"Desecrated" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... not trouble Lawyer Dean, but walked slowly back to my hotel, ruminating as I went. The image of the old woman washing that desecrated stair had struck my fancy; it seemed that all the water-supply of the city and all the soap in the State would scarce suffice to cleanse it, it had been so long a clearing-house of dingy secrets and a factory ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the struggle went on. The inner court of the Temple was desecrated by blood—dying men lay on the steps of the altar, and the shouts and songs of the savage soldiery rose, where the hymns of praise of the Levites had been wont ...
— For the Temple - A Tale of the Fall of Jerusalem • G. A. Henty
... against the silent Sphinx, and grain by grain heaped her slow-growing grave; the Nile spread its waters across the green valley, and lapped its brink with a watery thirst for land, and then receded to its channel, and poured its ancient flood still downward to the sea; worshipped, or desecrated; threaded by black Nubian boatmen, who mocked its sacred name with such savage mirth as satyrs might have spirted from their hairy lips; navigated by keen-eyed Arabs, lithe and dark and treacherous as the river beneath them; Coptic shepherds, lingering on the brink, drank the sweet waters, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... take the lesson that that house, too, may be desecrated. There may be, as there were in the original Temple, the externals of worship, and yet, eating out the reality of these, there may be an ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... close and dirty in the office. Nekhludoff went out into the yard, and was going into the garden, but he remembered: that night, the window of the maid-servant's room, the side porch, and he felt uncomfortable, and did not like to pass the spot desecrated by guilty memories. He sat down on the doorstep, and breathing in the warm air, balmy with the strong scent of fresh birch leaves, he sat for a long time looking into the dark garden and listening to the mill, the nightingales, ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... far from St. Etienne du Mont to the Pantheon. I cannot say that there is any odor of sanctity about this great temple, which has been consecrated, if I remember correctly, and, I will not say desecrated, but secularized from time to time, according to the party which happened to be uppermost. I confess that I did not think of it chiefly as a sacred edifice, or as the resting-place, more or less secure, of the "grands hommes" to whom it is dedicated. ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... contest on his part, is more for lordship and dominion, than for truth.' But there are many more such passages, which laid altogether, would make a considerable dung-hil." [Footnote: Idem, p. 9.] They dwelt with pathos upon those sacred rites desecrated by these "unsanctified" "young men" in their "miserable pamphlet." "The Lord is exceedingly glorified, and his people are edified, by the accounts, which the candidates, of the communion in our churches give of ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... figure of a stranger; a slender, wasted body, dark stains upon it in the moonlight. It wore some kind of curious headgear. The man stared. The light was reflected from the sharp points of long thorns. A cloth was fastened about the loins. The figure stood very straight in the desecrated Holy of Holies. A light seemed to come from its face. Its eyes looked at the man with great pity. Slowly the figure raised its arms. Slowly the arms extended themselves; there were blood-stains in the palms ...
— And Thus He Came • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... Sunday in any intellectual occupation, and having no friendly attractive home to make the peace of his own hearth the best refreshment after the exhausting week. And so it turned out: the public-houses were full to overflowing, and the holiness of Sunday was only too often desecrated by the unholy sight of drunken men and, more horrible still, drunken women; but this was not all, for so strong was the temptation thrust upon them, that the workman's hardly earned week's wages ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... statement is too general. Benares, Allahabad (Prayag), and many other important Hindoo cities, were never deserted, and continued to be populous through all vicissitudes. It is true that in most places the principal temples were desecrated or destroyed, and were ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... was merely our pretended Allies and Protectors that have desecrated our divine service, utterly wasted our Country, reduced the inhabitants to want and desperation, and, in short, have so behaved that you would not know this region again. Truly these troops have realized for us most of the infamies we heard reported ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... of all others, should have become his ally! But you would not, no indeed you would not, if you knew how I felt at the procession while I was looking down at the ground, and knew that his very look desecrated me like the rain that washed all the blossoms off the young vine-shoots last year. It was just as if he were drawing a net round my heart—but, oh! what a net! It was as if the flax on a distaff had been set on fire, and the flames spun out into ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... good people of Moscow had given proofs of high moral qualities, worthy of admiration, under the sad circumstances. Poor moujiks who had learned of the defeat of the Russians at Borodino said their place was no longer in a city which was to be desecrated by the presence of the enemy, and, leaving their huts to be burned down, their miserable belongings to be pillaged, they went on the highways at the mercy of God, disposed to march as long as their eyes could see before them. Others, ...
— Napoleon's Campaign in Russia Anno 1812 • Achilles Rose
... he's stayed there ever since. I've been afraid to go anywhere with the idol for fear he'd waylay me and get it. One day while I was away somewhere he came here and told Ezela about me having the idol. From that time on I led a life of hell. Ezela turned on me. She said I'd desecrated the altars of her tribe, and she kept harping to me about it until I got so I couldn't ...
— The Boss of the Lazy Y • Charles Alden Seltzer
... with the ruby. In the temple its influence was beneficent, its crimson glow benignant and abounding with blessings for all true believers; but when desecrated by the plundering vandal's touch it became a great power ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk
... truth and clearness, and you know, as He does, I have tried to do right. But what you do not know, what He alone can know, is how I have suffered—how every sacred feeling of my woman's heart has been torn and desecrated, and dragged to the earth, and how I endured it all, because I thought it was my duty—and all the time it was—Oh, I feel as if I don't know what may happen to me next to drag me deeper down in misery and sorrow. I thought the worst had come when my baby ...
— A Beautiful Alien • Julia Magruder
... the good, the brave, the great, thy land Lies at thy feet, a crushed and morient rose Trampled and desecrated by thy foes. One day a greater Belgium will be born, But what of this dead Belgium wracked and torn? What of this rose ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times
... I didn't; I bought enough clothes for two brides, and now I'm scared to wear 'em, and I don't know what you'll think when you see my bank-book. Everybody is talking about me and that dinner-party Tuesday night, and Aunt Adeline says she can't live in a house of mourning so desecrated any longer; she's going back to the cottage. Aunt Bettie Pollard says that if I want to get married I ought to do it to Mr. Wilson Graves because of the seven children and then everybody would be so relieved that they are taken care of that they would forget ...
— The Melting of Molly • Maria Thompson Daviess
... the world has yet witnessed. But in this struggle fair women and chivalrous men will play no part. Types and ideals have changed. Helens and Launcelots are anachronisms. Blows will be given and taken, and men fight and die, but not for faiths and altars. Shrines will be desecrated, but they will be the shrines, not of temples, but market-places. Prophets will arise, but they will be the prophets of prices and products. Battles will be waged, not for honor and glory, nor for thrones and sceptres, but ...
— War of the Classes • Jack London
... head, for the relic was encased in gold and jewels, and was therefore worth the king's having, who was most a friend of the reformed religion when it paid best. The later Cromwell, who beat a later king hard by at Marston Moor, must have somehow desecrated the Minster, though there is no record of any such fact. A more authentic monument of the religious difficulties of the times is the pastoral staff, bearing the arms of Catharine of Braganza, the poor little wife of Charles II., which was snatched ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... Desecrated Church," relating to ancient Albury,—whereof this matter is remarkable; I had protested against its demolition to Bishop Sumner, and used the expression in my letter that the man who was doing the wrong of changing the old church in his park for ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... spoken above (Appendix 12) of the way in which the Roman Catholic priests everywhere suffer their churches to be desecrated. But the worst instances I ever saw of sacrilege and brutality, daily permitted in the face of all men, were the uses to which the noble base of St. Mark's was put, when I was last in Venice. Portions of nearly all cathedrals may be found ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... hostilities; to remove from their minds the false impressions which their designing and interested rulers had artfully attempted to make, that the war on our part was one of conquest, that it was a war against their religion and their churches, which were to be desecrated and overthrown, and that their rights of person and private property would be violated. To remove these false impressions, our commanders in the field were directed scrupulously to respect their religion, their churches, ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Polk - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 4: James Knox Polk • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... think that the Reformers have gained the upper hand. I know King Philip and his advisers too well not to be sure that they will wreak a bitter vengeance on the cities in which the churches of the faith they hold have been desecrated. He may appear indifferent for a time, for the sake of lulling the people to sleep; but, depend upon it, he only bides his time, and he will speedily spring forth like a tiger of the Far East, to crush with his mighty paws all who have ventured ...
— The Golden Grasshopper - A story of the days of Sir Thomas Gresham • W.H.G. Kingston
... inscriptions. The Romans ornamented their tombs in a variety of ways, but did not care to represent death in a direct manner. The place of burial of a person, even a slave, was sacred, and one who desecrated it was liable to grave punishment—even to death,— if the bodies or bones were removed. Oblations of flowers, wine, and milk were often brought to the tombs by relatives, ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... There the good mistress of the cottage listened to all his directions, and promised devoutly to obey him—to keep the room quiet, if she could—to tell everything he had said to Miss Nettie. He did not enter the desecrated parlour again when he came down-stairs. What was the use? He was glad to go out and escape the chance of a fraternal struggle. He went out into the cold night air all thrilling with excitement and agitation. It was not wonderful ...
— The Doctor's Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... what I had observed at the Niagara Falls, and spoke of the many hideous bill boards and advertisements that desecrated the scenery wherever I had been, and pausing over the one among others that had really interested me, "A GOOD NAME", was interrupted by my chairman who exclaimed in ...
— My Impresssions of America • Margot Asquith
... streets in freedom now," the secretary went on, as if to himself; "even dares to enter the house he has so wofully desecrated; but justice is justice and, sooner or later, something will transpire which will prove to you that a premonition so wonderful as that I received had its significance; that the voice calling 'Trueman, Trueman,' was something more than the empty utterances of an excited brain; that it was Justice ...
— The Leavenworth Case • Anna Katharine Green
... know that there was an 'illuminator's guide' at home, and a great deal of red, blue, and gold paint, with grand designs for the ornamentation of Bankside chapel? Whether he knew it or not, she could not help answering, 'Illumination is desecrated by ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Gentile Bellini and Vittor Carpaccio, to whom we are indebted for the only existing faithful statements of the architecture of Old Venice, and who are the only authorities to whom we can trust in conjecturing the former beauty of those few desecrated fragments, the last of which are now being rapidly swept away by ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... mood, most Reverend Father, wert thou to scatter penitential ashes before a desecrated altar which may send no incense ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... enjoying a superb view of the city and the Golden Horn. It was burnt[486] in the fire which devastated the district on the 25th June 1784, and since that catastrophe its grounds have been converted into market gardens or left waste, and its chapel has been a desecrated pile. But its proud name still haunts the site, calling to mind political relations which have long ceased to exist. The chapel stood at the north-western end of the residence and formed an integral part of the structure. ...
— Byzantine Churches in Constantinople - Their History and Architecture • Alexander Van Millingen
... sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the church was desecrated and plundered by ruthless invaders, Christians (Hungarians) as well as Mohammedans, who carried off its treasures, which are said to have been of great value. In 1681, however, Prince Serban Cantacuzene, of whose good deeds we shall speak hereafter, completely restored the cathedral, ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... fled. The Saxons took possession of the deserted galleys. They found them, as they expected, stored full of plunder of all kinds—rich wearing apparel, drinking goblets, massive vessels of gold and silver which had been torn from some desecrated altar, rich ornaments and jewels and other articles. These were at once removed to the Dragon. Fire was applied to the boats, and they were soon a mass of flames. Then the Dragon directed her course to ...
— The Dragon and the Raven - or, The Days of King Alfred • G. A. Henty
... confirmatory of the actual condition of the people of Ceylon at the period as shown by the native chronicles, the king being the Malabar Magha, who invaded the island from Caligna 1219 A.D., overthrew the Buddhist religion, desecrated its monuments and temples, and destroyed the edifices and ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... the scaffold, the witch-hunters of the day did not refrain from their ghoulish work, but desecrated the remains of Goodwife Knapp at the grave side in their search for ...
— The Witchcraft Delusion In Colonial Connecticut (1647-1697) • John M. Taylor
... dilapidated. The revocation of the Edict of Nantes ruined its trade. Its principal merchants were Huguenots: there are still amongst the best families some of the Reformed religion. Then in the great Revolution it suffered again; the churches were desecrated, and turned to all manner of common uses; some are being restored, but I myself have seen straw hoisted in at a church window, beautiful with flamboyant tracery in the arch, the shafts below ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... beneath the mailed heel of the Greek, and trembled at the shadow of the Roman's spear; long has the ancient worship of its Gods been desecrated, and its people crushed with oppression. But we believe that the hour of deliverance is at hand, and with the solemn voice of Egypt and by the ancient Gods of Egypt, to whose cause thou art of all men bound, we call upon thee, Prince, to be the sword of our deliverance. Hearken! Twenty ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... Place—he arrived so early—when, in the afternoon, every sort of odd person dropped in. Miriam held a reception in the little garden and insisted on all the company's staying to supper. Her mother shed tears to Peter, in the desecrated house, because they had accepted, Miriam and she, an invitation—and in Cromwell Road too—for the evening. Miriam had now decreed they shouldn't go—they would have so much better fun with their good friends at home. ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... hourly conflicts were occurring. The Colonnas, the Orsinis, the Savellis, were every instant engaged in struggles which deluged the streets with blood, and cut off many of her citizens in the flower of their age; strangers were also continually invading the heritage of the Church, and desecrated Rome with massacres and outrages scarcely less deplorable than those of the Huns and the Vandals. In the capital of the Christian world, ruins of recent date lay side by side with the relics of past ages; the churches were sacked, burned, and destroyed; the solitary ...
— The Life of St. Frances of Rome, and Others • Georgiana Fullerton
... from the light-hearted manner in which Mrs. Montgomery strove to entertain him and relieve the monotony of his busy life. "Sunnybank" had been closed from society for several months. No guests desecrated the stillness of the deserted drawing-room, and save the occasional calls of a few business men, "all ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... heartiness with which they drank is a criterion, the good name of the ship was established. Then the assembly adjourned to the sitting room and—yes, even the front parlor. Not since the days when that sacred apartment had been desecrated by the irreverent city boarders, during the Howes regime, had its walls echoed to such whoops and shouts of laughter. The children played "Post Office" and "Copenhagen" and "Clap in, Clap out," while the ...
— Cy Whittaker's Place • Joseph C. Lincoln
... inflicted upon them, in consequence of this kingdom. The destruction of the temple in the literal sense is not, primarily, spoken of; although the latter, it is true, be inseparable from the former. If the Covenant-people in general were outwardly desecrated, because they had desecrated themselves inwardly, then also the outward sanctuary which they had, by their wickedness, converted into a den of thieves, was taken from them; compare the remarks on Dan. ix. ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... worn face, and the largest black eyes, it seemed to the youths that they had ever seen—an apparition of awe and grief and wonder. To compare a great thing to a small, she was to their eyes as a ruined, desecrated shrine to the eyes of the saint's own peculiar worshipper. I may compare her to what I please, great or small—to a sapphire set in tin, to an angel with draggled feathers; for far beyond all comparison is that temple of the holy ghost in ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... (after abstracting for our local museum the arrowheads and tomahawk, as well as the skull of the very ancient Briton himself), and when our archaeological society, ably led by the esteemed secretary, stood two years later on the desecrated tomb, the grass had grown again as green as ever, and not a sign remained of the sacrilegious act in which one of the party then assembled there had been a prime actor. Looking down from the summit of the ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... rapacity and bigotry unequalled in any former administration. In Dublin, on Saint Stephen's Day, 1629, the Protestant Archbishop, Bulkley, and the Mayor of the city, entered the Carmelite Chapel, at the head of a file of soldiers, dispersed the congregation, desecrated the altar, and arrested the officiating friars. The persecution was then taken up and repeated wherever the executive power was strong enough to defy the popular indignation. A Catholic seminary lately established in the capital was confiscated, and turned over to Trinity College as ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... or wail the death-wail over them. Those who sacrificed themselves for the peace, the liberty, and the religion of their fellow-countrymen, lay bleaching in the field of death for long, and when at last they were buried by charity, the peasants dug up their bodies, desecrated their graves, and cast them once more upon the open heath for the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... sympathy, unable to exchange ideas but with those whose ideas are only the hideous specters of departed intellect, or even to hear the welcome sound of the human voice, except to mistake it for the howl of a fiend, and stop the ear desecrated by its intrusion,— then at last your fear will become a more fearful hope; you will wish to become one of them, to escape the agony of consciousness. As those who have long leaned over a precipice, have at last felt a desire to plunge below, to relieve the intolerable temptation ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... informed the passer-by that here was likewise the abode of 'Mr. J. A. Dunlop Proudfoot, Advocate.' The Proudfoots must be rich, for no advocate could look to have much business in so remote a quarter; and John hated them for their wealth and for their name, and for the sake of the house they desecrated with their presence. He remembered a Proudfoot he had seen at school, not known: a little, whey-faced urchin, the despicable member of some lower class. Could it be this abortion that had climbed to be an advocate, and now lived in the birthplace of Flora and the home of ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... similitude, the comparison is well selected, and does great honor to the judgment of the military wiseacres. At all events, never was the memory of a Napoleon, a Massena, or a Davoust, more ignominiously desecrated than ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... she come here? Because she felt as though the Presence that had housed under the veil of the Consecrated Element were still guarding Its desecrated home. And near the door of the tiny sacristy dangled the rope communicating with the bell that hung, as yet uninjured, in the little wooden cupola upon the roof. The bell could be rung, should need ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... bishop told me—and a hard rap he gave Mr. M'Pepper across the knuckles for Bryan's affair—'the altar,' said he, 'isn't the place for politics, but for religion; an' I hope I may never hear of its being desecrated with politics again,' said his lordship, an' neither ...
— The Emigrants Of Ahadarra - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... Desecrated as the body is, a vengeful ghost survives and hovers over it to scare. Espied by some timid man-of-war or blundering discovery-vessel from afar, when the distance obscuring the swarming fowls, nevertheless still shows the white mass floating in the sun, and the white spray ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... paid for with the dreams of youth. The wide, vague world becomes familiar, becomes even common-place. London, Paris, Venice, many-colored Cairo, the desecrated crypts of the pyramids, the crumbling villages of Palestine, no longer glimmer before me in the iridescent glamor of fancy, for I have seen them. But something of the boyish thrill that filled me when I pored over the pages of Melville long ago returned while I stood on the deck of the Morning ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... dismal sanctuary, with hands outstretched towards the desecrated image of its tutelar saint, knelt Sybil. All was darkness. Neither the heavy vapors that surrounded her, nor the shrine before which she bent, were visible; but, familiar with the dreary spot, she knew that she had placed herself aright. ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... possible way of keeping pace with flying time in the army, is by writing a diary. But even when it was known that the Sabbath had been reached, no regard was taken of its sacred character. One of the causes of our disaster at the first battle of Bull Run was supposed by many to be, that we had desecrated the holy Sabbath by our attack. However true or false such a view may have been, the order we received to-day from Washington was universally felt to ...
— Three Years in the Federal Cavalry • Willard Glazier
... enough, but too big for mystery, too small to be impressive. One had imagined it twinkling like the wicked pupil of a witch's eye, with cornea of white stones and eye-lashes of pine trees, and we desecrated even its stillness by shooting at wild duck ...
— The Luck of Thirteen - Wanderings and Flight through Montenegro and Serbia • Jan Gordon
... would be the investigation of the places where any of her husband's papers might be found. Her own study was not exempt from the prying eyes of the detectives. This room, sacred to her, which Roland himself never entered without permission was ransacked, and forever desecrated in her eyes. This official meddling with her books and her papers could never be forgotten. The pleasant place was made an abomination ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... strength and it leads to respect for customs and to the observance of maxims. Especially are burial places held in sacred esteem, and as they contain the ashes of the fathers they must not be disturbed or desecrated. In this respect we might emulate the Chinese, for they are a perfect illustration of the old precept, "Honour thy father and thy mother," which, in a busy, independent age, there is danger of forgetting. But we look with no little interest on the Joss above the altar, the Chinese ...
— By the Golden Gate • Joseph Carey
... physically on the rack, owing to differences of religious opinion. The state of things which made it possible for sepoys to revolt because rifle bullets were greased with the fat of a sacred animal, or for yellow men to tear up railway tracks because the magic desecrated the tombs of their ancestors, is rapidly passing away, as Orientals realize the profits to be ...
— International Language - Past, Present and Future: With Specimens of Esperanto and Grammar • Walter J. Clark
... been knighted by Queen Anne in 1705. We visited it many years ago. The part of the house most intimately associated with his name is the little observatory perched on the roof. We were permitted to ascend into that spot, to see it desecrated by its present use, for there we found a shoemaker busy at his toil. A glass cupola probably crowned the observatory in Newton's time, and evidently there was a window in each of the four walls. So here he looked out on the London of nearly a century and a half ago, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... monarch was on his knees before the altar of his God, praying, or seeming to pray; asking that his trespasses might be forgiven as he forgave those who trespassed against him; although he anticipated that before his return to his desecrated palace-home the deed of blood would be accomplished. Suddenly, however, his devotions were interrupted by the entrance of De Vitry into the chapel, who, approaching De Luynes, whispered to him the tidings of his disappointment. In another second the lips ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... legend "Desecrator of holy things" (Profanateur des choses saintes), in front of the parish church in Montreal, and being placed on his knees, he made the amende honorable to God, to the King and to Justice, and declared in a loud and intelligible voice that he had rashly and wickedly desecrated the sacred image of Jesus Christ, and had profaned the words of Holy Scripture. He was then brought to all the cross-roads of the town, where he was scourged by the public executioner, and afterwards lodged in prison to await the sailing of the ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... of the band. Finding that he was a stranger, they related to him in fiendish glee their recent exploits of pillage, rapine, and murder. They conducted him through the temple; everywhere were marks of their brutish acts; its altars of prayer were broken; the baptismal font had been so "diligently desecrated as to render the apartment in which it was contained too noisome to abide in." There in the steeple close by the "scar of divine wrath" left by a recent thunderbolt, were broken covers ...
— The Story of "Mormonism" • James E. Talmage
... we dream we know it, Bound with all our heart-strings, all our own? Any cold and cruel dawn may show it, Shattered, desecrated, overthrown. ...
— Legends and Lyrics: Second Series • Adelaide Anne Procter
... full of rather tawdry antiquities giving off its corridors, and other antiquities (as we see them in Italian inns) crammed against walls and into corners. Donatello and Mino bas-reliefs become sham by their surroundings, apocryphal Byzantine mosaics, second-rate pictures. Even empty sarcophagi and desecrated tombs just as at Riettis or Della Torres at Venice, and with seventeenth-century gilding and painting obbligato overhead. And then into wider corridors, whitewashed, always with that glare of electricity from the low roof; corridors where you expect automatic trucks of coals, ...
— The Spirit of Rome • Vernon Lee
... not wash the land clean. She knew what the Germans were, and had seen the wreck they had made of Belgium and part of France. She knew what the women and children had suffered, and how the churches had been desecrated and demolished. It was said that this was a war of humanity, but she believed it was a war of right against wrong; and if she were asked when the war would finish, she could only say that we would fight it right on to the end until we ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... ago in the morning sunshine of a day of woe, whose untimely night has endured for nineteen hundred years, so, in the glorious flush of his youth, this man had stood facing a noble and possibly a sanctified future; but the ungovernable flames of sin had reduced him, like that darkened and desecrated fane, to a melancholy mass of ashy arches and blackened columns, where ministering priests, all holy aspirations, slumbered in the dust. His dress was costly but negligent, and the red stain on his jacket told ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... memory, Frederick was really dreaming again. Suddenly he started up, cuffing Hans Fuellenberg furiously and saying: "I'll box your ears." Shortly afterward he was in the smoking-room delivering a crushing sermon for the third or fourth time, morally felling to the ground the man who had desecrated his sacred relation to Ingigerd. But the captain came in, and said they had to bury the stoker. There was a dead man on board. When Frederick stepped from the smoking-room, he saw the corpse lying in the coffin. It was not Zickelmann, ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... attack; the joy of repairing machinery and helping to erect a new crusher, nursing peons with broken legs, and riding cow-ponies down black mountain trails at night under an exhilarating splendor of stars. It never seemed to him that the machinery desecrated the ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... itself, and was not implanted for gratification by itself. It is naturally intertwined—and to a much greater degree than the corresponding desire in men—with her deepest personal, family, and social instincts, so that if these are desecrated and lost ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis
... can. The reason it was made is plain enough. It is to save the feelings of the other passengers—the religious ones among them, I mean. They would not like it to have the Sabbath desecrated by card-playing on ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... glowed with zeal like that of the prophets of the Middle Ages. He saw the people united once more in this desecrated hall. He heard the bells ringing, the sound of song, the voices of love and fellowship filling the anterooms where hate had scrawled hideous blasphemy against ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... cover such a space of the country's life as an independent nation. The Douglas family especially with several of its branches found a resting-place for their dust within these walls. Built and rebuilt, burnt and reburnt, mutilated, dismembered, consecrated and desecrated, make up the history of this celebrated edifice, and that of its like, from Land's End to John O'Groat's. It is a slight but a very appreciable mitigation of these destructive acts that it was ruined artistically; just as some enthusiastic castle ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... threnody of treason. It would have been such a relief if the old asthmatic who played it could have been induced to learn another tune to play on Sundays, and give us one day of rest. He did not, but desecrated the Lord's Day by playing as vilely as on the rest of the week. The Rebels were fully conscious of their musical deficiencies, and made repeated but unsuccessful attempts to induce the musicians among the prisoners to come outside and form ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... about to see him? Ruined, decrepit, suffering, enfeebled by the fasts his pride compelled him to undergo? Would he have his reason? Tears flowed unconsciously from her eyes as she looked about the desecrated sanctuary. The images of her whole life, her past efforts, her useless precautions, her childhood, her mother happy and unhappy,—all, even her little Joseph smiling on that scene of desolation, all were parts of a poem ...
— The Alkahest • Honore de Balzac
... tales of wild adventure told by Alan Hawke returned to her now—the mysteries of Thibet, the weird ferocity of Bhotan, the quaint tales of the polyandrous Todas, and the strange story of Vijaynagar, the desecrated city whose streets are peopled but ten days in the year! A lotos land where crime broods, where the cobra hides under ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... altars the swan-white mother-souls glisten and flutter. The estufas are without human occupants, their entrances alone are watched by old men or women outside to prevent the work of invocation and gratitude performed inside by symbolic advocates from being desecrated by rude or ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... on the spot, the carnage was over, but he was unreproving as he inspected the gruesome result. Into the great church itself he rode, and his horse's hoofs sank through the blood lying inches deep on the floor. The desecrated building was full of dead—men, women, and children—but the duke's only comment as he looked about was, "Here is a fine sight. Verily I have good butchers with me," ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam
... authors are, in general, discriminative and profound. In fact, his papers on Emerson and on Macaulay, published in 'Arcturus.' are better than merely 'profound,' if we take the word in its now desecrated sense; for they are at once pointed, lucid, and just:—as summaries leaving ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... of gold and the jewels which Akhnaton's hands had hidden in the hills near his tomb? Others besides Michael, students of Egyptology, had treasured the idea that the heretic King, knowing that his days were numbered, and that when he was dead everything in his fair city would be stolen and desecrated, taken to Thebes and there turned into wealth for the gods of Amon, had hid from his enemies his private ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... Australian colonies. She had seen Melbourne from 1852 to 1855—a wonderful growth and development. The only idea the ladies from Valparaiso formed about Australia was that it was hot and must be Roman Catholic, and consequently the Sabbath must be desecrated. It was in vain that my friend spoke of the Scots Church and Dr. Cairns's Church. Heat and Roman Catholicism were inseparably connected in ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... yonder in the name of one who still waits at a desecrated altar; and for myself you must take me as I am, with the remembrance ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... no answer; she sat there upon the fallen masonry, gazing at the ruins round her, motionless and white as a marble goddess, forgotten in her desecrated fane. ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... castle of all its valuables, furniture, etc., and to fill it with rubbish, and to put a litter of pigs in the king's bed. A short distance on their journey, Ethelburgh persuaded the king to return, and, showing him over the desecrated palace, exhorted him to consider the utter worthlessness of all earthly splendor and the advisability of joining her on a pilgrimage to Rome. Imprest by her words, Ina acted as she advised, and later endowed a school in Rome in which Anglo-Saxon children might become acquainted with the customs of ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various
... gray man now sat to the left of that which had been Tiburce d'Arnaye, and this new-comer was marked so that all might know who he was; and Florian's heart was troubled to note how handsome and how admirable was that desecrated face ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... of the duties of peaceful citizenship; and we are willing that colored soldiers, with their descendants, should have the benefit, if possible, of a public sentiment which has so extravagantly lauded their white companions in arms. If pulpits must be desecrated by eulogies of the patriotism of bloodshed, we see no reason why black defenders of their country in the war for liberty should not receive honorable mention as well as white invaders of a neighboring republic who have volunteered in a war for plunder and slavery extension. ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... nerve, the iron strain on brain and heart, the steel manacles on memory, all snapped simultaneously; the actress was trampled out of sight, the weak, suffering, long-tortured woman bowed down in helpless and hopeless agony before her desecrated mouldering altar, was alone with the dust of her ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... ground, were broken with sledge-hammers, hewn with axes, trampled, torn; and beaten into shreds. A troop of harlots, snatching waxen tapers from the altars, stood around the destroyers and lighted them at their work. Nothing escaped their omnivorous rage. They desecrated seventy chapels, forced open all the chests of treasure, covered their own squalid attire with the gorgeous robes of the ecclesiastics, broke the sacred bread, poured out the sacramental wine into golden chalices, quaffing huge draughts to the beggars' ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... words bewailed a state of War and Captivity—a state of things in which the great relations of human life are broken up and desecrated. But it is strange to find that the most flourishing forms of civilization involve conditions very similar to this. For, if any man will push beyond the circle of his daily associations, and enter the regions of the abject poor, he will see how the hostile ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... sought in vain to hide itself among the leaves. So busied had I been it escaped my notice. Instinctively I reclaimed the prize and with no gentle hand I doubt, for his touch and jeering manner desecrated the sacred ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... the tomb of the Scipios looks, no one can behold it without feelings of profound veneration. The history of the most heroic period of ancient Rome is linked with this tomb; and all the romance of the Punic Wars, of Hannibal and Hasdrubal, pass before the mind's eye, as one gazes upon the desecrated chambers where the son and relatives of the great conqueror ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... in their influence on Venice than the five hundred that preceded them; though the noble landscape of approach to her can now be seen no more, or seen only by a glance, as the engine slackens its rushing on the iron line; and though many of her palaces are for ever defaced, and many in desecrated ruins, there is still so much of magic in her aspect, that the hurried traveller, who must leave her before the wonder of that first aspect has been worn away, may still be led to forget the humility of her origin, and to shut his eyes to the depth of her desolation. They, ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... as proudly as it did when a monarch, bare-footed, walked through the roughly paved streets to do penance at the tomb of its martyred archbishop. It escaped lightly during the Reformation and civil war, though Becket's shrine was despoiled as savoring of idolatry and Cromwell's men desecrated its sanctity by stabling their horses ...
— British Highways And Byways From A Motor Car - Being A Record Of A Five Thousand Mile Tour In England, - Wales And Scotland • Thomas D. Murphy
... middle portal, which could only be used by the royal family, and which had never been desecrated by the entrance of one who was "lowly-born," the carriage came to a standstill. The lackeys hastened to open the gate, and a lady, advanced in years, gross in form, with an irritable face well pitted with pock-marks, and wearing ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... frantic manner, and if only——But no, he could not look back on the last five minutes. The past was a grey blank, but the flaming episode of the kiss had burnt a big black hole in his present consciousness. He felt that by that rash, unpardonable act he had desecrated the holy thing; and with it all, had forestalled, delayed, perhaps for ever prevented, the sanction of some diviner opportunity. If he had only waited another year, she could not have ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... he added in a moment, "you must not take us for party bigots. The masses of the Bleus are honest, and any day our own name may be desecrated by a clique of knaves, our principles represented ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair
... ecclesiastics were compelled to imitate his example; the Christian religion was formally abolished and the worship of Reason was established in its stead. Half-naked women were placed upon the altars of the desecrated churches and worshipped as "goddesses of Reason." Goebel's friend, Pache, a native of Freiburg, a creature abject as himself, was particularly zealous, as was also Proli, a natural son of the Austrian minister, Kaunitz. Prince Charles of Hesse, known among ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... aid of another. The offence is, then, entire and complete. Now, is there not also disdain of nature, of the work of God, since the subject of the sin is no longer—as even in bestiality—a palpable and living creature, but an unreal being created by a projection of the desecrated talent, a being almost celestial, since, by genius, by artistry, it often ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... history for a while, we find the church on which all this labour was so lovingly bestowed undergoing another terrible experience in 1264. On Good Friday of that year it was desecrated by the troops of Simon de Montfort, after their capture of the city. In the old annalist's account we read (in Latin) how they "entered the church of St. Andrew on the day on which the Lord hung on the cross for sinners.... Armed knights on their ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Rochester - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See • G. H. Palmer
... translate, but which it was necessary he should repeat. A hadji was standing by, driving the words into his head. The hadji could not translate it either; but the Koran may only be read in Arabic, lest it should be desecrated. Sometimes papa would read a chapter to any Malay who desired to understand the meaning of his sacred book; but they were generally content with learning it as a charm, or certain ...
— Sketches of Our Life at Sarawak • Harriette McDougall
... the end there would be an intervention from other powers. Perhaps from this site no 'residential' affair was destined to scrape the sky? Perhaps that saint to whom the club had dedicated itself would reappear, at length, glorious equestrian, to slay the dragons who had infested and desecrated his premises? I wondered whether he would then restore the ruins, reinstating the club, and setting it for ever on a sound commercial basis, or would leave them just as they were, a fixed ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... the throne; yet she was forgiven and bidden rule on wisely. She has tampered with our holy religion; yet she was forgiven. She has killed the peoples of Atlantis in greedy useless wars, and destroyed the country's trade; yet she was forgiven. She has desecrated the old temples, and latterly has set up in them images of herself to be worshipped as a deity; yet she was forgiven. But at last her evil cleverness has discovered to her the tremendous Secret of Life and Death, and there she overstepped the boundary ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... once humiliated, once misled, she could not trust again. She did not say that the past married life which she had made so full of duty, so full of reverence as almost to deceive herself while she lived it, had been desecrated, polluted and had made her shrink ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward
... something of his residence, whenever he is at home: what do we know of the man? We have been annoyed at finding his lofty name desecrated to base uses. If "imagination may trace the noble dust of Alexander, till he find it stopping a bung-hole," literature traces the man in the moon, and discovers him pressed into the meanest services. Our readers need not be disquieted with details; ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... but praise for the Communards, who killed and burned, desecrated the churches and devastated the town. They speak with enthusiasm of the leaders of that outbreak as of heroes who fought for the "Brotherhood of Man," and they exalt them above the saints of early Christianity. The philosopher of British ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... Ziza. Moorish it may be called; for the main feature of the edifice, a hall with a fountain trickling along a channel in the pavements, is clearly due to the Saracens. These, however, had availed themselves of Roman columns to support their fretted ceilings, once gorgeous in color, but now desecrated with whitewash. The Norman invaders have added their never-failing gold mosaic,—while the Spaniard, after painting sundry scenes from Ovid's "Metamorphoses" in a dreadfully barocco style, calls upon the world, in those magniloquent phrases which somehow belong ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... vainly counselled the Assembly to refrain; he was overborne by Alcibiades, whose ambition it was to reduce not only Sicily but Carthage also. When the expedition was about to sail most of the statues of Hermes in the city were desecrated in one night. Alcibiades, appointed to the command with Nicias and Lamachus, was suspected of the outrage, but was allowed to sail. The fleet left the city with all the pomp and ceremony of prayer and ritual, ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... baubles I regard. Are you a man? are you a father? and think you I could stoop so low, vile as I stand here, as to make money—filthy money—of the stuff which a daughter's touch has desecrated? Deep in some pit first ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb |
