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More "Spectral" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the whole scene, in which she was the most conspicuous object, seemed to vanish from her eyes, or, at least, glimmered indistinctly before them, like a mass of imperfectly shaped and spectral images. Her mind, and especially her memory, was preternaturally active, and kept bringing up other scenes than this roughly hewn street of a little town, on the edge of the Western wilderness; other faces than were ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... court, thus organized, proceeded to Salem, and commenced operations by the trial of an old woman who had long enjoyed the reputation of being a witch. Besides "spectral evidence," that is, the tales of the afflicted, a jury of women, appointed to make an examination, found upon her a wart or excrescence, adjudged to be "a devil's teat." A number of old stories were also raked up of dead hens and foundered cattle and carts upset, ascribed by the neighbors ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... absurd and impressionable brains of the young ladies of the ballet, their mothers, the box-keepers, the cloak-room attendants or the concierge. Yes, he existed in flesh and blood, although he assumed the complete appearance of a real phantom; that is to say, of a spectral shade. ...
— The Phantom of the Opera • Gaston Leroux
... "Nothin' doin'!" But he remembered the Boy's injunction, as well as his doubts, and checked himself. A moment later a faint, swirling gurgle of water caught his ear, and he was glad he had kept silence. An instant more, and the form of a beaver, spectral-gray in the moonlight, took shape all at once on the brink of the canal. For several minutes it stood there motionless, erect upon its hind quarters, questioning the stillness with eyes and ear and nose. Then, satisfied that there was no ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... but they neglected the fine Sirinjah ("sponges"), which here grow two feet long. The night was dark and painfully still, showing nought but the youngest of moons, and the gloomiest silhouettes of spectral mountains. ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... grayed down into a wan, spectral morning, and slowly the gray morning paled into a dim mother-of-pearl dawn. And then suddenly the mother-of-pearliness brightened into a shimmering opal, and the ray of pale gold light slanted through the barred window and the bright face of new day peeped ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... undergrowth of bushes, the tall poplars by the roadside seemed to be moving swiftly onward, and keeping pace, as it were, with the carriage. She no longer knew where she was. The only object she could clearly distinguish, except the horses, was the tall figure at their side—the spectral form that towered above the little animals, and kept steadily abreast of them. Where were they going? And like lightning the thought flashed upon her that they were not making for the town, that this stranger was not an officer, ...
— Captain Mansana and Mother's Hands • Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson
... right and regular. But his sufferings when the clock was going to strike were frightful to behold; and when a Cuckoo looked out of a trap-door in the Palace, and gave note six times, it shook him, each time, like a spectral voice—or like a something ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... had ever been before. Let the reader picture to himself the stillness of the night within, and without the rumbling roar of the sea—the peculiar piping of the wind, which rang upon my ears like the tones of a mighty organ played upon by spectral hands—the passing scudding clouds which, shining bright and white, often seemed to peep in through the rattling oriel-windows like giants sailings past—in very truth, I felt, from the slight shudder ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... narrow that at times John could easily touch the walls of the spectral houses on either ...
— Miss Caprice • St. George Rathborne
... lockfasted in slumber's arms I lay and dream'd (so dreams our race When every spectral object charms, To melt, like shadow, in ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... called, All Hallows' night or Hallowe'en, all the fairy hills or shees are thrown wide open and the fairy host issues forth, as mortals who are bold enough to venture near may see. Naturally therefore people keep indoors so as not to encounter the spectral host. The superstition that the fairies are abroad on Samain night still exists in Ireland and Scotland, and there is a further belief, no doubt derived from it, that the graves are open on that night and that the spirits of the dead ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... different times an adult male blue yellow-backed warbler, and a bird of the same species in immature plumage. It seemed highly probable, to say the least, that the young fellow had been reared not far off, the more so as the neighboring Wellfleet woods were spectral with hanging lichens, of the sort which this exquisite especially affects. At first I wondered why this particular little grove, by no means peculiarly inviting in appearance, should be the favorite resort of so many birds,—robins, ...
— The Foot-path Way • Bradford Torrey
... minutes the tall and graceful column itself became visible, looking pale and spectral against the black sky. At the same time the roar of the surf broke familiarly on Ruby's ears. He steered close past the north end of the rock, so close that he could see the rocks, and knew that it was ...
— The Lighthouse • R.M. Ballantyne
... hearing him! For the wind seemed to have got up the bit that was predicted of it, and had certainly gone round to the suth'ard. If any sleeper could cling to unconsciousness through the rattle of the windows and the intermittent banging of a spectral door that defied identification—the door that always bangs in storms everywhere—the mere movement of a cautious foot would have no effect. If unable to sleep for the wind, none would be alive to it. It would ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... soul.—'Soul! spirit!'—thus I often cried to myself laughing, and even now I cannot refrain from laughter,—'can there be anything else? And if this be so, in what does spirit differ from matter? where is the party wall between life and death?' In the spectral phantom of life, in the sphinx-born riddle of being, in that terrific fiat out of which the worlds sprang forth, to roll convulsively onward and evermore onward, till they can drop back into rest and nothingness—in this all contradictions and contrarieties ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... walls and roofs, moonlight streamed: its spectral brightness intensifying every patch or streak of shadow. And there, where Kings and Princes had held audience—watched by their womenfolk through fretted screens—was neither roof nor walls; only a group of marble pillars, as it were assembled in ghostly conference. ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... standing in the midst of a desolation and a silence that was profound. There was nothing there that lived, except a few fire-blacked trees that stuck up here and there in the shelter of broken walls. Now I understood the meaning of the spectral shapes. They were nothing but the broken walls of the other houses that were. They were all that remained ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... all. Raising the lid you would find the jug half filled with water. Sometimes in the tangle up above, between two trees, you would see a thing like a bird come to ruin. Orchids grew here as in a hothouse. All the trees—the few there were—had a spectral and miserable appearance. They were half starved by the voluptuous growth of ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... sea-fog, landward bound, The spectral band was seen, And with a sorrowful deep sound, The ...
— The Haunted Hour - An Anthology • Various
... He was sobbing now like a child. Laverick rose to his feet and went to the window. What was to be done with such a creature! When he got back, Morrison had raised himself once more into a sitting posture. His appearance was absolutely spectral. ...
— Havoc • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... down quietly on the top step of the landing, and gazed down into the dark, dank water below. Once or twice a spectral thought loomed among the shadows of her brain; a wonder whether beneath that cold dismal surface there would not be rest from the troubles of earth. But she could not hold an idea before her for two consecutive moments; and she forgot what she thought ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... certain amount of desert temperament, and you will vaguely understand how the red corpuscles were raising rebellion in Jack's artery walls on the morning of his journey's end. From the ferryboat on the dull-green bosom of the river he first renewed his memory of the spectral and forbidding abysses and pinnacles of New York. Here time is everything; here man has done his mightiest in contriving masses to imitate the architectural chaos of genesis. A mantle of chill, smoky mist formed the ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... atom of dust imbedded in the great Shamo desert. The eye of the astronomer, who thinks he also knows of the existence of such systems, has never rested upon them, has never caught of them, even that spectral glimpse, fanciful and hazy as the incoherent vision in a slumbering mind that he has occasionally had of other systems, and yet he verily believes he has gauged INFINITUDE! And yet these immeasurably distant worlds ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... fitting sentiment and skill would have loved to study. The visitor had gained the door; and as he stood there, his noble height—the magnificent strength and health of his manhood in its full prime—contrasted alike the almost spectral debility of extreme age and the graceful delicacy of Fanny—half girl, half child. There was something foreign in his air—and the half military habit, relieved by the red riband of the Bourbon knighthood. His complexion was dark as that of a Moor, and his raven hair curled close ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Then I heard myself exclaiming, "No, no, no!" The nameless dread was strong upon me. I listened intently for Hubbard's breathing. Had it ceased? I crawled over and peered long and anxiously at his face—his face which was so spectral and wan in the uncertain firelight. Twice I did this. A confused sense of things evil and malicious, a confused sense of sighing wind and pattering rain, a confused sense of starts and jerks and struggles with wood, and the night ...
— The Lure of the Labrador Wild • Dillon Wallace
... that he would not tell me, but that was just like him. For the last twenty minutes, having something to do, he had become himself again, had come to earth from that unsafe country of the brain where beckoned a spectral Steve. Nothing was left but in his eyes that question which pain had set there; and I wondered if his friend of old, who seemed so brave and amiable, would have dealt him that hurt at the solemn end had he known what a poisoned wound it ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... put up her poniard! And Sparta sheathe the sword; Be none too prompt to punish, And cast indignant word! Bear back your spectral Brutus From robber Bonaparte; Time rarely will refute us Who doom the ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... fell down to gazing at the corresponding window to her own, on the opposite side of the court. It was lighted, but the blind was drawn down: upon the blind she saw, first unconsciously, the constant weary motion of a little spectral shadow, a child's hand and arm—no more; long, thin fingers hanging down from the wrist, while the arm moved up and down, as if keeping time to the heavy pulses of dull pain. She could not help hoping ...
— The Grey Woman and other Tales • Mrs. (Elizabeth) Gaskell
... a Sister who stood by the convent gate like a statue of Eternal Silence, and a man who was killing a wretched calf in the middle of the road, I might have asked myself if this fantastic Bozouls was not some spectral village, reproducing the past in all except the living beings who had gone down into their graves. When I recrossed the Dourdou, the light was several tones lower than it was when I first descended to the bottom of the ravine, and the vegetation was of a deeper and sadder green. And the stream ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... strode to the windows of Anstruther's rooms and standing there, watched the drifting moonbeams mantling on the spectral blue lake, while his chance-met friend rang for a waiter. There was the murmur of confidential orders, and then Anson Anstruther with a bright smile dropped easily into the role of host. The young staff officer ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... rocks of Gometra, and clouds of puffins wheeling round the dark and lonely pillars of Staffa; while away in the north, as they got clear of Treshanish Point, the mountains of Rum and of Skye appeared a pale and spectral blue, like ghostly shadows at the horizon. And there was no end to the sports and pastimes that occupied day after day. On their first expedition up the lonely corries of Ben-an-Sloich young Ogilvie brought down a royal hart—though his ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... perfect, From heaven to heaven extending, perfect As the mother-moon's self, full in face. It rose, distinctly at the base With its severe proper colours chorded Which still, in the rising, were compressed, Until at last they coalesced, And supreme the spectral creature lorded In a triumph of whitest white,— Above which intervened the night. But above night too, like only the next, The second of a wondrous sequence, Reaching in rare and rarer frequence, Till the heaven of heavens were circumflexed, Another rainbow rose, a mightier, ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... these previsions have been verified by experiment. It has also invaded optics; and by relying on the principle of Doppler, Professor Michelson has succeeded in obtaining from it an explanation of the length presented by the spectral rays of ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare
... itself ambushed by the very ones it hoped to surprise. The snap of a twig; the dropping of a fruit from some tall tree; each sudden sound was interpreted as the twang of a hostile bow. Overwrought nerves peopled the jungle with spectral enemies; they found relief in ...
— The Black Phantom • Leo Edward Miller
... spectacle unfolds itself. The rain and wind have ceased. The barricade of cloud which veiled the moon's passage up the western sky has sunk riven at her feet. She herself shines forth in unbroken radiance, and a double lunar rainbow, in all its spectral grandeur, spans the vault of heaven. There is a sense as of a heavenly presence about to emerge upon the arc. Then the rapture overflows the spectator's brain, and the Master, arrayed in a serpentining garment, appears in the path ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... ghost-like pictures, ad infinitum, at the rate of five dollars each. Mothers came to the room of the artist, and gratefully retired with ghostly representations of departed little ones. Widows came to purchase the shades of their departed husbands. Husbands visited the photographer and procured the spectral pictures of their dead wives. Parents wanted the phantom-portraits of their deceased children. Friends wished to look upon what they believed to be the lineaments of those who had long since gone to the spirit-land. ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... of London rang out their joyous peals, for the armistice had been signed and the war was over. There was wild rejoicing in the city and the crowds went crazy with delight. But it seemed to me that behind the ringing of those peals of joy there was the tolling of spectral bells for those who would return no more. The monstrous futility of war as a test of national greatness, the wound in the world's heart, the empty homes, those were the thoughts which in me overmastered all ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... "I like this view of the works better than when the glare was fiercest? These heavy shadows and the amphitheatre of smothered fires are ghostly, unreal. One could fancy these red smouldering lights to be the half-shut eyes of wild beasts, and the spectral figures ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... ran to the window, could not get it up, but smashed it with a chair, and stepped out on the landing of the fire-escape; below him was a crowd of men, with a sprinkling of women and youth, massed in a ruddy light. Must he go down in his spectral night dress? No—this side of the house was not yet on fire except at the further end; he would snatch on those clothes. Which he did. They fitted well enough, though a trifle loosely, and they were just a shade loud as to pattern. Also as to hat—which was of a new breed ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... excellent taste he had shown in falling in love with her. Round this bright young creature (Owen, at the foot of the table, and Morgan and I on either side) sat her three wrinkled, gray-headed, dingily-attired hosts, and just behind her, in still more inappropriate companionship, towered the spectral figure of the man in armor, which had so unaccountably attracted her on her arrival. This strange scene was lighted up by candles in high and heavy brass sconces. Before Jessie stood a mighty china punch-bowl of the olden time, containing the folded pieces of ...
— The Queen of Hearts • Wilkie Collins
... marry him!" cried Caroline, wringing her hands; "I should be forever seeing at his side the spectral figures of my dead sisters. Mother, dear ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... they knew that she herself had slipped by a night station unseen. Oftener, with blanched faces they would hear of her dashing like an apparition past a frightened operator, huddled over his lonely stove, a spectral flame shot across the fury of the sky—as if the dread night breathing on the scrap-pile and the grave had called from other nights and other storms a wraith of riven engines and slaughtered men to one last phantom race with death and ...
— The Daughter of a Magnate • Frank H. Spearman
... Brothers, for the icebergs of frozen Labrador, Floating spectral in the moonshine along the low, black shore. Where in the mist the rock is hiding, and the sharp reef lurks below; And the white squall smites in summer, and the autumn ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... Frostburgh, a small village set on a hill mined and tunneled with coalpits; fifteen miles or so beyond this was the roadside inn, where I proposed to halt for the night. The sun had long set when I rode up to the spectral-looking white house; remarking with no pleasant surprise, that not a vestige of smoke rose from its gaunt chimneys. At the gate there stood a cart laden with some sort of household goods. Near this, a man, who lounged ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... down again, rising in lesser numbers each time as the sager birds made ready to settle, for the evening was already spent enough to make the air inside the wood almost dark. The moss was soft; the tree-trunks spectral. Beyond them lay a silvery meadow. The pampas grass raised its feathery spears from mounds of green at the end of the meadow. A breadth of water gleamed. Already the convolvulus moth was spinning over the flowers. Orange and purple, ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... friendships had so totally vanished from the Rome of that day that the whole intercourse of business and acquaintance could be garnished with forms and flourishes which had lost all meaning, and thus by degrees the reality came to be superseded by that spectral shadow of "friendship," which holds by no means the least place among the various evil spirits brooding over the proscriptions and civil ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... miss the joy is to miss all. In the joy of the actors lies the sense of any action. That is the explanation, that the excuse. To one who has not the secret of the lanterns, the scene upon the links is meaningless. And hence the haunting and truly spectral unreality of realistic books. Hence, when we read the English realists, the incredulous wonder with which we observe the hero's constancy under the submerging tide of dulness, and how he bears up with his jibbing sweetheart, and endures the chatter of idiot girls, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the call, and was led to a bed on which lay a gaunt, spectral man, evidently in the last stage ...
— The Young Bank Messenger • Horatio Alger
... "I know thou com'st for me," Lee's spirit to the Spectre said; "I know that I must go with thee— Take me not to the dead. It was not I alone that did the deed!" Dreadful the eye of that still, spectral Steed! ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... astonishing rapidity, seemed made up of unassigned and unassorted units, out of which some imaginative god might be about to create a world of giants, ready supplied with some of the appliances of a high civilization. Yet the whole apparition had so shadowy and spectral a look that the terror it inspired was itself vague and indefinite, like the terror of a dream. It affected our horses as well as ourselves; they extended their necks and threw forward their ears. For some moments we sat in our saddles ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... abruptly, and rising, began to heap more wood upon the fire. The figure of the Indian, with something dark upon its shoulder, emerged from the spectral forest, and came towards them through ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... very busy with Elizabeth, tying up some flowers which had been tossed about, and broken, many of them, in the night gale, when the keeper came through the gate, leading this Manuel, who, grim as a spectral shadow, that had been fearful but for its exceeding pitifulness, stood now between her and all that she rejoiced in. "There!" exclaimed Sandy. Looking up, she saw them approaching straight along the path that led ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... field, it was the more lawless element that first began to conspicuously assert the white supremacy. There grew up an organization called "the Ku-Klux Klan," designed at first partly as a rough sport and masquerade, partly to overawe the negroes. There were midnight ridings in spectral disguises, warnings, alarms and presently whippings and even murders. The society, or imitations of it, spread over most of the South. It was at its height in 1868-70, and in the latter year it gradually gave way, partly owing to vigorous measures ordered from Washington, ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... of them and of their life with absolute certainty. Spectral analysis showed the same composition in the stars as on the earth, consequently if life had arisen in our atom, most certainly it must exist in other celestial bodies, though probably in different forms; in many planets it had already ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... feared many things. Her own footsteps were a terror to her. The moving of a bush in the wind, the starting of a rabbit from her path, caused her flesh to thrill. At sight of an object slowly and noiselessly emerging from the darkness and standing before her, motionless and spectral, she almost fainted, until she discovered that it was an old acquaintance, a tall pine stump. But all these childish terrors she resolutely overcame. Her heart never faltered in its purpose. Affection for her father, anxiety for his welfare, ...
— Cudjo's Cave • J. T. Trowbridge
... this spectral appearance to the sentinel on duty has been described in the report of the officer of the guard on the following morning, and is absolutely a matter of official record. The previous visitations of the "white lady" ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... to his trio of guests. All the way down the carpeted vestibule he was haunted by the grim shadow of a spectral fear. The frozen horror of that ghastly evening was before him like a hateful tableau. Hilditch's mocking words rang in his cars: "My death is the one thing in the world which would make my wife happy." The Court scene, with all its gloomy tragedy, ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... horizon the fog crouched and moved; marched like a battalion of ocean's ghosts; suddenly cohered and sent out light puffs of smoke, as from the crater of a spectral volcano. The moon, full and bright and cold, hung low in the dark sky: one hardly noted the stars. The vast sweep of water was as calm as a lake, dark and metallic like the sky, barely reflecting the silver light between. But although calm it was not quiet. It greeted the forbidding ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... of a March morning, when the sun had not yet dispelled the mists of night, and the fringing woods back from the Red River loomed white and spectral through the frost, they re-entered the Empire, and in a few minutes were detraining at Emerson, the boundary town and gateway to the prairies which for a thousand miles stretched into ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... floating nets were spread, lights were scattered like constellations. The foreland was clearly visible, with the high woods which clothed its summit. But the farther end of the beach faded into an uneven string of lights, soft and spectral as will-o'-the-wisps. Warmth rose from the sleeping earth; and a breeze blew in from the sea, making a strange metallic rustling, which to Japanese ears is the sweetest natural music, in the gaunt sloping pine-trees, whose height in the ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... out of the room, down the stairs, and back into the library, with the face of a man who has just been reprieved from sudden death. As he re-entered the library, he paused and started a step back, gazing fixedly at one of the windows. The heavy curtain had been partially drawn back, and a white, spectral face was glued to ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... that stirs the smallest interest in me; or gives me fortitude to bear up against what I am doomed to feel for the ungrateful. Otherwise, I am dead to every thing but the sense of what I have lost. She was my life—it is gone from me, and I am grown spectral! If I find myself in a place I am acquainted with, it reminds me of her, of the way in which I thought ...
— Liber Amoris, or, The New Pygmalion • William Hazlitt
... long ceased to be visible to any eye save his own. In my opinion, all this is not so much a delusion as a partly wilful and partly involuntary sport of the imagination, to which his disease has imparted such morbid energy that he beholds these spectral scenes and characters with no less distinctness than a play upon the stage, and with somewhat more of illusive credence. Many of his letters are in my possession, some based upon the same vagary as the present one, and others upon hypotheses not a whit short of it in ...
— P.'s Correspondence (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... form a scene of peculiar interest. High overhead, dimly visible through the tops of the trees, the sky wears an almost supernatural aspect during these long summer nights. A soft golden glow flushes upward from the horizon, and, lying outspread over the firmament, gives a spectral effect to the gentler and more delicate sheen of the moon; the stars seem to shrink back into the dim infinity, as if unable to contend with the grosser effulgence of the great orbs that rule the day and the night. Unconscious whether the day is waning into the night, or the night ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... proper place—and often the most audacious violations of proportion admitted, as in the limbs of Michael Angelo's sitting Madonna in the Uffizii; all artifices, also, of deep and sharp cutting being allowed, to gain the shadowy and spectral expressions about the brow and lip which the mere actualities of form could not have conveyed;—the sculptor never following a material model, but feeling after the most momentary and subtle aspects of the countenance—striking these out sometimes suddenly, ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... light, gave the character and outline of a great spectre. But the colors of those gray-blue granites, mingling with the black and tawny schists, must have been seen in order to understand how vividly a spectral image was suggested by the empty and gloomy carcass of the building. Its disjointed stones and paneless windows, the battered tower and broken roofs gave it the aspect of a skeleton; the birds of prey which ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... carve that way," she protested. "It is not sculpture. Thou wouldst fill the land with frozen creatures—ai!" with another little shrug. "It would be haunted and spectral. Nay, give me the ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... indeed I consider it, is of no more than such a mere luminous distant point as may give to the feelings a species of escape from all the finite objects about them. There is a spectral etching of Rembrandt, a presentation of Christ in the temple, where the figure of a robed priest stands glaring by its gems out of the gloom, holding a crosier. Behind it there is a subdued window light seen in the opening ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... and characters; a world to which they may make occasional visits, but where they are sojourners, not dwellers, and which, when out of it, or even when in it, they think of, peradventure, but as a phantom-world, a place of ignes fatui and spectral illusions. Those only who have the peculiarity of association which we have mentioned, and which is a natural though not a universal consequence of intense sensibility, instead of seeming not themselves when they ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... the pathless sweep Of the terrible northern blast; Above its roof the wild clouds leap And shriek as they hurtle past. The snow-waves hiss along the plain, Like spectral wolves they stretch and strain And race and ramp—with hissing beat, Like stealthy tread of myriad feet, I hear them pass; upon the roof The icy showers swirl and rattle; At times the moon, from storms aloof, Shines white and wan ...
— A Little Norsk; Or, Ol' Pap's Flaxen • Hamlin Garland
... was very solemn and strange. Once, through a broken gorge, we had a glimpse of a little space of mackerel sky, moon-litten, on the other side of the hill; the broken ridges standing grey and spectral between; and the hilltop over all, snow-white, and strangely ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... wind, by the wrath of Heaven, their spectral forms would be whirled eddying all day long in the dust of the roads. The night on the contrary was somewhat less hostile to them. Night is not wholly the Galilean God's; He shares its dominion with the devils. As the shades of night descended from the hills, ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France
... involved himself and his followers in treason, raised the standard of revolt, put his foot upon the neck of the invincible republic which had humbled all the kings of the earth, and founded an empire which was to last for a thousand and half a thousand years. In what manner this spectral appearance was managed—whether Csar were its author, or its dupe—will remain unknown for ever. But undoubtedly this was the first time that the advanced guard of a victorious army was headed by an apparition; ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... there were other projections, just enough for a hand, a foot: a wet and terrible pathway; to follow it might be death, to neglect it certainly was. What had she danced for all her days, if it had not made her sure and nimble footed? Under her the foam leaped up, the spectral mist crept like an icy breath, the spray sprinkled all about her, swinging herself along from ledge to ledge, from jag to jag, like a spider on a viewless thread. Now she hung just above the fall, looking down and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... Montfort, but has a powerful and diabolical rival—Walleran—whose character combines the most dangerous qualities of Mrs. Radcliffe's villains with the magical gifts of a wizard. Fitzowen, not long before the day fixed for his wedding, is led astray, while hunting, by an elusive stag, a spectral monk and a "wandering fire," and arrives home in a thunderstorm to find his castle enveloped in total darkness and two of his servants stretched dead at his feet. He learns from his mother and sister, who are shut in a distant room, that Adeline has been carried off by armed ruffians. ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... Hark, hark! A spirit was it, and asleep? A spirit doth not breathe like clay. There hung A cresset from the roof, and thence appeared A flickering speck of light, and disappeared; Then dropped along the floor its elfish flakes, That fell on some one resting, in the gloom,— Somewhat, a spectral shadow, then a shape That loomed. It was a heifer, ay, and white, Breathing ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow
... intriguing by night. Stealthily you draw near. You peer into the windows, the uncurtained windows, in breathless awe prepared to see the lady with the lamp floating from room to room, hoping to glimpse the spectral couple seated at table in the high-paneled dining hall of which you have heard so many tales. Tales of gleaming silver, white-clad Negro servants bowing with deference before the master and mistress ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas
... been meditating she was unable to tell, when all at once without the garden wall a curious noise was heard. Clary lifted her head and listened; the reading had excited her to the extent that at this moment a spectral appearance would have come not unexpectedly and yet she quite plainly noticed a sparkling pair of eyes, which inquiringly turned in all directions. Clary did not stir. A cloud, which up to that moment hid the moon, broke, and the girl recognized the Zouave, who sat upon the wall and ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume I (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... this island beach where Poe once walked, And heard the melic throbbing of the sea, With muffled sound of harbor bells— Bells—he loved bells! And here are drifting ghosts of city chimes Come over water through the evening mist, Like knells from death-ships off the coasts of spectral lands. ...
— Carolina Chansons - Legends of the Low Country • DuBose Heyward and Hervey Allen
... They saw spectral illusions of broad lakes, with trees mirrored upon their placid surface. A sun of dazzling brightness seemed shining from the bottom of an unfathomed sea, and a forest appeared suspended ...
— The Giraffe Hunters • Mayne Reid
... story of city life from the back windows of the hotel, is derived from notes made just before we went to Lenox; there are the enigmatic drawing-room windows, the kitchen, the stable, the spectral cat, and the emblematic dove; the rain-storm; the glimpse of the woman sewing in one of the windows. There is also a passage containing a sketch of the personage who served as the groundwork for Old Moody. "An elderly ragamuffin, in a dingy and battered hat, an old surtout, ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... As he steps stealthily along, advancing towards Antonina, he mutters to himself, and clutches mechanically at his garments with his lank, shapeless fingers. The radiant moonlight, falling fully upon his countenance, invests it with a livid, mysterious, spectral appearance: seen by a stranger at the present moment, he would have been almost ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... and then trotted away. The water supply was contained in a wooden tank set some ten feet above ground, and high beyond that, dimly discernible through the cloud of smoke, the spectral arms of a wind-mill revolved imperturbably. Mr. Brady, followed by the boys, went on around to the further side of the burning building. It was a huge hip-roofed structure. One end, that nearest the house, was already falling, and the tons of crackling hay in the mows ...
— Left Guard Gilbert • Ralph Henry Barbour
... and other visitations of government, that it is hard for us to have the added risk of wraiths, but there's no escaping. Many persons of to-day are in the same mental state as one Mr. Boggs, told of in a magazine story, a rural gentleman who was agitated over spectral visitants. He had once talked at a seance with a speaker who claimed to be the spirit of his brother, Wesley Boggs, but who conversed only on blue suspenders, a subject not of vital interest to Wesley in the flesh. "Still," Mr. Boggs reflected, "I'm not so darn sure!" In answer to a ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... recommending, as they do, such irrational methods of thinking, are only to be recommended for the first landmarks in a system, or for such purely detached facts as enjoy no rational connection with the rest of our ideas. Thus the student of physics may remember the order of the spectral colours by the word vibgyor which their initial letters make. The student of anatomy may remember the position of the Mitral valve on the Left side of the heart by thinking that L.M. stands also for 'long meter' ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... specter of what had once been the city hall a blizzard of flame swept back into the gore between Turk and Market streets. Peeled of its heavy stone facing like a young leek that is stripped of its wrappings, the dome of the city hall rose spectral against the ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... that ghastly gibbet, How dismal 't is to see, The great spectral skeleton— The ladder and the tree. Hark! hark! the clash of arms The bells begin to toll,— He is coming! He is coming! God have mercy on his soul! One last long peal of thunder,— The clouds are cleared away And the glorious sun once more look'd ...
— A Book For The Young • Sarah French
... the very door with the rockaway, and we tucked my wife and children under the buffalo robes and blankets till they could hardly breathe. Then we started out into the white, spectral world, for the wind had coated everything with the soft, wet snow. On we went at a slow walk, for the snow and mud were both deep, and the wheeling was very heavy. Even John Jones's loquacity was checked, for every time he opened ...
— Driven Back to Eden • E. P. Roe
... one—I had; he was a famous one—he was; he broke his neck once, when the net had been forgotten. They all do it—ils se cassent le cou tous, tot ou tard! Allons toi t'as peur, toi?" Chat noir's great back was quivering with fear; he had no taste, himself, for shapes like these, spectral and wan as ghosts, walking about in the sun. He took us as far away as possible, and as quickly, from these reminders of the thing ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... the presence of the Pope. His mind was concentrated on this culminating point, and vibrated there as did the sparkling, ever-rising water at the apex of the mighty jet. The square was empty. No one would see him enter the Vatican save that spectral diadem of saints standing rigid over there on the summit of the opposite colonnade. The saints and the fountains were saying to him with one voice, that he believed he was passing through a solemn hour, ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro
... new razor, any object, such as a wafer, be laid, and the metal be then breathed upon, and, when the moisture has had time to disappear, the wafer be thrown off, though now the most critical inspection of the polished surface can discover no trace of any form, if we breathe once more upon it, a spectral image of the wafer comes plainly into view; and this may be done again and again. Nay, more, if the polished metal be carefully put aside where nothing can deteriorate its surface, and be so kept for many months, on breathing again upon ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... long way off. Once more the dance caught them. Then Auld Lang Syne struck up. Hands were clasped, a circle swayed riotously. There were promises to meet next night, promises that neither meant to keep. Rudd was waiting impatiently at the cafe. Once more the wall by the Abbey rose spectral, once more the cloisters echoed vaguely. The ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... in speechless eloquence, The waving shadows of the cypress fall In spectral patches on the quaint old wall, Nodding ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... air, porters were calling in un-English English, then trotting with heavy bags, their colourless blouses looking ghostly as they disappeared; Ursula stood at a long, low, zinc-covered barrier, along with hundreds of other spectral people, and all the way down the vast, raw darkness was this low stretch of open bags and spectral people, whilst, on the other side of the barrier, pallid officials in peaked caps and moustaches were turning the underclothing in the bags, ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... what accents loud and hoarse This warder on the walls of death Sends forth the challenge of his breath! I see the dead that sleep in the grave! They rise up and their garments wave, Dimly and spectral, as they rise, With the light of another world ...
— The Golden Legend • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... betrayed the secret of the ancient padres. Nero could be made as white as any ghost horse by the application of a little paint; and shod with rubber could pass over the sandy roads with almost as little noise as any spectral steed. It was easy to bribe and terrify two small boys into securing and restoring to him the pointed wand, even if by their effort to obtain it they might happen to fall and break it. That mattered little, however, since ...
— Jessica, the Heiress • Evelyn Raymond
... the spectrum is a narrow field of greenish yellow, grading into darker red on one side and into darker green upon the other, followed by still darker blue and purple. Upon the sphere the values of these spectral colors trace a path high up on the yellow section, near white, and slanting downward across the red and green sections, which are traversed near the level of the equator, it goes on to cross the blue and purple well down ...
— A Color Notation - A measured color system, based on the three qualities Hue, - Value and Chroma • Albert H. Munsell
... father and Mr. Grigsby stood long at the rail, as did the other passengers, gazing at the dim shore and its multitude of spectral lights, and talking. The whole ship seemed to be athrill with great expectations; row-boats approached, circled and mysteriously lingered, as if awaiting; and the little waves murmured low and invitingly, as they ...
— Gold Seekers of '49 • Edwin L. Sabin
... as if he were about to awake, and then his eyes opened and he gazed on the spectral pallor of the dawn in the windows, his brain rousing from dreams slowly into comprehension of the change that had come. Then collecting his thoughts he rose and stood facing the dawn. He stood for a moment like one in combat, and then like ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... into the tonneau, the chauffeur had already seized the wheel and the car was backing for the turn. Far back up the hillside there was a crashing of underbrush. A spectral figure, struggling with the unaccustomed drapery of a Bedouin robe, emerged from the woods into the open, ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... landscape far and near, Then impetuous stamped the earth, And turned and tightened his saddle-girth; But mostly he watched with eager search The belfry-tower of the old North Church, As it rose above the graves on the hill, Lonely, and spectral, and sombre, and still. And lo! as he looks, on the belfry's height, A glimmer, and then a gleam of light! He springs to the saddle, the bridle he turns, But lingers and gazes, till full on his sight A second lamp in ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... the rigid limbs began to relax, and Tcheriapin slid gently on to the floor, collapsing there with a soft thud, where he squatted like some hideous Buddha, resting back against the cushions, one spectral yellow hand upraised, the fingers still clutching a big ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... could not run away. The desolate, plague-stricken place had a dismal fascination for me. I wondered what manner of persons could dwell in it; and, as I lingered, I saw the low door opened, and a thin, spectral figure standing in the gloom within, but delaying to cross the mouldering door-sill as long as I remained in sight. In another minute Pierre had rushed back for me, and dragged me away with all his boyish ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... honor—yea, his whole future—to the payment of a debt forced upon him before he had reached the age of reason? The oath of ordination, the priest's oath, echoed in his throbbing ears like a soul-sentence to eternal doom; while spectral shades of moving priests and bishops, laying cold and unfeeling hands upon him, sealing him to endless servitude to superstition and deception, glided to and fro through the darkness before his straining eyes. Could he receive the ordination ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... were likely to encounter some being, human or spectral, at every turn, they went below. The farther they went the more inexplicable became the Minnie B's desertion. Her engines were in perfect order, her furnace so new that the grate bars were still unsealed from heat; the maker's name-plate was still bright ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... at the moment when the trial of darkness approaches, be not confirmed in moral character, but are only maintaining a superficial virtue by the aid of a spectral religion; the moment the staff of their faith is broken, the character of the race falls like a climbing plant cut from its hold: then all the earthliest vices attack it as it lies in the dust; every form of sensual and insane sin is developed, and half a century is sometimes ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... that cross was less cold than Angelique crucifying her husband under the plea of virtue. This it was that lay at the root of their woes; the young wife saw nothing but duty where she should have given love. Here, one Ash Wednesday, rose the pale and spectral form of Fasting in Lent, of Total Abstinence, commanded in a severe tone—and Granville did not deem it advisable to write in his turn to the Pope and take the opinion of the Consistory on the proper way of observing Lent, the Ember days, and the ...
— A Second Home • Honore de Balzac
... a range of mountains, spread out like an enormous horse-shoe and in its center arose the form of a solitary hill. In the heavens from the east drifted a white, ragged cloud. The solitary hill seemed to rise high and higher and all the mountains bowed before it. The spectral cloud resolved itself into a terrible vision which enveloped the central hill. Great Heavens! Again I saw the phantom dog and fancied that I heard shrill screams of "Perro, perro, gringo perro!" A crackling noise, a coming shadow, and forward I fell on my face, ever on the alert, ever ready. ...
— Tales of Aztlan • George Hartmann
... probable that she is neither the wife of Clovis, nor Solomon's friend—this strange princess who stands before us, at once so earthly and yet more spectral than her sisters; for time has marred her features, injured her skin, dotted her chin with hail-specks, vulgarized her mouth, injured her nose, making it look like the ace of clubs, and put the stamp of death on ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... and looked fixedly at the sky above him. The bridge was deserted. His black figure rose up erect, motionless, and spectral, with the white still light falling solemnly all around it. Standing so for some minutes, his first movement was to drop his hand angrily on the parapet of the bridge. He then turned round slowly in the direction by which the two ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... into sheaves Of scorpions by spectral arms, Swung to and fro, and whipped the eaves, And filled the house with weird alarms That hissed ...
— The Mistress of the Manse • J. G. Holland
... faint and far (Spectral sail and ghostly spar) Through the mist-banks a vessel glides Biding the ridge of the ...
— From The Lips of the Sea • Clinton Scollard
... much of the Allied troops rushing upon them. These they had faced in many battles, and though they knew the mettle of their foes, they were still men who could be faced on even terms. But their courage gave way when through the spectral mists they saw the wallowing monsters bearing down on them like so many Juggernauts, crushing, tearing, mowing them down as though they were insects in the ...
— Army Boys in the French Trenches • Homer Randall
... "There is a tale of a man who spent his life in wishing he had lived differently; and when he died he was surrounded by a throng of spectral shapes, each one exactly like the other, who, on his asking what they were, replied: 'We are all the different lives you ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... high upon the hearth, and the cheery blaze lit up the old pictures with a shimmering lustre, reducing the lamp to a mere spectral ornament. It was the flickering firelight that made the men and women on the walls nod at each other, as perhaps they had ...
— The Ghost of Guir House • Charles Willing Beale
... on the buoyant element he watched the mists of morning as they soared into the air. Reluctantly, with imperceptible movement, they detached themselves from their watery home; they clambered aloft in spectral companies, drawn skyward, as by some beckoning hand, under the stealthy compulsion of the sun. They crept against the tawny precipices, clinging to their pinnacles like shreds of pallid gauze, and nestling demurely among dank clefts where something of ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... of the wildest turmoil. Hell itself let loose could present no such spectacle as this myriad mass of brute life sweeping over the lonely plain under the wan, elfin light of the new-risen moon. Clouds of steam, wreathing itself into spectral shapes of sullen aspect, rose from the dusky, writhing mass, and the flaming of more than ten thousand eyeballs in the gloom presented a picture more terrible than ever came into the imagination of the writer of the Inferno. ...
— The Story of Louis Riel: The Rebel Chief • Joseph Edmund Collins
... folk-belief, sun, moon, winds, etc., are regarded as actual personages. Sun and moon are husband and wife; the winds have wives; they are addressed by personal names and reverenced.[566] Some spirits may already have had a demoniac aspect in pagan times. The Tuatha Dea conjured up meisi, "spectral bodies that rise from the ground," against the Milesians, and at their service were malignant sprites—urtrochta, and "forms, spectres, and great queens" called guidemain (false demons). The Druids also sent forth mischievous spirits called siabra. In the Tain there ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... is the swell, scarce perceptible to inexperienced eyes, such as those of the land-lubbers on the towering decks of the great liners; gleaming dead copper and blue in the morning sun, flecked with spectral white in the distance—the easy roll ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov 21, 1917 • Various
... but Hope Wayne took the wasted hands in hers, placed her arm behind him gently, and tenderly pressed him back into the chair. The old man raised his eyes to her as she stood by him, and holding one of her hands in one of his, the spectral calmness returned into his face; while, beating his thin knee with the other hand, he said, in the old way, as the body of his son was borne out of his house, "Riches have wings! Riches have wings!" But still he held Hope Wayne's hand, and from time ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... from fabled Atlantis, or the extinct Aztec empire of the South, no living tongue can tell; whither fled their remnant,—if remnant there was left to flee,—and what proved its ultimate fate, no previous pen has written. Out from the darkness of the unknown, scarcely more than spectral figures, they came, wrote their single line upon the earth's surface, and vanished, kings and people alike ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... building, formed a narrow court. Clouds harrying the moon failed quite to destroy its power, so that she could see, across the court, the facade of the old wing and the two windows of the large room through whose curtains a spectral glow was diffused. She heard one of the windows opened with a grating noise. The court was a sounding board. It carried to her even the shuffling of the old man's feet as he must have approached the bed. The glow ...
— The Abandoned Room • Wadsworth Camp
... to look ahead, away from the spectral shapes that pursued. They were close, yet he thrilled with the realization that he had helped Chet in some small degree: he had drawn off this ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... wild winds have stripped the thorn, And clogged with leaves the forest-creek; Now that the woods look blown and bleak, And webs are frosty white at morn; At night beneath the spectral sky, A far foreboding cry I hear— The wild fowl calling as they fly? Or wild voice ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... the shadow of the sun's eclipse Sweeps on the earth, and spreads a spectral air, As if the universe were dying there, On continent and isle the darkness dips Unwonted gloom, and on the Atlantic slips; So in the night the Belgian cities flare Horizon-wide; the wandering people fare Along the roads, ...
— A Treasury of War Poetry - British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 • Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by George Herbert Clarke
... as if it had been their own. It was very much wasted, evidently through want of food and over-fatigue; but we instantly recognised the once sturdy little son of Njamie in the faded little being before us. He, too, recognised us, for his bright spectral eyes opened wide when ...
— The Gorilla Hunters • R.M. Ballantyne
... ruddy firelights from the hearth Flap their bright wings against the window panes,— A billowy swarm that beat their slender bars, Or seek the night to leave their track of flame Upon the sleet, or sit, with shifting feet And restless plumes, among the poplar boughs— The spectral poplars, standing at ...
— Bitter-Sweet • J. G. Holland
... crystallized on the rigging, the rail was white with rime, and the deck grew slippery, but they left everything on the Selache to the topsails, and she crept on erratically through the darkness, avoiding the faint spectral glimmer of the scattered ice. The breeze abeam propelled her with gently leaning canvas at some four knots to the hour, and now and then Wyllard, who hung about the deck that night, fancied he could hear a thin, sharp crackle beneath the ...
— Masters of the Wheat-Lands • Harold Bindloss
... cherishing in silence. Not only he himself, with his handbreadth of days, that shrink into absolute nothingness when brought into contrast with the life of God, but "every man," even when apparently "standing" most "firm, is only a breath." As a shadow every man moves spectral among shadows. The tumult that fills their lives is madness; "only for a breath are they disquieted." So bitterly, with an anticipation of the sad, clear-eyed pity and scorn of "The Preacher," does the sick and wearied ...
— The Life of David - As Reflected in His Psalms • Alexander Maclaren
... her very good-naturedly, and who helped very kindly to wipe off the ablution of tea which she had received. Petrea felt herself quite confidential with this excellent person, and inquired from her what was her opinion of Swedenborg, beginning also to give her own thoughts on spectral visions, ghosts, etc. The lady looked at her, as if she thought she might be a little deranged, and then hastened ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... at dawn Owen found it as deserted as the spectral Hicks had promised. From the tool kit of his motor-cycle he took two files of different shapes and a pair of pliers and walked briskly and fearlessly over the uneven ground to the hangars. All were closed except one, and that one contained the French machine in which Pauline ...
— The Perils of Pauline • Charles Goddard
... sculptor with a familiar kindness which reminded him of the days when Hilda and they and he had lived so happily together, before the mysterious adventure of the catacomb. What a succession of sinister events had followed one spectral figure out ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... ruddy train rustling round the turns ahead that aroused these atavistic superstitions. But when we stood together on the landing all doubts fell away; a broad ray of sunlight that struck through an open doorway showed her spectral beauty to be after all reassuringly corporeal. Over the threshold she fairly pushed me with the warning, 'The place is holy, we must be silent.' For a moment I was staggered by the wide pencil of light that shot through ...
— The Collectors • Frank Jewett Mather
... on the spot, the silvery moon rising at the full, passing through occasional strata of dark cloud that veiled her light at intervals, illumined the sky with her weird beams, making it bright as day, but with a ghostly radiance that lent a mystic spectral effect ...
— Bob Strong's Holidays - Adrift in the Channel • John Conroy Hutcheson
... a stillness, in the midst of which Richmond, with her ruins, her spectral roof, afar, and her unchanging spires, rests beneath a ghastly, fitful glare,—the night stain which a great conflagration leaves behind it for weeks,—struggling silently with colossal shadows along the foreground, two hideous walls alone arise ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... occasion only, and to frighten one undergraduate, yet it was certain that the hearse was not 'the old family coach.' My entertainers had undeniably never heard of it in their lives before. Even tradition at the castle said nothing of a spectral hearse, though the house was credited with a white lady deprived of her hands, and a ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... the cross of St. Peter's is hanging spectral white above the mists of morning. Is it a symbol of hope, I wonder? The dawn is coming up from the south-east. It would travel quicker to the north-west if it loved you as much as I do. I have been writing this letter over and over again all night long. Do you ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... spectral scene— The tombstones white, with low mounds between, The awful stillness, eerie and dread, Brooding above that home of the dead, While Christmas fires lit up each hearth And shed their glow upon ...
— The Poetical Works of Mrs. Leprohon (Mrs. R.E. Mullins) • Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon
... the eve of Bosworth fight, it seemed as if the spectral shadows of all those she had injured in the body or the soul, by her unerring demands upon one, and her negligence as to the other, rose a host of dismal spectres round. Their pale, exhausted, pleading looks, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... about the police, about officers, about sensual ladies, about engineers, about baritones—and really, by God, altogether well—cleverly, with finesse and talent. But, after all, all these people are rubbish, and their life is not life, but some sort of conjured up, spectral, unnecessary delirium of world culture. But there are two singular realities—ancient as humanity itself: the prostitute and the moujik. And about them we know nothing, save some tinsel, gingerbread, debauched depictions ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... should mind failure, except for the sake of those excited children. Really I hate to think how the ghost will feel when we get through rattling his bones." A sudden dash at a pair of ceiling rings set the whole line dangling along the gym and served to illustrate a possible way of rattling spectral dry bones, although Jane's graceful figure, as she swung to and fro, did much ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft
... haunted room, Up through the ghostly shadows loom, And gleam with a spectral light; Pictures lit with a radiant glow, And some that image such desolate woe That, weeping, you turn ...
— Poems • Marietta Holley
... in closer together, and munched a hard cracker apiece, occasionally exchanging a muttered word or two, thrashing their limbs about to keep up circulation, and dampening their lips with snow. They were but dim, spectral shapes in the darkness, the air filled with crystal pellets, swept about by a merciless wind, the horses standing tails to the storm and heads drooping. In spite of the light refraction of the snow the eyes could scarcely see two yards away through the smother. Above, about, the ...
— Molly McDonald - A Tale of the Old Frontier • Randall Parrish
... any sum. Some one had said that some very old person had seen a phantom there. Nobody knew who some one was. Nobody knew who the very old person was. Nobody knew who had seen it; nor when; nor how. The very rumor was spectral. ...
— The Ghost • William. D. O'Connor
... the event will mar our holiday gayeties to some extent, stranger though he is!" deplored the hostess. "Some people are superstitious about such things. His must have been the spectral visage I saw at the window. I was sure it was that of a white man although Winston tried, to ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... which they wrap themselves so closely that it is difficult to get a glimpse of their faces, and their steeple-crowned black hats, they quite resemble the pictures of the bandits in the Abruzzi. They glide about in so spectral a manner, and eye travellers with such a sinister look, that I almost ...
— A Visit to the Holy Land • Ida Pfeiffer
... poems that I know of, poems that would be at home with one on such an expedition; there is plenty that is weird and spectral, as in Poe, but little that is woody and wild as this scene is. I recall a Canadian poem by the late C. D. Shanly—the only one, I believe, the author ever wrote—that fits well the distended pupil of the mind's eye about the camp-fire at night. It was printed many years ago in the "Atlantic Monthly," ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... solid phalanx of men in uniform. A mounted inspector was riding slowly up and down in the middle of the road. At the entrance to the street, barely fifty yards away, a moving mass of people, white-faced, almost spectral, were passing slowly ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... an inner influence. "Yes, a boy—a little boy such as you teach at school—had the strength to break the solid shield of ice under which the river held up the dead and bring the murder out. Do you ever think of that as you hear a spectral river surge and buoy upward, whose waves are made by children's murmurs—innocent ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... had turned out of Piccadilly into St. James's Street before either man spoke again. The tossing lights of a windy autumn evening were shimmering on the wet pavement, and faces looked spectral white in the morris-dance of shine and shadow. Wratislaw, whose soul was sick for high, clean winds and the great spaces of the moors, was thinking of Glenavelin and Lewis and the strong, quickening north. His companion was furrowing his brow over some knotty ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... village go so completely. Ablain-Saint-Nazaire, and Carency, these still retained some shape of a place, with their collapsed and truncated houses, their yards heaped high with plaster and tiles. Here, within the framework of slaughtered trees that surrounds us as a spectral background in the fog, there is no longer any shape. There is not even an end of wall, fence, or porch that remains standing; and it amazes one to discover that there are paving-stones under the tangle of beams, ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... street, the fast-falling mist which obscured the light from the meagre oil lamps, seemed to add a certain weirdness to this moving, seething multitude. No one could see his neighbour. In the blackness of the night the muttering or yelling figures moved about like some spectral creatures from hellish regions—the Akous of Brittany who call to those about to die; whilst the women squatting in the oozing mud, beneath that swinging piece of rope, looked like a group of ghostly witches, waiting for the hour ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... it was impossible to disguise that Clennam's unoffending head was the particular temple of reason depreciated; and secondly, because nobody ever knew on these occasions whose Uncle George was referred to, or what spectral presence might be invoked under ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... midnight battle-ground The spectral camp is seen, And, with a sorrowful, deep sound, Flows the ...
— The Haunted Hour - An Anthology • Various
... Glamis To haunted Woodhouselea, I mark in hosts the grisly ghosts I hear the fell Banshie! I know the spectral dog that howls Before the death of Squires; In my 'Ghosts'-guide' addresses hide For Podmore ...
— Ban and Arriere Ban • Andrew Lang
... served to heighten his determination on another day. He had never admitted to himself that Gwendolen might refuse him, but—heaven help us all!—we are often unable to act on our certainties; our objection to a contrary issue (were it possible) is so strong that it rises like a spectral illusion between us and our certainty; we are rationally sure that the blind worm can not bite us mortally, but it would be so intolerable to be bitten, and the creature has a biting look—we ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... hours he used to write his wild, fantastic tales. To his excited fancy everything around him had a spectral look. The shadows of fevered thought stalked like ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth
... the string that holds those weights, blow up the infernal machine with gunpowder? What a passion comes over us sometimes for silence and rest!—that this dreadful mechanism, unwinding the endless tapestry of time, embroidered with spectral figures of life and death, could have but one brief holiday! Who can wonder that men swing themselves off from beams in hempen lassos?—that they jump off from parapets into the swift and gurgling waters beneath?—that they take counsel of the grim friend who ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... my dear Beers, and it "sets me up immensely" to be treated by a practical man on practical grounds as you treat me. I inhabit such a realm of abstractions that I only get credit for what I do in that spectral empire; but you are not only a moral idealist and philanthropic enthusiast (and good fellow!), but a tip-top man of business in addition; and to have actually done anything that the like of you can regard as having helped him is an unwonted ground with me for self-gratulation. I think that ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... hangings and left it open to the winds and rain of December. The wet ponies and kine turned away from the north and stood in the slanting storm with bowed heads. The great wall of cypress swamp grew spectral. But its depths, the marshes far beyond sight behind them, and the little, hidden, rushy lakes, were alive with game. No snake crossed the path. Under the roof, on the galerie, the wheel hummed, the loom pounded; inside, the logs crackled and blazed on the hearth; on the board ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... 'your journey shall be prosperous—such is the will of Heaven!' The experiment was tried on many other occasions by the young lady, and always with similar success, although never without a certain degree of trepidation, even after she had learned that the spectral appearance in the heavens was nothing more than the picture retained on the retina of the eye. She never saw the phantom without a head, which accounts for her being alive to this day; or even wanting ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 437 - Volume 17, New Series, May 15, 1852 • Various
... which had hung like a spectral curtain over the little demesne of Martinhoe Manor, had almost entirely disappeared when, at a few minutes before eight, with all traces of his long journey obliterated, Andrew Tallente stepped out on to the stone-flagged terrace and looked out across the little bay below. The top of the ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... his foot upon the neck of the invincible republic which had humbled all the kings of the earth, and founded an empire which was to last for a thousand and half a thousand years. In what manner this spectral appearance was managed—whether Csar were its author, or its dupe—will remain unknown for ever. But undoubtedly this was the first time that the advanced guard of a victorious army was headed by an apparition; and we may conjecture that it will be the last. [Footnote: According ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... blue; let us consider the chord of the dominant or 5th note, whose analogue is blue. This chord is constructed on the 5th of the diatonic as a fundamental note, and consists of the 5th, 7th, and 9th, or returning the 9th an octave, the 5th, 7th, and 2d. The parallel harmony among the spectral colors is blue, violet, and orange. The name 'dominant' indicates the nature of this chord; its often recurring importance in harmonic combinations of a certain key make it easily recognized, and it is even more pleasing than the tonic ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... onwards; the night scenery being almost more beautiful than the day. The heavens seemed more deep, the water more glittering, the trees more graceful and feathery; and here and there a tall palm reared its thin and spectral form above the dense foliage through which the moonlight broke at intervals, and fell, as it were, in showers of ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... matters by arranging them in curls around her pale countenance, to which they added an expression almost corpse-like and unearthly. To make matters still worse, she had chosen a vest or cymar of a pale green silk, which gave her, on the whole, a ghastly and even spectral appearance. ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... horses fretting at delay, The customary afternoon blockade, The babel and the babble, the brilliant show— And then the dusky quiet of the nave. The pillared space, an organ strain that throbs Mysteriously somewhere, a rainbow shaft Shed from a saint's robe, powdering the spectral air, A workman with hard hands who bows his head, And there before the shrine of Virgin Mary A lonely servant girl who kneels ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... to keep my secret, until the time agreed upon for the present general disclosure. Agitated by a multitude of curious thoughts, I retired to my room, that night, prepared to encounter some new experience of a spectral character. Nor was my preparation needless, for, waking from an uneasy sleep at exactly two o'clock in the morning, what were my feelings to find that I was sharing my bed with the skeleton of ...
— The Signal-Man #33 • Charles Dickens
... met. "I know thou com'st for me," Lee's spirit to the Spectre said; "I know that I must go with thee— Take me not to the dead. It was not I alone that did the deed!" Dreadful the eye of that still, spectral Steed! ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... along, advancing towards Antonina, he mutters to himself, and clutches mechanically at his garments with his lank, shapeless fingers. The radiant moonlight, falling fully upon his countenance, invests it with a livid, mysterious, spectral appearance: seen by a stranger at the present moment, he would have been almost awful ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... Rigid and conscious, spectral yet human, a man of his own substance and stature waited there to measure himself with his power to dismay. This only could it be—this only till he recognised, with his advance, that what made the face dim was the pair of raised hands that covered it and in which, so far from ...
— The Jolly Corner • Henry James
... looking straight before him into the moonlit shimmer and white spectral hazes of the valley, his ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... a horseman quake, The flowers on many a bonnet shake, And shouts arise from left and right, "Stick on! Stick on!" "Hould tight! Hould tight!" "Cling round his neck and don't let go—" "That pace can't hold,—there! steady! whoa!" But like the sable steed that bore The spectral lover of Lenore, His nostrils snorting foam and fire, No stretch his bony limbs can tire; And now the stand he rushes by, And "Stop him!—stop ...
— The One Hoss Shay - With its Companion Poems How the Old Horse Won the Bet & - The Broomstick Train • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... Sirius, make the latter seem like an atom of dust imbedded in the great Shamo desert. The eye of the astronomer, who thinks he also knows of the existence of such systems, has never rested upon them, has never caught of them, even that spectral glimpse, fanciful and hazy as the incoherent vision in a slumbering mind that he has occasionally had of other systems, and yet he verily believes he has gauged INFINITUDE! And yet these immeasurably distant worlds ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... yellowing rows a few ears of corn, tender enough and sweet enough for the table, with not quite the flavor of July, perhaps, but with something that appeals as much to the imagination, that belongs with the spectral sunlight, the fading stalks and vines, and carries the memory back to that first day of April planting. To bring in a basket, however scanty, of those odds and ends and range them side by side on the kitchen table affords a gratification that is not ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine
... reply. He was sobbing now like a child. Laverick rose to his feet and went to the window. What was to be done with such a creature! When he got back, Morrison had raised himself once more into a sitting posture. His appearance was absolutely spectral. ...
— Havoc • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... elm, a chestnut, a beech, a cedar or maple. For miles and miles, we see nothing against the clear blue sky but the spiry tops of evergreens; or perhaps, a gigantic skeleton, "a rampike," pine or hemlock, scathed and spectral, stretches its gaunt outline above its fellows. Spruces and firs, such as adorn our gardens, cluster in never-ending profusion; and aromatic and unwonted odor pervades the air—the spicy breath of resinous balsams. Sometimes the sense is touched with a new fragrance, and presently ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... companion of Sirius, brightest of all stars—not our own chill and spectral planet rushing toward Vega in the constellation of Lyra—presided at the birth of millions born ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... them all firing, for the first time we had some idea of the number that had been advanced into the conquered territory since July 1st. The ruins and the sticks of trees of Fricourt and Mametz with their few remaining walls stood out spectral in the flashes of batteries that had found nesting places among the debris. The whole slope had become a volcanic uproar. One might as well have tried to count the number of fireflies over a swamp as the flashes. ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... convulsions and cramps at sight of him. All the countless spirits of evil are abroad striving to bring sickness and death, foul weather and failure in hunting on the Esquimaux. Most dreaded of all these spectral visitants are Sedna, mistress of the nether world, and her father, to whose share dead Esquimaux fall. While the other spirits fill the air and the water, she rises from under ground. It is then a busy season for the wizards. In every house you may hear them singing ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... Renan's which chanced to be lying on the table, I composed myself to detect the sophistries of this brilliant but unprincipled writer. Thus, by an effort of will, I distracted myself from that state of 'expectant attention' to which modern science attributes such phantoms and spectral appearances as can neither be explained away by a morbid condition of the liver, nor as caused by the common rat (Mus rattus). I should observe by the way," said the learned bishop, interrupting his own narrative, "that scepticism will in vain attempt to account, by the latter cause, namely rats, ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... time she had ever watched with the sick, and she found it a very solemn thing. Yet with all the solemnity and gloom brooding over her, she felt inexpressible gratitude that she was not haunted by the spectral illusions of her childhood. Reason was no longer the vassal, but the monarch of imagination, and though the latter often proved a restless and wayward subject, it acknowledged the former ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... is so narrow that at times John could easily touch the walls of the spectral houses on either side by extending ...
— Miss Caprice • St. George Rathborne
... drew his cloak about him more closely, as if he were cold. Then with an air almost spectral, yet very sad, he drew further and further away, always keeping his eyes upon the ...
— Everychild - A Story Which The Old May Interpret to the Young and Which the Young May Interpret to the Old • Louis Dodge
... Yes, Madam, for between us ever more, a barrier invisible is raised, and should I strive to reach those arms again, two spectral thumbs would press me coldly back—the thumbs I sucked, in blissful ignorance, the thumbs that solaced me in solitude, the thumbs your County Council took from me, and your endearments scarcely will replace! Where, Madam, lay the harm ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 9, 1890. • Various
... in the twilight, at the well-known gate I linger, with no heart to enter more. Among the elm-tops the autumnal air Murmurs, and spectral in the fading light A solitary heron wings its way Southward—save this no sound or touch of life. Dark is the window where the scholar's lamp Was used to catch ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... to miss the train. Perhaps they had decided against travelling during the night. Perbaps this thing, and perhaps that thing. The morning was very cold. Closely muffled in his cloak, he went to the door and stared at where the road was whiten- ing out of night. At the station stood a little spectral train, and the engine at intervals emitted a long, piercing scream which informed the echoing land that, in all probability, it was going to start after a time for the south. The Greeks in the coffee room were, of ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... now she had none; she was an out-of-door creature by nature and habit, but now she was shut up day and night in a steel cage like an animal; she was used to the light, but now she was always in a gloom where all objects about her were dim and spectral; she was used to the thousand various sounds which are the cheer and music of a busy life, but now she heard only the monotonous footfall of the sentry pacing his watch; she had been fond of talking with her mates, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... agreed. "There is a tale of a man who spent his life in wishing he had lived differently; and when he died he was surrounded by a throng of spectral shapes, each one exactly like the other, who, on his asking what they were, replied: 'We are all the different lives ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... valleys, and the gloomy phantasmagoria slowly changed and changed in that unearthly twilight, as the mists and the wind and the rain transformed the solid hills and the straths into intermingling vapors and visions. A spectral world, unreal, and yet terrible; apparently voiceless and tenantless; and yet somehow suggesting that there were eyes watching, and vaguely moving and menacing shapes passing hither and thither before him in ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... "The spectral form of Death is nigh, The thread of Life is spun, Ave Maria! I have looked Upon my latest sun. And yet 'tis not with pale disease This frame is worn away, Nor yet—nor yet with length of years— ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... elephantine tread again. I noted its approach, nearer and nearer, along the musty halls, and dimmer and dimmer the light waned. The tread reached my very door and paused—the light had dwindled to a sickly blue, and all things about me lay in a spectral twilight. The door did not open, and yet I felt a faint gust of air fan my cheek, and presently was conscious of a huge, cloudy presence before me. I watched it with fascinated eyes. A pale glow stole over the Thing; gradually its cloudy folds took shape—an arm appeared, then legs, then ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... at the sky above him. The bridge was deserted. His black figure rose up erect, motionless, and spectral, with the white still light falling solemnly all around it. Standing so for some minutes, his first movement was to drop his hand angrily on the parapet of the bridge. He then turned round slowly in the direction by which the two women ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... whole year and carefully tended unless it could be exorcised or frightened away. The usual recipe, the same as for the riddance of changelings, was to brew beer in egg-shells, and this performance was supposed so to startle the spectral dog that he would fly with his tail between his legs, exclaiming that, although as old as the Behmer, or Bohemian forest, he had never before beheld ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... First Volume finished (in the miserablest way, after great efforts) in October last; my head was all in a whirl; I fled to Scotland and my Mother for a month of rest. Rest is nowhere for the Son of Adam: all looked so "spectral" to me in my old-familiar Birthland; Hades itself could not have seemed stranger; Annandale also was part of the kingdom of TIME. Since November I have worked again as I could; a second volume got wrapped up and sealed out of my sight within the last three days. There is but a Third ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... own account. Perhaps, in his long solitary hours in this very room, where she never trespassed till the afternoon, her husband HAD acquired it already, and was silently carrying the dread weight of whatever it had revealed to him. Mary was too well-versed in the code of the spectral world not to know that one could not talk about the ghosts one saw: to do so was almost as great a breach of good-breeding as to name a lady in a club. But this explanation did not really satisfy her. "What, after all, except for the fun of ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 2 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... which a painter of fitting sentiment and skill would have loved to study. The visitor had gained the door; and as he stood there, his noble height—the magnificent strength and health of his manhood in its full prime—contrasted alike the almost spectral debility of extreme age and the graceful delicacy of Fanny—half girl, half child. There was something foreign in his air— and the half military habit, relieved by the red riband of the Bourbon knighthood. His complexion was dark ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 4 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... seers are published, and the Society of Psychical Research lately printed Mr. Procter's contemporary journal. A man, a woman, and a monkey were the chief apparitions. There were noises, lights, beds were heaved about: nothing was omitted. A clairvoyante was turned on, but could only say that the spectral figures, which she described, "had no brains". After the Quakers left the house there seems to have been no more trouble. The affair lasted for ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang
... means of cords running from their heads, arms, and legs to the top of the stage. To the management of the cords they owe all the vehemence of their passions and the grace of their oratory, not to mention a certain gliding, ungradual locomotion, altogether spectral. ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... silent and more ordinary; but somehow he alarmed me much more than poor little Smythe. He was very tall and slight, and light-haired; his nose had a high bridge, and he might almost have been handsome in a spectral sort of way; but he had one of the most appalling squints I have ever seen or heard of. When he looked straight at you, you didn't know where you were yourself, let alone what he was looking at. I fancy this sort of disfigurement embittered the poor chap ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... he had three of them—nursing the child as tenderly as if it had been their own. It was very much wasted, evidently through want of food and over-fatigue; but we instantly recognised the once sturdy little son of Njamie in the faded little being before us. He, too, recognised us, for his bright spectral eyes opened wide ...
— The Gorilla Hunters • R.M. Ballantyne
... citizens' time, money, energies, &c., is ridiculously out of place in the United States. As if our proper man and woman, (far, far greater words than "gentleman" and "lady,") could still fail to see, and presently achieve, not this spectral business, but something truly noble, active, sane, American—by modes, perfections of character, manners, costumes, social relations, &c., adjusted to standards, far, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... and to him, as to the old one, the just gods were very stern! The ever-revolving, never-advancing Wheel (of a kind) was his, through life; and from his Cloud-Juno did not he too procreate strange Centaurs, spectral Puseyisms, monstrous illusory Hybrids, and ecclesiastical Chimeras,—which now roam the earth in a very ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... let loose could present no such spectacle as this myriad mass of brute life sweeping over the lonely plain under the wan, elfin light of the new-risen moon. Clouds of steam, wreathing itself into spectral shapes of sullen aspect, rose from the dusky, writhing mass, and the flaming of more than ten thousand eyeballs in the gloom presented a picture more terrible than ever came into the imagination of the writer of the Inferno. The ...
— The Story of Louis Riel: The Rebel Chief • Joseph Edmund Collins
... she might somehow come to hear of it, oppressed me like guilt. I blamed myself besides for my suspicions of the night before; wondered that I should ever have attributed those shocking cries to one of whom I now conceived as of a saint, spectral of mien, wasted with maceration, bound up in the practices of a mechanical devotion, and dwelling in a great isolation of soul with her incongruous relatives; and as I leaned on the balustrade of the gallery and looked down into the bright close of pomegranates and at the gaily ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... upon ridge. The cannon smoke shot up from the thickets of vines, rose, and drifted to the west, blotting out the greater portion of the vineyard. The cannon themselves were invisible. At times Jack fancied he saw a human silhouette when the white smoke rushed outward, but the spectral vines loomed up everywhere through the dense cannon-fog and he could not ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers
... which comes under the class of natural ghost-seeing above mentioned, I may mention in good faith, that, if such phantoms were worth recalling, I could fill up an hour with the narration of those spectral sights and sounds which were most prominent among the illusions of my childhood. Sights and sounds were equally distinct and lifelike. I have run up-stairs obedient to a spectral call. Every successive night for a fortnight, my childish breath was stilled by the proceedings ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... time to time flooding for a few moments the whole of that gloomy palace with green, blue, white and rose-coloured flames to which the red flame of the pitch-torches with their black smoke formed a spectral contrast. ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... ancient thorns, but the higher branches rose nakedly against faintly luminous sky. Spruce firs formed clumps of solid blackness, and here and there a delicate tracery of birch boughs filled gaps against the sky-line between. The meadows behind him were silent and empty, streaked with belts of spectral mist, and, because it was not very late, he could see a red glimmer of light in the windows of ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... dank, brown, and uninhabited, and to the rough black crags that frown like sentinels over the beach. Now the rime thickened as the rain pattered more loudly on the deck; and even the nearer stacks and precipices showed as unsolid and spectral in the cloud as moonlight shadows thrown on a ground of vapor; anon it cleared up for a few hundred yards, as the shower lightened; and then there came in view, partially at least, two objects ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... timid knock against the front door caused everyone to start. A strange eerie feeling descended on the hearts of all, of innocent and of guilty, of accuser and of defender. The knock seemed to have come from spectral hands, for 'twas followed by no ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... was; he broke his neck once, when the net had been forgotten. They all do it—ils se cassent le cou tous, tot ou tard! Allons toi t'as peur, toi?" Chat noir's great back was quivering with fear; he had no taste, himself, for shapes like these, spectral and wan as ghosts, walking about in the sun. He took us as far away as possible, and as quickly, from these reminders of the thing ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... grew louder as the band of spectral white astern extended and approached; and presently, with a deafening shriek, the hurricane struck us, the line of white foam at the same instant sweeping past us at railway speed. The stroke of the blast ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... uprushes and downrushes occur, but there is no marked predominance of either in a sun-spot. The velocity of motion thus indicated in the line of sight sometimes appears to amount to 320 miles a second. But it must be remembered that pressure of a gas has some effect in displacing the spectral lines. So we must go on, collecting data, until a time comes when the meaning of all the facts ...
— History of Astronomy • George Forbes
... ladies of the ballet, their mothers, the box-keepers, the cloak-room attendants or the concierge. Yes, he existed in flesh and blood, although he assumed the complete appearance of a real phantom; that is to say, of a spectral shade. ...
— The Phantom of the Opera • Gaston Leroux
... with the lasso to a corner of the haywagon, and was standing over him, cowhide in hand, panting with rage and the desire for vengeance. The gaunt horse had moved off a few paces, and stood like an apparition, gazing with spectral indifference at the scene. ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... wilderness yet menaced by a foe, and that strange French phrase which kept recurring in his mind—all had the effect of conjuring up giant shadows in Joe's fanciful mind. During all his life, until this moment, he had never feared anything; now he was afraid of the darkness. The spectral trees spread long arms overhead, and phantom forms stalked abroad; somewhere out in that dense gloom stirred this mysterious ...
— The Spirit of the Border - A Romance of the Early Settlers in the Ohio Valley • Zane Grey
... was absolutely colorless, and her strange brilliant eyes seemed to have lost all their fire. Her gown was black, and the decorations of her hair were black except for a single diamond. There was something almost spectral about her appearance. She walked stiffly—for the moment she had lost the sinuous grace of movement which had been one of her many fascinations. Her neck and shoulders alone remained, as ever, ...
— The Malefactor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... how his hair clung about his temples, and that for all accoutrement his mare had but a halter. Yet Richard sat erect and proud, and Lady stepped like a mare full of life and vigour. And there was Marquis, not cowering or howling as dogs do in spectral presence, but madly bounding and barking as if ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... writing-table hangs a quaint German picture, illustrating Goethe's ballad of the Erlking, in which the whole wild pathos of the story is compressed into one supreme moment; we see the fearful, half-gliding rush of the Erlking, his long, spectral arms outstretched to grasp the child, the frantic gallop of the horse, the alarmed father clasping his darling to his bosom in convulsive embrace, the siren-like elves hovering overhead, to lure the little soul with their weird harps. There can be no better illustration than is furnished by this ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... The garland's vernal green Shrivels to greyness in its spectral hand. Joy-bells are muffled, mute, Hushed is the bridal lute, And general grief darkens ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, January 23, 1892 • Various
... moon gone down. But when we had left behind us the black streets of the little town, and were come out into the open country, the star-haze sufficed to light us as we went onward by the windings of the spectral white road: for the stars ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier
... centuries ago, so that when I was there I saw the full program of one of these spectral auctions and was chilled with ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris
... Nor when—Ah, faded, spectral sheet, Wraith of long-perished wrong and time, Forbear! the spirit starts to meet The resurrection of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... cold grey of a March morning, when the sun had not yet dispelled the mists of night, and the fringing woods back from the Red River loomed white and spectral through the frost, they re-entered the Empire, and in a few minutes were detraining at Emerson, the boundary town and gateway to the prairies which for a thousand miles stretched into the mysteries ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... is, according to the measure of it, in the truest sense, kingly; conferring indeed the purest kingship that can exist among men: too many other kingships (however distinguished by visible insignia or material power) being either spectral, or tyrannous;—Spectral—that is to say, aspects and shows only of royalty, hollow as death, and which only the "Likeness of a kingly crown have on"; or else tyrannous—that is to say, substituting ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... but I think it should be bought." And Sir Alured rejoiced in the idea that when his ghost should look at the survey map, that hiatus of Barnton Spinnies would not trouble his spectral eyes. ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... reaching the rope, the terrified sailor stood gazing on the stern of the canoe; in which, by the faint light of the dawning day, was to be seen an object well calculated to fill the least superstitious heart with terror and dismay. Through an opening in the foliage peered the pale and spectral face of a human being, with its dull eyes bent fixedly and mechanically upon the vessel. In the centre of the wan forehead was a dark incrustation, as of blood covering the superficies of a newly closed wound. The pallid mouth was partially unclosed, so as to display a row of white ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... every-day lives and characters; a world to which they may make occasional visits, but where they are sojourners, not dwellers, and which, when out of it, or even when in it, they think of, peradventure, but as a phantom-world, a place of ignes fatui and spectral illusions. Those only who have the peculiarity of association which we have mentioned, and which is a natural though not a universal consequence of intense sensibility, instead of seeming not themselves when they are uttering ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... if he were about to awake, and then his eyes opened and he gazed on the spectral pallor of the dawn in the windows, his brain rousing from dreams slowly into comprehension of the change that had come. Then collecting his thoughts he rose and stood facing the dawn. He stood for a moment like one in ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... approach to the distance of about a yard. Then ignite the spirit with a match. It will burn with a peculiar yellowish-blue flame, and in the light of this the human countenances, and all objects of similar color, lose their natural tint, and look spectral. The contrast of the wan and ghostly hue with the smiling lips and white teeth of those who look on, is most amusing. The effect of this experiment is heightened by dissolving some common table-salt in the spirit, and still further by putting into it a small quantity of saffron. ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, October 1878, No. 12 • Various
... forests was in front of us and far above us rose the grander peaks of the New Zealand Alps, a constant charm through the changing atmosphere, now brought near to us through the optical refraction of the clear air, and again veiled and shadowed and removed into spectral evanescent forms. The picture was intensely interesting and like all commanding views where the most expressive elements of scenery are combined, the remote sea, reflecting every mood of light and color, and the snowy peaks carrying to us the opaline glories of rising or setting ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... seeing the morning drill of the marines and the bluejackets on the iron decks, with the lively music that went with it. The bugle calls and the bells were charming; the week's wash hung out to dry had its picturesqueness by day, and by night the spectral play of the search-lights along the waves and shores, and against the startled skies, was even more impressive. There was a band which gave us every evening the airs of the latest coon- songs, and the national anthems which we have borrowed from various nations; and yes, I remember the white ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... were rolling down with them and before them in a miniature avalanche. She stood very quietly, holding one hand against her heart and gazing down. But while she saw the real happening, in her eyes was also the vision of her father dealing the spectral blow that had smashed Comanche down in mid-leap and sent horse and rider hurtling ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... looked, something in the carved paneling struck my notice, and, following the direction in which the spectral finger had pointed, I saw that the dragons and the twisted scrolls were united in the center by a Tudor rose. In an instant there flashed across my mind the old saying which ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... of his tongue to whisper, derisively, "Nothin' doin'!" But he remembered the Boy's injunction, as well as his doubts, and checked himself. A moment later a faint, swirling gurgle of water caught his ear, and he was glad he had kept silence. An instant more, and the form of a beaver, spectral-gray in the moonlight, took shape all at once on the brink of the canal. For several minutes it stood there motionless, erect upon its hind quarters, questioning the stillness with eyes and ear and nose. Then, ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... through the solemn gloom and the empty vastness of the night, were new and strange to him. At intervals he heard voices approach, pass by, and fade into silence; and as he saw nothing more of the bodies they belonged to than a sort of formless drifting blur, there was something spectral and uncanny about it all that made him shudder. Occasionally he caught the twinkle of a light—always far away, apparently—almost in another world; if he heard the tinkle of a sheep's bell, it was vague, distant, indistinct; the muffled lowing of the herds ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... bloated with Locusts, soon becomes irritated and shows fight. The Empusa, with her frugal meals, does not indulge in hostile demonstrations. There is no strife among neighbours nor any of those sudden unfurlings of the wings so dear to the Mantis when she assumes the spectral attitude and puffs like a startled Adder; never the least inclination for those cannibal banquets whereat the sister who has been worsted in the fight is devoured. Such atrocities ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... if to mock our cautious progress, and invite us to follow it. The eye, wistfully pursuing its eccentric sweep, suddenly loses it in impenetrable shadows. There is not a vestige of any other ruin near it, and the long lines it here and there shows, ghostly white in the moonlight, seem like spectral strands of sand. ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... his desk, Bruce Grierson's letter spread out before him, the ghost of his torture. At night he heard it move, with a spectral rustling, under his pillow where he kept it. By day it writhed, a small, hot thing, over his heart. He had tried again and again to destroy it. Everything else that had got in his way he had destroyed, but this he had not destroyed. He was trying ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... way up along that rocky and treacherous shore we had seen the evidences of wreck and disaster everywhere. Above the flats of shimmering water, where the gold or crimson of sunset lay, rose constantly the tops of masts, shadowy and spectral, telling of the sunken hull, the pale corpses beneath those gleaming waves. Ship after ship went down out of those adventurous little coasting vessels that plied up and down the coast trading with the natives, and as we passed these half submerged ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... charm of warmth and colour, independent of subject. More than one version of the opera exists. That which is now most usually played is in three acts. In the first version of the work there is a curious scene, in which Ourrias is drowned by a spectral ferryman in the waters of the Rhone, but ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... from the train of thought into which he had unconsciously fallen by hearing a sound not far from him. He raised his head and rubbed his eyes, half expecting to be confronted by a spectral visitor; but not being able to distinguish anything in the deep gloom to which his eyes were not yet accustomed, he dismissed that theory, and ascribed the ...
— Heiress of Haddon • William E. Doubleday
... unknown to the world. It will not be amiss to observe here that the term second sight is of Lowland Scotch origin, and first made its appearance in print in Martin's book. The Gaelic term for the faculty is taibhsearachd, the literal meaning of which is what is connected with a spectral appearance, the root of the word being taibhse, a ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... moon rising at the full, passing through occasional strata of dark cloud that veiled her light at intervals, illumined the sky with her weird beams, making it bright as day, but with a ghostly radiance that lent a mystic spectral effect ...
— Bob Strong's Holidays - Adrift in the Channel • John Conroy Hutcheson
... third mate, "he does wear one, any how, and night before last I sat on the hatch, as he says, reading Shakspeare in the moonlight, and when the second mate's night-capped head rose through the slide, he looked so very spectral that I couldn't forbear hailing him with—'Art thou a ghost or goblin damned?' which he persists in rendering his own fashion. I'm sure I didn't intend to liken him to a barn-yard fowl of any kind; I should rather have gone into the stable ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... end! With agonising shriek He turned and fled, the spectral perspiration Dewing his brow and coursing down his cheek; Fled, and was lost to man's investigation (For full discussion of his little tricks See ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 8, 1914 • Various
... 30th of May, 1539, De Soto, with nine vessels and six or seven hundred well-armed followers, sailed into Tampa Bay, on the Gulf coast of Florida. Here they at once landed and marched inland, greedy to reach and grasp the spectral image of gold which floated before their eyes. A daring but a cruel man was this new adventurer. He brought with him blood-hounds to hunt the Indians and chains to fetter them. A drove of hogs was brought to supply the soldiers with fresh meat. They were provided with horses, with fire-arms, with ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... Marsh or feel that to deny them is to indicate a mind as profoundly enslaved by a system as was ever the humble intellect of a medieval monk. The reasoning of this representative phantom of the chosen, or of the spectral appearances who sit in judgment, or condemnation, upon us of the more ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... its Lords are drunk! Or spread Heav'n's partial gifts o'er all, like dew? The Many's weedy growth withers the gracious Few! Strange opposites, from those, again, shall rise. Join, then, if thee it please, the bitter jest Of mankind's progress; all its spectral race Mere impotence of rest, The heaving vain of life which cannot cease from self, Crest altering still to gulf And gulf to crest In endless chace, That leaves the tossing water anchor'd in its place! Ah, well does he who does but stand aside, Sans hope ...
— The Unknown Eros • Coventry Patmore
... sat doggedly up and began chafing his abraded shin. The desperate woman raised her white arms heavenward for the final plunge, and the voice of the gale seemed like the dread roaring of the waters in her ears, as down, down, she went—in imagination—to a black death among the spectral piles. She backed a few paces to secure an impetus, cast a last look upon the stony officer, with a wild shriek sprang to the awful verge and came near losing her balance. Recovering herself with an effort, she turned ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... moon was in the sky, hanging low down and half-inverted as if spilling a spectral glamour over the ghostly mists which lay deep in ...
— Frank Merriwell Down South • Burt L. Standish
... more desolate, and we travelled along valleys of deep snow and across dark, lonely gorges, the depths of which even a brilliant sunshine could not penetrate. What this region may be like in summer-time I know not, but in winter the surface of the moon itself could scarcely present a more silent, spectral appearance. ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... you know, is, when radiating light, characterized by what at first appears to be almost haphazard sets of spectral bands without relation to one another. But they are related by mathematical laws, and the apparent haphazard character is only the result of our lack of knowledge of ...
— The Gold of the Gods • Arthur B. Reeve
... think that ships forget a shore, Or bitter seas, or winds that made them wise; There is a dream upon them, evermore;— And there be some who say that sunk ships rise To seek familiar harbours in the night, Blowing in mists, their spectral ...
— Ships in Harbour • David Morton
... is stuck, as a thing no longer wanted, a very old, pious image Kwanon with the thousand arms, and Kwanon with the horses' head, seated among clouds and flames, both horrible to behold with their spectral grins. ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... do," said the prophet. Whereupon she uncovered her face and said, "Dost thou see it now?" "I do not." "Glad tidings to thee, O Mohammed!" exclaimed Chadizah: "it is an angel, for he has respected my unveiled face; an evil spirit would not." As his disease advanced, these spectral illusions became more frequent; from one of them he received the divine commission. "I," said his wife, "will be thy first believer;" and they knelt down in prayer together. Since that day nine thousand millions ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... Indeed, a tall spectral figure, black from head to foot, his face carefully hidden under a velvet mask, walked at the end of the corridor, lamp in hand, and stopped at the first step of a staircase which led to the upper floors. The conspirators advanced ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - JOAN OF NAPLES—1343-1382 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... harbor and the gulf and the surrounding shores into a strange, fantastic, unreal world of pale silver mist, through which everything loomed phantom-like. Captain Josiah Crawford's black schooner sailing down the channel, laden with potatoes for Bluenose ports, was a spectral ship bound for a far uncharted land, ever receding, never to be reached. The calls of unseen gulls overhead were the cries of the souls of doomed seamen. The little curls of foam that blew across the sand were elfin things stealing up from the sea-caves. The big, ...
— Anne's House of Dreams • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Henry, vehemently; "and yet I have, beneath the canopy of Heaven, declared that I will, so help me God! spare neither time nor trouble in the unravelling of this most fearful piece of business. Did either of you remark the clothing which this spectral ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... when the moisture has had time to disappear, the wafer be thrown off, though now the most critical inspection of the polished surface can discover no trace of any form, if we breathe once more upon it, a spectral image of the wafer comes plainly into view; and this may be done again and again. Nay, more, if the polished metal be carefully put aside where nothing can deteriorate its surface, and be so kept for many months, on breathing again upon it the ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... was oppressed by the thought of his sufferings in that dreary convalescence. At night, when she looked from her window, the fog hung white, like mildew over the pond, and she could not reason herself out of a spectral haunting fancy that sickness lurked in the heavy, misty atmosphere. She dreamt of it and the four babies, started, awoke, and had to recall all her higher trust to enable her vigour to chase off the ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... that her pony's feet were shod with felt. She looked neither to the right nor the left, and she saw nothing of the strange restlessness which seemed to pervade the camp. Everywhere the shadows of men were moving noiselessly about. Spectral guns were surrounded by little groups of whispering soldiers. There was no bivouacing, the camp-fires burned low. Every now and then, when challenged, she mechanically repeated the countersign. All the while her lips were moving in ...
— The Traitors • E. Phillips (Edward Phillips) Oppenheim
... other ancient author except Aesop. To boys he has always been the Robinson Crusoe of classic antiquity, making what had hitherto seemed a remote island sequestered from them by a trackless flood of years, living and real. Those obscure solitudes which their imagination had peopled with spectral equestrian statues, are rescued by the sound of his cheery voice as part of the familiar and daylight world. We suspect that Agesilaus on his hobby-horse first humanized antiquity for most of us. ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... and waited. Soon she saw, with a certain grim satisfaction, Zora and Bles emerging from the swamp engaged in earnest conversation. Here was an opportunity to overwhelm both with an unforgettable reprimand. She rose before them like a spectral vengeance. ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... impetuous, stamped the earth, And turned and tightened his saddle-girth; But mostly he watched with eager search The belfry-tower of the Old North Church, As it rose above the graves on the hill, Lonely and spectral and sombre and still. And lo! as he looks, on the belfry's height A glimmer, and then a gleam of light! He springs to the saddle, the bridle he turns, But lingers and gazes, till full on his sight, A second lamp in the belfry burns! A hurry of hoofs in a village ...
— The Children's Own Longfellow • Henry W. Longfellow
... Antonio presently stepped forth leading the horse by the bridle; the macho followed behind. I looked at the horse and shrugged my shoulders: as far as I could scan it, it appeared the most uncouth animal I had ever beheld. It was of a spectral white, short in the body, but with remarkably long legs. I observed that it was particularly high in the cruz or withers. "You are looking at the grasti," said Antonio; "it is eighteen years old, but it ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... "Mr. Whistler is as spectral as ever in an unattractive portrait of an awkward little girl, happily not rendered additionally ridiculous ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... windows of Anstruther's rooms and standing there, watched the drifting moonbeams mantling on the spectral blue lake, while his chance-met friend rang for a waiter. There was the murmur of confidential orders, and then Anson Anstruther with a bright smile dropped easily into the role of host. The young staff officer was so elated by the apparently flattering selection ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... throwing sticks. One or two rockets were sent up soon after to amuse them, on which the few remaining women and children hurried to their sheds of bark and hid their faces in terror. When a blue light was burned, and lit up the gloomy shadows of the neighbouring bush, it disclosed the spectral figures of many armed men among the trees, singly and in groups, intently watching our motions. Paida, who with other native allies of ours still remained with us, was very urgent for us to be off, telling me that spears would be thrown immediately (kaibu kalaka muro); ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray
... by galvanic forces, and that of the bold French philosopher, Carnot, whose speculations have led to the theory that the sun will finally expend all its heat, and constellated life cease, as the solar system hangs, like a dead orrery, ashy and spectral, the ghost of what it was. So the extravagant author ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... lake were spectral in the whirl of the elements, and the island was the one fixed spot. It was as brilliant as an emerald in a setting of lead. A beach of yellow sand encircled it, with a border of willows, and taller trees sticking ...
— The Huntress • Hulbert Footner
... shook the house, and rattled the window-panes of the room. It was the eyrie in which the deceased artist had painted his pictures, with two large windows which looked over the cliff. Again the gale sprang at the house, and smote the windows with spectral blows. Downstairs, ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... blind, insect-like intentness through the dark grey air, porters were calling in un-English English, then trotting with heavy bags, their colourless blouses looking ghostly as they disappeared; Ursula stood at a long, low, zinc-covered barrier, along with hundreds of other spectral people, and all the way down the vast, raw darkness was this low stretch of open bags and spectral people, whilst, on the other side of the barrier, pallid officials in peaked caps and moustaches were turning the underclothing in the bags, ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... the greatest part of the story was Mr. Coleridge's invention; but certain parts I suggested; for example, some crime was to be committed which was to bring upon the Old Navigator, as Coleridge afterwards delighted to call him, the spectral persecution, as a consequence of that crime and his own wanderings. I had been reading in Shelvocke's Voyages, a day or two before, that, while doubling Cape Horn they frequently saw albatrosses in that latitude, the largest sort of sea-fowl, some extending their wings ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... see the black skarts standing on the rocks of Gometra, and clouds of puffins wheeling round the dark and lonely pillars of Staffa; while away in the north, as they got clear of Treshanish Point, the mountains of Rum and of Skye appeared a pale and spectral blue, like ghostly shadows at the horizon. And there was no end to the sports and pastimes that occupied day after day. On their first expedition up the lonely corries of Ben-an-Sloich young Ogilvie brought down a royal hart—though his hand ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... was just sufficient to give a ghostly appearance to what may be truly termed the ghastly ruins around them, and to reveal in undefined solemnity the neighbouring mountains. Smoke still issued from the half-smothered fires, and here and there a spectral figure might be seen flitting silently to and fro. But all was profoundly still and quiet, even the occasional tremors of the earth had ceased for a time, when they issued from the ...
— The Rover of the Andes - A Tale of Adventure on South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... in the tray underneath the bowl, light it, and stir the brandy back and forth until it also catches from the flame below. Let burn two or three minutes—if the lights have been extinguished as they should be, the effect is beautifully spectral. After the three minutes pour in strong, hot, clear, black coffee, a small cupful for each person, keep stirring until the flame dies out, then serve literally blazing hot. This "burnt water" known in more sophisticated regions ...
— Dishes & Beverages of the Old South • Martha McCulloch Williams
... his God, and he took up the vast chain of being in his hand, and the round world became the centre and the soul of all things in some shadowy sense, forlorn of meaning, and around him he beheld the living traces and the sky-pointing proportions of the mighty Pan—but poetry redeemed him from this spectral philosophy, and he bathed his heart in beauty, and gazed at the golden light of heaven, and drank of the spirit of the universe, and wandered at eve by ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
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