"Phantom" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... views for which it was relinquished would fade away ere five years ran their course. What strange destinies do men carve out for themselves! what sacrifices are they ever making of felicity and of real good, in the pursuit of some phantom which is sure to elude their grasp! How many Edens have been forfeited by madness and by folly, since the first ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... lift a corner of the veil, we might catch a glimpse of the face of Folly, mockingly, cunningly peering at us, as all too easily she persuades us to give of our royal coins of generosity to wantons, to phantom enterprises, to balls filled with air, to dust ...
— The Prodigal Returns • Lilian Staveley
... directly addressed to Mrs. Browning. It was originally appended to the collection of Poems called Men and Women. For other tributes by great poets to their wives see Wordsworth's "She was a phantom of delight," and "O dearer far than life and light are dear;" and Tennyson's "Dear, near and true." Mrs. Browning's love for her husband had found passionate expression in Sonnets ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... really wonderful. That vague dream which had grown out of Lady Laura's womanly hints, that pleasant phantom which she had conjured up in Mr. Lovel's mental vision a month or two ago, in the midsummer afternoon, had made itself into a reality so quickly as to astound a man too Horatian in his philosophy to be easily surprised. The fish ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... the Prince of the fallen Angels, is admirably preserved in the Beginning of this Book. His opening and closing the Debate; his taking on himself that great Enterprize at the Thought of which the whole Infernal Assembly trembled; his encountering the hideous Phantom who guarded the Gates of Hell, and appeared to him in all his Terrors, are Instances of that proud and daring Mind which could not ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... said good-night, and with muffled oar Silently rowed to the Charlestown shore, Just as the moon rose over the bay, Where swinging wide at her moorings lay The Somerset, British man-of-war: A phantom ship, with each mast and spar Across the moon, like a prison-bar, And a huge, black hulk, that was magnified By its own reflection ...
— Our Boys - Entertaining Stories by Popular Authors • Various
... re-establish the tribunician power, which Sulla had not abolished but had divested of its most essential prerogatives, and which exercised over the multitude a charm all the more mysterious, because the institution had no obvious practical use and was in fact an empty phantom—the mere name of tribune of the people, more than a thousand years later, ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... contrary, if follows that is does not suit others; the inconvenience becomes extreme on its being imposed on a living society; the measure of that inconvenience will be the immensity of the distance which divides a hollow abstraction, a philosophical phantom, an empty insubstantial image from the ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... influence depends upon its strength, and its strength upon the prosperity of its people, and this upon a wise and enlightened administration of the government. It would seem that the best thing the Sultan could have done for Islam, would have been not to excite the fears of Europe by the phantom of a Panislamic league, but to have devoted all his energies to the ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... House of Commons, at issue with the sovereign, what could he do? What could Louis XVI. do one hundred and fifty years afterwards? What could Louis Philippe do in our times? A king, without the loyalty of the people, is a phantom, a mockery, and a delusion, unless he have physical force to sustain him; and even then armies will rebel, if they feel they are not bound to obey, and if it is not for ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... Enter, and for the small sum of ten sous you shall hear sobs such as the Odeon never echoed in its halcyon days. The unhappy woman has waked up to the absurdity and inanity of her blind passion; she confesses to herself that she is madly pursuing a phantom. She knows but too well that he, in the vigor and beauty of youth, cannot love a faded old woman like herself, who vainly makes pitiable efforts to retain the last remains of her once entrancing beauty. She feels that the sweet words he once whispered ...
— File No. 113 • Emile Gaboriau
... of Hades. There he saw and spoke with many renowned Shades, old and young, even his own friends who had fallen on the plain of Troy. Achilles he saw, Patroclus and Ajax and Agamemnon, still grieving over the treachery of his wife. He saw, too, the phantom of Heracles, who lives with honor among the gods, and has for his wife Hebe, the daughter of Zeus and Juno. But though he would have talked with the heroes for a year and ...
— Old Greek Folk Stories Told Anew • Josephine Preston Peabody
... another a common secret vice, "Phantom warfare." When we walked alone, especially in the country, we had both developed the same practice of fighting an imaginary battle about us as we walked. As we went along we were generals, and our attacks ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... end of the house was it possible for a man to be concealed, and before he stepped away from the door Estein ran his eye carefully along both. He could see nothing, and had just stepped forward a pace, when noiselessly as a phantom a dark form appeared round the corner of the hall, and without pausing an instant came straight up to him. He saw only that the man was small, and wrapped in a cloak of fur; his sword flashed, and he was ...
— Vandrad the Viking - The Feud and the Spell • J. Storer Clouston
... earnest conversation. It was a perfect evening. The sky was full of color, scarlet, rosy, violet, primrose—changing, fading, flushing, perpetually. And before all was gray the moon had risen and was shining in silver floods upon the sea. In the mystery of moonshine Bessie lost sight of the phantom poplars that fringe the Orne. The excitement of novelty and uncertainty routed dull thoughts, and her fancy pruned its wings for a flight into the future. In the twilight came Mrs. Betts, and cut short the flight of fancy ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... workmanship and the most modern in his sentiment. One of his epigrams is like an early poem of Shakespeare's;[29] another has in a singular degree the manner and movement of a sonnet by Rossetti.[30] This group of epigrammatists brought back a phantom of freshness into the old forms; once more the epigram becomes full of pretty rhythms and fancies, but they are now more artificial; set beside work of the best period they come out clumsy and heavy. Language is no longer vivid and ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... parliament, and grand hotels, rose darkly around him on the arc of the river, against the dark violet murk of the sky. Huge trams swam past him like glass houses, and hansoms shot past the trams and automobiles past the hansoms; and phantom barges swirled down on the full ebb, threading holes in bridges as cotton threads a needle. It was London, and the roar of London, majestic, imperial, super-Roman. And lo! earlier than the earliest municipal light, an unseen hand, the hand of destiny, printed a writing on the wall of vague gloom ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... strange footsteps stopped on the very threshold of our room. "Oh!" I gasped, thinking that in another moment spirit fingers would turn the handle, and a ghostly figure enter the room. What form would it take? Would the phantom be man or woman—tall or short—an assassin, murderer, or victim? Yes, the steps had ceased at our very door, and the next moment they ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... their meaning. Though dead to the rest of the world, David would maintain an intense and secret life in his murderer's conscience. He had never fought such a subtle and implacable foe, and he lay thinking of how he could create conditions that would give him escape, push the phantom from him, make him forget, and be as he had been when no one had disputed his sovereignty over himself. He tried to think that time would mitigate this haunting discomfort. His sense of guilt, his fear ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... of her form, and seemed to shed a lustre on the woodland around, like lightning illuminating masses of dark clouds. And they who saw her asked themselves, 'Is this an Apsara, or a daughter of the gods, or a celestial phantom?' And with this thought, their hands also joined together. They stood gazing on the perfect and faultless beauty of her form. And Jayadratha, the king of Sindhu, and the son of Vriddhakshatra, struck with amazement at the sight of that lady of faultless beauty, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... ineffaceable stains upon the flag traced out by blue phosphoric fire, while above them hovered the shape of a bleeding infant. Horror-stricken, she averted her gaze, but it encountered another object, equally appalling—her husband's portrait; or rather, it would seem, a phantom in its place; for the eyes, lighted up by infernal fire, glared at her from beneath the frowning and contracted brows, while the hand significantly pointed to the hearthstone, on which the sanguinary stains had now formed themselves into the ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... this panorama Passing slowly, dully by, With the sun's brass disc high gleaming From a white and cloudless sky, Sometimes drew fantastic pictures. Many a strange and gruesome sign— Phantom trees and fairy castles— Blurred the far horizon line. Then they'd vanish like the fancies Of a fever-smitten brain, And returning, changed in outline, Elsewhere on the mighty plain Would allure the eyesore ...
— Nancy MacIntyre • Lester Shepard Parker
... than himself, who are masters of his secret and ever ready to use it for their own base purposes. Are there not many men so situated—men near us now, who walk through life haunted by the dreadful spectres of past misdeeds hastily committed, bitterly repented—a phantom that can blast every joy, and from whose presence death comes as ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... neither her husband nor her child had ever observed. There was a fine moisture on her forehead, and this added so greatly to the natural transparency of her features that, standing there in the wan light, she might have been mistaken for the phantom of her daughter's vivid flesh and blood beauty. "I wonder if you would mind going on to Bolingbroke Street, so I may speak to Belinda Treadwell a minute?" she asked, as soon as she had recovered her breath. "I ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... Slone, that fanlike slope of sand which opened down into the valley, appeared a swiftly moving black object, like a fleeting phantom. It was a phantom horse. Slone felt that his eyes, deceived by his mind, saw racing images. Many a wild chase he had lived in dreams on some far desert. But what was that beating in his ears—sharp, swift, even, rhythmic? Never had his ears played him false. ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... dead and dying! Across the silence seem to go With dream-like motion, wavery, slow, And shrouded in their folds of snow, The friends we loved long, long ago! Gliding across the sad retreat, How beautiful their phantom feet! What tenderness is in their eyes, Turned where the poor survivor lies 'Mid monitory sanctities! What years of vanished joy are fanned From one uplifting of that hand In its white stillness! when the shade Doth glimmeringly in sunshine fade From our embrace, how dim appears ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 266, July 28, 1827 • Various
... hit us. If you could only have lived these weeks in Germany I do not doubt that what you would have seen would have led your ripe experience to a fervent faith in a Divinely guided future of mankind. The great spiritual movement of 1870, when I was a boy growing up, was but a phantom compared to July and August of 1914. Germany was a nation stirred by the most sacred emotions, humble and strong, filled with just wrath and a firm determination to conquer—a nation disciplined, ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... over their shoulders. Directly afterwards a tall thin figure, habited in grey from head to foot, emerged from the gloom. Those who beheld it might have been excused if they supposed it rather a phantom than a being of the earth, so shadowy did it appear in the ...
— Won from the Waves • W.H.G. Kingston
... in our same footprints. These holes became to our tired brains not depressions but elevations: hummocks over which we stepped, raising our feet painfully and draggingly. And then we remembered, and said what fools we were, and for a while we compelled ourselves to walk through these phantom hills. But it was no lasting good, and as the days passed we realized that we must suffer this absurdity, for we could not do anything else. But of course it ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... silence and the dimness, we were like ghosts, the car like a phantom. An old stone bridge seemed to beckon us, and we crossed to the other side. There, at Miss Falconer's gesture, I drew the automobile off the road at the edge of the town, halted it beneath some trees, and helped her to alight. We started up the hill ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... new hopes are born, The coming months to cheer; And phantom-fears and griefs outworn Die with ...
— A Christmas Faggot • Alfred Gurney
... kindly eye, and was lonely and sick at heart.... And still Hypatia's voice haunted his ears, like a strain of music, and would not die away. That lofty enthusiasm, so sweet and modest in its grandeur—that tone of pity—in one so lovely it could not be called contempt—for the many; that delicious phantom of being an elect spirit, unlike the crowd.... 'And am I altogether like the crowd?' said Philammon to himself, as he staggered along under the weight of a groaning fever-patient. 'Can there be found no fitter work for me than this, which ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... thing that is destined to affect them seriously, for good or evil, it often happens that at the time of the action a certain unaccountable premonition arises in the mind. This is chiefly the case when the act is to be the cause of sorrow. Like the wizard with Lochiel, some dark phantom arises before the mind, and warns of the evil to come. So it was in the present case. The pulling out of that drawer was an eventful moment in the life of Zillah. It was a crisis fraught with future sorrow and evil and suffering. ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... him his wild African imagination and sent him soaring. And then the affectionate note, the plaint in those sacred songs: Deus, Deus meus!—"O God! O my God!" The Divinity was no longer a cold abstraction, a phantom that withdrew into an unapproachable infinite; He became the actual possession of the loving soul. He leant over His poor scarred creature, took him in His arms, and comforted him like ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... became aware of another horseman by his side. It was impossible to discern the features of the rider, but his figure in the mist seemed gigantic; neither was the color of his steed distinguishable. Nothing was visible except the meagre-looking, phantom-like outline of a horse and his rider, and, as the unknown rode upon the turf that edged the way, even the sound of the horse's hoofs was scarcely audible. Turpin gazed, not without superstitious awe. Once or twice he essayed ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... his spirit soared on high Through the vast whole, the one infinity. Victor, he brought the tidings from the skies What things in nature may, or may not, rise; What stated laws a power finite assign, And still with bounds impassable confine. Thus trod beneath our feet the phantom lies; We mount o'er Superstition to ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... left his envenomed sting in the body of the great victim of Calvary. It was thenceforward disarmed of its fearfulness! So complete, indeed, is the Redeemer's victory over this last enemy, that He Himself speaks of it as no longer a reality, but a shadow—a phantom-foe from which we have nothing to dread. "Whosoever believeth in Me shall never die." "If a man keep My sayings, he shall never see death." These are an echo of the sweet Psalmist's beautiful words, a transcript of his ...
— Memories of Bethany • John Ross Macduff
... destroy it. Surgical Corps operated within an hour. Although they did an excellent prosthetic job after removing my left leg and arm, the substituted limbs had their limitations. While they permitted me to do all my jobs, phantom pain was a constant problem. There were new methods of prosthesis to eliminate this weird effect but these were only available back ...
— Man Made • Albert R. Teichner
... negotiations was made at York, in April, when the proposals of Parliament—nineteen propositions for curtailing the power of the Monarchy in favour of the Commons—were rejected by Charles with the words: "If I granted your demands, I should be no more than the mere phantom of a king." ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... for everything, and, usually the goods are not delivered. In the race for wealth men often sacrifice time, energy, health, home, happiness and honor,—everything that money cannot buy, the very things that money can never bring back. Hurry is a phantom of paradoxes. Business men, in their desire to provide for the future happiness of their family, often sacrifice the present happiness of wife and children on the altar of Hurry. They forget that their place in the home should be something greater than being merely ...
— The Majesty of Calmness • William George Jordan
... phantom listeners, That dwelt in the lone house then, Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight To that voice from ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... have similarly passed their lives in doing violence to mankind; but it was for something that was likely to last, and for a national interest. What they deemed the public good was not a phantom of the brain, a chimerical poem due to a caprice of the imagination, to personal passions, to their own peculiar ambition and pride. Outside of themselves and the coinage of their brain a real and substantial object of prime importance ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... makes sweet in seeming Even Krishna's woodland dreaming; Mighty Love sways all alike From self to selflessness. Oh! strike From your eyes the veil, and see What Love willeth Him to be Who in error, but in grace, Sitteth with that lotus-face, And those eyes whose rays of heaven Unto phantom-eyes are given; Holding feasts of foolish mirth With these Visions of the earth; Learning love, and love imparting; Yet with sense of ...
— Indian Poetry • Edwin Arnold
... another thing. It stood before my disturbed sense of sight, but it never moved. The phantom that my mind pursued, was another and more real child. Of her outward appearance I know no more than that she was like her mother. The other had that likeness too—as you have—but was not the same. Can you follow me, Lucie? Hardly, I think? I doubt you must have been a solitary prisoner ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... superstructure alone is hung with snowy frost curtains, and these help to emphasize the forbidding nature of the dark, narrow under-world. Down, down he goes, as though he were journeying to the very bowels of the earth, heedless of the place, heedless of all but the phantom he seeks. Again his surroundings have changed. The barrenness is emphasized by skeleton-like trees of such size as no man has ever seen before. High up aloft there is foliage upon them, but so meagre, so torn and wasted as to suggest a wreck of magnificent life. These gigantic trunks are few in ...
— In the Brooding Wild • Ridgwell Cullum
... spirit!'—thus I often cried to myself laughing, and even now I cannot refrain from laughter,—'can there be anything else? And if this be so, in what does spirit differ from matter? where is the party wall between life and death?' In the spectral phantom of life, in the sphinx-born riddle of being, in that terrific fiat out of which the worlds sprang forth, to roll convulsively onward and evermore onward, till they can drop back into rest and nothingness—in this all contradictions and contrarieties are mixt up and confounded, ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... marked. Nor does the form, which her activity assumed, seem less adapted for displaying these qualities, than many other forms in which we praise them. The gorgeous inspirations of the Catholic religion are as real as the phantom of posthumous renown; the love of our native soil is as laudable as ambition, or the principle of military honour. Jeanne d'Arc must have been a creature of shadowy yet far-glancing dreams, of unutterable feelings, of 'thoughts that wandered through ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... the most striking results of the peace of Westphalia was the completion of a long process of political disruption in the Germanies. Only the form of the Holy Roman Empire survived. The already shadowy imperial power became a mere phantom, nor was a change destined to come until, centuries later, the Prussian Hohenzollerns should replace the Austrian Habsburgs. Meanwhile the weakness of Germany enabled France to extend her northern ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... twenty perhaps, and they were in gala dress. Head-dresses of eagles' feathers, gaily colored, hung from their crowns over the sides of their mounts, to the length of a man's height. They uttered no sounds, looked neither to the right nor left, but like a dreadful, phantom procession moved straight ...
— Dorothy on a Ranch • Evelyn Raymond
... a fish with an oily omelette, and we slept in great mouldering rooms tainted with ruined arches and heaps of dung—and coming from which we saw no colour in the cheek of man, woman, or child for another twenty miles. Imagine this phantom knocking at the gates of Rome; passing them; creeping along the streets; haunting the aisles and pillars of the churches; year by year more encroaching, ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... mankind than the last descendants of Charles V. At the end of the seventeenth century, the immense empire of Philip IV. and Charles II., reduced to a feebleness which the Ottoman empire in our own days has scarcely felt, was nothing more than the phantom of a nation. The House of Austria had triumphed over feudality and municipal resistance as completely as the House of Bourbon; but the successes of monarchical power had been as sterile on one side of the Pyrenees as they had been ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... the axe would pierce the oak that it fells; binds thee as the woodbine binds the tree; darts upon thee even as the hawk darts upon little birds, so that never until time and life shall end, shalt thou have a call, or right, or claim for prowess or for valour: thou little fairy phantom!" said Laeg. Up sprang Cuchulain, swift as the wind; quick as the swallow; fiery as the dragon; powerful as the lion; and he bounded into the air for the third time into the troubled clouds of it, until he lit upon the boss of the shield of Ferdia, the ...
— Heroic Romances of Ireland Volumes 1 and 2 Combined • A. H. Leahy
... which he worshipped to the tips of her graceful fingers; her alert mind, which he saw reflected in the simplest thought she expressed; her mobile lips, which he followed to the least sound they gave forth! The longer he pictured her, figured as she had appeared to him like a phantom on Music Mountain, the more he longed to be back at the foot of it, wounded again and famished. And the impulse that moved him the first moment he could get out of bed and into a saddle was to spur his way hard and fast to her; to make her, against ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... was speaking, Hugh was being perplexed with that most annoying of perplexities — the flitting phantom of a resemblance, which he could not catch. He was forced to dismiss it for the ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... of the great hymns, one of the great victories; and I had been drunk with it, it had come with a surge and a sweep, it had set everything about me in motion—huge phantom shapes—all life and all being ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair
... the midst of this hundred miles of tunnels that look so much alike? What if he should not intend to come? What if—But, thank Heaven! there he is at last! That is the firm, substantial sound of a mortal footstep; not those stealthy, phantom steps I seemed to hear before! There too is the distant glinting of the red lamplight on the sides of the cave! How long it takes him to get here! There he is at last! Blessed be his black face! how unlike the pale, phosphorescent forms I fancied ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... Athene, turned to other thoughts. She made a phantom, and fashioned it after the likeness of a woman, Iphthime, daughter of great-hearted Icarius, whom Eumelus wedded, whose dwelling was in Pherae. And she sent it to the house of divine Odysseus to bid Penelope, amid ...
— DONE INTO ENGLISH PROSE • S. H. BUTCHER, M.A.
... heavy eyes repose: But if a slumber haply does invade My weary limbs, my fancy's still awake, Thoughtful of drink, and eager, in a dream, Tipples imaginary pots of ale, In vain; awake I find the settled thirst Still gnawing, and the pleasant phantom curse. Thus do I live, from pleasure quite debarred, Nor taste the fruits that the sun's genial rays Mature, john-apple, nor the downy peach, Nor walnut in rough-furrow'd coat secure, Nor medlar, fruit delicious in decay; Afflictions great! yet greater still remain: ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... knew that Smolensk was entirely occupied, and its fires almost extinguished, and when day and the different reports had sufficiently instructed him; when, in short, he saw that there, as at the Niemen, at Wilna, at Witepsk, the phantom of victory, which allured him forward, and which he always imagined himself to be on the point of seizing, had once more eluded his grasp, he proceeded slowly towards his barren conquest. He inspected the field of battle, according to his custom, in order to appreciate ...
— History of the Expedition to Russia - Undertaken by the Emperor Napoleon in the Year 1812 • Count Philip de Segur
... uses to the victory gained by a teacher and the discipline learned through obedience. And thus it is also that many who give promise of great distinction in early life fail to achieve it. They run off after a phantom, and society pronounces them mad. In their case the personal factor has overcome the social factor; they have failed in the lessons they should have learned, their own self-criticism is undisciplined, and they ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... they went, bridles clinking, lances clashing. Then commenced a phantom race as they flew over the ground like the wind, the Belgians following hot in pursuit, until they both disappeared over ...
— Lige on the Line of March - An American Girl's Experiences When the Germans Came Through Belgium • Glenna Lindsley Bigelow
... trees of gold and of silver; and in his ears was the tinkling music, which the sea-wind was wont to make as it swept through the metal forest, causing its branches to clang and its leaves to shake. He was far away from Keewatin now, making the phantom journey to the land of ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... of the autumn days Like a phantom ghost I glide, Where the big moose sees the crimson trees Mirrored on the silver tide, And the blood red sun when day is done Sinks below the hill, The night hawk swoops, the lily droops, And ...
— The Camp Fire Girls at School • Hildegard G. Frey
... profligacy and riot have staggered home to dream; it was at this still and silent hour, that Fagin sat watching in his old lair, with face so distorted and pale, and eyes so red and blood-shot, that he looked less like a man, than like some hideous phantom, moist from the grave, and worried ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... above. Though he did not do business in a very large way, yet he was a most respectable man, and his connection was chiefly with the smaller trades-people, who seem to live a strange kind of hand-to-mouth existence, and who might be happy were it not for the constant reappearance of that grim phantom—bills to be met. Nearly all these persons were in the banker's hands entirely. Martin Rigal used his power despotically and permitted no arguments, and speedily quelled rebellion on the part of any new customer who ventured to object to his ...
— Caught In The Net • Emile Gaboriau
... heavens. All things that are, are on condition of perpetual flux and change. The cloud-rack has the likeness of bastions and towers, but they are mist, not granite, and the wind is every moment sweeping away their outlines, till the phantom fortress topples into red ruin while we gaze. The tiniest stream eats out its little valley and rounds the pebble in its widening bed, rain washes down the soil, and frost cracks the cliffs above. ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... nation? We are instantly menaced with the chastisement which English pride will not fail to inflict. Whether we assert our rights by sea, or attempt their maintenance by land—whithersoever we turn ourselves, this phantom incessantly pursues us. Already has it had too much influence on the councils of the nation. It contributed to the repeal of the embargo—that dishonorable repeal, which has so much tarnished the character of our government. Mr. President, I have before said on this floor, and now take occasion ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... the countless and daily trifles of fairer aspect that made her actual presence possible to suffer,—comes to flatter his memory with assurance of strength in having endured so much and yet survived, or to stab him with her phantom poniards freshly and fiercely as ever,—no diffused affair, but a positive ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... Gilmore, on the upper deck forward, repeating to the pilot the leadsman's muttered "No bottom." The storm spread its sheltering wing over the gallant vessel, baffling the excited efforts of the enemy, before whose eyes she floated like a phantom ship; now wrapped in impenetrable darkness, now standing forth in the full blaze of the lightning close under their guns. The friendly flashes enabled her pilot, William E. Hoel, who had volunteered from another gunboat to share the fortunes of the night, to keep her in the channel; ...
— The Gulf and Inland Waters - The Navy in the Civil War. Volume 3. • A. T. Mahan
... refused to take in the explanation. That he should have been so deceived seemed incredible, yet deceived he had been. All this time he had been following a phantom, while the real person was tricking him with masterly ingenuity. "But Anne told me herself that she had an uncle called Walter," ...
— A Coin of Edward VII - A Detective Story • Fergus Hume
... thus he knelt, Behold, upon the cold and bitter wind Rang wail on wail; and o'er the moor there moved What seemed a woman's if a human form. That miserable phantom onward came With cry succeeding cry that sank or swelled As dipped or rose the moor. Arrived at last, She heeded not the Saint, but on that grave Dashed herself down. Long time that woman wailed; And Patrick, long, ...
— The Legends of Saint Patrick • Aubrey de Vere
... of it was that the firms mentioned supplied us with a quantity of goods, agreeing to receive phantom eggs in exchange. This satisfied Ukridge. He had a faith in the laying power of his hens which would have flattered them if they could have known it. It might also have stimulated their efforts in that direction, which up to ...
— Love Among the Chickens • P. G. Wodehouse
... so Jurgen went to bed prepared for anything. Later he sat up in bed, and found it was much as he had suspected. The room was haunted, and at the foot of his couch were two ghosts: one an impudent-looking leering phantom, in a suit of old-fashioned armor, and the other a beautiful pale lady, in ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... shillings each for a "subject." In the face of such facts it would be idle to suggest that the tradition of that mysterious cart, moving silently through the darkness of night on muffled wheels towards our village churchyards, was merely a creature of the imagination. The tradition of that phantom cart which lingered for years had a substantial origin as certain as the memory of many persons still living can make it! In many of the villages around Royston, as indeed in other districts, the terror of it became such that not a burial took place ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... island, where, in co-operation with the insurgents by land and the fleet by sea, it would besiege and capture Havana. But again and again the sailing of the fleet was delayed, and there was alarm in the cities of the Atlantic states, because the newspapers published wild reports of phantom armadas hovering off the coast. When news came that Cervera had sailed from St. Vincent, and for many days there was no trace of his movements, there was a quite unnecessary alarm as to what the Spanish squadron might do. A wise Press censorship would have ...
— Famous Sea Fights - From Salamis to Tsu-Shima • John Richard Hale
... vigorous youth kept him ever active, either in study or in sport, until again the close of the day left him free; and the world of night, which had lain drowned in the cataract of the day, rose up in his soul, with all its stars, and dim-seen phantom shapes. But this could hardly last long. Some one form must sooner or later step within the charmed circle, enter the house of life, and compel the bewildered ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... howled like a wolf—like a lone wolf that has found no quarry—melancholy, mean, grown reckless with his hunger. There was a pause of nearly a minute. Then in the hideous darkness a phantom wolf-pack took up the howl in chorus, and for three long minutes there was din beside which the voice of living wolves at war would be a slumber song. Ten times ghastlier than if it had been real, the chorus wailed and ululated back and forth along immeasurable distances—became ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... nervously to the spot in which his uncle had stood; still he seemed to fear that he should see a ghostly figure standing there and pointing at him; should see himself, in some phantom counterpart, sitting in the chair. His eyes opened as if he were listening intently. For in the midnight he thought he heard, in that dim light he thought he saw, the Prophet and the King. He did not remember more the words his uncle had spoken. But he heard only, ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... upon the room, "the ghost of this sinful man haunts the Blue Chamber, in this very house. There, from midnight until cock-crow, amid wild muffled shrieks and groans and mocking laughter and the ghostly sound of horrid blows, it does fierce phantom fight with the spirits of the solo cornet- player and the murdered wait, assisted at intervals, by the shades of the German band; while the ghost of the strangled harpist plays mad ghostly melodies with ghostly toes on the ghost of a ...
— Told After Supper • Jerome K. Jerome
... the night of the apparition had not been enviable. He could neither eat nor sleep. As he lay in bed at night, he kept his face covered with the clothes, dreading that if he peeped out into the room the phantom of the murdered horseman would beckon to him from the dark corners. Lying so till the dawn broke and the cocks began to crow, he would then look cautiously forth, and seeing by the gray light that ...
— Frances Kane's Fortune • L. T. Meade
... inconsiderateness towards one too tender for such treatment. He deserves more pity than blame. And for her—thank Heaven for the blessing on them that mourn. Innocent creature, much will be spared her; if I could but dwell on that rather than on the phantom of delight she was, and my anticipations of again seeing the look that recalls Helen. If Helen was here, how she would ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... with the river Ebro flowing round the edge as an ingenious variant of the Ocean-river on the shield of Achilles. A Carthaginian fleet cruising off the coast of Italy falls in with Proteus, who takes the opportunity of prophesying the course of the war. Hannibal at Zama pursues a phantom of Scipio, which flies before him and disappears like that of Aeneas before Turnus. Such was the degradation to which the noble epic machinery had now sunk. Soon after the death of Silius the poem seems to have ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... and pinned his faith to the stars; he, the victim of a senseless bullet; he, stretched here as he had fallen, all thoughts, all activities quenched, gone out into that night of which the darkness gathering in this forsaken glade was but a phantom, to be chased away by to-morrow's sun. To-morrow . . . to-morrow I should go on living and begin forgetting him. To-morrow? God forgive me for an ingrate, I had begun already. . . . Even as I bent over him, my uppermost thought had not been of my friend. I had made, in ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... love their property, who love their sovereign, would have done on such an occasion. They looked upon him as their sovereign, although degraded. They were unacquainted with any authority superior to his, and the phantom of tyranny which performed these oppressive acts was unaccompanied by that force which justifies submission by affording the plea of necessity. An unseen tyrant and four miserable companies of sepoys executed all the horrible things that we have mentioned. The spirit ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... pines on Haunted Point To build the pungy boat, And other axes than their own Yet other echoes smote; They heard the phantom carpenters, But not a man could see; And every pine that crashed to earth Brought down a ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... her again. He could not, for the brown eyes which still seemed looking at him as if asking what he did. There was a strange spell about those phantom eyes, and they made him say to Lucy, who was now ...
— The Rector of St. Mark's • Mary J. Holmes
... had been stirring on his cot as though trying to throw off some phantom of dread. Now instantly after the sentry's hail this stirring sleeper ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys as Sergeants - or, Handling Their First Real Commands • H. Irving Hancock
... me, and I drank my own milk to Mr. Carter's health with my sweetest smile. "Confound that milkman! I wish he had cut his throat before I stumbled over him," he exclaimed after tea. But I had more amusing game than to make him angry then; I wanted to laugh to get rid of the phantom that pursued ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... gold, bounded and intersected and broken into innumerable wide bays and narrow inlets by great cloud-promontories, purple and rose and umber. Directly opposite, just above the crest-line of the hills, hung the nearly full moon, pale as a mere phantom of itself. And from somewhere in the boscage at the garden's end came a lool-lool-lool-lioo-lio, deep and long-drawn, liquid and complaining, which one knew to be the ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland
... knew not where he was hurrying. Always in front of him, as on a cloth, was the face of Helena, while somewhere behind the cloth was Cornwall, a far-off lonely place where darkness came on intensely. Sometimes he saw a dim, small phantom in the darkness of Cornwall, very far off. Then the face of Helena, white, inanimate as a mask, with heavy eyes, ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... forgiveness. Since then, if sitting alone, ligna super foco large reponens, I involuntarily recur to that ill-favored conception, it suffices to contrast with it the grotesque appearance of its originator, and the pale phantom evanisheth. ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... lake, smoke lazily, and watch the sun shimmer through the lifting fog. He saw a canoe approaching from across the lake. He gazed vacantly at it, when it grew strange and more unlike a canoe. The paddles did not move, but the phantom craft drew quickly on. ...
— Crooked Trails • Frederic Remington
... Pain haunts not that garden-land Where Passion's phantom is so softly laid; But Charity beside that earth doth stand, Most lovely left of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... Scrooge? A vision of his death—how he is plundered by laundress, charwoman, and undertaker; the phantom of Death; ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Literature • Ontario Ministry of Education
... away? Why should the phantom of a dead past divide us? We belong to one another, you and I. Think of what life might mean to us, side by side, hand in hand, working, striving together, you the stronger, giving me some of your strength, I ready to give you the ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... the same eyes as formerly. To enjoy the present moment—to snatch that chance of happiness from the fleeting hour, which the next hour is chasing and may utterly destroy—seems the only aim. Love is an amusement, constancy a phantom, in which no one believes—which is only spoken of in nursery fairy tales. The women have learned, by experience, that their husbands and lovers did not die of longing to see them; that they themselves, after the tears of separation, which perhaps flowed freely a long ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... Master respected every tittle, every iota of the law; that he had come to fulfil the law, and to reestablish the theocracy; how could they possibly think of the idea of abolishing Sabbath and holidays, circumcision and ablutions, all and everything, to be guided by the phantom of hope, love, and faith, against which James argues in his epistle with all the energy of his soul? Those inexperienced saints did not know that the Pharisean doctors held similar theories, and that Paul could not possibly hope to meet ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... net. On the third day by wonderful luck he gaffed an old seal in the slob ice. This he hauled in and drank the warm blood. On the fifth day he killed a white-coat, and thinking that he saw a ship he walked five miles over the floe, leaving his boat behind. The phantom ship proved to be an island of ice, and in the night he had to tramp back to his open punt. On the seventh day he was really beginning to give up hope when a vessel, the Flora, suddenly hove in sight. He shouted loudly as it was dark, whereupon she immediately ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... body, the kamic[92] elements continue for some time, us a "shade"[93] or a "phantom,"[94] in the finer and invisible atmosphere;[95] then they, in turn, become disintegrated by the various forces of this environment,[96] and are lost in the strata of matter from which they have been taken. Like the physical elements (life-atoms), ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... took off from San Miguel, Azores, and in nine hours made Lisbon—Lisbon, capital of Portugal, which sent out the first bold mariners to explore the Sea of Darkness, prior to Columbus. On the thirtieth, NC4 took off for Plymouth, England, and arrived in ten hours and twenty minutes. Perhaps a phantom ship, with sails set and flags blowing, the name Mayflower on her hull, rode in Plymouth Harbor that day to greet ...
— The Age of Invention - A Chronicle of Mechanical Conquest, Book, 37 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Holland Thompson
... did he believe it even now. Though he looked the phantom through and through, and saw it standing before him; though he felt the chilling influence of its death-cold eyes; and marked the very texture of the folded kerchief bound about its head and chin, which wrapper he had not observed ...
— A Christmas Carol • Charles Dickens
... finished, she ordered Annouschka to shut the door; for she wished to see Foedor once more, and to bid a last farewell to him who had been her lover. Annouschka obeyed; and Vaninka, with flowers in her hair and her breast covered with jewels, glided like a phantom into ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - VANINKA • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... breeches-pocket. "It's an old saying, James, and times proves it true, that you may take an 'oss to the water but you carn't make him drink—and talking of 'osses, pray, how are you off in that line?" "Oh, werry well—uncommon, I may say—a thoroughbred, bang tail down to the hocks, by Phantom, out of Baron Munchausen's dam—gave a hatful of money for him at Tatts'.—five fives—a deal of tin as times go. But he's a perfect 'oss, I assure you—bright bay with four black legs, and never a white hair upon him. He's touched ...
— Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities • Robert Smith Surtees
... taking them away. Does that look as if he seduced them? [The counsel here commented at length on Drayton's statements, for the purpose of showing that they tended to prove nothing more than a transportation for hire; and he threw no little ridicule on the 'phantom ship' which the District Attorney had conjured up in his opening of the case, but which, in his late speech, he ...
— Personal Memoir Of Daniel Drayton - For Four Years And Four Months A Prisoner (For Charity's Sake) In Washington Jail • Daniel Drayton
... was regarded as a victim fastened on because his reputation embarrassed Bonaparte; for Moreau had always been looked up to as capable of opposing the accomplishment of the First Consul's ambitious views. The whole crime of Moreau was his having numerous partisans among those who still clung to the phantom of the Republic, and that crime was unpardonable in the eyes of the First Consul, who for two years had ruled the destinies of France as sovereign master. What means were not employed to mislead the opinion of the public respecting Moreau? The police published pamphlets of all sorts, and the Comte ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... commended Charles Finger's "Canassa" (Reedy's Mirror, October 30). W. Adolphe Roberts submitted a number of stories from Ainslee's: "Young Love," by Nancy Boyd; "The Token from the Arena," by June Willard; "The Light," by Katherine Wilson. He also drew attention to "Phantom," by Mildred Cram (Green Book, March). That the Committee of Award, after a careful study of these and other recommendations, failed to confirm individual high estimates is but another illustration of the disagreement ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... curiosity leading me to enquire the whereabouts of the chief music-halls and vacant ignorance manifesting itself on the faces of the policemen and waiters whom I interrogated, I abandoned matches for the chase of music-halls. Eventually I became aware that I was pursuing a phantom. There were no music-halls. All had been perverted into picture palaces. I read Lackaday's letter again. There it was as clear ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... I should prepare myself for Saint Cyr, and gave me there Andre de Saint-Avit as classmate. I might have studied law or medicine. Then I should be today a respectable inhabitant of a town with a church and running water, instead of this cotton-clad phantom, brooding with an unspeakable anxiety over this desert which ...
— Atlantida • Pierre Benoit
... fear?" asked Mr. Gabriel,—his face perfectly pale, and his eye almost lost in darkness. "If it is a phantom, it can do ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... at the sight of the genie, fainted; when Aladdin, who had seen such a phantom in the cavern, snatched the lamp out of his mother's hand, and said to the genie boldly, "I am hungry, bring me something to eat." The genie disappeared immediately, and in an instant returned with a large ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... weakened, while Martin especially looked a phantom of his former self. Alick, though only so lately recovered from his severe illness, held out the best. Pat never made a complaint, though his wan cheek showed that famine was telling on him. If I sucked in ...
— Snow Shoes and Canoes - The Early Days of a Fur-Trader in the Hudson Bay Territory • William H. G. Kingston
... and hopeless; he knew he was the bond-slave of the drink, and, whatever he might say to others, he felt in his own heart that it was useless any longer to try and cheat himself with the transparent phantom of a lie. Yet he could not for shame acknowledge thus much to others, nor would he allow his conscience to state it deliberately to himself; he still clung to something, which was yet neither conviction nor hope, ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... are closed. Ah, cannot he before? must I appear The vilest?—O just Heaven! can it be thus? I am—all earth resounds it—lost, despised, Anguish and shame unutterable seize me. 'Tis palpable, no phantom, no delusion, No dream that wakens with o'erwhelming horror: Spaniard and Moor fight on this ground alone, And tear the arrow from my bleeding breast To pierce my father's, ...
— Count Julian • Walter Savage Landor
... was a line-of-battle ship of the largest class. Then, indeed, we found our voices and shouted, and perhaps the sentries or look-outs might have heard us; but away she rushed, like some monstrous phantom of a dream, and, mighty as she was, she quickly disappeared in the darkness ahead. Our companions, who had been awoke by our shouting, lifted up their heads, but as the ship passed by, lay them down again, probably under ...
— Will Weatherhelm - The Yarn of an Old Sailor • W.H.G. Kingston
... and birds and animals and all other living things are inextricably made up of the stuff of the same unfathomable struggle. For where there is life there must be a soul possessed of life. Life, apart from some soul possessed with life, is an abstraction of the logical reason and a phantom of no more genuine reality than the "a priori unity of apperception" or ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... earnestly at the chair where Rickman had sat propping his chin in his hands. He seemed to be contemplating his phantom; the phantom that had ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... of a mad philosopher. That which would remain in the cupel if one should assay a phantom. ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... Was he to believe his eyes? Was it not some delusive phantom of the night that his own feverish imagination ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... clouds. Near at hand the foliage shimmered with pale flashes of light; the perfumes of dew-laden flowers were like those of an oriental bower. Faint rustlings, soft undertones broke upon the ear from dark places; mists seemed drawn like phantom ribbons, now here, now there. He looked at the stars; watched one of them, very small, drop into the maw of a black-looking monster of vapor. As it vanished the sound of music was wafted from within; John Steele listened; they were beginning ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... split his sides with laughing, when the Chevalier de Grammont, resuming the discourse, "apropos, sire," said he, "I had forgot to tell you, that, to increase my ill-humour, I was stopped, as I was getting out of my chair, by the devil of a phantom in masquerade, who would by all means persuade me that the queen had commanded me to dance with her; and as I excused myself with the least rudeness possible, she charged me to find out who was to be her partner, and desired me to send him to her immediately so that your Majesty will do ...
— The Memoirs of Count Grammont, Complete • Anthony Hamilton
... which has tempted her forth; while the last, not the cold, has caused her to cloak herself, and go close hooded. If her father but knew of the errand she is on, it could not be executed. And well is she aware of this. For the proud planter is still proud, despite his reverses, still clings to the phantom of social superiority; and if he saw her now, wandering through the woods at an hour near midnight, alone; if he could divine her purpose: to meet a man, who in time past has been rather coldly received at his house—because ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... alive, they took me for ghoulish ghost 'stead o' good flesh and blood, and fled from me amain. So, by reason of my dead body, that is no body o' mine, yet that nobody will believe is no body o' mine, they believe that this my body is yet no body, but a phantom; the which is out of reason; yet thus unreasonably do the rogues reason by reason of the body that hangeth in place of my body above the city gate. Wherefore I reason there is yet reason in their unreason, seeing this body ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... suspended, and that he be tried again, his sentence being too mild. The terrorists rise at Toulon, as at Paris, and are subdued with much difficulty and bloodshed. 25. The Chouans, seeing themselves betrayed and deceived by a phantom of a treaty which had been held out to them as secure and permanent, again take up arms. 28. Rhull blows his brains out. A petition is presented to the convention demanding a separation of the supreme powers, as the only means of guarding against tyranny. The Spaniards are again defeated by Kellerman. ...
— Historical Epochs of the French Revolution • H. Goudemetz
... and explicitly made exceptions. I only wish that Mr. Nevin may not base his remarks upon a phantom. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... to his halting maunderings, hardly heeded them. She heard in her troubled ears the rush of mad waters; phantom voices cracked again in pistoled oaths at the horses, the fear of sudden death clutched at her heart, and in the dreadful dark a powerful arm caught her again and drew her, helpless, out ...
— Laramie Holds the Range • Frank H. Spearman
... glittering phantom, Fame, is ever before my eyes. I know this is folly, but when once you have listened to her intoxicating whispers, you cannot cast her off. Speak not, then, of exposure, or care, or danger; these are as dust of the balance; I am amazed ...
— Frederick the Great and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... Whatever happened he must not take it out of Martin. It was astonishing how real she had become now—as V.V. became a dream. Yes, Martin was astonishingly real. And if only he could go now and talk to Martin—and face all the facts of life with her, even as he had done with that phantom Martin in his dream.... ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... or a product of the absurd and impressionable brains of the young ladies of the ballet, their mothers, the box-keepers, the cloak-room attendants or the concierge. Yes, he existed in flesh and blood, although he assumed the complete appearance of a real phantom; that is to say, of ...
— The Phantom of the Opera • Gaston Leroux |
