarity, in the atmosphere of science it really is of no avail whatever to shut one's eyes to facts, or to try to bury them out of sight under a tumulus of rhetoric. That is my experience of the "Elysian regions of Science," wherein it is a pleasure to me to think that a man of Mr. Gladstone's intimate knowledge of English life, during the last quarter of a century, believes my philosophic existence to have been rounded ...

— Mr. Gladstone and Genesis - Essay #5 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley

... shall be the victim rendered to death-stroke, Whenas the earthern tomb on lofty tumulus builded Shall of the stricken maid receive limbs white as the snow-flake. Speed ye, the well-spun woof out-drawing, speed ye, O ...

— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus

... young people the various quarters and places known to them by name from reading their Bibles; Mount Moriah, the Valley of Jehoshaphat, the City of Zion, the walls and the gates, outside one of which there was a large mound like a tumulus, and on the mound a little white cross. The ...

— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy