"Wraith" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... say?" suggested Benton. "Why hunt Trouble under the alias of Romance? Vesuvius, across there, is as vague and noiseless to-day as a wraith, but to-morrow his demon may run amuck over all this end of Italy! And then—" ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... sort of unuttered inner atmosphere in which his consciousness dwells alone with the secrets of its prison-house. This inner personal tone is what we can't communicate or describe articulately to others; but the wraith and ghost of it, so to speak, are often what our friends and intimates feel as our most characteristic quality. In the unhealthy-minded, apart from all sorts of old regrets, ambitions checked by shames and aspirations obstructed by timidities, it consists mainly of bodily ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent
... That nobody saw,— Old Hickory there at every keel, In every timber, from stem to stern,— A something in every crank and wheel, That made 'em answer their turn; And everywhere, On earth and water, in fire and air, As it were to see it all well done, The Wraith of the murdered Law,— Old John ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... a bell rang. It was like a summons. The wraith of his own making vanished. He wiped his eyes, now with one fringed sleeve, now with the other, stooped and felt round just inside the little room for his scrap of mattress and the quilt, took them up, softly shut ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates
... the entrance way again. At last with a cautious glance around, a pause to rub a match skilfully over the woolen cloak, and to light a fuse in a hidden corner, he vanished out upon the street like the passing of a wraith, and was gone ...
— The War Romance of the Salvation Army • Evangeline Booth and Grace Livingston Hill
... sense of an eerie and mysterious Presence has forced itself upon our mind, and we have been able to understand the emotions in which originated the visions of wraith and phantom of the bards of old. Our travellers, however, passed through the gale unhurt. A tremendous outburst of rain, the final effort of the tempest, cleared the sky, which towards the west was gradually lighted up with gleams of purple light, contrasting gloriously with the darkness of ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... Duke of Orleans going out into the dark, where hired assassins were waiting to hack him in pieces. Then a court of justice trying and acquitting this confessed murderer of the king's brother, upon the ground that tyrannicide is a duty; the sad, crazed wraith of a king saying the words he had been taught: "Fair cousin, we pardon you all." And the tragedy and ...
— A Short History of France • Mary Platt Parmele
... a huge shadow floated out of the dark chaos and passed so close over the heads of Neewa and Miki that they heard the menacing purr of giant wings. As the wraith-like creature disappeared there came back to them a hiss and the grating snap of a powerful beak. It sent a shiver through Miki. The instinct that had been fighting to rouse itself within him flared up ...
— Nomads of the North - A Story of Romance and Adventure under the Open Stars • James Oliver Curwood
... right abode, Heartless and happy lackeying its god. How com'st thou, little tender thing of white, Whose very touch full scantly me beseems, How com'st thou resting on my vaporous dreams, Kindling a wraith there of earth's vernal green? Even so as I have seen, In night's aerial sea with no wind blust'rous, A ribbed tract of cloudy malachite Curve a shored crescent wide; And on its slope marge shelving to the night The stranded moon lay quivering ...
— Sister Songs • Francis Thompson
... Grenville's gone, A secret word or twa, man; While slee Dundas arous'd the class, Be-north the Roman wa', man: An' Chatham's wraith, in heavenly graith, (Inspired Bardies saw, man) Wi' kindling eyes cry'd "Willie, rise! Would I ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... the night. Anxiety came, wraith-like at first, drifting into her busy brain. She had hardly had time to be anxious in the rush of preparation and departure. But restlessness paved the way. She began to ask herself with growing uneasiness what could be awaiting her at the end of the journey. The summons had been so clear ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... miracle Rapturous lyrical Flushes and glows With a wraith of florescence That tempers or lessens The ...
— Lundy's Lane and Other Poems • Duncan Campbell Scott
... one, "she's the wraith of a ship. When I was a lad I saw such a craft in the Indian seas, and afterward we foundered, and I and the cook's mate ...
— Red Eve • H. Rider Haggard
... changed trains and were headed for New York, with their destination only a few hours away, Stuart, again in the vestibule of the car, looking out through the closed entrance door upon a dull landscape passing like a misty wraith through the November fog and twilight, found Georgiana at ...
— Under the Country Sky • Grace S. Richmond
... spectral sheet, Wraith of long-perished wrong and time, Forbear! the spirit starts to meet The resurrection of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... draw her sperrit hack to the airth arter she wur dead it 'ud be the sound o' my crwth; but there she wur wrong as wrong could be: Romany music couldn't never touch Gorgio sperrit; 'tain't a bit likely. But it can draw her livin' mullo [wraith].' And as she spoke she began to play her crwth pizzicato and to sing the opening bars of the old Welsh incantation which I had heard on Snowdon ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... that when the northern fires light the sky, across the fjord drifts the wraith of Arnkel, and that ever the wild hunt comes up from the sea and hounds him hence. I have heard the bay of those terrible hounds more than once indeed, but I have seen naught, and round ...
— A Sea Queen's Sailing • Charles Whistler
... still holding her hand in his. There stirred in his pulses the thrill Kathleen Eppes had always wakened—a thrill of memory now, a mere wraith of emotion. He was thinking of a certain pink-cheeked girl with crinkly black-brown hair and eyes that he had likened to chrysoberyls—and he wondered whimsically what had become of her. This was not she. This was assuredly ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... sat to watch him. Day by day Lydia sat there when he was in the garden and she was not busy and he knew it was a favourite seat of hers for, glancing over his rows of corn, he could see the top of her head bent over a book. He did not know how long she pored over a page with eyes that saw him, a wraith of him hovering over the print, nor that when their passionate depths grew hungrier for the actual sight of him, how she threw one glance at his working figure and bent to her book again. As he came suddenly in upon her she sprang up and faced ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... really a stranger, and not thy wraith?" said John anxiously. "I hope it was, for Dame Idonea said if it were a wraith, it betokened that thou wouldst not—live long—and oh, Richard! ...
— The Prince and the Page • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and always repeating in that flute-like voice of hers "Well, this is rather queer!" Hither and thither she fared, her neck and arms gleaming white from the luminous blackness of her dress, in the luminous blueness of the night. At a distance, she might have been a wraith; or a breeze made visible; a vagrom breeze, warm and delicate, and in league ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... persuade myself Whether to laugh or pull a solemn face At seeing you. It is preposterous! I thought that you were dead—a myth—a wraith. ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke
... Like a wraith the girl was out of his arms ... in anger or alarm his whirling senses could not know, although it was their passionate concern. But his last gleam of prudence got him through the gate ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... descended, and no hole, nor nook, nor cranny where anything the size of Robert could be completely hidden from sight. What did it all mean? Ah! I knew Robert had always had a weakness for exploring areas, especially in H—— Street, and in the box where his wraith disappeared I espied a piece of ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... loath. Either he was not the bravest in the party, or else he had the keenest appreciation of the odds against an exposed position. In a very few minutes the dory was a mere gray wraith on the water, but there it hung. Evidently the rower was overruled by others less cautious, or of the certain conviction that at the distance the yacht was a better mark ...
— Radio Boys Loyalty - Bill Brown Listens In • Wayne Whipple
... counted a big part by actresses, but I loved playing it. Some nights I played it beautifully. My appearance was right—I was such a poor wraith of a thing. But let there be no mistake—it took strength to act this weakness and passiveness of Desdemona's. I soon found that, like Cordelia, she has ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... some barque be borne In wake of the wraith (ah, hearts that mourn!) Through the power of its fatal spell Into the yawn ...
— From The Lips of the Sea • Clinton Scollard
... change came then, for the clouds had also been moving and the moon at last was sensed behind them—not as a radiance, but as a percolation of light, a gleam that was strained through matter after matter and was less than the very wraith or remembrance of itself; a thing seen so narrowly, so sparsely, that the eye could doubt if it was or was not seeing, and might conceive that its own memory was re-creating that ...
— Irish Fairy Tales • James Stephens
... of the wraith of red, O blush but yet in prophecy, O sun-hint that hath overspread Sky, marsh, my ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... most frightful thing of all, was the old house she had left, standing silent in the mist, holding her room inside it empty, the candle burning away in the face of the moon! Across the common she glided like a swift wraith, and again into the ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... peaks rose sheer and forbidding about a valley through which a narrow river flashed its thin loop of water. Down the steep slopes from a rain-darkened sky hung ragged fringes of cloud-streamer and fog-wraith. ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... then opened them again—wide. The figures were still there, and they had grown clearer, more definite, especially the countenance of each of the two wraith-like women who stood, like sentinels, one on either side of the ...
— From Out the Vasty Deep • Mrs. Belloc Lowndes
... retained, gave these in place, all by the mistress messenger! As I recognized her, at potency of truth, so she, by the crystalline soul, knew me, never mistook the signs. Enough of this—let the wraith go to nothingness again, here is the orb, have only thought for her!" What follows admits us to the very HEART of Browning's poetry—admits us to the great Idea which is almost, in these days, strange to say, peculiarly ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... to break some spell of lethargy, but she only succeeded in swaying a little as she stood pallid and wraith-like in the moonlight. Her lips moved, but ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... the hills, his unhurt right hand began crying out for action and a brush to nurse. As he watched, day after day, the unveiling of the monumental hills, and the transitions from hazy wraith-like whispers of hues, to strong, flaring riot of color, this fret of restlessness became actual pain. He was wasting wonderful opportunity and the creative instinct in him ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... and the whiteness of her skin would have matched the Hyperborean snows tidily enough. As for her eyes, the customary similes of the court poets were gigantic onyxes or ebony highly polished and wet with May dew. These eyes were too big for her little face: they made of her a tiny and desirous wraith which nervously endured each incident of life, like a foreigner uneasily acquiescent to the custom ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... near him in her lounging-chair and with gentle artfulness lured him into reminiscences of his past campaigns. She was very frail to-day, and in her white robe, and with her large eyes which seemed to have outgrown her face, she looked like the wraith of a woman rather than a creature of flesh ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... towards the maid like a sane man, and, above all, a true man. Don't go about the land gnashing thy teeth until everyone laughs at thee. Don't go staring at her in grim silence as if she were a wraith; and, more particularly, don't pretend to be fond of other girls, for thou didst make a pitiful mess of that attempt. In short, be Glumm without being Gruff, and don't try to be anybody else. Be kind and straightforward to her, worship her, or, as Kettle ...
— Erling the Bold • R.M. Ballantyne
... bore a resemblance to her father, that was all. Perhaps it was only a waxen image she saw, or a wraith in that long dream of hers, of which she could not quite remember the beginning. She knew that she was nothing to the image, and that it was nothing to her. While her lips repeated the grand dirge of the King-poet in Saint Jerome's noble old ...
— The White Sister • F. Marion Crawford
... as Poesy, the perils of a wild mountain-born stream, flowing between thinly-inhabited banks, were personified in the beliefs of the people by a frightful goblin, that took a malignant delight in luring into its pools, or overpowering in its fords, the benighted traveller. Its goblin, the "water-wraith," used to appear as a tall woman dressed in green, but distinguished chiefly by her withered, meagre countenance, ever distorted by a malignant scowl. I knew all the various fords—always dangerous ones—where of old she used to start, it was said, out of the river, before the terrified ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... A short fat man passed in pursuit of her—an elderly man in a black alpaca jacket that billowed. I saw that she had left a trail of little white things on the asphalt. I watched the efforts of the agonised short fat man to overtake her as she swept wraith-like away to the distant end of the terrace. What was the matter? What had made her so spectacularly angry with him? The three or four waiters of the cafe' were exchanging cynical smiles and shrugs, as waiters ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... behind me; it does not move; it glares at me with its two red eyes. It is my wraith,[1], Sigurd! Three times has it appeared to me; that bodes that I ...
— The Vikings of Helgeland - The Prose Dramas Of Henrik Ibsen, Vol. III. • Henrik Ibsen
... and maple, and other hardwood growths, with their graceful leafless branches stretching up like dumb pleading hands toward the pitiful sky. I grew so interested seeking out specially picturesque forest growths, and glimpses into the still woodland depths under the white snow wraith which I might come again to study more closely, and put on my canvas, that I so far forgot the business of the hour as to find myself a half hour after the appointment at still some distance from Linden Lane. Shutting my eyes resolutely on the rarest bits ...
— Medoline Selwyn's Work • Mrs. J. J. Colter
... which sings out, sets you to thinking of John Sargent and how he has caught the trick of brush-work—at a slower tempo. But not even Sargent could have produced the collar and cuffs. A Whistler, a full-length, in another gallery, looks like an unsubstantial wraith by comparison. Two weeks' daily attendance at this excellently planned collection did no more than fix the position of the exhibits in the mind. There is a goodly gathering of such names as Israels, Mesdag, Blommers, and others at the Rijks, but the display of modern Dutch ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... flour broth and thawing bacon on the ends of sticks; and in the morning darkness, without a word, they arose, slipped on their packs, adjusted head-straps, and hit the trail. The last miles into Selkirk, Daylight drove the Indian before him, a hollow-cheeked, gaunt-eyed wraith of a man who else would have lain down and slept or abandoned ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... devotion, not to yourself, but to an obscure, back-breaking business. And that's difficult enough. Mind, I am not trying to excuse or even explain—I am trying to account to myself for—for—Mr. Kurtz—for the shade of Mr. Kurtz. This initiated wraith from the back of Nowhere honored me with its amazing confidence before it vanished altogether. This was because it could speak English to me. The original Kurtz had been educated partly in England, and—as ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... head-on collision some claim of Gnosticism. Then, too, the early Christians drew up rituals; they had to. We cannot keep any spiritual thing in human life, even the spirit of courtesy, as a disembodied wraith. We ritualize it—we bow, we take off our hats, we shake hands, we rise when a lady enters. We have innumerable ways of expressing politeness in a ritual. Neither could they have kept so deep and beautiful a thing as the Christian ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... faithful cloud A wraith-muezzin of the sunset cried Over the sea that swung with sultan pride, "Allah is Beauty, there is none beside! Allah is Beauty, not to be denied By ...
— Many Gods • Cale Young Rice
... Sailor and I were now, to the best of our belief, alone on the island, and a lonesomer spot it would be hard to imagine, or one touched at certain hours with a fairer beauty—a beauty wraith-like and, like a sea-shell, haunted with the marvel of the sea. But we, alas!—or let me speak for myself—were sinful, misguided men, to whom the gleam and glitter of God's making spoke all too seldom, and whose hearts ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... some time, when the space that was Isabel's room came to be made into the small bedrooms and "kitchenettes" already designed as its destiny, that space might well be haunted and the new occupants come to feel that some seemingly causeless depression hung about it—a wraith of the passion that filled it throughout the last night that George ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... her words and attitude of abjection, dispersed the nightmare horror. She understood that Tante had come not as a ghastly wraith; not as a pursuing fury; but as a suppliant. Her eyes rested on her guardian and their gaze, now, was like cold, calm daylight. "Why ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... willingness to 'speed the parting guest.' It seems that Pym for months after the death of Lilama was in an extremely morbid state of mind. He spent most of his time with Masusaelili, who allowed him to see Lilama's apparition or wraith many times. The aged mystic explained to Pym the scientific modus operandi of the production, so that he was in no way deceived into thinking that he met Lilama in person; but we may presume that, ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... wide with fear, her face white as a lily, appeared like a wraith at the parlor door and looked at him. It gave Reyburn a queer sensation, as if a picture one had been looking at in a story book should suddenly become alive and move and stare at one. As he rose and came forward he still seemed to see ...
— Exit Betty • Grace Livingston Hill
... supernatural, yet there was in him also a vein of sentiment, shown in his poem on the death of Clidna—"Clidna the fair-haired, long to be remembered," who was tragically drowned at Glandore harbor in the south, and whose sad wraith still moans upon the bar, in hours of fate for the ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... to me to have been particularly kindly and "safe." The most pronounced anarchist among them has long since become a convert to a religious sect, holding Buddhistic tenets which imply little food and a distrust of all action; he has become a wraith of his former self but he ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... since we know in advance that he reached home safely at last. One of the most popular modern books of travel—Eothen—is a poem which gives us the very atmosphere and odor of the Orient, but nothing more; and the author floats before our vision in so dim and wraith-like a manner, that many readers have doubted whether the work was founded on actual experience. On the other hand, those old narratives, of which Robinson Crusoe is the ideal type, bear unmistakable stains ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... Lake of Tears which my grief discovered, I laid dead Love with a passionate kiss, And over those soundless depths has hovered The sweet, sad wraith of my vanished bliss. ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... hush, as though at sunset the world had really resolved, and had stopped moving. But from the waiting steamer looming over us, a gigantic and portentous bulk, a thin wisp of steam hums from a pipe, and hangs across the vessel, a white wraith. Yet the hum of the steam is too subdued a sound in the palpable and oppressive dusk to be significant. Then a boatswain's pipe rends the heavy dark like the gleam of a sword, and a great voice, awed by nothing, ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... realm of imagination. These supernatural constituents penetrate and pervade The White Ship; and The King's Tragedy is saturated in the spirit of them. We do not speak of the incidents associated with the wraith that haunts the isles, but of the less palpable touches which convey the scarce explicable sense of a change of voice when the king sings of the pit ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... Ibsen's An Enemy of Society; the last act is melodrama with a large admixture of remarkably interesting social philosophy; the intervening acts betray the poet that always underlay the dramatist in Bjornson. The crudity, again, of the melodramatic appearance of the wraith of Clara's father in the third act, contrasts strangely with the mature thoughtfulness of much of the last act and with the tender charm of what has gone before: And—strangest incongruity of all in a play so essentially "actual"—there is in ...
— Three Dramas - The Editor—The Bankrupt—The King • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson
... none of the other passengers by the way, as if instinctively, took note of this one. His nerves crisped at the noiseless slide of that form, as it stalked on from lamp to lamp, keeping pace with his own. He felt a sort of awe, as if he had beheld the wraith of himself; and even as he glanced suspiciously at the stranger, the stranger glanced at him. He was inexpressibly relieved when the figure turned down another street ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... autumn of 1788 peaceful electioneering went on throughout the country. Among the last acts of that thin wraith, the Continental Congress, was a decree that Presidential Electors should be chosen on the first Wednesday of January, 1789; that they should vote for President on the first Wednesday in February, and that the new Congress should meet on the first Wednesday in March. The ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... youth and adolescence, he can trace the psychological effect of what was going on secretly, in his relations to girls and women. In a word, these relations were sentimental only. He often imagined himself in love; but it was imagination only. He was in love with a wraith, not a girl of flesh and blood. He hesitated to regard in any sexual way any girl of whom he had a high opinion; sexual desire and 'love' seemed for him to inhabit different worlds and that it would be a pollution to bring them together. In hours ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... from a height King Modred drew his dreadful sword: Then as a snow-wraith, silent, white, He stared and ...
— Christmas in Legend and Story - A Book for Boys and Girls • Elva S. Smith
... looked, and I saw all the northern sky glow red as glows the light of a burning town on the low clouds when the host that has fired it looks back on its work. And plain and clear in the silver moonlight against the crimson sky sat the wraith of a king, throned on the sand at the very water's edge, and round him stood shadowy ...
— King Olaf's Kinsman - A Story of the Last Saxon Struggle against the Danes in - the Days of Ironside and Cnut • Charles Whistler
... alighted upon the ground, there! in them again, Sprigg saw his semblance. Manitous, temple, amphitheater—all had vanished—a forest of lofty trees appearing instead, through whose glimmer of lights and shadows the boy now saw himself, or rather his wraith running with incredible swiftness, and glancing furtively over his shoulder at every bound, as if death were a present fear behind him; life ...
— The Red Moccasins - A Story • Morrison Heady
... the dear grandmother's only brother, her father's heir; he was her father's only son, two daughters born between died in infancy. That poor young fellow died at sea, and just at the time (as is supposed) that he expired, his wraith appeared to the old woman, Becky Maddison, then a very young girl. I am sorry to say the old woman has made a gain of this story. People often used to come to hear it, and she certainly does not always tell it exactly the ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... confession. There had been no snow up to this time, but as Diana crossed the old log bridge on her homeward way the white flakes were beginning to flutter down over the fields and woods, russet and gray in their dreamless sleep. Soon the far-away slopes and hills were dim and wraith-like through their gauzy scarfing, as if pale autumn had flung a misty bridal veil over her hair and was waiting for her wintry bridegroom. So they had a white Christmas after all, and a very pleasant day it was. In the forenoon letters and gifts came from Miss Lavendar ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... for a few days, and hence the delay in answering your charming message. Don't trouble a moment about the dead-and-buried nightmare. If the story is true, so much the better. R. R. is dead, thank God, and her unhappy wraith will haunt your path no more. But if Dr. Roselli knew nothing about David Rossi, how comes it that David Rossi knows so much about Dr. Roselli? It looks like another clue. Thanks again. ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... the sewing began there grew up within her a sort of courage. A girl whose material embodiment has melted away until she has worn the aspect of a wraith is not restored to normal bloom in a week. But what Dowie seemed to see was the lamp of life relighted and the first flickering flame strengthening to a glow. The hands which fitted together on the table in the Tower room delicate puzzles in bits of ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... greeting he received was hearty enough to leave no doubt in his mind that he was a welcome visitor. Perhaps it was the heartier because of the relief the boys experienced in the discovery that the lone canoeman was not, after all, the wraith of Long John, but was their friend Indian ...
— Troop One of the Labrador • Dillon Wallace
... house and up stairs, and threw himself upon the bed. And outside he still heard Sheila singing lightly to herself as she went about her ordinary duties, little thinking in how strange and wild a drama her wraith had that night ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... from the arm that held the candle on high. The yellow beams of light struck down across her head and face, and even at the distance the man could see how white she was and hollow-eyed and worn—a pale wraith of the splendid beauty that had walked in the garden at ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... they always did when their Captain started one of her "sermonettes" as Julie called them; and when she had concluded, Joan said: "In other words, you want us to starve the poor wraith still more by withdrawing any thoughts ...
— Girl Scouts in the Adirondacks • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... attends, what boots it to complain? Men's froward hearts are moved with women's tears As marble stones are pierced with drops of rain, No plaints find passage through unwilling ears: The tyrant, haply, would his wraith restrain Heard he these prayers ruthless Godfrey hears, Yet not thy fault is this, my chance, I see, Hath made even pity, ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... moving with great bounds on his huge swathed paws, shot past between the iron-hard tree-boles; a fox followed, scudding like the wind on the frozen crest; a hare, white as a waste wraith, flashed by, swift as a racing white cloud-shadow; a goshawk screamed, and drew a straight streaking line across a glade. And then came the men, side by side, deadly dumb, with set faces, the pale sun glinting coldly cruel upon the snaky, lean barrels of their slung rifles, moving with steady, fleet, ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... seen many campaigns, was riding his hobby of the Civil War and descanting on Lee's tactics in the last Wilderness struggle. I said something about the stark romance of it—of Jeb Stuart flitting like a wraith through the forests; of Sheridan's attack at Chattanooga, when the charging troops on the ridge were silhouetted against a harvest moon; of Leonidas Polk, last of the warrior Bishops, baptizing his fellow generals by the light of a mess candle. "Romance," I said, "attended ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... glow of the reflected sky for a single instant they stood out in the bright yellow of the new birch-bark, the glow of warm colour on the women's dress. Then instantaneously, in the darkness of the opposite bank, they faded wraith-like and tenuous. Like phantoms of the past they glided by, a river's width away; then vanished around the upper bend. A moment later ...
— The Silent Places • Stewart Edward White
... midges, swaying in the breath of the depths. They would rise to a certain height, then suddenly fall, and rise again, just like a juggler's balls. Sometimes the breathing from below sucked the whole swarm right down, but it rose up again, veering hither and thither like a dancing wraith in the draught from the tunnel-like entry. The little girls would gaze at it, lift their petticoats, and take a few graceful steps. Olsen's Elvira had learned her first dance-steps here, and now she was dancing respectable ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... no names," I stubbornly protested. "He did not even call the vision he encountered a woman. It was a wraith, you remember, a dream-maiden, a creature of his own imagination, born of ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... outlining her cumbersome hulk. Men's voices made the night noisy, and numerous feet scuttled to and fro over the cobbles of the dockyard to where a handful of fishing boats were drawn up, only their masts showing above the landing, with here and there a ghostly wraith of sail. ...
— The Riddle of the Frozen Flame • Mary E. Hanshew
... a dim white bulk seemed to hover above the ice. It was almost wraith-like in the moonlight. It flitted on like a huge bird, and seemed to be ...
— The Rainy Day Railroad War • Holman Day
... she was drowned while bathing, and the rest of Nancy's world agrees with him. She had left the house one morning for her usual swim. The fog was coming in, and the last person to see her was a fisherman returning from his nets. He had stopped and watched her flitting wraith-like through the mist. He reported later that Nancy wore a gray bathing suit and cap ...
— The Gay Cockade • Temple Bailey
... dark wraith of sin faded, and there was no music in the air, and her cheek was cool, while she looked all the world in the face with the fearless eyes of a child-empress. Again the monotonous, good day rolled in the same grooves, noiselessly, and surely, as all the days to come were to roll along, to the end ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... that she did not exist, and the little wraith floated back to Paris from which she had come, suddenly, on days when she had written him certain letters which had brought ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold
... aloud to him in languages of which they did not understand a word. Naturally they never loved him; his fame, which they were not able to appreciate, cast on them no ray of comforting light; and they thought probably in sad and scared bewilderment of the relations between their unhappy wraith-like mother, and their Titan father. How different the warm and tender relations between Shakspere and his children! In that instance it was the daughter, the pet Judith, that was the demure sweet Puritan, yet with a touch of her father's wit in her, and able ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... least a woman of her remarkable size and appearance—start suddenly out of a thicket; she said she had called to her by name, but, as the figure turned from her and made no answer, she was uncertain if it were the gipsy or her wraith, and was afraid to go nearer to one who was always reckoned, in the vulgar phrase, 'no canny.' This vague story received some corroboration from the circumstance of a fire being that evening found in the gipsy's deserted ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... seemed to him stranger than complete oblivion. But he soon convinced himself that a slight hazy vision he conjured up of a wedding years and years ago was only a reflex image—an automatic reaction—from his recent marriage. For did not the wraith of his present wife quietly take its place before the altar where by rights he should have been able to recall her predecessor? It was all confusion; no ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... incident, Johnson, who for a brief time had loomed so large in our imaginations, faded into a sort of wraith. Years passed, bringing with them great changes for me. I left California and settled in England. I wrote a book which excited a certain amount of interest, and inspired some of my old school-fellows to ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... are, who do not love her as we love her, or know her as we know her; and they might judge her wrongly. Therefore we must tell to none, that which we know—how the Reverend Mother, alone, dealt with that visitor, who was not the wraith ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay
... he in this work that he paid not attention to what was taking place around him, and consequently did not see the shadowy figure that came flitting from tree to tree like a wraith of the great pinelands, finally reaching the oak against which ...
— Canoe Mates in Canada - Three Boys Afloat on the Saskatchewan • St. George Rathborne
... to whom they were written in England. The pony's unshod hoofs had made hardly any sound on the turf as he cantered off, and Lara's boy, in his loose shirt and shabby clothes, and his bare feet hanging stirrupless on each side of the pony, disappeared like a wraith. There was a week to wait before he would come ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... Silently as a wraith she went, now appearing in the open spaces, now vanishing, beneath the dense gloom of cedar boughs, till she reached a naked, lonely rock which stood almost upon the edge of the gulf. Opposite to this rock was a great mound such as ancient peoples reared over the bodies of their dead, and in ...
— The Brethren • H. Rider Haggard
... mountain goats, On stormy cape and crag, The refuge of the wanderer floats— Our hospitable flag; While alien banners only mock With glory's fleeting wraith, It stands on the eternal rock Of our eternal faith; And handed on from sire and son, It furls not day nor night; So England holds what England won, And ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... tears in her eyes and the wraith of a smile on her lips. A little drop escaped and she dashed it away and her ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... produced one with the most obliging readiness. This phantom wore many faces, but it always had golden hair, was enveloped in a diaphanous cloud, and floated airily before his mind's eye in a pleasing chaos of roses, peacocks, white ponies, and blue ribbons. He did not give the complacent wraith any name, but he took her for his heroine and grew quite fond of her, as well he might, for he gifted her with every gift and grace under the sun, and escorted her, unscathed, through trials which would have ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... myself away to you. I walked beside you, a little wraith of love, through the silent night streets of your great city,—but you did not know me. There was no sky above us, only a hollow blackness, and the snow lay new and white upon the pavements; but I wore green leaves in my hair and a red Southern rose on my breast to remind ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... at the Kanaka half-breed who played under the hau tree, and it seemed, as by some illumination, that he was gazing on a wraith of himself. Feature after feature flashed up an unmistakable resemblance. Or, rather, it was he who was the wraith of that other full- muscled and generously moulded man. And his features, and that other man's features, were all reminiscent of Isaac Ford. And nobody had told ...
— The House of Pride • Jack London
... grew loud apace, The water—wraith was shrieking; And in the scowl of heaven eachface, Grew ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... doors were wide, the story saith, Out of the night came the patient wraith, He might not speak, and he could not stir A hair of the Baron's minniver—- Speechless and strengthless, a shadow thin, He roved the castle to seek his kin. And oh,'twas a piteous thing to see The dumb ghost ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... hardest to know. When Groa was questioned she laughed darkly, as was her fashion, and said that she knew nothing of it, never having seen the face of the child's father, who rose out of the sea at night. And for this cause some thought him to have been a wizard or the wraith of her dead husband; but others said that Groa lied, as many women have done on such matters. But of all this talk the child alone remained and she was ...
— Eric Brighteyes • H. Rider Haggard
... heard what had chanced. It seemed that the wraith, or emanation, or the sprite, good or evil, or whatever it may have been, which called itself Eleanor, materialized in a very ugly temper. It complained that it had not been allowed to appear upon the previous ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... you, when you aren't here physically with me, like this, where by merely reaching out I can touch you, a little—visionary to me. I confuse you with the Dumb Princess over there whom you made me create. I get misgivings that you're just a sort of wraith. Well, if you're going away and we aren't to be within—touching distance of each other again for a long while—perhaps months, I want more of you, that my memory can hold on by. The real every-day person that you are instead, as you say, of the image I've had to make of you. So I ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... voices crying the nature and remarkable qualities of the wares within. Every hand-cart carried a flaring naphtha-lamp, and the glare of these innumerable torches created strong lights and flickering shadows which would have gladdened the heart of Rembrandt were his artistic wraith permitted to roam the by-ways of a city which, perhaps, he never heard of, even in its early Dutch guise as ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... the loss of the stone, in which he felt his life bound up, the chariot of death was urgent on his footsteps; I bore in mind his memory of his grandfather dying in agony just seventy years ago after seeing his own wraith by the churchyard-wall; I knew that such a man could not be struck by the sudden, the terrific shock of seeing himself sitting in the chair before the mirror (the chair, you remember, had been placed there by Ul-Jabal) without dropping down ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... though he merely expressed the opinion that his guest was "light-headed." But when Cranstoun one morning announced that he had been visited in the night, as the clock struck two, by the old gentleman's wraith, "with his white stockings, his coat on, and a cap on his head," Mr. Blandy "did not seem pleased with the discourse," and the subject was dropped. But Mary, mentioning these strange matters to ...
— Trial of Mary Blandy • William Roughead
... my visions a golden-haired glory Flits to and fro; She whom I loved—but 'tis just the old story: Dead, long ago. 'Tis but a wraith of love; yet I linger (Thus passion errs), Foolishly kissing the ring on my ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... phenomenon has its informing spirit; every quality, as hunger, greed, envy, malice, has an embodied visible shape prowling about seeking what it may devour. Where our science, for example, sees (or rather smells) sewer gas, the Japanese behold a slimy, meagre, insatiate wraith, crawling to devour the lives of men. Where we see a storm of snow, their livelier fancy beholds a comic snow-ghost, a queer, grinning old man ...
— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang
... for the white wraith-like being who did not rise from her chair, but nodded and motioned him to a seat ...
— A Little Girl in Old Quebec • Amanda Millie Douglas
... of the annihilation of Eugene Brassfield. The mails might take to Mrs. Baggs at Hazelhurst vague letters from Judge Blodgett hinting at clues and traces of Florian, preparatory to the restoration of the lost brother; but Brassfield, never anything but a wraith from the mysterious caves of the subconsciousness, was non-existent for evermore, except through the magic of Le Claire. But Elizabeth Waldron, just home from college, full of the wise unwisdom of Smith and twenty-three, ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... flows into South Harvey and the Valley towns, a great open ravine, because you people sitting here who own the property down there won't tax yourselves to enclose those sewers that poison us!" A faint—rather dazed smile ran over the congregation like a wraith of smoke. He felt that the smoke proved that he had struck fire. He went on: "Love, great aspiring love of fathers and mothers and sisters and brothers, love stifled by fell circumstance, by cruel events, and love that winces in agony at seeing children and ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... the clouds, now, Marcella, like a wraith. Some day ye'll come down to airth. And it'll be with sic' a bang that ye'll find ye're very solid." She ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... has never seen, but whom both his father and her father—old friends—earnestly desire that he should marry. He travels to her home, is enthusiastically greeted, and finds her even more bewitching than her wraith or whatever it is to be called. But she is evidently in bad health, and dies the same night of aneurism. Not guested in the house, but trysted in the morning, he goes there, and seeing preparations in the street for a funeral, asks of some one, being only half alarmed, "Qui est mort?" ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... the tortured, sobbing girl seemed to be bursting from its pain and suspense. Her beloved father wanted to go away—to follow the wraith mother beckoning from the rafters. How could she open her arms and allow him to leave her alone ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... like them maist, Ye're far frae kelpie, wraith, and ghaist, And fairy dames, no unco chaste, And haunted cell. Among a heathen clan ye're ...
— Ban and Arriere Ban • Andrew Lang
... dust of death was the dust of the ways that the tribes of him trod: And he knew not if just or unjust were the might of the mystery of God. Strange horror and hope, strange faith and unfaith, were his boon and his bane: And the God of his trust was the wraith of the soul or the ghost of it slain. A curse was on death as on birth, and a Presence that shone as a sword Shed menace from heaven upon earth that beheld him, and hailed him her Lord. Sublime and triumphant as fire or as lightning, ...
— A Channel Passage and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... so black that the rising ground was exaggerated into a hill; against it, Helen's figure was like a wraith, yet Zebedee was acutely conscious of her slim solidity. He was also half afraid of her, and he had an easily controlled desire to run from the delight she gave him, a delight which hurt and reminded him ...
— Moor Fires • E. H. (Emily Hilda) Young
... continues visible during the evenings of March and part of April, after which, ordinarily, it is seen no more, or if seen is relatively faint and unimpressive. But when autumn comes it appears again, this time not like a wraith hovering above the westward tomb of the day-god, but rather like a spirit of the morning announcing his reincarnation in ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... in the dike, Under the ooze and the slime, Nestles the wraith of a reticent Gryke, Blubbering bubbles of rhyme: Though the reeds touch him and tickle his teeth— Though the Graigroll and the Cheest Pluck at the leaves of his laureate-wreath, Nothing affects him ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... North of Ireland is called wraith, as in Scotland. The Fetch is a spirit that assumes the likeness of a particular person. It does not appear to the individual himself whose resemblance it assumes, but to some of his friends. If it is seen in the morning, it ...
— The Ned M'Keown Stories - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... A faint, wraith-like change of expression drifted over Emily's beautiful face and was gone in a moment. What was it—relief? Regret? It would have been impossible to say. When she next spoke her vibrant voice was as ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... a terrible thing that one so peculiarly strong, sentient, luminous, as my father should grow feebler and fainter, and finally ghostly still and white. Yet when his step was tottering and his frame that of a wraith, he was as dignified as in the days of greater pride, holding himself, in military self-command, even more erect than before. He did not omit to come in his very best black coat to the dinner-table, where the extremely prosaic fare had no effect upon the distinction of ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... or her wraith," he swore afterwards. "I'll never forget the moment I looked down and down, and the water seemed to grow clearer, and I saw her walking there at the bottom among the rocks, with him over her back, singing as she went, looking everywhere for ...
— The Vanished Messenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... old Patience Goodyear, and from the corner where we stood we could see their faces plainly as they turned and looked at each other with the moonbeams pouring over them. Was it fancy that made her look like a wraith, and he like some handsome demon given to haunting churchyards? Or was it only the sternness of his air, and the shrinking timidity of hers, which made him look so ...
— The Old Stone House and Other Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... aeroplanes is that they look very much like one another. Tam fought indecisively three big white Albatross machines before a Fokker hawk darted down from the shelter of a cloud-wraith and revealed itself as the temporary preoccupation ...
— Tam O' The Scoots • Edgar Wallace
... the wraith fair, Dull gleams her hair. Ah, strong one, so cruel—fierce breath of the North— The torches of heaven are lighting thee forth! Fell Lilith comes! ...
— Lilith - The Legend of the First Woman • Ada Langworthy Collier
... December day. Gray clouds lowered, wintry winds began to moan, and she had proceeded but a little way when light flakes of snow began to fall. The chill penetrated her thin clothing and shook her fragile form. She moved more like a wraith than a living woman. Her tired feet left such slight impressions in the snow that the feathery flakes obliterated one almost before she had made another, and she was haunted by the thought that every trace of her passage through life was thus ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... his few clothes, and boarded a bus which dropped him at Jarviston, Minnesota, at two a.m. He thrust his hands into his pockets, partly like a lonesome tramp, partly like some carefree immortal, and partly like a mixed-up wraith who didn't quite know who or what he was, ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... (and what a shiver ran down my back!) I remembered hearing that a woman had been killed by falling down the steep cellar stairs, and the spot on the left side where she was found unconscious and bleeding had been pointed out to me. There, I heard it again! Was it the wraith of the aged dame or the cries of that unfortunate creature? Hush! Ellen can't have ...
— Adopting An Abandoned Farm • Kate Sanborn
... sinks. Rising, the figures ascend, but now leaf thin, tapering to a dusky wraith, which, fiery tipped, draws its twofold passion from my heart. For me it sings, unseals my sorrow, thaws compassion, floods with love the sunless world, nor, ceasing, abates its tenderness but deftly, subtly, weaves in and out until in this pattern, ...
— Monday or Tuesday • Virginia Woolf
... wife cam till her braith, And she thocht the Bible micht ward aif scaith; Be it benshee, bogle, ghaist, or wraith— But it fear'd ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... like tracing a shadow that has passed along a street on soundless feet, and Hartley felt an eager determination seize him to catch up with this flying wraith. ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... it came into my head That I was killed long since and lying dead— Only a homeless wraith that way had passed. ...
— Spirits in Bondage • (AKA Clive Hamilton) C. S. Lewis |
