"Charon" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of—Stolen Goods!" So, talk to me of the religion of a bishop! I have renounced all bishops save Bishop Beveridge—mean to live so—and die—As some Greek dog-sage, dead and merry, Hellward bound in Charon's wherry with food for both worlds, under and 35 upper, Lupine-seed and Hecate's supper, and never an obolus. (Though thanks to you, or this Intendant through you, or this Bishop through his Intendant—I possess a burning pocketful of ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... elegies and sonnets burn; And on the marble grave these rhymes, A monument to after-times— "Here Cassy lies, by Celia slain, And dying, never told his pain." Vain empty world, farewell. But hark, The loud Cerberian triple bark; And there—behold Alecto stand, A whip of scorpions in her hand: Lo, Charon from his leaky wherry Beckoning to waft me o'er the ferry: I come! I come! Medusa see, Her serpents hiss direct at me. Begone; unhand me, hellish fry: "Avaunt—ye cannot say 'twas I."[1] Dear Cassy, ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... gunboats which held one division of the expedition were merely old sugar-barges, roofed over with boards, and looking like coffins. They were pleasantly named the "Charon" and the "Cerberus," but Stedman thought that the "Sudden Death" and the "Wilful Murder" would have been titles more appropriate. The chief duty of the troops consisted in lying at anchor at the intersections of wooded ...
— Black Rebellion - Five Slave Revolts • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... Edda, when Hermodhr went to seek the soul of Baldr, he was told by the keeper of the bridge, a maiden named Modhgudhr, that the bridge rang beneath no feet save his. Similarly Vergil tells us that Charon's boat (which is also a parallel to the Brig) was almost sunk by ...
— Ballads of Mystery and Miracle and Fyttes of Mirth - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Second Series • Frank Sidgwick
... existence, Hell, and Elysium, of which no Thessalian witch shall partake, Proserpine, for ever cut off from thy health-giving mother, and horrid Hecate, Cerberus curst with incessant hunger, ye Destinies, and Charon endlessly murmuring at the task I impose of bringing back the dead again to the land of the living, hear me!—if I call on you with a voice sufficiently impious and abominable, if I have never sung this chaunt, unsated with human gore, if I have ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... horse the spur, persuaded that my father's house lay before me. The island, too, I took for the grove that surrounded our house. On reaching its border, I literally dismounted, and shouted out for Charon Tommy. There was a stream running through our plantation, which, for nine months out of the twelve, was only passable by means of a ferry, and the old negro who officiated as ferryman was indebted to me for the above classical cognomen. I believe ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... hid I curs'd the haggard scene— 500 The banquet of my arms, my arbour queen, Seated upon an uptorn forest root; And all around her shapes, wizard and brute, Laughing, and wailing, groveling, serpenting, Shewing tooth, tusk, and venom-bag, and sting! O such deformities! Old Charon's self, Should he give up awhile his penny pelf, And take a dream 'mong rushes Stygian, It could not be so phantasied. Fierce, wan, And tyrannizing was the lady's look, 510 As over them a gnarled staff she shook. Oft-times upon the sudden she laugh'd out, And from a basket emptied ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats
... in their shroud. Better late than never, but the reward shall not be as great as the reward of those who make charitable contribution while yet they have power to keep their money. Charity, in last will and testament, seems sometimes to be only an attempt to bribe Charon, the ferryman, to land the boat in celestial rather than infernal regions. Mean as sin when they disembark from the banks of this world, they hope to be greeted as benefactors when they come up the beach on the other side. Skinflints ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... For from my heat not heaven itself is free. Then since to me thy loss can be no gain, Avoid thy harm and fly what I foretell. Make thou thy love with me for to be slain, That I with her and both with thee may dwell. Thy fact thus, Charon, both of us shall bless, Thou save thy boat ...
— Elizabethan Sonnet Cycles - Phillis - Licia • Thomas Lodge and Giles Fletcher
... however, was the bonds of companies that he incorporated himself and disposed of at cut rates to a clientele all his own. These companies all bore impressive names, such as Tennessee Gas, Heat, and Power Company, the Mercedes-Panard- Charon Motor Vehicle Supply Company, the Nevada Coal, Coke, Iron, and Bi-product Company, the Chicago Banking and Securities Company, the Southern Georgia Land and Fruit Company, and so on. He had an impressive office in a marble-fronted building ...
— The Confessions of Artemas Quibble • Arthur Train
... the complete moralist, old Jack!" he cheered. "I'll back you for a bushel of nuts to have it out with Charon as you ferry across. And here, for want of us, you turn to the hares! Sancie, you and I must get season tickets to Sarum, ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... Ascending, make one funeral blaze. As soon as you can hear his knell This god on earth turns devil in hell; And lo! his ministers of state, Transformed to imps, his levee wait, Where, in the scenes of endless woe, They ply their former arts below; And as they sail in Charon's boat, Contrive to bribe the judge's vote; To Cerberus they give a sop, His triple-barking mouth to stop; Or in the ivory gate of dreams Project Excise and South-Sea schemes, Or hire their party pamphleteers To set ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... escaped their vigilance; but he thought, by the liberal use of pitch and cotton, materials easily obtainable in that neighborhood, it could be made sufficiently water-tight to answer their purpose. Accordingly, accompanied by their friendly Charon, with his pitch-pot and cotton, they reached the spot indicated ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... she asked, with the smile of curiosity which she always had ready for his plans. Would he pursue the Professor beyond Charon's stream? ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... on the fountain of forgetfulness. In Scotland the channering worm doth chide even the souls that come from where, "beside the gate of Paradise, the birk grows fair enough." The Romaic idea of the place of the dead, the garden of Charon, whence "neither in spring or summer, nor when grapes are gleaned in autumn, can warrior or maiden escape," is likewise pre-Christian. In Provencal and Danish folk-song, the cries of children ill-treated by a cruel step-mother awaken the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... was far other than at peace. The great bombs rose in vast curves overhead, with trails of light, and, seeming to hesitate in mid-air, exploded, or fell on town or ship or in the stream between. As we looked, awe-struck, hot shot set fire to the "Charon," a forty-four-gun ship, nigh to Gloucester, and soon a red rush of fire twining about mast and spar rose in air, lighting the sublime spectacle, amid the crash of guns, the rattle of musketry, and multitudinous inexplicable noises, ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... after this life. On one side of the strait dwell a few fishermen, men possessed of a strange charter, and enjoying singular privileges, in consideration of their being the living ferrymen who, performing the office of the heathen Charon, carry the spirits of the departed to the island which is their residence after death. At the dead of night, these fishermen are, in rotation, summoned to perform the duty by which they seem to hold the permission to reside on this strange coast. A knock is heard at the door of his cottage ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... bid the dead arise? Why call them back from Charon's wherry? Come, Yankee Mark, with twinkling eyes, Confuse these ghouls with something merry! Come, Kipling, with thy soldiers three, Thy barrack-ladies frail and fervent, Forsake thy themes of butchery And be ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III., July 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... not imbued with the knowledge of our intentions, would indicate us to be a combination of perturbed spirits, rowed by Charon ...
— Stories of Comedy • Various
... just finished dressing, when a knock was heard at the door, and a Spartan soldier came in and gravely informed Charon that the commander ...
— The Story of the Greeks • H. A. Guerber
... Old Charon by the Stygian coast Take toll of all the shades who land, Your little, faithful, barking ghost May leap ...
— The Dog's Book of Verse • Various
... and Ate, Pluto, Rhadamanthus, and Minos, the Fates and the Furies, together with Charon, Calumnia, Bellona, and all such objectionable divinities, were requested to disappear for ever from the Low Countries; while in their stead were confidently invoked Jupiter, Apollo, Triptolemus, and ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... evidence to warrant such a belief. Could I believe that I should meet the loved ones who have gone before, I do not know but that I should look forward with pleasure to the "passing across." Not having this belief, I am quite content to stay where I am as long as I can; and finally, when old Charon appears to row me over the river Styx, I shall be ready ...
— Fifty Years of Public Service • Shelby M. Cullom
... made by the brisker inhabitants of Ashbridge, who do not understand its spirit, to substitute for this aged and ineffectual Charon someone who is occasionally awake, but nothing ever results from these revolutionary moves, and the requests addressed to the town council on the subject are never heard of again. "Old George" was ferryman there before any members ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... century B.C. Plautus in the Captivi alluded to these paintings as familiar;[850] and we must not forget that the Etruscans habitually chose the most gruesome and cruel of the Greek fables for illustration, and especially delighted in that of Charon, one likely enough to strike the popular imagination. The play-writers themselves were responsible for inculcating the belief, as Boissier remarked in his work on the Roman religion of the early empire.[851] In the theatre, with women and children present, ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... rowest the boat of the dead in the water of this reedy lake, for Hades, stretch out thy hand, dark Charon, to the son of Kinyras, as he mounts the ladder by the gang-way, and receive him. For his sandals will cause the lad to slip, and he fears to set his feet naked on the sand of ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... from the school of Sosia, set against a hundred picked captives of all nations. Not less than a half of each number got it. These fellows look as if they had done their best. You've fought your last battle, old boys—unless you have a bout with Charon, who will be loath, I warrant you beforehand, to ferry over such a slashed and swollen company. Now ought you in charity,' he continued, addressing a half-naked savage, who was helping to drag the bodies from the cart, 'to have these trunks well ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... Cheever will find nothing in me to aid them in speaking to the mobs of Ephesus and Antioch. They are making shrines, and crying, Great is Diana. Mrs. Stowe is on the Dismal Swamp, with Dred for her Charon, to paddle her light canoe, by the fire-fly lamps, to the Limbo of Vanity, of which she is the queen. None of these will read with attention or honesty, if at all, this examination of what Randolph long ago said was a fanfaronade ...
— Slavery Ordained of God • Rev. Fred. A. Ross, D.D.
... CHARON, ferryman. Never had a childhood. Devoted life to his business. Has navigated more people than all the Atlantic liners combined. Ambition: A launch. ...
— Who Was Who: 5000 B. C. to Date - Biographical Dictionary of the Famous and Those Who Wanted to Be • Anonymous
... telling the captain the opinion the crew formed of him, which was a very just one. Neither he nor I had much doubt that the ships in sight were British. We hoisted British colours, so did they; and in a short time we were all paying compliments to each other, they being his Majesty's ships Charon, Lowestoffe, and Pomona, under the command of the Honourable Captain Luttrell. He confirmed the account we had received of the attack of the Spaniards on the British territories, and informed us also that he had been in quest of two Spanish galleons which ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... complaints To cheenge puir sinners into saints, An' mony divers ways o' deein' That doctors hae a chance o' seein'. The Babylonian scartit bricks To tell his doots o' Death's dark tricks, The Roman kentna hoo 'twas farin' Across the ferry rowed by Charon, An' readin' doonwards through the ages The tale's the same in a' their pages, Eternal grum'lin' at the load We hae to bear alang Life's road, Yet, when we're fairly at the bit, Awfu', maist awfu sweer to flit, Praisin' the name o' ony drug The doctor whispers in oor lug As guaranteed ...
— The Auld Doctor and other Poems and Songs in Scots • David Rorie
... I stalk about her door Like a strange soul upon the Stygian banks Staying for waftage. O, be thou my Charon, And give me swift transportance to these fields Where I may wallow in the lily beds Propos'd for the deserver! O gentle Pandar, from Cupid's shoulder pluck his painted wings, and fly with ...
— The History of Troilus and Cressida • William Shakespeare [Craig edition]
... beguiled the tardy time; no little group made common cause against the full depression of the scene. But that, at certain periods, they swallowed food together from a common trough, it might have been old Charon's boat, conveying melancholy ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... then wilt thou overtake a lame ass laden with wood, and a lame driver, who will pray thee reach him certain cords to fasten the burden which is falling from the ass: but be thou cautious to pass on in silence. And soon as thou comest to the river of the dead, Charon, in that crazy bark he hath, will put thee over upon the further side. There is greed even among the dead: and thou shalt deliver to him, for the ferrying, one of those two pieces of money, in such ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... them really repulsive to see. On an opposite wall is the painting from which our cut is taken. This represents the sacrifices made before Troy by Achilles, on account of the death of his dear friend Patroklos. The figure with the hammer is Charon, who stands ready to receive the sacrifice which is intended to win his favor. Your mythology will tell you the story, which is too long to be given here. The realism of this picture is shocking in its effect, and yet there is something about the manner of the drawing and ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture - Painting • Clara Erskine Clement
... perplexities have occurred in the publishing of my poor book, which perplexities I could only cut asunder, not unloose; so the MS., like an unhappy ghost, still lingers on the wrong side of Styx: the Charon of Albemarle Street durst not risk it in his sutilis cymba, so it leaped ashore again. Better days are coming, and new trials ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... was ready to jump into his delivery wagon and ride with him clear to the end of the pier and on to the ferry-boat of the Charon line. ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... no tempest warring there, No rain-storm beating on them, But Charon sweeping over them, ...
— Hildegarde's Holiday - a story for girls • Laura E. Richards
... think of passing the Styx, lest Charon should touch me; he is so old and wilful, so cross ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... said—"Farewell!" and her voice was a sigh of hopeless grief. In mad desperation Orpheus sought to follow her, but his attempt was vain. At the brink of the dark, fierce-flooded Acheron the boat with its boatman, old Charon, lay ready to ferry across to the further shore those whose future lay in the land of Shades. To him ran Orpheus, in clamorous anxiety to undo the evil he had wrought. But Charon angrily repulsed him. There was no place for such as Orpheus in his ferry-boat. Those only who went, never to return, ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... is the handsomest man in the University, and one of the nicest too. They call him 'the Greek god'; but look at the other one, he's Vincey's (that's the god's name) guardian, and supposed to be full of every kind of information. They call him 'Charon.'" I looked, and found the older man quite as interesting in his way as the glorified specimen of humanity at his side. He appeared to be about forty years of age, and was I think as ugly as his companion was handsome. To begin ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... (Leyden, 1896). (2) So: "The rugged Charon fainted, And asked a navy, rather than a boat, To ferry over the sad world that came." (Ben Jonson, "Catiline", Act i., scene 1.) (3) I take "tepido busto" as the dative case; and, as referring to Pompeius, doomed, like Cornelia's former husband, ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... this, and guided by the Sibyl, after a great sacrifice, AEneas passed into a gloomy cave, where he came to the river Styx, round which flitted all the shades who had never received funeral rites, and whom the ferryman, Charon, would not carry over. The Sibyl, however, made him take AEneas across, his boat groaning under the weight of a human body. On the other side stood Cerberus, but the Sibyl threw him a cake of honey and of some opiate, and he lay asleep, while AEneas passed on and found in myrtle groves ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... river's brim, Where Charon plies the ceaseless oar, Two mighty Shadows, dusk and dim, Stood lingering on the dismal shore. Hoarse came the rugged Boatman's call, While echoing caves enforced the cry— And as they severed life's last thrall, Each Spirit spoke one ...
— Poems • Sam G. Goodrich
... person who died, however exalted his position. Characters were given by judges, after inquiry into the life and conduct of the deceased. The judges sat on the opposite side of a lake; and while they crossed the lake, he who sat at the helm was called Charon, which gave rise to the fable among the Greeks, that Charon conducted the souls of deceased persons into ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... innocent sort, was connected. There was, however. no lack of learned humanists who boldly ridiculed these delusions, and to whose attacks we partly owe the knowledge of them. Gioviano Pontano, the author of the great astrological work already mentioned above, enumerates with pity in his 'Charon' a long string of Neapolitan superstitions—the grief of the women when a fowl or goose caught the pip; the deep anxiety of the nobility if a hunting falcon did not come home, or if a horse sprained its foot; the magical formulae ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... speaks of it as "a most sublime sonnet, full of that antique purity and Dantesque gravity." Dante's influence over the great artist's pictorial imagination is strongly marked in the fresco of the Last Judgment, where Charon's boat, and Minos with his twisted tail, are borrowed direct from the Inferno. Condivi, moreover, informs us that the statues of the Lives Contemplative and Active upon the tomb of Julius were suggested by the Rachel and Leah of the Purgatorio. ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... vary let all be merry, And then if e'er a disaster befall, At Styx's ferry is Charon's wherry In ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... steered his steamer Many a year through the Sound of Mull, He that was never a Celtic dreamer, But a captain of captains masterful: O Death, thou madest the world more dull When you nailed him down in his narrow bier, And sent his ghost into Charon's hull; But where are the ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... a rising gale, Still set them onwards to the welcome shore, Like Charon's bark of spectres, dull and pale: Their living freight was now reduced to four, And three dead, whom their strength could not avail To heave into the deep with those before, Though the two sharks still followed them, and dashed The spray into their ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... may gainsay, the ketch Arangi, trader and blackbirder in the Solomon Islands, may have signified in Jerry's mind as much the mysterious boat that traffics between the two worlds, as, at one time, the boat that Charon sculled across the Styx signified to the human mind. Out of the nothingness men came. Into the nothingness they went. And they came and went ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... as well pass over into Fowey by the ferry here instead of by that from Polruan. If we had already come from Fowey to Bodinnick we should find that the ferryman would carry us back without further payment; the outward fee included a return—not like the ferry of Charon which had no return for passengers. The oars dip peacefully into the water, breaking its surface of glistening light; a delicious coolness, that phantom fragrance of water to which we can give no name, steals upward ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... shall he journey to the dismal beach, Or win the ear of Charon, without one To keep him and stand by him, sure of speech? He is so little, and has just begun To use his feet And speak a few small words, And all his daily usage has been sweet As the soft nesting ways of tender birds. ...
— Alcyone • Archibald Lampman |
