"Spectral" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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
... 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; ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... 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
... 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
... '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
... spectral arms of the peeled trees as they lay, and onward among the growing trees, by a path where there were no oaks, and no barking, and no Fitzpiers—nothing but copse-wood, between which the primroses could be discerned in pale bunches. "I didn't ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... 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
... spectral children; thus The Angel made reply: 'They have no part or share with us; They were but passers-by.' 'But may we pray for them?' the phantoms plead. 'Yea, for they need your prayers,' the ...
— The Englishman and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... 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
... 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
... 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 |
