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More "Sepulchral" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... these sepulchral monuments were erected in the fourth and fifth centuries, they indicate a remarkable freedom from superstitions with which the religion of the New Testament has been since defiled. These witnesses to the faith of the early Church of Rome altogether repudiate ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... he, "I know them." His face was almost sepulchral as he answered her, and as she looked at him she perceived that a slight quiver came upon his lips as she pronounced with peculiar clearness the two ...
— Cousin Henry • Anthony Trollope
... the dead Are swept away, and tomb inherits tomb, Until the memory of an age is fled, And, buried, sinks beneath its offspring's doom: Where are the epitaphs our fathers read? Save a few glean'd from the sepulchral gloom Which once-named myriads nameless lie beneath, And lose ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... tones, Sepulchral, and with pain, the sufferer spake, "I know that this is truth, but how can man Be just with God? How shall he dare contend With Him who stretches out the sky and treads Upon the mountain billows of the sea, And sealeth up the stars? Array'd in ...
— Man of Uz, and Other Poems • Lydia Howard Sigourney
... window, was rather surprised at his youthfulness, which Mirah had not mentioned, and which he had somehow thought out of the question in a personage who had taken up a grave friendship and hoary studies with the sepulchral Ezra. Lapidoth began to imagine that Deronda's real or chief motive must be that he was in love with Mirah. And so much the better; for a tie to Mirah had more promise of indulgence for her father ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... wind which I now heard? No! there was not a breath of air stirring, neither was it an echo. There could be no doubt about it, the long-drawn sepulchral howl which filled and permeated the shivering air was an answering ...
— The Black Wolf Pack • Dan Beard
... convent of the Carmelite friars. The padres accommodated him with a cell, and assisted him very efficaciously in his researches. But the first night, being alone in his cell, the convent large and dreary, and the wind howling lugubriously over the plains, he was awakened at night by a deep sepulchral voice, apparently close to his ear, tolling ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... the chief guest happened to be a great Hebrew scholar. One tea time, a Miss Henman, passing the butter to some one in a hurry, let it slip out of her hand. 'Why is Miss Henman like a caterpillar?' asked our learned guest in a sepulchral voice. Nobody appeared to know. 'Because she makes the butter fly.' It never occurred to any one of us that the Doctor could possibly joke. There was dead silence for about a minute. Then our hostess, looking grave, remarked: 'Oh, do ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... understand, it is one of those Hibernian wakes. Poor thing!' and I began to pardon Susan, feel sorry for the coachman, and made up my mind to give $10 towards the sepulchral expenses. As I entered the house, surcharged with benevolence and overcome by a repentant feeling, I caught sight of Susan and a strapping man whirling round the floor to the tune of the Irish Washwoman. I approached her and said, 'I hope ...
— A Christmas Story - Man in His Element: or, A New Way to Keep House • Samuel W. Francis
... stranger at the same water-hole. He's alone—he's looking for something. He rides in circles. He's off his horse and bending over—What? A skeleton! Yes, it's the skeleton of one of them other Mexicans." Strange's voice became positively sepulchral as his spirit control took fuller possession of his earthly shell and as his visions resolved themselves into clearer outline. "See! He swears an oath to avenge. And now—the scene changes. Everything dissolves. I'm in a mansion; and the red-haired woman ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... her, and turned for her bag. As she left the car, the Little Angel's eyes followed her with a malicious gleam that gave them the strange glow of candles in a sepulchral cavern. The colours which she unfurled to all seeking eyes were not secret, and yet she was filled with an inward antagonism that this stranger with the wonderful blue eyes had dared to see them and recognize them. ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... Mona. The chief literary productions of mine in that modern Trinacria, whose heraldic emblem, like that of ancient Sicily, is the Three legs of Three promontories, are some antiquarian pieces, principally one on the sepulchral mound of ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... architecture or sculpture of modern England. You may urge, that I ought rather to describe the qualities of the refined sculpture which is executed in large quantities for private persons belonging to the upper classes, and for sepulchral and memorial purposes. But I could not now criticise that sculpture with any power of conviction to you, because I have not yet stated to you the principles of good sculpture in general. I will, however, in some points, tell ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... that she crossed so swiftly gleamed like the sea, and the cows loomed through the greyness like peaceful apparitions. But the dark wood with its sepulchral fir-tops and mysteriously spreading beech-trees was full of formless terror, and once the girl screamed as the birds flew with an awful sound through the dark undergrowth. A gloomy wood by night has terrors for the bravest, and it was only the certainty that she was leaving girl-life—chaperons, ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... her with strange, deep interest and curiosity, she related her sepulchral experiences of the night. When with pale cheeks and shuddering frame she described the six dark, shrouded forms that had come up out of the vault, bearing long shadowy coffins, which they carried in a slow procession down along the east wall, past the Gothic ...
— Cruel As The Grave • Mrs. Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... up, and inquires in a sepulchral voice if I am ready for Sabbath school. It is time to go. I like the Sabbath school; there are bright young faces there, at all events. When I get out into the sunshine alone, I draw a long breath; I would turn a somersault up against Neighbor Penhallow's newly ...
— The Story of a Bad Boy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... escape. Rodin, stretched upon the carpet, his limbs twisted with fearful cramps, was writhing in the extremity of pain. The violence of his fall had, no doubt, roused him to consciousness, for he moaned, in a sepulchral voice: "They leave me to die—like a dog—the ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... doing a little detective work," he said. His voice was low and sepulchral. "And I have come upon a real adventure. There are reasons why I cannot share it with you, but as it develops you can follow it. About half an hour ago," he explained, "I came here to get my pipe. The ...
— Once Upon A Time • Richard Harding Davis
... favour of the liberty of the press, good Sir Thomas was meditating profoundly on quincunxes. Milton hurled fierce attacks at Salmasius, and meanwhile Sir Thomas, in his quiet country town, was discoursing on 'certain sepulchral urns lately found in Norfolk.' In the year of Cromwell's death, the result of his labours appeared in a volume containing 'The Garden of Cyrus' and ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... solitary granite pile, a Druid monument. This monument, as Mr. Browning describes it,[54] consists really of two, so standing or lying as to form part of each other. The one cross-shaped is supposed to have been sepulchral, or in some other way sacred to death. The latter, on which he mainly dwells, was, until lately, the centre of a rude nature-worship, and is therefore consecrated to life. It symbolizes life in its most active and most perennial ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... apparatus (Fig. 1), which presents the appearance of an ordinary round center table, permits of reproducing at will the "spirit rappings" and sepulchral voice experiments. The table support contains a Leclanche pile, of compact form, carefully hidden in the part that connects the three legs. The top of the table is in two parts, the lower of which is hollow, and the upper forms a cover three or ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 483, April 4, 1885 • Various
... hermitage of Engedi, are signs of the gradual decline in force of intellect and soul which those who love Scott best have done him the worst injustice in their endeavors to disguise or deny. The mean anxieties, moral humiliations, and mercilessly demanded brain-toil, which killed him, show their sepulchral grasp for many and many a year before their final victory; and the states of more or less dulled, distorted, and polluted imagination which culminate in "Castle Dangerous" cast a Stygian hue over "St. Ronan's ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... from the grass, might be called glorious. The bright sun and delicious air are quite exhilarating. We passed a fine flowing rivulet, called Levize, going into the Lake, and many smaller runnels of delicious cold water. On resting by a dark sepulchral grove, a tree attracted the attention, as nowhere else seen: it is called Bokonto, and said to bear eatable fruit. Many fine flowers were just bursting into full blossom. After about four hours' march we put up at Chitimba, the village of Kangomba, and were introduced by Kawa, who ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... they ranged the coffins justly, Each with fitting rank and stamp, And with shows of court precedence Mocked the grave's sepulchral damp. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... received by the attentive inquirer, as an interesting specimen of the sepulchral architecture of olden times; and, judging from the mutilated remains, its original beauty would have reminded us of the remark of an antiquarian writer,—that he never saw a fine monument ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 583 - Volume 20, Number 583, Saturday, December 29, 1832 • Various
... Haeckel, or possibly the two categories of Bastian—Matter and Motion! Philologically speaking, we should all be at sea, drifting, like a set of deaf-mutes, on a wide and inaudible ocean—all inarticulate, tongue-tied, voiceless—with only the screeching of the sea-mew, or some other sepulchral bird of the night, to greet us as in wide-mouthed derision of our ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... repeated. 'I am like the ancient figure of mortality entering the mouth of the tomb on a sepulchral monument, somewhere, by a celebrated sculptor: I have seen it: I forget the city. I shall presently forget names of men. It is not your abuse, Mr. Beltham. I should have bowed my head to it till the storm passed. Your facts . . . Oh! Miss Beltham, this last privilege to call you ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... dark. No moon; and even the brilliant starlight of summer in Hellas is an uncertain guide. Democrates knew he was traversing a long avenue lined by spreading cypresses, with a shimmer of white from some tall, sepulchral monument. Then through the dimness loomed the high columns of a temple, and close beside it pale light spread out upon the ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... even for the hour or two necessary to a visit to headquarters, I found myself compelled to do so. Packing up in a small basket I had for the purpose, the little articles I had been engaged during the last few days in making, I gave way to a final fit of coughing so hollow and sepulchral in its tone, that it awoke a curse from the next room deep as the growl of a wild beast, and still continuing, finally brought Luttra to the door with that look of compassion on her face that always called up a flush to my cheek whether I wished ...
— A Strange Disappearance • Anna Katharine Green
... cicadas and tree-toads ringing so incessantly, that only when they cease do you become conscious of their existence; the dull "gluck-gluck" of the great bullfrog; the sharp cries of the heron and qua-bird; and the sepulchral screech of the great horned owl. Still less agreeable might appear the fierce miaulling of the red puma, and the howl of the gaunt wolf; but not so to the ears of the awakened hunter, who, through the chinks of his lone cabin, listens to such ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... hollow echo was our only response. At last the light of a lantern illumined the crevices in the weather-beaten doors, and a weird-looking face appeared through the midway opening. "Who's there?" said a voice, whose sepulchral tones might have belonged to the sexton of the Holy Tomb. "We are Ferenghis," we said, "and must get into the city to-night." "That is impossible," he answered, "for the gates are locked, and the keys have been sent away to the governor's palace." With this ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben
... the Vth and VIth Dynasties. Several of these tombs have lately been discovered and opened, and fitted with modern improvements. One or two of them, of the Persian period, have wells (leading to the sepulchral chamber) of enormous depth, down which the modern tourist is enabled to descend by a spiral iron staircase. The Serapeum itself is lit with electricity, and in the Tombs of the Kings at Thebes nothing disturbs the silence but the steady thumping pulsation of the dynamo-engine which ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, And Assyria In The Light Of Recent Discovery • L.W. King and H.R. Hall
... persons. One or two shattered yew-trees still grew within the precincts of that which had once been holy ground. Warriors and barons had been buried there of old, but their names were forgotten, and their monuments demolished. The only sepulchral memorials which remained were the upright headstones which mark the graves of persons of inferior rank. The abode of the sexton was a solitary cottage adjacent to the ruined wall of the cemetery, but so low that, with its thatch, ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... as to the issue of the trial in all the neighbouring coffee-houses. Ennui, impatience, disgust sat on almost every countenance. The figures passing and repassing, rendered more ghastly by the pallid lights, and who in a slow, sepulchral voice pronounced only the word—Death; others calculating if they should have time to go to dinner before they gave their verdict; women pricking cards with pins in order to count the votes; some of the deputies fallen asleep, and only waking up to give their sentence,—all this had the appearance ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... in the "Sepulchral Monuments of Great Britain," gives this epitaph of Robert Byrkes, which is to be found in Doncaster Church, "new cut" upon his tomb in ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... living paid him his dues in pomps and solemn sacrifices, repeated from year to year at regular intervals; but the dead bought more dearly the protection which he deigned to extend to them. He did not allow them to receive directly the prayers, sepulchral meals, or offerings of kindred on feast-days; all that was addressed to them must first pass through his hands. When their friends wished to send them wine, water, bread, meat, vegetables, and fruits, he insisted that these should first be offered and formally ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... the gentle Mother. The Gothic, on the contrary, is less timid, more captivated by the two other Persons and the Virgin; it is the home of less rigorous and more artistic Orders. Bowed shoulders are straightened, downcast eyes are raised, sepulchral voices become seraphic. It is, in fact, the expansion of the spirit, while the Romanesque symbolizes its repression. At least, to me, that is the interpretation of these styles," Durtal ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... was sleeping in the light of the moon. Crisostomo arose to admire the sepulchral peace of Nature. The river was narrow and its banks formed a plain planted ...
— Friars and Filipinos - An Abridged Translation of Dr. Jose Rizal's Tagalog Novel, - 'Noli Me Tangere.' • Jose Rizal
... meads, no changes ye are mourning; 'Tis to the hopeless every star appears Like lamps in dark sepulchral vistas burning— And every dew-tipp'd flower ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 10, No. 270, Saturday, August 25, 1827. • Various
... unspoken thought was—"Ah, phosphorus! pretty well done that, for the country! it is really worthy of one of our Madrid conjurers!" Watching intently to see if any other show was forthcoming, the skeleton as suddenly disappeared as it had come, and she heard various sepulchral groans and sighs, with a running commentary of the rattling of chains and jingling of keys. At last this pleasing interlude, as she termed it, ceased altogether, and in a few moments she again distinguished that clinking sound, ...
— Holidays at the Grange or A Week's Delight - Games and Stories for Parlor and Fireside • Emily Mayer Higgins
... "The Genius of Poetry," "Eve," and other ideal works that mark his development. His busts, such as those of Lord Leighton and Queen Victoria; his statues, such as "Sir Richard Owen" and "Dr Philpott, bishop of Worcester"; his sepulchral monuments, such as that to Lord Leighton in St Paul's cathedral, a work of singular significance, refinement and beauty; and his memorial statues of Queen Victoria, at Hove and elsewhere, are examples of his power as a portraitist, sympathetic in ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... recent meeting of the Archaeological Institute, Mr. Nesbitt exhibited rubbings of some fine brasses at Bamberg, Naumberg, Meissen, and Erfurt. Mr. Nesbitt would confer a favour on the readers of "N. & Q." by stating the names and dates of those sepulchral memorials, and the churches from which he obtained the rubbings, and thus aid in carrying out MR. W. SPARROW SIMPSON'S excellent suggestion for obtaining a complete list of monumental brasses ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 186, May 21, 1853 • Various
... had previously remarked, "A unity of feeling and character pervades every drama of Shakespeare" (Works IV, 61), and Schlegel had written in the same manner concerning "Romeo and Juliet": "The sweetest and the bitterest love and hatred, festive rejoicings and dark forebodings, tender embraces and sepulchral horrors, the fulness of life and self-annihilation, are here all brought close to each other; and yet these contrasts are so blended into a unity of impression, that the echo which the whole leaves ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... said he, again and again, with a more and more sepulchral deviltry—"a song and dance is what you want. You should have heard the Sisters Belton in their palmy days at the Pav! You don't get the best of everything ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... internally of domical form, its construction with horizontal beds in the masonry proves that the idea of the true dome with the beds of each course pitched at an angle always normal to the curve of the vault, was not yet grasped. Asmall sepulchral chamber opens from the great one, by a door with the customary ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... thrilling narrative she became intensely excited, and when Ruth tried in sepulchral tones to imitate John Gunter's gruff voice, she exclaimed, "Oh! lawks!" in such a gasp that the three ladies leaped up with three shrieks like three conscience-smitten kittens caught in a guilty act! Liffie ...
— The Young Trawler • R.M. Ballantyne
... of departed worth! Immortal! though no more; though fallen, great; Who now shall lead thy scatter'd children forth And long-accustom'd bondage uncreate? Not such thy Sons who whilom did await, The hopeless warriors of a willing doom, In bleak Thermopylae's sepulchral strait: Oh! who that gallant spirit shall resume, Leap from Eurotas' banks, and call ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... than before. So far as any outward object or circumstance could be said to be in harmony with his mood, the dismal lane, the failing light, the bitter air, were at that moment sympathetic to him. The tomb itself is not more sepulchral than certain streets and places in Prague on a dark winter's afternoon. In the certainty that the last and the greatest of misfortunes had befallen him, the Wanderer turned back into the gloomy by-way as the pale, wreathing ghosts, fearful ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... long, seemingly lifeless, limbs of a man, as if thrown upon a chair and left to sprawl in unseemly disorder. A step further, and the fallen head disclosed the features of the President. I turned back; a word from my companion reached the drooping figure, and a sepulchral voice bade us advance. We came upon a man, in some respects the most remarkable of any time, in the hour of his prostration and weakness—in the depths of that depression to which his inherited melancholy at times reduced him, now perhaps coming to overwhelm him as he ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... the same," chimed in Hiram Bangs, in a sepulchral voice, that made my heart go down to my toes; "but Sam, he usest to say, sez he, ez how none o' them sperrits could never touch he, cos he hed a charm agen 'em 'cause of his father bein' jest in the ring, ...
— The Island Treasure • John Conroy Hutcheson
... on which we tread than would be good for us to know; and probably, if capable of speech, she could tell us the strangest stories of air and water. Gifted, or afflicted, as she is with such terribly penetrant power of sense, her notion of apparent realities must be worse than sepulchral. Small wonder if she howl at the moon that shines ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... madness of it! He did not believe—and yet it seemed to him that the being he loved best in all the world was struggling up from below, calling to him for help from her tomb; and he was helping her enemy to hold down the sepulchral stone above her. He put his hand to his brow, and the sweat ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... could she attempt under that sepulchral robe, that convict's dress, which must cover her for a whole year? A year! She must remain a year imprisoned in that black attire, inactive and vanquished. For a whole year she would feel herself growing old, day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute, under that sheath of crape! What would she ...
— Strong as Death • Guy de Maupassant
... beleaguered city. The mine advanced towards the gate; the besieged delved deeper, and intersected it with a transverse excavation, and the contending forces met daily, in deadly encounter, within these sepulchral gangways. Many stratagems were, mutually employed. The citizens secretly constructed a dam across the Spanish mine, and then deluged their foe with hogsheads of boiling water. Hundreds were thus scalded to death. They heaped branches and light fagots in the hostile mine, set fire ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... and sizes of iron discs, so as to get the one that would best convey the sound. If the iron was too thick, he discovered, the voice was shrilled into a Punch-and-Judy squeal; and if it was too thin, the voice became a hollow and sepulchral groan, as if the speaker had his head in a barrel. Other months, too, were spent in finding out the proper size and shape for the air cavity in front of the disc. And so, after the telephone had been perfected, ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... the little parlour resound to its foundations with a note of anger positively sepulchral in its depth of tone. "Farce be hanged! She has bolted with my wife's brother, Captain Anthony." This outburst was followed by complete subsidence. He faltered miserably as he added from force of habit: "The son of the ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... canvas waiting for sombre pictures; a setting for all the dark tales of the world, haunted forever a grizzly place was haunted ever, in any century, in any land; but not by mere ghosts from all those thousands of graves and half-buried bodies and sepulchral shell-holes; haunted by things huger and more disastrous than that; haunted by wailing ambitions, under the stars or moon, drifting across the rubbish that once was villages, which strews the lonely plain; the lost ...
— Unhappy Far-Off Things • Lord Dunsany
... but as we chatted in there it suddenly occurred to me the fellow was trying to get at something—in fact, pumping me. He alluded constantly to Europe, to the people I was supposed to know there—putting leading questions as to my acquaintances in the sepulchral city, and so on. His little eyes glittered like mica discs—with curiosity,—though he tried to keep up a bit of superciliousness. At first I was astonished, but very soon I became awfully curious to see what he would find out from me. I couldn't possibly imagine what I had in me to make it worth ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... guffawed in a sepulchral manner at what he considered his prisoner's simplicity; he did not understand that George was trying to convince himself against ...
— Under the Rebel's Reign • Charles Neufeld
... Walter Scott infers that he did not scruple to join the Musselmans in the external ceremonies of their religion. He embellishes his romance with the ridiculous farce of the sepulchral chamber of the grand pyramid, and the speeches which were addressed to the General as well as to the muftis and Imaums; and he adds that Bonaparte was on the point of embracing Islamism. All that Sir Walter says on this subject is the height of absurdity, and does not ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... oddly startled at the sepulchral sound with which her question fell on the banter of the other two, and she saw the shadow of the same surprise flit across Alida's clear pupils. "I suppose so. One just has ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... peasants of the Roman Campagna. In this garb, they look like antique Satyrs; and, in truth, the Spectre of the Catacomb might have represented the last survivor of that vanished race, hiding himself in sepulchral gloom, and mourning over his lost life ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... wailed the Aunt, "That's just it. There's just one person he likes as well, or mebbe better'n Miss Mary Lynn, an' that's Mark Carter! Mrs. Severn I'm just afraid he's gone off with Mark Carter!" she lowered her voice to a sepulchral whisper, "And Mrs. Severn, they do say that Mark ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... brought with him from his house. The forms of oath and of divination which they use are as follows:—they swear by the men among themselves who are reported to have been the most righteous and brave, by these, I say, laying hands upon their tombs; and they divine by visiting the sepulchral mounds of their ancestors and lying down to sleep upon them after having prayed; and whatsoever thing the man sees in his dream, this he accepts. They practise also the exchange of pledges in the following ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 1(of 2) • Herodotus
... me safe, as I lay on my cot in my clothes with my knees drawn up and my fingers over my ears so the louder lines from the play wouldn't be able to come nosing back around the trunks and tables and bright-lit mirrors and find me. Generally I like to listen to them, even if they're sort of sepulchral and drained of overtones by their crooked trip. But they're always tense-making. And tonight ...
— No Great Magic • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... valley widens a little. On its western side are several sepulchral caves hewn in the chalky rock. Another quarter of an hour brought us to the Ain Beit el Djanne, a copious spring, with a mill near it; and from thence, in half an hour, we reached the plain on the eastern side of the ...
— Travels in Syria and the Holy Land • John Burckhardt
... the N. transept, is Le Pendentif, asepulchral chapel (22 ft. square and 25 ft. high) of the Mistral family, built in 1548. On each side is a large round arch, over which rises a remarkably flat dome. Close to the "Place des Clercs" is the Maison des Ttes, built in 1531, covered ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... them through the street door, and hovered about the staircase, charging the air with a moist sepulchral odour. ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... telephone and did exactly as Jack had instructed her to do. She heard a sepulchral voice say, "Are ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... and handsome man will soon come into your life," he was intoning in that sepulchral voice men habitually use in their dealings with ...
— Sense from Thought Divide • Mark Irvin Clifton
... entertained by anybody. Like an echo that resounds from rock to rock until it is lost in the distance, this hope had died away in their breasts. Willis nevertheless continued to keep the beacon on Shark's Island alight; but he regarded it more as a sepulchral lamp in commemoration of the dead, than as ...
— Willis the Pilot • Paul Adrien
... Giotto, in the presence of whose tactile values she was capable of feeling what was proper. But who was to tell her which they were? She walked about disdainfully, unwilling to be enthusiastic over monuments of uncertain authorship or date. There was no one even to tell her which, of all the sepulchral slabs that paved the nave and transepts, was the one that was really beautiful, the one that had been most praised by ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... which used in former time to be "haunted by fairies." Even Ferry-hill, a well-known stage between Darlington and Durham, is evidently a corruption of "Fairy-hill." In Yorkshire a similar story attaches to the sepulchral barrow of Willey How,[C] and in Sussex to a green mound called the Mount in the parish of Pulborough.[D] The fairies formerly frequented Bussers Hill in St. Mary's Isle, one of the Scilly group.[E] The Bryn-yr-Ellyllon,[F] ...
— A Philological Essay Concerning the Pygmies of the Ancients • Edward Tyson
... procession of animals. First came Mistress Stephen, Stumpin Steenie the policeman's cow, with her tail at full stretch behind her. To the end of her tail was tied the nose of Jeames Joss the cadger's horse—a gaunt sepulchral animal, which age and ill-treatment had taught to move as if knees and hocks were useless refinements in locomotion. He had just enough of a tail left to tie the nose of another cow to; and so, by the accretion of living joints, the strange ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... were furnished for his funeral banquet. Such men as Sir Roger Scatcherd are always well buried, and we have already seen that his glories were duly told to posterity in the graphic diction of his sepulchral monument. In a few days the doctor had returned to his quiet home, and Sir Louis found himself reigning at Boxall Hill in his father's stead—with, however, a much diminished sway, and, as he thought ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... tall chimney-stacks and the high roofs and the white walls of the Chateau, looking spectral enough in the wan moonlight,—ghostly, silent, and ominous. One light only was visible in the porter's lodge; all else was dark, cold, and sepulchral. ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... special callings, but also for ornamentation or commemoration in any and every sphere in which merchants desired to leave the impress of their personality and interest. They were to be found on the fronts of houses, over the fireplace in halls, on seals, on sepulchral slabs and monumental brasses, and on painted windows. In his description of a Dominican convent—printed in full in Prof. Skeat's "Specimens of English Literature" (a.d. 1394-1579)—the author of "Peres the Ploughman's Crede" speaks ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... in the Reformation; yet even this was meteor-like, and seemed but the transient glow of some mere natural emotion. The fire which then flashed so brilliantly upon the altar of home, has now become taper-like and sepulchral; and the altar of family religion, like the altar of Jehovah upon Mt. Carmel, has been demolished, and forsaken. Only here and there do we find a Christian home erect and surround a Christian altar. Parents seem now ashamed to serve the Lord at home. They have ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips
... a tone that made me jump, it was so extremely sepulchral—a tone that seemed as if it might have been acquired in a damp corner of some cave off the earth. "But it's a ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... machine, with Hector beside him. Their footsteps echoed hollowly in the sepulchral chamber. Leoh ...
— The Dueling Machine • Benjamin William Bova
... Ortiz," he said gutturally, and in a sepulchral profundity, "he does not understand himself. I haff nefer said it before. But he serfs Der Master because he despairs, andt he will cease to serf Der Master when he hopes. And I—I serf Der Master because I hope, andt I will cease to serf him ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various
... remarked Mr. Wyvern, his voice sounding rather sepulchral after the outburst of youthful passion. 'Mrs. Waltham's point of view is not inconceivable. I, as you know, am not altogether a man of formulas, but I am not sure that my behaviour would greatly differ from hers in her position; I mean as ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... is divided into four Parts. Part I. deals with The Primeval or Stone Period: Aboriginal Traces, Sepulchral Memorials, Dwellings, and Catacombs, Temples, Weapons, &c. &c.; Part II., The Bronze Period: The Metallurgic Transition, Primitive Bronze, Personal Ornaments, Religion, Arts, and Domestic Habits, with other topics; Part III., ...
— MacMillan & Co.'s General Catalogue of Works in the Departments of History, Biography, Travels, and Belles Lettres, December, 1869 • Unknown
... the sepulchral voice of the figure crouched in the chimney-corner; 'he will not die thus; I ...
— The Regent's Daughter • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... to be all graveyards, sepulchral urns, skeletons. How beautiful it would be to die young and a poet, to die like the young English poet, Henry Kirke White, whose works I was so enamoured of. The wan consumptive glamour of his career led me, as he had done, to stay up all ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... arrangements were well adapted to their purpose has been proved by the result. Thanks to the drains we have described, these sepulchral mounds have remained perfectly dry to the present day. Not only the coffins, with the objects in metal or terra-cotta they contained, but even the skeletons themselves have been preserved intact. A touch will reduce the latter ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... passed his hands over his eyes as if he saw something while he spoke, and then, letting his voice drop to an almost sepulchral pitch, he went ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... ought to have been slung across from house to house to keep up the character of the thoroughfare; but here, apparently, consistency was less thought of than economy. We looked and looked, every moment expecting a cloaked watchman to appear, with lantern casting weird flashes around and a sepulchral voice calling the hour and the weather. But Il Sereno of Majorca had no counterpart in Morlaix; the darkness, silence and solitude ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 1, January, 1891 • Various
... Volpes and Bigliottis is attested by ancient sepulchral monuments of the family in Santo Spirito at Florence. To mark the ancient origin, they retained or assumed the fox (volpe) as their arms. Borghini, in his Discorsi (Florence, 1584-5), mentions the family as an instance of the name giving rise to the arms, and mentions ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 74, March 29, 1851 • Various
... pilasters, some even from the vaulting. These mocking spectres moved slowly along the pavement, mounting the opposite pillars and losing themselves in the darkness; those rays of cold and diffused light made the shadows seem even darker as they brought out of the darkness here a chapel, beyond, a sepulchral stone or the outline of some pilaster; and the great Christ, who crowned the railings of the high altar, glowed against its background of shadow with the brilliancy of its old gilding, like some miraculous apparition floating in space in a ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... dreary grandeur which steam has made familiar to modern tourists. With slowly moving paddles they glided beneath the cliff whose shaggy brows frown across the zenith, and whose base the deep waves wash with a hoarse and hollow cadence; and they passed the sepulchral Bay of the Trinity, dark as the tide of Acheron,—a sanctuary of solitude and silence: depths which, as the fable runs, no sounding line can fathom, and heights at whose dizzy verge the wheeling ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... in his steps. The tune, whatever it was, was like a fresh wind to blow aside his depression. The house no longer looked sepulchral. He saw that the two men had hurried back from their patrol, had met and exchanged some message, and made off again as if alarmed by the music. Then ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... another groan, this time much louder than before. The voice appeared to be overhead. There was no tree or house to be seen; and then again the voice seemed to answer from under the ground, in a hollow, sepulchral tone, but I could not tell where he was. But I was determined to find him, so I kept on hallooing and he answering. I went to the place where the voice appeared to come out of the earth. I was walking along rather thoughtlessly and carelessly, when one inch more ...
— "Co. Aytch" - Maury Grays, First Tennessee Regiment - or, A Side Show of the Big Show • Sam R. Watkins
... every half year. Like the old heroes in Homer we exchanged gifts; I gave Byron a beautiful dagger mounted with gold, which had been the property of the redoubted Elfi Bey. But I was to play the part of Diomed in the Iliad, for Byron sent me, some time after, a large sepulchral vase of silver, full of dead men's bones, found within the land walls of Athens. He was often melancholy, almost gloomy. When I observed him in this humour I used either to wait till it went off of its own accord, or till some natural and easy mode occurred of ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... requirements of drinking largely and drinking delicately; of pouring easily out, or of keeping for years the perfume in; of storing in cellars, or bearing from fountains; of sacrificial libation, of Pan-athenaic treasure of oil, and sepulchral treasure of ashes,—and you have a resultant series of beautiful form and decoration, from the rude amphora of red earth up to Cellini's vases of gems and crystal, in which series, but especially in the more simple conditions of it, are developed the most beautiful lines and most ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... eye. He knows all the tram-drivers who go by, and his nicely graduated wink rewards the glances of the rubicund, jolly drivers of the hackneys and the decayed Jehus with purple faces and dismal hopefulness who drive sepulchral cabs for some reason which has no acquaintance with profit; nor are the ladies and gentlemen who saunter past foreign to his encyclopedic eye. Constantly his great head swings a slow recognition, constantly his serene finger motions onwards ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... scarlet white-edged poppy, or blue with a flower like larkspur. Wheat fields half covered with this unthrifty beauty! But alas! the elasticity is in Nature's works only. The works of man breathe over us a dismal, sepulchral, stand-still feeling. The villages have the nightmare, and men wear wooden shoes. The day's ride, however, was memorable with novelty; and when we saw Mont Martre, and its moth-like windmills, telling us we were coming to Paris, it was almost with regret at the swiftness of the hours. ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... actress, Rachel. She has been playing at the New York Theatre, and caught a cold on that overventilated stage, as open to the winds as a sawmill, which will kill her within a year. With her are the singer, Brignoli, and that man of orchestras, Theodore Thomas. The sepulchral Herman Melville enters, and saunters funereally across to Taylor, Stoddard, and Boker. Rachel and Brignoli are talking of the operatic failure at the Academy of Music under Manager Payne. They speak, too, of Mrs. Wood's ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... the 'third loft,' often in the streets, often in the market-place, in the fields and by solitary waysides, on shipboard and by the sea-shore, 'in the midst of Mars Hill' at Athens, and, when persecution began to darken, amid the deep gloom of the sepulchral caverns of Rome. The time had evidently come, referred to by the Saviour, when neither in the temple at Jerusalem, nor on the mountain deemed sacred by the Samaritans, was the Father to be worshipped; but all over the world, 'in spirit and in truth.' ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... by the opaque and almost sensible darkness, I listened eagerly for anything to break the sepulchral quiet. But nothing came, save, perhaps, an emphatic crack from the old cabinet that was made by Deacon Brodie, or the dry rustle of the coals on the extinguished fire. It was a calm; or I know that I should have heard in the roar ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Timothy," said Rachel, in a sepulchral tone. "I sha'n't live twenty-four hours. I've felt it coming on for a week past. I forgive you for all your ill-treatment. I should like to have some one go for the doctor, though I know I'm past help. I will go up ...
— Timothy Crump's Ward - A Story of American Life • Horatio Alger
... half-year. Like the old heroes in Homer, we exchanged gifts. I gave Byron a beautiful dagger mounted with gold, which had been the property of the redoubted Elfi Bey. But I was to play the part of Diomed in the Iliad, for Byron sent me, some time after, a large sepulchral vase of silver. It was full of dead men's bones, and had inscriptions on two sides of the base. One ran thus: 'The bones contained in this urn were found in certain ancient sepulchres within the long walls of Athens, in the month of February, 1811.' ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... great hall of generations dead Has something more sepulchral and more dread Than lurid glare from seven-branched chandelier Or table lone with stately dais near— Two rows of arches o'er a colonnade With knights on horseback all in mail arrayed, Each one disposed with pillar at ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... upsetting Dolly with the effort. There was a pause, during which Mr Bideawhile moved away from the table,—as he might have done had he been picking a lock;—and then Mr Longestaffe bade the stranger come in with a sepulchral voice. The door was ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... Glyndon, sounding hollow and sepulchral, alarmed Viola even more than his words. Pale, haggard, emaciated, he seemed almost as one risen from the dead, to appall and awe her. "What," she said, at last, in a faltering voice,—"what wild words do you utter! ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... turned to flee—again Tried to elude the snares around my feet; But struggling could not—though I knew not why, Self-will and self-possession vaguely lost.— Horror thrill'd through me—to recede was vain; Fear lurk'd behind in that sepulchral court, In its mute avenue and grave-like grass; And to proceed—where led my onward way? Ranges of doorways branch'd on either side, Each like the other:—one I oped, and lo! A dim deserted room, its furniture Withdrawn; gray, stirless cobwebs from the roof Hanging; and its deep windows letting ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... instance, in Jala-Jala, at the approach of one of these phenomena, a profound, even mournful stillness pervades nature. The wind no longer blows; not a breeze nor even a gentle zephyr is perceptible. The sun, though cloudless, darkens, and spreads around a sepulchral light. The atmosphere is burdened with heavy and sultry vapours. The earth is in labour. The frightened animals quietly seek shelter from the catastrophe they foresee. The ground shakes; soon it trembles ...
— Adventures in the Philippine Islands • Paul P. de La Gironiere
... on Brocken's sovran height, and saw Woods crowding upon woods, hills over hills; A surging scene, and only limited By the blue distance. Wearily my way Downward I dragged, through fir groves evermore Where bright green moss moved in sepulchral forms, Speckled with sunshine; and, but seldom heard, The sweet bird's song become a hollow sound; And the gale murmuring indivisibly, Reserved its solemn murmur, more distinct From many a note of many a waterbreak, And the brook's chatter; ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... shall have to languish in purgatory much longer," the sepulchral voice replied with a deep sigh; but the next moment the ghost yelled out in terror: "Oh! Good Lord!" and began to run away as fast as it could. A shrill whistle was heard, and then another, and the police director laid his hand on the shoulder ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... is astonishing how rapidly it gained possession of my judgment, altering the whole tenor of my thoughts, and if not exactly transforming the situation into one of cheerfulness and ease, at least robbing it of much of that sepulchral character which had hitherto made it so nearly unbearable to me. The surroundings, too, seemed to partake of the new spirit of life which had seized me. The room looked less shadowy, and lost some of that element of mystery which had made its dimly seen corners the possible abode of supernatural ...
— The Mill Mystery • Anna Katharine Green
... Where once my playful footsteps trod, Where now my head must lay; The meed of pity will be shed In dew-drops o'er my narrow bed, By nightly skies and storms alone; No mortal eye will deign to steep With tears the dark sepulchral deep Which hides ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XX. No. 556., Saturday, July 7, 1832 • Various
... later I was sneaking up the interminable stairways in the sepulchral east wing, lighting and relighting a tallow candle with grim patience at every other landing and luridly berating the drafts that swept the passages. Mr. Poopendyke stood guard below at the padlocked doors, holding the keys. He was to await ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... of sepulchral urns have been found at Cirencester. When dug up they usually contain little besides the ashes of the dead, though a few coins are sometimes included. There is a very perfect specimen of a glass urn—a large green bottle, square, wide-mouthed, ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... present day is in great part divided by walls and dotted with gardens; while a square enclosure of moderate size, shaded by dusky cypresses, honeycombed with tombs, and adorned with urns and other sepulchral monuments, surrounds the church. This is a public cemetery, laid out toward the end of the eighteenth century, and fearfully filled in three weeks by the dire pestilence which devastated Sicily in 1837. On the Tuesday following ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume VI. • Various
... had become repellent; it was a sepulchral place entombing all she had lost. In the midst of the dusk and gloom her mind groped about—after its habit—for something cheerful, something that would break the colorless monotone of the room and change the atmosphere. In ...
— The Primrose Ring • Ruth Sawyer
... the church which Pisa, great and free, Reared to St. Catharine. How the time-stained walls, That earthquakes shook not from their poise, appear To shiver in the deep and voluble tones Rolled from the organ! Underneath my feet There lies the lid of a sepulchral vault. The image of an armed knight is graven Upon it, clad in perfect panoply— Cuishes, and greaves, and cuirass, with barred helm, Grauntleted hand, and sword, and blazoned shield. Around, in Gothic characters, worn dim By feet of worshippers, are traced his name, And ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... fifteen bloody corpses of my shipmates who had been murdered. We stood aghast; the hair rose straight up from our heads, as we viewed the supernatural reappearances. After a pause of about five minutes, during which we never spoke or even moved, one of the corpses cried out in a sepulchral voice, "Come, every man his bird!" and held up its arms as ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat
... he prepared to turn his face toward the open room, there came to his ears the most terrifying sound. Distinctly, plainly he heard a chuckle, almost at the bedside. A chuckle, hollow, sepulchral, mirthless. The hair on Hawkins's head stood straight on end. The impulse to hide beneath the covers was conquered by the irresistible desire ...
— Her Weight in Gold • George Barr McCutcheon
... The more we saw of it, the less we liked it; its cold presence sent a chilly sense of discouragement to the heart, and I had daily to struggle with an ardent desire to throw a boot at Wilson's head, every time his sepulchral voice announced the "Ice ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... enough to permit a very diminutive call-boy to be squeezed through—seem to lead to unexplored regions. But stranger than even the clerk, or the undefined but yet perfectly tangible weirdness of the doors is the tinkling of a sepulchral bell, and the responsive tramp of a heavy-heeled boot. And strangest of all is a huge black board whereon are marked the figures from one to twenty, over some of which the word 'Out' is written; and the visitor notices with ever-increasing wonder that the tinkling of the bell ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... insults, bitter and galling threats, exposure to scorching heat by day and to frosty cold at night, torturing pangs of hunger,—these were the methods by which stalwart men had been transformed into ghastly beings with sunken eyes and sepulchral voices. They were clothed in uncleanly rags, many without caps, and most without shoes. Their hair and beards were overgrown and matted. The condition of their teeth was the only appearance of neatness about them: and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... subterraneous passages and foundations of ancient buildings, scattered over a wide extent of ground, attest a place of no small size. The remains of a theatre,[151] added to abundance of vases, cinerary urns, sepulchral lamps, and coins and medals, both of the upper and lower empire, which have been from time to time dug up here, prove it to have been occupied by the Romans during a considerable period. But no records remain, either of its greatness or overthrow. It fell, in all probability, ...
— Architectural Antiquities of Normandy • John Sell Cotman
... precious trifles, in short, which the collector of mediaeval curiosities amasses for his heirs to disperse amongst the palaces of kings and the cabinets of nations—were dragged again to unfamiliar light. The invaded sepulchral building seemed a very Pompeii of the Cinque Cento. To examine, arrange, methodise, select for national purposes, such miscellaneous treasures would be the work of weeks. For easier access, Darrell caused a slight hasty passage to be thrown over the gap between the two edifices. ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Navagin dreamed of a gaunt old clerk in a shabby uniform, with a face as yellow as a lemon, hair that stood up like a brush, and pewtery eyes; the clerk said something in a sepulchral voice and shook a bony finger at him. And Navagin almost had an attack ...
— The Schoolmaster and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... knee-breeches and yellow stockings, in the outer hall, intended for coats and hats, by more lackeys in powdered wigs, and in the first reception-room, gorgeously decorated in the yellow and gold of the middle ages, by Felice, in a dress coat, the Baron's solemn personal servant, who said, in sepulchral tones: ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... wide rolls the sepulchral sea, Grave of my kindred, of my sire the grave! Perchance, where now he sleeps, a space for me Is mark'd by Fate beneath the deep green wave. It well may he! Poor bosom, why dost heave Thus wild? Oh, many a care, troublous and dark. ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... instant a voice reached their ears—in a hollow sepulchral tone, like that of a man speaking from the bottom of a well, or through the bung-hole of an ...
— Bruin - The Grand Bear Hunt • Mayne Reid
... was on mine own, I would have turned and fled: But ah! my limbs were chilled to stone, As in a low, sepulchral tone The sheeted ...
— Canadian Wild Flowers • Helen M. Johnson
... my heavy heart up solemnly, As once Electra her sepulchral urn, And, looking in thine eyes, I overturn The ashes at thy feet. Behold and see What a great heap of grief lay hid in me, And how the red wild sparkles dimly burn Through the ashen greyness. If thy foot in scorn Could tread them out to darkness utterly, It might be well perhaps. ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... illumined by the crepuscular light of a magical sky on the boundaries of the major and minor modes, now seeming to spring from the bowels of the earth with sepulchral inflexions, melody moves with ease on the serried degrees of the enharmonic scales. Lively or slow she always assumed in them the accents of a fatalist impossibility, for the laws of arithmetic have preceded her, and there still remains, as it were, an atmosphere of proud rigidity. ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... augmented, wears A threatening aspect, ominously dark; Enveloping the heaven's canopy In lowering shadow and portentous gloom; In pall of ambient obscurity. The fork-ed lightnings ramify and play Upon a background of sepulchral black; The growling thunders rumble a reply Of detonation awful and profound, To every corruscation's vivid gleam; In deep crescendo and fortissimo, In quavering tremolo and stately fugue Echoes, ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... the flag. Some of his evolutions were quite wonderful, and all of them were the perfection of grace. He described all kinds of curves and loops. On alighting he uttered a low, hollow chuck suggestive of the sepulchral. Another notch had to be cut in the tally-stick of my ornithological journey—I had learned how the whip-poor-will takes his nocturnal dinner of moths and beetles, and I felt that there was still such a thing as news to be ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... magnetic, expressive, carrying, and responsive. Endeavor to keep your voice free from such undesirable qualities as the harsh, breathy, sharp, rough, rigid, throaty, guttural, thin, shrill, nasal, unmusical, discordant, muffled, explosive, strained, inaudible, hollow, strident, sepulchral, ...
— Talks on Talking • Grenville Kleiser
... she had something to sell—a bit of carving or some intaglio supposed to be antique. It was known that I had a fancy for oddities. I said to myself, "She has read or heard of my 'Old Gold' story, or else 'The Buried God,' and she thinks me an idealizing ignoramus upon whom she can impose. Her sepulchral name is at least not Italian; probably she is a sharp countrywoman of mine, turning, by means of the present aesthetic craze, an honest penny ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... last!" he said, in a tone that was already sepulchral. "Canst tell me, boy, why they had golden rods to measure the city?" His nurse had been reading to him a chapter of the Revelations which had been selected by himself. "Thou seest, lad, the wall itself was of jasper and the city was of pure gold—I shall not need money in my new habitation—ha! ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... and suffering, called him again and again, but without response. Half an hour—an hour passed, and then he feebly and painfully crept to the doorway of the tomb. He saw Atma prostrate on the damp sepulchral mould, his face buried in his hands, and beside him lay still, and cold, and lifeless, a girl attired in bridal finery, with jewels gleaming on her dark hair and on her stiffening arms. It ...
— Atma - A Romance • Caroline Augusta Frazer
... he said. 'Remember!'—and, as his head disappeared, his words came in a hollow, sepulchral voice from beneath that spot of black earth—'remember ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... he, in a hollow and sepulchral voice, "that could do it." Father Magauran, who was present, looked at him with surprise; as indeed did every one who had got an ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... at a country inn when they were horrified to hear a sepulchral voice from the hearse-like ...
— The Portland Peerage Romance • Charles J. Archard
... all of which belong to the Old Empire. The three great pyramids of Gizeh are among the earliest. They were built by three kings of the Fourth Dynisty, Cheops (Chufu), Chephren (Chafre), and Mycerinus (Menkere) They are gigantic sepulchral monuments in which the mummies of the kings who built them were deposited. The pyramid of Cheops (Fig. 1, at the right), the largest of all, was originally 481 feet 4 inches in height, and was thus doubtless ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... sepulchral, I thought he must be right, though I'd never seen any "funeral mutes." But Mr. Barrymore answered in a low voice, "No, they're policemen. I wonder what's up?" Then, aloud, he addressed the melancholy black beanpoles; but to my ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... the tombstone of the dead. From the earliest times men have sought to squeeze their loves and joys, their sorrows and hatreds, into distichs and quatrains, and to inscribe them somewhere, on walls or windows, on sepulchral urns and gravestones, as memorials of ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... nights when the supernatural realm threatened to impinge upon the physical, that shuddered and shrank from the contact,—when the atmosphere gave vague hints of ghostly denizens, and every passing breeze seemed laden with sepulchral damps and ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... be a knock at the door And I would arise at midnight and go to the shop, Where belated travelers would hear me hammering Sepulchral boards and tacking satin. And often I wondered who would go with me To the distant land, our names the theme For talk, in the same week, for I've observed Two always go together. Chase Henry was ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... birds in plenty, as well as much other wild life, should go over Maddeket way and sit on the shore of Long Pond. There I found the bushy swales alive with marsh birds. Blackbirds gurgled all about. The reedy shallows held many bitterns whose sepulchral "Cahugancagunk, cahungancagunk" sounded ventriloqually from the reeds. Coot, sea duck, loons, black duck, grebes, dotted the surface of the pond and in all the sandy shallows spawning alewives splashed ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... of construction of mazes include complicated ranges of caverns, architectural labyrinths, or sepulchral buildings, tortuous devices indicated by coloured marbles and tiled pavements, winding paths cut in the turf, and topiary mazes formed by clipped hedges. As a matter of fact, they may be said to have descended to us in ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... she surrendered. After a short silence she placed the ring to her forehead, closed her eyes, and drew her face so near to Max that he felt her warm breath on his cheek. Max was learning a new lesson in life—the greatest of all. She spoke in soft whispers, slowly dropping her words one by one in sepulchral tones:— ...
— Yolanda: Maid of Burgundy • Charles Major
... the chamber toward the door, when a gruff, sepulchral oath came rolling up to the chamber through the secret passage. Quick as a flash Selim, who realised that they could not reach and open the door leading to the stairs, turned in among the huge wine casks, first blinding his lantern. He whispered ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... The rest of his sepulchral performances hardly deserve the notice of criticism. The contemptible dialogue between He and She should have been suppressed for ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... paintings in which Florence is so rich, returning ever and anon, with restless sympathies, to wonder whether these tender blossoms of art had not a vital fragrance and savour more precious than the full-fruited knowledge of the later works. We lingered often in the sepulchral chapel of San Lorenzo, and watched Michael Angelo's dim-visaged warrior sitting there like some awful Genius of Doubt and brooding behind his eternal mask upon the mysteries of life. We stood more ...
— The Madonna of the Future • Henry James
... it told the story of the overwhelming of one of the chiefs of the old primeval people of Holland, amid all his gala array, in a great storm. But it was another view which Sebastian preferred; that this object was sepulchral, namely, in its motive—the one surviving relic of a grand burial, in the ancient manner, of a king or hero, whose very tomb was wasted away.—Sunt metis metae! There came with it the odd fancy that he himself would like to have been dead and gone as long ago, with a kind of envy of those whose ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Horatio Pater
... whether the thoughts of death are useful, whenever they put a man out of the possession of his faculties. Young pursued the scheme of Quarles: he raised about him an artificial emotion of death: he darkened his sepulchral study, placing a skull on his table by lamp-light; as Dr. Donne had his portrait taken, first winding a sheet over his head and closing his eyes; keeping this melancholy picture by his bed-side as long as he lived, to remind him of his mortality[133]. Young, even in his garden, had ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... stones of a conical form, erected by the Druids. Some suppose them to have been sepulchral monuments, others altars. They were undoubtedly of a religious character, since sacrificial fires were lighted upon them, and processions were made around them. These processions were analogous to the circumambulations ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... had begun to line the way, first only on one marge of the channel; then; the clifty banks appeared on the other side, and at length a deep> black-arched opening yawned beneath the mountains, glooming with sepulchral shadows; in the silence one might hear drops trickling vaguely and the sudden hooting of an ...
— The Raid Of The Guerilla - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... parlour resound to its foundations with a note of anger positively sepulchral in its depth of tone. "Farce be hanged! She has bolted with my wife's brother, Captain Anthony." This outburst was followed by complete subsidence. He faltered miserably as he added from force of habit: "The son of ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... then he crept in and took his way along a low, narrow passage. It had many windings, but was without intersections or intricacy. He heard his own steps echoed like a pursuing footfall. His labored breathing returned in sighs from the inanimate rocks. It was an uncanny place, with strange, sepulchral, solemn effects. He shivered with the cold. A draught stole in from some secret crevice known only to the wild mountain winds. The torch flared, crouched before the gust, flared again, then darkness. He hesitated, took one step forward, ...
— 'way Down In Lonesome Cove - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... occasionally opened just far enough to permit a very diminutive call-boy to be squeezed through—seem to lead to unexplored regions. But stranger than even the clerk, or the undefined but yet perfectly tangible weirdness of the doors is the tinkling of a sepulchral bell, and the responsive tramp of a heavy-heeled boot. And strangest of all is a huge black board whereon are marked the figures from one to twenty, over some of which the word 'Out' is written; and the visitor notices with ever-increasing ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... stood on Brocken's[315:2] sovran height, and saw Woods crowding upon woods, hills over hills, A surging scene, and only limited By the blue distance. Heavily my way Downward I dragged through fir groves evermore, 5 Where bright green moss heaves in sepulchral forms Speckled with sunshine; and, but seldom heard, The sweet bird's song became a hollow sound; And the breeze, murmuring indivisibly, Preserved its solemn murmur most distinct 10 From many a ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... unendurable. Here there was no well to cool my face, smarting with the bitterness of my own tears. Nor would I have washed in the well of that grotto, had it flowed clear as the rivers of Paradise. I rose, and feebly left the sepulchral cave. I took my way I knew not whither, but still towards the sunrise. The birds were singing; but not for me. All the creatures spoke a language of their own, with which I had nothing to do, and to which I cared not to ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... wow! was heard again, and it lasted while the pendulum swung back and forth just fifteen times. I took a cooling draft, and counted in feverish agony forty-four, and fifteen, till the daylight came creeping in at the windows, filling with sepulchral greyness the room. The barking ceased, and I slept only to dream of snarling curs and 'dirty ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... the architecture or sculpture of modern England. You may urge, that I ought rather to describe the qualities of the refined sculpture which is executed in large quantities for private persons belonging to the upper classes, and for sepulchral and memorial purposes. But I could not now criticise that sculpture with any power of conviction to you, because I have not yet stated to you the principles of good sculpture in general. I will, however, in some points, tell you the ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... astonishing how rapidly it gained possession of my judgment, altering the whole tenor of my thoughts, and if not exactly transforming the situation into one of cheerfulness and ease, at least robbing it of much of that sepulchral character which had hitherto made it so nearly unbearable to me. The surroundings, too, seemed to partake of the new spirit of life which had seized me. The room looked less shadowy, and lost some of that element of mystery which had made its dimly seen ...
— The Mill Mystery • Anna Katharine Green
... finds a good market; the ashes, &c., are used in the furnaces for the drying process, and the residue therefrom, or clinkers, forms a valuable substance for roadmaking or building purposes, &c., in the shape of concrete, paving flags, mantelpieces, tabletops, and even sepulchral monuments being constructed with it, so that in a short time the receipts will, it is expected, more than balance the expenditure in this department of local sanitary work. The pollution of the river Tame in past years led ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... Celtic times. It makes no difference if it can be shown that below these cromlechs coins have occasionally been found of the Roman Emperors. This only proves that even during the days of Roman supremacy the Cornish style of public monuments, whether sepulchral or otherwise, remained. Nay, why should not even a Roman settled in Cornwall have adopted the monumental style of his adopted country? Roman and Saxon hands may have helped to erect some of the cromlechs which are ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... he disposed upon his breast, as a token to all whom he should meet that he came as a messenger of peace. And this, according to one authority, was the origin of wampum, of which Hiawatha was the inventor. That honor, however, is one which must be denied to him. The evidence of sepulchral relics shows that wampum was known to the mysterious Mound-builders, as well as in all succeeding ages. Moreover, if the significance of white wampum-strings as a token of peace had not been well known in his day, Hiawatha would not have relied upon them as a means of proclaiming his ...
— The Iroquois Book of Rites • Horatio Hale
... That sepulchral groan had issued not from a mortal in the agony of impending death but from the smiling red lips of Viola Gwyn. The grewsome "death-rattle" was the result of the means she took to suppress a ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon
... in plenty, as well as much other wild life, should go over Maddeket way and sit on the shore of Long Pond. There I found the bushy swales alive with marsh birds. Blackbirds gurgled all about. The reedy shallows held many bitterns whose sepulchral "Cahugancagunk, cahungancagunk" sounded ventriloqually from the reeds. Coot, sea duck, loons, black duck, grebes, dotted the surface of the pond and in all the sandy shallows spawning alewives splashed and played—thousands of them. I had ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... powers of life have ceased their operations; and such, my brethren, is the state to which we are all hastening; let us, therefore, gratefully improve the remaining space of life, that when our weak and frail bodies, like this memento, shall become cold and inanimate and mouldering in sepulchral dust and ruins, our disembodied spirits may soar aloft to the blessed regions, where dwell light ...
— The Mysteries of Free Masonry - Containing All the Degrees of the Order Conferred in a Master's Lodge • William Morgan
... dark, and handsome man will soon come into your life," he was intoning in that sepulchral voice men habitually use in their ...
— Sense from Thought Divide • Mark Irvin Clifton
... morn restored the day, we paid Sepulchral honours to Elpenor's shade. Now by the axe the rushing forest bends, And the huge pile along the shore ascends. Around we stand, a melancholy train, And a loud groan re-echoes from the main. Fierce o'er the pyre, by ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... he said, in a tone that was already sepulchral. "Canst tell me, boy, why they had golden rods to measure the city?" His nurse had been reading to him a chapter of the Revelations which had been selected by himself. "Thou seest, lad, the wall itself was of jasper and the city was of pure gold—I shall not need ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... night. The stars seemed, to the boy's eyes, farther from the earth than he had ever seen them before; there was no wind; and the sombre shadows thrown by the trees upon the ground, looked sepulchral and death-like, from being so still. He softly reclosed the door. Having availed himself of the expiring light of the candle to tie up in a handkerchief the few articles of wearing apparel he had, sat himself down upon a bench, to wait ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... Victor, thou art a fool of the first water!" he said to himself as he realised the ignominy of his situation. For he was in the most dismal of dungeons, furnished as scantily as a cellar, fireless, damp, and almost in sepulchral darkness, for what light might have entered by a little window over the door was obscured by ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... this gloomy avenue for about four miles, the first symptoms of war met our eyes in the shape of a dead horse, whose ribs glared like a cheval-de-frise from a tumulus of mud. If the ghosts of the dead haunt these sepulchral groves, we must have passed through an army of spirits, as our driver, who had visited the scene three days after the battle, described the last four miles as a continued pavement of men and horses ...
— Before and after Waterloo - Letters from Edward Stanley, sometime Bishop of Norwich (1802;1814;1814) • Edward Stanley
... brigade, but I was horrified to hear the officer pronounce his "rs" in the back of his throat. Of course, when we are not at war with Germany, a man may pronounce his "rs" however he pleases, but when we are at war with the great guttural hordes of Teutons it is different. The moment I heard the sepulchral "r" I said, "This man is a German". He told me he had come from the Indian Army and had a message for the artillery brigade. I took him by subtlety, thinking all was fair in war, and I asked him to come with me. I made for the billet of our signallers ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... chatted in there it suddenly occurred to me the fellow was trying to get at something—in fact, pumping me. He alluded constantly to Europe, to the people I was supposed to know there—putting leading questions as to my acquaintances in the sepulchral city, and so on. His little eyes glittered like mica discs—with curiosity—though he tried to keep up a bit of superciliousness. At first I was astonished, but very soon I became awfully curious to see what he would find out ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... Isole de Heton," returned Nicholas, becoming more sepulchral in his accents as he proceeded; "it has vanished from the wall. See ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... is ended. No revolution, so far as we are aware, has distracted modern England, and Sir Richard and Lady Burton still sleep in sepulchral pomp in their marmorean Arab Tent at Mortlake. More than fifteen years have now elapsed since, to employ a citation from The Arabian Nights, there came between them "the Destroyer of Delights and the Sunderer of Companies and glory be to Him who changeth ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... caution—made him blind To the fell vigor of bullkind, Till, filled with valor to the teeth, He drew his dasher from its sheath And bravely brandished it; the while He smiled a dark, portentous smile; A deep, sepulchral smile; a wide And open smile, which, at his side, The churn to copy vainly tried; A smile so like the dawn of doom That all the field was palled in gloom, And all the trees within a mile, As tribute to that awful smile, Made haste, with loyalty discreet, To fling their shadows ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... with monumental tombs. If in the reliefs and inscriptions of these tombs there had been any telling echo of the sorrow and regret of bereaved survivors, every one would have entered the cities in a black mood. As it is, as every one who has been in the museums of Athens knows, the sepulchral artists carefully avoided anything which might harrow the feelings. They represented the dead at their best, engaged in victorious warfare, or in athletic sports or in the happy family circle. A gentle air of melancholy could not be ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... Sithbhein is also given in both, but explained a fort, a turret, and the real meaning of the word as still understood in many parts of Ireland is a fairy-hill, or hill of the fairies, and is applied to a green round hill crowned by a small sepulchral mound. ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... clock resurrected on that day, dressed like the former, but a little stiffer and straighter in the back, and armed with a pair of gold spectacles and a manuscript. When he is wound up he will break out in a cold sepulchral tone with, firstly: "foreordination!" secondly: "predestination!" and thirdly: "the final perseverance of the saints!" And he will be recognized as a Presbyterian preacher, a little blue and frigid, a little dry and formal, but one of God's ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... on the British stage, Great Anarch! spread thy sable wings; Not fired with all the frantic rage, With which thou hurl'st thy darts at kings. As thou in native garb art seen, With scattered tresses, haggard mien, Sepulchral chains and hideous cry By despot arts immur'd ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... the desert, along the Suez Canal[2], I watched the ghastly pallor of the wan unhappy moon, as the horrible shadow crept slowly over her face, stealing away her beauty, and turning the lone and level sands that stretched away below to a weird and ashy blue, as though covering the earth with a sepulchral sympathetic pall. For we caught the "griesly terror," Rahu, at his horrid work, towards the end of ...
— An Essence Of The Dusk, 5th Edition • F. W. Bain
... began to drone again. "Now I behold a stranger at the same water-hole. He's alone—he's looking for something. He rides in circles. He's off his horse and bending over—What? A skeleton! Yes, it's the skeleton of one of them other Mexicans." Strange's voice became positively sepulchral as his spirit control took fuller possession of his earthly shell and as his visions resolved themselves into clearer outline. "See! He swears an oath to avenge. And now—the scene changes. Everything dissolves. I'm in a mansion; and ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... moon; and even the brilliant starlight of summer in Hellas is an uncertain guide. Democrates knew he was traversing a long avenue lined by spreading cypresses, with a shimmer of white from some tall, sepulchral monument. Then through the dimness loomed the high columns of a temple, and close beside it pale light spread out upon the road as from ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... Museum of Rhenish Antiquities at Bonn there is a Roman sepulchral monument the inscription on which records that it was erected to the memory of M. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... forward to coming years, she said to her drooping spirit: "Be strong and bear this sorrow. I will conquer my own heart." How is it that, when the human soul is called to pass through a fierce ordeal, and numbing despair seizes the faculties and energies in her sepulchral grasp, how is it that superhuman strength is often suddenly infused into the sinking spirit? There is a mysterious yet resistless power given, which winds up and sets again in motion that marvelous bit of mechanism, the human will; that curiously intricate combination of wheels; ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... prepared to turn his face toward the open room, there came to his ears the most terrifying sound. Distinctly, plainly he heard a chuckle, almost at the bedside. A chuckle, hollow, sepulchral, mirthless. The hair on Hawkins's head stood straight on end. The impulse to hide beneath the covers was conquered by the irresistible ...
— Her Weight in Gold • George Barr McCutcheon
... Monastery of Heilsbronn (between Nurnberg and Anspach), with Tombs to many of them, which were very legible for slight Biographic purposes in my poor friend Rentsch's time, a hundred and fifty years ago; and may perhaps still have some quasi-use, as "sepulchral brasses," to another class of persons. One or two of those old buried Figures, more peculiarly important for our little Friend now sleeping in his cradle yonder, we must endeavor, as the Narrative proceeds, to resuscitate a little and render visible ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol, II. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Of Brandenburg And The Hohenzollerns—928-1417 • Thomas Carlyle
... and that the cart he had met at the mouth of the port had come back empty to the cave for another load of sea-wrack. The lobster-fisher, too, had beached his boat near by, and was shouting through the hollow air, wherein every noise seemed to echo with a sepulchral quake, "The block was going whistling at the mast-head. We'll have a squall I was thinking, so ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... homes degenerated since then in family piety! They received a reviving impulse in the Reformation; yet even this was meteor-like, and seemed but the transient glow of some mere natural emotion. The fire which then flashed so brilliantly upon the altar of home, has now become taper-like and sepulchral; and the altar of family religion, like the altar of Jehovah upon Mt. Carmel, has been demolished, and forsaken. Only here and there do we find a Christian home erect and surround a Christian altar. Parents seem now ashamed to serve the Lord at home. ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips
... faint motions of recognition, which might have been subdued either by the solemnity of the scene, or by the doubt as to how far the others meant to go; Mrs. Jack Stepney gave a careless nod, and Grace Stepney, with a sepulchral gesture, indicated a seat at her side. But Lily, ignoring the invitation, as well as Jack Stepney's official attempt to direct her, moved across the room with her smooth free gait, and seated herself in a chair which seemed to have been ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... arming his enigmatic goddess with the venerated lotus, the painter had dreamed of the dancer, the mortal woman with the polluted Vase, from whom spring all sins and crimes. Perhaps he had recalled the rites of ancient Egypt, the sepulchral ceremonies of the embalming when, after stretching the corpse on a bench of jasper, extracting the brain with curved needles through the chambers of the nose, the chemists and the priests, before ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... candidate, who turned out to be the discharged Stevens, sitting in an anteroom, foolish and apprehensive, and looking withal much as he had done in the counting-room. He was now asked by the leader of the file, in a sepulchral tone, several formal questions, among others whether he believed in a Supreme Being. Stevens gulped, and said "Yes." He was then asked if he was prepared to endure any ordeal to which he might be subjected, and warned that unless ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... escape. But he had not gone a step when he felt himself seized by the arm, and heard two sepulchral ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various
... said the Hermit in a sepulchral tone. "Yes, my boy; but keep it mum. I shan't waste my Latin over you ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed
... to study; eight heads bent diligently over the long oak table in the library until a safe passage into the deserted halls above was assured. Then Gyp and Jerry led the new Ravens to the secret door where, in a sepulchral whisper, Gyp extracted a solemn promise from each that she would not divulge the secret of the hidden stairway. One by one, quite breathless with excitement, they climbed to the tower room where Gyp with ridiculous solemnity ...
— Highacres • Jane Abbott
... succeeded in making his escape. Rodin, stretched upon the carpet, his limbs twisted with fearful cramps, was writhing in the extremity of pain. The violence of his fall had, no doubt, roused him to consciousness, for he moaned, in a sepulchral voice: "They leave me to ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... seemed hours—during which time periods of sepulchral silence would be followed by a repetition of the uncanny scraping of naked ...
— Thuvia, Maid of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... predecessor. Voracity killed him, as it killed Scott's. He died unexpectedly before the kitchen-fire. "He kept his eye to the last upon the meat as it roasted, and suddenly turned over on his back with a sepulchral cry of Cuckoo!" The letter which told me this (31st of October) announced to me also that he was at a dead lock in his Christmas story: "Sick, bothered and depressed. Visions of Brighton come upon me; and I have a great mind to go there to finish my second part, ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... turned outwards: this is contrary to the commonly received opinion that the turning inward symbolised the domestic rule over a monastic house. The head of one abbot rests on a square cushion. Four of these effigies are in the south choir aisle; one of them being beneath the Norman sepulchral arch raised to commemorate three abbots, John de Sais, who died in 1125, Martin of Bee, in 1155, and Andrew, in 1199. It seems unlikely that the one placed beneath the arch should represent one of those three, although usually assigned to the latest, Andrew. The next two in the aisle ...
— The Cathedral Church of Peterborough - A Description Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • W.D. Sweeting
... Strawberry Hill-I am now doing a great deal to the house—stay, I don't want Genoa damask!(328) What I shall trouble you to buy is for the garden: there is a small recess, for which I should be glad to have an antique Roman sepulchral altar, of the kind of the pedestal to my eagle; but as it will stand out of doors, I should not desire to have it a fine one: a moderate one, I imagine, might be picked up easily at Rome at a moderate price: if you could order any body to buy such an one, I ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... the same, Feb. 15.-Specimen of Mr. Gough's "Sepulchral Monuments." Antiquarian solemnities ridiculed. Count-bishop Hervey. Martin Sherlock the ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... pair of those goat-skin breeches, with the hair outward, which are still commonly worn by the peasants of the Roman Campagna. In this garb, they look like antique Satyrs; and, in truth, the Spectre of the Catacomb might have represented the last survivor of that vanished race, hiding himself in sepulchral gloom, and mourning over his lost ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... "I want you to understand that it will be all right to laugh tonight. Let me hear you laugh heartily, laugh right out, just as much as ever you want to, because" (and here his voice assumed the deep sepulchral tones of the preacher),-"when we think of the noble object for which the professor appears to-night, we may be assured that the Lord will forgive any one who will laugh at ...
— My Discovery of England • Stephen Leacock
... you that," I attempted to assure him in weak, sepulchral tones. "And now, if you like, I'll put you ashore in the small boat. You must be getting chilly ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... degree persuaded that no art, Florentine or any other, can be understood without knowing these sculptures and mouldings of the national soul. You remember I first begun this large digression when it became a question with us why some of Giovanni Pisano's sepulchral work had been destroyed at Perugia. And now we shall get our first gleam of light on the matter, finding similar operations carried on in Florence. For a little while after this speech in the Council of Ancients, Aldobrandino died, and ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin
... stood on Brocken's sovran height, and saw Woods crowding upon woods, hills over hills; A surging scene, and only limited By the blue distance. Wearily my way Downward I dragged, through fir groves evermore Where bright green moss moved in sepulchral forms, Speckled with sunshine; and, but seldom heard, The sweet bird's song become a hollow sound; And the gale murmuring indivisibly, Reserved its solemn murmur, more distinct From many a note of many a waterbreak, And the brook's chatter; ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... but also for ornamentation or commemoration in any and every sphere in which merchants desired to leave the impress of their personality and interest. They were to be found on the fronts of houses, over the fireplace in halls, on seals, on sepulchral slabs and monumental brasses, and on painted windows. In his description of a Dominican convent—printed in full in Prof. Skeat's "Specimens of English Literature" (a.d. 1394-1579)—the author of "Peres the Ploughman's Crede" ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... no changes ye are mourning; 'Tis to the hopeless every star appears Like lamps in dark sepulchral vistas burning— And every dew-tipp'd flower is ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 10, No. 270, Saturday, August 25, 1827. • Various
... Nile I knew; What time hot Sirius glows, And Egypt's thirsty field the covering deluge knows; But whence the wonder flows, O Father Nile! no mortal e'er did view. Along thy bank not any prayer is made To Jove for fruitful showers. On thee they call! Or in sepulchral shade, The life-reviving, sky-descended powers Of bright Osiris hail,— While, wildly chanting, the barbaric choir, With timbrels and strange ...
— The Elegies of Tibullus • Tibullus
... martyrs are preserved in cases placed round the church. Large sections of the walls in the church are shelved and divided into pigeon holes, each containing a skull! I saw no less than 600 or 700 of these skulls (by actual count). The bones "are worked into the walls in a species of sepulchral mosaic." These bones, it is said, had been in their graves about 400 years. The old pictures of the apostles are painted upon slates, one of ...
— The Youthful Wanderer - An Account of a Tour through England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany • George H. Heffner
... my coffin, Timothy," said Rachel, in a sepulchral tone. "I sha'n't live twenty-four hours. I've felt it coming on for a week past. I forgive you for all your ill-treatment. I should like to have some one go for the doctor, though I know I'm past help. I will go up to ...
— Timothy Crump's Ward - A Story of American Life • Horatio Alger
... you; but much too long out of my grave,' answered grannie; in no sepulchral tones, however, for her voice, although weak and uneven, had a sound in it like that of one of the upper strings of a violin. The plaintiveness of it touched me, and I crept near her—nearer than, ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... the house, which was otherwise unoccupied, and the museum, which was in a separate wing, seemed strangely silent and remote. As the Yale latch of the massive door clicked behind me, I seemed to be, and in fact was, cut off from all the world. A mysterious, sepulchral stillness pervaded the place, and when I entered the long room I found myself unconsciously treading lightly so as not to disturb the silence; even as one might on entering some Egyptian tomb-chamber hidden in the heart ...
— The Uttermost Farthing - A Savant's Vendetta • R. Austin Freeman
... threatening to fall at any moment, had already laid its intolerable weight upon his chest. And that prancing ghost, that giggling death's head, which only a week before perhaps had still been young, affected him like a nightmare. And the thought that now his turn had come to stick it out in that sepulchral vault for five or six days or a week and experience the same horrors that the man there was telling about with a laugh intensified his discouragement into a passionate, throbbing indignation which he could scarcely control any more. He could have roared out, could have jumped up, run ...
— Men in War • Andreas Latzko
... with crimson splendor in the farewell rays of the setting sun. No painter's brush could do justice to the prismatic tints which hover around the higher peaks. But this flood of glory is soon followed by the pure whiteness of death. "Like a gigantic ghost shrouded in sepulchral sheets, the mountain now hovers in the background of the landscape, towering ghastly through the twilight until ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... fashion, and not like the more ancient tombs of the Jews, which we see cut in the rock for the reception of the dead. There are seven lamps constantly burning over it, the gifts of different sovereigns in a succession of ages. It occupies about one-half of the sepulchral chamber, and extends from one end of it to the other. A space about three feet wide in front of it is all that remains for the accommodation of visiters, so that not more than three or four can be conveniently ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... of silk became blue; a dim, dull, sepulchral, leaden tinge fell over its purity. The hum of gnats arose, the bat flew in circling whirls over the tents, horns sounded from all quarters, the sun had set, the sabbath had commenced. The forge was mute, the fire extinguished, the prance of horses and ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... present state of the abbey,[109] and even in that of Ducarel's time, there is, and was, a great dearth of sepulchral monuments. Indeed I know not whether you need be detained another minute within the interior; except it be, to add your share of admiration to that which has been long and justly bestowed on the huge organ[110] at the west end of the nave, which is considered ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... a wine skin, and is applied alike to the necromancer and to the spirit evoked. Its use, in these senses, appears to have been suggested by the likeness of the hollow sound emitted by a half-empty skin when struck, to the sepulchral tones in which the oracles of the evoked spirits were uttered by the medium. It is most probable that, in accordance with the general theory of spiritual influences which obtained among the old Israelites, the spirit of Samuel was conceived to pass into the body of the wise woman, and to use ...
— The Evolution of Theology: An Anthropological Study - Essay #8 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... freethinker. He was not a Royalist. In his character the noblest qualities of every party were combined in harmonious union. From the Parliament and from the court, from the conventicle and from the Gothic cloister, from the gloomy and sepulchral circles of the Roundheads, and from the Christmas revel of the hospitable Cavalier, his nature selected and drew to itself whatever was great and good, while it rejected all the base and pernicious ingredients by which ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... a sepulchral inscription is professedly a panegyrick, and therefore not confined to historical impartiality, yet it ought always to be written with regard to truth. No man ought to be commended for virtues which he never possessed, but whoever is curious to know his faults must inquire after them in other ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... generations dead Has something more sepulchral and more dread Than lurid glare from seven-branched chandelier Or table lone with stately dais near— Two rows of arches o'er a colonnade With knights on horseback all in mail arrayed, Each one disposed with pillar at his back And to another vis-a-vis. Nor lack The fittings ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... existence now extant were the nuraghs of Sardinia and the talayots of the Balearic Islands,—gigantic tables formed with blocks, barbaric altars of enormous rocks which recalled the Celtic obelisks and sepulchral monuments of the Breton coast. These obscure people had passed from isle to isle, from the extreme of the Mediterranean to the strait ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... wives and daughters of the dead repair thither and pass the greater part of the day in contemplation and self-communion. In the public cemeteries alms are distributed at the graves of the pious: even the winged wanderers of the air find refreshment there, for on each sepulchral stone a small receptacle is hollowed out to collect the dews of heaven, where the birds, as they flutter past, may slake their thirst. On each succeeding Sabbath fresh green branches adorn the headstones, and vailed mourners, seated by them, keep silent watch, in the fond belief ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Of Literature, Art, and Science - Vol. I., July 22, 1850. No. 4. • Various
... lying in his blood, a cord round his neck as though he were a thief, his head crushed in by the height from which he fell. Then two monks went upstairs to the queen's room, and respectfully knocking at the door, asked in sepulchral tones— ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... gave a weird light. When sugar burns in spirits, a sepulchral light appears on everything: living faces look like faces of the dead; all color disappears from them, the ruddiness of the countenance, the brilliance of the lips, the glitter of the eyes,—all turn green. It is ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... in the dream," said Skippy sulkily. Then he remembered that all through the hideous phantasmagoria, in the smoky mists of low gambling dens, in the drizzle of midnight conclaves, across the sepulchral silences of leaden prisons, there had flitted the beatific vision of an angel with velvety eyes and the ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... occasionally arise within the nursery precincts, in spite of iron rules and severe penalties, she was wont to detach the bag from its hiding-place and, retiring to a corner, would count the gold and read over the future epitaph, murmuring in sepulchral tones, befitting such a lugubrious subject, that she should soon have need ...
— Bessie Bradford's Prize • Joanna H. Mathews
... these were all of black bamboo arranged in two long sociable rows from every window. Between the chairs stood an occasional table, suggestive of something eatable or drinkable to come, and on every table and nearly every chair were sepulchral looking antimacassars ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel
... otherwise I shall have to languish in purgatory much longer," the sepulchral voice replied with a deep sigh; but the next moment the ghost yelled out in terror: "Oh! Good Lord!" and began to run away as fast as it could. A shrill whistle was heard, and then another, and the police ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... graveyard full of roses for the starry night of the wax tapers which reigned already in the church, quitting the odor of hay and of roses for that of incense and of the tall, cut lilies, passing from the lukewarm and living air outside to that heavy and sepulchral cold that centuries amass in old sanctuaries—a particular calm came at once to her mind, a pacifying of all her desires, a renunciation of all her terrestrial joys. Then, when she had knelt, when the first canticles had taken their flight under the vault, ...
— Ramuntcho • Pierre Loti
... jumped on to his feet, almost upsetting Dolly with the effort. There was a pause, during which Mr Bideawhile moved away from the table,—as he might have done had he been picking a lock;—and then Mr Longestaffe bade the stranger come in with a sepulchral voice. The door was ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... The sepulchral Pyramid, a little way out of the town, has an order for its basement, the pedestal of which, from point to point of its cap, is twenty-four feet, one inch. At each angle, is a column, engaged one fourth in ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... were closed. We knocked and pounded, but a hollow echo was our only response. At last the light of a lantern illumined the crevices in the weather-beaten doors, and a weird-looking face appeared through the midway opening. "Who's there?" said a voice, whose sepulchral tones might have belonged to the sexton of the Holy Tomb. "We are Ferenghis," we said, "and must get into the city to-night." "That is impossible," he answered, "for the gates are locked, and the keys have been sent away to the governor's palace." With this the night air grew more chill. ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben
... glorious. The bright sun and delicious air are quite exhilarating. We passed a fine flowing rivulet, called Levize, going into the Lake, and many smaller runnels of delicious cold water. On resting by a dark sepulchral grove, a tree attracted the attention, as nowhere else seen: it is called Bokonto, and said to bear eatable fruit. Many fine flowers were just bursting into full blossom. After about four hours' march we put up at Chitimba, the village of Kangomba, and were introduced by Kawa, who ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... work of the same hands that had wrought for the cathedral of Chartres, admitted only an almost angry ray of purple or crimson, here or there, across the dark, roomy spaces. The heart, the heart of youth at least, sank, as one entered, stepping warily out of the sunshine over the sepulchral stones which formed the entire pavement of the church, a great blazonry of family history from age to age for indefatigable eyes. An abundance of almost life-sized sculpture clung to the pillars, lurked in the angles, seemed, with those symbolical gestures, and mystic faces [6] ready to speak their ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... statue; in one place, a range of things like coffeehouse boxes, covered a-top; in another, a parcel of ale-house benches; in a third, a puppet-show representation of a tin cascade; in a fourth, a gloomy cave of a circular form, like a sepulchral vault half lighted; in a fifth, a scanty flip of grass-plat, that would not afford pasture sufficient for an ass's colt. The walks, which nature seems to have intended for solitude, shade, and silence, are filled with ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... and Duncan too glad of the delay to hazard the slightest interruption. As the dying cadence of his strains was falling on the ears of the latter, he started aside at hearing them repeated behind him, in a voice half human and half sepulchral. Looking around, he beheld the shaggy monster seated on end in a shadow of the cavern, where, while his restless body swung in the uneasy manner of the animal, it repeated, in a sort of low growl, sounds, if not words, which bore some slight resemblance ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper
... the hair rose straight up from our heads, as we viewed the supernatural reappearances. After a pause of about five minutes, during which we never spoke or even moved, one of the corpses cried out in a sepulchral voice, "Come, every man his bird!" and held up its arms as ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat
... present day did not interest Braddock in the least. He lived almost continuously on that portion of the mental plane which had to do with the far-distant past, and only concerned himself with physical existence, when it consisted of mummies and mystic beetles, sepulchral ornaments, pictured documents, hawk-headed deities and suchlike things of almost inconceivable antiquity. He rarely walked abroad and was invariably late for meals, save when he missed any particular one altogether, which happened frequently. ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume
... urged in the same direction, each paroxysm of suffering, of moaning, of struggle, on the part of the psychic, being followed a few seconds later by absolute silence. It was in these moments of profound sepulchral hush that the heavy table lurched along the floor. It was a strange ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... On the sepulchral mound she had raised there yet lay the cross of boughs, the last work of him who slept beneath. Helga lifted up the cross, in pursuance of a sudden thought that came upon her. She planted it upon the burial mound, over the priest and the dead horse. The sorrowful ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... perceived why we have caused them to be preceded by these reflections. Nothing could be more sad than the nocturnal aspect of the vast ward of the hospital, where we will introduce our readers. Along the whole length of its gloomy walls were ranged two parallel rows of beds, vaguely lighted by the sepulchral glimmering of a lamp suspended from the ceiling; the narrow windows were barred with iron, like a prison's. The atmosphere is so sickening, so filled with disease, that the new patients did not often become acclimated without danger: this increase of suffering is a ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... and the home government, he conceived the idea of monuments destined to immortalize his glory and to fix in the spirit of the people the remembrance of the past, on which the new master of France, set much value. He repaired the basilica of St. Denis, built sepulchral chapels, and instituted a chapter composed of former bishops. He finished the Pantheon, restored to public worship under the old name of Sainte- Genevieve, ordered the construction of the arcs de triomphe (triumphal arches) ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... president wanted to see, written by his own hand on a long slip of paper. He carried the paper in one hand, a pencil in the other, and when he could find the one he wanted in a crowd of his comrades, he took special pleasure in serving his notice, and would say in his solemn, sepulchral voice: ...
— Recollections and Letters of General Robert E. Lee • Captain Robert E. Lee, His Son
... the work that they were taking under him. Hence the body-snatching and other stories. Mondino continued to be held in high estimation by the Bolognese for centuries after his death. Dr. Pilcher calls attention to the fact that his sepulchral tablet, which is in the portico of the Church of San Vitari in Bologna, and a replica of which he was allowed to have made in order to bring it to America, is the only one of the sepulchral tablets in the great churches of Florence, San Domenico, San Martino, the Cathedral and ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... constructed a hut upon the logs, after which one of the male relations went into the hut and said, "I sit in his house."[219] Thus it would seem that the hut on the grave is regarded as the house of the dead man. If only these sepulchral huts were kept up permanently, they might develop into something like temples, in which the spirits of the departed might be invoked and propitiated with prayer and sacrifice. It is thus that the great round ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... between them and the dread object of their gaze, their expression changed not; she placed her hand in his, she spoke his name to her conductor, but it was as if a statue was suddenly endowed with voice and motion, so cold was the touch of that hand, so sepulchral was that voice; she motioned him aside with a gesture that compelled obedience, and again she looked upon the scaffold. The earl welcomed the old man gladly, for the tale of Agnes had already prepared ...
— The Days of Bruce Vol 1 - A Story from Scottish History • Grace Aguilar
... filth and wretchedness that met our eyes on looking around. Our own misery had stolen upon us by degrees and we were accustomed to the contemplation of each other's emaciated figures, but the ghastly countenances, dilated eye-balls, and sepulchral voices of Captain Franklin and those with him were more than we could bear.' Franklin, on his part, was equally dismayed at the appearance of Richardson and Hepburn. {104} 'We were all shocked,' he says in his journal, 'at ...
— Adventurers of the Far North - A Chronicle of the Frozen Seas • Stephen Leacock
... Jones let out a ghostly, squeaky laugh. "I've never been placed in such a ridiculous position before," he went on, with a sepulchral equanimity of tone. "It's you, Martin, who dragged me into it. However, it's my own fault too. I ought to—but I was really too bored to use my brain, and yours is not to be trusted. You ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... know him as I know him,' said Mrs. Meeker, in a tone so sepulchral, that it made her daughter start. 'He will ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... time of the Vth and VIth Dynasties. Several of these tombs have lately been discovered and opened, and fitted with modern improvements. One or two of them, of the Persian period, have wells (leading to the sepulchral chamber) of enormous depth, down which the modern tourist is enabled to descend by a spiral iron staircase. The Serapeum itself is lit with electricity, and in the Tombs of the Kings at Thebes nothing disturbs the silence but the steady thumping pulsation of the dynamo-engine ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, And Assyria In The Light Of Recent Discovery • L.W. King and H.R. Hall
... from, found Jack's door open and bed empty, while the vision of a white ghost flitting about the garden suggested a midnight rush after old Bun. Frank watched laughingly, till poor Jack came toward the house with the gentleman in gray kicking lustily in his arms, and then whispered in a sepulchral tone,— ...
— Jack and Jill • Louisa May Alcott
... about the earth on which we tread than would be good for us to know; and probably, if capable of speech, she could tell us the strangest stories of air and water. Gifted, or afflicted, as she is with such terribly penetrant power of sense, her notion of apparent realities must be worse than sepulchral. Small wonder if she howl at the moon that shines upon ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... for some of us undoubtedly that we are condemned to be eternal strangers to ourselves, and that not merely to our physical selves. We do not know even the sound of our own voices. Mr. Pemberton-Billing has never heard the most sepulchral voice in the House of Commons, and Lord Charles Beresford does not know how a foghorn sounds when it becomes articulate. I have no idea, and you have no idea, what sort of impression our manner makes on others. If we had, how stricken some of us would be! We should hardly survive the revelation. ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... galling threats, exposure to scorching heat by day and to frosty cold at night, torturing pangs of hunger,—these were the methods by which stalwart men had been transformed into ghastly beings with sunken eyes and sepulchral voices. They were clothed in uncleanly rags, many without caps, and most without shoes. Their hair and beards were overgrown and matted. The condition of their teeth was the only appearance of neatness ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... almost walked into it. Now she parted the bushes and looked down. A stone fell as she looked, making a sepulchral echo. What a place to hide one's sorrow in! No one would think of looking there. Antony might think she had gone away, or he might drag the three black ponds, but here it was unlikely any one would ...
— The Worshipper of the Image • Richard Le Gallienne
... ugly. An exception to this dull magnificence in death was a marble slab, newly set against the wall, in memory of a Lucifero—one of that family, still eminent, to which belonged the sacrilegious bishop. The design was a good imitation of those noble sepulchral tablets which abound in the museum at Athens; a figure taking leave of others as if going on a journey. The Lucifers had shown good taste in their choice of the old Greek symbol; no better adornment of a tomb has ever been devised, ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing
... as of a hundred silvery bells tinkled in the room of Mademoiselle. The laughter filled the alley and trickled back into the court, as strange a thing to enter there as sunlight itself. Mademoiselle was amused. Sidonie, a wise echo, added a sepulchral but faithful contralto. The laughter of the two seemed at last to penetrate the candy man. He fumbled with his horseshoe pin. At length Mademoiselle, exhausted, turned her flushed, beautiful ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... weakness of the consul's that his sense of the ludicrous was too often reached before his more serious perceptions. The absurd combination of the bleak, inhospitable desolation before him, and the sepulchral complacency of his self-elected monitor, quite upset ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... species of composition, the laws of which it is our present purpose to explain, take his stand. Accordingly, recurring to the twofold desire of guarding the remains of the deceased and preserving their memory, it may be said that a sepulchral monument is a tribute to a man as a human being; and that an epitaph (in the ordinary meaning attached to the word) includes this general feeling and something more; and is a record to preserve the memory of the dead, as a tribute due to his individual worth, for a satisfaction ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... like us they dread the bosom Of chill earth's sepulchral gloom; They will find them where to blossom, And perhaps select ...
— A Brief Memoir with Portions of the Diary, Letters, and Other Remains, - of Eliza Southall, Late of Birmingham, England • Eliza Southall
... have every mother's son of us sent to jail or hanged, if he could," growled another voice on Snell's right, while from a mask on the left there came in sepulchral tones, the words, "It had better be hands off with you then, man," the speaker pointing ...
— Elsie's Motherhood • Martha Finley
... took down her spade, and commenced her operations. After a good deal of toil she arrived at the object of her labour. Raising the first head, or rather skull, that came in her way, she was about to make it her own property, when a hollow, wild, sepulchral voice exclaimed, "That is my head; let it alone!" Not wishing to dispute the claimant's title to this head, and supposing she could be otherwise provided, she very good- naturedly returned it and took up another. "That is my father's head," bellowed the same voice. Wishing, if possible, to ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends - Scotland • Anonymous
... his sepulchral performances hardly deserve the notice of criticism. The contemptible Dialogue between He and She should have been suppressed for ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... Recluse." The purpose was not, after all, betrayed; it was really fulfilled, though not in the form intended, in his various occasional poems. In relation to the edifice that he aspired to construct, he likened these poems to little cells, oratories, and sepulchral recesses; they are really the completed work, much more firmly united by their common purpose than by any formal and visible nexus of words. Formally disconnected, they really, as we read and feel them, range themselves to spiritual music, as the component parts ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... the very genius of desolate stillness, had stopped breathless upon the threshold of one cabin; a squirrel peeped impudently into the window of another; a woodpecker, with the general flavor of undertaking which distinguishes that bird, withheld his sepulchral hammer from the coffin-lid of the roof on which he was professionally engaged, as we passed. For a moment I half regretted that I had not accepted the invitation to the river-bed; but, the next moment, a breeze ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... true, were not confined to the clergy. All classes were alike forlorn, miserable, and corrupt. It was a gloomy period. The Church, whenever religious, was sad and despairing. The contemplative hid themselves in noisome and sepulchral crypts. The inspiring chants of Ambrose gave place to gloomy and monotonous antiphonal singing,—that is, when the monks confined themselves to their dismal vocation. What was especially needed was a reform among the clergy themselves. They indeed owned their allegiance to the Pope, as the supreme ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume V • John Lord
... their grief was right grievous and the women and the slave girls shrieked and keened,[FN253] and they continued their lamentations for the space of seven days. Moreover the King bade build over his daughter's ashes a vast vaulted tomb, and burn therein wax tapers and sepulchral lamps: but as for the Ifrit's ashes they scattered them on the winds, speeding them to the curse of Allah. Then the Sultan fell sick of a sickness that well nigh brought him to his death for a ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... a hillock or tumulus near Bishopton, and a large hill near Billingham, both of which used in former time to be "haunted by fairies." Even Ferry-hill, a well-known stage between Darlington and Durham, is evidently a corruption of "Fairy-hill." In Yorkshire a similar story attaches to the sepulchral barrow of Willey How,[C] and in Sussex to a green mound called the Mount in the parish of Pulborough.[D] The fairies formerly frequented Bussers Hill in St. Mary's Isle, one of the Scilly group.[E] The Bryn-yr-Ellyllon,[F] or Fairy-hill, near Mold, may be cited as ...
— A Philological Essay Concerning the Pygmies of the Ancients • Edward Tyson
... sound of a wheeled chair coming toward the living room and he made a pretense of staring aimlessly into the street. Presently a sepulchral voice broke the silence. He turned—Mrs. Hilmer was leaning forward in her chair, regarding him attentively, while the maid stood a little to one side. He had expected to come upon a huddle of blond plumpness, an inanimate mass of forceless ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... long time, I heard another groan, this time much louder than before. The voice appeared to be overhead. There was no tree or house to be seen; and then again the voice seemed to answer from under the ground, in a hollow, sepulchral tone, but I could not tell where he was. But I was determined to find him, so I kept on hallooing and he answering. I went to the place where the voice appeared to come out of the earth. I was walking along rather ...
— "Co. Aytch" - Maury Grays, First Tennessee Regiment - or, A Side Show of the Big Show • Sam R. Watkins
... out of the heights, out of the west and the dark, and growing and growing momentarily, became a rustling, sinister, untidy, heavy shape, which anon settled upon a rock, and croaked, "Glock! glock!" twice, almost like a bark, in a deep and sepulchral voice. To it was added another sable form, coming down from the lonely stony heights, and the two sat together, remarking, as they looked—but their wonderful eyes must have seen it very far away—at the bait. It was the wild cat turned inside-out, and other things, on ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... of age or sex, without any other provocation or incitement than brutal lust and wantonness of barbarity. They even violated the sepulchres of the dead, which have been held sacred among the most savage nations. At Camin and Breckholtz they forced open the graves and sepulchral vaults, and stripped the bodies of generals Schlaberndorf and Ruitz, which had been deposited there. But the collected force of their vengeance was discharged against Custrin, the capital of the New Marche of Brandenburgh, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... the tall chimney-stacks and the high roofs and the white walls of the Chateau, looking spectral enough in the wan moonlight,—ghostly, silent, and ominous. One light only was visible in the porter's lodge; all else was dark, cold, and sepulchral. ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... draw us round no Northern Poles With crowns of mimic roses. That mock our sad sepulchral souls And counterfeit ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, May 16, 1891 • Various
... announced the deep voice of the Postmaster. This meant that the boy must come to bed. It was the sepulchral tone that made them jump perhaps. Zizi got up without a murmur; he was glad to go, really. He slept in the room with his parents. His father, an overcoat thrown over his night things, led him away without another word. And the two women resumed their seance. ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... spend all his time in the mountains. He came to live at various times on the sea-shore at Kailua. He employed everywhere workmen to cut stones, to serve, some say, in the construction of a sepulchral cave; according to others, to build a magnificent palace. Whatever may have been their destination, the stones were admirably hewn.[18] In our days the Calvinistic missionaries have used them in the ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff
... be absolutely without any hangings or tester, and yet carry embroidery, as in the curious funeral couch of a sepulchral monument in painted terra-cotta in the Campana Museum of the Louvre. Here the mattress is worked to resemble ticking, striped, and the cushions have embroidered ends; and are made in the form of bolsters. There is a similar ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... loudly your words have a weird sepulchral tone that echoes far and near through the spacious halls and avenues that makes the black pall of mystery all the more uncanny. As you first enter on your journey on this stream of inky blackness you are appalled by the awful darkness, and the stillness so intense is like that ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... little detective work," he said. His voice was low and sepulchral. "And I have come upon a real adventure. There are reasons why I cannot share it with you, but as it develops you can follow it. About half an hour ago," he explained, "I came here to get my pipe. The window was open. The ...
— Once Upon A Time • Richard Harding Davis
... Moment of Peril" was followed by "The Genius of Poetry," "Eve," and other ideal works that mark his development. His busts, such as those of Lord Leighton and Queen Victoria; his statues, such as "Sir Richard Owen" and "Dr Philpott, bishop of Worcester"; his sepulchral monuments, such as that to Lord Leighton in St Paul's cathedral, a work of singular significance, refinement and beauty; and his memorial statues of Queen Victoria, at Hove and elsewhere, are examples of his power as a portraitist, sympathetic in feeling, sound and ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... had the blue light already, expecting to be called on to use it, and the next instant a lurid glare illumined the whole ship; the sails, the spars, and the countenances of the people, all assumed a sepulchral hue, which gave her the appearance of some phantom bark, such as has appeared to the excited imagination of many a seaman in his wandering through those distant and torrid climes, whose pestilential vapours, rising from the overteeming earth, fever his ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... the word tumulus was in great measure looked upon as a tomb; and tumulo signified to bury. The Greeks speak of numberless sepulchral monuments, which they have thus misinterpreted. They pretended to shew the tomb of [392]Dionusus at Delphi; also of Deucalion, Pyrrha, Orion, in other places. They imagined that Jupiter was buried in Crete: which Callimachus supposes to have been a ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume II. (of VI.) • Jacob Bryant
... some even from the vaulting. These mocking spectres moved slowly along the pavement, mounting the opposite pillars and losing themselves in the darkness; those rays of cold and diffused light made the shadows seem even darker as they brought out of the darkness here a chapel, beyond, a sepulchral stone or the outline of some pilaster; and the great Christ, who crowned the railings of the high altar, glowed against its background of shadow with the brilliancy of its old gilding, like some miraculous apparition floating in space in a ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... country churches. There are several ancient monuments of nobility and gentry, over some of which hang funeral escutcheons, and banners dropping piecemeal from the walls. The tomb of Shakespeare is in the chancel. The place is solemn and sepulchral. Tall elms wave before the pointed windows, and the Avon, which runs at a short distance from the walls, keeps up a low perpetual murmur. A flat stone marks the spot where the bard is buried. There ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various
... light brighter than a thousand noonday suns, stand with the whole story written on scalp, and forehead, and cheek, and hands, and feet; the whole resurrection body aflame and dripping with fiery disclosures, ten thousand sepulchral and celestial and infernal ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... both looked at her with strange, deep interest and curiosity, she related her sepulchral experiences of the night. When with pale cheeks and shuddering frame she described the six dark, shrouded forms that had come up out of the vault, bearing long shadowy coffins, which they carried in a slow ...
— Cruel As The Grave • Mrs. Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... countenances of the Doctor and Hepburn as they strongly evidenced their extremely debilitated state. The alteration in our appearance was equally distressing to them for since the swellings had subsided we were little more than skin and bone. The Doctor particularly remarked the sepulchral tone of our voices which he requested us to make more cheerful if possible, unconscious that his own partook of ...
— The Journey to the Polar Sea • John Franklin
... of these hours among those early paintings in which Florence is so rich, returning ever and anon, with restless sympathies, to wonder whether these tender blossoms of art had not a vital fragrance and savour more precious than the full-fruited knowledge of the later works. We lingered often in the sepulchral chapel of San Lorenzo, and watched Michael Angelo's dim-visaged warrior sitting there like some awful Genius of Doubt and brooding behind his eternal mask upon the mysteries of life. We stood more than once in the little convent chambers where Fra Angelico wrought as if an angel indeed had held ...
— The Madonna of the Future • Henry James
... spacious abbey, where they were received with the greatest hospitality. The good abbot, for the purpose of detaining his guests another day, exhibited to them the whole of the apartments, the dormitory, the refectory, and the chapter-house, in which they beheld a vast sepulchral monument, covered with a superb pall, fringed with gold, and surrounded by twenty waxen tapers in golden candlesticks, while a vast silver censer, constantly burning, filled the air with fumes of incense. The guests naturally inquired ...
— The Lay of Marie • Matilda Betham
... in a sepulchral tone. "That's true. I made the appointment, and, Macrorie—I was ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille
... instinct asserted itself. In a sepulchral voice, he spoke: "One key to the right, in writing. One to the left to read. Hands up, Warren, you're wanted in Paris, and we ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... exaltation of the night she felt herself equal to any conflict, any endurance, and she fell asleep, the hands clasped on her breast expressing a kind of resolute patience, like those of some old sepulchral monument. ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... cautious sotto voce to Leroy, "at the end of your adventures! Behold the number Thirteen! Six lights at one end, six lights at the other,—that is twelve; and in the centre the Thirteenth—the red Eye looking into the sepulchral urn! It is ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... just pulled up at a country inn when they were horrified to hear a sepulchral voice from ...
— The Portland Peerage Romance • Charles J. Archard
... wet hair!' cried the ghost in a deep sepulchral voice. 'Kind English maid, be so kind as ...
— Hollyhock - A Spirit of Mischief • L. T. Meade
... inhabited by a people, whom Ptolomy and Pliny call the Vedantij: but these were undoubtedly mixed with a Roman colony, as appears by the monuments which still remain; I mean the ruins of an amphitheatre, a temple of Apollo, baths, aqueducts, sepulchral, and other stones, with inscriptions, and a great number of medals which the peasants have found by accident, in digging and labouring the vineyards and cornfields, which now cover the ground where ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... radiant tone, Thrills through me, from my lips the goblet stealing! Ye murmuring bells, already make ye known The Easter morn's first hour, with solemn pealing? Sing you, ye choirs, e'en now, the glad, consoling song, That once, from angel-lips, through gloom sepulchral rung, A new ...
— Faust • Goethe
... would be a knock at the door And I would arise at midnight and go to the shop, Where belated travelers would hear me hammering Sepulchral boards and tacking satin. And often I wondered who would go with me To the distant land, our names the theme For talk, in the same week, for I've observed Two always go together. Chase Henry was paired with Edith ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... upon whom the greed of gold was stronger than on Ezekiel, yet he hesitated now that his spectral friend had spoken so plainly, and trembled in every limb as the ghost slowly delivered himself in sepulchral tones of this ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... at all gave a quiet dignity to his tone, and an involuntary sigh that accompanied his words was not lost upon Miss Joliffe. To her this speech seemed oracular and ominous; there was a sepulchral mystery in so vague an expression. He might have to take a holiday. What could this mean? Was this poor young man completely broken by the loss of his friend Mr Sharnall, or was he conscious of the seeds of some fell disease that others knew nothing of? He might have ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... with admirable gravity; then fixed his eyes on the pair, in silence; and then said in a tone so solemn it was almost sepulchral, "This very day, nearly a century and a half ago, Sir Richard Raby was beheaded for being true to ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... the stern, where the expectant passengers had gathered together, the group were silent a minute, while he stood among them holding little Inez by the hand. A few minutes later the purser came aft, carrying a parcel in his hand, which he carefully placed upon the taffrail. Then he spoke in a sepulchral voice. ...
— Adrift on the Pacific • Edward S. Ellis
... occasionally, at his apartments, in the wing of an old palace, looking toward Mount AEtna. He was an antiquary, a virtuoso, and a connoisseur. His rooms were decorated with mutilated statues, dug up from Grecian and Roman ruins; old vases, lachrymals, and sepulchral lamps. He had astronomical and chemical instruments, and black-letter books, in various languages. I found that he had dipped a little in chimerical studies and had a hankering after astrology and alchymy. He affected to believe ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... did not answer. She laid a compelling hand on Mrs. Bean's shoulder and turned her so that she looked straight at the small group of home-stayers down on the wharf. She pointed a sepulchral finger, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... penetrated, and the girl, frenzied with fear, cried out with the wild hope that some one might be near and come to her rescue. But the gloomy aisle of the canyon caught up her voice and echoed it far and high, until it came back to her in a volume of sepulchral sound that filled her with a nameless dread and made her fear to open her lips again. It was as if she had by her cry awakened the evil spirit who inhabited the canyon and set it searching for the intruder. "Help! Help!" How the words rolled and returned upon ...
— The Man of the Desert • Grace Livingston Hill
... best," was the sepulchral reply, "the seven hundred and seventy-seventh wouldn't be too much, would it?—'where moth and ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... to say, here, that my horse could not stand these sepulchral noises, and that my nerves, being shattered by the fever, were inadequate to bear the shock. So the man Dimpdin smiled, like a window-mummy, and contented himself with looking like Apollyon. We reached a rill directly, and he produced ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
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