"Charnel" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... announced the wish of the divers to rise again, I started from a seat on a coil of ropes which I had in my musings taken possession of—having been oblivious of the intervening half hour, during which I had been shadowing forth the secrets of the green charnel-house, with its surface lying smiling before me in the lurid glare of ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... is crowded upon every leaf, and yet absent from the immensities of space? The law of the Great System forbids the waste even of an atom; it knows no spot where something of life does not breathe. In the very charnel-house is the nursery of production and animation. Is that true? Well, then, can you conceive that space, which is the Infinite itself, is alone a waste, is alone lifeless, is less useful to the one design of ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... the custom of a number of Indian tribes, when first encountered by the whites, and even down to a comparatively modern date, to remove the flesh before final burial by suspending on scaffolds, depositing in charnel-houses, by temporary burial, or otherwise, is well known to all students ...
— The Problem of Ohio Mounds • Cyrus Thomas
... in her voice that recalled the night he had listened to it over the telephone, "he was different. There is no more dreadful thing in the play, to me, than the character of Rosmer. To think of him sitting quietly in that charnel house, prospering in soul, growing sleek in thought, becoming stored with high ideas. Perfect peace came to him in spite of the stern-faced portraits which shrieked murder from the walls. He dreamed of freeing and ennobling mankind, and all the time Fate was ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Investigator • John T. McIntyre
... reason why, to the eyes of astonished servants, from that day forth the Crown Prince of Livonia apparently devoured his chop, bone and all. And why Nikky resembled, at times, a well-setup, trig, and soldierly appearing charnel-house. "If I am ever arrested," he once demurred, "and searched, Highness, I shall ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... them at sight of their king so strangely and appallingly stricken, but evidently they were entirely and happily unconscious of the THING that sat there in their midst, touching them, consorting its charnel horrors with their warm-blooded humanity,—so near, so close to them, that he fancied the smell of that trickling gore, that dank grave-soil, must necessarily enter in at their nostrils, and he sickened ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... forever pass'd, that once so mighty world, now void, inanimate, phantom world, Embroider'd, dazzling, foreign world, with all its gorgeous legends, myths, Its kings and castles proud, its priests and warlike lords and courtly dames, Pass'd to its charnel vault, coffin'd with crown and armor on, Blazon'd with Shakspere's purple page, And dirged by Tennyson's ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... tolerable accommodations, and a host and hostess both well disposed to fall in with their guests' wishes. There is a schloss hard by, inhabited by certain officials, who, however, exercise no jurisdiction over the town; and a church, not remarkable for anything, except the good order of its charnel-house. This, a small building separated by the breadth of the churchyard from the main edifice, seems to be a place of deposit for all the skulls and other bones which may be thrown up in digging the graves; and they ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig
... I would, Marian was not there, and my heart misgave me that that beautiful form was lying in the loathsome charnel-house whence I had so hardly come out. A man near me, who appeared to have preserved his strength better than most of us, presently observing my trouble, and guessing its cause, undertook to ...
— Athelstane Ford • Allen Upward
... yet fearing my arm. With wife and children heavy to carry— Yet fruits of my very zest of life. Stealing odd pleasures that cost me prestige, And reaping evils I had not sown; Foe of the church with its charnel dankness, Friend of the human touch of the tavern; Tangled with fates all alien to me, Deserted by hands I called my own. Then just as I felt my giant strength Short of breath, behold my children Had ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... fumes 'Mid rural nature's charnel tombs; Thou hast sped with eye unscar'd Where Merthyr's fields of fire flar'd; And thou wert dauntless on thy ...
— The Poetry of Wales • John Jenkins
... Lady Agatha's face flushed and lit up. "I've made it healthy for them. Highercombe is a painted lie—a pest-house, a charnel-house, full of unwholesome miasmas from its pretty green, its pond covered with water-lilies. Death lurks in that pond. There is bad drainage and bad water; the damp oozes through the old brick floors of the houses. The whole ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... Not in vain from the charnel have come to me the records I produce. And whom did fate select to discover the wrongs of the mother, whom appoint as her avenger? Your son,—your own son; ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... as to visit the Catacombs, or subterranean burying grounds of the early inhabitants. These are not much compared with those at Naples, or Palermo, for instance, but to those who have seen neither the one nor the other, they will present all the charm of novelty. Though only a charnel house it is laid out with great care, in street, square, and alley, just like the abodes of men above. The bodies are mostly in a fine state of preservation, reposing in niches cut out of the dry earth, some of the tombs being ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... the kind that always does live!" cried Delafield, with angry emphasis. "And as for Lady Henry, her imagination is a perfect charnel-house. She likes to think that everybody's dead or dying but herself. The fact is that Mervyn is a good deal stronger this year than he was last. Really, Lady Henry—" The tone lost itself ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... a body taken from the charnel, and placed there by the demon," replied the monk. "Of my long wanderings in other lands and beneath brighter skies I need not tell you; but neither absence nor lapse of years cooled my desire of vengeance, and when the appointed ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... darkness of a vast pile, evidently once a convent, and where the chill of the massive walls struck to the marrow. I felt as if walking through a charnel-house. We hurried on; a trembling light, towards the end of an immense and lofty aisle, was our guide; and the crowd, long familiar with the way, rushed through the intricacies where so many feet of monks had trod before them, and where, perhaps, many a deed that shunned the day had ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... battered walls which now remain give but little indication of the imposing dimensions quoted above, and the visitor will have to depend on sentiment and the imagination rather than on actual sightseeing. The excavators in 1845 had a gruesome experience, for they discovered a charnel pit containing thirteen cart loads of bones of the fallen warriors at the battle of Lewes. Although nearly six centuries had ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... nature a tremendous push upward. Ask any philosopher, and he will tell you that the tendency of all endowed forces is to find their equilibrium and be at rest—that is, dead. He draws a dismal picture of the time when the sun shall be burned out, and the world float like a charnel ship through the dark, cold voids of space—the sun a burned-out char, a dead cinder, and the world one dismal silence, cold beyond measure, and dead beyond consciousness. The philosopher has wailed a dirge without [Page 261] hope, a requiem without grandeur, over the world's future. ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... his finger's call The box wide open flew. O heaven! O hell! What Pandemonium In the pouncet dwells! How it quakes, and how it quivers; How it seethes and swells! Misty steams from it upwreathing, Wave on wave is spread! Like a charnel-vault, 'tis breathing Vapors of the dead! Fumes on fumes as from a throat Of sooty Vulcan rise, Clouds of red and blue and yellow Blotting the fair skies! And the air, with noisome stenches, As from things that rot, Chokes the breather—exhalation From the infernal pot. And amid ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... concerning Angling, and I will endeavour to do so; and to live like those many worthy men, of which you made mention in the former part of your discourse. This is my firm resolution. And as a pious man advised his friend, that, to beget mortification, he should frequent churches, and view monuments, and charnel-houses, and then and there consider how many dead bodies time had piled up at the gates of death, so when I would beget content, and increase confidence in the power, and wisdom, and providence of Almighty God, I ...
— The Complete Angler • Izaak Walton
... groans; {108b} By the lubrican's sad moans; {108c} By the noise of dead men's bones In charnel-houses rattling; By the hissing of the snake, The rustling of the fire-drake, {108d} I charge thee thou this place forsake, Nor of Queen Mab ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... an appalling figure to behold, and the two lighted tapers in massive candelabras on each side of the desk lighted up his face with an unholy and gruesome glare. The funereal aspect of the scene was heightened by the house being in total darkness, and though many women had fainted, oppressed by the charnel-house atmosphere that surrounded us, still the audience as a whole remained spellbound in their seats. The medical man now plied the conductor-pianist with the contents of the mysterious phial, and placing a long, white ostrich plume in his hand, he made a signal for the orchestra ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... know, yet hither came winging unerringly, like flights of homing doves, their myriad prayers, their passionate loving thoughts and wistful thirsty longing for one word, one kiss, one touch of the hand.... Surely such thoughts and prayers sanctified this charnel-house. ...
— The End of Her Honeymoon • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... breath, then spoke and said,— "Great Prince, my brother, Famine, attacks the poor. He is most terrible against the helpless and the old. But I have made a charnel-house of the mightiest cities of men. When I strike, neither their stores of gold or of grain avail. With a breath I lay low their strongest, and wither up their fairest. I come upon them without warning, ...
— Fifty years & Other Poems • James Weldon Johnson
... morbid his fancies might become, desiderium could never take any but beautiful forms. Jenny could never come to him in any fearful images of corruption, nor could he picture her in any mouldering shape of catacomb or charnel. ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... attractive, equally does it represent him as a man of ready, aggressive and caustic wit, and rebellious and bitter against opposition.[19] The lines on the slab over his grave are less supplicatory than mandatory against the removal of his bones to the adjacent charnel-house.[20] His name, often written with a hyphen, indicates that he came of English fighting stock. When the Sonnets were written he was in the full tide of success. It is not credible that such a man at thirty or thirty-five, of buoyant and ...
— Testimony of the Sonnets as to the Authorship of the Shakespearean Plays and Poems • Jesse Johnson
... resistance was at an end? We know that the South plotted and consummated rebellion; that her people have slain three hundred thousand of our sons on the battle-field; that more than thirty thousand have wasted and died of slow torture in her prisons; that whenever the secrets of that charnel-house, Southern life, are disclosed, they will tell of thousands of Unionists who were hung, who were shot, who were burned at the stake, who were hunted by dogs, who were scourged to death with whips, and all because they were faithful to their country. And knowing all ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... sand-beach; and these now form no inconsiderable proportion of the entire mass. I found the deposit thickly inhabited by spatangi, razor-fish, gapers, and large, well-conditioned cockles, which seemed to have no idea whatever that they were living amid the debris of a charnel house. Such has been the origin here of a bed of shell-sand, consisting of many thousand tons, and of which at least eighty per cent. was once associated with animal life. And such, I doubt not, ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... store chambers and cellars are dug out of the rock. But the most curious feature of Aubeterre is the monolithic church of S. John beneath the castle. The doorway admitting into it is on the level of the street, and gives access to a charnel-house with what would be termed arcosolia in the catacombs, on each side, and the floor is humpy with graves. This is 70 feet long by 16 feet wide. On the right hand it gives admission through a doorway ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... the little iron bed, streamed out on each side over the pillow, and in the midst of it lay her face, a radiant isle in a dark sea. I stood and gazed. Fascinated by her beauty? God forbid! I was fascinated by the awful incongruity between that face, pure as the moonlight, and the charnel-house that lay unseen behind it. She was to me, henceforth, not a woman, but a live Death. I had no sense of sacredness, such as always in the chamber even of a little girl. How should I? It was no chamber; it was a den. She ...
— The Flight of the Shadow • George MacDonald
... other secretions and excretions—particularly the dejections—are as they should be. Nay, the very exhalations of the lungs are purer, as is obvious from the breath. That of a vegetable-eater is perfectly sweet, while that of a flesh-eater is often as offensive as the smell of a charnel-house. This distinction is discernible even among the brute animals. Those which feed on grass, grain, etc., have a breath incomparably sweeter than those which prey on animals. Compare the camel, and horse, ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott
... Suddenly it paused, lifted its head high, and looked straight toward the boats, and at the same moment a whiff of air came toward us heavily charged with a most disgusting and nauseating odour, about equally suggestive of musk and the charnel-house. Its eyes, distinctly luminous, and apparently about two feet apart, were directed straight toward the longboat, and the next instant it began to move toward us, again stretching ...
— A Middy in Command - A Tale of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtile deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains white or colourless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... salvation; he will set them free, and take them home to the bosom of the Father—if only they will mind what he says to them—which is the beginning, middle, and end of faith. If, instead of searching into the mysteries of corruption in their own charnel-houses, they would but awake and arise from the dead, and come out into the light which Christ is waiting to give them, he would begin at once to fill them with ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... But this once lost, how recoverable? how, rather, ever acquirable? 'First must the dead Letter of Religion own itself dead, and drop piecemeal into dust, if the living Spirit of Religion, freed from this, its charnel house, is to arise on us, new born of Heaven, and with new healing ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... quantities, tusks the like of which I had never seen, except in pictures of the giant mammoth of prehistoric ages, tusks the girth of a man in size. Piled in all directions they lay, the whole vast floor was indeed a stupendous charnel house. And among the white sand and bones diamonds lay thick as pebbles ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... shipwrecked in Nova Zembla; ah! like the mother's voice to her little child that strays bewildered, weeping, in unknown tumults; like soft streamings of celestial music to my too exasperated heart, came that Evangel. The Universe is not dead and demoniacal, a charnel-house with spectres; but godlike, ...
— Daily Strength for Daily Needs • Mary W. Tileston
... anxious to know your opinion of my daughter's condition. You have inspired us with a degree of hope that we have not known for a long time. Indeed, Hope spread her wings and left this castle long since, and it has been little better than a charnel-house until your appearance. Now I ask you to tell me candidly whether you entertain any hope of my Feodora's ultimate recovery. You may lay your heart open to me, for I should receive her as one raised from the dead if you save her. Do not, as you love ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman
... the age of fifty-two. {272c} On Thursday, April 25 (O.S.), the poet was buried inside Stratford Church, near the northern wall of the chancel, in which, as part-owner of the tithes, and consequently one of the lay-rectors, he had a right of interment. Hard by was the charnel-house, where bones dug up from the churchyard were deposited. Over the poet's grave were ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... dungeon foul, Where, maimed and torn, they die, From gory trench and charnel-house, Where, heap on heap, ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... of the few survivors of General Leclerc's expedition to St. Domingo, had, on leaving that charnel-house, become aide-de-camp to Marshal Ney. He it was who, during the famous retreat from Russia, was sent to ask the general who was blowing up the Beresina bridges to suspend the work of destruction, so as to allow of the passage of the column with the wounded, who must otherwise be doomed to ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... so faint that it was impossible to tell in which direction they were. I had lost all trace of Holman. With extreme caution I crawled toward what I thought to be the spot where I had left him, but my groping fingers found only the fragments of bone that covered the dusty floor of the charnel house. ...
— The White Waterfall • James Francis Dwyer
... those powerful fragments on the dead. And, as he pass'd, each lifted up its head, 790 As doth a flower at Apollo's touch. Death felt it to his inwards: 'twas too much: Death fell a weeping in his charnel-house. The Latmian persever'd along, and thus All were re-animated. There arose A noise of harmony, pulses and throes Of gladness in the air—while many, who Had died in mutual arms devout and true, ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats
... rats. No sound or sign of a live one on the Laughing Lass. No rats, no mice. No bugs. Gentlemen, the Laughing Lass is a charnel ship." ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... make their nests, and cry unceasingly for flesh, although the whole place is but one vast, putrid shamble. The pillars of the hall were made of thighbones, and those of the parlour of shinbones, while the floors were formed of layer upon layer of all manner of charnel. ...
— The Visions of the Sleeping Bard • Ellis Wynne
... weighing anchor. Soon the soft slap of the water around the bow and the regular heaving motion told that the Bozra was under way. The sea-mouse creaked and groaned through all her timbers and her lading. The foul bilge-water made the hold stifling as a charnel-house. Lampaxo, Hib being absent, began to ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... the wrong, who, when the great Alexander, finding him in the charnel-house, asked him what he was seeking for, answered, "I am seeking for your father's bones, and those of my slave; but I cannot find them, because there is no difference ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 330, September 6, 1828 • Various
... short steps to totter with their load, Shakes her numb arm that slumbers with its weight, And eyes through tears the mountain's shadeless height; And bids her soldier come her woes to share, Asleep on Bunker's [iv] charnel hill afar; For hope's deserted well why wistful look? Chok'd is the pathway, and the pitcher ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... lies enough to sink a kingdom. Forgive me for the many stories I have told. I never was in Mexico, and solemnly declare that if you will be merciful to me, and restore me to my family, that I may not die in this charnel house, to forsake the life of a politician, and so devote myself to doing your will that when the end comes I shall surely be fit for the kingdom of heaven. Yes, merciful and forgiving Lord, there's that story of my first adventure in New York; draw near ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... with him, and throw it overboard. "D—n the body!" said he, "I think 'tis fair enough if I take care of my own." My fellow mate, snatching up the amputation knife, pursued him half-way up the cock-pit ladder, crying, "You lousy rascal, is this the churchyard, or the charnel-house, or the sepulchre, or the golgotha, of the ship?"—but was stopped in his career by one calling, "Yo he, avast there—scaldings!" "Scaldings!" answered Morgan; "Cot knows 'tis hot enough indeed: who are you?" "Here's one!" replied the voice; and I immediately knew it to be ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... horrible! O charnel gulf I 2 Of death on death, not to be done away, Why harrowest thou my soul? Ill boding harbinger of woe, what word Have thy lips uttered? Oh, thou hast killed me again, Before undone! What say'st? What were ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... was proposed and decreed on the same evening. It possessed unlimited powers to confiscate property and take life. The Girondists dared not vote against this tribunal. The public voice would pronounce them the worst of traitors. France was now a charnel-house. Blood flowed in streams which were never dry. Innocence had no protection. Virtue was suspicion, suspicion a crime, the guillotine the penalty, and the confiscated estate the bribe to accusation. Thus there was erected, in the name of ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... churchyard was to me merely the receptacle of bodies deprived of life, which, from being the seat of beauty and strength, had become food for the worm. Now I was led to examine the cause and progress of this decay and forced to spend days and nights in vaults and charnel-houses. My attention was fixed upon every object the most insupportable to the delicacy of the human feelings. I saw how the fine form of man was degraded and wasted; I beheld the corruption of death succeed to the blooming cheek of life; I saw how the ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... of blood, which had been so successfully ushered in on that ill-starred Sunday of August, was maintained on the succeeding days with little abatement of its frenzied excitement. Paris soon resembled a vast charnel-house. The dead or dying lay in the open streets and squares, they blocked the doors and carriage-ways, they were heaped in the courtyards. When the utmost that impotent passion could do to these lifeless remains was accomplished, ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... on young Fulton. The men, who believed implicitly every word that he had said, regarded him almost with superstition. He alone of the defenders had come alive out of that terrible charnel house, ...
— The Texan Scouts - A Story of the Alamo and Goliad • Joseph A. Altsheler
... was wont to let his imagination dwell on these details of the charnel-house. In a letter to Dallas, August 12, 1811, he writes, "I am already too familiar with the dead. It is strange that I look on the skulls which stand beside me (I have always had four in my study) without emotion, but I cannot strip the features of those ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... smoking-room then, with its occupants so greedy for the things that money connotes—the furs, champagne, cigars, and heavy possessions that were symbols of the personal aggrandizement they sought and valued—seemed to the Irishman like a charnel-house where those about to die sat making inventories in blind pride of the things they must ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... speakers of essential truth, Opposed to relative, comparative, And temporal truths; the only holders by His sun-skirts, through conventional gray glooms; The only teachers who instruct mankind, From just a shadow on a charnel-wall, To find man's veritable stature out, Erect, ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... black and funeral yew That bathes the charnel house with dew Methinks I hear a voice begin: (Ye ravens, cease your croaking din; Ye tolling clocks, no time resound O'er the long lake and midnight ground) It sends a peal of hollow groans Thus speaking from among the bones: 'When ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... pluck. Charge after charge was broken and hurled back. On they came again—ever to the shambles! Night fell on a field piled thick with bodies of the attacking force; in front of the broken salient was a perfect charnel-house! ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... horror of the faithful, and all obits and chantreys were confiscated, and the vestments and altar cloths were sold. The early reformers were backed by greedy partisans. The Protector Somerset, who was desirous of building rapidly a sumptuous palace in the Strand, pulled down the chapel and charnel-house in the Pardon churchyard, and carted off the stones of St. Paul's cloister. When the good Ridley was installed Bishop of London, he would not enter the choir until the lights on the altar ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... beneath, he knew that it was a wall, formed of the bleached remains of the bygone dead. As he drew nearer the voice, he was guided by the lanthorn brought by George's companion; and towards this he proceeded, almost overpowered by the horrible stench of the charnel house, As he drew near enough to distinguish objects, what a scene presented itself! In one corner of the vault, lay a quantity of lime used to consume the bodies, whilst nearer the light, lay corpses in every stage of putrefaction. In some, the lime had but half accomplished ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... very doors, and one might not know how the coroner would interpret it. His power to commit a suspect added to his terrors, and gave to the capable, astute official a mundane formidableness that overtopped the charnel-house flavor of his more habitual duties. He was visible through the unchinked logs of the little room where the inquest was in progress, barely spacious enough to contain the bier, the jury, and the witness under examination; and yet so great was ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... were black with many a crack, All black and bare, I ween; Jet-black and bare, save where with rust Of mouldy damps and charnel crust They were patch'd ...
— Lyrical Ballads, With Other Poems, 1800, Vol. I. • William Wordsworth
... passionately—had loved her and left her for duty's sake. No Kirkland had ever faltered in his fidelity to crown and king. This John Kirkland had sacrificed all things, and, alone with his beloved dead in the darkness of that narrow charnel house, it seemed to him that there was nothing left for him except to cleave to those fallen fortunes and patiently await ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... appear to cover family vaults, trip you up at every step. Every yard of progress is made with difficulty, and you move nervously among the tall rank nettles in momentary fear of dislocating your ankle, or of being suddenly precipitated into the reeking charnel house of some defunct Mayo family. The Connaught dead seem to be very exclusive. Most of the ground is enclosed in small squares, each having a low stone wall, half-a-yard thick, with what looks like the gable-end of ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... our attention: whereas the interior of the house is exquisitely clean, the outside is covered with dirt, bits of earth, chips of rotten wood, little pieces of gravel. Often there are worse things still: the exterior of the tent becomes a charnel-house. Here, hung up or embedded, are the dry carcasses of Opatra, Asidae and other Tenebrionidae {39} that favour underrock shelters; segments of Iuli, {40} bleached by the sun; shells of Pupae, {41} common among the stones; ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... verge of the parapet of the Latomia, where the breath of the sirocco, the gnawing tooth of time, and the slow ravelling of rain had serrated the ledge, stood Leo, gazing into the dizzying depths of the charnel house that swarmed with the ghosts of nine thousand men, who once were huddled ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... values in the world are truth and beauty, and of these it is probable that truth is lasting only in so far as it is a function and manifestation of beauty—a projection of feeling in terms of idea. The world is a charnel house of dead religions. Where are all the faiths of the middle ages, so complex and yet so precise? But all that was essential in the beauty of the middle ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... the still harder task confronted you of putting the drawer in its grooves again. Sometimes you succeeded; more often you left it "for mother to do"—that depended on your temper and the time of your train. The drawer was a charnel-house of gloves and mittens and veils. When you cut your finger you were sent to it to get a "cot", and it had a peculiar smell of its own, the smell of the hat-tree drawer. A whiff of old gloves still brings that odor back to me, out of childhood, stirring memories of ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... all the prophets of God had to tell us—as it is all the prophets of Infidelity can prophecy—we had as little need for the one as for the other. Earthquake and hurricane, volcano and valley flood, autumn frosts and winter blasts, fever, consumption, war, and pestilence, the grave-yard and the charnel-house, the Parthenon and the Pyramids, the silent cities of Colorado, and the buried palaces of Assyria, unite ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... auto-infection. Which of the following microbes are the most active agents of progressive auto-infection: the streptococcus lanceolatus, the bacterium pyogenes, the bacillus subtilis, the staphylococci, the bacterium coli commune? They all play a part in the game, reducing the body in time to a charnel-house. Or are such substances as putrescein, cadaverin, skatol or indol—which are derived through chemical change in the putrescent mass—contributors to the spread of the poisonous taint throughout the system? Any single one or a group of the ...
— Intestinal Ills • Alcinous Burton Jamison
... slave of old Marster John Durham, on a plantation 'bout five miles east of Blackstock, S.C. My mistress name Margaret. Deir chillun was Miss Cynthia, Marse Johnnie, Marse Willie and Marse Charnel. I forgits de others. Then, when young Marse Johnnie marry Miss Minnie Mobley, my mammy, Kizzie, my daddy, Eph, and me was give to them. Daddy and mammy had four other chillun. They was Eph, Reuben, Winnie and Jordan. ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves • Works Projects Administration
... she is constantly picking flaws in the character of others. Madam Snob will entertain you with a long account of her family connections. Poor soul she is constantly resurrecting the remains of dead and gone ancestors; her life is spent in the charnel house, being very careful however, to let the remains of a certain few rest in peace, while she rattles the dry bones of her favored ones in our face, until we are tempted to cry "peace." At last our curiosity is aroused, and we make inquiries as to these noble ancestors, and find the overwhelming ...
— Bohemian Society • Lydia Leavitt
... And now I do remember, The old Egyptians at their banquets placed A charnel sight of dead men's skulls before them, With images of cold mortality, To temper their fierce joys when they grew rampant. I like the custom well: and ere we crown With freer mirth the day, I shall propose, In calmest recollection ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... old America is dead; America is money mad; America is a charnel house of greed. Millions and millions of men from all over the earth came to her shores. And the world said: They have brought only their greed with them. And still the struggle went on. The continent was taken; man ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... men who had fought their way five bloody miles since daybreak? I could not tell; it would be a death grapple worthy of the gods, and the Hardy house would be in the very vortex. Whether it was destined also to become a charnel house, a shambles, depended on the early coming of those other, unseen men toiling up that ...
— Love Under Fire • Randall Parrish
... to some sleepy mountain's top, Where rearing bears and savage lions roam; Or shut me nightly in a charnel house] [Or walk in thievish ways, or bid me lurk Where serpents are; chain me with rearing bears, Or hide ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson
... to do more upon this earth? Young, innocent, loving, and beloved, they descend together into the tomb: but Shakspeare has made that tomb a shrine of martyred and sainted affection consecrated for the worship of all hearts,—not a dark charnel vault, haunted by spectres of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 563, August 25, 1832 • Various
... principally "mere Irish," and the cost of their support derived chiefly from the land, the landlords consider their health, comfort, or life of only secondary importance. Hence we find the number of deaths in these charnel houses averaging that of years of plague; and each pauper is allowed far less weekly for his support than the lord of the soil allows the meanest dog in his kennel. Add to these the separation of man and wife, the isolation of members of the same family, the dangers of perversion and proselytism ...
— The Cross and the Shamrock • Hugh Quigley
... a hundred steps, and the atmosphere became singularly cold and charnel-like, when they entered a large vault, which, by the light of their torches, appeared of great extent. Its walls were covered with uncouth representations, and inscriptions ...
— Alfgar the Dane or the Second Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... taste of death long before they have died, and have placed before their eyes all the furniture of mortality. The horrors of a charnel-house is the scene of their pleasure. The "Midnight Meditations" of Quarles preceded Young's "Night Thoughts" by a century, and both these poets ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... "a truce to digression," let us see what the ancient cemetery of the Innocents was like. Round an irregular four-sided space, about five hundred feet by two, ran a low cloister-like building, called Les Charniers, or the Charnel Houses. It had originally been a cloister surrounding the churchyard; but, so convenient had this place of sepulture been found, from its situation in the heart of Paris, that the remains of mortality increased ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... meteor of the night of distant years, That flashed unnoticed, save by wrinkled eld, Musing, at midnight, upon prophecies, Who at her only lattice, saw the gleam Point to the mist-poised shroud, then quietly Closed her pale lips, and locked the secret up, Safe in the charnel's treasure. ...
— A Book For The Young • Sarah French
... we look steadily with the wise, searching eye of faith into the face of mother earth, we shall see how death is but the gate of life, and this narrow churchyard, with its corpses close-packed underneath the sod, would not seem to us a frightful charnel-house of corruption. No! it would seem like what it is—a blessed, quiet, seed-filled God's garden, in which our forefathers, after their long-life labour, lay sown by God's friendly hand, waiting peaceful, one and all, to spring ...
— Twenty-Five Village Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... ready and timorous acquiescence, she pushed the door open, but instantly recoiled with terror. It was a charnel house, half filled with ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... wall enclosed the flat expanse of charnel, over which the scattered houses of the barriers looked widowed through their mournful windows; and now and then a crippled crone, or a bereaved old pauper, hobbled to the roadway and shook her white hairs to ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... of the ocean has been rendered a foul and gloomy charnel house, where the bones of thousands of our fellow-men await the summons of the Archangel's trumpets, when 'the sea shall give up her dead.' The reckless seamen, though unprepared for another world, hurry themselves into the presence of their Judge, ...
— Narratives of Shipwrecks of the Royal Navy; between 1793 and 1849 • William O. S. Gilly
... ceremonial from El Zagal, and appears to have been interred obscurely to prevent any popular sensation; and it is recorded by an ancient and faithful chronicler of the time that the body of the old monarch was deposited by two Christian captives in his osario or charnel-house.* Such was the end of the turbulent Muley Abul Hassan, who, after passing his life in constant contests for empire, could scarce gain quiet admission into the ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... this life and colour death and the taint of death are ever present, for every church is little better than a charnel-house, and in the crowded city nearly eighty cemeteries are packed with dead. Magnificent processions of princes and of great prelates march through the town by day; they are followed by the riot of the Mascarade des Conards, a burlesque throng ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... loose his assassins upon the priests of God. Now Paris is made a theatre where the people whom Louis and his nobles would have died to save have turned every street into a stable of carnage, every prison and hospital into a vast charnel-house. One last revolting thing alone remains to be done—the murder of the King; then this France that we have loved will have no name and no place in our generation. She will rise again, but we shall not see her, for our eyes have been blinded with blood, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... to great men remember th' old wives' tradition, to be like the lions i' th' Tower on Candlemas-day; to mourn if the sun shine, for fear of the pitiful remainder of winter to come. 'Tis well yet there 's some goodness in my death; My life was a black charnel. I have caught An everlasting cold; I have lost my voice Most irrecoverably. Farewell, glorious villains. This busy trade of life appears most vain, Since rest breeds rest, where all seek pain by pain. Let no harsh flattering bells resound my knell; Strike, ...
— The White Devil • John Webster
... the Lord's Vicegerent at Canterbury, and many of the most learned divines of England; and from those ecclesiastical leeches there was a Shylock cry of incest, incest, incest! And those terrible words came greeting the ears of Charles Blount, making his home like a charnel-house, and they nearly sent his beautiful Eliza to a maniac's grave. Still she lingered on. Denied the power of a wife, she would not relinquish her duties as a mother to her sister's babes. There was a calm ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... a week may be divided into two conflicts of equal intensity which raged along the ridge of the heights of Tser. Each of the two slopes, descending one to the Save and the town of Shabatz and the other to the Drina, is now nothing but a charnel house. ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various
... truth;—drenching the world with blood, depopulating realms, and turning fertile lands into deserts; until, for religious war, persecution, and bloodshed, the Earth for many a century has rolled round the Sun, a charnel-house, steaming and reeking with human gore, the blood of brother slain by brother for opinion's sake, that has soaked into and polluted all her veins, and made her a horror to ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... also, of the College of the Holy Trinity, endowed as a "carnarie," or charnel-house, of the city. The chief duties of the priests belonging to the chantry attached thereto were to bury the dead, and keep up perpetual Masses for the souls of ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... cloister of the church, by eighteen degrees at the right side, is the charnel of the Innocents, where their bones lie. And before the place where our Lord was born is the tomb of Saint Jerome, that was a priest and a cardinal, that translated the Bible and the Psalter from Hebrew into Latin: and without the minster is the chair that he sat in when he ...
— The Travels of Sir John Mandeville • Author Unknown
... through the fire." On the mountain opposite, Solomon, with the thousand women of his harem, worshipped the gods of all their nations, "Ashtoreth," and "Milcom, and Molech, the abomination of the Ammonites." An enormous charnel-house stands on the hill where the bodies of dead pilgrims used to be thrown; and common belief has fixed upon this spot as the Aceldama, which Judas purchased with the price of his treason. Thus you go on from one gloomy place to another, each seared ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... instead of fishing for barbel, I was unable to rise from my bed; and for fifteen nights I never closed my eyes without seeing in my dreams ghosts, and all the horrid details of the churchyard and the charnel-house. ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... off the face of the moon, and a slant ray fell upon the hideous features of the vampire. He looked as if just rescued from some charnel-house, and endowed for a space with vitality to destroy all beauty and harmony in nature, and drive some benighted soul ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... uttered a little shriek, and covered her face with her hands. To face these objects was painful enough, but to have them grinning on her, as in mockery, behind her back, was more than she could stand. So seizing old Moodie by the arm, he being beside her, she rushed out of this charnel house, and impatiently called to the others to join her in ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... turned milder. By Monday the city reeked with the smell of a charnel house and pestilence was in the air. The bodies of dead animals lay in the streets; the waters of the bay and gulf were thick with the dead. All the disinfectants in the city were quickly consumed. ...
— The True Story of Our National Calamity of Flood, Fire and Tornado • Logan Marshall
... with the result of the work of the week. The sponge of commerce, the one you buy at the drug store, is the skeleton of the creature; the thing taken from the water is its corpse. Not until this body has rotted away is it pleasant to live with. Day by day the stench, like that of a charnel house, became more unbearable to Dick. The crew seemed never to notice it, which caused the boy much wonderment that noses had ever been given them. He was glad when a strong wind came and swept some of the smell away instead of leaving it ...
— Dick in the Everglades • A. W. Dimock
... hole, and they have found things like flowerpots upside down, Mis'ess Yeobright; and inside these be real charnel bones. They have carried 'em off to men's houses; but I shouldn't like to sleep where they will bide. Dead folks have been known to come and claim their own. Mr. Yeobright had got one pot of the bones, and was going to bring 'em home—real skellington ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... who, lashed to his own mast, There where the sea-flowers screen the charnel-caves, Beside the sirens' singing island pass'd, Till sweetness failed along the inveterate waves... Say, soul,—are songs of Death no heaven to thee, Nor shames her lip the cheek ...
— The House of Life • Dante Gabriel Rossetti
... and death, Of beauty singing in a charnel house, Like the lost soul of a poor moon-mad maid, With too much loving of some lord of hell; Doomed and disastrous spirit, to what shore Of what dark gulf infernal art thou strayed, Or to what spectral star of topless heaven ...
— The Lonely Dancer and Other Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... it is a mistake to be for ever looking back to the past for precedents," she said. "The past has its charm, of course, but it is the charm of the charnel house—it is the dead past, and what was good for one age is ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... thought ere he came from the bosom of the Father? Did the perfect will embrace in the all-atoning tenderness of the divine heart, the degraded, disfigured, defiled, distorted thing, whose angel is too blind ever to see the face of its Father? Through all the hideous filth of the charnel-house, which the passions had heaped upon her, did the Word recognise the bound, wing-lamed, feather-draggled Psyche, panting in horriblest torture? Did he have a desire to the work of his hands, the child of his ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... now the body of some poor victim is taken from the debris, and the town, or rather the remnants of it, is one vast charnel house. The scenes at the extemporized morgue are beyond powers of description in their ghastliness, while the moans and groans of the suffering survivors, tossing in agony, with bruised and mangled bodies, or screaming in a delirium of fever as they issue ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... she shut the door. Nana was left alone with upturned face in the light cast by the candle. She was fruit of the charnel house, a heap of matter and blood, a shovelful of corrupted flesh thrown down on the pillow. The pustules had invaded the whole of the face, so that each touched its neighbor. Fading and sunken, they had assumed the grayish hue of mud; and on that ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... the Museum, and present rather an unaccording appearance, amidst the peaceful solemnity of the surrounding objects. This exhibition is not yet completed, but, in its present condition, is very interesting. Some hints, not altogether useless, may be collected from it. In England, our churches are charnel houses. The pews of the congregation are raised upon foundations of putrefaction. For six days and nights the temple of devotion is filled with the pestilent vapours of the dead, and on the seventh they are absorbed by the living. Surely it is high time to subdue prejudices, ...
— The Stranger in France • John Carr |
