"Charnel" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... into the darkness of a vast pile, evidently once a convent, and where the chill of the massive walls struck to the marrow. I felt as if walking through a charnel-house. We hurried on; a trembling light, towards the end of an immense and lofty aisle, was our guide; and the crowd, long familiar with the way, rushed through the intricacies where so many feet of monks had trod before them, and where, perhaps, many a deed that ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... Il fut gallican, ce siecle, et janseniste! C'est vers le Moyen Age enorme et delicat, Qu'il faudrait que mon coeur en panne naviguat, Loin de nos jours d'esprit charnel et ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... within its chest: Wild and unsettled are his eyes; His quicken'd hairs begin to rise: Ghastly and strong his features grow; The cold dew trickles from his brow; Whilst grinning beat his clatt'ring teeth, And loosen'd knock his joints beneath. As to the charnel he draws nigh The whiten'd tomb-stone strikes his eye: He starts, he stops, his eye-balls glare, And settle in a death-like stare: Deep hollow sounds ring in his ear; Such sounds as dying wretches hear When ...
— Poems, &c. (1790) • Joanna Baillie
... animals instead of clothes hanging loosely about their limbs, their long and matted locks streaming wildly down their shoulders, their faces burned and blackened by the tropical sun, their bodies wasted by famine and sorely disfigured by scars,—it seemed as if the charnel-house had given up its dead, as, with uncertain step, they glided slowly onwards like a troop of dismal spectres! More than half of the four thousand Indians who had accompanied the expedition had perished, and of the Spaniards only eighty, and many of these irretrievably ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... three had vanished into the shadow of the sphinx, and we could see nothing of them. The great round moon rose higher and higher, flooding the rest of the charnel-house with light, and, save for an occasional roar or whimper from the lions beyond the wall, the silence was intense. Now I could make out the metal gates in this wall, and even dark and stealthy forms which passed and repassed beyond their bars. Then I made out something else also, the figures ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... mystic grin, as if he saw something that they could not perceive. Perhaps he did. Perhaps he saw the Simiacine Plateau, and knew that, after all, he had won the last throw; for up there, far above the table-lands of Central Africa, there lay beneath high Heaven a charnel-house. Hounded down the slope by his tormentors, he had left a memento behind him surer than their torturing knives, keener than their sharpest steel—he had left the ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... Dupper rose to his feet and suggested that the city be called Phoenix, because, he explained, the Phoenix was a bird of beautiful plumage and exceptional voice, which lived for five hundred years and then, after chanting its death-song, prepared a charnel-house for itself and was cremated, after which a new and glorified bird arose from the ashes to live a magnificent existence forever. When Dupper finished his suggestion and explanation the meeting voted on the names and ...
— Arizona's Yesterday - Being the Narrative of John H. Cady, Pioneer • John H. Cady
... catacomb, mausoleum, Golgotha, house of death, narrow house; cemetery, necropolis; burial place, burial ground; grave yard, church yard; God's acre; tope, cromlech, barrow, tumulus, cairn; ossuary; bone house, charnel house, dead house; morgue; lich gate^; burning ghat^; crematorium, crematory; dokhma^, mastaba^, potter's field, stupa^, Tower of Silence. sexton, gravedigger. monument, cenotaph, shrine; grave stone, head stone, tomb stone; memento mori [Lat.]; hatchment^, stone; obelisk, pyramid. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... those thick and gloomy shadows damp, Oft seen in charnel-vaults and sepulchres, Lingering, and sitting, by ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... the death that had met this casual wayfarer at their very doors, and one might not know how the coroner would interpret it. His power to commit a suspect added to his terrors, and gave to the capable, astute official a mundane formidableness that overtopped the charnel-house flavor of his more habitual duties. He was visible through the unchinked logs of the little room where the inquest was in progress, barely spacious enough to contain the bier, the jury, and the witness under examination; ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... was piled with the result of the work of the week. The sponge of commerce, the one you buy at the drug store, is the skeleton of the creature; the thing taken from the water is its corpse. Not until this body has rotted away is it pleasant to live with. Day by day the stench, like that of a charnel house, became more unbearable to Dick. The crew seemed never to notice it, which caused the boy much wonderment that noses had ever been given them. He was glad when a strong wind came and swept some of the smell away instead of leaving it to settle in chunks in every ...
— Dick in the Everglades • A. W. Dimock
... have dared to repeat those names in the charnel hut, lest those whom he invoked should spring upon him and tear him to pieces. No more potent or more perilous charm was known ...
— The Bridge of the Gods - A Romance of Indian Oregon. 19th Edition. • Frederic Homer Balch
... "a truce to digression," let us see what the ancient cemetery of the Innocents was like. Round an irregular four-sided space, about five hundred feet by two, ran a low cloister-like building, called Les Charniers, or the Charnel Houses. It had originally been a cloister surrounding the churchyard; but, so convenient had this place of sepulture been found, from its situation in the heart of Paris, that the remains of mortality increased in most rapid proportion within its ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... the throbs stiffened into death-spasms, and yet the suffering had been nought, compared with that loathing and disgust in my soul. It had seemed that I was alone, I said. Alone as the corpse in unshrouded grave! I was in a charnel-house. Men who were sinless as you hung dead upon the wall, hung dying there. Darkness covered all things at a distance, sighs crept up from far corners, chains clanked, or imprecations or prayer uttered ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... first is an exhibition of wax figures, representing her husband and children as they appeared in death. Then comes a dance of madmen, with dismal howls and songs and speeches. Then a tomb-maker whose talk is of the charnel-house, and who taunts her with her mortality. She interrupts his insulting homily with the exclamation, "Am I not thy Duchess?" "Thou art," he scornfully replies, "some great woman sure, for riot begins to sit on thy forehead (clad in gray hairs) twenty years sooner than on ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... making him deadly sick, and as in a nightmare he scrambled out. Half-way up, he recollected Bondell's gripsack. It had fallen into the hole with him; the pack-strap had evidently broken, and he had forgotten it. Back he went into the pestilential charnel-pit, where he crawled around on hands and knees and groped for half an hour. Altogether he encountered and counted seventeen dead horses (and one horse still alive that he shot with his revolver) before he found Bondell's grip. Looking back upon a life that had not been ...
— Lost Face • Jack London
... taste of death long before they have died, and have placed before their eyes all the furniture of mortality. The horrors of a charnel-house is the scene of their pleasure. The "Midnight Meditations" of Quarles preceded Young's "Night Thoughts" by a century, and both these ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... do!" And swiftly to his finger's call The box wide open flew. O heaven! O hell! What Pandemonium In the pouncet dwells! How it quakes, and how it quivers; How it seethes and swells! Misty steams from it upwreathing, Wave on wave is spread! Like a charnel-vault, 'tis breathing Vapors of the dead! Fumes on fumes as from a throat Of sooty Vulcan rise, Clouds of red and blue and yellow Blotting the fair skies! And the air, with noisome stenches, As from things that rot, Chokes the breather—exhalation From the ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... that, as though peering about in search of something. Suddenly it paused, lifted its head high, and looked straight toward the boats, and at the same moment a whiff of air came toward us heavily charged with a most disgusting and nauseating odour, about equally suggestive of musk and the charnel-house. Its eyes, distinctly luminous, and apparently about two feet apart, were directed straight toward the longboat, and the next instant it began to move toward us, again ...
— A Middy in Command - A Tale of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... veins, Dammed like the dull canal with locks and chains, And moving, as a sick man in his sleep, Three paces, and then faltering:—better be Where the extinguished Spartans still are free, In their proud charnel of Thermopylae, Than stagnate in our marsh,—or o'er the deep Fly, and one current to the ocean add, One spirit to the souls our fathers had, One freeman more, America, to ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... Crept into gloom and vanished from their sight. "O, Robin, Robin!" the old Witch softly cried, "Alack, I'm here!" faint voice, below, replied. "Thou dead," croaked she, "thou ghostly shade forlorn, From charnel-vault sound now thy spectral horn, Sound now thy rallying-note, then silent be Till from thy ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... in to die—lazzaretto, charnel-house, morgue, living grave! Oh, go away, girl, go to the blarsted church if you want to, and ...
— Ridan The Devil And Other Stories - 1899 • Louis Becke
... bring him through and get ahead to the dressing station as quickly as possible. Keep your heads down." Then turning to me the officer said: "Look here, I've just come from the Wood, and, by gad, it's fair hell there! The place is a charnel-house. It's literally choked with corpses; heaps of them; and we dare not bring them in. We've tried even at night, but the shelling prevents us. The place reeks. And the flies! They're awful. It's more than flesh and blood can stand! To put your head up means certain ...
— How I Filmed the War - A Record of the Extraordinary Experiences of the Man Who - Filmed the Great Somme Battles, etc. • Lieut. Geoffrey H. Malins
... a black mass in the gloom, A tower that merged into the heavy sky; Around, the huddled stones of grave and tomb: Some old God's-acre now corruption's sty: 10 He murmured to himself with dull despair, Here Faith died, poisoned by this charnel air. ...
— The City of Dreadful Night • James Thomson
... to let his imagination dwell on these details of the charnel-house. In a letter to Dallas, August 12, 1811, he writes, "I am already too familiar with the dead. It is strange that I look on the skulls which stand beside me (I have always had four in my study) without emotion, but I cannot strip the features of those I have known of their fleshy ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... for more than a week may be divided into two conflicts of equal intensity which raged along the ridge of the heights of Tser. Each of the two slopes, descending one to the Save and the town of Shabatz and the other to the Drina, is now nothing but a charnel house. ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various
... caverns wide, The charnel-house of ages! gathered lie Nations and empires, flung by destiny Beneath thy flowing tide: There rest alike the monarch and the slave; There is no galling chain, no crown ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... says that he "planned his singular edifice in advance, like a castle of Anne Radcliffe, with donjon, turrets, underground chambers, secret passages, corkscrew stairs, vaulted halls, mysterious closets, hiding places in the thickness of the walls, oubliettes, charnel-houses, crypts where his heroes and heroines were to meet later on, to love, hate, fight, set ambushes, assassinate, or marry. . . . He cut masked doors in the walls for his expected personage to appear through, and trap doors in the floor for him ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... And naught of thee remain, but grim and hollow head. O, woeful pride! dark root of all distress! With contrite heart, our fleshless scalps behold! O wretched man, to God, meek prayers address. Thy lusty strength, thy wit, thy daring bold, All shall lie low with us in charnel cold: Proud king, 'tis thus thy pamper'd corpse shall rot; Thus, in the dust thy purple pomp be roll'd, Mark then, in peeled skull, thy ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 554, Saturday, June 30, 1832 • Various
... owing to the presence of various fakirs, who, though still alive, were in advanced stages of putrefaction. Most people are supposed to go easily and pleasantly to the devil, but these elected to do so by way of a charnel-house asceticism, and an elaborate system of self-torture. Some were suspended from the ceiling by a rope tied to their arms, some embedded in plaster, some stiffened in a circle, some permanently distorted into the shape of the letter ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... abominal smell!" exclaimed the widow, holding a flimsy lace handkerchief to her nose. "Kind of camphor-sandal-wood charnel-house smell. I wonder you are not ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume
... time, was shaken to its foundations. When the news of the February Revolution in Paris reached Austria the Magyar Diet was in session in Hungary. The success of the revolutionists in France inflamed the Liberal leaders in Hungary. Casting aside all reserve, Kossuth declared in the Diet: "From the charnel house of the Viennese system a poison-laden atmosphere steals over us. It would paralyze our nerves and pin us down when we might soar. The future of Hungary can never be secured while Austria maintains a system of government in direct antagonism to ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... instead of fishing for barbel, I was unable to rise from my bed; and for fifteen nights I never closed my eyes without seeing in my dreams ghosts, and all the horrid details of the churchyard and the charnel-house. ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... back again, after seven years, scarcely knowing why he came, except that the coast beckoned with a remote gesture, and that he desired to get as far as possible from the charnel house of Europe, and that he shrank from presenting himself among the acquaintances of his boyhood and the few distant relatives left him upon the ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... 'My pupil must not repeat to me that worn-out Christian calumny. Into whatsoever low superstitions the pious vulgar may have fallen, it is the Christians now, and not the heathens, who are idolaters. They who ascribe miraculous power to dead men's bones, who make temples of charnel-houses, and bow before the images of the meanest of mankind, have surely no right to accuse of idolatry the Greek or the Egyptian, who embodies in a form of symbolic beauty ideas beyond the ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... and they have found things like flowerpots upside down, Mis'ess Yeobright; and inside these be real charnel bones. They have carried 'em off to men's houses; but I shouldn't like to sleep where they will bide. Dead folks have been known to come and claim their own. Mr. Yeobright had got one pot of the bones, and was going to bring 'em home—real skellington ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... the Lord's Vicegerent at Canterbury, and many of the most learned divines of England; and from those ecclesiastical leeches there was a Shylock cry of incest, incest, incest! And those terrible words came greeting the ears of Charles Blount, making his home like a charnel-house, and they nearly sent his beautiful Eliza to a maniac's grave. Still she lingered on. Denied the power of a wife, she would not relinquish her duties as a mother to her sister's babes. There was a calm heroism here which few can imitate. ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... messenger of God, Poised lightly 'bove the charnel sod, With upturned brow and radiant eyes, Pointing unto the distant skies, Whispers: "Oh, weary child of care, Look up! thy heavenly ...
— The Poetical Works of Mrs. Leprohon (Mrs. R.E. Mullins) • Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon
... and a churchyard was to me merely the receptacle of bodies deprived of life, which, from being the seat of beauty and strength, had become food for the worm. Now I was led to examine the cause and progress of this decay and forced to spend days and nights in vaults and charnel-houses. My attention was fixed upon every object the most insupportable to the delicacy of the human feelings. I saw how the fine form of man was degraded and wasted; I beheld the corruption of death succeed to the blooming cheek of life; I saw how the worm inherited the wonders of the ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... and under a goodly light. Wide enough the light was, and clear; no more Salvator's lurid chasm on jagged horizon, nor Duerer's spotted rest of sunny gleam on hedgerow and field; but light over all the world. Full shone now its awful globe, one pallid charnel-house,—a ball strewn bright with human ashes, glaring in poised sway beneath the sun, all blinding-white with death from pole to pole,—death, not of myriads of poor bodies only, but of will, and mercy, and conscience; death, not once inflicted on the flesh, but daily, fastening ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... the war, thousands of our bravest and noblest heroes, captured by the rebels, the feeble remnant of the tens of thousands imprisoned there, a majority of whom had perished of cold, nakedness, starvation, and disease, in those charnel houses, victims of the fiendish malignity of the rebel leaders. These poor fellows, starved to the last degree of emaciation, crippled and dying from frost and gangrene, many of them idiotic from their sufferings, or with the fierce fever of typhus, more deadly than sword or minie bullet, ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... villany; instilling and steal- ing into our hearts that the blessed spirits are not at rest in their graves, but wander, solicitous of the affairs of the world. But that those phantasms appear often, and do frequent cemeteries, charnel-houses, and churches, it is because those are the dormitories of the dead, where the devil, like an insolent champion, beholds with pride the spoils and trophies ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne
... delay in the accomplishment of his vow. Charles V. had charged him in his will to build a mausoleum for the kings of the Austrian race. He bound the two obligations in one, and added a third destination to the enormous pile he contemplated. It should be a palace as well as a monastery and a royal charnel-house. He chose the most appropriate spot in Spain for the erection of the most cheerless monument in existence. He had fixed his capital at Madrid because it was the dreariest town in Spain, and to envelop himself ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... committee" disposes of lives, proscribes and executes: it is the reign of sailors, porters, and the dregs of the populace.—At Avignon,[3374] it is that of simple brigands, incendiaries and assassins, who, six months previously, converted the Glaciere[3375] into a charnel-house. They return in triumph and state that "this time the Glaciere will be full." Five hundred families had already sought asylum in France before the first massacre; now, the entire remainder of the honest bourgeoisie, twelve hundred persons, take to ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... no solemn stole Shall on thy breast be laid; No mumbling priest shall speed thy soul, No charnel vault thee shade. But by the shadowed hazel copse, Aneath the greenwood tree, Where airs are soft and waters sing, Thou'lt ever sleep by me, My love, ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... struggled, May fall before the foe: Stout hearts, devoted to their trust, All moulder, cold and low. The land may prove a charnel-house For millions of the slain, And blood and carnage mark the track Where madmen march amain,— Fanatic heels may scourge it, Black demons blight the sod; And hell's foul desolation Mock Liberty's fair God.— The future leave no record, Of mighty struggle there, Save hollowness, ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... always beautiful. In a happier day than this it was believed that the true and the beautiful were bound together in angelic wedlock and that all art found its highest mission in giving them expression. But the drama has been led through devious paths into the charnel house, and in "Salome" we must needs listen to the echoes of its dazed and drunken footfalls. The maxim "Truth before convention" asserts its validity and demands recognition under the guise of "characteristic beauty." ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... of the College of the Holy Trinity, endowed as a "carnarie," or charnel-house, of the city. The chief duties of the priests belonging to the chantry attached thereto were to bury the dead, and keep up perpetual Masses for the souls ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... left the room. He closed the door behind him, and felt of the knob to see that he had shut it tight. This revelation of a woman's nature was sickening him; he wanted to make sure that the library door was shut close upon the malodorous charnel house of the passions. He shivered with a nervous chill as he hurried down the hall and went upstairs to his room ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... reigning dynasty could only be saved by granting to Hungary a responsible Ministry drawn from the Diet itself, and by establishing constitutional government throughout the Austrian dominions. "From the charnel-house of the Viennese system," he cried, "a poison-laden atmosphere steals over us, which paralyses our nerves and bows us when we would soar. The future of Hungary can never be secure while in the other provinces there exists a system of government in direct antagonism to every ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... This was Edward Ravenscroft, once a member of the Middle Temple,—an ingenious gentleman, of whose taste it may be held a satisfactory instance, that he deemed the tragedy of "Titus Andronicus" too mild for representation, and generously added a few more murders, rapes, and parricides, to that charnel-house of horrors[1]. His turn for comedy being at least equal to his success in the blood-stained buskin, Mr Ravenscroft translated and mangled several of the more farcical French comedies, which he decorated with the lustre of his own great name. Amongst others which ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... evening when the Wanderer fell to the earth before the shadow of Beatrice, Keyork Arabian sat alone in his charnel-house. The brilliant light of two powerful lamps illuminated everything in the place, for Keyork loved light, like all those who are intensely attached to life for its own sake. The yellow rays flooded the ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... with clay, And in the ghastly gleam Of charnel gloom didst kiss decay; And many full moons waned away, And ...
— My Beautiful Lady. Nelly Dale • Thomas Woolner
... proceed to the room occupied by the United States Minister and his wife, and there to place a clammy hand on Mrs. Otis's forehead, while he hissed into her trembling husband's ear the awful secrets of the charnel-house. With regard to little Virginia, he had not quite made up his mind. She had never insulted him in any way, and was pretty and gentle. A few hollow groans from the wardrobe, he thought, would be more than sufficient, or, if that failed to wake her, he might grabble at ...
— Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories • Oscar Wilde
... not wanting. While I—good Heaven!—have thatched myself over with the dead fleeces of sheep, the bark of vegetables, the entrails of worms, the hides of oxen or seals, the felt of furred beasts; and walk abroad a moving Rag-screen, overheaped with shreds and tatters raked from the Charnel-house of Nature, where they would have rotted, to rot on me more slowly! Day after day, I must thatch myself anew; day after day, this despicable thatch must lose some film of its thickness; some film of it, frayed away by tear and wear, must be brushed-off ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... past the revolting carcasses. I followed, holding my nose against their nauseating, charnel-house odor. We scrambled up ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... De Quincey's phrase, was "a little lower than the angels," died and was buried in the parish church at Stratford. Shakespeare knew that in the course of time graves were often opened and the bones thrown into the charnel house. The world is thankful that he deliberately planned to have his resting place remain unmolested. His grave was dug seventeen feet deep and over it was placed the following inscription, intended to frighten those who might think of moving ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... the last thought that occurred to him; that morbid excitability of fancy which, whether in his art or in his deeds, had led him to strange delight in horror, now served but to haunt him with the images of death in those ghastliest shapes familiar to them who look only into the bottom of the charnel, and see but the rat and the worm and the loathsome agencies of corruption. It was not the despair of conscience that seized him, it was the abject clinging to life; not the remorse of the soul,—that still slept within him, too noble an agency ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of this charnel-house into the pure air once more. Do not shrink back—trust yourself with me this once at least." The brick walls of the factory rose a hundred yards off, in full view of the Row, and leading her along the river bank he placed her on one of the ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... wakes!—finds himself well and alone—there is no one to tell him who it is that has preserved his life; nor has Irene, it seems, left any trace of her presence. He sallies forth again into the city of the plague to seek her, and she is destined to return to the empty chamber! Taken to a hideous sort of charnel-house, Adrian is shown the body of a female clad in a mantle that had once been Irene's, and concludes that it is the corpse of her who, for the last three days and nights, has been tending on him. I recollect that, when I came to this part of the novel, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... the deck, For a charnel-dungeon fitter: 435 All fixed on me their stony eyes, That in the Moon ...
— Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Select Poems • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... heart of every man and boy we pass upon the street, how few—how very few—there are that would not reveal sickening pictures of lust, disease, melancholy and insanity. Charnel-houses of sin and lust—sloughs of despond and regret—excess of passion offset by lack of power—dread, despair, hopelessness, shame and desperation, making a picture of misery scarcely to be conceived by any but those unfortunate ...
— Manhood Perfectly Restored • Unknown
... now I do remember, The old Egyptians at their banquets placed A charnel sight of dead men's skulls before them, With images of cold mortality, To temper their fierce joys when they grew rampant. I like the custom well: and ere we crown With freer mirth the day, I shall propose, In calmest recollection of ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... signal with ready and timorous acquiescence, she pushed the door open, but instantly recoiled with terror. It was a charnel house, half filled ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... things the ruin is not altogether to be regretted. It has softened certain loathsome details of the charnel facts portrayed, and in other pictures the torment and anguish of the lost souls are no longer so painful as the old painters ascertained them. Hell in the Campo Santo is not now the hell of other days, just as the hell of Christian doctrine is not the hell it used to be. Death and the world are ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... blend them; finding it convenient to make external show pass for sterling worth—to let whitewashed walls vouch for clean shrines. It may hate him who dares to scrutinize and expose—to raze the gilding, and show base metal under it—to penetrate the sepulcher, and reveal charnel relics: but hate as it will, it is indebted ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... natural to them at sight of their king so strangely and appallingly stricken, but evidently they were entirely and happily unconscious of the THING that sat there in their midst, touching them, consorting its charnel horrors with their warm-blooded humanity,—so near, so close to them, that he fancied the smell of that trickling gore, that dank grave-soil, must necessarily enter in at their nostrils, and he sickened at the thought for very sympathy. The woe-wasted wife, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... Stratford in 1694, records the tradition that the poet himself composed the lines in a style calculated to impress sextons and prevent them from digging up his bones and throwing them into the adjacent charnel house. However this may be, the grave ...
— The Facts About Shakespeare • William Allan Nielson
... when the clang of the hammer on the bell announced the wish of the divers to rise again, I started from a seat on a coil of ropes which I had in my musings taken possession of—having been oblivious of the intervening half hour, during which I had been shadowing forth the secrets of the green charnel-house, with its surface lying smiling before me in the lurid glare of the ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... same evening. It possessed unlimited powers to confiscate property and take life. The Girondists dared not vote against this tribunal. The public voice would pronounce them the worst of traitors. France was now a charnel-house. Blood flowed in streams which were never dry. Innocence had no protection. Virtue was suspicion, suspicion a crime, the guillotine the penalty, and the confiscated estate the bribe to accusation. Thus there was erected, in the name of liberty and popular rights, over the ruins of the ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... had prostituted liberty to lust. It was France that had dragged public opinion to the scaffold and the guillotine. It was France that held the axe uplifted over all that was good and holy. It was France that was making all Europe a charnel-house. It was General Buonaparte of France, who only sought to subdue England, the more easily to conquer the world. Many an English hearth had cursed his name. Many a widow had he made desolate, and many an orphan fatherless. The "conquered subjects" of King George spoke and thought in French. ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... is it." Lady Agatha's face flushed and lit up. "I've made it healthy for them. Highercombe is a painted lie—a pest-house, a charnel-house, full of unwholesome miasmas from its pretty green, its pond covered with water-lilies. Death lurks in that pond. There is bad drainage and bad water; the damp oozes through the old brick floors of the houses. The whole place is as deadly in its ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... you up at every step. Every yard of progress is made with difficulty, and you move nervously among the tall rank nettles in momentary fear of dislocating your ankle, or of being suddenly precipitated into the reeking charnel house of some defunct Mayo family. The Connaught dead seem to be very exclusive. Most of the ground is enclosed in small squares, each having a low stone wall, half-a-yard thick, with what looks ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... calm and motionless, whilst I Slide giddily as the world reels—My God! The beautiful blue heaven is flecked with blood! The sunshine on the floor is black! The air Is changed to vapours such as the dead breathe In charnel pits! Pah! I am choaked! There creeps A clinging, black, contaminating mist About me—'tis substantial, heavy, thick, I cannot pluck it from me, for it glues My fingers and my limbs to one another, And eats into my sinews, and dissolves My flesh to a pollution, poisoning The subtle, pure, ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... corner where Sir Adrian's almost lifeless body had been found? Is this a trick, a delusion of the brain? What is this thing huddled together, lying in a heap—a ghastly, ragged, filthy heap, before their terrified eyes? And why does this charnel-house smell infect their nostrils? They stagger. Even the strong men grow pale and faint, for there, before them, gaunt, awful, ...
— The Haunted Chamber - A Novel • "The Duchess"
... before. The hues of life flushed up with unwonted energy into the countenance—the limbs relaxed—and, save that the eyelids were yet pressed heavily together, and that the bandages and draperies of the grave still imparted their charnel character to the figure, I might have dreamed that Rowena had indeed shaken off, utterly, the fetters of Death. But if this idea was not, even then, altogether adopted, I could at least doubt no longer, when, arising from the bed, tottering, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... began to prevail. Then it was learned that the ship's doctor had run out of medicines. The passengers became demoralized. They believed their vessel was to become a charnel ship. Strict sanitary orders were issued, ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... as well as shadows to the picture. Out of that grim den of death, out of that floating lazar house, there came a few blooming maidens and stalwart youths, like fair flowers springing from the rankness of a charnel. Their sorrows were but for the misfortunes of others; and even these were a while forgotten in the joy of meeting near and dear relatives, and old friends upon the shore of the promised land. They went their way rejoicing, ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... there was a note in her voice that recalled the night he had listened to it over the telephone, "he was different. There is no more dreadful thing in the play, to me, than the character of Rosmer. To think of him sitting quietly in that charnel house, prospering in soul, growing sleek in thought, becoming stored with high ideas. Perfect peace came to him in spite of the stern-faced portraits which shrieked murder from the walls. He dreamed of freeing and ennobling mankind, and all the time ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Investigator • John T. McIntyre
... are some that see him sit In the charnel house alone, Counting what seems to him shining gold, Heap upon heap, a sum ne'er told: Alas, the dead, how they lack of wit! They are not even bits ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... the parapet of the Latomia, where the breath of the sirocco, the gnawing tooth of time, and the slow ravelling of rain had serrated the ledge, stood Leo, gazing into the dizzying depths of the charnel house that swarmed with the ghosts of nine thousand men, who once were ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... sittings, and many a long afternoon's discourse, that I learned all the details of the sad event which had converted that fair pavilion into a place as terrible, to the ideas of the country folks, as a dark charnel-vault. ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... study, a very modest extension of my open air establishments, has become something of a charnel house. The grey fly pays me a visit. If I lay a piece of butcher's meat on the windowsill, she hastens up, works her will on it and retires. No hiding place escapes her notice among the jars, cups, glasses and receptacles of every ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... through the stiffening carcass and the eyes glaze over. To humans the buzzard pays a deeper meed of respect—he hangs aloft longer; but in the end he comes. No scavenger shark, no carrion crab, ever chambered more grisly secrets in his digestive processes than this big charnel bird. Such is the way ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... year after the death, when the flesh of the corpse is entirely decayed, the skull is removed and placed solemnly in another burying-ground, or rather charnel-house, where all the skulls of the family are deposited. Every family has such a charnel-house, which is commonly situated near the dwelling. It appears to be simply an open space in the forest, where the skulls are set in ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... miseries looked small, and the whole external world shrunk into a little child's garden. It was, "Simply to sink down into this little garden; and there to nestle yourself so snugly, so homewise, in some furrow, that in looking out from your warm lark-nest, you likewise can discern no wolf-dens, charnel-houses, or thunder-rods, but only blades and ears, every one of which, for the nest-bird, is a tree, and a sun-screen, and rain-screen." There is a similar way of being good, with a goodness which, though limited, is pure and perfect in nature. Nay, we ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... Prince Karl, and I marvelled what they spoke about. Not that I had long to wonder, for through the open door of the chapel there streamed a dismal host of invaders from the Wolfmark—black Hussars of Death, in dark armor, with white skeletons painted over them, all charnel-house ribs and bones in hideous and ridiculous array—which was one of Duke Casimir's devices to frighten children, and no doubt these scarecrows frightened many of these. Specially when these villanous companies were recruited ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... little iron bed, streamed out on each side over the pillow, and in the midst of it lay her face, a radiant isle in a dark sea. I stood and gazed. Fascinated by her beauty? God forbid! I was fascinated by the awful incongruity between that face, pure as the moonlight, and the charnel-house that lay unseen behind it. She was to me, henceforth, not a woman, but a live Death. I had no sense of sacredness, such as always in the chamber even of a little girl. How should I? It ...
— The Flight of the Shadow • George MacDonald
... "Creeping down the crypt steps, oppressed by growing horror and by terror of coming judgment, sickening under fears engendered by the darkness of night and the charnel-house air he breathed, Jasper opens the door of the tomb and holds up his lantern, shuddering at the thought of what ...
— The Puzzle of Dickens's Last Plot • Andrew Lang
... a climate so bracing and life-giving that the phthisis bacillus can hardly live in it, it seemed to our soldiers, after their long march across the veldt, a veritable City of Refuge. Alas! how soon it was to be turned into a charnel house! ...
— From Aldershot to Pretoria - A Story of Christian Work among Our Troops in South Africa • W. E. Sellers
... as rehearsed by Sir Edwin Arnold. There all beings met—gods, devas, men, beasts of the field, and fowls of the air—to make common cause against the relentless fate that rules the world, and to bewail the sufferings and death which fill the great charnel-house of existence, while Buddha voiced their common complaint and stood before them as the only pitying friend that the universe had found. It was the first great Communist meeting of which we have any record.[88] The wronged and suffering ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... all, and little by little, without perceiving it, thinking only of stammering forth acts of gratitude, he disappeared from the chapel, his soul borne up by the souls of others, away, away from the world, far from his charnel-house, far ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... search-light of our observation turned upon the fact of death, the world would appear to us like a huge charnel- house; but in the world of life the thought of death has, we find, the least possible hold upon our minds. Not because it is the least apparent, but because it is the negative aspect of life; just as, in spite of the fact that we shut our eyelids every second, it is the openings ...
— Sadhana - The Realisation of Life • Rabindranath Tagore
... mysterious impulse, had struggled through many difficulties only to lie down here silently, uncomplainingly, and give up their lives, all stirred Dermot strangely. And when the thought of the incalculable wealth that lay in the vast quantity of ivory stored in this great charnel-house flashed through his mind, he felt that it would be a shameful desecration, inviting the wrath of the gods, to remove ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... O charnel gulf I 2 Of death on death, not to be done away, Why harrowest thou my soul? Ill boding harbinger of woe, what word Have thy lips uttered? Oh, thou hast killed me again, Before undone! What say'st? What were thy tidings? Woe ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... dawn. Desolate as was the appearance of the dull, misty daybreak, it was yet the most welcome of all the objects surrounding the starving soldier on which he could fix his languid gaze. To look back on the city behind him was to look back on the dreary charnel-house of famine and death; to look down on the waste ground without the walls was to look down on the dead body of the comrade of his watch, who, maddened by the pangs of hunger which he had suffered during the night, had cast himself from the rampart to meet a welcome death on ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... rails laid over the steps, and listening to the rasping noise which the casters of these osier waggons made in their descent. Down below there was a scene of exquisite horror. They entered into a charnel-house atmosphere, and walked along through murky puddles, amidst which every now and then purple eyes seem to be glistening. At times the soles of their boots stuck to the ground, at others they splashed through the horrible mire, anxious and yet delighted. The gas ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... a hundred steps, and the atmosphere became singularly cold and charnel-like, when they entered a large vault, which, by the light of their torches, appeared of great extent. Its walls were covered with uncouth representations, ...
— Alfgar the Dane or the Second Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... he could not believe the discovery; but next instant—as at the temple pond, though now without need of placard or interpreter—he understood. This bowl, a tiny crater among the weeds, showed like some paltry valley of Ezekiel, a charnel place of Herod's innocents, the battlefield of some babes' crusade. A chill struck him, not from the water or the early mists. In stupor, he ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... loathsome experience. The dead detective had altered his position as Silas Blackburn had done, and this time someone had been in the room and suffered the appalling change. Bobby's fingers still responded to the charnel feeling of cold, inactive flesh suddenly become alive and potent beneath his touch. And a reason for the apparent miracle offered itself. Between the extinction of his candle and the commencement ...
— The Abandoned Room • Wadsworth Camp
... loose gestures, and foul talk, But most by lewd and lavish act of sin, Lets in defilement to the inward parts, The soul grows clotted by contagion, Imbodies, and imbrutes, till she quite lose, The divine property of her first being. Such are those thick and gloomy shadows damp Oft seen in charnel vaults and sepulchres, Lingering, and sitting by a new made grave, As loath to leave the body that it lov'd, And linked itself by carnal sensuality To a degenerate ...
— Phaedo - The Last Hours Of Socrates • Plato
... of the Story of Paris in 1906. The Tower of Dagobert; the old Academy of Medicine; the Annexe of the Hotel Dieu and a whole street, the Rue du Petit Pont; the Hotel of the Provost of Paris—all have fallen under the housebreakers' picks. As we write the curious vaulted entrance to the old charnel houses of St Paul is being swept away and the revision of this little book has been a melancholy task to a lover of historic Paris. Part II. of the work has been brought up to date and the changes in the Louvre noted: ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... you enjoyed in the Parc de Charrebourg, madame," he began, in an obvious vein of sarcasm. And as he did so, he thought he observed her eyes averted, and her color brighten for a moment. He did not suffer this observation to interrupt him, but he laid it up in the charnel of his evil remembrances, and continued: "I don't know, I say, what society you there enjoyed. It may have been very considerable, or it may have been very limited: it was possibly very dull, or possibly very delightful, ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... would never be able to free his mind from the memory of those dreadful moments. The gloom which surrounded that horrible charnel pit, which seemed to go down to the very bowels of the earth, conveyed from far down the sights and sounds of the nethermost hell. The ghastly fate of the African as he sank down to his terrible doom, his black face growing grey with terror, his white eyeballs, ...
— The Lair of the White Worm • Bram Stoker
... and to live like those many worthy men, of which you made mention in the former part of your discourse. This is my firm resolution. And as a pious man advised his friend, that, to beget mortification, he should frequent churches, and view monuments, and charnel-houses, and then and there consider how many dead bodies time had piled up at the gates of death, so when I would beget content, and increase confidence in the power, and wisdom, and providence of Almighty God, I will walk the meadows, by some gliding stream, and ...
— The Complete Angler • Izaak Walton
... lie in the hospitals and in the graves, while their souls are being tossed over into a lost eternity, an avalanche of horror and despair. The London plague was nothing to it. That counted its victims by thousands; but this modern pest has already shoveled its millions into the charnel-house of the morally dead. The longest rail train that ever ran over the Erie or the Hudson tracks was not long enough or large enough to carry the beastliness and the putrefaction which have gathered up in the bad books and newspapers of ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... together on the deck, For a charnel-dungeon fitter: All fixed on me their stony eyes, That in the moon ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... little clock, my life away! Even a second seems a day. Even a minute seems a year, Peopled with ghosts, that press and peer Into my face so charnel white, Lit by the devilish, dancing light. Tick, little clock! mete out my fate: Tortured and tense I wait, I wait. . ...
— Rhymes of a Rolling Stone • Robert W. Service
... "Here rest these bones till the last day," When Time, swift both of foot and feather, May bear them the sexton kens not whither? What care I, then, though my last sleep Be in the desert or the deep, No lamp nor taper, day and night, To give my charnel chargeable light? I have there like quantity of ground, And at the last day I shall ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... man," said he, "to treat a poor Emir like me in the manner you have done, as if my house was a charnel-house? I suppose you will ask me the price of ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... microbes are the most active agents of progressive auto-infection: the streptococcus lanceolatus, the bacterium pyogenes, the bacillus subtilis, the staphylococci, the bacterium coli commune? They all play a part in the game, reducing the body in time to a charnel-house. Or are such substances as putrescein, cadaverin, skatol or indol—which are derived through chemical change in the putrescent mass—contributors to the spread of the poisonous taint throughout the system? Any single one or ...
— Intestinal Ills • Alcinous Burton Jamison
... shouting, huzzaing and bell-ringing, either in, upon or around the church, and also not to touch the bells, at peril of being stripped and flogged soundly from top to toe. When school is out they shall go together before the charnel-house and each one shall repeat with devotion a pater noster, an ave maria or the psalm de profundis and then return home quietly. Striking each other with satchels, pinching, spitting, fighting and stone-throwing, shall be punished by the rod. The schoolmaster shall beat them with rods, and ...
— The Life and Times of Ulric Zwingli • Johann Hottinger
... number, and there is no reason to believe that there has been any improvement since then. Many of them are simply appalling. They become more wretched and squalid as the East River and Five Points sections are reached. Cherry, Water, and the neighboring streets, are little better than charnel houses. ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... live; in black draped they their corpses; even in their talk do I still feel the evil flavour of charnel-houses. ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... the tumult died away in low gaspings and moanings. The day broke. The Nabob had slept off his debauch, and permitted the door to be opened. Twenty-three ghastly figures staggered out of the charnel-house, one hundred and twenty-three bodies were hastily thrown into a pit and covered up, and the Black Hole of Calcutta has gone into history as a synonym for all that is dreadful and all that is possible ...
— Ten Great Events in History • James Johonnot
... extraordinary case, for I have witnessed scenes equally wretched; and it is only necessary to go into Crosby-street, Freemason's row, and many cross streets out of Vauxhall-road, to find hordes of poor creatures living in cellars, which are almost as bad and offensive as charnel houses. In Freemason's-row I found, about two years ago, a court of houses, the floors of which were below the public street, and the area of the whole court was a floating mass of putrefied animal and vegetable ...
— The Claims of Labour - an essay on the duties of the employers to the employed • Arthur Helps
... Young, innocent, loving, and beloved, they descend together into the tomb: but Shakspeare has made that tomb a shrine of martyred and sainted affection consecrated for the worship of all hearts,—not a dark charnel vault, haunted by spectres of pain, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 563, August 25, 1832 • Various
... about the result. On the 23rd of April 1616, England's greatest dramatist died in the prime of life—he was just fifty-two years of age. Two days later he was buried in Stratford Church, near the north wall of the chancel. Fearful lest his bones should be added to the grisly burden of the charnel-house close by, he penned a curse upon those who should ...
— William Shakespeare - His Homes and Haunts • Samuel Levy Bensusan
... chapel dedicated to St. John the Evangelist, converted by Edward VI. into, and now used as, a grammar school; below it was a charnel-house. ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Norwich - A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief History of the Episcopal See • C. H. B. Quennell
... obits and chantreys were confiscated, and the vestments and altar cloths were sold. The early reformers were backed by greedy partisans. The Protector Somerset, who was desirous of building rapidly a sumptuous palace in the Strand, pulled down the chapel and charnel-house in the Pardon churchyard, and carted off the stones of St. Paul's cloister. When the good Ridley was installed Bishop of London, he would not enter the choir until the lights on the altar were ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... me leap, rather than marry Paris, From off the battlements of yonder tower; Or walk in thievish ways; or bid me lurk Where serpents are; chain me with roaring bears; Or shut me nightly in a charnel-house, O'er-cover'd quite with dead men's rattling bones, With reeky shanks and yellow chapless skulls; Or bid me go into a new-made grave, And hide me with a dead man in his shroud; Things that, to hear them told, have made me tremble; And I will do it without fear ...
— Romeo and Juliet • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... When I went to sleep, last night, there were—corpses all round me. I thought I was in a charnel ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... vengeance of nature, even of God, that Macbeth cannot say Amen; that Macbeth can sleep no more; that Macbeth is "cabined cribbed, confined, bound in to saucy doubts and fears;" that his very brain is a charnel-house, whence arise the ghosts of his own murders, till he envies the very dead the rest to which his hand has sent them. That immediate and eternal vengeance upon crime, and that inner reward of ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... filled with human corpses in thick, serried masses. Quicklime and straw had been thrown over them by the ton. Piles of bodies of men and of horses had been partially cremated in the most rudimentary fashion. The country seemed to be one endless charnel-house. The stench of the dead was appalling. Of the fifty odd houses that form the village of Etrepilly, not one remained intact. Some of them had been hit by a shell that penetrated through the roof, falling into the cellar, ...
— Paris War Days - Diary of an American • Charles Inman Barnard
... note of cleanliness in the charnel-house, this still pliant body that lolls its head aside when it is moved as if to lie better; it gives a childish illusion of being less dead than the others. But being less disfigured, it seems more pathetic, nearer to one, more intimate, as we look. And had we said anything in the presence ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... a culmination of fear. It had never seemed so near, so strong. It was stronger than her will to put it from her and in it, with inherent superstition, she saw a premonition. The little peaceful church became all at once a place of terror, a grisly charnel house of vanished hopes and lives. The spirits of countless Cravens seemed all about her, hostile, malign, triumphing in her weakness, rejoicing in her fear—spectral figures of the dead crowding, hurrying, threatening. She seemed to see ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... them to ransom courteously when they were all cured, for there was none that was not grievously wounded, French as well as English. I saw afterwards, sitting at the table of King Charles of France, a Breton knight who had been in it, Sir Yvon Charnel , and he had a face so carved and cut that he showed full well how good a fight had been fought. The matter was talked of in many places, and some set it down as a very poor, and others as a very ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... Showering those powerful fragments on the dead. And, as he pass'd, each lifted up its head, 790 As doth a flower at Apollo's touch. Death felt it to his inwards: 'twas too much: Death fell a weeping in his charnel-house. The Latmian persever'd along, and thus All were re-animated. There arose A noise of harmony, pulses and throes Of gladness in the air—while many, who Had died in mutual arms devout and true, Sprang to each other madly; and the rest Felt a high certainty of being blest. 800 They gaz'd ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats
... the church, by eighteen degrees at the right side, is the charnel of the Innocents, where their bones lie. And before the place where our Lord was born is the tomb of Saint Jerome, that was a priest and a cardinal, that translated the Bible and the Psalter from Hebrew into ...
— The Travels of Sir John Mandeville • Author Unknown
... from the charnel, and placed there by the demon," replied the monk. "Of my long wanderings in other lands and beneath brighter skies I need not tell you; but neither absence nor lapse of years cooled my desire of vengeance, and when the appointed time drew nigh I returned to my own country, and came hither in a lowly ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... said Maskull. "At this moment the world with its sweetness seems to me a sort of charnel house. I feel a loathing for everything in it, including myself. I ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... leap, rather than marry Paris, From off the battlements of yonder tower, Or walk in thievish ways; or bid me lurk Where serpents are—chain me with roaring bears, Or shut me nightly in a charnel-house O'ercovered quite with dead men's rattling bones; Or bid me go into a new made grave; Or hide me with a dead man in his shroud;— Things that to hear them told have ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... common degree, was left to die in the hands of strangers—no slight reproach to the cruel insensibility of those who, wallowing in wealth, and fluttering from year to year through the round of fashion, suffered their former associate, nay their envied example, to perish in his living charnel. He was buried in the Protestant cemetery of Caen, under a stone with ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... grisly being—skull-headed, skeleton-boned, scythe in hand—Death himself; and ever and anon, when the dance was swiftest, would he dart into the midst, pounce on one or other, holding an hour-glass to the face, unheeding rank, sex, or age, and bear his victim to the charnel-house beside the church. It was a sight as though some terrible sermon had taken life, as though the unseen had become visible, the veil were taken away; and the implicit unresisting obedience of the victims added to the sense of ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... that with 300 additional men, he could so hunt the rebel, that ere May was passed, he should not show his face in Ulster. But the 'Black Death' returned after a brief respite; and, says Mr. Froude, in the reeking vapour of the charnel-house, it was indifferent whether its victims returned in triumph from a stricken field, or were cooped within their walls by hordes of savage enemies. By the middle of March there were left out of 1,100 but 300 available to fight. Reinforcements had been ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... the weather turned milder. By Monday the city reeked with the smell of a charnel house and pestilence was in the air. The bodies of dead animals lay in the streets; the waters of the bay and gulf were thick with the dead. All the disinfectants in the city were quickly consumed. An earnest appeal for more was sent to Houston and other places. ...
— The True Story of Our National Calamity of Flood, Fire and Tornado • Logan Marshall
... bestial appetites it fosters, of all the unnameable impurities that revel in its abodes; think of the hearth-stones desolated, of the mothers and daughters whose earthly hopes and joys have been destroyed by that charnel-house, the tavern. The incendiary who applies the midnight torch to peaceful dwellings, the robber who commits murder to secure his prey, is not an enemy to society half so dangerous, as he who inflames all evil passions and scatters wretchedness through a community, by dispensing ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... of uneasiness that inevitably preceded this moment of decision. He was not lacking in courage, else the circumstances under which he had worked for the past ten years—the sometimes perilous, sometimes downright charnel conditions left by the fleeing Hymenop conquerors—would have broken him long ago. But that same hard experience had honed rather than blunted the edge of his imagination, and the prospect of a close-quarters stalking of an unknown and patently hostile ...
— Control Group • Roger Dee
... I had lost all trace of Holman. With extreme caution I crawled toward what I thought to be the spot where I had left him, but my groping fingers found only the fragments of bone that covered the dusty floor of the charnel house. ...
— The White Waterfall • James Francis Dwyer
... seven divisions" of glorious memory decimated in this first battle of Ypres, that at a critical time, the bakers, cobblers and grooms were put into the trenches to fill the gaps made by the slain soldiers in that great charnel house. The "thin red line" held back—not for days, but for weeks,—an immensely superior force, and the soldiers of England unflinchingly bared their breasts to the most destructive artillery-fire that the ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... one of the few survivors of General Leclerc's expedition to St. Domingo, had, on leaving that charnel-house, become aide-de-camp to Marshal Ney. He it was who, during the famous retreat from Russia, was sent to ask the general who was blowing up the Beresina bridges to suspend the work of destruction, so as to allow of the passage of the column with the wounded, who must otherwise ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... something of the feelings of the resurrectionists, a bold, dark party went to rob the charnel-house of the sea, to spoil it of its golden bones and wedgy ingots of silver. They chose a mirky night, when the thick air seemed too clotted and moist to break into hurly-burly of storm, and yet too heavy and dank to throw off the black ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... men lying amongst the rocks surrounding the laager: here a leg, there an arm, further on a ghastly human head protruding from amidst the scattered boulders, until I had only to close my eyes to fancy I was in a charnel-house, where Goths and Huns were holding devilish revelry. The B.R. paused, and dropped his voice two octaves lower, and the crowd on the balcony craned their heads further forward, so that they might ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... served our turn," said Hugh, glancing back at it from the other side of the deserted square, "but oh, I pray heaven that we may never see that charnel-house again!" ...
— Red Eve • H. Rider Haggard
... while I'm speaking! I have been fighting—fighting hard—for half an hour. The place smells like a charnel-house and the—shapes are taking definite, horrible form! They have ... eyes!" His voice sounded harsh. "Quite black the eyes are, and they shine like beads! It's gradually wearing me down, although I have myself in hand, so far. I mean I might ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... Literary squabbles I know preserve one's name, when one's work will not; but I despise the fame that depends on scolding till one is remembered, and remembered by whom? The scavengers of literature! Reviewers are like sextons, who in a charnel-house can tell you to what John Thompson or to what Tom-Matthews such a skull or such belonged—but who wishes to know? The fame that is only to be found in such vaults, is like the fires that burn unknown in tombs, and go out as fast as they are discovered. Lord ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... and came, and struck upon my brain, most detestable, most execrable; and while one might count ten, I was aware of her near-sounding engines, and that cursed charnel went tearing past me on her maenad way, not fifteen yards from my eyes and nostrils. She was a thing, my God, from which the vulture and the jackal, prowling for offal, would fly with shrieks of loathing. I had a glimpse of decks piled thick ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... or large heaps of organic matter, brought either from the Equator by the Gulf Stream, or from the North Pole by the counter-current of cold water which skirts the American coast. There also are heaped up those erratic blocks which are carried along by the broken ice; and close by, a vast charnel-house of molluscs, which perish here by millions. The depth of the sea is not great at Newfoundland—not more than some hundreds of fathoms; but towards the south is a depression of 1,500 fathoms. There the Gulf Stream widens. It loses some of its speed and some of its temperature, ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... wall of the cathedral, close to the west front, there is a doorway which is reported to have led to the chapel and charnel-house mentioned by Leland. "S. Swithin, now called Trinity," he says, "stands on the south side of the town, and there is a chapelle with a carnarie at the west end of it." S. Swithin is, of course, the cathedral itself. Leland's other carnary, ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Winchester - A Description of Its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See • Philip Walsingham Sergeant
... covered her face with her hands. To face these objects was painful enough, but to have them grinning on her, as in mockery, behind her back, was more than she could stand. So seizing old Moodie by the arm, he being beside her, she rushed out of this charnel house, and impatiently called to the others to join her in ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... wedded laws of life and death wear the solemn beauty and wield the merciful functions of God; all is balanced and ameliorating; above the slaughterous struggle safely soar the dove and the rainbow; out of the charnel blooms the rose to which the nightingale sings love; nor is there poison which helps not health, nor destruction which supplies not creation with nutriment ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... overboard. "D—n the body!" said he, "I think 'tis fair enough if I take care of my own." My fellow mate, snatching up the amputation knife, pursued him half-way up the cock-pit ladder, crying, "You lousy rascal, is this the churchyard, or the charnel-house, or the sepulchre, or the golgotha, of the ship?"—but was stopped in his career by one calling, "Yo he, avast there—scaldings!" "Scaldings!" answered Morgan; "Cot knows 'tis hot enough indeed: who are you?" "Here's one!" ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... become clear and clearer, until at last she scents the "blood-dripping slaughter within;" a vapour rises to her nostrils as from a charnel house—her own fate, which she foresees at hand, begins to overpower her—her mood softens, and she enters the palace, about to become her tomb, with thoughts in which frantic terror has yielded to solemn ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... ill-housed populace, her ruins of old glory rising dim and ghostly amid her palaces of to-day. With all her awful secrets of rapine, cruelty, ambition, injustice,—with her foul orgies of unnatural crime,—with the very corruption of the old buried Roman Empire steaming up as from a charnel-house, and permeating all modern life with its effluvium of deadly uncleanness,—still Rome had that strange, bewildering charm of melancholy grandeur and glory which made all hearts cleave to her, and eyes and feet turn longingly towards ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... corbels, girders and panels were of the blackest oak; and the general effect of all this, augmented, if anything, by the windows, which were too high and narrow to admit of much light, was much the same as that produced by the interior of a subterranean chapel or charnel house. ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... foxes, jackals, and hyenas were disputing over their prey; whilst bears were chewing the livers of children. The space within was peopled by a multitude of fiends. There were the subtle bodies of men that had escaped their grosser frames prowling about the charnel ground, where their corpses had been reduced to ashes, or hovering in the air, waiting till the new bodies which they were to animate were made ready for their reception. The spirits of those that had been foully slain wandered about with gashed limbs; and skeletons, whose mouldy ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... upon every leaf, and yet absent from the immensities of space? The law of the Great System forbids the waste even of an atom; it knows no spot where something of life does not breathe. In the very charnel-house is the nursery of production and animation. Is that true? Well, then, can you conceive that space, which is the Infinite itself, is alone a waste, is alone lifeless, is less useful to the ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... Strudwick's newly-purchased vault, in what Southey has termed the Campo Santo of Nonconformists, the burial-ground in Finsbury, taking its name of Bunhill or Bonehill Field, from a vast mass of human remains removed to it from the charnel house of St. Paul's Cathedral in 1549. At a later period it served as a place of interment for those who died in the Great Plague of 1665. The day after Bunyan's funeral, his powerful friend, Sir John Shorter, the Lord Mayor, had a fatal fall from his horse in Smithfield, ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... Sigmund Oroshaz, whose sad and pensive face of a soldier who has seen too much slaughter and too many charnel houses, was marked by a large scar, raised his head and said in ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... principally "mere Irish," and the cost of their support derived chiefly from the land, the landlords consider their health, comfort, or life of only secondary importance. Hence we find the number of deaths in these charnel houses averaging that of years of plague; and each pauper is allowed far less weekly for his support than the lord of the soil allows the meanest dog in his kennel. Add to these the separation of man and wife, ...
— The Cross and the Shamrock • Hugh Quigley
... of Christian character, come to that. And I didn't know but that even a pa'son might backslide to such things in these gory times—I won't say on a Zunday, but on a week-night like this—when we think what a blasphemious rascal he is, and that there's not a more charnel-minded villain towards womenfolk ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... reason why, to the eyes of astonished servants, from that day forth the Crown Prince of Livonia apparently devoured his chop, bone and all. And why Nikky resembled, at times, a well-setup, trig, and soldierly appearing charnel-house. "If I am ever arrested," he once demurred, "and searched, Highness, I shall be consigned to ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... little child that strays bewildered, weeping, in unknown tumults; like soft streamings of celestial music to my too exasperated heart, came that Evangel. The Universe is not dead and demoniacal, a charnel-house with spectres; but godlike, ...
— Daily Strength for Daily Needs • Mary W. Tileston
... discovery was due to the Rev. Canon Jones, Vicar of Bradford. At the Reformation with the dissolution of the abbey at Shaftesbury it had passed into lay hands. The chancel was used as a cottage. Round its walls other cottages arose. Perhaps part of the building was at one time used as a charnel-house, as in an old deed it is called the Skull House. In 1715 the nave and porch were given to the vicar to be used as a school. But no one suspected the presence of this exquisite gem of Anglo-Saxon architecture, until Canon Jones when surveying the town from the ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield
... make their nests, and cry unceasingly for flesh, although the whole place is but one vast, putrid shamble. The pillars of the hall were made of thighbones, and those of the parlour of shinbones, while the floors were formed of layer upon layer of all manner of charnel. ...
— The Visions of the Sleeping Bard • Ellis Wynne
... this story, Hamlet, the moody moraliser upon charnel-houses and mouldy bones, is identified with the jolly companion of the Mermaid, the wine-bibbing joker of the Falcon, and the Apollo saloon? It is because Hamlet is the most elaborately-painted character in literature. It is because the springs of his actions are so profoundly touched, ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... whose ermined pride Stalks the corruption of a charnel-house, Where fest'ring flesh lies in its cloth of gold, E'en yet the wonder of the gaping crowd. Upon his brow the jewelled circlet rests, His only title to nobility; But that, unto the vulgar, symbols still The orbit ...
— Eidolon - The Course of a Soul and Other Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... foolishness appeared in setting the brave mansion between the winds and its own graveyard. Let the dead lie seawards, one had thought, and the church inland where we stand. So had the bell rung to this day; and only the charnel bones flaked piecemeal into ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes |
