"Phantom" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 'The Phantom Bride'? It 's perfectly thrilling! There 's a regular rush for it at the library; but some prefer 'Breaking a Butterfly.' Which do you like best?" asked a pale girl of Polly, in one of ...
— An Old-fashioned Girl • Louisa May Alcott
... was still there. He felt for it as though he were in a dream. The bright light made him giddy. The stone was his link with and his tangible assurance that the life which he had led for the past weeks was a reality; it was his sacred token that the vision of Akhnaton was no mere phantom of an over-imaginative brain. Yet, even as he felt its hard substance between his thumb and forefinger, he wondered if it was really there. He knew that imagination can create strange things; phantom tumours have been produced by imagination, tumours which are visible ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... with naught to inspire and none to witness the flowering of her soul. That this rare plant should thus fail and wither seemed to him a crime quite outside his own personal concern. This unreal Mary Ellen, this daily phantom, which hung faces on bare walls and put words between the lines of law books, seemed to have some message for him. Yet had he not had his final message from the actual Mary Ellen? And, after all, did ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... before there had been a crowd of mounted men. We could hardly believe our eyes, or comprehend at first that what we had seen was simply a mirage, but so like reality that anyone must have been deceived. Our relief, on becoming convinced that we had been scared by a phantom enemy, was considerable; but the apparition had the good effect of making us realize the folly of having allowed ourselves to be tempted so far away from our camp without escort of any kind in an enemy's country, and we determined not to ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... pieces of mechanism scattered about, apparently models, such as might be seen in the study of any professional mechanician. Four automata (mechanical contrivances which, with these people, answer the ordinary purposes of domestic service) stood phantom-like at each angle in the wall. In a recess was a low couch, or bed with pillows. A window, with curtains of some fibrous material drawn aside, opened upon a large balcony. My host stepped out into the balcony; I followed him. We were on the uppermost story of one of the angular ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... on the palm? I took up the big magnifying-glass with which I had often scanned that photograph close before. Not a sign or a trace of them. I shut my eyes, and called up again the mental Picture of the murder. I looked hard at the phantom-hand in it, that floated like a vision, all distinct before my mind's eye. It was flat and smooth and white. Not a scar—not a sign on it. I turned round to ...
— Recalled to Life • Grant Allen
... silently from the river deep down between the cliffs, and wreathing the mountain-side above, might have been the smoke from some unearthly battle fought in the dim pass by ghostly guns, yet posted there in the darkness, manned by phantom gunners, while phantom horses stood behind, lit vaguely up by phantom camp-fires. At the given word the laniards were pulled together, and together as one the six black guns, belching flame and lead, roared their last challenge on the misty night, sending a ...
— The Burial of the Guns • Thomas Nelson Page
... bounding dance, and her common speech like a gay and sparkling song;—her laugh echoed from hill to hill, like the tone of some sweet, but wild and shrill instrument of music. She out-stripped the boldest of the youths in the chase; skimmed like some phantom shape along the edge of precipices approached even by the wild goat with fear; and looked round with careless joy, from pinnacles which interrupted the flight of the eagle ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 480, Saturday, March 12, 1831 • Various
... away a less happy man than he had come. This time it was not sheer Wanderlust that had driven him into the wilderness. He had fled in the blind hope of escaping from the unescapable. The ogre to whatsoever No Man's Land he betook himself would forever be haunted by the phantom of the elf. . . . It was just as well he had gone, ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... hieroglyphics in the middle heavens, showering over the dark harbour into the sea. Scorrier walked slowly. A weight seemed lifted from his mind, so entangled had he become in that uncanny silence. At last Pippin had broken through the spell. To get that, letter sent would be the laying of a phantom, the rehabilitation of commonsense. Now that this silence was in the throes of being broken, he felt curiously tender towards Pippin, without the hero-worship of old days, but with a queer protective feeling. After all, he was different from other men. In spite of ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... open. A gigantic figure of frightful aspect stood before him, and continued to gaze upon him with silent severity. 23. Brutus is reported to have asked, "Art thou a daemon or a mortal? and why comest thou to me?" "Brutus," answered the phantom, "I am thy evil genius—thou shalt see me again at Philippi."[9] "Well, then," replied Brutus, without being discomposed, "we shall meet again." Upon this the phantom vanished; when Brutus, calling to his servants, asked if they had seen anything; ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... Voltaire, "the patriarch, does not desire to abandon his redeeming and avenging God;"[3313] let us tolerate in him this remnant of superstition on account of his great services; let us nevertheless examine this phantom in man which he regards with infantile vision. We admit it into our minds through faith, and faith is always suspicious. It is forged by ignorance, fear, and imagination, which are all deceptive powers. At first it was simply ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... European sleeps, he feels sure of success, for the Asiatic will not long resist the attraction of repose. At the proper moment, he makes a vertical incision in the cloth of the tent, on the spot where he happens to be, and just large enough to admit him. He glides through like a phantom, without making the least grain of sand creak beneath his tread. He is perfectly naked, and all his body is rubbed over with oil; a two-edged knife is suspended from his neck. He will squat down close to your couch, and, with incredible coolness and dexterity, will gather ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... granite. The low shore, often within reach of our oar blades, appeared gloomy and inhospitable, the spectral rushes creeping far out upon the water like living things, seeming to grasp after us as the wind swept them, and we glided past in phantom silence. Beyond, like a great black wall, arose higher ground, occasionally jutting into bare bluffs outlined against the lighter sky; again diversified by gaunt dead trees, their fleshless limbs extended ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... away merrily towards Boston, without so much as a parting glance at that fountain of dreamlike vicissitude. He knew not that a phantom of Wealth had thrown a golden hue upon its waters, nor that one of Love had sighed softly to their murmur, nor that one of Death had threatened to crimson them with his blood—all, in the brief hour since he lay down to sleep. ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... and again we shouted and rowed toward it, and again it glided away from us and disappeared, and again, and again, through the seemingly endless procession of the slow-moving hours of that first day, we chased the phantom ship. ...
— Out of the Fog • C. K. Ober
... creak, not with the heat of June but with the weight of Invisibles who come to lounge in the chair; Peshawur possesses houses that none will willingly rent; and there is something—not fever—wrong with a big bungalow in Allahabad. The older Provinces simply bristle with haunted houses, and march phantom armies ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... again to the mysteries of our own limited life and, as in a far-off phantom parallel, we begin ...
— Paradoxes of Catholicism • Robert Hugh Benson
... a farewell or a tear, A sob or a flutter of breath, Unharmed by the phantom of Fear, To glide through the ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... kindness that it has for the last few months almost reconciled me to myself. Yes, it makes me happy to have you cast a glance upon my soul, at once so barren and so full of bloom; and I am thankful for every gentle word you say to one who rides the phantom steed ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... Army which they had ceased to trust and had well-nigh deserted and cast off, had been enabled to shiver all the banded strength of a second English Insurrection, aided by an invasion from Scotland—even after this rebuke from God, were they not still pursuing the same phantom of an Accommodation? Here the Remonstrants argue the whole subject most earnestly. Having laid down the principle that in every State the care of all matters of public concern must be in a Supreme Representative Council or Parliament, freely ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... no real foundation; it floated like a variegated phantom in the air, a fata morgana, whose glittering temple halls and pillars would soon melt away like the early cloud and the morning dew. In these "cloud-capped towers and gorgeous palaces," the two great freethinkers and genial philosophers of their century intended ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... defiled, defective, false, surreptitious; who have corrected some passages, tampered with others; torn out others; who have converted every bulwark wherewith it was guarded into Lutheran "spirits," what I may call phantom ramparts and parted walls. All this they have done that they might not be utterly dumbfounded by falling upon Scripture texts contrary to their errors, texts which they would have found it as hard to get over as to swallow hot ashes or chew stones. This ...
— Ten Reasons Proposed to His Adversaries for Disputation in the Name • Edmund Campion
... his pastimes, or his studies, unfavourable to the formation of the poetical character. His amusements were active; his reading, though without method, was yet congenial to his impassioned imagination; and the phantom of an enthusiastic attachment, of which Miss Chaworth was not the only object (for it was altogether intellectual, and shared with others), were circumstances calculated to open various sources of reflection, and to concentrate the elements of an energetic ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... do you dream? Nay, never a dream will stay, Never a phantom is fond, or a vision kind. Your dreams elude you and fly through the dark my way, My dreams fly forth to you whom they may not find; And we in the darkness weep, we weep and ...
— The Rainbow and the Rose • E. Nesbit
... defend the purity of purpose in giving examples that where there is the presumption of uprightness they are anxious to remove even the least spot, lest, if all examples had their truthfulness disputed, and if the purity of all human virtue were denied, it might in the end be regarded as a mere phantom, and so all effort to attain it be made light of as vain affectation and ...
— The Critique of Practical Reason • Immanuel Kant
... accompanies its coming. Reaching the zenith, it seems there to hang poised awhile,—a ghostly bridge arching the empyrean,—upreaching its measureless span from either underside of the world. Then the colossal phantom begins to turn, as on a pivot of air,—always preserving its curvilinear symmetry, but moving its unseen ends beyond and below the sky-circle. And at last it floats away unbroken beyond the blue sweep of the world, with a wind following after. Day after day, almost at ...
— Chita: A Memory of Last Island • Lafcadio Hearn
... became more solemn. Brissot spoke prophetically of the misfortunes of the republic, deprived of her most virtuous and eloquent citizens. "How much blood will it require to wash out our own?" cried he. They were silent, and appeared terrified at the phantom of the future evoked ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... beat a little faster than it was wont when, with the silence of a phantom, she began slowly raising her head, with her eyes fixed on the top of the rock, which she touched with her hands. Before she reached the elevation in mind, she discovered the Indian was doing the same thing, and, fortunately for her, was two ...
— The Phantom of the River • Edward S. Ellis
... ideas, and above all an overpowering will, are here indubitably marked. Nor does the form, which her activity assumed, seem less adapted for displaying these qualities, than many other forms in which we praise them. The gorgeous inspirations of the Catholic religion are as real as the phantom of posthumous renown; the love of our native soil is as laudable as ambition, or the principle of military honour. Jeanne d'Arc must have been a creature of shadowy yet far-glancing dreams, of unutterable feelings, of 'thoughts that wandered through Eternity.' Who can tell the trials and the ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... Future, and its gifts, alone we prize, Few joys the Present brings, and those alloy'd; Th' expected fulness leaves an aching void; But HOPE stands by, and lifts her sunny eyes That gild the days to come.—She still relies The Phantom HAPPINESS not thus shall glide Always from life.—Alas!—yet ill betide Austere Experience, when she coldly tries In distant roses to discern the thorn! Ah! is it wise to anticipate our pain? Arriv'd, it then is soon enough to mourn. Nor call the dear Consoler false and vain, When ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... by what his comrade was ridden, shrieked in pure animal terror, uttering unearthly sounds that cut the air like a knife. For a moment he could only stand and shriek; then he turned and fled through the yard, and the other fled after him, the glimmering phantom clutching him tight. Down the road they fled. Mira could now see nothing save the riding Thing, apparently horsed on empty air; but now she saw it, still clutching close with its left hand, raise the ...
— The Green Satin Gown • Laura E. Richards
... stone, and the frail green moss that clings to it, are more essentially different than were Roger Pierce and Violet Channing. Without a trace of the Shadow in herself, Violet disbelieved its existence in others. She had heard a rumor of Roger's phantom, but thought it some strange delusion, or want of perception, in those who told her,—being rather softened toward him with pity that he ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... ghostly light; the ship, like a vast phantom, loomed out against the black sky directly ahead, and after a momentary pause the sharp report of the brass nine-pounder rang out forward, the flash lighting up the chase for an instant, and bringing every rope, spar, and sail into clear relief, while the sound was repeated right and left by ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... give him her full attention. She had a feeling that she had seen the man somewhere before, but where and under what circumstances she could not recall. It was no moment for retrospection and the phantom eluded her. ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... Another Phantom Peril. As the young girl is taught to fear the menstrual period, so the older woman is taught to dread the time when the periods shall cease. Despite the general enlightenment of this day and age, the menopause or "change of life" is all too frequently feared as a "critical period" ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... 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 Mrs. | |Pepper or another medium and being of | |some use in the world and having a | |pleasant, dim-lighted cabinet all its | |own, this unhappy ghost—or ghostess—is | |pestering Marciana Rose of 1496 Bergen | |street, who owns ...
— Newspaper Reporting and Correspondence - A Manual for Reporters, Correspondents, and Students of - Newspaper Writing • Grant Milnor Hyde
... mocks and maddens me. I ought to despise myself, and I certainly shall, for this unpardonable weakness. But very precious memories unnerved me just then, and I clung, not to you, not to Abbie Ames' husband, but to the phantom of the Cuthbert whom long ago I loved so well, to the vision of the young bridegroom I worshipped so blindly. Let me go. ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... and powder and shot brought from below, and our men stood ready for the next order. The phantom ship, for such she appeared, loomed larger and larger. The admiral divined her ...
— The Boy who sailed with Blake • W.H.G. Kingston
... that she fell dead at the entrance of the castle. Even at this day, notwithstanding the ruins, as soon as twilight falls, it is said she still descends the steps, runs from story to story, glides through the corridors and the rooms, and passes like a phantom through the gaping windows which open into the desert void. All return. Isabeau, Gudule, Vonne, Austreberthe, all these "happy dead," loved by the stern messenger, who spared them from the vicissitudes of life by taking them suddenly when, in early youth, they thought ...
— The Dream • Emile Zola
... anythin' we-'uns strikes now days. Take that tale about a fish swallerin' a feller named Jonah; why, a fish 't could swaller a man 'od have to be as big in the barrel as the Pecos River is wide an' have an openin' in his face bigger'n Phantom Lake Cave. Nobody on the Pecos ever see such a fish. But I wish you fellers to distinctly understan' it's a fact. I believes it. Does you? Every feller that believes a fish swallered Jonah, hold ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... to the least of the French writers he would have kept it, but to a German poet it was not worth while. What is a native poet to the great German king? A phantom that he knows not, and believes not. As great as he is, the king showed himself very small to me. I sang him as a poetess and he bestowed a pittance upon me as one would to a beggar ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... the great phantom of geological time rises before the student of this, as of all other, fragments of the history of our earth—springing irrepressibly out of the facts, like the Djin from the jar which the fisherman so incautiously opened; and like the Djin again, being vaporous, shifting, and indefinable, ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... of the past arising to confront her, but which she could not for the moment identify. And still she looked out, resisting the impulse of dread which bade her move away, fixing a strained gaze upon the captive, in a vain struggle to allay, by one moment of calm scrutiny, that phantom of her memory which, act as she might, would not be repressed, but which each instant seemed to expand into ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... humanity, and sustained by the affections of the people. While our physical force and accumulating wealth would thus be rapidly and vastly augmented, our moral power would be increased in a still grander ratio. Then the cry of tyrants, that self-government is a phantom, and republics a failure, would cease to oppress the listening ear of humanity. Then the chains would soon fall everywhere from the limbs of the slave. Then the reactionary and feudal party of Europe, now so loudly proclaiming republics a failure, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... through the facility of divorce, and through the consequences of that facility (viz., levity in choosing, and fickleness in adhering to the choice), into so exquisite a traffic of selfishness, that it could not yield so much as a phantom model of sanctity. The relation of husband and wife had, for all moral impressions, perished amongst the Romans. And, although it is not quite so bad with ourselves at present, that is what ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... and howled like a wolf—like a lone wolf that has found no quarry—melancholy, mean, grown reckless with his hunger. There was a pause of nearly a minute. Then in the hideous darkness a phantom wolf-pack took up the howl in chorus, and for three long minutes there was din beside which the voice of living wolves at war would be a slumber song. Ten times ghastlier than if it had been real, the chorus wailed and ululated back and forth along immeasurable ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... our flight; but all around are multitudes of stars, some shining with a brightness almost equal to what our Sun appears to give forth at that great distance, others hardly visible, but the smallest telescope increases their number enormously, and presents to our mind the appalling phantom of immensity in all its terror, standing there to withstand our next great step. How are we to continue on our journey when our very senses seem paralysed by this obstruction, and even imagination is powerless from utter loneliness? One guide only is there to help us, the messenger ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... (2 Cor. xii. 4) was "caught up into Paradise," which in those days was a kind of region that roofed the earth. The Shaykh in question began by showing the Voltairean Sultan of Egypt certain specious miracles, such as a phantom army (in our tale two lions), Cairo reduced to ashes, the Nile in flood and a Garden of Irem, where before lay a desert. He then called for a tub, stripped the King to a zone girding his loins and made him dip his head into the water. Then came the adventures as in the following tale. When ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... lives in a phantom Court, believing herself still Empress of Mexico, and that the Emperor will soon come home from the wars to ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood
... vessel leaped from wave to wave like a thing of life, until Isenstein, with its tall towers and its green marble halls, sank from sight in the distance and the mist. And Siegfried and his noble steed seemed to be the only living beings on board; for the sailors who plied the oars were so silent and phantom-like, that they appeared to be nought but the ghosts of the summer sea-breezes. As the ship sped swiftly on its way, all the creatures in the sea paused to behold the sight. The mermen rested from their weary search for hidden ...
— The Story of Siegfried • James Baldwin
... make so much vain show. What! Will you find no difference between Hypocrisy and genuine devoutness? And will you treat them both alike, and pay The self-same honour both to masks and faces Set artifice beside sincerity, Confuse the semblance with reality, Esteem a phantom like a living person, And counterfeit as good as honest coin? Men, for the most part, are strange creatures, truly! You never find them keep the golden mean; The limits of good sense, too narrow for them, Must always be passed by, in each direction; ...
— Tartuffe • Jean-Baptiste Poquelin Moliere
... Xerxes, we may well set the grave and dignified patriotism of Atossa, the Queen-mother of the Persian kingdom; the loyalty, in spite of their bewilderment, of the aged men who form the Chorus; and, above all, the royal phantom of Darius, evoked from the shadowland by the libations of Atossa and by the appealing cries of the Chorus. The latter, indeed, hardly dare to address the kingly ghost: but Atossa bravely narrates to him the catastrophe, of which, in the lower world, Darius has known ...
— Suppliant Maidens and Other Plays • AEschylus
... him years and years before, and now she saw him; he was there, and she knew him. But not a throb went through her heart. He came to her side, and she gave him no greeting. "Why should I heed him?" she said to herself. "He is dead. I am only in a dream. This is not he; it is but his pitiful phantom that comes wandering hither—a ghost without a heart, made out of the moonlight. It is nothing. I am nothing. I am lost. Everything is an empty dream of loss. I know it, and there is no waking. If there were, surely the sight of him would give me some shimmer of delight. The old time was but a thicker ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... fashioned unuttered entreaties,— Went, and came again in a year at the time of the meeting, Haggard and wan of face, and wasted with passion and sorrow. Dead in his eyes was the careless smile of old, and its phantom Haunted his lips in a sneer of restless incredulous mocking. Day by day he came to the outer skirts of the circle, Dwelling on her, where she knelt by the white-haired exhorter, her father, With his hollow looks, and never moved ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... Buffon said is a big blasphemy: genius is not long-continued patience. Still, there is some truth in the statement, and more than people think, especially as regards our own day. Art! art! art! bitter deception! phantom that glows with light, only to lead one ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... stone. If the health of the body were attended to as a matter of course, as its cleanliness is attended to by those of us who are more civilized, how much easier life might be! Indeed, the various trippings on, and endeavors to encircle, this physical stone, raise many phantom stones, and the severity of the fall is just as great when one trips over a stone that is not there. Don Quixote was quite exhausted when he had been fighting the windmills. One recognizes over and over the truth spoken ...
— As a Matter of Course • Annie Payson Call
... of Jimmie Dale? The Night Operator, From Now On, Pawned, and, most recently, Doors of the Night have had their public ready and waiting. That same public will denude the book counters of Jimmie Dale and The Phantom Clue ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... when Lavender called attention to a fishing-smack that was apparently making for the harbor. With all sails set she was sweeping by them like some black phantom across the dark plain of the sea. They could not make out the figures on board of her, but as she passed some one called ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... Mount Music on Wednesday, and on Thursday, Larry was to be married to Tishy Mangan. What room was there for phantom fears when these things were certainties? What spectre from the other world has power ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... therefore start not (too nice and lovely maid) at shadows of things that can but frighten fools. Put me not off with these delays; rather say you but dissembled love all this while, than now 'tis born, to die again with a poor fright of nonsense. A fit of honour! a phantom imaginary, and no more; no, no, represent me to your soul more favourably, think you see me languishing at your feet, breathing out my last in sighs and kind reproaches, on the pitiless Sylvia; reflect when I am dead, ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn
... heart, Why is it that I tremble when thine eyes, Thy human eyes and beautiful human speech, Draw me, and stir within my soul That subtle ineradicable longing For tender comradeship? It is because I cannot all at once, Through the half-lights and phantom-haunted mists That separate and enshroud us life from life, Discern the nearness or the strangeness of thy paths Nor plumb thy depths. I am like one that comes alone at night To a strange stream, and by an unknown ford ...
— Alcyone • Archibald Lampman
... he deliberated. Yes, there could be no doubt about the decision. He could not endure another public expulsion, or even another birching; he could not endure the cold faces of even his best friends. No, no! he could not face the horrible phantom of detection, and exposure, and shame. But worse than all this, he could not endure himself; he must fly away from the sense that he, Eric Williams, the brother of Vernon, the friend of Edwin Russell, was sunk in all degradation. Could it really, really be, that he, once the soul ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar
... politics over the dinner table? That this fatal policy was dictated simply by fear of the growth of "Russian barbarism and autocracy" and "the overshadowing of the Western nations by a country whose institutions are inimical to our own"? That while we were thus led into war by a phantom danger to our Indian possessions, we were quite blind to the real danger which threatened them, which a year or two later, in the Mutiny, nearly lost us them and which were not due to the machinations of a rival power but to our own misgovernment; that this very "barbaric ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell
... standing about on deck, we saw the little brig drifting by us, hove to under her fore topsail double reefed; and she glided by like a phantom. Not a word was spoken, and we saw no one on deck but the man at the wheel. Toward morning the captain put his head out of the companion-way and told the second mate, who commanded our watch, to look out for a change of wind, which usually ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... the sea and eaten by the fishes. It was, however, something, so they maintained; for they had seen it; the dead man had spoken; the dreamer had questioned him. Was it psyche, was it pneuma, was it nous, with whom one had conversed in the dream? One imagined a phantom, an airy figure: it was skia, it was daimon, a ghost from the shades, a little soul of air and fire, very unrestricted, which wandered I know ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... may I never see another! It is a phantom! It's a nightmare! It's something that comes to ...
— The Girls of Central High in Camp - The Old Professor's Secret • Gertrude W. Morrison
... the contemplation of this death by hanging, a new and violent enemy to brave. The prospect of a slow and solitary expiation would have no congeniality with his wicked thoughts, but this throttling and strangling has. There is always before him, an ugly, bloody, scarecrow phantom, that champions her, as it were, and yet shows him, in a ghastly way, the example of murder. Is she very weak, or very trustful in him, or infirm, or old? It gives a hideous courage to what would be mere slaughter ...
— Miscellaneous Papers • Charles Dickens
... existing in England to be present at the sights exhibited in a despotic government. A thousand times, in like manner, have I wished that those European philosophers whose closet speculations exalt a state of nature above a state of civilization, could survey the phantom which their heated imaginations have raised. Possibly they might then learn that a state of nature is, of all others, least adapted to promote the happiness of a being capable of sublime research and unending ratiocination. That a savage roaming for prey ...
— A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson • Watkin Tench
... invisible powers of life and death. In his conception of nature all things were ordered by the dead,—light and darkness, weather and season, winds and tides, mist and rain, growth and decay, sickness and health. The viewless atmosphere was a phantom-sea, an ocean of ghost; the soil that he tilled was pervaded by spirit-essence; the trees were haunted and holy; even the rocks and the stones were infused with conscious life .... How might he discharge his duty to the ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... villain. The Parliament had made their covenant with the King at Newport—a bargain which gave them all, and left him nothing—save only his broken health, grey hairs, and the bare name of King. He would have been but a phantom of authority, powerless as the royal spectres Aeneas met in the under-world. They had got all from him—all save the betrayal of his friends. There he budged not, but ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... the schooner, rowed gently over the lagoon, taking care to keep as near to the beach as possible. We rowed in the utmost silence, and with muffled oars, so that had any one observed us at the distance of a few yards, he might have almost taken us for a phantom-boat, or a shadow on the dark water. Not a breath of air was stirring; but, fortunately, the gentle ripple of the sea upon the shore, mingled with the soft roar of the breaker on the distant reef, effectually drowned the ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... refused to utter more than "no" or "yes," and since the first promised new torment and agony, but the latter perchance peace, she breathed a "yes:" a little word, born of fear and exhaustion, and, scarce alive, winged with a mysterious power. Her mind, confused and consumed with longing, turned a phantom image, the creation of a thousand effervescent brains, into an actual experience. The half consciously heard, half distractedly read, became a burning reality. Her existence seemed strangely entangled in that of the man of the wood and dale, who had ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... ready to split his sides with laughing, when the Chevalier de Grammont, resuming the discourse, "apropos, sire," said he, "I had forgot to tell you, that, to increase my ill-humour, I was stopped, as I was getting out of my chair, by the devil of a phantom in masquerade, who would by all means persuade me that the queen had commanded me to dance with her; and as I excused myself with the least rudeness possible, she charged me to find out who was to be her ...
— The Memoirs of Count Grammont, Complete • Anthony Hamilton
... As stealthily as a phantom did the canoe bearing the scout skim along the shore of the Gila, hugging the banks as closely as possible, so as to take advantage of the ribbon of shadow which followed the winding of the stream. The moon was creeping ...
— Through Apache Lands • R. H. Jayne
... the stern of the judges' yacht, and anchored in the line indicated by the captain of the fleet. The Skylark soon arrived, and took her place next to the Penobscot. In these two yachts all the interest of the occasion centred. The Phantom and the Sea Foam soon came into line; and then it was found that the Christabel had withdrawn, for it blew too hard for her. Mr. Norwood and his son came on board, with Dick Adams, who was to be mate of the Maud, and Kennedy, who was well skilled in sailing a boat. Donald ...
— The Yacht Club - or The Young Boat-Builder • Oliver Optic
... along behind her, dim shadows in the dark. Her powerful electric headlight threw a beam, long and bright, that burrowed into the black void far in front. But for this and the few red-glowing chinks in her firebox and the thunder of the wheels, the freight might have been some phantom reptile rushing through the land with two red eyes ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse
... has a secret no man can find out," said Uncle Teddy. "Big and awkward as he is, he moves through the forest as silently as a phantom. How he does it no one knows. A horse or a cow, though smaller, would make ten times ...
— The Campfire Girls on Ellen's Isle - The Trail of the Seven Cedars • Hildegard G. Frey
... closely into the face of the mysterious woman—and suddenly I gave an involuntary shudder: there was a chilly breath upon me. And then I was not lying down, but sitting up in my bed; and where, as I fancied, the phantom had stood, the moonlight lay in a long streak of ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... we reached the summit of the south peak. Here we stopped to look down on Camp Sierra. Long shadows spread their mantle across the glaciers, and in the east lay the phantom {p.126} mountain—the shadow of Rainier. A flash of light attracted our attention. We saw that our companions had ...
— The Mountain that was 'God' • John H. Williams
... Dread phantom, with pale finger on thy lips, Who dost unclose the awful doors for each, That ope but once, and are unclosed no more, Turn the key gently in the mystic ward, And silently unloose the silver cord; Lay thy chill seal of silence upon ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean
... upon the great armoury of the castle, a dim indistinguishable light shining upon its fretted roof and masses of faintly gleaming steel. The scene which followed, in which the Countess Hilda, disguised as the traditional phantom of the Hohenzollerns, whose appearance bodes misfortune and death to those who behold it, throws herself across the path of her rival in the hope of driving her and those interested in her by sheer force of terror ...
— Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... trade, but once kept a toll-bar in South Wales, which, however, he was obliged to leave at the end of two years, owing to the annoyance which he experienced from ghosts and goblins, and unearthly things, particularly phantom hearses, which used to pass through his gate at midnight without paying, ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... himself, pictures in which the gleams of fortune were reserved for the tricolour flag, and gloom and disaster shrouded the Union Jack; he conceived that Nelson had made for Jamaica, and that the British squadrons were engaged in chasing phantom French fleets around Ireland or to the East Indies. "We have not to do," he said, "with a far-seeing, but ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... Melhuish was another man's wife had stunned him. It was not until the fire of sacrifice had died into parched ashes that its earlier banality became clear. He realized then that he had given his love to a phantom. By one of nature's miracles a vain and selfish creature was gifted in the artistic portrayal of the finer emotions. He had worshiped the actress, the mimic, not the woman herself. At any rate, that was how he read the repellent notion that he should bargain with any man for the sale ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy
... is something subtle and bewildering about that sort of frail and fantastic wood. A forest of big trees seems like a bodily barrier; but somehow that mist of thin lines seems like a spiritual barrier. It is as if one were caught in a fairy cloud or could not pass a phantom. When I had well lost the last gleam of the high road a curious and definite feeling came upon me. Now I suddenly felt something much more practical and extraordinary—the absence of humanity: inhuman loneliness. Of course, there was nothing ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... he gazed from a window of the hall upon the undulating park, the majestic trees, the flowers, the shrubs, and the many natural beauties with which the place was full,—"must I be chased from this spot, the home of my self and of my kindred, by a phantom—must I indeed seek refuge elsewhere, because my own home has ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... the rows upon rows of senseless marble, supported by the expressionless stone faces of the gods, these things overwhelmed the great warrior. Then, from the gloom, he saw a white figure emerge. Is it a phantom? At first he thought it some fearful vision. But as he peered through the twilight he recognized—Aida. Perhaps it was her ghost come to comfort him, he thought, and raised himself to stare ...
— Operas Every Child Should Know - Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces • Mary Schell Hoke Bacon
... a different way, as if he uttered an unguarded thought, "I had so little to make me think she cared." There was in it that phantom of speculation and concern which a sick man finds under pressure, and it penetrated Alicia that he abandoned himself to his invalid's privileges as if he valued them. He lay extended beside her among his cushions and wraps; ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... phantom I follow forever through all of the shadow and shine, Whose face is fair as the blossom, whose form is as warm as the wine; Whose lips are as sweet as the dewfalls that velvet the mornings of June, And eyes as the deep stars of Autumn that glow in ...
— Oklahoma Sunshine • Freeman E. (Freeman Edwin) Miller
... single strand of recollection; he saw her parted lips, the passionate reproach of her eyes and felt her strenuous tacit acquiescence; he sensed the richness of her love. So he stood, unstable, vacillating and a treacherous groper amidst cruel shards of an ineluctable memory, powerless to stay the fair phantom and fearful of looking night squarely in the front. And he remained a dweller in the shadows, as he faintly fingered the bevelled-edge screw of ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... herself, and go close hooded. If her father but knew of the errand she is on, it could not be executed. And well is she aware of this. For the proud planter is still proud, despite his reverses, still clings to the phantom of social superiority; and if he saw her now, wandering through the woods at an hour near midnight, alone; if he could divine her purpose: to meet a man, who in time past has been rather coldly received at his house—because scarce ranking with his own select circle—had ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... but there is a still small voice within me wich whispers, "All is well!" The delusive phantom, Hope, may be playin false with me. The wish may be paternal parient to the thought, and I may be indulgin in a dream from wich I shel be, to-morrer, roodly awakened; but it's my opinion that the day-star uv glory hez ...
— "Swingin Round the Cirkle." • Petroleum V. Nasby
... And a real sound smothered the phantom. Johnson the purser was sitting here alone in the dimness. He was smoking. I noticed that his cigar held a long, frail ash. It could not have been him I was chasing. He was sitting there quite calmly. A thick-necked, heavy fellow, ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... a year till of late—I know not whether the thing may be seen still—a strange phantom used to appear at San Fernando, twenty miles to the north. Canoes of Indians came mysteriously across the Gulf of Paria from the vast swamps of the Orinoco; and the naked folk landed, and went up through the town, after the Naparima ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... that from the martyr's bier as from the battlefield of right it is but one step to paradise, may we not, on days like this, draw back the veil that separates from our mortal gaze the phantom squadrons as they pass again in grand review before their "Martyr President."—From an address by Hiram F. Stevens, read before the Minnesota Commandery ...
— The Poets' Lincoln - Tributes in Verse to the Martyred President • Various
... to the rest of the world, David would maintain an intense and secret life in his murderer's conscience. He had never fought such a subtle and implacable foe, and he lay thinking of how he could create conditions that would give him escape, push the phantom from him, make him forget, and be as he had been when no one had disputed his sovereignty over himself. He tried to think that time would mitigate this haunting discomfort. His sense of guilt, his fear of his wife, would die when the ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... you have said, I am not surprised that you should consider principle as a phantom. But you only quarrel with the word: for, as principle can mean nothing more than a rule of action, deduced from past experience and influencing our present conduct, you, certainly, like other men, act from ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... instant. The explanation lies in sin. Death is but the projection of a sin-burdened conscience upon the mists of the unknown. Thank God that it has been given to our generation to tear away the veil from this falsehood, and to recognize the absolute unreality of the phantom which the ignorance and superstition of guilty humanity have conjured up." The smooth, deliberate voice of Mrs. Staggchase broke the silence which this ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... contradictions of my character without inquiring into the causes of them? Are there secrets in your heart which seek absolution through a knowledge of mine? Ah! Natalie, you have guessed mine; and it is better you should know the whole truth. Yes, my life is shadowed by a phantom; a word evokes it; it hovers vaguely above me and about me; within my soul are solemn memories, buried in its depths like those marine productions seen in calmest weather and which the storms of ocean cast ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... same time set their bells tinkling; when the breeze first blows, then dies down, leaving the cheek kissed; when the ships on the sea below seem to cross each other and pass on as if drawn by an invisible hand; when there are distant concussions in the air and phantom horsemen galloping, ceasing; when the horizon swims blue, green, emotional—then Mrs. Jarvis, heaving a sigh, thinks to herself, "If only some one could give me... if I could give some one...." But ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... through the separating barrier, and lavish their whole hearts on each other; but, in spite of these generous qualities, their common desires and their bitter suffering, some falsehood, some pride, some shyness, some suspicion, some chill, intangible phantom, is set fatally between them. In every community there are piteous tragedies of this sort, little dreamed of by those outside, but which the bleeding hearts concerned in them feel as a deadly drain, hastening them towards ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... States; but to those who heard it first to-night it came as the revelation of a new reality. As the unveiling of some solid marble figure would transform the thought of one who had taken it, when swathed, for a ghost or phantom, so did the heart's desire of these singers stand out now with such intensity as to give it objective existence to those who ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... After the phantom of our Freedom died Methought a Voice within the Tavern cried: "Drink coffee, Lads, for that is all that's left Since our Land of the Free ...
— The Rubaiyat of Ohow Dryyam - With Apologies to Omar • J. L. Duff
... in especial had been stirring on his cot as though trying to throw off some phantom of dread. Now instantly after the sentry's hail this stirring ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys as Sergeants - or, Handling Their First Real Commands • H. Irving Hancock
... certainly; but Harold, who invented his own games and played them without assistance, always stuck staunchly to a new fad, till he had worn it quite out. Just at present he was a muffin-man, and day and night he went through passages and up and down staircases, ringing a noiseless bell and offering phantom muffins to invisible wayfarers. It sounds a poor sort of sport; and yet—to pass along busy streets of your own building, for ever ringing an imaginary bell and offering airy muffins of your own make to a bustling thronging crowd of your own creation—there ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... hard-favoured and unshowy, which he took as the staple of active and every-day duties, and that virtue was JUSTICE. Now, in earlier life, he had been enamoured of the conventional Florimel that we call HONOUR,—a shifting and shadowy phantom, that is but the reflex of the opinion of the time and clime. But justice has in it something permanent and solid; and out of justice arises the ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book III • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... say," Raskolnikov went on, twisting his mouth into a smile, "that I am mad. I thought just now that perhaps I really am mad, and have only seen a phantom." ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... strange the world seemed to him all at once! Peopled with phantom creatures, that came he knew not whence, and went he knew not whither! Creatures of awe and horror, who came out of chaos, and went back into annihilation! Who were flung here and there by cosmic forces, ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... seemed to concur in supposing that the lady must have borne no inactive part in arranging the affair; there were considerations of expediency which she would be far more likely to appreciate than Mr. Ellenwood, and there was just the specious phantom of sentiment and romance in this late union of two early lovers which sometimes makes a fool of a woman who has lost her true feelings among the accidents of life. All the wonder was how the gentleman, with his lack of worldly ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... we know by admeasurement, whatsoever hath these is 'High Art,' whatsoever hath not, is 'Low Art.'" This was as certain as the fact that the sun is a globe of glowing charcoal, because forsooth they both yield light and heat. Now if the phantom of a then embryon-electrician had arisen and told them that their "high art marbles possessed an electric influence, which, acting in the brain of the observer, would awake in him emotions of so exalted a character, ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... the spring crooned softly over its mossy rocks and where young brook trout darted in phantom flashes, Ham Burton found Paul with his face tight-clasped in his nervous hands. Back there in the school-house had been only terror, but out here was something else. A specter of self-contempt had risen to contend with physical ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... club-boats are out, and from island to island in the distance these shafts of youthful life shoot swiftly across. There races some swift Atalanta, with no apple to fall in her path but some soft and spotted oak-apple from an overhanging tree; there the Phantom, with a crew white and ghostlike in the distance, glimmers in and out behind the headlands, while yonder wherry glides lonely across the smooth expanse. The voices of all these oarsmen are dim and almost inaudible, being so far away; but one would scarcely wish that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... a tilt of the torn heath I saw suddenly between myself and the moon a black shapeless pile higher than a house. The atmosphere was so intense that I really thought of a pile of dead Danes, with some phantom conqueror on the top of it. Fortunately I was crossing these wastes with a friend who knew more history than I; and he told me that this was a barrow older than Alfred, older than the Romans, older perhaps ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... "The old, old phantom!" he said, half to himself. "Will it never be laid, even for those who know it to be a myth?" And then to his father: "It's no use, pappy. I tell you we've got to take this thing by the neck. See here; that's how near they came to settling ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... woman's love-cry broke midway, the calabashes were lowered, and the dancers ceased, as all gazed into the abyss above the sea, where a rocket flared like a wan phantom ...
— The House of Pride • Jack London
... novel now is nothing more Than an old castle and a creaking door; A distant hovel; Clanking of chains, a gallery, a light, Old armour, and a phantom all in ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... parliament has been induced to sanctify the imposition; false lights have been held out to the country gentlemen, and they have been seduced into the support of a most destructive war, under the impression that the land-tax would be diminished by means of an American revenue. The visionary phantom, thus conjured up for the basest of purposes—that of deception—is now about to vanish." Chatham had said that Burgoyne might or might not be an able officer; but he now eulogised his zeal, his bravery, and his abilities, and then, in defiance of his assertion that he would not condemn ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... Gilmore, on the upper deck forward, repeating to the pilot the leadsman's muttered "No bottom." The storm spread its sheltering wing over the gallant vessel, baffling the excited efforts of the enemy, before whose eyes she floated like a phantom ship; now wrapped in impenetrable darkness, now standing forth in the full blaze of the lightning close under their guns. The friendly flashes enabled her pilot, William E. Hoel, who had volunteered from another gunboat to share the fortunes of the night, to keep her in the channel; once ...
— The Gulf and Inland Waters - The Navy in the Civil War. Volume 3. • A. T. Mahan
... situations like mine, you must often have experienced, I noticed her pliant waist spring in easy undulation to the horse's flying leap. And so, with that thick cable of platted hair flapping and surging down her back, she vanished from the scene. She was a phantom of delight, when first she gleamed upon my sight; but the revulsion of feeling was one of the quickest and ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... hundred cities, cried out, overcome with rage, "O father, name abandoned by thy daughter! O my duty! Whence, whither am I come? One death is too little for virgins' crime. Am I awake, while I deplore my base offense; or does some vain phantom, which, escaping from the ivory gate, brings on a dream, impose upon me, still free from guilt. Was it better to travel over the tedious waves, or to gather the fresh flowers? If any one now would deliver up to me in my anger this infamous bull, I would do my utmost ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... phantom hunt varied greatly, and was either a visonary boar or wild horse, white-breasted maidens who were caught and borne away bound only once in seven years, or the wood nymphs, called Moss Maidens, who were thought to represent the autumn leaves torn from ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... the crowd grew in volume. Some satirical wit started whistling an imitation of an advancing fife and drum band; others took it up and the air resounded with the shrill music of a phantom army on the march. The mock throbbing of drum and squealing of fife rose and fell above the packed masses of spectators, but no answering echo came from beyond the distant trees. Like mushrooms in the night a muster of uniformed police and plain ...
— When William Came • Saki
... it did. Margaret, in bold defiance of history, but with fine dramatic effect, is introduced again in the gorgeous and polluted court of Edward the Fourth. There she stalks around the seat of her former greatness, like a terrible phantom of departed majesty, uncrowned, unsceptered, desolate, powerless—or like a vampire thirsting for blood—or like a grim prophetess of evil, imprecating that ruin on the head of her enemies, which she lived to see realized. ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... said Sibyl. She thought of her pretty fancy of the phantom ships that took her night after night to the breast ...
— Daddy's Girl • L. T. Meade
... So, like a phantom dawn, it fades to dark, This vision of a world made new and better; And he whose heavenly notes recalled the lark Soaring, in air without an earthly fetter— WILSON is gone, the mystic, Whose views, like ours, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 26, 1919 • Various
... hall gave to the street faint sounds of swift, machine-like music, as if a group of phantom musicians were hastening. ...
— Maggie: A Girl of the Streets • Stephen Crane
... wanted us to come down on the yacht, but we thought the steamer would be faster; so he sailed without us and was to have touched at Havana, but he has apparently changed his course. Doesn't she look like a phantom ship in ...
— Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... the yellow man, whom I had left senseless at the door of Ruth Bellenden's bungalow more than twenty days ago. A giant figure, the head bandaged, the arms and chest naked, a rifle gripped in both hands, this phantom of the darkness showed itself for an instant and then vanished with an echoing laugh which mocked and angered us. At the same moment the young seaman who had shuddered before the dead, fell headlong in the passage, and with one loud ...
— The House Under the Sea - A Romance • Sir Max Pemberton
... sights and visions; I knew a lady once who was continually thinking that she saw an armed man threaten her, but it was only an imagination, a phantom of the brain. ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... in his work, and as that arch-cheat, Hope, gradually becomes a phantom of the past, the neck will grow inured ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... fiercely, convulsively, in my seat, drew one long breath, but whether he thought I was going to kill him,—I dare say I looked it,—or whether he saw a sheriff behind, or a phantom gallows before, I know not; but without waiting for the thunderbolt to strike, he rushed from the car as precipitately as he had rushed in. I WAS angry,—not because I was to have been cheated, for I been repeatedly and atrociously cheated and only ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... hose, Hardens in ruff and doublet, in ruffles and periwig; Hardens in powder and patches, in the loosest of stocks and the tightest of trousers; and never a petticoat among them all. It was just as well, Rickman reflected, that Poppy's frivolous little phantom had not danced after him into the Harden library; those other phantoms might not have received it very kindly, unless indeed Sir Thomas, the maker of madrigals, had spared it ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... he pulled up at a wayside cabaret, preferring it to the publicity of a larger hotel, and lay there till morning. The slight consternation of the cabaret-keeper and his wife over this long-haired phantom, with glittering, deep-set eyes, was soothed by a royally-flung gold coin, and a few words of French slang picked up in the arena, which, with the name of Havre, comprised Dick's whole knowledge of the language. But he was ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... (smallness) 32; all talk, moonshine, stuff and nonsense; matter of no importance, matter of no consequence. thing of naught, man of straw, John Doe and Richard Roe, faggot voter; nominis umbra [Lat.], nonentity; flash in the pan, vox et praeterea nihil [Lat.]. shadow; phantom &c (fallacy of vision) 443; dream &c (imagination) 515; ignis fatuus &c (luminary) 423 [Lat.]; such stuff as dreams are made of [Tempest]; air, thin air, vapor; bubble &c 353; baseless fabric of a vision [Tempest]; mockery. hollowness, blank; void &c (absence) 187. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... said Lambourne, "to say yes; but, to speak on the square, I must needs say no. If you want a hypocrite, you may take Anthony Foster, who, from his childhood, had some sort of phantom haunting him, which he called religion, though it was that sort of godliness which always ended in being great gain. But I have no such knack ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... steady gush like a rush of steam issues from that awful arch, which, after darkening the heavens like an eclipse, collapses in fragmentary torrents of blinding rain. In the midst of the spoon-drift we see, or we think we see, "La Junon" gliding like a phantom-ship towards the river mouth. The lightning seems to work its way into our eyes, the air-shaking thunder rolls and roars around our very ears; the oars are taken in utterly useless, the storm-wind sweeps the boat before it at ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... welcome morning broke, The loud wind fell, though gray and chill The drizzling rain and drifting smoke Drove slowly toward the westward hill, Half hidden in its phantom cloak. ...
— The Mistress of the Manse • J. G. Holland
... alone, So shalt thou rest, and what if thou withdraw In silence from the living, and no friend Take note of thy departure? All that breathe Will share thy destiny. The gay will laugh When thou art gone, the solemn brood of care Plod on, and each one as before will chase His favorite phantom; yet all these shall leave Their mirth and their employments, and shall come And make their bed with thee. As the long train Of ages glide away, the sons of men, The youth in life's green spring, and he who goes In the full strength of years, matron ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... patiently at the foot of the steps for her playmate; but will wait in vain, for though the face of Death is hidden from us, yet we can see from the terror in the boy's eyes and quivering lips, that, Medusa-like, this grey phantom turns all it looks upon to stone; and the wings of Love are rent and crushed. Except on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome, there are perhaps few paintings to compare with this in intensity of strength and in marvel of conception. It is worthy to ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... caused that uncontrollable burst of sincerity. It completed his bewilderment, but he was not at all angry now. He was as if benumbed by the fascination of the incomprehensible. She stood before him, tall and indistinct, like a black phantom in the red twilight. At last poignantly uncertain as to what would happen if he opened ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... hail was repeated. Still no answer, the strange sail keeping steadily on her course, regardless of every thing, her huge hull towering up high and dark as she passed almost within harpooning distance of the Alabama, and shot away again into the darkness, like a phantom that on being ...
— The Cruise of the Alabama and the Sumter • Raphael Semmes
... must be carried far into the mists of that "prehistoric" period, that mythical age which inspires the modern historian with such a feeling of squeamishness that anything creeping out of its abysmal depths is sure to be instantly dismissed as a deceptive phantom, the mythos of an idle tale, or a later fable unworthy of serious notice. The Atlantean "old Greeks" could not be designated even as the Autochthones—a convenient term used to dispose of the origin of any people whose ancestry cannot be traced, and which, at any rate with ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... great in the wild old woman, that could thus at once confess her error, admit greatness in any form in another, and succumb to it reverently. Truly, Bridget Kennedy was like fire to the weak and foolish, a scourge and a grizzly phantom; to the brave and capable, a minister fearless, fond, and untiring ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... Phantom British warships may lie at their moorings, swinging wide on the unforgetting tide, lanterns may hang high in the belfry of the Old North Church tower, hurried knocks and calls of defiance and hoof-beats of fast-galloping steed may echo and echo again, borne on the night-wind of the dim Past, ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... come to this place with the face that indicated a mind at peace, thus found himself suddenly confronted by a grim phantom, the aspect of which struck terror to his heart. That phantom was drawn up from a past which he usually did not care to remember. Now, however, he could not forget it. There was one by his side to remind him of it always—one who had become his guard, his jailer—in ...
— The Living Link • James De Mille
... said, "I calculate to ask the Earl of Yalding to permit me to pass a night in his ancestral best bed- chamber. And if I hear so much as a phantom footstep, or hear so much as a ghostly sigh, I'll take the ...
— The Enchanted Castle • E. Nesbit
... After sunset all lights go out. There is no smoking anywhere on board and not a light even in the stateroom. Then if we look out we see the other ships of the convoy—we hug one another closely—just stumbling through the water like phantom shapes—and that's the weirdest sight I have ever seen.... To-day we are having gun practice on board the transport—trial shots for the subs and the cruiser experimenting with balloon observers. Such are our interests.... Last night I had a wonderful experience. It was delightful—one of ...
— Our Navy in the War • Lawrence Perry
... something in its hands which Mr. Brentshaw could not clearly make out. It drew nearer, and paused at last beside the coffin containing the ashes of the late Mr. Gilson, the lid of which was awry, half disclosing the uncertain interior. Bending over this, the phantom seemed to shake into it from a basin some dark substance of dubious consistency, then glided stealthily back to the lowest part of the cemetery. Here the retiring flood had stranded a number of open coffins, ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... nature, nourished by its own creations, and also consumed by them; and breaking down in consequence under the first strain of real conflict and passion. The mysterious Italian poet,—scarcely known but as a voice, a mere phantom among living men—was well fitted to illustrate such an idea; he might also perhaps have suggested it. But we know that it was already growing in Mr. Browning's mind; for Sordello had been foreshadowed in Aprile, ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... breaking, My burning brain is reeling, My very soul is riven, I feel myself forsaken. And phantom forms of horror, And shapeless dreams of terror. And mocking tones of laughter, About me seem to gather; And death, and hell, and darkness Are ...
— Ellen Middleton—A Tale • Georgiana Fullerton
... bare, bleak stage, where oddments of dilapidated furniture served to indicate thrones and staircases and palace doors and mossy banks; where men and women in ordinary costume behaved towards one another in the most ridiculous way and went through unintelligible actions with phantom properties; where the actor-manager would pause in the breath of an impassioned utterance and cry out, "Oh, my God! stop that hammering!" where nothing looked the least bit in the world like the lovely ordered picture he had been ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... gradually stolen from their hands, and to drop upon the ground. At this moment a sudden and violent earthquake was felt through all the extensive scene. The centre of the vacant area opened—it threw forth a phantom terrific and enormous—its magnitude seemed to grow upon the sight; its lineaments were shrouded from our view by an immense mantle, on which were represented a thousand different and hideous images of Death. Its name was Contagion—it rushed forward with an ...
— The Eulogies of Howard • William Hayley |
