"Tombstone" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... freedom from all oddity, is Catholicity,—and departure from it so much departure in me from Nature and myself. We say a man is original, if he lives at first, and not at second hand,—if he requires a new tombstone,—if he takes law, not from the many or the few, but from the sky,—if he is no subordinate, but an authority,—if he does not borrow judgment, but is judgment. Such a man is singular in his attitude only because we have ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... could not persuade herself of a possible harmony between them, save at the cost of Tony's expiation of the sin of the greater heart in a performance equivalent to Suttee. Perfectly an English gentleman of the higher order, he seemed the effigy of a tombstone one, fixed upright, and civilly proud of his effigy bride. So far, Emma considered them fitted. She perceived his quick eye on her corner of the room; necessarily, for a man of his breeding, without ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... of that pale illumination he saw the tall tombstone, and beneath it the figure of a woman lying face downward on the snow. Trim gave an exclamation of astonishment, but Giles set his mouth and suppressed all signs of emotion. He wondered if the figure was that ...
— A Coin of Edward VII - A Detective Story • Fergus Hume
... tuft on cheek nor beard on chin, But lips where smile went out and in; There was no guessing his kith and kin: And nobody could enough admire The tall man and his quaint attire. Quoth one: "It's as my great-grandsire, Starting up at the Trump of Doom's tone, Had walked this way from his painted tombstone!" ...
— The Pied Piper of Hamelin • Robert Browning
... a drunken man, and of this drunken man in particular, was not, I grieve to say, of sufficient novelty in Red Gulch to attract attention. Earlier in the day some local satirist had erected a temporary tombstone at Sandy's head, bearing the inscription, "Effects of McCorkle's whiskey—kills at forty rods," with a hand pointing to McCorkle's saloon. But this, I imagine, was, like most local satire, personal; and was a reflection ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various
... first covenant was read, and afterwards it was laid on a flat tombstone in Greyfriars churchyard, and signed by the earl of Sutherland as the first noble of Scotland, and then by others according to their degree. During two days it was borne round the city, followed by an immense crowd, sobbing ...
— The Red Book of Heroes • Leonora Blanche Lang
... tombstone a name and a wreath, And a tale to touch hearts through the slow-spreading years— How he died his noble and beautiful death, And his mother who longed for him, died ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... Sophia. I am glad to stretch my old limbs after that terrible drive. So here we are together again. What are you sighing for? Upon my soul, you are the same as ever, I see, the same tombstone on your chest, and blowing yourself out with sighs, just as you used. That will never give you a figure, my poor girl; it is no wonder you are but skin and bones. Ah, can't you let the poor fellow rest in his grave Sophia? it is flying ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... turned to the dust whirl that advanced up the road that ran round the corral. "That doesn't prove anything, Alan. Everybody knows Jose. He's lived all over Arizona—at Tucson and Tombstone and Douglas." ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... they sink into the grave. Such was the case with Peter Anderson: he was ninety-seven when he died, but long before that time his mind was quite gone. Still he was treated with respect, and many were there who attended his funeral. I erected a handsome tombstone to his memory, the last tribute I could pay to a worthy, honest, sensible, and highly religious ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... smile on his countenance that completed his ugliness, and would have frightened any honest man from his side at once. Merely glancing my way, he shuffled up to my companion, and leading him aside, drew out a paper which he laid on a flat tombstone with a gesture significant of his desire that the other should affix ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... Burns, whose death this letter intimates, lies buried in the kirk-yard of Alloway, with a tombstone recording his worth.] ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... writings—the friend and wife, whose exalted sense of truth and right was my strongest incitement, and whose approbation was my chief reward, I dedicate this volume." Not less touching is the testimony borne by another great living writer to the character of his wife, in the inscription upon the tombstone of Mrs. Carlyle in Haddington Churchyard, where are inscribed these words:—"In her bright existence, she had more sorrows than are common, but also a soft amiability, a capacity of discernment, and a noble loyalty of heart, which are rare. For forty years she was the true and loving helpmate of ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... wherever there were not children there were signs. Blatant, dingy signs. The first one she glimpsed was propped before the basement gate through which the housemaids had been wont to enter. It was shaped like a tombstone and with ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... and took a piece of a tombstone from the churchyard to dredge the bottom with; and in the evening, when the tide had turned, he lay out in ...
— Weird Tales from Northern Seas • Jonas Lie
... associates why a man of O'Day's intelligence should have cultivated the acquaintance of an undertaker like Digwell, for instance, whose face was a tombstone, his movements when on duty those of a crow stepping across wet places in a cornfield, they would have shaken their heads in disparaging wonder. Had you asked Felix he would have answered with a smile: "Why to hear Digwell laugh!" And then, warming to his subject, he would have told you ...
— Felix O'Day • F. Hopkinson Smith
... of vaults, regarding them, with reason, as uncertain places of sepulture for the presumably defunct. I had never heard, or read, of cremation. I had had the misfortune to break my slate a few days before, and the biggest fragment made a nice tombstone for Caspar Hauser. With a nail and with infinite toil ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... Doctor Grimshawe's residence, by confessing that it stood in a shabby by-street, and cornered on a graveyard, with which the house communicated by a back door; so that with a hop, skip, and jump from the threshold, across a flat tombstone, the two children [Endnote: 4] were in the daily habit of using the dismal cemetery as their playground. In their graver moods they spelled out the names and learned by heart doleful verses on the headstones; and in their merrier ones (which ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... As cut on the tombstone after revision the epitaph was substantially the same. "Interred" was changed to "deposited"; "theatre" was stricken out and "aim" inserted and "honor" added after "usefulness"; "became" was changed to "was"; "Virtues as a Man" was made to read ...
— The Story of Commodore John Barry • Martin Griffin
... in truth, was not a place to inspire fear. It was a barren piece of ground whose narrow paths were smothered by rank weeds. Here and there the soil was bossy with mounds. A single tombstone, that of Abbe Caffin, brand-new and upright, could be perceived in the centre of the ground. Save this, all around there were only broken fragments of crosses, withered tufts of box, and old slabs split and moss-eaten. There were not two burials ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... the old Norman barons from whom he traced his descent, were all enrolled in regular order on every leaf—headed, sometimes merely by representations of the Knight's favourite weapon; sometimes by copies of the Baron's effigy on his tombstone in a foreign land. As the history advanced to later dates, beautiful miniature portraits were inlaid at the top of each leaf; and the illuminations were so managed as to symbolize the remarkable merits or the peculiar ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... much discussed in the newspapers at the time. Colonel Joyce's tombstone in Oak Hill bears a likeness of ...
— A Portrait of Old George Town • Grace Dunlop Ecker
... order a tombstone for me—plain, neat—four feet by sixteen inches—with nothing on it but my name and date. The sale of my effects will bring enough to pay for it. Don't you fellows go and put up a tablet about me. I tell you plainly, I ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille
... enjoy life a bit, his mother died, and that rather knocked him up, you see. He fell sick, and came to grief generally, Uncle Josh said; so he was ordered off to get righted, and here he is, looking like a tombstone. I've a regard for Frank, for he took care of me through the smallpox a year ago, and I don't forget things of that sort; so, if you wish to be introduced, Mrs. Carroll, I'll trot him out with pleasure, and make a ...
— A Modern Cinderella - or The Little Old Show and Other Stories • Louisa May Alcott
... free and equal by the Father Almighty. Let this be our proud position. Then it shall never be said that the ocean was dug for America's grave, that the winds were woven for her winding sheet, that the mountains were reared for her tombstone. But rather we shall live on, and gifted with immortal youth, America shall ascend the mountain tops of the oncoming centuries with the old flag in her hand, symbol of universal liberty, the light of whose stars shall blend their radiance ...
— 'America for Americans!' - The Typical American, Thanksgiving Sermon • John Philip Newman
... subsided, and we all went to sleep. There is no necessity in Cyprus for sentries or night-watchers, the people are painfully good, and you are a great deal too secure when travelling. As to "revolvers!" I felt inclined to bury my pistols upon my first arrival, and to inscribe "Rest in peace" upon the tombstone. It would be just as absurd to attend church in London with revolvers in your belt as to appear with such a weapon in any part of Cyprus. Mine were carefully concealed in some mysterious corner of the gipsy-van; where ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... people of Edinburgh were called on to attest their devotion to the cause which was represented by the Covenant. Tradition long loved to tell how the honored parchment, carried back to the Grey Friars, was laid out on a tombstone in the churchyard, whilst weeping multitudes pressed round in numbers too great to be contained in any building. There are moments when the stern Scottish nature breaks out into an enthusiasm less passionate, but more enduring, ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... her principle. "I share with you," she says, "the sense of oppressive narrowness; but it is necessary that we should feel it, if we care to understand how it acted on the lives of Tom and Maggie."[2] We must confess that we care very little for Tom and Maggie, who, although the inscription on their tombstone and the motto on the title-page of the book tell us that "in their death they were not divided," do not strike us as having been "lovely and pleasant in their lives." We do not think the development ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... examinin' the hoss an' then pa says let's go up the road aways an' see if we c'n see anything. An' by gosh, we hadn't gone more'n fifty feet afore we come plumb on a man layin' in the middle of the road. Pa shook him an' he didn't let out a sound. He was warm but deader'n a tombstone. I wuz fer leavin' him there till we c'd git the coroner, but pa says no. We'd carry him down to our porch, an' lay him there, so's he'd be out o' danger. Ma an' the kids wuz all up when we got him there, an' pa sent Bill and Charley over to Mr. ...
— Green Fancy • George Barr McCutcheon
... and set out on the journey, but died on his way. His wife was the daughter of the Reverend Daniel Bliss, his predecessor in the pulpit at Concord. This was another very noticeable personage in the line of Emerson's ancestors. His merits and abilities are described at great length on his tombstone in the Concord burial-ground. There is no reason to doubt that his epitaph was composed by one who knew him well. But the slabs which record the excellences of our New England clergymen of the past generations are ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... care for their graves; look, how the grass and weeds nod over that tombstone; and you would not clear this, unless you knew something about the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... could actually see Vailima, which I would like you to, for it's beautiful and my home and tomb that is to be; though it's a wrench not to be planted in Scotland—that I can never deny—if I could only be buried in the hills, under the heather and a table tombstone like the martyrs, where the whaups and plovers are crying! Did you see a man who wrote the Stickit Minister,[68] and dedicated it to me, in words that brought the tears to my eyes every time I looked at them. "Where about the graves ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... as my father's family name, on the authority of his tombstone and my sister,—Mrs. Joe Gargery, who married the blacksmith. As I never saw my father or my mother, and never saw any likeness of either of them (for their days were long before the days of photographs), my first fancies regarding what they ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... on a tombstone,—"All our children. Emma, aged 1 mo. 23 days. John, 3 years 5 days. Anna, aged 1 year 1 mo." As a physiologist, I might make some very instructive comments upon ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... the village industries—the railroad-yards with a freight-train switching, the wheat-elevator, oil-tanks, a slaughter-house with blood-marks on the snow, the creamery with the sleds of farmers and piles of milk-cans, an unexplained stone hut labeled "Danger—Powder Stored Here." The jolly tombstone-yard, where a utilitarian sculptor in a red calfskin overcoat whistled as he hammered the shiniest of granite headstones. Jackson Elder's small planing-mill, with the smell of fresh pine shavings and the burr of circular saws. Most important, ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... mortality slumbered, he arrived at a secluded spot near where an aged weeping willow bowed its thick foliage to the ground, as though anxious to hide from the scrutinizing gaze of curiosity the grave beneath it. Jerome seated himself on a marble tombstone, and commenced reading from a book which he had carried under his arm. It was now twilight, and he had read but a few minutes when he observed a lady, attired in deep black, and leading a boy, apparently some five or six years old, coming up one of the ...
— Clotelle - The Colored Heroine • William Wells Brown
... of course, at least one story of a blind girl, and one of a consumptive; there is much harmless punning, and in the acrostics which the ladies of 1820 so much loved are fantastically woven the names of the handsome young women of Barnstaple whose only other record is now upon a tombstone. ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... five hundred a-year, and he rented a 'first-floor furnished,' at Pentonville, which he originally took because it commanded a dismal prospect of an adjacent churchyard. He was familiar with the face of every tombstone, and the burial service seemed to excite his strongest sympathy. His friends said he was surly—he insisted he was nervous; they thought him a lucky dog, but he protested that he was 'the most unfortunate man in the world.' Cold as he was, and wretched as he declared ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... sad and subtle little satire on the vaunted permanence of love and fame. The poet's grave falls to pieces. The words: "love me for ever," appeal to us from a tombstone which records how Spring garlands are severed by the hand of June, and June's fever is quenched in ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... only human nature that, as I come round the church, I should get on the top of a tombstone and look in to see what they was doing. It was the little window where a pane was broken by a stone last summer, and so I heard what they was saying. He was trying to tell her what I had told him—quite as much for ...
— In Homespun • Edith Nesbit
... the weeds were already matted over it, and the tombstone was half hid among nettles. I cleared them away, and they stung my hands; but I was heedless of the pain, for my heart ached too severely. I sat down on the grave, and read, over and over again, the epitaph on ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... Erpinghams. The insides of both the pillars were painted in red colours, with divers figures and inscriptions from the top almost to the bottom, which are now washed out by the late whiting of the pillars.... There was a long brass inscription about the tombstone, which was torn away in the late times, the name of Erpingham ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Norwich - A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief History of the Episcopal See • C. H. B. Quennell
... have been laid, and where Rab will lie when Mrs. Phin has 'boxed' him, is a sleepy little place set on a gentle slope of ground, softly shaded by willow and yew trees. It is enclosed by a stone wall, into which an occasional ancient tombstone is built, its name and date almost obliterated by stress of ...
— Penelope's Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... a procession of marvelous ghosts tattooed from head to toe and capering like a company of debonair totem poles over the cobblestones of another South State Street. But the macabre days are gone. The Barnum bacchanal of the nineties lies in its grave with a fading lithograph for a tombstone. Along with the fall of the Russian empire, the collapse of the fourteen points and the general dethronement of reason since the World's Fair, the honorable art of tattooing has come in for its share ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... was to walk in a higher atmosphere and to breathe a purer air. And since this she had been his wife, and the mother of his child. She lay in the little churchyard at Ventnor, and only a year ago he had given the order for her tombstone. A few slow, silent tears dropped upon his waistcoat as he thought of these things in the quiet and ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... the 20th of October, 1894, and was buried at Salcombe in his beloved Devonshire not far from his beloved sea. He "made his everlasting mansion upon the beached verge of the salt flood." By his own particular desire he was described on his tombstone as Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, so deeply did he feel the complete though tardy recognition of the place he had made for himself among English historians. Otherwise he was the most unassuming of ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... memory of the place of his interment within the abbey, as we are told by Giraldus Cambrensis, who was present when the grave was opened by command of Henry II. about 1150, and saw the bones and sword of the monarch, and a leaden cross let into his tombstone, with the inscription in rude Roman letters, "Here lies buried the famous King Arthur, in the island Avalonia." This story has been elegantly versified by Warton. A popular traditional belief was long entertained among the Britons, that Arthur was not dead, but had been carried off ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... where the bright sun shone in, on a picture of General Washington, and a sampler of Grandma Scott's, representing a woman crying over a tombstone shaded by a pea-green willow; and black profile likenesses of all the Scott family cut by a traveling artist, hanging in spots over the fire place; and an old-fashioned clock, standing guard in the corner, with the picture of the rising sun on it, and Grandpa's spectacles, and loose copies of ...
— Little Ferns For Fanny's Little Friends • Fanny Fern
... of which there is any record or tradition, was kept by Samuel Bowers, Jr., in the house lately and for a long time occupied by the Champney family. Mr. Bowers was born in Groton on December 21, 1711, and, according to his tombstone, died on "the Sixteenth Day of December Anno Domini 1768. Half a hour after Three of the Clock in ye Afternoon, and in the Fifty Eight year of his age." He kept the house during many years, and was known in the neighborhood as "land'urd Bowers,"—the innkeeper of that period being ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. 1, Issue 1. - A Massachusetts Magazine of Literature, History, - Biography, And State Progress • Various
... fought upon the 22d of July, 1298: Sir John the Grahame lies buried in the churchyard of Falkirk. A tombstone was laid over him, which has been three times renewed since his death. The inscription bears, "That Sir John the Grahame, equally remarkable for wisdom and courage, and the faithful friend of Wallace, being slain in battle by the English, ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... escaped assassination. He was afterwards seized as a suspected person. On being brought before the revolutionary tribunal, he reminded his judges of his services, and desired it might be engraved on his tombstone, that he had occasioned the events of the 10th of August. He was guillotined in ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... to whose papers in Der Deutsche Pioneer and that able periodical the Penn Monthly, of Philadelphia, I am indebted for many of the foregoing facts in regard to the German pilgrims of the New World, thus closes his notice of Pastorius:— "No tombstone, not even a record of burial, indicates where his remains have found their last resting-place, and the pardonable desire to associate the homage due to this distinguished man with some visible memento can not be gratified. ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... moment—the only moment, perhaps, which I shall have; creeping on his hands and feet, he reached the grave yard, a stone's throw from the church, and here behind a tombstone, succeeded ...
— Whig Against Tory - The Military Adventures of a Shoemaker, A Tale Of The Revolution • Unknown
... tombstone!" he said below his breath as his eyes rested on a large blue cross. Then he smiled again and held the book ...
— The Masquerader • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... his flies from his Scotch cap and found a tangle; and I saw the glistening of his rod, as the sunshine pierced the valley, and then his tall, straight figure pass the corner of a crag that stood as upright as a tombstone; and after that no more of any live and bright ...
— George Bowring - A Tale Of Cader Idris - From "Slain By The Doones" By R. D. Blackmore • R. D. Blackmore
... Carlyle married Sybil West, he named their only son for his well loved brother-in-law, George William Fairfax. When his will was opened, it was by the side of Sarah he wished to be buried: "As to my Body, I desire it may be interred under the Tombstone in the enclosed ground in the Presbyterian Yard near where my first wife and ...
— Seaport in Virginia - George Washington's Alexandria • Gay Montague Moore
... dog to her again. This time he came near, rubbed hard against her dress, and, when she sat down on a flat tombstone, laid his head comfortably in her lap, ...
— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger
... to the old tombstone. When I was a boy, some five or six and forty years ago, my father, one day as we were passing by the churchyard, mentioned that stone to me; but as I had then several cousins living whose claims were prior to mine, the matter made but little ...
— Notes and Queries, 1850.12.21 - A Medium of Inter-communication for Literary Men, Artists, - Antiquaries, Genealogists, etc. • Various
... lay, and then the man, after looking at me for a moment, turned me upside down and emptied my pockets, but there was nothing in them except a piece of bread. When the church came to itself, for he was so sudden and strong that he made it go head over heels before me,—I was seated on a high tombstone trembling, while he ate the bread ravenously. Then he came nearer to my tombstone, took me by both arms, and tilted me back as far as he could hold me, ...
— Ten Boys from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... a grant of the site about A.D. 1600. This cemetery includes the Martyrs' Chapel, also known as the Chapel of Father Santus (Santucci), which was erected in memory of Khoja Mortenepus, an Armenian merchant, whose epitaph is dated 1611. The next oldest tombstone, that of Father Emmanuel d' Anhaya, who died in prison, bears the date August, 1633. Father Joseph de Castro, who died at Lahore, on December 15, 1646, lies in the ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... inscription and verses of the Tombstone, which were written by the celebrated M. de Haller, could not with propriety be introduced in the engraving, we insert them here, in a free translation from ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... "Everything's alive," he said; and again cries it aloud, "thank God, everything's alive!" He lingered yet a while in the kirk-yard. A tuft of primroses was blooming hard by the leg of an old black table tombstone, and he stopped to contemplate the random apologue. They stood forth on the cold earth with a trenchancy of contrast; and he was struck with a sense of incompleteness in the day, the season, and the ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of the pleasantest days I have ever passed in the course of a carefully spent life. Auriol was at her best. She had thrown off the harried woman of affairs. She had put a nice little tombstone over the grave of her romance, thus apparently reducing to beautiful simplicity her previous complicated frame of mind. For aught I could have guessed, not a cloud had ever dimmed the Diana serenity of her soul. ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... a eulogy, even if truthful and merited, would be sufficiently inflated upon a tombstone raised to a dead chieftain by his bereaved admirers. What shall we say of such false and fulsome tribute, not to a god, not to the memory of departed greatness, but to a living, mortal man, and offered not by his adorers but by himself? Certainly, self-worship never went ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... loved—your father—and when I married his brother I swore that she should pay me for that, and she has! If she can see you as you are to-day, all heaven cannot dry her tears, for all heaven itself cannot give you a name, since the one on her own tombstone is not hers by any right. I hope she sees you! Oh, I hope it was not for nothing that she fasted till she fainted, and prayed till she was hoarse, and knelt in damp churches till she died of it! I hope she has starved ...
— The White Sister • F. Marion Crawford
... (probably about the date 1200), during the restoration of Hargrave church in Northamptonshire. This stone is now in the Northampton Museum. A similar stone has since been found at Sempringham, Lincolnshire. It is to be seen on an ancient tombstone in the Isle of Man, and painted on old Dutch tiles. And in 1901 a stone was dug out of a gravel pit near Oswestry bearing an undoubted ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... angelic sex, coolness, growing to statuesque frigidity, would develop in the object of my devotions, and the beauty whose charms had bedeviled me into insomnia and wild-eyed desperation became related to me thereafter as the angel surmounting the tombstone that marked the resting place ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... flit and fly—in summer there are bluebells; in the opening there, when Spring comes, primroses. A parting, was it, twenty years ago? Vows broken? Not Minnie's!... She was faithful. How she nursed her mother! All her savings on the tombstone—wreaths under glass—daffodils in jars. But I'm off the track. A crime.... They would say she kept her sorrow, suppressed her secret—her sex, they'd say—the scientific people. But what flummery to saddle her with sex! No—more like this. Passing down the streets of Croydon ...
— Monday or Tuesday • Virginia Woolf
... 'asn't Master Percy, an' maybe he might put up a monyment and a hepithet 'imself for me if he did but know I'd done that for 'im. It's a risk, too; Percy's no 'ead on his shoulders, an' I might be left with no tombstone an' no hepithet." ...
— Bessie Bradford's Prize • Joanna H. Mathews
... two days ago," said George, "then you must have noticed that it has a tombstone, though not of marble. How did ...
— After Long Years and Other Stories • Translated from the German by Sophie A. Miller and Agnes M. Dunne
... Khuenaten, while M. Alexandre, on behalf of the Gizeh Museum, has spent the summer and autumn among the tombs of Tel el-Amarna, and his labours have been rewarded by some important discoveries. At the entrance to one of the tombs, for instance, he has found stelae of the usual tombstone shape let into the wall like the dedication tablets of Greek and Roman times. The removal of the sand from the foot of the great stela of Khuenaten, first discovered by Prisse d'Avennes, has brought to light a most interesting text. This describes ...
— The American Journal of Archaeology, 1893-1 • Various
... Works of the late Joseph (vulgo Joe) Miller. With a humorous etching of his tombstone, and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 23, 1841 • Various
... calamity hastened the last day of the poor old man, who did not live to see the coronation of King Louis the Eleventh. He founded a daily mass in the Church of Roche-Foucauld, where in the same grave he placed mother and son, with a large tombstone, upon which their lives are much ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 3 • Honore de Balzac
... than a month, without a single pennant belonging to the station having looked in: our money is running short, and if we are to hold on in Carthagena for another six weeks, we shall not have a shot left in the locker—not a copper to tinkle on a tombstone." ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... unexpected things. I went down to Santa Ysobel with Worth Gilbert. It happened this way: Cummings, one of those individuals on whose tombstone may truthfully be put, "Born a man—and died a lawyer," seemed rather taken aback at the effect of the blow he'd launched. If he was after information, I can't think he learned much in the moment while Worth stood regarding him with ...
— The Million-Dollar Suitcase • Alice MacGowan
... could not make out. But then the distance separating the living from the dead is so great! Poor Tom had tried. Byrne ran to the bed and attempted to lift up, to push off the horrible lid smothering the body. It resisted his efforts, heavy as lead, immovable like a tombstone. The rage of vengeance made him desist; his head buzzed with chaotic thoughts of extermination, he turned round the room as if he could find neither his weapons nor the way out; and all the time he ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... my overcoat, and took him away to his new home. I had the greatest confidence in him, being a firm believer in the doctrine of heredity. His father I never knew, but his grandfather bore a great reputation for courage, as was indicated on his tombstone, the inscription on ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... fellow to stretch the long bow, and it became such a habit that he could not break it. He seemed to prefer a falsehood to the truth, even when the truth would have served him better. Well, he died and was buried. One day I visited the cemetery and gazed on his tombstone. On the top of the stone was his name and on the bottom were these words: 'I am not dead, but sleeping.' Now that man was lying in his ...
— Frank Merriwell at Yale • Burt L. Standish
... able to prevent all dispute with regard to the succession;—and that, for her part, she desired no higher character or fairer remembrance of her should be transmitted to posterity, than to have this inscription engraved on her tombstone, "Here lies Elizabeth, who lived and died ...
— Coronation Anecdotes • Giles Gossip
... patrician Built a tomb to his freed woman, Whom he'd brought as a remembrance From Judaea, at the time of The destruction of the Temple. She was called Zatcha Achyba. There he sat, the spies related; 'Twas a subject for an artist: The Campagna's sombre landscape; Moonlight on the marble tombstone; He his mantle wrapped around him; Mournfully he blew his trumpet Through the gloomy lonely silence. This had brought upon him later Many mocking jeers like this one: 'Signor Werner is composing For the ...
— The Trumpeter of Saekkingen - A Song from the Upper Rhine. • Joseph Victor von Scheffel
... was not only a broken heart, but a broken fiddle you left behind you, when you departed so suddenly last time you were here? It's astonishing how soon hearts get mended, and fiddles too, it appears. Goody has shuddered at the sight of that instrument ever since. I thought the epitaph on her tombstone would ...
— Dwell Deep - or Hilda Thorn's Life Story • Amy Le Feuvre
... flowers and strewed them on the graves of David and Uncle Eb; there, Hope and I go often to sit for half a summer day above those perished forms, and think of the old time and of those last words of my venerable friend now graven on his tombstone: ...
— Eben Holden - A Tale of the North Country • Irving Bacheller
... Elizabethan named William Shakespeare, who was born at Stratford, and married, and migrated to London, and became a second-rate actor, and afterwards returned to Stratford, and made a will, and composed a few lines of doggerel for the tombstone under which he was buried. Our reverence is given to the writer of certain plays and sonnets. To that second-rate actor, because we believe he wrote those plays and sonnets, we give that reverence. But our belief is not such as we give to the proposition that one and two make ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... where for hours I have ponder'd, As reclining, at eve, on yon tombstone I lay; Or round the steep brow of the church-yard I wander'd, To catch the last gleam of ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... and written between Jew and Gentile, between Protestant and Catholic, between Turk and Russian, between French and English, between Mongolian and anti-Mongolian, between black and white; and then let us set up a tombstone and put upon it the epitaph: "Here lies the monster that cursed the earth for nearly three thousand years. He has departed to go to perdition, from which he started. No ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... British authority among them. Such, indeed, is the ground taken by Dr. Jones, in his minute and authentic account of the occurrence, in which he was, as we have made him in our illustrations, an actor. And even the inscription on the tombstone of the ill-fated French, written when the transaction, and all its attendant circumstances, were fresh in the minds of all, sufficiently proves, if further proof were necessary, that the version we have given of the affair is identical with the one generally understood and ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... and so long at March without speaking or smiling, or taking any more notice of him than if he had been an effigy on a tombstone, seemed unaccountable to that youth. Had he been able to look at himself from her point of view he would not have been ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne
... and gazed toward the little graveyard where his father and his grandfather and all the simple forbears of the lonely neighborhood had gone to their rest. Not a sound was there in that solemn little acre. He strained his eyes and tried to identify the place by Deacon Small's tall, white tombstone, but he could not make ...
— Pee-wee Harris on the Trail • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... about me the people I want, the big people, the right people, and to help them I want to promote culture, like those Renaissance women you're always talking about. I want to do it for Apex City; do you understand? And for father and mother too. I want all those titles carved on my tombstone. They're facts, anyhow! Don't laugh at me...." She broke off with one of her clumsy smiles, and moved away from him to the ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... make me feel as if it were my tombstone; you are all so solemn. Let me see a smile ...
— The Happy Adventurers • Lydia Miller Middleton
... little less of the symbolic, in the older religions; but the difference was probably on the whole more one of degree than of essential disparity. But however that may be, we cannot but be struck by the extraordinary analogy between the tombstone inscriptions of that period "born again into eternity by the blood of the Bull or the Ram," and the corresponding texts in our graveyards to-day. F. Cumont in his elaborate work, Textes et Monuments relatifs aux Mysteres de Mithra (2 vols., Brussels, 1899) gives a great number of ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... many peculiarities. One was, that he never left his house, or ventured into the streets, save "like a but, in the dusk of the evening." He was, in short, what is called a "crank," and he gloried in his eccentricity. He desired that it might be written on his tombstone, "Here lies an Odd Man." For sixty years he had made no effort to attract popular attention, but in 1755 he had published a sort of romance, called Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain, and now he succeeded it by the truly extraordinary work, the name of which stands at the head of ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... walked through the graveyard, and stood leaning against her tombstone. I soon knew that she was coming, for I heard the ringing sound in the air which always came before her. A moment after, she stood beside me. She placed her hand on my heart, and said, "Joseph, all ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... silence for a little while, when an old man replied, in a thin piping voice, "Nicholas Vedder! why, he is dead and gone these eighteen years! There was a wooden tombstone in the churchyard that used to tell all about him, but ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... fight is a tombstone white, With the name of the late deceased; And the epitaph drear, a fool lies here Who tried to hustle ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... unconventional character his mournful family, after much trouble, hit upon the happy thought of satisfying their desire to leave an amiable and incontestable record concerning him by having inscribed upon his tombstone the following epitaph:—"He never acted ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... the life of the Roman working class. It is true that there was then no doctrine of the "dignity of labour," but that there was reasonable pride taken in a trade reputably maintained is seen from the frequent appearance of its tools upon a tombstone. In respect of the mere enjoyment of life, the labourers, of the Roman world were, so far as we can gather, tolerably happy. They had abundant holidays, mostly of religious origin; but, like our own, so frequently added to, and ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... burial they could do no more than consign the body to one of the waves in the great billowy land sea about them. They had no tombstone, nor were there even rocks to make a simple cairn. He saw them bury her, and thought there was little to choose between hers and the grave of his father, whose body was being now carried noiselessly down in the bed of the river. The general locality would be kept by landmarks, by the bearing of ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... arrival he arranged with Creech, the chief bookseller in Edinburgh, to undertake a second edition of his poems. This was published in March, 1787, the subscribers numbering over 1,500. Out of money thus derived, he provided a tombstone for the neglected grave of Robert Fergusson, his "elder brother in the muses," in the Canongate churchyard. Then he decided to visit some of the classic scenes of Scottish history and romance. He had as yet seen but a small part ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... bitter Dutch partisanship. "Rebel Burghersdorp" they call it in the British centres, and Capetown turns anxious ears towards it for the first muttering of insurrection. What history its stagnant annals record is purely anti-British. Its two principal monuments, after the Jubilee fountain, are the tombstone of the founder of the Dopper Church—the Ironsides of South Africa—and a statue with inscribed pedestal complete put up to commemorate the introduction of the Dutch tongue into the Cape Parliament. Malicious comments ...
— From Capetown to Ladysmith - An Unfinished Record of the South African War • G. W. Steevens
... find ourselves in the south-west transept, which, together with the nave and the north-west transept, was rebuilt by Prior Chillenden. In the pavement we see memorial stones to canons and other departed worthies. Among them is the tombstone of Meric Casaubon, Archbishop Laud's prebendary, and son of Isaac Casaubon, the ...
— The Cathedral Church of Canterbury [2nd ed.]. • Hartley Withers
... he, poor fellow, had a wife already! So what was I to do? I threw my line at last in utter despair, and out of the troubled sea I drew the Sieur Tremblay, whom I married, and soon put cosily underground with a heavy tombstone on top of him to keep him down, with this inscription, which you may see for yourself, my Lady, if you will, in the churchyard ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... From the judge's garden came the faint sound of a negro voice as the old gardener weeded the vegetables. Nicholas rolled over again and faced the outstretched wings of the noseless angel on the nearest tombstone. The loss of the nose had distorted the marble smile into a grimace, which gave a leer to the remaining features. As the boy looked at it he laughed suddenly, and his voice startled him amid the droning of bees. Then he sat up and glanced at his brier-scratched feet stretched ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... slumbering giant. When life roars about you on a world that's rugged and new you've got to go on respecting the lads who have thrown in their lot with you, even when their impulses are as harsh as the glint of sunlight on a desert-polished tombstone. ...
— The Man the Martians Made • Frank Belknap Long
... Grame, who had been hidden by a large upright tombstone, emerged into view. Lucy, with another blush, ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 2, February, 1891 • Various
... and the benediction of his genial face has come to its long amen. But his influence halted not a half-second for his obsequies to finish, but goes right on without change, save that of augmentation, for in the great sum of a useful life death is a multiplication instead of subtraction, and the tombstone, instead of being the goal of the race, is only the starting point. What means this rising up of all good men, with hats off, in reverence to one who never wielded a sword or delivered masterly oration or stood in ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... right across the city to the temple of Nishni Hongangi. On our way we were more than once stopped and turned off the direct road, which was kept by soldiers for the passage of the Mikado to worship at the tombstone of his innumerable ancestors, real or imaginary. Being a spiritual Emperor, he has to be well kept up to his religious duties, and is always being sent off to worship at some shrine or another, in order to ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... differed concerning Von Ditfurth's appraisal of the comparative values of Rheims Cathedral and the tombstone of a German grenadier, but even the champions of military necessity were glad to learn later that the cathedral still stood, though much damaged. There was military excuse for the bombardment of ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... some score o' years syne. They just danced like mad when they looked on the friars' heads, and the nuns' heads, in the cloister yonder; they took to them like auld acquaintance like.—Od, he is not stirring yet, mair than he were a through-stane! [Footnote: A tombstone.] I never kend a Roman, to say kend him, but ane—mair by token, he was the only ane in the town to ken—and that was auld Jock of the Pend. It wad hae been lang ere ye fand Jock praying in the Abbey in a thick night, wi' his knees on a cauld stane. Jock likit a kirk wi' a chimley in't. ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... told me that she wrote the words and asked that they should be placed on her tombstone," said ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay
... I wish my grandfather were here, and would resurge, as he promises to do on his tombstone; and would bring my father, the Ensign, ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... which was preferable, munificence or courage? He answered, "Whoever has munificence has no need of courage." On the tombstone of Bahram-gor was inscribed: "The hand of liberality is stronger than the arm of power.—Hatim Tayi remains not, yet will his exalted name live renowned for generosity to all eternity. Distribute the tithe of thy wealth in alms, for the more the gardener prunes his vine the more he ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 2, Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... Evening, when Harry had left us, she took me into the Churchyarde, and scattered the little Grave with Flowers; and then continued sitting beside it on the Grasse, quiete, but not comfortlesse. I am avised to think she prayed. Then Mr. Agnew came forthe and sate on a flat Tombstone hard by; and without one Word of Introduction took out his Psalter, and commenced reading the Psalms for that Evening's Service; to wit, the 41st, the 42d, the 43de; in a low solemne Voice; and methoughte I never in my Life hearde aniething to equall ...
— Mary Powell & Deborah's Diary • Anne Manning
... heart she died; and she was only twenty-six at the time—so we can imagine how young and lithely beautiful she must have been. Her name, too, was Joanna Gavadia—a sweet name, surely never wasted on an ungraceful woman; and on her tombstone she is called "pudicissima et musicis scientissima." So she was good and she was skilful in music, like Bach's second wife; and doubtless, like her, of infinite help and ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... unsteady step she makes her way to the little graveyard; she had gone there often, and there were those who said wantonly that she went to say her prayers before the little cross upon the tombstone she had placed over the grave of Madame Arles. Now she threw herself prone upon the little hillock, with a low, sharp cry of distress, like that of a wounded bird,—"My mother! ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... he's not a bad 'eart, 'asn't Master Percy, an' maybe he might put up a monyment and a hepithet 'imself for me if he did but know I'd done that for 'im. It's a risk, too; Percy's no 'ead on his shoulders, an' I might be left with no tombstone ...
— Bessie Bradford's Prize • Joanna H. Mathews
... no harm in crying for one's husband, and the tombstone, though plain, was a solid piece of work, and on summer's days when the widow brought her boys to stand there one felt kindly towards her. Hats were raised higher than usual; wives tugged their husbands' ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... of anything; not toward her father, you understand, because I can fancy that might irritate her. I really try to be gay toward Gracie herself; but can you imagine an attempt to be cheery with a tombstone? I study as much as I can, her tastes, in the ordering of dinner and desserts, and arrange the flowers that I know she likes best, and in short try to do all those little bits of nice things that I feel certain you would do in my ...
— Ester Ried Yet Speaking • Isabella Alden
... came upon a field of sleek purple lava sown all over with little lemon jets of silent smoke, which in their wan and melancholy glow might have been the corpse lights of those innumerable dead whose tombstone was ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... fully deserved, and the famous sentence, "It is hard to say whether his soul or his ejaculations arrived first in heaven, seeing he prayed dying, and died praying," shows that he was reverenced by the Reformed Church as a veritable saint. He died at Monkton Fairleigh in 1571, his tombstone, despoiled of its brass, is now near that of Bishop Wyvil, whence it was removed from its former place ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Salisbury - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the See of Sarum • Gleeson White
... Cemetery, where tall cypresses rise above the graves of numerous English, American, German, and other visitors. Prominent among those resting there are: Shelley, the English poet (died 1822), whose heart only was buried there; the tombstone of the English poet Keats (died 1821) bears the melancholy inscription: "Here lies one whose name was writ in water." There is also the grave of August Goethe (died 1830), the only son ...
— Eingeschneit - Eine Studentengeschichte • Emil Frommel
... not good for the Christian soul to hustle the Aryan brown, For the Christian riles and the heathen smiles And it weareth the Christian down. And the end of the fight is a tombstone white With the name of the dear deceased; And the epitaph drear—'A fool lies here Who tried ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... the capital question. And the Creed ends with that phrase, resurrectionem mortuorum et vitam venturi saeculi—the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. In the cemetery of Mallona, in my native town of Bilbao, there is a tombstone on which this verse ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno |
