"Epitaph" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... let thy last kindness be With leaves and moss-work for to cover me: And while the wood-nymphs my cold corpse inter, Sing thou my dirge, sweet-warbling chorister! For epitaph, in foliage, next write this: Here, here the tomb of Robin ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... the heart of France, where his career Of conquest ended, let his relics lie! So far no hostile sword attained before. A fitting tomb shall memorize his name; His epitaph the spot whereon ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... and nights of sleep—their toils, by danger dignified, yet guiltless—their hopes of cheerful old age and a quiet grave, with cross and garland over its green turf, and their grand children's love for epitaph." ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... which mention is made of my service on his staff, I wrote to my chief, whose own bearing on the battlefield was an inspiration, that no tribute to my Greek scholarship I had received or could receive would ever be more cherished, if so much; and I cited the famous epitaph inscribed on the tomb of Aeschylus at Gela. No mention is made of his great tragedies. It is simply recorded that Aeschylus had quitted himself like a ...
— The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915 • Basil L. Gildersleeve
... a nameless wanton served for epitaph to the man lying in an unmarked grave in the soldiers plot at Fort Regent. With gnashing of teeth did Garcin and Jack Blunt discover that H. R. M.'s Consul had officially aided Justine Delande to remove the valuable deposits of the ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... variety of accidents combine to lessen, enlarge, or change Sir William's fame; and no doubt but he who has taken so much pains to be singular in his conduct, would choose to be just as singular in his exit, his monument and his epitaph. ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... bespeaking four gravestones in a lot. I was better pleased with a rough old whaling captain, who gave directions for a broad marble slab, divided into two compartments, one of which was to contain an epitaph on his deceased wife, and the other to be left vacant, till death should engrave his own name there. As is frequently the case among the whalers of Martha's Vineyard, so much of this storm-beaten widower's life had been tossed away on distant seas, that out of twenty years ...
— Chippings With A Chisel (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... more shadow than shunshine, more cholera-morbus than cream. Man born of woman is of few days and full of politics. The moment he hits the globe he starts for the grave, and his only visible reward for long days of labor and nights of pain is an epitaph he can't read and a tombstone he don't want. In the first of the Seven Ages of man he's licked, in the last he's neglected, and in all the others he's a fair mark for the shafts of falsehood. If he don't marry his first love, he's ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... it to my luck in catching him at family prayers. For I know that the general impression of him is erroneous; he is not merely a hypocrite before the world, but also a hypocrite before himself. A more profoundly, piously conscientious man never lived. Never was there a truer epitaph than the one implied in the sentence carved over his niche in the magnificent mausoleum he built: ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... wife, "a chronicler of small-beer," with a perfectly negative expression. One might guess she did no harm, and fear she did no good,—that she saved the hire of an upper servant,—that she was an inveterate sewer and cleaner, and would leave the world in time with an epitaph. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... Cimabue.] Giovanni Cimabue, the restorer of painting, was born at Florence, of a noble family, in 1240, and died in 1300. The passage in the text is an illusion to his epitaph: ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... obscure manner; but when Rubens knew it, he had the body reinterred, with funeral pomp, in the church of the Carmelites; and he intended also to have erected a superb monument to his memory, had he lived to see it executed; though Sandrart says there was a magnificent one over his tomb, with an epitaph ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects and Curiosities of Art (Vol. 3 of 3) • S. Spooner
... whole court went into mourning for little Tom Thumb. They buried him under a rosebush, and raised a nice white marble monument over his grave, with the following epitaph:— ...
— The Fairy Book - The Best Popular Stories Selected and Rendered Anew • Dinah Maria Mulock (AKA Miss Mulock)
... * Good my lord, will you see the Editors well bestowed? Do you hear, let them be well used, for they are the abstract and brief chroniclers of the time. After your death you had better have a bad epitaph than their ill report while you live. Hamlet, ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 1 • Charles Farrar Browne
... wearied of his persistent entreaties, or perhaps her self-development had exhausted what it sought in the poet-musician. An absolute separation came, and his mistress buried the episode in her life with the epitaph: "Two natures, one rich in its exuberance, the other in its exclusiveness, could never really mingle, and a whole world separated them." Chopin said: "All the cords that bind me to life are broken." His sad ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... [8] The Journal's epitaph was promptly written by a scurrilous opponent in lines showing that the prominences of Fielding's ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... mountain-ridge; He turn'd his back on Sheegus Hill, and view'd with misty sight The Abbey walls, the burial-ground with crosses ghostly white; Under a weary weight of years he bow'd upon his staff, Perusing in the present time the former's epitaph; For, gray and wasted like the walls, a figure full of woe, This man was of the blood ...
— Sixteen Poems • William Allingham
... and yet never be seen; and wear the form of man, and yet fly in the face of all the laws of human nature:—and all this, in the hope of getting a belly-god burgess through a needle's eye! Oh, let him stick, by all means; and let his polity tumble in the dust; and let his epitaph and all his literature (of which my own works begin to form no inconsiderable part) be abolished even from the history of man! For a fool of this monstrosity of dulness there can be no salvation; and the fool who looked for the elixir of life was an angel of reason to the fool ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Walter Raleigh
... to their airy hall my fathers' voice Shall call my spirit * * * * * * * Oh! may my shade behold no sculptured urns To mark the spot where earth to earth returns! No lengthen'd scroll, no praise-encumber'd stone; My epitaph shall be my name alone: If that with honor fail to crown my clay, Oh! may no other fame my deeds repay! That, only that, shall single out the spot; By that remember'd, or with ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... Saxon king, had a son, and the conqueror William had a daughter, Gundrada. The former became a Viking pirate, and in his old age a monk, and was buried in a church, now a Presbyterian chapel. There his epitaph may be read in fine bold lettering, still distinct. That man ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... of a man reading his own epitaph, and truly it gave me many curious feelings to stand there and read of myself as a dead man. And yet I had been dead to all of them for more ...
— In the Days of Drake • J. S. Fletcher
... throughout the volume by poems written especially for such orders as the Holland Lodge, and the Washington Chapter of Royal Arch Masons. He was also asked to write an epitaph ...
— The Politician Out-Witted • Samuel Low
... better Christians, I trust, than so: who are taught, that the rewards of God's elect are not temporal but eternal. And Cranmer's martyrdom is his monument, and his name will outlast an epitaph or a shrine." Life of Cranmer; p. 391. It would seem, from the same authority, that RIDLEY, LATIMER, and CRANMER, were permitted to dine together in prison, some little time before they suffered; although they were "placed in separate lodgings that they might not confer ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... are common: 'I send him away ship' is the epitaph of not a few, his majesty paying the exile's fare to the next place of call. For instance, being passionately fond of European food, he has several times added to his household a white cook, and one after another these have been deported. They, on their side, swear they were ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... at Thermopylae: "Foreigner, tell the Lacedaemonians that we are lying here in obedience to their laws." On the Rhodian lyric poet, Timocreon, an opponent of Simonides in his art, he wrote the following in the form of an epitaph: "Having eaten much and drank much and said much evil of other men, here I lie, ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... his epitaph, Sublimely simple, nobly plain; Who adds to them but addeth chaff, Obscures with husks the golden grain. Not all the bards of other days, Not Homer in his loftiest vein, Not Milton's most majestic strain, Not the whole wealth of Pindar's lays, Could ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... heart, and listening to the death-watch in the wall, I was certainly very much scared, but I was not without the consolation that I was at least a sufferer for literature. At the same time that I was so horribly afraid of dying, I could have composed an epitaph which would have moved others to tears for my untimely fate. But there was really not impairment of my constitution, and after a while I began to be better, and little by little the health ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... or chance, for that conquest of them which she thought not only religion requires, but the care of our own happiness, renders necessary. And the effect of the trial, in her own case, was answerable to her wishes; and what she says of herself in her own humorous epitaph, ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... then the "Epigoni" in seven thousand verses beginning: 'And now, Muses, let us begin to sing of men of later days'; for some say that these poems also are by Homer. Now Xanthus and Gorgus, son of Midas the king, heard his epics and invited him to compose a epitaph for the tomb of their father on which was a bronze figure of a maiden bewailing the death of Midas. He wrote the ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... tainted wether of the flock, Meetest for death; the weakest kind of fruit Drops earliest to the ground, and so let me: You cannot better be employ'd, Bassanio, Than to live still, and write mine epitaph. ...
— The Merchant of Venice [liberally edited by Charles Kean] • William Shakespeare
... By some this is attributed to the great excess of infant mortality—consolatory for the grown-up people, as reducing their risk; but the children, who die like flies before they are twelve months old, may say with the epitaph ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... of love and grief—boots it to you now, that the whole world loves and deplores you? Scarce any man, I believe, ever thought of that grave; that did not cast a flower of pity on it, and write over it a sweet epitaph. Gentle lady, so lovely, so loving, so unhappy! you have had countless champions; millions of manly hearts mourning for you. From generation to generation we take up the fond tradition of your beauty; we watch and follow your tragedy, your ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... cripples, the white slaves of crueler days than the most barbarous countries in history have ever permitted to their children? You understand your jobs, and you do yourselves well; that's your motto and your epitaph. There's only one amongst you who's a people's man ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... A very good epitaph, Claude was thinking. Most of the boys who fell in this war were unknown, even to themselves. They were too young. They died and took their secret with them,—what they were and what they might have been. The name that stood was La France. How much ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... luxuriantly that it quite obstructed our way, and we were compelled to have a black pioneer, who went before us with a sword to cut down the thorny branches. In this remote and lonely place I found the following epitaph on a tombstone, which appeared to me so curious that I caused it ...
— A Voyage Round the World, Vol. I (of ?) • James Holman
... the potter's field. The great leveller had passed his rule over him as he passes it over every one of us. The dead lion was less now than the living dog, and the Golden Dog itself was henceforth only a memory, and an epitaph forever of the tragedy ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... dishonest actors or of more or less ignorant compositors. Is such a text, thus transmitted, to be held in reverence so deep that not a syllable is to be changed for fear of the cry that we are tampering with the words of Shakespeare? Is the curse in his epitaph on the mover of his bones to hang over his text? Small reverence for Shakespeare does it betoken, in our opinion, to believe this. Rather, let us regard these pages of the Folio as what they virtually are in so many cases—namely, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... further south, in the aisle, formerly stood the tomb of A. Gorges, son of Sir A. Gorges, who was possessor of the chapel for many years. This blocked up the aisle and was taken to pieces. The black slab which was on the top is set in the floor, and the brasses containing an epitaph in doggerel rhyme, attributing all the merits in the universe to the deceased, hang on the wall on the north side. The date of the chapel, 1528, is on the capital of one of the pillars supporting ...
— Chelsea - The Fascination of London • G. E. (Geraldine Edith) Mitton
... fellowship of the spirits of the just. His works praise him, because they are to the praise of Him that wrought by him; for which his memorial is and shall be blessed. I have done, as to this part of my preface, when I have left this short epitaph to his name,—Many sons have done virtuously in this day; but, dear ...
— A Brief Account of the Rise and Progress of the People Called Quakers • William Penn
... this is, 'Herse is the solemne obsequie in funeralles.' Cp. also Ben Jonson's 'Epitaph on the Countess ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... entered; a vaulted cell and two modern windows alone presented themselves to view: the poet's name is the only ornament of the place. No sarcophagus, no urn, and even no inscription to feed the devotion of the classical pilgrim. The epitaph which though not genuine is yet ancient, was inscribed by the order of the Duke of Pescolangiano, then proprietor of the place, on a marble slab placed in the side of the rock opposite the entrance of the tomb, where it still remains. Every body is acquainted ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 406, Saturday, December 26, 1829. • Various
... jewels and vast landed estates, distributed with such reckless profusion amongst the characters, intended as a covert satire upon the vulgar English worship of wealth, or did they imply a genuine instinct for the sumptuous? Disraeli would apparently parody the old epitaph, and write upon the monument of every ducal millionaire, 'Of such are the kingdom of heaven.' Vast landed estates and the Christian virtues, according to him, naturally go together; and he never dismisses a ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... over the details. Many portions of it were, indeed, known to him, for the traveller was no other than our old acquaintance Tom; but all was interesting. When he had heard it to the end, he uttered these only words, which might, indeed, serve for moral and poor Bruin's epitaph:— ...
— The Adventures of a Bear - And a Great Bear too • Alfred Elwes
... Cumberland, I copied the following epitaph from the album kept at the inn at Pooley Bridge, the landlord of which is well known, as ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 354, Saturday, January 31, 1829. • Various
... afternoon, riding on a little pony, and wearing a magnificent beard of twenty years' growth, which an Oriental might well have envied, the more remarkable in an age when shaving was so generally practised.—A jocular epitaph was composed on "Mary Van Butchell," of which these lines may ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... ignominious than to have a husband eaten by a bear. And this was not my only anxiety. The mind at such times is not under control. With the gravest fears the most whimsical ideas will occur. I looked beyond the mourning friends, and thought what kind of an epitaph they would be compelled to put ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... pass out into the sunlight (fig. 126). As a matter of fact, the stela symbolised the door leading to the private apartments of the dead, a door closed and sealed to the living. It was inscribed on door-posts and lintels, and its inscription was no mere epitaph for the information of future generations; all the details which it gave as to the name, rank, functions, and family of the deceased were intended to secure the continuity of his individuality and civil status in the life beyond death. A ...
— Manual Of Egyptian Archaeology And Guide To The Study Of Antiquities In Egypt • Gaston Camille Charles Maspero
... night. I must lie near him always. Say to people that I have asked you to bury me in that pit at the top of Quill's Window,—that it was my whim, if you like. Close it up after you have placed me there and cover it with great rocks, so that Edward and I may never be disturbed. I want no headstone, no epitaph. Just the stones as they were ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... upon him to be a prophet, he doubts not but that deliverance will come, and suddenly, of which his failings had rendered him unworthy to be the instrument. In some verses which he composed on the night preceding his execution, and which he intended for his epitaph, he thus expresses this hope ...
— A History of the Early Part of the Reign of James the Second • Charles James Fox
... some degree that [he] must now sometime or other have all that disagreeable work to go over again." He seems to have become sufficiently interested in what was likely to follow his decease, in this world at least, to compose an epitaph which has become world-renowned, and has ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.
... The lady for whom it was written was the mother of that William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, to whom Shakspere's sonnets are thought to have been {85} dedicated. And she was the subject of Ben Jonson's famous epitaph. ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... handle him in my own way. Have no fear that he will use our material for newspaper purposes. With regard to the Innesmore Mansions affair, Theydon will lie close as a fish. Why? No use asking you, of course. You despise intuition. When you die some one should begin your epitaph: 'From information received.' But I'll stick to Theydon. See if I don't, even if I have to go up with him in one of ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... these Aubades decline, or whether it be worth your while to give your Rival the Challenge; or to stab, poison, or drown'd your self, to shew, by such an untimely death, the love you had for her; and on your Grave, bear this Epitaph, that through damn'd jealousie you murthered your self. These married Couple, used to do so; but see now what a sad life they live together, because jealousie took root in them so soon, and now bringeth forth such ...
— The Ten Pleasures of Marriage and The Confession of the New-married Couple (1682) • A. Marsh
... such. But why should I name generals, and other men of high rank, when Cato could write that legions have marched with alacrity to that place from whence they never expected to return? With no less greatness of soul fell the Lacedaemonians at Thermopylae, on whom Simonides wrote the following epitaph: ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... slave-lad was destined to attain purer and clearer heights of philosophy than he himself had ever done, and to become quite as illustrious as himself, and far more respected as an exponent of Stoic doctrines. For that lame boy was Epictetus—Epictetus for whom was written the memorable epitaph: "I was Epictetus, a slave, and maimed in body, and a beggar for poverty, ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... to West Chester with my mother; you can tell how long it was, for it was in 1826; my brother was born in that year; I was quite small then; don't know how she came there; she was with my mother during her confinement; my brother is dead; it is written down in our Testament; and I took an epitaph from it to put on the tombstone; the last time I saw it was when the fellow killed the school-mistress. I looked because about 1830, a man killed a woman, and was hung, and I wanted to see how long ago it was. I have seen her more or less ever since, until within two years. I don't ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... 'there were many other Dickenses, 'an industrious Dickens, a public spirited Dickens, but the last one (that is Edwin Drood) was the great one. The wild epitaph of Mrs. Sapsea, "Canst thou do likewise?" should be ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... Cliffe leads northwards to South Malling; here is a conventicle named "Jireh" erected by J. Jenkyns, W.A. These cryptic initials mean "Welsh ambassador." In the cemetery behind is the tomb of William Huntingdon, the evangelist, whose epitaph ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... 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 the stone. It was simple, but it was true. I had written it myself. I had tried to write a poetical epitaph, but in vain; my feelings refused to utter themselves in rhyme. My heart had gradually been filling during my lonely wanderings; ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... Johnston and Falkland did not. After all, their loud cries for a non-party administration only meant an administration in which their own party was supreme. Howe was wholly in the right when he said that Johnston's epitaph should be, 'Here lies the man who denounced party government, that he might form one; and professing justice to all parties, gave ...
— The Tribune of Nova Scotia - A Chronicle of Joseph Howe • W. L. (William Lawson) Grant
... branches reach the heavens and its roots the primal rock and nations of men may rest in its shade; Edgar Lee Masters, whose work is full of the shadow and light of Lincoln, has made his most moving lyric an epitaph upon Ann Rutledge, the girl Lincoln loved and lost; and Vachel Lindsay, in Lincoln's own Springfield, during the World War thought of him as so stirred even in death by the horrors which then alarmed the universe that he could not sleep but walked up and down the midnight ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... individually, will be nothing to us if we lift up between Him and us the black barrier of unbelief, and so dam back the stream that was meant to give life to all the world and life to us. Christ infinitely desires to bless us, but He cannot unless we trust Him. I beseech you, do not let this be the epitaph on your tombstone:—'Christ could there do no mighty ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... of London, and afterwards archbishop of Canterbury, might be accused of profane confidence in the strength and number of his kindred. In peace, the earls of Devon resided in their numerous castles and manors of the west; their ample revenue was appropriated to devotion and hospitality; and the epitaph of Edward, surnamed from his misfortune, the blind, from his virtues, the good, earl, inculcates with much ingenuity a moral sentence, which may, however, be abused by thoughtless generosity. After a grateful commemoration of the fifty-five years of union and happiness which he enjoyed ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... were taken from the common walk; the men he had met in the road and at the hustings, at whose firesides he had passed many hours. Whatever concerned them, whatever involved in any manner their welfare, was of deep interest to him. If he had chosen his own epitaph it ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... Giorgione from plague in 1511 is registered by all the oldest authorities. His body was conveyed to Castelfranco by members of the Barbarelli family and buried in the Church of San Liberale. In 1638 an epitaph was placed over his tomb by Matteo and ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... literary medley, Sterne introduces his reader to a group of characters amongst the most odd and original in fiction. Mr. Shandy, with his syllogisms and his hypotheses, his "close reasoning upon the smallest matters"; Yorick, the witty parson, whose epitaph, Alas! Poor Yorick! expresses so tenderly the amiable faults for which he suffered; Captain Shandy, that combination of simplicity, gentleness, humanity, and modesty, are all creations which deserve to rank with the most individual and happily conceived of fictitious personages. Sterne makes ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... back the locust's flowery plume, The birch's pale-green scarf, And break the web of brier and bloom From name and epitaph. ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... an old-time dinner, at least, that Antonio provided; but, alas! those others were not there to eke out the illusion of the past. To each name, as I uttered it, Antonio added an epitaph. This one had gone to bury himself in the Abruzzi hills. That one had become a professor at Bologna. Others, in vanishing, had ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... the platform of the Epitaph depot for Malloy, of the Rangers, whose wire had brought him here. The cause of the latter's absence was soon made clear to him in a note he found waiting for ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine
... Why do the editors choose the present tense of the Quarto? Hamlet does not mean, 'It is worse to have the ill report of the Players while you live, than a bad epitaph after your death.' The order of the sentence has provided against that meaning. What he means is, that their ill report in life will be more against your reputation after death than ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald
... the world wisdom.' Laputa was speaking English in a strange, thin, abstracted voice. 'There would have been no king like me since Charlemagne,' and he strayed into Latin which I have been told since was an adaptation of the Epitaph of Charles the Great. 'Sub hoc conditorio,' he crooned, 'situm est corpus Joannis, magni et orthodoxi Imperatoris, qui imperium Africanum nobiliter ampliavit, et multos per annos mundum feliciter rexit.'[1] He must have ...
— Prester John • John Buchan
... cannot be said to affect his happiness, as he is past caring whether people think ill or well of him. Besides, after death it must needs be all right, as every man is so particularly fortunate in his epitaph!" ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... better for its presence is a noble profession. Often it has come to me that what is regarded as the somewhat remarkable progression of our enterprises—I will not say "success," for that word is an epitaph, and we are just starting—is due to some accident; and that the methods which we have used, while well enough in their way, fit only the making of our particular products and would not do at all in any other line of business or indeed for any products or personalities other ...
— My Life and Work • Henry Ford
... his verse, And judge if mine be better or be worse: Read and pronounce! The meed of praise is thine; But still let his be his and mine be mine. I say no more; but how can you for- swear Outspoken Jonson, he who knew me well; [106] So, too, the epitaph which still you read? Think you they faced my sepulchre with lies — Gross lies, so evident and palpable That every townsman must have wot of it, And not a worshipper within the church But must have smiled ...
— Songs Of The Road • Arthur Conan Doyle
... severely judged by some, harshly, perhaps, by others, it is quite natural that a man, himself a phantom at the present day, who knew that king, should come and testify in his favor before history; this deposition, whatever else it may be, is evidently and above all things, entirely disinterested; an epitaph penned by a dead man is sincere; one shade may console another shade; the sharing of the same shadows confers the right to praise it; it is not greatly to be feared that it will ever be said of two tombs in exile: ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... adding to his cares, the genius of the poet flashed forth once more in his personal poem, "Retaliation." At a club dinner at St. James's coffee-house, the proposition was made that each member present should write an epitaph on ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... his first published composition was an article describing it. He speaks of Owen Stanley thus: "Of all those who were actively engaged upon the survey, the young commander alone was destined to be robbed of his just rewards; he has raised an enduring monument in his works, and his epitaph shall be the grateful thanks of many a mariner threading his way among the mazes of the ...
— Before and after Waterloo - Letters from Edward Stanley, sometime Bishop of Norwich (1802;1814;1814) • Edward Stanley
... ask what profits were likely to come their way. They knew that there were none, but they were willing to sacrifice themselves to save decency and humanity from being trampled in the mud. This was the Army that the Germans called a mercenary Army, and its epitaph has been written by a ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... thee that my daughter have Her last request: thou shalt within one tomb Inter her Earl and her, and thereupon Engrave some royal epitaph of love. That done, I swear thee thou shalt take my corpse Which thou shalt find by that time done to death, And lay my body by my daughter's side— Swear ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VII (4th edition) • Various
... dream on the journey from one to the other. Doctor Mendenhall's teaching was all white meat, sweet to the taste, and altogether nourishing. He is the man who made the first correct copy of Shakespeare's epitaph there in the church at Stratford-on-Avon. I sent a copy of Doctor Mendenhall's version to Mr. Brassinger, the librarian in the Memorial Building, and have often wondered what his comment was. He never told me. There are those "who, having eyes, see not." There had been thousands ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... at the early age of seventeen." He had long planned that he should be laid beside her, but on Mrs. Hogarth's death, some five years later, he had to resign his place to her. This was a renewal of the old grief. The epitaph nearly seems the epitome of all that he says ...
— Pickwickian Studies • Percy Fitzgerald
... inferred that he was in attendance on Queen Elizabeth at her palace in Greenwich when he died, for he was buried in the old parish church there in November, 1585. The rustic rhymer who indited his epitaph evidently did the best he could to embalm the virtues of the great musician as a man, a citizen, ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... read that long inscription: 'Virtue'—'best of husbands'—'affectionate father'—'inconsolable grief'-'sleeps in the joyful hope,' etc. Do you suppose these stoneless mounds hide no dust of what were men just as good? But no epitaph tells their virtues, bespeaks their wifes' grief, or promises joyful ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Benjamin, with joyous huskiness, "you'll see that Our Own comes out this week as usual. Tell Jack Simmonds he must not forget to rule black lines around the page containing Bruno's epitaph. Bony-nose—I—I mean Mr. Bernstein, wrote it for us in dog-Latin. Isn't it a lark? Thick, black lines, tell him. He was a good dog and only bit one boy ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... burial-ground. You love to stroll round among the graves that crowd each other in the thickly peopled soil of that breezy summit. You love to lean on the freestone slab which lies over the bones of the Mathers,—to read the epitaph of stout William Clark, "Despiser of Sorry Persons and little Actions,"—to stand by the stone grave of sturdy Daniel Malcolm and look upon the splintered slab that tells the old rebel's story,—to kneel by the triple stone that says ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... our time has wrought so subtle a veil, shining on this side, where the few are, a thick cloud on the other, where are the many? The oracles have always had the wisdom to hide their secret in the obscurity of double meanings or of what has seemed meaningless; and might it not after all be the finest epitaph for a self-respecting man of letters to be able to say, even after the writing of many books: I have kept my secret, I have not betrayed ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... murder? I want to meet some of them. What are our wrongs of generations to this horror? All humanity is at stake here. I'll talk to them. I must. They'll have to do something now or go down branded through the generations as Pro-German. Can a man have a worse epitaph? No decent Irishman will bear that; every loyal Irishman must loathe them.... I'll talk to them—soul to soul.... Sorry, Dartrey. You have your own sorrow.... Good of you to put up with ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... silent way of saying, "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die," which, as Paul's solemn irony makes but too plain, must be the philosophy of life to those who believe that the dead rise not, which was the case with the Egyptians and the Greeks, and the Hebrews also. An old French epitaph expresses to the full ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... seemed in a fair way to make his removal from the Reform Club a prosperous venture. But he lost his wife, and was unfortunate in other ways, and the end was very sad indeed. "Soyez tranquille," was the epitaph proposed at the time by some unsentimental wagforpoor Madame Soyer; it soon served for ...
— Old Cookery Books and Ancient Cuisine • William Carew Hazlitt
... Legal studies seem not to have absorbed his attention to the total exclusion of literary work. The occasion of his first publication was the death of his mother in 1579. In that year appeared the "Epitaph of the Lady Anne Lodge." This is not extant, but his reply to Stephen Gosson's "School of Abuse" has survived. Gosson's book had been a furious attack upon the contemporary drama. Lodge's reply was a fair sample of the literary billingsgate of that controversial age and deserves the oblivion ...
— Rosalynde - or, Euphues' Golden Legacy • Thomas Lodge
... experience. Witness but the melody and the rhythm of der rmische Brunnen or of the Serspruch. In English letters Walter Savage Landor is a kindred spirit and his Finis, except for a note of haughty pride, might well be the epitaph of the ...
— A Book Of German Lyrics • Various
... the latter part of that year, I was struck with her ready attention to my wishes. I had, agreeably to the plan above mentioned, sent her into the churchyard to commit to memory an epitaph which I admired. On her return she told me that, in addition to what I desired, she had also learned another, which was inscribed on an adjoining stone, adding, that she thought it a ...
— The Annals of the Poor • Legh Richmond
... twice subsequently he went again, venturing in small ill-equipped vessels of thirty or forty tons into the most dangerous seas. These voyages were as remarkable for their success as for the daring with which they were accomplished, and Davis's epitaph is written on the map of the world, where his name still remains to commemorate his discoveries. Brave as he was, he is distinguished by a peculiar and exquisite sweetness of nature, which, from many little facts of his life, seems to have affected every one with whom he came in contact ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... with the rest of us, and who had nursed him with the fondest mother's care, broke out into loud sobs of irrepressible grief. We decided upon a broken column as his monument—fit emblem of the life so early broken—and we settled his brief, simple epitaph, which Mr. Cassell drew up:—"Erected by his friends in this colony in ...
— Personal Recollections of Early Melbourne & Victoria • William Westgarth
... in whose very appearance men saw something of the eagle grace of the young Napoleon. But he was luckier than the young Napoleon; for he has remained young. He was hanged; not before he had uttered one of those phrases that are the hinges of history. He made an epitaph of the refusal of an epitaph: and with a gesture has hung his tomb in heaven like Mahomet's coffin. Against such Irishmen we could only produce Castlereagh; one of the few men in human records who seem to have been made famous ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... presume that this is often the result of a constitutional defect, but in most instances it is attributable to insufficient nourishment in some department of their nature. "All but," is the appropriate epitaph for the tombstone of many an author; and if we look carefully into his history we shall find an answer to the question: "All but what?" We shall find, perhaps, that he is a recluse, that his social nature is not ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... time that the names Jean de Mandeville and Jean a la Barbe are to be met with, as Ortelius, in his description of Liege, included in his Itinerary of Belgium, has given the epitaph ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... Brothers, the Union shall be sacred which you died to save! In the more intense and glowing patriotism engendered by your sacrifice, we swear it on your blessed sepulchres, and this shall be your deathless epitaph! ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... treasure the thought of it through all time to come. Appropriately enough, Macaulay, who dedicated his brilliant powers to the great task of worthily recording the history that other men had made, composed the epitaph ...
— A Handful of Stars - Texts That Have Moved Great Minds • Frank W. Boreham
... Charles II. appointed the Earl of Rochester gentleman of the bedchamber and comptroller of Woodstock Park, and it is said that he here scribbled upon the door of the bedchamber of the king the well-known mock epitaph: ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... ascription does not carry with it much authority, but is in no way inherently improbable.[81] The opening stanzas may be quoted as conveying a fair idea of the whole, which sustains its character of sprightly elegance for over a hundred lines, ending with the luckless Harpelus' epitaph: ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... His epitaph claims for him the honor of commanding at Concord Bridge, but the weight of evidence is in favor of Major Buttrick as the active commander. And Robinson's fame can well spare even so distinguished an ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 1 • George Boutwell
... "Write your epitaph, Jack," drawled a deep voice from the reading table. "That's the only sure way, and even that is no good ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... printed in 1580 in 8vo. (miscalled 16mo.), "A Memorial, &c. of Mr. William Lambe, Esquier," is well known; but many years ago I saw, and copied the heading of a broadside, which ran thus:—"An Epitaph, or funeral inscription vpon the godlie life and death of the Right worshipfull Maister William Lambe Esquire, Founder of the new Conduit in Holborne," &c. "Deceased the 21st April Anno 1580. Deuised by Abraham Fleming." At the bottom was—"Imprinted at London by Henrie ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 6. Saturday, December 8, 1849 • Various
... inner side of the external wall a tomb under a boldly trefoiled canopy. It is a sarcophagus with a recumbent figure on it, which is the only work of art in the church deserving serious attention. It is the tomb of Gerard Bolderius "sui temporis physicorum principi," says his epitaph,[10] not, as far as I can discover, untruly. On the front of the sarcophagus is the semi-figure of Christ rising from the tomb, used generally at the period for the type of resurrection, between the Virgin and St. John; and two shields, bearing, one the fleur-de-lys, the other ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... establish any fancied communication with one before whose generous love I had felt myself dishonoured, if not actually disgraced. Even the remorse and regret had long since failed to disturb my peace of mind, causing me no anxiety, much less pain. Sic transit was the epitaph, if any. Acute sensation I had none at all. This, then, plainly argues against the slightest predisposition on my part to imagine that the loving guidance so strangely given owned a personal origin I could recognize. That it involved a "personal ...
— The Garden of Survival • Algernon Blackwood
... am sick of this false world, and will love nought But even the mere necessities upon't. Then, Timon, presently prepare thy grave; Lie where the light foam of the sea may beat Thy gravestone daily: make thine epitaph, That death in me at ...
— The Life of Timon of Athens • William Shakespeare [Craig edition]
... was again "resolved anew to be upon his guard." In the May of 1795, he died, after an illness of great suffering. To him might be applied some of the lines which the great poet who lived so near him wrote as his own epitaph:— ...
— Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica • James Boswell
... thought the question out, and then gravely and deliberately answered: "I should think his greatest characteristic was a passion of philanthropy." A passion of philanthropy! Is it possible to have a nobler epitaph pronounced on one than that—and pronounced by such a man? No man in our modern history was ever so bitterly and savagely denounced in England as O'Connell. No words were too rough for him. He was commonly called in English ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... part of the epitaph said to be composed by Governor Thomas Dudley, who died at Andover, Mass., in 1653. They were found after his death and preserved in Morton's New England's Memorial. They ...
— Diary of Anna Green Winslow - A Boston School Girl of 1771 • Anna Green Winslow
... creator of unforgettable types of character, and no pre-occupation of his epoch was foreign to his mind, whilst his vigorous realism always obstinately refused to turn from contemporaneous themes, or to gratify the needs and aspirations which it was possible to satisfy. His epitaph might well be that he understood the women of his ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... Jerome was her spiritual director at Rome for two years and a half-her other soul while life remained. She built and supported at her own expense an extensive monastery for Jerome and his monks at Bethlehem. When she died, Jerome wrote to her daughter the long and celebrated letter called "Epitaph of Paula," in which he exhausts the hyperboles of praise. The features of a rare character and the proofs of an extraordinary affection may be discerned within the extravagances of this eloquent panegyric. The tombs of Jerome and Paula are still to be seen side by side ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... swore at least a thousand times a day was 'God damn my blood,'" he wrote, "and God so infected his blood that it bred lice in an incredible number, so that for twenty days he never washed his shirts but burned them. To this God added the bloody flux, and an honest minister wrote this epitaph on him: ...
— Bacon's Rebellion, 1676 • Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker
... have ever been so saturated with the language and the spirit of the Bible as this lay theologian. It was this, indeed, which seems to have specially impressed his contemporaries. "Theologus Dantes nullius dogmatis expers" is the title which the epitaph of his friend Joannes de Virgilio confers upon him in its opening line. And among all the books of the "Sacred Library," as an earlier age called it, we can see that two had a predominant place in his memory—the prophecy ...
— Dante: His Times and His Work • Arthur John Butler
... artist's canvas: a touch of the brush is all that is spared for each, and yet, if we like to look sympathetically, they live before us. Now, this good woman, about whom we never hear again, and for whom these few words are all her epitaph—was apparently, judging by her name, of Persian descent, and possibly had been brought to Rome as a slave. At all events, finding herself there, she had somehow or other become connected with the Church in that city, and had there distinguished ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... proof that it is his own composition, against the internal testimony of utter want of all the marks by which we know him—the Burns-stamp, so to speak, which is visible on all that ever came from his pen. Misled by his handwriting, I inserted in my former edition of his works an epitaph, beginning ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... A proof of the infallibility of the foregoing receipt, in the lamentations of the widow; with other suitable decorations of death, such as physicians, &c., and an epitaph in the true stile. ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... This noble epitaph to the memory of Pitt conveys an impression alike of heroic endeavour and of irretrievable failure. It is the Funeral March of Chopin, not of Handel, and it echoes the feeling of the time. An impenetrable darkness hung over England. Ulm, Austerlitz, the ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... Thumb; but the King and the Court were so sorry at the loss of their little favourite that they went into mourning for him. And they put a fine white marble monument over his grave whereon was carven the following epitaph: ...
— English Fairy Tales • Flora Annie Steel
... antiquities in iron, so that only a limited number of specimens of this metal have come down to us from very early times; one of the earliest in England is a grave-stone of cast metal, of the date 1350: it is decorated with a cross, and has the epitaph, "Pray for the ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... life, let us insert here an amusing epitaph which he composed about this time, and ...
— Benjamin Franklin • Paul Elmer More
... has not been another of my kind, nor has man suffered as I have suffered, and been crushed and torn and thrown aside to die, without even the mercy of a death-wound. Describe it? Tell it? Look at me! I am both love's description and the epitaph on his gravestone. In me he lived, me he tortured, with me he dies never to live again as he has lived this once. There is no justice and no mercy! Think not that it is enough to love and that you will be loved in return. ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... that his wife should be buried in an abbey which he founded partly to atone for the sin that he had committed in killing her; and he caused a beautiful tomb to be built, in which the bodies of his niece and the gentleman were laid together, with an epitaph setting forth their tragic story. And the Duke undertook an expedition against the Turks, in which God so favoured him, that he brought back both honour and profit. On his return, he found his eldest son now able to govern his ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. V. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... modest," he corrected. "I like that better! Nothing mean and modest! What a splendid epitaph that would make for me! Stop a moment! I ...
— Whistler Stories • Don C. Seitz
... linking all the incidents together. And, as I said before, relations are agreeable adjuncts at your own funeral, since you may always depend upon them saying nice things about you when it's too late for you to hear them. Friends will never do that. They don't need to. They carry your epitaph with them written on their own hearts. The "nice" things have been said—they have been said ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... is represented as gathering in the harvest; then he is seen in procession with wife, children, friends, and followers, carrying sheaves to the temple, a thank-offering to the gods. This seems to be a painted epitaph, signifying that the deceased was industrious, prosperous, and pious. It was common to deposit in these tombs various articles of use or ornament, such as the departed ones had been familiar with and attached to, while on earth. Many things in the ancient ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... that the story of the burial of Montcalm in a grave partially formed by the explosion of a bomb, rests only on the assertion in his epitaph, composed in 1761 by the Academy of Inscriptions at the instance of Bougainville. There is, however, other evidence of the fact. The naval captain Foligny, writing on the spot at the time of the burial, says in his Diary, under the ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... (afterwards Sir James) Clark. But all was of no avail: after continual and severe suffering, devotedly watched by Severn, he expired on 23 February, 1821. He was buried in the old Protestant Cemetery of Rome, under a little altar-tomb sculptured with a Greek lyre. His name was inscribed, along with the epitaph which he himself had composed in the bitterness of his soul, 'Here lies one whose name was writ ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... told also that "King Henry the 4th helped to build up a good part of the Body of the Chirch." The immediate direction of the work was in the hands of Prior Chillenden, already frequently mentioned; his epitaph, quoted by Professor Willis, states that "Here lieth Thomas Chyllindene formerly Prior of this Church, Decretorum Doctor egregius, who caused the nave of this Church and divers other buildings to be made anew. Who after nobly ...
— The Cathedral Church of Canterbury [2nd ed.]. • Hartley Withers
... abbeys, the friend of Mary Stuart, of the Duc d'Orleans, of Charles IX., HE is traite en subalterne, and is jealous of a frocked or unfrocked manant like Maitre Francoys! And then this amazing Fleury falls foul of thine epitaph on Maitre Francoys and cries, "Ronsard a voulu faire des vers mechants; il n'a fait que de mechants vers." More truly saith M. Sainte-Beuve, "If the good Rabelais had returned to Meudon on the day ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... The following epitaph which was placed over his grave was interpreted, according to the prepossessions of those who read it, either as a testimony to his sanctity or as a proof of ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere |
