"Charon" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... this fancy shifted to the notion that, through neglect of burial, the dead man was dishonoured—he had no friends—and that his spirit was thereby disgraced and unworthy of reception by the powers beneath. It must therefore remain shivering on the near side of the river across which the grim Charon ferried the more fortunate souls. Even when the body had been decently buried, the spirit, though received into the gloomy realm, called for continued respect on the part of its friends on earth. Unless it received ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... of the grotto of the Sybil. As this grotto is nearly knee-deep filled with water we got on the backs of the boatmen to enter it. It is about twenty-five feet long, fifteen broad and the height about thirteen feet. As we were neither devoured by Cerberus nor hustled by old Charon into his boat, we returned from the Shades below to the light of heaven, triumphant like Ulysses or Aeneas, considering ourselves now among the Pauci ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... that from Polruan. If we had already come from Fowey to Bodinnick we should find that the ferryman would carry us back without further payment; the outward fee included a return—not like the ferry of Charon which had no return for passengers. The oars dip peacefully into the water, breaking its surface of glistening light; a delicious coolness, that phantom fragrance of water to which we can give no name, ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... was now something that had a sense of actual obstruction in it. It seemed that a hand put forth would encounter a wall. The tide was here, but no perceptible current. For all they could tell to the contrary, they might have been floating in Charon's boat across some ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... the Milky Way; and, since the journey was long, they put boots into the coffin, (for it was made on foot,) and coins to pay the ferrying across a wide sea, even as the Greeks expected to be carried over the Styx by Charon. This abode of the dead, at the end of this long pathway, was an island, a ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... Tyndals swept all of us, except Mrs. Norton, away to Delabole to see the slate quarries, and to have the adventure of sliding down a fearfully steep incline in a tiny trolley-car—if that's the right word for it. I half expected Charon to meet me with his ferry-boat at the bottom. It wouldn't have seemed much stranger than other things ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... eternal law; There was in him no hope of fame, no passion, But with calm, godlike eyes he only saw. He did not sigh o'er heroes dead and buried, Chief-mourner at the Golden Age's hearse, 10 Nor deem that souls whom Charon grim had ferried Alone were fitting themes of epic verse: He could believe the promise of to-morrow, And feel the wondrous meaning of to-day; He had a deeper faith in holy sorrow Than the world's seeming loss could take away. To know the heart of all things was his duty, All things did sing ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... for Charon's Westerne barge Running a tilt at the Subjunctive mood, Beckoned to Bednal Green, and gave him charge To fasten padlockes ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... went to seek the soul of Baldr, he was told by the keeper of the bridge, a maiden named Modhgudhr, that the bridge rang beneath no feet save his. Similarly Vergil tells us that Charon's boat (which is also a parallel to the Brig) was almost sunk by the weight ...
— Ballads of Mystery and Miracle and Fyttes of Mirth - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Second Series • Frank Sidgwick
... is still decked about with holly, For the Season that at any rate's conventionally "jolly," Is by no means wholly over, and the very hard-worked Baron Feels rather like a sort of tired-out literary Charon, With an over-laden ferry-boat, and passengers too numerous. For seasonable "novelties"—and "notions" quaint and humorous Still crowd on him, and claim his constant critical attention, Some may ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari Volume 98, January 4, 1890 • Various
... those times, in regard to the peace and happiness of the soul after death, made the protection of the body a matter of great importance. For a full account of these rites, see the articles Charon and ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... [228]Charon in Lucian, as he wittily feigns, was conducted by Mercury to such a place, where he might see all the world at once; after he had sufficiently viewed, and looked about, Mercury would needs know of him what he had observed: He told him that he saw a vast multitude ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... judge's ermine; the coxcomb's wig; the snuff-box a la Foppington—all must overboard, he positively swears—and that ancient mariner brooks no denial; for, since the tiresome monodrame of the old Thracian Harper, Charon, it is to be believed, hath ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... leaving all your friends, your brother's family in particular, in great prosperity." He said that he felt that satisfaction so sensibly, that when he was reading, a few days before, Lucian's Dialogues of the Dead, among all the excuses which are alleged to Charon for not entering readily into his boat, he could not find one that fitted him; he had no house to finish, he had no daughter to provide for, he had no enemies upon whom he wished to revenge himself. "I could not well imagine," said he, "what ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... open a dispensary, but, proving dishonest, he lost his license and became a ferryman—a very Charon for terrestrial passengers. He died in New Caledonia ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... besieged withdrew their cannon from the embrasures, and scarcely returned a shot. The shells and red hot balls from the batteries of the allied army reached the ships in the harbour, and, in the evening, set fire to the Charon of forty-four guns, and to three large transports, which were entirely consumed. Reciprocal esteem, and a spirit of emulation between the French and Americans, being carefully cultivated by the Commander-in-chief, ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 3 (of 5) • John Marshall
... thinks, a revelation of the end of all things. Great storm clouds, whereon throne the Almighty and His Elect, brood over the world, across which, among the crevassed, upheaving earth, pours the wide glacier torrent of Styx, with the boat of Charon struggling across its precipitous waters. The angels, confused with the storm clouds of which they are the spirit, lash the damned down to the Hell stream, band upon band, even from the far distance. And in the foreground the rocks are splitting, the soil is upheaving ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... Kremlin, that had seen a city perish, to this Bench where my father languished! There was no comparing them for tragic horror. And the Kremlin had snow-fields around it; this Bench was caught out of sight, hemmed in by an atmosphere thick as Charon breathed; it might as ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... canoe glare like fiery eye-balls; and the passengers, sitting there so hushed and motionless, look like shadows. The scene is so strangely funereal and spectral, that it seems as if the Greeks must have witnessed it, before they imagined Charon conveying ghosts to the dim regions of Pluto. Your ...
— Rambles in the Mammoth Cave, during the Year 1844 - By a Visiter • Alexander Clark Bullitt
... cannie man Old Dr. Hanneman— Two individuals of consummate gumption, Who declare, That whensoe'er The patient's labouring under a consumption, To save him from a trip across the Styx, To ancient Nick's In Charon's shallop, If the consumption be upon the canter, It should be put upon the gallop Instanter; For, "similia similibus curantur," Great medicinal cod (Beating the mode Of old Hippocrates, whom M.D.'s mostly follow, Quite ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 25, 1841 • Various
... simultaneous movement upon the part of all present to get up closer, so as the more readily to hear what he said, as a result of which poor old Boswell was pushed overboard, and fell with a loud splash into the Styx. Fortunately, however, one of Charon's pleasure-boats was close at hand, and in a short while the dripping, sputtering spirit was drawn into it, wrung out, and sent home to dry. The excitement attending this diversion having subsided, ...
— The Pursuit of the House-Boat • John Kendrick Bangs
... the next Wednesday. She said she once knew a lady who was separated from her lover, and yielded to her parents' choice, who lived in perpetual torment, surrounded by a profusion of wealth. In a few years she pined away, and died broken-hearted, entered Charon's boat with her first love, and sailed over the River of Death together, to join their friends on the Elysian Fields of Paradise, and left her parents and the man of their choice digging in the mud and dust for gold. But that lady was not Nelly Gordon. She would sooner seek the ...
— The Forest King - Wild Hunter of the Adaca • Hervey Keyes
... ribs of lath; around him were bare, dirty-white walls, that seemed to grow out of the gray light of a wet morning as the natural deposit from such a solution. Two slender poles, meant to support curtains, but without a rag of drapery upon them, rose at his feet, like the masts of a Charon's boat. Was he indeed in the workhouse he had pre—ferred to Cairncarque? It could hardly be, for there was the plaster fallen in great patches from the walls as well as the ceiling, and surely no workhouse would be allowed to get into such a disrepair! ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... trifling boon of a handful of earth cast upon their bones was very different. They had not yet been admitted to the world below, and were forced to wander for a hundred years before they might enter Charon's boat. AEneas beheld them on the banks of the Styx, stretching out their hands "ripae ulterioris amore." The shade of Patroclus describes its hapless state to Achilles, as does that of Elpenor to Odysseus, when they meet in the lower world. It is not surprising that the ancients ...
— Greek and Roman Ghost Stories • Lacy Collison-Morley
... concealed in a desert place, and drew near to the city gates in the guise of labourers returning home with the latest comers from the fields. Having got safely within the city, they spent the whole of that night at the house of a man named Charon, and again the next day in the same fashion. Phyllidas meanwhile was busily taken up with the concerns of the polemarchs, who were to celebrate a feast of Aphrodite on going out of office. Amongst other things, the secretary was to take this opportunity of fulfilling an old undertaking, ...
— Hellenica • Xenophon
... classic poets say The simple truth, as poets do to-day,— When Charon's boat conveyed a spirit o'er The Lethean water to the Hadean shore, The fare was just a penny,—not too great, The moderate, regular, Stygian statute rate. Now, for a shilling, he will cross the stream, (His paddles whirling ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... any sticks," said ignorant Maurice, who had never learned that the old heathens believed the souls of dead people went in a ferryboat across a dark river called the Styx, and that the old man who rowed the boat was called Charon. ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... whose significance Dale was far from realising. Of what value, indeed, is money to me? There is none to whom I can usefully bequeath my little fortune, my sisters having each married rich men. I shall not need even Charon's obolus when I am dead, for we have ceased to believe in him—which is a pity, as the trip across the Styx must have been picturesque. Why, then, should I not deal myself a happy lot and portion by squandering my money benevolently during ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... her voice was a sigh of hopeless grief. In mad desperation Orpheus sought to follow her, but his attempt was vain. At the brink of the dark, fierce-flooded Acheron the boat with its boatman, old Charon, lay ready to ferry across to the further shore those whose future lay in the land of Shades. To him ran Orpheus, in clamorous anxiety to undo the evil he had wrought. But Charon angrily repulsed him. There was no place for such as Orpheus in his ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... the brisker inhabitants of Ashbridge, who do not understand its spirit, to substitute for this aged and ineffectual Charon someone who is occasionally awake, but nothing ever results from these revolutionary moves, and the requests addressed to the town council on the subject are never heard of again. "Old George" was ferryman there before any members of the town council were born, and he seems to have established ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... birds, hushed first by noon and then by possibilities of tempest, cautiously begin once more, leading on the infinite melodies of the June afternoon. As the freshened air invites them forth, so the smooth and stainless water summons us. "Put your hand upon the oar," says Charon in the old play to Bacchus, "and you shall hear the sweetest songs." The doors of the boathouse swing softly open, and the slender wherry, like a water-snake, steals silently in the wake ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... current, with a rising gale, Still set them onwards to the welcome shore, Like Charon's bark of spectres, dull and pale: Their living freight was now reduced to four, And three dead, whom their strength could not avail To heave into the deep with those before, Though the two sharks still ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... voyage, I had time not only to coax into quietness my restive horse, but also to conclude that it would never do to dismiss our Charon on the other bank, as half an hour might put on our track a squad of cavalry, who, in our ignorance of the roads and country, would soon return us to Rebeldom and a rope. A man who would take twenty dollars for twenty minutes' work, ...
— Thirteen Months in the Rebel Army • William G. Stevenson
... than his opponent. In the end the dog won, but he was the most devastated small dog that I have ever seen, before or since, and had it not been for prompt surgical aid at his home nearby I dare say Charon might have ferried both shades over the Styx together. No, the woodchuck is not so easy to get. He is quite likely to whip his own weight in most anything that forces him to ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... They speak of Charon's lingering boat, which will convey you to your last home, to the one great resting-place for all ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... is the handsomest man in the University, and one of the nicest too. They call him 'the Greek god'; but look at the other one, he's Vincey's (that's the god's name) guardian, and supposed to be full of every kind of information. They call him 'Charon.'" I looked, and found the older man quite as interesting in his way as the glorified specimen of humanity at his side. He appeared to be about forty years of age, and was I think as ugly as his ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... with Tritons, and other Nymphs; every River, and Fountayn, with a Ghost of his name, and with Nymphs; every house, with it Lares, or Familiars; every man, with his Genius; Hell, with Ghosts, and spirituall Officers, as Charon, Cerberus, and the Furies; and in the night time, all places with Larvae, Lemures, Ghosts of men deceased, and a whole kingdome of Fayries, and Bugbears. They have also ascribed Divinity, and built Temples to meer ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... iron skewer pierces the tender sides of both, their legs and wings close pinioned to their ribs, so was this pair of friends transfixed, till down they fell joined in their lives, joined in their deaths; so closely joined, that Charon would mistake them both for one, and waft them over Styx for half his fare.' The humour of the piece is delightful, and it matters not a whit for the enjoyment of it, that the ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... imbued with the knowledge of our intentions, would indicate us to be a combination of perturbed spirits, rowed by Charon across the ...
— Stories of Comedy • Various
... imitated. As for Purcell's instrumentation, it is primitive compared to Mozart's, but when he uses the instrument in group or batteries he obtains gorgeous effects of varied colour. He gets delicious effects by means of obligato instrumental parts in the accompaniments to such songs as "Charon the Peaceful Shade Invites"; and those who have heard the "Te Deum" in D may remember that even Bach never got more wonderful results from the ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... of perplexities have occurred in the publishing of my poor book, which perplexities I could only cut asunder, not unloose; so the MS., like an unhappy ghost, still lingers on the wrong side of Styx: the Charon of Albemarle Street durst not risk it in his sutilis cymba, so it leaped ashore again. Better days are coming, and new ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... with M. Charon, who was a counsellor, and in charge of a suit between Madame d'Urfe and her daughter Madame du Chatelet, whom she disliked heartily. The old counsellor had been the favoured lover of the marchioness forty years before, and he thought ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... that guarded the portal of Hades may possibly be a distorted survival of this ancient symbolism of the three-fold dog-skin as the graphic sign for the act of emergence from the portal of birth. Elsewhere (p. 223) in this lecture I have referred to Charon's obolus as a surrogate of the life-giving pearl or cowry placed in the mouth of the dead to provide "vital substance". Rohde[284] regards Charon as the second Cerberus, corresponding to the Egyptian dog-faced god Anubis: just as Charon received his obolus, so in Attic custom ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... was far other than at peace. The great bombs rose in vast curves overhead, with trails of light, and, seeming to hesitate in mid-air, exploded, or fell on town or ship or in the stream between. As we looked, awe-struck, hot shot set fire to the "Charon," a forty-four-gun ship, nigh to Gloucester, and soon a red rush of fire twining about mast and spar rose in air, lighting the sublime spectacle, amid the crash of guns, the rattle of musketry, and ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... the audience, and left full space beneath for the actors. Down the centre of the stage flowed a stream, broad enough to contain a boat, which was plied by the Abbe de Mericour—transformed by a gray beard and hair and dismal mask into Charon. ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... as you please, your will is mine; Enjoy it without fear, And your grave will be this glass of wine, Your epitaph—a tear— Go, take your seat in Charon's boat; We'll tell the ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... him, which was a very just one. Neither he nor I had much doubt that the ships in sight were British. We hoisted British colours, so did they; and in a short time we were all paying compliments to each other, they being his Majesty's ships Charon, Lowestoffe, and Pomona, under the command of the Honourable Captain Luttrell. He confirmed the account we had received of the attack of the Spaniards on the British territories, and informed us also that he had been in quest of ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... vast catacombs of Egypt, the dismal mansions of the dead—were the temple and stream, both called Cocytus, the foul canal of Acheron, and the Elysian plains; and according to the same equivocal authority, the body of the dead was wafted across the waters by a pilot, termed Charon in the Egyptian tongue. But previous to the embarkation, appointed judges on the MARGIN of the ACHERON listened to whatever accusations were preferred by the living against the deceased; and if convinced of his mis-deeds, deprived him of the rights of Sepulture.—Athens, by ...
— The Author's Printing and Publishing Assistant • Frederick Saunders
... Elysium, of which no Thessalian witch shall partake, Proserpine, for ever cut off from thy health-giving mother, and horrid Hecate, Cerebrus [Errata: read Cerberus] curst with incessant hunger, ye Destinies, and Charon endlessly murmuring at the task I impose of bringing back the dead again to the land of the living, hear me!—if I call on you with a voice sufficiently impious and abominable, if I have never sung this chaunt, unsated with human gore, if I have frequently laid on ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... Michelangelo's poems, speaks of it as "a most sublime sonnet, full of that antique purity and Dantesque gravity." Dante's influence over the great artist's pictorial imagination is strongly marked in the fresco of the Last Judgment, where Charon's boat, and Minos with his twisted tail, are borrowed direct from the Inferno. Condivi, moreover, informs us that the statues of the Lives Contemplative and Active upon the tomb of Julius were suggested by the Rachel and Leah of the Purgatorio. We also know that ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... probably similar instruction was given to the initiate at Eleusis. But the Fijians also have a regular theory of what is to be done and avoided on "The Path of the Shades." The shade is ferried by Ceba (Charon) over Wainiyalo (Lethe); he reaches the mystic pandanus tree (here occurs a rite); he meets, and dodges, Drodroyalo and the two devouring Goddesses; he comes to a spring, and drinks, and forgets sorrow at Wai-na-dula, the "Water of Solace." After half-a-dozen ...
— The Homeric Hymns - A New Prose Translation; and Essays, Literary and Mythological • Andrew Lang
... Charon, the Ferryman of renown, was cruising slowly along the Styx one pleasant Friday morning not long ago, and as he paddled idly on he chuckled mildly to himself as he thought of the monopoly in ferriage which in the course of years he had ...
— A House-Boat on the Styx • John Kendrick Bangs
... the way of death, then wilt thou overtake a lame ass laden with wood, and a lame driver, who will pray thee reach him certain cords to fasten the burden which is falling from the ass: but be thou cautious to pass on in silence. And soon as thou comest to the river of the dead, Charon, in that crazy bark he hath, will put thee over upon the further side. There is greed even among the dead: and thou shalt deliver to him, for the ferrying, one of those two pieces of money, in such wise that he take [88] it with his hand ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... on a time in Charon's wherry Two Painters met, on Styx's ferry. Good sir, said one, with bow profound, I joy to meet thee under ground, And though with zealous spite we strove To blast each other's fame above, Yet here, as neither bay nor laurel Can tempt us to prolong our quarrel, I hope the ...
— The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems • Washington Allston
... Philidas, secretary of the polemarchs, entered into the conspiracy, and, being sent in an embassy to Athens, concocted the way for Pelopidas and his friends to return to Thebes and effect a revolution. Charon, an eminent patriot, agreed to shelter the conspirators in his house until they struck the blow. Epaminondas, then living at Thebes, dissuaded the enterprise as too hazardous, although all his sympathies were with ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... Charon propitious to thee when thy soul meets him at the river in Hades," he cried. "Be he propitious to thee, Chamilly, for making me ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair
... of the Saviour of men. Annihilation is repugnant to the common intelligence. Homer sends Ulysses, Dantelike, to the realms of the dead, where he converses with them he had known in life. The Stygian River, the dumb servitor, Charon, the coin-paid fare, are all well known in the classics of ...
— Trail Tales • James David Gillilan
... to it," said the friar, "or it will give us no peace. I would all my customers were of this world. I begin to think that I am Charon, and that this river ...
— Maid Marian • Thomas Love Peacock
... and as one that must give us pause when we would deny to 'prince Randolph' the gifts requisite for the higher imaginative drama, I must quote the scene in which the distracted Amyntas fancies that in his endless search for the 'impossible dowry' he has arrived on the shores of Styx and boarded Charon's bark. ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... Aryan lore, the sky itself was a blue sea, and the clouds were ships sailing over it; and an English legend tells how one of these ships once caught its anchor on a gravestone in the churchyard, to the great astonishment of the people who were coming out of church. Charon's ferry-boat was one of these vessels, and another was Odin's golden ship, in which the souls of slain heroes were conveyed to Valhalla. Hence it was once the Scandinavian practice to bury the dead in boats; and ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... —Charon, demoniac form, With eyes of burning coal, collects them all, Beck'ning, and each that lingers, with his oar Strikes. As fall off the light autumnal leaves, One still another following, till the bough Strews all its honours on the earth beneath;— E'en in like manner Adam's evil ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... Grecian theatre; and that these exhibitions were also the prototypes whereon D'Hancarville shows Mercury, Momus, and Psyche delineated as we see Harlequin, Columbine, and Clown on our stages. The old man (Pantaloon), is Charon (the ferryman of hell). The Clown is Momus, the buffoon of heaven, the god of raillery and wit, and whose large gaping mouth is in imitation of ...
— A History of Pantomime • R. J. Broadbent
... all the descriptions of motion in the Divina Commedia, I do not think there is another quite so fine as that in which Dante has glorified the old fable of Charon by giving a boat also to the bright sea which surrounds the mountain of Purgatory, bearing the redeemed souls to their place of trial; only an angel is now the pilot, and there is no stroke of laboring oar, for his wings are ...
— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin
... sonnets burn; And on the marble grave these rhymes, A monument to after-times— "Here Cassy lies, by Celia slain, And dying, never told his pain." Vain empty world, farewell. But hark, The loud Cerberian triple bark; And there—behold Alecto stand, A whip of scorpions in her hand: Lo, Charon from his leaky wherry Beckoning to waft me o'er the ferry: I come! I come! Medusa see, Her serpents hiss direct at me. Begone; unhand me, hellish fry: "Avaunt—ye cannot say 'twas I."[1] Dear Cassy, ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... Styx. Every evening Mercury brought all the spirits of the people who had died during the day to the shore of the Styx, and if their funeral rites had been properly performed, and they had a little coin on the tongue to pay the fare, Charon, the ferryman, took them across; but if their corpses were in the sea, or on battle-fields, unburied, the poor shades had to flit about vainly begging to be ferried over. After they had crossed, they were judged by ...
— Aunt Charlotte's Stories of Greek History • Charlotte M. Yonge
... account of his manners and conversation, which you know very well, or you would not have sent him to me. I only now hope I shall not see him to-morrow; and should I learn that he shall have departed in one of those Plutonian engines to the keeping of Charon himself, I should only regret that I had not put an obol into his hand, lest he should be presented with a return-ticket. What did he say, and what did he not say? He called my daughter "Miss," and said he should like music very well ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... call 'em a nautical name. They've one big, square sail of crazy-quilt work—raw silk, pieces of rubber boots, rattan matting, and grass cloth, all colors, all shapes of patches. They point into the wind and then go sideways; and they don't steer with an oar that Charon discarded thousands of years ago, that's painted crimson and raw violet; and the only thing they'd be good for would be fancy wood-carpets. Mine, or better, ours, was made of satinwood, and was ballasted with scrap-iron, rotten ivory, and ebony. There, I've told ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... replied; "but what is that to me? Mine only to see Charon on the wave pass light over and return. Man of the green world, prithee die not yet awhile! 'Tis dull being a shade. See these cold palms! Yet my heart ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... the flowering apple trees, and gleaming on the fountain of forgetfulness. In Scotland the channering worm doth chide even the souls that come from where, "beside the gate of Paradise, the birk grows fair enough." The Romaic idea of the place of the dead, the garden of Charon, whence "neither in spring or summer, nor when grapes are gleaned in autumn, can warrior or maiden escape," is likewise pre-Christian. In Provencal and Danish folk-song, the cries of children ill-treated by a cruel step-mother awaken ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... becomes almost suppliant. The reason for this is indeed somewhat obscure: one does not at once see why the formula "So it is willed there, where will is power," should not be as good for the Furies or for Malacoda as it has proved for Charon and Minos. Perhaps the clue is to be found in the fact that the sins punished inside the walls of the city (sins which, it will be seen, are not represented in Purgatory at all) are to be regarded as the result of a will obstinately ...
— Dante: His Times and His Work • Arthur John Butler
... sinners into saints, An' mony divers ways o' deein' That doctors hae a chance o' seein'. The Babylonian scartit bricks To tell his doots o' Death's dark tricks, The Roman kentna hoo 'twas farin' Across the ferry rowed by Charon, An' readin' doonwards through the ages The tale's the same in a' their pages, Eternal grum'lin' at the load We hae to bear alang Life's road, Yet, when we're fairly at the bit, Awfu', maist awfu sweer to flit, Praisin' the name o' ony drug The doctor whispers in oor lug ...
— The Auld Doctor and other Poems and Songs in Scots • David Rorie
... strange that the dead nowadays were coming in such numbers. They were coming in thousands where they used to come in fifties. It was neither Charon's duty nor his wont to ponder in his grey soul why these things might be. Charon leaned ...
— Fifty-One Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... Rostopchin's witty remark on that occasion. The foreigners were deported to Nizhni by boat, and Rostopchin had said to them in French: "Rentrez en vousmemes; entrez dans la barque, et n'en faites pas une barque de Charon." * There was talk of all the government offices having been already removed from Moscow, and to this Shinshin's witticism was added—that for that alone Moscow ought to be grateful to Napoleon. It was said ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... you, do the physicians lie, when they aver things good for sicknesses, which afterwards send Charon a great number of souls drowned in a potion before they come to his ferry? And no less of the rest, which take upon them to affirm. Now, for the poet, he nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth. For, as I take it, to lie is to affirm that to be true which is ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... to believe their force more considerable than we at first supposed. I think, since the arrival of the three transports which had been separated in a storm, they may be considered as about two thousand strong. Their naval force, according to the best intelligence, is the Charon, of forty-four guns, Commodore Symmonds, the Amphitrite, Iris, Thames, and Charlestown frigates, the Forvey, of twenty guns, two sloops of war, a privateer ship, and two brigs. We have about thirty-seven hundred militia embodied, but ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... more steadily wrong side up, perhaps because we had lashed all our loads in place and they acted as ballast. Will took the pole and acted the part of Charon, our proper pilot contenting himself with perching on the rear end lamenting the ill-fortune noisily until Kazimoto struck him and threatened to throw him back ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... sonnet is a coin: its face reveals The soul,—its converse, to what Power 'tis due:— Whether for tribute to the august appeals Of Life, or dower in Love's high retinue, It serve; or, 'mid the dark wharf's cavernous breath, In Charon's palm it pay the toll ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... Chironian, and sacred to the Sun. Charon was of the same purport, and etymology; and was sacred to the same Deity. One temple of this name, and the most remarkable of any, stood opposite to Memphis on the western side of the Nile. It was near the spot where most people of consequence ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume II. (of VI.) • Jacob Bryant
... O Sun.]—Alcestis has come out to see the Sun and Sky for the last time and say good-bye to them. It is a rite or practice often mentioned in Greek poetry. Her beautiful wandering lines about Charon and his boat are the more natural because she is not dying from any disease but is being mysteriously drawn away by the ...
— Alcestis • Euripides
... his black stringy hair and his dirty and tattered clothes, such a singularly wild and infernal look, that he actually struck me as a real Charon. His voice, and the questions he asked me, were not of a kind to remove this notion, so that, far from its requiring any effort of imagination, I found it not easy to avoid believing that, at length, I had actually ...
— Travels in England in 1782 • Charles P. Moritz
... the junction of two rivers, between which intervened a narrow point of land, with a background of steep hills, covered with a growth of black-jack and yellow-pine to the summit. Here was a ferry with its Charon-like boat, of the primitive sort—flat barge, poled over by negroes, and capable of containing at one time many bales of cotton, a stagecoach or wagon with four ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... trained gladiators, most of them from the school of Sosia, set against a hundred picked captives of all nations. Not less than a half of each number got it. These fellows look as if they had done their best. You've fought your last battle, old boys—unless you have a bout with Charon, who will be loath, I warrant you beforehand, to ferry over such a slashed and swollen company. Now ought you in charity,' he continued, addressing a half-naked savage, who was helping to drag the bodies from the cart, 'to have these trunks well washed ere you bury them, or ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... spiritual Pandanus at which he must throw the ghost of the whale's tooth which was placed in his hand at time of burial. If he succeeds in hitting the Pandanus, he may then wait until the spirit of his strangled wife comes to join him, after which he boards the canoe of the Fijian Charon and proceeds to Nambanggatai, where until 1847 there dwelt the god Samu, and after his death Samuyalo "the ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... said that the thing is so, but we can be made to see that it is so. Not only does a man tell us that when a taper burns the wax is converted into carbonic acid and water, as a man may tell us, if he likes, that Charon is punting his ferry-boat on the river Styx, or that Victor Hugo is a sublime poet, or Mr. Gladstone the most admirable of statesmen; but we are made to see that the conversion into carbonic acid and water does actually happen. This reality ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... why bid the dead arise? Why call them back from Charon's wherry? Come, Yankee Mark, with twinkling eyes, Confuse these ghouls with something merry! Come, Kipling, with thy soldiers three, Thy barrack-ladies frail and fervent, Forsake thy themes of butchery And be the ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III., July 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... later asserted) a fee to Charon the ferryman to Hades, but simply a "minimum precautionary sum, for the dead man's use" (Dr. Jane Harrison), placed in the mouth, where a Greek usually kept ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... of this outward world and unjustifiably applied to the fortunes of the mind in the invisible sphere of the future. The figment of a judicial transportation of the soul from one place or planet to another, as if by a Charon's boat, is a clattering and repulsive conceit, inadmissible by one who apprehends the noiseless continuity of God's self executing laws. It is a jarring mechanical clash thrust amidst the smooth evolution of spiritual ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... afloat amid soot and iridescent patches or pools of tar. In the cottage gardens not a soul was at work, nor, by their appearance, had a soul worked in them for years past. The canal, too, was deserted, save for one long monkey-boat, black as Charon's barge, that lay moored to a post on the towpath, some seventy-odd yards up stream, near where the wall of the Orphanage ended. Beyond this, and over a line of ragged thorns, the bulk of a red-brick Brewery—its roof crowned with a ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... and think. It certainly was a curious, and indeed almost a weird, position to be placed in — rushing along, as we were, through the bowels of the earth, borne on the bosom of a Stygian river, something after the fashion of souls being ferried by Charon, as Curtis said. And how dark it was! The feeble ray from our little lamp did but serve to show the darkness. There in the bows sat old Umslopogaas, like Pleasure in the poem, {Endnote 9} watchful and untiring, the pole ready to his hand, and behind ...
— Allan Quatermain • by H. Rider Haggard
... lad. Charon it is. What with drink an' the sinful climate, I've forgot much that ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... bridgeless. Owing to the malaria and the loneliness of the spot, the acting of ferryman over this river was not an agreeable post, and Count Stolberg, a German dilettante who has left some memories of his Italian wanderings, relates how a feeble dismal soured old man, a veritable Charon of the upper air, had great difficulty in conveying himself, his horse and his servant across the swollen stream. The old man's age and misery aroused the Count's compassion, so that he asked him why ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... hence among the Greeks the same word signified to die, and to be initiated. In the British Mysteries, says Davies (Mythol. of the British Druids), the novitiate passed the river of death in the boat of Garanhir, the Charon of the Greeks; and before he could be admitted to this privilege, it was requisite that he should have been mystically buried, as well ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... bestowed indiscriminately upon every person who died, however exalted his position. Characters were given by judges, after inquiry into the life and conduct of the deceased. The judges sat on the opposite side of a lake; and while they crossed the lake, he who sat at the helm was called Charon, which gave rise to the fable among the Greeks, that Charon conducted the souls of deceased ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... surround it, and into these from a higher society, and so on. All his types mean the same few things. All his figures speak one speech. All his interlocutors Swedenborgize. Be they who they may, to this complexion must they come at last. This Charon ferries them all over in his boat; kings, counselors, cavaliers, doctors, Sir Isaac Newton, Sir Hans Sloane, King George II., Mahomet, or whosoever, and all gather one grimness of hue and style. Only when Cicero comes by, our gentle ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... with Charon's knife and sunk In death's dark swoon, a hapless mother feels Life's tide return, she hears again, like first Life-summons, the anxious voice of her fond child, A voice that comforts her and tenderly Tells of ...
— Life Immovable - First Part • Kostes Palamas
... derived their impressions of his poem from M. Dore's memorable illustrations, will here probably demur. What! Dante not grotesque! That tunnel-shaped structure of the infernal pit; Minos passing sentence on the damned by coiling his tail; Charon beating the lagging shades with his oar; Antaios picking up the poets with his fingers and lowering them in the hollow of his hand into the Ninth Circle; Satan crunching in his monstrous jaws the arch-traitors, Judas, Brutus and Cassius; Ugolino appeasing ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... the ghost almost in the words of Charon, who, too charitable to suffer a man to go to the devil in his own way, thus addressed the son ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 4, April 1810 • Various
... up and listened. Presently there grated on the sand the keel of a boat, and someone stepped ashore. From the woods there emerged the shadowy forms of three men. Nothing was said, but they got silently into the boat, which might have been Charon's craft for all he could see of it. The rattle of the rowlocks and the plash of oars followed, while a voice cautioned the rowers to make less noise. It was evident that some belated fugitives were eluding the authorities of both countries. Renmark thought, with a smile, that if Yates ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... of songs, is dead; flee, O you under earth! Eutychides is coming with his odes; he left instructions to burn along with him twelve lyres and twenty-five boxes of airs. Now Charon has come upon you; whither may one retreat in future, ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... with Uncle Tom, descended, as we were told that the boat could not carry a larger fare. After looking down for a few seconds, we distinguished a light; and going down the ladder, we stepped into a boat, in which a man, whom we of course denominated Charon, was seated. Instead of oars, he used a long pole to urge on the boat. We noticed the dark appearance of the water as we made our way through the vaulted chambers. We now found ourselves floating on a lake, the ...
— A Yacht Voyage Round England • W.H.G. Kingston
... was, for the most part, a waste of stones through which two larger and several lesser streams were in much worry to find their way to the sea. The two larger were just big enough to be unfordable; so a Charon stationed at each ferried the country folk across. At the smaller, after picking out the likeliest spots, we took off our shoes and socks and waded, and then, upon the other side, sat some time on stones, ill-modeled to that end, to draw our ...
— Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan • Percival Lowell
... fans or bouquets, Even laugh at their miseries whenever they have a chance, And deride their demands as useless extravagance. One case of a bride was brought to my view, Too sad for belief, but alas! 'twas too true, Whose husband refused, as savage as Charon, To permit her to take more than ten trunks to Sharon. The consequence was, that when she got there, At the end of three weeks she had nothing to wear; And when she proposed to finish the season At Newport, the monster refused, ...
— Little Masterpieces of American Wit and Humor - Volume I • Various
... nothing. You know him of old, dear. He's only too happy to rest,— After making three millions in gold, dear. He's played out, it must be confessed,— And I—I'm to wed an old Baron Three weeks from to-day, in great style (He's as homely and gaunt as old Charon, And they say that his past has been vile); And I've promised to cut you hereafter,— Small chance, though, we ever shall meet,— So let's turn our old love into laughter, And face the thing through. Shall we, sweet? Can you give me ...
— When hearts are trumps • Thomas Winthrop Hall
... been traced to the Roman mime, who continued to please the country-people with coarse and debased representations after Rome had fallen, and comedy had perished. Some have even given a classic origin to our pantomime, considering harlequin to be Mercury, the clown Momus, pantaloon Charon, and columbine Psyche. The Roman Sannio and Manducus certainly somewhat corresponded to our fool and clown, the latter especially in his gormandising propensities. But it is scarcely necessary to travel so far back, for the ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... just finished dressing, when a knock was heard at the door, and a Spartan soldier came in and gravely informed Charon that the commander ...
— The Story of the Greeks • H. A. Guerber
... what had been the highest good of their life in this world. They were on the eve, perhaps, of a splendid victory; but, perchance, on the other hand, their foot was already on the plank that led from the shore of life to Charon's bark. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Charon, of Greek mythology, who was supposed to ferry the souls of the dead over the river Acheron to the ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... to wait a pilot, being strangers to the waters," surmised Clowes, wheeling and looking up the river townwards. "Ay, there goes some signal from the 'Charon's' truck," he went on, as the British frigate anchored off the town displayed three flags ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... years of age, it happened that, in a cavern in Derbyshire, I had to cross in a boat (in which two people only could lie down) a stream which flows under a rock, with the rock so close upon the water as to admit the boat only to be pushed on by a ferryman (a sort of Charon) who wades at the stern, stooping all the time. The companion of my transit was M.A.C., with whom I had been long in love, and never told it, though she had discovered it without. I recollect my sensations, but cannot describe them, and it is as well. We were a party, a Mr. W., two Miss W.s, Mr. ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... answered "Yes," or "No;" he was full of the Derby and Sandown; didn't know about the fishing; supposed there were fish; didn't see 'em, nor eat 'em; want a punt? No. So he landed me, desolate and hopeless, on the opposite bank, and I began to understand how the souls felt after Charon had got them over. They could not have been more unhappy than I was on the towing-path, as the ferryboat receded and left me watching the continuous succession of boats passing up and down ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... crowding the banks of the fateful river, and waiting, sick with hope deferred, their turn to cross; and your eyes wander curiously along the swollen, dashing stream to catch sight of the unclean grizzly beard, Charon, the ...
— Our campaign around Gettysburg • John Lockwood
... kingdoms, where is none to fear Shaking of any spear. Even the ghosts are gone From lightless fields of mint and euphrasy: There sings no wind in any willow-tree, And shadowy flute-girls wander listlessly Down to the shore where Charon's empty boat, As shadowed swan doth float, Rides all as listlessly, with none to steer. A shrunken stream is Lethe's water wan Unsought of any man: Grass Ceres sowed by alien hands is mown, And now she seeks Persephone ...
— A Handbook for Latin Clubs • Various
... fortune has smiled on you in the shape of wholly undeserved inheritances which have fallen to you by the frequent deaths of relatives, deaths to which, far more than to your hideous face, you owe your nickname of Charon. ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... powerful was the illusion, that I gave my horse the spur, persuaded that my father's house lay before me. The island, too, I took for the grove that surrounded our house. On reaching its border, I literally dismounted, and shouted out for Charon Tommy. There was a stream running through our plantation, which, for nine months out of the twelve, was only passable by means of a ferry, and the old negro who officiated as ferryman was indebted to me for the above classical cognomen. I believe I called twice, nay, three times, but ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... unfinished works on the left of the town, silenced the guns mounted on them and occasioned a considerable loss of men. Some of the shot and shells from the batteries passed over the town, reached the shipping in the harbor, and set on fire the Charon of forty-four guns and three large transports, which were ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... from common life could hardly be greater if one were suddenly swept away to some far star, blazing in the firmament; or if Charon had rowed him over the mystic river and he had entered the abodes of life on the plane beyond. Even the hotel becomes an enchanted palace whose salons, luxuriously decorated, open by long windows on marble balconies overhanging the Grand Canal. Dainty little tables piled with current reading matter, ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... dark and stormy night when the good Antony arrived at the creek (sagely denominated Haerlem river) which separates the island of Manna-hata from the mainland. The wind was high, the elements were in an uproar, and no Charon could be found to ferry the adventurous sounder of brass across the water. For a short time he vapored like an impatient ghost upon the brink, and then, bethinking himself of the urgency of his errand, took a hearty ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... Mine. And he is only twenty-nine. "I kinder felt I ought to see Europe," he said, "never having been further East than Chicago; so I came over at Christmas time and have been around in this machine ever since." He calls his automobile, an immense 90 h.p. Charon, his "machine!" He said all this so simply, as if it were quite natural to tell a stranger his life story, and he is perfectly direct—only you have to speak to him with the meaning you intend in the words. Metaphor is not the least ...
— Elizabeth Visits America • Elinor Glyn
... folk-song three youths plot to escape from Hades, and a young mother, eager to return to earth to suckle her infant child, persuades them to allow her to accompany them. Charon, however, suddenly appears upon the scene and seizes them just as they are about to flee. The beautiful young woman then appeals to him: "Let go of my hair, Charon, and take me by the hand. If thou wilt but give ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... pauses of the combats the dead were removed by men masked as Mercury, god of hell; red irons, that others, masked as Charon, bore, being first applied as safeguard against swoon or fraud. And when, to the kisses of flutes, the last palm had been awarded, the last death acclaimed, a ballet was given; that of Paris and Venus, ...
— Imperial Purple • Edgar Saltus
... this, and guided by the Sibyl, after a great sacrifice, AEneas passed into a gloomy cave, where he came to the river Styx, round which flitted all the shades who had never received funeral rites, and whom the ferryman, Charon, would not carry over. The Sibyl, however, made him take AEneas across, his boat groaning under the weight of a human body. On the other side stood Cerberus, but the Sibyl threw him a cake of honey and of some opiate, and he lay asleep, while AEneas passed on and found in myrtle ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... the mystic Three Around me ply their merry trade? — And Charon soon may carry me Across the gloomy Stygian glade? — Be up, my soul! nor be afraid Of what some unborn year may show; But mind your human debts are paid, As one ...
— The Children of the Night • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... communing with their spirits, and bringing them presents—a kind of All-souls-day. (Dorman, "Prim. Superst.," p. 35.) The Stygian flood, and Scylla and Charybdis, are found among the legends of the Caribs. (Ibid., p. 37.) Even the boat of Charon reappears in the ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... lies Hood's Isle, or McCain's Beclouded Isle; and upon its south side is a vitreous cove with a wide strand of dark pounded black lava, called Black Beach, or Oberlus's Landing. It might fitly have been styled Charon's. ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... up half the studio with its half-finished, threatening shapes, greater than life-size, and its vast brood of green snakes, each darting forth two sharp, forked tongues. In the foreground, to the left, could be discerned Charon in his boat, a haggard, wild-looking figure,—a powerful and well conceived design, but of the schools, schooly. There was far more of genius and less of artificiality in a canvas of smaller dimensions, also unfinished, that hung in the best lighted corner of the studio. It was an Orestes ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France
... failures throng my mind like ghosts on the other shore of the river whom Charon will not ferry over; but I can single out none of them who is, without positively evil qualities, so absolutely intolerable as Marius.[103] Others have more such qualities; but he has no good ones. His very bravery is a sort of moral and intellectual running amuck because he thinks ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... but the reward shall not be as great as the reward of those who make charitable contribution while yet they have power to keep their money. Charity, in last will and testament, seems sometimes to be only an attempt to bribe Charon, the ferryman, to land the boat in celestial rather than infernal regions. Mean as sin when they disembark from the banks of this world, they hope to be greeted as benefactors when they come up ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... Israelites threw ashes on their heads and garments. Placing food with the corpse or in its mouth, and money in the hand, finds its analogue in the custom of the ancient Romans, who, some time before interment, placed a piece of money in the corpse's mouth, which was thought to be Charon's fare for wafting the departed soul over the Infernal River. Besides this, the corpse's mouth was furnished with a certain cake, composed of flour, honey, &c. This was designed to appease the fury of Cerberus, the infernal doorkeeper, ...
— A Further Contribution to the Study of the Mortuary Customs of the North American Indians • H.C. Yarrow
... also had a dodecad of six male and six female deities, the Consentes and Complices, making a council of gods, whom Jupiter consulted in important cases. Vertumnus was an Etruscan; so, according to Ottfried Mueller, was the Genius. So are the Lares, or household protectors, and Charun, or Charon, a power of the under-world. The minute system of worship was derived by Rome from Etruria. The whole system of omens, especially by lightning, came from ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... would as soon have suspected him of being the Khann of Tartary! Nay, candid readers, are there not some of you who refuse to the last to recognize the maa of genius, till he has paid his penny to Charon, and his passport to immortality has been duly examined by the customhouse officers of Styx! When one half the world drag forth that same next-door neighbour, place him on a pedestal, and have him cried, "Oyez! Oyez! Found a man of genius! Public property! ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... on the patches with, together with a kettle and provisions, are still placed in the graves by the North American Indians. The Laplanders lay beside the corpse flint, steel, and tinder, to supply light for the dark journey. A coin was placed in the mouth of the dead by the Greeks to pay Charon, the ferryman of the Styx, and for a similar purpose in the hand of a deceased Irishman. The Greenlanders bury with a child a dog, for they say a dog will find his way anywhere. In the grave of the Viking warrior were buried his horn and armour in order that ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... placed in the doorway. A small coffin of cedar-wood, painted red and black, stood on a bier, and showed the dead child dressed in a white shroud. He had a garland on his head, woven of the plant of death, the strong-scented Apium or celery. In his mouth he had an obol as Charon's fee. ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... persisted the giant. "Eu! don't complain that you've lacked warning, when you sit to-night in Charon's ferry-boat." ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... encouraging example; but here you are living by yourself, in this odd fashion, unlike any one else. Perhaps you may come in time and live in Sicca. We shall find some way of employing you, and it will be pleasant to have you near me as I get old. However, I mean it to be some time yet before Charon makes a prize of me; not that I believe all that rubbish more than you, Agellius, I ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... the organisation, had been murdered by a girl's hand; but Charon, Manuel, Osselin had gone the usual way, denounced by their colleagues, Rabaut, Custine, Bison, who in their turn were sent to the guillotine by those more powerful, ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... himself with examining these trinkets, he turned to the antiquary and said, "Is that all, sir? Why, where is Charon's flask ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... do now?" she asked, with the smile of curiosity which she always had ready for his plans. Would he pursue the Professor beyond Charon's stream? ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... of goods, however, was the bonds of companies that he incorporated himself and disposed of at cut rates to a clientele all his own. These companies all bore impressive names, such as Tennessee Gas, Heat, and Power Company, the Mercedes-Panard- Charon Motor Vehicle Supply Company, the Nevada Coal, Coke, Iron, and Bi-product Company, the Chicago Banking and Securities Company, the Southern Georgia Land and Fruit Company, and so on. He had an impressive office in a marble-fronted building on Wall Street, doors covered with ...
— The Confessions of Artemas Quibble • Arthur Train
... his solemn command to "Whip poor Will." Those notes repeated—as by some slave ordering his brother to be lashed or one sympathetic soul in perdition made the time-caller to another's misery—floated on the evening light as if the oars of Charon echoed on the Styx, and broken hearts ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... and we began to see their rays reflected from the water; we could hear too the dull splashing of the boat, which we could not see, as old Charon slowly ferried to our shore. More lights were used; they flashed and flickered from the opposite ferry station, and we began to have an indistinct sense of a spangled dome, and of an undulating surface ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... Ascending, make one funeral blaze. As soon as you can hear his knell This god on earth turns devil in hell; And lo! his ministers of state, Transformed to imps, his levee wait, Where, in the scenes of endless woe, They ply their former arts below; And as they sail in Charon's boat, Contrive to bribe the judge's vote; To Cerberus they give a sop, His triple-barking mouth to stop; Or in the ivory gate of dreams Project Excise and South-Sea schemes, Or hire their party pamphleteers To set Elysium by ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... notion of Charon, the ferryman of the lower world, refusing to carry over the river Acheron the souls of such as had not been buried, but leaving them to wander on the shores for a century before he would consent, or rather before he was permitted by the rulers of the Hades to do so, contains a vestige ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... Athens, they also in their turn, starting from Athens, might set Thebes free. When then he prevailed with these arguments, they sent secretly to Thebes to communicate their determination to such of their friends as were left there. They agreed, and Charon, who was the leading man among them, offered his house for their reception, and Phillidas proceeded to act as secretary to the polemarchs, Archias and Philippus. Epameinondas had long been instilling ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... acquaintance, I offered to get his friend admittance in an instant; the offer was delightedly accepted, and I soon procured a small piece of pencilled paper from Lady—, which effectually silenced the Charon, and opened the Stygian via to ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... senses wander, And my spirit seems to roll With the tide of swift Scamander Rushing to a viewless goal. In my ears, like distant washing Of the surf upon the shore, Drones a murmur, faintly splashing, 'Tis the splash of Charon's oar. ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... "That's him, Charon, I'm sure you're right this time. I wasn't sure about the sulky old boy in the tent. I always thought Iphi-something was the one that got his throat—Abram and Isaac sort of tale without any ram and thicket at the end of it—but of ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... life, and appear in all companies as if it were at the head of their regiments, with a sort of deportment that ought to have been dropt behind, in that short passage to Harwich. It puts me in mind of a dialogue in Lucian,[11] where Charon wafting one of their predecessors over Styx, ordered him to strip off his armour and fine clothes, yet still thought him too heavy; "But" (said he) "put off likewise that pride and presumption, those high-swelling words, and that vain-glory;" because they were of no use on the other ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... the utmost of their power, and did such things to them as are too indecent to be related. They also laid themselves down in public places, and celebrated general feastings, with garlands on their heads, and with ointments and libations to Charon, and drinking to one another for joy that the king was expired. Nay, they were not only unmindful of Agrippa, who had extended his liberality to them in abundance, but of his grandfather Herod also, who ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... the "Inferno." In the foreground "Minos standeth horribly and gnasheth," condemning the miserable souls before him each to his different circle, his tail wound twice about his middle. Farther back, the Pistoiese, Vanno Fucci, with blasphemous gesture, yells out his challenge to God; Charon plies his boat; and in the background despairing souls follow a mocking demon who runs before them ...
— Luca Signorelli • Maud Cruttwell
... lip, and said something under his breath, but he took the oars and pulled ashore. Mae turned her eyes downward and felt the color creep up, up into her cheeks. It seemed eternity. The boat was Charon's, and she was drifting to her fate. Norman Mann stood like a statue. The wind moved his hair over his forehead, and once Mae saw him toss the unruly locks back in a familiar way he had. She did not know why, ...
— Mae Madden • Mary Murdoch Mason
... of his passion is suggestively brought before us in an account of his crossing the Styx of the Peak cavern, alone with the lady and the Charon of the boat. In the same passage he informs us that he had never told his love; but that she had discovered—it is obvious that she never returned—it. We have another vivid picture of his irritation when she was waltzing in his presence at Matlock; then an account ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... gunboats which held one division of the expedition were merely old sugar-barges, roofed over with boards, and looking like coffins. They were pleasantly named the "Charon" and the "Cerberus," but Stedman thought that the "Sudden Death" and the "Wilful Murder" would have been titles more appropriate. The chief duty of the troops consisted in lying at anchor at the intersections of wooded streams, waiting for rebels who never came. It was dismal work, and the ...
— Black Rebellion - Five Slave Revolts • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... the brickfield!' they cried. It was many miles off. The road fed by a never-to-be-forgotten drop, to a river broad as the Orange at Norval's Pont, rustling between mud hills. An old Scotchman, in the very likeness of Charon, with big hip boots, controlled a pontoon, which sagged back and forth by current on a wire rope. The reckless motors bumped on to this ferry through a foot of water, and Charon, who never relaxed, bore us statelily across the dark, broad river to the further bank, where ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... Charon, about whose eyes were wheels of flame, endeavored to drive the poet and his guide away as they stood among the weary and naked souls that gathered shivering on the margin of Acheron; but as a blast of wind and a burst of crimson light caused a deep sleep to fall on the poet, he was ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... excesses of youth are drafts payable at maturity. Chatterton dead at eighteen, Keats at twenty-six, Shelley at thirty-three, Byron at thirty-six, Poe at forty, and Burns at thirty-seven, are the rule. When drafts made by the men mentioned became due, there was no balance to their credit and Charon beckoned. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... follow her, in vain he besought Charon to carry him a second time across the waters of Acheron. Seven days he sat on the further bank without food or drink, nourished by his tears and grief. Then at last he knew that the gods below were pitiless; and full of sorrow he ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 2 (of 12) • Various
... as Francken (Leyden, 1896). (2) So: "The rugged Charon fainted, And asked a navy, rather than a boat, To ferry over the sad world that came." (Ben Jonson, "Catiline", Act i., scene 1.) (3) I take "tepido busto" as the dative case; and, as referring to Pompeius, doomed, like Cornelia's former husband, to defeat and death. (4) It ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... brand discharged by him, hit either brow, But most severely on the left did smite; For that ill feature perished by the blow, Which was the thief's sole minister of light. Nor is the stroke content to blind the foe; Unsated, save it register his sprite Among those damned souls, whom Charon keeps, With their companions, plunged in ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... enough," said Cupid. "That's where Charon hangs out; and he and I don't hit it off. No, we'd better go down to where you went asleep, and then trot down by the track to Llanberis. I know ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed
... Plutonis continetur. Hoc transire necesse erat antequam in Orcum venire possent. Cum tamen in hoc flumine nullus pons factus esset, manes transvehebantur a Charonte quodam, qui cum parva scapha ad ripam exspectabat. Charon pro hoc officio mercedem postulabat, neque quemquam, nisi hoc praemium prius dedisset, transvehere volebat. Quam ob causam mos erat apud antiquos nummum in ore mortui ponere eo consilio, ut cum ad Stygem venisset, pretium traiectus solvere posset. Ii autem qui post mortem in terra non sepulti erant ...
— Ritchie's Fabulae Faciles - A First Latin Reader • John Kirtland, ed.
... rowest the boat of the dead in the water of this reedy lake, for Hades, stretch out thy hand, dark Charon, to the son of Kinyras, as he mounts the ladder by the gang-way, and receive him. For his sandals will cause the lad to slip, and he fears to set his feet naked on the sand ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn |
