"Charnel" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... swept from off the face of the moon, and a slant ray fell upon the hideous features of the vampire. He looked as if just rescued from some charnel-house, and endowed for a space with vitality to destroy all beauty and harmony in nature, and drive some benighted ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... a charnel-house; the deathbell tolled hourly in every village; not a family but was called to mourn for its dearest relatives, while the survivors stalked listlessly about, the ghosts of their former selves, among the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... come, then. It was as if the old, good-easy, meek-eyed man of science, dying, had left his effectual curse on all the world, and had thereby converted civilisation into one omnivorous grave, one universal charnel-house. I spent several days in reading out to Zaleski accounts of particular deaths as they had occurred. He seemed never to tire of listening, lying back for the most part on the silver-cushioned couch, and wearing an inscrutable mask. Sometimes he rose and paced the carpet with noiseless ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... though he thought me insane; he returned with the air of a serving-man who, expecting to find a well-equipped pantry, had wandered into a charnel house. ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... path lay was white with fresh hoar-frost, and the thicket away to the south was a haunt for crows such as I never have seen again since; the black birds flew round and about it in dark clouds with loud shrieks, as though in its midst stood a charnel and gallows, and from the brushwood likewise, by the pool's edge, came other cries of birds, all as full of complaining as though they were bewailing the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... philosopher, and he will tell you that the tendency of all endowed forces is to find their equilibrium and be at rest—that is, dead. He draws a dismal picture of the time when the sun shall be burned out, and the world float like a charnel ship through the dark, cold voids of space—the sun a burned-out char, a dead cinder, and the world one dismal silence, cold beyond measure, and dead beyond consciousness. The philosopher has wailed a dirge without [Page 261] hope, a ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... all this, our new-made divine is an unmistakable poet. To a clay compounded chiefly of the worldling and the rhetorician, there is added a real spark of Promethean fire. He will one day clothe his apostrophes and objurgations, his astronomical religion and his charnel-house morality, in lasting verse, which will stand, like a Juggernaut made of gold and jewels, at once magnificent and repulsive; for this divine is Edward Young, the ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... not have dared to repeat those names in the charnel hut, lest those whom he invoked should spring upon him and tear him to pieces. No more potent or more perilous charm was known ...
— The Bridge of the Gods - A Romance of Indian Oregon. 19th Edition. • Frederic Homer Balch
... the runes are as blanks, and the wave sleeps unstirred on the fountain. Go where the Fylgia [96], whom Alfader gives to each at his birth, leads thee. Thou didst desire love that seemed shut from thee, and I predicted that thy love should awake from the charnel in which the creed that succeeds to the faith of our sires inters life in its bloom. And thou didst covet the fame of the Jarl and the Viking, and I blessed thine axe to thy hand, and wove the sail for thy masts. So long as man knows desire, can Hilda have power over his doom. But when the ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... and shame to the homes of men, and pass by the grog-shops that are constantly grinding out their fearful grist of poverty, ruin and death, I long for the hour when woman's vote will be levelled against these charnel houses; and have, I hope, the power to close them throughout the length and breadth of ...
— Minnie's Sacrifice • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
... little clock, my life away! Even a second seems a day. Even a minute seems a year, Peopled with ghosts, that press and peer Into my face so charnel white, Lit by the devilish, dancing light. Tick, little clock! mete out my fate: Tortured and tense I wait, ...
— Rhymes of a Rolling Stone • Robert W. Service
... that was light, my body might have ached till the throbs stiffened into death-spasms, and yet the suffering had been nought, compared with that loathing and disgust in my soul. It had seemed that I was alone, I said. Alone as the corpse in unshrouded grave! I was in a charnel-house. Men who were sinless as you hung dead upon the wall, hung dying there. Darkness covered all things at a distance, sighs crept up from far corners, chains clanked, or imprecations or prayer uttered themselves,—bodiless ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... solitude of his cell, but made it a source of penance to him. His employment was to portray, either on canvas or in waxen models, the human face and human form, in the agonies of death and in all the stages of dissolution and decay. The fearful mysteries of the charnel house were unfolded in his labors—the loathsome banquet of the beetle and the worm.—I turn with shuddering even from the recollection of his works. Yet, at that time, my strong, but ill-directed imagination seized with ardor upon ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... round! I see a woman weeping there, And standing calm and motionless, whilst I Slide giddily as the world reels—My God! The beautiful blue heaven is flecked with blood! The sunshine on the floor is black! The air Is changed to vapours such as the dead breathe In charnel pits! Pah! I am choaked! There creeps A clinging, black, contaminating mist About me—'tis substantial, heavy, thick, I cannot pluck it from me, for it glues My fingers and my limbs to one another, And eats into my sinews, and dissolves ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... they heard the rattling of the cables weighing anchor. Soon the soft slap of the water around the bow and the regular heaving motion told that the Bozra was under way. The sea-mouse creaked and groaned through all her timbers and her lading. The foul bilge-water made the hold stifling as a charnel-house. Lampaxo, Hib being absent, ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... slaves of false knowledge; that our memories are filled with ideas that have no origin in truth; that we believe what our fathers credited, who were convinced without a cause; that we study human nature in a charnel house, and, like the nations of the East, pay divine honours to the maniac and the fool." But if these two great men cannot refrain from such outspoken vituperation—they also lead the way: they both teach the divinity of ideas and the vileness of action without ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... broken salient. The Yankees fought with obstinacy and furious pluck. Charge after charge was broken and hurled back. On they came again—ever to the shambles! Night fell on a field piled thick with bodies of the attacking force; in front of the broken salient was a perfect charnel-house! ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... many other gruesome matters, in the Palatine of Bohemia's family. She usually talked of the spectres of Hollenbogenblitz Castle in the passing of the threads. Those were dismal spectres in Bohemia, smelling of murder and the charnel-breath of midnight. They uttered noises that wintered the blood, and revealed sights that stiffened hair three feet long; ay, and ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... evening when the Wanderer fell to the earth before the shadow of Beatrice, Keyork Arabian sat alone in his charnel-house. The brilliant light of two powerful lamps illuminated everything in the place, for Keyork loved light, like all those who are intensely attached to life for its own sake. The yellow rays flooded the life-like faces ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... least signal with ready and timorous acquiescence, she pushed the door open, but instantly recoiled with terror. It was a charnel house, half filled with ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... of the parapet of the Latomia, where the breath of the sirocco, the gnawing tooth of time, and the slow ravelling of rain had serrated the ledge, stood Leo, gazing into the dizzying depths of the charnel house that swarmed with the ghosts of nine thousand men, who once were ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... No sound or sign of a live one on the Laughing Lass. No rats, no mice. No bugs. Gentlemen, the Laughing Lass is a charnel ship." ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... at sight of their king so strangely and appallingly stricken, but evidently they were entirely and happily unconscious of the THING that sat there in their midst, touching them, consorting its charnel horrors with their warm-blooded humanity,—so near, so close to them, that he fancied the smell of that trickling gore, that dank grave-soil, must necessarily enter in at their nostrils, and he sickened at the thought for very ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... Germans were filled with human corpses in thick, serried masses. Quicklime and straw had been thrown over them by the ton. Piles of bodies of men and of horses had been partially cremated in the most rudimentary fashion. The country seemed to be one endless charnel-house. The stench of the dead was appalling. Of the fifty odd houses that form the village of Etrepilly, not one remained intact. Some of them had been hit by a shell that penetrated through the roof, ...
— Paris War Days - Diary of an American • Charles Inman Barnard
... and gloomy shadows damp, Oft seen in charnel-vaults and sepulchres, Lingering, and sitting, by ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... of the church, by eighteen degrees at the right side, is the charnel of the Innocents, where their bones lie. And before the place where our Lord was born is the tomb of Saint Jerome, that was a priest and a cardinal, that translated the Bible and the Psalter from Hebrew into Latin: and without the minster is the chair that he sat in when he translated it. And ...
— The Travels of Sir John Mandeville • Author Unknown
... the last no solemn stole Shall on thy breast be laid; No mumbling priest shall speed thy soul, No charnel vault thee shade. But by the shadowed hazel copse, Aneath the greenwood tree, Where airs are soft and waters sing, Thou'lt ever sleep by me, My love, Thou'lt ever sleep ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... God? Art thou not the 'living garment of God'? O Heavens, is it in very deed He, then, that ever speaks through thee? that lives and loves in thee, that lives and loves in me?... The Universe is not dead and demoniacal, a charnel-house with spectres: but godlike and my Father's." "This fair Universe, were it in the meanest province thereof, is in very deed the star-domed City of God; through every star, through every grass-blade, and most through every Living Soul, the glory of a ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... men make bloody sacrifice, And pile the earth with slain, Kind Mother Nature ever tries To cover up the stain. 'Mid charnel of the tiger's den May pure white lilies blow, And on the graves of warlike men ...
— War Rhymes • Abner Cosens
... the custom in this part of the country—and perhaps extensively in the interior of New England—to bury the dead first in a charnel-house, or common tomb, where they remain till decay has so far progressed as to secure them from the resurrectionists. They are then reburied, with certain ceremonies, in their ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... received no honor or ceremonial from El Zagal, and appears to have been interred obscurely to prevent any popular sensation; and it is recorded by an ancient and faithful chronicler of the time that the body of the old monarch was deposited by two Christian captives in his osario or charnel-house.* Such was the end of the turbulent Muley Abul Hassan, who, after passing his life in constant contests for empire, could scarce gain quiet admission into the corner of ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... Revolution in Paris reached Austria the Magyar Diet was in session in Hungary. The success of the revolutionists in France inflamed the Liberal leaders in Hungary. Casting aside all reserve, Kossuth declared in the Diet: "From the charnel house of the Viennese system a poison-laden atmosphere steals over us. It would paralyze our nerves and pin us down when we might soar. The future of Hungary can never be secured while Austria maintains a system of government ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... of confinement in the hulks of Rochelle. How often he had regretted it, then, not to have been one of the chosen few who, the day after capture, stood in front of six levelled muskets, and were sped to rest in some unknown charnel! Then!—not now. No, it was worth having lived to this hour, to know of that fair face, in living sleep upon his pillow, under the ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... Charlotte Bronte, who feels the pressure of every-day life to be as hard as a giant's grasp upon her throat! Charlotte Bronte cannot tell why she is so unhappy, why she feels like a prisoner in the world,—why earth, our beautiful earth, is like a charnel house to her. And yet we think that the most ordinary passerby could see very satisfactory reasons why Charlotte Bronte was what she was, and felt what she felt. Hollow cheek and faded eye, teach their wisdom to their possessor last of all. The pale-eyed school-girl, who ...
— A Lecture on Physical Development, and its Relations to Mental and Spiritual Development, delivered before the American Institute of Instruction, at their Twenty-Ninth Annual Meeting, in Norwich, Conn • S.R. Calthrop
... of the College of the Holy Trinity, endowed as a "carnarie," or charnel-house, of the city. The chief duties of the priests belonging to the chantry attached thereto were to bury the dead, and keep up perpetual Masses for the souls ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... more than a week may be divided into two conflicts of equal intensity which raged along the ridge of the heights of Tser. Each of the two slopes, descending one to the Save and the town of Shabatz and the other to the Drina, is now nothing but a charnel house. ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various
... began to prevail. Then it was learned that the ship's doctor had run out of medicines. The passengers became demoralized. They believed their vessel was to become a charnel ship. Strict sanitary orders were issued, and ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... by wrinkled eld, Musing, at midnight, upon prophecies, Who at her only lattice, saw the gleam Point to the mist-poised shroud, then quietly Closed her pale lips, and locked the secret up, Safe in the charnel's treasure. ...
— A Book For The Young • Sarah French
... into the darkness of a vast pile, evidently once a convent, and where the chill of the massive walls struck to the marrow. I felt as if walking through a charnel-house. We hurried on; a trembling light, towards the end of an immense and lofty aisle, was our guide; and the crowd, long familiar with the way, rushed through the intricacies where so many feet of monks had trod before them, and where, perhaps, many a deed that shunned the day had been perpetrated. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... hospitals and in the graves, while their souls are being tossed over into a lost eternity, an avalanche of horror and despair. The London plague was nothing to it. That counted its victims by thousands; but this modern pest has already shoveled its millions into the charnel-house of the morally dead. The longest rail train that ever ran over the Erie or the Hudson tracks was not long enough or large enough to carry the beastliness and the putrefaction which have gathered up in the bad books and newspapers of this land in the last ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... ruin is not altogether to be regretted. It has softened certain loathsome details of the charnel facts portrayed, and in other pictures the torment and anguish of the lost souls are no longer so painful as the old painters ascertained them. Hell in the Campo Santo is not now the hell of other days, just ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... lifted its head high, and looked straight toward the boats, and at the same moment a whiff of air came toward us heavily charged with a most disgusting and nauseating odour, about equally suggestive of musk and the charnel-house. Its eyes, distinctly luminous, and apparently about two feet apart, were directed straight toward the longboat, and the next instant it began to move toward us, again ...
— A Middy in Command - A Tale of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... a charnel-house if you like, under those trees there, but a very beautiful one as is evident. We ought to keep alive the memories that make the place romantic. It would be a pity if utilitarian axe and fire were to spoil the beauty of Te ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... upon noses—or collaterally touching them;—such for instance as Prignitz, now lying upon the table before me, who with infinite learning, and from the most candid and scholar-like examination of above four thousand different skulls, in upwards of twenty charnel-houses in Silesia, which he had rummaged—has informed us, that the mensuration and configuration of the osseous or bony parts of human noses, in any given tract of country, except Crim Tartary, where they are ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... a hundred steps, and the atmosphere became singularly cold and charnel-like, when they entered a large vault, which, by the light of their torches, appeared of great extent. Its walls were covered with uncouth representations, ...
— Alfgar the Dane or the Second Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... parenthesis between every syllable. He would give all the books in his study (which are rarities all,) for one of the old Roman binding, or six lines of Tully in his own hand. His chamber is hung commonly with strange beasts skins, and is a kind of charnel-house of bones extraordinary; and his discourse upon them, if you will hear him, shall last longer. His very attire is that which is the eldest out of fashion, [[AW]and you may pick a criticism out of his breeches.] He never looks upon himself till he is grey-haired, and then ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... convenient to make external show pass for sterling worth—to let whitewashed walls vouch for clean shrines. It may hate him who dares to scrutinize and expose—to raze the gilding, and show base metal under it—to penetrate the sepulcher, and reveal charnel relics: but hate as it will, it is indebted ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... been any improvement since then. Many of them are simply appalling. They become more wretched and squalid as the East River and Five Points sections are reached. Cherry, Water, and the neighboring streets, are little better than charnel houses. ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... vanished into the shadow of the sphinx, and we could see nothing of them. The great round moon rose higher and higher, flooding the rest of the charnel-house with light, and, save for an occasional roar or whimper from the lions beyond the wall, the silence was intense. Now I could make out the metal gates in this wall, and even dark and stealthy forms which passed and ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... of our observation turned upon the fact of death, the world would appear to us like a huge charnel- house; but in the world of life the thought of death has, we find, the least possible hold upon our minds. Not because it is the least apparent, but because it is the negative aspect of life; just as, in spite of the fact ...
— Sadhana - The Realisation of Life • Rabindranath Tagore
... can find a way out of this accursed charnel-house before long, I think that we shall add to its company," I said, staring ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... now the body of some poor victim is taken from the debris, and the town, or rather the remnants of it, is one vast charnel house. The scenes at the extemporized morgue are beyond powers of description in their ghastliness, while the moans and groans of the suffering survivors, tossing in agony, with bruised and mangled bodies, or screaming in ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... Tobias lean smilingly over to Abbot Prince Karl, and I marvelled what they spoke about. Not that I had long to wonder, for through the open door of the chapel there streamed a dismal host of invaders from the Wolfmark—black Hussars of Death, in dark armor, with white skeletons painted over them, all charnel-house ribs and bones in hideous and ridiculous array—which was one of Duke Casimir's devices to frighten children, and no doubt these scarecrows frightened many of these. Specially when these villanous companies were recruited from all the wild bandits of the Mark, and never punished ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... but the opposite wall had in it the narrow door aforesaid, and a wide grated window, the bars of which were rusty, though strong. The atmosphere of the place was cold and musty and suggestive of a charnel house. Certainly a strange place in which to transact business, but everything about Aaron Norman ...
— The Opal Serpent • Fergus Hume
... plague. I myself had escaped the sickness, perhaps because of the strength and natural healthiness of my body, which has always saved me from fevers and diseases, fortified as it was by the good food that I had obtained. But now I knew that I could not live long, indeed chained in this dreadful charnel-house I prayed for death to release me from the horrors of such existence. The day passed as before in sweltering heat, unbroken by any air or motion, and night came at last, made hideous by the barbarous ravings of the dying. But even there ...
— Montezuma's Daughter • H. Rider Haggard
... got there; that he would never have to resort to the subways that he was figuring on to steal the ore out of the Canaan Tigmores; that all this ceaseless, merciless calculation was but the reaction of a conscience, stalking, gaunt and lunatic, through the charnel-house of its own experience. But for all that he had to go on crossing bridges that he was never to reach, covering black tracks that he was never to make. Often at his desk there, his mind became strangely obtunded and he babbled vapidly; his big face pinched up till it seemed lean and ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... you buy at the drug store, is the skeleton of the creature; the thing taken from the water is its corpse. Not until this body has rotted away is it pleasant to live with. Day by day the stench, like that of a charnel house, became more unbearable to Dick. The crew seemed never to notice it, which caused the boy much wonderment that noses had ever been given them. He was glad when a strong wind came and swept some of the smell away instead of leaving it to settle ...
— Dick in the Everglades • A. W. Dimock
... man," said he, "to treat a poor Emir like me in the manner you have done, as if my house was a charnel-house? I suppose you will ask me ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... culture of the soul was all, and little by little, without perceiving it, thinking only of stammering forth acts of gratitude, he disappeared from the chapel, his soul borne up by the souls of others, away, away from the world, far from his charnel-house, ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... wont to let his imagination dwell on these details of the charnel-house. In a letter to Dallas, August 12, 1811, he writes, "I am already too familiar with the dead. It is strange that I look on the skulls which stand beside me (I have always had four in my study) without emotion, but I cannot strip the ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... and soft sand-beach; and these now form no inconsiderable proportion of the entire mass. I found the deposit thickly inhabited by spatangi, razor-fish, gapers, and large, well-conditioned cockles, which seemed to have no idea whatever that they were living amid the debris of a charnel house. Such has been the origin here of a bed of shell-sand, consisting of many thousand tons, and of which at least eighty per cent. was once associated with animal life. And such, I doubt not, is the history of many a calcareous rock in ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... a charnel house, and in the middle of the night the survivors fled forth, taking nothing with them except arms and ammunition and a heavy store of tinned foods. We camped on the opposite side of the campus from the prowlers, and, while some stood guard, others of us volunteered to scout into the ...
— The Scarlet Plague • Jack London
... lay huge tusks in quantities, tusks the like of which I had never seen, except in pictures of the giant mammoth of prehistoric ages, tusks the girth of a man in size. Piled in all directions they lay, the whole vast floor was indeed a stupendous charnel house. And among the white sand and bones diamonds lay thick ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... chill of uneasiness that inevitably preceded this moment of decision. He was not lacking in courage, else the circumstances under which he had worked for the past ten years—the sometimes perilous, sometimes downright charnel conditions left by the fleeing Hymenop conquerors—would have broken him long ago. But that same hard experience had honed rather than blunted the edge of his imagination, and the prospect of a close-quarters stalking of ...
— Control Group • Roger Dee
... youth to a condition of abject terror, he was then to proceed to the room occupied by the United States Minister and his wife, and there to place a clammy hand on Mrs. Otis's forehead, while he hissed into her trembling husband's ear the awful secrets of the charnel-house. With regard to little Virginia, he had not quite made up his mind. She had never insulted him in any way, and was pretty and gentle. A few hollow groans from the wardrobe, he thought, would be more than ...
— The Canterville Ghost • Oscar Wilde
... he died at the age of fifty-two. {272c} On Thursday, April 25 (O.S.), the poet was buried inside Stratford Church, near the northern wall of the chancel, in which, as part-owner of the tithes, and consequently one of the lay-rectors, he had a right of interment. Hard by was the charnel-house, where bones dug up from the churchyard were deposited. Over the poet's grave ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... about 1283 to 1462, or later.[1] "In 1464," writes the Rev. J. K. Floyer, in his article entitled A Thousard Years of a Cathedral Library, "we first hear of a regular endowment for the acquisition of books. Bishop Carpenter made a library in the charnel house chantry, and endowed it with L 10 for a librarian. The charnel house was near the north porch of the Cathedral, and stood on or near the site of the present Precentor's house. It was a separate institution from the monastery, and had its own endowments and priests. Bishop Carpenter's ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... perceive. Perhaps he did. Perhaps he saw the Simiacine Plateau, and knew that, after all, he had won the last throw; for up there, far above the table-lands of Central Africa, there lay beneath high Heaven a charnel-house. Hounded down the slope by his tormentors, he had left a memento behind him surer than their torturing knives, keener than their sharpest steel—he had left the sleeping ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... groans. The atmosphere was prescient with horror. He struggled to his feet and paced gloomily back and forth along the brow of the hill. The second church stood near, deserted, gloomy, no longer a temple of God, but a charnel house of fear and black superstition. In the distance the ghostly white walls of the Rincon church glowed faintly in the feeble light that dripped from the yellow stars. There was now no thought of God—no thought of divine ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... sight which wrung tears from the eyes of those who did not often weep. The ship was a charnel-house. Death in its most horrible forms was there,—from starvation, from corruption, scurvy, lock-jaw, gangrene, consumption, and fever. How ghastly the scene! Men, once robust and strong, weak and helpless as babes, with hollow cheeks, toothless ...
— Winning His Way • Charles Carleton Coffin
... the bleached remains of the bygone dead. As he drew nearer the voice, he was guided by the lanthorn brought by George's companion; and towards this he proceeded, almost overpowered by the horrible stench of the charnel house, As he drew near enough to distinguish objects, what a scene presented itself! In one corner of the vault, lay a quantity of lime used to consume the bodies, whilst nearer the light, lay corpses in every stage of putrefaction. ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... science and artists would have been gratified, if decay had spared the more durable portions of his material structure. It was probably not against such a transfer that the lines were written,—whoever was their author,—but in the fear that they would be carried to the charnel-house. ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... sea level, with a climate so bracing and life-giving that the phthisis bacillus can hardly live in it, it seemed to our soldiers, after their long march across the veldt, a veritable City of Refuge. Alas! how soon it was to be turned into a charnel house! ...
— From Aldershot to Pretoria - A Story of Christian Work among Our Troops in South Africa • W. E. Sellers
... of death. A fortnight ago, Danton, the incomparable fiend, let loose his assassins upon the priests of God. Now Paris is made a theatre where the people whom Louis and his nobles would have died to save have turned every street into a stable of carnage, every prison and hospital into a vast charnel-house. One last revolting thing alone remains to be done—the murder of the King; then this France that we have loved will have no name and no place in our generation. She will rise again, but we shall ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... consuming. The corpse, I repeat, stirred, and now more vigorously than before. The hues of life flushed up with unwonted energy into the countenance—the limbs relaxed—and, save that the eyelids were yet pressed heavily together, and that the bandages and draperies of the grave still imparted their charnel character to the figure, I might have dreamed that Rowena had indeed shaken off, utterly, the fetters of Death. But if this idea was not, even then, altogether adopted, I could at least doubt no longer, when, arising ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... their guests' wishes. There is a schloss hard by, inhabited by certain officials, who, however, exercise no jurisdiction over the town; and a church, not remarkable for anything, except the good order of its charnel-house. This, a small building separated by the breadth of the churchyard from the main edifice, seems to be a place of deposit for all the skulls and other bones which may be thrown up in digging the graves; and they are arranged round the ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig
... being—skull-headed, skeleton-boned, scythe in hand—Death himself; and ever and anon, when the dance was swiftest, would he dart into the midst, pounce on one or other, holding an hour-glass to the face, unheeding rank, sex, or age, and bear his victim to the charnel-house beside the church. It was a sight as though some terrible sermon had taken life, as though the unseen had become visible, the veil were taken away; and the implicit unresisting obedience of the victims added to the sense ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... instilling and steal- ing into our hearts that the blessed spirits are not at rest in their graves, but wander, solicitous of the affairs of the world. But that those phantasms appear often, and do frequent cemeteries, charnel-houses, and churches, it is because those are the dormitories of the dead, where the devil, like an insolent champion, beholds with pride the spoils and trophies of ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne
... and they have found things like flowerpots upside down, Mis'ess Yeobright; and inside these be real charnel bones. They have carried 'em off to men's houses; but I shouldn't like to sleep where they will bide. Dead folks have been known to come and claim their own. Mr. Yeobright had got one pot of the bones, and was going to bring 'em home—real skellington bones—but ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... Of course, these charnel prophets are not the only phantasms that "possess" furniture. For example, I once heard of a case of "possession" by a non-prophetic phantasm in connection with a chest—an antique oak chest which, I believe, claimed to be a native ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... together on the deck, For a charnel-dungeon fitter: All fixed on me their stony eyes, That in the Moon ...
— The Rime of the Ancient Mariner • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... ravens, vampires and the like, make their nests, and cry unceasingly for flesh, although the whole place is but one vast, putrid shamble. The pillars of the hall were made of thighbones, and those of the parlour of shinbones, while the floors were formed of layer upon layer of all manner of charnel. ...
— The Visions of the Sleeping Bard • Ellis Wynne
... this party at the Browns—to which I duly went, although in sore disgrace—that my charnel poets played me a mean trick. It was proposed that 'our young friends' should give their elders the treat of repeating any pretty pieces that they knew by heart. Accordingly a little girl recited 'Casabianca', and another little girl 'We are Seven', ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... recall her to life, how small and mean would all that dreaded world appear to him! Too late, too late! The dews were glistening in the sun, the birds were singing overhead, life wakening all around him—and his own heart felt like a charnel-house. Nothing but death and the dead there,—nothing! He arrived at the door: it was open: he called; no one answered: he walked up the narrow stairs, undisturbed, unseen; he came into the chamber of death. At the opposite side ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... and anxious ambush, until the moment arrived of the Pale-face's security, and the Indian war-whoop, surprise, and triumph. The continued massacre is next detailed; ending with the settlement being left a reeking charnel-house, and its best champion led captive to crown the triumph with his death, the last and proudest ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... bones till the last day," When Time, swift both of foot and feather, May bear them the sexton kens not whither? What care I, then, though my last sleep Be in the desert or the deep, No lamp nor taper, day and night, To give my charnel chargeable light? I have there like quantity of ground, And at the last ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... Sigmund Oroshaz, whose sad and pensive face of a soldier who has seen too much slaughter and too many charnel houses, was marked by a large scar, raised his head and said ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... has preserved his life; nor has Irene, it seems, left any trace of her presence. He sallies forth again into the city of the plague to seek her, and she is destined to return to the empty chamber! Taken to a hideous sort of charnel-house, Adrian is shown the body of a female clad in a mantle that had once been Irene's, and concludes that it is the corpse of her who, for the last three days and nights, has been tending on him. I recollect that, when I came to this part of the novel, I threw the book down, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... appearance, amidst the peaceful solemnity of the surrounding objects. This exhibition is not yet completed, but, in its present condition, is very interesting. Some hints, not altogether useless, may be collected from it. In England, our churches are charnel houses. The pews of the congregation are raised upon foundations of putrefaction. For six days and nights the temple of devotion is filled with the pestilent vapours of the dead, and on the seventh they are absorbed by the living. Surely it is high ...
— The Stranger in France • John Carr
... endeavour to do so; and to live like those many worthy men, of which you made mention in the former part of your discourse. This is my firm resolution. And as a pious man advised his friend, that, to beget mortification, he should frequent churches, and view monuments, and charnel-houses, and then and there consider how many dead bodies time had piled up at the gates of death, so when I would beget content, and increase confidence in the power, and wisdom, and providence of Almighty God, I will walk the meadows, by ...
— The Complete Angler • Izaak Walton
... relentless hand, smiting Jew and gentile, the pious and the ungodly, with equal severity. The cholera had broken out in Central Russia and its devastations were terrible beyond description. The country from Kief to Odessa was as one vast charnel-house. As has always been the case during epidemics, the Jews suffered less from the ravages of the disease than did their gentile neighbors. The strict dietary laws which excluded everything not absolutely ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith
... that that which is crooked may be made somewhat straight, till their whole soul was distempered, all but degraded, by the continual sight of sin, till their eyes seemed full of nothing but the dance of death, and their ears of the gibbering of madmen, and their nostrils with the odours of the charnel house, and they longed for one breath of pure air, one gleam of pure light, one strain of pure music, to wash their spirits clean from those foul elements into which their duty had ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... clearer and clearer. "Death destroys a man: the idea of Death saves him." Behind the coffins and the skeletons that stay the vulgar mind lies something so immense that all that is great in us responds to it. Men of the world may recoil from the charnel-house that they will one day enter, but Love knows better. Death is his foe, but his peer, and in their age-long struggle the thews of Love have been strengthened, and his vision cleared, until there is no one who can ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... and to employ the stones to the same purpose but the parishioners rose in a tumult, and chased away the protector's tradesmen. He then laid his hands on a chapel in St. Paul's churchyard, with a cloister and charnel-house belonging to it; and these edifices, together with a church of St. John of Jerusalem, were made use of to raise his palace. What rendered the matter more odious to the people was, that the tombs and other monuments of the dead wore defaced; and the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... ravings become clear and clearer, until at last she scents the "blood-dripping slaughter within;" a vapour rises to her nostrils as from a charnel house—her own fate, which she foresees at hand, begins to overpower her—her mood softens, and she enters the palace, about to become her tomb, with thoughts in which frantic terror has yielded to solemn and ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... from end to end, was no more than a charnel house, a smashed and battered sepulchre. There was not one building that was whole, not one roof that had more than a few tiles clinging to shattered rafters, hardly a wall that was not cracked ...
— Between the Lines • Boyd Cable
... the crypt steps, oppressed by growing horror and by terror of coming judgment, sickening under fears engendered by the darkness of night and the charnel-house air he breathed, Jasper opens the door of the tomb and holds up his lantern, shuddering at the thought of what it may reveal ...
— The Puzzle of Dickens's Last Plot • Andrew Lang
... consists mainly of translations and adaptations from the German. He revelled in the horrific school of melodrama. He delighted in the kind of German romance parodied by Meredith in Farina, where Aunt Lisbeth tells Margarita of spectres, smelling of murder and the charnel-breath of midnight, who "uttered noises that wintered the blood and revealed sights that stiffened hair three feet long; ay, and kept it stiff." The Bravo of Venice (1805) is a translation of Zschokke's Abellino, ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... moor (in this neighbourhood), from whence the name Moorfields, reached from London-wall to Hoxton; the southern part of it, denominated Windmill Hill, began to be raised by above one-thousand cart-loads of human bones, brought from St. Paul's charnel-house in 1549, which being soon after covered with street dirt from the city, the ground became so elevated, that three windmills were erected on it; and the ground on the south side being also much raised, it obtained the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, - Vol. 10, No. 283, 17 Nov 1827 • Various
... the heart of every man and boy we pass upon the street, how few—how very few—there are that would not reveal sickening pictures of lust, disease, melancholy and insanity. Charnel-houses of sin and lust—sloughs of despond and regret—excess of passion offset by lack of power—dread, despair, hopelessness, shame and desperation, making a picture of misery scarcely to be conceived by any but those unfortunate ...
— Manhood Perfectly Restored • Unknown
... of unfathomed night! Glare thro' black shadows vague with forms Convulsed with cries that pierce each dome As impeached gumps seek plains unsunned, (Satellites to mounted Light!) Teem in the wind-strewn crest of thorns A phantom that a charnel urn Spewed from its lap and cancered fold,— Trophies of grim Destiny's crypt! A burning pyre, whose deadly breath Stir sighs of men as cesspools burn A harlot strewn with virgin gold That some malignant, stol'n script, Condemn'd to witches' ...
— Betelguese - A Trip Through Hell • Jean Louis de Esque
... and its meetings, its inquietudes and its persecutions!—that mistaken zeal should follow them down to the very tomb—as if earthly passion could glimmer, like a funeral lamp, amid the damps of the charnel-house, and "even in their ashes ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... reigning dynasty could only be saved by granting to Hungary a responsible Ministry drawn from the Diet itself, and by establishing constitutional government throughout the Austrian dominions. "From the charnel-house of the Viennese system," he cried, "a poison-laden atmosphere steals over us, which paralyses our nerves and bows us when we would soar. The future of Hungary can never be secure while in the other provinces there exists a system of government in ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... and came, and struck upon my brain, most detestable, most execrable; and while one might count ten, I was aware of her near-sounding engines, and that cursed charnel went tearing past me on her maenad way, not fifteen yards from my eyes and nostrils. She was a thing, my God, from which the vulture and the jackal, prowling for offal, would fly with shrieks of loathing. I had a glimpse of decks piled thick ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... being principally "mere Irish," and the cost of their support derived chiefly from the land, the landlords consider their health, comfort, or life of only secondary importance. Hence we find the number of deaths in these charnel houses averaging that of years of plague; and each pauper is allowed far less weekly for his support than the lord of the soil allows the meanest dog in his kennel. Add to these the separation of man and wife, the isolation of members of the same family, the dangers of perversion ...
— The Cross and the Shamrock • Hugh Quigley
... something of the feelings of the resurrectionists, a bold, dark party went to rob the charnel-house of the sea, to spoil it of its golden bones and wedgy ingots of silver. They chose a mirky night, when the thick air seemed too clotted and moist to break into hurly-burly of storm, and yet too heavy and dank to throw ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... metaphysicians, which our New England fosters and sustains, and above all, the proverbial trickery of the Yankee race, are but the reaction of the stern and gloomy tenets of that olden time which would have made of our earth a charnel house crowded with ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... ever do, but when something particular is pointed out to me. Literary squabbles I know preserve one's name, when one's work will not; but I despise the fame that depends on scolding till one is remembered, and remembered by whom? The scavengers of literature! Reviewers are like sextons, who in a charnel-house can tell you to what John Thompson or to what Tom-Matthews such a skull or such belonged—but who wishes to know? The fame that is only to be found in such vaults, is like the fires that burn unknown in tombs, and go out as fast as they are discovered. Lord Hardwicke is welcome to live ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... and impressive thing (which we should see if we were not so foolish and blind) which the writer of our text lays his finger upon is that at the same time the two opposite processes of death and renewal are going on, so that if you look at the facts from the one side it seems nothing but a charnel-house and a Golgotha that we live in, while, seen from the other side, it is a scene of rejoicing, budding ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... that I am exceedingly anxious to know your opinion of my daughter's condition. You have inspired us with a degree of hope that we have not known for a long time. Indeed, Hope spread her wings and left this castle long since, and it has been little better than a charnel-house until your appearance. Now I ask you to tell me candidly whether you entertain any hope of my Feodora's ultimate recovery. You may lay your heart open to me, for I should receive her as one raised from the dead if you save her. Do not, as you love your own soul, ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman
... as was the appearance of the dull, misty daybreak, it was yet the most welcome of all the objects surrounding the starving soldier on which he could fix his languid gaze. To look back on the city behind him was to look back on the dreary charnel-house of famine and death; to look down on the waste ground without the walls was to look down on the dead body of the comrade of his watch, who, maddened by the pangs of hunger which he had suffered during the night, had cast himself from the rampart to meet a welcome death on ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... trifle. The imagery of death serves for delicate ornament, and they weave into the airy nothingness of their verses their trite reflections on the vanity [170] of life. Just so the grotesque details of the charnel-house nest themselves, together with birds and flowers and the fancies of the pagan mythology, in the traceries of the architecture of that time, which wantons in its graceful arabesques with the images ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... world is the chief theme of edification. A charnel filled with festering corpses, snakes, and worms points the preacher's moral. Before the eyes of all, in terror-stricken vision or in nightmares of uneasy conscience, leap the inextinguishable flames ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... the few survivors of General Leclerc's expedition to St. Domingo, had, on leaving that charnel-house, become aide-de-camp to Marshal Ney. He it was who, during the famous retreat from Russia, was sent to ask the general who was blowing up the Beresina bridges to suspend the work of destruction, so as to allow of the passage of the column with the wounded, who must ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... forward, with the air of one to whom fear had no meaning; but even he closed his eyes for a moment in horror. The poor creatures behind mumbled and crossed themselves and clung to each other. The plain was a vast charnel-house. The sun, looking over the brow of an eastern hill, threw its pale rays upon thousands of crumbling skeletons, bleached by unnumbered suns, picked bare by dead and gone generations of carrion, white, rigid, ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... skirt on, and torn lace upon his wrists, and he came mincingly up, holding the parasol above his head, and imitating the walk of an affected lady, to the vociferous delight of his comrades. And all this, and much more, in that fearful charnel city, with death and ...
— Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands • Mary Seacole
... yet clear in my mind, the most miserable sadness and depression that can be conceived came upon me; and, accompanying me through the wood, filled its avenues (which doubtless were fair enough to others' eyes) with the blackness of despair. I saw but the charnel-house, and that everywhere. It was not only that the horrors of the first discovery returned upon me and almost unmanned me; nor only that regrets and memories, pictures of the past and plans for the future, crowded thick upon my mind, so that I could ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... their long and matted locks streaming wildly down their shoulders, their faces burned and blackened by the tropical sun, their bodies wasted by famine and sorely disfigured by scars,—it seemed as if the charnel-house had given up its dead, as, with uncertain step, they glided slowly onwards like a troop of dismal spectres! More than half of the four thousand Indians who had accompanied the expedition had perished, and of the Spaniards ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... he could not believe the discovery; but next instant—as at the temple pond, though now without need of placard or interpreter—he understood. This bowl, a tiny crater among the weeds, showed like some paltry valley of Ezekiel, a charnel place of Herod's innocents, the battlefield of some babes' crusade. A chill struck him, not from the water or the early mists. In stupor, he viewed that ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... wide, The charnel-house of ages! gathered lie Nations and empires, flung by destiny Beneath thy flowing tide: There rest alike the monarch and the slave; There is no galling chain, no crown ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... thousands of our bravest and noblest heroes, captured by the rebels, the feeble remnant of the tens of thousands imprisoned there, a majority of whom had perished of cold, nakedness, starvation, and disease, in those charnel houses, victims of the fiendish malignity of the rebel leaders. These poor fellows, starved to the last degree of emaciation, crippled and dying from frost and gangrene, many of them idiotic from their sufferings, or with the fierce fever of typhus, more deadly than sword or minie bullet, ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... voice of the orators, the procession to the Capitol? Buried under the mountain of potsherds! O Dian, how can a man who loses a father, a beloved, in Rome shed a single tear or look round him with consternation, when he comes out here before this battle-field of time and looks into the charnel-house of the nations? Dian, one would wish here an iron heart, for fate has an ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... auto-infection: the streptococcus lanceolatus, the bacterium pyogenes, the bacillus subtilis, the staphylococci, the bacterium coli commune? They all play a part in the game, reducing the body in time to a charnel-house. Or are such substances as putrescein, cadaverin, skatol or indol—which are derived through chemical change in the putrescent mass—contributors to the spread of the poisonous taint throughout the ...
— Intestinal Ills • Alcinous Burton Jamison
... him, despite myself, was an unkind remembrance—his breath had been charnel-foul, and always, when discussing anything, he insisted on taking the lapel of his listener's coat and talking directly into ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... for that of a sun-dried corpse had it not been for a pair of large black eyes, still full of fire and intelligence, which gleamed and played under the snow-white eyebrows, and the projecting parchment-coloured skull, like jewels in a charnel-house. As for the head itself, it was perfectly bare, and yellow in hue, while its wrinkled scalp moved and contracted like the ...
— King Solomon's Mines • H. Rider Haggard
... it is known that above seven hundred thousand Cuban non-combatants have been killed or have died of starvation in the past two or three years, many of them not buried, but their bones picked by the buzzards. The island is a charnel-house of dead. Every graveyard has piles of exposed human bones, and the earth has been strewn with them outside of cities and towns. There were many killed who were not actual insurgents, but Cubans, women and children included. The deaths left broken families; many orphans, who do not know ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... was lamenting and adding another chapter to the horrors of the mountain, hoping for fresh ossuary relics for his charnel glass-case, the Swedish youth and his guides, who had returned from their expedition, set off in search of the hapless Tartarin with ropes, ladders, in short a whole life-saving outfit, alas! unavailing... Bompard, rendered half idiotic, could ...
— Tartarin On The Alps • Alphonse Daudet
... to stand upright, and there was little room for moving. James Finlay, still bound and gagged, lay at full length on the floor. Round him, their backs against the walls, crouched the other men. Moylin's lantern cast a feeble, smoky light. The air was heavy and close. It was the air of a charnel house. ...
— The Northern Iron - 1907 • George A. Birmingham
... in an obvious vein of sarcasm. And as he did so, he thought he observed her eyes averted, and her color brighten for a moment. He did not suffer this observation to interrupt him, but he laid it up in the charnel of his evil remembrances, and continued: "I don't know, I say, what society you there enjoyed. It may have been very considerable, or it may have been very limited: it was possibly very dull, or possibly very delightful, madame. But if you had any society there whatever, it was private, ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... talk, But most by lewd and lavish act of sin, Lets in defilement to the inward parts, The soul grows clotted by contagion, Imbodies, and imbrutes, till she quite lose, The divine property of her first being. Such are those thick and gloomy shadows damp Oft seen in charnel vaults and sepulchres, Lingering, and sitting by a new made grave, As loath to leave the body that it lov'd, And linked itself by carnal sensuality To ...
— Phaedo - The Last Hours Of Socrates • Plato
... difficulties only to lie down here silently, uncomplainingly, and give up their lives, all stirred Dermot strangely. And when the thought of the incalculable wealth that lay in the vast quantity of ivory stored in this great charnel-house flashed through his mind, he felt that it would be a shameful desecration, inviting the wrath of the gods, to remove even one ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... same was he who, lashed to his own mast, There where the sea-flowers screen the charnel-caves, Beside the sirens' singing island pass'd, Till sweetness failed along the inveterate waves... Say, soul,—are songs of Death no heaven to thee, Nor shames her lip the ...
— The House of Life • Dante Gabriel Rossetti
... taken from the charnel, and placed there by the demon," replied the monk. "Of my long wanderings in other lands and beneath brighter skies I need not tell you; but neither absence nor lapse of years cooled my desire of vengeance, and when the appointed ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... note of cleanliness in the charnel-house, this still pliant body that lolls its head aside when it is moved as if to lie better; it gives a childish illusion of being less dead than the others. But being less disfigured, it seems more pathetic, nearer to one, more intimate, as we look. And had we said anything in the ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... the true and the beautiful were bound together in angelic wedlock and that all art found its highest mission in giving them expression. But the drama has been led through devious paths into the charnel house, and in "Salome" we must needs listen to the echoes of its dazed and drunken footfalls. The maxim "Truth before convention" asserts its validity and demands recognition under the guise of ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... all speed this ghastly memorial for ever, as she hoped, from the gaze and knowledge of the world. It was her desire to conceal this foul stain upon the family name, but "the grave gives back its dead. The charnel gapes. The ghastly head hath burst its cold tabernacle, and risen from the dust." No human power could drive it away. It hath "been torn in pieces, burnt, and otherwise destroyed, but even on the subsequent day it is seen filling its wonted place. Yet it was always ...
— Strange Pages from Family Papers • T. F. Thiselton Dyer
... over the pillow, and in the midst of it lay her face, a radiant isle in a dark sea. I stood and gazed. Fascinated by her beauty? God forbid! I was fascinated by the awful incongruity between that face, pure as the moonlight, and the charnel-house that lay unseen behind it. She was to me, henceforth, not a woman, but a live Death. I had no sense of sacredness, such as always in the chamber even of a little girl. How should I? It was no chamber; it ...
— The Flight of the Shadow • George MacDonald
... three miles! You must not take shelter in that charnel-house," he muttered; and moved along in his seat as if to show me there was ...
— The Forsaken Inn - A Novel • Anna Katharine Green
... sheep, the bark of vegetables, the entrails of worms, the hides of oxen or seals, the felt of furred beasts; and walk abroad a moving Rag-screen, overheaped with shreds and tatters raked from the Charnel-house of Nature, where they would have rotted, to rot on me more slowly! Day after day, I must thatch myself anew; day after day, this despicable thatch must lose some film of its thickness; some film of it, frayed away by tear ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... is it." Lady Agatha's face flushed and lit up. "I've made it healthy for them. Highercombe is a painted lie—a pest-house, a charnel-house, full of unwholesome miasmas from its pretty green, its pond covered with water-lilies. Death lurks in that pond. There is bad drainage and bad water; the damp oozes through the old brick floors of the houses. ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... a mistake to be for ever looking back to the past for precedents," she said. "The past has its charm, of course, but it is the charm of the charnel house—it is the dead past, and what was good for one age is bad ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... such a voice as might have come from the charnel, so ghostly and deathly sounded its hollow tone; then, recoiling some steps, he placed both his hands upon his temples, and muttered, "Mad, mad! yes, yes, this is but a delirium, and I am tempted with a devil! Oh, my child!" he resumed, in a voice that became, on the sudden, inexpressibly tender ...
— Leila or, The Siege of Granada, Book IV. • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... insensibility of those who, wallowing in wealth, and fluttering from year to year through the round of fashion, suffered their former associate, nay their envied example, to perish in his living charnel. He was buried in the Protestant cemetery of Caen, under ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... colour death and the taint of death are ever present, for every church is little better than a charnel-house, and in the crowded city nearly eighty cemeteries are packed with dead. Magnificent processions of princes and of great prelates march through the town by day; they are followed by the riot of the Mascarade des Conards, a burlesque throng of some two thousand fantastic dresses careering ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... wounds.... But why is she fighting? For what mad love of glory? Is she not intoxicated with successes and conquests? Remember our journey through Europe.... Wherever we went, we found traces of her passage: cemeteries and charnel-houses to bear witness that she was the great victress. Isn't that enough ...
— The Frontier • Maurice LeBlanc
... old iron grating, which was out of order, into which were cast not only the human remains, which were taken from the chains of Montfaucon, but also the bodies of all the unfortunates executed on the other permanent gibbets of Paris. To that deep charnel-house, where so many human remains and so many crimes have rotted in company, many great ones of this world, many innocent people, have contributed their bones, from Enguerrand de Marigni, the first victim, and a just man, to Admiral de Coligni, who was ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... condition was mainly owing to the presence of various fakirs, who, though still alive, were in advanced stages of putrefaction. Most people are supposed to go easily and pleasantly to the devil, but these elected to do so by way of a charnel-house asceticism, and an elaborate system of self-torture. Some were suspended from the ceiling by a rope tied to their arms, some embedded in plaster, some stiffened in a circle, some permanently distorted into the shape of the letter ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... hollow head. O, woeful pride! dark root of all distress! With contrite heart, our fleshless scalps behold! O wretched man, to God, meek prayers address. Thy lusty strength, thy wit, thy daring bold, All shall lie low with us in charnel cold: Proud king, 'tis thus thy pamper'd corpse shall rot; Thus, in the dust thy purple pomp be roll'd, Mark then, in peeled skull, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 554, Saturday, June 30, 1832 • Various
... were black with many a crack, All black and bare, I ween; Jet-black and bare, save where with rust Of mouldy damps and charnel crust They were patch'd ...
— Lyrical Ballads, With Other Poems, 1800, Vol. I. • William Wordsworth
... pleasantries, Lord Pomfret muttered something about "hearing his mother calling" and fled with precipitate irrelevance in the direction of the back stairs, leaving Mrs. Wrangle speechless with indignation and bitterly repenting her recent indecision. She swept past Anthony as if she were leaving a charnel-house. Her daughters, who took after their father, walked as though ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... anybody doing anything else in such a room,' said Ida, to whom the spacious chamber looked as gloomy as a charnel-house. 'I beg your pardon. I ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... is the naked skeleton bleaching in the winds, the gigantic bones of the forest still erect, the speaking records of former life, and of strength still unsubdued, vigorous even in death, which renders Glenmore one enormous charnel-house." ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... to taste of death long before they have died, and have placed before their eyes all the furniture of mortality. The horrors of a charnel-house is the scene of their pleasure. The "Midnight Meditations" of Quarles preceded Young's "Night Thoughts" by a century, and both these poets ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... a word. She led the way back to the low and dismal sheds which lay there like a vast charnel-house, and thence to a low hut some distance away from all, where she opened a door. She spoke a few words to a man, who finally withdrew. A light was burning. A rude cot was there. Here I laid the one whom ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... voice and aristocratic bearing doing full justice to the grandeur of the occasion—it is a contrast in which there is a bitter humor, a farce in which there is something horrible, a comedy that smells of the charnel house. ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann |
