"Desecration" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... be it said, he made a mistake in not combing it oftener—imparted to his brothers the subject for his new novel, which should have made the hair of the others bristle with terror; for the principal episode in this agreeable fiction was the desecration of a dead body in a cemetery by moonlight. There was a sort of hesitation in the audience, a slight movement of recoil, and Sillery, with a dash of raillery in his glance, asked ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... rocking and tetering like a gold-digger's washing-pan, unless the lame leg is propped up with an old shoe, or a stray newspaper fifty times folded, or a magazine of due thickness (I am using 'Harper's Magazine' at this moment, which is somewhat a desecration, as it is too good to be trampled under foot, even the foot of a table), or a coal cinder, or a towel. Well, it is but for a moment ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... a hostile nation Once since hath entered Ville Marie, But we avenged that desecration At Chrystler's farm and Chateauguay— Peace! peace! 'tis cowardly to flout Our triumphs in a cousin's face: That page was long since blotted out And Friendship written ...
— Fleurs de lys and other poems • Arthur Weir
... another, and I became almost oblivious to all thought of dressing until the gong rang for breakfast. I felt rebellious, and, on that morning at least, the meal seemed a desecration, the sacrifice of an opportunity. Once before, I had a similar early morning experience; that was at Laggan, on the Canadian Pacific Railway, when, on awakening, I beheld directly opposite my window lovely Lake Louise ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... to be ever fascinated by the mere supernatural, which (take it any way you like) is but a manufactured article, the fabrication of minds insensitive to the intimate delicacies of our relation to the dead and to the living, in their countless multitudes; a desecration of our tenderest memories; an outrage on ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... discovered. I should say that it was Sunday afternoon, and that the mine had been laid on Saturday night. This train-wrecking scheme of ours was contrary to the practices of our nation, who regard all such acts on Sunday as a desecration of the Sabbath, but here I will again apply an English precept, "The better the day the better ...
— My Reminiscences of the Anglo-Boer War • Ben Viljoen
... who stood around that the task to be undertaken was one of grievous peril and trial; that disease and heat, hunger and thirst, must be dared, as well as the sword of the infidel. But he spoke of the grand nature of the work, of the humiliation to Christians of the desecration of the shrines, and of the glory which awaited those who joined the crusade, whether they lived or whether they died in the ...
— Winning His Spurs - A Tale of the Crusades • George Alfred Henty
... volumes. There is, of course, in this townling, of not six thousand souls, a theatre, which is greatly resorted to. One old church has been turned into a theatre at Arbois, and another into the Halles, a third into the Hotel-de-Ville, a desecration we Protestants can but behold with aversion. Protestantism is a young and tender plant as yet in Arbois, the church and school, or so called culte, dating from ten years back only. The congregation ...
— Holidays in Eastern France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... witness the exhibitions, as manuscripts known to have belonged to this library were found—so the catalogue states—as remote as in a grocer's shop in Nova Scotia. It would be difficult to conjecture which would have caused the greater grief to Mr. Prince,—the desecration of the church, whose construction had been a daily delight, and where he had earnestly labored for so many years, or the sacrifice of a portion of the results of the patient toil of a lifetime. This material, however, ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 4, April, 1886 • Various
... reforms against which they have so bitterly inveighed, and so resolutely fought. We are disgusted and shocked at reading Croly's account of the scandalous conduct of the Catholic clergy in Ireland, with regard to the emoluments they extort from their miserable flocks, and at the systematic desecration of holy things which they countenance and practise; but when the difference is considered between their spiritual condition and their moral composition as a class, the conduct of the clergy here appears just as revolting. ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... and porches, desecrated and destroyed the tombs of warriors and prelates, obliterated ancient paintings; flung stained glass by cart loads into the city ditch; and razed to the ground the beautiful old campanile which stood opposite the north porch." That such desecration should be permitted in a civilized country only a century ...
— 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
... has been, to be scrutinised, canvassed, and judged. What we carry away from following such a history is something far higher and more solemn than any controversial inferences; and it seems almost like a desecration to make, as we say, capital out of it, to strengthen mere argument, to confirm a theory, or to ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... the people at large against the immorality of the age, was proved by their ascribing this frightful affliction to the inefficacy of baptism by unchaste priests, as if innocent children were doomed to atone, in after-years, for this desecration of the sacrament administered by unholy hands. We have already mentioned what perils the priests in the Netherlands incurred from this belief. They now, indeed, endeavoured to hasten their reconciliation ...
— The Black Death, and The Dancing Mania • Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker
... several others, drew up a remonstrance against "the desecration by officious restoration, and the tearing down of time-mellowed structures to make room for the unsightly brick ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... were dead—Piero de' Medici, Lorenzo, Giuliano, Lucrezia, Simonetta, Filippino Lippi, and Savonarola. He hobbled about on crutches for a while, a pensioner of the Medici family, and dying at the age of seventy-eight was buried in Ognissanti, but without a tombstone for fear of desecration by the enemies ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... flowers came down in a pink shower, and in this way in half a minute every bird made a twig bare where he could sit perched at ease. There were millions of blossoms; only one here and there would ever be a peach, yet it vexed me to see the parrots cut them off in that heedless way: it was a desecration, a crime even in ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... the back, seeing that the desecration of the article had been completed, plucked up heart of courage and put in her little request; "I think I might have a needle-case out of it," said she, "just as a suvneer of the poor general"—and a long fragment cut rapidly out of the waistband ...
— The Relics of General Chasse • Anthony Trollope
... well ordered, no emotion so thoroughly controlled, but that under sudden pressure—click!—the mechanism slips a cog and runs amuck. Just that thing happened inside the Unspeakable Perk's smooth-running, scientific brain upon incitement of his flag's desecration and his lady's grief. To her it seemed that he shot past her horizontally like a human dart. The next second he was over the railing, had swung from a branch of the neighboring tree to the trunk, and leaped ...
— The Unspeakable Perk • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... for any consideration shall it be mutilated. It would be desecration to do it. If we never get home, it could do no good; and if we do, the day may come when we can return in safety, and remove it whole, or at least we might give the information that would lead to its removal," ...
— The American Family Robinson - or, The Adventures of a Family lost in the Great Desert of the West • D. W. Belisle
... he left a good many clothes, which are most of them very good and carefully packed away, so that I am sure there is not a moth-hole in any one of them. I have several times thought, Asaph, that I might give you some of his clothes; but it did seem to me a desecration to have the clothes of such a man, who was so particular and nice, filled and saturated with horrible tobacco-smoke, which he detested. But now you are getting to be so awful shabby, I do not see how I can stand it any longer. But one thing ...
— A Chosen Few - Short Stories • Frank R. Stockton
... had it in mind that he might some day write a play with Santa Barbara as a background, but he had stopped after the first act. He had ridden down one night and had reached the mission at dawn. The gold cross had flamed as the sun rose over the mountain. After that it had seemed somehow a desecration to put it in a painted scene. O-liver had rather queer ideas as to the sacredness of ...
— The Gay Cockade • Temple Bailey
... one hand, for doing nothing were obvious enough. No one, of course, suggested the possibility of preventing Mr. Churchill coming to Belfast; but could even the Ulster Hall itself, the Loyalist sanctuary, be preserved from the threatened desecration? It was the property of the Corporation, and the Unionist political organisation had no exclusive title to its use. The meeting could only be frustrated by force in some form, or by a combination of force and stratagem. The Standing Committee, all men of solid sense and judgment, ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... abandon the "Round Church," which stood on the triangle between Liberty, Wood and Sixth streets, and began to dig for a foundation for Trinity, where it now stands, there was great desecration of graves. One day a thrill of excitement and stream of talk ran through the neighborhood, about a Mrs. Cooper, whose body had been buried three years, and was found in a wonderful state of preservation, ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... not the pleasantest occupation in the world to ransack the clothing of a skeleton, and he who was doing it could not help reflecting as he did so that it looked very much like a desecration and a robbing of the dead. To his great disappointment, however, he failed to discover anything which would give the slightest clue. It looked as if the man had purposely destroyed all such articles before destroying himself, and, after a thorough search, ...
— In the Pecos Country • Edward Sylvester Ellis (AKA Lieutenant R.H. Jayne)
... cad. I can't understand your inviting him. His very look is an insult, his touch a desecration. I don't like the ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... therefore a vivid and intent imagination. But this alone will hardly suffice. It is necessary also, especially to a true conception of the whole, to compare, to analyse, to dissect. And such readers often shrink from this task, which seems to them prosaic or even a desecration. They misunderstand, I believe. They would not shrink if they remembered two things. In the first place, in this process of comparison and analysis, it is not requisite, it is on the contrary ruinous, to set imagination ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... even more grotesque I should have been pained by his thinking it," Charteris said, sadly. "But what would you have? I am so abominably in love with you that it seemed a sort of desecration when the man lugged your name into a discussion of money-matters. It really did. And then, besides—ah, my lady, you know that I would glory in the thought that I had given up all for you. You know, ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... mass of the population regarded us with acute distrust, if not with dislike and fear. But the prompt measures taken by General Miles to disabuse their minds of any preconceived ideas of ensuing rape, robbery, or desecration, did much to soothe the more ignorant and childish of the natives, while the intelligent and educated class needed no further assurance than that contained in the proclamation issued by the commanding general from Ponce on the 28th of July, ...
— From Yauco to Las Marias • Karl Stephen Herrman
... lessened the satisfaction I felt at this my most successful work." This oratorio was not given in England till 1839, at the Norwich festival, Spohr being present to conduct it. The zealous and narrow-minded clergy of the day preached bitterly against it as a desecration, and one fierce bigot hurled his diatribes against the composer, when the latter was present in the cathedral. A journal of the day describes the scene: "We now see the fanatical zealot in the pulpit, and sitting right opposite to him ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris
... thwarting, and from the same source, so nettled me, that I greatly fear, all my respect for the foreign office and those who live thereby, would not have saved them from something most unlike a blessing, had not Monsieur Schnetz saved diplomacy from such desecration by saying, that if I could content myself with a plain suit, such as civilians wore, he would do his endeavour to ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... become the parish churchyard; the south transept had perished in the fire of 1830, and its unroofed area had also become a burying-ground; whilst the north transept had been gradually encroached upon, no one knew how, and a large part of it was then used as a forge. The desecration of the east end was almost worse. The great Lady Chapel, which had been rebuilt in the fourteenth century, and which had formed part of the assignment to Sir Richard Rich, had been for long employed for trade purposes, being at one time the ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various
... article, and well worth the price charged for it, but he was "humbugging" the public by this queer way of arresting attention. It turned out just as he anticipated, that English travelers in that part of Egypt were indignant at this desecration, and they wrote back to the London Times (every Englishman writes or threatens to "write to the Times," if anything goes wrong,) denouncing the "Goth" who had thus disfigured these ancient pyramids by writing ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... Siddartha, the Bodhisattwa, in his second question, his probing had not been so deep, nor the effect so quick and great; but Mahomet, the camel-driver! Centuries of feud, hate, crimination, and wars—rapine, battles, sieges, massacres, humiliations, lopping of territory, treaties broken, desecration of churches, spoliation of altars, were evoked by ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... and been quiet, I should have slept: then had I been at rest." North could not rise to the height of this. But even this Milton will dare to lay his hand upon: and, if even he cannot lift it any higher, only he could have touched it at all without desecration. "How ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... "Thou knowest, Lord," that unsurpassed and unsurpassable piece of choral writing which Dr. Crotch, one of the "English school," living in an age less sensitive even than this to Purcellian beauty, felt to be so great that it would be a desecration to set the words again. Later composers set the words again, feeling it no desecration, but possibly rather a compliment to Purcell; and Purcell's setting abides, and looks down upon every other, like Mozart's G minor and Beethoven's Ninth upon every other symphony, or the finale ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... which began with forsaking the house of the Lord and serving Ashtaroth, ends with Joash steeping his hands in blood. The murder of Zechariah was beyond the common count of crimes, for it was a foul desecration of the Temple, an act of the blackest ingratitude to the man who had saved his infant life, and put him on the throne, an outrage on the claims of family connections, for Joash and Zechariah were probably blood relations. My brother! once get your foot upon that steep incline of evil, once ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... in Chelsea, cleaned, swept and garnished by the wife of the porter of the Mansions, received Emmy, her babe, Madame Bolivard and multitudinous luggage. All the pretty fripperies and frivolities had been freshened and refurbished since their desecration at alien hands, and the place looked cheery and homelike; but Emmy found it surprisingly small, and was amazed to discover the prodigious space taken up by the baby. When she drew Septimus's attention to ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... blood in your veins? Has your manhood rotted into cowardice? Wake up and take your place in the class struggle. For the desecration of the flag your leader is in jail. What flag? The flag of the capitalist class—the flag that floats over the bull pens of Colorado. The wholesome truths he stamped upon its stripes are your shame and your masters' crime. Rally to the ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... green-fly on the roses has almost charm. There is something slummy and unwashed-looking about the black blight. These insects are as foul as a stagnant pond. Though they have wings, they seem incapable of flight. They are microbes of a larger growth—a disease and a desecration. On the other hand, there is one good point about them: they are very stupid. Instead of spreading themselves out along the entire extent of the bean and so lessening their peril, they mass themselves in hordes in the very tops of the plants as though they had all some passionate ...
— The Pleasures of Ignorance • Robert Lynd
... sincere devotion was like a simple flower blooming by the edge of a glacier. She felt that the human love she brought there and sought to gratify was pure and unselfish, and that in no sense could it be a desecration of the place and hour. To a nature like hers, her half-pitying love for one so unfortunate as Vinton Arnold was almost as sacred as her faith, and therefore she had no scruple in ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... pulse was beating feebly, the weakness of seven days' starvation blurred his eyes, and unconsciously he sank over the bed and one of his thin hands touched the soft sweep of the woman's hair. A stifled cry fell from him as he jerked himself rigidly erect; and as if for the desecration of that touch there was but one way of forgiveness, he drew his violin half to his shoulder, and for a few moments played so softly that none but the spirit of the woman and ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood
... of it makes it almost desecration to touch it. It is to keep a private note-book with columns for the days of the week, and a list of virtues, with spaces against each for marks. this, with many stern rules for preface, is stored away in a secret place, and from time to time, ...
— Addresses • Henry Drummond
... fluttering breath of morning and a sound like the cooing of doves. Never had the wood before shown so sweet a sense of security from the turmoil and tempest of the world beyond; never before had an intrusion from the outer life—even in the shape of a letter—seemed so wicked a desecration. Tempted by the solicitation of air and shade, she lingered, with Low's herbarium slung ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... go before telling you how rotten I feel for striking that match. I beg of you, Miss Crown,—you ARE Miss Crown?—I can only ask you to believe that it was not a conscious act of desecration. It was sheer thoughtlessness. I would not have done it for the world if ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... may travel," replied Mordecai. "It is a matter of more importance than life and death, and the Talmud authorizes the desecration of the Sabbath in ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith
... literature, fit into it himself; and both, as it happened, fitted in perfectly to the second ideal possibility. To get married with a view to turning into domestic beings, would be a failure, a trouble, an interruption, a desecration, and a bore; to get married merely to go on as they were at present, would, in the eyes of Alfieri, have been a profanation of the poetry of their situation, a perfectly ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... to serve them food. Must I be blamed—must I be deprived of the means of a livelihood,' he goes on, 'on account of an accident that was the result of their own presumption and haughtiness? But what hurts me more than all,' says Sir Percival, 'is the desecration that has been done to this splendid Rindslosh—the confiscation of its halberdier to serve menially at the ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... spirit of the little bride flew to the side of her uncoffined body to protect it from desecration ere her lord had looked upon it. And there she saw the little brother playing by ...
— The Story and Song of Black Roderick • Dora Sigerson
... hangs about us as we travel. It is only to Paris—Paris beautiful in its strange blending of smoky ruins and splendid, freshly-erected mansions—that we can pardon the white glare of newly-opened streets, the Vandal desecration of antique landmarks, the universal sacrifice of old memories, historic associations and antique picturesqueness on that altar of modern progress whose high priest was Baron Haussmann and whose ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... to name the Library "The Lincoln-Carnegie Memorial Library"; but after Mr. Carnegie had made his contribution, through his secretary he informed the Rev. E. S. Walker, of Springfield, who carried on the correspondence with him, that he would consider it a desecration to have any name listed with that of Lincoln. "He trusts that the library will be known as the 'Lincoln Library,' not the 'Lincoln Memorial Library,' as Lincoln needs no memorial, being one of the dozen supremely great rulers of men the world ...
— Fifty Years of Public Service • Shelby M. Cullom
... wrath of God. Now we know they are due to carelessness and lack of sanitation. It is the same with the sufferings of women. We used to think it was a dispensation of Providence if a woman were compelled to undergo an operation. Now we know it usually is due to someone's lack of care, to a desecration of Nature's teachings. ...
— Herself - Talks with Women Concerning Themselves • E. B. Lowry
... and an editorial from Forest and Stream may reveal to visitors who now enjoy without let or hindrance the wonders of that region, how narrowly this "Temple of the living God," as it has been termed, has escaped desecration at the hands of avaricious money-getters, and ...
— The Discovery of Yellowstone Park • Nathaniel Pitt Langford
... a desecration," said he, "to deprive the book of its original binding. What! Would you tear off and cast away the covers which have felt the caressing pressure of the hands of those whose memory you revere? The most sacred of sentiments should ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... which you once captivated dinner-parties, on a costeimonger—seeing the strong-boned hunter that has carried you over post and rail, in a cab,—are sore trials; but nothing, according to my companion's description, to the desecration of your house and home by its conversion into a factory. Such an air of the "Inferno," too, pervades the smelting-house, with its lurid glow, its roar, its flash, and its furious heat, that I could readily forgive him ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... paper and broken bottles left about to mar what would otherwise be one of the finest scenes in the Downs. Refreshment stalls and tea gardens help to vulgarize the surroundings, though the added desecration of aerial railway across the ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... touch money. We are going to trust our customers, and keep our accounts without pen or ink. We have invented a most ingenious system, which gives us far more work than writing, but we have determined to spare ourselves no trouble to keep the Sabbath from unnecessary desecration.' ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... modifies the severity of judgment. Years after, in The Lost Occasion I gave utterance to an almost universal regret that the great statesman did not live to see the flag which he loved trampled under the feet of Slavery, and, in view of this desecration, make his last days glorious in defence of "Liberty and Union, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... no greater desecration to me than cutting down an old and well-remembered French forest I have loved; and solving all its mystery, and laying bare the nakedness of the land in a way so brutal and expeditious and unexpected. It reminds one ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... hear that I had told a string of falsehoods to her uncle over the dead body of their idolised Bingo—an act, no doubt, of abominable desecration, of unspeakable profanity, in ...
— Stories By English Authors: London • Various
... the desecration of her tomb mentioned by any other writer? If it really took place, are we to conclude that the tree—if it still exists—marks only the place where she had been interred: for, that the body was rescued and recommitted to the ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 215, December 10, 1853 • Various
... fingers trembled as he pulled them away, as though to avoid further desecration of ...
— Christmas Eve on Lonesome and Other Stories • John Fox, Jr.
... stripped and stoned to pieces, and burned, and there were no crowds to greet them with bravoes and caresses, but furious mobs clamouring for their blood. We have changed all that indeed, thank God: but they were heroes and martyrs indeed, and it sounds to me somewhat like a desecration of the word to apply it to men and even women who are good, probably brave in a way, but who win their crown of glory very cheaply indeed. If we are to have heroes, let us make sure that they ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.
... National Guard. Under Napoleon III the Palais Royal became the dwelling of Prince Jerome, the uncle of the emperor. Later it served the same purpose for the son of Prince Napoleon. It was at this epoch that the desecration of scraping out the blazoned lys and the chipping off the graven Bourbon armoiries took place. Whenever one or the other hated Bourbon symbol was found, eagles, phoenix-like, sprang up in their place, only in their turn to disappear when the Republican device of '48 (now brought ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield
... to a god, and then nailed the straw simulacrum of her betrayer to the trunk, invoking the kami to curse and annihilate the destroyer of her peace. She adjures the god to save his tree, impute the guilt of desecration to the traitor and visit him with deadly vengeance. The visit is repeated and nails are driven until the object of the incantation sickens and dies, or is at least supposed to do so. I have more than once seen such trees and straw images upon them, and have observed others in ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... Love the Lord's Day, was published December 18; but he had already exerted himself much in this cause, as convener of the Committee of Presbytery on Sabbath Observance, and had written his well-known letter to one of the chief defenders of the Sabbath desecration. He continued unceasingly to use every effort in this holy cause. And is it not worth the prayers and self-denying efforts of every believing man? Is not that day set apart as a season wherein the Lord desires the refreshing rest of his own love to be offered to a fallen ...
— The Biography of Robert Murray M'Cheyne • Andrew A. Bonar
... scholars and experts to scour the Italian cities; and soon untold treasures of art, letters, and science began to pour into the galleries, cabinets, and libraries of Paris. A few brave voices among the artists of the capital protested against the desecration; the nation at large was tipsy with delight, and would not listen. Raphael, Leonardo, and Michelangelo, Correggio, Giorgione, and Paul Veronese, with all the lesser masters, were stowed in the holds of frigates and despatched by way of Toulon toward the new Rome; ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... along, stepping slow and cautious, and they halts themselves in the protecting shadows of the freight-shed or what's left of it, and they beckon me to come near 'em, and when I responds, they tell me I'm under arrest for inciting riots and disturbances and desecration of property and various other crimes and misdemeanours. I suggests to 'em that if they're really craving to arrest anybody, they should oughter begin with Emily, but they don't fall in with the idea. They marches ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... the custom, formerly, to hold all meetings for the transaction of public business in the sanctuary. None, not even the most piously fastidious parson or deacon, ever thought of being shocked at what in these degenerate times would seem like a gross desecration of the house of God. There were fewer Pharisees in Belfield a hundred years ago than now. To the Puritans, and to all their descendants, until of late, their places of worship were not churches, but meeting-houses merely; and by the stout-hearted men who used to dwell in New England ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... emancipation of humanity. It has its source in the cries of despair which rise unceasingly to heaven from the hearts of tortured millions, in the famine of the operatives, the grinding poverty of the peasants, the desecration of their wives and daughters, the degradation of the race through unjust laws and debasing and brutal prejudices—from all this agony spring my new formulas, the creed which I am determined to establish: 'Man has a birthright of happiness.' ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... study two uniformed constables, and an officer in plain clothes, were apparently engaged in making an inventory—or such was the impression conveyed. The clock ticked merrily on; its ticking a desecration, where all else was hushed in deference to the grim visitor. The body of the murdered woman had been laid upon the chesterfield, and a little, dark, bearded man was conducting an elaborate examination; when, seeing the trio enter, he hastily ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... her room for the use of a feminine busy-body; a political, higher-thought, pseudo-spiritualistic friend. (He must weed out her friends!) The trend of the work done in this room now his quick mind had seized upon—titles of books, papers, it was enough. Notices stuck in the Venetian Mirror (the desecration!) for meetings of this and that society, and all of them, so he judged, just excuses for putting unwanted fingers into unwanted, dangerous pies. He thought of it like that—he could not help it; he saw too far into motive and internal ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Various
... about Sabbath desecration. "I confess," observes this sage of ten, "when I look upon the present and past state of our public morals, and when I contrast our present luxury, dissipation, and depravity, with past frugality and virtue, I feel not merely a sensation of regret, but ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... all, he had not really passed through the door of death, like these others, but only through the door of dreams, and was walking in a vision, a living man among the blessed dead. Would it be right for him to go with them into the heavenly city? Would it not be a deception, a desecration, a deep and unforgivable offense? The strange, confusing question had no reason in it, as he very well knew; for if he was dreaming, then it was all a dream; but if his companions were real, then he also was with them in reality, ...
— The Mansion • Henry Van Dyke
... face, every slight intonation of her voice when she was able to share in his game; he hated his uncle and aunt so profoundly that he revelled in their incapacity to understand him, and he would have accounted it a desecration of her memory to ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... hearth: she will defend Her gods from desecration of the vile. Fierce, like a wounded tigress, ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... sight to find in Somerset the one man who really interested himself on the side of toleration towards individuals, in the cases both of Mary and of Gardiner. As a matter of fact, although when Protector he had been particularly zealous in the war against images, had carried desecration to abnormal lengths in his private appropriation of spoils, and had grossly transgressed his constitutional powers for the repression of the bishop of Winchester as the ablest of the opponents of his policy: yet he was not generally vindictive, ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... compelling the unsuspicious colonists to keep beneath their roofs. Indeed, no one dreamed of a forced march by human beings on that dreadful night of tempest, else it might have gone hard had I been detected in the desecration of colonial soil. Still I was prepared for all emergencies. I never went abroad without the two great keys of Africa—gold and fire-arms; and had it been my lot to encounter a colonist, he would either have learned the value of silence, or have been carried along, under the muzzle of a pistol, ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... by an English ship and carried into Salem, and thence sold to Deerfield, where it called the Puritans to prayer, till at last it also summoned the priest-led Indians and 'habitans' across hundreds of miles of winter and of wilderness to reclaim it from that desecration,—this fateful bell still hangs in the church-tower of St. Regis, and has invited to matins and vespers for nearly two centuries the children of those who fought so pitilessly and dared and endured so much ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... letter a month, later, Mrs. Graham refers to the gay and fashionable circles to which they were introduced in Quebec, and mentions her visiting the beautiful falls of Montmorency; but mourns over the low state of religion, and the prevailing desecration of ...
— The Power of Faith - Exemplified In The Life And Writings Of The Late Mrs. Isabella Graham. • Isabella Graham
... associated the name of religion with all that was good and beautiful and true. Such a state of things demanded reformation. The churchyard—that holy ground on which the church was built and sanctified by the dust of pious and saintly men—cried aloud against the desecration to which it was subjected; and Burns, who alone had the power to purify it from such profanities, would have been untrue to himself and a traitor to the religion of his country had he merely shrugged ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... dangers of worldliness in high ecclesiastical places. Let those wince who feel a sense of their own backslidings. When the Bishop had ended, I determined to walk once through the bazaar just to make sure that there were no lotteries nor games of chance—a desecration of our MITES now too, too frequent. As I was returning through the throng, alas! of PLEASURE-SEEKERS, and wishing that I might scourge them out of the schoolroom, Mr. Crawley met me, in company with a lady ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... time may have contained forty houses, some shatters of which still stand. There are a few red-brick walls, some frames of wood from which the plaster has been blown, some gardens gone wild, fruit trees unpruned and more or less ragged from fire, and an air of desecration and desertion. In some of the ruins there are signs of use. The lower windows are filled with sandbags, the lower stories are strengthened with girders and baulks. From the main road in the valley, a country track or road, muddy even for the Somme, leads up the hill, through the heart ...
— The Old Front Line • John Masefield
... plantation, extending from the shore up into the mountainous hinterland, thousands of close-crowded acres of heavy green palms." This was in May, 1908. Vailima was at that time the residence of the German Governor (a desecration since happily removed); but the LONDONS were able to explore the gardens and peep in at the rooms whose planning STEVENSON had so enjoyed. Later of course they climbed to the lonely mountain grave of "the little great man"—a phrase oddly reminiscent of one in an unpublished letter of RUPERT ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 19, 1916 • Various
... Tlascalans. He went first to Cholula, a town regarded as sacred by the Indians, and as the sanctuary and favoured residence of their deities. Montezuma felt much satisfaction in the advance of the Spaniards to this town, either from the hope that the gods would themselves avenge the desecration of their temples, or that he thought a rising, and massacre of the Spaniards might be more easily organized in this populous and fanatical town. Cortes had been warned by the Tlascalans that he must place no trust in the protestations of friendship and devotion made by the Cholulans. However, ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... brains to weigh your arguments; that, after education such as this, we can stand silent witnesses while you sell our birthright of liberty to save from a timely death an effete political organization? No, as we respect womanhood, we must protest against this desecration of the magna charta of American liberties; and with an importunity not to be repelled, our demand must ever be, "No compromise of human rights"—"No admission to the Constitution of inequality of rights or disfranchisement on account of color ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... Then comes a Miss Wallis, who played the Part, to declare that 'the Veteran' (Miss G.) had wished to play the Part as it was acted: and furthermore comes Mr. Halliday, who somehow manages and adapts at D. L., to assert that the Veteran not only wished to enact the Desecration, but did enact it for many nights when Miss Wallis was indisposed. Then comes Isabel forward again—but I really forget what she said. I never saw her but once—in the Duchess of Malfi—very well: better, I dare say, than anybody now; but one could not remember a Word, a ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble (1871-1883) • Edward FitzGerald
... the most precious part of all our 'find,' a beautiful wedge-shaped bronze hatchet, and three thin gold beads. Having no consideration for the feelings of the ashes, we promptly appropriated both hatchet and beads, and took the urn and cup as a peace-offering to the lord of the manor for our desecration of a tomb (with his full consent) on the land of ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... who had no strong personal interest in her, could hardly see the noble-looking woman in her widow's dress, with a sad sweet gravity in her face, and not be touched with fresh admiration for her—and not feel, at least vaguely, that she had entered on a new life in which it was a sort of desecration to allude to the painful past. And the old friends who had a real regard for her, but whose cordiality had been repelled or chilled of late years, now came round her with hearty demonstrations of affection. Mr. ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... Edward Bray worked with his companions, it was with more conflicting feelings. There was a certain sense of desecration in their act. How her proud lip would have curled had she seen him—he who but a few hours before would have searched the whole slope for the treasure of a ribbon, a handkerchief, or a bow from her dress—now delving and picking the hillside for that fortune her accident had so mysteriously ...
— From Sand Hill to Pine • Bret Harte
... and fear, who with the stones of my lady's chamber would build a kennel, or with the carved stones of chapel or hall a barn or cowhouse! What would the inventor of the water-commanding engine have said to the pollution of our waters, the destruction of the very landmarks of our history, the desecration of ruins that ought to be venerated for their loveliness as well as their story! Would he not have broken it to pieces, that the ruin it must occasion might not be laid to his charge? May all such men as ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... unassisted river system is going to continue to serve human needs in the future as it has served them heretofore—that after cleaning up the network of streams and ensuring against their repollution and the desecration of their landscape, men will be able to leave them respectfully alone to run down toward the Chesapeake Bay as they have run during ...
— The Nation's River - The Department of the Interior Official Report on the Potomac • United States Department of the Interior
... "It would be a desecration of the sanctuary, and we should be the aiders and abettors of sin and iniquity, if we allowed a fellow who has been accused of stealing to lead the singing," said Deacon Hardhack to ...
— Winning His Way • Charles Carleton Coffin
... the outer edge of the cloth, and flung the bolt unfurling itself toward his fellows over the heads of the believing men who had crowded forward to save it from the desecration, while the woman tried to seize it from him, beseeching, imploring, "Oh, don't hurt it, Bill Murray! Oh, be careful! Don't let it drop! Oh, ...
— The Leatherwood God • William Dean Howells
... if she could speak. All she considered was what she was going to say. She clasped her slender hands in front of her, and began, slowly, with the formula she had heard the other speakers use: "Madam Chairman, ladies—" She paused, then suddenly spoke out on The Desecration of Marriage. ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... generous young lovers are to end their days, when a young knight steps forward loudly proclaiming none of the Christians are to blame for the disappearance of the image, since Allah himself removed it from the temple because he considered it desecration to have such an image within its walls. This young knight turns out to be the warrior maid Clorinda, who not only convinces Aladine that the young people are guiltless, but bribes him to release them, in ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... complain, but still I am not better satisfied than the child that has eaten its cake and wants to have it too. And I suppose there are many who would call me wretched, and say that my life, with my sorrowful marriage—which was no marriage, but a desecration of that holy state, and a sin—and my hopeless love, is a broken life. Certainly I feel it so. And yet I don't know. With his nature it seems to me that some wrong-doing was inevitable. Do you think my ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... knew that this step would subject her to her mother's displeasure, but just then the girl's heart was hardened against her, in consequence of her persistency in dramatizing a record which the daughter deemed too mournfully solemn and sacred for the desecration ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... fact that Karl could not overlook, in Marshal Soult's raid, was the desecration of the genealogical tree. This huge painting with its shields of the Bismarck descent was slashed from end to ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... of Fanny Merton were really working in her memory. They were so light—yet so ugly. They suggested something, but so vaguely that Diana could find no words for it: a note of desecration, of cheapening—a breath of dishonor. It was as though a mourner, shut in for years with sacred memories, became suddenly aware that all the time, in a sordid world outside, these very memories had been the sport of an unkind and insolent chatter ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... day we halted at the Mission of the White Dog, a spot which some more than heathen missionary had named Islington in a moment of virtuous cockneyism. What could have tempted him to commit this act of desecration ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... cause for other accusations calculated to keep up this hatred; such as the desecration of the consecrated host, the mutilation of the crucifix. Tradition informs us of a miracle which took place in Paris in 1290, in the Rue des Jardins, when a Jew dared to mutilate and boil a consecrated host. This ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... and also not educating us to the better knowledge of the beautiful and significant things of nature. In connection with this kind of blindness, music is also compatible (as we see by its flourishing in great manufacturing towns) with a great deal of desecration of nature and much hand-to-mouth ruthlessness of life. But, on the other hand, music has the especial power of suggesting and regulating emotion, and the still more marvellous faculty of creating an inner world ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... everything Royal Family if they were allowed to marry as they liked? Scandal.: Simple statements of simple facts Secrecy is strength Secret spring of certainty She experienced the worst: She could not cry! Solemn delicious creatures, all front and no behind Speech seemed but desecration Temperamentally unable to beg anything of anybody The boy—for what else was thirty to seventy-six? They forgot everything but happiness To a woman the preciousness of her reputation was a fiction To ...
— Quotations from the Works of John Galsworthy • David Widger
... read that day six months; but the third reading was carried by one hundred and four against fifty-four. In the lords the second reading encountered no opposition, objections to it being reserved for the committee. In the committee the Bishop of Exeter moved, in order to avoid the desecration of the marriage contract when the ceremony was not performed in church, that the parties should make the following declaration:—"In the presence of Almighty God and these witnesses, I, M., do take thee, N., to be my wedded wife, according to God's holy ordinance; ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... and the roof and other parts restored at a cost of L6,700, but the architecture was never the same afterwards. Of course the disappointed Romanists attributed the disaster to the Divine anger, and Bishop Pilkington, of Durham, preaching next Sunday at the Cross, to the still continued desecration. ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of St. Paul - An Account of the Old and New Buildings with a Short Historical Sketch • Arthur Dimock
... did speak the truth," put in Miss Thornhill hastily. "You mentioned one word in your definition—it was a desecration to drag it in—hope. For me romance means only—hope. And I'm afraid there are a pitiful number in the world to whom ...
— Seven Keys to Baldpate • Earl Derr Biggers
... what next will the love of gain suggest to these gold-worshippers? The whole earth should enter into a protest against such an act of sacrilege—such a shameless desecration of one of the noblest ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... hast seen the life of the great city and the strife of faction there," answered his companion, lapsing into the familiar "thou" as he spoke with increased earnestness. "In thy hermit's life thou hast had no knowledge of the robbery, the desecration, the pollution which our Holy Mother Church has undergone from these pestilent heretics, who have thought to denude her of her beauty and her glory, whilst striving to retain such things as jump with their crabbed humours, and may be pared down to please ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... Babylon. On the ground over which he now flew mighty armies had fought, kingdoms had been lost and won, four or five thousand years ago. The passage of so modern a thing as an aeroplane seemed almost a desecration of the spirit of antiquity, an insult ...
— Round the World in Seven Days • Herbert Strang
... makes it no idol—his toy only—what shall follow this desecration of the sacred thing! What but shame, remorse, humiliation, perhaps death!—alas! for Margaret Cooper, the love which had so suddenly grown into a precious divinity with her, was no divinity with him. He is no believer. He has no faith in such things, but like the trader in religion, he can preach ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... that such desecration was impossible. The scene prolonged itself to midnight. On the morrow, with the exception of Mrs. Denyer's resolve to subdue Marsh, all was forgotten, and the Denyer family pursued their old course, putting off decided action until there should come ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... on? A slavey, one pre-eminently of the boarding house description, is kicking up a row. I don't exactly know what sort of a row, unless—. Yes, by jove, I have it, she's singing. I don't know whether Messrs. Moody and Sankey would be shocked at her for desecration of the Sabbath or praise her for singing one of their tunes. Probably they would split the difference and tell her she was a good girl, with a hint tacked on that a little went a long way. Well, this is a confounded lot of rubbish I've been ...
— Canada for Gentlemen • James Seton Cockburn
... proceeded, according to his account, to lecture the people from their ancient history, in order to prove that they had never been successful in aggressive warfare. "Arms were never given to our nation, but we are always given up to be fought against and taken." The Zealots' desecration of the Temple deprived them of Divine help, and it was madness to suppose that God would be well-disposed to the wicked. Had He not shown favor to Titus and performed miracles in his aid? Did not the springs of Siloam ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... and Lady Gower watched the successful progress of the play with an anxiety almost as keen as that of the author. To Helen it seemed as though the giving of these lines to the public—these lines which he had so often read to her, and altered to her liking—was a desecration. It seemed as though she were losing him indeed—as though he now belonged to these strange people, all of whom were laughing and applauding his words, from the German Princess in the Royal box to the straight-backed Tommy in the pit. Instead of the painted scene before her, she saw the ...
— The Exiles and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... But with this last desecration the Storm seemed satisfied; its fury abated. And ere long leaves slowly dripping and birds chirping were ...
— The Heart of Arethusa • Francis Barton Fox
... the rod of the shepherd—"and I will bring you into the bond of the covenant."[704] The good promised to those who keep the sabbath, whether viewed as positive privilege, or as a disposition and fitness to obey Divine injunctions, is most extensive; while the evil threatened for the desecration of it is appalling indeed. What less than the highest privileges of the saints on earth is offered in the promise, "And it shall come to pass, if ye diligently hearken unto me, saith the Lord, to bring in no burden through the gates of this city on the sabbath-day, but hallow the sabbath-day, ...
— The Ordinance of Covenanting • John Cunningham
... There is a circular gallery in it, around which the thrones of the Emperor and Electors were formerly placed, at the ceremonies of coronations. Each of these thrones was flanked by small antique columns, brought from Rome, but which during the reign of Napoleon, in the spirit of monopoly and desecration[23] that marked the era, had been transferred to Paris, where some of them are still seen standing in the gallery of the Tuileries. A chair that was found in Charlemagne's tomb stands in this gallery, and was long used as a throne for ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... office shorn of some of his former duties. He witnessed all the changes of that changeful time, the spoliation of his church, the selling of numerous altar cloths, vestments, banners, plate, and other costly furniture, and, moreover, took his part in the destruction of altars and the desecration of the sanctuary. In the accounts for the year 1559 of the Church of St. Lawrence, Reading, appear ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... be guarded with jealous care. How sacred the spot where lie the parents that tended us, the bosom that shielded our infancy, the hands that carried our weakness everywhither. Men will always deem the desecration of the body or the grave blasphemous. The physical house, standing, is the temple of God; falling, it must forever be ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... success.—Long, long after, when the chimera had become a form radiantly real, Ivan looked back upon this night as perhaps the happiest of his life. That it should be spent in solitude, seemed to him most natural. It would have been abnormal to him to seek companionship in an hour of exaltation: desecration to drown the pure delights of the intellect in the artificial ecstasy of alcohol. No. He sat quietly in his leathern chair, or paced rapidly about the room, occasionally seating himself at the piano and rippling off portions of the work that was to be judged at last by the dread tribunal, ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... is said that when the Government had been persuaded, chiefly by the two Humboldts, to found a chair of Sanskrit at the University of Wuerzburg, and had nominated Bopp as its first occupant, the philological faculty of the University protested against such a desecration, and the appointment fell through. It is true, no doubt, that in their first enthusiasm the students of Sanskrit had uttered many exaggerated opinions. Sanskrit was represented as the mother of all languages, instead of being the elder ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller
... the completion of the Psalter. Many of the psalms, especially those in the latter half of the book, bear the unmistakable marks of the Maccabean struggle. In Psalms 74 and 89, for example, there are clear references to the desecration of the temple and the bitter persecutions of Antiochus. They voice the wails of despair which then rose from the lips of many Jews. Many other psalms, as, for example, the one hundred and eighteenth, express that intense love and devotion to the law which was from this ...
— The Makers and Teachers of Judaism • Charles Foster Kent
... who should dare to deprive them of such articles of little value as belonged to them, or to turn them out of their chambers in order to make room for others, with all sorts of vengeance, divine and human. These imprecations have not, however, availed to save them from the desecration the danger of which they foresaw, and there are few of their tombs which were not occupied by a succession of tenants between the date of their first making and the close of the Roman supremacy. When the modern explorer ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... uncomplainingly, and give up their lives, all stirred Dermot strangely. And when the thought of the incalculable wealth that lay in the vast quantity of ivory stored in this great charnel-house flashed through his mind, he felt that it would be a shameful desecration, inviting the wrath of the gods, to remove even ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... hands tightly, while her lips opened to utter a wild protest at this desecration. What the document contained she did not yet know, except that it was evidence that fixed upon the men named guilt for some past deed in which Weir had suffered and which would bring them to account. But something more than protest was needed, she saw in a flash, to deflect the man from ...
— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd
... have desecration of the Sabbath." Not sell the Sunday paper? Not buy a Sunday paper? How ...
— Men of the Bible • Dwight Moody
... held only a feeling of disgust that such a desecration of Nature's gifts to humanity should be allowed. Then he remembered another place further along the glen which was almost as pretty as this had been before the defiling brush of the advertiser had ruined it. So he spurred his horse and rode up the winding way to the spot. There a red-lettered ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Work • Edith Van Dyne
... misuse, misusage, misemployment^, misapplication, misappropriation. abuse, profanation, prostitution, desecration; waste &c 638. V. misuse, misemploy, misapply, misappropriate. desecrate, abuse, profane, prostitute: waste &c 638; overtask, overtax, overwork: squander &c 818. cut blocks with a razor, employ a steam engine to crack ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... doubt my faithfulness to his memory, if I consented to such a desecration," came in smothered tones ...
— The Tinder-Box • Maria Thompson Daviess
... Phoebe. "I don't want to die just yet. But isn't it the loveliest place! I come here often when the men are not blasting. It seems almost a desecration to blast these rocks when we think how long nature took ...
— Patchwork - A Story of 'The Plain People' • Anna Balmer Myers
... less than a holy feeling; and without doubt the person whose rule of modesty has been transgressed feels the same sort of wound that he would feel if something made holy to him by his religion had suffered a desecration. I say "rule of modesty" because there are about a million rules in the world, and this makes a million standards to be looked out for. Major Sleeman mentions the case of some high-caste veiled ladies who were profoundly scandalized when some English young ladies passed by with faces bare ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... The dirt had been neatly rounded up, as could be plainly seen, though it had been torn open and robbed by the sacrilegious hands of the savages; and everywhere, amid the debris and mould of the grave, the little wild flowers were thickly spread as if to hide the desecration of unfriendly hands. The fine texture of the cloth and linen and several gilt buttons showed the deceased to have been an officer, but there was nothing to be seen anywhere that would identify the remains to a stranger. Every stone that marked ...
— Schwatka's Search • William H. Gilder
... the week), might be applied to the Christian Sunday, the dies solis, the first day of the week which the sun opens in glory, the day of devotion and joy. The consequence of this fraud is that "Sabbath-breaking," or "the desecration of the Sabbath," that is, the slightest occupation, whether of business or pleasure, all games, music, sewing, worldly books, are on Sundays looked upon as great sins. Surely the ordinary man must believe that if, as his spiritual guides impress upon him, he is only constant in "a ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, A Dialogue, Etc. • Arthur Schopenhauer
... splendour! Steer Between the graveyard island and the quay, Where North-winds dash the spray on Venice;—see The rosy light behind dark dome and tower, Or gaunt smoke-laden chimney;—mark the power Of Nature's gentleness, in rise or fall Of interlinked beauty, to recall Earth's majesty in desecration's place, Lending yon grimy pile that dream-like face Of evening beauty;—note yon rugged cloud, Red-rimmed and heavy, drooping like a shroud Over Murano in the dying day. I see it now ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... straighten out their affairs and plan the future campaign. Trade revived at the end of May and held pretty well into July, then dropped as the country season got into swing. Ernestine was for turning the Cake Shop into a glorified ice-cream stand for the summer, but Milly would not hear of this desecration of her Vision; they were both tired and had earned a vacation. So while Ernestine took Virginia to one of the lake resorts, Milly rested in the big, cool, empty house and played around Chicago with her ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... said the Count, peremptorily, advancing to the side of the coffin and extending his arm across it, "I cannot permit that indignity—that desecration." ...
— The Room in the Dragon Volant • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... Feast of Dedication is annually celebrated by all Jews everywhere, to commemorate the purifying of the Temple and the restoration of its worship after its desecration by Antiochus Epiphanes, of which an account may be found in 1 Maccabees iv. 52-59. It is very probable that some of our Christmas festivities are only adaptations of the observances of this Jewish feast ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... Mahomedans. He had been first received in that land, so to speak, with a blow on the head with a club; he was destined to break the sword of the last Arab conqueror, to wreck his holy city and treat all the religious traditions of it with a deliberate desecration which has often been held oppressive and was undoubtedly ruthless. Yet with the individual Moslem he had a sort of natural brotherhood which has never been explained. Had it been shown by a soldier ...
— Lord Kitchener • G. K. Chesterton
... brass-blurting of the overture to "Zampa" was noised forth: this was encored with ecstacies, and so were some of the quadrilles. Happy musical taste! Beethoven's septour, arranged as a set of quadrilles, is a desecration unworthy of Musard. For this piece of bad taste he ought to be condemned to arrange the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... Peace. The nation's critics may continue their indictment, and, pointing out the crises of the hour, paint in dismal hues a picture of the problems never to be solved except by shot and shell. Her skeptics, blinded by thought of the errors of the past, may prophesy the desecration of her honor and the disappointing failure of her hopes. The press may pen a graphic story of the military spirit of the age, and frowning patriarchs relate the deeds of golden days gone by. But underneath this cloud that overhangs, and almost hidden in ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... suppressed passion. "So long as I deemed thee honest in taking her to wife I respected that bond as became a good Muslim; but since 'tis manifest that it was no more than a pretence, a mockery to serve some purpose hostile to myself, a desecration of the Prophet's Holy Law, I, before whom this blasphemous marriage was performed, do pronounce it to be no marriage. There is no need for thee to divorce her. She is no longer thine. She is for any Muslim ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... not fond of strangers; moreover, he had a vague belief that strangers were at the bottom of that desecration of the stocks. The boy, then, was a stranger; but what was his rank? Was he of that grade in society in which the natural offences are or are not consonant to, or harmonious with, outrages upon stocks? On that Lenny Fairfield did not feel quite assured. According to all the experience ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... believe that the portrait of the old bishop, now hanging on the walls of Convocation Hall, should be covered with a dark veil, emblematic of the sorrow which he would feel were he to return to earth and see what to him would be the desecration of an institution which he built as a great remonstrance against the spoliation ...
— Lord Elgin • John George Bourinot
... week. Once when Tom Taylor altered the good Scotch of a "field preacher" (Almanac for 1880) he declared himself "in a great rage," and swore that he would "never forgive" the delinquent. On other occasions, too, he fumed at the desecration of his "librettos;" and when the word "last" was accidentally omitted from his joke—"Heard my [last] new song?" "Oh, Lor! I hope so!!" he mourned over the loss of the point. Yet he might have been comforted; for had the word been retained, the further charge ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... and partly through their scientific attainments during this culmination of Atlantean civilization, the most intellectual and energetic members of the race gradually obtained more and more insight into the working of Nature's laws, and more and more control over some of her hidden forces. Now the desecration of this knowledge and its use for selfish ends is what constitutes sorcery. The awful effects, too, of such desecration are well enough exemplified in the terrible catastrophes that overtook the race. ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot |
