"Goblin" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... heights. I have thoughts of a venturesome and lonely journey by moonlight, in and out of the chimney stacks, and all the way to the distant mountains. It looks inviting, and possible, by moonlight. And, indeed, any bright day in summer, from my window, Dockland with its goblin-like chimneys might be the enchanted country of a child's dream, where shapes, though inanimate, are watchful and protean. From that silent world legions of grotesques move out of the shadows at a touch of sunlight, and ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... stubborn, unlaid ghost, a | |gnome, a goblin, a swart fairy at the | |least, who has settled down for the | |winter in a perfectly respectable cellar | |over in Brooklyn and whiles away the | |dismal hours of the night by chopping | |spectral cordwood with a phantom axe. | |Instead of going to board with ...
— Newspaper Reporting and Correspondence - A Manual for Reporters, Correspondents, and Students of - Newspaper Writing • Grant Milnor Hyde
... chuckle,—rises again to a wail, very much higher and wilder than before,—breaks suddenly into a kind of atrocious laughter,—and finally sobs itself out in a plaint like the crying of a little child. The ghastliness of the performance is chiefly—though not entirely—in the goblin mockery of the laughing tones as contrasted with the piteous agony of the wailing ones: an incongruity that makes you think of madness. And I imagine a corresponding incongruity in the soul of the creature. I know that she loves me,—that she would throw away her poor life for me at an instant's ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... forth to play On a sun-shine holy-day, Till the live-long day-light fail: Then to the spicy nut-brown ale, With stories told of many a feat, How faery Mab the junkets eat; She was pinch'd and pull'd, she said; And he, by friar's lantern led, Tells how the drudging Goblin sweat To earn his cream-bowl duly set, When in one night, ere glimpse of morn, His shadowy flail hath thresh'd the corn That ten day-labourers could not end; Then lies him down the lubber fiend, And, stretch'd out all ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... As though forgotten, light and dull. From the sacred heights the green sky spills Still water on the city. Glazed cobblers' lamps shine. Empty bakeries are waiting. People in the street, astonished, stride Towards a miracle. A copper red goblin runs Up towards the roof, up and down. Little girls fall, sobbing From the ...
— The Verse of Alfred Lichtenstein • Alfred Lichtenstein
... involuntarily half-superstitious thoughts. He recalled all those mysterious beings of whom he had ever heard whose occupation was to haunt the seats of old families. He thought of the White Lady of Avenel, the Black Lady of Scarborough, the Goblin Woman of Hurst, and the Bleeding Nun. A second glance served to show him, however, that she could by no possibility fill the important post of Family Ghost, but was real flesh and blood. Yet even thus she was scarcely less impressive. Most of all ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... go back into the garden for that—here is a goodly crimson one, but what the little speedwell will think of him for a relative I can't think!—a mullein?—that we must do without for the moment; a monkey flower?—that we will do without, altogether; a lady's slipper?—say rather a goblin's with the gout! but, such as the flower-cobbler has made it, here is one of the kind that people praise, out of the greenhouse,—and yet a figwort we must have, too; which I see on referring to Loudon, may be balm-leaved, ...
— Proserpina, Volume 2 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... at a given signal they all began to perform their music. The ass brayed, the dog barked, the cat mewed, and the cock crowed; then they burst through into the room, breaking all the panes of glass. The robbers fled at the dreadful sound; they thought it was some goblin, and fled to the wood in the utmost terror. Then the four companions sat down to table, made free with the remains of the meal, and feasted as if they had been hungry for a month. And when they had finished they put out the lights, and each sought out a sleeping-place to ...
— Household Stories by the Brothers Grimm • Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm
... rapidly-increasing multitudes: but it is in danger of becoming a conquest of matter over us; for the agencies we have called into almost fearful activity threaten, like Frankenstein's miscreated goblin, to beat us down to the same level. ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... foreign millions had ebbed away, showing itself to have been no fructifying Nile but a destructive lava stream, leaving the country charred and desolate after its passage. The gold that only yesterday had poured through greedy fingers, had turned to-day to ashes and withered leaves like the goblin gold of a fairy tales. Diminished inclination for work, an insanely increased demand for the luxuries of life, the accepted ideas of morality shaken to their foundations by scandalous examples of triumphant vice and villainy—these were ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... goblin now the fool alarms, Hags meet to mumble o'er their charms, The night-mare rides the dreaming ass, And fairies trip it on the ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper
... For granting even that Religion were dead; that it had died, half-centuries ago, with unutterable Dubois; or emigrated lately, to Alsace, with Necklace-Cardinal Rohan; or that it now walked as goblin revenant with Bishop Talleyrand of Autun; yet does not the Shadow of Religion, the Cant of Religion, still linger? The Clergy have means and material: means, of number, organization, social weight; a material, at lowest, of public ignorance, known to be the ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... me cold. It is not that I am incapable of the same kind of pleasure, but, as you know, I have other ideas concerning the uses of life. I cannot enjoy sunsets while men and women are starving. The thought of all the misery of life for multitudes would, as Rossetti puts it, "make a goblin of the sun." You used to be very eloquent against good men who lived only for their own pleasure; are not you yourself living in the same way? I have heard you declaim against the gross selfishness of Goethe's aim in life—"to build the pyramid of ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... sleepers with the murderess in the midst of them, bending with hard, glittering eyes over her prey, while around them all the huge shadows cast by the dim, untrimmed light, like uncouth monsters, rose, flitted, and fell, as if in a goblin-dance of joy over the scene of approaching guilt. Sleep, solemn at any time, becomes almost awful when we gaze upon it amid the stillness of night, so mysterious is it, and so near akin to the deeper mystery of death,—so peaceful, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... his lip as he drew back, I judged it had not been answered satisfactorily; and was made yet more sure of this when the third person, stooping, took up the light, and beckoning to Guy Pollard, began to walk away. Yes, Miss Sterling, I am telling no goblin tale, as you can see if you will cast your eyes on our companion over there. They walked away, and the light grew dimmer and dimmer and the sense of horror deeper and deeper, till a sudden cry, rising shrill enough now from that deadly hole, drew the two conspirators ...
— The Mill Mystery • Anna Katharine Green
... also flitted in and out. There was the cat, the bird, the donkey as in pantomime; goblin caves and haunted valleys and talking flowers; and the queer shadowy folk who came to the Pension in the summer months, then vanished into space again. Links with the outside world were by no means lacking. As in the theatre, one caught now and again the ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... monster, with a wing spread of eight feet, dashed past them, and silhouetted against the rising moon like a goblin. Then came another, and finally a flock ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... straight to the stable, where the sight of the dead calf told him all. Swearing loudly, he opened the door of the third stall quickly, and cried to his goblin servants to go and chase the fugitives. 'Bring them to me, however you may find them, for have them I must!' he said. So spake the old man, and the servants fled ...
— The Violet Fairy Book • Various
... my excited thoughts; and as I saw another enormous wave advancing till it overhung me, instead of getting out of its reach, which I could easily have done, I kept staring at it as it broke into what seemed innumerable goblin faces and yelling voices over my head. I was down again. My leading thought now was that I would strike out and swim for my life. But when I had just made up my mind to this—which the sailors would have called being washed away—I rose once more to the surface—and struck ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 423, New Series. February 7th, 1852 • Various
... up the fire: While well attested, and as well believed, Heard solemn, goes the goblin story round, Till superstitious horror creeps o'er all. Or, frequent in the sounding hall, they wake The rural gambol. Rustic mirth goes round; The simple joke that takes the shepherd's heart, Easily pleased; the long, loud laugh, sincere; The kiss, snatched hasty from the ...
— In The Yule-Log Glow, Vol. IV (of IV) • Harrison S. Morris
... say, no evil thing that walks by night, Blue meagre hag, or stubborn, unlaid ghost That breaks his magic chains at curfew time, No goblin, or swart faery of the mine, Hath ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... haunted Tower!" said the magistrate, who was apt soon to lose his patience; "I suspect that you and your one-armed companion there, who looks as scared as if he had a real goblin at his heels, have been leaving some door or window open by which these ghosts, as you call them, have found an entrance, and if they have not got out by the same way they came in they must still be somewhere about the building, and you must be held responsible for any mischief they ...
— Washed Ashore - The Tower of Stormount Bay • W.H.G. Kingston
... pussy had the warm hearth all to herself. If any late wanderer had looked in at midnight, he would have seen the fire blazing up again, and in the cheerful glow the old cat blinking her yellow eyes, as she sat bolt upright beside the spinning-wheel, like some sort of household goblin, guarding the children while ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... ought to allow for the capriccios of what is, after all, but a better sort of goblin. The bath into which Ariel, the most delicate creation of Shakspeare's imagination, seduces our jolly friend Trinculo, was not of amber or rose-water. But no one shall find me rowing against the stream. I care not who knows it—I ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... in England in the 17th century. The tune and words of the original 'Tom a Bedlam' are to be found in Chappell, Vol. I. p. 175. Its date is some time before 1626,[6] and verse 1 begins, 'From the hagg and hungrie Goblin,' and the whole is as full of ejaculations of 'Poor Tom' as Act ...
— Shakespeare and Music - With Illustrations from the Music of the 16th and 17th centuries • Edward W. Naylor
... not been ridden for weeks, and every greasewood bush that she saw became in the weird light of sunrise a grotesque goblin ready to spring at her and devour her whole. At least, so she pretended, and as her natural weapon of defense lay in flight, she kept Hiram Hooker busy holding her down to a ...
— The She Boss - A Western Story • Arthur Preston Hankins
... barbarous smile, ten times more terrific than the frown of any other being. Triumph, inhuman triumph, glistened in its eye, and, with relentless delight, it brewed the tempest, and hurled the destructive lightning. Edwin gazed upon this astonishing apparition, and knew it for a goblin of darkness. The heart of Edwin, which no human terror could appal, sunk within him; his nerves trembled, and the objects that surrounded him, swam in confusion before his eyes. But it is not for virtue to tremble; ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin
... kingdom of England there is a hillock in the midst of a dense wood. Thither in old days knights and their followers were wont to repair when tired and thirsty after the chase. When one of their number called out, "I thirst!" there immediately started up a Goblin with a cheerful countenance, clad in a crimson robe, and bearing in his outstretched hand a large drinking-horn richly ornamented with gold and precious jewels, and full of the ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... negro woman by the name of De Squak, whose house was much frequented by sailors; and how she had two black cats, with remarkably green eyes, and nightcaps on their heads, solemnly seated on a claw-footed table near the old goblin; when she felt his pulse, to tell what ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... minor finish and of color. They had their horrible decorations; they showed the ingenuity and the artistic force of the Afreets who had fashioned them; they were wrought and tinted with a demoniac splendor suited to their magnitude. It seemed as if some goblin Michel Angelo had here done his carving and frescoing at the command of the lords of hell. Layers of brown, gray, and orange sandstone, alternated from base to summit; and these tints were laid on with a ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... spirit of health, or goblin damn'd, Bring with thee airs from heaven, or blasts from hell, Be thy intents wicked or charitable, Thou com'st in such a questionable shape, That I will speak to thee. ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson
... Anything comical, Was the first who tried it; But Mellish could never abide it. But it signifies very little what Mellish said, Because he is dead. For who can confute A body that's mute?— Or who would fight With a senseless sprite?— Or think of troubling An impenetrable old goblin That's dead and gone, And stiff as stone, To convince him with arguments pro and con, As if some live logician, Bred up at Merton, Or Mr. Hazlitt, the Metaphysician— Hey, Mr. Ayrton! With all ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... that warlike name, And eke the time when here he came To seek Sir Hugo, then our lord; A braver never drew a sword; A wiser never, at the hour Of midnight, spoke the word of power: The same, whom ancient records call The founder of the Goblin Hall. I would, Sir Knight, your longer stay Gave you that cavern to survey. Of lofty roof, and ample size, Beneath the castle deep it lies: To hew the living rock profound, The floor to pave, the arch to round, There never ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... the torrents toil, He watch'd the wheeling eddies boil, Till, from their foam, his dazzled eyes Beheld the River Demon rise; The mountain mist took form and limb Of noontide hag or goblin grim. ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... about until they riveted themselves upon two glittering spots peering at her over the top step from the shadow of the stairway. A low growl from Snatchet did not disturb the fascination the evil eyes held for her. It seemed as if goblin hands reached out to touch her; as if supernatural objects and evil human things menaced her from all sides. The crouching figure of the scowman became more distinct as he sneaked over the top step and edged toward her. A sudden morbid desire came over the girl to throw ...
— From the Valley of the Missing • Grace Miller White
... because he could not make the dead earth smile into flowers, was looking through the frosty fog of the winter morning as I walked across the bridge to find Thomas Weir in his workshop. The poplars stood like goblin sentinels, with black heads, upon which the long hair stood on end, all along the dark cold river. Nature looked like a life out of which the love has vanished. I turned ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... upon her as to say: "You are not stupid;" for Amrei, after listening to his playing for a long time, had remarked: "It's wonderful how a fiddle can hold its breath so long; I can't do that." And, on quiet winter nights at home, when Marianne told sparkling and horrifying goblin-stories, Amrei, when they were finished, would draw a deep breath and say: "Oh, Marianne, I must take breath now—I was obliged to hold my breath all the time ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... was always rhyming of goblin, ghost, fairy, and all Sir Walter's themes. At Edinburgh University he was a pupil of Christopher North (John Wilson), who pooh-poohed The Death-Wake in Blackwood. He also knew Aytoun, Professor ...
— The Death-Wake - or Lunacy; a Necromaunt in Three Chimeras • Thomas T Stoddart
... don't think Mr. Allan has been a minister long enough for it to have had a bad effect on him. I just grow cold when I think of my layer cake. Oh, Diana, what if it shouldn't be good! I dreamed last night that I was chased all around by a fearful goblin with a big layer ...
— Anne Of Green Gables • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... gardens that are always June, To sit within the shadow of a rose, And strum and sing your every fragile tune. For all we meet you where the great world rides, You have no league with anything we are: Your life is all entangled in the tides Of goblin moons ...
— Ships in Harbour • David Morton
... he licks his jaws and says, "More, by your leave!" Devouring property, he says, between grin and glut, "This is so good that it ought to be paid for!" Into the vacuum of wasted life rush the moaning winds of grief and desolation; in to the vacuum of wasted property rushes the goblin of debt. The wasted life is transformed at length into a reminiscent glory; the wasted property becomes a hideous nightmare. The heroes fallen rise from their bloody cerements into everlasting fame; the property destroyed rises from the red and flame-swept field as a spectral vampire, ...
— One Thousand Secrets of Wise and Rich Men Revealed • C. A. Bogardus
... and death around I see," is their key-note, rather than "O all ye works of the Lord, bless Him, praise Him, and magnify Him together." There lingers about them a savour of the old monastic theory, that this earth is the devil's planet, fallen, accursed, goblin-haunted, needing to be exorcised at every turn before it is useful or even safe for man. An age which has adopted as its most popular hymn a paraphrase of the mediaeval monk's "Hic breve vivitur," and in which stalwart public-school boys are bidden in their chapel worship ...
— Scientific Essays and Lectures • Charles Kingsley
... insensibility came upon him. The painter started, stared, rubbed his eyes, thought it was another spectral illusion, and was on the point of yielding to his terror, when Karl rose, and approached him with a smile. The healthy, sunshiny countenance of Karl, let him be ghost or goblin, could not fail to produce somewhat of a tranquilizing effect on Teufelsbuerst. He took his offered hand mechanically, his countenance utterly vacant with idiotic bewilderment. ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 3 • George MacDonald
... so little of the goblin in this appeal that it resolved him. The crew hung in the wind, but he addressed them peremptorily. I heard him damn them for a set of curs, and tell them that if they put him aboard they might lie off till he was ready to return, where they would be safe, as the devil could not ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... nothing to do but to provide you with a model? My time is fully occupied; I am engaged upon a mystical play, which is to be called The Spinster's Prayer or the Goblin Child's Mother, and take Paris by storm. A propos—yes, now I come to think of it, there is something in Comoedia ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... his way to Italy, Lewis sojourned for a space with Byron and Shelley in their Swiss retreat and set the whole company composing goblin stories. The most remarkable outcome of this queer symposium was Mrs. Shelley's abnormal romance, "Frankenstein." The signatures of Byron and Shelley are affixed, as witnesses, to a codicil to Lewis' will, which he drew at this time and dated at Maison Diodati, ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... was B., who never undeceived Mountain, or tried to do so; but in detailing the story to my father, closed the recital thus: 'I have always thought that he had an attack of delirium tremens, and that he fancied the assault of the goblin; for I forgot to tell you that next morning they followed his track, finding his shoes and fragments of his attire on the opposite side of the run, which was torn up, with the marks of a terrible struggle and many ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... by the door, gave vent to a goblin chuckle. "Oh, what a pal was M-Mary! Oh, what a pal—Nothing doing!" he finished with a shriek and began to flap ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... Eunice to go to bed, but the child refused. She still sat huddled up on the foot of the bed, watching her mother's face intently. Naomi appeared to sleep. The candle burned long, and the wick was crowned by a little cap of fiery red that seemed to watch Eunice like some impish goblin. The wavering light cast grotesque shadows of Sarah Spencer's head on the wall. The thin curtains at the window wavered to and fro, as ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... "I love him best in buff and steel, though he'll ever be my cap'n, pal. There aren't what you'd call a lot of him, neither, but what there is goeth a prodigious long way in steel or velvet. Talk o' glory! Talk o' fame! Pal, glory's a goblin and fame's a phantom compared wi' Cap'n Sir Adam Penfeather, and you can keel haul, burn and ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... is commonly exercised by female deities, is worth remarking as a hint of his subsequent transformation into a goddess. For the better achievement of his merciful deeds, he assumes all manner of forms, and appears in the guise of a Buddha, a Bodhisattva, a Hindu deity, a goblin, or a Brahman and in fact in any shape. This chapter was translated into Chinese before 417 A.D. and therefore can hardly be later than 350. He is also mentioned in the Sukhavati-vyuha. The records of the Chinese pilgrims Fa-Hsien ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... I needn't either," sighed Nancy. "How nice to be like the Goblin Lady, and only play the harp when ...
— The Hawthorns - A Story about Children • Amy Walton
... goblin, snapping her fingers. "What think you I care for them? Do I not tire of stooping to pick them up? for they are given me by my cousins, the gnomes, any day. No diamonds for me! Keep them and your gold. I ask but ...
— Fairy Book • Sophie May
... deserters and the like;—and we keep an eye on them. No discontent elsewhere, at least none audible; on the contrary, much enlisting on the part of the Silesian youth, with other good symptoms. But in the Dom, there is, singular to say, a Goblin found walking, one night;—advancing, not with airs from Heaven, upon the Prussian sentry there! The Prussian sentry handles arms; pokes determinedly into the Goblin, and finding him solid, ever more determinedly, till the Goblin ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... that he was tormented the livelong night by the mischievous spirits that got into his chamber, and played a thousand pranks about his hammock, for there is not one bed within his walls. Well, sir, he rang his bell, called up all his servants, got lights, and made a thorough search; but the devil a goblin was to be found. He had no sooner turned in again, and the rest of the family gone to sleep, than the foul fiends began their game anew. The commodore got up in the dark, drew his cutlass, and attacked them both so manfully, that in five minutes everything in the apartment went ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... victim; 2dly, that if even here he were mistaken, for public opinion was not always righteous, what was public opinion after all?—"A breath—a puff," cried Dr. Riccabocca—"a thing without matter—without length, breadth, or substance—a shadow—a goblin of our own creating. A man's own conscience is his sole tribunal, and he should care no more for that phantom 'opinion' than he should fear meeting a ghost if he ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... his lofty lay To grace Eliza's golden sway; And called to life old Uther's elfin-tale, And roved through many a necromantic vale, Portraying chiefs who knew to tame The goblin's ire, the dragon's flame, To pierce the dark, enchanted hall Where Virtue sat in lonely thrall. From fabling Fancy's inmost store A rich, romantic robe he bore, A veil with visionary trappings hung, And o'er his Virgin Queen the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... clock struck twelve—and, bounce! the lid flew off the snuff-box; but there was no snuff in it, but a little black Goblin: you ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... dead under a smother of falling flakes that fluff up ankle deep, knee deep, till the sled plunges along behind, half buried, while the men wallow and invent ingenious oaths. Again the wind whirls it by in grotesque goblin shapes; wonderful storm beings, writhing, whipping, biting as they pass; erasing bank and mountain. Yet always there is that aching, steady tug of the shoulder-rope, stopping circulation till the arms depend numbly; and always the weary effort of ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach
... Your hour has struck, your tyrants face their doom, But let hot haste unsettle temperate order, And Hope's bright disc will feel eclipse's gloom. This is a lying spirit, sly and sinister, Its promise false, its loud incitements vain. Not to your true advantage shall it minister, Mere Goblin Gold its glittering show of Gain: Spectre of Chaos and the Abyss, it flutters Before you flaunting high its foolish fire, But there's a lie in each loud word it utters, And its true goal is Anarchy's ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, July 19, 1890 • Various
... visited Fairy-land and spent a day in Goblin-town. The people there are much like ourselves, only they are very, very small and roguish. They play pranks on one another and have great fun. They are good natured and jolly, and rarely get angry. But if one does get angry, he quickly ...
— The Goblins' Christmas • Elizabeth Anderson
... it was Mr. Loring who had hold of me until I looked around," she confessed, "and that frightened me just as much as the wickedest fairy or goblin could ever do." ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan
... he would fight him with his trusty hawthorn. Accordingly he set forth, and arrived at the haunted spot. The spectre stood in his path, and, raising his stick, he struck it with all his strength, but it made no impression, nor did the goblin move. The stick fell as upon a blanket—so the man described it—and he instantly became sober, while a cold tremor ran through every nerve of ...
— Strange Pages from Family Papers • T. F. Thiselton Dyer
... every new turn revealing untold wonders and giving an added stimulus to the leader's lively imagination. And indeed the forest was a place in which anyone might expect to meet a fairy or a goblin behind every tree. The happy sense of unreality lent by the uncertainty of distances, the airy unsubstantial appearance of the leaf-grown earth; the dazzling splashes of golden light on the green, the sudden appearance ...
— The Silver Maple • Marian Keith
... his forte; it never was. The plot of the Lay, if not exactly non-existent, is of the simplest and loosest description; the whole being in effect a series of episodes strung together by the loves of Margaret and Cranstoun and the misdeeds of the Goblin Page. Even the Book supplies no real or necessary nexus. But the romance proper has never required elaborate construction, and has very rarely, if ever, received it. A succession of engaging or exciting ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... the subject; for it was evident that his kind hosts supposed him to have been deluded by some goblin. But after having bidden them farewell, and obtained all necessary information as to his road, he determined to look again for the hermitage on the hill, and so to ascertain whether he had really been deceived. He found the anjitsu without any difficulty; and, this time, its aged occupant ...
— Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things • Lafcadio Hearn
... the hag and hungry goblin That into rags would rend ye, All the spirits that stand By the naked man, In the book of moons defend ye! That of your five sound senses You never be forsaken; Nor travel from Yourselves with Tom Abroad, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... mused the Minor Poet. "I shall see them in the twilight: pathetic little round-eyed things of goblin shape, dimly luminous against the darkening air. Whence come you, little tender Thought, tapping at my brain? From the lonely forest, where the peasant mother croons above the cradle while she knits? Thought of Love and Longing: lies your ...
— Tea-table Talk • Jerome K. Jerome
... you laugh indignant at the schemes Of magic terrors, visionary dreams, Portentous wonders, witching imps of Hell, The nightly goblin, and enchanting spell?" ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... there was nothing to fear, whether from ghost, goblin, or white face, retired and brought her mistress, a short stumpy old dame, who had seen at least some sixty summers. Her nose was short, squat, and flabby at the end, and her eyes were bald of brows or lashes; but still she retained ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... all the household gods! 'Twas no goblin of the fen that twinkled to deceive, but a real substantial weatherproof tenement shining with invitation to benighted travellers. Oh, blessings on its hospitable threshold; my heart luxuriates already ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... other family—who live in an American hurry and eat by steam—was the goblin diner of whom a friend told me in accents of awe. One day, at the St. Charles, a resident stopped him on the way ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... fire-flies pulsed within the meadow mist Their halos, wavering thistle-downs of light; The loon, that seemed to mock some goblin tryst, Laughed; and the echoes, huddling in affright, Like Odin's hounds, fled baying down ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... is known as the Great Herb, and Lusmore, also the Fairy Cap; and in Wales it is the Goblin's Gloves; whilst in the North of Scotland it is the Dead men's Bells. We read in the Lady of the Lake ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... the Bank, and in good time; for had they tarried later they would probably have encountered some gouty old goblin of a capitalist, whose soul could not long be anywhere save in the vault with ...
— The New Adam and Eve (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... brisk bowler on his head and resuming his goblin glasses, the Doctor moved so quickly towards the door, that the others instinctively followed him. Syme seemed a little distrait, and as he passed under the doorway he suddenly struck his stick on the stone ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... name?" sort of thing. I was afraid I should laugh, so I asked him questions instead; and all the time he seemed to be studying me in a puzzled, surprised way, as if I were a duck that had just stepped out of a chicken egg, or a goblin in a Nonconformist home. (If he keeps on doing this, I shall have to find out what he means by ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... old ones crow's-feet and crafty. When I greeted the woman, she answered in Romany, and said she was a Stanley from the North. She lied bravely, and I told her so. It made no difference in any way, nor was she hurt. The brown boy, who seemed like a goblin, umber-colored fungus, growing by a snaky black wild vine, sat by her and stared at me. I was pleased, when he said tober, that she corrected him, exclaiming earnestly, "Never say tober for road; that is canting. Always say drom; that is good Romanes." There is always a way of bringing ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... Chick, a large-headed, small-bodied goblin of a boy, made an unintelligible, guttural sound in his throat and remained where he was, evidently considering it of paramount importance that he should see what the ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... and down, up and down; I will lead them up and down: I am fear'd in field and town. Goblin, lead them up and ...
— A Midsummer Night's Dream • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... Universe more free from the debauching, and the debasing Vices of Ungodliness. The Body of the People are hitherto so disposed, that Swearing, Sabbath-breaking, Whoring, Drunkenness, and the like, do not make a Gentleman, but a Monster, or a Goblin, in the vulgar Estimation. All this notwithstanding, we must humbly confess to our God, that we are miserably degenerated from the first Love of our Predecessors; however we boast our selves a little, when Men would go to trample upon us, and we venture to ...
— The Wonders of the Invisible World • Cotton Mather
... wearer is probably a clean-shaven person with thin hair, a daring scoundrel who is well posted in the leading characteristics of Owd Ben. Charles le Petit, time is now ripe for details of that hairy goblin." ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy
... onlooker. It seemed like a scene of a bygone age reproduced on the canvas of some Flemish artist; and, but that Eric and his mother were accustomed to it, they must have rubbed their eyes, like Rip Van Winkle when he came down from the goblin-haunted mountain into the old village of his youth, in doubt whether all was real, thinking it might be a dream. Presently, however, they were at the railway station, and they would have been convinced, if they had felt inclined to believe otherwise, that they were ...
— Fritz and Eric - The Brother Crusoes • John Conroy Hutcheson
... grandfather, we should not have ventured to come in contact with you; but you are only the heir of the pit of darkness, you dirty hell-dog! You are scarcely worthy of a night's lodging," added he, "and yet we'll grant you some nook, wherein to await the dawn;" and with that word the goblin with his pitchfork, gave him more than thirty tosses in the fiery air, until he at length cast him into an abyss out of sight. "That may do," said the other, "for a squire of half blood, but I hope you will behave better to a knight, who has had the honor of ...
— The Sleeping Bard - or, Visions of the World, Death, and Hell • Ellis Wynne
... suppose that it was rather terrible to its friends; being a statue of the Elevated or Goblin School, in which the Honourable Elijah Pogram was represented as in a very high wind, with his hair all standing on end, and his nostrils blown wide open. But Mr Pogram thanked his friend and countryman for the aspiration to which ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... game of hare and hounds in tricky floods of Earthlight, upon slopes and spills of broken rock, amid a goblin's garden of towering jagged spires. It was tense work over the bad going, and the light was both distorted and insufficient. In shadow, they groped blindly from arrow to arrow. In the patches of Earthglare, they fled at awkward, ...
— Master of the Moondog • Stanley Mullen
... leafless Lady, with a young silver moon hanging over her, "A white birch is a beautiful Pagan maiden who has never lost the Eden secret of being naked and unashamed." Miss Oliver had said, "Put that into a poem, Walter," and he had done so, and read it to them the next day—just a short thing with goblin imagination in every line of it. Oh, how ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... invention, and preserved with profound skill in nature, extensive knowledge of opinions, and accurate observation of life. In a single drama are here exhibited princes, courtiers, and sailors, all speaking in their real characters. There is the agency of airy spirits, and of an earthly goblin. The operation of magick, the tumults of a storm, the adventures of a desert island, the native effusion of untaught affection, the punishment of guilt, and the final happiness of the pair for whom our passions and reason ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... borders, civil war was crushed, the Revolution triumphant. Soon the "dwarfish, ragged sans-culottes, the small black-looking Marseillaises dressed in rags of every colour," whom Goethe saw tramping out of Mayence "as if the goblin king had opened his mountains and sent forth his lively host of dwarfs," had forced Prussia, the arch-champion of monarchy, to make peace and leave its Rhine provinces in the hands of regicides. Meanwhile terror reigned in Paris. In the frenzy of mortal strife the ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... crying, by perpetual brilliant sallies. There were other peculiarities of habit and power. When she turned her head on one side, she alleged she had second sight, like St. Francis. These traits or predispositions made her a willing listener to all the uncertain science of mesmerism and its goblin brood, which have been rife in ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... all around, like giants, to "sentinel this enchanted land." On leaving the island we saw the Goblin's Cave in the side of Ben Venue, called by the Gaels "Coiran-Uriskin." Near it is Beal-nam-bo—the "Pass of Cattle"—overhung with gray ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... ways radiated from the place where she stood, but there was no one to go with her down them. She waited—waited. And then she saw far off the gleam of the torch from which spring colored fires. It flitted through the darkness; it hovered. The gleam of it lit up, like a goblin light, the beginnings of the strange ways. She saw shadowy forms slipping away stealthily into their narrow and winding distances; she saw obscure stairways, leaning balconies full of soft blackness. She divined ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... here, most strange of all—is a land of ice and snow, without green fields, woods, or gardens. In this land, they found some mammoth bones: there are no mammoths now. You don't know what it was; but I can tell you, because Graham told me. A mighty, goblin creature, as high as this room, and as long as the hall; but not a fierce, flesh- eating thing, Graham thinks. He believes, if I met one in a forest, it would not kill me, unless I came quite in its way; when it would trample me down amongst the ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... Cow. His was a narrow and surly old age, not overwell provided, for he had never been a thrifty man; and he found among the rattletrap furnishings of his neglected home one living chattel quite as worthless—a weird, lean goblin of a boy, his sole descendant, fatherless and motherless, playing lonely little games in corners, making crass drawings with a charred stick on the walls, and viewing the blossoming orchards of spring with a crazy delight in color. ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... cries, "was ever moonlight seen So clear and tender for our midnight trips? Go some one forth, and with a trump convene My lieges all!"—Away the goblin skips A pace or two apart, and deftly strips The ruddy skin from a sweet rose's cheek, Then blows the shuddering leaf between his lips, Making it utter forth a shrill small shriek, Like a fray'd bird in ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... vaulting, the rogues in great astonishment said to one another, By cock's death, he is a goblin or a devil thus disguised. Ab hoste maligno libera nos, Domine, and ran away in a full flight, as if they had been routed, looking now and then behind them, like a dog that carrieth away a goose-wing in his mouth. Then Gymnast, spying his advantage, alighted from his horse, ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... high eminence. In addition to these, which include many stories perhaps better known in book form, such as: "The Boy in Grey" (H. Kingsley), George Macdonald's "At the Back of the North Wind," "The Princess and the Goblin," "Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood," "Gutta-Percha Willie" (these four were published by Strahan, and now may be obtained in reprints issued by Messrs. Blackie), and "Lilliput Lectures" (a book of essays for children by Matthew Browne), we find him as sole illustrator of ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... head; and when, while looking, she began to talk in an indescribably dry, monotonous tone—a tone without vibration or inflection—you felt as if a graven image of some bad spirit were addressing you. But it was all a figment of fancy, a matter of surface. Miss Mann's goblin grimness scarcely went deeper than the angel sweetness of hundreds of beauties. She was a perfectly honest, conscientious woman, who had performed duties in her day from whose severe anguish many a human Peri, gazelle-eyed, silken-tressed, and silver-tongued, ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... plains and valleys! I will find thee fit conveyance, Find a horse for thee to ride on, One whose feet nor slip nor stumble On the ice or on the mountain; Get thee gone, I do conjure thee; Take thee from the hill a courser, From the Goblin's Burg a stallion For thy dreary homeward journey; If thou ask me for conveyance, If thou ask me for a courser, I will raise thee one full quickly, On whose back though mayest gallop To thy home accurst in ...
— Targum • George Borrow
... my own inflammation of the brain, two years ago, I dreamed that I fell through the earth and came out on the other side). In its grotesque and distorting power, it produced all the figures of the Lay Goblin, Pacolet, Flibbertigibbet, Cockledemoy, Geoffrey Hudson, Fenella, and Nectabanus; in Dickens it in like manner gives Quilp, Krook, Smike, Smallweed, Miss Mowcher, and the dwarfs and wax-work of Nell's caravan; and runs entirely wild in "Barnaby Budge," ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... wild turkeys that, bewildered, ran headlong among us so that Tahoontowhee knocked over two with his rifle butt, and, slinging them to his shoulders, went forward buried in plumage like same monstrous feathered goblin of the forest. ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... to tell more of the tale. In spite of minute examinations and close search, no solution of the mystery of the noises, on this or any other occasion, was ever found. The natives, of course, attributed the disturbance to the Pezazi, or goblin. No one, perhaps, has asserted that the Aztecs were connected by ties of race with the people of Ceylon. Yet, when the Spaniards conquered Mexico, and when Sahagun (one of the earliest missionaries) ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... Some years ago were hobblin' An elderly ghost of easy ways, And an influential goblin. The ghost was a sombre spectral shape, A fine old five-act fogy, The goblin imp, a lithe young ...
— Fifty Bab Ballads • William S. Gilbert
... is the name of a notable sword.... The fragments of it are preserved by a wise smith, for he knows that with the Wotan-sword alone an intrepid stupid boy, Siegfried, shall destroy the dragon." He rubs his hands in goblin glee. "Am I, dwarf, in the second instance still to retain my head?" Wanderer, with a laugh for his antics, felicitates him: "The most keen-witted are you among the wise; who can equal you in acuteness? ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... exciting that all the great stiff images from the dusty museum of "standard authors," seem to swim in a sort of blurred mist before our eyes, and even, some of them at least, to nod and beckon and put out their tongues. After a while, however, the shock of first excitement diminishing, that solemn goblin Responsibility lifts up its head, and though we bang at it and shoo it away, and perhaps lock it up, the pure sweet pleasure of our seductive enterprise, the "native hue," as the poet says, of our "resolution" is henceforth "sicklied ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys
... Benedight Blesse this house from wicked wight; From the night-mare and the goblin, That is hight good-fellow Robin; Keep it from all evil spirits, Fairies, weezels, rats, and ferrets: From curfew time ...
— Old Christmas From the Sketch Book of Washington Irving • Washington Irving
... they have sent, and desire, that you would sooner commit your grave head to this knot, than to the wedlock noose; or, take a little sublimate, and go out of the world like a rat; or a fly, as one said, with a straw in your arse: any way, rather than to follow this goblin Matrimony. Alas, sir, do you ever think to find a chaste wife in these times? now? when there are so many masques, plays, Puritan preachings, mad folks, and other strange sights to be seen daily, private and public? If you had lived in king Ethelred's time, sir, or Edward the Confessor, ...
— Epicoene - Or, The Silent Woman • Ben Jonson |
