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Updated: June 26, 2025
To bodies that had been laid in earth, in joyful expectation of a far different awakening, there came that hasty, lamp-lit, terror-haunted resurrection of the spade and mattock. The coffin was forced, the cerements torn, and the melancholy relics, clad in sackcloth, after being rattled for hours on moonless byways, were at length exposed to uttermost indignities before a class of gaping boys.
There was even no need to unwrap the body from its cerements, as the face itself, and the scar thereon, were quite sufficient for the friends of the deceased to swear to the corpse. Thereupon the assurance company, on the fullest of evidence, was compelled to admit that their client was dead, and expressed themselves ready to pay over the money to Mrs. Vrain as soon as the will should be proved.
Something fresh began to stir in his mind; even as in the spring, away in far depths of beginning, the sap gives its first upward throb in the tree, and the first bud, as yet invisible, begins to jerk itself forward to break from the cerements of ante-natal quiescence, and become a growing leaf, so a something in Hector that was his very life and soul began to yield to unseen creative impulse, and throb with a dim, divine consciousness.
Evil has been constantly at work, turning our house of the body into a prison; rendering it more opaque and heavy and insensible; casting about it bands and cerements, and filling it with aches and pains.
Leaden and cold it fell over the corpse of that poor woman as it was borne up to the tavern, with the seaweed trailing from it and the wet garments clinging to the limbs like cerements. Two rude seamen carried her away, for North fled from the first sight of his work and plunged madly into the water, where many a poor wretch was buffeting with the waves.
Be thou a spirit of health, or goblin damn'd; Bring with thee airs from heav'n, or blasts from hell; Be thy events wicked or charitable; Thou com'st in such a questionable shape That I will speak to thee. I'll call thee Hamlet, King, Father, Royal Dane. Oh I answer me. Let me not burst in ignorance; but tell Why thy canoniz'd bones, hearsed in death, Have burst their cerements?
The ghost of Athelstane himself would burst his bloody cerements and stand before us to forbid such dishonour to his memory." It seemed as if Cedric's words had raised a spectre; for, scarce had he uttered them ere the door flew open, and Athelstane, arrayed in the garments of the grave, stood before them, pale, haggard, and like something arisen from the dead!
I have often known him select one of the rawest and most ignorant persons in presence, and to him for the amusement of the rest, he has pretended to cause the absent to appear, the distant to draw near, and the dead themselves to burst the cerements of the grave. Take care, Hereward, that his arts make not a stain on the credit of one of my bravest Varangians."
"C'est la mode du pays," is the only account of the practice which you get either here or at Nice; and it is fortunate that they have not still improved on it by a hint from the black nurses of Barbadoes, who embalm weakly young Creoles in wrappers lined with assa-foetida, and think it prejudicial to "burst their cerements" more than once in a fortnight.
"Sister," said Harold, "thou speakest as I love to hear thee speak as my bright-eyed, rose-lipped sister spoke in the days of old; thou speakest as a woman with warm heart, and not as the mummy in the stiff cerements of priestly form; and if thou art with me, and thou wilt give me countenance, I will marry thy godchild, and save her alike from the dire superstitions of Hilda, and the grave of the abhorrent convent."
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