"Ghostly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... another effort at addition. A hundred and ninety, and fifty, and twenty, and the other ghostly hundred that wouldn't account for itself and yet insisted on coming in and mixing everything up. She turned on the two partners a ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... with phantasy, and looks That threaten the profane;—a pillared shade, Upon whose grassless floor of red-brown hue, By sheddings from the pinal umbrage tinged Perennially—beneath whose sable roof Of boughs, as if for festal purpose, decked With unrejoicing berries—ghostly shapes May meet at noontide; FEAR and trembling HOPE, SILENCE and FORESIGHT; DEATH, the Skeleton, And TIME, the Shadow; there to celebrate, As in a natural temple scattered o'er With altars undisturbed of mossy stone, United ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... reader out. The worst of criticising Hegel is that the very arguments we use against him give forth strange and hollow sounds that make them seem almost as fantastic as the errors to which they are addressed. The sense of a universal mirage, of a ghostly unreality, steals over us, which is the very moonlit atmosphere of Hegelism itself. What wonder then if, instead of {293} converting, our words do but rejoice and delight, those already baptized in the faith of confusion? To their charmed senses we ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... were continued in office, and were called Santi, or holy, although they had set ecclesiastical censures at defiance, plundered the churches of their property, and compelled the priests to perform divine service. So much did citizens at that time prefer the good of their country to their ghostly consolations, and thus showed the church, that if as her friends they had defended, they could as enemies depress her; for the whole of Romagna, the Marches, and Perugia ...
— History Of Florence And Of The Affairs Of Italy - From The Earliest Times To The Death Of Lorenzo The Magnificent • Niccolo Machiavelli
... the "Lay of the Sunken Castle," with the piteous tale of the spirits imprisoned; and Simrock tells us in rhyme of the merman who sits waiting for a mortal bride; while Wolfgang Mueller sings of the "Castle under the Lake," where at night ghostly torches are lighted and ghostly revels are held, the story of which so fascinates the fisherman's boy who has heard of these doings from his grandmother that as he watches the enchanted waters one night his fancy plays him a cruel trick, and he plunges in to ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various
... immediate inspiration, to which the constructive element—real though slight—is subordinate. In the silence and vacuity which follow the impromptu on his orchestrion, the composer yearns, broods, aspires. Never were a ghostly troop of sounds reanimated and incarnated into industrious life more actually than by Browning's verse. They climb and crowd, they mount and march, and then pass away; but the musician's spirit is borne onward by ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... stile I passed round the village churchyard, where the moss-grown gravestones stood grim and ghostly in the white light, and out across the meadows down to where the waters of the Nene, rippling on, were touched with silver. The river-path was wide, running by the winding bank away to the fen-lands and beyond. ...
— The Seven Secrets • William Le Queux
... were as negligent in their office as prelates be, we should not long live, for lack of sustenance. And as it is necessary for to have this ploughing for the sustentation of the body, so must we have also the other for the satisfaction of the soul, or else we cannot live long ghostly. For as the body wasteth and consumeth away for lack of bodily meat, so doth the soul pine away for default of ghostly meat. But there be two kinds of inclosing, to let or hinder both these kinds of ploughing: the one is an inclosing to let or hinder the bodily ploughing, and the other to ...
— Sermons on the Card and Other Discourses • Hugh Latimer
... caution given me, no sooner had I quitted the ghostly governor than I hastened to my little upright friend. Tell him indeed I must not: honour, shame, principle, forbade. Yet to keep the good news wholly secret would be to render the severe covenant cruel. What ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... entering life and those who were quitting it, alike found it to be irresistible. "An archdeacon," wrote Mr. Carlyle afterwards to me, "with his own venerable lips, repeated to me, the other night, a strange profane story: of a solemn clergyman who had been administering ghostly consolation to a sick person; having finished, satisfactorily as he thought, and got out of the room, he heard the sick person ejaculate, 'Well, thank God, Pickwick will be out in ten days ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... thrilling road than the road along which we came to Chichester, and by which we will leave it in a few minutes now. Think of Roman Stane Street, and listen for the rumble of ghostly chariot wheels! Then—if you've not come this way for Goodwood races—you can throw your mind a little further ahead to the days of the crusaders and the pilgrims; and to kings' processions glittering with gold and ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... her trembling dome Essayed in vain her ghostly charm: Wealth shook within his gilded home ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various
... a little) the moon leap—a pale, and ever growing orb—up into the night sky, and glide, with a strange swiftness, through the vast arc of blue; and, presently, to see the sun follow, springing out of the Eastern sky, as though in chase; and then again the night, with the swift and ghostly passing of starry constellations, was all too much to view believingly. Yet, so it was—the day slipping from dawn to dusk, and the night sliding swiftly into day, ever ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... the young bride was not yet called upon to join their terrible flight, for until her body was laid beneath the clay the soul had power to stay beside it. So stayed the spirit of the young bride by her dead body till her ghostly eyes grew accustomed to the change which had come to her. And when she found she could see the brown earth again and the things thereon, she rose to her feet, and ran down the mountains to the castle of Black ...
— The Story and Song of Black Roderick • Dora Sigerson
... maximum of discomfort with a minimum of good looks or good cheer. I was some time in finding the dirty housekeeper, in an outhouse hard by, and then in waking him. As he led me up the crazy verandah, and into a broad ghostly room, without glass in the windows, or fire, or any one comfort, my mind recurred to the stories told of the horrors of the Hartz forest, and of the benighted traveller's situation therein. Cold sluggish beetles hung to the damp walls,—and ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... increased and his blandness was dissolved. A terrible sequel might have occurred, had not the crunch of wheels on the drive been heard at that very instant. The huge, dim form of a coach drawn by a ghostly horse passed along towards the front door, just below the diners. Almost simultaneously the electric light above the front door was turned on, casting a glare across a section of the inchoate garden, where no flower grew save the dandelion. Everybody sprang up. Host and hostess, ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... in the underground Chamber of Conference of the Fortress, where secrets might be freely uttered because of the double walls of massive masonry: where flaring torches fastened high in the chamber, scattered the ghostly shadows, and ample potations of the fine wine of the ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... Pole. I wandered around the house for awhile, but every time I turned a corner there was a memory waiting to greet me. Now the merriest of them seemed to be covered with a chilly shadow, and every one was pale and ghostly. All night I lay awake, playing at the old game of mental solitaire and keeping tryst with the wind which seemed to tap with unseen fingers at my ...
— The Lady and Sada San - A Sequel to The Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... sure that a ghostly surprise, not down on my pragramme, had been planned for us. Perhaps this will elucidate my meaning," Katherine explained, and, bringing to light something, which she had until then concealed behind her, she ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... the King among the latter. Henry is said to have wrestled earnestly with God that no sins of his might be remembered against him, to lead to the discomfiture of his army. There was need for the entreaty. Perchance, had he slept that night, some such ghostly visions, born of his own conscience, might have disturbed his sleep, as those which troubled one of his successors on the eve ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... of this woodland pond! Are they held here, like the sovereigns in the palace of the Sleeping Beauty, till some mortal breaks their spell? What sage counsels must be theirs, as they nod their weary heads and whisper ghostly memories and old men's tales to each other, while the red leaves dance on the snowy sward below, or a fox or squirrel steals hurriedly through the wild and wintry night! Here and there is some discrowned Lear, who has thrown off his regal ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... seen farther than about two, or at most three, lengths from the ship. As it was, with the outfly of the hurricane that weird, unnatural, ruddy light of which I have spoken almost immediately died out from the sky, leaving the night as pitch-dark as before, save for the ghostly gleam of phosphorescent light which arose from the storm-swept ocean, and which gave the water, as far as it could be seen, the appearance as if moonlight were shining up ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... troubled dream with a start. For a moment she lay quietly and listened, not afraid, but interested, as though upon the threshold of some new experience. The scurrying feet of mice made a ghostly patter in the attic, above her room, and a vagrant wind, in passing, tapped at her window with the fairy-like fingers of the vine that clung ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... it; that the spirit acts the part of a jackal, as it were, and leads the tiger to his prey; and so thoroughly subservient does the ghost become to his tigerish master, that he not infrequently brings the tiger to the presence of his wife and family, and calmly sees them devoured before his ghostly face. ...
— Prisoners Their Own Warders - A Record of the Convict Prison at Singapore in the Straits - Settlements Established 1825 • J. F. A. McNair
... of the night in the early spring it was deserted to the roosting birds. Hares rustled among the covert; here and there a statue stood glimmering, with its eternal gesture; here and there the echo of an imitation temple clattered ghostly to the trampling of the mare. Ten minutes brought him to the upper end of his own home garden, where the small stables opened, over a bridge, upon the park. The yard clock was striking the hour of ten; so ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... at a ghostly pace and stood beside the widow, contrasting the awful simplicity of his shroud with the glare and glitter in which she had arrayed herself for this unhappy scene. None that beheld them could deny the terrible strength of the moral which ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... towering there, and its crest and the crests of all its lofty neighbors were brightly 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 ...
— A Woman's Will • Anne Warner
... Something that had not seen or heard - And two drew near to the window-pane, Kissed in the moonlight and kissed again, And looked, through my face, to the moon-shroud, spread Over the garlanded garden bed; And—"How ghostly ...
— Many Voices • E. Nesbit
... Black Watch's ghostly piper that plays proudly when the men of the Black Watch do well, and ...
— Echoes of the War • J. M. Barrie
... last scene as written and composed to suit the conventional type of a comic opera was an intolerable anticlimax. Mozart sounds a deeply tragical note at the outset of his overture. The introduction is an Andante, which he drew from the scene of the opera in which the ghostly statue of the murdered Commandant appears to Don Giovanni while he is enjoying the pleasures of the table. Two groups of solemn chords command attention and "establish at once the majestic and formidable authority of divine justice, the avenger ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... light of dawn was just sufficient to give a ghostly appearance to what may be truly termed the ghastly ruins around them, and to reveal in undefined solemnity the neighbouring mountains. Smoke still issued from the half-smothered fires, and here and there a spectral figure might be ...
— The Rover of the Andes - A Tale of Adventure on South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... and he was alone in the tiny hall, where the light was dim from one pearly-shaded sconce, and walls, carpet, everything was silvery, making the walled-in space all ghostly, he could only think ridiculously: 'Shall I go in with my overcoat on, or take it off?' The music ceased; the maid ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... full. This supply would take him far down. He turned over and went down head first, swimming with all his strength and all his will. Deeper and deeper he went. His eyes were open, and he watched the ghostly, phosphorescent trails of the darting bonita. As he swam, he hoped that they would not strike at him, for it might snap the tension of his will. But they did not strike, and he found time to be grateful for this last ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... functions of palace-ghost. Many writers agree that she was a Countess named Orlamuende, Beatrice, or Cunigunde, and that she was desperately in love with Count Albert of Nuremberg, and was led by her passion to a crime which is the cause of her subsequent ghostly disquiet. Mr. Minutoli proves that this lady cannot be the same that alarms the palace with her untimely visitations. The accounts of the White Lady ascend to 1486, and she was first seen at Baireuth. Subsequently two ghosts were heard of, ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... sheet to her friend and stood up to get a better view of the lake astern of them. At first she saw nothing but the dim shores and the silvering water. Then, some distance out, Polly caught sight of a ghostly sail drifting across the path ...
— Wyn's Camping Days - or, The Outing of the Go-Ahead Club • Amy Bell Marlowe
... complete in all its details in the will I made twenty years ago to my friends. Marquis, as the summer goes on, you know that the ripest and reddest cherries are the fullest flavored, just so, in the noblest and wealthiest of families in Paris there is not one that has not some terrible and ghostly secret which is sedulously concealed. Now, suppose that one man should gain possession of all of them, would he not be sole and absolute master? Would he not be more powerful than a despot on his throne? Would he not be able to sway society in any ...
— Caught In The Net • Emile Gaboriau
... its patrons seemed now that she was gone! The great clamp at the portal of his hotel sounded very ghostly as he knocked; the concierge was a hideous old man in gown ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... together; also there was practically no undergrowth, perhaps for the reason that their dense, spreading tops shut out the light. As I saw afterwards both trunks and boughs were clothed with long grey moss, which even at midday gave the place a very ghostly appearance. The darkness beneath those trees was intense, literally we could not see an inch before our faces. Yet rather than stand still we struggled on, Hans leading the way, for his instincts were quicker than ours. The steep rise of the ground beneath ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... plodded on. The opaque wall of the wood was before her and over her, but she knew its breach. She ducked her head under a droop of branches, squirmed through, was visible still for some seconds as a gleam of blue frock, and then the ghostly shadows received her and she was gone. The wood closed ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... reached this point you will, I know, have reached also the conclusion (with a sigh) that I am embarked upon some commonplace experience of ghostly return, or, at least, of posthumous communication. Perhaps I wrong you here, but in any case I would at once correct the inference, if it has been drawn. You remember our adventures with the seance-mongers years ago? ... ...
— The Garden of Survival • Algernon Blackwood
... ornaments as were still left to them, were paraded in the great square. They were attended each by his own numerous retinue, who performed all the menial offices, as if the object of them were alive and could feel their import. Each ghostly form took its seat at the banquet-table—now, alas! stripped of the magnificent service with which it was wont to blaze at these high festivals—and the guests drank deep to the illustrious dead. Dancing succeeded the carousal, and the festivities, prolonged to a late hour, were continued night ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... the morning of his burial, with bird and song and sweet-smelling flowers. The trees whispered to the grass, but the children sat with hushed faces. And yet it seemed a ghostly unreal day,—the wraith of Life. We seemed to rumble down an unknown street behind a little white bundle of posies, with the shadow of a song in our ears. The busy city dinned about us; they did not say much, those pale-faced hurrying men and women; they did not say ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... finished with her. She is a twofold goddess, therefore, according as one or the other of these two contrasted aspects of her nature is seized, respectively. A duality, an inherent opposition in the very conception of Persephone, runs all through her story, and is part of her ghostly power. There is ever something in her of a divided or ambiguous identity: hence the many euphemisms of ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... and steerage, I noticed scores of box coffins for the removal of corpses from the field to the North. There were quantities of spirits, consigned mainly to Quartermasters, but evidently the property of certain Shylocks, who watched the barrels greedily. An embalmer was also on board, with his ghostly implements. He was a sallow man, shabbily attired, and appeared to look at all the passengers as so many subjects for the development of his art. He was called "Doctor" by his admirers, and conversed in the blandest manner of the triumphs of ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... is that man can smile dreaming his ghostly ghastly dream;- Better the heedless atomy that buzzes ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... as well as heard by it—a sound that might proceed from some incalculable distance, from some far invisible height—a sound so unlike anything that is heard on the upper ground, in the free air of heaven; so sublimely mournful and still; so ghostly and impressive when listened to in the subterranean recesses of the earth, that we continue instinctively to hold our peace, as if enchanted by it, and think not of communicating to each other the awe and astonishment which it ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... the mountains of the earth the snow and ice began to melt that night, and all the rivers coming out of high country flowed thick and turbid, and soon—in their upper reaches—with swirling trees and the bodies of beasts and men. They rose steadily, steadily in the ghostly brilliance, and came trickling over their banks at last, behind the flying ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... had been wheeled to the head of the table. On his right-hand side sat his sad and silent daughter. She signed to me, with a ghostly solemnity, to take the vacant place on the left of her father. Silas Meadowcroft came in at the same moment, and was presented to me by his brother. There was a strong family likeness between them, Ambrose ...
— The Dead Alive • Wilkie Collins
... depths of which he looked with rapt eyes, seeing visions which that forest never held for any other gaze. Mayhap, adown those dim green aisles he previsioned the "ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir" with the tomb of Ulalume at the end of the ghostly path through the forest—the road through life that led to the grave where his heart lay buried. Through the telescope on that balcony he may first have followed the wanderings of Al Araaf, the star ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... evidently referring to the Boffin property. On that table also, carefully backed with canvas, varnished, mounted, and rolled like a map, was the placard descriptive of the murdered man who had come from afar to be her husband. She shrank from this ghostly surprize, and felt quite frightened as she rolled and tied it up again. Peeping about here and there, she came upon a print, a graceful head of a pretty woman, elegantly framed, hanging in the corner by the easy chair. "Oh, indeed, Sir!" said Bella, after stopping ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... circumstantially reported in Section the Third, entitled, "Dream-Fugue upon the Theme of Sudden Death." What I had beheld from my seat upon the mail,—the scenical strife of action and passion, of anguish and fear, as I had there witnessed them moving in ghostly silence; this duel between life and death narrowing itself to a point of such exquisite evanescence as the collision neared,—all these elements of the scene blended, under the law of association, with the previous and ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... her lover, and gave him both her hands, looking up at him through a mist of tears, but still with that ghostly ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... left it so. I dare say the house has a ghostly reputation and is shunned. And now, do you know why I did ...
— The Story of Bawn • Katharine Tynan
... world. They resolved to observe with the most exact punctuality every law of God, and every precept of the Church; to obey their husbands with the most attentive and Christian-like submission; to be invariably docile to their ghostly father, and submit to him their actions, their words, and even their thoughts; and thus to secure themselves against the deceits of the evil one. They then proceeded to arrange for themselves a place of retreat, ...
— The Life of St. Frances of Rome, and Others • Georgiana Fullerton
... He went home tingling with pleasure, and yet overwhelmed with shame. Sometimes he told himself that he was no better than a Judas, and sometimes that Pete might never come back. The second thought rose oftenest. It crossed his mind like a ghostly gleam. He half wished to believe it. When he counted up the odds against Pete's return, his pulse beat quick. Then he hated himself. He was in torment. But under his distracted heart there was a little chick of frightened ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... he thought of the sanative and benign sulphur smouldering, smouldering always with ghostly yellow flamelets in the midst of his work of art, while the old year died ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... breathe. No sound but cinders on the sails And the ghostly heave, The voice the wind makes in the mast— And dainty gales And fluffs of mist and smoking stars Floating past— From ...
— The Voice of the Machines - An Introduction to the Twentieth Century • Gerald Stanley Lee
... I limped up, he came forward to meet us, and, when he helped her down from her saddle, he kissed her before all the picnic. It was like a scene in a theatre, and the likeness was heightened by all the dust-white, ghostly-looking men and women under the orange-trees, clapping their hands, as if they were watching a play—at Saumarez's choice. I never knew anything so un-English ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... be told off, and the crews to man the heavy sweeps. Up on the heights to the rear, planted thickly on every knoll and ridge, are the black-mouthed guns, and around them are grouped the squads of ghostly, grisly, fog-dripping cannoneers. One may walk along that line of heights for mile after mile, and find there only grim ranges of batteries and waiting groups of men. All is silence; all is alertness; all is fog. Back of the lines of unlimbered cannon, sheltered ...
— A War-Time Wooing - A Story • Charles King
... witches," and as they dart off, when disturbed, like a streak of light, their bodies being coated in a suit of shining mail, which the arrangement of the scales resembles, they have really a weird and ghostly look. ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... difficult to get any explanation out of Seven Knott; but finally the tale of the ghostly "clock" on the lower deck was blurted out ...
— Navy Boys Behind the Big Guns - Sinking the German U-Boats • Halsey Davidson
... pulpit, as he had never given any cause for scandal, his name was always mentioned with repugnance. A peculiar incident occurred to fan this animosity into a flame, and to involve the aged recluse in an atmosphere of ghostly terror. He possessed a very large library, consisting of works belonging to the eighteenth century. All those philosophical treatises which have exercised a wider influence than Luther and Calvin were ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... considerable time,—even till the old clock from the turret of the house told twelve, he turned away with a sigh, and went to bed. The wind moaned through the ancestral trees; the old house creaked as with ghostly footsteps; the curtains of his bed seemed to waver. He was now at home; yes, he had found his home, and was sheltered at last under the ancestral roof after all those long, long wanderings,—after the little log-built hut of the ...
— The Ancestral Footstep (fragment) - Outlines of an English Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... lonelier than before. Then the sharp bark of a fox rang out from a neighboring hill. The breeze started up again and a limb of a tree that rubbed against its neighbor produced a wailing sound as of some one in distress. We could see fantastic shapes out among the gnarled tree trunks and ghostly forms appeared in the velvety shadows and vanished again among the trees. The moon rose out over the rim of the eastern hills and seemed almost to pause as if some Oriental Magic was being wrought. A mist arose from the river and hovered over the valley below us; the complaining water ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... think, they sat there, two ghostly figures formless against the woods; then one rose, and presently I saw ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... ghostly way you see Stanley turning the pump handle. With a handful of waste which he has borrowed from the Rosa's engine room, the Professor wipes from the section of wall through which the searchlight plays the moisture ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... and azure draperies which became her as well as they did the sea-green furniture of her marine boudoir, where unwary walkers tripped over coral and shells, grew sea-sick looking at pictures of tempestuous billows engulfing every sort of craft, from a man-of-war to a hencoop with a ghostly young lady clinging to it with one hand, and had their appetites effectually taken away by a choice collection of water-bugs and snakes in a glass globe, that looked like a jar of mixed pickles ...
— Work: A Story of Experience • Louisa May Alcott
... of the Dominican Order were, in those days, to be found in many posts of influence, not the least of which was that of confessor to the King, and to Fray Tomas de Matiencio, the ghostly father of King Ferdinand, Las Casas did not fail to go at the outset. Matiencio had already shown pronounced sympathy with the cause of the Indians and was, therefore, to be counted upon as a firm ally, both because of his personal convictions and for ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... than armies would be." The mild blue eyes thanked him with an affectionate glance. His words somewhat calmed her fears; but before retiring to rest, she looked out, far and wide, upon the lonely prairie. It was beautiful, but spectral, in the ghostly veil of moonlight. Every bolt was carefully examined, and the tin horn hung by the bedside. When all preparations were completed, she drew aside the window-curtain to look at the children in their trundle-bed, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... adapted to his peculiar 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 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 ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... darker round; the stillness seemed to deepen; the moon was gone; and, save from the struggling ray of the lamp beside Rienzi, the blackness of night closed over the solemn and ghostly scene. ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... This Ghost would search, And whenever it would see The passers-by Take wings and fly It would laugh in ghostly glee, Hee, hee!—it ...
— Fifty years & Other Poems • James Weldon Johnson
... time when God's delight Crowned the head of Attila! Hungry river of the crag Stretching hands for earth he came: Force and Speed astride his name Pointed back to spear and flag. He came out of miracle cloud, Lightning-swift and spectre-lean. Now those days are in a shroud: Have him to his ghostly queen. Make the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... from sleep with a shiver But on my breast a kiss is hot, And by my bed the ghostly giver Is waiting tho' ...
— Rivers to the Sea • Sara Teasdale
... of England, they are fantastic enough, no doubt, and unreal, but yet they are most true and most practical, if we but use them as parables and symbols of human feeling and everlasting truth. What, after all, is any event of earth, palpable as it may seem, but, like them, a shadow and a ghostly dream, till it has touched our hearts, till we have found out and obeyed its spiritual lesson? Be sure that one really pure legend or ballad may bring God's truth and heaven's beauty more directly home to the young spirit than whole volumes of dry abstract didactic morality. Outward things, ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... prisoners confined for debt or for political offences. And, lastly, there was a small capilla or chapel, in which prisoners cast for death passed the last three days of their existence in company of their ghostly advisers. ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... is gone; The thronging legions madly ride O'er hill and dale, With hurried pace unsatisfied. In fierce assail Where none may fail; And only phantoms dimly blent Tell where the mounted armies went, Like shifting shadows, faint and dim, Or ghostly spectors, gaunt and grim, Beyond the far horizon's rim! Behold! Adown the valleys bright, The last, lone straggler fades from sight, And only hasty hoof-beats say What thousands rode the race to-day; What hosts, with hearts that build and bless, ...
— Oklahoma and Other Poems • Freeman E. Miller
... by the wild light, leaped like spectres out of the black, and granite crags, searched by blazing shafts, printed themselves in ghostly flames on the retina; thunder, searching unnumbered gorges, echoed beneath the sharper crashes in one long, unending roll, and far out beyond the mountains the flooded desert tossed on a dancing screen into ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... bowl. The house of Sawyer slept. Gathering his train in his hand, Jimsy hurried through the hall and down the stairs to the lower floor, quite dark now, save for barred patches of window framing ghostly landscapes. A gust of wind and snow whirled in as he unbarred the kitchen door. Then something with an ingratiating waggle pushed gladly against his feet. Five seconds later Jimsy and Stump were ...
— Jimsy - The Christmas Kid • Leona Dalrymple
... innumerable of steadily burning lights. A long, slender shaft of bluish radiance streamed out from the corner of Fort Taylor, widening as it extended seaward, until it struck and illuminated with a sort of ghostly phosphorescence the whitish hull of a gunboat stealing noiselessly into the harbor from the direction of the Cuban coast. The strange craft hung out a perpendicular string of red and white lights, which winked solemnly once or twice, changed ...
— Campaigning in Cuba • George Kennan
... a week after the murder queer things began to happen in that room," the Colonel went on. "Odd noises were to be heard, muffled screams came from behind the closed doors, and finally the people who lived here saw the white, ghostly form of my great-great-grandmother moving about in the room and in the halls. Ever since that time her spirit can be seen up there, for it comes around once in a while to see if anybody desecrates the room by trying to sleep in it. With my own eyes I have seen it—dozens ...
— Her Weight in Gold • George Barr McCutcheon
... the "Myrtle Grove" was haunted by ghosts, but the ghosts, if any there were, must have been pro-Boers, since they never disturbed us. But though we had no ghostly visitors we certainly had some of another kind. The house was perfectly infested by particularly large and bold rats. These thieving rodents, not satisfied with robbing our larder, had the audacity ...
— My Reminiscences of the Anglo-Boer War • Ben Viljoen
... out the Riverfield ribbon, and I thought an old owl hooted the question at me from a dead tree beside the road, while I felt also that a mocking-bird sang it from a thicket of dogwood in ghostly bloom opposite. "Will there be ...
— The Golden Bird • Maria Thompson Daviess
... gave place to the ghostly, grey twilight before the dawn; and at last the welcome streaks of colour in the east proclaimed to the weary watchers that daylight was again at hand. Their first night in ...
— Marguerite De Roberval - A Romance of the Days of Jacques Cartier • T. G. Marquis
... not last long. Major Kent drove into the town in his pony trap and pulled up opposite the statue. He called to Father McCormack, who had satisfied himself about Mary Ellen's appearance, and was prowling round the statue, making mild jokes about its ghostly appearance. Doyle detected a note of urgency in the Major's voice, and hurried across the square, reaching the pony trap just ...
— General John Regan - 1913 • George A. Birmingham
... to the window overlooking the river. They opened it, and peered out fearfully. Even Catherine trembled now that the hour approached. The air was fresh and cool, swept clean by the stirring breeze of the dawn, whose first ghostly gleams were already in the sky. Suddenly, somewhere near at hand, a pistol cracked. The noise affected them oddly. The King fell into an ague and his teeth ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... transparent upper current of meaning an under or suggestive one'? To this 'mystic or secondary impression' he attributes 'the vast force of an accompaniment in music.... With each note of the lyre is heard a ghostly, and not always a distinct, but an august soul-exalting echo.' Has anything that has been said since on that conception of poetry without which no writer of verse would, I suppose, venture to write verse, been said ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... its embattled belfry, its little turrets or bartizans hanging high at the angles of the wall, its dim old court, with a deep well in the centre, speaks with a ghostly voice of ancient Martel. This building, after the English left, was the residence of the seneschals of the Viscounts of Turenne down to the Revolution. In two of the rooms are chimney-pieces ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... Isabella had a terrible fit of the toothake, and she walked with a long night-shift at dead of night like a ghost, and I thought she was one. She prayed for nature's sweet restorer—balmy sleep—but did not get it—a ghostly figure indeed she was, enough to make a saint tremble. It made me quiver and shake from top to toe. Superstition is a very mean thing, and ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... silence As deep and sudden fell, As though some mighty wizard Had hushed them with a spell; And every sound was muffled, And every soldier's tread Fell lightly as a mother's 'Round her baby's cradle-bed; And rank, and file, and column, So softly by they swept, It seemed a ghostly army Had passed him as he slept; But mightier than enchantment Was that with magic move— The spell that hushed their voices— Deep reverence ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... water was firing. Every breaking wave dissolved in phosphorescence. The tub before the bow was outlined in radiance; the whipping painter was transmuted to a rope of silver; and as the dory split the crashing rollers they streamed away in sparkles of ghostly flame. Even in their peril the boys could not help appreciating the weird beauty ...
— Jim Spurling, Fisherman - or Making Good • Albert Walter Tolman
... castle, as he was passing up the stairs, he heard a footstep behind, and on turning round he perceived the same apparition. He hastily entered his room, and bolted, locked, and barred the door, but to his horror and surprise this offered no impediment to his ghostly visiter, for the door sprang open at his touch, and he entered the room! The apparition was seen by various others, all of whom asserted it bore the strongest resemblance to their deceased master! One gentleman spoke to him, and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 494. • Various
... us to follow it. The eye, wistfully pursuing its eccentric sweep, suddenly loses it in impenetrable shadows. There is not a vestige of any other ruin near it, and the long lines it here and there shows, ghostly white in the moonlight, seem ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... seen the inside of the medicine-lodge; but it was well known to be very dark, and to contain skulls and thigh-bones of famous enemies, and devil-masks, and horns and rattles and other disturbing and ghostly properties. Of what would happen to him when he had passed between the flaps of the lodge and was alone with the medicine-men he did not know. But he reasoned that if they really wanted to make a man of him they ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... that I have not dreamt this vision; and give me, I pray thee, note and warning, when the evil star of Boabdil shall withhold its influence, and he may strike, without resistance from the Powers above, for his glory and his throne.' 'The sign and the warning are bequeathed thee,' answered the ghostly image. It vanished,—thick darkness fell around; and, when once more the light of the lamps we bore became visible, behold there stood before me a skeleton, in the regal robe of the kings of Granada, and on its grisly head was the imperial ...
— Leila or, The Siege of Granada, Book II. • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... Abe gradually recovered his composure, and when his partner at last put down the paper Abe was able to smile the slow, ghostly smile of a man who has called four deuces with an ...
— Abe and Mawruss - Being Further Adventures of Potash and Perlmutter • Montague Glass
... appeal to her soul, silence had fallen on the floating home of the singers. A light white mist, like a filmy veil—a tissue of clouds and moonbeams—hung over the lake. Work was long since over in the ship-yard, and the huge skeletons of the unfinished ships threw weird and ghostly shadows on the silvered strand-forms like black visions of crayfish, centipedes, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... across the moat, were mysteriously provided. In the last silent watch of the night, the go-between (who had been waiting) conducted the escaped prisoner to the carter's cavern. Already the East was showing the ghostly light of the ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon
... literature. That "Caesar, in armour, with Ger-Falcon eyes," challenges one's obeisance as a great shout of his own legionaries, while that "Alone, by himself, the Soldan" bows to the dust our Christian pride, as the Turbaned Commander of the Faithful, with his ghostly crescent blade, strides past, dreaming ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... to the subdued rustle of Sunday silks and the whisper of Sunday voices. At the door some one shook hands with Callandar and remarked in a ghostly whisper that it was a fine day. A grave young man, in black, led them to a pew half way down the aisle. Most of the pews were already full, the latest comers showing slight signs of hurry; and as they seated themselves the bell stopped and ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... circumscribed space that was left to them of the chamber, being the only evidence she had till she dropped off to sleep that she was not without company. But with the daylight he was gone, and feeling almost panic-stricken with ghostly fears and loneliness, she ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi |
