"Tocsin" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... can do for himself," added Eskew, "is deliverin' the Daily Tocsin on a second-hand Star bicycle and gamblin' with niggers and riff-raff! None of the nice young folks invite him ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... President of the Section sitting in the next court, the citoyen Dumas, has been arrested on the bench, but that the case goes on. Drums can be heard beating the alarm, and the tocsin ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France
... of threatening denunciations. The petitioners frequently appear in person, and read their enthusiastic effusions, their imperious advice, their doctrines of dissolution. To-day it is Danton, in the name of Paris, with his bull visage and his voice that seems a tocsin of insurrection; to-morrow, the vanquishers of the Bastille, or some other troop, with a band of music which continues playing even into the hall. The meeting is not a conference for business, but a patriotic opera, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... the Deacon's workshop; benches, shavings, tools, boards, and so forth. Doors, C., on the street, and L., into the house. Without, church bells; not a chime, but a slow, broken tocsin. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XV • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Monsieur Chateaupers with you. You will cause the tocsin to be sounded. You will crush the populace. You will seize the witch. 'Tis said. And I mean the business of the execution to be done by you. You will render me an account of it. Come, Olivier, I shall not go to bed this ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... would be best and strongest. Of these Philadelphia had her full share, but there was a strong undercurrent. Had not the famous Declaration of Independence been born here and the State House bell pealed out the first tocsin of freedom? And here Congress ...
— A Little Girl in Old Philadelphia • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... of public safety. But by this time all was in alarm amongst the commune of Paris, where Fleuriot the mayor, and Payan the successor of Hebert, convoked the civic body, despatched municipal officers to raise the city and the Fauxbourgs in their name, and caused the tocsin to be rung. Payan speedily assembled a force sufficient to liberate Henriot, Robespierre, and the other arrested deputies, and to carry them to the Hotel de Ville, where about two thousand men were congregated, ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... again and paced to and fro, or dropped into an arm-chair and dozed. But my slumber was agitated by feverish dreams. I dreamed that I could hear the murmur of angry crowds, and the report of distant firing; the tocsin was clanging from the church towers. I awoke. It ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... hour before daybreak. But the king had spoken in a moment of passion and agitation. An hour's reflection might change his mind. There was no time to be lost. The queen gave the signal at once, and out on the air of that dreadful night rang the terrible tocsin peal from the tower of the church of St. Germain l'Auxerrois, the alarm call for which the ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris
... dawns our wedding day; Joyous hour, we give thee greeting! Whither, whither art thou fleeting? Fickle moment, prithee stay! What though mortal joys be hollow? Pleasures come, if sorrows follow: Though the tocsin sound, ere long, Ding dong! Ding dong! Yet until the shadows fall Over one and over all, Sing a merry ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... moisture from their faces until the sound of "Eis! meine Herrschaften!" "Bier! meine Herrschaften!" roused them from their lethargy. Ices and beer and cherries and peaches successively filled up the weary hours until "the tocsin of the soul, the dinner bell," carried joy to their hearts. I can never forget the rapturous look of anticipation and satisfaction which those stolid middle-class Teutonic countenances wore when "Mittagsessen" was announced. They shook off their normal and habitual torpidity, and ...
— A War-time Journal, Germany 1914 and German Travel Notes • Harriet Julia Jephson
... reverberating like the bourdon of a great bell. It was the trackers exulting on the trail of the pursued, the prolonged, raucous howl, eager, ominous, vibrating with the alarm of the tocsin, sullen with the heavy muffling note of death. But close upon the bay of the hounds, came the gallop of horses. Five men, their eyes upon the hounds, their rifles across their pommels, their horses reeking ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... field of practical and beneficent activity. For there was an immense task to accomplish. The tide of immigration had set in, and ship after ship came laden with hunted human beings flying from their fellow-men, while all the time, like a tocsin, rang the terrible story of cruelty and persecution,—horrors that the pen refuses to dwell upon. By the hundreds and thousands they flocked upon our shores,—helpless, innocent victims of injustice and oppression, panic-stricken ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... grant them. Should the North succeed in striking some heavy blow at the South, I will tell you what will happen; your abolitionists will seize the occasion of the peoples' exultation to push their doctrine to a consummation. Whenever you shall hear the tocsin of victory sounding in the North, then listen for the echoing cry of emancipation—for you will hear it. You will see it in every column of your daily prints; you will hear your statesmen urging it in your legislative halls, and your cabinet ministers making it ...
— Fort Lafayette or, Love and Secession • Benjamin Wood
... heart no Christmas Peace can fall. The chimes shall be a tocsin, and the red Glow of the Yule-wood embers shall recall A myriad smouldering pyres ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 18, 1914 • Various
... burn low, and flicker in final sickliness; the great bell called Conscience, hanging in the dome, strikes an alarm that rocks the building. How oft the solemn tocsin sounds! It drives us to our duty! Let us be thankful ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... splendid to live so bravely, To be so great and strong, That your memory is ever a tocsin To rally the foes of the wrong; To live so proudly and purely That your people pause in their way, And year by year, with banner and drum, Keep the ...
— Washington's Birthday • Various
... seizing his hammer, went to the door of his hut, where hung part of a suit of armour, that served at the same time as a sign of his profession and as a tocsin. He smote the hanging iron with his sledge until the clangorous reverberation sounded through the valley, and presently there came hurrying to him eight of his stalwart sons, who had been occupied ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... right, wins. The caucus in Fort Canibas exposed the methods of "so-called reformers"—as the report of it was set forth in print. And that news was a tocsin for town committeemen who ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day
... some old-time belfry tower. And underneath, in the scroll—a motto. It was a full minute before Jimmie Dale could decipher it, for the lettering was minute and the words, of course, reversed. It was in French: SONNEZ LE TOCSIN. ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... in a paroxysm of silent despair. Her words rung like a tocsin of the bright romance conjured up by the avowal of their love. It seemed to him, in that instant, they had no separate existence as distinguished from the great stream of human life—the turbulent ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... Marseillaise ring out through the open windows to the dormant or drunken denizens of Lysander Grove. The Reincarnation is patiently turning the wheel of the printing machine, and rolling out fresh Tocsins, thinking, no doubt, of that tocsin which, at no distant date, shall ring out from a loftier sphere to rouse the deluded inhabitants of this globe to a different millennium from that dreamed of by Anarchists. But, whatever his thoughts, he grinds ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... of weakness and mad anger. Anxious to profit by it, "she gave orders on the instant for the signal, which was not to have been given until an hour before daybreak," says De Thou, "and, instead of the bell at the Palace of Justice, the tocsin was sounded by the bell of St.-Germain-Auxerrois, which ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... come home to get ready for supper," came in a loud, jovial voice that carried across the street like the tocsin of a bass drum. The Rucker home sat in a clump of sugar maples just opposite the Briars, and was square, solid and unadorned of vine or flower. A row of bright tin buckets hung along the picket fence that separated the yard from the store enclosure, and rain-barrels ...
— Rose of Old Harpeth • Maria Thompson Daviess
... knew and loved, And every fibre of his soul was knit To see what passed. Then,—in a sun-white land, Where a great sea poured out through narrow gates To meet a greater,—came the clang of arms, And drew the nations like a tocsin peal, Till all the sun-white sands ran red, and earth Sweat blood, and writhed in fiery ashes, and Grew sick with all the reek and stench of war, And heaven drew back behind the battle-clouds. And ever, through the clamour of the ...
— Bees in Amber - A Little Book Of Thoughtful Verse • John Oxenham
... the New Rochelle, a weak-looking excursioner that might have done for Long Island Sound, where somebody said she'd just come from, but which didn't seem to fit in here. Her passengers were mostly fishermen—crews of vessels not in the race. There was also a big powerful iron sea-tug, the Tocsin, that promised to make better weather of it than any ...
— The Seiners • James B. (James Brendan) Connolly
... feet thick had been erected with embrasures for cannon and a loop-holed platform for riflemen. Cannon were placed on the roof of the building where the old Monumental firebell had been installed as a tocsin of war. ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... She did not hear the tocsin this time; she felt it on her spine—the drums of fear. If ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... London justly ranged themselves on the side of Simon de Montfort, who stood up for their liberties, the great bell of St. Paul's was the tocsin that summoned the burghers to arms, especially on that memorable occasion when Queen Eleanor tried to escape by water from the Tower to Windsor, where her husband was, and the people who detested her tried to sink her barge as it ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... ourselves then in the mouth of an obscure alley which my companion whispered would bring us to his house; and here we paused to take breath and look back. The sky was red behind us, the air full of the clash and din of the tocsin, and the flood of sounds which poured from every tower and steeple. From the eastward came the rattle of drums and random shots, and shrieks of "A BAS COLIGNY!" "A BAS LES HUGUENOTS!" Meanwhile the city was rising as one man, pale at this dread awakening. From every ...
— The House of the Wolf - A Romance • Stanley Weyman
... and Ball number that covered the subject historically, beginning with the vampire bat and ending with the Patriarchs' ball—illustrated with interior views of the Van Plushvelt country seat. Ministers, educators and sociologists everywhere hailed the event as the tocsin call that proclaimed the universal brotherhood ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... 28th, we knew Paris to be in open revolt. Cannon boomed, the great bell of Notre-Dame sounded the tocsin, and naturally we did not go to school. But the masters who gave my sisters lessons came out to Neuilly, and from them, in turn, we learnt what was going on within the capital—barricades in all the streets—the troops on the ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... never released while you stay there); and the great bell of St. Mark's Cathedral tolling midnight. Next I put up for a minute at the restless Inns upon the Rhine, where your going to bed, no matter at what hour, appears to be the tocsin for everybody else's getting up; and where, in the table-d'hote room at the end of the long table (with several Towers of Babel on it at the other end, all made of white plates), one knot of stoutish ...
— The Holly-Tree • Charles Dickens
... quite too much even for Marie's soaring spirit; but she scarcely had time to picture herself ranging the sky when Dumas was back again, sorrowfully confessing failure. Aeroplanes likewise had heard the tocsin; they had sterner business than wafting lovers through the sky; they were carrying explosives and messages in the service of France. Dumas looked almost as disappointed as the wilted little figure he ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... punishment. It required peculiar boldness, at that hour, to accuse Robespierre and Danton of crime. Though thousands in France were horror-stricken at these outrages, the mob, who now ruled Paris, would rally instantaneously at the sound of the tocsin for the ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... the first who introduced it in the form of a treatise, and surely "in an evil hour" was this treatise published—although its amiable author must be acquitted of "malice prepense." His History of England[52] seems to have sounded the tocsin for a general rummage after, and slaughter of, old prints: venerable philosophers and veteran heroes, who had long reposed in unmolested dignity within the magnificent folio volumes which recorded their achievements, were instantly ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... marching his confident hosts into Maryland. This movement at first was regarded as a feint only, with the intention of uncovering Washington; but as column after column was known to have crossed the Potomac, and to be advancing through the State with more or less rapidity, the tocsin of alarm was sounded everywhere, and a general movement was made to repel the invaders. Pennsylvania was thoroughly aroused, and her loyal and true governor issued a proclamation calling upon all the able-bodied men of the Commonwealth ...
— Three Years in the Federal Cavalry • Willard Glazier
... the Chancellor, aghast. 'If he but saw this, he would sound the tocsin - we should ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... there is little bustle and activity when compared to that which exists in a British yard. Their small navy can hardly find them enough work to keep their "hands in;" but doubtless the first knell of the accursed tocsin of war, while it gave them enough to do, would soon fill their dockyards with able and willing hands to do it. Commodore Ringold's surveying expedition, consisting of a corvette, schooner, steamer, &c., was fitting out ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... my light when the telephone rang a furious tocsin in the next room. I flounced out of bed more asleep than awake; in another minute I should have been past ringing up. It was one o'clock in the morning, and I had been dining with Swigger Morrison at ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung
... higher pretentions of the Negro without apology or equivocation. The old form of appeal has become insipid and uninspiring; the ear has become dull to its dinging. The old blade has become blunt and needs a new sharpness of point and keenness of edge. Where now is heard the tocsin call whose key-note a generation ago resounded from the highlands of Kentucky and Tennessee to the plains of the Carolinas calling the black youths, whose hopes ran high within their bosoms, to rise and make for higher ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... the two brothers, they were sore displeased, but they could do nothing,' says the chronicler; 'for the citizens who were in the plot straightway fell to sounding the tocsin, and gathering about the castle in great numbers, with arms and with sticks, were soon ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... unconsciously turns on the world the most hateful of its hundred faces. English reverence, Irish mysticism, American idealism, looked up and saw on the face of Moses a certain smile. It was that smile of the Cynic Triumphant, which has been the tocsin for many a cruel riot in Russian ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... France. One day we had been over to have one of our occasional pitched battles with those hated Burgundian boys of the village of Maxey, and had been whipped, and were arriving on our side of the river after dark, bruised and weary, when we heard the bell ringing the tocsin. We ran all the way, and when we got to the square we found it crowded with the excited villagers, and weirdly lighted by ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... on the ninth of August the tocsin was sounded in every quarter, and the generale was beat. Early the next morning the Tuilleries were attacked by the populace, and the king and his family, attended by the Swiss guard, fled for protection to the National Assembly. ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... campaign; on the other a hundred and twenty Representatives, a thousand or twelve hundred patriots, six hundred muskets, two cartridges per man, not a drum to beat to arms, not a bell to sound the tocsin, not a printing office to print a Proclamation; barely here and there a lithographic press, and a cellar where a hand-bill can be hurriedly and furtively printed with the brush; the penalty of death against any one who unearths a paving stone, penalty of death against any one who would ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... state in which of late the end of the day's work found him—overwhelmingly fatigued. He had not an ounce of superfluous energy to answer his wife's tocsin. "Well, what if it was?" ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... was the famous Bett-Buoy, which is precisely what its name implies; and tolls fast or slow, according to the agitation of the waves. In a calm, it is dumb; in a moderate breeze, it tolls gently; but in a gale, it is an alarum like the tocsin, warning all mariners to flee. But it seemed fuller of dirges for the past, than of monitions for the future; and no one can give ear to it, without thinking of the sailors who sleep far beneath it at the bottom ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... to Lafayette baulked, and completed the ruin of, the Royalist hopes. He retired into exile, and sadly left the Royal cause to its fate. On the 20th of April 1792 France entered upon her supreme struggle with Europe by declaring war. On the night of the 9th of August the dread tocsin sounded the note of doom to the Royal cause—herald to the bloodshed of the 10th of August. Three days afterwards the king and the Royal Family were prisoners in the Temple. There ...
— Vigee Le Brun • Haldane MacFall
... ring our bells.' Beautiful as a dream is Florence; but her somber streets, overshadowed by gigantic belfries and masked by grim brown palace-fronts, contained a menace that the French king could not face. Let Capponi sound the tocsin, and each house would become a fortress, the streets would be barricaded with iron chains, every quarter would pour forth men by hundreds well versed in the arts of civic warfare. Charles gave way, covering with a bad joke the discomfiture he felt: Ah, Ciappon, Ciappon, ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... of romanticism; and in Ibsen as in Balzac the romanticist is forever wrestling with the realist. There is in Ibsen's writing an echo of that note of revolt, which rings thruout all the romanticist clamor, a tocsin of anarchy, and which justified the remark of Thiers that the Romanticists of 1830 were the forerunners of the Communists of 1871. And the Communists were only putting into practise what Ibsen was preaching ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... in the streets seemed to have increased in certain places to a battle, for the crash of the artillery grapeshot was constantly intermingled with the crackling of the infantry fire, and through it all the bells were sounding the tocsin, a wailing, warning sound, which ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... ready to assist any subversionary movement, yea, even with coin of the realm, on the one condition that he should be allowed to insert articles of his own composition in the new organ which it was proposed to establish. There was no difficulty in conceding this trifle, and the 'Tocsin' was the result. The name was a suggestion of the oil merchant himself, and no bad name if Socialists at large could be supposed capable of understanding it; but the oil merchant was too important a man to be thwarted, and the argument by which he supported his choice was incontestable. ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... visage Of her, our tiny Belle, Whom my boy Gus (at his age!) Said was a "deuced swell!" P'raps now Miss Tickler's tocsin Has caged that pert young linnet; Old Birch perhaps is boxing My Gus's ears ...
— Verses and Translations • C. S. C.
... de Bouille, warned by one of the officers whom he had stationed on the road, would march all night to their assistance; and they attributed his delay to the necessity of collecting a sufficient force to overpower the numerous troops of national guards whom the sound of the tocsin had summoned to Varennes. But at each instant they expected to see him appear, and the least movement of the populace, the slightest clash of arms in the streets, seemed to announce his arrival; the courier despatched ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... hearing a tocsin sounded, augurs a strife from which you will come victorious. For a woman, this is a warning of separation from ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... our Union shall grow closer. Let faction die; political intrigue cease to rear its serpent head; let doubt become trust; suspicion, faith! Countrymen, let us also learn to pity the unhappy race whom this war must free. You cannot now prevent it; its first tocsin of liberty pealed with the first gun fired at Fort Sumter. After long ages of barbaric night, of slavery, of misery, these beings cut in ebony begin to robe themselves as men; on the battle field they have at last put on the virile ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... board; and the poor commandant, beside himself with terror, cried, "Boys, the fleet is on fire;" and immediately had the alarm beaten. The frightful news spread like lightning; and in less than half an hour more than sixty thousand men appeared upon the wharves, the tocsin was sounded in all the churches, the forts fired alarm guns, while drums and trumpets sounded along the streets, the whole making an ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... about it, that was the rattle of musketry at a distance! And now they heard also the loud booming of artillery, and the ringing of the tocsin at Brunecken ...
— Andreas Hofer • Lousia Muhlbach
... doctrinary eulogium made of it by Varus Vibiscus is to be credited: Contra Gracchos Tiberim habemus, Bibere Tiberim, id est seditionem oblivisci. Paris drinks a million litres of water a day, but that does not prevent it from occasionally beating the general alarm and ringing the tocsin. ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... naval and military expenditure, to the extent of L28,000,000, to be incurred in the first six months of 1914. Thus on all sides the alarm was raised, and special preparations were put in hand, long before the crisis of 1914 actually arrived. It was Germany that had sounded the tocsin; and it is difficult to believe that some startling coup was not even then being planned by the leaders ...
— Why We Are At War (2nd Edition, revised) • Members of the Oxford Faculty of Modern History
... breeze then your banner dishonored unfold, And, at once, let the tocsin be sounded afar; We greet you, as greeted the Swiss, Charles the Bold— With a farewell to peace ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... to those old things, Hoping still to hold the strings, And, for your ungodly gains, Life to bind with golden chains;— Man! you're mightily mistaken! From such dreams you'd best awaken To the sense of what is coming, When you hear the low, dull booming Of the far-off tocsin drums. —Such a day of vast upsettings, Dire outcastings and downsettings!— You have held the reins too long,— Have you time to ...
— 'All's Well!' • John Oxenham
... the opposition vessel, was sounding its tocsin to summon passengers on board, while ours was altogether mute. Presently, through the grey mist of the morning, we observed parties flocking down to the place of embarkation, who, somewhat to our surprise, ...
— Notes of an Overland Journey Through France and Egypt to Bombay • Miss Emma Roberts
... alert wore us to shadows; rockets from the goulet, the tocsin, the warning boom of a gun from the castle, found us spurring our jaded horses through ice and snow to scour the landward banlieue and purge it of a dreaded revolt. The names of Marx, of Flourens, of Buckhurst, were constantly repeated; news ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... mankind! with all the dread array That wraps in wrath thy desolating way, As the wild tempest wakes the slumbering sea, Thou only teachest all that man can be. Alike thy tocsin has the power to charm The toil-knit sinews of the rustic's arm, Or swell the pulses in the poet's veins, And bid the nations tremble ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... onslaught, there came another sound to arouse the town. From the belfry of the little church a bell suddenly gave tongue upon a frantic, hurried note that spoke unmistakably of alarm. Ding-ding-ding-ding it went, a tocsin summoning the assistance of all true sons of ...
— The Snare • Rafael Sabatini
... welcome sound of the tocsin been heard—almost indeed before it has time to sound—hundreds, aye thousands of men emerge from their workshops, and for a time quite throng streets that just before the magic hour of one p.m. were comparatively ...
— A Tale of One City: The New Birmingham - Papers Reprinted from the "Midland Counties Herald" • Thomas Anderton
... separate payments for any articles that he wrote. The Song of the Shirt, which it would be futile to praise or even to characterize, came out, anonymously of course, in the Christmas number of Punch for 1843: it ran like wildfire, and rang like a tocsin, through the land. Immediately afterwards, in January 1844, Hood's connection with the New Monthly closed, and he started a publication of his own, Hood's Magazine, which was a considerable success: more ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... heard Matilda toss about, draw long, tremulous breaths; then from the couch of that elderly virgin sounded the incontrovertible tocsin of deep sleep. But for Mrs. De Peyster there was no ...
— No. 13 Washington Square • Leroy Scott
... contrast. There is something very fairy-like in the cheerful voice of a bell sounding among the wilder scenes of nature, particularly where Time advances his claim to the sovereignty of the landscape; for the cheerfulness is a little ghostly, and might serve well enough for a tocsin to the elvish hordes whom our footsteps may be ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Since the tocsin sounded we have gone from bad to worse. During the past summer (1877) laborers, striking for increased wages or to resist diminution thereof, seized and held for many days the railway lines between East and West, stopping all traffic. Aided by mobs, they took possession of great towns and destroyed ...
— Destruction and Reconstruction: - Personal Experiences of the Late War • Richard Taylor
... place it was made to peal out with a resistless volume, and his portentous notes rang through the house like the boom of a great bell. It was said that his wife was sometimes aroused at night by what appeared to be the fire tocsin, only to discover that it was her recumbent husband producing these bell-like sounds in his sleep. The vibratory power of his full voice was so great that it was dangerous for him to ...
— Great Singers, Second Series - Malibran To Titiens • George T. Ferris
... that he might join Marshal Moncey; and the insurgents took advantage of this division of our forces to throw themselves on General Schwartz's column, which had been ordered to search the convent of Montserrat. The tocsin was heard everywhere in the mountain villages; the bridges over the streams were broken down, and every little town had to be carried with the bayonet. By a sudden sally, General Duhesme dislodged the enemy from their post on the River Llobregat, took possession of their cannons, ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... Presently the tocsin call of "Clara!" sounded to the world the state of Miss Leeson's purse. A dark goblin seized her, mounted a Stygian stairway, thrust her into a vault with a glimmer of light in its top and muttered the menacing and cabalistic ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... the flight of Rankin's incarnations. Drawing-room comedy, pathetic pastoral, fantastic adventure, slum idyll and medieval romance, it was all one to Rankin. An infallible instinct told him which genre should be chosen at any given moment; a secret tocsin sounded far-off the hour of his success. And still the spirit of Rankin held itself aloof; and underneath his many disguises he remained a junior journalist. But latterly (since his marriage with a rich City merchant's daughter) ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... of cannon and the bursting of bombs thundered through the air, which was rendered livid and tremendous by long spires of fire streaming from the burning houses, and mingling with the volumes of smoke which rolled from the guns. The dreadful tocsin, and the hurrahs of the victors, pierced the soul of Thaddeus. Springing from the ground, he was preparing to rush towards the gates, when loud cries of distress issued from within. They were burst open, and a moment after, the ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... religiously, though little divining that, it was to be their last. They first took alarm on perceiving that their jailer had removed his family, and then that he sent up their dinner earlier than usual, and removed all the knives and forks. By and by howls and shouts were heard, and the tocsin was heard, ringing, alarm guns firing, and reports came in to the prisoners of the Abbaye that the populace were breaking into ...
— A Book of Golden Deeds • Charlotte M. Yonge
... mingled with some lofty pity for their silly ambition and short-lived career. She existed for a week in the delightful expectation of his grace being sent for again, and informed every one in confidence, that "these people could not form a cabinet." When the tocsin of peace, reform, and retrenchment sounded, she smiled bitterly; was sorry for poor Lord Grey of whom she had thought better, and gave them a year, adding with consoling malice, "that it would be another Canning affair." At length came the Reform Bill itself, and ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... then— Swollen corpses, gashed and gory, Heads and limbs of slaughter'd men? Father Euxine! be thou joyful! I am running red once more— Not with heathen blood, as early, But with gallant Christian gore! For the old times are returning, And the Cross is broken down, And I hear the tocsin sounding In the village and the town; And the glare of burning cities Soon shall light me on my way— Ha! my heart is big and jocund With the draught I drank to-day. Ha! I feel my strength awakened, And my brethren shout to me; Each is leaping red and joyous To his own awaiting sea. Rhine ...
— Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers and Other Poems • W.E. Aytoun
... opposition thereto, urging that there was something terrifying in solitude, most of all here, amid vast fields and meadows, and that, away from the Court and all my friends, I should grow old, and death would take me before my time. While plunged in such thoughts, I suddenly heard the sound of a tocsin, and scanning the horizon, I saw flames and smoke rising from some hamlet or country-house. I rang for my servants, and told them instantly to despatch horsemen to the scene of the catastrophe, and ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... various quarters sounds that warned of approaching danger reached his ears. On one hand, although at a considerable distance, the clang of a cavalry trumpet was audible; on the other, church and convent bells rang out a tocsin of alarm. The sounds were taken up by other bells; in their rear, in front, on all sides. The Mochuelo rode along the flank of the little column, which in dead silence, and with rapid steps, followed El Tuerto, who, with Paco and Velasquez, marched at its head. So dim and shadowy did the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... Cherry was an unconscious prophet; and presently it actually became a prudential necessity for her to have a masculine escort when she walked out. For a growing state of lawlessness and crime culminated one day the deep tocsin of the Vigilance Committee, and at its stroke fifty thousand peaceful men, reverting to the first principles of social safety, sprang to arms, assembled at their quarters, or patrolled the streets. In another hour the city of San Francisco was in the hands of a mob—the most ...
— The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... takes place in somebody's nursery corner at twilight, when you are waiting for "that cheerful tocsin of the soul, the dinner-bell," or around somebody's fireside just before the children's bedtime; but the same scene is enacted every few days in the presence of the fresh-hearted, childlike kindergartner, of all women the likeliest to find the secret of eternal youth. She chooses ...
— The Story Hour • Nora A. Smith and Kate Douglas Wiggin
... aside your idle fancies, your unintelligible dogmas, your despicable quarrels; banish to imaginary regions these phantoms, which could be of use to you only in the infancy of nations; take the tone of reason, instead of sounding the tocsin of persecution against your adversaries; instead of entertaining the people with foolish disputes, of preaching useless and fanatical virtues, preach to them humane and social morality; preach to them virtues which are really useful to the world; ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... feels that the tocsin of alarm, or the anti-slavery trump, must sound a louder note before they can hear it, one would think they must be very hard of hearing,-yea, that they belong to that class, of whom it may be truly said, 'they have stopped their ears that they ...
— The Narrative of Sojourner Truth • Sojourner Truth
... cropped up again and the Carleton papers, in particular, were already sounding the tocsin. Carleton's argument was that we ought to fall upon France and crush her, before she could develop her supposed submarine menace. His flaming posters were at every corner. Every obscure French newspaper was being ransacked ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... alarmed, that the measures of military preparation were required by circumstances (les evenements) and did not mean war. Then over this bill the maire posted a notice that in case of a real mobilization (une mobilisation serieuse) they would ring the tocsin. At eleven o'clock the tocsin rang, oh, la la, monsieur, what a fracas! All the bells in the town, Saint-Martin, Saint-Laurent, the hotel de ville. Immediately all our troops went away. We did not ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... choice between victory and death. On the 25th of July, the Marseillais arrived in Paris, and augmented the strength and confidence of the insurgents. Popular commotions increased, and the clubs became unmanageable. On the 10th of August, the tocsin sounded, the generale beat in every quarter of Paris, and that famous insurrection took place which overturned the throne. The Hotel de Ville was seized by the insurgents, the Tuileries was stormed, and the Swiss guards were massacred. The last chance for the king to regain his power was lost, ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... Country's Flag" Nero not the Last Violinist of his Kind The Ever Unpractical Feminine The Comedian A Tale of a Political Difference The Rule of the Regent Echoes of a Serenade A Voice in a Garden The Room in the Cupola The Tocsin The Firm of Gray and Vanrevel When June Came "Those Endearing Young Charms" The Price of Silence The Uniform The Flag ...
— The Two Vanrevels • Booth Tarkington
... dismal chord of discord; and now for a second all seem to have conspired to hold their peace. Indeed, there are not many uproars in this world more dismal than that of the Sabbath bells in Edinburgh: a harsh ecclesiastical tocsin; the outcry of incongruous orthodoxies, calling on every separate conventicler to put up a protest, each in his own synagogue, against "right-hand extremes and left-hand defections." And surely there are few ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the tables are spread; a bell rings—that "tocsin of the soul," as Byron has sarcastically but truthfully termed the dinner-bell; and all the passengers rush in from every quarter of the ship, and seat themselves with an air of expectation till the covers are raised. Grievous disappointments ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... yet a lad the crusade tocsin found her ready to respond, in accordance with her own convictions and her mother's faithful teachings. She gave a public address in the opera house at Auburn, and served for two years as the first president of the local union in that place, and at the first meeting of the national union, ...
— Two Decades - A History of the First Twenty Years' Work of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union of the State of New York • Frances W. Graham and Georgeanna M. Gardenier
... at once for the general's reception; from attic to kitchen was sounded the tocsin of his coming. Julian was all bustle and excitement, to his mother's joy and pride; while Charles merited her wrath by too much of his habitual and paternal quietude, particularly when he withdrew his forces altogether from the loud domestic ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... arrangements of the enterprise were left to the Duke of Guise, and a more efficient and fitting agent could not have been found. He had ordered that the tocsin, the signal for the massacre, should be tolled at two o'clock in the morning. Catharine and Charles, in one of the apartments of the palace of the Louvre, were impatiently awaiting the lingering flight of the hours ...
— Henry IV, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... feet became audible in the kitchen above, while bass voices were added to the shrill soprano that had sounded the former tocsin. The men had arrived from the stables. The burglar and the ghost regarded each other for a moment of suspended breathing; their mutual danger drew them together. Patty hesitated an instant, while she studied his face ...
— Just Patty • Jean Webster
... wedding day; Joyous hour, we give thee greeting! Whither, whither art thou fleeting? Fickle moment, prithee stay! What though mortal joys be hollow? Pleasures come, if sorrows follow. Though the tocsin sound, ere long, Ding dong! Ding dong! Yet until the shadows fall Over one and over all, Sing a merry madrigal ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... that year, a year decisive for the future destinies of Florence, he summoned Cosimo to the Public Palace, which he had previously occupied with troops at his command. There he declared him a rebel to the State, and had him imprisoned in a little square room in the central tower. The tocsin was sounded; the people were assembled in parliament upon the piazza. The Albizzi held the main streets with armed men, and forced the Florentines to place plenipotentiary power for the administration of the commonwealth ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... Entered, with serious mien, and ascended the steps of the altar. Raising his reverend hand, with a gesture he awed into silence All that clamorous throng; and thus he spake to his people; Deep were his tones and solemn; in accents measured and mournful Spake he, as, after the tocsin's alarum, distinctly the clock strikes. "What is this that ye do, my children? what madness has seized you? Forty years of my life have I labored among you, and taught you, Not in word alone, but in deed, to love one another! Is this the fruit of my toils, ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... joyful friends from eight in the evening until eleven. Meanwhile the old insurrectionary methods of the nights of June and of August in '92, of May and of June in '93, were again followed. The beating of the rappel and the generale was heard in all the sections; the tocsin sounded its dreadful note, reminding all who should hear it that insurrection is the most sacred and the most indispensable of duties. Hanriot, the commandant of the forces, had been arrested in the evening, but he was speedily released ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... from other Senators, now forgetful of Unfinished Business, and wild with reanimated party zeal; interruptions from certain Senators mindful of Unfinished Business, and unable to pass the Roscommon bottle, only spurred him to fresh exertion. The tocsin sounded in the Senate was heard in the lower house. Highly-excited members congregated at the doors of the Senate, and left Unfinished Business ...
— The Story of a Mine • Bret Harte
... Norway. But scarcely had he done so, when the incursion of a band of Danish mercenaries sent to seek him, and the full confirmation of what he had told them concerning the massacre at Stockholm, roused the Dalecarlians from their inaction. The tocsin was sounded throughout the provinces, the Danes were driven away, and the two swiftest runners in the country bound on their snow-shoes, and set out with the speed of the wind to bring back the royal fugitive. They overtook him at the foot of the Norwegian ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... and departed on the morrow with the bitter words, "Adieu, O city, where everything is permitted but to be a good man!" Ten years later he burnt the Bull of the Pope in the public square of Wittemberg, and all Europe rang with the tocsin of the Reformation. I never passed that venerable monastery without thinking of the austere German monk and his glorious work; and the old well-known motto of the Reformation which had been his battle-cry in many ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... restlessness and petulance in the long series of revolts which filled his reign with wearisome monotony from the moment when he first rode out to claim his duchy of Normandy, and along its southern frontier peasant and churl turned out at the sound of the tocsin, and with fork and flail drove the hated "Guirribecs" back over the border. Five years after his marriage, in 1133, his first child was born at Le Mans. Englishmen saw in the grandson of "good Queen Maud" the direct descendant of the old English line of kings of Alfred ...
— Henry the Second • Mrs. J. R. Green
... have fought for France with a sword (or gun) I should have been at her service from the first of August, 1914, when I heard her tocsin ring, saw her sons march away to fight and die on battlefields as familiar to me as ...
— Foch the Man - A Life of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Armies • Clara E. Laughlin
... Your information shall be forwarded to the court; where, however, I doubt whether it will be received with much credence. The Austrian declaration of war has put the flatterers of royalty into such spirits, that if the tocsin were sounding at this instant, they would not believe in the danger. We have been unfortunately forced to send the chief part of the garrison of Paris towards the frontier. But we have three battalions of the Swiss guard within call at Courbevoie, and they can be ready on the first emergency. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... mission, as the great apostle of liberty, to propagate republicanism through all the kingdoms of Europe. In her madness of intoxication she undertook the work, threw down the gauntlet, and the fierce tocsin of war sounded from nation to nation, until the continent was converted into one ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... set at liberty. The French from Landau make an effort to deliver Mayence. A bold sally is made from Mayence. Prince Louis, son of Prince Ferdinand, makes a vigorous resistance. The jacobins are victorious in Paris. 100,000 citizens are under arms all night. The tocsin (alarm bell) is ringing all day. The forty-eight sections of Paris demand an act of accusation against twenty members; among whom are, Pethion, Brissot, Barbaroux, Chambon, Gorsas, Guadet, Lanjuinais, Verniaud, &c. Six escape, and ...
— Historical Epochs of the French Revolution • H. Goudemetz
... mademoiselle's side. Men shouted and raved, women screamed and prayed. Some flew to the doors, others, again, huddled together like sheep; and from outside rose higher and higher the dreadful voice of the mob, mad with blood lust, and ever above all rang out the harsh clang of the tocsin of the Mathurins. ...
— Orrain - A Romance • S. Levett-Yeats
... long run to the foot of the vineyard hill, where, on the crest, deep hidden among the vines, three cannon clanged at regular intervals, stroke following stroke, like the thundering summons of a gigantic tocsin. ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers
... prove there is no real disposition, in the masses, to do otherwise. The attachment to the Union is very strong and general throughout the whole of this vast country, and it is only necessary to sound the tocsin to bring to its maintenance a phalanx equal to uphold its standard against the assaults of any enemies. The impossibility of the North-western States consenting that the mouth of the Mississippi should be held by a foreign power, is in itself a guaranty of the long existence ...
— New York • James Fenimore Cooper
... another author enthusiastically exclaims: 'All hail, therefore, to those who, by attacking a truth, prevent that truth from slumbering. All hail to those bold and fearless natures, the heretics and innovators of the day, who, rousing men out of their lazy sleep, sound in their ears the tocsin and the clarion, and force them to come forth that they may do battle for their creed. Of all evils, torpor is the most deadly. Give us paradox, give us error, give us what you will, so that you save us from stagnation. It is the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... things. When man has failed to rule the world rightly, God will step in, and will cause famines, and plagues, and pestilence—even poverty itself—with His own Right Arm. But the cure was effected, and the country was on its road to a fair amount of prosperity, when the tocsin was sounded in America, and Home Rule became ...
— The Landleaguers • Anthony Trollope
... and so did le Pere et la Mere Francois, and Madame Pele, and one of the Napoleonic prisoners (not M. le Major), and several other people we had known, including a servant of our own, Therese, the devoted Therese, to whom we were all devoted in return. That malodorous tocsin, which I have compared to the big bell of Notre Dame, had warned, and warned, ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... Entierement a bas! oui, sans ressource a bas! Et moi qui dans ses voeux trouvais tant de soulas, Qui du miel de ses vers ai suce la musique, De sa raison je vois descendre la tunique Sur moi, malheur!... C'est comme au lointain le tin-tin De la cloche ... de pres qui se change en tocsin. De tout ce que j'ai vu conserver souvenance Et voir ce que je ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... waiting as lady of honour. I found the queen always firm; or, if she ever trembled, it was at the want of firmness in others. She had made up her mind for the worst long before. She often said to me, in those revolutionary nights when we sat listening for the sound of the cannon or the tocsin from Paris—'France is an abyss, in which the throne must sink. But sovereigns may be undone—they must not be disgraced.' The world never possessed a ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various |
