"Knell" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... when I walked in, instead of seeing your father, I confronted a haggard, death-stricken young woman sitting up in bed, her great eyes bright with pain, her lips as white as her hollow cheeks, and her long, black hair streaming over the pillow. The very sight of her struck a knell to the little hope I had of soothing your father's sick bed and forgiving him if he ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... silence stole o'er those youthful brows of mirth, They knew she spoke of the Bridegroom King—the Lord of Heaven and earth; And e'er fleet time of another year had sounded the passing knell, The maiden Clare and her Bridegroom fair were wedded in ...
— The Poetical Works of Mrs. Leprohon (Mrs. R.E. Mullins) • Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon
... cum dignitate of a midshipman's life on shore scarcely more than six weeks when, in September, 1775, the shrill bugle-blast of war sounded the knell of the piping tunes of peace; and I received the very satisfactory intelligence that I was rated as master's mate on board the Orpheus frigate, of fifty-two guns, Captain Hudson, then fitting for sea with ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... him. A clock outside, chiming the half-hour, rang its knell with derisive strokes that seemed to beat upon his heart. It was just his luck. She would never turn up. A hundred contingencies might arise to prevent her—a street accident, a headache, bad news of ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... and when I came up to it, I observed that it appeared to be hollow; but stepping forward, with the chain in my hand, ready to attach it to the log, when, oh, horror! the warning rattle of a snake sounded like a death knell in my ears, proceeding from the log I was about to lay hold of. I was so much frightened by the sound, that I dropped the chain as though it were red hot, left my team, and ran with all the speed in my power, screaming "murder, murder!" ...
— Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman • Austin Steward
... past! and now the distant bell (For deep and pensive thought had held her there) Toll'd midnight out, with long resounding knell, While dismal echoes quiver'd in ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... cherished guest, Who quits you never on an alien quest. But what that mystic prism shadows forth Hath menace which auxiliar from the North May scarce avert. The scales of Justice tilt Something askew. The curse of high-placed guilt Is on you, if the warning tocsin's knell, Clanging forth fiercely, hath not force to tell The hearer that Fate's hourglass fast runs out. That spectral Comet flames, beset about With miasmatic mist, and lurid fume, Conquering Corruption threatens hideous doom. Yet, yet the Bow ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 29, 1893 • Various
... watch every pulsation of the excitement, contemplated the aspect of our opening strife. But with the first echo from abroad of its earliest announcements here came the most positive averments in the English papers, with scarcely a single exception, that the knell of this Union had struck. We had fallen asunder, our bond was broken, we had repudiated our former league or fellowship, and henceforth what had been a unit was to be two or more fragments, in peaceful or hostile relations as the case might be, but never again One. It would ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... when he sat beside her in the tiny boudoir of the Square du Roule, and the heavy foot fall of Heron and his bloodhounds broke in on their first kiss, down to this hour which he believed struck his own death-knell, his love for her had brought more tears to her dear eyes than smiles to ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... swiftly now: she strained her ears, vaguely hoping to catch one last, lingering echo of his voice. But all was silence, save that monotonous clapper, which seemed to beat against her heart like a rhythmic knell of death. ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... stings the madd'ning pain, His dearest happiness that blow must stain, Kissing and boxing—glory, shame! Light, darkness! Fire, ice! Life, death! Heaven, hell! All this was to our Pascal's soul the knell Of hope! But to be thus tormented By flagrant insult, as the soldier meant it; Now without fear he must resent it! It does not need to be a soldier nor a "Monsieur," An outrage placidly to bear. Now fiery Pascal let fly at his foe, Before he could turn round, ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... sorrowing Mermaids deck'd his watery grave; O'er his pale corse their pearly sea-flowers shed, And strew'd with crimson moss his marble bed; Struck in their coral towers the pausing bell, And wide in ocean toll'd his echoing knell. ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... disengaged hand, fell back step by step, till they found the support of a tree- trunk, when they waited for the attack. From time to time the low growls gave warning of the enemy's close presence, and to them each sound was as a death-knell; for what were their knives against a foe so powerful, who had, ...
— In Search of the Okapi - A Story of Adventure in Central Africa • Ernest Glanville
... water fails to check itself by enlarging the supply, it shall, before the point of danger is reached, infallibly check the combustion, let off the steam, and blow a whistle or ring a bell, which the proprietor may, if he pleases, regard as the official death-knell of the careless engineer. Human vigilance must not be superseded, but fortified,—as in the case of the watchman watched by the tell-tale clock. The steam-creature must be so constituted as to refuse to work itself down to the zone where alone unequal strains are possible; it ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... To Capel-court rushed women, boys, and men, All seeking railway shares and scrip; and when The market rose, how many a lad could tell, With joyous glance, and eyes that spake again, 'Twas e'en more lucrative than marrying well;— When, hark! that warning voice strikes like a rising knell. ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... the stately Madam Esmond Warrington had placed her by her own side at dinner and had kissed her check at leaving; but oftenest at Brandon Mansion where one of her heroines had lived—Evelyn Byrd; so that, Sir Godfrey Knell having painted that sad young lady, who now lies with a heavy stone on her heavier heart in the dim old burying-ground at Westover, she would have it that hers must be painted in the same identical fashion, with herself sitting on a green bank, a cluster of roses in her hand, a ...
— The Choir Invisible • James Lane Allen
... through all life. 'All is vanity.' That principle may even be exemplified in worship, and the obscure verse 7 which closes the section about the faults of worship seems to be equivalent to the more familiar close which rings the knell of so many of men's pursuits in this book, 'This also is vanity.' It stands in the ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... diphtheria that is occurring here. I am an old man, as you see, and have had a hundred, perhaps five hundred cases as like this as two peas in a pod." (He stopped, expecting a smile at least for his homely comparison, but every face was as sober as if he had come to sound a death-knell.) "Miss Blair is sick, I might say is very sick, but I am not in the least anxious about her, or about any of you. Under ordinary circumstances, and I consider these very ordinary, I think there is not any probability of another ...
— Miss Ashton's New Pupil - A School Girl's Story • Mrs. S. S. Robbins
... place. It was witchcraft, it was some vile art. They had no heart to man the battlements, to fight like their brothers at Orleans and Jargeau in face of all the powers of the evil one: the cry of "Sus! Sus!" was like the death-knell in their ears. ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... of age and disuse. It was sad. It was solemn. It had the look of a place where silence had become master and was now irrevocable and terrible and could not be broken. Yet, at the moment, from high up in the carved crevices of the arch, floated down the low, strange wail of wind—a knell indeed for all ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... knell of parting day; The lowing herds wind slowly o'er the lea; The ploughman homeward plods his weary way, And leaves the world ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... three of those men seized the Capitol at once, the fourth intended to do so. It was always the immediate object of every revolt, and the power to ring the great Patarina, the ancient bell stolen by the Romans from Viterbo, had for centuries a directing influence in Roman brawls. Its solemn knell announced the death of a Pope, or tolled the last hour of condemned criminals, and men crossed themselves as it echoed through the streets; but at the tremendous sound of its alarm, rung backward till the tower rocked, the Romans ran to arms, the captains of ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... chagrin in his heart, Maurice viewed the scene. The knell of the Osians had been struck. He gazed forlornly at the cuirassiers; they at least had come to sell their lives honestly for their bread. Presently the two armies came together; all was confusion and cheers. Kronau approached the leader of the cavalry.... Maurice was greatly ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... the ultimate triumph and dignity of labor. 'We shall one day,' he says, 'supersede Politics by Education.' Pause well here, you who grope forward into the dark future with misgiving and faithless hearts. This is not the chimerical delusion of a transcendental philosophy, this death-knell to the Slavery of Ignorance and Vice. Recognize in it the wide generosity that says with Leczinsky, 'Je ne connais d'avarice permise que celle du temps.' Here is wealth for want, industry for indolence, distinction for degradation, virtue for vice. It beams clear as the red of morning. Hear ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... blood; and those whose infancy has sheltered them from the fire of the rabble soldiery will be bayoneted as they cling to the knees of their destroyers.[64] The common doom of man commuted for the violence of the sword, the bayonet, the sucking boat, and the guillotine, the knell of the nation tolled, and the world summoned to its execution and funeral, will need no preacher to expound the text, Where there is no vision, the ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... distance, yet it penetrated, with clear, sharp vibrations, to the brain of the sick man, and seemed to him, in the gathering excitement of this fearful hour, to grow louder and louder, till each tick sounded to his sharpened sense like the vibrations of a bell, and seemed to be the funeral knell of his destiny; sounding thus to his ears, solemnly, fatefully, bodingly; pealing forth thus with every sound the announcement that second after second out of those few minutes of time which were still left him had passed away from him forever. ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... settles down on these sad five, standing, huddled together, at the door, with the extinguished lamps hanging in their despairing hands. 'Too late, too late, ye cannot enter now.' The wedding bell has become a funeral knell. They were not the enemies of the bridegroom, they thought themselves his friends. They let life ebb without securing the one thing needful, and the neglect was irremediable. There is a tragedy underlying many a ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... him, were all silent, and the words of the Public Prosecutor fell like a knell. The condemned man, however, had not stirred, had not even seemed to understand: his attitude was that of a man in a state of somnambulism. The Public Prosecutor was surprised by this strange impassivity and spoke again, ...
— Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... cried the compassionate nurse. "I feared it would be so. I saw it coming this last week; and a third stroke is a death-knell—that's certain! But it will be a blessed escape for the poor dear; so don't take on, Mr. Morris" (this was her nearest approach to saying "Maurice"). "You'll need all your spirit to get along with the old lady; though, if she were the north pole itself, ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... now—the friends I loved so well? My outstretched hands clutch only empty air! I call on those who loved me—Like a knell The silence echoes to ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay
... a right in any sense, only a concession! Mr. President, I do not hold my liberties by any such tenure. On the contrary, I believe that whenever you establish that doctrine, whenever you crystallize that idea in the public mind of this country, you ring the death-knell ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... son of Sir Evan, undaunted Lochiel, Place thy targe on thy shoulder and burnish thy steel! Rough Keppoch, give breath to thy bugle's bold swell, Till far Coryarrick resound to the knell! ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... looked up and round; the birds had ceased to chirp; the parroquets were hiding behind the leaves; the monkeys were clustered motionless upon the highest twigs; only out of the far depths of the forest, the campanero gave its solemn toll, once, twice, thrice, like a great death-knell rolling down from far cathedral towers. Was it an omen? He looked up hastily at Ayacanora. She was watching him earnestly. Heavens! was she waiting for his decision? Both dropped their eyes. The decision was not to ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... Theo—seriously?" she gasped; and the repressed eagerness in her tone sounded the death-knell of his ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... to shake it, fool! Back to thy house again, Serpent with forked tongue! Wait till the knell hath rung; Thou shalt not wait in vain! Now clasp it tightly, carry it ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... Strictly speaking, it may not be more impressive now, than at any other time; for the hours steal as swiftly on, at other periods, and their flight is little heeded. But, we measure man's life by years, and it is a solemn knell that warns us we have passed another of the landmarks which stands between us and the grave. Disguise it as we may, the reflection will force itself on our minds, that when the next bell announces the ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... of less note came one frail form, A phantom among men, companionless As the last cloud of an expiring storm Whose thunder is its knell. He, as I guess, Had gazed on Nature's naked loveliness 5 Actaeon-like; and now he fled astray With feeble steps o'er the world's wilderness, And his own thoughts along that rugged way Pursued like raging hounds ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... direction, but not one so peculiarly perilous. From this they made a turn to the left into a lane that would have led them back again to a little village, through which they had already passed, the bell of which was already sounding their death-knell. The constabulary, by turning into the narrow lane at the left, unconsciously approached the very ambush into which the people, or rather their more disciplined leaders, had intended to decoy them. This lane was enclosed ...
— The Tithe-Proctor - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... a prisoner, lying helpless among his sleeping captors. Silvertip and the guard had fled into the woods, frightened by the appalling moan which they believed sounded their death-knell. And Joe believed he might have fled himself had he been free. What could have caused that sound? He fought off the numbing chill that once again began to creep over him. He was wide-awake now; his head was clear, and ...
— The Spirit of the Border - A Romance of the Early Settlers in the Ohio Valley • Zane Grey
... though in that sound be years Of blighted hopes and fruitless tears— Though the soul vibrate to its knell Of ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar
... came to them covered with the blood of those who had striven in their defence. The holiday was duly called forth; houses, where funeral hatchments for murdered inmates had been perpetually suspended, were decked with garlands; the bells, which had hardly once omitted their daily knell for the victims of an incredible cruelty, now rang their merriest peals; and in the very square where so lately Egmont and Horn, besides many other less distinguished martyrs, had suffered an ignominious death, a gay tournament was held, day ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... thought!—well might it sink deeply into my heart, and taking root there spring forth yielding fruits of repentance. Soon may Death, the great enemy of mankind, add one more ghastly victim to the lifeless piles that lie heaped together in every clime and on every shore; and when my death- knell shall sound will it be the signal of a spirit wailing in the regions of the lost, or rejoicing in the bright realms of everlasting bliss? It is for me, and me alone to decide. Perhaps it is for this that my life has been spared—that I might make a firm and decided choice; and shall I still ...
— Canadian Wild Flowers • Helen M. Johnson
... in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. We are not enemies, but friends." This message, held out as an olive branch, the South denounced as a menace. Some northern papers condemned it as the "knell and requiem of the Union." But the general feeling it evoked at the North was one of rejoicing. People believed that a hand both moderate and firm had ...
— History of the United States, Volume 3 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... for those less blest than they. These are the men who serve the city in times of peace, save it in times of war, deserve the highest honors in its gift, and leave behind them a record that keeps their memories green. For such an one we lately tolled a knell, my brothers; and as our united voices pealed over the city, in all grateful hearts, sweeter and more solemn than any chime, rung the words that made him ...
— Kitty's Class Day And Other Stories • Louisa M. Alcott
... on; the sound of that death-knell shook her nerves, and made her feel faint and weak. Oh, it would have been easier had she been as she was a year ago, before she learned to love, and hand in hand had seen faith and hope re-arise from the depths of her stirred soul. ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... reasonable chance of decisive victory with the troops available. Longstreet, in obedience to the letter of his orders, but contrary to their spirit, refused to sanction Hood's advance. Longstreet's failure to seize a fleeting opportunity sounded the death-knell of the Confederate cause. ...
— Lectures on Land Warfare; A tactical Manual for the Use of Infantry Officers • Anonymous
... the ship rolled and dashed, like a desperate creature driven mad, now showing us the whole sweep of her deck, as she turned on her beam-ends towards the shore, now nothing but her keel, as she sprung wildly over and turned towards the sea, the bell rang; and its sound, the knell of those unhappy men, was borne towards us on the wind. Again we lost her, and again she rose. Two men were gone. The agony on the shore increased. Men groaned, and clasped their hands; women shrieked, and turned away ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... shuffle their feet, loaf in the sunlight; A girl's laugh rings like a silver bell. But clearer than all these sounds is a sound he hears More in his secret heart than in his ears,— A hammer's steady crescendo, like a knell. He hears the snarl of pineboards under the plane, The rhythmic saw, and then the hammer again,— Playing with delicate strokes that sombre scale . . . And the fountain dwindles, ...
— The House of Dust - A Symphony • Conrad Aiken
... believed in the ghost all night, And believed in the day as well; And he vowed, with a sorrowing tearful might, All she asked, whate'er befel, If she came to his room, in her garment white, Once more at the midnight knell. ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... rapid conclusions from the way he spoke. He bit off his words, as riflemen bite their cartridges, he chiselled every consonant, and gave full free scope to every vowel. This was all the accent he had, an accent of precision and determination and formalism, that struck like a knell, clear and ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... That seems to mourn for the expiring day.] The curfew tolls the knell of parting day. ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... the storm, in the smoke, in the fight, I come To help thee, dear, with my fife and my drum. My name is Music: and, when the bell Rings for the dead men, I rule the knell; And, whenever the mariner wrecked through the blast Hears the fog-bell sound, it was I who passed. The poet hath told you how I, a young maid, Came fresh from the gods to the myrtle shade; And thence, by a power divine, I stole To where ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... "You are sounding the death-knell of autocracy in industry. There was autocracy in political life, and it was superseded by democracy. So surely will democratic power wrest from you the control of industry. The fate of the aristocracy of industry will be as the fate of the aristocracy of land, if you ...
— Six days of the Irish Republic - A Narrative and Critical Account of the Latest Phase of Irish Politics • Louis Redmond-Howard
... tatter'd ensign of my ancestors, Which swept the desert shore of that Dead Sea Whereof we got the name of Mortimer, Will I advance upon this castle ['s] walls— Drums, strike alarum, raise them from their sport, And ring aloud the knell of Gaveston! Lan. None be so hardy as to touch the king; But neither spare you Gaveston nor his ...
— Edward II. - Marlowe's Plays • Christopher Marlowe
... stood like a shrouded ghost, and the drip, drip, drip of the rain on the veranda came to him like a death-knell. ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... disaster are always interposed? Unsuspectedly from the bottom of every fountain of pleasure, as the old poet said, something bitter rises up: a touch of nausea, a falling dead of the delight, a whiff of melancholy, things that sound a knell, for fugitive as they may be, they bring a feeling of coming from a deeper region and often have an appalling convincingness. The buzz of life ceases at their touch as a piano-string stops sounding when the damper ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... suddenly before his face. Michu, superstitious like all primitive beings, fancied he heard the muffled tones of a death-knell. The day, however, began brightly enough for lovers, who rarely see magpies when together in the woods. Michu, armed with his plan, verified the spots; each gentleman had brought a pickaxe, and the money was soon found. The part of the forest where ...
— An Historical Mystery • Honore de Balzac
... Ramona in after years, as she looked back over this life, that the news of Father Salvierderra's death was the first note of the knell of their happiness. It was but a few days afterward, when Alessandro came in one noon with an expression on his face that terrified her; seating himself in a chair, he buried his face in his hands, and would neither ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... gnat-like evils hover round its head; Nor doubt it when in mad, disjointed times It shakes the torch of terror, and its cry Shrills o'er the quaking earth, and in the flame Of riot and war we see its awful form Rise by the scaffold, where the crimson axe Rings down its grooves the knell of shuddering kings. For ever in thine eyes, O Liberty, Shines that high light whereby the world is saved, And though thou slay us, ...
— Pike County Ballads and Other Poems • John Hay
... a poor woman neatly headed off the scent of a fifty-dollar bill. She rang the knell of a new hat by ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... total absence of vulgarity and a fairer treatment, which made this department of warfare always pleasing"—which is all very true if we admit that the function of ridicule and banter as political weapons is to be merely "pleasing." At any rate, if it be so, it is the knell of all great satire—with the corresponding effect of making the more caustic and grosser sides of men like Swift impossible. Yet, on the other hand, so late as 1860, according to Sir Theodore Martin, Punch more than any other paper reflected the national feeling in such matters as our naval ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... was re-echoed on every side; but they were still attempting to escape in different directions. Scarcely two of them were agreed as to the place whence the sound proceeded. Yet it came on, at stated intervals, a long, deep, melancholy knell, almost terrific in their present condition. Another council was attended with the same results—opinions being as varied as ever. Still that warning toll had some connection with their fellow-men, some link, which, however remote, united them to those who were now slumbering in happiness ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... loathing escaped her lips and with a jerk she freed her skirt from his clutch. Then she ran quickly up the stairs. Outside the door of her own room on the first landing she paused for one minute, and from out of the gloom her voice came to him like the knell ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... style was moulded. From it his diction and his method derived their peculiarities. It transformed what would in all probability have been the mere counterpart of Caedmon's Paraphrase or Langland's Vision into Paradise Lost; and what would have been the mere counterpart of Corydon's Doleful Knell and the satire of the Three Estates, into Lycidas and Comus." (Quarterly ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... triple bob: Oh, how our widow's heart did throb, And thus she heard their burden go, "Marry, mar-marry, mar-Guillot!" Bells were not then left to hang idle: A week,—and they rang for her bridal But, woe the while, they might as well Have rung the poor dame's parting knell. The rosy dimples left her cheek. She lost her beauties plump and sleek, For Guillot oftener kick'd than kiss'd, And back'd his orders with his fist, Proving by deeds as well as words, That servants ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... kuirilaro. Kite (bird) milvo. Kite (toy) flugludilo. Knack lerteco. Knacker defelisto. Knapsack tornistro. Knave fripono. Knave (cards) lakeo. Knavery friponeco. Knead knedi. Kneading-trough knedujo. Knee genuo. Kneecap genuosto. Kneel genufleksi. Knell mortsonorado, funebra sonorado. Knife trancxilo. Knife-blade trancxanto. Knight kavaliro. Knit triki, trikoti. Knitting-needle trikilo. Knob butono. Knock frapi. Knock down disjxeti, dejxeti. Knot ligtubero. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... crack beneath her door. She listened. The house was still as the grave. Not a sound from all the world outside, except the striking of a fire alarm for the seventh district. The deep notes vibrated upon her quickened hearing like a knell. ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... was how Moze had broken his chain and plunged into the raging Colorado River, and tried to swim it just above the terrible Sockdolager Rapids. Rust and his fellow-workmen watched the dog disappear in the yellow, wrestling, turbulent whirl of waters, and had heard his knell in the booming roar of the falls. Nothing but a fish could live in that current; nothing but a bird could scale those perpendicular marble walls. That night, however, when the men crossed on the tramway, Moze met them with a wag of ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... sounded the death-knell of one brave, noble heart, and crushed countless hopes as George Marshall's soul went out. The murderous fragment of a shell penetrated his brain, and his life was ended in ...
— Leah Mordecai • Mrs. Belle Kendrick Abbott
... over the place. The screech-owl gave one gloomy shrill and prolonged note, and all was still again. But that sound went thrilling to Theodora's heart, like the death-knell on the mountain blast; while the night wind blew fearfully, and the dismal howling was rehearsed by the echoes ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... household, husbands and wives must one day hear the striking of a fatal hour. It is a knell, the death and end of jealousy, a great, noble and charming passion, the only true symptom of love, if it is not even its double. When a woman is no longer jealous of her husband, all is over, she loves him no more. So, conjugal love ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Second Part • Honore de Balzac
... women, but the girls I meet with in society won't let me. They like me to make free with them; they like me to talk to them about doubtful subjects, and they make me"—and he ground his teeth as he said it—"what I just hate myself for being." Alas! alas! can sadder words knell in ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... and they were confirmed in the order in which Washington had written them; but when they came back, jealousy and temper mastered him, and he committed the intemperate act which tolled the death-knell of the Federalist party: he ordered the commissions made out with Hamilton's name third on the list. Knox and Pinckney, he declared, were entitled to precedence; and so the order should stand or not at all. He had not ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... it wid my gun on the other side of the creek; I didn't want it tollin' our funeral knell all the time we was goin' through the rapids and splittin' the rocks to pieces by bangin' our ...
— The Hunters of the Ozark • Edward S. Ellis
... poor Stella danc'd and sung; The am'rous youth around her bow'd: At night her fatal knell was rung! I saw and kiss'd ...
— Language of Flowers • Kate Greenaway
... accomplished, must be as sudden as the danger which it affronts. Even that, even the sickening necessity for hurrying in extremity where all hurry seems destined to be vain, self-baffled, and where the dreadful knell of too late is already sounding in the ears by anticipation—even that anguish is liable to a hideous exasperation in one particular case, namely, where the agonising appeal is made not exclusively to the instinct of self-preservation, ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... church bell Tolls forth its death knell, Mournfully to tell The hour has come at last, In heavy sadness past, To bury the dead, And in silence bid. Then the mourners go, All mournfully slow, Every heart beating low The march of the dead. All with soft and gentle tread Unto ...
— A Leaf from the Old Forest • J. D. Cossar
... Giving, not receiving; asking, not answer." The words reverberated through her consciousness like a funeral knell. She dropped the stained lily ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... even in his dying fear One dreadful sound could the Rover hear— A sound as if with the Inchcape bell The devil below was ringing his knell." ...
— Grace Darling - Heroine of the Farne Islands • Eva Hope
... he laid; Poppies these, that were his eyes, Of fish-bones are these blue-bells made; His fins of gold that to and fro Waved and waved so long ago, Still as petals wave and wave To and fro above his grave. Hearken, too! for so his knell Tolls ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... Anecdotes'), who leaves his house one morning for no particular reason, and though living in the next street, does not reveal his existence to his wife for twenty years; and the hero of the 'Wedding Knell,' the elderly bridegroom whose early love has jilted him, but agrees to marry him when she is an elderly widow and he an old bachelor, and who appals the marriage party by coming to the church in his shroud, ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... to the table may quell and may awaken romance. When, in some abode of poetized luxury, the "silver knell" sounds musically six, and a door opens toward a glitter that is not pewter and Wedgewood, and, with a being fair and changeful as a sunset cloud upon my arm, I move under the archway of blue curtains toward the asphodel and the nectar, then, O Reader! Friend! romance crowds ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... of Constance. But I loved her; every pulse in me throbbed love and longing at her approach. Again and again I had demonstrated to myself my own unworthiness of such a woman; the natural affinity between Constance and Crondall. Yet now, the sight of that kiss was as the sound of a knell in my heart; it filled me with an aching lament for the death of——of something which had still lived in me, whether admitted ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... the knell of parting day, The lowing herd winds slowly o'er the lea, The ploughman homeward plods his weary way, And leaves the world to darkness ...
— Voices for the Speechless • Abraham Firth
... silently on while the body was removed from the train to the hearse, and the funeral cortege moved on to Westminster Hall at once and entered the Palace Yard just as "Big Ben" tolled the hour of one like a funeral knell. ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... country for a second, and the same effect was produced by the shots fired at Sarajevo. It became obvious that the signal for the fall of the Monarchy had been given. The bells of Sarajevo, which began to toll half an hour after the murder, sounded the death knell of the Monarchy. ...
— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin
... in our wards increased daily. Sick men poured into the hospital. Often they came too late, having remained at the post of duty until fever had sapped the springs of life or the rattling breath sounded the knell of hope, marking too surely that fatal disease, double pneumonia. Awestruck I watched the fierce battle for life, the awful agony, trying vainly every means of relief, lingering to witness struggles which wrung my heart, because I could not resist ...
— Memories - A Record of Personal Experience and Adventure During Four Years of War • Fannie A. (Mrs.) Beers
... survivors tell How nought from death could save, Till every sound appears a knell, And every spot ...
— The Poets' Lincoln - Tributes in Verse to the Martyred President • Various
... numbs my thought: methinks I hear the passing knell; As dies across yon thin blue line ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... and give us the fruits of victory, although the destruction of Hood's army was the real object to be desired. Yet Atlanta was known as the "Gate-City of the South," was full of founderies, arsenals, and machine-shops, and I knew that its capture would be the death-knell of the Southern Confederacy. ...
— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman
... "The knell of the highest society is tolling," said a Russian Prince. "Do you hear it? And the first stroke is your ...
— Another Study of Woman • Honore de Balzac
... voice had a cristalline sonority that pierced Rodolphe's heart like a funeral knell, and filled it with a mournful alarm. He looked at her more attentively. It was no ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... common was called Mucklestane-Moor, from a huge column of unhewn granite, which raised its massy head on a knell near the centre of the heath, perhaps to tell of the mighty dead who slept beneath, or to preserve the memory of some bloody skirmish. The real cause of its existence had, however, passed away; and tradition, which is as frequently an inventor of fiction as a preserver of truth, had supplied ...
— The Black Dwarf • Sir Walter Scott
... river that he loved so well Like a full heart is awed to calm, The winter air that wafts his knell Is ...
— The Hudson - Three Centuries of History, Romance and Invention • Wallace Bruce
... grant the power of 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 of the ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... she who shaped my ways, Or works, or thoughts," he said. "I scarcely marked her living days, Or missed her much when dead." But O, his joyance knew its knell When daisies hid ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... action, and where that was impossible they took hardly any recognizable shape. When the first boom of the big bell filled the little study in which we sat, I gave a cry, and jumped up from my chair: it sounded in my ears like the knell of my lost baby, for at the moment I was thinking of her as once when a baby she lay for dead in my arms. Mr. Blackstone got up and left the room, and my husband rose and would have followed him; but, saying he would be back in a few minutes, he shut the door and left ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... pleasures; he had been too absorbed to enjoy them. But now—in a single moment—Ambition was dethroned. At the time, though his eyes were open, he scarcely realized that the old supremacy had passed. Only long afterwards did he ask himself if the death-knell of his success had begun to toll on that golden morning; because a man cannot serve ...
— The Rocks of Valpre • Ethel May Dell
... Meldrum could hear something. They all could hear something above the shrieking of the wind, and the roar of the waves, and the crash of the cakes and bergs of ice tumbling against each other. It was something that sounded like the death-knell of the Nancy Bell, and made their faces blanch with fear. It was the noise of breakers, distant yet, but still as plainly distinguishable as if quite near— breakers breaking on a lee-shore, the most terrible sound of all sounds to a ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson
... what was the phrase that kept ringing in his ears?—"And when she bids die he shall surely die!" But he no longer heard the pathetic vibration of Natalie Lind's voice; the words seemed to him solemn, and distant, and hopeless, like a knell. But only if it were over—that was again his wild desire. In the grave was forgetfulness ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... followed on the night when we together fell, And when ye made our burial, there was triumph in the knell! Though crushed behind the barricades, and scarred in every limb, The pride of conscious Victory lay on our foreheads grim! We thought: the price is dearly paid, but the treasures must be true, And rested calmly in the graves we swore to ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... this? Was he deluding himself? Did his over-excited imagination make him hear a death knell pealing for his honour and his hopes, which must be borne to their grave? Yet no! All the citizens and peasants, men and women, great and small, who thronged the salt market, which he had just entered, raised their heads to listen with him; ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Charley! It was the imminent danger only to the Cause that made his heart sink in that seemingly fateful hour. When we heard in the malignant and triumphant roar of the Rebel cannon in our rear what might be the death-knell of the last great experiment of civilized men to establish among the nations of the world a united republic, freed from the curse of pampered kings and selfish, grasping aristocrats—it was in that moment, in his simple language, that the peril to the Cause ...
— The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War, 1861-1865 • Leander Stillwell
... from the shore the signal gun was fired; the farewell gun! how it brought back to the father's memory that moment of agony when the signal gun of another steamer struck the knell of his parting with his only daughter, and seemed to ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... was dead, sounded through all Scotland like a knell announcing a great national bereavement. Men woke up to feel the greatness of the gift which in him had been vouchsafed to their generation, and which had met, on the whole, with so poor a reception. Self-reproach ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... shall that night light such a candle as shall never be put out. Electric light is doomed. The knell ...
— The Brother of Daphne • Dornford Yates
... like pensile stars, Such as never yet were beaming 'mid this world's discordant jars. And their whispers wild, unearthly, unutterable, fell like a harp-string's dying echo, or a fair young spirit's knell, On my soul amid the shadows of my native forest trees, Rustling melancholy, lowly, in the wailing of the breeze, Till, unknowing pain or agony, I've wept such blissful tears As shall never, never flow ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... pleasing to present-day readers since we escape, or seem to escape, from the cool universality of humble life to a focus on an individual grief. To end on a grim note of generalized "doom," would have given the poem a temporary success such as it deserved; and it must be acknowledged that the knell-like sound of "No more ... No more" (lines 20, 21) echoed and re-echoed for decades through the imaginations of gloom-fed poets. But Gray, although an undoubted "graveyard" poet, is no mere graveyard poet: he ...
— An Elegy Wrote in a Country Church Yard (1751) and The Eton College Manuscript • Thomas Gray
... death—the only calm one there—Katherine stood; and her words smote on the ear in tones whose appallingly slow and separate intonation rung on the heart like a chill, isolated tolling of some fatal knell. ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... Come sun, come showers, Are friends of flowers, And fairies all; When frost entrapped her, They came and lapped her In leaves, and wrapped her With shroud and pall; In red leaves wound her, With dead leaves bound her Dead brows, and round her A death-knell rang; Rang the death-bell for her, Sang, "is it well for her, Well, is it well with ...
— Poems & Ballads (Second Series) - Swinburne's Poems Volume III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... watched her. There was a tone in her voice that he had hungered for all his life; that he had never heard but in his imaginings and in his dreams; that he had heard sounding in the ears of another and sounding at the same time the death-knell of the one hope that until now had made effort worth while. All evening she had played about his spirit as a wistful, changeful light will play over the fields when the moon is bright and clouds run swiftly. She turned on him like ...
— Crittenden - A Kentucky Story of Love and War • John Fox, Jr.
... his jest to these Seemed—screamed, shrieked, wreaked on kin for sin! When for mirth's yell earth's knell seemed please Some dumb new grim great whim in him Made Jews take ...
— The Heptalogia • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... and at last the ship suddenly sinks from our view, whilst the loud and awful death-cry of five hundred helpless beings, imprisoned in the burning vessel, rings in our ears, curdling our blood, and seeming as if it would burst the very vault of Heaven with its appalling tones. It was a fitting knell to be rung over the ...
— Hair Breadth Escapes - Perilous incidents in the lives of sailors and travelers - in Japan, Cuba, East Indies, etc., etc. • T. S. Arthur
... justification of her act. "A sick man cannot live on beans." But now they were down to beans—just beans and lard boiled together. Then a day dawned when there was not even a spoonful of lard left. "Beans straight!"—it was the death knell, for beans straight—beans without grease—kill the strongest man in a brief span of days. Oh, that the ice bridges would melt, the ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... Archbishop Laud, going into his study (which no one could enter without him being present, as he invariably locked the door and kept the key), found his portrait one day lying on its face on the floor. He was extremely perplexed, for to him it was as his death knell, and he commenced setting his house in order. The sad summons was not long of coming, and death took ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... today where it has hung for fifty years or more, But some who loved its silver tones the church-yard covers o'er, And many are the times since then, with deep and solemn knell, Has tolled for dear departed ...
— The Old Hanging Fork and Other Poems • George W. Doneghy
... September was he laid, Poppies these that were his eyes, Of fish-bones were these bluebells made. His fins of gold that to and fro Waved and waved so long ago, Still as petals wave and wave To and fro above his grave. Hearken too! for so his knell Tolls ...
— English Poems • Richard Le Gallienne |
