"Epitaph" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... epitaph, it cannot be said that the maxim de mortuis was observed. But it speaks ...
— Old St. Paul's Cathedral • William Benham
... 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 summary of all was that his life had been an episode which began and ended in ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... likewise desire that 300l. may be laid out to purchase a handsome monument, made in London, to the memory of my late aunt, the Lady Carteret, to be erected in the church where she is interred, and a due epitaph, enumerating her exemplary virtues and life, to be inscribed on it in French and English, and recorded to posterity; and this I desire my brother John will see duly performed, as well as my other executors, with expedition; this piece of gratitude to her ...
— Memoirs and Correspondence of Admiral Lord de Saumarez. Vol II • Sir John Ross
... Mr. Hillard's epitaph on my dear kind friend Kenyon. Thank him in my name for it. There are some copies to be reserved of a lithograph now in progress (a portrait of Kenyon) for his American friends. Should it be completed in time, Mr. Sumner will be asked to take them over. I have ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... pompous ass, auctioneer, and mayor, sit at their wine, expecting a third guest. Mr. Sapsea reads his absurd epitaph for his late wife, who is buried in a "Monument," a vault of some sort in the Cathedral churchyard. To them enter Durdles, a man never sober, yet trusted with the key of the crypt, "as contractor for rough repairs." In the crypt "he habitually sleeps ...
— The Puzzle of Dickens's Last Plot • Andrew Lang
... and is one of the many "good gifts" which proceed from Him, who made man and dog "familiar," as the apt specific name of Linnaeus denominates the latter. One of our greatly-gifted poets, in a cynical mood, could write an epitaph on a favourite Newfoundlander, and end it with the dismal lines on his views ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... 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 first Tudors all England's efforts at empire have come to nothing. Knut's empire sinks with him; Norman and Plantagenet follow; but of their imperial policy the dying words of Mary Tudor, "Calais will be found graven on my heart," form the epitaph. It was not merely the loss of Calais that oppressed the dying Queen, but she felt instinctively, obscurely, prophetically that here was an end to the empire which her house had inherited ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... that of the signing of the "Round Robin" at Sir Joshua Reynolds's house in 1776, when a company which included, besides Reynolds himself, Burke, Gibbon, Sheridan, Colman, J. Warton, and Barnard, afterwards Bishop of Killaloe, were anxious to protest to Johnson against his proposed Latin Epitaph on Goldsmith; but not one dared to approach him about it or even to be the first to sign a letter to be sent to him. So a sailors' Round Robin, drawn up by Burke, was adopted, and all the {234} ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... behind. She's passed. Then and not till then. Tram kran kran kran. Good oppor. Coming. Krandlkrankran. I'm sure it's the burgund. Yes. One, two. Let my epitaph ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... Newtown-Butler, was the second wife of Edward, fourth Earl of Meath, who died without issue in 1707. She afterwards married General Richard Gorges (see Journal, April 5, 1713), of Kilbrue, County Meath, and Swift wrote an epitaph on ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... — 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 ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... I am going to tell ye: Poor Wade, my schoolfellow, lies low in the gravel, One month ere fifteen put an end to his travel; Harmless and mild, and remark'd for good nature; The cause of his death was his overgrown stature: His epitaph I wrote, as inserted below; What tribute more friendly could I on him bestow? The bard craves one shilling of his own dear mother, And, if you think proper, add to ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... a 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 employed, Bassanio, Than to live still and write mine epitaph." ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... house, holding the revenue of many 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 when this epitaph was made over the wine, he would, methinks, have laughed heartily." ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... says the epitaph on the flat table-stone, beneath the wind tormented trees of Iron Gray. Concerning these Manes Presbyteriani, "Guthrie's and Giffan's Passions" and the rest, Scott had a library of rare volumes full of prophecies, "remarkable Providences," angelic ministrations, ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... and wisdom which pierces the ear." ("That utterance indeed will have a taste which shall strike the ear.") —Epitaph on Lucan, in Fabricius, Biblioth. ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... is done with the four "Matthew" poems. A small group of four poems follows appropriately, viz. 'To a Sexton', 'The Danish Boy', 'Lucy Gray', and 'Ruth'; while the Fenwick note almost necessitates our placing the 'Poet's Epitaph' immediately after the Lines 'Written in Germany'; and, with Wordsworth's life at Goslar, we naturally associate five things—the cold winter, 'The Prelude', the "Lucy" and the "Matthew" poems, and the ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... finished his life by violence, or whether mere distaste of life and the loathing he had for mankind brought Timon to his conclusion, was not clear, yet all men admired the fitness of his epitaph, and the consistency of his end; dying, as he had lived, a hater of mankind: and some there were who fancied a conceit in the very choice which he had made of the sea-beach for his place of burial, where the vast sea might weep for ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb
... epitaph orders fell off: and two or three months later, when autumn came, Jude perceived that he would have to return to journey-work again, a course all the more unfortunate just now, in that he had not as yet cleared off ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... and he spoke to them of their duty to the nation as one might imagine some fearless prophet speaking to a council of degenerate princes. When the aristocracy failed Ireland he bade them farewell, and wrote the epitaph of their class in words whose scorn we almost forget because of their sounding melody and beauty. He turned his mind to the problems of democracy and more especially of those workers who are trapped in the city, and he pointed out for them the way of escape and how they might ...
— The Coming of Cuculain • Standish O'Grady
... family by venturing to entertain the hope that he might win the heart and hand of the Princess Anne. Disappointed in this attempt, he had exerted himself to regain by meanness the favour which he had forfeited by presumption. His epitaph, written by himself, still informs all who pass through Westminster Abbey that he lived and died a sceptic in religion; and we learn from the memoirs which he wrote that one of his favourite subjects of mirth was the Romish superstition. Yet he began, as soon as James was on the throne, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Christendom. They were, and but for the defensive energy of the Christianized Teuton would have been, to the Saxon what the Saxon had been to the Celt, whose sole monuments in England now are the names of hills and rivers, the usual epitaph of exterminated races. Like the Saxons the Northmen came by sea, untouched by those Roman influences, political and religious, by which most of the barbarians had been more or less transmuted before their actual irruption into the Empire. If they treated all the rest of ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... contravention of the truth of this epitaph, to say that the Major had been always a most miserable manager of his private business affairs; it is even doubtful if the kindest fathers and best husbands are not apt to be. Certain it is, that, when Benjamin came to examine, in connection with a village attorney, (for the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... right hand, on Brister's Hill, lived Brister Freeman, "a handy Negro," slave of Squire Cummings once—there where grow still the apple trees which Brister planted and tended; large old trees now, but their fruit still wild and ciderish to my taste. Not long since I read his epitaph in the old Lincoln burying-ground, a little on one side, near the unmarked graves of some British grenadiers who fell in the retreat from Concord—where he is styled "Sippio Brister"—Scipio Africanus he had some title to be called—"a man of color," as if he were discolored. It also told me, ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... that he excelled all in book-learning. In time, he became one of the most famous scholars in Welsh history. When he died, he asked to be buried, not in the monk's cemetery, but with his father and mother, in the churchyard. He made request that no name, record, or epitaph, be chiseled on his ...
— Welsh Fairy Tales • William Elliot Griffis
... if he were inclined to drive a thriftier bargain by 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 ...
— Chippings With A Chisel (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... 1729"; another states that the body below "is deposited here until the last trump"; and one, which must be the veritable original of the "affliction sore" rhyme, ends: "till death did seize and God did please to ease me of my pain." Still another bears this epitaph, verbatim ...
— Over the Border: Acadia • Eliza Chase
... peculiar sanctuary, of his mother, who, still in real widowhood, provided the deceased Marius the elder with that secondary sort of life which we can give to the dead, in our intensely realised memory of them—the "subjective immortality," to use a modern phrase, for which many a Roman epitaph cries out plaintively to widow or sister or daughter, still in the land of the living. Certainly, if any [21] such considerations regarding them do reach the shadowy people, he enjoyed that secondary existence, that warm place still left, in thought at least, beside the living, the desire for ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... positively told, and when, after twenty years of wild-beast life, his deliverance is at hand, perishing by a combination of foul play on the part of his foes and neglect on that of his slave. At least once, too, in that parting of Asdis with Grettir and Illugi, which ranks not far below the matchless epitaph of Sir Ector on Lancelot, there is not only suggestion, but expression of ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... matter is summed up in a sentence which I heard not long since about a recently deceased friend of the speaker's, and the like of which you have no doubt often heard and perhaps said, 'He is sure to be saved because he has lived so straight.' And at the foundation of that confident epitaph lay a tragical, profound misapprehension of ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... be given as an example of a punning epitaph. It is found in St. Anne's churchyard, in the Isle of Man, and is said to have been written by Sir Wadsworth Busk, who was for many years ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 184, May 7, 1853 • Various
... St. Louis cemetery, with its epitaph of barely two words—'Adieu, Chapdelaine.' Who supplied that? ...
— The Flower of the Chapdelaines • George W. Cable
... almost abstract, nay, almost cabalistic thing, the science of bodily proportions. It was plain that the mystery of antique beauty—the ancient symmetry, symmetria prisca as a humanist designs it in his epitaph for Leonardo da Vinci—was but a matter of numbers. For a man's length, if he stand with outstretched arms, is the same from finger tip to finger tip as his length when erect from head to feet, namely, ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... epitaph, you mean that she called me a liar, I did, brother, and she was not much wrong, for I certainly do not always stick exactly to truth; you, however, have not ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... his side. "Is this going to be my epitaph?" he groaned; for he was not a man particular in his diet, or exacting in choice of roes, or panting for freshness in an egg. He wondered what his landlady could mean by sending up to him, that morning of all others, to tempt his appetite after her fashion. "I thought ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... drop of spray cast by the infinite I hung an instant there, and threw my ray To make the rainbow. A microcosm I Reflecting all. Then back I fell again, And though I perished not, I was no more."— The Pantheist's Epitaph. ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... and his 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)
... the Judge. "I think I could show you a tombstone which you would find very good reading. An epitaph upon my late better-half. If you are a married man you can ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 25, September 17, 1870 • Various
... take notice what thou reads, At Edinburgh lie our bodies, here our heads; Our right hands stood at Lanark, these we want, Because with them we signed the Covenant.' Epitaph on a ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... derived the sources of his existence in his old age from the filial exertions of an excellent son, who was an actor of some genius. I wish, however, that every man of letters could apply to himself the epitaph of ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... Sisters Written at Midnight On a Tear To a Voice that had been lost From a Greek Epigram. To the Torso To——- Written in a Sick Chamber To a Friend on his Marriage The Alps at Day-break Imitation of an Italian Sonnet On——asleep. To the youngest Daughter of Lady ** Epitaph on a Robin Red-breast A Wish An Italian Song To the Gnat An Inscription in the Crimea Captivity A Character Written in the Highlands of Scotland A Farewell To the Butterfly Written in Westminster Abbey The ...
— Poems • Samuel Rogers
... of state, neither the name nor the epitaph can yet be given ; nor can it now be said precisely when. The verses are allowed to be very beautiful. Those on the anniversary of the wedding were received (this day) in the presence of two poets and a poetess, who said handsome things ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... Sometimes an old epitaph will be found of such impressive though simple language that it clings long in the memory. Such is this verse of gentle quaintness over the grave of a tender Puritan blossom, the child of ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... are laying life's sword aside, Spent and dishonored and sad, Our epitaph this, when once we have died: "The weak lie ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... how long the ancient and established custom of keeping fools has been disused in England. Swift writes an epitaph on the Earl ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... be left behind, alas! One block, pure green as a pistachio-nut, There's plenty jasper somewhere in the world— And have I not Saint Praxed's ear to pray Horses for ye, and brown Greek manuscripts, And mistresses with great smooth marbly limbs? —That's if ye carve my epitaph aright, Choice Latin, picked phrase, Tully's every word, No gaudy ware like Gandolf's second line— Tully, my masters? Ulpian serves his need! And then how I shall lie through centuries, And hear the blessed mutter of the mass, And see God made and eaten all day long, And feel the steady ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... He needs no long and fulsome epitaph carved in marble to tell his worth. Did his memory depend upon that alone, the marble would crumble into dust, mingle with his, and his name pass away with the stone that man vainly thought would preserve it. No; his monument is a world made free, and his memory as lasting as ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... means—from simple habit! And when he does admit the achievement of the desired end, and abandons the means, he has so badly prepared himself to relish the desired end that the mere change kills him! His epitaph ought to read: "Here lies the plain man of common sense, whose life was all means and ...
— The Plain Man and His Wife • Arnold Bennett
... against the tree, and sighed as she recalled her own bereavements, and her Christian heart was busy in suggesting some means of consolation for the stricken parents. Mr. Colbert was stooping by a distant tomb reading its epitaph to little Jennie, who listened with the deepest interest. There was no sound to mar the stillness of that peaceful retreat, the whispering winds went, dirge-like, through the waving grass, and the leaves rustled softly above ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... 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
... good for the Christian soul to hustle the Aryan brown, For the Christian riles and the heathen smiles And it weareth the Christian down. And the end of the fight is a tombstone white With the name of the dear deceased; And the epitaph drear—'A fool lies here Who ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... that an inscription of the nature of an epitaph should be cut on the great rock at the foot of ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens
... it won't do any good to discuss it. I am to be hanged; if it doesn't happen to-day, it will happen to-morrow. I only beg, before I die, that you will pay my respects to Madam Burgomaster and the young lady, and instruct them to give me the following epitaph: ...
— Comedies • Ludvig Holberg
... saw this epitaph, Angus's hair really stood on end with fright, and on the day he found that the boat was gone, leaving no trace, he became absolutely terror-stricken. He sought for it behind every rock and in every ...
— The Scotch Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... took to himself a wife, one Lelia Pavese, by whom he had no children. After a simple and blameless life, during which he produced a vast quantity of verse—epic, tragic, pastoral, lyrical and satirical—he died in 1637, at the patriarchal age of eighty-five. An epitaph was written for him in elegant Latin by Urban VIII.; but on his tombstone are graven two quaint Italian hexameters of his own, in which the gazer is warned from the poet's own example not to ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... in the Vacation;" and to this various others might be added, such as his emptying his snuff-box into the teapot when he was preparing breakfast for a hungry friend, &c. But it is scarcely worth while to chronicle minutely the harmless foibles of this inoffensive old man. If I had to write his epitaph, I should say that he was neither much respected nor at all hated; too good to dislike, too inactive to excite great affection; and that he was as simple as the daisy, which we think we admire, and ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... paraphrasing epitaph the Correspondent wrote for him in the pretty Bay of Vivi, and when he read it, we all drank in silence to the memory of ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... down to us the original epitaph, as it was cut on the monument of Sir Richard, by order of his executors; and, exclusive of its connection with the subject of these pages, it may be subjoined as a curious specimen of the poetry of an age which was comparatively with the present so entirely involved in the ...
— The History of Sir Richard Whittington • T. H.
... 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 that name had come to mean ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... which were perfectly familiar to him. After having directed the rays of the dark lantern upon the inscriptions of several tombs, we came at last upon a great slab, half concealed by huge weeds and devoured by mosses and parasitic plants, whereupon we deciphered the opening lines of the epitaph: ...
— Clarimonde • Theophile Gautier
... that it was not only a broken heart, but a broken fiddle you left behind you, when you departed so suddenly last time you were here? It's astonishing how soon hearts get mended, and fiddles too, it appears. Goody has shuddered at the sight of that instrument ever since. I thought the epitaph on her tombstone would be, "She ...
— Dwell Deep - or Hilda Thorn's Life Story • Amy Le Feuvre
... The epitaph of John Kline is read without a doubt ever springing up in the mind of any one who knew him. We saw him, not as Elisha saw Elijah in sight, ascend to heaven; but with the eye of faith we saw him clothed in a celestial body; and with the ear of ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... slander" cried he, with a laugh, "Thus should the poets frame my epitaph, Above whose mouldering dust it will be said, 'Blessed be Allah that the hound is dead!'" Out rang a rhythmic revel as he spake From joyous bulbuls in the poplar brake, Hailing the night's first blossom in the sky. And now, with failing foot, he drew anigh The ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... Romans, whose dates she could never recall. She hoped she should never be anything so dull as an historical personage! And besides, greatness was for the men—it was enough for a princess to be virtuous. And she looked as edifying as her own epitaph. ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... after the British victory at Queenston, and the anniversary of Brock's splendid death, the remains of the two heroes were re-interred and deposited in two massive stone sarcophagi in the vault of the new monument. On the two oval silver plates on Brock's coffin was inscribed the following epitaph: ...
— The Story of Isaac Brock - Hero, Defender and Saviour of Upper Canada, 1812 • Walter R. Nursey
... Dr. James Johnson, writing his "Economy of Health" ten years after, declared that these German exercises had proved "better adapted to the Spartan youth than to the pallid sons of pampered cits, the dandies of the desk, and the squalid tenants of attics and factories," and also adds the epitaph, "This ultra-gymnastic enthusiast did much injury to an important branch of hygiene by carrying it to excess, and consequently by causing its desuetude." And Dr. Jarvis, in his "Practical Physiology," declares the unquestionable ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... '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
... was the highly esteemed Friend of Dr. Parr, Mr. Grove of Lord Sheffield. A beautiful epitaph in verse, written by Mr. Grove, on his beloved Wife, is one of the chief ornaments ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... 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 hive, ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... Springfield, Illinois, where they rest at the foot of a small hill in Oakwood Cemetery. A simple monument, with the name—"Lincoln"—upon it, is the only epitaph of him, who next to Washington was the greatest man ...
— Reading Made Easy for Foreigners - Third Reader • John L. Huelshof
... to be the most fortunate person I ever met, endowed as he was with every advantage of mind, body and estate. Yet in the end this did not prove to be the case. Well, while he lived he was a good friend and a good fellow and none can hope for a better epitaph in a world where all things ...
— The Ancient Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... arbor, and under it a table still stands not entirely destroyed by time. At the aspect of this garden that is no more, the negative joys of the peaceful life of the provinces may be divined as we divine the history of a worthy tradesman when we read the epitaph on his tomb. To complete the mournful and tender impressions which seize the soul, on one of the walls there is a sundial graced with this homely ...
— La Grande Breteche • Honore de Balzac
... where the last of the faithful band died was erected a monument with a marble lion in honor of Leonidas, while on it was carved the following epitaph, written by ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... auxiliary devices, he at once erected above the bones of his benefactor a costly monument, overtopping every rough headboard in the cemetery, and on this he judiciously caused to be inscribed an epitaph of his own composing, eulogizing the honesty, public spirit and cognate virtues of him who slept beneath, "a victim to the unjust ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... parched Argos whence kings...', and 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 ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... vain 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 ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine
... at St. Denis, "was saluted by the curses of a noisy crowd sitting in the wine-rooms, celebrating his death by drinking more than their fill as a compensation for having suffered too much from hunger during his lifetime. Such was the coarse but true epitaph which popular opinion accorded to ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... employed in backbiting him day and night. His own character was by no means free from the same imputations; and the Ferrarese poet, Tebaldeo, the friend of Raphael and Castiglione, composed a witty epitaph, in which he warns passers-by to avoid the last resting-place of this singer, who had made so many enemies in life, lest he turn in his grave and bite them. Bellincioni's bitterest foe was a certain Bergamasque poet, Guidotto Prestinari, ...
— Beatrice d'Este, Duchess of Milan, 1475-1497 • Julia Mary Cartwright
... itself and in the works of immortal beauty which in its short course were produced—has ever been lived by anyone of those to whom the crown of inspired singers and an enduring monument in the temple of art has been given. "Look around," was the epitaph on a great architect. "Listen," is the most fitting tribute to the wonderful ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... Were the palaces and priceless 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 hero without giving ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... that dog. His life had been long; he had won all hearts; he had done many wonderful things, besides fulfilling his duties as a faithful constable of the place in which his lot was cast; and now, loving and beloved, he had died. Such were the data from which his epitaph had to be evolved. Man could desire no better. To have been loved—that, all said and done, is the great thing, for it comprises all others. Another French writer reckoned it the highest eulogy bestowable, and it seems ...
— 'Murphy' - A Message to Dog Lovers • Major Gambier-Parry
... Ravenna; whereon each one for himself, to show his own power and to bear witness to the goodwill he had to the dead poet, and to win the grace and love of the signore, who was known to have it at heart, made verses which, if placed as epitaph on the tomb that was to be, should with due praises teach posterity who lay therein. And these verses they sent to the glorious signore, who, by great guilt of Fortune, in short space of time lost his estate, ...
— Ravenna, A Study • Edward Hutton
... she knew poverty at its lowest ebb and despair at its bitterest; and yet there was in her a touch of fineness that never yielded, a gallant spirit that faced and fought things through. One thinks, somehow, of the mother of Gounod.... Her son has not forgotten her. His book is her epitaph. He enters into her presence with love and with reverence and with something not far ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... year 1583, aged about sixty-five, and is buried in St. Mildred's church, in the Poultry. His epitaph is preserved in Stowe's Survey of London; and (as Mr. Mavor observes) it is perfectly in character with the man and his writings; and if conjecture may be ...
— On the Portraits of English Authors on Gardening, • Samuel Felton
... without fear of the future, doing good, pursuing the beautiful, protecting the arts, with a tender heart and open hand, the countess passed through life, calm, happy, beloved, and admired." She left an epitaph on herself, thus ...
— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang
... Dean of Westminster went so far, we know, in his scruples as to exclude an epitaph from the Abbey, because it contained the name of Milton:—"a name, in his opinion," says Johnson, "too detestable to be read on the wall of a building ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... Oehlenschlager are the three dramatic luminaries of Denmark. The best production of Samsoe is the play of Dyveke, produced a few days after his death. Such was the enthusiasm it excited, that the following epitaph was proposed to be inscribed on his tomb, in ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 333 - Vol. 12, Issue 333, September 27, 1828 • Various
... the afternoon in front of his tent, surrounded by the guard, who did not witness his affliction without tears. From this time he would listen to no reports or suggestions.—"Everything to-morrow," was his invariable answer. He stood by Duroc while he died; drew up with his own hand an epitaph to be placed over his remains by the pastor of the place, who received 200 napoleons to defray the expense of a fitting monument; and issued also a decree in favour of his departed friend's children. Thus closed the 22nd. The allies being strongly posted during most of the day, ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... dead it doesn't matter if you were not successful in a business way. No one has yet had the courage to memorialize his wealth on his tombstone. A dollar mark would not look well there. The best epitaph proclaims simple old Scripture virtues, like honesty and diligence and patience. And you will observe that when the meanest skinflint or the most disgracefully avaricious millionaire dies, his tombstone never refers to his most notorious characteristics. ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... the nymphs Hesperian gave the limbs From the fork'd lightening flaming. On his tomb This epitaph they grav'd: "Here Phaeton "Intombed rests; the charioteer so bold, "Of Phoebus' car, which though he fail'd to rule, "He perish'd greatly daring." Griev'd his sire, Veil'd his sad face; and, were tradition true, ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... Gallery of the Brera is preserved a fair white marble tomb, carved by that excellent Lombard sculptor, Agostino Busti. The epitaph runs as follows:— ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... sonnets, and also in the magnificent lines on Peel Castle—"I was thy neighbour once, thou rugged pile." He also had a relative living there—Miss Hutchinson, his sister-in-law. A brother of this lady, a mariner, lies buried in Braddan churchyard, and his tombstone bears an epitaph which Wordsworth indited. The poet spent a summer at Peel, pitching his tent above what is now called Peveril Terrace. One of my friends tried long ago to pump up from this sapless soil some memory of Wordsworth, but no one could remember anything about him. Shelley ...
— The Little Manx Nation - 1891 • Hall Caine
... bravado might be laughed at, but it left me in the dark relative to your fate; and if you are to be flattered by the feelings of men who cannot get at you but by cannon-shot, you may congratulate yourself on having had as many fine things said of you as would make an epitaph for a duke—and, I believe, with a sincerity at least equal to the best of them. I write all this laughingly now, but suspense makes heaviness of heart, and you cost me some uneasy hours, of course. I send you none of our news; ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... place on April 17, 1782, and the epitaph on his grave in the cemetery at Globe Road, Mile End, "bears witness to his excellencies and orthodoxy": "Here is interred ... the aged and honourable man, a great personage who came from the East, an accomplished sage, an adept in Cabbalah.... His name was ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... the sad epitaph of Spanish thought which preferred to perish as it could not speak the truth. In order to live quietly and support themselves in those days of ignorance, many poets sought the shadow of the Church and wore its vestments. Lope de Vega, Calderon, Tirsode ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... been noticed that the well-known epitaph, sometimes assigned to Robin of Doncaster, sometimes to Edward Courtenay, third Earl of Devon, and I believe to others besides: "What I gave, that I have," &c., has been anticipated by, if not imitated from, Martial, book ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 193, July 9, 1853 • Various
... themselves for Beth's sake. Laurie dug a grave under the ferns in the grove, little Pip was laid in, with many tears by his tender-hearted mistress, and covered with moss, while a wreath of violets and chickweed was hung on the stone which bore his epitaph, composed by Jo while ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... bones of Venerable Bede." We know the old story how the pupil who was writing his dear master's epitaph could not find the right word, as it has happened to many a one for the time being; and how he slept and awoke to find the word supplied ...
— Our Catholic Heritage in English Literature of Pre-Conquest Days • Emily Hickey
... The Cotter's Saturday Night of Burns, The Twa Dogs of the same Author; or of these in conjunction with the appearances of Nature, as most of the pieces of Theocritus, the Allegro and Penseroso of Milton, Beattie's Minstrel, Goldsmith's Deserted Village. The Epitaph, the Inscription, the Sonnet, most of the epistles of poets writing in their own persons, and all loco-descriptive poetry, ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... Purbeck: "Sir Robert Howard died April 22, 1653, and was buried at Clunn in Shropshire, leaving issue by Catherine Nevill, his Wife, 3 sons, who, I presume, he married after the Lady Purbeck's death which happened 8 years before his own. The Epitaph in my Book in Folio of Lichfield, lent me by Mr. Mitton. Sir Robert was 5th Son to Thomas, Earl of Suffolk, ...
— The Curious Case of Lady Purbeck - A Scandal of the XVIIth Century • Thomas Longueville
... seated and stretching out her right arm, which a woman friend was touching. In the background was another, contemplative, woman and a man wearing a chaplet of leaves, his hand lifted to his face. For epitaph there was one word cut ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... Had all dedications been occasioned by such feelings as gave birth to this, these graceful and fitting tributes of affection and gratitude would never have dwindled away to the cold and scanty lines, like an epitaph on a charity tomb-stone, in which they appear, when they appear at all, in ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... consideration of their Lordship's House. Some persons of quality, of less truculent aspect than McCallum More, thought to enlist the poet's services, and the Duchess of Buckingham got him to write an epitaph on her deceased son—a feeble lad—to which transaction the poet is thought to allude in ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... Wednesday, "was made on the hearers" (i.e., Prince BISMARCK'S audience at Kissengen) "when, in reply to a remark by one of the guests" (remark and name of immortal guest not reported), "the Ex-Chancellor said, 'My only ambition now is a good epitaph. I hope and beg for this.'" May it be long ere necessity imperatively demands his epitaph, good or indifferent, say all of us. But in the meantime, and to come to business, how much will the Ex-Chancellor give? Why not advertise, "A prize of ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99, September 6, 1890 • Various
... a board in No. 1 double dormitory there still repose that identical lemonade bottle and the roll-book with its blue cover, now sadly faded and its leaves turned up with age, to serve as Gordon's epitaph, when all his other deeds have perished ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... of "the Club" the exception dwindled to two stanzas (Boswell's Life, ii. 300).] are slaughtered in detail; [Footnote: Johnson's Works, xi. 372-378. Johnson is peculiarly sarcastic on the Bard and the Progress of Poetry.] the man himself is given dog's burial with the compendious epitaph: "A dull fellow, sir; dull in company, dull in his closet, dull everywhere". [Footnote: Boswell's Life, ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... the hardness which the torture leaves at last? And if, as in Catherine's case (a case, how common!), the truth come too late—if the tomb is closed—if the heart you have wrung can be wrung no more—why the truth is as valueless as the epitaph on a forgotten Name! Some such conviction of the hollowness of his own words, when he spoke of service to the dead, smote upon Philip's heart, and stopped the flow of ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... and the kings quarreled; the priests began to dispute, and the millions began to get their rights. In 1441 printing was discovered. At that time the past was a vast cemetery, without an epitaph. The ideas of men had mostly perished in the brains that had produced them. Printing gives an opening for thought; it preserves ideas; it made it possible for a man to bequeath to the world the ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... The Regent Morton's famous epitaph spoken by Knox's grave, is an imperfect echo of what the Reformer ten days before, in bidding farewell to the Kirk (Session) of Edinburgh, had said of his own past career:—'In respect that he bore God's message, to whom ...
— John Knox • A. Taylor Innes
... are a ghastly struggle of mean pride and miserable terror: the one mustering the statues of the Virtues about the tomb, disguising the sarcophagus with delicate sculpture, polishing the false periods of the elaborate epitaph, and filling with strained animation the features of the portrait statue; and the other summoning underneath, out of the niche or from behind the curtain, the frowning skull, or scythed skeleton, or some other more terrible image of ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... of their patients, among them two Presidents of Harvard College, Charles Chauncy and Leonard Hoar,—and Thomas Thacher, first minister of the "Old South," author of the earliest medical treatises printed in the country,[A Brief Rule to Guide the Common People in Small pox and Measles. 1674.] whose epitaph in Latin and Greek, said to have been written by Eleazer, an "Indian Youth" and a member of the Senior Class of Harvard College, may be found in the "Magnalia." I miss this noble savage's name in our triennial catalogue; and as there is many a ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... beautiful chapel at the corner of the castle court, and the romantic story of his last moments at Fontainebleau becomes the sad reality of a tombstone covering ashes mostly unknown and certainly indistinguishable; "among which" as the epitaph painfully records, "are supposed to be the remains of Leonardo da Vinci." He had been brought to Paris a weak old man, by Francis, in pursuance of a certain fixt artistic policy, to which it may be noticed this forgotten and uncertain grave ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... in Fressingfield, where he did not attend the parish church, nor would allow any but non-juring clergy to perform Divine service in his presence. Dr. Sancroft (who was a book-lover, and had designed a binding of his own) died on November 24, 1693, and the epitaph, of his own composition, on his tombstone may still be read with profit by time-servers of all degrees and denominations, cleric and lay, in Parliament and out of it. All the deprived Bishops, so Mr. Lathbury assures us, were ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... had, was likely to live." He published these bold words in 1641, when he had given no public proof at all of their truth. Such a man was not likely to be unwilling that his verses should be seen: and in particular such poems as the epitaph on Lady Winchester, whose death aroused much public interest, or the Ode on the Nativity, plainly challenging the greatest of his predecessors by its high theme and noble art, are almost sure to have got about and won him ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... soon, at the early age of seven, having previously had for my home tutor a well-remembered day-teacher in "little Latin and less Greek" of the name of Swallow, whom I thought a wit and a poet in those days because one morning he produced as an epitaph on himself ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... At last, after a time the month Quintiles, in which Julius Caesar was born, was called Julius, whence we have July. Thus this name, placed in the calendar, is become the imperishable record of a great man; it is an immortal epitaph on Time's highway, engraved by the ...
— An "Attic" Philosopher, Complete • Emile Souvestre
... giving you a transitory uneasiness. A man who never yet raised his voice to assert a lie, will not hazard his character with posterity, by asserting a falsehood on a subject so important to his country, and on an occasion like this. Yes, my lords, a man who does not wish to have his epitaph written until his country is liberated, will not leave a weapon in the power of envy, or a pretence to impeach the probity which he means to preserve, even in the grave, to ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various
... laid up for many years.' Well and good, what then? 'I will say to my soul, Take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry.' Yes, what then? 'This night thy soul shall be required of thee.' He never thought of that! And so his epitaph was 'Thou fool!' ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... Earth The Knight's Epitaph The Hunter of the Prairies Seventy-Six The Living Lost Catterskill Falls The Strange Lady Life deg. "Earth's children cleave to earth" The Hunter's Vision The Green Mountain Boys deg. A Presentiment The Child's Funeral deg. The Battlefield The Future Life The Death of Schiller deg. The ...
— Poems • William Cullen Bryant
... good Inclinations, I would have her consider what a pretty Figure she would make among Posterity, were the History of her whole Life published like these five Days of it. I shall conclude my Paper with an Epitaph written by an uncertain Author [5] on Sir Philip Sidney's Sister, a Lady who seems to have been of a Temper very much different from that of Clarinda. The last Thought of it is so very noble, that I dare say my Reader will pardon me ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... on my stone the words: "His life was gentle, and the elements so mixed in him That nature might stand up and say to all the world, This was a man." Those who knew me smile As they read this empty rhetoric. My epitaph should have been: "Life was not gentle to him, And the elements so mixed in him That he made warfare on life In the which he was slain." While I lived I could not cope with slanderous tongues, Now that I am dead I must submit to an ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... church was inexplicable, unless it enabled him to concentrate his thoughts on the business of the day. If any affair of particular moment, or demanding peculiar acuteness, was weighing on his mind, he invariably went in, to wander with mouse-like attention from epitaph to epitaph. Then retiring in the same noiseless way, he would hold steadily on up Cheapside, a thought more of dogged purpose in his gait, as though he had seen something which he had made up his mind ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Charge d'Affaires. For him I have been almost condemned to go houseless, and naked; and now the very most sacred feelings of my heart are subject to his influence. I walked up and down in an agony. Another such disappointment, and my brain will turn, thought I, and they may write my epitaph—"Died of love and a ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... 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 solely that they might be ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... neither is weary, and is as little a respecter of parchments as of persons! They know there is a people, as well as politicians, a posterity not yet assembled, and they would not like to have certain words writ on their tomb-stone. 'Traitor to the rights of mankind,' is no pleasant epitaph. They, too, remember there is a day after to-day; aye, a forever; and 'Inasmuch as ye have not done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have not done it unto me,' is a sentence they would not like to hear ...
— The Trial of Theodore Parker • Theodore Parker
... to the lake, and his tomb in a church among the vineyards which overlook the little town of Vevay. On the house was formerly legible an inscription purporting that to him to whom God is a father every land is a fatherland; [537] and the epitaph on the tomb still attests the feelings with which the stern old Puritan to the last regarded the people of Ireland ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... every week; but when called upon to confront his first five days of banishment he felt sure that he would not survive them. A leaden cistern belonging to the school had in, or outside it, the raised image of a face. He chose the cistern for his place of burial, and converted the face into his epitaph by passing his hand over and over it to a continuous chant of: 'In memory of unhappy Browning'—the ceremony being renewed in his spare moments, till the acute stage of the feeling had ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... a minor poet, unconsciously paraphrasing Garrick's epitaph, wrote: "For loss of him the laughter of the children will grow less." I quote the line from memory, perhaps incorrectly; if so, its author will, I feel sure, forgive the unintentional mangling. Did the laughter of the children ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... that they purposed to execute their design upon him that very night. In this distress, the poor man (as if inspired by his good Genius) girds about him his heretofore victorious, now his mourning cloak, with a brave resolution to compose and sing his own epitaph, as the swans when they apprehend the approaches of death are reported to do. Being thus habited, he told the seamen he was minded to commit the protection of himself and his fellow-passengers to ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... live your epitaph to make, Or you survive when I in earth am rotten; From hence your memory death cannot take, Although in me each part will be forgotten. Your name from hence immortal life shall have, Though I, once gone, to all ...
— Shakespeare's Sonnets • William Shakespeare
... in the porch had turned red, and the maples in the door-yard yellow, the flower-pots were removed to the warm cellar, and one winter evening Sammy Ray wrote Greeny's epitaph:— ...
— Miss Elliot's Girls • Mrs Mary Spring Corning
... painter in his day and painted the whole wall (on the left hand as one enters) of the Pieve of San Gimignano with stories of the Old Testament; in which work, which in truth was not very good, there may still be read in the middle this epitaph: ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol 2, Berna to Michelozzo Michelozzi • Giorgio Vasari
... grace enabled her to cut a brilliant figure. She was the intimate friend of the poet La Faye, whom she advised in his compositions, and whose life she made delightful. Her fondness for the arts and pleasure procured for her the appellation of 'Dame de Volupte', and she wrote this epitaph upon herself: ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... the roadside trees. Sitting in his saddle he watched the midnight wanderer, whose eccentric movements continued to cause him surprise. He saw the latter walk on to the little woodland cemetery, take stand by the side of a grave, bending forward as if to read the epitaph on its painted slab. Soon after kneeling down as in prayer, then throwing himself prostrate along the earth. Woodley well knew the grave thus venerated. For he had himself assisted in digging and smoothing down the turf ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... that of Lord Dunglass. But it was bought about the middle of the seventeenth century by the Halls, who own it still, and in whose family there has been a baronetcy since 1687. The laird at the time with which we are now dealing was Sir James Hall, whose epitaph in the old church at Dunglass bears that he was "a philosopher eminent among the distinguished men of an enquiring age." He was President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh for many years, and was an acknowledged ...
— Principal Cairns • John Cairns
... he wrote his own epitaph. His usefulness to his country during the Revolutionary period will warrant us in giving it place in ...
— Tea Leaves • Various
... implores you to leave her to her melancholy and her mournful memories. She talks to you about her last wishes, follows her own funeral, is buried, plants over her tomb the green canopy of a weeping willow, and at the very time when you would like to raise a joyful epithalamium, you find an epitaph to greet you all in black. Your wish to console her melts away in the ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part III. • Honore de Balzac
... my son, cover him. Now, Mr. Texas Pete," he says, cold as steel, "there is the grave. We will place the hoss in it. Then I intend to shoot you and put you in with the hoss, and write you an epitaph that will be a comfort to such travellers of the Trail as are honest, and a warnin' to such as are not. I'd as soon kill you now as an hour from now, so you may make a break for it if you ...
— Arizona Nights • Stewart Edward White
... 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 left ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... bishops to Rome in the 2nd and 3rd centuries see Caspari, l.c. Above all we may call attention to the journey of Abercius of Hierapolis (not Hierapolis on the Meander) about 200 or even earlier. Its historical reality is not to be questioned. See his words in the epitaph composed by himself (V. 7 f.): [Greek: eis Rhomen hos epempsen emen basilean athresai kai basilissan idein chrusostolon chrusopedilon]. However, Ficker raises very serious objections to the ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack |
