"Phantasmagoria" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... within the last two or three days. The gory visage of the murdered slave, the sweet and calm expression of his own Julia, the truculent eyes and sneering lip of Catiline, and the veiled glance and voluptuous smile of his too seductive daughter, whirled still before him in a strange sort of human phantasmagoria, with the deep searching look of the consul orator, the wild glare of the slaughtered Volero, and the stern face, grand and proud in his last agony, ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... faith. It cannot take a single step without it. How does Haeckel know that his senses do not deceive him? How does he know that he can trust to the operations of his intellect? How does he know that things are as they appear? How does he know that the universe is not a great phantasmagoria, as so many men have regarded it, and man the mere sport of chimeras? He must believe in the laws of belief impressed on his nature. Knowledge implies a mind that knows, and confidence in the act of knowing implies belief in the laws of mind. "An inductive science of nature," says ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... "I seem to have been in a trance, or a dream, ever since you gave me that composing draught! What was it—opium, hasheesh, amyle—what? And, mother, how much was real and how much was dream that I have passed through? It seems like the phantasmagoria of a midnight orgie—through which only one thing seems to stand out clearly—that I have had 'some outlet through thunder and lightning' into freedom! Mother, is it true? Am ...
— Her Mother's Secret • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... hurt. My falling companion, being a much stouter man than myself did not fare so well, as his right shoulder received a severe contusion. The noble man-of-war captain inside had his face much cut with the bottles of wine that were in the pockets of the vehicle, and he would have made an excellent phantasmagoria. His nephew had one of his legs very much injured. Here we were in a most pitiable condition, not knowing what to do, as we could not move our travelling machine without assistance. As we were scratching ...
— A Sailor of King George • Frederick Hoffman
... was the Countess de Mussidan, Flavia, the rich heiress, and Gaston de Gandelu, who was to be led into a crime the result of which would be penal servitude,—all jumbled and mixed up together in one strange phantasmagoria. Was he, Paul, to be a mere tool in such hands? Toward what a precipice was he being impelled! Mascarin and Van Klopen were not friends, as he had at first supposed, but confederates in villainy. Too late did he begin ...
— Caught In The Net • Emile Gaboriau
... my mouth. I struggled to hold my breath—failed. Then inhaled with a gasp, a pungent, sickening-sweet gas. Roaring, clanging gongs sounded in my ears—roaring and clattering louder, then fading into silence. A wild, tumbling phantasmagoria of dreams. Then ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... English life all this time; it would be madness to lose, by a clumsy change of place, these imperishable sensations.' So he gathers together his luggage, and goes home again, resolving never to abandon the 'docile phantasmagoria of the brain' for the mere realities of the actual world. But his nervous malady, one of whose symptoms had driven him forth and brought him back so spasmodically, is on the increase. He is seized by hallucinations, haunted by sounds: the hysteria of Schumann, the morbid ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... impressed upon Russian literature, faced with the realities of modern life, a spirit titanic and in clash with its material, and produced in the mastery of this every-day material, commonly called sordid, a phantasmagoria intense with beauty. A clue to all Russian realism may be found in a Russian critic's observation about Gogol: "Seldom has nature created a man so romantic in bent, yet so masterly in portraying all that is unromantic in life." But this statement does not cover ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... remembrance, that this man was chiefly prone among the ancient matrons of her own political persuasion. It certainly seemed probable that intelligence from the continent, which could easily have been transmitted by an active and powerful agent, might have enabled him to prepare such a scene of phantasmagoria as she had herself witnessed. Yet there were so many difficulties in assigning a natural explanation, that, to the day of her death, she remained in great doubt on the subject, and much disposed to cut the Gordian knot, by admitting the existence ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... that of an angel, and of another which was so weirdly and horribly ugly—suggesting as it did all that was evil and sinister—that one shivered and looked away. All these showed themselves like phantasmagoria, and startled one with a suggestion of intelligent design. But it was not with the face of the cliff ...
— The Rising of the Red Man - A Romance of the Louis Riel Rebellion • John Mackie
... not," he adds, "keep a whole stud of them." To go deeper into this matter, to speculate upon the possible germs, the first vague intimations to the mind of Coleridge of the weird spectra of "The Ancient Mariner," the phantasmagoria of "Kubla Khan," would be, perhaps, over-refining. "Barry Cornwall," too, Lamb tells us, "had his tritons and his nereids gambolling before him in nocturnal ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... conclusion of his great work The Golden Bough, (1) bids farewell to his readers with the following words: "The laws of Nature are merely hypotheses devised to explain that ever-shifting phantasmagoria of thought which we dignify with the high-sounding names of the World and the Universe. In the last analysis magic, religion and science are nothing but theories (of thought); and as Science has supplanted its predecessors so it may hereafter itself be superseded ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... the carriage-door. So it is really a lady who is the object of all this bloodless fray, this pushing and pressing, this restless motion to and fro, the endlessly shifting phantasmagoria of necks and epaulettes, of features and bearded faces, this unanimous laughter ...
— Captain Mansana and Mother's Hands • Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson
... and up in the air and down on the floor; but the search was in vain. The judge at last began to suspect witchcraft, and exclaimed, "This is a deceptio auris—it is absolute delusion, necromancy, phantasmagoria." And to the day of his death the judge never understood the precise origin ...
— Law and Laughter • George Alexander Morton
... any case a grand phantasmagoria, but it assumes an infinitely more interesting aspect under the knowledge that the intelligent action of the human will is, in some small measure, capable of guiding its course. Man has the power of doing this largely ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... illusion! Fancy-born delusion! Reason-bred confusion! Phantasmagoria! Love, where shall I find thee? Faith, how shall I bind thee? Truth, who has defined ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume XXIV. • Revised by Alexander Leighton
... cannot compare with it. These spots spread and shrink, changing form and color, constantly displacing one another. Sometimes the change is slow and gradual, sometimes again it is a whirlwind of vertiginous rapidity. Whence comes all this phantasmagoria? The physiologists and the psychologists have studied this play of colors. "Ocular spectra," "colored spots," "phosphenes," such are the names that they have given to the phenomenon. They explain it either by the slight modifications which occur ceaselessly in the retinal circulation, ...
— Dreams • Henri Bergson
... dream," said Skippy sulkily. Then he remembered that all through the hideous phantasmagoria, in the smoky mists of low gambling dens, in the drizzle of midnight conclaves, across the sepulchral silences of leaden prisons, there had flitted the beatific vision of an angel with velvety eyes and ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... retiring more and more into himself as his growing experience with the world shows him his unfitness for it. Only in his work did he have any real reason for living. His every-day life became, for the most part, a phantasmagoria, wherein persons and events continually changed from grotesque to sublime, where nothing was stable or to be depended upon. The only reality was in his art. The consciousness that he was composing works that ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... neither saw nor thought of them. Even had he seen them it is questionable whether he would have made any attempt to escape from them. They would, in all likelihood, have appeared a part of the fearful phantasmagoria already ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... evidence. The voices which chanted these melodies were discordant, but the people around listened with reverential awe, from time to time making excited comments in Irish. Altogether Tuam is a depressing kind of place, and but for the enterprise of a few Protestants, the place would be a phantasmagoria of pigs, priests, peasants, poverty, and "peelers." Perhaps Galway would have more civilization, if less piety. You cannot move about an Irish country town after nightfall without barking your shins on a Roman Catholic Cathedral. This in time ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... uninfluenced by this phantasmagoria of the brain, without movement and almost without breath, the sportsman waits hopefully; for the greatest virtue in this kind of sport is patience, the second courage, first-rate—his heart should be of marble, his flesh of steel, ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... What a phantasmagoria of colour, what a wonderful vision! Wrapped up in the delight of it, I passed on through some and round others, pursuing my way up the beach, and ascended slowly the rocks, the huge morain at the side of the glacier, while impressively from the inlet came ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... upon a carpet of strewn flowers. Enderley would not be defrauded of its welcome—all the village escorted the young couple in triumph home. I have a misty recollection of how happy everybody looked, how the sun was shining, and the bells ringing, and the people cheering—a mingled phantasmagoria of sights and sounds, in which I ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... voice, husky, uncertain, brought both his visitors to a halt; and for a wild moment he fancied that after all they were no real beings, only more than usually vivid shadows, projected visions from the whirling phantasmagoria of his brain. The light behind them, streaming in through the open door, confused him, made him feel as though this were all a trick of the nerves, a kind of chaotic nightmare; and with a muttered curse at his own folly in imagining for one moment that Iris Wayne herself stood before him, he ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... phantasmagoria which, at the approach of equinoctial days, mark the coming of the winds. Over the rim of the sea a bright cloud gently pushes up its head. It rises; and others rise with it, to right and left—slowly at first; then more swiftly. All are brilliantly white and flocculent, like loose new ...
— Chita: A Memory of Last Island • Lafcadio Hearn
... apparitions of the rainbow and the bird, the feast on Juan's spaniel, his reluctance to dine on "his pastor and his master," the consequences of eating Pedrillo,—all follow each other like visions in the phantasmagoria of a nightmare, till at last the remnant of the crew are drowned ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... our memory, but there were so many of them, and our brain got mixed so quickly, that at present we had no very clear recollection of anything or anybody. Even objects that were immediately before us appeared to us in a vague, dusky phantasmagoria and got confounded with precious objects in an inextricable manner. The world became a sort of kaleidoscope to us, seen in a dream through the ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... the persons directly, or even remotely, affected by this nerve-shattering confusion, Rose was perhaps the least perturbed. The only thing that really mattered to her, was the successful execution of those twelve costumes. The phantasmagoria at North End Hall was a regrettable, but necessary, interruption of her more important activities. The interruption didn't interfere so seriously as at first she thought it would. The routine of rehearsal as Galbraith developed it, began with special scenes—isolated ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... common magic-lantern, the spectators see a round circle of light with the figures in the middle of it; but in the Phantasmagoria they see the figures only, without any circle of light. The exhibition is produced by a magic lantern, placed on that side of a half-transparent screen which is opposite to that on which the spectators are, instead of being on ...
— Entertainments for Home, Church and School • Frederica Seeger
... From this phantasmagoria let us roam To the chief wheel and capstan of the show, Distant afar. I pray you closely read What I reveal—wherein each feature bulks In measure with its ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... into the man he was, and differentiated him from his fellows. How came he, endowed with a poetic imagination which puts him in the same class with Homer and Shakespeare, not to be content, like them, to give us a simple view of the phantasmagoria of life, but eager to use the fleeting images as instruments by which to enforce the lesson of righteousness, to set forth a theory of existence and a scheme of ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... asleep in the midst of a not unpleasing picture of herself as the wise, considerate prop of the whole family, looked up to by her parents, leant upon by Lady Myrtle, a Lady Bountiful to all within her reach, a——But here I think her imaginings probably faded into the phantasmagoria of dreams. ...
— Robin Redbreast - A Story for Girls • Mary Louisa Molesworth
... with the young men on the other side of the Rhine, and there as here, they were escorted by their gods: Country, Justice, Right, Liberty, Progress of the World, Eden-like dreams of re-born humanity, a whole phantasmagoria of mystic ideas in which young men shrouded their passions. None doubted that his cause was the right one, they left discussion to others, themselves the living proof, for he who gives his life needs ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... which does not shudder me. To be afraid is to be healthy. Fear of death makes for life. But the curse of the White Logic is that it does not make one afraid. The world-sickness of the White Logic makes one grin jocosely into the face of the Noseless One and to sneer at all the phantasmagoria of living. ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... things that exist are the mind and God, and that the universe is only the infinitely varied manifestation of God in the human conscience. It is evident, then, that matter, the only thing the materialist concedes real existence, is simply an orderly phantasmagoria; and God and soul, which materialists regard as mere fictions of the imagination, are the only conceptions that answer ...
— Was Man Created? • Henry A. Mott
... after a nameless interval, a phantasmagoria of wild, drugged dreams. My senses came slowly. At first, there were dim muffled voices and the tread of footsteps. Then I knew that I was lying on the ground, and that I was indoors. It was warm. My overcoat was off. Then I realized ...
— Beyond the Vanishing Point • Raymond King Cummings
... beginning to be familiar with this strange phantasmagoria. Each time that any of these honest folks turned round and declared to me, "This is mine!" I laughed and said, "Wait a bit, my fine fellow!—you will melt away just like ...
— The Man-Wolf and Other Tales • Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian
... them the direct result of physical weakness. Again and again he turned upon himself fiercely, discovering that an hour had passed, while he had been tranced in strange attention for the recurrence of some voice in his brain. Angrily, he would brush the whole phantasmagoria away, force himself back into the world of Equatoria, stride out of his rooms, if it were day, and down into the city; but the pressure of the deeper activities of his mind would steal back and command him. His physical nature was sunk into a great ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... but, even as I approached, a lurid glare foretold me of its destruction. As I drew nearer, the whole ghost-factory was seen to be in flames; every moment crackling reports were heard, as the over-heated tins of phantasmagoria exploded and threw their supernatural contents upon the night. These liberated ghosts joined the army of Napoleon's outraged warriors, and turned upon me. There was not enough formaldybrom in all the world to quench their fierce energy. ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... during the remainder of the evening. His mouth was dry. Carmen, and her gaudy fate, drove past him like the phantasmagoria of a ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... become so evident which way the coroner's inquiries tended that I wished to be the first to note their effect on him. It was less marked than I had anticipated. The man seemed benumbed by accumulated torment and stared at the witnesses filing before him as if they were part of some wild phantasmagoria which confused, without enlightening him. When finally several persons of both sexes were brought forward to prove that his attentions to Miss Tuttle had once been sufficiently marked for an announcement ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... the dying winter drew to a close, as the ashes powdered on the hearth and the face of Renault became obscure in the twilight, the dim outlines of a great meaning rose before her, reconciling all.... The Vision that abides within apart from the teasing phantasmagoria of sense, the Vision that comes, now dim, now vivid, as the flash of white light in the storm, the Vision towards which mankind blindly reaches, the Vision by which he may learn to ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... desultory ramblings she passed the cottage of Susan Nunsuch, a little lower down than her grandfather's. The door was ajar, and a riband of bright firelight fell over the ground without. As Eustacia crossed the firebeams she appeared for an instant as distinct as a figure in a phantasmagoria—a creature of light surrounded by an area of darkness: the moment passed, and she ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... fear that had been following her all these days had her by the throat now. The great vision of beauty through which she had been moving as one enchanted was turned to a phantasmagoria of evil mocking shapes. She hated the past; she hated its splendor, its power, its wicked magical vitality.... She dropped into a seat and continued to stare at the wall before her. Gradually, as she stared, there stole out to her from the dimmed humbled canvases a reminder ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... the phantasmagoria (magic lantern), is at present performing some interesting experiments that must doubtless advance our knowledge concerning galvanism. He has just mounted metallic piles to the number of 2,500 zinc plates and as many of rosette copper. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 430, March 29, 1884 • Various
... tramp-life is the absence of monotony. In Hobo Land the face of life is protean—an ever changing phantasmagoria, where the impossible happens and the unexpected jumps out of the bushes at every turn of the road. The hobo never knows what is going to happen the next moment; hence, he lives only in the present moment. He has learned the futility of telic endeavor, ...
— The Road • Jack London
... my brain, one of those disturbances which physiologists of the present day try to note and to fix precisely, and that disturbance must have caused a profound gulf in my mind and in the order and logic of my ideas. Similar phenomena occur in the dreams which lead us through the most unlikely phantasmagoria, without causing us any surprise, because our verifying apparatus and our sense of control has gone to sleep, while our imaginative faculty wakes and works. Is it not possible that one of the imperceptible keys of the cerebral finger-board has been ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... Cossacks, as they advance to battle. Many husbands become irritated and fall into irreparable mistakes. Others abandon their wives. And, indeed, even those of superior intelligence do not know how to get hold of the enchanted ring, by which to dispel this feminine phantasmagoria. ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... all the flames of the vanished sun; and long, red clouds, set motionless in the sky, formed glorious landscapes, fantastic lagoons, fiery plains, forests of gold, lakes of blood, a whole glowing and peaceful phantasmagoria. ...
— The Hollow Needle • Maurice Leblanc
... snow-powdered road, carpet-bag in hand, and four-horsed coach ramping along with a frosty gleam of lamps. A jingle of harness, and an adventurous tooting from the guard's horn, as if a charge was being sounded. Gone. Snow Hill, Birmingham, all white and glistening. An extraordinary bustle and clamour. A phantasmagoria of strange faces and figures. Gone. A station all in darkness, but full of ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... luncheon-party was a phantasmagoria of faces and voices to poor Nelly. He was going, and she would never see him again, although he had shown her by a thousand infallible signs that he loved her. Despite his occasional coldness, she was sure he loved her. Her pride was down with ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... more, and I knew the uselessness of trying to make him talk. Following his example I settled likewise with magazines into my corner. But when I closed my eyes again to look for the flashing lights and the sensation of heat, I found nothing but the usual phantasmagoria of the day's events—faces, scenes, memories,—and in due course I fell asleep and then saw nothing at all of ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... flaming fires, or here and there burned to a dull red by heated furnaces; and before these, strange toilers, half naked, scarcely human, and red in the leaping flicker and gleam of the fire. The meaning of their work he could not see, but a fearful and impressive phantasmagoria of flame and blackness and fiery energies at work in ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... its gorgeous phantasmagoria there were none of the accustomed sounds of pleasure in the post,—no fiddle squeaked by the stockade wall, no happy laughter wafted from the cabins. Even the sleepy children seemed to feel the strangeness and ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... the progress of the flames, and every now and then observed a terrified antelope spring from its lair, and appearing like a black figure in a phantasmagoria, suddenly the storm burst upon them and the rain poured down in torrents, accompanied with large hailstones and thunder and lightning. The wind was instantly lulled, and after the first burst of the ...
— The Mission • Frederick Marryat
... flash-lightnings from the daily press, the whole literature, the political names and the intellectual celebrities, the civil and the criminal law, the "liberte', egalite', fraternite'," together with the 2d of May 1852—all vanished like a phantasmagoria before the ban of one man, whom his enemies themselves do not pronounce an adept at witchcraft. Universal suffrage seems to have survived only for a moment, to the end that, before the eyes of the whole ...
— The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte • Karl Marx
... kind of spot, as we may call it, on the eye of the moral sense; it is a small spot; but we know how a very small object held close before the eye will wholly shut out the most lovely natural prospects, interposing distressful phantasmagoria, due to the strained and, for the time, morbid condition of the organ itself. So, it must be confessed, it is ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... Park at Night: Clerks Gipsy Two-Fold Under the Oak Sigh no More Love Storm Parliament Hill in the Evening Piccadilly Circus at Night: Street Walkers Tarantella In Church Piano Embankment at Night: Charity Phantasmagoria Next Morning Palimpsest of Twilight Embankment at Night: Outcasts Winter in the Boulevard School on the Outskirts Sickness Everlasting Flowers The North Country Bitterness of Death Seven Seals Reading a Letter Twenty Years Ago Intime Two Wives Heimweh Debacle ...
— New Poems • D. H. Lawrence
... quarter of an hour, that quarter of an hour before the liner sails; that worrying, waving, whooping, whistling quarter of an hour through which you stand on deck like a human centre-piece loaded with candy, fruit, and flowers, surrounded by a phantasmagoria of friendly faces, talking like a dancing-man and feeling like a dancing dervish. Small wonder that the deafening whistle-blast and cry of "All ashore!" smite sweetly on your ears. Small wonder that you hand a dollar to your sister and kiss the porter ...
— Ship-Bored • Julian Street
... administrative, ecclesiastical, judicial, fiscal, municipal, scholastic, commercial, and consular—throughout France, on the soldier, the citizen, and the peasant. Add, as we have above pointed out, the fictitious communist Jacquerie and the real Bonapartist terrorism, the government imposing by phantasmagoria on the weak, and by dictatorship on the refractory, and brandishing two terrors together. It would require a special volume to relate, expose, and develop the innumerable details of that immense extortion of signatures, which is called "the vote of ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... shore, a shadow play without even a plot. He feels more strongly than the European that change is in itself an evil and he finds small satisfaction in action for its own sake. All his higher aspirations bid him extricate himself from this labyrinth of repeated births, this phantasmagoria of fleeting, unsubstantial visions and he has generally the conviction that this can be done by knowledge, for since the whole Samsara is illusion, it collapses and ceases so soon as the soul knows its own real ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... sentimental, I should say continental mythical music, upon the scene springs with his amazing apparatus of staves and octaves, aiding the chef-de-musique and his trained voices to make sound within the very presence chamber of Divine Worship this phantasmagoria of Teuton intellectualism! ...
— Original Letters and Biographic Epitomes • J. Atwood.Slater
... truth, and even the virtues of the human mind: they called up past ages, summoned spectres, and the dead were heard to speak. They played upon the plastic imagination of princes, by rapid transition from terror to enthusiasm. The knowledge of the phantasmagoria, then but little known, served as an auxiliary in these deceptions. On the death of Frederic II., his successor submitted to such tests, and was worked upon by wonders. Kings conspired against thrones. The princes of Gotha ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... only numskulls. Oh, that old romantic lion, the carriage of him! He was a decorator who knew how to make the colours blaze. And what a grasp he had! He would have covered every wall in Paris if they had let him; his palette boiled, and boiled over. I know very well that it was only so much phantasmagoria. Never mind, I like it for all that, as it was needed to set the School on fire. Then came the other, a stout workman—that one, the truest painter of the century, and altogether classical besides, a fact which not one of the dullards understood. ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... Along the horizon they resolved themselves into a phantasmagoria of Eskimo maidens and white men resembling the Danes who came each summer to gather riches of ivories and furs. And the Eskimo maidens and white men danced together. As these mirage-forms melted, Ootah ...
— The Eternal Maiden • T. Everett Harre
... seaman. The same diminutive and misty tracery, as before, was to be seen on the light background of the threatening horizon, looking not unlike the faintest shadows cast upon some brighter surface by the deception of the phantasmagoria. But to the mariners, who so well knew how to distinguish between the different lines of her masts, it was very evident that her course had been suddenly and dexterously changed, and that she was now steering no longer to the south and west, but, like ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... that, though I wear trousers and shave once a day, I am not, properly speaking, a Man. Surely it is from no failure of goodwill, no lack of prayerful striving towards that noble estate: for if there is one spectacle in this moving phantasmagoria of life that I love to carry within my eye, it is the figure of a true man. The mere idea of a true man stirs one's heart like a trumpet. Therefore, this doubt I am confiding is all the more dreary. Naturally, I feel it most keenly in the company of my fellows, each ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... Phoebe and Ruth in the letter cannot be drowned, if they are Granny Marrable and Widow Thrale." A rapid phantasmagoria of possibilities and impossibilities shot through her mind. How could order come of such ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... is justly described by the writer just quoted as "a phantasmagoria of continuous visions, vivid, impressive, but monotonous and hard to distinguish in memory, like the waves of the sea or the decorations of some barbarous temple, sublime only by ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... which can never be written, owing to the fact that no human mind could follow the swift events of the next few tumultuous months, no brain could record it. Chaos came. Life in the oil fields became a phantasmagoria of ceaseless action and excitement—a fantastic stereopticon ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... suffered. Oh! the many many hours, that I have groaned under the terrible incubi which the fits of real delirium evoke. Oh! the racking anguish of body that a traveller in Africa must undergo! Oh! the spite, the fretfulness, the vexation which the horrible phantasmagoria of diabolisms induce! The utmost patience fails to appease, the most industrious attendance fails to gratify, the deepest humility displeases. During these terrible transitions, which induce fierce distraction, Job himself would become irritable, insanely ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... contains is a mere illusion; an unreality; against which idea his instincts revolt. But this, like all other great truths, must be considered both from the Absolute and the Relative points of view. From the Absolute viewpoint, of course, the Universe is in the nature of an illusion, a dream, a phantasmagoria, as compared to THE ALL in itself. We recognize this even in our ordinary view, for we speak of the world as "a fleeting show" that comes and goes, is born and dies—for the element of impermanence and change, finiteness and unsubstantiality, ...
— The Kybalion - A Study of The Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece • Three Initiates
... which have come under my eye, even those written before he went to Malta, where his opium habits were confirmed. If my father sought more from opium than the mere absence of pain, I feel assured that it was not luxurious sensations or the glowing phantasmagoria of passive dreams, but that the power of the medicine might keep down the agitations of his nervous system, released for a time at least from the tyranny of ailments which by a spell of wretchedness fix the thoughts upon themselves, ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... Himself a live thing, solid and substantial, possessed of weight and dimension, a reality incontrovertible, he moved through the space and place of being, concrete, hard, quick, convincing, an absoluteness of something surrounded by the shades and shadows of the fluxing phantasmagoria of nothing. ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... still fluttering bravely in defiance of the adverse gale, and the Flying Fish with the white ensign of the Royal Yacht Squadron, of which Sir Reginald was a member, streaming from her ensign staff in honour of little Florrie. It was a strange sight, even in that region of fantastic phantasmagoria, to see the two ships, one of which, moreover, wore such an unaccustomed shape, dashing rapidly along through the black foam-flecked water, with ice in every conceivable form heaped and piled around them, and their bright-hued flags fluttering against the dark and dismal background of a stormy ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... it was resolved in the same sense and by the same sequence of beliefs both on the banks of the Euphrates and on those of the Nile; but other questions were more attractive to the peoples of Mesopotamia. Their curiosity was roused chiefly by the phenomena of the skies, by the complicated phantasmagoria offered nightly in the depths above. These they set themselves to observe with patience and exactitude, and it is to the habits thus formed that they, in part at least, owed their scientific superiority and the honour they ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... themselves merrily with dust or bask in the sun; his dissipation is at the restaurateur's, whose poisonous dinner has won renown, or at some family ball, where he suffocates till midnight. Some fools are surprised at the phantasmagoria of the monads which they see with the aid of the microscope in a drop of water; but what would Rabelais' Gargantua,—that misunderstood figure of an audacity so sublime,—what would that giant say, fallen from the celestial spheres, if he amused himself by ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... orator, a lawyer, or a priest, A nabob, a man-midwife;[539] but the wight[hk] Mysterious changed his countenance at least As oft as they their minds: though in full sight He stood, the puzzle only was increased; The man was a phantasmagoria in Himself—he was so volatile ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... the newspaper. The sight of the red cross pinned on M. de Guersaint's jacket was also calculated to render him prudent; nevertheless his tongue won the victory. "Well, monsieur, opinions are free, are they not?" said he. "I respect yours, but for my part I don't believe in all that phantasmagoria! Oh I've never concealed it! I was already a republican and a freethinker in the days of the Empire. There were barely four men of those views in the whole town at that time. Oh! ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... count of time, of days and nights and storms and camps. Through a vast mad phantasmagoria of suffering and toil he and Labiskwee struggled on, with McCan somehow stumbling along in the rear, babbling of San Francisco, his everlasting dream. Great peaks, pitiless and serene in the chill blue, towered about them. They fled down black canyons ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... he is not too dull to dream at all) he will dream about oxen; whereas, in the case before him, the reader will find that the Opium-eater boasteth himself to be a philosopher; and accordingly, that the phantasmagoria of his dreams (waking or sleeping, day-dreams or night-dreams) is suitable to ...
— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas De Quincey
... [Footnote: See the Republic, VI, 485, ff.] The moral instincts of the philosopher are unerring, Plato declares, because the philosopher's attention is riveted upon the unchanging idea of the good which underlies the confusing phantasmagoria of the temporal world. The poets retort that the moral instincts of the poet, more truly than of the philosopher, are unerring, because the poet's attention is fixed upon the good in its most ravishing aspect, that of beauty, and in ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... rode the rest of the day. The desert compassed them about, marvellously changing shape and colour, and every character, with all the noiselessness of phantasmagoria. At evening the desert stars shone steady and unwinking, like the flames of candles. By moonrise they came to ...
— Arizona Nights • Stewart Edward White
... trait of the race. Even in Japanese art—developed, if not actually created, under Buddhist influence—the doctrine of impermanency has left its traces. Buddhism taught that nature was a dream, an illusion, a phantasmagoria; but it also taught men how to seize the fleeting impressions of that dream, and how to interpret them in relation to the highest truth. And they learned well. In the flushed splendor of the blossom-bursts of spring, in the coming and the going of the cicada, in the dying crimson ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... demeanour hath consigned A timid love to banishment?— On fresh allurements they are bent, At least by show of sympathy; At least their accents and their words Appear attuned to softer chords; And then with blind credulity The youthful lover once again Pursues phantasmagoria vain. ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... medicine for these self-created mental diseases. It will successfully drive away devils and spirits that frequent ignorant minds, just as Jesus did in the old days. Zen makes use of moral idealism to extirpate, root and branch, all such idle dreams and phantasmagoria of illusion and opens the ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... philosopher, has bound me absolutely to the wheel of the Real. I, the super-realist, am the only unrealist on board the Elsinore. Therefore I, who penetrate it deepest, in the whole phenomena of living on the Elsinore see it only as phantasmagoria. ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... The phantasmagoria faded to a blank wall of gray fog, and Rowland found sanity to mutter, "They've drugged me"; but in an instant he stood in the darkness of a garden—one that he had known. In the distance were the lights of a house, and close to ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson
... of visions; unconsciousness of seers, at first, of their peculiarity; subsequent dislike to speak about it; imagery connected with words; that of Mrs. Haweis; automatic changes in dark field of eye; my own experiences; those of Rev. G. Henslow; visions frequently unlike vivid visualisations; phantasmagoria; hallucinations; simile of a seal in a pond; dreams and partial sensitiveness of brain; hallucinations and illusions, their causes; "faces in the fire," etc.; sub-conscious picture-drawing; visions based on patched recollections; on blended recollections; hereditary seership; visions caused ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... hiccoughing platitudes lodged in the pigeon-holes of the Home Office by all the gentlemen clerks and gentlemen farmers of the world cannot mend this. While the Indian villager has to maintain the glorious phantasmagoria of an imperial policy, while he has to support legions of scarlet soldiers, golden chuprassies, purple politicals, and green commissions, he must remain the hunger-stricken, ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... explorer, so entirely at home in this more tropical clime, had relapsed into respectability when I spoke to him. He was sitting at a supper-table smoking a cigarette, and gazing somewhat sadly—it seemed to me—at the pandemoniac phantasmagoria of screaming dancers, the glittering cosmopolitan chaos that multiplied itself riotously in the mirrored walls of the great flaring ball-room, where under-dressed women, waving many-coloured paper lanterns, rode on the shoulders of grotesquely ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... who had put together the singular dramatic phantasmagoria known as Mozart's "Magic Flute," and acted the part of the buffoon in it, who, having donned the garb of respectability, commissioned Beethoven to compose the only opera which that supreme master gave to the world. The opera is "Fidelio," ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... found in Protestantism its spiritual confirmation. Protestantism, as the self assurance of the individual that he was directly related to God without any dependence on the mediation of any man, rose to the truth in the autonomy of the soul, and began out of the abstract phantasmagoria of monachism and chivalry to develope Christianity, as the principle of humanitarian education, into concrete actuality. The cities were not merely, in comparison with the clergy and the nobility, the "third estate"; but ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... lighted, there was no one to be seen in the room besides themselves. Several, Hugh amongst them, had observed the figure; but all had taken it for part of the illusive phantasmagoria. Hugh would have concluded it a variety of his vision of the former night; but others had seen it as well ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... notable points; for instance, the lines (iii. 86) beginning "Allah holds the kingship!" are a lesson to the manichaeanism of Christian Europe. It relates the doings of three royal generations and has all the characteristics of Eastern art: it is a phantasmagoria of Holy Places, palaces and Harems; convents, castles and caverns, here restful with gentle landscapes (ii. 240) and there bristling with furious battle-pictures (ii. 117, 221-8, 249) and tales of princely prowess and knightly ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... the picture produced by the evolution of the phenomena of consciousness. For any demonstration that can be given to the contrary effect, the "collection of perceptions" which makes up our consciousness may be an orderly phantasmagoria generated by the Ego, unfolding its successive scenes on the background of the abyss of nothingness; as a firework, which is but cunningly arranged combustibles, grows from a spark into a coruscation, and from a coruscation into figures, ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... out a screech or two that served to alarm the camp. The tramp of the warriors, as they sprang from the fire, was plainly audible, and at the next moment three or four of them appeared on the top of the ridge, drawn against the background of light, resembling the dim shadows of the phantasmagoria. It was now quite time for the hunter to retreat. Tripping up the heels of his captive, and giving her throat a parting squeeze, quite as much in resentment at her indomitable efforts to sound the alarm as from any policy, he left her on her back, and moved towards ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... play the higher faculties; its language is that of sentiment Furthermore, the motives which have presided over particular musical combinations establish links between the composer and the listener. We sigh with Bellini in the finale of La Somnambula; we shudder with Weber in the sublime phantasmagoria of Der Freischutz; the mystic inspirations of Palestrina, the masses of Mozart, transport us to the celestial regions, toward which they rise like a melodious incense. Music awakens in us reminiscences, souvenirs, associations. When we have wept over a song, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... and inadequate as a picture of the great whole, is yet sufficient to serve him as a chart for the guidance of his practical affairs. It has taken long ages of toilsome and often fruitless labour to enable man to look steadily at the shifting scenes of the phantasmagoria of Nature, to notice what is fixed among her fluctuations, and what is regular among her apparent irregularities; and it is only comparatively lately, within the last few centuries, that the conception of a universal order and of a definite course of things, which we term the course ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... him, Dickens had exactly the opposite intention. He found his book in the expanse of life which his David had travelled over; Dickens's only care was to represent the wonderful show that filled his hero's memory. The whole phantasmagoria is the subject of the book, a hundred men and women, populating David's past and keeping his pen at full speed in the single-minded effort to portray them. Alone among the assembly David himself is scarcely of the subject ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... students picturesquely long-haired and floppily trousered and cravated, and poorly clad models, a whole army of nondescripts, heaven knows with what means of livelihood, all dancing, drinking, eating, laughing, jesting, smoking, primitively love-making, moving, shouting, a phantasmagoria of souls making merry beyond the pale of reputable life; such were the frequenters of the Bal Jasmin. Gas flared in two concentric circles of flame around the hall and around the central bandstand. There was no ventilation. ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... this revelation of human nakedness was likely to add to the popular respect for nature and the natural man. After all, considering that literature is for the most part a hollow and pretentious phantasmagoria of mimic figures posing in breeches and peruke, we may try to forgive certain cruel blows to the dignified assumptions, solemn words, and high heels of convention, in one who would not lie, nor dissemble kinship with the four-footed. ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... within these nine years, to Rousseau, Goethe, Young, Aretin, Timon of Athens, Dante, Petrarch, an Alabaster Vase lighted up within, Satan, Shakspeare, Bonaparte, Tiberius, AEschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Harlequin the clown, Sternhold and Hopkins, to the Phantasmagoria, to Henry the Eighth, to Chenier, to Mirabeau, to Young, R. Dallas (the schoolboy), to Michael Angelo, to Raphael, to a petit maitre, to Diogenes, to Childe Harold, to Lara, to the Count in 'Beppo,' to Milton, to Pope, to Dryden, to Burns, to Savage, to Chatterton, to 'oft have I heard ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... followed his taking of opium. No person of ordinary mind could induce those gorgeous and bewildering dreams by its use. In his case the drug acted upon a mind fitted to see visions and dream dreams even without its use; and the result was that gorgeous and bewildering phantasmagoria which he ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... of thousands of busy cares and ambitious projects? Was not life the MERE DREAM of their now senseless tenants—like the trackless path of a bird in the air, or of a fish in the waters? Were they not the Phantasmagoria which, in their day, filled up the shifting scene of the world,—and are we not, in our several days, similar shadows, which modify the light for a season, and then disappear to make room for others like ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... incurred a great danger, that he had rendered the Prince his enemy, and that he had betrayed to him a secret which might affect his own life. In this state of mind and body, it was not strange that he should either dream, or else that his diseased organs should become subject to that species of phantasmagoria which is excited by the use of opium. He thought that the shade of Queen Annabella stood by his bedside, and demanded the youth whom she had placed under his charge, simple, ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... had not finished their chimes when his son, choking, calling wildly upon Heaven to aid him, had fallen in the midst of crowding, obscene things, and, in the instant of his fall, had found the room clear of the waving antennae, the beady eyes, and the beetle shapes. The whole horrible phantasmagoria—together with the odour of ancient rottenness—faded like a fevered dream, at the moment that Dr. Cairn had burst in upon the creator ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... that thought,—through this space, in which nothing save one mellow translucent light had been discernible,—a swift succession of shadowy landscapes seemed to roll: trees, mountains, cities, seas, glided along like the changes of a phantasmagoria; and at last, settled and stationary, he saw a cave by the gradual marge of an ocean shore,—myrtles and orange-trees clothing the gentle banks. On a height, at a distance, gleamed the white but shattered relics of some ruined heathen edifice; and the moon, in ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... of trees or a cottage, emerging like an island, completed the illusion, for such it was. A sheet of bluish mist, floating a little above the ground and curling up along its upper surface under the rays of the sun, caused this aqueous phantasmagoria, resembling the Fata Morgana of Sicily. In vain did my geographical knowledge protest, disconcerted, against this inland sea, which no map of Prussia indicates; my eyes would not give it up, and later in the day, when the sun, rising higher, had dried up this imaginary ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various
... of life, whirls us into the boundless regions of imagination, "exhausting" one "world," and imagining others, to supply pictures which may refresh and charm the mind.[L] Lord Byron shews us man and nature, like the phantasmagoria, in shade; whereas, in poetry at least, we desire to see them illuminated by all the friendly rays which ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... service, and who had, on so many occasions, proved himself entirely trustworthy, I passed away the seasons as they came and went, always living in the best hotels, and making a good many passing acquaintances. Life was, indeed, a perfect phantasmagoria. ...
— Hushed Up - A Mystery of London • William Le Queux
... written in all colors and motions, uttered in all tones of jubilee and wail, in thousand-figured, thousand-voiced, harmonious Nature: but where is the cunning eye and ear to whom that God-written Apocalypse will yield articulate meaning? We sit as in a boundless Phantasmagoria and Dream-grotto; boundless, for the faintest star, the remotest century, lies not even nearer the verge thereof: sounds and many-colored visions flit round our sense; but Him, the Unslumbering, whose work both Dream and Dreamer are, we see not; except in rare half-waking moments, suspect ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... dead, and by a light that was gloom. It was like Night blanched in death then; and wan as the very kingdom of death and Hades I have seen it, most terrifying, that neuter state and limbo of nothingness, when unreal sea and spectral sky, all boundaries lost, mingled in a vast shadowy void of ghastly phantasmagoria, pale to utter huelessness, at whose centre I, as if annihilated, seemed to swoon in immensity of space. Into this disembodied world would come anon waftures of that peachy scent which I knew: and their frequency rapidly grew. But still the Boreal moved, traversing, ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... Pierce Phillips never knew; the experience was too terrific to be long lived. It was a nightmare, a hideous phantasmagoria of frightful sensations, a dissolving stereopticon of bleak, scudding walls, of hydrophobic boulders frothing madly as the flood crashed over them, of treacherous whirlpools, and of pursuing breakers that reached ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... Coleridge, in the biographical supplement to the "Biographia Literaria," replies with what we now know to be truth: "If my Father sought more from opium than the mere absence of pain, I feel assured that it was not luxurious sensations or the glowing phantasmagoria of passive dreams; but that the power of the medicine might keep down the agitations of his nervous system, like a strong hand grasping the strings of some shattered lyre." In 1795. that is, at the age of twenty-three, we find him taking laudanum; in 1796, he is taking ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... it. This was more than mere coincidence. It was plagiarism. He wanted to cry out. But the room swam before his eyes. Surely he must be dreaming. It was a dream. The faces of the audience, the lights, Reginald, Jack—all phantasmagoria of ...
— The House of the Vampire • George Sylvester Viereck
... answers to the problem, may be generalized into these two: either consciousness is able to transcend, or go beyond itself; or else the whole pomp, and pageantry, and magnificence, which we miscall the external universe, are nothing but our mental phantasmagoria, nothing but states of our ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... with dark, happy eyes intent upon the rose-colored phantasmagoria of existence, her worriment past. Donald was safe with Brian. It hurt her a little that he ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... The phantasmagoria overhead was shifting infinitely and rapidly; there were flashes that seemed to presage a thunderous roar of an explosion and were more bodeful because the hush aloft in the heavenly spaces remained unbroken; then the filaments and streamers of ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day
... by Stringer and Townsend, continues to make its appearance once a fortnight, and well sustains the reputation it has acquired, as a brilliant, searching, and good-humored satirical commentary on the many-colored phantasmagoria of the town. The name of the author is still a dead secret, in spite of numerous hints and winks among the knowing ones, and he is shrewd enough to prefer the prestige of concealment to the tickling of his vanity by publicity. The ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... trace, but it should be remembered that in the lower stages of human civilization no distinction is drawn between supernatural or spiritual beings who have never been enclosed in human bodies, and the spirits of the dead. Savage philosophy mingles them together in one phantasmagoria of grotesquery and horror. The line which separates fairies and ogres from the souls of men has gradually grown up through ages of Christian teaching; and, broad as it may seem to us, it is occasionally hardly visible in these ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... superstitious darkness. Murder! What a hell full of furies hovers around that word. Yet 'tis no more than if nature forgets to bring forth one man more or the doctor makes a mistake—and thus the whole phantasmagoria vanishes. It was something, and it is nothing. Does not this amount to exactly the same thing as though it had been nothing, and came to nothing; and about nothing it is hardly worth while to waste a word. Man is made of filth, and for a time wades in filth, and produces filth, and ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... he has not his equal, as a positive, dogmatic, knock-me-down argument-monger; a dare devil; an embodied phantasmagoria, or frisky infatuation. I have often thought that Punch might be converted to profitable use, by being made a speaking Pasquin; and, properly instructed, might hold up his restless quarter staff, in terrorem, ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... those gigantic pillars of sand that mould themselves continually under the action of sun and wind in the great deserts—suddenly showing themselves upon the remote horizon, rear themselves silently and swiftly, then stalking forward towards the affected caravan like a phantom phantasmagoria, approach, manoeuvre, overshadow, and then as suddenly recede, collapse, fluctuate, again to remould into other combinations and to alarm other travellers—have passed. This vast structure of Central Europe had been abandoned by all the greater tribes; they had crossed the vast barriers ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... the fair pale face bathed in blushes, and a clergyman standing by the altar, and a carriage-and-four with white favours at the church-door; and of a honeymoon, which would have astonished as to honey all the bees of Hymettus. And in the midst of these phantasmagoria, which composed what Frank fondly styled, "making up his mind," there came a single man's elegant rat-tat-tat ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... surface of polished lacquer, darker than the night, and powdered thick with the gold of reflected stars. Leaning over, she marvelled at the silhouette of her own slim figure. It did not seem to have an actual place among these frail phantasmagoria. As she stared on she noticed that the end of the pond farthest from her, to the west, quivered and turned gray. She looked quickly upward and around. Yes, there to the east was the answering blur ...
— The Dragon Painter • Mary McNeil Fenollosa
... right to say that these portraits of a possible humanity, this Portia, this Toby Veck, this Tiny Tim, this ideal man and woman, are real men and real women in possibility, if not in the actualities of life? Or are we to think of them as simply phantasmagoria hung up for the delectation of a passing moment? The Bible makes answer to that question,—the Bible preeminently, but the great poets and the great prophets of all religions; the Bible, because the poets and the prophets of the Bible transcend the poets and the prophets of all other religions. ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 8 - Talmage to Knox Little • Grenville Kleiser
... placing implicit trust in others, as I had done; instead of failing to discover a significance and a warning in each circumstance as it arose, I was suspicious from the first—suspicious of Margaret, of her father, of her mother, of Mannion, of the very servants in the house. In the hideous phantasmagoria of my own calamity on which I now looked, my position was reversed. Every event of the doomed year of my probation was revived. But the doom itself, the night-scene of horror through which I had passed, had utterly vanished ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... The square-browed judge likewise dreamed, and all his race rose up before him in a mighty phantasmagoria—his steel-shod, mail-clad race, the law-giver and world-maker among the families of men. He saw it dawn red-flickering across the dark forests and sullen seas; he saw it blaze, bloody and red, to full and triumphant noon; and down the shaded slope he saw the blood-red sands ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... found for them,—and establish no axioms, because we have no mathematical certainties. Objects which present the assurance of palpable facts to-day may vanish as meteors to-morrow. The effort to crystallize into a creed one's articles of faith in these mental phantasmagoria is like carving a cathedral from sunset clouds, or creating salient and retreating lines of armed hosts in the northern lights. Though willing dupes to the pretty fancy, we know that before the light of science the architecture is resolved into mist, and the battalions into ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... the turning of a page in some gigantic book, the swift-moving phantasmagoria swung back into the blackness of the infinite and was gone. Before them stretched a landscape of rolling hills and fertile valleys. Overhead, the skies were a deep blue, almost violet, and twin suns shone down on the scene. The sphere drifted along a few hundred ...
— Wanderer of Infinity • Harl Vincent
... of this place is 'Angel Island,'" announced Billy Fairfax after a long time. His tone was that of a man whose thoughts, swirling in phantasmagoria, ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... Lost, as in Paradise Regained and Samson, Milton felt himself to he standing on the sure ground of fact and reality. It was not in Milton's nature to be a showman, parading before an audience a phantasmagoria of spirits, which he himself knew to be puppets tricked up for the entertainment of an idle hour. We are told by Lockhart, that the old man who told the story of Gilpin Horner to Lady Dalkeith bona fide believed the existence of the elf. Lady Dalkeith ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... enjoyment of the other, and not brutally attempt to sever them by fixed lines. Each is best seen in the light reflected from the other, and we had best admit the fact without asking awkward questions; but they are blended after a perfectly original fashion in the strange phantasmagoria of 'Tancred.' Let the images of crusaders and modern sportsmen, Hebrew doctors and classical artists, mediaeval monks and Anglican bishops, perform their strange antics before us, and the scenery shift from Manchester to Damascus, ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... past then rose up before her, from the time of her first entering that house, the bride of Mr. Carlyle, to her present sojourn in it. The old scenes passed through her mind like the changing picture in a phantasmagoria. ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... life setting forth the curious circumstances concerning Lord Cloden and Oswald Quain":[23] a mad opus this, an insane phantasmagoria of crime, avarice, and murder. For the second time in this author's novels incest plays a role. This time it is real. Quain is indeed the half-brother of the lady who desires to marry him. He is as vile ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... difficult question of imposition and personation by spirits. Thus a soul, or a spirit, may give itself out for a god, and exhibit the appropriate phantasmagoria: may boast and deceive (ii. 10). This is the result of some error or blunder in the ceremony of evocation. {69} A bad or low spirit may thus enter, disguised as a demon or god, and may utter deceitful words. But all arts, says our guide, are liable to errors, and ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... less stunned, and consequently far more active, than Margaret Hall's. Visions, as in a phantasmagoria, came rapidly passing before her—recollections of the time (which seemed now so long ago) when the shadow of the feebly-waving arm first caught her attention; of the bright, strangely isolated day at Dunham Park, where the world had seemed so full of enjoyment, and beauty, and life; of ...
— The Grey Woman and other Tales • Mrs. (Elizabeth) Gaskell
... room and had my bag packed. Then I sat down to think. I reviewed the course of events carefully since the night before last. Try how I could, I found it absolutely impossible to arrive at any clear conclusion with regard to them. The whole thing was a phantasmagoria. The one person in whom I had believed, and at whose bidding I was willing to take a hand in this mysterious game, had disappeared without a word of explanation or farewell. There could be only one reasonable course of action for me to pursue, and that ...
— The Great Secret • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... feet higher than the river at this point. Cataract followed rapid and rapid followed cataract as we were hurled on down through the midst of the sublimity, which, parting at our advance, closed again behind like some wonderful phantasmagoria. At times in the headlong rush the boats could barely be held in control. Once, a wild mass of breakers appeared immediately in the path of our boat, from which it was impossible to escape, even though we made a severe effort to do so. We thought we were surely to be ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... about him. He goes through the crowded thoroughfares, through cluttered places, through factories, hotels, wharves, sits in railway trains, and the glare and tumult and pulsation, the engines and locomotives and cranes, the whole mad phantasmagoria of the modern city, evoke images in him, inflame him to reproduce them in all their weight and gianthood and mass, their blackness and luridness and power. The most vulgar things and events excite him. The traffic, the restlessness of crowds, the noise of vehicles, ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... to bring his eyes within two or three inches of his face, looked fixedly at him, retreated a little distance without averting his gaze, approached again, again withdrew, and so on for half-a-dozen times, like a head in a phantasmagoria. Kit stood his ground as if in expectation of an immediate assault, but finding that nothing came of these gestures, snapped his fingers and walked away; his mother dragging him off as fast as she could, ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... wonder: so lively, and yet so dead: so noisy, and yet so quiet: so obtrusive, and yet so shy and lowering: so wide awake, and yet so fast asleep: that it is a sort of intoxication to a stranger to walk on, and on, and on, and look about him. A bewildering phantasmagoria, with all the inconsistency of a dream, and all the pain and all the ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... something that baffled and vexed her once more. She felt the polished surface of the wood under her hand, and saw all the pretty ornamentation, the inlaid-work, the delicate carvings, which she knew so well; they swam in her eyes a little, as if they were part of some phantasmagoria about her, existing only in her vision. Yet the smooth surface resisted her touch; and when she withdrew a step from it, it stood before her solidly and square, as it had stood always—a glory to ...
— Old Lady Mary - A Story of the Seen and the Unseen • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
... was picturesque to a degree (no more can be said for it). There were no jellies, no tempting hams, no imported puddings nor nude poultry, none of the solid, savoury things associated with the festive season. There were none of these; but holly, mistletoe, and Chinese lanterns made a fine phantasmagoria. There were neat and compact packets of starch, interspersed with tins of mustard, to tickle the palate of the hungry passer-by; while scented soaps, in lovely little wrappers, intermingled in malodorous profusion. ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... is a sure solvent of distress. There whirls not for him in the night any so hideous a phantasmagoria as will not become, in the clarity of next morning, a spruce procession for him to lead. Brief the vague horror of his awakening; memory sweeps back to him, and he sees nothing dreadful after all. "Why not?" is ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... known. It is needless to praise the literally inimitable humour of the tragic series "Our Cat took Rat Poison." In Lewis Carroll's "Rhyme? and Reason?" (1883), Mr. Frost shared with Henry Holiday the task of illustrating a larger edition of the book first published under the title of "Phantasmagoria" (1869); he illustrated also "A Tangled Tale" (1886), by the same author, and this is perhaps the only volume of British origin of which he is sole artist. Mr. Henry Holiday was responsible for the classic pictures to "The Hunting of the Snark" by Lewis ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... the amusements and novelties which would recreate his imagination, the farmer allows his mind to be oppressed with strange fancies, and though he may never avow the feeling, from the fear of not meeting with sympathy, he broods over it and is a slave to the wild phantasmagoria of his brain. The principal cause of this is, the monotony and solitude ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... tongue at ghosts, he takes the poetry out of stilted things, he introduces caricature into epic extravaganzas. It is not that he is prosaic; far from that; but he replaces the solemn vision by the farcical phantasmagoria. If Adamastor were to appear to him, the street Arab would say: "Hi there! ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... permitting his adversaries to push their ponies so close to his sides that he could work only with a shortened blade. Appreciating what terrific additional handicap this would be to Carrick, Carter was yet scarcely prepared for the immediate tragedy that followed. Like the phantasmagoria of dreams, he saw the Cockney, cut, slashed, and pierced, ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... worlds, between the different poles of the universe and of life, the mental and physical fantasy called space, is a nightmare of the human imagination. That nightmares exist, and exist only to torment, every child knows; and what we need is the power of discrimination between the phantasmagoria of the brain, which concern ourselves only, and the phantasmagoria of daily life, in which others also are concerned. This rule applies also to the larger case. It concerns no one but ourselves that we live in a nightmare of unreal horror, and fancy ourselves ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins
... Dey, that the Frenchmen who had come to Algiers by land had among their baggage cases filled with zechins, destined to revolutionize the Kabylie. They immediately had these cases forwarded to Algiers, and at their opening, before the Minister of Naval Affairs, all the phantasmagoria of zechins, of treasure, of revolution, disappeared at the sight of the stands and the limbs of several ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... at full moon is as light as Broadway, and the only shadows are those the camels cast, than which there is nothing more weird in the whole range of phantasmagoria. We looked like a string of glistening ghosts accompanied by goblins of a fourth dimension mocking us, and though you couldn't see the details of men's faces, looking back along the line you could see every movement ...
— The Lion of Petra • Talbot Mundy
... softening its high lights for the time. At times, as the sun shone full and strong, the faint loom of the mirage added the last touch of mysticism, the figures of the wagons rising high, multiplied many-fold, with giant creatures passing between, so that the whole seemed, indeed, some wild phantasmagoria of the desert. ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... diversified! All species of thinkers and actors, of ideas and passions, all the labyrinthine complications and scenery of existence, may be illustrated in persons or introduced by-the-by; into whatever colors make up the phantasmagoria of collective humanity the novelist may dip his brush, in painting his moving picture. Yet problems need not be fully appreciated, nor characters or actions profoundly understood. It must be an engrossing story, but the theme and treatment are as lawless as the ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... either to some temporary defect in Peter's vision, or to some illusion attendant upon mist and moonlight, or perhaps to some other cause, that the whole procession had a certain waving and vapoury character which perplexed and tasked his eyes not a little. It was like the pictured pageant of a phantasmagoria reflected upon smoke. It was as if every breath disturbed it; sometimes it was blurred, sometimes obliterated; now here, now there. Sometimes, while the upper part was quite distinct, the legs of the column would nearly fade away or vanish outright, and then again they would come ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 4 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... drama. We have no clue to the history of the Gondals, whereby we can arrange these scenes in their right order. But dark and broken as they are, they yet trail an epic splendour, they bear the whole phantasmagoria of ancestral and of racial memories, of "old, unhappy, far-off things, and battles long ago". These songs and ballads, strung on no discernible thread, are the voice of an enchanted spirit, recalling the long roll of its secular existences; in whom nothing lives but that mysterious, ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... the mountain; and the isle and its unsubstantial canopy rose and shimmered before us like a single mass. There was no beacon, no smoke of towns to be expected, no plying pilot. Somewhere, in that pale phantasmagoria of cliff and cloud, our haven lay concealed; and somewhere to the east of it—the only sea-mark given—a certain headland, known indifferently as Cape Adam and Eve, or Cape Jack and Jane, and distinguished by two colossal figures, the gross statuary of nature. These we were to ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... me about the man in the moon, I could not have been more startled. I made up for it with my animals, which I was far from forgetting amid this phantasmagoria of heroes and demigods. While honoring the exploits of Cadmus and Cynoegirus, I hardly ever failed, on Sundays and Thursdays [the weekly half-holiday in French schools], to go and see if the cowslip or the yellow daffodil was making its appearance in the meadows, if the Linnet was hatching on ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... of matter this coping with spiritual abstractions must appear like juggling with intellectual phantasmagoria. Yet I protest that life is finally for intangible triumphs. Unnamed fragrances steal upon the senses and the soul revels and greatens. Unseen hands draw us to worlds afar, and we are gathered up in the dignity of the human spirit. Unknown ideas attract and hold us, and ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... mingled in his mind with fleeting impressions of Madrid already half forgotten. One by one the sensations of distinct epochs intertwined themselves in his memory, without rhyme or reason and among them, in the phantasmagoria of near and distant images that rolled past his inner vision, there stood out clearly those sombre towers glimpsed by night in Almazan by the light ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... absence; even that 'restraint' which is the salient characteristic of Greek expression in literature no less than in Art, is largely relaxed in the rough-and-tumble, informal, miscellaneous modern phantasmagoria of these ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... anything! But I seem to be feverish again! Did Porphyrius give me a kind of wink just now, or was I deceived in some way? The idea is absurd! Why should he wink at me? Perhaps they intend to upset my nervous organization, and, by so doing, drive me to extremes! Either the whole thing is a phantasmagoria, or—they know!" ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... obligation to forswear himself either directly, as by false professions, or by implication, as when he attend services, public or private, which are to him the symbol of superstition and mere spiritual phantasmagoria. The vindication of this simple right of living one's life honestly can hardly demand any heroic virtue. A little of the straightforwardness which men are accustomed to call manly, is the only quality that is needed; ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... is a sort of phantasmagoria, and others were no better than myself. Whole columns went to sleep, in the saddle, as they rode along; and General Stuart told me afterward, that he saw a man attempt to climb over a fence, half succeed only, and go to sleep ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... apathetic and purblind. Critics rage and quarrel before a canvas, but the nations do not care; quarries of marble are hewn into various shapes, and the throngs gape before them and are indifferent; writers are so many that their writings blend in the public mind in a confused phantasmagoria, where the colours run into one another, and the lines are all waved and indistinct; the singer alone still keeps the old magic power, "The beauty that was Athens, once the glory that was Rome's," still holds the divine Cadmus, still sways the vast ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida |
