"Charnel" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and out through the ring a grisly 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 of ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... as though the basilisk had confronted him. When at last he spoke, it was in a curiously remote voice, lucid and emotionless. "Well, why not? All beliefs die—die and rot! A vain show—and this, too, was of the charnel!" ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... 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', and various children ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... 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 ...
— The Complete Angler • Izaak Walton
... accommodations, and a host and hostess both well disposed to fall in with 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 walls ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig
... amongst the rocks surrounding the laager: here a leg, there an arm, further on a ghastly human head protruding from amidst the scattered boulders, until I had only to close my eyes to fancy I was in a charnel-house, where Goths and Huns were holding devilish revelry. The B.R. paused, and dropped his voice two octaves lower, and the crowd on the balcony craned their heads further forward, so that they might not miss a single word. ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... 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 young life, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... a lurid gleam of brightness to the dull aspect of the heavens. Within the bosom of the encircling hills, an impenetrable darkness had already settled; and the plain lay like a vast and deserted charnel-house, without omen or whisper to disturb the slumbers of its ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper
... inspired by them. They do not serve with me the purpose intended, viz., of calling up the memory of the departed. On the contrary, their memory is associated with their deeds, their works, the places where they wrought, and the monuments of themselves they have left. Here, however, in the charnel house is commemorated but the event of their deepest shame and degradation, their total vanquishment under the dominion of death, ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... breast-high, a rudely piled rampart of stone. A human skeleton lay atop, whitened by the winds; there was a broken pike beside it; and, stuck fast in the naked skull, which had rolled to the bottom of the rampart, the rusty fragment of a sword. The space behind resembled the floor of a charnel-house—bindwood and ground-ivy lay matted over heaps of bones; and on the top of the hugest heap of all, a skull seemed as if grinning at the sky from amid the tattered fragments of a cap of liberty. Bones lay thick around the shattered vehicles; a trail of skeletons dotted ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... the deck, For a charnel-dungeon fitter: All fixed on me their stony eyes, That in ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... the highest to the lowest. There were formerly many examples of such dances. Next to the cloister was the library, the catalogue of which still exists to show what a scholar's collection of books then meant. Next to the library stood the College of the Minor Canons: then came Charnel Chapel, beneath which was a crypt filled with human bones taken from the churchyard. Remember that this has been a burial place ever since the year 610, when a church was first built here. From the year 610 till the year 1840, or for a period ...
— The History of London • Walter Besant
... 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 ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... bones 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
... the guiding glitter of the knife. At the same moment, he caught a doubtful gleam of two eyes looking in at him from one of the windows. That moment the place became insupportable with horror. The vague sense of an undefined presence turned the school of science into a charnel-house. He started up, hurried from the room, feeling as if his feet took no hold of the floor and his back was fearfully exposed, locked the door, threw the key upon the porter's table, and fled. He did not ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... Republicans, Calvinists, merchants, bankers, Hating me, yet fearing my arm. With wife and children heavy to carry— Yet fruits of my very zest of life. Stealing odd pleasures that cost me prestige, And reaping evils I had not sown; Foe of the church with its charnel dankness, Friend of the human touch of the tavern; Tangled with fates all alien to me, Deserted by hands I called my own. Then just as I felt my giant strength Short of breath, behold my children Had wound their lives in stranger gardens— And I stood alone, ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... 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 ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... of strangers—no slight reproach to the cruel 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
... where I would, Marian was not there, and my heart misgave me that that beautiful form was lying in the loathsome charnel-house whence I had so hardly come out. A man near me, who appeared to have preserved his strength better than most of us, presently observing my trouble, and guessing its ...
— Athelstane Ford • Allen Upward
... Heymes, one of 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 ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... 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) ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... noisome 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 S; some were head downwards, some in a cruciform ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... 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
... and pointed chin, suggested to him unhealthiness, a human being perhaps stricken by some obscure disease which had drained her body of all fresh color, and robbed it of flesh, had caused to come upon her something strange, not easily to be defined, which almost suggested the charnel-house. ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... 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
... 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 an unknown and patently hostile force ...
— Control Group • Roger Dee
... social ghosts,— Speeches and women and guests and hosts, Weddings and morning calls and toasts, In every bad variety: Ghosts who hover about the grave Of all that's manly, free, and brave: You'll find their names on the architrave Of that charnel-house, Society. ...
— The Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... 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
... from the study of the Bible, with its transcendent beauty, its perfect ethics, its heavenly spirit, its Divine Saviour and way of salvation, to the Scriptures of India, especially the more recent parts, is to exchange the pure air of heaven for the charnel house. ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... jumped onto the dinner-table, looked at me out of his one eye, in which all the desolation of two was concentrated, and miaowed heart-rendingly in my face. Something is wrong with the house, with my pens which will not write, with my books which have the air of dry bones in a charnel-house, with the MS. of my History of Renaissance Morals, which stands on the writing-table like a dusty monument to the futility of human endeavour. ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... with the British in the naval engagement, but the greater sacrifice, the supreme charnel house of the war, the British race reserved for itself. There, the yeomanry of England, the unsung county regiments whose sacrifices and achievements have been neglected in England's generous desire to honor the men from "down under," the Australians ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... gestures, and foul 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 a degenerate and ...
— Phaedo - The Last Hours Of Socrates • Plato
... to suppose that being is crowded upon every leaf, and yet absent from the immensities of space? The law of the Great System forbids the waste even of an atom; it knows no spot where something of life does not breathe. In the very charnel-house is the nursery of production and animation. Is that true? Well, then, can you conceive that space, which is the Infinite itself, is alone a waste, is alone lifeless, is less useful to the one design of universal being than the dead carcass of a dog, ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... she was seated was rotting away; a huge fleshy fungus had formed on it, and the decaying timber emitted a charnel-house smell. ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... find a way out of this accursed charnel-house before long, I think that we shall add to its company," ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... 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 ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... 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 ...
— Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands • Mary Seacole
... the paradox became 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
... 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 ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... innocent, loving, and beloved, they descend together into the tomb: but Shakspeare has made that tomb a shrine of martyred and sainted affection consecrated for the worship of all hearts,—not a dark charnel vault, haunted by spectres of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 563, August 25, 1832 • Various
... us more deeply than any thing else in this world. Sudden catastrophes, the dreadful alternations forced upon the shuddering fragile ship, tossed like a toy by the wild breath of the tempest; the blood of the battle-field, with the gloomy smoke of artillery; the horrible charnel-house into which our own habitation is converted by a contagious plague; conflagrations which wrap whole cities in their glittering flames; fathomless abysses which open at our feet;—remove us less sensibly from all the fleeting attachments "which pass, which can ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... stately air, he was quitting the room; but was soon stopt, upon Mr Briggs calling out "Ay, ay, Don Duke, poke in the old charnel houses by yourself, none of your defunct for me! didn't care if they were all hung in a string. ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... 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 all crush'd down by the thumb, so that no judgment can be formed upon them—are much ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... countermarches in preparation for a battle which would decide the destiny of France and Italy, the garrison of Genoa found itself reduced to its last extremity. The typhus epidemic was raging. The hospitals had become ghastly charnel houses; starvation was at its worst. Nearly all the horses had been eaten, and though for a long time the soldiers had had no more than half a pound of rotten food daily, the distribution for the following day was not assured. There was absolutely ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... 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, ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... open, and she could see into it, right across the landing. It was in a shocking mess. Food, bedclothes, patent-leather boots, dirty plates, and knives lay strewn over a large table and on the floor. But it was the mess that comes of life, not of desolation. It was preferable to the charnel-chamber in which she was standing now, and the light in it was soft and large, as ...
— Where Angels Fear to Tread • E. M. Forster
... 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 from the bed, tottering, with feeble steps, with closed ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... Il fut gallican, ce siecle, et janseniste! C'est vers le Moyen Age enorme et delicat, Qu'il faudrait que mon coeur en panne naviguat, Loin de nos jours d'esprit charnel et de chair triste. ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... of George I.'s reign, among Englishmen and noblemen, notably in four lodges in the city of London: (1) at The Goose and Gridiron alehouse in St. Paul's Churchyard; (2) at The Crown alehouse near Drury Lane; (3) at The Apple Tree tavern near Covent Garden; (4) at The Rummer and Grapes tavern, in Charnel Row, Westminster. That its principles were brotherly love and good fellowship, which included in those days port, sherry, claret, and punch; that it was founded on the ground of mere humanity, in every sense of the word; being (as was to ...
— The Ancien Regime • Charles Kingsley
... "It is 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 ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... was buried in Mr. Strudwick's newly-purchased vault, in what Southey has termed the Campo Santo of Nonconformists, the burial-ground in Finsbury, taking its name of Bunhill or Bonehill Field, from a vast mass of human remains removed to it from the charnel house of St. Paul's Cathedral in 1549. At a later period it served as a place of interment for those who died in the Great Plague of 1665. The day after Bunyan's funeral, his powerful friend, Sir John Shorter, the Lord Mayor, had a fatal fall from his horse ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... 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, ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... floor by the eastern wall lies one of those charnel house memorials, in the shape of a ghastly and desiccated human figure, of the kind not uncommon in tombs of the sixteenth century. To whose tomb this figure belonged there is no ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: Southwark Cathedral • George Worley
... fleeces of 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 and wear, must be brushed off into the Ashpit, into ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... d'Anjou implored, "Let not your grief to such excess be wrought; Bid that our men through all this field be sought, Whom those of Spain have in the battle caught; In a charnel command that they be borne." Answered the King: "Sound then ...
— The Song of Roland • Anonymous
... 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, I ...
— Rhymes of a Rolling Stone • Robert W. Service
... limbs, 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 only eighty, and many of these irretrievably broken ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... black mass in the gloom, A tower that merged into the heavy sky; Around, the huddled stones of grave and tomb: Some old God's-acre now corruption's sty: 10 He murmured to himself with dull despair, Here Faith died, poisoned by this charnel air. ...
— The City of Dreadful Night • James Thomson
... was with difficulty preserved by Steiger, the venerable mayor, a man of extreme firmness of character. A French force under Brune had already overrun Vaud, which, under pretext of being delivered from oppression, was laid under a heavy contribution; the ancient charnel-house at Murten was also destroyed, because the French had formerly been beaten on this spot by the Germans. But few of the Swiss marched to the aid of Berne; two hundred of the people of Uri, arrayed in the armor of their ancestors, some of the peasantry of Glarus, St. Gall, and Freiburg.[10] ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... 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
... down deeper—I do not know how much—than the level on which we stood, and was edged in with a low wall of rock. So far as I could judge, this pit was about the size of the space beneath the dome of St. Paul's in London, and when the lamps were held up I saw that it was nothing but one vast charnel-house, being literally full of thousands of human skeletons, which lay piled up in an enormous gleaming pyramid, formed by the slipping down of the bodies at the apex as fresh ones were dropped in from above. Anything more appalling than this jumbled ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... (1548) the chapel of St. Paul's charnel house was pulled down and the bones removed into the country and reburied. From a sanitary point of view their removal is to be commended. There is no such excuse, however, for the destruction of the cloister in Pardon churchyard (April, 1549), with its famous ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume I • Reginald R. Sharpe
... deflect that murderous tomahawk, its keen edge had failed to reach me. And what had occurred? What could account for my escape; for this silence and darkness; for these dead bodies; for the flight of our assailants? Indians always removed their dead, yet seemingly this place was a perfect charnel house, heaped with slain. Surely there could be but one answer—the occurrence of a disaster so complete, so horrifying, that the few who were left alive had thought only of instant flight. Then it was that the probable truth came ...
— The Devil's Own - A Romance of the Black Hawk War • Randall Parrish
... seated part of the congregation. Behind and around us were the vaults I have already described; before us the devout audience, dimly shown by the light which streamed on their faces through one or two low Gothic windows, such as give air and light to charnel-houses. By this were seen the usual variety of countenances which are generally turned towards a Scotch pastor on such occasions, almost all composed to attention, unless where a father or mother here and there recalls the wandering eyes of a lively child, or disturbs the slumbers ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... and the other secretions and excretions—particularly the dejections—are as they should be. Nay, the very exhalations of the lungs are purer, as is obvious from the breath. That of a vegetable-eater is perfectly sweet, while that of a flesh-eater is often as offensive as the smell of a charnel-house. This distinction is discernible even among the brute animals. Those which feed on grass, grain, etc., have a breath incomparably sweeter than those which prey on animals. Compare the camel, and horse, and cow, and sheep, and rabbit, with the tiger (if you choose ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott
... though rambling a dozen hours or more, over paths of the roughest and most difficult kind, is seldom conscious of fatigue, until he returns to the upper air; and then it seems to him, at least in the summer season, that he has exchanged the atmosphere of paradise for that of a charnel warmed by steam—all without is so heavy, so dank, so dead, so mephitic. Awe and even apprehension, if that has been felt, soon yield to the influence of the delicious air of the Cave; and after a time a certain jocund feeling is found mingled ...
— Rambles in the Mammoth Cave, during the Year 1844 - By a Visiter • Alexander Clark Bullitt
... heart would have healed again had not the life-warmth of Faith been withdrawn.' But this once lost, how recoverable? how, rather, ever acquirable? 'First must the dead Letter of Religion own itself dead, and drop piecemeal into dust, if the living Spirit of Religion, freed from this, its charnel house, is to arise on us, new born of Heaven, and with new ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... beings. Their dresses showed that they were those of men, women, and children; but weeks had now passed since they were slain, and their bones alone remained. The beasts and even the birds of prey had been there, or it would have been impossible to enter into that charnel-house. ...
— Manco, the Peruvian Chief - An Englishman's Adventures in the Country of the Incas • W.H.G. Kingston
... 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 of the bed was seated John Avenel; but ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... drowsy FOG, 80 That lingering slumbers on the sedge-wove bog, With webbed feet o'er midnight meadows creeps, Or flings his hairy limbs on stagnant deeps. YOU meet CONTAGION issuing from afar, And dash the baleful conqueror from his car; 85 When, Guest of DEATH! from charnel vaults he steals, And bathes in human gore his ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... 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 ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman
... error, but inculcated by a divine being. Even the sickening tales of Krishna and his amours are less shocking than this. When we turn from such representations of divinity to "the Word made flesh" we seem to have escaped from the pestilential air of a charnel-house to the sweet, pure breath ...
— Two Old Faiths - Essays on the Religions of the Hindus and the Mohammedans • J. Murray Mitchell and William Muir
... argue as yet," said Maskull. "At this moment the world with its sweetness seems to me a sort of charnel house. I feel a loathing for everything in it, including myself. I know ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... country, which he amused himself with in his spare time. But he did not live to print it, his death taking place late in the year 1573. His will was short, and mentioned none of his children by name. His property in St. Paul's Churchyard, which included the Chapel or Charnel House on the north side, which he had purchased of King Henry VIII., he left to his wife, and the witnesses to his will were George Bishop, Raphael Holinshed, John Hunn, and John Shepparde.[6] His wife, Joan Wolfe, only ...
— A Short History of English Printing, 1476-1898 • Henry R. Plomer
... 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 was a den. She was ...
— The Flight of the Shadow • George MacDonald
... 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 ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... cumbersome weapons, and that we should give ourselves up with clean hearts and empty hands to battle against the fiery nightmare. He who fights and defends himself needs a pure heart: so does he who wanders among charnel houses, gives drink to parched lips, washes fevered faces and bathes wounds. We thought there would be a great forgetfulness of self and of former hopes, and of the whole world. O Union of pure hearts to ...
— The New Book Of Martyrs • Georges Duhamel
... 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 ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... said: The old America is dead; America is money mad; America is a charnel house of greed. Millions and millions of men from all over the earth came to her shores. And the world said: They have brought only their greed with them. And still the struggle went on. The continent was taken; man abolished the wilderness. ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... left, she strives, alas! in vain, To teach their limbs along the burning road A few short steps to totter with their load, Shakes her numb arm that slumbers with its weight, And eyes through tears the mountain's shadeless height; And bids her soldier come her woes to share, Asleep on Bunker's [iv] charnel hill afar; For hope's deserted well why wistful look? Chok'd is the pathway, ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... is 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 ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... obits and chantreys were confiscated, and the vestments and altar cloths were sold. The early reformers were backed by greedy partisans. The Protector Somerset, who was desirous of building rapidly a sumptuous palace in the Strand, pulled down the chapel and charnel-house in the Pardon churchyard, and carted off the stones of St. Paul's cloister. When the good Ridley was installed Bishop of London, he would not enter the choir until the lights on the altar were extinguished. Very soon a table was substituted for the altar, and there ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... caverns 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, ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... all the earth, and should have of everything the fairest, best and noblest. Likewise have they costly shrines of gold and silver, and images set with gems and jewels; but within are dead men's bones, as foul and corrupt as in any charnel-house. So also have they costly vestments, chasubles, palliums, copes, hoods, mitres, but what are they that be clothed therewithal? slow- bellies, evil wolves, godless swine, persecuting and dishonoring the word of God.Just in the same way have they much noble music, especially ...
— The Hymns of Martin Luther • Martin Luther
... more repulsive. Most of them have passed through the successive grades of immorality. Some of them have been the queenly mistress of the spendthrift, and have descended, step by step, to the foul, degraded beings of those human charnel-houses. In some instances fresh-looking girls will be seen, and careful inquiry will discover the fact that they were either emigrant or innocent country girls, who have been inveigled into these dens by the arts of procuresses or brought there ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... melodramas—Gautier says that he "planned his singular edifice in advance, like a castle of Anne Radcliffe, with donjon, turrets, underground chambers, secret passages, corkscrew stairs, vaulted halls, mysterious closets, hiding places in the thickness of the walls, oubliettes, charnel-houses, crypts where his heroes and heroines were to meet later on, to love, hate, fight, set ambushes, assassinate, or marry. . . . He cut masked doors in the walls for his expected personage to appear through, and trap doors in the floor for ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... to give life to the dead. He will make the deaf ear to hear, the blind eye to see, the pulseless heart to beat, and the damp walls of your spiritual charnel-house will crash into ruin at His cry: "Come forth!" I verily believe there are souls in this house who are now dead in sin, who in half an hour will be alive forever. There was a thrilling dream, a glorious dream—you may have heard of it. Ezekiel closed his ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... anything else that Dore has done; but they are also vapid, and without any one merit whatever in point of art. The illustrations to the 'Contes Drolatiques' are full of power and invention; but those to 'Elaine' are merely and simply stupid; theatrical betises, with the taint of the charnel-house ...
— Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne - Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work • John Ruskin
... and milk-warm sphinx, I taste a strange apocalypse: Your subtle taper finger-tips Weave me new heavens, yet, methinks, I know the wiles and each iynx That brought me passionate to your lips: I know you bare as laughter strips Your charnel beauty; ...
— The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems • Aldous Huxley
... believe that there has 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
... he got to the hotel, and I got a doctor and a nurse, and for two days I had to watch the revolution alone, while dad had fits of remorse 'cause he brought me to such a charnel house, he said. ...
— Peck's Bad Boy Abroad • George W. Peck
... died away in low gaspings and moanings. The day broke. The Nabob had slept off his debauch, and permitted the door to be opened. Twenty-three ghastly figures staggered out of the charnel-house, one hundred and twenty-three bodies were hastily thrown into a pit and covered up, and the Black Hole of Calcutta has gone into history as a synonym for all that is dreadful and all that is possible in ...
— Ten Great Events in History • James Johonnot
... of nations—bear witness field and storm To our desert hereafter? Now we are but braggarts warm— But by our honest cause, we swear, ere they our land retake, Each town shall he a charnel ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 476, Saturday, February 12, 1831 • Various
... actors must be bold men to tread a stage covering so many mouldering relics of mortality. Not for Potosi, and the Real del Monte to boot, would we do it, lest, at the witching hour, some ghastly skeleton array should rise and drive us from the Golgotha, or drag us to the charnel-house beneath. But we forget that the good old days are gone when such things were, or were believed in, and that superstition is now as much out of date as a heavy coach upon the Great North Road. Spectres may occasionally be seen at the Gymnase, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... the sight of so many poor fellows in the last stage of that horrid disease—their teeth fallen out, gums ulcerated, bodies full of tumours and sores—was quite sufficient, and, hurrying up from the lower deck, as he would have done from a charnel-house, the officer hastened on shore and made ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... on the same evening. It possessed unlimited powers to confiscate property and take life. The Girondists dared not vote against this tribunal. The public voice would pronounce them the worst of traitors. France was now a charnel-house. Blood flowed in streams which were never dry. Innocence had no protection. Virtue was suspicion, suspicion a crime, the guillotine the penalty, and the confiscated estate the bribe to accusation. Thus there was erected, in the name of liberty ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... 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 ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... the gloomy platform, and various slouching shapes entered third-class carriages. The wanderers had the only first-class compartment to themselves. It struck cold and noisome, like a peculiarly unaired charnel-house. A feeble lamp, whose effect was dimmed by the swishing dirty oil in the bottom of the globe, gave a pretense at illumination. The guard passing by the window turned his lantern on them and paused for a wondering moment. Were they a runaway couple? If so, thought he, ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... nothing seems to avail with the other articles of clothing. Linen feels quite wet if it is left unused in the almirah, or chest of drawers, for a week. Silk dresses break out into a measle-like rash of yellow spots. Cotton or muslin gowns become livid and take unto themselves a horrible charnel-house odor. Shoes and books are speedily covered a quarter of an inch deep by a mould which you can easily imagine would begin to grow ferns and long grasses in another week ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... 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 ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... we make moan— Nay! 'tis in envy of your martyrdom! The mirror of your flaming soul Has caught our poverty and gloom, In that fierce light our virtues shown Petty, distorted, wan! Then, hail! O martyr, in our day of doom! Hail, fiery heart, receive the victor's crown! Our heart a charnel house has grown For our vast dead! Yet we make room For freedom's slain. Shall not the tomb Yield heavy harvest where ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... with understanding. The period of actual death and race-extermination is not far off. We could have produced the same barrenness and frenzy of nothingness in people, perhaps, by dinning it into them that every man is just a charnel-house skeleton of unclean bones. Our "understanding," our science and idealism have produced in people the same strange frenzy of self-repulsion as if they saw their own skulls each time they looked in the mirror. A man is a thing of scientific cause-and-effect and biological ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... that the human mind can retain such a mass of recollections; yet we seem to be, in general, little aware that for one solitary incident in our lives, preserved by memory, hundreds have been buried in the silent charnel-house of oblivion. We peruse the past, like a map of pleasing or melancholy recollections, and observe lines crossing and re-crossing each other in a thousand directions; some spots are almost blank; others faintly traced; and the rest a confused and perplexed labyrinth. ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - Tailor in Dalkeith, written by himself • David Macbeth Moir
... retrace my steps.— Despair I take with me. Alas, my people! E'en to the second Deluge now the plague May rage at will, may pile mount Oeta high With corpses upon corpses, and may turn All Greece into one mighty charnel-house, Ere Semele can bend the angry gods. I, thou, and Greece, and all, ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... 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 price of ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... that it was a wall, formed of 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 ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... with which he beheld his nearest, and almost his only, friend consigned to the tomb of his ancestry. A relative observed him turn deadly pale, when, all rites being now duly observed, it became the duty of the chief mourner to lower down into the charnel vault, where mouldering coffins showed their tattered velvet and decayed plating, the head of the corpse which was to be their partner in corruption. He stept to the youth and offered his assistance, which, by a mute ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... hole, 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 ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... upon my fancy, and a churchyard was to me merely the receptacle of bodies deprived of life, which, from being the seat of beauty and strength, had become food for the worm. Now I was led to examine the cause and progress of this decay and forced to spend days and nights in vaults and charnel-houses. My attention was fixed upon every object the most insupportable to the delicacy of the human feelings. I saw how the fine form of man was degraded and wasted; I beheld the corruption of death succeed to the blooming cheek of life; I saw how the worm inherited the wonders of ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... document from a small, flat cardboard box which he carried in the breast pocket of his coat. But first he withdrew from the box a little object, and placed it on the table. It was an ivory skull, and the very presence of such a sinister token brought some hint of the charnel-house into the cozy ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... sir—now, while I'm speaking! I have been fighting—fighting hard—for half an hour. The place smells like a charnel-house and the—shapes are taking definite, horrible form! They have ... eyes!" His voice sounded harsh. "Quite black the eyes are, and they shine like beads! It's gradually wearing me down, ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... 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. ...
— Montezuma's Daughter • H. Rider Haggard |
