"Spectral" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... such. Strange enough: here once more was a kind of Heaven-scaling Ixion; and to him, as to the old one, the just gods were very stern! The ever-revolving, never-advancing Wheel (of a kind) was his, through life; and from his Cloud-Juno did not he too procreate strange Centaurs, spectral Puseyisms, monstrous illusory Hybrids, and ecclesiastical Chimeras,—which now roam the earth ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... artist, though not a man of science. The riot of the 14th of July did not specially deliver prisoners inside the Bastille, but it did deliver the prisoners outside. Napoleon when he returned was indeed a revenant, that is, a ghost. But Waterloo was all the more final in that it was a spectral resurrection and a second death. And in this second case there were other elements that were yet more strangely symbolic. That doubtful and double battle before Waterloo was like the dual personality in a dream. It corresponded curiously to the double mind ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... own, including the aesthetic preferences of seven or eight different sets of students at Radcliffe and Wellesley colleges. Experiments of this kind are particularly difficult, inasmuch as the material, usually colored paper, varies considerably from the spectral color, and differences in saturation, hue, and brightness make great differences in the results, while the feeling-tone of association, individual or racial, very often intrudes. But other things being equal, the bright, the ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... soon heard the clattering of the animals' feet, and Antonio presently stepped forth leading the horse by the bridle; the macho followed behind. I looked at the horse and shrugged my shoulders: as far as I could scan it, it appeared the most uncouth animal I had ever beheld. It was of a spectral white, short in the body, but with remarkably long legs. I observed that it was particularly high in the cruz or withers. "You are looking at the grasti," said Antonio; "it is eighteen years old, but it is the very best in the Chim del Manro; I have long had my eye upon it; I bought it for my own ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... threw himself on his side to force a way through the snow, and then turned over to repeat the performance, and leap and race round his master, who stood shading his eyes from the light, and staring before him at something misty and spectral-looking in the distance. Finally the dog burst into a joyous peal of barking at the objects which had struck his master, and there came the sharp report of a gun, followed by a rolling volley ...
— Steve Young • George Manville Fenn
... Alleghanies, and their boughs, arched and pendulous like those of the elm, almost sweeping the earth below, over which they cast shadows so dark that scarce anything was visible beneath them, save their hoary and spectral trunks. ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... concentrated on this culminating point, and vibrated there as did the sparkling, ever-rising water at the apex of the mighty jet. The square was empty. No one would see him enter the Vatican save that spectral diadem of saints standing rigid over there on the summit of the opposite colonnade. The saints and the fountains were saying to him with one voice, that he believed he was passing through a solemn hour, but that this atom of time, he himself and the Pontiff, would soon pass away, would ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro
... light; it streamed in oddly fixed lines like atoms of crystals in a still solution. Drake thrust an arm within it, waved it; the mist did not move. It seemed instead to interpenetrate the arm—as though bone and flesh were spectral, without power to dislodge the ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... the train of thought into which he had unconsciously fallen by hearing a sound not far from him. He raised his head and rubbed his eyes, half expecting to be confronted by a spectral visitor; but not being able to distinguish anything in the deep gloom to which his eyes were not yet accustomed, he dismissed that theory, and ascribed ...
— Heiress of Haddon • William E. Doubleday
... like streets or avenues between them. There were hundreds or thousands of these earthy tents stretching away for twenty-five miles. Along the horizon was a gigantic stockade of red, rounded pillars, or a solid line of mosque-like temples. How unreal, how spectral it all seemed! Not a sound or sign of life in the whole painted solitude—a deserted camp, or one upon which the silence of death had fallen. Here, in Carboniferous times, grew the gigantic fern-like trees, the Sigillaria ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... fringed along the water's edge with willows, sweeps across the view, met half-way by a wall of Devonian rock, whose alternate glitter and shade, in the strong sunshine streaming from the east, seemed almost spectral. ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... flow of the tide upon the stranded shore of the ocean. Close to the house the faces were plainly discernible, but they faded into mere ghostly outlines on the outskirts of the assembly; and what added to the weird, spectral beauty of the scene, was the confused hum of voices that rose above the sea of forms, sounding like the subdued, sullen roar of an ocean storm, or the wind soughing through the dark lonely forest. It was a grand and imposing scene, and when ...
— Behind the Scenes - or, Thirty years a slave, and Four Years in the White House • Elizabeth Keckley
... resembling the mobile, light, and thin substance of the ether, as conceived by modern physics. The same is true also for most of the conceptions which rude primitive peoples and the uneducated classes among the civilised races have, for thousands of years, cherished as to spectral "ghosts" and "gods." Serious reflection on the matter shows that here—as in modern spiritualism—it is not with really immaterial beings, but with gaseous, invisible bodies, that we are dealing. And further, we are utterly incapable ...
— Monism as Connecting Religion and Science • Ernst Haeckel
... lay on the ground wrapped in his cloak: he never left the batteries." There, amidst the autumn rains, he contracted the febrile symptoms which for several years deepened the pallor of his cheeks and furrowed the rings under his eyes, giving him that uncanny, almost spectral, look which struck a chill to all who saw him first and knew not the fiery energy that burnt within. There, too, his zeal, his unfailing resource, his bulldog bravery, and that indefinable quality which separates genius from talent ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... heaven extending, perfect As the mother-moon's self, full in face. It rose, distinctly at the base With its seven proper colors chorded, Which still, in the rising, were compressed, Until at last they coalesced, And supreme the spectral creature lorded In a triumph of whitest white,— Above which intervened the night. But above night too, like only the next, The second of a wondrous sequence, Reaching in rare and rarer frequence, Till the heaven of heavens were ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... with that impudent grossness which I knew to underlie the veneer of his fine manners; and sometimes my gorge rose against him as though he were deformed—and sometimes I would draw away as though from something partly spectral. I had moments when I thought of him as of a man of pasteboard—as though, if one should strike smartly through the buckram of his countenance, there would be found a mere vacuity within. This horror (not merely fanciful, I think) vastly increased my detestation of his neighbourhood; ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... increased by his religion. He lived an entirely interior life, and his joys and sorrows were not those of Abchurch, but of another sphere. Abchurch feared wet weather, drought, ague, rheumatism, loss of money, and, on Sundays, feared hell, but Mr. Cardew's fears were spiritual or even spectral. His self-communion produced one strange and perilous result, a habit of prolonged evolution from particular ideas uncorrected by reference to what was around him. If anything struck him it remained with him, deduction followed deduction in practice unfortunately ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... did not meet the approval of Mr. Brown, who was disposed to argue the matter, but I cut the discussion short by recommending silence, for fear of a party of scouts overhearing our conversation, when not even the spectral appearance of the shepherd could have saved us from a ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... veritable ghost ship, loomed the wrecked Conomo. Spray had beaten over her and had congealed until she seemed like a mass of ice that had been molded into the shape of a ship. She gleamed, a spectral ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... and very carefully stepped nearer the edge of the gallery. I followed his example, and craned forward and looked down, but I was dazzled by that gleam of light above, and I could see only a bottomless darkness with spectral patches of crimson and purple floating therein. Yet if I could not see, I could hear. Out of this darkness came a sound, a sound like the angry hum one can hear if one puts one's ear outside a hive ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... except on Christmas Eve, and then as the clock was striking twelve, in which respect alone was it lacking in that originality which in these days is a sine qua non of success in spectral life. The owners of Harrowby Hall had done their utmost to rid themselves of the damp and dewy lady who rose up out of the best bedroom floor at midnight, but without avail. They had tried stopping the clock, so ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... Indeed, a tall spectral figure, black from head to foot, his face carefully hidden under a velvet mask, walked at the end of the corridor, lamp in hand, and stopped at the first step of a staircase which led to the upper floors. The conspirators advanced slowly, two by two, like a procession of ghosts, ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - JOAN OF NAPLES—1343-1382 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... with his nerves, and now to this was added the ghastly vista of impending actual beggary. Whatever he did and wherever he went this thought would not be quenched. It was ever with him, gnawing like an aching tooth. Lying awake at night it would glare at him with spectral eyes in the darkness; then, unless he could force himself by all manner of strange and artificial means, such as repeating favourite verse, and so forth, to throw it off, good-bye to sleep—result, nerves yet further shaken, a succession of brooding days, ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... more exceptional frame of mind than I had ever been before. Let the reader picture to himself the stillness of the night within, and without the rumbling roar of the sea—the peculiar piping of the wind, which rang upon my ears like the tones of a mighty organ played upon by spectral hands—the passing scudding clouds which, shining bright and white, often seemed to peep in through the rattling oriel-windows like giants sailings past—in very truth, I felt, from the slight shudder which shook me, that possibly a new sphere ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... the broad Vale of Tears afar, The spectral camp is fled; Faith shineth as a morning star, Our ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... sponged out. The mist was darkening, the rain was thickening, the trees were dotted about like spots of faint shadow, the division-lines which mapped out the fields were all getting blurred together, and the lonely farm-house where the dog-cart had been left, loomed spectral in the grey light like the last human dwelling at the end of the habitable world. Was this a sight worth climbing to ...
— The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices • Charles Dickens
... beauty, had not greatly improved matters by arranging them in curls around her pale countenance, to which they added an expression almost corpse-like and unearthly. To make matters still worse, she had chosen a vest or cymar of a pale green silk, which gave her, on the whole, a ghastly and even spectral appearance. ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... noticing that her pony's feet were shod with felt. She looked neither to the right nor the left, and she saw nothing of the strange restlessness which seemed to pervade the camp. Everywhere the shadows of men were moving noiselessly about. Spectral guns were surrounded by little groups of whispering soldiers. There was no bivouacing, the camp-fires burned low. Every now and then, when challenged, she mechanically repeated the countersign. All the while her lips were moving in one ...
— The Traitors • E. Phillips (Edward Phillips) Oppenheim
... the landscape far and near, Then impetuous stamped the earth, And turned and tightened his saddle-girth; But mostly he watched with eager search The belfry-tower of the old North Church, As it rose above the graves on the hill, Lonely, and spectral, and sombre, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... through the trees, and their foliage cast dark, spectral shadows that swayed fitfully to and fro in the weird light of the waning moon as Richmodis staggered along feebly, absorbed in the melancholy thoughts which ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... out her plan of journeying to St. Petersburgh to visit her brother, Sir Robert Ker Porter, who had been long united to a Russian princess, and was then a widower; her strength was fearfully reduced; her once round figure become almost spectral, and little beyond the placid and dignified expression of her noble countenance remained to tell of her former beauty; but her resolve was taken; she wished, she said, to see once more her youngest and most beloved brother, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... handed down to us in a book, some parts of which may indeed be called holy. But there are others yet to be revealed; and if we are to reject them because they are not in those pages, we should act as wisely as the scientist who would take no notice of Kirschoff's spectral analysis because there is no mention of it in Albertus Magnus. A modern prophet may wear a broadcloth coat and write to the magazines; but none the less he may be the little pipe which conveys a tiny squirt from the reservoirs of truth. Look at this!" I cried, rising and reading my Carlyle text. ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... way down a green hillside yellow with cowslips, and breathing perhaps the most delicate of all flowery fragrances. Yet again, as we pass into another stretch of woodland, another profusion and another fragrance await us, the winey perfume and the spectral blue sheen of the wild hyacinth. As one comes upon stretches of these hyacinths in the woods, they seem at first glance like pools of blue water or fallen pieces of the sky. Here, for once, the poets are left behind, and, of them all, Shakespeare and Milton alone have ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... God! That ghastly gibbet! How dismal 'tis to see The great tall spectral skeleton, The ladder, and the tree! Hark! hark! It is the clash of arms— The bells begin to toll— He is coming! he is coming! God's mercy on his soul! One last long peal of thunder— The clouds ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... cry out. Fire and subsequent storms had practically leveled the stand of trees between the spot where Lew stood and the summit. Here and there a blackened tree thrust its bare trunk upward, limbless, its top gone, a ragged, spectral, pitiful remnant of what had been a beautiful tree. But mostly the thick stand of young poles had been laid low even as a scythe levels a field of grain. And these fallen poles lay in almost impassable confusion, twisted and tangled and in places heaped in towering masses. ...
— The Young Wireless Operator—As a Fire Patrol - The Story of a Young Wireless Amateur Who Made Good as a Fire Patrol • Lewis E. Theiss
... When, presently, they lift a corner of the shade to peep out, they see him still standing there, spectral in the gloom. He is waiting for them to open the door! He thinks they have quitted the window for that purpose! Ah! here comes the ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Love rides by ordinary with a dripping spur, and is still as arbitrary as in the day when Mars was taken with a net and amorous Jove bellowed in Europa's kail-yard. My faith! if Love distemper thus the spectral ichor of the gods, is it remarkable that the warmer blood of man pulses rather vehemently at his bidding? It were the least of Cupid's miracles that a lusty bridegroom of some twenty-and-odd should be pricked to ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... and Fortitude, who had stood at Truth's side, was fastened with nails and pulleys to the stake. I would not revive by any images, in the abode of the graceful and the gentle Arts, these sorrowful reminiscences. The vicissitudes of the world appear to be bringing round again the spectral Past. Let us place great men between it and ourselves: they all are tutelar: not the warrior and the statesman only; not only the philosopher; but also the historian who follows them step by step, and the poet ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 9. - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 26, 1850 • Various
... and terror of the lonely place, and of the wild and fearful night that reigned there, touched him like a spectral hand. His distance from all help; the long, dark, winding, ghost-beleaguered way that lay between him and the earth on which men lived; his being high, high, high, up there, where it had made him dizzy to see the birds fly in the day; cut off from all good people, ...
— The Chimes • Charles Dickens
... of the valley stretched away and away behind him to the foot of the Huachucas in the west. They unfolded their long reaches to the southward until they melted into the hot sky between spectral mountain ranges down in Mexico. He came up out of that wide landscape, a tall wild figure, lonesome as ...
— When the West Was Young • Frederick R. Bechdolt
... lawless element that first began to conspicuously assert the white supremacy. There grew up an organization called "the Ku-Klux Klan," designed at first partly as a rough sport and masquerade, partly to overawe the negroes. There were midnight ridings in spectral disguises, warnings, alarms and presently whippings and even murders. The society, or imitations of it, spread over most of the South. It was at its height in 1868-70, and in the latter year it gradually gave way, partly owing to vigorous measures ordered from Washington, and partly perhaps ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... remoteness of mid-ocean. Through the chinks of the narrative, the wedding music sounds unreal and far on. What may not happen to a man alone on a wide, wide sea? The line between earthly and unearthly vanishes. Did the mariner really see the spectral bark and hear spirits talking, or was it all but the phantasmagoria of the calenture, the fever which attacks the sailor on the tropic main, so that he seems to see green meadows and water brooks on the level brine? No one can tell; for he ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... onwards—passed the haunted spot—without either hearing or seeing the spectral drummer. On arriving at home, Sir Robert, who drank privately, ordered wine for himself, and sent Rowland Drum to the kitchen, where he was rather meagerly entertained, and was afterwards lodged for ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... her chamber in yon spectral keep With ivy wreaths now crowned; Whose casket rent By Time's grim hand and strewn by fragments round, Once held a jewel whose rare beauty lent Its light to cheer the sailors toiling on ...
— Rowena & Harold - A Romance in Rhyme of an Olden Time, of Hastyngs and Normanhurst • Wm. Stephen Pryer
... bitter, brooding mood which had become habitual to her since she lived alone. While the tired hands slowly worked, the weary brain ached and burned with heavy thoughts, vain longings, and feverish fancies, till things about her sometimes seemed as strange and spectral as the phantoms that had haunted her half-delirious sleep. Inexpressibly wretched were the dreary days, the restless nights, with only pain and labor for companions. The world looked very dark to her, life seemed an utter failure, God a delusion, ...
— Work: A Story of Experience • Louisa May Alcott
... ghost indeed, a Methodist ghost—the spectral property, consequently, of my good friends the Methodists—used to rattle, and clatter, and bang, and communicate, in the house of the Rev. Mr. Wesley, the father of John Wesley, at Epworth, in England. This ghost ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... limitless space. For moments, hours, ages she was propelled with the velocity of a shooting-star. The earth seemed a huge automobile. And it sped with her down an endless white track through the universe. Looming, ghostly, ghastly, spectral forms of cacti plants, large as pine-trees, stabbed her with giant spikes. She became an unstable being in a shapeless, colorless, soundless cosmos of unrelated things, but always rushing, even to meet the darkness that haunted her and never ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... his religion, from very early association, there was to me something of the unearthly and spectral. ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... certainly cut a strange figure, while thus lunching in our little boat— surrounded by ice, and looking hazy through the thickly falling snow, which prevented us from seeing very far ahead, and made the mountains on shore look quite spectral. ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... abyss. Russia was infinitely distant. Yet the nightmare of the glacial ice-cap still pressed down on him from the hills, in full vision, and no one could look out on the dusky and oily sea that lapped these spectral islands without consciousness that only a day's steaming to the northward would bring him to the ice-barrier, ready at any moment to advance, which obliged tourists to stop where Laps and reindeer and Norse ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... of the precipice, was almost as deserted as the church. But for a Sister who stood by the convent gate like a statue of Eternal Silence, and a man who was killing a wretched calf in the middle of the road, I might have asked myself if this fantastic Bozouls was not some spectral village, reproducing the past in all except the living beings who had gone down into their graves. When I recrossed the Dourdou, the light was several tones lower than it was when I first descended ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... eve of Bosworth fight, it seemed as if the spectral shadows of all those she had injured in the body or the soul, by her unerring demands upon one, and her negligence as to the other, rose a host of dismal spectres round. Their pale, exhausted, pleading looks, as she scolded and threatened, when the clock ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... lonely gorges, the depths of which even a brilliant sunshine could not penetrate. What this region may be like in summer-time I know not, but in winter the surface of the moon itself could scarcely present a more silent, spectral appearance. ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... was far more adept at causing pain than at enduring it. Also, from birth, he had had an unconquerable fear of dogs. His nerves, too, were not yet recovered from Bruce's attack earlier in the day. All this, and the spectral suddenness of the onslaught, robbed him of every atom of his usual ...
— Bruce • Albert Payson Terhune
... Anyhow, it is the business of ships. The people on the bridge watch another life below, with its strange cries and mysterious movements. A leisurely wisp of steam rises from a steamer's funnel. She is alive and breathing, though motionless. The walls enclosing the Pool are spectral in a winter light, and might be no more than the almost forgotten memory of a dark past. Looking at them intently, to give them a name, the wayfarer on the bridge could imagine they were maintained ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... the call, and was led to a bed on which lay a gaunt, spectral man, evidently in the ...
— The Young Bank Messenger • Horatio Alger
... against the door of which is stuck, as a thing no longer wanted, a very old, pious image Kwanon with the thousand arms, and Kwanon with the horses' head, seated among clouds and flames, both horrible to behold with their spectral grins. ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... avatars were easy, seized this occasion to become Jondrette. His two daughters and Gavroche had hardly had time to discover that they had two little brothers. When a certain degree of misery is reached, one is overpowered with a sort of spectral indifference, and one regards human beings as though they were spectres. Your nearest relations are often no more for you than vague shadowy forms, barely outlined against a nebulous background of life and easily confounded ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... reply. He was sobbing now like a child. Laverick rose to his feet and went to the window. What was to be done with such a creature! When he got back, Morrison had raised himself once more into a sitting posture. His appearance was absolutely spectral. ...
— Havoc • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... presence of the wild fancies that now came rushing and thronging before his mind. The words of his father sounded in his ears; he thought he heard them spoken from the air; he thought he saw an aged spectral face, wan with suffering and grief, in front of his cave. He covered his eyes with his hands, and sought to reason down his superstitious feeling. In vain. Words rang in his ears, muffled words, as though muttered in the storm, and his mind, which had brooded so long over his ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... Lob, "and what is worse, 'Tis here my grand-dam oft doth come to curse, And haunteth it with spiteful toads and bats, With serpents fell, with ewts and clawful cats. Here doth she revel hold o' moony nights, With grave-rank ghouls and moaning spectral sprites; And ... Saints! what's that? A hook-winged bat? Not so; perchance, within its hairy body fell Is man or maid transformed by magic spell. O, brothers, heedful be, and careful tread Lest magic gin should catch and strike us dead! O ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... carried him that day, nor his double, but what was so like him in colour, size, and bone, while so unlike him in muscle and bearing, that he might have been he, worn but for his skin to a skeleton. Straight down upon John he came, spectral through the fog, as if he were asleep, and saw nothing in his way. John stepped aside to let him pass, and then first looked in the face of his rider: with a shock of fear that struck him in the middle of the body, making him gasp and choke, he saw before him—so plainly that, but for the impossibility, ...
— The Flight of the Shadow • George MacDonald
... indeed, magnificently ornamented, but without occupants, made one think of the misunderstanding which had gradually arisen for centuries between them and the head of the empire. Their ambassadors had already withdrawn to eat in a side-chamber; and if the greater part of the hall assumed a sort of spectral appearance, by so many invisible guests being so magnificently attended, a large unfurnished table in the middle was still more sad to look upon; for there also many covers stood empty, because all those who had certainly a right to sit there had, for ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... were over. Thus frequently, I was sent to bed several hours too late, with nerves unnaturally stimulated. The consequence was a premature development of the brain, that made me a "youthful prodigy" by day, and by night a victim of spectral illusions, nightmare, and somnambulism, which at the time prevented the harmonious development of my bodily powers and checked my growth, while, later, they induced continual headache, weakness and nervous affections, of all kinds. As these again re-acted on the brain, giving ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... the path where Wolfe had led his men they climbed, and stood at length where they had stood upon the heights of Abraham. They had no cannon, and half their muskets were useless. Yet Arnold at the head of his spectral little company boldly summoned ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall
... steadfast to the right, Fresh from the heart that haughty verdict came; Beneath a waning moon, each spectral height Rolled back ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... who was one—I had; he was a famous one—he was; he broke his neck once, when the net had been forgotten. They all do it—ils se cassent le cou tous, tot ou tard! Allons toi t'as peur, toi?" Chat noir's great back was quivering with fear; he had no taste, himself, for shapes like these, spectral and wan as ghosts, walking about in the sun. He took us as far away as possible, and as quickly, from these reminders of the thing ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... This spectral and visionary-looking idea somehow in the Red Cross, was not only the thing that started the Red Cross, but it was the daily momentum, the daily mounting up in the hearts of the people that ...
— The Ghost in the White House • Gerald Stanley Lee
... assume that biscuits are 4 a penny, and then that they are 2 a penny, adding that "the answer will of course be the same in both cases." It is a dreamy remark, making one feel something like Macbeth grasping at the spectral dagger. "Is this a statement that I see before me?" If you were to say "we both walked the same way this morning," and I were to say "one of you walked the same way, but the other didn't," which of the three ...
— A Tangled Tale • Lewis Carroll
... shook hands with Elfreda, and all around again for good luck, then linking an arm in each of hers they conducted the rescued prisoner to where the rest of the party awaited them. During their absence the ghosts had doffed their spectral garments and the instant the three joined them the order to march was given. Once fairly in Overton, conversation was permitted, and on the same corner where they had met, the rescuers parted, after much ...
— Grace Harlowe's First Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... believe it, by any sum. Some one had said that some very old person had seen a phantom there. Nobody knew who some one was. Nobody knew who the very old person was. Nobody knew who had seen it; nor when; nor how. The very rumor was spectral. ...
— The Ghost • William. D. O'Connor
... quietly on the top step of the landing, and gazed down into the dark, dank water below. Once or twice a spectral thought loomed among the shadows of her brain; a wonder whether beneath that cold dismal surface there would not be rest from the troubles of earth. But she could not hold an idea before her for two consecutive moments; and she forgot what she thought about before she ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... what might be termed direct experimental evidence for the hypothesis of Prout. Unfortunately, however, it is evidence of a kind which only a few experts are competent to discuss—so very delicate a matter is the spectral analysis of the stars. What is still more unfortunate, the experts do not agree among themselves as to the validity of Professor Lockyer's conclusions. Some, like Professor Crookes, have accepted them with acclaim, hailing Lockyer as "the ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... the East a grey streak marked the advent of another day, and upon all things was a solemn hush, a great, and awful stillness that was like the stillness of Death. The Earth was a place of gloom, and mist, where spectral shadows writhed, and twisted, and flitted under a frowning heaven, and out of the gloom there came a breath, sharp, ...
— The Money Moon - A Romance • Jeffery Farnol
... like all those of Russian peasants, so that the flames, creeping out at the four corners, soon made great headway, and, fanned by the wind, spread rapidly to all parts of the building. Vaninka followed the progress of the fire with blazing eyes, fearing to see some half-burnt spectral shape rush out of the flames. At last the roof fell in, and Vaninka, relieved of all fear, then at last made her way to the general's house, into which the two women entered without being seen, thanks to ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - VANINKA • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... the twinkle of the light. What could be the meaning of such an apparition, with such accompaniments—the time of its appearance midnight—the place a solitary burying-ground? I was in the Highlands: was there truth, after all, in the many floating Highland stories of spectral dead-lights and wild supernatural sounds, seen and heard by nights in lonely places of sepulture, when some sudden death was near? I did feel my blood run somewhat cold, for I had not yet passed the credulous time of life—and had some thoughts of stealing down to my master's bedside, to be within ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... not thy face away, But place thy finger on my brow, and take All burthens from me and all dreams that ache; Upon mine eyes a cooling balsam lay, Seeing I am aweary of the day. But, lo! thy lips are ashen and they quake. What spectral vision sees thou that can shake Thy sweet composure, and thy heart dismay? Perhaps some murderer's cruel eye agleam Is fixed upon me, or some monstrous dream Might bring such fearful guilt upon the head Of my unvigilant soul as would arouse The Borgian snake from her envenomed bed, ...
— The House of the Vampire • George Sylvester Viereck
... to be visible to any eye save his own. In my opinion, all this is not so much a delusion as a partly wilful and partly involuntary sport of the imagination, to which his disease has imparted such morbid energy that he beholds these spectral scenes and characters with no less distinctness than a play upon the stage, and with somewhat more of illusive credence. Many of his letters are in my possession, some based upon the same vagary as the present one, and others upon hypotheses not a ...
— P.'s Correspondence (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... smoke and the glare. Was it a fool's errand? And had he and Shad only entrapped themselves to no good end? To the right of him the fire roared and with his back to the glare his eyes eagerly sought the shadows down the wind. Vague shapes of gnarled branches and pallid tree trunks, spectral bushes quivering before the advancing demon, some of them already alight. Safety lay only in this one direction—for Beth, if she had been there, for Shad——Peter suddenly remembered the lumberman and turned to his left ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... that with this exception, it acted merely as a screen to diminish the intensity of all the rays. We also supposed that there was a sharp distinction to be drawn between sunlight after passing through blue glass and the blue spectral ray: that in one case all the colored rays were more or less present, and that in the other but one was. But think of the utter dismay of such pretenders as Helmholtz, Tyndall, and Henry when they learn that the undulatory theory of light with which they have so long taxed our credulity is ...
— Scientific American, Volume XXXVI., No. 8, February 24, 1877 • Various
... nor their mountains rise—for them the flowers do not blossom— for them the creatures of field and forest do not live. They lie bound in the dungeon of their own corruption, encompassed only by doleful phantoms, or by spectral vacancy. ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... Trivigiana, who has been repeatedly seen. There is a man (a huntsman) now alive who saw her also. Hoppner could tell you all about her, and so can Rose, perhaps. I myself have no doubt of the fact, historical and spectral.[11] She always appeared on particular occasions, before the deaths of the family, &c. &c. I heard Madame Benzoni say, that she knew a gentleman who had seen her cross his room at Colalto Castle. ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... speech, and "as his soul ascended and his last breath departed from him he closed his eyes, and then disposed his hands and body into such a posture as required not the least alteration by those that came to shroud him." It was a strange chance that preserved his spectral monument almost uninjured when St. Paul's was burned down in the Great Fire, and no other monument in the cathedral escaped. Among all his fantasies none remains in the imagination more despotically than this last fanciful game of dying. Donne, however, ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... of Piccadilly into St. James's Street before either man spoke again. The tossing lights of a windy autumn evening were shimmering on the wet pavement, and faces looked spectral white in the morris-dance of shine and shadow. Wratislaw, whose soul was sick for high, clean winds and the great spaces of the moors, was thinking of Glenavelin and Lewis and the strong, quickening north. His companion was ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... it that night, it bore every appearance of having been abandoned for years instead of only a few hours. No smoke curled from the chimneys; no light gleamed at any of the windows. In its white setting of snow, it loomed silent and spectral. ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk
... bed. The sound she heard now was a new one, and one that caused her flesh to tingle. It was the sound of a stealthy hand upon her door. The knob turned noiselessly, the hinges gave a faint whine, and there on the threshold stood a white-robed figure, ghastly and spectral in the pallid light that fell upon it from the cloud-freed moon outside. Miss Blake did not utter a sound and the apparition glided forward with slow, measured steps until it stood beside her bed. Its eyes were staring and wide ...
— The Governess • Julie M. Lippmann
... propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine. ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... might be only a delusion, which the unequal paces of the horse occasioned, and by the thick snow-mist through which she saw him. All around her had, in fact, a bewildering appearance, and seemed to her waving and spectral. A dull cry from Mrs. Astrid broke the ghostly silence—was this also a delusion? Harald's horse stood still, and was without its rider. Of a truth, it was only too certain! Harald had, seized by dizziness, fallen down beside his horse. He had borne for long in silence ...
— Strife and Peace • Fredrika Bremer
... he were about to awake, and then his eyes opened and he gazed on the spectral pallor of the dawn in the windows, his brain rousing from dreams slowly into comprehension of the change that had come. Then collecting his thoughts he rose and stood facing the dawn. He stood for a moment like one in combat, and then like ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... great deal of comfort in this. We were almost as much afraid of Peg Bowen as we would be of any spectral visitant. ...
— The Story Girl • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... districts." So we, along with 1,200 others, marched out to our work, and as soon as we were outside of the prison grounds I saw a sight that, while it explained the mud-splashed appearance of my spectral array, was enough to daunt any man doomed to join in the game. Mud, mud everywhere, with groups of weary men with shovel, or shovel and barrow, working in it. A sort of road had been made over the mud with ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... Grotto. In between, from out of the corners of the cavern Bengal lights burst forth from time to time flooding for a few moments the whole of that gloomy palace with green, blue, white and rose-coloured flames to which the red flame of the pitch-torches with their black smoke formed a spectral contrast. ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... concerns our subject: the special sensitisers used by the photographer to modify the spectral distribution of sensibility of the haloid salts, e.g. eosine, fuchsine, cyanine. These again are electron-producers under light stimulus. Now it has been shown by Stoletow, Hallwachs, and Elster and Geitel that ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly
... partial gifts o'er all, like dew? The Many's weedy growth withers the gracious Few! Strange opposites, from those, again, shall rise. Join, then, if thee it please, the bitter jest Of mankind's progress; all its spectral race Mere impotence of rest, The heaving vain of life which cannot cease from self, Crest altering still to gulf And gulf to crest In endless chace, That leaves the tossing water anchor'd in its place! Ah, well does he who does but stand aside, Sans hope or fear, And marks ...
— The Unknown Eros • Coventry Patmore
... strong under me as if he had never heard of short commons. We baited at Frostburgh, a small village set on a hill mined and tunneled with coalpits; fifteen miles or so beyond this was the roadside inn, where I proposed to halt for the night. The sun had long set when I rode up to the spectral-looking white house; remarking with no pleasant surprise, that not a vestige of smoke rose from its gaunt chimneys. At the gate there stood a cart laden with some sort of household goods. Near this, a ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... being in his hand, and the round world became the centre and the soul of all things in some shadowy sense, forlorn of meaning, and around him he beheld the living traces and the sky-pointing proportions of the mighty Pan—but poetry redeemed him from this spectral philosophy, and he bathed his heart in beauty, and gazed at the golden light of heaven, and drank of the spirit of the universe, and wandered at eve ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... of Love and Fame In a golden halo about her; She had shared his triumphs and worn his name: But, alas! he had died without her. He had wandered in many a distant realm, And never had left her behind him, But now, with a spectral shape at the helm, He had sailed where she could not ...
— Poems of Power • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... the joy is to miss all. In the joy of the actors lies the sense of any action. That is the explanation, that the excuse. To one who has not the secret of the lanterns, the scene upon the links is meaningless. And hence the haunting and truly spectral unreality of realistic books. Hence, when we read the English realists, the incredulous wonder with which we observe the hero's constancy under the submerging tide of dulness, and how he bears up with his jibbing sweetheart, and endures the chatter of idiot girls, and stands by his whole unfeatured ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the first time she had ever watched with the sick, and she found it a very solemn thing. Yet with all the solemnity and gloom brooding over her, she felt inexpressible gratitude that she was not haunted by the spectral illusions of her childhood. Reason was no longer the vassal, but the monarch of imagination, and though the latter often proved a restless and wayward subject, it acknowledged the former as its ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... in speechless eloquence, The waving shadows of the cypress fall In spectral patches on the quaint old wall, Nodding in ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... the freshet-flood, And up the muddy bank they strain; A horse at the spectral white-ash shies— One of the span of the ambulance, Black as a hearse. They give the rein: Silent speed on a scout were wise, ...
— Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War • Herman Melville
... Many, however, had full faith in his supernatural power, and often he seemed to believe in his own spectral account of himself. ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... skies lay over the sombre valleys, and the gloomy phantasmagoria slowly changed and changed in that unearthly twilight, as the mists and the wind and the rain transformed the solid hills and the straths into intermingling vapors and visions. A spectral world, unreal, and yet terrible; apparently voiceless and tenantless; and yet somehow suggesting that there were eyes watching, and vaguely moving and menacing shapes passing hither and thither before him in ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... Antonina, he mutters to himself, and clutches mechanically at his garments with his lank, shapeless fingers. The radiant moonlight, falling fully upon his countenance, invests it with a livid, mysterious, spectral appearance: seen by a stranger at the present moment, he would have been ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... the pathless sweep Of the terrible northern blast; Above its roof the wild clouds leap And shriek as they hurtle past. The snow-waves hiss along the plain, Like spectral wolves they stretch and strain And race and ramp—with hissing beat, Like stealthy tread of myriad feet, I hear them pass; upon the roof The icy showers swirl and rattle; At times the moon, from storms aloof, Shines white and wan within the room— Then swift clouds drive across the light ...
— A Little Norsk; Or, Ol' Pap's Flaxen • Hamlin Garland
... dial; the accidental tinklings among the pendant lustres, more startling than alarm-bells; the softened sounds and laggard air that made their way among these objects, and a phantom crowd of others, shrouded and hooded, and made spectral of shape. But, besides, there was the great staircase, where the lord of the place so rarely set his foot, and by which his little child had gone up to Heaven. There were other staircases and passages ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... the midst of a desolation and a silence that was profound. There was nothing there that lived, except a few fire-blacked trees that stuck up here and there in the shelter of broken walls. Now I understood the meaning of the spectral shapes. They were nothing but the broken walls of the other houses that were. They were all that ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... noise and motion of the train had put our fellow-travelers to sleep, and when it gradually ceased they did not stir. There was no bustle at the little station where we stopped; a few drowsy figures stole silently by in the dim light, like ghosts on the spectral shore of Acheron; the whole scene was strangely unreal, phantasmal. "What can it be?" we asked each other under our breaths. "There is but one thing that it can be—Lake Thrasimene." And so it was. Often since, both by starlight and daylight, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... dreaming sea, when the pinnacled rocks of Rum and Aye, the outposts of the Banda group, pierce the swathing vapours. The creamy cliffs of Swangi (the Ghost Island), traditionally haunted by the spirits of the departed, show their spectral outlines on the northern horizon, and the sun-flushed "wings of the morning" span the sapphire arch of heaven as we enter the sheltered gulf of the Zonnegat, fringed by luxuriant woods clothing a mountain side, and ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... oppressed by the thought of his sufferings in that dreary convalescence. At night, when she looked from her window, the fog hung white, like mildew over the pond, and she could not reason herself out of a spectral haunting fancy that sickness lurked in the heavy, misty atmosphere. She dreamt of it and the four babies, started, awoke, and had to recall all her higher trust to enable her vigour to chase off the ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... back in the hereditary temper of the Ravenswoods, in the intrigues of the Ashtons, and in the feuds of the times. When Love intervenes we discover in an instant that he is not sent by the gods to bring peace, but that he is the awful instrument of destruction. The spectral appearance of Alice at the hour of her departure, on the very spot "on which Lucy Ashton had reclined listening to the fatal tale of woe . . . holding up her shrivelled hand as if to prevent his coming more near," is necessary in order to intimate that the interdict is pronounced ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... soft gray sky, like the breast of a dove; sheeny gray sea, with gleams of steel running across; trailing skirts of mist shutting off the mainland, leaving Light Island alone with the ocean; the white tower gleaming spectral among the folding mists; the dark pine-tree pointing a sombre finger to heaven; the wet, black rocks, from which the tide had gone down, huddling together in fantastic groups as if ...
— Captain January • Laura E. Richards
... sense of peace in those cool, vast, unworn mountain solitudes, with the rain-mists sweeping like spectral armies over the level lands below, and the sun-rays slanting heavenward, like the spears of an angelic host. There is such abundance of rushing water, of deep grass, of endless shade, of forest trees, of heather and pine, of torrent and tarn; and ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... my life, having read many books in favour of Ghosts and Spectral Appearances, the recollection remained so strong in my mind, that, for years after, the dread of phantoms bore irresistible sway. This dread continued till about my twenty-third year, when the following ...
— Apparitions; or, The Mystery of Ghosts, Hobgoblins, and Haunted Houses Developed • Joseph Taylor
... the baffled sight Houses and church-spires stretch away; The trees, all spectral and still and white, Stand up like ghosts in the failing light, And fade and faint ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... grown perceptibly colder. The haze crystallized on the rigging, the rail was white with rime, and the deck grew slippery, but they left everything on the Selache to the topsails, and she crept on erratically through the darkness, avoiding the faint spectral glimmer of the scattered ice. The breeze abeam propelled her with gently leaning canvas at some four knots to the hour, and now and then Wyllard, who hung about the deck that night, fancied he could hear a thin, sharp crackle beneath the ...
— Masters of the Wheat-Lands • Harold Bindloss
... Long learnt on Hellespont, or Styx. Dan Chaucer hears his river still Chatter beneath a phantom mill. Tennyson notes, with studious eye, How Cambridge waters hurry by . . . And in that garden, black and white, Creep whispers through the grass all night; And spectral dance, before the dawn, A hundred Vicars down the lawn; Curates, long dust, will come and go On lissom, clerical, printless toe; And oft between the boughs is seen The sly shade of a Rural Dean . . . Till, at a shiver in the skies, Vanishing with Satanic cries, The ...
— The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke • Rupert Brooke
... capitalists. We might say this if men of art and science had taken as their aim the needs of the people; but there are none such. All scientists are busy with their priestly avocations, out of which proceed investigations into protoplasm, the spectral analyses of stars, and so on. But science has never once thought of what axe or what hatchet is the most profitable to chop with, what saw is the most handy, what is the best way to mix bread, from what flour, how to set it, how to build and heat ...
— What To Do? - thoughts evoked by the census of Moscow • Count Lyof N. Tolstoi
... wooden building, through whose rough glass windows cheerful lights could be seen. A rumor spread that they were to have a hot supper, and, sure enough, they were marched in, dividing on each side of four long tables that stretched into spectral distance, in the feeble glimmer of the oil-lamps hanging from the ceiling. Most of the men in Jack's company, at least, were gently nurtured, but the steaming oysters, cold beef, and generous "chunks" of bread, filled their eyes with a magnificence and their stomachs with a gentle repletion ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... That o'er the current casts a tower'd ridge, Dark sky-line forms fantastic as a dream; And cresset watch-lights on the bridge-gate gleam, Where 'neath the star-lit dome gaunt masts upbuoy No flag of festive joy, But blanching spectral heads;—their heads, who died Victims to tyrant-pride, Martyrs of Faith and Freedom in the day Of shame and flame ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... from the North May scarce avert. The scales of Justice tilt Something askew. The curse of high-placed guilt Is on you, if the warning tocsin's knell, Clanging forth fiercely, hath not force to tell The hearer that Fate's hourglass fast runs out. That spectral Comet flames, beset about With miasmatic mist, and lurid fume, Conquering Corruption threatens hideous doom. Yet, yet the Bow of Promise gleams above, Herald of Hope to her whom all men mark ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 29, 1893 • Various
... Himself a pallor in the heart of light, with spectral folds of silk dripping from His shoulders, His hands swathed in them, and His down-bent head hidden by the silver-rayed monstrance and That which ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson |
