"Spectre" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... remained of it we wanted to know it soon. "Several miles back on the trail," he said. Not having eaten a mouthful since the morning before it was no wonder he was weak and silent. We gave him the best breakfast we could command from our meagre stock and then like a spectre he vanished on his scrawny steed up the Paria Canyon. All the day long we watched and waited for his triumphal return with the longed-for supplies at his back, but the sun departed without his approach and the twilight ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... which his rapacity and acts of arbitrary power have betrayed him. Thank God, my Lords, men that are greatly guilty are never wise. I repeat it, men that are greatly guilty are never wise. In their defence of one crime they are sure to meet the ghost of some former defence, which, like the spectre in Virgil, drives them back. The prisoner at your bar, like the hero of the poet, when he attempts to make his escape by one evasion, is stopped by the appearance of some former contradictory averment. If he attempts to escape by one door, there his criminal allegations of one kind stop ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... Fitfully she awoke, and struggled hard to chase away the heart-rending vision, and then she sunk again to meet another still more frightful. The wind whistled gloomily through the forest trees; the wild bird screamed his death song; and a spectre rose with sunken eyes and squalid cheek, his wounds distilling blood, and his raven locks clotted with gore. It was her lover—he had left the tree on which he withered like the seared leaf of autumn, and stalked to her widowed couch smiling sadly in death,—she shrieked aloud—the ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... mere mention of the name of Dreyfus suffices to remind us of the terrible nets woven by this dark spinner. Within the last year or two, have we not seen the loved king of a great nation driven to seek protection from the spectre of innuendo in the courts of law? But gossip laughs at such tribunals. It knows that where once it has affixed its foul stain, the mark remains forever, indelible as that imaginary stain which not all the multitudinous seas could wash from ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... ear bent, as if some unhallowed noise had struck upon it suddenly. As he moved to his lonely couch, he passed before an immense glass, in a heavy oaken frame: his own reflection met his eye; he started as if a spectre had crossed his path—his cheek blanched—his knees smote one against the other—his respiration was impeded. At last, waving his hand, as if to dispel the phantom his imagination had conjured up, he sprang into the bed, and buried his head under ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... was one of the last he would have wished to meet at any time; but, now that he recognised in him only the patron and protector of Nicholas, he would rather have seen a spectre. One beneficial effect, however, the encounter had upon him. It instantly roused all his dormant energies; rekindled in his breast the passions that, for many years, had found an improving home there; ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... the twilight of their cathedrals, and their "pale cloisters," the most revolting emblems of death. They startled the traveller on the bridge; they stared on the sinner in the carvings of his table and chair; the spectre moved in the hangings of the apartment; it stood in the niche, and was the picture of their sitting-room; it was worn in their rings, while the illuminator shaded the bony phantom in the margins of their "Horae," their primers, and their breviaries. Their ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... somewhat more agreeable life, as of late I have been associating more with other people. You could scarcely believe what a sad and dreary life mine has been for the last two years; my defective hearing everywhere pursuing me like a spectre, making me fly from every one, and appear a misanthrope; and yet no one is in reality less so! This change has been wrought by a lovely fascinating girl [undoubtedly Giulietta], who loves me and whom I love. I have once more had some blissful moments during ...
— Beethoven's Letters 1790-1826, Volume 1 of 2 • Lady Wallace
... the same order, but this time with so small an interval that the fugitive barely saved himself through the window. Once more, while we stared in stupefaction, they flashed out and in; and this time it seemed to me that as they vanished the black spectre seized its victim. ...
— From the Memoirs of a Minister of France • Stanley Weyman
... if Cedric's words had raised a spectre; for, scarce had he uttered them ere the door flew open, and Athelstane, arrayed in the garments of the grave, stood before them, pale, haggard, and like something ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... "Anyhow, I'm goin' to stay. No sheeted spectre can't scare me away from a place I've always stayed in Summers, 'specially," she added, sarcastically, "when I'm remembered in ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... old house, the yellow light in the darkened room, the faded spectre in the chair by the dressing-table glass, that I felt as if the stopping of the clocks had stopped Time in that mysterious place, and, while I and everything else outside it grew older, it stood still. Daylight never entered the house as to my thoughts and remembrances ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... become evident what abstruse and insoluble questions present themselves—rise, as it were, like ghosts of many an ancient creed, on every side, as soon as we have crossed the threshold of this great Mausoleum of human thought and imagination. There is the spectre of the great Mystery of existence—of Life and Death and Eternity; and that of the Knowledge of Good and Evil; and that of Evil itself—a phantom assuming at times such a visible and substantial shape and then dissolving into thin air as mere negation. And this Mephistopheles—are ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... also lived to a great age. His head was very fine, and I never could quite understand the satirical sayings about his personal appearance which have crept into the literary gossip of his time. He was by no means the vivacious spectre some of his contemporaries have represented him, and I never thought of connecting him with that terrible line in ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... as the idea of the means had come to him, came now the spectre of the consequences to affright him. How would it fare with him on Robespierre's return? How angered would not Robespierre be upon discovering that his wishes had been set at naught, his very measures contravened—and this by fraud? And than Robespierre's anger there were ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... stood apart from the rest, with his tall, straight form standing out like a spectre against the dim sky, and the illusion was fully sustained by the light-gray military cloak which he folded around him. His face was pale, but wore a determined expression, and at times he drew nearer the centre of the ...
— My Days and Nights on the Battle-Field • Charles Carleton Coffin
... by Elmer E. Wentworth. Cloth, 35 cents. This book contains The Voyage, The Wife, Rip Van Winkle, Sunday in London, The Art of Bookmaking, The Mutability of Literature, The Spectre Bridegroom, Westminster Abbey, Christmas, The Stage Coach, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, Stratford-on-Avon, To My Books, The Legend ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... cannot help opening the flood-gates of language, as the Spanish say. Rembrandt exerts an especial fascination. Fra Angelico is a saint, Michelangelo is a giant, Raphael is an angel, Titian a prince, Rembrandt is a spectre. What else can this miller's son be called? Born in a windmill, he arose unexpectedly without a master, without example, without any instruction from the schools, to become a universal painter, who depicted life in every aspect, who painted figures, ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... him!" cried the duchess, sympathizing, in spite of herself, with his sudden sorrow. He was ghastly as a spectre, and his whole frame shook like the leaf ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... pain. Often she paused from the page as she heard him sigh, and felt that she would even have renounced the bliss of being loved by him, if she could have restored to him that blessing, the desire for which haunted him as a spectre. ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... as they. Not a word, whether of sympathy or of animosity, greeted the silent procession. On went the noiseless, spectre-like train until it reached the market-place. There the superior stopped, and the brothers gathered around ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... turned to McCloskey and said, with a much bolder air than he had yet shown in addressing him, "So, you're back again, villain! are you? I thought and hoped you were dead;" and he leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes as if to shut out some horrid spectre. ...
— The Garies and Their Friends • Frank J. Webb
... classes became a serious and pressing problem. The German armies, in their onset toward the west, had swept the Belgian country-side bare; the products of the farms and gardens in the immediate vicinity of the city had been commandeered for the use of the garrison, and the spectre of starvation was already beginning to cast its dread shadow over Brussels. Mr. Whitlock acted with promptness and decision. He sent Americans, who had volunteered their services, to Holland to purchase food-stuffs, and at the same time informed the German commander ...
— Fighting in Flanders • E. Alexander Powell
... out, the camp-fire fades, The wild auroral ghost-lights die, And stealing up the distant wood The moon's white spectre floats on high, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... pleasure in every increase of Knowledge, every problem solved, every witty thought, whether of his own or another's; and so his mind will have no further aim than to be constantly active. This will be an inexhaustible spring of delight; and boredom, that spectre which haunts the ordinary man, can never ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer
... invention was too much. He shut his eyes wearily, let his head roll to rest inertly, and quickly relaxed what he had regained of muscular control. Out of a crevice of his mind crept the vague but inevitable spectre of the night before—but it proved in this case to be nothing but a seemingly interminable conversation with Richard Caramel, who had called on him at midnight; they had drunk four bottles of beer and munched dry crusts of bread while Anthony ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... his narrow room, In the bright sunshine of that Paris day; Saw in his thought the awful hand of doom; Saw in his dream his glory pass away; Tried in his heart, his weary heart, to pray: "O God! who made me, give me strength to face The spectre ...
— Songs of a Sourdough • Robert W. Service
... enthusiasms had to be abandoned: but the objectives were not. Most of them were eventually to be translated into action and actuality. It was in their modification, perhaps, that the author was to display most of all his foresight and acumen. From 1848 onwards he recognised the true nature of "the spectre which haunted Europe"—and which still haunts the world. From then onwards he was not to write in the way ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth
... a large village; no lights burned in the windows, but white fences gleamed through the darkness, and sharp gable ends loomed up against the dull sky, one after another, and the horse's hoofs flashed sparks from the paved street before the church, that showed its white spire, spectre-like, directly in their path. Here, by some evil chance, the child awoke, and, between cold and hunger and fear, began one of those long and loud shrieks that no power can stop this side of strangulation. In vain ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... real and more lovable and more desirable than the girl who tempts him into sin. And he can't be found. Was he in your service to-night? Can he be emotionally conjured up by 'Yield not to temptation' or 'Dare to be a Daniel'? Be honest, padre—the thing is a spectre of the imagination." ...
— Simon Called Peter • Robert Keable
... arched gateway is alone worth a good rent; the long corridors from which the chambers open are suitable to ghosts fond of walking exercise; the superb dining-room is round, and the floor is so old that it would shake under the foot of the lightest spectre. The repertoire of family traditions is almost inexhaustible, and doubtless one might have the use of them for a little additional money. One of the latest is of the seventeenth century, when the daughter of the house was "the beautiful Nicolaide ...
— A Little Swiss Sojourn • W. D. Howells
... an opposite window. As if touched by a gleam from the lamp, or as if by some subtle interior illumination, the spectre became faintly luminous, and a thin smile seemed to quiver over its features. At the same moment, a strong, energetic figure—Dr. Renton, himself—came in sight, striding down the slope of the pavement to his own door, his over-coat thrown back, as if the icy ...
— The Ghost • William. D. O'Connor
... If the absence of your children gives you so much pain, judge what I must suffer. The affection you show them makes me feel most acutely my unhappiness in having none." These words sounded in Josephine's ears like a funeral knell. She saw the spectre of divorce rising before her, and turned pale. From Genoa they went to Turin. Napoleon heard there of the coalition preparing against him, and left suddenly for France with Josephine. Non-commissioned officers of the Grenadiers and the Chasseurs of the ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... But they all listened to the contributor's explanation with interest and eventual sympathy; and in truth,—briefly told, with a word now and then thrown in by Jonathan Tinker, who kept at the bottom of the steps, showing like a gloomy spectre in the night, or, in his grotesque length and gauntness, like the other's shadow cast there by the lamplight,—it was a story which could hardly fail to ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... Mary Hope was asleep and Belle was dozing beside the stricken woman, Lance saddled Jamie and led Coaley home. And while he rode, black Trouble rode with him and Love could not smile and beat back the spectre with his fists, but hid his face and whimpered, ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... stood as if she had been transfixed to the floor, dragged her out of the room. In the passage, I heard a loud scream; and, in a moment, all was again silence. Mr B——, without uttering a word, raised his feeble body from the bed, and came forth, the spectre of what he was only a few weeks before. His limbs, which were reduced to bony shanks, covered with shrivelled skin, seemed totally unable to support even the decayed, emaciated frame. He staggered ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton
... sick—a dangerous illness.—"No hope" said the physician, and shook his awful whig. Bitterly wept Clarine. "O death!" she cried, "O death! might I prefer a petition? Spare my husband; let me be the victim in his stead." Death heard, appeared, and "What," said the grim spectre, "is thy request?" "There," said Clarine sore dismayed, "There he lies; overcome with agony he ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... Cabinet also addressed the Dalesmen, urging them not to ally themselves with Sunnanvaeder, who was disgruntled, so they heard, because he had not been given the bishopric of Vesteras. In one of his appeals Gustavus warned the rebels to be still, lest Christiern might be encouraged to return. The spectre of their gory tyrant seems not, however, to have haunted them, and in February we find that Knut, the deposed dean of Vesteras, had joined their ranks. To him Gustavus wrote a note, assuring him that the archbishopric would ...
— The Swedish Revolution Under Gustavus Vasa • Paul Barron Watson
... made common property by writers of fiction in all generations; it occurs at least thrice in the Ingoldsby Legends; Sir Walter Scott gives a terrible instance in his story of the Scotch judge haunted by the spectre of the bandit he had sentenced to death {2}, which appears to be founded on fact; and indeed the present narrative was suggested by one of Washington Irving's short stories, read by the writer when a ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... ready to put it a' doon to auld wives' clavers then, I'm thinkin'." I saw it was hopeless to reason with him, so contented myself with begging him as a personal favour to call me up the next time the spectre appeared—a request to which he acceded with many ejaculations expressive of his hopes that such an ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... all the day thou wrapped in sleep didst lie. Where wouldst thou go, my dove?" The gentle girl Was much afraid and trembled, and she thought: "Is it a spirit come to find me here? Avaunt thee and begone, O spectre dread," She said, amid her tears. "No phantom I," Replied the King; "be not afraid. I wish To marry thee." Then Bidasari strove Again to flee. Then sang the King a song That told of love and happiness. Its words Astonished Bidasari, and she cried: "Art thou a pirate? Why dost thou come here? ...
— Malayan Literature • Various Authors
... woman, but a wood-spirit in the guise of the beloved. The result would be his death within three days, and, as a matter of fact, he died. This is the groundwork of the old Breton ballad of Le Sieur Nan, who dies after his intrigue with the forest spectre.(1) A tale more like a common modern ghost-story is vouched for by Mr. C. J. Du Ve, in Australia. In the year 1860, a Maneroo black fellow died in the service of Mr. Du Ve. "The day before he died, having been ill some time, he said that in the night his father, his father's friend, ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... carried back the candles to the table and went to the fire, and with the tongs took down the kindled coals, and laid them on the deal chamber floor. The doctor then thought it time to rise and put on his clothes, in the time of which the spectre laid up the coals again in the chimney, and, going to the table, lifted the candles and went to the door, opened it, still looking to the Principal, as he would have him following the candles, which he now, thinking there was something extraordinary in ...
— Greek and Roman Ghost Stories • Lacy Collison-Morley
... wildly in their hollow sockets, and a yell more appalling than the former rang through the room. The man sprang from his chair, which he overturned in his fright, and stood for an instant with his one-eyeball starting from his head, and glaring upon the spectre; his cheeks deadly pale; the cold perspiration streaming from his face; his lips dissevered, and his ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... must be a spectre or a servant of the Ice Maiden," thought Rudy, who had heard such things talked about when he was a little boy, and had stayed all night on the ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... was not near him. With flint, steel, and gunpowder he quickly raised a blaze; his kettle was boiling, his meat toasting, and his damper warming up, while his blanket and clothes were drying; and had it not been for the spectre he had seen, he would have been well content with his lot,—not that he much feared what the poor creature could do to him, but it was the feeling that at any moment he might rush out on him which was so painful. By the look of the sky he saw that the weather was still unsettled, ...
— The Gilpins and their Fortunes - A Story of Early Days in Australia • William H. G. Kingston
... now well up; the smoke clouds had been scattered by the breeze; the sky was studded with diamonds. Zen had a feeling of being very happy. True, a certain haunting spectre at times would break into her consciousness, but in the companionship of such a man as Grant she could easily beat it off. She studied the face in the moon, and invited her soul. She was living through a new experience—an experience she ...
— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead
... the speech of the Palmer. As Marmion listened, he gathered from the legend that not far from where they sat, a knight might learn of future weal or woe. He might, perchance, meet "in the charmed ring" his deadliest foe, in the form of a spectre, and with it engage in mortal combat. If victorious over this supernatural antagonist, the omen was victory in all ...
— The Prose Marmion - A Tale of the Scottish Border • Sara D. Jenkins
... back to the fireplace and placed several chunks of wood on the blaze. A bright orange glow leaped out from the hearth and danced mockingly over his pallid brow, hiding his lank jowls in the shadows cast by the cheekbones. Like some grim spectre he rose up, towering above the little Dutchman. Peter had only to look into his eyes to see the imperative request that lingered behind ...
— The White Feather Hex • Don Peterson
... misfortune. I shall have to show you a life, the sport of fate and circumstances, hurried along through shifting storm and sun, bright with trusting innocence and anon black with heartless villainy, a career which moves on in love and desertion and anguish, always hovered over by the dark spectre of INSANITY—an insanity hereditary and induced by mental torture,—until it ends, if end it must in your verdict, by one of those fearful accidents, which are inscrutable to men and of which ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... himself, with exultation, would win him all the money in the pool, or, perhaps at the moment when he raised the glass to his lips, anticipating the delicious exhilaration of the seductive peach-honey, that the unwelcome spectre would, with startling suddenness, appear before his eyes. His face would blanch, his own voice become almost as hoarse as the warning whisper that was in his ear, and with trembling hand he would put down the cards or the cup and refuse to have ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... her slight form showing like a spectre against the dim gleam towards which she bent her way, till suddenly she paused and we saw her standing with clasped hands, and bent head, looking down into ...
— The Mill Mystery • Anna Katharine Green
... into which its presence casts the soul the scaffold appears in terrible guise, and as though taking part in what is going on. The scaffold is the accomplice of the executioner; it devours, it eats flesh, it drinks blood; the scaffold is a sort of monster fabricated by the judge and the carpenter, a spectre which seems to live with a horrible vitality composed of all the death ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... still, without hope or understanding, with the end of his days well in view! Surely it were better to risk all things, to have him back at any cost? Then a thought more terrible yet than any rose up before him like a spectre, there was a sudden catch at his heart-strings, he was cold with fear. What would she think of the man who deserted his partner, an old man, while life was yet in him, and safety close at hand? Was it possible that he could ever escape the everlasting stigma of cowardice—ay, and before him in great ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Alas! I am unhappy, and I know not why." While she spoke a tear trembled on her dark eyelashes, and as the moonlight shone upon it, the reflection glanced back to the eye-ball, and a radiant form apparently glided through the chamber. But the spectre vanished as the eyelid passed over, and swept away the illusion. She leaned her glowing cheek upon a hand white and exquisitely formed as the purest statuary: an image of more perfect loveliness never glanced ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... his thoughts to lucre's thirst, And stored until his garners burst: The spectre haunted him the more. Then poverty besieged his door: He feared the burglar and the thief; Nor light nor darkness ...
— Fables of John Gay - (Somewhat Altered) • John Gay
... He stopped on the spot, and his heart almost stopped, too—but only for a moment. Driven by some necessity he could not explain to himself, he picked himself together and pushed on, only to find that the intimidating spectre consisted of some white clothing hung for drying on the iron rod of the shutter and kept moving by a high wind. It was a lesson that ...
— The Soul of a Child • Edwin Bjorkman
... Ballarook was over, and Gavan Blake turned his horses' heads in a direction he had never taken before—along the road to Kuryong. As he drove along, his thoughts were anything but pleasant. Behind him always stalked the grim spectre of detection and arrest; and, even should a lucky windfall help to pay his debts, he could not save the money either to buy a practice in Sydney or to maintain himself while he was building one up. He thought of the pitiful smallness of his chances at Tarrong, and then of Ellen Harriott. ...
— An Outback Marriage • Andrew Barton Paterson
... struck the same formless shudder through my bones. Yet it was only for a moment. I had seen such phosphorescent ghosts before and I had but to step boldly forward and give the stub a kick to send the spectre flying in fragments that dropped like huge glowworms in chunks to the sodden ground. Often in a northeast rain after long drought a rotten birch stump will thus glow with phosphorescent fire producing a most formidable ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... degree it pained me to move. I clambered down and took a few turns about the room as if I had naught to do but exercise. But at every turn the hideous face and whitened eyes of Broussard dogged my footsteps as a spectre. Look where I would, it was only that I saw. Hour after hour crawled by. Jerome would ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... spectre paused. Then it started onward toward the two men. Again it hesitated. For a moment it remained motionless, then turned and vanished, just as Jim Lane came flying out of the timber, into the bright light ...
— The Shepherd of the Hills • Harold Bell Wright
... employed to so many bad purposes, that surmises of this nature were likely to meet with the less credit among all men of sense; and nothing but the duke's imprudent bigotry could have convinced the whole nation of his change of religion. Popery, which had hitherto been only a hideous spectre, was now become a real ground of terror being openly and zealously embraced by the heir to the crown a prince of industry and enterprise; while the king himself was not entirely free from ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part F. - From Charles II. to James II. • David Hume
... gaping month. It was late before Ida got to bed, and later still before she fell asleep; for, somehow, now that she was back at Herondale the memory of that happy past grew more vivid; in fact, the whole place was haunted by the spectre of her lost love: and of all spectres this is ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... existence,—ay, her very body and soul. And yet for years she had slept in that room, if not happily at least tranquilly. It was matter of wonder to her now, as she looked back at her past life, that her guilt had sat so lightly on her shoulders. The black unwelcome guest, the spectre of coming evil, had ever been present to her; but she had seen it indistinctly, and now and then the power had been hers to close her eyes. Never again could she close them. Nearer to her, and still nearer, the spectre came; and now it sat upon her pillow, and put its claw upon ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... marvel much what our boys are coming to, as if we had any right to expect better treatment of them. I doubt if Jacob, in the whole course of his wizened little life, had ever a hand in an honest game that was not haunted by the spectre of the avenging policeman. That he was not "doing anything" was no defence. The mere claim was proof that he was up to mischief of some sort. Besides, the policeman was usually right. Play in such a setting becomes a direct ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... made up in the castoff mail of a court buck, a wellset man with a bass voice. It is the ghost, the king, a king and no king, and the player is Shakespeare who has studied Hamlet all the years of his life which were not vanity in order to play the part of the spectre. He speaks the words to Burbage, the young player who stands before him beyond the rack of cerecloth, calling ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... himself in silence at the other end of the log. The head of the stranger was bound with a white cloth and his eyes were fixed with a glassy stare upon Major B., who felt his blood run cold at the singular apparition. At last the Major mustered up courage to ask the stranger what he wanted. The spectre replied "I am a dead man, and was buried in the graveyard yonder" (pointing as he spoke to a dilapidated enclosure a few yards distant). "The dogs," he continued, "have found their way into my shallow grave, and are gnawing my flesh. I can not rest until I am laid deeper in the ground." The Major ...
— The Narrative of a Blockade-Runner • John Wilkinson
... taken with a panic; she fancied herself deserted in a giant tomb, with dead men gathering about her. She herself was in truth the grisliest spectre there, in her white satin gown and feathers, and the horror of her hideous face. But she took to flight, and the key remained ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... remain a few minutes at the bottom of the stairs, I darted up towards my own room. My hand was already on the lock of the door before I recollected myself. I then paused, and a cold shivering came over me. I threw the door forcibly open, as children are accustomed to do when they expect a spectre to stand in waiting for them on the other side; but nothing appeared. I stepped fearfully in: the apartment was empty, and my bedroom was also freed from its hideous guest. I could hardly believe that so great a good fortune could ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... estranged from them or had actually turned {112} against them. The Duke of Wellington and Sir Robert Peel probably thought that their wisest course would be to let Lord Grey and Brougham and their friends try what they could do with the monstrous spectre of reform which they had conjured up, and wait till the country had recovered its senses before again undertaking to act as ministers of ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IV (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... worn— But now is borne away by thee Memorial of thine agony! Yet with thine own best blood shall drip; Thy gnashing tooth, and haggard lip; Then stalking to thy sullen grave, Go—and with Gouls and Afrits rave, Till these in horror shrink away From spectre more accursed than they. ...
— The Vampyre; A Tale • John William Polidori
... secures to the King a method of resisting electoral or elective majorities. If then, renewing the days of 1792 and 1793, the majority should refuse the taxes, would the King be called upon to deliver up his crown to the spectre of the Convention? No; but in that case he ought to maintain his right, and save himself from the danger by means respecting which it is proper to keep silence." On the 1st of January, the Royal ...
— Memoirs To Illustrate The History Of My Time - Volume 1 • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... fall," continued the old gentleman, and Fritz Nettenmair's bright, new heaven sank into nothingness. The old spectre held him again in its grasp. He loved again the woman from whom he had just wanted to flee. The old gentleman had awaited his son's assent. "You will go," he said, when the son remained silent. "You will go. Tomorrow before day-break you will be on your way to America, or I shall be on my way ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... feverishly seeking distraction from his own black moods, the demure, devout Princess, ignorant of the caresses and coquetry of her sex, moving like a spectre among the brilliant, light-hearted ladies of his Court, was the most unsuitable, the most impossible of brides. He quickly wearied of her company, and fled from her sighs and her homilies to seek forgetfulness ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... present for the future I abandon, but if I am to create for the present, that present must appear to me in a less disgusting form than it actually does. I renounce fame, and more especially the ridiculous spectre of posthumous fame, because I love my fellow-men too much to condemn them, for the sake of my vanity, to the poverty in which alone the posthumous fame of dead people finds ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... said he to himself, "a mental, like an optical, illusion. In the last, we fancy we have seen a spectre. If we dare not face the apparition,—dare not attempt to touch it,—run superstitiously away from it,—what happens? We shall believe to our dying day that it was not an illusion, that it was a spectre; and so we may ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... reeling and blind as if drunk. He went mad. He had lived with her in a close, living, pulsing world, where everything pulsed with rich being. Now he found himself struggling amid an ashen-dry, cold world of rigidity, dead walls and mechanical traffic, and creeping, spectre-like people. The life was extinct, only ash moved and stirred or stood rigid, there was a horrible, clattering activity, a rattle like the falling of dry slag, cold and sterile. It was as if the sunshine that fell were unnatural light exposing the ash of the town, as if the lights ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... Revolution of 1848—the return of foreign refugees to Austria, and other significant indications of joining with the old powers in oppressing freedom. Let Louis Napoleon beware of an anti-American policy—for to every such policy there will be an opposition, with a spectre of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... as it were from that merry and populous chamber of life and health, once again I met the Spectre I derided, a red-headed, red-visaged Thing that chose me out to stop and grin at. Somehow I was not minded to return ...
— Doctor Therne • H. Rider Haggard
... almost wish—' Andrew's fingers worked over his poll, and then the spectre of righteous wrath flashed on him—naughty little man that he was! He knew himself naughty, for it was the only time since his marriage that he had ever been sorry to see his wife. This is a comedy, and I must not preach ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... throws squibs at people in the street, who fastens rabbits' tails behind their backs, who fishes for their wigs, who sticks up pins in his friends' chairs, who carries a hideous mask in his pocket to frighten little children, and who is himself frightened into repentance by a spectre with a speaking trumpet, is a very objectionable, though an excellent dramatic character. The part of the spectre is played by the groom; this is ill contrived in a drama for children; grooms should have nothing to do with their entertainments; and Caesar, ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... impressed by the German power to strike. Our soil was chosen as a garden of domestic sedition, and of foreign conspiracy against powers with which we were at peace. To keep us busy with troubles of our own, German propaganda and German money in Mexico raised on our southern border a threatening spectre of war. We were to have been rushed into conflict with Mexico and kept employed there while being terrorized by wholesale arson and sabotage at home, so that by no chance could any friendly European power look to us for help. The scheme came near to succeeding, for ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... across the sill now, and she opened her heavy lids and gazed downwards, half eagerly, half fearfully. The water was dark and the moon-light on the surface glittered. The wheel was below, huge and gaunt like a spectre; silent, with its spokes dipping into ...
— The Black Cross • Olive M. Briggs
... decidedly sheepish, was forced to admit that he had obtained permission from His Excellency to present his friend Jansoulet. He had hardly finished his sentence when a tall spectre with flabby cheeks and multicolored hair and whiskers darted from the dressing-room into the chamber, holding together with both hands at his skinny but very straight neck, a dressing-gown of light silk with violet dots, in which he had enveloped ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... 1872. Poor fellow! He was the smallest in size of all the children, in his manhood reaching only to a little over five feet; and throughout his childhood was never called by any other name than the "Ocean Spectre," from a strange little weird yet most attractive look in his large wondering eyes, very happily caught in a sketch in oils by the good Frank Stone, done at Bonchurch in September 1849 and remaining in his aunt's possession. "Stone ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... from him like a dream at morning. On what a spider thread is hung our individual existence! Fragility, appearance, nothingness. If it were for our powers of self-detraction and forgetfulness, all the fairy world which surrounds and draws us would seem to us but a broken spectre in the darkness, an empty appearance, a fleeting hallucination. Appeared—disappeared—there is the whole history of a man, or of a world, ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... inspired by the souls of the dead is not so absolute. He tells us, indeed, that ghosts are thought to make people ill by stealing their souls; that the natives fear to go alone outside the village in the dark lest they should encounter a spectre; and that if too many quarrels occur among the women, the spirits of the dead may manifest their displeasure by visiting hunters and fishers with bad luck, so that it may be necessary to conjure their souls out of the village. ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... read of it in her books; its shadow had passed her by when she missed her little brother from the cradle; but still it had never stood by her side and said, "Lo, I am here!" Her circle of love was so small that it seemed as though the dread spectre could not enter. She saw it afar off; she thought upon it sometimes in her poetical dreams, which clad the imaginary shape of grief with a strange beauty. It was sweet to be sad, sweet to weep. She even tried to make a few delicious sorrows for herself; and when a young ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... probability brief; but, far from feeling distressed on this account, he hugged the knowledge to his heart that he had provided for Sibyl, and that she at least would never want. During the night which followed, however, he could not sleep. Spectre after spectre of his past life rose up before him in the gloom. He saw now that ever since his marriage the way had been paved for this final act of crime. The extravagances which his wife had committed, and which ...
— Daddy's Girl • L. T. Meade
... hatred you may be so but do not deceive yourself. The curse of the widow and the orphan shall pursue—it shall cling to you and yours—it shall gnaw your heart in the midst of splendour—it shall cleave to the heritage of your son! There shall be a deathbed yet, beside which you shall see the spectre of her, now so calm, rising for retribution from the grave! These words—no, you never shall forget them—years hence they shall ring in your ears, and freeze the marrow of your bones! And now begone, my father's brother—begone ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 1 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... the opportunity to relieve himself from the affliction with which he had afflicted others. Like an impostor who has established the claim of deafness, and mankind bawls in his ear, the hatted spectre was made to feel uncomfortable when he put off his tile—his consistency was at once on trial. He was like a boy who had pricked a cross upon his hand in India ink, and, growing to be a man with taste and position, sees the indelible advertisement of ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... of lightning, that seemed to rive the remotest heights of heaven, illumined the darkness. By its light, between the Island of Lemaire and Cape Croiselle, a quarter of a league distant, Dantes saw a fishing-boat driven rapidly like a spectre before the power of winds and waves. A second after, he saw it again, approaching with frightful rapidity. Dantes cried at the top of his voice to warn them of their danger, but they saw it themselves. Another flash showed him four men clinging ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... the White Czar imperial progress made Through terror-haunted days. A shock, a cry Whose echoes ring the globe—the spectre's laid. Hurled o'er the abyss, see the crowned martyr lie Resting in peace—fear, change, and death gone by. Fit end for nightmare—mist of blood and tears, Red climax to ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... his gold-colored robe vanish into the gold of the sun through the copper color of the columns. And I was quite alone in the "thinking-place" of Rameses. It was a brilliant day, the sky dark sapphire blue, without even the spectre of a cloud, or any airy, vaporous veil; the heat already intense in the full sunshine, but delicious if one slid into a shadow. I slid into a shadow, and sat down on a warm block of stone. And the silence flowed upon ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... something as all-pervading and impalpable as the air we drew into our lungs. And suddenly this danger, this breath of our life, had taken this material form. It was material and expected, and yet it had the effect of an evil spectre, inasmuch as one did not know where and how it was vulnerable, what precisely it would do, how one ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... the morning, the thermometer indicating 18 degrees. The nights I pass in these fearful regions are more dreadful than the days, for "night is the time for care, brooding o'er days misspent, when the pale spectre of despair comes to our lonely tent;" and often when I lay me down I fall into a dim and death-like trance, wakeful, yet "dreaming dreams no mortals had ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... those three men retire. The boy, grown old in lust, goes thence to be an hour alone, to ponder for an hour on this God, this resurrection, and this truth, of which the Jew, in such uncourtly phrase, has harangued him. To be alone, until the spectre of a dying mother rises again to haunt him, to persecute him and drive him forth to his followers and feasters, where he will try to forget Paul and the Saviour and God, where he would be glad to ...
— If, Yes and Perhaps - Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact • Edward Everett Hale
... with stranded wrecks of ships whose passengers had long years before gone down at sea. The broken windows in the dormitories were festooned with cobwebs that had housed long lines of ancestral spiders, and where a pane or two of glass remained among the many empty frames, one fancied a gibbering spectre might look out ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... stream whose soundless tide Sets ever to the unknown tideless sea They who have drunk of Slumber's poppied draught Walk with unsandalled feet the path of dreams That winds thro' gray, low-lying fields of sleep To dim dream shores girt with dim spectre-trees, Swayed ever by the sweep of unseen wings, Slow-stirring palms and arabesques of ferns And fields of sombre bloom and scentless flowers Not of their wonted hue, but dimly gray, Where songless birds like shades ...
— The Path of Dreams - Poems • Leigh Gordon Giltner
... him!" and an emotion which he had believed was long since dead rose hotly in his consciousness. Before the dread spectre, suddenly imbued with vitality, Farwell reeled and covered his face. Murder was in his heart—the old madness of desire to wipe out, by any means, that which barred his way ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock |
