"Wraith" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in anger when a shadowy figure darted for the door. The intruder moved as fast as any wraith but the two former gods were too quick for him. A brief struggle, then they dragged the eavesdropper before the throne where they ...
— Satan and the Comrades • Ralph Bennitt
... car, staring back at the wet tracks slipping away behind. When they had changed trains and were headed for New York, with their destination only a few hours away, Stuart, again in the vestibule of the car, looking out through the closed entrance door upon a dull landscape passing like a misty wraith through the November fog and twilight, ...
— Under the Country Sky • Grace S. Richmond
... haunted the house. As this weird sound died away, it was followed by another, sharp, short, blood-curdling in its intensity. Something in this cry seemed familiar to Eliphalet, and he felt sure that it proceeded from the family ghost, the warning wraith of ...
— Tales of Fantasy and Fact • Brander Matthews
... autumn of 1788 peaceful electioneering went on throughout the country. Among the last acts of that thin wraith, the Continental Congress, was a decree that Presidential Electors should be chosen on the first Wednesday of January, 1789; that they should vote for President on the first Wednesday in February, and that the new Congress ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... tears in her eyes and the wraith of a smile on her lips. A little drop escaped and she dashed it away and her ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... uncertain, and philosophically anarchistic. From one point of view it might have been said of him that he was seeking the realization of an ideal, yet to one's amazement our very ideals change at times and leave us floundering in the dark. What is an ideal, anyhow? A wraith, a mist, a perfume in the wind, a dream of fair water. The soul-yearning of a girl like Antoinette Nowak was a little too strained for him. It was too ardent, too clinging, and he had gradually extricated himself, not without difficulty, ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... their graceful leafless branches stretching up like dumb pleading hands toward the pitiful sky. I grew so interested seeking out specially picturesque forest growths, and glimpses into the still woodland depths under the white snow wraith which I might come again to study more closely, and put on my canvas, that I so far forgot the business of the hour as to find myself a half hour after the appointment at still some distance from Linden Lane. Shutting my eyes resolutely on the rarest bits of landscape caught ...
— Medoline Selwyn's Work • Mrs. J. J. Colter
... not all delusion, That strange intelligence of sorrow Searching the tranquil heart's seclusion, Making us quail before the morrow. 'Tis the farewell of happiness departing, The sudden tremor of a soul at rest; The wraith of coming grief upstarting Within ...
— Scottish sketches • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... attention, he hardly saw her. She was pretty enough, but very quiet and self-absorbed, a slender, nervous creature with that pathetically eager look peculiar to her age and caste in France, starving for the life she might not live till marriage should set her free. A pale and ineffective wraith beside Eve, whose beauty, relieved in candleglow against the background of melting darkness, burned like some rare exotic flower set before a screen of lustreless black velvet. And like a flower to the sun she responded to the homage ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... of an eerie and mysterious Presence has forced itself upon our mind, and we have been able to understand the emotions in which originated the visions of wraith and phantom of the bards of old. Our travellers, however, passed through the gale unhurt. A tremendous outburst of rain, the final effort of the tempest, cleared the sky, which towards the west was gradually lighted up with gleams ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... a wraith she went, now appearing in the open spaces, now vanishing, beneath the dense gloom of cedar boughs, till she reached a naked, lonely rock which stood almost upon the edge of the gulf. Opposite ...
— The Brethren • H. Rider Haggard
... sheet, Wraith of long-perished wrong and time, Forbear! the spirit starts to meet ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... knew she was speaking, but I could not hear her voice. . . . It was that way while she stood beside me—I could not hear her, Celia. I could not hear what she was saying. It was no spirit I saw—no phantom from the dead there by my bed, no ghost—no restless wraith, grave-driven through the night. I believe she is living. She knows I believe it. . . . As you sat here, a moment ago, reading to me, I saw her reflected for a moment in the mirror behind you, passing into the room beyond. Her hair is perfectly white, Celia—or," he said vaguely ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... psychological effect of what was going on secretly, in his relations to girls and women. In a word, these relations were sentimental only. He often imagined himself in love; but it was imagination only. He was in love with a wraith, not a girl of flesh and blood. He hesitated to regard in any sexual way any girl of whom he had a high opinion; sexual desire and 'love' seemed for him to inhabit different worlds and that it would be a pollution to bring them together. In hours of relaxation ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... a hush, as though at sunset the world had really resolved, and had stopped moving. But from the waiting steamer looming over us, a gigantic and portentous bulk, a thin wisp of steam hums from a pipe, and hangs across the vessel, a white wraith. Yet the hum of the steam is too subdued a sound in the palpable and oppressive dusk to be significant. Then a boatswain's pipe rends the heavy dark like the gleam of a sword, and a great voice, awed by nothing, roars from the steamer's bridge. There is a sudden commotion, we hear ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... everything is prophetic of the gentle and noiseless meteor that is approaching, and of the stillness that is to succeed it, when "all the batteries of sound are spiked," as Lowell says, and "we see the movements of life as a deaf man sees it,—a mere wraith of the clamorous existence that inflicts itself on our ears when the ground is bare." After the storm is fairly launched the winds not infrequently awake, and, seeing their opportunity, pipe the flakes a lively dance. I am speaking now ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs
... insignificant, scrofulous wraith of a man with green eyes and straight, fair hair. He whined complaint of his boss, the ranch, his bad ...
— The Underdogs • Mariano Azuela
... round to the gable of the house to water the plants there, and then he stole into the house and up stairs, and threw himself upon the bed. And outside he still heard Sheila singing lightly to herself as she went about her ordinary duties, little thinking in how strange and wild a drama her wraith ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... he was by nature, in vain endeavoured to banish from his mind the gloomy impression which the startling interview with Cesarini had bequeathed. The face, the voice of the maniac, haunted him, as the shape of the warning wraith haunts the mountaineer. He returned at once to his hotel, unable for some hours to collect himself sufficiently to pay his customary visit to Miss Cameron. Inly resolving not to hazard a second meeting ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book XI • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... Harvey and the Valley towns, a great open ravine, because you people sitting here who own the property down there won't tax yourselves to enclose those sewers that poison us!" A faint—rather dazed smile ran over the congregation like a wraith of smoke. He felt that the smoke proved that he had struck fire. He went on: "Love, great aspiring love of fathers and mothers and sisters and brothers, love stifled by fell circumstance, by cruel events, and love that winces in agony at seeing ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... know that a part of my youth which in some strange way seems to have acquired an individuality, of its own dwells, and will for ever dwell, among these scenes. And I shall never be so ill-advised as to seek it, for the wraith, like a mocking dryad, would flit from tree to tree, as beautiful and ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... not a wraith, no grisly spectre, no half-nebulous Shape. He was Peter Grimm, rugged, homespun, the man whose iron individuality had undergone ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... so, all things discern me, name me, praise me— I walk in a world of silent voices, praising; And in this world you see me like a wraith Blown softly here and there, on silent winds. 'Praise me'—I say; and look, not in a glass, But in your eyes, to see my image there— Or in your mind; you smile, I am contented; You look at me, with interest unfeigned, ...
— The House of Dust - A Symphony • Conrad Aiken
... when she had passed by. A few hens, questing for food under a rick, stole away under a gate at her approach. Sylvia felt that if she had come across any human beings in this wilderness of barn and byre they would have fled wraith-like from her gaze. At last, turning a corner quickly, she came upon a living thing that did not fly from her. Astretch in a pool of mud was an enormous sow, gigantic beyond the town-woman's wildest computation of swine-flesh, ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... and closed her eyes. In the moonlight which blanched her streaming robe and her loosened hair that, falling to her knees, wrapped her in a mantle of spun gold, she looked a wraith, a creature woven of the mist of the stream below, a Loerelei sleeping upon her rock. Landless, still upon his knee beside her, watched her with a beating heart, while the Susquehannock, leaning upon his gun, bent his darkly impassive looks upon them both. At ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... and marveled, and smiled to think that, had one stayed at home, one might never know these things. Forgotten was the wraith of Leung Kai Chu, the jungle trail of Hallman, and even the trepidation with which we had awaited the sailing ship's boat. I was soon to be in those enchanted archipelagoes, and to see for myself those mighty swimmers and those sleepers upon the sea. I might even get ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... discourage me," she said, "because I want all the spirits I am capable of to carry it through. It has to be done with a light heart, else it will deceive nobody. And so, my dear, to-morrow you will say 'good-bye' to me, and have a sort of wraith of me instead for a little while. Oh, Alice, I hope it won't take ...
— Daisy's Aunt • E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson
... cried, kissing her on both cheeks, "I don't believe you're half properly glad to see me! Did you think it was my wraith? I assure you it's my own self in the flesh, and very cold flesh, too. What a delightful room! I'd no idea atheists' homes were so much like other people's. You cold-hearted little cousin, why don't ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... the wraith of the dead mother moved toward her—the wraith of the weaver moved her way—and round and about her body was wound the shining cloth. Wherever it touched the body of the stepmother, it was as hateful to her as the touch of a monster out of sea-slime, so that her flesh crept away from ...
— The Shape of Fear • Elia W. Peattie
... dead, and would come again Never, though she might honor ineffably The flimsy wraith of him she conjured Out of a dream with ...
— The Three Taverns • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... really a stranger, and not thy wraith?" said John anxiously. "I hope it was, for Dame Idonea said if it were a wraith, it betokened that thou wouldst not—live long—and oh, Richard! I ...
— The Prince and the Page • Charlotte M. Yonge
... opportunity of fresh experience. The sun sinks out of sight before the sultry atmosphere begins to cool. The weird "gecko," a large lizard which foretells rain, screams "Becky! Becky!" in the garden shadows, and a cry of "Toko! Toko!" echoes from another unseen speaker of a mysterious language, while wraith-like forms of his tiny brethren make moving patterns on the white columns, as the hungry little reptiles hunt ceaselessly for the mosquitos which form their staple diet. Lashing rain and deafening ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... false hair, it seemed to restore her reason though it destroyed her coiffure. "Enough of this!" I cried to her. "Take your place by the boat, and do as you are told." And I saw Helena pass forward, also, as we all reached the deck, herself pale as a wraith, but with no outcry and no spoken word. So, at last, I ranged them all near the boat that swung ready at ...
— The Lady and the Pirate - Being the Plain Tale of a Diligent Pirate and a Fair Captive • Emerson Hough
... spoke. Then the little melancholy carriage was wheeled away. Motherhood always seemed the most sacred, the supreme experience to Robinette; a thing high and beautiful like the topmost blooms of Nurse Prettyman's plum tree. "If one had to choose between that sturdy boy and this wistful wraith, it would be hard," she thought. "All my pride would run out to the boy, but I could die for love and pity if this ...
— Robinetta • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... a boy was creeping towards him—creeping, as it seemed to him, from the shadows in the tunnel. Who—who was it? Was it really a being of flesh and blood? At first it seemed to him that it must be the wraith of the little fellow about whom he had been speaking—Hibbert—but even as the thought filtered through his mind the boy was kneeling beside him, looking ...
— The Hero of Garside School • J. Harwood Panting
... nothing loath. Either he was not the bravest in the party, or else he had the keenest appreciation of the odds against an exposed position. In a very few minutes the dory was a mere gray wraith on the water, but there it hung. Evidently the rower was overruled by others less cautious, or of the certain conviction that at the distance the yacht was a better mark than ...
— Radio Boys Loyalty - Bill Brown Listens In • Wayne Whipple
... chosen to pause was at the grave of old Patience Goodyear, and from the corner where we stood we could see their faces plainly as they turned and looked at each other with the moonbeams pouring over them. Was it fancy that made her look like a wraith, and he like some handsome demon given to haunting churchyards? Or was it only the sternness of his air, and the shrinking timidity of hers, which made him look so dark ...
— The Old Stone House and Other Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... old-world times returned by magic? had a crazed serving-man revived the vanished duties of his warlike predecessor? was the wraith of seneschal or man-at-arms conjuring up a ghostly beacon to stream into the soft air? was an evil spirit about to bewilder and mislead a fated ship to meet its doom on the jagged rocks beneath the dead calm of that ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... of passionate music, A hush and a silence then; The dancers rest in their pleasure quest, And lo! I am old again. Old and alone in my chamber, While the night wears wearily on, And the pallid wraith of a broken faith— Keeps watch with me ...
— Yesterdays • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... the room adjoining that in which was the body, a pale candle burning near it, I felt as though Peter were walking to and fro, to and fro, past me and into the room of his wife beyond, thinking and grieving. His imagined wraith seemed horribly depressed and distressed. Once he came over and moved his hand (something) over my face. I felt him walking into the room where were his wife and kiddies, but he could make no one see, hear, understand. I got up and looked at his cadaver a long ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... wide, the story saith, Out of the night came the patient wraith, He might not speak, and he could not stir A hair of the Baron's minniver—- Speechless and strengthless, a shadow thin, He roved the castle to seek his kin. And oh,'twas a piteous thing to see The dumb ghost follow ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... the first button of her blouse and kissed her neck harshly, while she watched him, in a maze. He abruptly fastened the button again, sprang up, stared out at the wraith-filled darkness over the river, while his voice droned on, as though it were a ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... back, threw a prodigious summerset, and when they alighted upon the ground, there! in them again, Sprigg saw his semblance. Manitous, temple, amphitheater—all had vanished—a forest of lofty trees appearing instead, through whose glimmer of lights and shadows the boy now saw himself, or rather his wraith running with incredible swiftness, and glancing furtively over his shoulder at every bound, as if death were a present fear behind him; life ...
— The Red Moccasins - A Story • Morrison Heady
... silhouetted against the glare of light from the billiard-room. And here she made an effort to efface the vision, shutting her eyes as she rode there in the rain. But clearly against the closed lids she saw the phantoms passing—spectres of dead hours, the wraith of an old happiness masked with youth and wearing ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... 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 a-way, as punishment enough. ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... the mountain goats, On stormy cape and crag, The refuge of the wanderer floats— Our hospitable flag; While alien banners only mock With glory's fleeting wraith, It stands on the eternal rock Of our eternal faith; And handed on from sire and son, It furls not day nor night; So England holds what England won, And God ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... sinks. Rising, the figures ascend, but now leaf thin, tapering to a dusky wraith, which, fiery tipped, draws its twofold passion from my heart. For me it sings, unseals my sorrow, thaws compassion, floods with love the sunless world, nor, ceasing, abates its tenderness but deftly, subtly, weaves in and out until in ...
— Monday or Tuesday • Virginia Woolf
... wolf there—close behind me; it does not move; it glares at me with its two red eyes. It is my wraith,[1], Sigurd! Three times has it appeared to me; that bodes that I shall ...
— The Vikings of Helgeland - The Prose Dramas Of Henrik Ibsen, Vol. III. • Henrik Ibsen
... black hulk of a Japanese liner rose black out of the gray fog shadow. But the freighters, the coasters, tramps that went hither and thither over the earth wherever fat cargoes lured them—they were either swallowed in the mist or shadowed to a ghost-like wraith of themselves so tenuous that all detail ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... it is really I, and not my wraith. Miraut was not mistaken. Here I am again, if not richer than when I went away, at least all safe and sound. Come now, lead the way with your torch, and we will go ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... wistfully of the police, now plodding over the hills after my wraith. They at any rate were fellow-countrymen and honest men, and their tender mercies would be kinder than these ghoulish aliens. But they wouldn't have listened to me. That old devil with the eyelids had not taken long to get rid of them. I thought he probably had some kind ...
— The Thirty-nine Steps • John Buchan
... in the dike, Under the ooze and the slime, Nestles the wraith of a reticent Gryke, Blubbering bubbles of rhyme: Though the reeds touch him and tickle his teeth— Though the Graigroll and the Cheest Pluck at the leaves of his laureate-wreath, Nothing ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... Peace seems but a wraith, The glory that was ours seems but a name, And like a rotten reed our broken faith, Our boasted virtue turned to scarlet shame By the low, envious lust of party power; While he upon the heights whence he had led, ...
— Woodrow Wilson's Administration and Achievements • Frank B. Lord and James William Bryan
... words for me, made letters he called mine: what I sent, he retained, gave these in place, all by the mistress messenger! As I recognized her, at potency of truth, so she, by the crystalline soul, knew me, never mistook the signs. Enough of this—let the wraith go to nothingness again, here is the orb, have only thought for her!" What follows admits us to the very HEART of Browning's poetry—admits us to the great Idea which is almost, in these days, strange to say, peculiarly his— which no other poet, certainly, of this intellectual, analytic, scientific ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... the name of the dear grandmother's only brother, her father's heir; he was her father's only son, two daughters born between died in infancy. That poor young fellow died at sea, and just at the time (as is supposed) that he expired, his wraith appeared to the old woman, Becky Maddison, then a very young girl. I am sorry to say the old woman has made a gain of this story. People often used to come to hear it, and she certainly does not always tell it ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... But I wasna the only ane that saw ye. Ye micht hae gotten a waur fleg gin I hadna come up, for Mr Beauchamp was takin' the bearin's o' ye throu the window, and whan I gaed up, he slippit awa' like a wraith. There ye lay, wi' yer heid back, and yer mou' open, as gin you and the deid man had been tryin' whilk wad sleep the soun'est. But ye hae ta'en to ither studies sin' syne. Ye hae a freah subject—a bonnie young ane. The Lord hae mercy upo' ye! ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... incorruptible crown that fadeth not away, which His hand will give, should fire our hope, and shine before our faith. Not Naaman's gifts but God's approval is Elisha's reward. Not the praise from lips that will perish, or the 'hollow wraith of dying fame,' but Christ's 'Well done! good and faithful servant,' should ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... far minaret of faithful cloud A wraith-muezzin of the sunset cried Over the sea that swung with sultan pride, "Allah is Beauty, there is none beside! Allah is Beauty, not to be denied By Death or ...
— Many Gods • Cale Young Rice
... stared, electrified at her appearance. White as a bone, her beautiful violet eyes full of haunting fear; her hair, torn down by the wind and flickering in long black strands about her face, far below her waist, she looked like a wraith ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... love you," he replied, brokenly, and he drew her closer. He had never embraced her, never kissed her. But there was a whiteness about her then—a wraith—a something from her soul, and he ...
— The Rainbow Trail • Zane Grey
... impossible that she should be the sea-wraith of the lost child; but, then, it was wholly impossible that she should be, and there she was, smiling at him, and Caius saw in the dark eyes a likeness to the long-remembered eyes of the child, and thought he still read there human wistfulness and sadness, ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... since we know in advance that he reached home safely at last. One of the most popular modern books of travel—Eothen—is a poem which gives us the very atmosphere and odor of the Orient, but nothing more; and the author floats before our vision in so dim and wraith-like a manner, that many readers have doubted whether the work was founded on actual experience. On the other hand, those old narratives, of which Robinson Crusoe is the ideal type, bear unmistakable stains of the soil on every page. You not only ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... a wraith—I took you for a vision," said the Baron plaintively. He put his hand upon his guest's arm. "Oh, man!" said he, "if you were Gaelic, if you were Gaelic, if you could understand! I came through the dark ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... in the breath of the depths. They would rise to a certain height, then suddenly fall, and rise again, just like a juggler's balls. Sometimes the breathing from below sucked the whole swarm right down, but it rose up again, veering hither and thither like a dancing wraith in the draught from the tunnel-like entry. The little girls would gaze at it, lift their petticoats, and take a few graceful steps. Olsen's Elvira had learned her first dance-steps here, and now she was dancing respectable citizens into ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... away from the business district. It required enormous self-control to go slowly. While among the lighted streets the urge to flee at top speed was strong. But he clenched his teeth. A car makes much less noise when barely in motion. He made it drift as silently as a wraith under the trees and ...
— Operation Terror • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... for a brief time had loomed so large in our imaginations, faded into a sort of wraith. Years passed, bringing with them great changes for me. I left California and settled in England. I wrote a book which excited a certain amount of interest, and inspired some of my old school-fellows to renew acquaintance with me. By this time I had forgotten Johnson. He was part of a distant ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... listened seriously, as they always did when their Captain started one of her "sermonettes" as Julie called them; and when she had concluded, Joan said: "In other words, you want us to starve the poor wraith still more by withdrawing any thoughts from ...
— Girl Scouts in the Adirondacks • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... were now, to the best of our belief, alone on the island, and a lonesomer spot it would be hard to imagine, or one touched at certain hours with a fairer beauty—a beauty wraith-like and, like a sea-shell, haunted with the marvel of the sea. But we, alas!—or let me speak for myself—were sinful, misguided men, to whom the gleam and glitter of God's making spoke all too seldom, and whose hearts ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... names," I stubbornly protested. "He did not even call the vision he encountered a woman. It was a wraith, you remember, a dream-maiden, a creature of his own imagination, born of ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... now—he is in that room in there! And he has heard everything! And seen everything! And the man who sees his own wraith dies! ...
— Plays by August Strindberg, Second series • August Strindberg
... the after-deck, and under this was arranged with care the main collection of corals and shells, the commoner sorts, such as found a ready sale at low prices. There was pure white coral, in long branches, studded with tiny points, like the wraith of the fairy thorn; there were great piles of the delicate fan-coral, which the sailors call sea-fans, and which Franci would hold out to every girl who had any pretence to good looks, with his most gracious bow, and "Young lady like to fan herself, keep the sun off, here you air, ...
— Nautilus • Laura E. Richards
... for love of a gap-toothed ogress? No. He goes out into the fairy world, and, sending his ogress-wife to Jericho, becomes desperately enamoured of the elfin princess. There he is, great, ruddy, hairy wretch: there she is, a wraith of a creature made up of thistledown and fountain-bubbles and stars. He stares at her, stretches out his huge paw to grab a fairy, feathery tress of her dark hair. Defensive, she puts up her little hand. Its touch is an electric shock to the marauder. He blinks, and rubs his arm. He has ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... born as the blue swirls and whirls through the resisting medium. Unseen forces and currents, tides and pressures, set up a seething and flowing, pulling and twisting of the drop of ink until it becomes a strange wraith created out of the molecules. A temporary individuality lives ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... auld wife cam till her braith, And she thocht the Bible micht ward aif scaith; Be it benshee, bogle, ghaist, or wraith— ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... swinging like dead leaves on the long swells. The stars came out, the gulls went shoreward for the night, and we were as alone as if on the sea. The woman's slender figure, wrapped in her white cloak, became a silent, shining wraith. She was within touch of my hand, yet unreachably remote. I lost my glib speech. The gray loneliness that one feels in a crowd came over me. If I had been alone with my men, I should have felt well accompanied, master of my craft, and in tune with my condition. It was ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... death, On moonless nights, by lightning shown, How oft they saw the water-wraith, And heard the weeping banshee's groan. How many a barque, at midnight toss'd And in the angry waters lost, In the gray dawn-light seemed to glide ...
— Lays from the West • M. A. Nicholl
... the hills. Still, we ought to be able to find in Masonry some trace of Rosicrucian influence, some hint of the lofty wisdom it is said to have added to the order; but no one has yet done so. Did all that high, Hermetic mysticism evaporate entirely, leaving not a wraith behind, going as mysteriously as it came to that far place which no ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... there—in Paris, Bombay, Omaha, with his wife and family, doing this, that and the other. He's still alive. He's still in some kind of human relation with you. You grind your teeth and say that it's all in the day's work. You know where you are. But when a man fades out of your life like a wraith—well—you don't know where you are. It has been maddening—the ghastly seriousness of it. I've done my best to keep sane. I'm a woman with a lot of physical energy—I've run it for all it's worth. But this ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... which she always placed in the window. Then the moon shone full upon his face, and Jessie Bain looked at him with eyes that fairly bulged from their sockets. His features were now clearly visible in the bright moonlight. It was Hubert Varrick in the flesh, surely, or his wraith! ...
— Kidnapped at the Altar - or, The Romance of that Saucy Jessie Bain • Laura Jean Libbey
... she did not exist, and the little wraith floated back to Paris from which she had come, suddenly, on days when she had written him certain letters which had brought ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold
... one of them could move an eye-lash. Their outlines began to waver; their faces began to be dim and vague, as if covered with close white veils; from their outsides inward they slowly faded, melted, dissolved; nothing remained of any of them but a wraith, a vapor, a puff of smoke, remotely in the shape of a human being; and then that also vanished; nothing remained; the place where they had ...
— The Old Tobacco Shop - A True Account of What Befell a Little Boy in Search of Adventure • William Bowen
... quarter,—for Michael had stood somewhat in the shadow—and because of the cowardliness of all bullies, for the moment he was able to prevail against all four, just long enough for the girl to slip like a wraith from their grasp ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... themselves into the slumbers of sportsmen who have not treated them as they deserved. I have suffered from it myself. It was only last week that, having said something derogatory to the dignity of my second gun, I woke with a start at two o'clock in the morning, and found its wraith going through the most horrible antics in a patch of moonlight on my bed-room floor. I shot with that gun on the following day, and missed nearly everything I shot at. Could there be a more convincing proof? Take my advice, therefore, and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 10, 1892 • Various
... tell you exactly what she wears—and her every feature and the color of her eyes? The wraith so materializes that I can describe it as accurately as I could describe you ...
— The Man and the Moment • Elinor Glyn
... great bounds on his huge swathed paws, shot past between the iron-hard tree-boles; a fox followed, scudding like the wind on the frozen crest; a hare, white as a waste wraith, flashed by, swift as a racing white cloud-shadow; a goshawk screamed, and drew a straight streaking line across a glade. And then came the men, side by side, deadly dumb, with set faces, the pale sun glinting coldly cruel upon the snaky, lean barrels of their slung rifles, moving with steady, ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... Cherokees and his own band, brightly painted for war, move forward to battle under the leadership of a ghostly semblance of himself. Suddenly a musket rang out and a bullet sped from the enemy's line. His wraith was struck full in the forehead and fell to earth in the agony of death. On rejoining his comrades he related his vision and foretold that in the battle about to take place he should meet death. He said also, however, that, if the Indians fought on, ...
— Tecumseh - A Chronicle of the Last Great Leader of His People; Vol. - 17 of Chronicles of Canada • Ethel T. Raymond
... black sea of Michiganon a vast black wraith; a thing horrible, tremendous, titanic in organic power. It howled, execrated, menaced; missed its aim, and passed. The little swaying house still stood! Under the sheltered log some tiny sparks of fire still burned, omen of the ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... across the valley deep. Be near to me, for now I need you most. To-night I saw an unsubstantial flame Flickering along those shadowy paths, a ghost That turned to me and answered to your name, Mocking me with a wraith of far delight. ... My lovely one, ...
— Georgian Poetry 1918-19 • Various
... appeal to you. His letter was written in deep dejection of spirit, and mentioned that he feared a judgment had come upon him for wishing to appear as a Scotchman on Scottish soil, as he had one moonlight night shortly after his arrival seen his 'wraith'. He evidently alluded to the fact that before his departure he had procured for himself a Highland costume similar to that which we had the honour to supply to you, with which, as perhaps you will remember, he was much struck. He may, however, ...
— Dracula's Guest • Bram Stoker
... opened them again—wide. The figures were still there, and they had grown clearer, more definite, especially the countenance of each of the two wraith-like women who stood, like sentinels, one on either side ...
— From Out the Vasty Deep • Mrs. Belloc Lowndes
... figure had suddenly materialized beside the figure of a Jap. Another figure—a gnome, a wraith! The unholy light from the pit painted it an unearthly greenish hue, and accentuated the haggardness of face, and the gleaming eyes, the humped body, its crookedness magnified by the crouched attitude. It looked like some demon come floating up on the wicked light from the "deep ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... and distinct. Then (and what a shiver ran down my back!) I remembered hearing that a woman had been killed by falling down the steep cellar stairs, and the spot on the left side where she was found unconscious and bleeding had been pointed out to me. There, I heard it again! Was it the wraith of the aged dame or the cries of that unfortunate creature? Hush! Ellen can't have ...
— Adopting An Abandoned Farm • Kate Sanborn
... this the storm grew loud apace, The water-wraith was shrieking; And in the scowl of heaven each face Grew dark ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... her or her wraith," he swore afterwards. "I'll never forget the moment I looked down and down, and the water seemed to grow clearer, and I saw her walking there at the bottom among the rocks, with him over her back, ...
— The Vanished Messenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... brownie, pixy, elf, dwarf, urchin; Puck, Robin Goodfellow; leprechaun, Cluricaune^, troll, dwerger^, sprite, ouphe^, bad fairy, nix, nixie, pigwidgeon^, will-o'-the wisp. [Supernatural appearance] ghost, revenant, specter, apparition, spirit, shade, shadow, vision; hobglobin, goblin, orc; wraith, spook, boggart^, banshee, loup-garou [Fr.], lemures^; evil eye. merman, mermaid, merfolk^; siren; satyr, faun; manito^, manitou, manitu. possession, demonic possession, diabolic possession; insanity &c 503. [in jest, in science] Maxwell's demon. [person possessed by a ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... of memory slipped ahead through four years of time, and he was aware of the present, of the books he had opened and the universe he had won from their pages, of his dreams and ambitions, and of his love for a pale wraith of a girl, sensitive and sheltered and ethereal, who would die of horror did she witness but one moment of what he had just lived through—one moment of all the muck of life through which he ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... retorted, and his strong face lost all its anger and found the wraith of a smile. "Dinnae be too hard on the lassie! She's ane of ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... heart! bright be thy doom As the bodings which light up thy bold spirit now, But the fate of M'Crimman is closing in gloom, And the breath of the gray wraith hath pass'd o'er his brow; Victorious, in joy, thou'lt return to Benaer, And be clasp'd to the hearts of thy best beloved there, But M'Crimman, M'Crimman, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... they disobeyed her. They made what search in Venice they could, without rousing a scandal, and Ashe rushed out to join it, using the special means at a minister's disposal. But it was fruitless. Kitty vanished like a wraith in the dawn; and the living world of action and affairs ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... The wraith-like figure before him was only too clearly flesh and blood, and, as he stepped forward, it moved quickly across, and stood, barring his way, on the top stone step of the ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... every keel, In every timber, from stem to stern,— A something in every crank and wheel, That made 'em answer their turn; And everywhere, On earth and water, in fire and air, As it were to see it all well done, The Wraith of the murdered Law,— Old ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... by the feet of faith Untrodden, bloom not where such deep mist drives. Dead fancy's ghost, not living fancy's wraith, Is now the storied sorrow that survives Faith in the record of these lifeless lives. Yet Milton's sacred feet have lingered there, His lips have made august the fabulous air, His hands have touched and left the ...
— Locrine - A Tragedy • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... the map of Massachusetts yet, one does not dispute; but the Andover of New England theology—the Andover of a peculiar people, the Andover that held herself apart from the world and all that was therein—will soon become an interesting wraith. ...
— McClure's Magazine, January, 1896, Vol. VI. No. 2 • Various
... the storm grew loud apace, The water—wraith was shrieking; And in the scowl of heaven eachface, Grew dark as ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... inhospitable chairs and settees whose satin slipperiness offered no inducements to sit down. There were gold-lacquered tables and a curious concert-grand piano, also gold inlaid with mother-of-pearl cupids and flowers. Everything was most elaborate. Gila, in her soft transparencies, looked like a wraith amid it all. The young man chose to think she was too rare and fine ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... rang. It was like a summons. The wraith of his own making vanished. He wiped his eyes, now with one fringed sleeve, now with the other, stooped and felt round just inside the little room for his scrap of mattress and the quilt, took them up, softly shut the door, and ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates
... in sickness he usually resorted to mental healers, mesmerists, and clairvoyants. Before making investments or embarking in his great railroad ventures, Vanderbilt visited spiritualists; we have one circumstantial account of his summoning the wraith of Jim Fiske to advise him in stock operations. His excessive vanity led him to print his picture on all the Lake Shore bonds; he proposed to New York City the construction in Central Park of a large monument that would commemorate, side ...
— The Age of Big Business - Volume 39 in The Chronicles of America Series • Burton J. Hendrick |
