"Ghostly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... also, by the triumph that such men make over all their enemies, both bodily and ghostly: "Now thanks be unto God," said Paul, "which always causeth us to triumph in Christ." And, "who shall separate us from the love of Christ" our Lord? and again, "O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? The sting of death is sin, and the strength of sin ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... Though dread artillery rattle, And ghostly corses load the ground, Cheer up, cheer up; Where groan'd the field of battle, The song, the dance, the feast, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... on a bank of the Charles River, fishing. The soft melancholy red of evening was fading off in streaks on the glassy water, and the houses of Oldtown were beginning to loom through the gloom, solemn and ghostly. There are times and tones and moods of nature that make all the vulgar, daily real seem shadowy, vague, and supernatural, as if the outlines of this hard material present were fading into the invisible and unknown. So Oldtown, with its ...
— Oldtown Fireside Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... know. Then Dad sat beside him, and for long intervals would stare silently into the darkness. Sometimes a string of the vermin would hop past close to the fire, and another time a curlew would come near and screech its ghostly wail, but he never noticed them. Yet ...
— On Our Selection • Steele Rudd
... the advice, it is said, of his priests—the most incompetent advisers in times of danger—he chose to await the approach of the enemy in his own capital; and it was not till the latter had arrived within a few leagues of Cuzco, that the Inca, taking counsel of the same ghostly monitors, sallied forth ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... stars come out; the fragrant shadows fall About a dreaming garden still and sweet, I hear the unseen bats above me bleat Among the ghostly moths their hunting call, And twinkling glow-worms all about me crawl. Now for a chamber dim, a pillow meet For slumbers deep as death, a faultless sheet, Cool, white and smooth. So may I reach the hall ...
— Spirits in Bondage • (AKA Clive Hamilton) C. S. Lewis
... Nor did my courage altogether come back when the shutters were thrown open, and the wintry sunlight streamed in upon dusty floors, and cobwebbed ceilings, and piles of mysterious objects covered in a ghostly way with large white sheets, looking like heaps of slain ...
— Monsieur Maurice • Amelia B. Edwards
... dangerous to offend; that the wise man and wise woman (the white witches of our ancestors) still continue their investigations of truth, undisturbed by the rural police or the progress of the schoolmaster; that each locality has its haunted house; that apparitions still walk their ghostly rounds—and little would his reputation for piety avail that clergyman in the eyes of his parishioners who should refuse to lay those "extravagant and erring spirits," when requested, by those due liturgic ceremonies which the orthodoxy ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... though he is classed with the oscines, passes his life in almost unbroken silence. Of course I refer to the waxwing, or cedar-bird, whose faint, sibilant whisper can scarcely be thought to contradict the foregoing description. By what strange freak he has lapsed into this ghostly habit, nobody knows. I make no account of the insinuation that he gave up music because it hindered his success in cherry-stealing. He likes cherries, it is true; and who can blame him? But he would need to work hard to steal more than does that indefatigable songster, the robin. ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... back, and threw open the folding leaves of the window. He found himself looking out upon the leads of Albemarle Street. No stars and no moon showed through the grey clouds draping the wintry sky, but a dim and ghostly half-light nevertheless rendered the ugly expanse ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... grounds his chin, And motionless abides till day come in; Pure of his vice, that he might ease her woe, Not brand her with his own. Not yet the glow Of false dawn throbbed, nor yet the silent town Stood washt in light, clear-printed to the crown In the cold upper air. Dark loomed the walls, Ghostly the trees, and still shuddered the calls Of owl to owl from unseen towers. Afar A dog barked. High and hidden in the haar Which blew in from the sea a heron cried Honk! and he heard his wings, but not espied The heavy flight. ...
— Helen Redeemed and Other Poems • Maurice Hewlett
... of the plain. Alone, alone, Upon a mossy stone, She sits and reckons up the dead and gone With the last leaves for a love-rosary, Whilst all the wither'd world looks drearily, Like a dim picture of the drowned past In the hush'd mind's mysterious far away, Doubtful what ghostly thing will steal the last Into that distance, gray ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... terrible queen of the kingdom of the dead. Beside her, on a beautiful throne, sat Balder, pale and wan, crowned with a withered wreath of flowers, and close at hand was Nanna, pallid as her husband, for whom she had died. And all night long, while ghostly forms wandered restless and sleepless through Helheim, Hermod talked with Balder and Nanna. There is no record of what they said, but the talk was sad enough, doubtless, and ran like a still stream among the happy days in Asgard when Balder's smile ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... lingered by the side of the deep old road where this robbery was committed, to cast wistful glances into its mysterious windings; and when night deepened the shadows of the trees, have urged my horse on his journey, from a vague apprehension of a visit from the ghostly highwayman. And then there was the Bollin, with its shelvy banks, which Turpin cleared at a bound; the broad meadows over which he winged his flight; the pleasant bowling-green of the pleasant old inn at Hough, where he produced ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... could entertain no doubt; her manners, her accomplishments, her ways of thinking and speaking, all proved it. Looking below the surface, her character showed itself in aspects not common among young women in these days. In her quiet way she was an incurable fatalist, and a firm believer in the ghostly reality of apparitions from the dead. Then again in the matter of money, she had strange views of her own. Whenever my purse was in my hand, she held me resolutely at a distance from first to last. She refused ...
— Little Novels • Wilkie Collins
... mists moved over the fields near dawn and wavered ghostly about Lowlight, the green bowman moved with them. And just out of hearing of the village, behind wild shrubs that hid them, the bowmen that were coming from the forest met the three that had spent the night in taverns of Lowlight. And the three told the ...
— Don Rodriguez - Chronicles of Shadow Valley • Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Baron, Dunsany
... brave man, as respected all bodily enemies or the dangers of human warfare, but was as sensitive and timid as the most superstitious of old women in facing the frowns of a priest or under the vague anticipations 10 of ghostly retributions. But had it been otherwise, and had there been any reason to apprehend an unsteady demeanor on the part of this prince at the approach of the critical moment, such were the changes already effected in the state of their domestic politics ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey
... and his deputy, who quietly submitted to the authority of their new sovereign. But the noise of the pistol had alarmed Mrs. Pickle, who, running downstairs, with the most frantic appearance, attended by two maids and the curate, who still maintained his place of chaplain and ghostly director in the family, would have assaulted our hero with her nails, had not she been restrained by her attendants. Though they prevented her from using her hands, they could not hinder her from exercising her tongue, which ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... but it was very exciting, and Bucks was extremely happy. Stanley watched that night until twelve. When he woke Bucks the moon was rising and the ghostly peaks in the west towered sentinel-like above the plains flooded with silver. The two were to move at one o'clock when the moon would be high enough to make riding safe. It was cold, but fire ...
— The Mountain Divide • Frank H. Spearman
... raiment, the ghostly capes that screen them, Of the storm winds that beat them, their thunder rents and scars, And the paradise of purple, and the golden ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... when the man was almost winded, and his breath was coming in quick gasps, a faint, far-off cry floated down to him through the ghostly aisles of the naked wind-swept forest. At first it was so faint as to be almost unintelligible, but as they pressed on, it grew louder and clearer, until the man recognized the pitiful wailing of ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes
... this world, and he is not without value to the next, for popular belief has credited him with the office of warning revisiting spirits to retire from the earth; and when he crows all through the night, the Katie Kings and other ghostly persons who come from space to rap upon tables and evoke discordant twangs from guitars are deaf to the seductive entreaties of the ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)
... Chailly, and he starts to find himself alone. No surf-bell on forlorn and perilous shores, no passing knell over the busy market-place, can speak with a more heavy and disconsolate tongue to human ears. Each stroke calls up a host of ghostly reverberations in his mind. And as he stands rooted, it has grown once more so utterly silent that it seems to him he might hear the church-bells ring the hour out all the world over, not at Chailly only, but in Paris, and away in outlandish cities, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the shore, but some optical delusion had detached them from the land on which they stood, and they had the appearance of so many little vessels sailing along the coast of it. I mention the circumstance, because, with the ghostly image of Dumbarton Castle, and the ambiguous ruin on the small island, it was much in the character of the scene, which was throughout magical and enchanting—a new world in its great permanent outline and composition, and changing at every moment in every part of it by ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... that you know what those few lines contained," he began again, "but it was not new to you. You heard it all at Rodeck. Ada, when I saw you standing in the shimmering, ghostly light on that frightful night, and knew that you had seen me trampled in the dust—even my own father, who loathes me, would have been ...
— The Northern Light • E. Werner
... Plaisance vowed she had heard the White Horses go past, on the nights before Tom Hamon and Peter were found. And every one knew that when the ghostly horses were heard, some one was going to die. But as she had said nothing about it before, her contribution to the general uneasiness was received with respect before her face but with open ...
— A Maid of the Silver Sea • John Oxenham
... passed the river three ghostly figures ambled down to the bank, and, after drinking their horses, likewise passed over. But while Scipio kept to the trail, they vanished amidst the woods. Their task was over, and they sought the shortest ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... laughter from somewhere among them were borne from time to time to the desolate spot I had reached. It was a Festa day, and a number of young people were apparently enjoying their games and dances, to judge by the shouts and laughter which woke echoes of ghostly mirth in the vaults and galleries that looked as though they had lain dumb ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... does forgather, [meet] That pat me in an eerie swither; [put, ghostly dread] An awfu' scythe, out-owre ae shouther, [across one shoulder] Gear-dangling, hang; [hung] A three-tae'd leister on the ither [-toed fish-spear] Lay large ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... was high and clear by now, and Chris often leaned his cheek on the sash as the priest talked, and watched that steady shining shield go up the sky, and the familiar view of lawns and water and trees, ghostly and mystical now in ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... after Sir Arnold de Curboil had left Gilbert Warde in the forest, believing him to be dead, the ghostly figure of a tall, wafer- thin youth, leaning on the shoulders of two grey brothers, was led out into the warm shadows of the cloister in Sheering Abbey. One of the friars carried a brown leathern cushion, the other a piece of stiff parchment ...
— Via Crucis • F. Marion Crawford
... not dreaming, that's one sure thing," she murmured, approaching the little opening with extreme caution, while chills of alternate fear and excitement coursed all over her. "It seems so weird and ghostly to see that thing open all by itself, with nothing to help it along! Ghosts or not, I'm going to see what's there," and, strengthened by this resolve, she started to place her hand in the opening, but drew it back quickly ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... brutal institution termed the Admiralty, and had never regretted the not seeing England again. The thought that she was bound thitherward enfolded her like a frosty mist. But these bare walls, these loud floors, chill rooms, dull windows, and the vault-sounding of the ghostly house, everywhere the absence of the faces in the house told her she had no choice, she must go. The appearance of her old friend the towering mountain-height, up a blue night-sky, compelled her swift mind to ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... to Don Alonzo, though her thoughts were perpetually on him. She, by the advice of Brilliard, writes a letter to Octavio; which was not like those she had before written, but as an humble penitent would write to a ghostly Father, treating him with all the respect that was possible; and if ever she mentioned love, it was as if her heart had violently, and against her will, burst out into softness, as still she retained there; and then she would take up again, and ask pardon for that transgression; ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn
... intolerance of her confessor. [38] Yet Talavera, as we have seen, was sincere, and benevolent at heart. Unfortunately, the royal conscience was at times committed to very different keeping; and that humility which, as we have repeatedly had occasion to notice, made her defer so reverentially to her ghostly advisers, led, under the fanatic Torquemada, the confessor of her early youth, to those deep blemishes on her administration, the establishment of the Inquisition, and the ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V3 • William H. Prescott
... red clouds with your glory gone, That are ghostly shapes of gray. My lady dreams by a moon-lit lawn, Away from me—away; Go down—go down from the sky, so the gleams Of the moon shine over the sea, And bring the thought of my lady's dreams Over ...
— Cap and Gown - A Treasury of College Verse • Selected by Frederic Knowles
... slain heroes were conveyed to Valhalla. Hence it was once the Scandinavian practice to bury the dead in boats; and in Altmark a penny is still placed in the mouth of the corpse, that it may have the means of paying its fare to the ghostly ferryman. [38] In such a vessel drifted the Lady of Shalott on her fatal voyage; and of similar nature was the dusky barge, "dark as a funeral-scarf from stem to stern," in which Arthur was received ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... that must melt it out. Judith, thou hast now five days more to live This life of beautiful passion and sweet sense: And now my love comes to thee like an angel To call thee out of thy visionary love For lost Manasses, out of ghostly desire And shadows of dreams housing thy soul, that are Vainer than mine were, dreams of dear things which death Hath for ever broken; and lead thy life To a brief shadowless place, into an hour Made splendid to affront the coming night By passion over sense more grandly burning ...
— Emblems Of Love • Lascelles Abercrombie
... their beginning, and from which a blast of damp air came forth as from a cellar; dark no-thoroughfares stood out against the sky with the rigidity of a great wall; streets stretched vaguely away in the distance, with the feeble gleam of a lantern twinkling here and there at long intervals upon the ghostly ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... the curtain, child. Yes, it is night. It was night then, when I awoke to feel That deadly chill, and see by ghostly gleams Of moonlight, creeping through the grated door, The coffins of my fathers all about. Strange, hollow clamors rang and echoed back, As, struggling out of mine, I dropped and fell. With frantic strength I beat upon the grate. It yielded to my touch. Some careless ...
— Verses • Susan Coolidge
... hurled me, far beneath The vast and ghostly halls of Death, Down to the limitless profound Of Tartarus, in fetters bound, Fixed by his unrelenting hand! So had no man, nor God on high, Exulted o'er mine agony— But now, a sport to wind and sky, Mocked ...
— Suppliant Maidens and Other Plays • AEschylus
... put her hand right upon it had it been perfectly dark, which it was not. She arose, therefore, and, without taking a light with her, went into the parlour. A faint afterglow illumined the windows and suffused the room with an uncertain, dim, ghostly light which lent to all its objects that vague flatness from which the imagination carves what shapes it lists. As Gwen reached for the picture, a sudden conviction possessed her that her father ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... which we saw several times among the islands, but never in greater perfection than on nearing Nevis from the south on our return. In that case, however, the cloud continued to leeward. It came up from the east for full ten miles, an advancing column of tall ghostly cumuli, leaden, above a leaden sea; and slid toward the island, whose lines seemed to leap up once to meet them; fail; then, in a second leap, to plunge the crater-peak high into the mist; and then to sink down again into the western sea, so gently that the line of shore and sea was indistinguishable. ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... the bell of midnight, ghostly hands Tolled for the dead year's doom, I saw the spirits of Earth's ancient lands Stand up amid the gloom! The crowned deities, whose reign began In the forgotten Past, When first the glad world gave to sovereign Man Her empires green ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... for Helen. There was nothing tenuous, elusively subtle, or impenetrably mysterious any longer about the ghostly apparition. Little Glen had something very clear and definite in his mind when he ...
— Campfire Girls at Twin Lakes - The Quest of a Summer Vacation • Stella M. Francis
... was speaking the big horse was whirling them through the quiet streets of the village. As Uncle George finished they reached the top of Academy Hill, where Miss Farwell saw the old school building—ghostly and still in the mists that hung about it like a shroud, the tumble-down fence with the gap leading into the weed-grown yard, the grassy knoll and the oak—all wet and sodden now, and—below, the valley—with its homes and fields hidden in the ...
— The Calling Of Dan Matthews • Harold Bell Wright
... winding path, vague as a wrinkle on a young face, and worn, said Amaryllis, by ghostly hoofs of departed sheep, they crept to the ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming
... guest and sharer of my might, Wherefore and whither dost thou fly away, Exquisite phantom, nude and ghostly white, Never with me again to flit and play, Never with ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... heard, never may I tell, if he were verily man by whom I had my child. But this I know for truth, and to its truth will I pledge my oath. At that time when I was a maid growing tall, I cannot tell whether it was a ghostly man, but something came often to my chamber, and kissed me very close. By night and by day this presence sought me, ever alone, but always in such fashion as not to be perceived. As a man he spake soft words in my ear; as a man he dealt with me. But though many a ...
— Arthurian Chronicles: Roman de Brut • Wace
... above me. O, see—I stand Like one bewildered! Father, take my hand— And through the gloom lead safely home Thy Child! The day declines, my Father! and the night Is drawing darkly down. My faithless sight Sees ghostly visions. Fears like a spectral band Encompass me. O, Father, take my hand, And from the night lead up to light Thy Child! The cross is heavy, Father! I have borne It long, and still do bear it. I cannot stand Or ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... figured out as a venerable old man."—Brownlee cor. "There never was exhibited an other such masterpiece of ghostly assurance."—Id. "After the first three sentences, the question is entirely lost."—Spect. cor. "The last four parts of speech are commonly called particles."—Al. Murray cor. "The last two chapters will not be found deficient in this respect."—Todd cor. "Write upon your ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... there is one GOD that made all thynges, bodily and ghostly, sene or vnsene, and hym thei honour: but not with any maner of Sacrifice or ceremonie. Thei make theim selues litle pupettes of silke or of felte, or of thrumme, like unto menne: whiche thei sette vp vpon eche side of their Tentes, and do them muche reuerence, beseching them to take ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries - Vol. II • Richard Hakluyt
... on the port side to the approximate location of the cross. This being in the neighborhood where Mac had thought he saw something move, we approached with extreme caution. But nothing more ominous was discovered than the port lifeboat, nothing more ghostly heard than the occasional creak with which it rocked in ...
— The After House • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... we for the first time make it ours, they had only a loose and troubled possession. They beheld or took part in great events, but there was no answerable commotion in their reflective being; and they passed throughout turbulent epochs in a sort of ghostly quiet and abstraction. Feeling seems to have been strangely disproportioned to the occasion, and words were laughably trivial and scanty to set forth the feeling even such as it was. Juvenal des Ursins chronicles calamity after calamity, with but one comment ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... dreamers through their dreams surmise II The thinkers light their lamps in rows III I pass my days in ghostly presences IV Each mote that staggers down the sun V He is a priest VI Through hissing snow, through rain, through many hundred Mays VII Gods dine on prayer and sacred song VIII A smile will turn away green eyes IX Two Kings there ...
— The Five Books of Youth • Robert Hillyer
... yet familiar, of the landscape down below. It swam in the milky radiance of a full moon whose light streamed down from some undiscoverable source behind the mountain, suffusing the distant vineyards and trees with a ghostly tinge of green. Like looking into another world, he though; a poet's world. Calmly it lay there, full of splendour. How well one could understand, in such a place, the glamour, the romance, of night! Romance. . . . ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... grew darker and drearier; and the plains more like ghastly oceans; and here and there the "dominant note of Australian scenery" was accentuated, as it were, by naked, white, ring-barked trees standing in the water and haunting the ghostly surroundings. ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... at the ghostly wood, and at the dull stream, and at my hand upon the hilt of the sword that I had drawn halfway from the scabbard. The life within that hand I had not asked for. Why should I stand like a soldier left to guard a thing not worth the guarding; seeing his comrades march ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... King's Great Drawing-room was not far from the Duchess of Kent's rooms, and was, in fact, put at her disposal in its dismantled, ghostly condition. Among its pictures—freely attributed to many schools and masters—including several battle-pieces and many portraits, there were three representations of English palaces: old Greenwich, where Elizabeth was born; old Hampton, dear to William and Mary; and ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... who conceives of these atolls, so narrow, so barren, so beset with sea, here would seem a superfluity of ghostly denizens. And yet there are more. In the various brackish pools and ponds, beautiful women with long red hair are seen to rise and bathe; only (timid as mice) on the first sound of feet upon the coral they dive again for ever. They are known to be healthy and harmless living people, dwellers ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... streamers floated like a mane. A moment thus it held its head erect, then sank below the surface. The boy sat with his eyes fixed upon the spot where he had seen this weird appearance, unknown and ghostly-seeming. ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... Poor people, crime-laden people! Before many doors, she saw other signs, "Barristers." And of that multitude of clients, how many left these offices with heavy hearts! In that dim, vague light of stairway and landings she seemed to feel, to see, a ghostly procession, sad-eyed, weary. But Captain Forsythe had said that John Steele had helped many, many. Her own heart seemed strangely inert, without life; she stood suddenly still, as if asking herself ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... At that I did feel more or less ghostly. I seemed to have lost some of my confidence. I expected to "go west" on the next time in. And that's a bad way to feel ...
— A Yankee in the Trenches • R. Derby Holmes
... foundation of fact underlies the various stories of spectral horsemen and hunting-troops may generally be referred to this category. This is also the explanation, evidently, of some of the visions of ghostly armies, such as that remarkable re-enactment of the battle of Edgehill which seems to have taken place at intervals for some months after the date of the real struggle, as testified by a justice of the peace, a clergyman, and ...
— Clairvoyance • Charles Webster Leadbeater
... a ghostly thing That hides beneath the simple name of Spring; Wild beyond hope the news—the dead return, The shapes that slept, their breath a frozen mist, Ascend from out sarcophagus and urn, Lips that were dust new redden to be kissed, Fires that ...
— A Jongleur Strayed - Verses on Love and Other Matters Sacred and Profane • Richard Le Gallienne
... the endless aisles of the forest. As the hour grew later the sky overhead changed from blue to crimson and gold, and the sunset, stabbing through the lace-work of branches overhead, cast ruddy lights on the trees, deepening the shadows, and giving a ghostly distance to objects around, so that we seemed in ...
— Orrain - A Romance • S. Levett-Yeats
... spiritual and temporal, occasioned, as they say, by the uncharitable behaviour and demeanour of divers ordinaries: to this we, the ordinaries, answer, assuring your Majesty that in our hearts there is no such discord or variance ort our part against our brethren in God and ghostly children your subjects, as is induced in this preface; but our daily prayer is and shall be that all peace and concord may increase among your Grace's true subjects our said children, whom God be our witness we love, have loved, and ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... weapons as men went to and fro with hasty steps. At a word from the steward, the women went softly from the room and up the winding stairs to their quarters, the rustling of their dresses coming back with ghostly stealthiness. ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... figure of the deceased, indicating the sex, is procured, and entrusted to the chief of a village, who sets it up in a funeral hut in the middle of a large taboo house adorned with plants. The survivors believe that the ghostly ogre, being so well provided for, will abstain ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... in darkness. The innumerable cornice lights had been extinguished. Graham saw the aperture of the ventilator with ghostly snow whirling above it and dark figures moving hastily. Three knelt on the fan. Some dim thing—a ladder was being lowered through the opening, and a hand appeared holding ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... tiller and sheet to her friend and stood up to get a better view of the lake astern of them. At first she saw nothing but the dim shores and the silvering water. Then, some distance out, Polly caught sight of a ghostly sail drifting across the ...
— Wyn's Camping Days - or, The Outing of the Go-Ahead Club • Amy Bell Marlowe
... silver-backed brushes on her dressing-table, gleaming on the edges of gilt frames, and throwing her shadow big and dancing on the wall behind her. The curtains were undrawn, and without the trees stood ghostly and bare against the pale grey sky. There was the dead silence in the atmosphere ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... mean? Oh, you are thinking of immortality, and all that," said Paula. "It's a chilly, ghostly subject. It makes me shiver. I get little ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... Dickey?" whispered Ben from the wings, thinking that it would not be seemly in the ghost of Hamlet's father to rush on to the stage before his time. But King Richard paid no attention to this call, if indeed he heard it, and, after waiting some moments, Ben, with his ghostly covering still flung over his arm, was obliged to go to the assistance of the two warriors, thereby causing a fresh burst of applause. He rolled Dickey over and over until Paul could drag him off by the shoulders, and then pulling ...
— Left Behind - or, Ten Days a Newsboy • James Otis
... with phantasy, and looks That threaten the profane;—a pillared shade, Upon whose grassless floor of red-brown hue, By sheddings from the pinal umbrage tinged Perennially—beneath whose sable roof Of boughs, as if for festal purpose, decked With unrejoicing berries—ghostly shapes May meet at noontide; FEAR and trembling HOPE, SILENCE and FORESIGHT; DEATH, the Skeleton, And TIME, the Shadow; there to celebrate, As in a natural temple scattered o'er With altars undisturbed of mossy stone, United worship; or ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... at a mirror almost with trembling. The last time he had looked at himself he had seen only that old, haggard face with the ghostly figures branded across the brow. Thank God! they were gone now, and he could even see in his face some faint resemblance to the ...
— Santa Claus's Partner • Thomas Nelson Page
... the hedges, so that Silvia (or her cubs) could enter from whatever side she came. At last he forced himself to go indoors and sit down and drink some tea. While he was there he fancied he heard the hounds again; it was but a faint ghostly echo of their music, yet when he ran out of the house it was already close at hand ...
— Lady Into Fox • David Garnett
... For when the blood ran lustier in him again, Full often the bright image of one face, Making a treacherous quiet in his heart, Dispersed his resolution like a cloud. Then if the maiden, while that ghostly grace Beamed on his fancy, spoke, he answered not, Or short and coldly, and she knew right well What the rough sickness meant, but what this meant She knew not, and the sorrow dimmed her sight, And drave her ere her time across ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... crustaceans, but to the visitation of the mother by a spirit—a floating, volatile demon or angel (known as an "incubus" in the Middle Ages) beneficent or malicious as the case might be. Stories of the nocturnal visits of these mysterious ghostly "incubi" are on record in great number and variety, both in European and Oriental tradition and legend. There seems to have been a readiness to believe the theory of paternity from among the hidden world of goblins, fairies, and sprites which was very naturally ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... gone in a quick hopping way, like a cricket, and the last that Captain Plum saw of him was his ghostly face turned back for an instant in the darkness of the next room, and after that the soft patter of his feet and the strange chuckle in his throat traveled to the outer door and died away as he passed out into the night. Nathaniel Plum was not a man to be easily startled, but there was something ...
— The Courage of Captain Plum • James Oliver Curwood
... ghostly sounds that horn in the black wood! [A countryman flying. Whither away, man? what are you ...
— Becket and other plays • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... of his boots was the only sound in a shadowy world. I kept by his side with a comparatively ghostly, silent tread. By a strange illusion the road appeared to run up against a lot of low stars at no very great distance, but as we advanced new stretches of whitey- brown ribbon seemed to come up from under the black ground. I observed, as we went by, the lamp in my parlour in the ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... eyes, are gnawing at a half-stripped reindeer's head. The thermometer stands at forty-five degrees below zero, Fahrenheit, and the breasts of deer, ravens, and dogs are white with frost. The thin smoke from the conical fur tents rises perpendicularly to a great height in the clear, still air; the ghostly mountain peaks in the distance look like white silhouettes on a background of dark steel-blue; and the desolate snow-covered landscape is faintly tinged with a yellow glare by the low-hanging wintry sun. Every detail of the scene is strange, wild, arctic,—even ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... black night, and the Adventurer made extremely slow progress, a leadsman at the bow calling off the depth of water, and a huge light, rather ingeniously arranged, casting a finger of radiance along the ghostly shore line. With no marks of guidance on either bank, the wheelsman felt his uncertain passage upward, advancing so cautiously progress was scarcely noticeable, and I could frequently distinguish the voice of the anxious captain from the upper deck, above the hiss of the steam, as he called ...
— The Devil's Own - A Romance of the Black Hawk War • Randall Parrish
... and felt some apprehension that the old Doctor's ghost would take this opportunity to visit me; but I rather think his former visitations have not been intended for me, and that I am not sufficiently spiritual for ghostly communication. At all events, I met with no disturbance of the kind, and slept soundly enough till six o'clock or thereabouts. The forenoon was spent with the pen in my hand, and sometimes I had the glimmering of an idea, and endeavored to materialize ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 2. • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... ever. They grew into dreams and visions. It seemed to me as if I were out in the graveyard again, and heard the screaming of the rusty weather vane as the wind turned it. Then I was in the mill again; the wheels were turning and stretching out ghostly hands to draw me into the yawning maw of the machine. Then again, I found myself in a long, low, pitch-black corridor, followed by Something I could not see—Something that drove me to the mouth of a bottomless abyss. I would start up out of my half sleep, listen and look about ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... Scott's first experience of pack-ice, and he has recorded how deeply he was impressed by the novelty of his surroundings. 'The wind had died away; what light remained was reflected in a ghostly glimmer from the white surface of the pack; now and again a white snow petrel flitted through the gloom, the grinding of the floes against the ship's side was mingled with the more subdued hush of their rise and fall on the long swell, and for ...
— The Voyages of Captain Scott - Retold from 'The Voyage of the "Discovery"' and 'Scott's - Last Expedition' • Charles Turley
... oddly entangled in his mind with his dislike of the old man. The iron bed; the chest of drawers, scratched and with broken handles; the closed colonial desk; the miserly rag carpet—all seemed mutely asking, as Bobby did, why their owner had deserted them the other night and delivered himself to the ghostly mystery of the ...
— The Abandoned Room • Wadsworth Camp
... was a curious fascination about Oldchurch. She never forgot it. The two great wide streets, High-street and Butcher-row, intersecting one another in the form of a cross: the two churches—the Old Church, gloomy and Norman, with its ghostly graveyard; and the New Church, shining white amidst a pleasant garden cemetery, beneath one of whose flower-beds her baby-brother lay: the two shops, the only ones she ever visited, the confectioner's, ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... the walls is a surprise until it is realized that the building is of brick. The southern entrance, by which we approach, is the most imposing part of the ruin. We enter by a wooden bridge across the moat; this replaces the drawbridge. In the recessed chamber behind the central arch a ghostly drum was sometimes heard, and the supernatural drummer was supposed to guard hidden treasure. This legend was made good use of by the smuggling fraternity, the thumping of an empty keg being sufficient to scare away inconvenient visitors. ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... think, they sat there, two ghostly figures formless against the woods; then one rose, and presently I saw ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... the siren women and masked men vanished, the flowers, the fruits, the bright silver and bizarre furniture faded swiftly, and I saw again, for the tenth of a second, my own old chamber restored. There was the acacia waving darkly; there was the table littered with books; there was the ghostly lithograph, the dearly beloved smoking-cap, the Canadian snow-shoes, the ancestral dagger. And there, at the piano, organ no longer, sat ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... my bed, and put a pillow comfortably to her back while I dressed. Hikeses' boy sat waiting for me in the porch whistling under his breath. He was the tallest and lankiest of them all, and like some ghostly cicerone, he never spoke, but led the way through the dewy grass into the white, glorious moonlight, and kept a few yards ahead of me in the dusty road until we reached the ...
— A Village Ophelia and Other Stories • Anne Reeve Aldrich
... from sight in the pale void afar; The spirits of change and of awe, with faint breath, Were shifting the midnight, above and beneath. The spirits of awe and of change were around And about, and upon her. A dull muffled sound, And a hand on her hand, like a ghostly surprise, And she felt herself fix'd by the hot hollow eyes Of the Frenchman before her: those eyes seemed to burn, And scorch out the darkness between them, and turn Into fire as they fix'd her. ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... century. Both stories take their rise from the "Knickerbocker Legend," and they are thoroughly American in coloring and flavor, even if they did happen to be written in England. No story in our literature is better known than that of Rip Van Winkle watching Hendrick Hudson and his ghostly crew playing ninepins in the Catskill Mountains and quaffing the magic liquor which caused him to ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... eyes as the ghostly procession drew near. The song soared so high that all dropped out except the tenors, who bore the melody triumphantly past the danger-point and relinquished it to the fantastic chorus. Then Amory opened his eyes, half afraid that sight would spoil ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... morning dawned. This day, forty-eight hours after battle, Burnside sent a flag of truce with a request that he be allowed to collect and bury his dead. There were few now alive upon that plain. The wind in the reeds had died to a ghostly hush. ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... gentleman," said Mme. la Duchesse gently, even whilst her bright, shrewd eyes gazed straight out before her as if on the great bare walls of her own ancestral home, the ghostly hand of memory had conjured up pictures of long ago:—her own, her husband's and her brother's arrest here in this very room, the weeping servants, the rough, half-naked soldiery—then the agony of a nine days' imprisonment in a dark, dank prison-cell ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... the story for the ordinary reader centres, not in its ghostly characters and improbable machinery, the scenes in Mejnour's chamber in the ruined castle among the Apennines, the colossal and appalling apparitions on Vesuvius, the hideous phantom with its burning ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... Lawler and Red King had traveled half the distance to the line camp. A dull, gray haze was sweeping southward. It mingled with the southern light and threw a ghostly glare into the valley, making distance deceptive, giving a strange appearance to the landmarks with which Lawler and the horse ...
— The Trail Horde • Charles Alden Seltzer
... personality, as with a self-spectre, the sensation being that of one who walked but could not make himself seen or heard. He drew his breath pensively, and, seeming thus almost his own ghost, gave his thoughts to the other ghostly presences with ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... thoughts, and shuddering at the night noises in the woods. The lapping of the water on the rocks below had a lonesome sound. She had not yet learned to hear its soft crooning lullaby. The wind rustled in the pine trees with a ghostly, mysterious sound. From somewhere in the woods came a mournful cry that sent the chills up and down her spine. It was only a whippoorwill, but Gladys did not know a whippoorwill from a bluebird. Then the frogs in a distant pool began their concert. "Blub!" "Blub!" ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Maine Woods - Or, The Winnebagos Go Camping • Hildegard G. Frey
... which was occupied by the Boers. This took the column over some millraces, a biggish jump for the men. The mules, having been relieved of their loads, were man-handled across. Once over these and then a wade through a stream knee deep, the ghostly column again halted. It was now 3.30 a.m. The foot of the low hills behind which was the laager, had been reached, and the officers were busy getting their ...
— The Record of a Regiment of the Line • M. Jacson
... required an armed force to execute it, the pontiff, casting his eyes around, fixed at last on Philip, King of France, as the person into whose powerful hand he could most properly intrust that weapon, the ultimate resource of his ghostly authority. And he offered the monarch, besides the remission of all his sins and endless spiritual benefits, the property and possession of the kingdom of England, as the reward of his labour [d]. [FN [c] M. Paris, p. 161. ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... remarkable statement the four listeners chiefly concerned looked wonderingly at each other. The main incidents of the family feud were repeating themselves in a ghostly manner. ...
— The Stowmarket Mystery - Or, A Legacy of Hate • Louis Tracy
... moment, her hand on the latch of the nearest door, and he had only just time to follow her before she vanished. Dark, smoke-stained reception rooms adjoined the hall. In one were two ghostly figures of shrouded statues and shrouded candelabra; by the walls were ranged dark stained oak pieces of furniture with brass decorations and inlaid work; there were huge Chinese vases, a clock representing Bacchus with ...
— The Precipice • Ivan Goncharov
... on I pace, religious horror wraps My soul in dread repose. But when the world Is clad in midnight's raven-coloured robe, 'Mid hollow charnel let me watch the flame Of taper dim, shedding a livid glare O'er the wan heaps, while airy voices talk Along the glimmering walls, or ghostly shape, At distance seen, invites with beckoning hand, My lonesome steps through the far-winding vaults. Nor undelightful is the solemn noon Of night, when, haply wakeful, from my couch I start: lo, all is motionless around! Roars not ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... fair you ass, it's—God knows what! That's the point of the whole affair. What are those flames, and where do they come from? That part of the Fens is uninhabited, a boggy, marshy, ghostly spot which no one in the whole countryside will cross at night. The story goes that those who do—well ...
— The Riddle of the Frozen Flame • Mary E. Hanshew
... the Black Watch's ghostly piper that plays proudly when the men of the Black Watch do well, ...
— Echoes of the War • J. M. Barrie
... communicated with a balcony, built out to command the wide view which, from a certain height, that part of the park affords. He stepped into the balcony and bared his breast to the keen air. The uncomfortable and icy heavens looked down upon the hoar-rime that gathered over the grass, and the ghostly boughs of the deathlike trees. All things in the world without brought the thought of the grave, and the pause of being, and the withering up of beauty, closer and closer to his soul. In the palpable and griping winter, death itself seemed to wind around him its skeleton and joyless arms. And ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... splendor; and then,—Ah, it was a long time ago; a long time the hermit had been sorrowing over her grave! But listen, by the lake of Derryvaragh, on the seas of Moyle, or by Erris and Innishglory, and you will hear still the ghostly echoes of the singing of Danaan swans. Danaan swans: music better than of the ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... countless, countless tombs, where lie these breathin' corpses! How mothers weep over them! how wives kneel, and beat their hearts out on the rocky barriers that separate them from their hearts' love, their hearts' desire! How little starvin', naked children cower in their ghostly shadows through dark midnights! How fathers weep for their children, dead to them, dead to honor, to shame, to humanity! How the cries of the mourners ascend ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... flow of his talk left a space of silence into which the encompassing peace and radiance stole like an inflowing tide. None loved better than Roy the ghostly music of silence; but to-night his brain was filled with the music of ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... was prudent, whether Mrs. Ponsonby were a prude or no, but it had its rise in quite a different cause. She had no dress she considered suitable for such an occasion. Her wedding dress still hung in ghostly splendor in a closet all by itself, but that was too grand, and the others of her trousseau had been few in number and plain in make, and would now have been consigned to the rag bag had she seen any means of supplying their place. ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... that Barker was awakened suddenly by the voice of the boy from the crib beside him, crying, "Mamma! mamma!" Taking the child in his arms, he comforted him, saying she would come that morning, and showed him the faint dawn already veiling with color the ghostly pallor of the Sierras. As they looked at it a great star shot forth from its brethren and fell. It did not fall perpendicularly, but seemed for some seconds to slip along the slopes of Black Spur, gleaming through the ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... bend the view of the sea came to him, the white moonlight lying, a path of dancing shining silver, on the grey sweep of the sea. A wind was blowing, turning the grey into sudden points of white—like ghostly hands rising for a moment suddenly from immensity and then sinking silently again, ...
— The Wooden Horse • Hugh Walpole
... lavender breath entered the room, and looked up as if at a ghostly herald. She toed out her two small morocco-shod feet more particularly upon the floor, she smoothed down her own and her doll's little petticoats, and she also made herself all ready ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... beliefs, fortified by her books on occult subjects—and of late, in our isolation from the rest of the world, the subject of daily conversations—helped to this end. No wonder, then, that, fully awake and with senses all on edge, I waited for some further manifestation from this ghostly visitor—as in my mind I took it to be. It must surely be a ghost or spiritual manifestation of some kind which moved in this silent way. In order to see and hear better, I softly moved back the folding ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... said—"but her ways were ghostly. That is, she made no noise,—and she sailed without wind. Mr. Harland may say what he likes,—I stick to that. She had no steam, but she carried full sail, and she came into the Sound with all her canvas bellying out as though she ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... a semi-circle round Westerfelt and his horse. In their white caps and sheets they appeared ghostly and hideous, as they looked down at him through the eye-holes of their masks. One of them held a coil of new rope and tantalizingly swung it back and forth before ...
— Westerfelt • Will N. Harben
... without ruth? And still she clings to Ida of her dreams, And sobs, Ah! let the world be what it seems! Then the shy nymph shall softly come again; The world, once more, make music for her pain. For, sitting in the dim and ghostly night, She fain would stay the strong approach of light; While later bards cleave to her, and believe That in her sorrow she can still conceive! Oh, let her dream; still lovely is her sigh; Oh, rouse her not, or she shall ...
— Primavera - Poems by Four Authors • Stephen Phillips, Laurence Binyon, Manmohan Ghose and Arthur Shearly Cripps
... he was dear, herself included, in an agony of suspense. For the rest, uncertainty and danger seemed written upon everything. The weathercocks on spires and housetops were mysterious with hints of stormy wind, and pointed, like so many ghostly fingers, out to dangerous seas, where fragments of great wrecks were drifting, perhaps, and helpless men were rocked upon them into a sleep as deep as the unfathomable waters. When Florence came into the City, and passed gentlemen who were talking together, she dreaded to hear them speaking of ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens |
