"Tocsin" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Francois, and Madame Pele, and one of the Napoleonic prisoners (not M. le Major), and several other people we had known, including a servant of our own, Therese, the devoted Therese, to whom we were all devoted in return. That malodorous tocsin, which I have compared to the big bell of Notre Dame, had warned, and warned, and warned ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... Felician Entered, with serious mien, and ascended the steps of the altar. Raising his reverend hand, with a gesture he awed into silence All that clamorous throng; and thus he spake to his people; Deep were his tones and solemn; in accents measured and mournful Spake he, as, after the tocsin's alarum, distinctly the clock strikes. "What is this that ye do, my children? what madness has seized you? Forty years of my life have I labored among you, and taught you, Not in word alone, but in deed, to love one another! Is this the fruit of my toils, of my vigils and prayers and privations? ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... Jay, was sent on a pilgrimage to London, to make up all by penance and petition. In the mean time the lengthy and drowsy writer of the pieces signed Camillas held himself in reserve to vindicate every thing; and to sound in America the tocsin of terror upon the inexhaustible resources of England. Her resources, says he, are greater than those of all the other powers. This man is so intoxicated with fear and finance, that he knows not the difference between plus and minus—between a hundred ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... Banner' has the peculiar merit of not being a tocsin song, like the 'Marseillaise.' Indeed, there is not a restful, soothing, or even humane sentiment in all that stormy shout. It is the scream of oppressed humanity against its oppressor, presaging a more than quid pro quo; and it fitly prefigured ...
— Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life • Orison Swett Marden
... the whiskered Spaniard all the land with terror smote; And again the wild alarum sounded from the tocsin's throat." ...
— Great Artists, Vol 1. - Raphael, Rubens, Murillo, and Durer • Jennie Ellis Keysor
... the Negro without apology or equivocation. The old form of appeal has become insipid and uninspiring; the ear has become dull to its dinging. The old blade has become blunt and needs a new sharpness of point and keenness of edge. Where now is heard the tocsin call whose key-note a generation ago resounded from the highlands of Kentucky and Tennessee to the plains of the Carolinas calling the black youths, whose hopes ran high within their bosoms, to rise and make for higher things? This clarion note, though still for the nonce, shall not become ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... natural history; and the fact is that it is this, and not publicity or importance, that hurts. It is for the modern world to judge whether such instincts are indeed danger signals; and whether the hurting of moral as of material nerves is a tocsin and a ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... was to be their last. They first took alarm on perceiving that their jailer had removed his family, and then that he sent up their dinner earlier than usual, and removed all the knives and forks. By and by howls and shouts were heard, and the tocsin was heard, ringing, alarm guns firing, and reports came in to the prisoners of the Abbaye that the populace ...
— A Book of Golden Deeds • Charlotte M. Yonge
... out, not only every professional soldier, but every guild and every male above fourteen, knew his appointed place at the wall, and took it. But every day, and all day, the Fischmarkt flung out its peaceful standards, or rallied men to this side or to that with the tocsin of its presses,—the old Amerbach printing-house "of the Settle" (zum Sessel), which was Johann Froben's home and ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... soul, personal or racial, unconsciously turns on the world the most hateful of its hundred faces. English reverence, Irish mysticism, American idealism, looked up and saw on the face of Moses a certain smile. It was that smile of the Cynic Triumphant, which has been the tocsin for many a cruel riot in Russian villages or ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... by the time Bung attained the latter age, he might see around him a family, even exceeding in number and extent, that to which Spruggins at present laid claim (deafening cheers and waving of handkerchiefs)? The captain concluded, amidst loud applause, by calling upon the parishioners to sound the tocsin, rush to the poll, free themselves from dictation, or be slaves ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... measures" have strengthened the bond of the Union, what mean all the meetings lately held to save the Union? Why is the tocsin now sounded by the very authors and friends of the measures? How comes it that, in Boston itself, the chairman of a Union meeting contradicts the exulting and jubilant shout of triumph uttered by the Secretary of ...
— A Letter to the Hon. Samuel Eliot, Representative in Congress From the City of Boston, In Reply to His Apology For Voting For the Fugitive Slave Bill. • Hancock
... unsafe halls of FAME Does HAPPINESS abide! O ye who weep Much for the many miseries of Mankind, More for their vices, ye whose honest eyes Frown on OPPRESSION,—ye whose honest hearts Beat high when FREEDOM sounds her dread tocsin;— O ye who quit the path of peaceful life Crusading for mankind—a spaniel race That lick the hand that beats them, or tear all Alike in frenzy—to your HOUSEHOLD GODS Return, for by their altars ...
— Poems • Robert Southey
... friends from eight in the evening until eleven. Meanwhile the old insurrectionary methods of the nights of June and of August in '92, of May and of June in '93, were again followed. The beating of the rappel and the generale was heard in all the sections; the tocsin sounded its dreadful note, reminding all who should hear it that insurrection is the most sacred and the most indispensable of duties. Hanriot, the commandant of the forces, had been arrested in the evening, but he ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... after the two brothers, they were sore displeased, but they could do nothing,' says the chronicler; 'for the citizens who were in the plot straightway fell to sounding the tocsin, and gathering about the castle in great numbers, with arms and with sticks, were soon admitted ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... summoned Cosimo to the Public Palace, which he had previously occupied with troops at his command. There he declared him a rebel to the State, and had him imprisoned in a little square room in the central tower. The tocsin was sounded; the people were assembled in parliament upon the piazza. The Albizzi held the main streets with armed men, and forced the Florentines to place plenipotentiary power for the administration of the ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... protests took a politic and methodical form in Dauphiny. An insurrection amongst the populace of Grenoble, soon supported by the villagers from the mountains, had at first flown to arms at the sound of the tocsin. The members of the Parliament, on the point of leaving the city, had been detained by force, and their carriages had been smashed. The troops offered little resistance; an entry was effected into the house of the governor, the Duke of Clermont-Tonnerre, and, with an axe above his head, the insurgents ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... of anguish, altogether changed, as if my head were a complete void at times and became something sonorous, and then was struck violent, prolonged blows from a heavy clapper, as if it had been a bell, which fills it with tumultuous deafening vibrations, from a kind of loud tocsin and from monotonous peals, that were succeeded by the ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... and two tents, a relay of saddle horses, and an arsenal of long-range firearms composed the outfit. Three of the five men on duty were Texans. Making ourselves perfectly at home, we had no trouble in locating the herds in question, they having already sounded the tocsin to clear the way, claiming government beef recognized no local quarantine. The herds were not over thirty miles to the south, and expectation ran high as to results when an attempt should be made to ...
— The Outlet • Andy Adams
... the people had repaired to the Hotel de Ville, and requested that the tocsin might be sounded, the districts assembled, and the citizens armed. Some electors assembled at the Hotel de Ville, and took the authority into their own hands. They rendered great service to their fellow-citizens ...
— History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814 • F. A. M. Mignet
... which the summons to arms had been answered by his brave troops, was far from being wholly satisfied with the scene he had conjured up. Recovered from the first and irrepressible agitation which had driven him to sound the tocsin of alarm, he felt how derogatory to his military dignity and proverbial coolness of character it might be considered, to have awakened a whole garrison from their slumbers, when a few files of the guard would ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... more it rained and blew, the closer crept Marguerite to Dumiger's side. It was a picture of comfort; of that comfort which, alas! is so easily destroyed by the breath of tyranny. It was a type of the many hearths which are covered with ruins when the trumpet sounds through the city and the tocsin rings to arms; when war or rebellion sweeps like a pestilence, not alone over the ruins of palaces and of senate-houses, but over the abodes of the humble, where every room can tell a tale ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 2, July 8, 1850 • Various
... my light when the telephone rang a furious tocsin in the next room. I flounced out of bed more asleep than awake; in another minute I should have been past ringing up. It was one o'clock in the morning, and I had been dining with Swigger Morrison ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung
... that General Lee was marching his confident hosts into Maryland. This movement at first was regarded as a feint only, with the intention of uncovering Washington; but as column after column was known to have crossed the Potomac, and to be advancing through the State with more or less rapidity, the tocsin of alarm was sounded everywhere, and a general movement was made to repel the invaders. Pennsylvania was thoroughly aroused, and her loyal and true governor issued a proclamation calling upon all the able-bodied men of the Commonwealth to organize for defence. The militia promptly ...
— Three Years in the Federal Cavalry • Willard Glazier
... left him, and he stood in the middle of the drawing room. Her last words rang like the knell of a tocsin in his ears: "It's over, quite over!" And he thought the ground was opening beneath his feet. There was a void in his brain from which the man awaiting Nana had disappeared. Philippe alone remained there in the young woman's ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... This tocsin made itself heard by Maulevrier. What will not a man think of doing when possessed to excess by love or ambition? He pretended to have something the matter with his chest, put himself on a milk diet, made believe that he had lost his voice, and was sufficiently master of himself to refrain ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... themes forbear to tell. May never War awake this bell To sound the tocsin or the knell! Hush'd be the alarum gun! Sheath'd be the sword! and may his voice Call up the nations to rejoice That War his tatter'd flag has furl'd, And vanish'd from a wiser world! Hurra! ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... neither moved nor uttered a sound. Little more than a minuted had elapsed since the moment when the first peremptory order, to open in the name of the Republic, had sounded like the tocsin through the stillness of the house. Droulde's kisses were still hot upon her hand, his words of love were still ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... to gas our salient while the wind holds. But west winds are predicted after sunrise tomorrow. I'm going to get into the Nivelle belfry tonight with a sack of bombs. I'm going to try to explode their gas cylinders if I can. The tocsin is the signal for ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... romanticism; and in Ibsen as in Balzac the romanticist is forever wrestling with the realist. There is in Ibsen's writing an echo of that note of revolt, which rings thruout all the romanticist clamor, a tocsin of anarchy, and which justified the remark of Thiers that the Romanticists of 1830 were the forerunners of the Communists of 1871. And the Communists were only putting into practise what Ibsen was preaching almost simultaneously in his correspondence ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... went out on the balcony and strained my ears to listen, then I entered the room again and paced to and fro, or dropped into an arm-chair and dozed. But my slumber was agitated by feverish dreams. I dreamed that I could hear the murmur of angry crowds, and the report of distant firing; the tocsin was clanging from the church towers. I awoke. It was ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... any one feels that the tocsin of alarm, or the anti-slavery trump, must sound a louder note before they can hear it, one would think they must be very hard of hearing,-yea, that they belong to that class, of whom it may be truly said, 'they have stopped their ears that they may ...
— The Narrative of Sojourner Truth • Sojourner Truth
... force. Our twenty thousand soldiers scattered here and there wherever they can find an Indian to shoot is hardly a respectable police force. [Laughter.] The founders of this Republic knew that freemen are soldiers in the disguise of citizens. Let the tocsin of war be founded; let a foreign foe invade our shores; let an insurrectionary body arise in our midst, and a million of freemen, armed to the teeth, will "Rally round the flag, boys, rally once again." [Vociferous applause.] It is difficult for immigrants coming to this country to ...
— 'America for Americans!' - The Typical American, Thanksgiving Sermon • John Philip Newman
... contrast. There is something very fairy-like in the cheerful voice of a bell sounding among the wilder scenes of nature, particularly where Time advances his claim to the sovereignty of the landscape; for the cheerfulness is a little ghostly, and might serve well enough for a tocsin to the elvish hordes whom our footsteps ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... mile or so, and then— Ah, what is't rends the air With horrent, blood-encurdling tones. The tocsin of despair! ...
— Laura Secord, the heroine of 1812. - A Drama. And Other Poems. • Sarah Anne Curzon
... ascertained that the ladies had actually become candidates on the Republican ticket than a movement was inaugurated to oust them, the old war tocsin of "Anything to beat Grant" being for this purpose amended thus: "Anything to beat the women." This antagonism to the fair candidates was based entirely upon the supposition that their names would so materially weaken the ticket as to place the ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... vessels had powder and ammunition on board; and the poor commandant, beside himself with terror, cried, "Boys, the fleet is on fire;" and immediately had the alarm beaten. The frightful news spread like lightning; and in less than half an hour more than sixty thousand men appeared upon the wharves, the tocsin was sounded in all the churches, the forts fired alarm guns, while drums and trumpets sounded along the streets, the whole ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... than she had hoped. All was easy now. So eager was she to give the order before a change of mood, that she flew herself to give the signal, fully two hours earlier than was expected. At midnight the tocsin rang out upon the night, ...
— A Short History of France • Mary Platt Parmele
... too much even for Marie's soaring spirit; but she scarcely had time to picture herself ranging the sky when Dumas was back again, sorrowfully confessing failure. Aeroplanes likewise had heard the tocsin; they had sterner business than wafting lovers through the sky; they were carrying explosives and messages in the service of France. Dumas looked almost as disappointed as the wilted little figure ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... order: a ferocious and cruel multitude, headed by chosen assassins, are attacking the prisons, forcing the houses of the noblesse and priests, and, after a horrid mockery of judicial condemnation, execute them on the spot. The tocsin is rung, alarm guns are fired, the streets resound with fearful shrieks, and an undefinable sensation of terror seizes on one's heart. I feel that I have committed an imprudence in venturing to Paris; but the barriers are now ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... number that covered the subject historically, beginning with the vampire bat and ending with the Patriarchs' ball—illustrated with interior views of the Van Plushvelt country seat. Ministers, educators and sociologists everywhere hailed the event as the tocsin call that proclaimed the ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... twofold, threefold, tenfold, a hundredfold, the debt which they had acquired. They excused themselves politely for being unable to postpone the little transaction. The Bishop threatened to sound the tocsin, to rouse against them the people who would kill them like dogs for profaning, violating, and stealing the miraculous images and holy relics. They smilingly pointed to the sheriff's officers, who were guarding them. They ...
— The Miracle Of The Great St. Nicolas - 1920 • Anatole France
... mad anger. Anxious to profit by it, "she gave orders on the instant for the signal, which was not to have been given until an hour before daybreak," says De Thou, "and, instead of the bell at the Palace of Justice, the tocsin was sounded by the bell of St.-Germain-Auxerrois, ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... Chateaupers with you. You will cause the tocsin to be sounded. You will crush the populace. You will seize the witch. 'Tis said. And I mean the business of the execution to be done by you. You will render me an account of it. Come, Olivier, I shall not go to ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... forbear to tell— May never War awake this bell To sound the tocsin or the knell— Hush'd be the alarum gun. Sheath'd be the sword! and may his voice But call the nations to rejoice That War his tatter'd flag has furl'd, And vanish'd from a wiser world— Hurra! the ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... hoarsely forth on to the night air, clang, clang, clang, burst out the tocsin of the alarm bell, silencing the music in the ballroom and sending an electric thrill through every listener within the precincts of the castle; but ere the great bell had sent forth a score of vibrating notes which came quivering through the darkness and echoing from every ...
— The King's Esquires - The Jewel of France • George Manville Fenn
... waiting as lady of honour. I found the queen always firm; or, if she ever trembled, it was at the want of firmness in others. She had made up her mind for the worst long before. She often said to me, in those revolutionary nights when we sat listening for the sound of the cannon or the tocsin from Paris—'France is an abyss, in which the throne must sink. But sovereigns may be undone—they must not be disgraced.' The world never possessed a ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... pathos, and of gold, Of beauty, flattery, threats, a shilling,—no Method's more sure at moments to take hold[fa] Of the best feelings of mankind, which grow More tender, as we every day behold, Than that all-softening, overpowering knell, The Tocsin ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... seizing his hammer, went to the door of his hut, where hung part of a suit of armour, that served at the same time as a sign of his profession and as a tocsin. He smote the hanging iron with his sledge until the clangorous reverberation sounded through the valley, and presently there came hurrying to him eight of his stalwart sons, who had been occupied ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... then your banner dishonored unfold, And, at once, let the tocsin be sounded afar; We greet you, as greeted the Swiss, Charles the Bold— With a farewell to peace and a welcome ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... arrangements of the enterprise were left to the Duke of Guise, and a more efficient and fitting agent could not have been found. He had ordered that the tocsin, the signal for the massacre, should be tolled at two o'clock in the morning. Catharine and Charles, in one of the apartments of the palace of the Louvre, were impatiently awaiting the lingering flight of the hours ...
— Henry IV, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... ourselves then in the mouth of an obscure alley which my companion whispered would bring us to his house; and here we paused to take breath and look back. The sky was red behind us, the air full of the clash and din of the tocsin, and the flood of sounds which poured from every tower and steeple. From the eastward came the rattle of drums and random shots, and shrieks of "A BAS COLIGNY!" "A BAS LES HUGUENOTS!" Meanwhile the city was rising as one man, pale at this dread awakening. From every ...
— The House of the Wolf - A Romance • Stanley Weyman
... we knew Paris to be in open revolt. Cannon boomed, the great bell of Notre-Dame sounded the tocsin, and naturally we did not go to school. But the masters who gave my sisters lessons came out to Neuilly, and from them, in turn, we learnt what was going on within the capital—barricades in all the streets—the troops on the defensive—the ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... Parliamentary crisis amidst which he found himself cast. The frightful Panama adventure was scarcely over; he had followed the progress of that tragedy with the anguish of a man who every night expects to hear the tocsin sound the last hour of olden, agonising society. And now a little Panama was beginning, a fresh cracking of the social edifice, an affair such as had been frequent in all parliaments in connection with big financial questions, ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... ground in Catalonia. Yet he was compelled to send away General Chabran, that he might join Marshal Moncey; and the insurgents took advantage of this division of our forces to throw themselves on General Schwartz's column, which had been ordered to search the convent of Montserrat. The tocsin was heard everywhere in the mountain villages; the bridges over the streams were broken down, and every little town had to be carried with the bayonet. By a sudden sally, General Duhesme dislodged the enemy from their post on the ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... President of the Section sitting in the next court, the citoyen Dumas, has been arrested on the bench, but that the case goes on. Drums can be heard beating the alarm, and the tocsin ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France
... returned the Chancellor, aghast. 'If he but saw this, he would sound the tocsin - we ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... doubt about it, that was the rattle of musketry at a distance! And now they heard also the loud booming of artillery, and the ringing of the tocsin at Brunecken and ...
— Andreas Hofer • Lousia Muhlbach
... weak-looking excursioner that might have done for Long Island Sound, where somebody said she'd just come from, but which didn't seem to fit in here. Her passengers were mostly fishermen—crews of vessels not in the race. There was also a big powerful iron sea-tug, the Tocsin, that promised to make better weather of it ...
— The Seiners • James B. (James Brendan) Connolly
... trouble had cropped up again and the Carleton papers, in particular, were already sounding the tocsin. Carleton's argument was that we ought to fall upon France and crush her, before she could develop her supposed submarine menace. His flaming posters were at every corner. Every obscure French newspaper was being ransacked for ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... brow. "Picture no more toothsome dainties to my soul lest for desire I swoon and languish by the way. I pray thee, let us haste, sire, so may we reach fair Canalise ere sunset—yet stay! Hearken, messire, hear ye aught? Sure, afar the tocsin soundeth?" ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... and petulance in the long series of revolts which filled his reign with wearisome monotony from the moment when he first rode out to claim his duchy of Normandy, and along its southern frontier peasant and churl turned out at the sound of the tocsin, and with fork and flail drove the hated "Guirribecs" back over the border. Five years after his marriage, in 1133, his first child was born at Le Mans. Englishmen saw in the grandson of "good Queen Maud" the direct descendant of the old English line of kings of Alfred and of Cerdic. ...
— Henry the Second • Mrs. J. R. Green
... Aubrey's ears like the brazen clang of a tocsin, for he knew they were true. But ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... standing on the balconies, looking anxiously in the direction of the palace, or collected in groups before the doors, and the azoteas, which are out of the line of fire, are covered with men. They are ringing the tocsin—things seem ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... your remarks on the storm in the Travailleurs. There was another very odd storm, as it struck me on a hasty reading in '93, where there is mention of a beautiful summer evening and yet the wind is so high that you can't hear the tocsin. You do justice also and more than justice to Hugo's tenderness about children. That, I think, points to one great source of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... measures of military preparation were required by circumstances (les evenements) and did not mean war. Then over this bill the maire posted a notice that in case of a real mobilization (une mobilisation serieuse) they would ring the tocsin. At eleven o'clock the tocsin rang, oh, la la, monsieur, what a fracas! All the bells in the town, Saint-Martin, Saint-Laurent, the hotel de ville. Immediately all our troops went away. We did not want to see them go. 'We shall be back again,' they said. They liked ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... exclaims: 'All hail, therefore, to those who, by attacking a truth, prevent that truth from slumbering. All hail to those bold and fearless natures, the heretics and innovators of the day, who, rousing men out of their lazy sleep, sound in their ears the tocsin and the clarion, and force them to come forth that they may do battle for their creed. Of all evils, torpor is the most deadly. Give us paradox, give us error, give us what you will, so that you save us from stagnation. It is the cold spirit of routine which is ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... can hear the sound now as I heard it that calm evening when we were anchored off Gravesend. The "cling-clang, cling-clang!" of our tocsin, tolling and telling the hour, being echoed by the "pong-pang, pong-pang!" of the merchantman lying near us, and that again answered a second or so later by the "ting-ting, ting-ting!" of the other vessel further away, the different tones lingering on the air and seeming to ...
— Afloat at Last - A Sailor Boy's Log of his Life at Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... rise on my head as these questions rang like a tocsin through my brain, and I think, at that moment, I had a foretaste of ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... almost immediately his father in the nominal sway of Russia. The new sovereign promised fealty to the Tartars, and feared no rival while sustained by their swords. His oppression becoming intolerable, the tocsin was sounded in the streets of Novgorod, and the whole populace rose in insurrection. The movement was successful. The favorites and advisers of Yaroslaf were put to death, and the prince himself was exiled. There is something ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... is not strong, that tiny column of blue smoke will ascend to a height often of fifty or sixty feet. During the war times they make use of these fires as signals from band to band, and each fire has a conventional meaning. Like the phares that flashed the alarm from hill-top to hill-top or the tocsin that sang from belfry to belfry in the Basse Bretagne, in the days of the rising of the Vendee, so those beacons would communicate as swiftly the tidings that one band or tribe had to convey to another. Again, speaking of the danger of fire-making, ...
— Two months in the camp of Big Bear • Theresa Gowanlock and Theresa Delaney
... had stationed on the road, would march all night to their assistance; and they attributed his delay to the necessity of collecting a sufficient force to overpower the numerous troops of national guards whom the sound of the tocsin had summoned to Varennes. But at each instant they expected to see him appear, and the least movement of the populace, the slightest clash of arms in the streets, seemed to announce his arrival; the ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... have one of our occasional pitched battles with those hated Burgundian boys of the village of Maxey, and had been whipped, and were arriving on our side of the river after dark, bruised and weary, when we heard the bell ringing the tocsin. We ran all the way, and when we got to the square we found it crowded with the excited villagers, and weirdly lighted by smoking and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... state in which of late the end of the day's work found him—overwhelmingly fatigued. He had not an ounce of superfluous energy to answer his wife's tocsin. "Well, what ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... What would Dr. Whitaker have thought of the following explosion, in which Webster sounds the tocsin with a vehemence and vigour which no Macbriar or Kettledrumle of the period could have surpassed. The extract is from his Judgment Set ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... direction of the vehicle. He was stopped by four armed men, who fired at him; his eagerness saved him, for he ran toward one of the three passengers to tell him to make for Chesnay and ring the tocsin. But two brigands followed him, and one of them, taking aim, sent a ball through his left shoulder, which broke his arm, ...
— The Brotherhood of Consolation • Honore de Balzac
... She did not hear the tocsin this time; she felt it on her spine—the drums of fear. If ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... of the Supreme Court. Mr. Dickens laughed very fairly at the "remarkable men" of our small towns; but England is full of just such little-greatness, with the difference that one is proclaimed in the "Bungtown Tocsin" and the other in the "Times." We must get a new phrase, and say that Mr. Brown was immortal at the latest dates, and Mr. Jones a great man when the steamer sailed. The small man in Europe is reflected to his contemporaries from a magnifying mirror, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... some far-off aerie would ring the tocsin of an elfin silversmith, fast, furious, ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... Manduel the tocsin was sounded: the two villages joined forces, and with weapons in their hands marched along the road from Beaucaire to Nimes. At the bridge of Quart the villagers of Redressan and Marguerite joined them. Thus reinforced, they ...
— Massacres Of The South (1551-1815) - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... burn low, and flicker in final sickliness; the great bell called Conscience, hanging in the dome, strikes an alarm that rocks the building. How oft the solemn tocsin sounds! It drives us to our duty! Let us be thankful its clangor is ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... destiny of France. How strange is the alteration which has occurred within so short a space of time! Five days ago, Charles the Tenth reigned in the Tuileries; at present, on Lafayette and Laffitte it depends whether he ever enters his palace again! The tocsin is now sounding! How strangely, how awfully it strikes on the ear! All this appears ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... no choice between victory and death. On the 25th of July, the Marseillais arrived in Paris, and augmented the strength and confidence of the insurgents. Popular commotions increased, and the clubs became unmanageable. On the 10th of August, the tocsin sounded, the generale beat in every quarter of Paris, and that famous insurrection took place which overturned the throne. The Hotel de Ville was seized by the insurgents, the Tuileries was stormed, and the Swiss guards were massacred. The ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... not a superstition very like this of the poor savages? I refer to the odd custom still observed in the country, or at least in some of the villages (and which not so very long ago was put into practice also in towns) of trying to arrest a heavy thunder storm, by the tocsin, the deep noted ringing increasing the general alarm amongst the timid of the place. The women too, will go to the door and rattle together the shovel and tongs just as their Sakai sisters beat their bamboos, and olive branches (that previously have received the priest's benediction) are burnt ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... abolition—the phrenzied fanatics of the North, neither sleep nor slumber. Their footsteps are even now to be seen wherever mischief can be perpetrated—and it may be that while the people of Kentucky are reposing in the confidence of fancied security, the tocsin of rebellion may resound through the land—the firebrand of the incendiary may wrap their dwellings in flames—their towns and cities may become heaps of ashes before their eyes and their minds drawn off from all thoughts ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 3, 1918 • Various
... when he heard that three young Protestants had been killed because they took {164} up arms at the sound of the tocsin, thinking it was the signal for rebellion. He received under his protection at Geneva the widow and children of the Protestant Calas, who had been broken on the wheel in 1762 because he was falsely ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead
... no Christmas Peace can fall. The chimes shall be a tocsin, and the red Glow of the Yule-wood embers shall recall A myriad smouldering ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 18, 1914 • Various
... cities within a city: the city of the priests, that is to say, the Roman city, and the city of the merchants, that is to say, the, French city. The city of the priests, with its papal palace, its hundred churches, its innumerable bell-towers, ever ready to sound the tocsin of conflagration, the knell of slaughter. The town of the merchants, with its Rhone, its silk-workers, its crossroads, extending north, east, south and west, from Lyons to Marseilles, from Nimes to Turin. The French city, the accursed city, longing ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... thereafter the shattering blare of a trumpet upon the walls. And now from within the waking city rose a confused sound, a hum that grew louder and ever more loud, pierced by shout and trumpet-blast while high above this growing clamour the tocsin ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... only child was yet a lad the crusade tocsin found her ready to respond, in accordance with her own convictions and her mother's faithful teachings. She gave a public address in the opera house at Auburn, and served for two years as the first president of the local union in that place, ...
— Two Decades - A History of the First Twenty Years' Work of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union of the State of New York • Frances W. Graham and Georgeanna M. Gardenier
... citizens of London justly ranged themselves on the side of Simon de Montfort, who stood up for their liberties, the great bell of St. Paul's was the tocsin that summoned the burghers to arms, especially on that memorable occasion when Queen Eleanor tried to escape by water from the Tower to Windsor, where her husband was, and the people who detested her tried to sink her barge as it ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... streets seemed to have increased in certain places to a battle, for the crash of the artillery grapeshot was constantly intermingled with the crackling of the infantry fire, and through it all the bells were sounding the tocsin, a wailing, warning sound, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... striking some heavy blow at the South, I will tell you what will happen; your abolitionists will seize the occasion of the peoples' exultation to push their doctrine to a consummation. Whenever you shall hear the tocsin of victory sounding in the North, then listen for the echoing cry of emancipation—for you will hear it. You will see it in every column of your daily prints; you will hear your statesmen urging it in your legislative ...
— Fort Lafayette or, Love and Secession • Benjamin Wood
... worshipped Wife and Child. But softly you shall frame the fence, and softly carve the door, And softly plane the table—as to spread it for the poor, And all your thoughts be soft and white as the wood of the white tree. But if they tear the Charter, Jet the tocsin speak for me! Let the wooden sign above your shop be prouder to be scarred Than the lion-shield of Lancelot that hung ...
— Poems • G.K. Chesterton
... pay. There were endless discussions as to whether a republican form of government would be best and strongest. Of these Philadelphia had her full share, but there was a strong undercurrent. Had not the famous Declaration of Independence been born here and the State House bell pealed out the first tocsin of freedom? And here Congress had met ...
— A Little Girl in Old Philadelphia • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... Hoping still to hold the strings, And, for your ungodly gains, Life to bind with golden chains;— Man! you're mightily mistaken! From such dreams you'd best awaken To the sense of what is coming, When you hear the low, dull booming Of the far-off tocsin drums. —Such a day of vast upsettings, Dire outcastings and downsettings!— You have held the reins too long,— Have you time to ...
— 'All's Well!' • John Oxenham
... indeed, was the change which had already swept over the landscape of American thought and purpose since the despised Birney, in 1844, received only a few thousand votes in the whole United States. Now the Rail-splitter had come! The tocsin of war sounded. The Union was rent. War with its flames of fire and streams of blood devastated the Republic. But the bow of promise was set on the dark background of the receding storm. American slavery was swept into oblivion, and the end of the third quarter of the century saw such a condition ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... there watch for the coming of the foe, and on their first appearance, probably a mile or more distant, give the alarm to those below, by pulling a wire attached to that from which the front door bell was suspended; thus setting it to ringing loudly. Now they were prepared to sound the tocsin in the kitchen, also, thus giving time for the removal of the boiling lye from the fire there to the second story of the mansion, where it was to be used ...
— Elsie's Motherhood • Martha Finley
... the empty house was only broken by the habitually subdued voices of the children at their play, when suddenly the harsh stroke of a distant bell came through the open window. But it was no Sabbath bell, and Mr. Breeze knew it. It was the tocsin of the Vigilance Committee, summoning the members to assemble at their quarters for a capture, a trial, or an execution of some wrongdoer. To him it was equally a summons to the ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... old town was terrific; Great Tom was booming sullenly over the uproar; the bell of Saint Mary's was clanging with alarm; St. Giles's tocsin chimed furiously; howls, curses, flights of brickbats, stones shivering windows, groans of wounded men, cries of frightened females, cheers of either contending party as it charged the enemy from Carfax to Trumpington ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... and ready to assist any subversionary movement, yea, even with coin of the realm, on the one condition that he should be allowed to insert articles of his own composition in the new organ which it was proposed to establish. There was no difficulty in conceding this trifle, and the 'Tocsin' was the result. The name was a suggestion of the oil merchant himself, and no bad name if Socialists at large could be supposed capable of understanding it; but the oil merchant was too important a man to be thwarted, and the argument by which he supported his choice was incontestable. ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... the bell-rope; again the solemn tocsin awoke the echoes of the inn; and ere they had died away, a light glimmered in the carriage entrance, and a powerful voice was heard upraised ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... our wedding day; Joyous hour, we give thee greeting! Whither, whither art thou fleeting? Fickle moment, prithee stay! What though mortal joys be hollow? Pleasures come, if sorrows follow: Though the tocsin sound, ere long, Ding dong! Ding dong! Yet until the shadows fall Over one and over all, Sing a merry ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... silently and swiftly building inside the ravelin a solid half-moon shaped battlement. On the 31st of December, the last day of 1572, the great assault was made. "The attack was unexpected, but the forty or fifty sentinels defended the walls while they sounded the alarm. The tocsin bells tolled, and the citizens, whose sleep was not apt to be heavy during that perilous winter, soon manned the ramparts again. The daylight came upon them while the fierce struggle was still at its height. The besieged, as before, defended themselves with musket ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... shells and red-hot shot were poured into the city, killing alike the soldiers on the ramparts and the citizens in their dwellings. Lamentations and shrieks, the roar of artillery, the uninterrupted peals of the tocsin, calling out the inhabitants, mingled with the crash of the falling houses, and the wails of ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... conceived the idea that she had a Divine mission, as the great apostle of liberty, to propagate republicanism through all the kingdoms of Europe. In her madness of intoxication she undertook the work, threw down the gauntlet, and the fierce tocsin of war sounded from nation to nation, until the continent was converted into ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... Materials are abundant; but naturally there is little bustle and activity when compared to that which exists in a British yard. Their small navy can hardly find them enough work to keep their "hands in;" but doubtless the first knell of the accursed tocsin of war, while it gave them enough to do, would soon fill their dockyards with able and willing hands to do it. Commodore Ringold's surveying expedition, consisting of a corvette, schooner, steamer, &c., was fitting out for ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... as the clock struck the hour, we went on to the balcony listening and saying: "It is the tocsin!" ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... game of games he knew and loved, And every fibre of his soul was knit To see what passed. Then,—in a sun-white land, Where a great sea poured out through narrow gates To meet a greater,—came the clang of arms, And drew the nations like a tocsin peal, Till all the sun-white sands ran red, and earth Sweat blood, and writhed in fiery ashes, and Grew sick with all the reek and stench of war, And heaven drew back behind the battle-clouds. And ever, through the clamour of the strife, I heard the ceaseless wailing of a child, And the ...
— Bees in Amber - A Little Book Of Thoughtful Verse • John Oxenham
... statement, by which it appears that the most active and unsparing inquisition was taking place, corresponds with the historical notices of repeated persecutions upon this dreadful charge of sorcery. A bull of Pope Innocent VIII. rang the tocsin against this formidable crime, and set forth in the most dismal colours the guilt, while it stimulated the inquisitors to the unsparing discharge of their duty in searching out and punishing the guilty. "It is come ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... tocsin sounded, augurs a strife from which you will come victorious. For a woman, this is a warning of separation from her ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... tocsin sounded we have gone from bad to worse. During the past summer (1877) laborers, striking for increased wages or to resist diminution thereof, seized and held for many days the railway lines between East and West, stopping all traffic. Aided by mobs, they took possession ...
— Destruction and Reconstruction: - Personal Experiences of the Late War • Richard Taylor
... Italian houses of the Commonwealth, rearing their towers above the town for tocsin and for ward, owe immortality to their intrinsic beauty. These are the Palazzo Pubblico of Siena and the Palazzo Vecchio of Florence. Few buildings in Europe are more picturesquely fascinating than the palace of Siena, ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... before the tocsin of civil war had sounded there were mutterings of thunder in the halls of Congress, and the cloud, at first no bigger than a man's hand, was yearly gathering force, till it finally burst in a cyclone of passion and prejudice and tyranny, and swept all before it in one besom of destruction. ...
— Historic Papers on the Causes of the Civil War • Mrs. Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... sharpshooters through the woodlands on the right, the Chasseurs de Vincennes on the heights to the left. Avezzana, war minister, from the top of the cupola of San Pietro in Montori, on seeing the first sentinel advance, gave the signal for the ringing of the tocsin, which brought the entire populace to the walls, the Roman matrons clustering there to encourage their husbands, sons, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... The people were as a body declared attainted of treason, their hotel-de-ville was razed to the ground, their written privileges were seized and reduced to ashes. The bells that had sounded out the tocsin, at the outbreak of the insurrection, were for the most part broken in pieces and melted. One miserable man was hung to the clapper of the same bell that he had rung to call the people to arms. Others for the like crime were broken on the wheel or burned ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... night air rang out the sound of a tocsin—the stroke of a hammer upon a steel rim from a locomotive wheel, and which was hung aloft in the only ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts - Or, The Struggle for Leadership • George A. Warren
... listen to the feet and chariots of "Dubarrydom" hurrying from the "Armida Palace," where Louis XV. and the ancien regime lay dying; later to the ticking of the clocks in Launay's doomed Bastile; again to the tocsin of the steeples that roused the singers of the Marseillaise to march from "their bright Phocaean city" and grapple with the Swiss guard, last bulwark of the Bourbons. "The Swiss would have won," the historian characteristically quotes from Napoleon, "if they had ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... shop keepers as well as the women of the farms have by far the best of it in time of war. The former are always their husband's partners, controlling the money, consulted at ever step. When the tocsin rings and the men disappear they simply go on. Their task may be doubled and they may be forced to employ girls instead of men, but ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... hundred and fourteen years after the foundation of this Chateau, a banquet was prepared for the reception of those invited to partake of the official hospitality of the Governor; when suddenly the tocsin sounded,—the dreaded alarm of fire. Soon the streets were thronged with citizens, with anxious enquiries passing from lip to lip, and ere long the cry was uttered: "To ...
— Famous Firesides of French Canada • Mary Wilson Alloway
... king had spoken in a moment of passion and agitation. An hour's reflection might change his mind. There was no time to be lost. The queen gave the signal at once, and out on the air of that dreadful night rang the terrible tocsin peal from the tower of the church of St. Germain l'Auxerrois, the alarm call for ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris
... moisture from their faces until the sound of "Eis! meine Herrschaften!" "Bier! meine Herrschaften!" roused them from their lethargy. Ices and beer and cherries and peaches successively filled up the weary hours until "the tocsin of the soul, the dinner bell," carried joy to their hearts. I can never forget the rapturous look of anticipation and satisfaction which those stolid middle-class Teutonic countenances wore when "Mittagsessen" was announced. They shook off their normal and habitual torpidity, ...
— A War-time Journal, Germany 1914 and German Travel Notes • Harriet Julia Jephson
... mellow chime had merged into the stillness did the intruder dare again to draw breath. Coming as it had the very moment that the door had closed noiselessly behind her, the double stroke had sounded to her like a knell: or, perhaps more like the prelude to the wild alarum of a tocsin, first striking her heart still with terror, then urging it ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... away from the great family of your fellows. You may hide from your responsibilities, but the burden of them will lie heavy upon your conscience, the poison will penetrate sometimes into your most jealously guarded paradise. We are of the people's party, you and I, Mannering, and I tell you that the tocsin has sounded. We ...
— A Lost Leader • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Beautiful as a dream is Florence; but her somber streets, overshadowed by gigantic belfries and masked by grim brown palace-fronts, contained a menace that the French king could not face. Let Capponi sound the tocsin, and each house would become a fortress, the streets would be barricaded with iron chains, every quarter would pour forth men by hundreds well versed in the arts of civic warfare. Charles gave way, covering with a bad joke the discomfiture he felt: Ah, Ciappon, Ciappon, voi siete un ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... not take place. Your information shall be forwarded to the court; where, however, I doubt whether it will be received with much credence. The Austrian declaration of war has put the flatterers of royalty into such spirits, that if the tocsin were sounding at this instant, they would not believe in the danger. We have been unfortunately forced to send the chief part of the garrison of Paris towards the frontier. But we have three battalions of the Swiss guard within call at Courbevoie, and they can be ready on the first ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... been lost to avenge, and defend what'er was remaining. Every man sprang to his arms, by the flight of the foeman encouraged, And by his blanching cheeks, and his timorous, wavering glances. Ceaselessly now rang out the clanging peal of the tocsin. Thought of no danger to come restrained their furious anger. Quick into weapons of war the husbandman's peaceful utensils All were converted; dripped with blood the scythe and the ploughshare. Quarter was shown to none: the enemy fell without mercy. Fury everywhere ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... services of that Sunday, one of the chief festivals of the Reformed Church—they retired without arms, intending to depart for more hospitable cities. Scarce, however, had the last detachment left the walls, when the tocsin was sounded, and their enemies, respecting none of their promises, involved them in a horrible carnage. It was the opinion of the best informed that in all three thousand persons perished on both sides during the riot at Toulouse, ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... battle songs were chanted, And war's stirring tocsin pealed, By those songs thy heart was haunted, And thy spirit, proud, undaunted, Clamored wildly — wildly panted: "Mother! let my wish be granted; I will ne'er be mocked and taunted That I fear to meet our vaunted Foemen ...
— Poems: Patriotic, Religious, Miscellaneous • Abram J. Ryan, (Father Ryan)
... opposition thereto, urging that there was something terrifying in solitude, most of all here, amid vast fields and meadows, and that, away from the Court and all my friends, I should grow old, and death would take me before my time. While plunged in such thoughts, I suddenly heard the sound of a tocsin, and scanning the horizon, I saw flames and smoke rising from some hamlet or country-house. I rang for my servants, and told them instantly to despatch horsemen to the scene of the catastrophe, and ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... 'The tocsin! The bell of St. Germain! Fire! No, a Huguenot rising! Fire! Oh, let us out! Let us out! The window! Where is the fire? Nowhere! See the lights! Hark, that was a shot! It was in the palace! A heretic rising! Ah! there was to be a slaughter of the heretics! I heard it whispered. ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... that had early made him famous. Interruptions from other Senators, now forgetful of Unfinished Business, and wild with reanimated party zeal; interruptions from certain Senators mindful of Unfinished Business, and unable to pass the Roscommon bottle, only spurred him to fresh exertion. The tocsin sounded in the Senate was heard in the lower house. Highly-excited members congregated at the doors of the Senate, and left Unfinished Business ...
— The Story of a Mine • Bret Harte
... salary of L300, besides the separate payments for any articles that he wrote. The Song of the Shirt, which it would be futile to praise or even to characterize, came out, anonymously of course, in the Christmas number of Punch for 1843: it ran like wildfire, and rang like a tocsin, through the land. Immediately afterwards, in January 1844, Hood's connection with the New Monthly closed, and he started a publication of his own, Hood's Magazine, which was a considerable success: more than half the first number was the actual handiwork of the editor. ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... for collecting prints has occasioned. Granger, however, was the first who introduced it in the form of a treatise, and surely "in an evil hour" was this treatise published—although its amiable author must be acquitted of "malice prepense." His History of England[52] seems to have sounded the tocsin for a general rummage after, and slaughter of, old prints: venerable philosophers and veteran heroes, who had long reposed in unmolested dignity within the magnificent folio volumes which recorded their ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... processes. In the contest between these forces, Andrew Jackson was the champion of the cause of the upland democracy. He denounced the money power, banks and the whole credit system and sounded a fierce tocsin of danger against the increasing influence of wealth in politics. Henry Clay, on the other hand, represented the new industrial forces along the Ohio. It is certainly significant that in the rivalry between the great Whig of the Ohio Valley and ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... earth! was your banquet of power, But the tocsin has burst on your festival hour— 'Tis your knell that it rings! To the popular tiger a prey is decreed, And the maw of Republican hunger will feed ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... running-board. He was gasping, purple, utterly spent, and for an instant could only beat the air with his hands. Then he broke out in a hoarse shout—the sound in that quiet sylvan spot was like a tocsin: "Fire! An awful fire! Hewitt's pine woods—up that road!" He waved a wild, bare arm—his shirt-sleeve was torn to the shoulder. "Go and git help. They need all the men they ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... of the 10th of August, 1792, arrived. On the preceding evening Potion went to the Assembly and informed it that preparations were making for an insurrection on the following day; that the tocsin would sound at midnight; and that he feared he had not sufficient means for resisting the attack which was about to take place. Upon this information the Assembly passed to the order of the day. Petion, however, gave an order ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... long run to the foot of the vineyard hill, where, on the crest, deep hidden among the vines, three cannon clanged at regular intervals, stroke following stroke, like the thundering summons of a gigantic tocsin. ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers
... will step in, and will cause famines, and plagues, and pestilence—even poverty itself—with His own Right Arm. But the cure was effected, and the country was on its road to a fair amount of prosperity, when the tocsin was sounded in America, and ...
— The Landleaguers • Anthony Trollope |
