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Wraith   Listen
noun
Wraith  n.  
1.
An apparition of a person in his exact likeness, seen before death, or a little after; hence, an apparition; a specter; a vision; an unreal image. (Scot.) "She was uncertain if it were the gypsy or her wraith." "O, hollow wraith of dying fame."
2.
Sometimes, improperly, a spirit thought to preside over the waters; called also water wraith.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Wraith" Quotes from Famous Books



... looked, and I saw all the northern sky glow red as glows the light of a burning town on the low clouds when the host that has fired it looks back on its work. And plain and clear in the silver moonlight against the crimson sky sat the wraith of a king, throned on the sand at the very water's edge, and round him ...
— King Olaf's Kinsman - A Story of the Last Saxon Struggle against the Danes in - the Days of Ironside and Cnut • Charles Whistler

... conspiring with Louis XV., as his father had done with Louis XIV., to get to the English throne. We see him flitting about Europe from time to time, landing here and there on the British Coast—until when finally defeated at "Culloden Moor," 1746, this wraith of the House of Stuart disappears—dying obscurely in Rome; and "Wha'll be King but Charlie," and "Over the Water to Charlie," linger only as the ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele

... my warning? you revile me—you flout me! 'Tis well! your fate shall prove a warning to all unbelievers—they shall remember this night, though you will not. Fool! fool!—your doom has long been sealed! I saw your wraith choose out its last lodgment on Halloween; I know the spot. Your grave is dug already—ha, ha!" And, with renewed laughter, Peter rushed ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth

... father, thoughtfully; "but the thing, you see, was in the shape of a man—a man lying at full length as if he were dead, and indeed in his grave: he might take it for his wraith—an ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald

... side of the chamber, silently as the wraith of a disembodied soul, the swift jungle creature moved from the path of the charging Titan that, guided solely in the semi-darkness by its keen ears, bore down upon the spot toward which Tarzan's noisy entrance into its lair had attracted it. Along the further ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... walks in the forest; and that her wraith so frightened Humphrey's horse that it would not budge a straw's breadth, just beside the great oak in the Broad Holm, before you get into the forest on ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby

... swinging like dead leaves on the long swells. The stars came out, the gulls went shoreward for the night, and we were as alone as if on the sea. The woman's slender figure, wrapped in her white cloak, became a silent, shining wraith. She was within touch of my hand, yet unreachably remote. I lost my glib speech. The gray loneliness that one feels in a crowd came over me. If I had been alone with my men, I should have felt well accompanied, master of my craft, and in tune with my condition. It was ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith

... that hideous umbrage fast, What wraith escaping from its tenement, Winona through the sleeping village passed, And pausing not, to Gray Cloud's tipi went, Laid back the door, and with a stealthy tread, Entered and softly crouched beside his head. Her gaze that seemed to pierce his inmost thought, Keen as the ready knife her hand ...
— Indian Legends of Minnesota • Various

... bewilderment; was it himself, or his ghost, his shadow. He tried to think, but everything melted before him in a mist. The girl by his side was a wraith; they were dead, and this was some strange unaccountable happening in another world. The marble felt cold to his knees. Velasco tried to move, to rise, but the hand of the priest held him ...
— The Black Cross • Olive M. Briggs

... The wraith of the present carries with him more vital energy than his predecessors, is more athletic in his struggles with the unlucky wights he visits, and can coerce mortals to do his will by the laying on of hands as well as by the look or word. He speaks with more emphasis and ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various

... apathy that so terrifies their watchers. On the red stream of Hemorrhagia a few souls drifted away, leaving behind pathetic heaps, white and chill as the fog itself. Two or three came to view this atmospheric wraith as the ghost of impossible joys, sent to whisper to them of the egregious folly it is to inhale breath into the lungs, only to exhale it again, and these used whatever came handy to their relief, pistols, ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry

... usually resorted to mental healers, mesmerists, and clairvoyants. Before making investments or embarking in his great railroad ventures, Vanderbilt visited spiritualists; we have one circumstantial account of his summoning the wraith of Jim Fiske to advise him in stock operations. His excessive vanity led him to print his picture on all the Lake Shore bonds; he proposed to New York City the construction in Central Park of a large monument that would commemorate, side by side, the names ...
— The Age of Big Business - Volume 39 in The Chronicles of America Series • Burton J. Hendrick

... compare with the meeting in Ibsen's An Enemy of Society; the last act is melodrama with a large admixture of remarkably interesting social philosophy; the intervening acts betray the poet that always underlay the dramatist in Bjornson. The crudity, again, of the melodramatic appearance of the wraith of Clara's father in the third act, contrasts strangely with the mature thoughtfulness of much of the last act and with the tender charm of what has gone before: And—strangest incongruity of all in a play so essentially "actual"—there is in the original, ...
— Three Dramas - The Editor—The Bankrupt—The King • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson

... billiard-room. It was light and warm there, though the place was empty, and he decided upon a cigar as a proximate or immediate solution. He sat smoking before the fire till the tobacco's substance had half turned into a wraith of ash, and not really thinking of anything very definitely, except the question whether he should be able to sleep after he went to bed, when he heard a creeping step on the floor. He turned quickly, with a certain ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... "It's my opinion that Mercer has seen his wraith," he remarked sententiously. "There's a grave, dour look about his pale countenance which a man who is long for this world ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston

... Papists, Jews or Turbaned Turks, Such is my spirit—(I don't mean my wraith!) Such, may it please you, is my humble faith; I know, full well, you do not ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton

... the storm grew loud apace, The water-wraith was shrieking; And in the scowl of heaven each face Grew dark as they ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester

... had his suspicions. Now he was certain. He tossed off his glass of Dubonnet, ordered another, and spoke incoherently of the opening and shutting of doors, whisperings, of a dreadful incident, the central fact of which was a glimpse of Zette gliding wraith-like down a corridor. Lastly, there was the culminating proof, a letter found that morning in Zette's room. He drew a crumpled sheet from his pocket and handed ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke

... yet well-known to the eye of faith! Ah, I have heard that wail far, far away In distant lands, by many a sheltered bay, When slumbered in his cave the water-wraith And the waves gently kissed the classic shore Of France or Italy, beneath the moon, When earth lay tranced in a dreamless swoon: And every time the music rose,—before Mine inner vision rose a form sublime, Thy form, O Tree, as in my happy prime I saw thee, in my ...
— Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan • Toru Dutt

... the wraith fair, Dull gleams her hair. Ah, strong one, so cruel—fierce breath of the North— The torches of heaven are lighting thee forth! Fell ...
— Lilith - The Legend of the First Woman • Ada Langworthy Collier

... stared, electrified at her appearance. White as a bone, her beautiful violet eyes full of haunting fear; her hair, torn down by the wind and flickering in long black strands about her face, far below her waist, she looked like a wraith of the storm. ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley

... Spooks of the Hiawassee Lake of the Dismal Swamp The Barge of Defeat Natural Bridge The Silence Broken Siren of the French Broad The Hunter of Calawassee Revenge of the Accabee Toccoa Falls Two Lives for One A Ghostly Avenger The Wraith Ringer of Atlanta The Swallowing Earthquake The Last Stand of the Biloxi The Sacred Fire of Natchez Pass Christian The ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner

... and said— 'I know that Odin the Great is dead; Sure is the triumph of our Faith, This one-eyed stranger was his wraith.' Dead rides Sir Morten ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer

... her eyes as he paused. She could not speak. The little boy had come home to her mind—like a wraith-child of her own. She was shaken ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort

... in the suburbs; so that your morning train may bear you from twilight to darkness. But to-day the enemy's maneuvering was more monotonous. From Bow even unto Hammersmith there draggled a dull, wretched vapor, like the wraith of an impecunious suicide come into a fortune immediately after the fatal deed. The barometers and thermometers had sympathetically shared its depression, and their spirits (when they had any) were low. The cold cut like ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill

... rare spots, which are always in the remote country, untouched by the advantages of civilisation, one is conscious of an enwrapping web or mist of spirit—is it, perhaps the glamourous and wistful wraith of all the vanished shapes once dwelling there in such ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy

... were wide, the story saith, Out of the night came the patient wraith, He might not speak, and he could not stir A hair of the Baron's minniver—- Speechless and strengthless, a shadow thin, He roved the castle to seek his kin. And oh,'twas a piteous thing to see The dumb ghost follow ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling

... me," she said, "because I want all the spirits I am capable of to carry it through. It has to be done with a light heart, else it will deceive nobody. And so, my dear, to-morrow you will say 'good-bye' to me, and have a sort of wraith of me instead for a little while. Oh, Alice, I hope it won't ...
— Daisy's Aunt • E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson

... always repeating in that flute-like voice of hers "Well, this is rather queer!" Hither and thither she fared, her neck and arms gleaming white from the luminous blackness of her dress, in the luminous blueness of the night. At a distance, she might have been a wraith; or a breeze made visible; a vagrom breeze, warm and delicate, and ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm

... perfectly enchanting—shall I tell you exactly what she wears—and her every feature and the color of her eyes? The wraith so materializes that I can describe it as accurately as I could describe you ...
— The Man and the Moment • Elinor Glyn

... Painfully distinct, the wraith of Josephine Childe rose up before me, pale and accusing. Fragments of the letter which had offered me the Sealyham re-wrote themselves upon my brain.... It nearly breaks my heart to say so, but I've got to part with Nobby.... I think you'd get ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates

... the other passengers by the way, as if instinctively, took note of this one. His nerves crisped at the noiseless slide of that form, as it stalked on from lamp to lamp, keeping pace with his own. He felt a sort of awe, as if he had beheld the wraith of himself; and even as he glanced suspiciously at the stranger, the stranger glanced at him. He was inexpressibly relieved when the figure turned down another street ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... on the Scribner scale," admitted Baker, "but I know what happens when you try to bump him. Bet you a thousand dollars I do," he shot at Welton. "It isn't the wraith-like Plant you run ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White

... a riverside, I know not where, I walked one night in mystery of dream; A chill creeps curdling yet beneath my hair, To think what chanced me by the pallid gleam Of a moon-wraith that ...
— Poems of American Patriotism • Brander Matthews (Editor)

... off wearily, his lips framing a mere wraith of a smile, and in its gravity she still saw no warning of deep waters stirring troublously. "A dance—you're giving a dance!" he repeated, and there came into his eyes a subtle hint of mockery that, coupled with the words, gave them almost the ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine

... In deepest crevice and highest place On mesa, butte and mountain-face; From the Grand Canyon's somber shade The sun-scorched desert, the dripping glade And sunken crater of Stoneman's Lake. The "Casa Grande," a home of ancient race— A ruin now—is haunted by Montezuma's wraith. In Montezuma's castle, crumbling from roof to base The winds and rain of heaven ghosts of the past ...
— Tales of Aztlan • George Hartmann

... button of her blouse and kissed her neck harshly, while she watched him, in a maze. He abruptly fastened the button again, sprang up, stared out at the wraith-filled darkness over the river, while his voice droned on, as though it ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis

... Even those that were well were sure that it was only a mater of days when the sickness would catch them and carry them off. And yet, believing this with absolute conviction, they somehow lacked the nerve to rush the frail wraith of a man with the white skin and escape from the charnel house by the whale-boats. They chose the lingering death they were sure awaited them, rather than the immediate death they were very sure would pounce upon them if they went up against ...
— Adventure • Jack London

... Europe, if it held a creed, Held it through custom, not through faith. Chaos returned, in dream and deed. Right was a legend; Love—a wraith; And That from which the world began Was less than ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... made you understand?" she returned a wan wraith of a smile, pitiful with entreaty, while one of her hands found the ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance

... slender figure came out from the orchard path, book in hand, and advanced slowly towards the house. Was it the ghost, the wraith, the shadow of beautiful Kate Danton? The lovely golden hair, glittering in the dying radiance of the sunset, and coiled in shining twists round the head, was the same; the deep large eyes, so darkly blue, were clear and cloudless ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming

... in England. The pony's unshod hoofs had made hardly any sound on the turf as he cantered off, and Lara's boy, in his loose shirt and shabby clothes, and his bare feet hanging stirrupless on each side of the pony, disappeared like a wraith. There was a week to wait before he would ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan

... came into my head That I was killed long since and lying dead— Only a homeless wraith that way ...
— Spirits in Bondage • (AKA Clive Hamilton) C. S. Lewis

... a bell rang. It was like a summons. The wraith of his own making vanished. He wiped his eyes, now with one fringed sleeve, now with the other, stooped and felt round just inside the little room for his scrap of mattress and the quilt, took them up, softly shut the door, and ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates

... I could to bid her be of good cheer, but the comfort of a hopeful spirit was dead within her; and she told me, that by many tokens she was assured her bairn was already slain.—"Thrice," said she, "I have seen his wraith—the first time he was in the pride of his young manhood, the next he was pale and wan, with a bloody and gashy wound in his side, and the third time there was a smoke, and, when it cleared away, I saw him in a grave, with neither winding-sheet ...
— The Annals of the Parish • John Galt

... unworthy of such honors," Venus answered. "This land is Libya, but the town is Tyrian, founded by Dido, who fled hither from her brother Pygmalion, who had secretly murdered her husband, Sichaeus, for his gold. To Dido, sleeping, appeared the wraith of Sichaeus, pallid, his breast pierced with the impious wound, and revealed to her her brother's crime, showed where a hoard of gold was concealed, and advised her ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb

... huge shadow floated out of the dark chaos and passed so close over the heads of Neewa and Miki that they heard the menacing purr of giant wings. As the wraith-like creature disappeared there came back to them a hiss and the grating snap of a powerful beak. It sent a shiver through Miki. The instinct that had been fighting to rouse itself within him flared up like a powder-flash. Instantly he sensed the ...
— Nomads of the North - A Story of Romance and Adventure under the Open Stars • James Oliver Curwood

... 'wraith' of a small box whose image was out at the right, appeared above the other image off at the left and it was turned with a corner to the front. Again, at the central position each image was duplicated, the true pair being of full size, bright and distinct, the false ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various

... North of Ireland is called wraith, as in Scotland. The Fetch is a spirit that assumes the likeness of a particular person. It does not appear to the individual himself whose resemblance it assumes, but to some of his friends. If it is seen in the morning, it betokens long life; if after sunset, approaching ...
— The Ned M'Keown Stories - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton

... a wraith in verity, for she was clothed throughout in white, save for the ponderous gold girdle about her middle. A white gorget framed the face which was so pinched and shrewd and strange; and she peered into the well, ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell

... for though she lay in a kind of stupor, and was conscious of no change whatever, she was able when she heard him coming to get up and sit in the chair in an ordinary attitude. But she looked like the wraith of herself an ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner

... mixture of all three. Ordinarily there was a suspicion of hardness in her face but there was also upon occasions a kind of winsomeness, an unexpected peeping out of a personality which was like the wraith of the child which she once had been—a suggestion of girlish charm and spontaneity utterly unlike ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart

... that outweigh the salt of the woeful brine, Yet no sleep dream-robbed, or dream-laden, nor even death's pallid peace; But a ceaseless crying over my heart's forsaken valleys Where love like a wraith haunts the empty tombs ...
— Sandhya - Songs of Twilight • Dhan Gopal Mukerji

... still holding her hand in his. There stirred in his pulses the thrill Kathleen Eppes had always wakened—a thrill of memory now, a mere wraith of emotion. He was thinking of a certain pink-cheeked girl with crinkly black-brown hair and eyes that he had likened to chrysoberyls—and he wondered whimsically what had become of her. This was not she. This was assuredly not Kathleen, for this woman had a large mouth—a ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell

... called mine: what I sent, he retained, gave these in place, all by the mistress messenger! As I recognized her, at potency of truth, so she, by the crystalline soul, knew me, never mistook the signs. Enough of this—let the wraith go to nothingness again, here is the orb, have only thought for her!" What follows admits us to the very HEART of Browning's poetry—admits us to the great Idea which is almost, in these days, strange to say, ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson

... unostentatious holes to bury the stuff in—your power of devotion, not to yourself, but to an obscure, back-breaking business. And that's difficult enough. Mind, I am not trying to excuse or even explain—I am trying to account to myself for—for—Mr. Kurtz—for the shade of Mr. Kurtz. This initiated wraith from the back of Nowhere honoured me with its amazing confidence before it vanished altogether. This was because it could speak English to me. The original Kurtz had been educated partly in England, and—as he was good enough to say himself—his ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad

... serried squadrons in the city, while he scatters them tenuously in the suburbs; so that your morning train may bear you from twilight to darkness. But to-day the enemy's manoeuvring was more monotonous. From Bow even unto Hammersmith there draggled a dull, wretched vapour, like the wraith of an impecunious suicide come into a fortune immediately after the fatal deed. The barometers and thermometers had sympathetically shared its depression, and their spirits (when they had any) were low. The cold cut like a ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill

... and smiled to think that, had one stayed at home, one might never know these things. Forgotten was the wraith of Leung Kai Chu, the jungle trail of Hallman, and even the trepidation with which we had awaited the sailing ship's boat. I was soon to be in those enchanted archipelagoes, and to see for myself those mighty swimmers and those sleepers upon the sea. I might ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien

... the figures ascend, but now leaf thin, tapering to a dusky wraith, which, fiery tipped, draws its twofold passion from my heart. For me it sings, unseals my sorrow, thaws compassion, floods with love the sunless world, nor, ceasing, abates its tenderness but deftly, subtly, weaves ...
— Monday or Tuesday • Virginia Woolf

... out of the room into the semi-darkness of the kitchen, watching with lynx-like closeness the man who sat so quietly under the shaded light. He felt behind him for the outer door-knob and turned it to let in a white sheet of rain, then vanished like a storm wraith, leaving a parched-lipped man and a zigzag trail of water, which gleamed in the lamplight ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach

... on to her last-taken breath Was unseen, save as wraith that in front of the brass made moan; So that ever the way of her life and the time of ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy

... —as he had expected—finding it difficult to marshal the regiments of his arguments. In vain he thought of the tragedy of Garvin . . . . The thing was more complicated. And behind this redoubtable and sinister Eldon Parr he saw, as it were, the wraith of that: other who had once confessed the misery of his loneliness. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... lounging-chair and with gentle artfulness lured him into reminiscences of his past campaigns. She was very frail to-day, and in her white robe, and with her large eyes which seemed to have outgrown her face, she looked like the wraith of a woman rather than a creature of ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... brightly blazing. Over in the Mazatzal to the westward there were two, and even as they stood and studied them, Archer dropped his glasses at an exclamation of surprise from one of his officers, and there, gaunt and weary, yet erect and fearless, stood 'Tonio. Like a wraith he seemed to have blown in among them, and now patiently awaited the attention of the commander; yet, when accosted, all he would say in answer to question, for they knew not his native ...
— Tonio, Son of the Sierras - A Story of the Apache War • Charles King

... wraith, or phantom, however, in the broad-shouldered figure in a wide-brimmed Stetson sitting in the office watching Sprudell's approach ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart

... free woman or the white wraith of the prostitute. Today it wavers between the prostitute and the nun. Civilization must show two things: the glory and beauty of creating life and the need and duty of power and intelligence. This and this only ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois

... eerie and mysterious Presence has forced itself upon our mind, and we have been able to understand the emotions in which originated the visions of wraith and phantom of the bards of old. Our travellers, however, passed through the gale unhurt. A tremendous outburst of rain, the final effort of the tempest, cleared the sky, which towards the west was gradually lighted up with gleams of purple light, contrasting gloriously ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams

... hour later, his heart thrilled as he glimpsed, wraith-like on the steely horizon, ...
— Raiders Invisible • Desmond Winter Hall

... swell of the North Pacific to that mythical realm of mist like a blanket, and strange, unearthly rumblings smoking up from the cold Arctic sea, with the red light of a flame through the gray haze, and weird voices, as if the fog wraith were luring seamen to destruction. These were mere details. Peter took no heed of impossibles. Neither did Bering; for he was in the prime of his honor, forty-four years of age. "You will go," commanded the ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut

... unique phenomenon in the world. Even on his physical side he is not a piece of dead matter, but is instinct through and through with spirit. And on his psychical side he is not an unsubstantial wraith, but a being inconceivable apart from outward embodiment. Perhaps the most general term which we may adopt is psyche or Soul—the living self or vital and animating principle which is at once the seat of all ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander

... a fire-veined darkness swept Over the rough pine-bearded Asquam range; A wraith of tempest, wonderful and strange, From peak to ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... little; they had stood there at the sluice gate, with his arm about her, and herself willingly nestling against him, trembling now and again; looking out at the sheeny surface of the slow flowing stream from which, in the imperceptible night breeze, stole away wraith after wraith of water mist to float and lose themselves in ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson

... of the supernatural, yet there was in him also a vein of sentiment, shown in his poem on the death of Clidna—"Clidna the fair-haired, long to be remembered," who was tragically drowned at Glandore harbor in the south, and whose sad wraith still moans upon the bar, in hours of fate for ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston

... Cardinal at his prayers—she is dead though; for I heard her wraith wailing and shrieking up the woods that night as I stood in the priory close. It seemed like, as it were, making its way through the air from Lathom, for the ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby

... heretics; and every one of its declarations met with a head-on collision some claim of Gnosticism. Then, too, the early Christians drew up rituals; they had to. We cannot keep any spiritual thing in human life, even the spirit of courtesy, as a disembodied wraith. We ritualize it—we bow, we take off our hats, we shake hands, we rise when a lady enters. We have innumerable ways of expressing politeness in a ritual. Neither could they have kept so deep and beautiful a thing as the Christian ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick

... she was gone. He glanced quickly behind him, but the room lay black.... A transient pallor on the blackness, and the door banged. He sat a long time, solemn, gazing at the serrated silhouette of the town against a sky that obstinately held the wraith of daylight, and listening to the everlasting murmur of the invisible weir. Not a sound came from the town, not the least sound. When at length he stumbled out, he saw the figure of the landlord smoking the pipe of philosophy, and waiting with a landlord's fatalism for the ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett

... Fourthly, beloved, 'tis an ass that—ha! O sweet vision for eyes human or divine! Do I see thee in very truth, thou damsel of disobedience, dear dame of discord, sweet, witching, wilful lady—is it thou in very truth, most loved daughter, or wraith conjured of thy magic and ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol

... began there grew up within her a sort of courage. A girl whose material embodiment has melted away until she has worn the aspect of a wraith is not restored to normal bloom in a week. But what Dowie seemed to see was the lamp of life relighted and the first flickering flame strengthening to a glow. The hands which fitted together on the table in the Tower room delicate puzzles in bits of lawn and paper, did not in these ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... who hates the king with the deep hatred of a fanatical Republican. A royal princess, who had come to insult her, is conquered by her candor and truth, and stays to sympathize with her and lend her the support of her presence. But just as the king comes to lead her out to face the populace, the wraith of her father rises upon the threshold and she falls back dead. It is learned afterward that Professor Ernst had ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen

... a shiver ran down my back!) I remembered hearing that a woman had been killed by falling down the steep cellar stairs, and the spot on the left side where she was found unconscious and bleeding had been pointed out to me. There, I heard it again! Was it the wraith of the aged dame or the cries of that unfortunate creature? Hush! Ellen ...
— Adopting An Abandoned Farm • Kate Sanborn

... which is not usually known to his neighbours, it is a temptation to lecture on the subject, and, looking back, I fear that I had been on the rostrum during the best part of that evening. I had told them of the Penangal, that horrible wraith of a woman who has died in child-birth, and who comes to torment small children, in the guise of a fearful face and bust, with many feet of bloody trailing entrails flying in her wake; of that weird little white animal the Mati-anak, that makes ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford

... arranged with care the main collection of corals and shells, the commoner sorts, such as found a ready sale at low prices. There was pure white coral, in long branches, studded with tiny points, like the wraith of the fairy thorn; there were great piles of the delicate fan-coral, which the sailors call sea-fans, and which Franci would hold out to every girl who had any pretence to good looks, with his most gracious bow, and "Young lady like to fan herself, keep ...
— Nautilus • Laura E. Richards

... away behind. When they had changed trains and were headed for New York, with their destination only a few hours away, Stuart, again in the vestibule of the car, looking out through the closed entrance door upon a dull landscape passing like a misty wraith through the November fog and twilight, found Georgiana ...
— Under the Country Sky • Grace S. Richmond

... the silver-framed portrait and placed it in the flaccid hand. The fingers closed over it. The filmiest wraith of a smile ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... frock and straw bonnet: for not to me appertained that suit of wedding raiment; the pearl-coloured robe, the vapoury veil pendent from the usurped portmanteau. I shut the closet to conceal the strange, wraith-like apparel it contained; which, at this evening hour—nine o'clock—gave out certainly a most ghostly shimmer through the shadow of my apartment. "I will leave you by yourself, white dream," I said. "I am feverish: I hear the ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte

... she said, appearing after her usual sudden fashion in a dim doorway and looking more like a wraith ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... faded, spectral sheet, Wraith of long-perished wrong and time, Forbear! the spirit starts to meet ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various

... retorted, and his strong face lost all its anger and found the wraith of a smile. "Dinnae be too hard on the lassie! She's ane of ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough

... see. Never did I think to be frayed with a bogle, {14} and, as might have been deemed, the bogle but a prentice loon, when all was done. To my thinking all this fairy work is no more true than that you are a dead man's wraith. But they are all wild about it, at the castle, where I was kept long, doing no trade, and ...
— A Monk of Fife • Andrew Lang

... to me a terrible thing that one so peculiarly strong, sentient, luminous, as my father should grow feebler and fainter, and finally ghostly still and white. Yet when his step was tottering and his frame that of a wraith, he was as dignified as in the days of greater pride, holding himself, in military self-command, even more erect than before. He did not omit to come in his very best black coat to the dinner-table, where the extremely prosaic fare had no effect upon ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop

... halting, listening, ever working rapidly, from floor to floor and back to the entrance way again. At last with a cautious glance around, a pause to rub a match skilfully over the woolen cloak, and to light a fuse in a hidden corner, he vanished out upon the street like the passing of a wraith, and was gone ...
— The War Romance of the Salvation Army • Evangeline Booth and Grace Livingston Hill

... far minaret of faithful cloud A wraith-muezzin of the sunset cried Over the sea that swung with sultan pride, "Allah is Beauty, there is none beside! Allah is Beauty, not to be denied By Death ...
— Many Gods • Cale Young Rice

... and other hardwood growths, with their graceful leafless branches stretching up like dumb pleading hands toward the pitiful sky. I grew so interested seeking out specially picturesque forest growths, and glimpses into the still woodland depths under the white snow wraith which I might come again to study more closely, and put on my canvas, that I so far forgot the business of the hour as to find myself a half hour after the appointment at still some distance from Linden Lane. ...
— Medoline Selwyn's Work • Mrs. J. J. Colter

... gone the chancellor paced the room with halting step. Then, toward the wraith of his ambition he waved a hand as if to explain how futile are the schemes of men. He shook himself free from this idle moment and proceeded to the apartments of her highness. Would she toss aside this crown, or would she fight for it? He found ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath

... words when last we met; My passion I as freely told him; Clasp'd in his arms, I little thought That I should never more behold him! Scarce was he gone, I saw his ghost; It vanish'd with a shriek of sorrow; Thrice did the water-wraith ascend, And gave a doleful groan ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various

... he was by nature, in vain endeavoured to banish from his mind the gloomy impression which the startling interview with Cesarini had bequeathed. The face, the voice of the maniac, haunted him, as the shape of the warning wraith haunts the mountaineer. He returned at once to his hotel, unable for some hours to collect himself sufficiently to pay his customary visit to Miss Cameron. Inly resolving not to hazard a second meeting with the Italian during the rest of his sojourn at Paris by venturing in the streets on foot, he ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book XI • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... wraith remained thus gazing towards the city of Tenoctitlan, then suddenly it threw its vast arms upward as though in grief, and at that moment the night rushed in upon it and covered it, while the sound of wailing died ...
— Montezuma's Daughter • H. Rider Haggard

... thinking of John Sargent and how he has caught the trick of brush-work—at a slower tempo. But not even Sargent could have produced the collar and cuffs. A Whistler, a full-length, in another gallery, looks like an unsubstantial wraith by comparison. Two weeks' daily attendance at this excellently planned collection did no more than fix the position of the exhibits in the mind. There is a goodly gathering of such names as Israels, Mesdag, Blommers, and others ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker

... eyes; then opened them again—wide. The figures were still there, and they had grown clearer, more definite, especially the countenance of each of the two wraith-like women who stood, like sentinels, one on either side of ...
— From Out the Vasty Deep • Mrs. Belloc Lowndes

... smiting the face of the cliff, booming through the low-mouthed caves, curling its great green curls and combing them out to frothing ringlets along the strips of beach, winding itself about the rock of Conca in a heavily gleaming sheet and whirling its wraith of foam to heaven, the very ghost ...
— Adam Johnstone's Son • F. Marion Crawford

... swallowed up by rising fog; all colour had been sucked out of the leaves and the heather, even from the golden glades of fern. Only Hester's hair, and her white dress as she passed along, uplifted, made of her a kind of luminous wraith, and beside her, like the supports of an altar-piece, moved the two pensive figures ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... as the Wraith of the Tulliwuddles. The heir must interview it within a week of coming ...
— Count Bunker • J. Storer Clouston



Words linked to "Wraith" :   phantasma, fantasm, shadow, spook, specter, ghost, spectre, shade



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