"Spectral" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... times of Paganism. The old men of the village can relate Horrible tales of this same tree: one hears Oft, in its thick dark branches, whisperings Of strange unearthly voices. I, myself, As once my way led past the tree at night, Saw sitting at its trunk a spectral woman, Who slowly, from her wide enfolding robe, Stretch'd a thin ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... Trembling limbs, convulsed and chill, Conscious of some mighty ill; Yet unable to recall Sights that did my sense appal; Sounds that thrill'd my sleeping ear With unutterable fear; Forms that to my sleeping eye Presented some strange phantasy— Shadowy, spectral, and sublime, That glance upon the sons of time At moments when the mind, o'erwrought, Yields reason to mysterious thought, And night and solitude in vain Bind the free spirit in their chain. Such the vision wild ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... showing only her reefed topsails and courses. The two pirate sloops vanished beyond the curtain of mist. When last seen, one of them was dismasted and the other was laboring in grave peril. The Revenge loomed as a spectral shape while Blackbeard was endeavoring to get her running free in pursuit of the Plymouth Adventure. But slovenly, reckless seamanship had caught him unready. His sails were blowing to ribbons, ropes flying at loose ends, and it was with great difficulty that the vessel could ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... have stripped the thorn, And clogged with leaves the forest-creek; Now that the woods look blown and bleak, And webs are frosty white at morn; At night beneath the spectral sky, A far foreboding cry I hear— The wild fowl calling as they fly? Or wild voice ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... hour of midnight approached, one sound after another died away in the Chateau. Caroline, who had sat counting the hours and watching the spectral moon as it flickered among the drifting clouds, withdrew from the window with a trembling step, like one ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... from me, and gazed back toward the dismal, miserable, spectral desert; while I stood facing the fruitful, delicious, flowery Paradise of all the world. I thought of the difference in our lots, and my heart was in misery about him. Then I conquered my pride and my littleness and trumpery, and did what the ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... dawn began to grow pale she went to the bedroom window and pulled up the blinds. Like a place of dreams the city slowly grew into solidity through the spectral light. It was as gray as her mood, all color subdued, walls and roofs and chimneys an even monochrome, above them in the sky an increasing, thin, white luster. The air stole in chill as the prospect and from the street beyond rose the sound of ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... Indians pursue me, and I could succeed in reaching the timber before them, a volley from my comrades would check the pursuers, however numerous. The nine rifles would be enough, with a few shots from the revolvers. The savages would fancy nine hundred under the mystifying shadows of that spectral-like grove. ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... 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 the noise ...
— Heiress of Haddon • William E. Doubleday
... dwell with fears on either hand, Within a daily strife, And spectral problems waiting stand Before ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... this Thanatopsis Club? Or should she make her house so charming that it would be an influence? She'd make Kennicott like poetry. That was it, for a beginning! She conceived so clear a picture of their bending over large fair pages by the fire (in a non-existent fireplace) that the spectral presences slipped away. Doors no longer moved; curtains were not creeping shadows but lovely dark masses in the dusk; and when Bea came home Carol was singing at the piano which she had not touched ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... of all is the great need, of course. That looms big and gaunt and spectral in any survey of ...
— Quiet Talks with World Winners • S. D. Gordon
... 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 Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... villagers relate Strange tales of horror of the Druid tree; Mysterious voices of unearthly sound From its unhallowed shade oft meet the ear. Myself, when in the gloomy twilight hour My path once chanced to lead me near this tree, Beheld a spectral figure sitting there, Which slowly from its long and ample robe Stretched forth its withered hand, and beckoned me. But on I went with speed, nor looked behind, And to the care ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... Wingrave studied her curiously. She was absolutely colorless, and her strange brilliant eyes seemed to have lost all their fire. Her gown was black, and the decorations of her hair were black except for a single diamond. There was something almost spectral about her appearance. She walked stiffly—for the moment she had lost the sinuous grace of movement which had been one of her many fascinations. Her neck and shoulders alone remained, ...
— The Malefactor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... so still and peaceful that the slightest noise was irrelevant, and we felt bound to talk in whispers. We found ourselves upon a gravel walk bordered by cedars; to our left was the road, to our right the white stones of a vast burying ground rose up like spectral sentinels of the tomb. ...
— The Love Story of Abner Stone • Edwin Carlile Litsey
... moment left me when it was first discovered, returned with overwhelming power. I rushed forward, but soon halted,—for I saw that it hung in the air, and as I approached, that it began to take a ghastly and spectral form! I discerned the lineaments of a head, and the hideous outlines of a shapeless anatomy. I stood rivetted to the spot; for I thought that I saw behind it, a dark and vast thing, in whose hand it was held forth. In that moment, a voice said,—"It is Winlaw the murderer; his bones ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 399, Supplementary Number • Various
... then the rippling waters of the brook caught and reflected for a moment a passing shaft of light, like a silvery rift in the midst of the valley, but otherwise all was shadow. And in the occasional moonlight every tree and bush and boulder was magnified into some weird, spectral shape, distorting it from plain truth into some grotesque fiction, turning the humblest growth into anything from a grazing steer to a moving vehicle; from a prowling coyote to a log hut. The music of the waking night-world droned on the scented air, emphasizing the calm, the delicious ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... 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 ...
— Bruce • Albert Payson Terhune
... level of the solid Archdeacon Coxe; add his keen touches, and, as in the 'Castle of Otranto,' the portraits of our respectable old ancestors, which have been hanging in gloomy repose upon the wall, suddenly step from their frames, and, for some brief space, assume a spectral vitality. ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... 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 prim ecclesiastic ...
— The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke • Rupert Brooke
... Dulled all the yellow heap, and sank far down, Like flame inverted, through the loose-piled mound, Crossing the splendour with the shadow-straws, In lines innumerable. 'Twas so bright, The eye was cheated with a spectral smoke That rose as from a fire. He never knew, Before, how beautiful the sunlight was; Though he had seen it in the grassy fields, And on the river, and the ripening corn, A thousand times. He threw him on the heap, And gazing down ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... willow, gathered into sheaves Of scorpions by spectral arms, Swung to and fro, and whipped the eaves, And filled the house with weird alarms That hissed ...
— The Mistress of the Manse • J. G. Holland
... blind power, and, for lack of enlightenment, suffers itself to be guided by spectral illusions. Imaginary conceptions work, and work in conformity with the structure of the excited brain which has given birth ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... would he, ever forget it? I think not. It was a poem of blue eyes like spring violets, of tender, loving words, of mellow moonlight on the fields where the corn-shocks stood in spectral rows, and the brook they crossed looked like a rippling stream of silver; where the maples along the lane, still clad in yellow foliage, cast mottled shadows in their pathway, and the fallen leaves rustled beneath ...
— Pocket Island - A Story of Country Life in New England • Charles Clark Munn
... weal, This kingdom's tomb of rasping night To elfin cheer as dances bloom, And speeds his flight from Terror's urn, Past jasper lanes where moonstones glow, And turns his eyes at writhing Hell, Upon the spectral haunts of Doom, Where fiends in hissing Cesspoles burn 'Mid howls of pain from vassals flow That rake ...
— Betelguese - A Trip Through Hell • Jean Louis de Esque
... means use a pencil, if only to jot down the pages to be re-read. To transcribe striking, beautiful, or important passages is a tremendous aid to the memory; these will live for years, clear and vivid as day, when the book itself has become spectral and shadowy in the night of oblivion. A manuscript volume of such passages, well indexed, will become in time one of the most valuable ...
— The Private Library - What We Do Know, What We Don't Know, What We Ought to Know - About Our Books • Arthur L. Humphreys
... the dawn, spectral, artistically perfect, aiming at ambitious, distant objectives, Northamptonshire Yeomanry who had come from France to Italy a year ago and had been kept behind the lines all through the war and were having their first show at last. The next day they suffered many casualties, but they did fine ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... under the harsh and repulsive character of the reigning prince, everything took a new color from his un-genial habits. The superstitious legend, which had so immemorially peopled the schloss with spectral apparitions, now revived in its earliest strength. Never was Germany more dedicated to superstition in every shape than at this period. The wild, tumultuous times, and the slight tenure upon which all men held their lives, naturally ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... standing on the rocks of Gometra, and clouds of puffins wheeling round the dark and lonely pillars of Staffa; while away in the north, as they got clear of Treshanish Point, the mountains of Rum and of Skye appeared a pale and spectral blue, like ghostly shadows at the horizon. And there was no end to the sports and pastimes that occupied day after day. On their first expedition up the lonely corries of Ben-an-Sloich young Ogilvie brought down a royal hart—though his ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... has devoted to pastoral visiting, about two months after the funeral, he steps into his little sail-boat, and stretches away for the shores of Orr's Island. He knows the sun will be down before he reaches there; but he sees, in the opposite horizon, the spectral, shadowy moon, only waiting for daylight to be gone to come out, calm and radiant, like a saintly friend neglected in the flush of prosperity, who waits patiently to enliven our hours ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... sickens and dies. Then the phantom of a huge hairless dog pursues the real dogs, which expire in convulsions and cramps at sight of him. All the countless spirits of evil are abroad striving to bring sickness and death, foul weather and failure in hunting on the Esquimaux. Most dreaded of all these spectral visitants are Sedna, mistress of the nether world, and her father, to whose share dead Esquimaux fall. While the other spirits fill the air and the water, she rises from under ground. It is then a busy season for the wizards. In every house you may hear them singing and praying, while ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... certificates were necessary for matriculation at the university. Any half-educated person might become a student of any faculty. The professors were at a loss to know how to lecture on higher mathematics to students ignorant of the multiplication table, or how to explain spectral analysis to persons hardly able to read. Then the Bolsheviki decided that there was no necessity for the professor to have a diploma either. It was only necessary that he should be a supporter of the Bolshevist platform. That ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... had turned out of Piccadilly into St. James's Street before either man spoke again. The tossing lights of a windy autumn evening were shimmering on the wet pavement, and faces looked spectral white in the morris-dance of shine and shadow. Wratislaw, whose soul was sick for high, clean winds and the great spaces of the moors, was thinking of Glenavelin and Lewis and the strong, quickening north. ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... was still in the sky, though it only appeared at long intervals. Strangely enough, at the moment when I addressed him, a flash came, and seemed to pass right over his face. It gave such a hideously livid hue, such a spectral look of ghastliness and distortion to his features, that he absolutely seemed to be glaring and grinning on me like a fiend, in the one instant of its duration. For the moment, it required all my knowledge of the settled calmness of his countenance, to convince me that ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... hosts— The smoke of burning cities—martyr fires— Towers toppling to ruin, palaces, Vast columned temples, and triumphal arch, Fair hanging gardens, walls magnificent, Resolved to dust by time—as summer's sun Resolves again a fleecy cloud to mist. Yet sometimes even here the spectral light Broadens and brightens into sunny day, And the soft winds (the sweeter for the war Of elements,) blow thence to us Legends,— Traditions fair of noble hearts as true, Of honor pure, of love as sacred—deep— Of valor great—of homes as fair and dear, As fresher, better modern days ...
— Across the Sea and Other Poems. • Thomas S. Chard
... thin blue line that rims the far horizon-ring, Our saddend sight why haunt these ghosts, whence do these spectral shadows spring? ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... 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 clear, the saturated color ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... 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
... as brightly as any, while through her mind flitted spectral visions of the secondary and so needless carnage in those awful field-hospitals behind the battles, and of the storms so likely to follow the fights, when the midnight rain came down in sheets on the wounded still lying among the dead. On all the teeming, bleeding ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... 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
... eye, they looked like colossal statues. I then strayed into the Piazza del Gran Duca. Here the rich moonlight, streaming through the arcade of the gallery, fell directly upon the fine Perseus of Benvenuto Cellini; and illuminating the green bronze, touched it with a spectral and supernatural beauty. Thence I walked round the equestrian statue of Cosmo, and so home over ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... happened many centuries ago, so that when I was there I saw the full program of one of these spectral auctions and was chilled with horror ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris
... been more agitated than I have said. I had read, of course, as everyone has, something about 'spectral illusions,' as you physicians term the phenomena of such cases. I considered my situation, and looked ...
— Green Tea; Mr. Justice Harbottle • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... entering the forest by a narrow bridle-path that twisted among the cedars. As if to look down in pity, the moon shone for a moment above the ragged edge of a storm cloud, and all the snow-laden evergreens stood out stately, shadowy and spectral, like mourners ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... White Light. White light or sunlight can be dispersed or separated into the primary colors or rainbow hues, as shown in the preceding Section. What seems even more wonderful is that these spectral colors can be recombined so ...
— General Science • Bertha M. Clark
... the air is dank and chill With dewy midnight, and the moon rides high O'er ghostly fields, pale stream, and spectral hill. ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... graceful attitude— picturesque, traditional—which for six hundred years has been the attitude of the Japanese woman serving tea. Verily, no small part of the life of the woman of Japan is spent thus in serving little cups of tea. Even as a ghost, she appears in popular prints offering to somebody spectral tea-cups of spectral tea. Of all Japanese ghost-pictures, I know of none more pathetic than that in which the phantom of a woman kneeling humbly offers to her haunted and remorseful murderer ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... 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 ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... uncertain light, was like the rising and falling of billows—like the ebb and 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 the ...
— Behind the Scenes - or, Thirty years a slave, and Four Years in the White House • Elizabeth Keckley
... soft, and soft and slow, From darkling earth and darkened sky Wide wings of gloom waved to and fro, And spectral ...
— Poems: Patriotic, Religious, Miscellaneous • Abram J. Ryan, (Father Ryan)
... and Gyp stood aside. Jerry's eyes were shining—it was fun to pretend that, maybe, a shadowy, spectral Fate waited there in the valley to hear ...
— Highacres • Jane Abbott
... the dignified form of Manlius Sargent in his stately horse, as he rode through his wood-roads, and many another familiar face of those who sought these rural paths, and cared not yet for "rapid transit," with its spectral accompaniments. And our hope is akin to a prayer, that what is left of Louder's Lane may be spared ...
— Annals and Reminiscences of Jamaica Plain • Harriet Manning Whitcomb
... trees. The monotonous 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 ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... apart. The tented entrance to the house was guarded by a solid phalanx of men in uniform. A mounted inspector was riding slowly up and down in the middle of the road. At the entrance to the street, barely fifty yards away, a moving mass of people, white-faced, almost spectral, were passing slowly beneath ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... horrible murder was committed on board. A plague broke out amongst the crew, and no port would allow the vessel to enter for fear of contagion, and so she still wanders about the sea with her phantom crew, never to rest, but doomed to be tossed about for ever. She is now a spectral ship, and hovers about the Cape of Good Hope as an omen of bad luck to mariners who are so unfortunate as ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... 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 to the bottom of the ravine, and the vegetation was of a deeper ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... 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 in a ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... dwarfing into insignificance the poor little houses and the tallest poplars in the valley. To your left behold the observatory, the daylight, pouring athwart its windows and galleries, producing such fantastical strange effects that the building looks like a black spectral skeleton. Further yet in the distance rises the elegant lantern tower of the Invalides, soaring up between the bluish pile of the Luxembourg and the gray tours of Saint-Sulpice. From this standpoint the lines of the architecture are blended with green leaves ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... the road. He had been finding something vaguely unfamiliar about the landscape, though this was not strange since neither house nor tree nor haystack was visible through the storm until they were almost upon it. Then it loomed up suddenly shrouded and spectral. This feeling of strangeness grew upon him and ...
— Chicken Little Jane on the Big John • Lily Munsell Ritchie
... sat that night by the low-burning embers of our first camp fire I forgot my new companions. Through the gathering night mists I could just discern the dim outlines of the opposite shore of Grand Lake. It was over there, just west of that high spectral bluff, that Hubbard and I, on a wet July night, had pitched our first camp of the other trip. In fancy I was back again in that camp and Hubbard was talking to me and telling me of the "bully story" of the mystic land of won- ders that lay "behind ...
— The Long Labrador Trail • Dillon Wallace
... rowels, and, now and then, a muttered malediction in a foreign tongue. But he was not frightened. Shadows, nor shadows of sounds could daunt him. Afraid? No. Afraid of Mother Peek? Afraid to face the girl of his heart? Afraid of tipsy Captain Peek? Nay! nor of these apparitions, nor of that spectral singing that always pursued him. Singing! He would show them! He lifted up a strong and ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... the British Empire at the head of ten thousand men; which seems a small quantity to think much about, but they wore wide red breeches blown out by Fame, big as her cheeks, and a ten thousand of that sort would never think of retreating. Their spectral advance on quaking London through Kentish hopgardens, Sussex corn-fields, or by the pleasant hills of Surrey, after a gymnastic leap over the riband of salt water, haunted many pillows. And now those horrid shouts of the legions of Caesar, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... of his race, this phantom-warrior gallops along the sea-beach near the castle, announcing the event by cries and loud lamentations. The doctor, who attended the present chief's mother, declares that, while sitting beside her bed during the silent watches of the night, he heard the noise of the spectral horse just before the old lady's decease. The natives of Mull can describe the ghost and horse with accurate detail. The horse is a small, hardy, sure-footed animal of brown colour, and Ewen is known ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... rigidly inert. His tall slight figure, fully erect, looked almost spectral in the mists of the gathering night. He went ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... treacherous shore we had seen the evidences of wreck and disaster everywhere. Above the flats of shimmering water, where the gold or crimson of sunset lay, rose constantly the tops of masts, shadowy and spectral, telling of the sunken hull, the pale corpses beneath those gleaming waves. Ship after ship went down out of those adventurous little coasting vessels that plied up and down the coast trading with the natives, and as we passed ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... the first spicy mornings of fall. Also, if one is lucky, he will find along the yellowing rows a few ears of corn, tender enough and sweet enough for the table, with not quite the flavor of July, perhaps, but with something that appeals as much to the imagination, that belongs with the spectral sunlight, the fading stalks and vines, and carries the memory back to that first day of April planting. To bring in a basket, however scanty, of those odds and ends and range them side by side on the kitchen table affords ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine
... on January 4—a fine day. On January 5 the "plot began to thicken." The clouds hung above like a blanket, sprinkling light snow. The light was atrocious, and a few open rents gave warning of the western zone of pitfalls. All the while there was a shifting spectral chaos of whiteness which seemed to benumb the faculties and destroy one's sense of reality. We decided to wait for a change ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... upon the brow, the bullet rushing like a blast beside the ear, all the terrible tempest of attack, trampled under the flashing hoof, climbing, clinching, slashing, back-falling beneath cracking revolvers, hand to hand in the night, both bands welded in one like hot and fusing metal, a spectral struggle of shuddering horror only half guessed by lurid gleams and under the light cloud flying across the stars. Clearly and remotely over the plain the hidden east sent up a glow into the sky; its reflection lay on Ray; he fought like ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... must admit that it was all true and reasonable,—but, oh, how very dreadful! Then she conjured up to view the image of Elam Hunt,—his lank, slim figure, arrayed in sombre black,—his pale, cadaverous visage, spotted with pimples and blue blotches of close-shaven beard,—his spectral glance of admiration through those detestable blue spectacles. She imagined that she felt the clammy touch of his long, skinny fingers, and cold, flabby palm. She reflected upon the probability, nay, the certainty, that ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... 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 of bees, a ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... for he enjoyed not more than three hours of nocturnal repose, nor even these in pure untroubled rest, but agitated by phantasmata of portentous augury; as, for example, upon one occasion, among other spectral visions, he fancied that he saw the sea, under some definite impersonation, conversing with himself. Hence it was, and from this incapacity of sleeping, and from weariness of lying awake, that ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... crystal, illuminating, decorating everything. And there were rubies hanging in strange trees, and at their feet the glamour of light dissolved, half of it perished, gone from the world, drunk up by the earth, half living on where gray walks wound like paths in a dream, between rings of spectral green, islands of dimmed, mysterious red, so transformed, so unclothed and clothed again by glamour, as to be hardly discernible as ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... the gay gondolas, and the golden ring was cast from the Bucentaur to Adria, the queen of the seas. Adria! shroud thyself in mists; let the veil of thy widowhood shroud thy form, and clothe in the weeds of woe the mausoleum of thy bridegroom—the marble, spectral Venice." ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... 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
... since I left Brook Farm; and I take this to be one proof that my life there was an unnatural and unsuitable, and therefore an unreal one. It already looks like a dream behind me. The real Me was never an associate of the community; there has been a spectral Appearance there, sounding the horn at daybreak, and milking the cows, and hoeing potatoes, and raking hay, toiling in the sun, and doing me the honor to assume my name. But this spectre was not myself. Nevertheless, it is somewhat remarkable ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... critical—the wonder of the child was giving place to the insight of the woman. The wish to shake off her invisible tormentors and be like other girls was in reality a demand for the right to be loved and valued for her own natural self, entirely free from the touch of spectral hands. ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... political field, it was the more 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 ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... should be—of his love of sport and open air, of his "hardness" and his pluck; of his powers of knowing his own mind, and taking his liquor like a man; of his creed, now out of date, of gallantry. Yes—a kind of cursed bogey of a man, a spectral follower of the hounds, a desperate character—a man that in old days someone would have shot; a drinking, white-faced devil who despised Horace Pendyce, whom Horace Pendyce hated, yet could not quite despise. "Always one like that in a hunting country!" A black dog ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... chained to the deck by a thousand mingled fears and fascinations, which breathed upon our nerves like a chill wind. As we became accustomed then to the yellow darkness, we beheld about the landscape a spectral look, and the sepulchral sound of the moving thunder seemed the half-muffled clang of some great iron-tongued funeral bell. Then came the rain, introduced swiftly by the deafening clatter of another thunder crash that made one stagger like a ship in a wild ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... razor, any object, such as a wafer, be laid, and the metal be then breathed upon, and, when the moisture has had time to disappear, the wafer be thrown off, though now the most critical inspection of the polished surface can discover no trace of any form, if we breathe once more upon it, a spectral image of the wafer comes plainly into view; and this may be done again and again. Nay, more, if the polished metal be carefully put aside where nothing can deteriorate its surface, and be so kept for many months, on breathing again upon it the shadowy ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... such friendly or avenging glare; the brooding 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 ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... this will go," thought Adrian to himself, "and then the marsh must become a mere which will be bad for whomever happens to be living in the Red Mill." He was on firm ground again now, and there, looming tall and spectral against the gloom, not five hundred yards away, rose the gaunt sails of the mill. To reach it he walked on six score paces or more to the little landing-quay, where a raised path ran to the building. As he drew near to it he was astonished to hear the rattle of oars working in ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... day that the whole intercourse of business and acquaintance could be garnished with forms and flourishes which had lost all meaning, and thus by degrees the reality came to be superseded by that spectral shadow of "friendship," which holds by no means the least place among the various evil spirits brooding over the proscriptions and civil wars ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... and looked at the spectral forest where dead pines towered, ghastly in the moon's beams. That morning he had cut the last wood on his own land; he had nothing left to sell but a patch of brambles and a hut which no ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... poems that I know of, poems that would be at home with one on such an expedition; there is plenty that is weird and spectral, as in Poe, but little that is woody and wild as this scene is. I recall a Canadian poem by the late C. D. Shanly—the only one, I believe, the author ever wrote—that fits well the distended pupil of the mind's eye about the camp-fire at night. It was printed many years ago ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... approach to the distance of about a yard. Then ignite the spirit with a match. It will burn with a peculiar yellowish-blue flame, and in the light of this the human countenances, and all objects of similar color, lose their natural tint, and look spectral. The contrast of the wan and ghostly hue with the smiling lips and white teeth of those who look on, is most amusing. The effect of this experiment is heightened by dissolving some common table-salt in the spirit, and still further by putting into it a small quantity of saffron. Let the ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, October 1878, No. 12 • Various
... battle-field was haunted at night by supernatural beings, and that the noise of combatants and the snorting of horses were heard to resound on it. The superstition has survived the change of creeds, and the shepherds of the neighborhood still believe that spectral warriors contend on the plain at midnight, and they say that they have heard the shouts of the combatants and the neighing ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... light from the meagre oil lamps, seemed to add a certain weirdness to this moving, seething multitude. No one could see his neighbour. In the blackness of the night the muttering or yelling figures moved about like some spectral creatures from hellish regions—the Akous of Brittany who call to those about to die; whilst the women squatting in the oozing mud, beneath that swinging piece of rope, looked like a group of ghostly witches, waiting for the hour of ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... the story of city life from the back windows of the hotel, is derived from notes made just before we went to Lenox; there are the enigmatic drawing-room windows, the kitchen, the stable, the spectral cat, and the emblematic dove; the rain-storm; the glimpse of the woman sewing in one of the windows. There is also a passage containing a sketch of the personage who served as the groundwork for Old Moody. "An elderly ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... figure in St. Paul's as the model of his own. Some of the memorable scenes and votaries of the drama are directly associated with the sculptor's art,— as, for instance, the last act of "Don Giovanni," wherein the expressive music of Mozart breathes a pleasing terror in connection with the spectral nod of the marble horseman; and Shakspeare has availed himself of this art, with beautiful wisdom, in that melting scene where remorseful love pleads with the motionless ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... rang out their joyous peals, for the armistice had been signed and the war was over. There was wild rejoicing in the city and the crowds went crazy with delight. But it seemed to me that behind the ringing of those peals of joy there was the tolling of spectral bells for those who would return no more. The monstrous futility of war as a test of national greatness, the wound in the world's heart, the empty homes, those were the thoughts which in me overmastered all feelings ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... completed in 1863. Achromatic object-glasses are placed on both sides of the prism, so that each pencil of light through the prism consists of parallel rays; and breadth is given to the spectrum by a cylindrical lens. The spectral lines are seen straighter than before, and generally it is believed that their definition is improved."—"For observation of the small planets, a convention has been made with M. Le Verrier. From new moon to full moon, all the small planets visible to 13h are observed at the ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... Dublin bailiffs never stopped till they got back to town, and were never seen again in the country, it was most natural to suppose that the devil had made a haul of them at the same time. In a few days rumour added the spectral appearance of Jim Barlow to the tale, which only deepened its mysterious horror; and though, after some time, the true story was promulgated by those who knew the real state of the case, yet the truth never ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... reason that its lessons are not taught wearily by book and by dreary homily, but by visible and enthusing action; and they go straight to the heart, which is the rightest of right places for them. Book morals often get no further than the intellect, if they even get that far on their spectral and shadowy pilgrimage: but when they travel from a Children's Theatre they do not stop permanently at that halfway house, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... all to Kitty; of begging her to marry me at once; and in her arms defying the ghostly occupant of the 'rickshaw. "After all," I argued, "the presence of the 'rickshaw is in itself enough to prove the existence of a spectral illusion. One may see ghosts of men and women, but surely never of coolies and carriages. The whole thing is absurd. Fancy the ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... sooner had the buoy touched the water than it floated away, flaming in our wake; the lurid blue light casting a spectral glare on the phosphorescent foam of the broken wave crests that contrasted weirdly with the last expiring gleams of the setting sun, now nearly hidden by the pall-like black cloud, which had gradually risen along the horizon and stretched itself across the whole western ...
— Crown and Anchor - Under the Pen'ant • John Conroy Hutcheson
... could be neither the horse that had 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 ...
— The Flight of the Shadow • George MacDonald
... pleasing task and one to summon many applicants. But this was not the case. Successful candidacy was followed by early exodus. None could endure the frightful sounds heard every night; the cries of pleasure followed by the screams of those in the agony of a painful dying. Spectral lights were seen, the old well in the garden poured forth its confined spirits, all the evil influence of the place was rejuvenated in the minds of people by this last disaster. "Thus the matter rests. 'Tis not this Shimo who is the cause of these nightly scenes ...
— Bakemono Yashiki (The Haunted House) - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 2 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... features—you looked like the awful night when a comet swings fearfully into our ken— oh, then I closed my eyes—I could not look on you any more. Black as the threatening storm-cloud, black as the shoreless sea with the spectral red tint of twilight on its ...
— The King of the Dark Chamber • Rabindranath Tagore (trans.)
... interest in colorful views on the screen, this was the first real evidence that Fuzzies possessed color perception. He proceeded to give further and more impressive proof, laying out the stones by shade, in correct spectral order, from a lump of amethystlike quartz to a dark red stone. Well, maybe he'd seen rainbows. Maybe he'd lived near a big misty waterfall, where there was always a rainbow when the sun was shining. Or maybe that was just his ...
— Little Fuzzy • Henry Beam Piper
... lake were spectral in the whirl of the elements, and the island was the one fixed spot. It was as brilliant as an emerald in a setting of lead. A beach of yellow sand encircled it, with a border of willows, and taller trees sticking up in ...
— The Huntress • Hulbert Footner
... At the very end he lost his 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, remained in ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... hesitated a moment and then trotted away. The water supply was contained in a wooden tank set some ten feet above ground, and high beyond that, dimly discernible through the cloud of smoke, the spectral arms of a wind-mill revolved imperturbably. Mr. Brady, followed by the boys, went on around to the further side of the burning building. It was a huge hip-roofed structure. One end, that nearest the house, was already falling, and the tons of crackling hay in the mows glowed like a furnace. ...
— Left Guard Gilbert • Ralph Henry Barbour
... go, be no more; die &c 360. annihilate, render null, nullify; abrogate &c 756; destroy &c 162; take away; remove &c (displace) 185; obliterate, extirpate. Adj. inexistent^, nonexistent &c 1; negative, blank; missing, omitted; absent &c 187; insubstantial, shadowy, spectral, visionary. unreal, potential, virtual; baseless, in nubibus [Lat.]; unsubstantial &c 4; vain. unborn, uncreated^, unbegotten, unconceived, unproduced, unmade. perished, annihilated, &c v.; extinct, exhausted, gone, lost, vanished, departed, gone with the wind; defunct &c (dead) ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... The wraith, or spectral appearance, of a person shortly to die, is a firm article in the creed of Scottish superstition. Nor is it unknown in our sister kingdom. See the story of the beautiful lady Diana ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott
... 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 the permission Annouschka had to go out at ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - VANINKA • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... and she lay with heaving breast, trying to find her way back into what we call reality. But it was a reality even more wretched than those recollections to which her dream had recalled her. For it was held and possessed by Winnington, and now by the threatening vision of Monk Lawrence, spectral amid the red ruin of fire. She had stopped the motor that day at the foot of the hill on which the house stood, and using Winnington's name, had made a call on the cripple child. Daunt had received ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... rather than in what you see lies half the charm of Andalusia, in the suggestion of all manner of delicate antique things, in the vivid memory of past grandeur. The Moors have gone, but still they inhabit the land in spirit and not seldom in a spectral way seem to regain their old dominion. Often towards evening, as I rode through the desolate country, I thought I saw an half-naked Moor ploughing his field, urging the lazy oxen with a long goad. Often the Spaniard on his horse ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... to set his wig on fire, and constantly begging his pardon with great awkwardness and embarrassment—John led the party to the best bedroom, which was nearly as large as the chamber from which they had come, and held, drawn out near the fire for warmth, a great old spectral bedstead, hung with faded brocade, and ornamented, at the top of each carved post, with a plume of feathers that had once been white, but with dust and age had now grown ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... music, all combined to form a scene of peculiar interest. High overhead, dimly visible through the tops of the trees, the sky wears an almost supernatural aspect during these long summer nights. A soft golden glow flushes upward from the horizon, and, lying outspread over the firmament, gives a spectral effect to the gentler and more delicate sheen of the moon; the stars seem to shrink back into the dim infinity, as if unable to contend with the grosser effulgence of the great orbs that rule the day and the night. Unconscious whether the day is waning ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... fears, And the flap of the flame, And the throb of the clock, And a loosened slate, And the blind night's drone, Which tiredly the spectral pines intone! ...
— Moments of Vision • Thomas Hardy
... the park. Trees made still gestures about them. The ivory silhouettes of trees haunted the distance. A spectral summer painted itself upon the barren lilac bushes. Beneath, the lawn slopes raised moon faces to the night. Deep in the storm the ghost of a bronze fountain emerged and remained ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... lift it. Pausing a moment, and looking forward at its shattered face in utter anguish of despair, I saw again, repeated in a hundred jagged splinters, up and down in zigzag confusion, in demoniac omnipresence, the uncanny eye, the spectral shape, which had so appalled me. The little phantom had arisen, its slim finger was outstretched,—it beckoned, slowly beckoned, growing indistinct, it receded farther and farther out from the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... They saw spectral illusions of broad lakes, with trees mirrored upon their placid surface. A sun of dazzling brightness seemed shining from the bottom of an unfathomed sea, and a forest appeared suspended in ...
— The Giraffe Hunters • Mayne Reid
... 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
... "Tembo Circus," for it was near this same clearing that one of their large elephants had been killed three years before, and in the clearing the skin had been prepared for preservation. All about us stretched the vast forest, full of strange night sounds and spectral in the darkness. In the morning we awoke in a dense cloud and did not break camp until afternoon. Our Kikuyu and Wanderobo guides were sent out with promises of liberal backsheesh to find fresh trails, but they returned with unfavorable reports, so we marched ...
— In Africa - Hunting Adventures in the Big Game Country • John T. McCutcheon
... windows of Anstruther's rooms and standing there, watched the drifting moonbeams mantling on the spectral blue lake, while his chance-met friend rang for a waiter. There was the murmur of confidential orders, and then Anson Anstruther with a bright smile dropped easily into the role of host. The young ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... running from their heads, arms, and legs to the top of the stage. To the management of the cords they owe all the vehemence of their passions and the grace of their oratory, not to mention a certain gliding, ungradual locomotion, altogether spectral. ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... That down Cocytus valley flow, Girdling the grey domain of Death, The spectral fishes come and go; The ghosts of trout flit to and fro. Persephone, fulfil my wish, And grant that in the shades below My ghost may land ...
— Grass of Parnassus • Andrew Lang
... splendid sight and the music are enough to make one shed tears. I don't know anything more affecting except a procession of lantern-lit gondolas and barges on the Grand Canal. It's phantasmal. It's the spectral resurrection of the old dead forms into the present. It's not even the ghost, it's the corpse, of other ages that's haunting Venice. The city ought to have been destroyed by Napoleon when he destroyed the Republic, and thrown overboard——St. Mark, Winged Lion, Bucentaur, and all. There is ...
— A Foregone Conclusion • W. D. Howells
... signal gong had stilled. The audience was hushed and expectant. The white patch of light overhead spread until it encompassed all the top of the globe. The whole area was glowing. The people were white, spectral shapes, transparent! And the top of the globe was transparent; I saw the night sky, with the gleaming ...
— Wandl the Invader • Raymond King Cummings
... Destruction?" I cried, as I saw how spectral all things were, for more than a thousand grimy faces had already added their fitful glances to ...
— Mr. World and Miss Church-Member • W. S. Harris
... seemed nearly as light as day. In his delight the dog 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
... fixedly at the sky above him. The bridge was deserted. His black figure rose up erect, motionless, and spectral, with the white still light falling solemnly all around it. Standing so for some minutes, his first movement was to drop his hand angrily on the parapet of the bridge. He then turned round slowly in the direction by which the two ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... frequent blowing, and constant waving to and fro, at a late hour in the afternoon, faint and exhausted, I kindled a fire for the night on the only vacant spot I could find amid a dense wilderness of pines. The deep gloom of the forest, in the spectral light which revealed on all sides of me a compact and unending growth of trunks, and an impervious canopy of somber foliage; the shrieking of night-birds; the supernaturally human scream of the Mountain lion; the prolonged howl ...
— Thirty-Seven Days of Peril - from Scribner's Monthly Vol III Nov. 1871 • Truman Everts
... vague, spectral dread in these low regions where hell penetrates; they are so little in the human order and so disproportionate that they create phantoms. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that a legend should be connected with this sinister bouquet offered by Bicetre to La ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... have mercy!—icy cold Spectral hands her own enfold, Drawing silently from them Love's fair gifts of gold and gem. "Waken! save me!" still as death ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... of a spectral Hunt, the Wild Huntsman well known in European Folk-lore. He equates this with Dionysus Zagreus, and ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston
... the 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 to look, when suddenly he espied a figure ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... of his white comforter dangling below his waist (for he boasted no greatcoat) running home as hard as he could pelt to play at blind man's buff." Instantly, upon the heels of this, we find noted on the margin, p. 18, "Tone to mystery." The spectral illusion of the knocker on Scrooge's house-door, looking for all the world not like a knocker, but like Marley's face, "with a dismal light about it like a bad lobster in a dark cellar," prepared the way marvellously for what followed. Numberless little tid-bits of description that anybody else would ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... teaching of the history of education; but I would urge that the subject requires in a peculiar degree rich and full illustration from the sources. The life of school, college, or university is varied, vivid, even dramatic, while we live it; but, once it has passed, it becomes thinner and more spectral than almost any other historical fact. Its original records are, in all conscience, thin enough; the situation is still worse when they are worked over at third or fourth hand, flattened out; smoothed down, and desiccated in the pages of a modern history of education. Such histories are ...
— Readings in the History of Education - Mediaeval Universities • Arthur O. Norton
... over hard cobble-stones and leading nowhere. There are mosques and stores entered by horse-shoe arches, a bazaar dotted over with squatting women, cowled with dirty blankets, selling warm griddle-cakes; moving here and there are the same spectral figures, similar dirty blankets veiling them from head to foot; over the way are cylinders of mat, with nets caging the apertures at each end, to hold the cocks and hens, rabbits and pigeons, brought for sale by Riffians, descendants of the corsairs of that ilk, stalwart, brown, ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... from overpowering volition. In cases of paralysis the Faculty is agreed upon the fact that local symptoms disappear when the will-power returns to the brain. And here I will boldly and baldly state my theory that, in sundry cases, spectral appearances (ghosts) and abnormal smells and sounds are simply the effect of a Will which has, ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... of them and of their life with absolute certainty. Spectral analysis showed the same composition in the stars as on the earth, consequently if life had arisen in our atom, most certainly it must exist in other celestial bodies, though probably in different forms; in many planets it had already ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... was gathering; high overhead the domes and pinnacles were each instant taking deeper tinges of rose and violet. It seemed as if a word loudly or carelessly uttered would break the spell of the alpgluhen. It was all like a dream, and it was in his quality of spectral figure in a dream that the driver suddenly turned on the box, and, pointing over his shoulder with the ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... clutching in the air; but Hope Wayne took the wasted hands in hers, placed her arm behind him gently, and tenderly pressed him back into the chair. The old man raised his eyes to her as she stood by him, and holding one of her hands in one of his, the spectral calmness returned into his face; while, beating his thin knee with the other hand, he said, in the old way, as the body of his son was borne out of his house, "Riches have wings! Riches have wings!" But still he held Hope Wayne's hand, and from time ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... weights, blow up the infernal machine with gunpowder? What a passion comes over us sometimes for silence and rest!—that this dreadful mechanism, unwinding the endless tapestry of time, embroidered with spectral figures of life and death, could have but one brief holiday! Who can wonder that men swing themselves off from beams in hempen lassos?—that they jump off from parapets into the swift and gurgling waters beneath?—that they ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... afternoon blockade, The babel and the babble, the brilliant show— And then the dusky quiet of the nave. The pillared space, an organ strain that throbs Mysteriously somewhere, a rainbow shaft Shed from a saint's robe, powdering the spectral air, A workman with hard hands who bows his head, And there before the shrine of Virgin Mary A lonely servant girl who kneels ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... typical (if his 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 ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... moment, faint and wan, High up in air, and landward striving, Stern-fore a spectral barque came on, Across the purple ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... being soothed by the tranquillity of the scene around him as he went on. The west was one sheet of orange. The brilliancy of the sunset had faded to a tenderer tone. The spikes of the pointed firs on the mainland stood dark against it. Over in the east, the moon was rising, pale and spectral, with all her ribs showing like a skeleton leaf. Jupiter shone out more clearly as the darkness deepened and the shadows fell more heavily along the ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... mate, "he does wear one, any how, and night before last I sat on the hatch, as he says, reading Shakspeare in the moonlight, and when the second mate's night-capped head rose through the slide, he looked so very spectral that I couldn't forbear hailing him with—'Art thou a ghost or goblin damned?' which he persists in rendering his own fashion. I'm sure I didn't intend to liken him to a barn-yard fowl of any kind; I should rather have gone into the ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... had strange dreams. Sometimes he thought he was in the Hodoo Region, or Goblin Land, the abode of evil spirits, where he saw every kind of fantastic beast, bird, and reptile, and no end of spectral shapes in the winding passages of a weird labyrinth on a far-off island. Then his dreams were of rare beauty. Green foliage was changed to pure white, the trees became laden with sparkling crystals, roadways ...
— The Harris-Ingram Experiment • Charles E. Bolton
... men-at-arms were at length of one mind as to the fact of the visits of some horrible creatures, whether bodily or spectral they could not yet say, they watched with special attention that part of the garden where they had last seen them. Perhaps indeed they gave in consequence too little attention to the house. But the creatures were too cunning to be easily caught; nor were the watchers ...
— The Princess and the Goblin • George MacDonald
... uneasily as if he were about to awake, and then his eyes opened and he gazed on the spectral pallor of the dawn in the windows, his brain rousing from dreams slowly into comprehension of the change that had come. Then collecting his thoughts he rose and stood facing the dawn. He stood for a moment like one in combat, and then like one overwhelmed retreated through ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... projecting chin. He alone was the illuminated focus of this picture which, after a half-century, is brilliantly burnt into my memory. His pupils were mere wraiths floating in a misty dream, with malicious white points of light for eyes. And I felt like a disembodied being in this spectral atmosphere. ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... footsteps were a terror to her. The moving of a bush in the wind, the starting of a rabbit from her path, caused her flesh to thrill. At sight of an object slowly and noiselessly emerging from the darkness and standing before her, motionless and spectral, she almost fainted, until she discovered that it was an old acquaintance, a tall pine stump. But all these childish terrors she resolutely overcame. Her heart never faltered in its purpose. Affection for her father, anxiety for his welfare, and, it may be, some little solicitude for her father's ...
— Cudjo's Cave • J. T. Trowbridge
... if it had, would not have been bribed to 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
... contemplated that the evening should be spent in a ring about our camp fire, singing songs and glees and old familiar melodies; but the oncoming of darkness dispelled in me all desire to uplift the voice in melodious outpourings. The thickening of the shadows along the turf, the spectral gleaming of the lake between the trunks of the intervening trees, the multiplying of mysterious and disquieting night noises, the realisation that we were isolated in the depths of the forest—all these things had a ...
— Fibble, D. D. • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... would believe; wonders that the few who have seen them can never forget, nor—despite all experience and all theoretical explanation—recall without renewing the thrill of awe-stricken dismay with which the sight was first beheld. But no marvel of the Mystic Schools, no spectral scene, objective or subjective, ever evoked by the rarest of occult powers, so startled, so impressed me as what I now saw, or thought I saw. The Throne, on which but a few moments before my eyes had been steadily fixed, and which had then assuredly been vacant, was now occupied; and occupied ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... hated the past; she hated its splendor, its power, its wicked magical vitality.... She dropped into a seat and continued to stare at the wall before her. Gradually, as she stared, there stole out to her from the dimmed humbled canvases a reminder of what she had once seen in them, a spectral appeal to her faith to call them back to life. What proof had she that her present estimate of them was less subjective than the other? The confused impressions of the last few days were hardly to be pleaded as a valid theory of art. How, after all, did she know ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... easier. He drinks himself into sottish unconsciousness. He sleeps a drugged sleep, and, if he dream, his dreams are dim and inarticulate. But to the imaginative man, John Barleycorn sends the pitiless, spectral syllogisms of the white logic. He looks upon life and all its affairs with the jaundiced eye of a pessimistic German philosopher. He sees through all illusions. He transvalues all values. Good is bad, truth is a cheat, and life is a joke. From ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... steps stealthily along, advancing towards 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 almost ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... could not rest because he had betrayed the secret of the ancient padres. Nero could be made as white as any ghost horse by the application of a little paint; and shod with rubber could pass over the sandy roads with almost as little noise as any spectral steed. It was easy to bribe and terrify two small boys into securing and restoring to him the pointed wand, even if by their effort to obtain it they might happen to fall and break it. That mattered little, ...
— Jessica, the Heiress • Evelyn Raymond
... now left of Saint Michael, the glittering hierarch? Can he still endure the light of sun? Or has he not shrivelled into a spectral Hermes, a grisly psychopomp, bowing his head in minished glory, and leading men's souls no longer aloft but downwards—down to the pale regions of things that have been? And will it be long ere he, too, is thrust by some flaming Demogorgon into these same realms of Minos, ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... one's 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, ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... high Glooms above the passing eye, Casting spectral shadows tall Over lower rock and wall; In its morn and sunset glow, I behold ...
— The Myth of Hiawatha, and Other Oral Legends, Mythologic and Allegoric, of the North American Indians • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... rockets were sent up soon after to amuse them, on which the few remaining women and children hurried to their sheds of bark and hid their faces in terror. When a blue light was burned, and lit up the gloomy shadows of the neighbouring bush, it disclosed the spectral figures of many armed men among the trees, singly and in groups, intently watching our motions. Paida, who with other native allies of ours still remained with us, was very urgent for us to be off, telling me that spears would be thrown immediately (kaibu kalaka muro); being a ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray
... laughing, and even now I cannot refrain from laughter,—'can there be anything else? And if this be so, in what does spirit differ from matter? where is the party wall between life and death?' In the spectral phantom of life, in the sphinx-born riddle of being, in that terrific fiat out of which the worlds sprang forth, to roll convulsively onward and evermore onward, till they can drop back into rest and nothingness—in this all contradictions and contrarieties ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... these, which may contain the rays of as many as four overlapping spectra, are next passed through a rock-salt or glass prism placed with its refracting edge parallel to the grating lines. This sorts out the different narrow spectral images, without danger of overlapping, and after their passage through the prism we find them again, and fix their position by means of the bolometer, which for this purpose is attached to a special kind of spectrometer, where its platinum thread replaces the reticule ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 363, December 16, 1882 • Various
... sailing westward all day along a solitude of woods, one might reach the English outpost of Pemaquid, and thence, still sailing on, might anchor at evening off Casco Bay, and see in the glowing west the distant peaks of the White Mountains, spectral and dim amid the weird and ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman
... as we stood there under the star-light drawn up over the whole field, like a spectral host. Was there a rebel ambuscade over yonder in the woods, watching for us to take up our unsuspecting march toward Carlisle in order to swoop down upon us unawares? A cowardly suggestion, but still one which occurred very naturally ...
— Our campaign around Gettysburg • John Lockwood |
