"Phantom" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... figures, names of ships and distant ports, freight consignments. Now and then his finger would go to his lips, as he turned phantom pages in feverish haste. Again, in gasping whispers, he would break out into arguments for the protection ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole
... dashed on; but instead of her stem striking us, her broadside appeared on our starboard hand. She was a line-of-battle ship of the largest class. Then, indeed, we found our voices and shouted, and perhaps the sentries or look-outs might have heard us; but away she rushed, like some monstrous phantom of a dream, and, mighty as she was, she quickly disappeared in the darkness ahead. Our companions, who had been awoke by our shouting, lifted up their heads, but as the ship passed by, lay them down again, probably under the belief that what they had seen ...
— Will Weatherhelm - The Yarn of an Old Sailor • W.H.G. Kingston
... coughed behind his hand. His wife started, and looked upon him in alarm. "Pears like he done gwine keep quiet ternight," he breathed. They continually pointed their speech and their looks at the inner door, paying it the homage due to a corpse or a phantom. Another long stillness followed this sentence. Their eyes shone white and wide. A wagon rattled down the distant road. From their chairs they looked at the window, and the effect of the light in the cabin was a presentation of an intensely ...
— The Monster and Other Stories - The Monster; The Blue Hotel; His New Mittens • Stephen Crane
... faith has been No evidence of things unseen, But a dim shadow, which recasts The creed of the Phantasiasts, For whom no man of sorrows died: For whom the tragedy divine Was but a symbol and a sign, And Christ a phantom crucified." ...
— The Theology of Holiness • Dougan Clark
... length of days was in its right hand, and in its left hand riches and honor. What the lion-hearted warrior of England was to the children of the Saracens, that had the gaunt mystery of Secession been to the little ones of this generation, an evening phantom and a morning fear, at the mere mention of whose name many had been but too ready to fall at the feet of opposition and cry imploringly, "Take any form but that!" The phantom approached, put off its shadowy outlines, assumed a definite purpose, loomed ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... then, as he leaned forward once more, determined to understand, shrank back with a sharp indrawing of breath, as there whirled past, it appeared only a few yards away, a flare of brilliant blue lines, in the midst of which passed a phantom-like body in a mist and accompanied by a musical sound (it seemed) of extraordinary clarity and beauty, that rose from a deep organ-note to the shrill of a flute, and down again Into a bass and a silence. ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson
... sometimes to suffer, rather than to give up your refined sense of happiness, at others; but, when your mind has been long harassed by vicissitude, you will be content to rest, and you will then recover from your delusion. You will perceive, that the phantom of happiness is exchanged for the substance; for happiness arises in a state of peace, not of tumult. It is of a temperate and uniform nature, and can no more exist in a heart, that is continually alive to minute circumstances, than in one that is dead to feeling. You see, my dear, that, though I ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... in Plain Tales from the Hills into which the Simla motive is threaded. In the books immediately following, published in 1888 and 1889, Simla is not wholly abandoned, but the proportion of Simla stories is less. The Phantom Rickshaw (1889) is the last story which can fairly be brought within the list, and this story can only be included by straining its point to vanishing. Of all the groups of stories in Plain Tales from the Hills the Simla ...
— Rudyard Kipling • John Palmer
... copies—Yes, sir; but he's engaged. Wait awhile," continued the clerk, as Mortimer turned to go. "'The Wizard of Wehawkin,' six copies; 'The Phantom of Philadelphia,' twelve ...
— Daisy's Necklace - And What Came of It • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... history of the world. This plan philosophy strives to comprehend; for only that which has been developed as the result of it possesses bona fide reality. That which does not accord with it is negative, worthless existence. Before the pure light of this divine Idea—which is no mere Ideal—the phantom of a world whose events are an incoherent concourse of fortuitous circumstances, utterly vanishes. Philosophy wishes to discover the substantial purport, the real side of the divine idea, and to justify the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... from so excellent a picture? none at all, most certainly: neither has the poet said a single word which might in the least serve to mark a single limb or feature of the phantom, which he intended to represent in all the horrors imagination can conceive. In reality, poetry and rhetoric do not succeed in exact description so well as painting does; their business is, to affect rather by sympathy than imitation; to display ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... ghost before, he naturally was terribly frightened, and, after a second hasty glance at the awful phantom, he fled back to his room, tripping up in his long winding-sheet as he sped down the corridor, and finally dropping the rusty dagger into the Minister's jack- boots, where it was found in the morning by the butler. Once in the privacy of his own apartment, ...
— Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde - with a Preface by Robert Ross • Oscar Wilde
... seeks the field;— False glare of glory, what hast thou to yield? How long, deluding phantom, wilt thou blind, Mislead, debase, unhumanize mankind? Bid the bold youth, his headlong sword who draws, Heed not the object, nor inquire the cause; But seek adventuring, like an errant knight, Wars not his own, gratuitous in fight, Greet the gored field, then ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... to his comfortless shanty. Those who love the forest know in how many tones it speaks, varying with the season and the force of the wind. When in full leaf and swayed by a summer breeze the sound is of falling water, of a phantom Niagara; in the winter, when the trees are bare, the Northwest blast shrieks through their tops and there are groanings diversified by sharp cries as some decayed branch is snapped or tree falls. It was amid these doleful sounds Archie swung ...
— The Narrative of Gordon Sellar Who Emigrated to Canada in 1825 • Gordon Sellar
... reflected there with a hundred ripples. I waited for the last wavelet to fade away, but when the surface was once more still and smooth as dark glass, I began to be affected by the profounded silence and melancholy of nature, and by a something proceeding from nature—phantom, emanation, essence, I know not what. My soul, not my sense, perceived it, standing with finger on lips, there, close to me; its feet resting on the motionless water, which gave no reflection of its image, the clear amber sunlight passing undimmed through ...
— A Crystal Age • W. H. Hudson
... the cloud edges, leaving them as though carven from 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 upward ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... seriously, for good or evil, it often happens that at the time of the action a certain unaccountable premonition arises in the mind. This is chiefly the case when the act is to be the cause of sorrow. Like the wizard with Lochiel, some dark phantom arises before the mind, and warns of the evil to come. So it was in the present case. The pulling out of that drawer was an eventful moment in the life of Zillah. It was a crisis fraught with future sorrow and evil and suffering. There was something ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... seems to know what it is that he wants to say, but as he proceeds he warms to his work. The poets gather round Adonais' bier, and in four admirable stanzas Shelley describes himself as "a phantom among men," who ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... phantom Indian. I've heard of such things," said Apple Newton, ignoring Chick-chick's absurd remark. "I think it would be fine to have a phantom come purposely to get us started on the right track for the treasure hunt. 'Hunt heap stone' was what he said. We shall have to look for peculiar formations ...
— The Boy Scout Treasure Hunters - The Lost Treasure of Buffalo Hollow • Charles Henry Lerrigo
... the drowsed soul from the dreams and phantom world of sensuality to actual reality—how has it been evaded! His word, that was spirit! His mysteries, which even the apostles must wait for the parable in order to comprehend! These spiritual things, which can only be spiritually discerned, were—say some—mere metaphors! Figures of speech! ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... was still grazing; perhaps the same cow that was once pestered by a volatile Irish terrier who used to swing merrily at the end of that cow's tail; a merry and irresponsible little creature, she was, and her phantom still scampers the road where the sharp scream of the Freeport trolley brings back her last fatal venture to our mind. It was strange to look at those windows, with their neat white sills, and to remember how we felt when for the first time we slept in a house of our ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... phantom, who is described as hurrying along the puszta, or steppe, in a mortar, pounding with a pestle at a tremendous rate, and leaving a long trace on the ground behind her with her tongue, which is three yards long, and with which she seizes any men and horses coming in ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... portals, and the Paleface treads her streets, The Indian's stealthy footstep with the course of commerce meets, And hunters whisper vaguely of the half forgotten tales Of phantom herds of bison lurking on ...
— Flint and Feather • E. Pauline Johnson
... was a phantom of a fright When first she burst upon my sight; A Cubist apparition meant To symbolize a Nude's descent. Her eyes like soft-shell crabs aflare Like loads of brick her dusky hair; And all things else about her drawn As by one coming home at dawn. ...
— The Re-echo Club • Carolyn Wells
... searching glances and anxious questionings Lida preferred to spend her days in solitude. Thus, on this evening she was seated by the river, watching the sunset and brooding over her grief. Life, as it seemed to her, was still incomprehensible. Her view of it was blurred as by some hideous phantom. A series of books which she had read had served to give her greater freedom of thought. As she believed, her conduct was not only natural but almost worthy of praise. She had brought harm to no one thereby, only providing herself and ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... the starting pistol. He drew a long breath. Then of a sudden, straight over the now useless blind, unexpected, startling as a thunderclap out of a cloudless sky, directly toward the nearest bird bounded a tall brown figure, silent as a phantom. For a second the entire flock stared in dumb paralytic surprise; then following there came a note of terror from eight and twenty throats that rose as one voice, that over the now silent prairie could have been heard for miles. It was the signal for action, for escape, ...
— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge
... Here comes a phantom clockwork man!" screamed the terrified monarch, and every Nome dropped his tools and made a rush from the cavern, knocking over their King in their mad flight and recklessly trampling upon his prostrate fat body. So, when Tiktok came into the cavern, there was only ...
— Little Wizard Stories of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... its unearthly blasts. Then a whistle seemed to cut the gloom right ahead, and a big black shape loomed through the murk. The Merry Seas sounded her warning, and the helm was jammed hard a-starboard. Another shriek came from the phantom that had seemed to rise right out of the sea. With that shriek, she also ...
— Frank Merriwell's Reward • Burt L. Standish
... open-eyed and fearless, picking, indeed, the most dangerous branch of service for his own, a modern if ever there was one, appreciative of most unmystical Broadway, and yet soberly and earnestly attesting to his belief in banshee, in shadowy people of the woods, and phantom harpers! I wondered what he would think if he could see the Dweller and then, with a pang, that perhaps his superstitions might make him ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... 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 otherwise; ...
— Miscellaneous Papers • Charles Dickens
... this reply, in which the noble heart of poor La Briere beat beneath the brilliant phantom of Canalis, excited in Modeste, they were as multifarious and confused as the waves which rushed to die along the shore while with her eyes fixed on the wide ocean she gave herself up to the joy of having (if we dare say so) harpooned ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... all anxieties—the fear of bread itself for the morrow—must mingle with all your romance, and soon steal from love all its poetry. You think his affection will console you for every sacrifice. Folly! the love of poets is for a mist, a moonbeam, a denizen of air, a phantom that they call an Ideal. They suppose for a moment that they have found that Ideal in Chloe or Phyllis, Helen or a milkmaid. Bah! the first time you come to the poet with the baker's bill, where flies the Ideal? I knew one more brilliant than Leonard, more exquisitely gifted by nature; ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... success; the parents thought His merit such as prudence would have sought; What more to wish?—the miser's hoarded store: The golden age's wealth is now no more, A silly shadow, phantom of the brain; O happy time! I see indeed with pain, Thou wilt return:—in MAINE thou shalt arise; Thy innocence, we fondly may surmise, Had seconded our lover's ardent flame, And hastened ...
— The Tales and Novels, Complete • Jean de La Fontaine
... (so flippant was your mien) a Pain as I mused on Pallas and her fowl, And left the phantom of a faked Athena, A ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 15, 1914 • Various
... large parties of Boers fleeing for life up dongas and over plains, the phantom carriage-and-four driving hastily north-westward after an urgent warning, and other such melodramatic incidents, which escaped my notice. The position of the falling shells, and the movement of those ...
— Ladysmith - The Diary of a Siege • H. W. Nevinson
... Meyerbeer's operas contain such strange scenes as phantom nuns dancing, girls bathing, sunrise, skating, gunpowder explosions, a king playing the flute, and the prima donna leading a goat, dramatic music owes to him new accents of genuine pathos and an addition to its resources of rendering passionate emotions. Through ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... or involve the contradiction above mentioned. It is unphilosophic, by admission of all philosophers, they add, to multiply causes beyond the necessity. Now if there are three Persons of infinite and the same attributes, dismiss two, and you lose nothing but a numerical phantom." ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... promise for the future. Even myself, as I say, I would not have had changed in one IOTA this forenoon, in spite of all my idleness and Guthrie's lost paper, which is ever present with me - a horrible phantom. ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... is the son of a landscape-painter, and is renowned for his curious and well-concealed plots, phantom-like characters, and striking effects. Among his novels the best known are: Antonina, The Dead Secret, The Woman in White, No Name, Armadale, The Moonstone, and Man and Wife. There is a sameness in these works; and yet it is ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... bewildered and taken all aback. In this holiday excursion after Blackbeard's treasure the party had reckoned only with dead or phantom pirates. There was some confusion, while Bill Saxby bawled at the seamen as addle-pated lubbers. Deserting their boat, they scrambled to cover in the tall grass while those busy with the derrick gear rushed to catch ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... that, although in France one experiment after another demonstrated the unreality of Socialist Utopias, the lodges were always there to reconstruct the mirage and lead humanity on again across the burning desert sands towards the same phantom palm-trees ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... this swamp of vileness a phantom city floats up; it is composed of the white Very lights and multi-coloured flares which the Hun employs to protect his front-line from our patrols. For brief spells No Man's Land becomes brilliant as day. Many of his flares are prearranged signals, meaning ...
— The Glory of the Trenches • Coningsby Dawson
... to go back to the High Street, I was startled by the apparition of a girlish figure upon the other side of the street—a figure so like Margaret's that its presence in that street filled me with a vague sense of fear, as if the slender figure, with garments fluttering in the wind, had been a phantom. ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... features of one and the other began to start forth so vividly, that it appeared as if his triumphant art would actually disengage them from the canvas. Amid the rich light and deep shade, they beheld their phantom selves. But, though the likeness promised to be perfect, they were not quite satisfied with the expression; it seemed more vague than in most of the painter's works. He, however, was satisfied with the prospect of success, ...
— The Prophetic Pictures (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... 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 ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... Fantasma, which is the Flying Dutchman with MAGGIE MACINTIRE Mac-in-tirely restored to us as the charming Senta—quite an Eighty-per-Senta—of attraction. Awful appearance of Phantom Ship! Evidently straight from Dead Sea. Racing conversation in all parts of house. "Ancient Mariners," or "Old Epsom Salts," talking about Flying Dutchman's ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, June 11, 1892 • Various
... between his knees, reading Beethoven, the only one "in his family"—as he said—"who had never played him false." When old Isabella, tired of his music, would literally put him out of the house to get a breath of air, he would wander like a phantom through the Gallery, distantly greeted by former friends, who avoided closer contact with that black despondency and feared the explosions of rage with which he received news of ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... faintly, 'the air of these rooms is unwholesome;' but, when she attempted to do so, considering that she must pass through the apartment where the phantom of her terror had appeared, this terror increased, and, too faint to support herself, she sad down on the side ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... followed the out track and told me to follow the in till three o'clock. It was now high noon. I walked on and on through an arid, wonderful maze of sand, rocks, and cacti, feeling that the old horseman was no more than a phantom, when in half an hour I almost fell upon our lost pack-train meandering slowly and silently through a depression. I fired our signal shots and Prof. soon joined us. The situation was precarious. The animals were nearly dead from thirst, one had been ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... atmospheric function of Mary, in enhancing his own personality, as contrasted with the radiant divinity of Emilia Viviani, to whom he ascribes his creativeness. [Footnote: Compare Wordsworth, She Was a Phantom of Delight, Dearer Far than Life; Tennyson, ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... replied Sandford, "of the passion in its most refined and predominant sense; while I may possibly be speaking of a mere phantom, that has led this ...
— A Simple Story • Mrs. Inchbald
... Such empty phantom I freely grant them; But there 's an anthem More dear to me,— 'T is the bells of Shandon, That sound so grand on The pleasant ...
— Victorian Songs - Lyrics of the Affections and Nature • Various
... streets, and past the harbored ships The Night's young handmaid, Twilight, walked with me. A spent moon leaned inertly o'er the sea; A few, pale, phantom stars were in eclipse. There was the house, My Ladye's sea-girt bower All draped in gloom, save for one taper's glow, Which lit the path, where willing feet would go. There was the house, and this the ...
— Custer, and Other Poems. • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... retrospective, for the dead through the living; the hypnotic condition of the soul which does not know where dreams and memories end and present feeling begins; the daily commingling of the most unreal thing in the world, the phantom of a lost love, with the freshest, the most actual, the most irresistibly naive and spontaneous thing in it, a young girl. She comes, she goes, she laughs, she sings, you go about with her in the ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... (Evangel. Barnabae.) Hence the resurrection is called not "Kiyamah" but "Kumamah"rubbish. This heresy about the Cross they share with the Docetes, "certain beasts in the shape of men" (says Ignatius), who held that a phantom was crucified. So far the Moslems are logical, for "Isa," being angelically, miraculously and immaculately conceived, could not be; but they contradict themselves when they hold a vacant place near Mohammed's tomb for the body of Isa after his second coming as a forerunner ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... 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 along ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... nearly a month in this retirement, spending all his time in answering the newspapers which accused him of treason to the Emperor. This accusation was his absorbing idea, a phantom, a spectre to him; day and night he tried to shake it off, seeking in the difficult position in which he had found himself all the reasons which it might offer him for acting as he had acted. Meanwhile the terrible news ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - MURAT—1815 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... could not afford more for fear of accident) and a royal salute of eight rifles. We could watch the flames of the tar-barrel in which Neptune was supposed to have embarked, as it rose and fell on the crests of the waves for many miles astern, looking like a small phantom ship. ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... of the world: and I think that the pale figure is seated on the recording heap, which rises slowly, and ebbs in giddiness, and flows again, and rises, tottering; and still she sees, falling beside her, the never-ending stream of phantom sand. Sometimes I like to think that she is seated on the sand because she is herself the Spirit of Staying, and victor over all things that pass and change;—quicksand of the desert in moving pillar; quicksand of the sea in moving floor; roofless all, and unabiding, ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... in Athens long ago.... The hunter and his gay companion ride Through the young fields of life; on every side Frail and fantastic the tall lilies grow. Her head thrown back, her eyes afraid and wide, Flies like a phantom the grey spectral doe, Her light feet scarcely bend the grass ...
— The Five Books of Youth • Robert Hillyer
... Henry had left to fall into decay. The spirit of enterprise grew with the Reformation. Merchant companies opened trade with Russia and the Levant; adventurous sea captains went to Guinea for gold. Sir Hugh Willoughby followed the phantom of the North-west Passage, turning eastward round the North Cape to look for it, and perished in the ice. English commerce was beginning to grow in spite of the Protector's experiments; but a new and infinitely dangerous ...
— English Seamen in the Sixteenth Century - Lectures Delivered at Oxford Easter Terms 1893-4 • James Anthony Froude
... and their capacity for beef, and in the name of "God and Liberty" they gratified their appetite for plunder. The priests, on their part, stood up manfully, and witnessed a good confession. They refused to accept this phantom of liberty which a party of vagabonds brought to them. The conquerors, however, could afford to be magnanimous in the midst of so much good eating, and no vengeance was inflicted upon unarmed men. But when the prefect of the missions was shipped off to Manilla, the war was at ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... chasing an elusive rabbit over endless wastes of sand and greasewood. With him ran a phantom dog, a lean, shaggy shape that raced tirelessly. When Sundown wanted to give up the dream-hunt and rest, the dog would urge him on with whimperings and short, explosive barks of impatience. Presently the dream-dog ran ahead and disappeared beyond ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... phantom shades that hover round in dreams Come full of sorrow, bringing vain delight; For vain it is, when one Sees seeming shows of good, And gliding through his hands the dream is gone, After a moment's space, On wings that follow still Upon the path where sleep goes ...
— Story of Orestes - A Condensation of the Trilogy • Richard G. Moulton
... what I had to do, though I shrank from both the task and the exposure which it would entail. I must, I said, give the true key to my whole life; I must show what I am that it may be seen what I am not, and that the phantom may be extinguished which gibbers instead of me. I wish to be known as a living man, and not as a scarecrow which is dressed up in my clothes. False ideas may be refuted indeed by argument, but by true ideas alone are they expelled. I will vanquish, not my accuser, but my judges. ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... of the phantom trail was solved at last. In fact, not to state a paradox, there had been no mystery at first—at least to the Desert Rat. The moment he saw the bones he guessed the answer to ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... 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 infinite concourse ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... forbidden recollection of her delightfulness. There seemed no longer any danger in these musings. He had entrusted his actual life to the safe-keeping of the nicest woman he had ever known. Where then was the harm in harking back, merely in reverie, to the frivolous, amusing phantom of a renounced sentiment? Yet, after a reverie of the kind, why did he often wonder how he and Agnes could look in one another's faces and pretend to any sort of real intimacy? Sara knew him better than he knew himself. Her sympathy ran into a hundred sinuosities—she understood ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... 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 followed a calm, with heavy rain. It was well that he ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... its own wars, and the knowledge could not be procured except at the price of blood. Two young men of good constitution, and who could afford to spend five years, might succeed. If the object of search prove a phantom, in the wild scenes of a new and unexplored country, there are other objects of interest; but, if real, besides the glorious excitement of such a novelty, they will have something to look back upon through life. As to the dangers, they are always magnified, and, in general, peril is discovered ...
— Memoir of an Eventful Expedition in Central America • Pedro Velasquez
... elements have become reconciled, and loyalty to England, which seemed at the time of the Boer War, and during the years that had preceded it, to have been confined to a small number of the English, has become the rule. British Imperialism is no mere phantom: the Union of South Africa has proved it to have a very virile body, and, what is more important, ...
— Cecil Rhodes - Man and Empire-Maker • Princess Catherine Radziwill
... The phantom stooped over me as she spoke, and lowered her gory fingers, as if to touch my face, when, terror giving me the power of which it at first deprived me, I screamed aloud—the casement of the apartment was thrown open with a loud ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... reason. "Of all we see, hear, feel and touch the substance is and must be in ourselves: and therefore there is no alternative in reason between the dreary (and, thank Heaven! almost impossible) belief that everything around us is but a phantom, or that the life which is in us is in them likewise.... The artist must imitate that which is within the thing, that which is active through form and figure, and ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy, and pursue with eagerness the phantom of hope—who expect that age will perform the promises of youth, and that the deficiencies of the present day will be supplied by the morrow," need not attend to the history of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... Kelly remained with the boy, an oasis in the trackless Sahara of his school life. In this dreary expanse now and then a shadow of hope arose, as if to lure him on, as some new teacher came up over his horizon, but in the main these all proved delusions, mirages that glittered at phantom distances, but faded away into empty nothingness as he took a nearer view of them. This constant cheating of his vision, this deferring of his hope, in time made his heart sick, and he gradually relapsed into his old hatred of books and schools and school teachers ...
— The Evolution of Dodd • William Hawley Smith
... being, or rather, the word by which he is designated, would be a matter of indifference, if it did not cause innumerable ravages in the world. But men, prepossessed with the opinion that this phantom is a reality of the greatest interest, instead of concluding wisely from its incomprehensibility, that they are not bound to regard it, infer on the contrary, that they must contemplate it, without ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach
... talking to me so sincerely, simply to gain approbation for your frankness, as you did from me just now, then of course you will not attain to anything in the achievement of real love; it will all get no further than dreams, and your whole life will slip away like a phantom. In that case you will naturally cease to think of the future life too, and will of yourself grow calmer after a fashion ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... the departed Chinaman, his glassy eyes turned upward in their angular slits and fastened on the dangling queue above with a look of yearning unspeakable. Mr. Beeson groaned, and again spread his hands upon his face. A mild odor of opium pervaded the place. The phantom, clad only in a short blue tunic quilted and silken but covered with grave-mold, rose slowly, as if pushed by a weak spiral spring. Its knees were at the level of the floor, when with a quick upward impulse like the silent leaping of a flame it ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... Democratic, was long the most absolutely governed and the most loyally infatuated among the great Nations of Europe. Her cure of the dust-licking distemper was Homoeopathic and somewhat slow, but it seems to be thorough and abiding. Those who talk of the National passion for that bloody phantom Glory—for Battle and Conquest—speak of what was, rather than of what is, and which, even in its palmiest days, was rather a penchant of the Aristocratic caste than a characteristic of the Nation. The Nobles of course loved ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... the North Sea like a phantom, sometimes crawling in the wake of the fleet when the gear was down, sometimes flying from one bank to another. In the course of two long, sweeping rounds she proved that she was worth all the other ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... fashion, was in Ireland a fury. In England a phantom of party, it was in Ireland a fierce superstition. In England a fading recollection of power lost, and a still feebler hope of favours to come, it was in Ireland a hereditary frenzy embittered by personal sufferings, exalted by fantastic notions of pedigree, and sanctioned by the secret but powerful ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... Count Abel speaking? To a phantom? To his double? He alone knew. When he had uttered the last words, he resumed the perusal of his letter, which ...
— Samuel Brohl & Company • Victor Cherbuliez
... we may see Kinchinjunga is in its aspect at dawn. It will be still night—a starlit night. The phantom snowy range and the fairy forms of the mountains will be bathed in that delicate yellow light the stars give forth. The far valley depths will be hidden in the sombrest purple. Overhead the sky will be glittering with brilliant gems set in a field of ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... Adamant. Balsamon Balm Balsam. Blasph[-e]mein (to speak ill of) Blame Blaspheme. Cheirourgon[9] Chirurgeon Surgeon. (a worker with the hand) Dact[)u]lon (a finger) Date (the fruit) Dactyl. Phantasia Fancy Phantasy. Phantasma (an appearance) Phantom Phantasm. Presbuteron (an elder) Priest Presbyter. Paralysis Palsy ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... the gallows; wherefore, seeing me manifestly alive, they took me for ghoulish ghost 'stead o' good flesh and blood, and fled from me amain. So, by reason of my dead body, that is no body o' mine, yet that nobody will believe is no body o' mine, they believe that this my body is yet no body, but a phantom; the which is out of reason; yet thus unreasonably do the rogues reason by reason of the body that hangeth in place of my body above the city gate. Wherefore I reason there is yet reason in their unreason, seeing this body was somebody, yet no body o' mine, but ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... boat; he was fisherman enough to be thrilled by the chances of capture; he was artist enough to gloat over the beauty of the dull morning—the white gulls circling overhead, the black rocks sticking their spines above the gray sea, a phantom four-masted ship sailing straight toward them out of ...
— Glory of Youth • Temple Bailey
... Fandor. "Human skin marvellously preserved by some special process: all its lines and marks are intact. Can you not guess whence it came? Do you need to be told whose dead body has supplied this phantom glove?" ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... terrific arches of termini, cathedral domes, houses of parliament, and grand hotels, rose darkly around him on the arc of the river, against the dark violet murk of the sky. Huge trams swam past him like glass houses, and hansoms shot past the trams and automobiles past the hansoms; and phantom barges swirled down on the full ebb, threading holes in bridges as cotton threads a needle. It was London, and the roar of London, majestic, imperial, super-Roman. And lo! earlier than the earliest municipal light, an unseen hand, ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... you know). In consequence again of those accursed laws of consciousness, anger in me is subject to chemical disintegration. You look into it, the object flies off into air, your reasons evaporate, the criminal is not to be found, the wrong becomes not a wrong but a phantom, something like the toothache, for which no one is to blame, and consequently there is only the same outlet left again—that is, to beat the wall as hard as you can. So you give it up with a wave of the hand because you have not found a fundamental cause. And try ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... essences of violet, rose and heliotrope. Sometimes he caught the echo of low laughter or the snatch of a gay song. The light of the lamps shot out on the crinkled surface of the lake in tongues of quivering flame, which danced a brave gavot with the phantom stars; and afar twinkled the dipping oars. The brilliant pavilion, which rested partly over land and ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... had this very same eye been kept to windward many years ago, much blood and treasure had been saved in the present. It is playing false to his national character thus long for which John now pays so dearly. But that phantom of terror excited by the Bear's growth, Mr. Smooth seriously thinks unworthy of being ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... get off; not one endeavours to ruin him entirely. You may get clear of the difficulty that embarrasses you by a door which opens into a field of honour and liberty. Paris, whose archbishop you are, groans under a heavy load. The Parliament there is but a mere phantom, and the Hotel de Ville a desert. The Duc d'Orleans and the Prince have no more authority than what the rascally mob is pleased to allow them. The Spaniards, Germans, and Lorrainers are in the suburbs laying waste the very gardens. You that have rescued them ...
— The Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz, Complete • Jean Francois Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz
... it; staggering she fell back upon a chair; she gazed fixedly at the window, even after the fearful phantom had disappeared. Her lips were open, as if for a cry which had been silenced by horror. She did not weep, she did not complain, and even the caresses of the children, the gentle address of Princess Elizabeth, and the comforting words of the king could not rouse her ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... the necessity of coming to an immediate decision almost deprived me of my power of thinking. The necessity had arisen too swiftly; the arrival of that man acted like the sudden apparition of a phantom. It had been expected, however; only, from the moment we had turned away from Carlos' bedside, we had thought of nothing but ourselves; we had dwelt alone in our emotions, as if there had been no inhabitant of flesh and blood on the earth but we two. Our danger had been present, no doubt, in our ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... wholly unforeseen way. The discovery that Adelaide 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 ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy
... good things befell me—possibly undeservedly—and though I swelled beneath my coat with inward satisfaction, She was still far off: a phantom on the hills. ...
— Drolls From Shadowland • J. H. Pearce
... person that the bible is simply and purely of human invention—of barbarian invention—is to read it. Read it as you would any other book; think of it as you would any other; get the bandage of reverence from your eyes; drive from your heart the phantom of fear; push from the throne of your brain the cowled form of superstition—then read the holy bible, and you will be amazed that you ever, for one moment, supposed a being of infinite wisdom, goodness and purity to be the author of such ignorance ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... 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 ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... notion of the interposition of the king of Prussia in the king's favour, is another phantom raised by calumny to terrify credulity; a phantom which will, I hope, be entirely dissipated, when I have informed the house, that the whole suspicion is without foundation, and that the king of Prussia has made no declaration of any design to support the king, or of ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 11. - Parlimentary Debates II. • Samuel Johnson
... But she had a yellow veil with black flowers over her face, and so many draperies about her person, that it was impossible to make any guess about her. From the top of the terrace he gazed upon this vague form standing up like a phantom in the penumbrae ...
— Salammbo • Gustave Flaubert
... shyly to one another a common secret vice, "Phantom warfare." When we walked alone, especially in the country, we had both developed the same practice of fighting an imaginary battle about us as we walked. As we went along we were generals, and our attacks pushed along on either side, crouching and gathering behind hedges, cresting ridges, ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... of the hermitage. And she looked grand in the superb beauty of her form, and seemed to shed a lustre on the woodland around, like lightning illuminating masses of dark clouds. And they who saw her asked themselves, 'Is this an Apsara, or a daughter of the gods, or a celestial phantom?' And with this thought, their hands also joined together, they stood gazing on the perfect and faultless beauty of her form. And Jayadratha, the king of Sindhu, and the son of Vriddhakshatra, struck with ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 2 • Translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... dull, I leaned back in my chair with half-closed eyes, while night, that master phantom maker, played upon my harried nerves and distraught mind. Stealthily out of his murky caldron the ghosts and goblins crept. I saw the spectres of all my dearest dreams trail slouching by, jostled and driven by sneering bullies. ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... Massachusetts on the floor of the Federal Convention. "He was filled with astonishment that, if we were convinced that every man in America was secured in all his rights, we should be ready to sacrifice this substantial good to the phantom of ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... these words Death seized upon the soldier and strove to bear him hence, but the soldier struggled so desperately that he prevailed against Death, and the strange phantom departed alone. Then when he had gone the soldier found upon his throat the imprint of Death's cruel fingers—so fierce had been the struggle. And nothing could wash away the marks—nay, not all the skill in the world ...
— Second Book of Tales • Eugene Field
... fated youth descry, Who, now perhaps in lusty vigour seen And rosy health, shall soon lamented die. For them the viewless forms of air obey, Their bidding heed, and at their beck repair. They know what spirit brews the stormful day, And, heartless, oft like moody madness stare To see the phantom train their secret ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... in the last place be observed that the supposed danger of judiciary encroachments on the legislative authority, which has been upon many occasions reiterated, is in reality a phantom. Particular misconstructions and contraventions of the will of the legislature may now and then happen; but they can never be so extensive as to amount to an inconvenience, or in any sensible degree to affect the order of the political system. This may be inferred ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... for the lone, cold slaughter So soon to seize them and hide them for aye; But they danced and they drank and their souls grew gay, Nor ever they knew of a ghoul's eye spying Their splendor a flickering phantom to stray Where the bones of the brave ...
— The Children of the Night • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... had to pass assumed the form and shape and even movement of an enemy on horseback riding silently down to meet me. Again and again I clutched my revolver, and even now I cannot tell what power prevented me from firing at my phantom foes. Over and over again I reined up to listen, and at such times the wind whispering through the tall grass sounded to me like human voices, while the cry of birds that now and then rose startlingly ...
— Our Home in the Silver West - A Story of Struggle and Adventure • Gordon Stables
... three ghosts left the phantom office, and glided down the phantom halls. Other ghosts in various stages of alarm were already making their way down the stairs. Some of them spoke, but no sound came. One woman, her eyes frightened, reached out furtively ...
— The Sign at Six • Stewart Edward White
... useless to attempt altering their course. They therefore kept on as before. The Captain kept his eye upon her, hoping that some change of the atmosphere might occur to hide her from sight, but that dark phantom-like form ...
— Roger Willoughby - A Story of the Times of Benbow • William H. G. Kingston
... to this dark physical power, it often reproduces within us the strange forms which the outer world throws in our way, so that thus it is we ourselves who engender within ourselves the spirit which by some remarkable delusion we imagine to speak in that outer form. It is the phantom of our own self whose intimate relationship with, and whose powerful influence upon our soul either plunges us into hell or elevates us to heaven. Thus you will see, my beloved Nathanael, that I and brother Lothair have well talked over the ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... mankind. It would not indeed be an example of our substituting others for ourselves, but it would be an example of user substituting ourselves for others. And as it would not be an instance of benevolence, so neither would it be any instance of self-love: for this phantom of danger to ourselves, naturally rising to view upon sight of the distresses of others, would be no more an instance of love to ourselves than the ...
— Human Nature - and Other Sermons • Joseph Butler
... there in store for those who, by degrading their natures in this world, may have rendered themselves unfit for happiness in the next,—and who, perhaps, still attracted to earth by the debasing excesses they once mistook for pleasure, may be doomed, in the phantom repetition of their sins, to detect their naked reality, to have stamped on their consciousness the vileness of these without the brutal gratifications that veiled it, the essence of vice shorn of its sensual halo, the grossness without the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... sombre room, of which all the breadth at the end is taken up by an iron grating, and behind the grating are again wooden bars, and a shutter painted black. You are quite in the dark, and the abbess, scarcely in the light, appears to you like a phantom." ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... said to him, "Acknowledge me, Martin; I am Jesus Christ, who, wishing to descend to earth, have resolved to manifest myself to thee first of all." St. Martin remained silent at first, fearing some snare; and the phantom having repeated to him that he was the Christ, Martin replied: "My Lord Jesus Christ did not say that he should come clothed in purple and decked with diamonds. I shall not acknowledge him unless he appears in that same form in which he suffered death, and unless I see the ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... individual freedom which is on trial in battle with the Prussian system—and as one is going to bed the sound of guns in the heart of the city! From the window one looked upward to see, under a searchlight's play, the silken sheen of a cigar-shaped sort of aerial phantom which was dropping bombs on women and children, while never a shot is fired at those sturdy ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... thick, the forest too eager. The black figure disappeared. In retrospect it was again as unsubstantial as a phantom. The flakes whispered ...
— The Abandoned Room • Wadsworth Camp
... that, as it drew nigh, its stature appeared to grow less and less colossal, and the wild lineaments with which fancy had invested it, faded from sight, leaving the phantom a mere man, of tall frame indeed, but without a single characteristic of dress or person to delight the soul of wonder. The black bear dwindled into a little dog, the meekest and most insignificant of ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... Wellington in Wellington Street? In Marlborough Street, what policeman remembers Marlborough? In St. James's Street, has any one ever fancied he saw the ghost of a pilgrim wrapped in a cloak, leaning on a staff? Other ghosts are there in plenty. The phantom chariot of Lord Petersham dashes down the slope nightly. Nightly Mr. Ball Hughes appears in the bow-window of White's. At cock-crow Charles James Fox still emerges from Brooks's. Such men as these were indigenous to the street. Nothing will ever lay their ghosts there. But the ghost of St. ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... probably wise in not giving too much credit to the fragmentary tablet which assigns to it a dynasty of kings, of which we have no confirmatory information from other sources—Amilgula, Shamashnazir, Amilsin, and several others: this list, however, places among these phantom rulers one individual at least, Shargina-Sharrukin, who has left us material evidences of his existence. This Sargon the Elder, whose complete name is Shargani-shar-ali, was the son of a certain Ittibel, who does not appear to have been king. ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... entered the house by the scullery door. For some minutes Susan remained standing on the grass, horror-struck, powerless to move. Then all at once feminine curiosity got the better even of terror, and she followed the phantom figure into the house. ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... her head again, muttering to herself. George made out with difficulty that she was going through one phantom scene after another—of burning, wounds, and sudden death. One or two of the phrases—of the fragmentary details that dropped out without name or place—made his flesh creep. He was afraid lest Letty should hear them, and was just putting out his hand for his hat, when Mrs. Batchelor gripped ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... despair I felt; for the first time that phantom seized me; the first and only time for it has never since left me—After the first moments of speechless agony I felt her fangs on my heart: I tore my hair; I raved aloud; at one moment in pity for his sufferings I would have clasped my father in my arms; and then starting back with horror I spurned ...
— Mathilda • Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
... was still bravely, persistently, pressing on toward the goal, all unaware that years ago he had left that goal like a lighthouse on a rocky shore, and was now sweeping along with the turbulent tide of Mammonism. He still saw the light ahead, but it was now a phantom of the imagination. He said, "When I am worth ten thousand I will have reached it"; when he was worth ten thousand he found the faithless light had moved on to twenty-five thousand. He said, "When I am worth twenty-five thousand I will have reached it"; when he was worth ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... their Government to which all those who submit to authority are entitled. Now, as to the negro problem. We southern women feel that the time has come to lay once and for all this old, old ghost that stalks through the halls of Congress. It is a phantom as applied to woman suffrage. In fifteen States south of the Mason and Dixon line there are over a million more white women than negro men and women combined. There are only two States in which the negro race predominates, South Carolina and Mississippi. ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... 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 smiled, but because ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... centuries to attain a true idea of any matter whatever. What 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 on ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... Scott had them, as Balzac had them. If one reads Turgenieff's stories with the knowledge that they were composed—or rather that they came into being—in this way, one can trace the process in every line. Story, in the conventional sense of the word—a fable constructed, like Wordsworth's phantom, 'to startle and waylay'—there is as little as possible. The thing consists of the motions of a group of selected creatures, which are not the result of a preconceived action, but a consequence of the qualities of the actors."—And yet, for the writer ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... mustering courage to urge our staying, since the great Jagdhaus herd belonging to the Sterniwitz (landlord of the Star) was approaching. We therefore lingered, and thus saw the beautiful herd. It had suffered from no cruel phantom this year. There were senners and herdsmen in their holiday costumes, with flowers and ribbons in their hats; there were leiterwagen returning with the chests of clothes and the now empty meal-sacks; but more than this, there were four ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... a supernatural creature—a phantom?" he demanded. "If not, how do you know that I ever ...
— Frank Merriwell's Bravery • Burt L. Standish
... electric torch from side to side. He noticed nothing. He was, indeed, a rather imaginative man, and he hoped he would not notice anything. He did not like coming down this ghostly street, which his weak mind would persist in peopling with phantom crowds from long-played picture dramas. It gave him the creeps, as he had more than once confessed. He hurried on, flashing his torch along the blind fronts of the shops in a perfunctory manner. He was especially nervous when he came to corners. And he was glad when he issued from the little ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... have been sufficiently alarming had the cowl been that of a monk, but the outline of this phantom being suggested that of one of the Misericordia brethren or the costume worn of old by the familiars of ...
— The Golden Scorpion • Sax Rohmer
... dagger, and sheathed it in his heart. [151] The unprotected Maximus, whom he had invested with the purple, was indebted for his life to the contempt that was entertained of his power and abilities. The caprice of the Barbarians, who ravaged Spain, once more seated this Imperial phantom on the throne: but they soon resigned him to the justice of Honorius; and the tyrant Maximus, after he had been shown to the people of Ravenna ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... appears to her and says that her son, guided by Pallas, will surely return. Doubtless we see here an expression of the deepest instinct of Penelope; the outer suggestion of the nurse and her own unconscious faith fuse together and form the phantom and give to the same an utterance. The youth who can plan and carry out such an expedition will probably be able to take care of himself. Penelope of course has some doubt, since the good Ulysses has ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... them to follow the standard of King Charles Albert. Then they took up arms, as they conceived, in the cause of Italian liberty. But now that honorable cause was manifestly in abeyance; and they would not leave their homes and endanger their lives for the phantom of national independence ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... the middle-aged, Bathsheba was perhaps additionally charming just now. Her exuberance of spirit was pruned down; the original phantom of delight had shown herself to be not too bright for human nature's daily food, and she had been able to enter this second poetical phase without losing much of ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... fairly be acquitted of all but his usual inconsiderateness towards one too tender for such treatment. He deserves more pity than blame. And for her—thank Heaven for the blessing on them that mourn. Innocent creature, much will be spared her; if I could but dwell on that rather than on the phantom of delight she was, and my anticipations of again seeing the look that recalls Helen. If Helen was here, how she ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... who of herself could be; And she had found no heart which, tuned with hers, Would beat in rhythm, growing into rime. She read phantasmagoric tales, sans salt, Sans hope, sans growth; or listlessly conversed With phantom-visitors—ladies, not friends, Mere spectral forms from fashion's concave glass. She haunted gay assemblies, ill-content— Witched woods to hide in from her better self, And danced, and sang, and ached. What ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... he observes and notes. In the presence of the egotistic indifference of the emancipated Jews, he is shaken in his firmest convictions, and he admits with anguish that the ideal for which he has fought and sacrificed his life is but a phantom. Under the stress of such disappointment he ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... sound in the air. His ears, strained to the alert, caught it above the drums and voices—a thin, high ululation. It came from behind high walls and hung among the leaves of the trees, a phantom yodeling, the welcoming "you-you-you-you" ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... the passage almost on top of Toto, who was stalking phantom rats. Mrs. Meecher was manoeuvring in the background. Her face lit up grimly at ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... I breathed the lesson of the dead: Sudden the rich bells chorussed overhead: "O be not of the throng ephemeral To whom to-day is fame, to-morrow fate, Proud of some robe no statelier than a pall, Mad for some wreath of cypress funeral— A phantom generation fatuate. Stand thou aside and stretch a hand to save, Virtue alone ...
— Thoughts, Moods and Ideals: Crimes of Leisure • W.D. Lighthall
... which is familiar to us—and this—and this. We are full of hope; the lineaments, one by one, pass into clearness; when suddenly the figure becomes enveloped in a cloud—some perplexity crosses our analysis, baffling it utterly, the phantom which we have evoked dies away before our eyes, scornfully mocking our ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... not but reflect at the moment what a strange contrast the scene about them offered to the peaceful landscape and commonplace adventures of hum-drum Long Island. Not but what the Girl Aviators had had their meed of excitement there, too, as readers of the "Girl Aviators and the Phantom Airship" well know. But in the scoriated hills with their scanty outcropping of pallid wild oats, the fire-seered acclivities and the burning blue of the desert heavens above all, she beheld a setting entirely foreign ...
— The Girl Aviators on Golden Wings • Margaret Burnham
... and humiliating, how Nature does not vex herself in the least for the dying of a man. And yet, to the man, the event is so very important! Each breath of spaceless night, each twinkle from the firmament, though but the phantom of a ray quenched ages before, everything, he teases into anxious commentary on his own puny end. There could not be more ado if the Universe were in the throes, writhing against a reconquering Chaos. Harassed creature, what ails him is only the pathetic fallacy, which is a soothing melody ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... Ritson and the flyman had returned to the bar. The phantom of a smile lurked about the flyman's mouth. Hugh Ritson's face was ashen, and his ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... judge of men in power, will doom this act to public execration. No necessity demanded, no policy justified it. Ulloa's conduct had provoked the measures to which the inhabitants had resorted. During nearly two years, he had haunted the province as a phantom of dubious authority. The efforts of the colonists, to prevent the transfer of their natal soil to a foreign prince, originated in their attachment to their own, and the Catholic king ought to have beheld in their conduct a pledge ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... of the rivers; impart to this water thy exalted magic power; sprinkle with it the man, son of his god, ... wrap up his head, ... and on the highway pour it out. May insanity be dispelled! that the disease of his head vanish like a phantom of the night. May Ea's word drive it ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... the forecastle; the other, an officer, Theodore 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 ...
— The Gulf and Inland Waters - The Navy in the Civil War. Volume 3. • A. T. Mahan
... of the autumn days Like a phantom ghost I glide, Where the big moose sees the crimson trees Mirrored on the silver tide, And the blood red sun when day is done Sinks below the hill, The night hawk swoops, the lily droops, And all the ...
— The Camp Fire Girls at School • Hildegard G. Frey
... the crooked entry beside the great gap in the wall a tall soldier, dismounting and walking and wearing only the dust-hued habit of modern war. There went no trumpet before him, neither did he enter by the Golden Gate; but the silence of the deserts was full of a phantom acclamation, as when from far away a wind brings in a whisper the cheering of many thousand men. For in that hour a long-lost cry found fulfilment, and something counted irrational returned in the reason ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... in the horizon the dome and campaniles and lofty aisles of some celestial fane, such as he had often more than dreamed of raising to the revealed author of life and death. Altars arose and sacred shrines, and delicate chantries and fretted spires; now the flashing phantom of heavenly choirs, and then the dim response ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... man rationally believe of a governor-general, left at large by his council, that, under the terrors of a phantom invasion such as this, visionary as a dream, and distant as heaven is distant, he could seriously have organized an armament which, merely by its money costs, would be likely to shake the foundations of the empire which he administered? Yet if Lord Auckland ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... Ebro flowing round the edge as an ingenious variant of the Ocean-river on the shield of Achilles. A Carthaginian fleet cruising off the coast of Italy falls in with Proteus, who takes the opportunity of prophesying the course of the war. Hannibal at Zama pursues a phantom of Scipio, which flies before him and disappears like that of Aeneas before Turnus. Such was the degradation to which the noble epic machinery had now sunk. Soon after the death of Silius the poem seems to have fallen into merited oblivion; there is a single reference to it in a poet of ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... learning the value of Ignorance, came perilously near believing that no man could know anything. He came dangerously near the belief that Knowledge is all a mirage toward which men journey hopelessly; a phantom to be grasped by no hand; a will-o'-the-wisp to be followed here and there but leading nowhere. He, for a little, said that Ignorance is the truest wisdom. He believed, for a time, that to say always: "I do not know," is the height of all intelligence. One by one, he saw ...
— Their Yesterdays • Harold Bell Wright
... heard nothing but that indescribable, nameless flutter of falling snow—a sensation rather than a sound, a vague, ominous murmur. A command was given in a low tone and when the troop resumed its march it left in its wake a sort of white phantom standing in the snow. It gradually grew fainter and finally disappeared. It was the echelons who were to ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... the spinster would filter through with the mien of an apologetic phantom, and Raikes at once established the basis of indulgence by tentative nibbles of this and that, which were almost Barmecidian in their meagerness, and the sister, under his sordid supervision, followed his ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... hysterical, he told himself with compressed lips—no better than Lichfield Stope. The latter rose greyly in his memory, and fled across the sea, a phantom body pulsing with a veined fire like that stirred from the nocturnal bay. He again consulted his watch, and said aloud, incredulously: "Five minutes past eight." The inchoate crawling of his thoughts changed to an acute, tangible ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... class. A bonefish is so incredibly fast that it was a long time before I could believe the evidence of my own eyes. You see him; he is there perfectly still in the clear, shallow water, a creature of fish shape, pale green and silver, but crystal-like, a phantom shape, staring at you with strange black eyes; then he is gone. Vanished! Absolutely without your seeing a movement, even a faint streak! By peering keenly you may discern a little swirl in the water. ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... simple faith which unites the philosopher and the infant; and thirdly, the image of the erring but pure-thoughted visionary, seeking over-much on this earth to separate soul from mind, till innocence itself is led astray by a phantom, and reason is lost in the space between earth and the stars. Whether in these pictures there be any truth worth the implying, every reader must judge for himself; and if he doubt or deny that there be any such ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... breathless; "dost thou see nothing, Hippolita? Is this ghastly phantom sent to me alone—to rue, ...
— The Castle of Otranto • Horace Walpole |
