"Ghostly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... he had taken out and still held in his hand. Without attempting to decide whether the thing he had seen was of common clay or of some lighter substance, he still did not lend his mind with sufficient readiness to ghostly theory to imagine that his unwelcome guest could pass through ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... out through new and always beautiful ways; through tunnels where feet and voices rang with ghostly boomings most pleasant to the ear; over bridges whence they saw—in partial proof of Isaac Borrachsohn's veracity—"mans und ladies ridin'." Of a surety they rode nothing more exciting than horses, but that was, to East Side eyes, an unaccustomed sight, and Eva opined that it was owing, probably, ...
— Little Citizens • Myra Kelly
... the applause was loud, The pleased musician smiled and bowed; The wood-fire clapped its hands of flame, The shadows on the wainscot stirred, And from the harpsichord there came A ghostly murmur of acclaim, A sound like that sent down at night By birds of passage in their flight, From the remotest ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... their way down to the beach. At first the storm completely deafened all sound. The lanterns, waved here and there by unseen hands, seemed part of some ghostly tableau, of which the only background was the raging of the storm. Then suddenly, with a startling hiss, another rocket clove its way through the darkness. They had an instantaneous but brilliant view of all that was happening,—saw the trawler ...
— The Zeppelin's Passenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... ghostly and unkempt appearance. The atmosphere of the sitting-room was stuffy and redolent of stale tobacco smoke. Wrayson's first action was to ...
— The Avenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... domestic, rode to the town on the laird's best horse, and returned with the mid-wife en croupe. Daring the short space of his absence, the Tweed, which they must necessarily ford, rose to a dangerous height. Brownie, who transported his charge with all the rapidity of the ghostly lover of Lenore, was not to be stopped by this obstacle. He plunged in with the terrified old lady, and landed her in safety where her services were wanted. Having put the horse into the stable (where it was afterwards found in a woeful plight), he proceeded to the room of the servant, ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott
... she rose, and dressed mechanically, avoiding the mirror, and pinning her veil securely to her hair. She went downstairs slowly, clinging to the railing from sheer weakness. She was as frail and ghostly as some disembodied ...
— A Spinner in the Sun • Myrtle Reed
... the scrub was a small ghastly, battle-rent piece of ground, not one hundred yards in width and rising slightly. Beyond and close on either side, it was bounded by the starry heavens, and seemed a strange, detached dreamland where men had gone mad. The Turks lined the far edge, their ghostly faces appearing and vanishing in the eerie light, as they poured a point-blank fusillade at the shattered series of shallow holes where the remnants of the New Zealanders were fighting gallantly. Sweeping round to ...
— The Tale of a Trooper • Clutha N. Mackenzie
... from day to day, he meets members of the bar, who congratulate him upon his advent, and feels his importance as he waits from day to day for the visit of his first client, but collapses when he arrives and with ghostly dread salutes him and prepares to listen with a disturbed sense of an awful responsibility he is about to undertake. For, side by side with his client's statements there seem to appear in stately majesty all the adjuncts of the law: First, ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... tent, and covered her head up in the bed-clothes; but in about ten minutes she came back, feeling a little ashamed of her timidity, and sat down by Gypsy before the fire. It was a strange picture—the ghostly white tents and tangled brushwood gilded with the light; the great forest stretching away darkly beyond; the fitful shadows and glares from the flickering fire that chased each other in strange, uncouth shapes, among the ...
— Gypsy Breynton • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... reason of a simple mechanism, the lantern threw out its bright beams, involving the vessel and the foam-clad boiling sea in a circle of light which ended in darkness profound, forming, as it were, a bright but ghostly chamber shut in with walls of ebony, and revealing, in all its appalling reality, the fury of the sea. What horrors lay concealed in the darkness beyond no one could certainly know; but the watch on board the Gull could form from past experience a pretty good conception of them, as they cowered ...
— The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands • R.M. Ballantyne
... the change in Mr. Rollin's tone, nor the meaning in his eyes, but as we stood there by the window, in the full moonlight, I caught a glimpse of another face outside, vanishing up the lane—almost like a ghostly apparition it seemed to me—the handsome pale young face. I guessed instinctively whose it was, and suffered a pang of sharp, unconfessed pain, while the fisherman ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... children and grew reckless of one another. The people being afflicted with hunger, without a morsel of food and reduced to skeletons, the capital looked very much like the city of the king of the dead, full of only ghostly beings. On beholding the capital reduced to such a state, the illustrious and virtuous and best of Rishis, Vasishtha was resolved upon applying a remedy and brought back unto the city that tiger among ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa - Translated into English Prose - Adi Parva (First Parva, or First Book) • Kisari Mohan Ganguli (Translator)
... appearing so mysteriously before him was indeed that of a woman of human flesh, or, as he feared, the vision of some ghostly dweller in the pine forest, Kenric could not at that moment have told. Even as he stepped farther into the glade a dark cloud again obscured the moon and all was black night around him, and no sound could he hear but the ...
— The Thirsty Sword • Robert Leighton
... boat was standing still, that everything in the world was standing still and only her fancy roamed free from all trammels. Lingard, perfectly motionless by her side, steered, shaping his course by the feel of the wind. Presently he perceived ahead a ghostly flicker of faint, livid light which the earth seemed to throw up against the uniform blackness of the sky. The dinghy was approaching the expanse of the Shallows. The confused clamour of ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... as different animals. There are twelve of us who are taking parts in the charade, and dear Hollyhock is to be the ghost. She 'll stalk in, in her ghostly garments, and create a great sensation amongst the animals. We would not have done it if we had known that you were coming back, Leuchy, being but too well aware of your terrible nervousness about ghosts, even when ...
— Hollyhock - A Spirit of Mischief • L. T. Meade
... "wailing for her demon lover" on the next farm, excel anything that the milkman can perpetrate, and almost vie with the performances of the sweep. When "the cocks are crowing a merry midnight," as in the ballad, the sleepless patient wishes he could make off as quietly and quickly as the ghostly sons of the "Wife of Usher's Well." Dogs delight to bark in the country more than in town. Leech's picture of the unfortunate victim who left London to avoid noise, and found that the country was haunted by Cochin-China cocks, illustrates the still ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... sought shelter in a thick spruce. It rained and hailed. By and bye the air grew bitterly cold, and Teague suggested we give up, and ride back. So we did. The mountains were dim and obscure through the gray gloom, and the black spear-tipped spruces looked ghostly against the background. The lightning was vivid, and the thunder rolled and crashed in ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... as part of the elements of this Christian certitude, the blessed thought that a body is part of the perfection of manhood. No mere dim, ghostly future, where consciousness somehow persists, without environment or tools to act upon an outer world, completes the idea of God in reference to man. But the old trinity is the eternal trinity for humanity, body, soul, and spirit. Corporeity, with all that it means ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... of life on the hills, no sign of movement. They were dead and cold even in the warm glow of the afternoon sun. Especially the isolated one at the far end with its row of sentinel trees. There was something ghostly about it—something furtive. ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... of a search-light, a band of white light ploughed overhead. Night turned to ghostly day on the instant, then blacker night descended. But to the southeast a noiseless commotion was apparent. The glowing greenish gauze was in a ferment, bubbling, uprearing, downfalling, and tentatively thrusting huge ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... compound of its kind Matthews had ever tasted. The bang of the sunset gun instantly brought the deserted city back to life. Lights began to twinkle—in tea houses, along the river, among the indigo plantations—streets filled with ghostly costumes and jostling camels, and everywhere voices would celebrate the happy return of dusk so strangely and piercingly that they made Matthews think of "battles far away." This was most so when he listened to them, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... if a burglar wished to steal the clothing, this spook would be his most effective accomplice, but such tortuous psychology has failed to satisfy the fishermen. To them we seem callous souls, to whom the spirit world is alien. This ghostly encroachment on our erstwhile quiet domain has had more than one inconvenient result. The Mission is very short of houses for its workmen, and was planning to rebuild and put in order a part of this ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... out of it. It glittered in ghostly fashion in the starlight. It rose up and up and up. It was a cylinder with a rounded top and a diameter of fifty feet or so. It rose and rose, very deliberately. Then a rounded lower end appeared. It floated in ...
— Long Ago, Far Away • William Fitzgerald Jenkins AKA Murray Leinster
... of piety, composed, in 1712, for the young ladies who were then pensioners at the monastery of St. Augustin, at Bruges, we have been surprised into frequent smiles by the scrupulous watchfulness with which the ghostly writer followed the lady-pensioners (though with pious fancy only) to the very sacred of sacreds! He was not contented with directing them concerning the prayers which he believed proper to be used when they assumed, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 267, August 4, 1827 • Various
... temperament. For Oubacha was a brave man, as respected all bodily enemies or the dangers of human warfare, but was as sensitive and timid as the most superstitious of old women in facing the frowns of a priest or under the vague anticipations 10 of ghostly retributions. But had it been otherwise, and had there been any reason to apprehend an unsteady demeanor on the part of this prince at the approach of the critical moment, such were the changes already effected in the state of their domestic politics amongst 15 ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey
... against the dun and motionless sky. The distant flat shrank in uniform whiteness and low-hanging uniformity of cloud. The very furniture in the room seemed to have shrunk since she saw it before: the slag in the tapestry looked more like a ghost in his ghostly blue-green world; the volumes of polite literature in the bookcase looked more like immovable imitations of books. The bright fire of dry oak-boughs burning on the dogs seemed an incongruous renewal of life ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... citizens of Al-Kyris, who, strange as this part of their behavior seemed, still paid no heed to the presence of their Laureate, but with pale, rapt faces and anxious, frightened eyes, riveted their attention entirely on the sombre, black- garmented Prophet whose thin ghostly arms, outstretched above them, appeared to mutely invoke in their behalf ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... to us. To-morrow shall we be with our uncle Hal. I only wish his lord was not of the ghostly sort, but perhaps he may prefer me to some great knight's service. But oh! Ambrose, come and look. See! The fellow they call Smallbones is come out to the fountain in the middle of the court with a bucket ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... The ghostly steed and its rider remained utterly motionless, as if scrutinizing the house on their own part or waiting for somebody to appear; then, as the little girl bounded to the open window the better to gratify her curiosity, the animal—if ...
— Jessica, the Heiress • Evelyn Raymond
... month, the waiting-women have been complaining to us of the ghostly noises by which my lady is nightly disturbed, and they say that they cannot continue to serve her. We have tried to soothe them, by saying that the devils should be exorcised at once, and that there was nothing to be afraid of. Still ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... up and down among those wrapped-up, ghostly chairs and tables and cabinets and statues many times before Joe arrived with the minister—and he was a Methodist, McCabe by name. You should have seen Mrs. Ball's look as he advanced his portly form and round face with its shaven upper lip into the drawing-room. She tried ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... of the other Congregational ladies was half as pretty. To-night Aunt Isabel had on a billowy pale-blue organdy, and she looked more like an angel than ever. An ethereally radiant, laughing, vivacious angel. And whenever she moved near you, you caught a ghostly whiff of that delicious perfume. (Missy now knows Aunt Isabel got it from little sachet bags, tucked away with her clothes, and from an "atomizer" which showered a delicate, fairy-like spray of fragrance ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... when the hills below loom up, their tops just visible like islands in a sea of dusk, I will show her a natural photograph of that old-world delta, with the fog breaking on the lower cliffs like the surf of a ghostly sea. She listens as to a fairy tale, and then I tell her of the stellar crystals concealed in the rough crust of the amygdaloid. She puts it away, and says I shall break it for her when we get home. We have traveled a long way, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... lady, weep not soe; Some ghostly comfort seek: Let not vain sorrow rive thy heart, Ne teares bedew ...
— Book of Old Ballads • Selected by Beverly Nichols
... all the world. She took in washing from the camps: there was nothing else to do, with Gray Billy Batch lost in Rattle Water, and now decently stowed away by the Reverend John Fairmeadow. It was lonely in Gray Billy Batch's cabin, now, of course; it was sometimes almost intolerably so—and ghostly, too, with echoes of long-past footsteps and memories of soft motherly words. Pattie Batch, however, a practical little person, knew in her own mind, you must be informed, exactly how to still the haunting echoes and transform the memories into blessed companions of her busy, gentle solitude; ...
— Christmas Eve at Swamp's End • Norman Duncan
... air and shrouded all the surrounding buildings in dull obscurity; while the fountains, rising and falling with an odd and ghostly movement as of gigantic living creatures, were seen dimly white in the midst of the gray gloom. The ceaseless stream of hurrying passers-by lost itself in darkness only a few paces from them. The chimes of unseen belfries and the ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... eyes, peace in thy breast!— Would I were sleep and peace, so sweet to rest! Hence will I to my ghostly father's cell, His help to crave and my dear ...
— Romeo and Juliet • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... with tide, wind, and engines carrying us up the James. Dancing Point reached sharply out as if to intercept us. But the owner of those strong dark hands that happened to be at the wheel knew the story of Dancing Point—of how many an ebony Tam O'Shanter had seen ghostly revelry there; and Gadabout was held well out in ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins
... in her the sensibility to magnetic and ghostly influences, which, the good Kerner assures us, her grandparents deeply lamented, and did all in their power to repress. But, as it appears that her grandfather, also, had seen a ghost, and there ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller
... was no occasion for his help, and they two stood there, some yards apart, silent, watching the red ball of the sun sink down into the limitless flats of the Camargue, and the grey mist rising from the marshes to wrap its ghostly fingers round this city ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... to her what himself had inspired her to demand; and was pleased to assure her, by a new revelation, that he had heard her prayers. She made known to her ghostly father what had passed betwixt God and her, and time verified it: for the sister above mentioned died without sickness, and appeared in dying to have had a foretaste of the joys to come. On the other side, the abbess was struck with a terrible disease, which took all her body, ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume XVI. (of 18) - The Life of St. Francis Xavier • John Dryden
... for some part, and the things about him began to take form. He saw that the ground in the deep shadows was cluttered with men, sprawling in every conceivable posture. Glancing narrowly into the more distant darkness, he caught occasional glimpses of visages that loomed pallid and ghostly, lit with a phosphorescent glow. These faces expressed in their lines the deep stupor of the tired soldiers. They made them appear like men drunk with wine. This bit of forest might have appeared to an ethereal wanderer as a scene of the result ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... tottered to a chair and hid her face. Common sense told her that she was the victim of her own tired nerves and tortured fancy. But the memory of Cousin Mary Leicester's second sight, of her "visions" in this very room, crept upon her and gripped her heart. A ghostly horror seized her of the room, the house, and her own tempestuous nature. She groped her way out, in blind and hurrying panic—glad of the lamp in the hall, glad of the sounds in the house, glad, above all, of Therese's thin hands as they once ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... once, as there is talk about you and the said Sir Christopher Harflete. I purpose, therefore, God permitting me, to ride this day to Cranwell Towers, and if you be there, as your lawful guardian and ghostly father, to command you, being an infant under age, to accompany me thence to the Nunnery of Blossholme. There I have determined, in the exercise of my authority, you shall abide until a fitting husband is found for you, unless, ...
— The Lady Of Blossholme • H. Rider Haggard
... The profound silence was only interrupted by those weird house-noises which live in the death of night and die in the life of day; by that sudden crackling in the wall, by that mysterious creaking in the furniture, by those still small ghostly sounds from inanimate bodies, which we have all been startled by, over and over again, while lingering at our book after the rest of the family are asleep in bed, while waiting up for a friend who is out late, or while watching alone through the dark hours ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... those lofty tiers of seats in the pale, clear starlight. Can you see no shadowy figures sitting there, hear no light whisper of ghostly laughter, no thin ripple of clapping hands? What flash of wit amuses them, what nobly tragic word or action stirs them to applause? What problem of their own life, what reflection of their own heart, does the stage reveal to them? We shall ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... dewy carpet of velvety moss in the woodland solitude, where numerous wild flowers and sweet-scented ferns filled all the air with fragrance. The noble beech trees throw up their naked branches as if pointing ghostly fingers of accusation to the carelessness and indifference of those vandal days. Now these decaying emblems stand scarred and desolate, "Monuments to ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... over. The peculiarity of these men was that, when they were driven to speak, they spoke in lines that flew on wings through the country. Indignation made their verse, and the burning memory of the wrongs they had seen gave it a power beyond its own expression. Which shall we recall of those ghostly poems, once so quick with flame? Still, at moments of deep distress or public wrong-doing, we may hear the echo of ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... who had been present at the great ball in Lexington. "Even Cousin Sarah Tom was there," said Mrs. Jefferson, thus for ever stamping this ghostly outline with greatness. And there was "Aunt Mandy" hovering on the outskirts of the general theme—"Aunt Mandy was there, as full of fun and mischief as ever." The old lady's stories bristled with such subsidiary characters concerning ...
— Fran • John Breckenridge Ellis
... that Adah was in the kitchen at the moment, for I lost at once my ghostly pallor. "Yes," said Mrs. Yocomb heartily, "come in and make this man eat, and scold him soundly for going so far away as to get lost when he's scarcely able to walk at all. I've kind of promised I wouldn't scold ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... to the foot of a big hollow tree, from which he pulled a large bundle. This he opened and showed a number of ghostly uniforms. He distributed these among the boys, who at once donned them, making a weird looking ...
— Jack Ranger's Western Trip - From Boarding School to Ranch and Range • Clarence Young
... leapt hastily from the stone fountain at sound of Paul's footsteps. Monkish herbs and sweet-smelling old-world flowers grew modestly in this domain once sacred to the chatelaine of Hatton; and Paul kept ghostly tryst with a white-shouldered lady whose hair was dressed high upon her head, and powdered withal, and to whose bewitching red lips the amorous glance was drawn by a patch cunningly placed beside a dimple. My lady's garden ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... sort of vague light peculiar to dreams, that colorless, empty atmosphere, in which everything assumes a ghostly aspect? well, Jansoulet was suddenly enveloped, made prisoner, paralyzed by it. He tried to speak, but the words would not come; his nerveless fingers clung so feebly to their support that he nearly fell backward. ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... hazy Indian-summer afternoon, if you look down the wide, irregular main street, lined with its mighty elms and gambrel-roofed houses, all seems wrapped in a dim gray atmosphere of antiquity, like that surrounding Poe's House of Usher, only not ghostly as that is. It is a strange je ne sais quoi that eludes description, as if houses and trees stood at the bottom of a sea of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... but found only a tremulous reflection of vines in the moonlight. She kept on round the house, and into the garden, frequently calling out, "Gerald! Gerald!" "Hark! hark!" she murmured to herself, as some far-off tones of "Toll the bell" floated through the air. The ghostly moonlight, the strange, lonely place, and the sad, mysterious sounds made her a little afraid. In a more agitated tone, she called Gerald again. In obedience to her summons, she saw him coming ...
— A Romance of the Republic • Lydia Maria Francis Child
... thy bosom, poor unfortunate, That love which is thy torture and thy crime, Or cry aloud to those departed hosts Of ghostly lovers! can they be more deaf To thy disaster than the living world? Who, with a careless smile, will note the pain Caused ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... decide in a passage like this, the difference existing between a man's /utukku/ and his /edimmu/, but the probability is, that the former means his spiritual essence, whilst the latter stands for the ghostly shadow of his body, resembling in meaning the /ka/ of the Egyptians. To all appearance the abode described above is not the place of the punishment of the wicked, but the dwelling of those accounted ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Theophilus G. Pinches
... generations that had trot this earth before us. The Parliament of living men, Lords and Commons united, what a miserable array against the Upper and Lower House composing the Parliament of ghosts! Perhaps the Pre-Adamites would constitute one wing in such a ghostly army. My brother, dying in his sixteenth year, was far enough from seeing or foreseeing Waterloo; else he might have illustrated this dreadful duel of the living human race with its ghostly predecessors, by the awful apparition ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... once more planted herself before him, her slim figure looking ghostly between the fading light of the departing day and the ...
— A Roman Singer • F. Marion Crawford
... it seems the sound of tears, So sad it seems life's parting sigh, And yet, alas! It can but be. Deserted ghostly wrecks of dreams Once freighted with Hope's golden gleams, Wrecks drifting on a sullen sea, To mock the memory-haunted years, Are all now left to you ...
— Debris - Selections from Poems • Madge Morris
... necessary that she should declare her purpose and the impossibility of change, now that she had once pledged herself to her lover,—Mrs. Mountjoy came into the room, and stood at her bedside, with that appearance of ghostly displeasure which always belongs to an angry old lady ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... further away than ever now, in that ghostly glimmer of dawn—more and more helpless every moment, compared with the beautiful vivid shining ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... the iridescent capitals of Denderah, by the contested line of Apelles, to the hues and the heaven of Perugino or Bellini, we might have been tempted to assoilzie from all staying of question or stroke of partisan the invulnerable aspect of his ghostly theory; but, if, with even partial regard to some of the circumstances which physically limited the attainments of each race, we follow their individual career, we shall find the points of superiority less salient and the connection ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... itself. This would separate the poetical from the domestic side of the story. But by far the most important alteration was in the interview with the spirits. In the old versions they spoke and sang. I remembered that the effect of this ghostly dialogue was dreadfully human, so I arranged that no voice but Rip's should be heard. This is the only act on the stage in which but one person speaks while all the others merely gesticulate, and I was quite sure that the silence of the crew would give a lonely and desolate ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... tobacco finished the business: and the Bute-Crawleys never knew how many thousand pounds it cost them. Firkin rushed downstairs to Bowls who was reading out the "Fire and the Frying Pan" to his aide-de-camp in a loud and ghostly voice. The dreadful secret was told to him by Firkin with so frightened a look, that for the first moment Mr. Bowls and his young man thought that robbers were in the house, the legs of whom had probably been discovered ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... you how, and with what care Those here intrusted with the government, Keep to the statutes made to that intent. By rules divine this house is governed; Not sanguinary ones, nor taught nor fed By human precepts: for the scripture saith, The word's our ghostly food; food for our faith. Nor are all forced to the same degree In things divine, tho' all exhorted be To the most absolute proficiency That law or duty can ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... in which x and y played a prominent part. When my next-door neighbor reflected so long, clutching his forehead between his hands, he was trying to discover the hidden meaning of his own hieroglyphics; he saw the ghostly translation of his sums dancing in space. What did he perceive? How would the alphabetical signs, arranged first in one and then in another manner, give an image of the actual things, an image visible to the eyes of the mind alone? ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... glimmer of the quiet eve, Away in milky wavings of the neck and ankle bare; The heavy-sliding stream in its sleepy song they leave, And the crags in the ghostly air; ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... persevered, working with a strange persistency and silence, that gave them the appearance of so many phantoms engaged at their ghostly labor. Not a word was exchanged, even in the most guarded of tones, for each understood ...
— The Huge Hunter - Or, the Steam Man of the Prairies • Edward S. Ellis
... on a truck," suggested Henri, peering into the gloom, and seeing the ghostly outline of twenty or more trucks which stood upon the rails in a siding quite close to them. "A truck of ...
— With Joffre at Verdun - A Story of the Western Front • F. S. Brereton
... disappointment, on familiar ground. He had nearly described a circle, and knew this end of the lane very well; it was not much more than a mile from home. He walked smartly down the hill; the air was all glimmering and indistinct, transmuting trees and hedges into ghostly shapes, and the walls of the White House Farm flickered on the hillside, as if they were moving towards him. Then a change came. First, a little breath of wind brushed with a dry whispering sound through the hedges, the few leaves left on the boughs began to stir, ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... Ghost would search, And whenever it would see The passers-by Take wings and fly It would laugh in ghostly glee, Hee, hee!—it would laugh ...
— Fifty years & Other Poems • James Weldon Johnson
... because they have lost their bodies? If life teaches us anything, it is that God does above all things respect the spiritual freedom of his creatures. He does not terrify and bully us into acknowledging Him by ghostly juggleries in darkened rooms, and by vapid exhibitions addressed to our outward senses. He approaches each man in the innermost sacred audience-chamber of his heart, and there shows him good and evil, truth and falsehood, ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... a death like that can never fade from the memory of one who has once seen it, and will outweigh the lives of a thousand guinea-pigs. No wonder there was such a widespread and peculiar horror of the disease, as of some ghostly ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... some epochs spirits as hardy as Raynal's, and wits as quick as Riviere's, would have fled then and there to the nearest public, and told over cups how they had heard the dames of Beaurepaire, long since dead, holding their revel, and the conscious old devil's nest of a chateau quivering to the ghostly strains. ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade
... as much engaged now as ever, in spite of the return of the ring. It's only her infern—her deep-rooted superstition that's caused this trouble. One can't blame her; her father and mother were both killed in an accident after some sort of 'ghostly warning.' The first thing I gave her, after our engagement, was a necklace of these stones"—he tapped his scarf pin—"that I'd selected, one by one, myself. They're beautiful, as you see, but they're not particularly valuable; only ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... all monitors. Grandcourt was contemptuous, not jealous; contemptuously certain of all the subjection he cared for. Why could she not rebel and defy him? She longed to do it. But she might as well have tried to defy the texture of her nerves and the palpitation of her heart. Her husband had a ghostly army at his back, that could close round her wherever she might turn. She sat in her splendid attire, like a white image of helplessness, and he seemed to gratify himself with looking at her. She could not even make a passionate exclamation, or throw up her arms, as she would have ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... vast rectangular building standing on the High Street, has a strange and individual charm when you come into it out of the glare of the white street. The windows are fitted with light green glass, which gives a sort of ghostly twilight to its bare spaciousness, with heavy masses of gloom among the pillars of the flanking colonnade. It has no pretence to artistic ornament of any kind; it was built for a specific purpose, which it answers admirably, and when it is crowded with stalls on market-days, and noisy with buyers ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... very faint spots of moonlight starring the vague desert. It was because of the phosphorus in the bones. But no scientific explanation could keep a body from shivering when he drifted by one of those ghostly lights and knew ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... defaulting village, it is said that a bishop has been known to suspend the functions of the priest until the necessary payments should be completed by his parishioners, who, thus temporarily cut off from all ghostly comfort, hastened to arrive ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... descend until the supper bell sounded—that funny little old jangling bell he and Del had striven to have abolished in the interests of fashionable progress, until they learned that in many of the best English houses it is a custom as sacredly part of the ghostly British Constitution as the bathless bath of the basin, as the jokeless joke of the pun, as the entertainment that entertains not, as the ruler that rules not and the freedom that frees not. When he appeared in the dining-room door, his mother and Del were already seated. His mother, her ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... Hanway, who, not having seen the young stranger for the past week or so, feared he was ill. The flakes of the first snow of the season were whirling past the windows—no more on autumn leaves they looked, no more on far-off bare but azure mountains, feigning summer. The distant ranges were ghostly white. The skeleton woods near at hand were stark and black, and trembled with sudden starts, and strove wildly with the winds, and were held in an inexorable fate, and cried ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... silvered by the descending sun. From Pilatus on the right, away to the green banks of Weggis and Vitznau on the left, the lake spread in blue and bronze, and by the opposite shore the water's calm was such that a ghostly Lucerne of the under-world lay upside down just beneath its level, and mocked reality above by the perfection of detail. Little bright-sailed boats danced here and there, a large steamer was gliding into the landing by the Gare, and the ...
— A Woman's Will • Anne Warner
... until the boy was panting. Then while he sat on a beer keg until he should be in breath again the unwinded Spike would skip the rope—a girl's skipping rope—or shadow-box about the room with intricate dance steps, raining quick blows upon a ghostly boxer who was invariably beaten; or with smaller gloves he would cause the inflated bag to play lively tunes upon the ceiling of its support. After an hour of this, when both were sweating, they would go to a sheltered spot beyond the shed to play cold water upon ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... insecure windows and sighing forlornly about the corners of the house. The door unlatched itself, swung inward hesitatingly, and hung wavering for a moment on its sagging hinges. A formless cloud of gray fog blew into the warm, steamy room. But whatever ghostly visitant had paused upon the threshold, he had evidently decided not to enter, for the catch snapped shut with a quick, passionate vigor. The echo of the slamming door ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... new kind of work, such that it would put an end forever to his old manner of writing. He intended to call the new volume "Old-Time Legends: together with Sketches, Experimental and Ideal,"—a title that is fairly ghostly with the transcendental nonage of his genius, pale, abstract, ineffectual, with oblivion lurking in every syllable. Fields knew better than that. But he gave him something more than advice; he cheered him with his extravagant appreciation, as it seemed to Hawthorne, and invigorated him by a true ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... here, and I don't like it. I shall tell Merton that I have moral objections to the whole affair. Miserable, mercenary fraud!' Thus, feeling very moral and discontented, Logan walked back to the house, carefully avoiding the ghostly robes that still glimmered on the lawn, and did not re-enter ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... on the poop long enough for my eyes to become accustomed to the darkness, nothing was visible save the feeble light of the low-turned cabin lamps shining through the skylight, the faint glow of the binnacle lamps upon the helmsman's face and hands and the upper part of the wheel, and the ghostly image of some twelve feet of the mainmast, part of the fife rail round it, and such portions of the running gear as were belayed to the pins therein, all glimmering uncertainly in as much of the cabin light as made its way out on deck, through the door by ...
— Overdue - The Story of a Missing Ship • Harry Collingwood
... protest rises within me as I begin this Sketch. The page almost turns crimson under my gaze, and shadowy forms come forth out of the darkness into which they wildly plunged out of life's misery into death's mystery. Ghostly lips cry out, "Leave us alone! Why call us back to a world where we lost all, and in quitting which we risked all? Disturb us not to gratify the cold curiosity of unfeeling strangers. We have passed on beyond human jurisdiction to ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... there came a sudden little silence. The dusk was falling; and the garden wore a ghostly look; while the river lay passively unreflecting beneath the ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... occasioned, as they say, by the uncharitable behaviour and demeanour of divers ordinaries: to this we, the ordinaries, answer, assuring your Majesty that in our hearts there is no such discord or variance ort our part against our brethren in God and ghostly children your subjects, as is induced in this preface; but our daily prayer is and shall be that all peace and concord may increase among your Grace's true subjects our said children, whom God be our witness we love, have loved, and shall love ever with hearty affection; never ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... and clear by now, and Chris often leaned his cheek on the sash as the priest talked, and watched that steady shining shield go up the sky, and the familiar view of lawns and water and trees, ghostly and mystical now ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... exercise himself in bearing pain, impelled the man to resist and overcome constitutional weaknesses by force of will. A student of architecture, he conquered a tendency to giddiness by standing on pinnacles and walking on narrow rafters over perilous abysses. In like manner he overcame the ghostly terrors instilled in the nursery, by midnight visits to ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... her, and shut her out from the world in which she was born and in which she ought to live. There was a far-away sound which came to her ears once, twice, thrice, and which might have been the call of some ghostly bird or the war-whoop of an Indian. At last she drew the covering over her head, determined that, so long as she could not see, ...
— The Associate Hermits • Frank R. Stockton
... Brad had at once seen the possibilities of the situation and decided, with an unerring certainty, that as a jack-o'-lantern is naught by day, the pumpkin face must be cunningly veiled. He was a busy man that morning; for he not only had to arrange his own ghostly progress, but settle the elephant on its platform, to be dragged by vine-wreathed oxen, and also, at the doctor's instigation, to make the sledge on which the first Nicholas Oldfield should draw ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... know, no doubt, How quickly such news flies— Throughout the place, From "Higgses Chase" Proceeded ghostly cries. ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... in the sky; And now, like cloud of dusky white, Slow sailing o'er the deep of night, The sheeted group within the bark Is seen amid the billows dark. Anon the keel with grating sound They hear upon the pebbly ground. And now with kind, officious hand, They help the ghostly crew to land. ...
— The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems • Washington Allston
... of the road is upon me, and the thirst of the sultry day; when the ghostly hours of the dusk throw their shadows across my life, then I cry not for your voice only, my friend, but ...
— Fruit-Gathering • Rabindranath Tagore
... from inferior numbers of undisciplined and ill-armed militia, who did not possess so much as bayonets to their guns. They kindled fires along the levees, ate their supper, and then, as the evening fell, noticed a big schooner drop down the river in ghostly silence and bring up opposite to them. The soldiers flocked to the shore, challenging the stranger, and finally fired one or two shots at her. Then suddenly a rough voice was heard, "Now give it to them, for the honor of America!" ...
— Hero Tales From American History • Henry Cabot Lodge, and Theodore Roosevelt
... quenched. Blackness walled and roofed him in close about his crumbled fire, save when at shorter and shorter intervals and with more and more deafening thunders the huge clouds lit up their own forms, writhing one upon another, and revealed the awe-struck sea and ghostly sands waiting breathlessly below. He rose to lay on more fuel, and while he was in the act the tornado broke upon him. The wind, as he had forecast, came out of the southeast. In an instant it was roaring and hurtling against ...
— Strong Hearts • George W. Cable
... love name she had called me in those olden days of this Age; and which surely I had not heard since Mirdath died. And, in verity, you to have dear understanding with me, how that I then to be all troubled with vague troubles and ghostly love-aches in the heart; and likewise, I did be all set about in a moment by the olden enchantment and speechless glamour that did be so long hid and lost in the Spaces of Memory, where surely the spirit doth wander ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson
... shining brightly, giving to the dead whitened trees on the little island a peculiar ghostly appearance. The canoes soon grounded in the marsh grass, and, fastening them to paddles, stuck down in the mud, our hunters shouldered their fowling-pieces and trudged ahead through the mire. They had prepared themselves well for the trip and each wore ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... case, a story suggested by some chronological connection, or the nature of the apparition, is attached to the phenomena. No doubt, in these days where the individuals who perceive the phenomena have a wider experience, such a variety of persons appear that the ghostly appearance loses its individuality if not its authenticity. Mr. Podmore discusses such cases.[20] In Mr. Podmore's book when Poltergeists, Cock-lore ghost affairs, are discussed, it appears that genuine hallucinations may be associated ...
— Inferences from Haunted Houses and Haunted Men • John Harris
... ghostly sounds that horn in the black wood! [A countryman flying. Whither away, man? what are you ...
— Becket and other plays • Alfred Lord Tennyson |
