|
|
|
More "Spectre" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the debauchee with dreams, Of the victim of his schemes; Paint her with dishevelled hair, Streaming eyes, and bosom bare, And with aspect pale and sad, As a spectre's from the dead, Weeping o'er her new-born, child, Her name reproached, her fame despoiled: Let her groanings reach his ear, Pierce his heart, and rouse his fear Of the retribution given, To such ...
— Mazelli, and Other Poems • George W. Sands
... Wynne had been drinking rather heavily merely added a further distaste to it all. He wished heartily that he had never ventured upon this act of unwanted friendliness and given a dinner in his honour. Wynne was going to be the spectre at the feast, and it looked like being a poor sort of ...
— The Riddle of the Frozen Flame • Mary E. Hanshew
... found drowned and carried to the Morgue and properly identified—not by me, curse you, Lucile Laroche. And then you were properly buried, and not by me either, nor at my cost, curse you again. You are dead, I tell you!' She looked at him as she looked at you the other day, dazed and spectre-like, and said: 'Henri, I gave up my life once to a husband ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... office next day with my gloomy secret gnawing my bosom, and, whatever I did, the spectre of the murdered poodle rose before me. For two days after that I dared not go near the Curries, until at last one evening after dinner I forced myself to call, feeling that it was really not safe to keep away ...
— Stories By English Authors: London • Various
... her into the bedroom, and I followed perforce. I shall never forget the scene, though I had but the one glimpse of it,—the raving, yellowed woman in the bed, not a spectre nor yet even a semblance of the beauty of Temple Bow. But she was his mother, upon whom God had brought such a retribution as He alone can bestow. Lindy, faithful servant to the end, held the wasted hands of her mistress against the violence they would have done. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... true? Pythagoras rendered a great service in telling us to remember that we have within ourselves a means of detecting fallacy and demonstrating truth. What is it that assures us of the unreality of the fiery circle, the rainbow, the spectre, the voices, the crawling of insects upon the skin? Is it not reason? To reason may we ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... inspire indescribable dread. Horror, which disproportions everything, blurred its dimensions while retaining its shape. It was a condensation of darkness, which had a defined form. Night was above and within the spectre; it was a prey of ghastly exaggeration. Twilight and moonrise, stars setting behind the cliff, floating things in space, the clouds, winds from all quarters, had ended by penetrating into the composition of this ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... his sight to the utmost, and putting on the glasses that suit him best, (ay, using a spy-glass, if he likes,)—and make a full report. What, probably, will he spy?—what will he select to look at? Of course, he will see a Brocken spectre of himself. He will see several meeting-houses, at least, and, perhaps, that somebody ought to be assessed higher than he is, since he has so handsome a wood-lot. Now take Julius Caesar, or Immanuel Swedenborg, or a Fegee-Islander, and set him up there. Or suppose ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... "The poor man is a king in his own house." But he is not to be let alone. He gets summoned, must answer for himself in the Imperial Court. So he goes, like an old-world spectre, whom no one knows any more. "What is he?" ask the young. "Ah, he is neither a lord, nor a serf! Yet even ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... White Czar imperial progress made Through terror-haunted days. A shock, a cry Whose echoes ring the globe—the spectre's laid. Hurled o'er the abyss, see the crowned martyr lie Resting in peace—fear, change, and death gone by. Fit end for nightmare—mist of blood and tears, Red climax to ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... advance with odious, muttering boorishness. The professor was obviously too astonished to be offended. All this was bad. And all this was Haldin, always Haldin—nothing but Haldin—everywhere Haldin: a moral spectre infinitely more effective than any visible apparition of the dead. It was only the room through which that man had blundered on his way from crime to death that his spectre did not seem to be able to haunt. ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... unreasonableness, and self-love, and the world's esteem, which are all as dust in the balance, or a feather in the whirlwind, to impetuous love. I was amazed to find myself a daily waiter upon beauty. Yet so it was. The vision of Gertrude was now gone from my path—the spectre had vanished in the broad ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... a violet sprung from the sod, By his bedside; pale, beautiful, dewy with tears. The spectre of death bridged the chasm of years: He sighed on her bosom. "Forgive, oh forgive!" She kissed his pale forehead and answered him: "Live, Live, my husband! oh plead with the angels to stay Until God, too, has pardoned your sins. Let ...
— Three Women • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... mere mention of the name of Dreyfus suffices to remind us of the terrible nets woven by this dark spinner. Within the last year or two, have we not seen the loved king of a great nation driven to seek protection from the spectre of innuendo in the courts of law? But gossip laughs at such tribunals. It knows that where once it has affixed its foul stain, the mark remains forever, indelible as that imaginary stain which not all the multitudinous seas could wash from the little hand ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... anon it is a solitary huntsman, who asks if you can tell him which way the stag has gone. He is always dressed in green; but the fashion of his clothes is some five hundred years old. This is what we call Demon Meridianum—the noon-day spectre." ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... joining with the Negroes did not seem to arouse the bitter resentment he expected. There even came whispers to his ears that he had sold out to the landlords, and there was enough truth in the report to scare him. Thus to both parties came the uncomfortable spectre of the black men, and both sides went to work to ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... refused to recognise as binding. In fact, to Blake's mind, the laws of reason were nothing but a horrible phantasm deluding and perplexing mankind, from whose clutches it is the business of every human soul to free itself as speedily as possible. Reason is the 'Spectre' of Blake's mythology, that Spectre, ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... "A horrid spectre rises to my sight, Close by my side, and plain, and palpable In all good seeming and close circumstance As man meets man." ...
— Elsie's Motherhood • Martha Finley
... peasantry, increased this hatred. The poor persecuted country people believed that the New Forest was enchanted. They said that in thunder- storms, and on dark nights, demons appeared, moving beneath the branches of the gloomy trees. They said that a terrible spectre had foretold to Norman hunters that the Red King should be punished there. And now, in the pleasant season of May, when the Red King had reigned almost thirteen years; and a second Prince of the Conqueror's blood—another Richard, the son of Duke Robert—was killed by an arrow in this dreaded ...
— A Child's History of England • Charles Dickens
... absence of your children gives you so much pain, judge what I must suffer. The affection you show them makes me feel most acutely my unhappiness in having none." These words sounded in Josephine's ears like a funeral knell. She saw the spectre of divorce rising before her, and turned pale. From Genoa they went to Turin. Napoleon heard there of the coalition preparing against him, and left suddenly for France with Josephine. Non-commissioned officers of the Grenadiers and the Chasseurs of the Guard served as escort, but they were ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... convincing himself; this crumbling house and its occupants knew as much about the recent high-jinks in New York as did the man who built it in the days when loop-holes were an essential part of local architecture, and the painted Sagamore passed like a spectre through ...
— The Gay Rebellion • Robert W. Chambers
... exclamation, and stood looking from one to the other with a frightened air. She advanced to him and asked him what was the matter, in his native tongue. He shrunk farther back. The man could not or would not speak. He murmured something to himself, and stared at her as if she were a spectre. ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... said Clodius. 'Imitating the Egyptians, we sometimes introduce a skeleton at our feasts. In truth, the presence of such an Egyptian as yon gliding shadow were spectre enough to sour the richest ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... when they 'take' a disease, seem to touch it only with the tips of their fingers: such was his constitution. He had the measles, admittedly. His temperature rose one night to a hundred and three, and for a few brief moments his mother and Aunt Annie enjoyed visions of fighting the grim spectre of Death. The tiny round pink spots covered his face and then ran together into a general vermilion. He coughed exquisitely. His beard grew. He supported life on black-currant tea and an atmosphere impregnated with eucalyptus. ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... than the darkness; it was like a cruel finger pointing her out in her wretchedness and humiliation; it made her shudder at the thought of the morning twilight. What could she do? Not go to her mother—not rouse her in the dead of night to tell her this. Her mother would think she was a spectre; it would be enough to kill her with horror. And the way there was so long ... if she should meet some one ... yet she must seek some shelter, somewhere to hide herself. Five doors off there was Mrs. Pettifer's; that kind woman would take her in. It was of no use now to be proud and mind about ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... clatter on the pavement and rumbled up the street, disappearing in the twilight, while the ear still tracked its course. Scarcely was it gone when the people began to question whether the coach and attendants, the ancient lady, the spectre of old Caesar and the Old Maid herself were not all a strangely-combined delusion with some dark purport in its mystery. The whole town was astir, so that, instead of dispersing, the crowd continually increased, and stood gazing up at the windows of the mansion, now silvered ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... rapture of silent bliss. With what breathless deep devotion, Have I watch'd, like spectre from swathing shroud, The white moon peer o'er the shadowy cloud, Illumine the mantled Earth, and kiss The meekly murmuring lips of Ocean, As a ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, - Vol. 10, No. 283, 17 Nov 1827 • Various
... end of a battalion was pressing past, the spectre of annihilation. West groaned. Then a figure sprang from the shadowy ranks and called West's name, and when he saw it was Trent he cried out. Trent ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... from their mittens, and raising them in an imploring gesture, Mookoomahn looked, as he stood there in the dim candlelight under the low log ceiling, more a spectre—a ghostly phantom visitor—than ...
— The Gaunt Gray Wolf - A Tale of Adventure With Ungava Bob • Dillon Wallace
... purchased it have been doing during these hundreds of years! Was there no member of it spirited enough to make away with his sweetheart, or take some other steps calculated to establish a hereditary spectre? Even now I can hardly write ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... renewing examination fees consequent on your callous failures," he had said, "terrifies me. I am haunted by the spectre of ruin. The Bank of ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... brave withal; for with her went the meat chopper. Also she might have turned and fled back down the stairs, rather than into the very place whither she knew the Reverend Mother was conducting this tall spectre of the long dead Sister Agatha, grown to most alarming proportions during her fifty years' entombment! But being brave and faithful old Antony had sped into the inner cell, and crouched there in a corner; ready to call for help or strike with ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay
... anything we can do?" demanded Glaudot, whose dreams of galactic conquest were fading before the spectre of ...
— A World Called Crimson • Darius John Granger
... robbers, and many a skeleton, since disinterred in solitary places, is the mortal framework of some wandering merchant who had met with foul play on his circuit. The packman's ghost too is no unusual spectre in many ...
— Old Roads and New Roads • William Bodham Donne
... a time For memory and for tears. Within the deep, Still chambers of the heart, a spectre dim, Whose tones are like the wizard voice of time, Heard from the tomb of ages, points its cold And solemn finger to the beautiful And holy visions, that have passed away, And left no shadow of their ...
— Songs from the Southland • Various
... of Maddaloni haunted him like a spectre. He ordered his beautiful villa at Posilipo to be destroyed, and made his people ransack once more his pillaged palace at Santa Maria della Stella. The barber of the Duke and a Moorish slave bought their lives, the first ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... chiefly through a system of judicious prize-giving that the senate attached to itself the loyalty of the official class. There was perhaps less fear of what Gracchus himself might do than of the spectre which he was raising for the future. For in Roman history the events of the past made those of the future; there were few isolated phenomena in ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... contrasts were overwhelming to his starved senses: from the dirt and dearth and grimy despair of his burial hutch in the snow to this softly lighted, close-curtained room, warm and sweet with flowers; from the gaunt, unshaven spectre of the packer and his ghostly revelations, to Moya, meekly beautiful, her bright eyes lowered as she trailed her soft skirts across the carpet; Moya seated opposite, silent, conscious of him in every look and movement. Her lovely hands lay in her lap, and the thought of holding ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... might flow. And a flood of emotion came over him, and in his heart he blessed her. It was then that on that gaunt headland he seemed to see her at his side. But between them, and dividing them, stalked the spectre of himself. ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... had one of those rare minds that reject the disagreeable superstitious affectations concerning death and that overcome hysterical grief. To be sure, for hours at a time she would suffer an extraordinary melancholy, and then, in my agony of curiosity, I believed that the spectre which had first appeared before her, the night of the Judge's death, was whispering to her again. True, however, to my solemn oath, which I have always kept, I asked her nothing, and she always emerged from these periods of meditation into moods of gayety and affection which were ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... come too late. The helpless loveliness lying in his arms was not for him. It was Ahmed whom she loved, Ahmed who had waked to such a tardy recognition of the priceless gift that she had given him, Ahmed whom he must wrest from the grim spectre that was hovering near him lest the light that shone in her violet eyes should go out in the blackness of despair. And yet as he looked at her with eyes filled with hopeless misery a demon of suggestion whispered within him, tempting him. He knew his friend as no one else did. What chance ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... and was scrupulously exact in his work. But the sense of his double personality began to worry him again. He did not see scarlet as of old; he noticed when his eyes were closed that the apparition of a second Ambroise swam into the field of his vision. And he was positively certain that this spectre of himself saw scarlet—the attitude of his double assured him of the fact. Simple-minded, ignorant of cerebral disorders, loyal, and laborious, Ambroise could not speak of these disquieting things—indeed, he only ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... the portal wide; A man rushed by him at a single stride, Haggard, half naked, without hat or cloak, Who neither turned, nor looked at him, nor spoke, But leaped into the blackness of the night, And vanished like a spectre ...
— Legends That Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... now men enough to remove half our property, I made a start of it, leaving Grant to bring up the rest. I believe I was a most miserable spectre in appearance, puffing and blowing at each step I took, with shoulder drooping, and left arm hanging like a dead leg, which I was unable ever to swing. Grant, remarking this, told me then, although fro a friendly delicacy he had abstained from saying ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... behold yon bleeding spectre! Ilion's children find no Hector; Priam's offspring loved their brother; Rome's great sire forgot his mother, When he slew his gallant twin, With inexpiable sin. See the giant shadow stride O'er the ramparts high and wide! When the first o'erleapt thy wall, Its foundation mourned ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... quickly obeyed, and after pulling for a few hundred yards, the boats lay in comparatively calm water. The island mountain rose like a dark spectre above their heads, without any beach that could be discovered on which the boats could be hauled up, or any cove to afford them shelter. Green had a lead-line on board; it was let fall over the side, but no bottom ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston
... For memory and for tears. Within the deep, Still chambers of the heart a spectre dim, Whose tones are like the wizard voice of Time, Heard from the tomb of ages, points its cold And solemn finger to the beautiful And holy visions that have passed away And left no shadow of their loveliness On the dead waste of life. That spectre lifts ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... whereupon Saul says, "Bring me up Samuel." The woman immediately sees an apparition. But to Saul nothing is visible, for he asks, "What seest thou?" And the woman replies, "I see Elohim coming up out of the earth." Still the spectre remains invisible to Saul, for he asks, "What form is he of?" And she replies, "An old man cometh up, and he is covered with a robe." So far, therefore, the wise woman unquestionably plays the part of a "medium," and Saul is dependent upon her ...
— The Evolution of Theology: An Anthropological Study - Essay #8 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... simulacrum of a thing long dead; yet with such continuing semblance of life, nay, with all life's real powers, that she seems the real, vital, living one, and Faustus yonder, thing as he is of the present, little better than a spectre. Yet Helena has been ages before Faust ever was; nay, by an awful mystery like those which involve the birth of Pagan gods, she whom he has evoked to be the mother of his only son has given, centuries before, somewhat of her life to make ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... let me implore you to reflect for a single moment on the deplorable condition of our country in case of a foreign war, with all our ports blockaded, all our cities in a state of siege; the gaunt spectre of famine brooding like a hungry vulture over our starving land; our commissary stores all exhausted, and our famishing armies withering away in the field, a helpless prey to the insatiate demon of hunger; our navy rotting in the docks for want of provisions for our gallant seamen, and we ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X) • Various
... of his numerous enemies seeking his chamber with the intent to assassinate him. Seizing the Persian cimeter [156] that lay beside him, he plunged it in the breast of the intruder, and the object of his passion fell dead at his feet. "From that hour," says the biographer, "he could rest no more!" A spectre haunted his nights—the voice of the murdered girl proclaimed doom to his ear. It is added, and, if we extend our belief further, we must attribute the apparition to the skill of the priests, that, still tortured by the ghost of Cleonice, he applied to those celebrated necromancers ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... kept fading away into thin air above our heads. Therefore the vision lasted as long as the sun stayed yet above the Alps; and the images with their aureoles shrank and dilated with the undulations of the mist. I could not but think of that old formula for an anthropomorphic Deity—'the Brocken-spectre of the human spirit projected on the mists of the Non-ego.' Even like those cloud-phantoms are the gods made in the image of man, who have been worshipped through successive ages of the world, gods dowered with like passions to those of the races who have crouched before them, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... him. Having done so much evil, would he now be permitted to do good, and gracefully partake of the joys he foresaw? These ties with the past, his fortune dishonestly acquired, his fatal mistress—the spectre of that old man would they ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet
... had greatly feared came upon us, and that spectre which we had been afraid of came unto us, and, behold, length of days was in its right hand, and in its left hand riches and honor. What the lion-hearted warrior of England was to the children of the Saracens, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... library door with his knife, and taking the papers from the study. With his right hand the old man seized his goddaughter and obliged her to walk at the pace of death and follow Minoret to his own house. Ursula crossed the town, entered the post house and went into Zelie's old room, where the spectre showed her Minoret unfolding the letters, reading them ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... before her dressing-room fire, she heard her maid soliciting entrance, and paid no heed, the door being locked—as though a spectre could be bolted out of rooms and houses! Pacing the floor, restless, annoyed, and dismayed by turns, she flung her wet skirt and coat from her, piece by piece, and stood for awhile, like some slender youth in riding breeches and shirt, facing the ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... windows, but white fences gleamed through the darkness, and sharp gable ends loomed up against the dull sky, one after another, and the horse's hoofs flashed sparks from the paved street before the church, that showed its white spire, spectre-like, directly in their path. Here, by some evil chance, the child awoke, and, between cold and hunger and fear, began one of those long and loud shrieks that no power can stop this side of strangulation. In vain Hitty kissed, and coaxed, and half-choked her boy, in hope ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... occur to the mind. In Pump Court we encounter the brisk little spectre of Mr. Frederick Minchin, and who can forget that his club was The Oxford and Cambridge, than which what better could he desire? Mr. Thackeray himself was a member of The Garrick, The Athenaeum, and The Reform, but the clubs of many of his characters, ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... see, deep down under a glass, all its own history and legends preserved forever as in a crystal casket; the story of saintly King David who built it, and of the French friars who left their own Abbey at Beauvais to people it; better still, of the wedding with the spectre guest—the marriage of little French Jolette to Alexander, the last of the Celtic kings. Perhaps, too, the window-eyes peering into the crystal could see the figure of Sir Walter Scott, seeking and finding inspiration in the ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... I, the man whom guilt chases from his country! He flies to distant lands in the hope of shaking off the remembrance of his crime. He finds that, go where he will, the spectre dogs his steps. In Paris, in Milan, in Rome, the grizzly form starts up before him. He must change, not his country, but his heart—himself—before he can shake ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... in like a spectre upon her. It was Stephen's letter-day, and she was bound to meet the postman—to stealthily do a deed she had never liked, to secure an end she now ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... round upon his sad burden as it loomed faintly through the flowering laurustinus, then at the unfathomable gloom amid the high trees on each hand, indistinct, shadowless, and spectre-like in their monochrome of grey. He felt anything but cheerful, and wished he had the company even of a child or dog. Stopping the horse, he listened. Not a footstep or wheel was audible anywhere around, and the dead silence was broken only by a heavy particle falling from a tree through the ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... endeavouring to fly, as it were, from myself, and, by seeking for natural thoughts among natural appearances and converse, rear up again the belief that I am a regularly organized being, capable of again becoming happy among the sons of men. But the thought still haunts me as a spectre, that I may be once more, by some other cause not less fortuitous than that which then took me out of the region of experience, precipitated, in spite of all my care, into some new position, where the feelings ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... curse him!" and an emotion which he had believed was long since dead rose hotly in his consciousness. Before the dread spectre, suddenly imbued with vitality, Farwell reeled and covered his face. Murder was in his heart—the old madness of desire to wipe out, by any means, that which barred his ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... cleave a passage through the stalwart figure's heart, and he bows his head, and thinks—it is but justice! In the same instant, a cry of intensest pain and horror escapes him: the deadly arrow, additionally poisoned by the blood it has just shed, has passed quite through the spectre of his former pupil, and is buried up to the feather in Professor Valeyon's own vitals! This shock effectually wakened the old gentleman—for, after all, he had only been having an uneasy nap in his straight-backed chair!—and he started to his feet, and fumbled nervously ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... on the subject of weddings, I may as well tell you about a Chinese wedding we had the other day at our house. The bridegroom was Akiat, a carpenter, about six feet two inches high. He was dressed in whity-brown silk, which made him look like a tall spectre; and the bride was Quey Ginn, a fat, dumpy little girl of sixteen, the Chinese deacon's daughter, and one of my scholars. She did not choose her old husband of fifty years, but her parents arranged it, and Akiat paid one ...
— Sketches of Our Life at Sarawak • Harriette McDougall
... apostleship of equality that was M. de Vilmorin's. You lacked the vision that would have shown you that God did not create men equals. Well, you are in case to-night to judge which of us was right, which wrong. You see what is happening here in Paris. You see the foul spectre of Anarchy stalking through a land fallen into confusion. Probably you have enough imagination to conceive something of what must follow. And do you deceive yourself that out of this filth and ruin there will rise up an ideal form of society? Don't you understand that ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... my father may yet be breathing on earth, living—the life of an apostate!" The idea haunted Zarah like a spectre. There was only one hope which had power to lay it: "If living, he may be spared for repentance. God is merciful; He judgeth not severely; He delighteth in receiving His wanderers back. Did not Nathan say to penitent David, 'Thou shalt not surely die;' was not even ...
— Hebrew Heroes - A Tale Founded on Jewish History • AKA A.L.O.E. A.L.O.E., Charlotte Maria Tucker
... old seaman had been severely tried. Misfortune had followed upon misfortune; until the hardy veteran looked like the spectre of his former self. His only daughter, a pretty girl of eighteen, was engaged to marry the ostler at the Crown Inn, a fine-looking young man, who had lately come from London. He saw Nancy Jarvis, became enamoured ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... a somewhat more agreeable life, as of late I have been associating more with other people. You could scarcely believe what a sad and dreary life mine has been for the last two years; my defective hearing everywhere pursuing me like a spectre, making me fly from every one, and appear a misanthrope; and yet no one is in reality less so! This change has been wrought by a lovely fascinating girl [undoubtedly Giulietta], who loves me and whom I love. I have once more had some blissful moments during ...
— Beethoven's Letters 1790-1826, Volume 1 of 2 • Lady Wallace
... the throne of that warrior-king. In the waving glitter of the countless swords raised on high, she saw the murderous blade against the boy-heir of Lancaster descend—descend! Her passion, her terror, at the spectre which fancy thus evoked, seized and overcame her; and ere the last hurrah sent its hollow echo to the raftered roof, she sank from her chair to the ground, hueless and insensible as ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... 1889 from the natural consequences of its intolerance and its corruption, was instructively shown by the absolute panic into which it was thrown by the election at Paris of General Boulanger on January 27. Here, at the very threshold of the great electoral year, rose the spectre of the ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... having warned been, Refuseth still to turn, Behind his shadow, shrunken mean, A poring spectre shall be seen With livid stare ...
— My Beautiful Lady. Nelly Dale • Thomas Woolner
... a wild night. The wind was driving the clouds across the moon at a tremendous rate, and sweeping at each gust flights of spectre leaves from the swaying trees. It caught him in the open of the bare high-road, and would not let him go. It opposed him, and buffeted him at every turn; but he held listlessly on his way. His feet took him, and he let them take him whither they would. They led him stumbling ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... was allowed to take place. The Germans and Austrians were exultant, for another couple of weeks' strike would have given them the victory. Already the collapse of our defence was become a definite eventuality. The tact and statesmanship of Mr. Lloyd George exorcised the redoubtable spectre, but the spirit which that piece of treason revealed filled the most sanguine with dread and set those of little faith asking themselves whether this lamentable phenomenon was not one of certain ill-boding symptoms which ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... was the dull old house, the yellow light in the darkened room, the faded spectre in the chair by the dressing-table glass, that I felt as if the stopping of the clocks had stopped Time in that mysterious place, and, while I and everything else outside it grew older, it stood still. Daylight never entered the house as ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... nothing? In 1660, the English thought, in recalling Charles II., that the memory of that scaffold which had once darkened the windows of Whitehall would be guaranty enough for his good behavior. But, spite of the spectre, Charles II. repeated Charles I., and James outdid him. Wiser by this experience, when the nation in 1689 got another chance, they trusted to no guaranties, but so arranged the very elements of their government that William III. ...
— American Eloquence, Volume II. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... name, her cheeks were dyed purple, and in another moment became ghastly pale. "Why do you call me Dorris Ritter?" she cried, with gasping breath, "why remind me of the past, which stands like a dark spectre ever behind me, and grins upon me with bloody and shameful horrors?" Lost wholly in these fearful remembrances, she stared before her, thinking no more of Pollnitz, forgetting that his watchful and heartless eyes were ever fixed upon her. "Dorris Ritter!" she cried, slowly, "Dorris ...
— Frederick the Great and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... in during the day. The concierge related the tale of his return and the locksmith. The mother, heart-stricken, went back a changed woman. White as the linen of her chemise, she walked as we might fancy a spectre walks, slowly, noiselessly, moved by some superhuman power, and yet mechanically. She held a candle in her hand, whose light fell full upon her face and showed her eyes, fixed with horror. Unconsciously, ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... madness, suffering and despair. But there was a ship—safe, convenient, roomy: a ship with beds, bedding, knives, forks, comfortable cabins, glass and china, and a complete cook's galley, pervaded, ruled and possessed by the pitiless spectre of starvation. The lamp oil had been drunk, the wicks cut up for food, the candles eaten. At night she floated dark in all her recesses, and full of fears. One day Falk came upon a man gnawing a splinter of pine wood. Suddenly he threw the piece of wood away, tottered to the rail, and ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... struck slowly across the open grounds towards the sunken fields beyond. When-midway across the grounds, he turned towards the mansion, and saw three of the front windows filled with white faces, gazing in terror at the wonderful spectre. Soon descending a slope, he disappeared ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... The Spectre.—There is a story going the rounds of our periodicals that a Miss G., of respectable family, young and very beautiful, attended Lord Byron for nearly a year in the habit of a page. Love, desperate and all-engrossing, seems to have been the cause of her singular ...
— Whittier-land - A Handbook of North Essex • Samuel T. Pickard
... been going nicely, but then and there I spoiled it. Moved by I know not what folly, I wrote her a yet more roundabout letter, which, however, was very pressing. In attempting to fan her flame I kindled myself—for a spectre—and ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... storm-clouds overcast, Even like a spectre of the past,— Of rapine, feudal strife, and blood, Thou tellest an old, wild, warlike story, When squadrons on thy ramparts stood, With spear ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 488, May 7, 1831 • Various
... magnificent under its conditions; magnificent in two ways—first, in keenest perception of the main forms and facts in the creature; and, secondly, in the grandeur of line by which their forms are abstracted and insisted on, making every asp, ibis, and vulture a sublime spectre of asp or ibis or vulture power. The way for students to get some of this gift again (some only, for I believe the fulness of the gift itself to be connected with vital superstition, and with resulting intensity of reverence; people were likely to know something about hawks ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... been easily arranged. On that foggy night when she had fled from Leonard Dowson, terrified by the spectre of a future life which his words had evoked, she had run, without in the least realizing her direction, straight to the railway station; and the idea of London had at once presented itself to her mind. A train was just starting, and Toni hastily took a ticket and jumped into a carriage ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... future from our vision. Faith and the inner consciousness are the basis of our belief that there is a future. One cannot be at the Front very long before he is compelled to examine his thoughts in regard to immortality. Death is brought home very closely. The grim spectre points his finger at a man—perhaps in the first flush of manhood—who has just commenced to appreciate the joy of living. Death challenges, and with no shadow of faltering, but perhaps with a smile, the challenge is accepted, and the lad ...
— Over the Top With the Third Australian Division • G. P. Cuttriss
... have completely vanished. The huge solid shell is full of expression; it looks as if it had been hollowed out by the sincerity of early faith, and it opens into a cloister as impressive as itself. Wherever one goes, in France, one meets, looking backward a little, the spectre of the great Revolution; and one meets it always in the shape of the destruction of something beautiful and precious. To make us forgive it at all, how much it must also have destroyed that was more hateful than itself! Beneath the church of Montmajour is a most extraordinary crypt, almost ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... are out, the camp-fire fades, The wild auroral ghost-lights die, And stealing up the distant wood The moon's white spectre floats on high, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... left in obscurity; and these brutish village-outbreaks, which collapsed at the first appearance of a handful of soldiers, were represented as the prelude to a vast Socialist revolution from which the coup d'etat, and that alone, had saved France. Terrified by the re-appearance of the Red Spectre, the French nation proceeded on the 20th of December to pass its judgment on the accomplished usurpation. The question submitted for the plebiscite was, whether the people desired the maintenance of Louis Napoleon's authority and committed to him the necessary powers for establishing ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... Perplexed to know how to dispose of her, the ambassador and the chancellor thought of sending her off to Pomfret Castle; doubtless, if once within Pomfret walls, to find the fate of the second Richard there: but again the spectre of Lord Howard ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... confederates their share in the assignation. Cassius had to die. There is some truth in the charge that he had usurped regal power, for he had indeed endeavoured like the kings to protect the free commons against his own order. His law was buried along with him; but its spectre thenceforward incessantly haunted the eyes of the rich, and again and again it rose from the tomb against them, until amidst the conflicts to which it ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... all-pervading and impalpable as the air we drew into our lungs. And suddenly this danger, this breath of our life, had taken this material form. It was material and expected, and yet it had the effect of an evil spectre, inasmuch as one did not know where and how it was vulnerable, what precisely it would do, how one should ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... it?—why, my Gabriel? Was she a thief? Was she really a man in disguise? Was she some malicious old hag who had seen that I was afraid of her? Was she a spectre conjured up by my very cowardice? Was she a mocking phantasm ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Spanish • Various
... with hope's slain importunities In miserable marriage? Nay, shall not All things be there forgot, Save the sea's golden barrier and the black Close-crouching promontories? Dead to all shames, forgotten of all glories, Shall I not wander there, a shadow's shade, A spectre self-destroyed, So purged of all remembrance and sucked back Into the primal void, That should we on that shore phantasmal meet I should not know the ...
— Artemis to Actaeon and Other Worlds • Edith Wharton
... less a person than Marshal Saxe. One night, on the march, he bivouacked in a haunted castle, and slept the sleep of the brave until midnight, when he was awakened by hideous howls heralding the approach of the spectre. When it appeared, the Marshal first discharged his pistol point-blank at it without effect, and then struck it with his sabre, which was shivered in his hand. The invulnerable spectre then beckoned the amazed Marshal to follow, and ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... and brings him in here. But on the way Mr. Buffle looks about him in his usual suspicious manner and the Major fires and asks him "Do you see a Ghost sir?" "No sir" says Mr. Buffle. "Because I have before noticed you" says the Major "apparently looking for a spectre very hard beneath the roof of my respected friend. When you find that supernatural agent, be so good as point him out sir." Mr. Buffle stares at the Major and then nods at me. "Mrs. Lirriper sir" says the Major going off into a perfect steam and introducing me with his hand. "Pleasure of ...
— Mrs. Lirriper's Legacy • Charles Dickens
... the steep paths where the spectre-like fir Moaned of death in the distance; we ceased not to spur! Death! what that to us, with our duty before! Then onward, still on our ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Millborne they at first suppressed their anguish. But by and by their feelings got the better of them, and when he was asleep in his chair after dinner Mrs. Millborne's irritation broke out. The embittered Frances joined her in reproaching the man who had come as the spectre to their intended feast of Hymen, and turned its ...
— Life's Little Ironies - A set of tales with some colloquial sketches entitled A Few Crusted Characters • Thomas Hardy
... Because, in the first place, such homes are being destroyed and made impossible now by the very causes against which Socialism fights, and because in this world at the present time very few homes are at all like this ideal. In reality every poor home is haunted by the spectre of irregular employment and undermined by untrustworthy insurance, it must shelter in insanitary dwellings and its children eat adulterated food because none other can be got. And that, I am sorry to say, it is only too easy to prove, by a second appeal to ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... She dashed into the valley, below us now, as if this rolling along of a heavy victoria, a lot of luggage, and three travellers, was an agreeable episode in her career of toil. But on the mind of her owner, the spectre of the free-thinkers was still hovering like an evil spirit. During the next hour he gave us a long and exhaustive exposition of the changes wrought by ces messieurs qui nient le bon Dieu. Among their crimes was to be numbered that of having disintegrated the morale of the peasantry. ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... have never seemed so green Since I remember, As in these groves and gardens of September, And yet already comes the chill That bodes the world's last garden ill, And in the shadow I have seen A spectre,—even thine, O ...
— The Five Books of Youth • Robert Hillyer
... only child of the mansion sickened and died. Mr. Keene's first wife died after the second apparition. Either it was the fancy of an ailing man, or perhaps the general report, but he notes that the spectre was bewailing its woes along the banks of Bogue Holauba when Jasper Keene himself was stricken by an illness which from the ...
— The Phantom Of Bogue Holauba - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... said, with trembling lips and tearful voice: "Sire, I am prepared to do all that you wish. I shall announce my betrothal to the prince cheerfully, and without sighs or tears. But be merciful, and free me forever from that hideous spectre which ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... That sings her song, half waking, half in dream. What two come here to mar this heavenly tune? A man is one: the woman bears my name, And honour. Their hands touch! Am I still tame? God, what a dancing spectre seems the moon! ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... quickly came my breath; Headlong I rush'd away, I knew not where; In frenzied hast rushing I ran; my feet With terror wing'd, a hell-hound at my heels, Yea! scarce three strides between us. Through a door Right opposite I flew, slamming its weight, To shut me from the spectre who pursued: And lo! another room, the counterpart Of that just left, but gloomier. On I rush'd, Beholding o'er its hearth the grinning face, Another and the same; the haunting face Reflected, as it seem'd, from wall to wall! There, opening as I shut, onward he came, That Broucoloka, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... I was lying on the floor, holding the half- perused paper in my hand. Grief and horror had locked up the avenues of complaint, and I sat as one petrified to stone. My father entered. At the sight of me, he started as if he had been a spectre. His well- known features opened at once my agonized heart. With fearful cries I cast myself at his feet, and putting the letter into his hand, clung, almost expiring, ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... panic-terror pervaded the halls, and like an evil-announcing night-spectre passed over the heads of the stiffened, lifeless crowd the dismal rumor—"The regent and the princess are at variance; the regent is speaking to her with vehemence, and ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... another of those intimate studies of Anglo-Indian life that ALICE PERRIN has made specially her own. The tragedy of it is sufficiently conveyed by the title. Separation, of husband from wife or parent from child, is of course the spectre that haunts the Anglo-Indian home. It was, chiefly at least, for the health of their child Winnie that Guy Bassett was forced to let her and his wife abide permanently in Kensington while he himself continued his Eastern career as a grass-widower. Very naturally, the result ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, March 14, 1917 • Various
... two fingers thoughtfully into his crisp, brown hair; "that would never do. How would it work to see the same ghost again, minus the overalls, and have gold bricks in the hod? That would elevate the spectre from degrading toil to a financial plane. Don't you think that ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... the soul haunts the spot where the murdered body is interred; that its appearances are directed to bring down vengeance on its murderers; or that, having left its terrestrial form in a distant clime, it glides before its former friends, a pale spectre, to warn them of its decease. Such tales, the foundation of which is an argument from our present feelings to those of the spiritual world, form the broad and universal basis of the popular superstition regarding ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott
... as words can be. Another carnage by the drear Red Sea— Another efflux of a sea more red! Another bruising of the hapless head Of a wrong'd people yearning to be free. Another blot on her great name, who stands Confounded, left intolerably alone With the dilating spectre of her own Dark sin, uprisen from yonder spectral sands: Penitent more than to herself is known; England, appall'd by her own ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... 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 ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... corner of the redoubt. Though his sabre was gone, a brace of English pistols lay on the table beside him, and he fired one of them in the direction. The shot was followed by a groan and the disappearance of the spectre. The men started to their feet, and all rushed out in pursuit. The captain's first step struck upon a dead body, evidently that of the spy who had fallen by his fire. The pursuit was now joined in by the whole regiment, who had been posted in the rear unseen, to take advantage of circumstances. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... and from the palm to the tips of the fingers was a mass of lambent flame. When Bill saw this fearful apparition he screamed with hearty good-will; but the noise he made was nothing to the yell of terror that came from beneath the shroud of the Yew-lane Ghost, who, on catching sight of the rival spectre, flew wildly up the lane, kicking the white sheet off as it went, and finally displaying, to Bill's amazement, the form and features of Bully Tom. But this was not all. No sooner had the first ghost started, than the second (not to be behind-hand) jumped nimbly over the wall and gave chase. ...
— Frances Kane's Fortune • L. T. Meade
... Sin's old spectre dismal; Our every step grew glad and brave. Best natal gift, in rite baptismal, Their own faith men their children gave. Holy in him, Life since hath floated, A happy dream, through every heart; We, to his love and joy devoted, Scarce know ...
— Rampolli • George MacDonald
... the witnesses testified that the "shape" of the prisoner often grievously tormented them, by pinching, choking, or biting them, and did otherwise seriously afflict them, urging them all the while to write their names in a book, which "the spectre" called: "Our book." ...
— The Witch of Salem - or Credulity Run Mad • John R. Musick
... horror. Some words certainly left his lips, but they did not carry to the hearing of any one of those three people. He looked at Maraton with the fierce, terrified intentness of one who looks upon a spectre! ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... people believed that the New Forest was enchanted. They said that in thunder- storms, and on dark nights, demons appeared, moving beneath the branches of the gloomy trees. They said that a terrible spectre had foretold to Norman hunters that the Red King should be punished there. And now, in the pleasant season of May, when the Red King had reigned almost thirteen years; and a second Prince of the Conqueror's blood—another Richard, the son of Duke Robert—was killed by an arrow in this dreaded Forest; ...
— A Child's History of England • Charles Dickens
... their mittens, and raising them in an imploring gesture, Mookoomahn looked, as he stood there in the dim candlelight under the low log ceiling, more a spectre—a ghostly phantom visitor—than a living ...
— The Gaunt Gray Wolf - A Tale of Adventure With Ungava Bob • Dillon Wallace
... sleep. She was too wobegone to find a tear. Life stood before her in the darkness like a hideous spectre. ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... for. But there remained in the eyes something as yet unquenched. And looking at her, he felt a sense of impatience and regret that the delicate youth of her should be wasted in the flare and shadow of the lesser world—burning to a spectre here on the crumbling edge of things—here with Malcourt leering at her through the disordered brilliancy of that false dawn ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... turned away, and with bent head left the room. So it came about that both Chrysophrasia and Cutter on the same evening struck a blow at the new-found happiness of the cousins, raising between them, as it were, the spectre of ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... of the blue-bottle fly. Glittering stalactites. blaze in front of you; fluted columns and draperies in broad folds with a formation that resembles the finest hemstitching may be seen all around you, while Pluto's chasm, a wide rift in the walls, contains a spectre clothed in shadowy draperies. One wonders how long this grim, ghastly person has stood here. Long ages came and went in that shadowy and evanescent time with no record save these stony ghosts, and over all a black pall of mystery ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... counted the most eminent among themselves, had squealed! Who was the Gray Seal? It he had held the secrets of Stangeist and his band, what else might he not know? Who else might not fall next? The Gray Seal had become a snitch, a menace, a source of danger that stalked among them like a ghastly spectre. Who was the ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... movement should reveal to me faces which might destroy the enchantment. The third girl is on her feet, dancing before this areopagus of idiots, with their lanky locks and pot-hats. What a shock when she turns round! She wears over her face the horribly grinning, death-like mask of a spectre or a vampire. The mask unfastened, falls. And behold! a darling little fairy of about twelve or fifteen years of age, slim, and already a coquette, already a woman—dressed in a long robe of shaded dark-blue china crape, covered with ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... music on different characters, holds equally true of genius: so many as are not delighted by it are disturbed, perplexed, irritated. The beholder either recognises it as a projected form of his own being, that moves before him with a glory round its head, or recoils from it as a spectre."[1] The octogenarian critic of the Johnsonian school recoils from "Frankenstein" as from an incarnation of the Evil Spirit: she does not know what to make of the "Tales of my Landlord"; and she inquires of an Irish acquaintance whether she retained recollection ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... windward and little enough could I see by reason of the dense smoke that enveloped us, a stifling, sulphurous cloud that drifted aboard us ever more thick as the fight waxed, a choking mist full of blurred shapes, dim forms that flitted by and vanished spectre-like, a rolling mystery whence came all manner of cries, piercing screams and shrill wailings dreadful to hear, while the deck beneath me, the air about me reeled and quivered to the never-ceasing thunder of artillery. But ever and ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... has played, besides the characters already named, Rolla, Penruddock, Lothaire, Othello, George Barnwell, Octavian, Osmond (Castle Spectre) Hotspur, Frederick in Lovers Vows, Petruchio, Gondebert, and many others, if not all with equal excellence, at least with so much as to rank him among the first masters of ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... face then. It was a fine, glad, good-humoured smile, and humanised her wonderful eyes just as though you clothed a ghost in flesh, making the spectre ...
— The Honour of the Flag • W. Clark Russell
... languidly back on the crimson cushions of her chair, the little fringes of pearls that nestled at her bosom on her low bodice, shivered and trembled as she breathed. The gas burned very low within, and with its subdued light only helped to make Honor still more like a spectre than she was. Guy, standing quite close to the panes, could see the gray pallor that had come over her agitated face, her eyes wore that far-off look that is not of earth, as if she were peering through the impenetrable, into mysteries beyond, he leaned forward ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... grandfather's—a colonel of West India Militia, I believe. Now my grandfather had been a rather short man, but very broad and stout, particularly round the stomach. Old Clump was tall and thin as a spectre, so the epaulettes fell over his shoulders, the waist flapped loosely eight inches above his trousers, and the short swallow-tails did not sufficiently cover the spot which the venerable darky usually placed on the chair to hide a ...
— Captain Mugford - Our Salt and Fresh Water Tutors • W.H.G. Kingston
... horrible. Nothing could appear more terrible than a black and dismal face, with a large white circle drawn round each eye. In general waved lines were marked down each arm, thigh, and leg; and in some the cheeks were daubed; and lines drawn over each rib, presented to the beholder a truly spectre-like figure. Previous either to a dance or a combat, we always found them busily employed in this necessary preliminary; and it must be observed, that when other liquid could not be readily procured, ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1 • David Collins
... observer by a sort of intuition. It was a sorrow that removed this beautiful girl out of the sphere of humanity, and set her in a far-off region, the remoteness of which—while yet her face is so close before us—makes us shiver as at a spectre." ...
— The Story of a Summer - Or, Journal Leaves from Chappaqua • Cecilia Cleveland
... never a whisper in the Sea Off darts the Spectre-ship; 200 While clombe above the Eastern bar The horned Moon, with one bright Star Almost atween ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... moonlight fell on a garden absolutely bare, as square as a handkerchief, and with the soil all turned over like a field. In one corner, standing motionless and with folded arms, on a hillock, was a black figure which looked like a spectre in one of Biard's pictures. It was M. Dardouillet, and he was so deeply absorbed that he did not see his visitor until Denoisel ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... however fantastic its expression may be, there will be reality in it, and force. It is not a manufactured terribleness, whose author, when he had finished it, knew not if it would terrify any one else or not: but it is a terribleness taken from the life; a spectre which the workman indeed saw, and which, as it appalled him, will appal us also. But the other workman never felt any Divine fear; he never shuddered when he heard the cry from the burning ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... one) is the name of a night spectre, said to have been Adam's first wife, but who, for her refractory conduct, was transformed into a demon endowed with power to injure and even destroy infants unprotected by ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... the darkness; it was like a cruel finger pointing her out in her wretchedness and humiliation; it made her shudder at the thought of the morning twilight. What could she do? Not go to her mother—not rouse her in the dead of night to tell her this. Her mother would think she was a spectre; it would be enough to kill her with horror. And the way there was so long ... if she should meet some one ... yet she must seek some shelter, somewhere to hide herself. Five doors off there was Mrs. Pettifer's; that kind woman would take ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... term second sight seems to be meant a mode of seeing superadded to that which nature generally bestows. In the Erse it is called Taisch; which signifies likewise a spectre or a vision.' Johnson's ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... just arisen. I woke in the middle of the night, and there was a spectre sitting by my bedside to frighten me; he succeeded at first, but I managed finally to get rid of him, and to find some peace. Many of your sentences came to me, and I was able to get behind the words, and I saw plainly that the letters were just what you should have ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... fizz—bang! and that's the end of it; there's not so much as the quaver of an echo. You drink it, and instead of seeing cool vineyards and purple waters and cataracts of icicles in your glass, you find a pale, gaunt spectre, or a poor, half-drowned Bacchus, staring at you. It's just so with your Landon Snowe. You, and other people, too, have a habit of admiring him, a great creature with eyes of milky blue, who goes about disbursing his small coin like some old ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... use for such things; he works wholly by inspiration. And so, when he is asked why he considers a new movement a passing fad and quickly perishable, he finds himself unprepared with a reason and is more or less embarrassed. For a moment. Only for a moment. Then he waylays the first spectre of a reason that goes flitting through the desert places of his mind, and is at once serene again and ready for conflict. Serene and confident. Yet he should not be so, since he has had no chance to examine his catch, and cannot ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... as its master; and if, as it came down the street, its head were turned aside towards the school-house, as indicating the rider's intent to visit us, I remember that the school was thrown into as much commotion as if an armed spectre were coming down the road. Our awe of him was extreme; yet he loved to be pleasant with us. He would say,—examining the school was always a part of his object, "How much is five times seven?" "Thirty-five," was the ready ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... If a spectre had made its appearance in their midst, the girls could not have been more disconcerted. A horrible hush spread over the room, and for a moment everybody stared in frozen horror. The musicians slipped down from the dressing-table and ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... her spirit sinks, Her weary eyes are filled with tears— A horse's hoofs she hears—She shrinks! Nearer they come—Eugene appears! Ah! than a spectre from the dead More swift the room Tattiana fled, From hall to yard and garden flies, Not daring to cast back her eyes. She fears and like an arrow rushes Through park and meadow, wood and brake, The bridge and alley to the lake, Brambles ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... our great seaboard merchants, our shippers, our factors, have given their patronage to pro-slavery journals and their votes to pro-slavery politicians, with intent to preserve the Union and lay the red spectre of civil war. Their recompense is found in the repudiation of the immense debts for merchandise due them from the South, and a gigantic war waged by the Slave Power for the overthrow of the Union. The profits of a ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... amused, for she saw that the Spectre, as her friends called the grey-draped peeress, had anticipated excitement and curiosity ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... sheeted spectre white and tall, The cold mist climbs the castle wall And lays its ...
— The Sea Fogs • Robert Louis Stevenson
... saw those pale, phantasmal waves of magnetic light chasing each other across the little opening above our heads, and at first sight seeming barely to clear the treetops, I was as vividly impressed as if I had caught a glimpse of a veritable spectre of the Neversink. The sky shook and trembled ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... in London, and the fog was heavy and dark. Animate London, with smarting eyes and irritated lungs, was blinking, wheezing, and choking; inanimate London was a sooty spectre, divided in purpose between being visible and invisible, and so being wholly neither. Gaslights flared in the shops with a haggard and unblest air, as knowing themselves to be night-creatures that had no business abroad under ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... fog still clung to the face of the water and hung in the hollows of the hills; shrouded in its folds the Mayflower lay like a spectre ship, ugly, unsafe, full of discomfort and misery, but yet the only link between this handful of dying men and their home. Standish gazed at her with a gathering darkness upon his face, until the burden of his thought broke ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... seemed rosier as she smiled. Then she laid down the comb and the smile faded. It made a difference, certainly—but was it right to try to make one's hair look thicker and wavier than it really was? Between that and rouging the ethical line seemed almost impalpable, and the spectre of her rigid New England ancestry rose reprovingly before her. She was sure that none of her grandmothers had ever simulated a curl or encouraged a blush. A blush, indeed! What had any of them ever had to blush for in all their frozen lives? And what, in Heaven's name, had she? She ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... sudden pallor of their men, by men who heard the cry of their women? I heard it in the streets, spoken quite brutally sometimes, by men afraid of breaking down, and with a passionate tenderness by other men, sure of their own strength but pitiful for those whose spirit fainted at the spectre of death ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... his smiles, which, by the fools of pride, Are treasured and preserved from side to side, 150 Fly round the court, e'en when, compell'd by form, He seems most calm, his soul is in a storm. Care, like a spectre, seen by him alone, With all her nest of vipers, round his throne By day crawls full in view; when Night bids sleep, Sweet nurse of Nature! o'er the senses creep; When Misery herself no more complains, And slaves, if possible, forget their chains; Though his sense weakens, though ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... their sharp iron-pointed spears at the defenceless strangers, whose dignified remonstrances and mild entreaties were only heard in sullen silence or with scornful jeerings. After a while a knight came down the stairs, with fire-flashing eyes. They hardly knew whether to think they saw a spectre, or a wild heathen; he gave a signal, and the fatal spears closed around them. At that instant the soft tones of a woman's voice fell on their ear, calling on the Saviour's holy name for aid; at the ...
— Sintram and His Companions • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... the shade, "unless you supplement sight with reason. A spirit has merely existence, entity, and will, and is entirely invisible to your eyes." "How is it, then, that we see and hear you?" asked Cortlandt. "Are you a man, or a spectre that is able to affect our senses?" "I WAS a man," replied the spirit, "and I have given myself visible and tangible form to warn you of danger. My colleagues and I watched you when you left the cylinder and ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... great many minor disturbances, so that on rousing one night to find me closing a window against a storm she thought I was a spectre, and to this day insists that I only entered her room when I heard her scream. For this reason I have made no record of her various experiences, as I felt that her nervous ...
— Sight Unseen • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... who have sailed the Gulf as I have, but have seen the Fireship which haunts these waters, and more than once I have steered to avoid an approaching light, and after changing my course nearly eight pints, found the spectre light still dead ahead. No, gentlemen, I shan't slight the warning. If you value life, be careful; for if we get through the breaking up of the ice without losing two men, I shall ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... Another spectre that rose to haunt my last days in prison, and long stood between my parole and final pardon, was the story of one John McMath, a corporal in an Indiana cavalry company, in Pleasanton's command, that I had maltreated him when he lay wounded on the battle field close by the Big Blue, near ...
— The Story of Cole Younger, by Himself • Cole Younger
... beat his breast, he tore his hair. Dry sorrow in his stupid eyes appears, For wanting nourishment, he wanted tears; His eyeballs in their hollow sockets sink, Bereft of sleep; he loathes his meat and drink; He withers at his heart, and looks as wan As the pale spectre of a murdered man: That pale turns yellow, and his face receives The faded hue of sapless boxen leaves; In solitary groves he makes his moan, Walks early out, and ever is alone; Nor, mixed in mirth, in youthful pleasure shares, But sighs when ...
— Palamon and Arcite • John Dryden
... state of the atmosphere, known as the Fata Morgana of Sicily, the Mirage of the Desert, the Spectre of the Brocken, and the more common exhibitions of halos, coronae, and mock suns. The Mountain House at Catskill has repeatedly been seen brightly pictured on the clouds below. Rainbows are also due to this condition ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... were exultant, for another couple of weeks' strike would have given them the victory. Already the collapse of our defence was become a definite eventuality. The tact and statesmanship of Mr. Lloyd George exorcised the redoubtable spectre, but the spirit which that piece of treason revealed filled the most sanguine with dread and set those of little faith asking themselves whether this lamentable phenomenon was not one of certain ill-boding symptoms which seemed to reveal the smoothly moving current that bears doomed ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... heavy rumbling sound which shook the ground and the car we were in and caused them to tremble. The flash of the light of the passing train, as it sped on its way, was so quick by us that it was impossible to see whether it was a light or not. It appeared like the ghost of a light or a spectre in its flight through the darkness, for a moment and it was gone. It left no trace behind that I could see. There had two or three of those trains of cars passed us before I was able to make out what made the extra noise. Not having ...
— The Bark Covered House • William Nowlin
... dull old house, the yellow light in the darkened room, the faded spectre in the chair by the dressing-table glass, that I felt as if the stopping of the clocks had stopped Time in that mysterious place, and, while I and everything else outside it grew older, it stood still. Daylight never entered the ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... sought me out—wanted me to live in it. Hundreds and hundreds of times, when I am being civilised, have I not tried to do otherwise? Have I not stopped my poor pale, hurried, busy soul (like a kind of spectre flying past me) before a great book and tried to get it to speak to it, and it would not? It requires a world—a great book does—as a kind of ticket of admission, and what have I to do, when I am being civilised, with a world—the ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... there. I have already seen it several times under the trees. True, it avoided approaching me. What still remains useful in this miserable body! But my eyes are sharp yet, and I recognised the spectre—it is ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... another place. He would again offer himself to the Medici. In April he set off for Tuscany, and alighted at the convent of Monte Oliveto, near Florence. Nobody wanted him; he wandered about the Pitti like a spectre, and the Florentines wrote: actum est de eo.[59] Some parting compliments and presents from the Grand Duke sweetened his dismissal. He returned to Rome; but each new journey told upon his broken health, and another illness made him desire ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... upon him. Hardly could he rally his tongue to the enunciation of a single platitude even of the most obviously staring sort. The mighty, indeed, were fallen and the weapons of wealth-getting perished! Yet never had Iglesias felt so drawn in sympathy towards his late employer, for the spectre of possible ruin had made Sir Abel almost humble, ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... that was precisely what Mr Bickersdyke was doing. He was feeling thoroughly pleased with life. For nearly nine months Psmith had been to him a sort of spectre at the feast inspiring him with an ever-present feeling of discomfort which he had found impossible to shake off. And tonight he saw his way of getting rid ...
— Psmith in the City • P. G. Wodehouse
... Pitt was about to join the ranks of the alarmists. But members generally were of his opinion. In vain did Fox, Erskine, Grey, and Sheridan deprecate the attempt to confuse moderate Reform with reckless innovation. Burke illogically but effectively dragged in the French spectre, and Windham declared that the public mind here, as in other lands, was in such a state that the slightest scratch ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... victim as soon after as I conveniently could. The one spectre superseded the other, until all vanished. They never trouble me now, though sometimes, in my waking moments, I have met them on the roadside, glaring at me from bush or tree, until I shouted at them fiercely, and then ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... Prospero, maddening with rage and the shame of his own momentary cowardice, rushed hurriedly through the six chambers, while none followed him on account of a deadly terror that had seized upon all." The spectre and the Prince pass successively through the same series of rooms; but it takes the former fifty-one words to cover the distance, whereas it takes the ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... retired. On the morning of Margaret's funeral she could be seen, pale and haggard, tottering toward the grave-yard. The simple peasants recoiled before the ghastly figure, which, tall and trembling, with a black gown and death-white face, passed among them like a spectre. Before she reached the church she fell senseless to the ground. The humanity of those who observed her triumphed over their fears, and they bore her to a newly finished ...
— The Truce of God - A Tale of the Eleventh Century • George Henry Miles
... contrived, by bribing the porter whilst the mother was at the opera with her intended son-in-law, to reach the room of the beloved being from whom he was about to be separated for ever. Emaciated by grief, she presented the mere spectre of what she was when he last left her. As soon as he entered the room, he fell senseless at her feet, from which state he was roused by the loud fits of her frightful maniac laughter. She stared upon him, like one bewildered. He clasped her with one hand, ...
— The Stranger in France • John Carr
... suicide," replied the spectre. "I am the ghost of that fair maiden whose picture hangs over the mantel-piece in the drawing-room. I should have been your great-great-great-great-great-aunt if I had lived, Henry Hartwick Oglethorpe, for I was the own ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... the one hand, that the now naturally more numerous marriages effected a rapid increase of population, and, on the other, that the gigantically developing industry of the new era brought on many ills, never known of before, caused the spectre of "overpopulation" to rise anew. Conservative and liberal economists pull since then the same string. We shall show what this fear of so-called overpopulation means; we shall trace the feared phenomenon ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... "Anyhow, I'm goin' to stay. No sheeted spectre can't scare me away from a place I've always stayed in Summers, 'specially," she added, sarcastically, "when I'm remembered ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... shook his trembling frame. He challenged some dark spectre seemingly floating on the midnight winds. "Down, down," he growled. "You are gone forever, under the black waters. Never to rise, and there's not a weak joint in my armor. I defy the very devil himself! With Heinrich's ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... hideous images of Death. Its name was Contagion—it rushed forward with an indescribable movement. Dismay and confusion overwhelmed all that quarter of the crowded scene, that was particularly threatened by its first advance. The affrighted multitude rolled back like a tumultuous sea. The horrid spectre stopt; and left a wide interval between itself and the retiring host. A ray of heavenly light illumined the vacant space. I fixed my eye on the brilliant spot, and soon beheld the meek and gentle form of HOWARD advancing, without fear or arrogance, towards the terrific Phantom. With an untrembling ...
— The Eulogies of Howard • William Hayley
... had ever been known before. And, because of these various disturbances, the International had become the terror of Europe. Its strength and influence were vastly overestimated by the reactionary powers. Its hand was seen in every act of the discontented masses. It became the "Red Spectre," and all the powers of Europe were now seeking to destroy it. Looming thus large to the outside world, those within the International knew how baseless were the fears of its opponents. They realized that internecine war was eating its heart out. During all ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... sergeant, partly because the jury were Jacobites. The prisoners' counsel, as one of them told Sir Walter Scott, knew that their clients were guilty. A witness had seen them in the act. But the advocate (Lockhart, a Jacobite) made such fun out of the ghost that an Edinburgh jury, disbelieving in the spectre, and not loving the House of Hanover, very logically disregarded also the crushing evidence for a crime which was actually described in court by ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... Flame-decked this plain of warring kings Where poisoned fumes and beacons burn! And thro' the hyoids, huge and red, Past portals black and guidons bright To onyx lees and opal sands, The Cyclopean vaults of dwale, And cavern'd shapes that Typhon bled, Greet each wand'ring spectre's sight; Where pixies dance on wind-blown strands, Lurke gyte incubi in a hall. Here, then, reigns gyving, batter'd Doom! Where shadows vague and coffined light, Spit broths from splinter'd wracks and domes. Where viscid mists and vulpine cries ...
— Betelguese - A Trip Through Hell • Jean Louis de Esque
... the adaptation of her scenes to supernatural effects. It requires less imagination to see a figure walk out of a portrait in the gloomy castle of Otranto, than to hear the groan of Miss Reeve's spectre. ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... were flaunting ladies in bonnets of the latest fashion and marvellous petticoats, who criticized the curtains and pointed the parasol of scorn at faded draperies; people who felt the heavy hand of the spectre of departed glory, and people who exulted at beholding the hidden recesses of an Imperial mansion laid bare to the jokes and ribaldry of Belleville and La Villette. Every class of Parisian society was represented in the throng that swayed ...
— The Insurrection in Paris • An Englishman: Davy
... pervaded the halls, and like an evil-announcing night-spectre passed over the heads of the stiffened, lifeless crowd the dismal rumor—"The regent and the princess are at variance; the regent is speaking to her with vehemence, and ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... flaming characters for all men to see, appealing to the spiritualized divination of the age, proclaiming that God is NOT DEAD! That a NEW day is dawning; HAS dawned for the Negro in America. A NEW liberty; broader and BETTER. A NEW Justice, unshaded by the spectre of: "Previous condition!" That the unpaid toil of thirty decades of African slavery in America is at last to be liquidated. That the dead of our people, upon behalf of this land that it might have a BIRTH, and ...
— History of the American Negro in the Great World War • W. Allison Sweeney
... was not a sight that we should wish any one to see in our house, as desirable as a dignified spectre might ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth
... hand, though I was not without secret reproaches of my own conscience for the life I led, and that even in the greatest height of the satisfaction I ever took, yet I had the terrible prospect of poverty and starving, which lay on me as a frightful spectre, so that there was no looking behind me. But as poverty brought me into it, so fear of poverty kept me in it, and I frequently resolved to leave it quite off, if I could but come to lay up money enough to maintain me. But these were thoughts of no weight, and whenever he came to me they vanished; ...
— The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders &c. • Daniel Defoe
... possible that my father may yet be breathing on earth, living—the life of an apostate!" The idea haunted Zarah like a spectre. There was only one hope which had power to lay it: "If living, he may be spared for repentance. God is merciful; He judgeth not severely; He delighteth in receiving His wanderers back. Did not Nathan say to penitent David, 'Thou shalt not surely die;' was not even ...
— Hebrew Heroes - A Tale Founded on Jewish History • AKA A.L.O.E. A.L.O.E., Charlotte Maria Tucker
... in question, what could be more serious? Was not Enrica's marriage to raise up heirs to the Guinigi—heirs to inherit the palace and the heirlooms? If—the marchesa banished the thought, but it would return, and haunt her like a spectre—if not the palace, then at least the name—the historic name, revered throughout Italy? Nothing could deprive Enrica of the name—that name was in itself a dower. That Enrica should possess both name ...
— The Italians • Frances Elliot
... for hours and for hours You are alone with your husband and lord. There is a skeleton hid in yon flowers; There is a spectre at bed and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... for the thin, bowed figure of his grief-stricken sister. There were two willow-shaded graves in the grass-grown church-yard, and o'er them bent the spectre-like form of the Hermit of the Cedars, his gray locks moistened by the falling night-dews, and his pale face turned upward to the midnight stars with an ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... still sweet to him. His quick, darting gaze registered a dozen impressions in as many seconds: of the silver splendour spilled so lavishly upon the soulless corpse of the city, of the high, bright sky, of dead black shadows sharp-edged against the radiance, of the fleet flitting spectre that ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... among them as pale, trembling, and overwhelmed as if she had seen a spectre. In strong reaction from her effort and blighted hope she was almost in a fainting condition. Her mother's arms received her and supported her to a lounge; Mrs. Nichol gave way to bitter weeping; Mr. Kemble wrung the father's ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe
... the Major and brings him in here. But on the way Mr. Buffle looks about him in his usual suspicious manner and the Major fires and asks him "Do you see a Ghost sir?" "No sir" says Mr. Buffle. "Because I have before noticed you" says the Major "apparently looking for a spectre very hard beneath the roof of my respected friend. When you find that supernatural agent, be so good as point him out sir." Mr. Buffle stares at the Major and then nods at me. "Mrs. Lirriper sir" says the Major going ...
— Mrs. Lirriper's Legacy • Charles Dickens
... the corrupt semblances, the hypocrisies, formalisms, and fanaticisms of man's religious life. The wildness of an Antinomian predestinarianism has never been so grandly painted as in 'Johannes Agricola in Meditation'; the white heat of the persecutor glares on us, like a nightmare spectre, in 'The Heretic's Tragedy'. More subtle forms are drawn with greater elaboration. If 'Bishop Blougram's Apology', in many of its circumstances and touches, suggests the thought of actual portraiture, recalling a form and ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... for bare life, but he was powerless to loosen that awful, merciless pressure. The barbaric face that glared into his own wore a devilish grin, inexpressibly malignant. It danced before his starting eyes like some hideous spectre seen in delirium, intermittent, terrible, with blinding flashes of light breaking between. He felt as if his head were bursting. The agony of suffocation possessed him to the exclusion of all else. There came a sudden glaze in his brain that was like ...
— Rosa Mundi and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... power?" and Angelique pressed her foot hard upon the floor as the answer returned ever the same: "The heart of the Intendant is away at Beaumanoir! That pale, pensive lady" (Angelique used a more coarse and emphatic word) "stands between him and me like a spectre as she is, and obstructs the path I have sacrificed so much ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... replied Varney. "In my lord's present humour it were the ready way to confirm him in his resolution of retirement, should he know that his lady was haunted with such a spectre in his absence. He would be for playing the dragon himself over his golden fruit, and then, Tony, thy occupation is ended. A word to the wise. ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... in unshaken tones. He rose slowly to his feet and stood with his back to the fire. The light of the flames was far brighter than that of the solitary lamp that stood upon the desk, and threw the vast black shadow of Greifenstein's gaunt frame against the opposite wall, so that it towered up like a spectre of fate from the floor to the carved brown beams of ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... eyes off the Moon, they could not help noticing that they were still attended outside by the spectre of Satellite's corpse and by the other refuse of the Projectile. An occasional melancholy howl also attested Diana's recognition of her companion's unhappy fate. The travellers saw with surprise that these waifs still seemed perfectly motionless ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... they have been set; and which in Shakespeare are represented in the soul-curdling scenes of Macbeth and Richard III. He was seized with an uncontrollable desire to undo what he had done. The money, on which his heart had been set, was now like a spectre to his excited fancy. Every coin seemed to be an eye through which eternal justice was gazing at his crime or to have a tongue crying out for vengeance. As the murderer is irresistibly drawn back to the spot where his victim lies, he returned to the place where his ...
— The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ - A Devotional History of our Lord's Passion • James Stalker
... speeches, none ever was so full of wit as Mr. Pultney's last. He said, "I have heard this committee represented as a most dreadful spectre; it has been likened to all terrible things; it has been likened to the King; to the inquisition; it will be a committee of safety; it is a committee of danger; I don't know what it is to be! One gentleman, I think, called it a cloud! (this was the Attorney) ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... classical antiquity Wordsworth has traced the career of Dion,—the worthy pupil of Plato, the philosophic ruler of Syracuse, who allowed himself to shed blood unjustly, though for the public good, and was haunted by a spectre symbolical of this fatal error. At last Dion was assassinated, and the words in which the poet tells his fate seem to me to breathe the very triumph of philosophy, to paint with a touch the greatness of a spirit which makes of Death himself a deliverer, ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... lifting her long veil, turned round on the lisping dandy, who staggered back, when the dowager O'Grady appeared before him, drawn up to her full height, and anything but an agreeable expression in her eye. She stalked up towards him, something in the style of a spectre in a romance, which she was not very unlike; and as she advanced, he retreated, until he got the table between him and this most ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... ship?" echoed the Spaniard. Then, with horrified gestures, as directed against some spectre, he unconsciously fell into the ready arms of his attendant, who, with a silent appeal toward Captain Delano, seemed beseeching him not again to broach a theme so unspeakably ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... drew it back, but as he did so he recoiled violently, for he saw advancing upon him a terrible spectre, holding its head in its two hands. Its eyes seemed full of blood and fire, and rolled round and round in a most horrible manner. The hermit was about to shriek in terror when the head of the apparition, after laughing ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... may be so immune from timidity Never a spectre could fill them with fright, Men who could keep their accustomed placidity Were they to meet in the gloom of the night Lady Hermione tramping the corridor, Wicked Sir Guy with his fetters adrag, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, April 28, 1920 • Various
... treasure it. A sister-in-law of his, who was often an inmate of his home, told me that Hawthorne really believed in ghosts. It will be remembered that in the introduction to the Mosses from an Old Manse, Hawthorne speaks of the spectre of an ancient minister who haunted it, the rustling of his silken gown was sometimes heard in the hallways. My friend attributed this passage to something which happened during one of her visits. She sat one evening ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... said Williams again to his motionless and silent wife. He had allowed only his head to appear. His wife, with one hand upon the edge of the table and the other at her knee, was regarding him with wide eyes and parted lips as if he were a spectre. She looked to be one who was living in terror, and even the familiar face at the door had thrilled her because it had ...
— The Monster and Other Stories - The Monster; The Blue Hotel; His New Mittens • Stephen Crane
... upright there, Whilst jammed between them, in the filthy den, Were twenty-three more miserable men, Who hardly could be said to be alive, So fearfully did death among them strive To make them all his own, leaving no trace Of aught but spectre life in that vile place. This dreadful history cannot fail to show, How fatal consequences surely flow, From disregard of the Creator's laws, For these foul poisonous vapours were the cause Of five score agonising deaths, within The space of a few hours, from wilful sin. Many such instances ...
— Home Lyrics • Hannah. S. Battersby
... printed in folio 1633. This play (says Langbaine) seems an imitation of the ancients; the Prologue is spoken by a ghost. This spectre gives an account of each character, which is perhaps done after the manner of Euripides, who introduced one of the chief actors as the Prologue, whose business it was to explain all those circumstances which preceded the opening the stage. He has not in one ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume I. • Theophilus Cibber
... years the McPhersons leased Evermay to Mr. William B. Orme and, certainly, during those years the spectre of the inhospitality of its first owner was laid, for the Ormes were noted for their delightful parties and there, too, were June ...
— A Portrait of Old George Town • Grace Dunlop Ecker
... I'll knock you down the stairs." The sexton thought: "He can't mean that in earnest," so gave forth no sound, and stood as though he were made of stone. Then the youth shouted out to him the third time, and as that too had no effect, he made a dash at the spectre and knocked it down the stairs, so that it fell about ten steps and remained lying in a corner. Thereupon he tolled the bell, went home to bed without saying a word, and fell asleep. The sexton's wife waited a long time for her husband, but he never appeared. At last ...
— The Blue Fairy Book • Various
... rim dips; the stars rush out: At one stride comes the dark; With far-heard whisper o'er the sea, Off shot the spectre-bark. ...
— The Children's Garland from the Best Poets • Various
... completely vanished. The huge solid shell is full of expression; it looks as if it had been hollowed out by the sincerity of early faith, and it opens into a cloister as impressive as itself. Wherever one goes, in France, one meets, looking backward a little, the spectre of the great Revolution; and one meets it always in the shape of the destruction of something beautiful and precious. To make us forgive it at all, how much it must also have destroyed that was more hateful than itself! ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... Favour of the Deity, you frowned upon him, and struck the Torch out of his Hand into the River. The God after having regarded you with a Look that spoke at [once [1]] his Pity and Displeasure, flew away. Immediately a kind of Gloom overspread the whole Place. At the same time I saw an hideous Spectre enter at one end of the Valley. His Eyes were sunk into his Head, his Face was pale and withered, and his Skin puckered up in Wrinkles. As he walked on the sides of the Bank the River froze, the Flowers faded, the Trees shed their Blossoms, the Birds dropped from off the Boughs, and ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... appeared again round the corner of the house, in the same order, but this time with so small an interval that the fugitive barely saved himself through the window. Once more, while we stared in stupefaction, they flashed out and in; and this time it seemed to me that as they vanished the black spectre ...
— From the Memoirs of a Minister of France • Stanley Weyman
... in many a Roman villa Earth and her ivies eat, Saw coloured pavements sink and fade In flowers, and the windy colonnade Like the spectre ...
— The Ballad of the White Horse • G.K. Chesterton
... from his ship the Topaze, and on his way home. He was buried at sea on the 2nd of May, 1872. Poor fellow! He was the smallest in size of all the children, in his manhood reaching only to a little over five feet; and throughout his childhood was never called by any other name than the "Ocean Spectre," from a strange little weird yet most attractive look in his large wondering eyes, very happily caught in a sketch in oils by the good Frank Stone, done at Bonchurch in September 1849 and remaining in his aunt's possession. "Stone has painted," Dickens then wrote to me, ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... the command of a Division. We were all sincerely sorry to lose him from the 3rd Brigade. He was ever a good and true friend, and took a deep interest in his men. But the immediate effect of his departure, as far as I was concerned, was to remove out of my life the hideous spectre of No. 2 General Hospital, and to give me absolute liberty in wandering through the trenches. In fact, as I told him sometime afterwards, I was beginning a little poem, the first line of which was "I never knew what freedom ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... paper?" No! America, thanks to God and herself is rich. But the right to take ten pounds, implies the right to take a thousand; and what must be the wealth that avarice, aided by power, cannot exhaust? True, the spectre is now small; but the shadow he casts before him is huge enough to darken all this fair land. Others, in sentimental style, talk of the immense debt of gratitude which we owe to England. And what is the amount ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... hair, As living Cynthia's tresses soft and fair: Beauteous her eyes as those once fir'd my breast, Her snowy bosom bare, and sing'd her breast. Her beryl-ring retain'd the fiery rays, Spread the pale flame, and shot the funeral blaze; As late stretch'd out the bloodless spectre stood, And her dead lips were wet with Lethe's flood. She breath'd her soul, sent forth her voice aloud, And chaf'd her hands ...
— Miscellanies upon Various Subjects • John Aubrey
... the alarmists. But members generally were of his opinion. In vain did Fox, Erskine, Grey, and Sheridan deprecate the attempt to confuse moderate Reform with reckless innovation. Burke illogically but effectively dragged in the French spectre, and Windham declared that the public mind here, as in other lands, was in such a state that the slightest scratch might ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... feared that a rebellion might be the consequence. The weather was fearful during the whole day; the snow rose up in thick whirlpools, wrapping up the Forward in an impenetrable cloak. Sometimes, under the action of the storm, the fog was torn asunder, and displayed towards land, raised up like a spectre, the Devil's Thumb. ...
— The English at the North Pole - Part I of the Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... days of defeat, when he fled from his miscarried picture, met an old acquaintance. This time he had sworn he would never go home again, and he had been tramping across Paris since noon, as if at his heels he had heard the wan spectre of the big, nude figure of his picture—ravaged by constant retouching, and always left incomplete—pursuing him with a passionate craving for birth. The mist was melting into a yellowish drizzle, befouling the muddy streets. ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... of individuals was allowed to take place. The Germans and Austrians were exultant, for another couple of weeks' strike would have given them the victory. Already the collapse of our defence was become a definite eventuality. The tact and statesmanship of Mr. Lloyd George exorcised the redoubtable spectre, but the spirit which that piece of treason revealed filled the most sanguine with dread and set those of little faith asking themselves whether this lamentable phenomenon was not one of certain ill-boding symptoms which seemed to reveal the smoothly moving ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... one hand, that the now naturally more numerous marriages effected a rapid increase of population, and, on the other, that the gigantically developing industry of the new era brought on many ills, never known of before, caused the spectre of "overpopulation" to rise anew. Conservative and liberal economists pull since then the same string. We shall show what this fear of so-called overpopulation means; we shall trace the feared phenomenon back to its legitimate source. Among those who suffer of the overpopulation ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... name. I imagined that he was your spectre, when you spoke of Harley Street. Does he send you ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... still stood by her door, like a spectre in the sunshine, her thin hands clasped together as she gazed away over the plain ...
— The Indian's Hand - 1892 • Lorimer Stoddard
... intercourse is kept up between the living and the departed. The superstition of a certain species of blood-sucking spectres, known to the novel reading world under the name of vampyres, a superstition retained chiefly in Dalmatia, belongs also here. In modern Greek, such a spectre is called Brukolacas in Servian Wukodlak. We do not however recollect the appearance of a vampyre, in any genuine production of modern Greek or Servian poetry. It seems as if the sound sense of the common people had taught them, that this superstition ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... afraid of what they can do to us. That accounts for our politeness. Death, universal and inevitable, is none the less a villainous institution. Every other antagonist can be ignored or bribed or circumvented or crushed outright. But here is a damnable spectre who knocks at the door and does not wait to hear you say, 'Come in.' Hateful! If other people think differently it is because they live differently. How do they live? Like a cow that has stumbled into a dark hole, and now spends its time wondering how it managed ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... chasm which still divides the pretender Law from the exiled King. In a like manner, and with feigned humility, the Cold Demon advanced to serve Religion, and by guile and violence usurped her throne; but the pure in heart still fly from the spectre Theology to dance in ecstasy before the starry and eternal goddess. Statecraft, also, that tender Shepherd of the Flocks, has been despoiled of his crook and bell, and wanders in unknown desolation while, beneath ...
— The Crock of Gold • James Stephens
... preceding me, had taken possession. Mr. Warder was reduced to a condition of abject obedience, and for a month and more my aunt hardly left her girl-boy's pillow. Indeed, it was long before I was let to see him, and then he was but a spectre of himself, with not enough blood to blush with. Our officers very promptly left for New York the day after our fight, and we heard ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... protection for that unhappy man filled her heart. For unhappy he was! She saw at once that he had had a long slide downhill since his last visit to her. He was frightened—frightened immediately now of Grace and the room and the physical world—but frightened also behind these things at some spectre all his own. Grace sat down and tried to recover herself. She began to talk in her society voice. Maggie knew that she was praying, over and over again, with a monotony possible only to the very stupid, that there would be no callers ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... a person than Marshal Saxe. One night, on the march, he bivouacked in a haunted castle, and slept the sleep of the brave until midnight, when he was awakened by hideous howls heralding the approach of the spectre. When it appeared, the Marshal first discharged his pistol point-blank at it without effect, and then struck it with his sabre, which was shivered in his hand. The invulnerable spectre then beckoned the amazed Marshal to follow, and preceded him to a spot where the floor of ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... mother was removed to Saint Denis. Four or five days before the horrible death of our adorable Henrietta, the arrows of Saint Denis appeared to me in a dream covered in dusky flames, and amid them I saw the spectre of Death, holding in his hand the necklaces and bracelets of a young lady. The appalling death of my cousin followed close upon this presage. Henceforth, the view of Saint Denis spoils all these pleasant landscapes for ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... not quite, dark, for a lamp, closely shaded, cast a dim light on a Prayer-book, placed on a small table, behind which stood poor Mr. Greaves—a black spectre, whose white bands were just discernible below a face whose nervous, disturbed expression was lost in the general gloom. He carefully avoided looking at the bride, fearing perhaps some appeal on her part such as would make his situation perplexing. Contempt and poverty had brought his stamp ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... O Muse! spectre insatiable, Ne m'en demande pas si long. L'homme n'crit rien sur le sable A l'heure o passe l'aquilon. J'ai vu le temps o ma jeunesse Sur mes lvres tait sans cesse Prte chanter comme un oiseau; Mais j'ai souffert ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... his ragged uniform, haggard but eager, was standing like a gaunt spectre in the sunlight that flooded the terrace. The vagabond, with the eyes of all upon him, raised and lowered his arms thrice, and the face ...
— Beverly of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... Egypt, soil of Ekkiklyma, the Elegants, effeminate Eleusis, mysteries of —women at Eleven (the), who they were Embezzling State funds Empusa, a spectre Engastromythes, explained Englottogastors, meaning of Epicrates, a demagogue Epigonus, a pathic Erasinidas, a general Erinnys, a fury Eryxis, noted for ugliness Ether (the), physical theory of ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... her hands on seeing the spectre which addressed her. At that moment the pale Veronique, standing in the moonlight, was like a shade defined upon the darkness of the open door-way. Her eyes ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... the car we were in and caused them to tremble. The flash of the light of the passing train, as it sped on its way, was so quick by us that it was impossible to see whether it was a light or not. It appeared like the ghost of a light or a spectre in its flight through the darkness, for a moment and it was gone. It left no trace behind that I could see. There had two or three of those trains of cars passed us before I was able to make out what made ...
— The Bark Covered House • William Nowlin
... he addresses himself to battle against the guardian angels he stands like Teneriffe or Atlas: his stature reaches the sky. Contrast with these descriptions the lines in which Dante has described the gigantic spectre of Nimrod. "His face seemed to me as long and as broad as the ball of St. Peter's at Rome; and his other limbs were in proportion; so that the bank, which concealed him from the waist downwards, nevertheless ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... night. He struck slowly across the open grounds towards the sunken fields beyond. When-midway across the grounds, he turned towards the mansion, and saw three of the front windows filled with white faces, gazing in terror at the wonderful spectre. Soon descending a slope, he disappeared ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... decision he had just made, weakly, it seemed to him. A good deal of the importance of his revolt against commercial medicine disappeared. Lindsay tried oily, obsequious means of attracting attention. He was to hang his sign from a corner store. Some dim idea of the terrible spectre that haunts the days and nights of those without capital or position confronted him. If he had never been rich, he had always the means to give him time to look about, to select from a number of opportunities. If he could manage to wait, even six months, some hospital place might turn up. ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... there was a spectre grim, A skeleton in Savitri's heart, Looming in shadow, somewhat dim, But which would never thence depart. It was that fatal, fatal speech Of Narad Muni. As the days Slipt smoothly past, each after each, ...
— Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan • Toru Dutt
... a panic-terror pervaded the halls, and like an evil-announcing night-spectre passed over the heads of the stiffened, lifeless crowd the dismal rumor—"The regent and the princess are at variance; the regent is speaking to her with vehemence, and ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... appears in terrible guise, and as though taking part in what is going on. The scaffold is the accomplice of the executioner; it devours, it eats flesh, it drinks blood; the scaffold is a sort of monster fabricated by the judge and the carpenter, a spectre which seems to live with a horrible vitality composed of all the ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... revolver relaxed. With a subdued cry of terror, Bradley was on his feet, glaring at the accusing sight. He saw Henley enter the wood and move on unsuspectingly toward the horrible spectre which swung across his path. Indeed, Henley passed through it as through a vapor, still whistling. With a cry still in his throat, Bradley dashed into the wood ...
— Dixie Hart • Will N. Harben
... lack of means is a lupine ghost sired by the same spectre as the lack of health, and both must be met and put to flight by the same mighty weapons ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... was at Athens a house which was roomy and commodious, but which bore an ill-name and was plague-stricken. In the silence of the night there was heard a sound of iron. On closer attention it proved to be a rattling of chains, first at a distance and then close at hand. Soon there appeared the spectre of an old man, miserably thin and squalid, with a long beard and unkempt hair. On his legs were fetters, and on his hands chains, which he kept shaking. In consequence the inhabitants spent horrible and sleepless nights; the sleeplessness made them ill, and, ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... preserved their patriarchal virtues: they are upright and honest, but at the same time very proud, and impatient of every kind of authority.... They are ignorant, and read no books or papers—only the Old Testament; but Kruger knew he could rouse these people by waving before them the spectre of England, and crying in their ears the word 'Independence.' And this is what disgusts us, that under cover of principles so dear to us all, independence and national honour, these brave men are sent to the battlefield to preserve for a tyrannical and venal oligarchy the right to share amongst ...
— Native Races and the War • Josephine Elizabeth Butler
... neighbouring collier's eyes. He sees himself reflected in the neighbouring opinion, like in a Brocken mist, several feet taller on the strength of the pianoforte, and he is satisfied. He lives for the sake of that Brocken spectre, the reflection of himself in the human opinion. You do the same. If you are of high importance to humanity you are of high importance to yourself. That is why you work so hard at the mines. If you can produce coal to ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... against Claude Vignon for what he considered the utmost indelicacy, and he pitied poor Felicite. How was it possible to be beloved by that sublime creature and not adore her on his knees, not believe her on the faith of a glance or a smile? He felt a desire to turn and rend that cold, pale spectre of a man. Ignorant he might be, as Felicite had told him, of the tricks of thought of the jesters of the press, but one thing he ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... founded on perjury; peace and love will be banished from among mortals. God, take yourself away! for, from this day forth, cured of your fear and become wise, I swear, with hand extended to heaven, that you are only the tormentor of my reason, the spectre of my conscience. ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... anonymous line announcing his death by drowning to the only person she had ever heard Charles mention as a relative. Posting this stealthily, and with a fearful look around her, she seemed to acquire a terror of the late events, pursuing her way to the station as if followed by a spectre. ...
— Victorian Short Stories, - Stories Of Successful Marriages • Elizabeth Gaskell, et al.
... happy as myself, but now the old restlessness sounded in her voice. I looked at her, and saw her eyes staring wearily into space. Oh dear, oh dear, the narcotic of the new life is already losing its power; the grim spectre of the past is casting ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... answer; but lifting her long veil, turned round on the lisping dandy, who staggered back, when the dowager O'Grady appeared before him, drawn up to her full height, and anything but an agreeable expression in her eye. She stalked up towards him, something in the style of a spectre in a romance, which she was not very unlike; and as she advanced, he retreated, until he got the table between him ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... lowly, she said, with trembling lips and tearful voice: "Sire, I am prepared to do all that you wish. I shall announce my betrothal to the prince cheerfully, and without sighs or tears. But be merciful, and free me forever from that hideous spectre which ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... pergam, the penciled pheasant, the peacock pheasant, the blue pheasant partridge, the mina, and the dial bird, with an endless variety of parrots, lories, green-feathered pigeons of various sizes, and wood-peckers. Besides these there are falcons, owls, or "spectre birds," sweet-voiced butcher birds, storks, fly-catchers, and doves, and the swallow which builds the gelatinous edible nest, which is the foundation of the expensive luxury "Bird's Nest Soup," frequents the verdant islands on the coast. [*Mr. ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... stables, partly ruinous, and closed on the landward front by a low embattled wall, while the remaining side of the quadrangle was occupied by the tower itself, which, tall and narrow, and built of a greyish stone, stood glimmering in the moonlight, like the sheeted spectre of some huge giant. A wilder or more disconsolate dwelling it was perhaps difficult to conceive. The sombrous and heavy sound of the billows, successively dashing against the rocky beach at a profound distance beneath, ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... too,' I said, remembering that the sceptic is sometimes vouchsafed revelations to which the most devout believer may not aspire. It is, for instance, always the young man who scoffs at ghosts that the family spectre chooses as his audience. But it required more than a mere sneer or an empty gibe to pump information out of Bradshaw. He took me ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... holding converse with the broom, or the peruke, or a spectre whom he, and no one else could see Frau Schimmel could not tell, but she had then recovered herself sufficiently to ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... audience, shocked, as the officer had been seen but the night previously among them in lusty life, and death is a spectre most terrible in a saloon of ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas
... was one of these two disciples, finds out the apostles, to make the report of what had passed to them. No sooner was the story told, but Jesus appears among them. They were all frightened and confounded, and thought they saw a spectre. He rebukes them for infidelity, and their slowness in believing the prophecies of his resurrection: and though he refused before to let the women touch him (a circumstance which I ought not to have omitted); yet now he invites the apostles to handle him, to examine his hands and feet, and ...
— The Trial of the Witnessses of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ • Thomas Sherlock
... presently recollected himself, and a gloomy kind of tranquility assumed the empire of his heart. He was more watchful than ever for his beloved Imogen; he gazed with threefold earnestness upon the fearful spectre. ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin
... heart to resent their spoliation and attempted extirpation, and in 1761 their misery under the exactions of landlords and a church which tried to spread Christianity by the brotherly agency of the tithe-proctor, gave birth to Whiteboyism—a terrible spectre, which, under various names and with various modifications, has ridden Ireland down to our ...
— Burke • John Morley
... both silent again, and Archer felt the spectre of Count Olenski's letter grimacing hideously between them. The letter filled only half a page, and was just what he had described it to be in speaking of it to Mr. Letterblair: the vague charge of an angry blackguard. But how much truth was ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... in Ethel's eye on the night when he had first linked his fate with the other man's. Walkham's experience, too, and Reginald's remarks on the busts of Shakespeare and Balzac unmistakably pointed toward the new and horrible spectre that Ethel's revelation had raised ...
— The House of the Vampire • George Sylvester Viereck
... without his aid. Medland's sanguine mind caught eagerly at the chance, and in a moment turned it into a hope—almost a conviction. Then the whole thing would go down to the grave with the unlucky man, and not even its spectre survive to trouble him. For if no one had certain knowledge, if there were never more than gossip, growing, as time passed, fainter and fainter from having no food to feed on, would not utter silence follow at last, so that the things ...
— Half a Hero - A Novel • Anthony Hope
... perceiving her, came forward, and Belfield, turning to see who interrupted them, started as if a spectre had crossed his eyes, slapped his hat over his face, and hastily went out ...
— Cecilia vol. 3 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... are not animal, and, therefore, they are spiritual. Thus, any man with enough money to take a shop, stock his shelves, and pay for advertisements shall be able to evoke the pure and censorious spectre of the circulating libraries whenever his own commercial spirit ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... now, and you cannot get away. Done is done! What thou hast written thou hast written; and neither thou nor anybody else can blot it out.' Hence the despair into which awakened consciences are apt to drop, and the feeling, which dogs the sense of evil like a spectre, of the hopelessness of all attempts to make oneself better. Brethren, they are both lies; the lie that we are pure is the first; the lie that we are too black to be purified is the second. 'If we ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... boy; what ghost? Thy fancy hath converted some white cow into a spectre, in the uncertain light ...
— The Rival Heirs being the Third and Last Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... eyes saw nothing of its homely peace. They saw, instead, a curving stretch of moonlit beach and a trail which wound upwards into thick darkness. Ever since she had broken away, that vision had haunted her, now near and menacing, now dimmer and farther off, but always there like a spectre of ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... ago of being able to see things inside his head; in his drunken hysteria he was to see them always. The vision he beheld against the darkness of his mind projected itself and glared at him. He was pursued by a spectre in his own brain, and for that reason there was no escape. Wherever he went ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... not a little at this cavalier treatment, but could arrive at no satisfactory conclusion regarding it. She finally tried to dismiss the matter by ascribing it to over-sensitiveness on her part, but every now and then it haunted her like an offending spectre. ...
— Grace Harlowe's First Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... taken with a panic; she fancied herself deserted in a giant tomb, with dead men gathering about her. She herself was in truth the grisliest spectre there, in her white satin gown and feathers, and the horror of her hideous face. But she took to flight, and the key remained unnoticed in ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... lasted as long as the sun stayed yet above the Alps; and the images with their aureoles shrank and dilated with the undulations of the mist. I could not but think of that old formula for an anthropomorphic Deity—'the Brocken-spectre of the human spirit projected on the mists of the Non-ego.' Even like those cloud-phantoms are the gods made in the image of man, who have been worshipped through successive ages of the world, gods dowered with like passions to those of ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... momentary miracles; by which term I mean to denote miracles of which the whole existence is of short duration, in contradistinction to miracles which are attended with permanent effects. The appearance of a spectre, the hearing of a supernatural sound, is a momentary miracle. The sensible proof is gone when the apparition or sound is over. But if a person born blind be restored to sight, a notorious cripple to the use of his limbs, or a dead man to life, here is a permanent effect produced by supernatural ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley
... also became the means of preserving and transmitting an immense stock of tales, by which the later poetry of Europe profited largely. One of these legends, narrated by Gervase of Tilbury, suggested to Scott the combat of Marmion with the spectre knight. ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... the wistful figure of the poor man doomed to conditions which he could not change—born, it may be, like Pinetop, self-poised, yet with an untaught intellect, grasping, like him, after the primitive knowledge which should be the birthright of every child. Even the spectre of slavery, which had shadowed his thoughts, as it had those of many a generous mind around him, faded abruptly before the very majesty of the problem that faced him now. In his sympathy for the slave, whose bondage he and his race had striven ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... not fall," continued the old gentleman, and Fritz Nettenmair's bright, new heaven sank into nothingness. The old spectre held him again in its grasp. He loved again the woman from whom he had just wanted to flee. The old gentleman had awaited his son's assent. "You will go," he said, when the son remained silent. "You will go. Tomorrow before day-break you will be on your way to America, or I shall be on my ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... reader ever hear of Finance-Minister Creutz, once a poor Regiment's Auditor, when his Majesty, as yet Crown-Prince, found talent in him? Can readers fish up from their memory, twenty years back, anything of a terrific Spectre walking in the Berlin Palace, for certain nights, during that "Stralsund Expedition" or famed Swedish-War time, to the terror of mankind? Terrific Spectre, thought to be in Swedish pay,—properly a spy Scullion, in a small concern of Grumkow VERSUS Creutz? [Antea, vol. v. pp. 356-358; Wilhelmina.] ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... celebrated ballad by Buerger, the German lyric poet, a maiden whose lover dies and whose spectre appears to her on horseback and carries her ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... becoming, in fact, almost too much for Lady Agatha. Most unpleasant things were happening at home, and occasionally Castle Clare loomed up grayly in the distance like a spectre. Certain tradespeople who ought, in Lady Claraway's opinion, to have kept quiet and waited in patience until things became better, were becoming hideously persistent. In view of the fact that Alix's next season must ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... a means for preserving the records of history, and it has also been a treasure house of stories, furnishing material for much of the poetry of Europe. One of these legends gave Scott the story of the combat between Marmion and the Spectre Knight. ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... show you a life, the sport of fate and circumstances, hurried along through shifting storm and sun, bright with trusting innocence and anon black with heartless villainy, a career which moves on in love and desertion and anguish, always hovered over by the dark spectre of INSANITY—an insanity hereditary and induced by mental torture,—until it ends, if end it must in your verdict, by one of those fearful accidents, which are inscrutable to men and of which God alone ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... perfection, though it is part of existence, is strong enough to deliver man in this world from the web of evil in which also he is involved, nor even that he makes any approach on the whole towards the loosening of the toils. The spectre of world-destruction, as Whitman says of Carlyle, was always before them. And I wish to ask later on if we may not surmise definite reasons in their own history for this recurring note of discouragement. But let us first look at the positive side, and first in Plato. ...
— Progress and History • Various
... that carried off Petrarch's Laura, and those other thousands of whom the world knew nothing then and knows nothing now. Some, too, have heard that the plague swept over Europe—desolating, devastating—the spectre with the swinging scythe mowing down broad swathes of men. Some, when they hear of it, picture to themselves Pope Clement VI. at Avignon, sitting in that vast palace that overlooks the Rhone, the stench of corpses mastered for him by the fragrant smoke of aromatic ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... saw them gaping round the tortured lover; and grinned as he thought of some respectable, newly-married spectre enabled by the state of his own affections to catch an inkling of what was going on within Bosinney; he fancied he could see his mouth getting wider and wider, and the fog going down and down. For in George was all that contempt ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... he spoke. The reception-room is on the right of the passage. Armstrong opened the door and looked in, but, instead of advancing, he stood transfixed, gazing before him open-mouthed as though he had seen a spectre, for there, in front of the fire, sat a beautiful, refined-looking girl, with golden hair and blue eyes, gazing pensively at the ...
— Blue Lights - Hot Work in the Soudan • R.M. Ballantyne
... as it were from that merry and populous chamber of life and health, once again I met the Spectre I derided, a red-headed, red-visaged Thing that chose me out to stop and grin at. Somehow I was not minded to return ...
— Doctor Therne • H. Rider Haggard
... enough, but what unimaginable dreariness there will be when there are neither rich nor poor, when all have been educated, when self-education has ceased. A terrible world to dream of, worse, far worse, in darkness and hopelessness than Dante's lowest circle of hell. The spectre of famine, of the plague, of war, etc., are mild and gracious symbols compared with that menacing figure, Universal Education, with which we are threatened, which has already eunuched the genius of the last five-and-twenty ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... the stranger: surely no man's tongue Was e'er so soft, or half so sweet, as his. Oft as he listened, Nino's heart had sprung With sudden start as from a spectre's kiss; For deep in many a word he deemed had rung The liquid fall of some loved emphasis; And so it pierced his sorrow to the core, The ghost of tones that he should hear ...
— Among the Millet and Other Poems • Archibald Lampman
... saw a ghost, as he believed, for the flour that still remained in the sack had completely whitened his fellow-traveller and given him a most unearthly appearance. The frightened miller was "putrified," as Mrs. Malaprop would say, at the sight, and a push from the white spectre brought the unfortunate man to the ground, when away rode the gallant quartermaster with his sacks of flour, which, at length bursting, made a ludicrous spectacle of ...
— Reminiscences of Captain Gronow • Rees Howell Gronow
... prisoners beside. Of Maurice's army not more than nine or ten were slain. The story sounds like a wild legend. It was as if the arm of each Netherlander had been nerved by the memory of fifty years of outrage, as if the spectre of their half-century of crime had appalled the soul of every Spaniard. Like a thunderbolt the son of William the Silent smote that army of Philip, and in an instant it lay blasted on the heath of Tiel. At least it could hardly be called sagacious generalship ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... relics of the cloister for the tears of the blessed saint. The venerable guardian of St. Bridget probably expected the interference of her patroness—she of Holyrood might, perhaps, hope that David Ruzzio's spectre would arise to prevent the profanation. But Mrs. Policy stood not long in the silence of horror. She uplifted her voice, and screamed as loudly as Queen Mary herself when the dreadful deed was in the act ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... thou goest," said Lord Huntinglen; "and I will have thee try, moreover, whether a cup of sack cannot bring some colour into these cheeks of thine. It were a shame to my household, thou shouldst glide out into the Strand after such a spectre-fashion as thou now wearest—Look to it, Dalgarno, for the honour of our ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... here alive, and close the opening to my tomb, and go away and charge everybody with my murder?" asked the spectre, bitterly. "O, uncle, hard of head and paralyzed in recollection! is it any good excuse for sacrificing my poor life, that, in your cloven state, you put me down a cellar, like a pan of milk, and then could not remember where you'd put me? And was it noble, ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., Issue 31, October 29, 1870 • Various
... window-curtain farthest from him. He half- opened his eyes, his mad dream still clung to him, and there was the dead Madge before him, pale in death, and holding a child in her arms! He distinctly heard himself scream as he started up in affright; he could not tell where he was; the spectre faded and the furniture and hangings transformed themselves into their familiar reality. He could not lie down again, and rose and dressed himself. He was not the man to believe that the ghost could be a revelation ...
— Clara Hopgood • Mark Rutherford
... powers as of his. How then could she forget it all, and wipe it away from her mind, as she would figures from a slate with a wet towel? How could it be fit that she should again be a bride with such a spectre of a husband haunting her memory? She had known that the request was to be made when he had come so quickly, and had not doubted it for a moment when he took his sudden departure. She had known it well, when just now the servant told her that Mr. Fletcher was in ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... candle that he could be no longer seen, he could still be heard marching about in the dark, however, and presently returned slowly towards the light, and emerged by degrees from obscurity, looking like a spectre, with his white robe and cap, and his tall, ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble (1871-1883) • Edward FitzGerald
... was a dictatorship, which was quite a new substitute for monarchy, and the Orleans spectre was no more than an illusion on which the Gironde spent much of its strength. In retaliation, they were accused of Federalism, and this also was a false suspicion. Federal ideas, the characteristic of America, had the sanction of the greatest names in the political literature of France—Montesquieu ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... hard enough stone for the macadam roads, thenceforward. The poor gentleman, after having played a certain part in the reaction after the Revolution of 1848, by the publication of a sensational pamphlet entitled Le Spectre Rouge, died of grief at the death of a son ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... people of the pine, Making their summer lives one ceaseless song, Were the sole echoes, save my steed's and mine, And vesper bells that rose the boughs along, The spectre huntsman of Onesti's line, His hell-dogs, and their chase, and the fair throng Which learn'd from this example not to fly From a true ...
— Ravenna, A Study • Edward Hutton
... Affection's fondest pledge was worn— But now is borne away by thee Memorial of thine agony! Yet with thine own best blood shall drip; Thy gnashing tooth, and haggard lip; Then stalking to thy sullen grave, Go—and with Gouls and Afrits rave, Till these in horror shrink away From spectre more ...
— The Vampyre; A Tale • John William Polidori
... menacing mention of Wylder's name by her brother, an indistinct remembrance of something unpleasant or horrible. It may have been mere fancy, or it may have referred to something long ago imperfectly heard. It was a spectre of mist, that evaporated before she could fix her eyes on it, but ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
Copyright © 2025 Dictionary One.com
|
|
|
