United States or Israel ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
From their solemn and hallowed depths, the mouldering relics of the departed had been raised, by torch light, and heaped in frightful piles of unfinished decay against the walls, for the purpose of converting the lead, which contained these wretched fragments of mortality, into balls for the musketry of the revolution.
Jenny could never come to him in any fearful images of corruption, nor could he picture her in any mouldering shape of catacomb or charnel. She had come like a sylph out of the air, and she had returned again whence she came.
He was particularly fond of this part of Rome, though he could hardly have expressed the charm he found in it. As you pass away from the dusky, swarming purlieus of the Ghetto, you emerge into a region of empty, soundless, grass-grown lanes and alleys, where the shabby houses seem mouldering away in disuse, and yet your footstep brings figures of startling Roman type to the doorways.
Watching this, I have found myself wishing that some Irish Walter Scott would arise whose pen would make Ireland's lakes and glens, mountain passes and battlemented rocks, ruined castles and mouldering abbeys, famous and fashionable as Scotland's brown heath and shaggy wood, till the Queen would love to have a home there, and the nobles of the land would follow in her shadow.
How had it been kindled? A wrecked, mouldering boat had lain close beside the scene of the murder. The freedman and his companions had broken it up and fed the flames with withered boughs, the torn garments of the murdered man, and dry sea-weed. A blaze soon rose, and a body was carefully placed upon the wretched funeral pyre. It was the corpse of the great Pompey.
The reception-rooms were huge and sparingly furnished with those thin-legged chairs and ancient card-tables which recall the days of Letitia Ramolino and that easy-going Charles Buonaparte, who brought into the world the greatest captain that armies have ever seen. The bedrooms were small: all alike smelt of mouldering age.
At a little distance from the house, and placed on a much more commanding site, were some ancient and ivy-grown ruins, now scanty indeed and fast mouldering into decay, but sufficient to show the antiquarian the remains of what once had been a hold of no ordinary size and power.
While awaiting the official announcement of dinner, the company were sauntering on the terrace above the river, and gazing at the water-plants, the mosaic of the currents, and the various pretty details of the houses clustering across the river, their old wooden galleries, their mouldering window-frames, their little gardens where clothes were drying, the cabinet-maker's shop, in short, the many details of a small community to which the vicinity of a river, a weeping willow, flowers, rose-bushes, added a certain grace, making the scene quite worthy of a landscape painter.
I felt all my boyish enthusiasm for the romantic age of the Crusaders revive, as I looked on the torn and mouldering banners which once waved on the hills of Judea, or perhaps followed the sword of the Lion Heart through the fight on the field of Ascalon! What tales could they not tell, those old standards, cut and shivered by spear and lance!
Reckoning time was not the charcoal-burner's strong point; and the empty hut, the dreary open window-casements in the mouldering wooden walls, the holes in the roof, through which a quantity of snow had drifted into the only room in the deserted house, indicated that no human being had sought shelter here for many a winter.
Word Of The Day