"Coffin" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... succeed, however; nor was any article taken on board. A good look-out was kept for men, from aloft, but none were seen from any of the vessels. The lake had swallowed up the rest of the two crews; and the Scourge, as had been often predicted, had literally become a coffin to a large portion ...
— Ned Myers • James Fenimore Cooper
... man. Taxes on the sauce which pampers man's appetite and the drug which restores him to health. On the ermine which decorates the judge and the rope which hangs the criminal. On the brass nails of the coffin and on the ribbons of the bride. At bed or at board, couchant or levant, we must pay. The beardless youth manages his taxed horse with a taxed bridle on a taxed road, and the dying Englishman, pouring his medicine (which has ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... incongruous proximity in the existence of those who live pell-mell in moral and material disorder after the manner of the poor. There was even a wedding coach in the back of the corner undertaker's establishment, and in the front window a coffin, small and white, as though death itself were more attractive in the young, as though the little people of the quarter were nearer Heaven and more suggestive of angels than their life-worn elders. The spotless tiny coffin with its fringe and satin tufting had its share of the ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... child gravely, "will they put you in a coffin and carry you away and put you in the ground and cover ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... strongly advocating the use of white troops upon the coast instead of West Indian regiments, when written to by Sir Garnet Wolseley for his advice as to articles of outfit, replied that the only article which he could strongly commend would be that each officer should take out his coffin. ...
— By Sheer Pluck - A Tale of the Ashanti War • G. A. Henty
... follows, drawn by four horses. Black plumes wave from the heads of the horses, and flowing black drapery covers their bodies and legs. Even their heads are draped in black, nothing being perceptible but their eyes. The coffin lies exposed on the top of the hearse, and is also similarly draped. This combination of sombre plumage and drapery has a singularly mournful appearance. Priests stand on steps attached to the hearse holding images of the Savior over the coffin; others follow ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... to grieve them again. But the hour for them to die must come. You may weep as though your heart would break, but it will not recall the past, and it will not delay their death. They must die; and you will probably gaze upon their cold and lifeless countenances in the coffin. You will follow them to the grave, and see them buried for ever from your sight. Oh, how unhappy you will feel, if you then have to reflect upon your misconduct! The tears you will shed over their graves will be the more bitter, because you will feel ...
— The Child at Home - The Principles of Filial Duty, Familiarly Illustrated • John S.C. Abbott
... would have liked to acquiesce, General Turner had to refuse, for we were in a dangerous corner and no one could be spared. Lieutenant Drummond, his brother-in-law, was permitted to attend. Captain Duguid, the quartermaster, with the assistance of the engineers, had a metallic coffin made for him and they buried him in ...
— The Red Watch - With the First Canadian Division in Flanders • J. A. Currie
... proven facts. A witch, for instance, owns to having taken from the graveyard the body of an infant lately dead, that she might use it in her magical compounds. Her husband bids them go the graveyard, for the child is there still. On being disinterred, the child is found all right in his coffin. But against the witness of his own eyes the judge pronounces it an appearance, a cheat of the Devil. He prefers the wife's confession to the fact itself; ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... however, that even conscientious Aunt Frances never tried to analyze, because it was too sad. Elizabeth Ann dreamed sometimes that she was dead and lay in a little white coffin with white roses over her. Oh, that made Aunt Frances cry, and so did Elizabeth Ann. It was very touching. Then, after a long, long time of talk and tears and sobs and hugs, the little girl would begin to get drowsy, and Aunt Frances would ...
— Understood Betsy • Dorothy Canfield
... tolling; dirge &c. (lamentation) 839; cypress; orbit, dead march, muffled drum; mortuary, undertaker, mute; elegy; funeral, funeral oration, funeral sermon; epitaph. graveclothes[obs3], shroud, winding sheet, cerecloth; cerement. coffin, shell, sarcophagus, urn, pall, bier, hearse, catafalque, cinerary urn[obs3]. grave, pit, sepulcher, tomb, vault, crypt, catacomb, mausoleum, Golgotha, house of death, narrow house; cemetery, necropolis; burial place, burial ground; grave yard, church yard; God's acre; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... pneumonia, and then the rat at the lung; but of shock, something also. But I think it was not concussion, as the doctors said, but soul-shock. It has left me, Father, like Mohammed's coffin, suspended. I think I have lost my grip on the world—and not found my hold ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... seen all de quality ob dis town? and dat fer de new quality," with a snap of her fingers, "an you take de shine off'n dem all eben in de kitchen. Law sakes, what kin' ob blood dat man Clancy hab to lebe you kase you po'? Pears ter me de ole cun'l, his fader, ud be orful figety in his coffin." ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... Rotting-Room, which I have elsewhere described, we read the inscriptions near us, and the monk read others as we asked him. We walked thus, all round, talking and discoursing thereon. Passing to the bottom of the room, the coffin of the unhappy Don Carlos offered itself ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... Grogan, as though Grogan were a synonym for something much stronger. His fiery indignation between Sherwood Square and Pall Mall was quite amazing. The Dowager in the next street! Why, he might as well order his coffin. And talking about taking Nelly from him. That muff, Robin, too! When had the fellow shown any impatience? He didn't want the girl to marry an oyster. He remembered the glory and glamour of his own ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... was never missed, of course. Really, he was worth fifty of me! When he was brought home from Vicksburg with a piece of shell in his skull, my poor mother began to think she had n't loved him enough. I remember, as she hung round my neck sobbing, before his coffin, she told me that I must be to her everything that he would have been. I swore in tears and in perfect good faith that I would, but naturally I have not kept my promise. I have been utterly different. I have been idle, restless, egotistical, ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... them. The voices ceased as soon as he was within. He marvelleth how it came that this house and hermitage were solitary, and what had become of the hermit that dwelt therein. He drew nigh the altar of the chapel and beheld in front thereof a coffin all discovered, and he saw the hermit lying therein all clad in his vestments, and seeth the long beard down to his girdle, and his hands crossed upon his breast. There was a cross above him, whereof the image came as far as ...
— High History of the Holy Graal • Unknown
... great enjoyment, while the tradesmen hurriedly shut up their shops; for a crowd in those times stopped at nothing, and was a monster much dreaded. They had already got the length of opening the hearse to take the coffin out, when some brighter genius proposed instead, its being escorted to its destination amidst general rejoicing. Practical suggestions being much needed, this suggestion, too, was received with acclamation, and the coach was immediately filled with eight inside and a dozen out, while as many people ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... he could remember he had had an unreasoning dread of coffins. Even now, big as he was, big enough to wear "'leven-year-old suits," nothing could tempt him into a furniture shop for fear of seeing a coffin. ...
— Georgina of the Rainbows • Annie Fellows Johnston
... 'neath the coffin-lid, We cannot think her dead; But we think of her as of some delicate bird To a milder country fled. 'Twas a long, dark flight for our gentle dove, Our bird so tender and fair; But we know she has reached the summer land And ...
— Poems • Marietta Holley
... and the incident alluded to in connection with the Roman town throws a clear ray of light upon the ancient site in those unsettled times. It tells how Sexburgh, the abbess of Ely, needing a more permanent coffin for the remains of AEtheldryth, her predecessor in office, sent some of the brothers from the monastery to find such a coffin. Ely being without stone, and surrounded by waterways and marshes, they took a vessel and came in time to an abandoned city, "which, in the language of the English, is ...
— Beautiful Britain—Cambridge • Gordon Home
... falls into a deep sleep, and is placed by a magician in a glass coffin. A glass mountain is prepared, on which the coffin is fixed. Up the glass mountain the successful suitor must ride when seven years and seven days have expired, when the princess will awake and give ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby
... moved in solemn procession towards the chapel, where the mass and requiem were chanted, and the corpse of the Lady Eleanor, inclosed in a stone coffin, was lowered to its resting-place, in the vault ...
— The Lances of Lynwood • Charlotte M. Yonge
... did; for then, it is likely, I should have withstood them no better than my neighbours. For you know, sir, that it is not the fashion now, as it was in former times, that I have read of in books, when your great generals died so poor, that they did not leave wherewithal to buy them a coffin; and people thought the better of their memories for it: if they did so now-a-days, I question if any body, except yourself, and some few ...
— The Man of Feeling • Henry Mackenzie
... the big fellows, and the law is used to make money for 'em, it takes nerve just to hang on," he said. "Nobody but a dang fool would fight." Slow anger grew within him. He turned upon Lorraine almost fiercely. "D'yuh think me and Frank could fight the Sawtooth and get anything out of it but a coffin apiece, maybe?" he demanded harshly. "Don't the Sawtooth own this country? Warfield's got the sheriff in his pocket, and the cor'ner, and the judge, and the stock inspector—he's Senator Warfield, and what he wants ...
— The Quirt • B.M. Bower
... was buried in the mosque in which he had held religious services for so many years; and Medina has ever since been honored, because it contains the tomb of the Prophet. It is believed by his followers that the body still lies in the coffin in the same state as when it was first buried. There is also a story that the coffin of Mohammed rests somewhere between heaven and earth, suspended in the air. But this fable was invented by enemies to bring ridicule on ...
— Famous Men of The Middle Ages • John H. Haaren, LL.D. and A. B. Poland, Ph.D.
... between time and eternity? Have you ever tried to get a glimpse beforehand of your own place where you will be an hour after your death, when they are putting the grave- clothes on your still warm body, and when they are measuring your corpse for your coffin? Where will you be by that time? Have you any idea? Can you fancy it? Did you ever try? And if not, why not? "My lord," wrote Jeremy Taylor to the Earl of Carbery, when sending him the first copy of the Holy Dying,—"My lord, it is ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... Requiem was chanted, they diverted her thoughts to the choice of mourning dresses. While the coffin was placed in the huge, black and white, wax-besprinkled catafalque that does duty for some three thousand dead in the course of its career—so I was informed by a philosophically-minded mute whom I once consulted on a point over a couple of glasses of petit ...
— The Firm of Nucingen • Honore de Balzac
... coffin, the commander commands: 1. Present, 2. ARMS, and the band plays an appropriate air; arms are then brought ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss
... bereaved father and his two surviving children followed the coffin to the grave, they were joined by Keeper, Emily's fierce, faithful bull-dog. He walked alongside of the mourners, and into the church, and stayed quietly there all the time that the burial service was being ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... had appointed me to the wild, free life of the north? So I was not surprised when Paul Larocque's spade struck sharply on a box. Indians sleep their last sleep in the skins of the chase. Nor was I in the least amazed when that same spade pried up the lid of cached provisions instead of a coffin. Then I had ocular proof of what I knew before, that Louis in word and conduct—but chiefly in conduct, which is the way of the expert had—lied outrageously ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... would be an act of kindness to deprive him of life at once. Sir H. Lowe said that a house of wood, fitted up with every possible accommodation, was then on its way from England for his use. Napoleon refused it at once, and exclaimed that it was not a house but an executioner and a coffin that he wanted; the house was a mockery, death would be a favour. A few minutes after Napoleon took up some reports of the campaigns of 1814, which lay on the table, and asked Sir H. Lowe if he had written them. Las Cases, after saying that the Governor replied in the affirmative, ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... drawing-room, where Jaffery and I, after a perfunctory liqueur brandy, soon joined them. We talked for a while on different things, the child's robustious health, the garden, the weather, our summer holiday, much in the same dismal fashion as assembled mourners talk before the coffin is brought downstairs. At ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... Old Hank Bunker done it once, and bragged about it; and in less than two years he got drunk and fell off of the shot-tower, and spread himself out so that he was just a kind of a layer, as you may say; and they slid him edgeways between two barn doors for a coffin, and buried him so, so they say, but I didn't see it. Pap told me. But anyway it all come of looking at the moon that way, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... came again in my emotional chaos. Then something comes out clear and sorrowful, rises out clear and sheer from among all these rather base and inconsequent things, and once again I walk before all the other mourners close behind her coffin as it is carried along the churchyard path to her grave, with the old vicar's slow voice saying regretfully and unconvincingly above ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... internment to Madame de Listomere when whist was over, the doors shut, and they were alone with the baron, "this Louis XI. in a cassock—imagine him if you can!—gave a last flourish to the sprinkler and aspersed the coffin with holy water." Monsieur de Bourbonne picked up the tongs and imitated the priest's gesture so satirically that the baron and his aunt could not help laughing. "Not until then," continued the old gentleman, "did he contradict himself. ...
— The Vicar of Tours • Honore de Balzac
... a pious and charitable nature, for almost his first care was to arrange with the chief ones at the Temple of Benevolent Intentions that each year, on the day corresponding to that on which he drank the gold fluid, a sumptuous and well-constructed coffin should be presented to the most deserving poor and aged person within that quarter of the city in which he had resided. When these preparations were completed, Ling set out with an extensive train of attendants; ...
— The Wallet of Kai Lung • Ernest Bramah
... the runaway servants; "and if his neck had been a foot longer I should have been dangling in mid-air like the coffin of the false prophet." ...
— Tales from the Lands of Nuts and Grapes - Spanish and Portuguese Folklore • Charles Sellers and Others
... side by side birth and death, the coffin and the cradle, to see them and to realize them, to comprehend not with the eye of imagination, but with the bodily eye, at one moment these fearful opposites, was a hard trial to the spectators; the harder, the more utterly it had taken them by surprise. Ottilie alone ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... amounting to half a crown and the privates' less in proportion. On another occasion, when we were again out on the search, we passed what we thought was a funeral, to which we presented arms, but which we afterwards found was nothing but smuggled tobacco put into a box of the shape of a coffin with a pall over, and in this way conveyed into security. Such and similar transactions were frequent during our stay here, the inhabitants being of the very wildest sort. Once even a cotton-ship drove ...
— The Autobiography of Sergeant William Lawrence - A Hero of the Peninsular and Waterloo Campaigns • William Lawrence
... appeared to be of an enormous size; for, as I have already observed, the chiefs of these islands have almost invariably been men of large and powerful frames. The bones of Kamehameha I. were in a square oak chest. At the foot of the coffin of Kamehameha IV. there were two immense kahilis about twelve feet high, one of rose-coloured, the other of black feathers, with tortoise-shell handles. The remains of King Luna'ilo are not here, having been buried just outside the native church ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... likely circumstances with perfect correctness, and to walk down the center of a large room with apparent ease. He had been trained, for review purposes and for the final privilege of carrying a cocked hat as well as a crown upon his coffin, in a profession which he would never be allowed to practise; and, having been "brought out" with much show and parade at an early age, had been introduced to a vast number of very important people, and dragged through a long series of social functions, which, however crowded, ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... home on Sunday, towards evening, he he had lain down on the bed never to rise again. Without any one knowing it, he had passed away; for he was already stiff when Rico had found him. On the following Sunday the burial took place. Rico was the only mourner to follow the coffin. Several kind neighbors joined in, and thus the little procession went on to Sils. In the church, Rico heard the pastor when he read out, "The deceased was called Henrico Trevillo, and was a native of Peschiera ...
— Rico And Wiseli - Rico And Stineli, And How Wiseli Was Provided For • Johanna Spyri
... what is to be done? My father has lost his wits. Must I have him certificated for lunacy, or must I order his coffin? ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... nail to their coffin," declared Gipsy. "We've tried them fairly, and they've refused to act fairly. We'll give them one more chance at the meeting to-morrow, and if they won't accept our terms—then we'll break loose and be off on our own. Are you all agreed ...
— The Leader of the Lower School - A Tale of School Life • Angela Brazil
... saw, in the middle of the room, a great long thing, all covered over with silk, an' I thought it was a coffin. I went up to it, an' there was Abel's hat on it, the one he wore when he went away. I took the hat off, an' the weddin'-silk, an' ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... voice, 'whativer are ye kicking up such a shindy out there for? Whativer d'ye want wid an old woman, and niver a livin' sowl in the house 'cept meself and Kathleen in her coffin?' ...
— Willis the Pilot • Paul Adrien
... bitter cold", the Colour-Sergeant said. "What makes that front-rank man fall down?" said Files-on-Parade. "A touch o' sun, a touch o' sun", the Colour-Sergeant said. They are hangin' Danny Deever, they are marchin' of 'im round, They 'ave 'alted Danny Deever by 'is coffin on the ground; An' 'e'll swing in 'arf a minute for a sneakin' shootin' hound— O they're hangin' Danny Deever ...
— Barrack-Room Ballads • Rudyard Kipling
... body of some royal woman, who, by tradition, was of my own race, yes, and by records of which my father can tell you, for he is among the last who can still read the writing of the old Egyptians. Moreover, she was very like me, Olaf, for I remember her well as she lay in her coffin, preserved by arts which the Egyptians had. She was young, not much older than I am to-day, and her story tells that she died in giving birth to a son, who grew up a strong and vigorous man, and although he was but half royal, founded a new ...
— The Wanderer's Necklace • H. Rider Haggard
... coffins, and in their shrouds hanged by the neck, until the going down of the sun. They were then cut down, their heads taken off, and their bodies buried in a grave made under the gallows. The coffin in which was the body of Cromwell was a very rich thing, very full of gilded hinges ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... curiosity, it was a matter of native genius engineered by Providence. I don't mind admitting that when I stood on the doorstep of this house fifteen nights ago and knocked the mystic knock, I felt like a man embarking on a coffin-ship." He ...
— The Mystics - A Novel • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... corpse is quietly interred in one of the denser spots of the jungles; and if rich, the funeral is at once costly and bloody; since gold and jewels are buried along with the dead body, and human victims as well. The ceremonial is as follows. The coffin is carried to the grave by slaves, when the retainers and friends press forwards, fix the number required (in general four), stun the selected individuals by a sudden blow on the head, throw the still breathing bodies into the grave of their master, ...
— The Ethnology of the British Colonies and Dependencies • Robert Gordon Latham
... if talking to himself. "These were the party of six left here to collect skins during the winter, to be fetched away the next season. One man died, and his kindly-hearted companions laboriously made that rough, wooden coffin, and dug a few inches into this icy rock for its reception. They covered it with these stones to guard it from wild beasts, and put up this elaborate timber with its three cross-pieces, cut in Russian characters as we see. Then another died, and his four companions ...
— Steve Young • George Manville Fenn
... the trees in front of the house, which was full of neighbouring planters and overseers, all walking about, and talking, and laughing, as if it had been a public meeting on parish business. Some of them occasionally went into the room to look at the body as it lay in the open coffin, the lid of which was at length screwed down, and the corpse carried on four negroes shoulders to its long home, followed by the brown girl and all the servants, the latter weeping and howling,—but she, poor thing, said not a word, although her heart ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... reigned in Russia. She was succeeded by her son, Paul I., (1796,) and her remains were deposited by the side of her murdered husband, while his chief murderers, Alexis Orloff and Prince Baratinski, were ordered to stand at her funeral, on each side of his coffin as ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... heard all the ringing at dinner-time. He was an excellent man. She enlarged, by the plundering of diverse fragments of the funeral sermon, upon his worth and importance as a man and a citizen of the town. There had been speeches and such countless black hats and flowers, that the coffin was quite hidden. Yes, that was the third they had taken in since the New Year, she uttered with ...
— One of Life's Slaves • Jonas Lauritz Idemil Lie
... Dean's face with it, when, a noise attracting his attention, he peered round at the picture. It was bulging from the wall; it was falling! And, Good God, what was that that was falling with it—that huge black object? A coffin? No, not a coffin, but a corpse! The servant ran to the door shrieking, and, in less than a minute, passage and room were filled to overflowing with a scared crowd ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... have left her, but he had to take his baths. These were in the lower story of the larger chalet. They were taken in rows of pinewood boxes in the vault. He muttered that it felt very like going alive into his coffin, when, like others, he laid himself down in the rust-coloured liquid, 'each in his narrow cell' in iron 'laid,' with his head on a shelf, and a lid closing up to his chin, and he was uncheered by conversation, as all the other patients ...
— That Stick • Charlotte M. Yonge
... was—Monitor. That same gale which had buffeted the Asia so rudely on the high seas, had raged yet more savagely shorewards: the Merrimac's antagonist, like a drowning paladin of the mail-clad days, had sunk under her mighty armor, and now, with half her crew in their iron coffin, lay at rest in the crowded burial-ground on which Cape Hatteras looks down. Great discouragement and consternation—greater than has often been caused by the loss of any single vessel—fell upon ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... promoted the migration of the blacks to the Northwest Territory with still greater zeal. Most of these settlements were made in Hamilton, Howard, Wayne, Randolph, Vigo, Gibson, Grant, Rush, and Tipton Counties, Indiana, and in Darke County, Ohio.[3] Prominent among these promoters was Levi Coffin, the Quaker Abolitionist of North Carolina, and reputed President of the Underground Railroad. He left his State and settled among Negroes at Newport, Indiana.[4] Associated with these leaders also were Benjamin Lundy of Tennessee and James G. Birney, ...
— The Education Of The Negro Prior To 1861 • Carter Godwin Woodson
... than possessed with a real understanding, why nobody was willing to play with me. I remember I went into the room where his body lay, and my mother sat weeping alone by it. I had my battledore in my hand, and fell abeating the coffin, and calling 'Papa,' for, I know not how, I had some light idea that he was locked up there. My mother catched me in her arms, and, transported beyond all patience of the silent grief she was before ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... such like talk she seemed to get a sort of comfort, somehow. From her, more than from anything I knowed myself, I got a fine notion o' my father; among other things, I thought he was the biggest man in the world, and I used to spekilate as to whether Mr. Farewell Rollins had a coffin in his shop that would be long enough for him, if he should happen to die at home. I didn't s'pose he had, and the thought of what it would cost to get one big enough caused me a good deal of sorrer. More 'n this, I thought he must have wonderful powers, and that he ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... cats all like our friend Tom here, all with a white spot on their chestesses. And what do you think they were carrying? Why, a small coffin covered with a black velvet pall, and on the pall was a small coronet all of gold, and at every third step they took they cried ...
— More English Fairy Tales • Various
... upon all these, upon the flowers and images alike there is some small stain which none sees but she and the one in shadow, the one whose face she cannot recognise. And although she is nailed fast in her coffin, she sees these stains vividly, and the one whose face she cannot recognise sees them too. And this is certain, for the shadow of the face is sometimes stirred by ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... of her own sorcery, because, so many times, that which she had seen had come true. Once, when a child was ill, she had gazed into the crystal and seen the little white coffin that, a week later, was carried out of the front door. Again, she had seen the vision of a wedding which was unexpectedly fulfilled later, when a passing cousin begged the hospitality of her house ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... of crackling walnut with the dogged self-complacency and sullen virtue of anthracite. Even where wood survives, he is too often shut in the dreary madhouse cell of an airtight, round which one can no more fancy a social mug of flip circling than round a coffin. Let us be thankful that we can sit in Mr. Whittier's chimney-corner and believe that the blaze he has kindled for us shall still warm and cheer, when a wood fire is as faint a tradition in ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... went the plumed hearse, a stately affair, with a bas-relief of funereal figures upon its sides. We proceeded quite across the city to the Necropolis, where the coffin was carried into a chapel, in which we found already another coffin, and another set of mourners, awaiting the clergyman. Anon he appeared,—a stern, broad-framed, large, and bald-headed man, in a black-silk ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... own sent him by the Queen, and the Mayor-domo then in waiting delivered him his. The Prior having received these three keys, demanded franca [Footnote: i.e., puerta franca; admittance.] of the Duke and Mayor-domo, that in that coffin was the body of Philip the Fourth; and when they had done, they there left the body with the Prior, who after the body's lying some time in the place where the infants are buried, placed it ...
— Memoirs of Lady Fanshawe • Lady Fanshawe
... the solitary hoof planted upon a slice of green sward, the ragged suggestion of forest land in the distance, and a ladder of enormous length, which appeared to possess something of that spirit of independence which distinguished Mahomet's coffin. In other words, it was self-supporting. After a careful scrutiny, I rose to my feet, took a pace or two backwards, and put my head on one ...
— The Brother of Daphne • Dornford Yates
... whom your faithful soul doubtless often dwells, is supplied—restricted by no monastic discipline—with whatever suits his taste. He frequently devotes himself for hours to religious exercises, and also retires to the black-draped room with the coffin, which you know; but the old industry and secular cares pursued him here. Mounted messengers come and go continually, but they are not allowed to remain near ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... astride a three-bushel bag thrown across the ridge-pole of a big grey horse, with a coffin-shaped head, and built astern something after the style of a roughly put up hip-roofed box-bark humpy.* His colour was like old box-bark, too, a dirty bluish-grey; and, one time, when I saw his rump looming out of the scrub, I really thought it was some old shepherd's hut that ...
— Joe Wilson and His Mates • Henry Lawson
... white frontlet plumes came round the Rotunda corner, galloping. A tiny coffin flashed by. In a hurry to bury. A mourning coach. Unmarried. Black for the married. Piebald for bachelors. Dun for ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... considered dead, and preparations were made for her burial,—this ceremony being repeated over and over again. White dresses were put on for the funeral; a cricket was turned upside-down to serve as the coffin; my mother's flower-pots furnished the green leaves for decoration; and I delivered the funeral oration in praise of the little sufferer, while placing her in the tomb improvised of chairs. I hardly ever joined the other children in their plays, except upon ...
— A Practical Illustration of Woman's Right to Labor - A Letter from Marie E. Zakrzewska, M.D. Late of Berlin, Prussia • Marie E. Zakrzewska
... said, "see that the old man is decently buried, and a prayer said over his grave. Yes, be sure and bury him decently in a coffin, and a grave so deep that the worms may not reach it, and then come to me again. But see that you bury him tenderly, and say nothing of ...
— The Boy Nihilist - or, Young America in Russia • Allan Arnold
... violently. There was an instant in which Pongo seemed to hang suspended, like Mohammed's coffin, between heaven and earth, then the force of gravity asserted itself. Pongo fell with a sharp crack and disintegrated. And as it did so there was a knock at the door, and in walked a dark, furtive person, who to the inflamed vision of Mr. Daniel Brewster looked like something connected ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... threw her arms above her head with a shrill wailing cry, whose despair echoed over the noiseless plains like the cry of a shot-stricken animal. She saw it all; the breathing of the rosy, golden day; the stillness of the hushed camp; the tread of the few picked men; the open coffin by the open grave; the levelled carbines gleaming in the first rays of the sun.... She had seen it so many times—seen it to the awful end, when the living man fell down in the morning light a shattered, senseless, soulless, ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... story St. Nicholas comes to the aid of an adventurer who watches beside the coffin of a bewitched princess. There were two moujiks in a certain village, we are told, one of whom was very rich and the other very poor. One day the poor man, who was in great distress, went to the house of the rich man ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston
... compassionate sympathy with the sufferings of his fellow-men. 'How often,' says Dr. William Budd in his celebrated work on Typhoid Fever,—' How often have I seen in past days, in the single narrow chamber of the day-labourer's cottage the father in the coffin, the mother in the sick-bed in muttering delirium, and nothing to relieve the desolation of the children but the devotion of some poor neighbour, who in too many cases paid the penalty of kindness in becoming ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... inscription, commencing with—"Start not—nor deem my spirit fled." Leaving this noble room, we descended by a few polished oak steps into the West Corridor, from which we entered the grand Dining Hall, and through several other rooms, until we reached the Chapel. Here we were shown a stone coffin which had been found near the high altar, when the workmen were excavating the vault, intended by Lord Byron for himself and his dog. The coffin contained the skeleton of an Abbot, and also the identical skull from which the cup, of ...
— Three Years in Europe - Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met • William Wells Brown
... know he has led a straight life ever since. He is still working about the hospital and there is no sign of the old dissipation. When Anna left us a few weeks ago, the man's grief was great, and it was this old 'body-guard' who sat up all night the one night after the coffin was sealed and remained in the house. The old mother at sixty-seven years of age has learned to read the Bible and is a very ...
— Notable Women Of Modern China • Margaret E. Burton
... of any kind whatever to that mysterious sequel to "The Romance of the Poor Young Dog." Was there a fond master mourning for him in Newcastle, England, or in Newcastle, Pennsylvania? Alas, poor dog! thou wert hastily snatched from this world—the ocean thy grave and a shark's belly thy coffin. Thy collar hangs, as I write this, over my study table, and many a time has my old Ponto sniffed at that relic of a fellow-dog, and his eyes grown moist as I repeated to him my surmises of the sad fate of ...
— Captain Mugford - Our Salt and Fresh Water Tutors • W.H.G. Kingston
... Mareham road, on the south side of Horncastle, beyond the Black Swan inn, was a Roman burial ground, and several cinerary urns and some coffins have been discovered there. One stone coffin now stands in the back premises of Mr. James Isle, near to the corner where the Spilsby and Boston roads meet. In connection with this subject, I may here mention the most recent archæological “find” in Horncastle. While digging gravel in a pit recently ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... of the day were vague and uncertain. There were things that always remained in his memory but strangely his general conviction was that his mother had had nothing to do with it. The black coffin conveyed nothing to him of her presence: he saw her as he had seen her on that day when he had talked to her, and now she was, as Stephen was, somewhere away. That was his ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... of art, making the arms of families on the chimneypieces and on the fronts of the houses of citizens, a most beautiful example of which may be seen in the house of the Sommai, which is opposite to that of the baker Della Vacca. For the family of the Martelli, moreover, he made a coffin in the form of a cradle wrought of wicker-work, to serve for a tomb; but it is beneath the Church of S. Lorenzo, because no tombs of any kind are to be seen above, save only the epitaph of the tomb of Cosimo de' Medici, and even that one has its entrance ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol 2, Berna to Michelozzo Michelozzi • Giorgio Vasari
... thinking the matter over, decided that the advice was good. The difficulty, of course, was in determining the "somewhere" from which the right sort of servant, one willing to work for a small wage, might be obtained. At length she wrote to a Miss Coffin, once a nurse in Middleboro but now matron of an orphans' home in Boston. Miss Coffin's reply was to the effect that she had, in her institution, a girl who might in time prove to be just the sort which ...
— Thankful's Inheritance • Joseph C. Lincoln
... fairer than any woman of the modern age could hope to be. At last Innocent VIII feared lest the orthodox faith should suffer by this new cult of a heathen corpse. Julia was buried secretly and at night by his direction, and naught remained in the Capitol but her empty marble coffin. The tale, as told by Infessura, is repeated in Matarazzo and in Nantiporto with slight variations. One says that the girl's hair was yellow, another that it was of the glossiest black. What foundation for the legend may really have existed need not ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... Paris. Recollect, I warned you, I bring no heart, no love; both are lost hopelessly in the ashes of the past. I never loved but one man—the husband of my youth, the father of my baby; and his loss I shall mourn till the coffin closes above me. General Laurance, you are running a fearful hazard, and the very marble of the altar should find a voice to cry out and ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... humanity, the value of which he had been so thoroughly taught to appreciate in his own person; but he treated them with harshness and caprice; and a paroxysm of rage, in which he broke out against one of his prisoners, laid him in his coffin, in ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... Including the editor, ten; viz. two died young, of scarlet fever, and were buried in the same coffin; two drowned at different times; two slain; two died at sea, while passengers on board his majesty's packets from Rio de Janeiro to Falmouth, on the same day of the same month (15th August) in different years, 1833 and 1837! and only two ...
— The Life and Correspondence of Sir Isaac Brock • Ferdinand Brock Tupper
... the deceitfulness of earthly good and the substantial reality of the heavenly. Will any fortune, even though it goes into seven figures, save a man from the miseries, the sorrows, the ills that flesh is heir to? Does a great estate make a man feel less desolate when he stands by his wife's coffin? Will any wealth 'minister to a mind diseased'? Will a mountain of material good calm and satisfy a man's soul? You see faces just as discontented, looking out of carriage windows, as you meet in the street. 'Uneasy lies the head that ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... being at all up to date was the clock. Not its face—that was old-timey enough with its sun, moon and stars in blue and gold, and the name of the Liverpool maker engraved on its enamel; nor its hands, fiddle-shaped and stiff, nor its case, which always reminded me of a coffin set up on end awaiting burial—but its strike. Whatever divergences the Exeter allowed itself in its youth, or whatever latitude or longitude it had given its depositors, and that, we may be sure, was precious little so long as that ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith
... the biggest hazard in the world—a game of chance that never is concluded, a venture that may end in the highest heaven or the blackest pit. It will keep a man on edge until the clods fall on his coffin, because he will never know—not until his last day, and not then will he know. It is a voyage without a rudder or compass, and you must be captain and crew and keep watch, every day and night, yourself, with no one to relieve you. I have found the VENTURE. Don't bother yourself about leaving ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... most of their time in small lonely cells, where they sleep in a narrow place dug out in the ground, in the shape of a coffin, without bed of any kind, except a piece of coarse serge spread down; and their daily dress is their only covering. SLEEP! Did I say? Alas! 'Tired nature's sweet restorer, balmy sleep, no more with his downy pinions lights on his unsullied with a tear:' FOR EVERY HOUR OF THE TWENTY-FOUR they are ...
— Life in the Grey Nunnery at Montreal • Sarah J Richardson
... fifty dollars a vara (the Mexican yard). Its equal was unknown. It was also ornamented and looped up at certain intervals with bows of ribbon very richly embroidered in gold. In this dress, the Condesa de ——- was laid in her coffin, thousands of dear friends crowding to view her beautiful costume de mort, and at length she was placed in her tomb, the key of which ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... Mr. Paine has been very happy. In May. 1837, he was united to Miss Lucy E. Coffin, of Newburyport, a lady of rare endowments, both ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 6 • Various
... they are frequently buried at night without much ceremony, and in many instances without any; their coffins are made by nailing together rough boards, frequently with their feet sticking out at the end, and sometimes they are put into the ground without a coffin or box ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... there is a mystery, and you cannot fathom it by direct evidence, you are driven back on motives. They are, in fact, the nut and kernel of what lawyers call circumstantial evidence, a fitting together of suspicions which have made the coffin of many an ...
— The Black Colonel • James Milne
... rude coffin himself, but there were no ceremonies at that most pathetic funeral when he laid his young wife in her desolate grave in the forest. Little Lincoln was nine years old, and the mystery of death, the pitiless winter, ...
— Life of Abraham Lincoln - Little Blue Book Ten Cent Pocket Series No. 324 • John Hugh Bowers
... is added, was the most impressive I ever saw, and all the Indians were awed into silence. A scaffold was erected (see print) at the cemetery, and a coffin was made. Just before sunset, the body was carried, followed by the father and other relatives, with chaplain,[2] officers, soldiers, and Indians. The chaplain read the beautiful burial-service, ...
— Three Years on the Plains - Observations of Indians, 1867-1870 • Edmund B. Tuttle
... death. Ala had been informed of the tragedy, and had visited the car and looked upon the dead form, which I thought greatly affected her. Edmund held little communication with her, but it was evidently with her cooperation that he was able to procure a kind of coffin, in which we placed Juba's body. I do not know whether Edmund informed her of his purpose to quit the planet, but she must have known that we were going to convey our friend somewhere ...
— A Columbus of Space • Garrett P. Serviss
... who had taken his commission to heart, regarding him with a cold, calculating air, very disquieting. He endured it as long as he could, then he said cautiously, "You aren't measuring me for my coffin; ...
— The Admirable Tinker - Child of the World • Edgar Jepson
... The coffin was got out of its rough-box and down on the snowy platform. The townspeople drew back enough to make room for it and then formed a close semicircle about it, looking curiously at the palm leaf which lay ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... them, they presaged nothing good; and accordingly found that all the unfortunate men had breathed their last. The first, as has been seen, expired on the 16th of April 1634, and his comrades, having put his body in a coffin, deposited it in one of the huts. The remainder were conjectured to have died about the beginning of May, from a journal kept by them, expressing that, on the 27th of April, they had killed their dog for want of fresh provisions, and ...
— Thrilling Narratives of Mutiny, Murder and Piracy • Anonymous
... that Rabbi Johanan ben Zakkai, the head of the Pharisees, was carried in a coffin outside the walls of Jerusalem by his disciples, and was brought to the Roman camp, where he hailed Vespasian as Emperor and Caesar, and thereby gained his favor. If not apocryphal, the event must have happened in 69 C.E., ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... It's a mercy they's too busy to practise forgery, or I'd be in gaol. Engineer-Commanders? Engineer-Lootenants? They're worse!... Look here! If my own mother was to come to me beggin' brass screws for her own coffin, I'd—I'd think twice before I'd oblige the old lady. War's war, I grant you that; but what I've got to contend ...
— Sea Warfare • Rudyard Kipling
... stairs to her chamber. In a plain, air-tight coffin, lay all that was left of the slave girl. Her hands were crossed on her bosom; her long, glossy, brown hair fell over her neck, and on her face was the look the angels wear. She seemed not ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... corpse of this ill-fated young lady was being borne to the grave. He was stopped by the crowd occasioned by this solemn procession. He contemplates it for some time. He observes a long train of persons in mourning, and remarks the coffin to be covered with a white pall, and that there are chaplets of flowers laid upon the coffin. He inquires whose funeral it is. The answer he receives is, that it is the funeral of a young lady. Unfortunately for him, this reply fails to satisfy his curiosity. He makes up to one who ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various
... Upon arriving, the coffin was borne into the chapel, and, two by two, the mourners filed in behind it. This guard of men, all attached to the dead by the bond of kinship, was an impressive and singular sight in the great city ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... from the wayward shuttle and rattling machine. I knew that she would have selected such a death could she have chosen, for she dreaded the parish. I think, too, that she would have wished for her old machine to be buried with her, and for its silent shuttle to be beside her in her coffin. To her it was a companion, and for it her husband died. Twenty-one years the machine and herself had lived with each other and for each other. Sharing with each other's toil, if not each other's hopes and ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... permitted a noble of the Dolfin family to remove; and a quaint and delightful story was further invented of this ring, which I shall not repeat here, as it is now as well known as any tale of the Arabian Nights. But the fast and the discovery of the coffin, by whatever means effected, are facts; and they are recorded in one of the best-preserved mosaics of the north transept, executed very certainly not long after the event had taken place, closely resembling in its treatment that of the Bayeux tapestry, and showing, ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... that under the high, still light in the round church, with its four niche-like chapels, you may see, draped in black, that thing which no one ever mistakes for anything else; and round about the coffin a dozen tall wax candles may be burning with a steady yellow flame. Possibly, at the sound of the leathern curtain slapping the stone door-posts, as it falls behind you, a sad-looking sacristan may shuffle out of a dark corner to see who has come in; possibly ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... severe with him, and when one is sharp it is a pleasure to outwit him. The boys had carried off some gates shortly before, and they had changed the sign of the Jolly Fisherman to Friend Reed's coffin shop, and he never knew it the whole morning and wondered why people stared. Both boys were soundly caned for it, and after all it was only a bit of fun. So then they kept their own counsel. Jonas knows such pages of funny verses, and ...
— A Little Girl in Old Philadelphia • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... look any person in the eye. Everything made me impatient; the going and coming of those who, on tip-toe crossed the room; their whisperings; the ceremonies and the prayers of the vicar.... The hour having come, I closed the coffin, but with trembling hands, so trembling that somebody noticed it and commented upon it aloud, ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... grave was digged in the church of Hedington for a widow, where her husband was buried in 1610. In this grave was a spring; the coffin was found firme; the bodie not rotten, but black; and in some places white spotts; the lumen was rotten. Mr. Wm. Scott's wife of this parish, from whom I have this, saw it, with severall ...
— The Natural History of Wiltshire • John Aubrey
... too. The rudest and the humblest in the land would grow into an inspired hero were leader after leader to advance and fall. Victory would be the religion of the country, and by one means or other it would triumph. A stronger spirit than his who died issues from the martyr's coffin. ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... Rochester at the West doore, not opened manie yeres before. At what time myselfe, then a yoong scholer" (he was born in 1545), "beheld the funeral pompe thereof, which trulie was great and answerable both to his birth and calling, with store of burning torches and mourning weedes. At what time, his coffin, being brought into the church, was covered with a cloth of blacke velvet, with a great crosse of white satten over all the length and bredth of the same, in the middest of which crosse his Cardinal's hat was placed. From Rochester he was conveied to Canterbury, where the same bodie (being first ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Rochester - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See • G. H. Palmer
... excited state, and partly because her mind is poisoned by false insinuations, sends, after transports of maternal and other rage, a message to Cyrus to the effect that if he does not put himself unreservedly in her hands, she will send him back Mandane dead, in the coffin of Spargapises. And so the last double-volume but one ends with a suitable "fourth act" curtain, as we may ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... deck and the galley-slaves in the outriggers at either side lay dead in rows under the overwhelming shower from above. From stem to rudder every foot of her was furred with arrows. It was but a floating coffin piled with dead and dying men, which wallowed in the waves behind them as the Basilisk lurched onward and left her ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... decisive action took place at Pres-de-Ville. The guard there consisted of fifty men—John Coffin, who was a merchant of Quebec, Sergeant Hugh McQuarters of the Royal Artillery, Captain Barnsfair, a merchant skipper, with fifteen mates and skippers like himself, and thirty French Canadians under Captain Chabot and Lieutenant ...
— The Father of British Canada: A Chronicle of Carleton • William Wood
... the lamp was like a section of an orange; it cast a warm, low radiance through the room. His gaze rested on the photograph of Lettice's mother in her coffin. He imagined that paper effigy of inanimate clay moved, turned its dull head to regard him. "I'm getting old," he told himself contemptuously, repressing an involuntary start of surprise. His heart rested like a lump of lead ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... its entrance into the world. You have seen what the atonement, and regeneration, and sanctification, and providence, and grace, have done for it, and with what accumulated love the Father of Spirits, and Redeemer, and Sanctifier, must regard it. And now do we suppose that the shroud, and coffin, and the funeral, and the narrow house, and the darkness, and the solitude and corruption, and the whole dreary and terrible train of death and the grave, are symbols of its reception into heaven, the proper pageantry of its arrival and resting place within the veil? ...
— Catharine • Nehemiah Adams
... of the most lasting of evergreens after being gathered, though we can scarcely credit the statement recorded by Phillips that "it is the custom in France to put a branch of Rosemary in the hands of the dead when in the coffin, and we are told by Valmont Bomare, in his 'Histoire Naturelle,' that when the coffins have been opened after several years, the plant has been found to have vegetated so much that the leaves have covered the corpse." ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe |
