"Spectral" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and divested spot; there is neither tree nor habitation near it; its monotony is unbroken, except by here and there the grey front of a rock peering above the heath, and the effect is rendered yet more dreary and spectral by the exaggerated and misty shadows which the moon casts along the ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume I. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... lockfasted in slumber's arms I lay and dream'd (so dreams our race When every spectral object charms, To melt, like ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... chin. He alone was the illuminated focus of this picture which, after a half-century, is brilliantly burnt into my memory. His pupils were mere wraiths floating in a misty dream, with malicious white points of light for eyes. And I felt like a disembodied being in this spectral atmosphere. ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... "he does wear one, any how, and night before last I sat on the hatch, as he says, reading Shakspeare in the moonlight, and when the second mate's night-capped head rose through the slide, he looked so very spectral that I couldn't forbear hailing him with—'Art thou a ghost or goblin damned?' which he persists in rendering his own fashion. I'm sure I didn't intend to liken him to a barn-yard fowl of any kind; I should rather have gone into the ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... season was midsummer, husks or twigs. Up went the rooks and down again, rising in lesser numbers each time as the sager birds made ready to settle, for the evening was already spent enough to make the air inside the wood almost dark. The moss was soft; the tree-trunks spectral. Beyond them lay a silvery meadow. The pampas grass raised its feathery spears from mounds of green at the end of the meadow. A breadth of water gleamed. Already the convolvulus moth was spinning over the flowers. Orange and purple, nasturtium and cherry pie, were ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... white moor, cut with deep hags, the arms of the "scroggie" thorns blown away from the sea and clawing at the ground like spectral hands, black beneath, but every gnarled knuckle and digit outlined in purest white above. Sometimes the clean tablecloth of white which covered a little loch, was cut by a round black "well-eye" through which a spring oozed ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... around her pale countenance, to which they added an expression almost corpse-like and unearthly. To make matters still worse, she had chosen a vest or cymar of a pale green silk, which gave her, on the whole, a ghastly and even spectral appearance. ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... friendship with John Barleycorn. The penalty paid by the stupid man is simpler, easier. He drinks himself into sottish unconsciousness. He sleeps a drugged sleep, and, if he dream, his dreams are dim and inarticulate. But to the imaginative man, John Barleycorn sends the pitiless, spectral syllogisms of the white logic. He looks upon life and all its affairs with the jaundiced eye of a pessimistic German philosopher. He sees through all illusions. He transvalues all values. Good is bad, truth is a cheat, and life is a joke. From his calm-mad ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... window, pressed close to the pane, And furrowed by tears that had fallen like rain, Was the face of a woman, so spectral in hue, With great liquid eyes, like twin oceans of blue, And cheeks in whose hollows were written the lines That pitiless hunger so often defines, Who muttered, as closer she gathered the shawl, "Oh, never for ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard
... and b are referred to the Milky Way (the Galaxy) as plane of reference. The pole of the Milky Way has according to HOUZEAU and GOULD the position ([alpha][delta]) (124527). From the distribution of the stars of the spectral type B I have in L. M. II, 14[2] found a somewhat different position. But having ascertained later that the real position of the galactic plane requires a greater number of stars for an accurate determination of its value, ...
— Lectures on Stellar Statistics • Carl Vilhelm Ludvig Charlier
... him, he saw that, strangely enough, the only creature whose influence could in any way cope with the influence of Valentine was not himself, who once had been as a seer to the two young men, but the thin, spectral, weary, painted Cuckoo. There, in that small room, with the long murmur of London outside, sat these two human beings, desolate woman, vice-ridden man, both fallen down in the deep mire, both almost whelmed ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... chastest virgin seemed impure, in a world where such a babe was possible. The governor whispered me, apart, that, like nearly all the rest of them, it was the child of unhealthy parents. Ah, yes! There was the mischief. This spectral infant, a hideous mockery of the visible link which Love creates between man and woman, was born of disease and sin. Diseased Sin was its father, and Sinful Disease its mother, and their offspring lay in ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... his face. Finally, the hands sank beneath the table, I believe Mr. Powers said; but I am not quite sure that they did not melt into the air. During this apparition, Mr. Home sat at the table, but not in such a position or within such distance that he could have put out or managed the spectral hands; and of this Mr. Powers satisfied himself by taking precisely the same position after the party had retired. Mr. Powers did not feel the hands at this time, but he afterwards felt the touch of infant hands, which were at the time invisible. He told ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... often—possibly not always by chance—the first two persons to get up at the dairy-house, they seemed to themselves the first persons up of all the world. In these early days of her residence here Tess did not skim, but went out of doors at once after rising, where he was generally awaiting her. The spectral, half-compounded, aqueous light which pervaded the open mead impressed them with a feeling of isolation, as if they were Adam and Eve. At this dim inceptive stage of the day Tess seemed to Clare to exhibit a dignified largeness both of disposition ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... soft gray sky, like the breast of a dove; sheeny gray sea with gleams of steel running across; trailing skirts of mist shutting off the mainland, leaving Light Island alone with the ocean; the white tower gleaming spectral among the folding mists; the dark pine tree pointing a somber finger to heaven; the wet, black rocks, from which the tide had gone down, huddling together in fantastic groups as if ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... woman raised her white arms heavenward for the final plunge, and the voice of the gale seemed like the dread roaring of the waters in her ears, as down, down, she went—in imagination—to a black death among the spectral piles. She backed a few paces to secure an impetus, cast a last look upon the stony officer, with a wild shriek sprang to the awful verge and came near losing her balance. Recovering herself with an effort, she turned ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... head and looked at the spectral forest where dead pines towered, ghastly in the moon's beams. That morning he had cut the last wood on his own land; he had nothing left to sell but a patch of brambles and a hut which ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... also, in truth, of a peculiarly northern poetry—a mystic poetry, which now and again, in his treatment, for instance, of angel forms and faces, reminds one of Blake. There is something of it certainly in the little white spectral soul of the penitent thief making its escape from the dishonoured body along the ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... the top step of the landing, and gazed down into the dark, dank water below. Once or twice a spectral thought loomed among the shadows of her brain; a wonder whether beneath that cold dismal surface there would not be rest from the troubles of earth. But she could not hold an idea before her for two consecutive moments; and she forgot what she thought about before ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... is on, more than ever does the tableau appear strange—more than ever unlike reality, and more nearly allied to the spectral. For, under the moonlight, shimmering through a film that has spread over the plain, the head seems magnified to the dimensions of the Sphinx; while the coyotes—mere jackals of terrier ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... his way back toward the hotel. He watched for the bank and found it still full of spectral activity. It occurred to him that city life must be made up of pleasure and work, without any rest. He was to find ...
— A Canadian Bankclerk • J. P. Buschlen
... ocean on all sides of me, I fancied that I again caught the mysterious sound which resembled that of breaking water; but this time it seemed to come from ahead. And looking in that direction, I presently became aware of a line of spectral whiteness, stretching right athwart our hawse, that seemed to come and go even ...
— Overdue - The Story of a Missing Ship • Harry Collingwood
... intervening figures came full in sight. Many turned away their faces; others kept a fixed and rigid stare, and a young girl giggled hysterically and fainted with the laughter on her lips. When the spectral procession approached the altar, each couple separated and slowly diverged, till in the centre appeared a form that had been worthily ushered in with all this gloomy pomp, the death-knell and the funeral. It was ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... through my dream, Went the Erl-king, with a moan, Where the wizard willow o'erhung the stream, And the spectral moonlight shone. ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... mercy!—icy cold Spectral hands her own enfold, Drawing silently from them Love's fair gifts of gold and gem. "Waken! save me!" still as death At ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... such hours he used to write his wild, fantastic tales. To his excited fancy everything around him had a spectral look. The shadows of fevered thought stalked like ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth
... beings, my dear Beers, and it "sets me up immensely" to be treated by a practical man on practical grounds as you treat me. I inhabit such a realm of abstractions that I only get credit for what I do in that spectral empire; but you are not only a moral idealist and philanthropic enthusiast (and good fellow!), but a tip-top man of business in addition; and to have actually done anything that the like of you can regard as having helped him is an unwonted ground with me ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... his trio of guests. All the way down the carpeted vestibule he was haunted by the grim shadow of a spectral fear. The frozen horror of that ghastly evening was before him like a hateful tableau. Hilditch's mocking words rang in his cars: "My death is the one thing in the world which would make my wife happy." The Court scene, with all its gloomy tragedy, rose before ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... leading the horse by the bridle; the macho followed behind. I looked at the horse and shrugged my shoulders: as far as I could scan it, it appeared the most uncouth animal I had ever beheld. It was of a spectral white, short in the body, but with remarkably long legs. I observed that it was particularly high in the cruz or withers. "You are looking at the grasti," said Antonio; "it is eighteen years old, but it is the very best in the Chim del Manro; I have long had my eye upon it; I ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... another life below, with its strange cries and mysterious movements. A leisurely wisp of steam rises from a steamer's funnel. She is alive and breathing, though motionless. The walls enclosing the Pool are spectral in a winter light, and might be no more than the almost forgotten memory of a dark past. Looking at them intently, to give them a name, the wayfarer on the bridge could imagine they were maintained there only by the frail effort of his will. Once they were, but now, in some ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... wine, dead to love, unamused by pleasure, indifferent to the arts, despising literature save as means to some end of power, Randal Leslie was the incarnation of thought hatched out of the corruption of will. At twilight we see thin airy spectral insects, all wing and nippers, hovering, as if they could never pause, over some sullen mephitic pool. Just so, methinks, hover over Acheron such gnat-like, noiseless soarers into gloomy air out of Stygian deeps, ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... see at once that no other claim to the command of his spirit is likely to succeed. His mind is already haunted. No Ghost can be more spiritual than his own thoughts, or more spectral than the world around him. No revelation of a particular crime can rival the revelation lately made to him of sin in the most holy place—the seat of virtue itself and heavenly purity. He may acknowledge the ties of filial obedience and the duty of revenge, ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... (xix. 8); "an angel of the Lord," angelos Kyriou, say the scriptures, (Acts. xii. 23,)—in either case a spectral illusion. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... embodied this tradition in the following ballad, in which he represents the friar as one of the ancient inmates of the Abbey, maintaining by night a kind of spectral possession of it, in right of the fraternity. Other traditions, however, represent him as one of the friars doomed to wander about the place in atonement for his crimes. But to ...
— Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey • Washington Irving
... them listlessly, willing to seem to attend to the boy, but, with her thoughts far away, while now and then she turned a weary gaze towards the next window: all she saw thence was a great, mounded country, dreary as sunshine and white cold could make it. Storm, driving endless whirls of spectral snow, would have been less dreary to her than the smiling of this cold antagonism. It was a picture of her own life. Evil greater than she knew had spread a winter around her. If her father suffered for the sins of his fathers, she suffered ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... parasols, The lathered horses fretting at delay, The customary afternoon blockade, The babel and the babble, the brilliant show— And then the dusky quiet of the nave. The pillared space, an organ strain that throbs Mysteriously somewhere, a rainbow shaft Shed from a saint's robe, powdering the spectral air, A workman with hard hands who bows his head, And there before the shrine of Virgin Mary A lonely servant ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... harvest moon in the sky, and the hills were bathed in a kind of spectral splendour—a faint and filmy shimmer of silver that left the outlines of objects blurred and elusive, though the scene as a whole emerged clearly for the eye. The wind was sighing drowsily across the moors, while high on the rugged ...
— Drolls From Shadowland • J. H. Pearce
... have lain for hours waiting in that spectral place, my eyes riveted on the tower and its golden cap of moonshine. I remember that my head felt void and light, as if my spirit were becoming disembodied and leaving its dew-drenched sheath far below. But ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... "Spectral illusion, most likely. There was a hut-keeper murdered here by the blacks, thirty years ago, and they say he walks occasionally. But he can't hurt you, even if he tried. Now let go, sweetest, and I'll say ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... what might be termed direct experimental evidence for the hypothesis of Prout. Unfortunately, however, it is evidence of a kind which only a few experts are competent to discuss—so very delicate a matter is the spectral analysis of the stars. What is still more unfortunate, the experts do not agree among themselves as to the validity of Professor Lockyer's conclusions. Some, like Professor Crookes, have accepted them with acclaim, hailing Lockyer as "the ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... gray, to moving blankness, to dim, hazy objects, spectral and tall, like blanketed trees, and when Ellen fully recovered consciousness she was ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... in hers, placed her arm behind him gently, and tenderly pressed him back into the chair. The old man raised his eyes to her as she stood by him, and holding one of her hands in one of his, the spectral calmness returned into his face; while, beating his thin knee with the other hand, he said, in the old way, as the body of his son was borne out of his house, "Riches have wings! Riches have wings!" But still he held Hope ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... where the cliff fell away on the Dardanelles side. He found a line of shallow holes, some a foot deep, some eighteen inches, aided a little by a few almost useless sandbags. The cliff brink was six or eight yards away, and under it lay the enemy—whose spectral figures, popping up and disappearing rapidly, blazed point blank into the exposed line. A few yards on the left the Turks poured across from the cliff to a small knob which protruded into the attackers' line, and upon which they bore ...
— The Tale of a Trooper • Clutha N. Mackenzie
... conscious had strange dreams. Sometimes he thought he was in the Hodoo Region, or Goblin Land, the abode of evil spirits, where he saw every kind of fantastic beast, bird, and reptile, and no end of spectral shapes in the winding passages of a weird labyrinth on a far-off island. Then his dreams were of rare beauty. Green foliage was changed to pure white, the trees became laden with sparkling crystals, roadways and streams were laid in shining silver, and geyser-craters enlarged in strange forms resembled ...
— The Harris-Ingram Experiment • Charles E. Bolton
... horse's side, Now gazed on the landscape far and near, Then impetuous stamped the earth, And turned and tightened his saddle-girth; But mostly he watched with eager search The belfry-tower of the old North Church, As it rose above the graves on the hill, Lonely, and spectral, and sombre, and still. ...
— Our Boys - Entertaining Stories by Popular Authors • Various
... which is stuck, as a thing no longer wanted, a very old, pious image Kwanon with the thousand arms, and Kwanon with the horses' head, seated among clouds and flames, both horrible to behold with their spectral grins. ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... dismay of a person terrified for the first time: he folded his arms, as if endeavouring to collect himself, but his whole frame shook convulsively. He was about to speak, when a noise of workmen approaching up the archway stopped him, and, turning away, he hastened on—that dark spectral woman ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... much bigger, more powerful, and more implacably savage than the other members of the gray, spectral pack, which had appeared suddenly from the north to terrorize their lone and scattered clearings, the settlers of the lower Quah-Davic Valley could not guess. Those who were of French descent among them, and full of the old Acadian superstitions, explained ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... window I saw the hearse and the carriages wind along the road and gradually grow vague and spectral in the falling snow, and presently disappear. Jean was gone out of my life, and would not come back any more. The cousin she had played with when they were babies together—he and her beloved old Katy—were conducting her to her distant childhood home, where she will lie by her mother's ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine
... came to him that to-morrow was Christmas Day, and he had forgotten it. This was remarkable. He had never forgotten it before, but this year he had been working so hard and had been so engrossed he had not thought of it. Even this reflection brought the spectral figures back sharply outlined before his eyes. They stayed longer now. He must think ...
— Santa Claus's Partner • Thomas Nelson Page
... an interest in colorful views on the screen, this was the first real evidence that Fuzzies possessed color perception. He proceeded to give further and more impressive proof, laying out the stones by shade, in correct spectral order, from a lump of amethystlike quartz to a dark red stone. Well, maybe he'd seen rainbows. Maybe he'd lived near a big misty waterfall, where there was always a rainbow when the sun was shining. Or maybe that was just his natural way of ...
— Little Fuzzy • Henry Beam Piper
... midst of a desolation and a silence that was profound. There was nothing there that lived, except a few fire-blacked trees that stuck up here and there in the shelter of broken walls. Now I understood the meaning of the spectral shapes. They were nothing but the broken walls of the other houses that were. They were all that ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... was more silent and more ordinary; but somehow he alarmed me much more than poor little Smythe. He was very tall and slight, and light-haired; his nose had a high bridge, and he might almost have been handsome in a spectral sort of way; but he had one of the most appalling squints I have ever seen or heard of. When he looked straight at you, you didn't know where you were yourself, let alone what he was looking at. I fancy this sort of ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... Prospero fell upon this spectral image (which with a slow and solemn movement, as if more fully to sustain its role, stalked to and fro among the waltzers) he was seen to be convulsed, in the first moment with a strong shudder either of terror or distaste; but, in the next, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... fine, the gentle sound of Thamis— Who vindicates a moment, too, his stream— Though hardly heard through multifarious "damme's:" The lamps of Westminster's more regular gleam, The breadth of pavement, and yon shrine where Fame is A spectral resident—whose pallid beam In shape of moonshine hovers o'er the pile— Make this a sacred part of ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... light from the meagre oil lamps, seemed to add a certain weirdness to this moving, seething multitude. No one could see his neighbour. In the blackness of the night the muttering or yelling figures moved about like some spectral creatures from hellish regions—the Akous of Brittany who call to those about to die; whilst the women squatting in the oozing mud, beneath that swinging piece of rope, looked like a group of ghostly witches, waiting for the hour of ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... the others, its prosperity was blighted by the sea's retiring. The harbor then became useless, the inhabitants left, the houses gradually disappeared, and, the historian says, the more massive buildings remaining "have a strangely spectral character, like owls seen by daylight." Three old gates remain, including the Strand Gate, where King Edward nearly lost his life soon after the town was built. It appears that the horse on which he was riding, frightened by a windmill, leaped over the town-wall, and all gave up ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... haunted at night by supernatural beings, and that the noise of combatants and the snorting of horses were heard to resound on it. The superstition has survived the change of creeds, and the shepherds of the neighborhood still believe that spectral warriors contend on the plain at midnight, and they say that they have heard the shouts of the combatants and the neighing ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... injunction, as well as his doubts, and checked himself. A moment later a faint, swirling gurgle of water caught his ear, and he was glad he had kept silence. An instant more, and the form of a beaver, spectral-gray in the moonlight, took shape all at once on the brink of the canal. For several minutes it stood there motionless, erect upon its hind quarters, questioning the stillness with eyes and ear and nose. Then, satisfied ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... silently like snowflakes. There was no wind. The moon rose out of the sea, and lent the sandy isle her own pallor. Here and there, back amongst the dunes, the branches of a low and leafless tree writhed upward like dark fingers thrust from out the spectral earth. The ocean, quiet now, dreamed beneath the moon and cared not for the five lives it had cast ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... laid well to heart, and build many wild suspicions upon, in these years! As that the Old Dessauer, with his gunpowder face, has a plot one day to assassinate his Majesty,—plot evident as sunlight to Wilhelmina and Mamma, which providentially came to nothing;—and other spectral notions of theirs. [Wilhelmina, i. 35, 41.] The Father of these two Margraves (elder of the two Half-brothers that have children) died in the time of Old King Friedrich, eight or nine years ago. Their Mother, the scheming old Margravine, whom I always fancy to dress in high colors, ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume IV. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Friedrich's Apprenticeship, First Stage—1713-1728 • Thomas Carlyle
... modified in color or spectral character to meet many requirements. Daylight has been reproduced in spectral quality so that certain processes requiring accurate discrimination of color are now prosecuted twenty-four hours a day under artificial daylight. Colored ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... eve of Bosworth fight, it seemed as if the spectral shadows of all those she had injured in the body or the soul, by her unerring demands upon one, and her negligence as to the other, rose a host of dismal spectres round. Their pale, exhausted, pleading ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... if he were about to awake, and then his eyes opened and he gazed on the spectral pallor of the dawn in the windows, his brain rousing from dreams slowly into comprehension of the change that had come. Then collecting his thoughts he rose and stood facing the dawn. He stood for a moment like one in combat, and then like one overwhelmed retreated ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... to be haunted; but whether by a spectral illusion or a real spectre, she could not know. In the glow of the fire light, in the shadow of the bed-curtains in the illuminated drawing-room, on the dark staircase, wherever and whenever she found herself alone, the vision of the girl in ...
— Cruel As The Grave • Mrs. Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... spectral horses moving slowly in the misty fields were grey. A streak of palest saffron light showed where the dim earth and ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... creeping out at the four corners, soon made great headway, and, fanned by the wind, spread rapidly to all parts of the building. Vaninka followed the progress of the fire with blazing eyes, fearing to see some half-burnt spectral shape rush out of the flames. At last the roof fell in, and Vaninka, relieved of all fear, then at last made her way to the general's house, into which the two women entered without being seen, thanks ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - VANINKA • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... of the wildest turmoil. Hell itself let loose could present no such spectacle as this myriad mass of brute life sweeping over the lonely plain under the wan, elfin light of the new-risen moon. Clouds of steam, wreathing itself into spectral shapes of sullen aspect, rose from the dusky, writhing mass, and the flaming of more than ten thousand eyeballs in the gloom presented a picture more terrible than ever came into the imagination of the writer of the Inferno. The spectacle, as observed by those some twenty feet from the ground, ...
— The Story of Louis Riel: The Rebel Chief • Joseph Edmund Collins
... night by the low-burning embers of our first camp fire I forgot my new companions. Through the gathering night mists I could just discern the dim outlines of the opposite shore of Grand Lake. It was over there, just west of that high spectral bluff, that Hubbard and I, on a wet July night, had pitched our first camp of the other trip. In fancy I was back again in that camp and Hubbard was talking to me and telling me of the "bully story" of the mystic land of won- ders that lay "behind the ranges" he would ...
— The Long Labrador Trail • Dillon Wallace
... in man generally exceeds that of chemical reaction or even of spectral analysis; see Passy, L'Annee Psychologique, second ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... night shadows are beginning to gather over the forest, throwing a sort of spectral gloom among the old woods, giving a distorted look to the trunks of the trees, the low bushes, the turned up roots, and the boulders scattered over the ground. See what ogre shapes these things assume as the darkness ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... than I have said. I had read, of course, as everyone has, something about 'spectral illusions,' as you physicians term the phenomena of such cases. I considered my situation, and looked my misfortune ...
— Green Tea; Mr. Justice Harbottle • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... black pall, wore white turbans and long white robes—the mourning color of the Turks. Torches were borne by attendants, and the whole company passed on at a quick pace. Seen thus by night, it had a strange and spectral appearance. ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... him—she will redeem him whether he wishes it or not; in a regular set trio she, he and Eric thrash the matter out; she is not to be shaken; Eric gives a despairing cry which brings on the women folk and the sailors. The Dutchman says farewell, pipes up his spectral crew, who heave the anchor, and he goes on board. As the ship moves off Senta throws herself into the water; the ship falls to pieces; the sun rises, and in its beams the "glorified forms" of the pair are seen mounting the skies. Senta has had her way: she has worked out her destiny and "saved" ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... with the glimmer of smouldering fires reddening the snow, there was something almost ghastly in the sloping field filled with white graves and surrounded by white mountains. Even the wintry sky borrowed, for an hour, the spectral aspect of the earth, and the familiar shapes of cloud, as of hill, stood out with all the majesty of uncovered laws—stripped of the mere frivolous effect of light or shade. It was like the ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... cedars, through a dark, gloomy forest, silent, almost spectral, which brought irresistibly to my mind the words "I found me in a gloomy wood astray." I was lost though I knew the direction of the camp. This section of cedar forest was all but impenetrable. Dead cedars were massed in gray tangles, live cedars, branches touching the ground, grew ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... himself to look ahead, away from the spectral shapes that pursued. They were close, yet he thrilled with the realization that he had helped Chet in some small degree: he had drawn off this ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... puff of smoke hung over the farm in the valley, trailed on the pure air and was gone. For a few minutes, in the clear light that is all shadow, fields and woods were outlined with an unreal precision; then the twilight blotted them out, and the little house turned gray and spectral under ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... one sense the change of title came about most inopportunely. Fate willed that over against the Durbar at Delhi there stood forth the spectral form of Famine, bestriding the dusty plains of the Carnatic. By the glint of her eyes the splendours of Delhi shone pale, and the viceregal eloquence was hushed in the distant hum of her multitudinous wailing. The contrast shocked all beholders, and unfitted them for a proper appreciation ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... untouched by the glow was the old priest, Hunrad, with his long, spectral robe, flowing hair and beard, and dead-pale face, who stood with his back to the fire and advanced slowly ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke
... it had stormed, though not as hard, the night when Miss Timpson received her "warning." If there were such things as ghosts, and if the little back bedroom WAS haunted, a night like this was the time for spectral visitations. She had half a mind to give ...
— Thankful's Inheritance • Joseph C. Lincoln
... 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 like spectral ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... kind of Heaven-scaling Ixion; and to him, as to the old one, the just gods were very stern! The ever-revolving, never-advancing Wheel (of a kind) was his, through life; and from his Cloud-Juno did not he too procreate strange Centaurs, spectral Puseyisms, monstrous illusory Hybrids, and ecclesiastical Chimeras,—which now roam the earth in a ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... Fire and subsequent storms had practically leveled the stand of trees between the spot where Lew stood and the summit. Here and there a blackened tree thrust its bare trunk upward, limbless, its top gone, a ragged, spectral, pitiful remnant of what had been a beautiful tree. But mostly the thick stand of young poles had been laid low even as a scythe levels a field of grain. And these fallen poles lay in almost impassable confusion, twisted and tangled and in ...
— The Young Wireless Operator—As a Fire Patrol - The Story of a Young Wireless Amateur Who Made Good as a Fire Patrol • Lewis E. Theiss
... hoary beard, an awful, ancient man rushes at you, as it were, out of the page." The eleventh is "a surging of mingled fire, water, and blood, wherein roll the volumes of a huge, double-fanged serpent, his crest erect, his jaws wide open." "The ever-fluctuating color, the spectral pigmies rolling, flying, leaping among the letters, the ripe bloom of quiet corners, the living light and bursts of flame, the spires and tongues of fire vibrating with the full prism, make the page seem to move and quiver within its boundaries, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... me—I never saw Vere startled—and came on to stop beneath the window. Taking off his cap, he ran his fingers through his black curls, pushing their wetness from his forehead. I noticed how the mists painted him with a spectral pallor. ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... bed opposite the fire, a confusion of dirty patchwork, lean-ribbed ticking, and coarse sacking, the lawyer, hesitating just within the doorway, sees a man. He lies there, dressed in shirt and trousers, with bare feet. He has a yellow look in the spectral darkness of a candle that has guttered down until the whole length of its wick (still burning) has doubled over and left a tower of winding-sheet above it. His hair is ragged, mingling with his whiskers and his beard—the latter, ragged too, and ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... not meet the approval of Mr. Brown, who was disposed to argue the matter, but I cut the discussion short by recommending silence, for fear of a party of scouts overhearing our conversation, when not even the spectral appearance of the shepherd could have saved us from ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... powerful and diabolical rival—Walleran—whose character combines the most dangerous qualities of Mrs. Radcliffe's villains with the magical gifts of a wizard. Fitzowen, not long before the day fixed for his wedding, is led astray, while hunting, by an elusive stag, a spectral monk and a "wandering fire," and arrives home in a thunderstorm to find his castle enveloped in total darkness and two of his servants stretched dead at his feet. He learns from his mother and sister, who are shut in a distant room, that Adeline has been carried off by armed ruffians. ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... Thus frequently, I was sent to bed several hours too late, with nerves unnaturally stimulated. The consequence was a premature development of the brain, that made me a "youthful prodigy" by day, and by night a victim of spectral illusions, nightmare, and somnambulism, which at the time prevented the harmonious development of my bodily powers and checked my growth, while, later, they induced continual headache, weakness and nervous affections, of all ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... forth Hath menace which auxiliar from the North May scarce avert. The scales of Justice tilt Something askew. The curse of high-placed guilt Is on you, if the warning tocsin's knell, Clanging forth fiercely, hath not force to tell The hearer that Fate's hourglass fast runs out. That spectral Comet flames, beset about With miasmatic mist, and lurid fume, Conquering Corruption threatens hideous doom. Yet, yet the Bow of Promise gleams above, Herald of Hope to her whom all men mark ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 29, 1893 • Various
... and Tantalus and Sisyphus for poetic effect, yet ever with an undertone of sadness and alarm. Not Orpheus' self, he says (I, xxiv, 13), in his exquisite lament for dead Quinctilius, can bring back life-blood to the phantom pale who has joined the spectral band that voyage to Styx: the gods are pitiless—we can only bear bereavements patiently (II, iii). You must leave, my Dellius, your pleasant groves and your cottage upon Tiber's banks, since Orcus, ruthless king, swoops ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... Hall on the eve of the execution of the rebel lords in 1745, having four headless inmates, who were duly welcomed as guests by old Sir Robert Altham. Nay, as a child, I had so often thrilled on my nurse's knees during the relation of this spectral visitation, that I own I felt indignant if any one presumed to laugh at a tale which had made me quake ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... show the patched windows and rickety doorways of the crazy houses, whose upper stories were lost in a brooding cloud of fog; and the pools of stagnant water at our feet; and the huge heap of cinders which filled up the waste end of the alley—a dreary, black, formless mound, on which two or three spectral dogs prowled up and down after the offal, appearing and vanishing like dark imps in and out of ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... house so charming that it would be an influence? She'd make Kennicott like poetry. That was it, for a beginning! She conceived so clear a picture of their bending over large fair pages by the fire (in a non-existent fireplace) that the spectral presences slipped away. Doors no longer moved; curtains were not creeping shadows but lovely dark masses in the dusk; and when Bea came home Carol was singing at the piano which she had ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... rows a few ears of corn, tender enough and sweet enough for the table, with not quite the flavor of July, perhaps, but with something that appeals as much to the imagination, that belongs with the spectral sunlight, the fading stalks and vines, and carries the memory back to that first day of April planting. To bring in a basket, however scanty, of those odds and ends and range them side by side on the kitchen table ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine
... lurching rapidly nearer, and down upon me loomed a stagecoach, a mountainous shape that flitted by me like a phantom. A phantom? The very night seemed peopled by phantoms; I sped past phantom wains and waggons, piled high with phantom loads, that moved with no sound of hoofs or wheels; spectral horsemen flitted by, soundless; in the shadow of hissing hedgerow and raving, wind-tossed trees crawled miserable, nebulous shapes, seen but to be lost again, ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... With agonising shriek He turned and fled, the spectral perspiration Dewing his brow and coursing down his cheek; Fled, and was lost to man's investigation (For full discussion of his little tricks See Psychical ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 8, 1914 • Various
... her, weighing on her spirits. The undulating movement of the boat, the splash of the oars, the faint breeze playing over the watery mirror, the sighing of the reeds, the long flight of the birds, the fitful twinkling of the first stars—there was something spectral about it all in the universal stillness. She fancied her friend was bearing her away to set her on some far-off shore, and leave her there alone; strange emotions were passing through her, and she could not give way to them ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... for her, and much assistance shewn, with Coachbuilders and such-like;—so helpful-polite are young military men. . . These are the Phenomena, or visual Appearances, of this wide-working terrestrial world: which truly is all phenomenal, what they call spectral; and never rests at any moment; one never at any moment ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... All this was the harder for him, because it came at a black and spectral hour of his life. It was not enough that the book was falling flat, and that all their hopes were collapsing; a new and most terrible calamity befell them. For three months now they had been dissolved in the bliss of their young ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... across the still lagoon, The colours of the sunset stream. Spectral in heaven as climbs the frail veiled moon So climbs my dream. Out of the heart's eternal torture fire No eastern phoenix risen— Only the naked soul, spent ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... ornamented, but without occupants, made one think of the misunderstanding which had gradually arisen for centuries between them and the head of the empire. Their ambassadors had already withdrawn to eat in a side-chamber; and if the greater part of the hall assumed a sort of spectral appearance, by so many invisible guests being so magnificently attended, a large unfurnished table in the middle was still more sad to look upon; for there, also, many covers stood empty, because all those who had certainly ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... yet the Dutchmen built their dorp With sturdy wit and will; In Nassau street their spectral feet Are heard to echo still. In many places sure I am New York is ...
— Songs for a Little House • Christopher Morley
... palaces, Vast columned temples, and triumphal arch, Fair hanging gardens, walls magnificent, Resolved to dust by time—as summer's sun Resolves again a fleecy cloud to mist. Yet sometimes even here the spectral light Broadens and brightens into sunny day, And the soft winds (the sweeter for the war Of elements,) blow thence to us Legends,— Traditions fair of noble hearts as true, Of honor pure, of love as sacred—deep— Of valor great—of homes as fair and dear, ...
— Across the Sea and Other Poems. • Thomas S. Chard
... she knows!" he kept saying to himself, as he groped his way toward home. He was dazed, benumbed. The many figures coming and going, this way and that way, seemed like a spectral vision to him. How he got as far as Union Square he never knew, but the first place he recognised was the open square. A large piano organ was playing and quite a number of people were grouped around it. This music recalled him ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein
... the long slippery grass to the summits of two of the mounds, and had a grand view of the whole scene of the tragic story, bathed in the dim misty light which always broods over the melancholy Campagna like the spectral presence of the past. The sunshine strove in vain to gild the dark shadows which the cypresses threw over the mound at my feet, and the lonely wind wailed wildly through their closely-huddled shivering ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... on Christmas Eve, and then as the clock was striking twelve, in which respect alone was it lacking in that originality which in these days is a sine qua non of success in spectral life. The owners of Harrowby Hall had done their utmost to rid themselves of the damp and dewy lady who rose up out of the best bedroom floor at midnight, but without avail. They had tried stopping the clock, so that the ghost would not know when it was midnight; but ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... peaceful that the slightest noise was irrelevant, and we felt bound to talk in whispers. We found ourselves upon a gravel walk bordered by cedars; to our left was the road, to our right the white stones of a vast burying ground rose up like spectral sentinels of ...
— The Love Story of Abner Stone • Edwin Carlile Litsey
... same hour, the noise of the approaching carriage was heard, he had the lights immediately carried to the top of the stairway, and he himself half descended the stairs. Up the stairs and past his very side came the footsteps; but neither living being nor spectral form could his ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... that takes to ha'ntin' about one of Enright's Bar-B-8 sign-camps, an' scarin' up the cattle an' drivin' 'em over a precipice, an' all to Enright's disaster an' loss. Nacherally, Enright don't like this spectral play; an' him an' Peets lays for the wraith with rifles, busts its knee some, an' Peets ampytates its laig. Then they throws it loose; allowin' that now it's only got one lai'g, the visitations will mighty likely cease. Moreover Enright regyards ampytation that ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... hollow eyes mournfully upon her. They were indeed a contrast—the bright vision in the rose silk dress, the floating amber curls, the milky pearls, the foamy lace, and the weird woman in the wretched rags, with sunken cheeks and hollow, spectral eyes. ...
— The Unseen Bridgegroom - or, Wedded For a Week • May Agnes Fleming
... the house, and rattled the window-panes of the room. It was the eyrie in which the deceased artist had painted his pictures, with two large windows which looked over the cliff. Again the gale sprang at the house, and smote the windows with spectral blows. ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... conquering hate, and steadfast to the right, Fresh from the heart that haughty verdict came; Beneath a waning moon, each spectral height ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... harder to bear than the dreary vision had been, and seemed not so real as many a dream of it. Rhoda sat by her, overcome by the awfulness of an actual sorrow, never imagined closely, though she had conjured up vague pictures of Dahlia's face. She had imagined agony, tears, despair, but not the spectral change, the burnt-out look. It was a face like a crystal lamp in which the flame has died. The ghastly little skull-cap showed forth its wanness rigidly. Rhoda wondered to hear her talk simply of home and the old life. At ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... people, at the moment when the trial of darkness approaches, be not confirmed in moral character, but are only maintaining a superficial virtue by the aid of a spectral religion; the moment the staff of their faith is broken, the character of the race falls like a climbing plant cut from its hold: then all the earthliest vices attack it as it lies in the dust; every form of sensual and insane sin is developed; and half a century is sometimes ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... was impossible to tell what was real and what was unreal. On the other side of the lane stretched what appeared to be a vast lake, but might only be mist on the meadows; cloud-like masses shaped themselves into spectral forms and rolled away into the dim and nebulous distance, where they settled into weird domes and towers and walls, a veritable elf king's castle. It was so uncanny and silent and strange that Carmel was far more frightened than she had felt before. Old fairy ...
— The Princess of the School • Angela Brazil
... attractions. But, at present, under the harsh and repulsive character of the reigning prince, everything took a new color from his un-genial habits. The superstitious legend, which had so immemorially peopled the schloss with spectral apparitions, now revived in its earliest strength. Never was Germany more dedicated to superstition in every shape than at this period. The wild, tumultuous times, and the slight tenure upon which all men held their lives, naturally threw their thoughts much upon ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... "Mr. Whistler is as spectral as ever in an unattractive portrait of an awkward little girl, happily not rendered additionally ridiculous by ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... on either hand, Within a daily strife, And spectral problems waiting stand Before ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... a sparkling ripple in the calm eternity of God? Dwellings, stores, banks, churches, streets, and the restless multitudes, are but forms of life,—as it were a rack of cloud drifting across the mirror of absolute being. That which seems to you substantial is only spectral. And as the dress of the fop, and the smile of the coquette, is merely an appearance; so the wealth for which men strain in eager chase, and the fabrics which pride builds up, the anvils on which labor strikes its mighty blows, and the body to which so much is devoted, ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... darkness—shrouds the whole scene: only above the accursed wood, as if through a horrid rift in the murky ceiling, a rainy deluge—'sleety-flaw, discoloured water'— streams down amain, spreading a grisly spectral light, even more horrible than that palpable night. Already the Earth pants thick and fast! the darkened Cross trembles! the winds are dropt—the air is stagnant—a muttering rumble growls underneath their feet, and some of that miserable crowd begin to fly down the hill. The ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... founders of the Briar Farm family. The little figure in the dark embrasure of the window clasped its white hands and turned its weeping eyes towards that ancient burial-place, and the moon-rays shone upon its fair face with a silvery glimmer, giving it an almost spectral pallor. "Why was I ever born?" sighed a trembling voice—"Oh, dear God! Why did you let ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... thing no longer wanted, a very old pious image: Kwanon with the thousand arms, and Kwanon with the horses' head, seated among clouds and flames, and horrible both of them to behold, with their spectral grin. ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... thou com'st for me," Lee's spirit to the Spectre said; "I know that I must go with thee— Take me not to the dead. It was not I alone that did the deed!" Dreadful the eye of that still, spectral Steed! ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... turned out of Piccadilly into St. James's Street before either man spoke again. The tossing lights of a windy autumn evening were shimmering on the wet pavement, and faces looked spectral white in the morris-dance of shine and shadow. Wratislaw, whose soul was sick for high, clean winds and the great spaces of the moors, was thinking of Glenavelin and Lewis and the strong, quickening north. His companion was furrowing ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... those nights? Did he, too, see that black shadow of his victim in the belfry sounding an alarm to the sleeping town and appealing to be avenged? It may be. At all events, the apparition boded ill to others, for, whenever the chimes were rung by spectral hands, mourners gathered at some bedside within hearing of them and lamented that the friend they had loved would never know them more ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... Through the spectral dawnlight she went down the stairs and took her way to the kitchen. The door stood half open; she heard the cheery crackling of the newly lighted fire before she entered. And hearing it, she was ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... by the village clock, When he galloped into Lexington. He saw the gilded weathercock Swim in the moonlight as he passed, And the meeting-house windows, blank and bare, Gaze at him with a spectral glare, As if they already stood aghast At the bloody ...
— Voices for the Speechless • Abraham Firth
... philosopher, Carnot, whose speculations have led to the theory that the sun will finally expend all its heat, and constellated life cease, as the solar system hangs, like a dead orrery, ashy and spectral, the ghost of what it was. So the extravagant author ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... a little to watch them pass, felt strangely isolated. They hurried on without seeing him, as if he were merely some spectral bystander. Yet the significant fact was not that a thousand strangers should pass him without being aware of his presence, but that he himself should notice their indifference. It was ...
— The Triflers • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... majestic are the neighbouring ruins of Spesburg, mere tumbling walls wreathed with greenery, and many another castled crag we see on our way. We are indeed in the land of old romance. Nothing imaginable more weird, fantastic and sombre, than these spectral castles and crumbling towers past counting! The wide landscape is peopled with these. They seem to rise as if by magic from the level landscape, and we fancy that they will disappear magically as they have come. And here again one wild visionary scene after another ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... been ruined it has been blocked. In the holes whence flints have dropped spiders harbour, that feed on ghostly moths which flit in the pitch darkness, and when caught between the fingers resolve themselves into a trace of silver dust. But on what did these spectral moths feed? A pallid boy of sixteen who guided me about the town told me that he had been born in a cave; that he slept in one every night, and worked underground all day. His large brown eyes could see objects in the dark where all was of inky blackness to me. It is astonishing with what unconcern ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... intimacy of family ties and family friendships had so totally vanished from the Rome of that day that the whole intercourse of business and acquaintance could be garnished with forms and flourishes which had lost all meaning, and thus by degrees the reality came to be superseded by that spectral shadow of "friendship," which holds by no means the least place among the various evil spirits brooding over the proscriptions and civil wars of ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... thus did muse: "This cabin lone Here stands to tell the tale of him, Back-woodsman brave, who having scaled The mystic mountains ne'er returned To them, though loved yet left behind; But here he chose his last abode, These gloomy woods whose blackness stands Up hard against horizon's slope; Grim, spectral, dreaded, and untrod Save monsters great of savage mien, That prowled, or crouched upon their prey; Sent forth a vicious roar that fairly shook Old Sylvia far and near, from vale Through crag to mountain peak! Upon this ...
— The Sylvan Cabin - A Centenary Ode on the Birth of Lincoln and Other Verse • Edward Smyth Jones
... of the blankness, out of the silence Emerges on soundless wings! The long sweet-sloping Rise and fall of far viol notes,— The mad Nirvana, The faint and spectral Dream-music Of my ...
— Spectra - A Book of Poetic Experiments • Arthur Ficke
... might be expected, are most abundant, as they include the subject of spectral illusions and apparitions, and natural phenomena marked with the marvellous. The properties of Sound are next in interest; among them we find explained the wonder of singers breaking glasses with their ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 560, August 4, 1832 • Various
... on, goes the fearsome rout, In pursuit through that region fenny, At each wild stride the bubbles burst out, And the sounds from beneath are many. Until at length from the midst of the din Comes the squeak of a spectral violin, That must be the rascally fiddler lout Who ran off ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... passage-way to Destruction?" I cried, as I saw how spectral all things were, for more than a thousand grimy faces had already added their fitful glances ...
— Mr. World and Miss Church-Member • W. S. Harris
... acquaintances, and during those few seconds, Wingrave studied her curiously. She was absolutely colorless, and her strange brilliant eyes seemed to have lost all their fire. Her gown was black, and the decorations of her hair were black except for a single diamond. There was something almost spectral about her appearance. She walked stiffly—for the moment she had lost the sinuous grace of movement which had been one of her many fascinations. Her neck and shoulders alone remained, as ...
— The Malefactor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... There is no passion More spectral or fantastical than Hate; Not even its opposite, Love, so peoples air With phantoms, as this madness of ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... on which they stood. The gorse and blue-bells and sea-pinks at their feet drooped suddenly wan and colourless, as though stricken with mortal sickness, and wept sad tears. They stood bewildered, while the pallid folds grew thicker and thicker, lit from above with a strange spectral glare, and coiling about them like the trailing garments of an army of ghosts. From the unseen abysses all round came the growl and wash of wave on rock and shingle, from the cliff above Pegane came the frightened bleat of a lamb, and an invisible gull went squawking ...
— Pearl of Pearl Island • John Oxenham |
