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It is the words of Frank that are the cause: on them my mind dwells, and painfully repeats them, as if in a delirium: like a singing in the ear, the tolling of death-bells, or the burthen of some tragic ditty, which memory, in its own despite, harps upon, and mutters to itself! 'He is certain that I act from mistaken principles! To the end of time he shall persist in thinking me his by right!
Francois read it: "Poor as a sparrow was I, Yet I was saved like a king; I heard the death-bells ring, Yet I saw a light in the sky: And now to my Father I wing." The Cure nodded his head. "Go on; the next," he said. "Annette John, aged twenty years " "So. The daughter of Chief John. When Queen Anne of England was on the throne she sent Chief John's grandfather a gold cup and a hundred pounds.
Here, during his three months' imprisonment in the pit, he experienced all that bitterness of life which makes his Grand Testament a "De Profundis" without parallel in scapegrace literature. Here, we may imagine with Mr. Stacpoole, his soul grew in the grace of suffering, and the death-bells began to bring a solemn music among the joy-bells of his earlier follies.
It is only two weeks since he told me not to marry Cesarine; he said you would soon be without bread, the monster!" Alexandre might have talked on indefinitely, for Birotteau stood still, petrified. Every phrase was a calamity, like the blows of a bludgeon. He heard the death-bells tolling in his ears, just as his eyes had seen, at the first word, the flames of his fortune.
Duncan, tossing about in his canvas cot, heard the skipper stamping overhead, and in an interval of the wind caught a snatch of song bawled out in a high voice. The song was not reassuring, for the two lines which Duncan caught ran as follows You never can tell when your death-bells are ringing, Your never can know when you're going to die.
Like the ashes which the Seer of the Hebrews cast towards Heaven, it has returned in boils and blains upon the proud and oppressive city. John Milton, sitting blind in Jewen Street, has heard the toll of the death-bells, and the nightlong rumble of the burial-carts, and the terrible summons, "Bring out your dead!" The Angel of the Plague, in yellow mantle, purple-spotted, walks the streets.
and spoke of his "poor, perfect voice," That rings athwart the sea whence no man steers, Like joy-bells crossed with death-bells in our ears.
Now came stories of death-bells at Rouen from the fishermen on the coast; now markets and petty sessions discussed the foul slaughter of the Ambassador and his household; truly related how the Queen had put on mourning, and falsely that she had hung the French Ambassador, La Mothe Feneon.
The roads were literally black with funerals, and as you passed along from parish to parish, the death-bells were pealing forth, in slow but dismal tones, the gloomy triumph which pestilence was achieving over the face of our devoted country a country that each successive day filled with darker desolation and deeper mourning. Nor was this all.
No man who has ever written has so cunningly mingled joy-bells and death-bells in his music. Here is a realism of damned souls damned in their merry sins at which the writer of Ecclesiastes merely seems to hint like a detached philosopher. Villon may never have achieved the last faith of the penitent thief. But he was a penitent thief at least in his disillusion. If he continues to sing Carpe diem when at the age of thirty he is already an old, diseased man, he sings it almost with a sneer of hatred. It is from the lips of a grinning death's-head not of a jovial roysterer, as Henley makes it seem in his slang translation that the Ballade de bonne Doctrine
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